Episode 118: Reading Rescued! Thanks to Lucy Calkins (Oct. 4, 2023)

Time to celebrate. Reading, real reading, can have a come back. This is big. Please share this announcement with 50 of your favorite people.

Reading Wars have raged for almost 100 years. This was never an imaginary thing, a mere figure of speech. It was real Americans, sensible Americans, trying to protect their schools and their children from an infestation. What progressives called education was really a kind of indoctrination, a kind of poison, a kind of engineered stupor. I.e. the deliberate dumbing down of America

I kept this thing short so everyone could read it two times. You have to understand what reading should be and then you'll appreciate how badly damaged we are. The left has been engaged in a dumbing down of America, and their main weapon, their nuclear weapon, was replacing traditional reading instruction with nonsense designed not to work.

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READING IS EASY   /  4 minutes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JV0tPGn-Ws&t=157s

GOOD SCHOOL? BAD SCHOOL? YOU KNOW.     /   3.5 min
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuihhEpQETs

AN EDUCATOR ADMITS HER MISTAKES     /   3 min
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Chjlzn8ByQ&t=60s


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CODA:

RE: Support Education Reform

I’m raising funds to rebuild my main site Improve-Education.org (founded2005), which was "lost" by the hosting company. 

Perhaps just as important, I want to be able to publicize important developments, like this news about phonics and the Science of Reading. Everybody in America should know this squalid story where determined ideologues sabotaged the effective teaching of literacy. (That's my conclusion.) There are many millions damaged by this activity and many many millions more who still don’t know what happened to reading in American public schools.

For either good cause, please consider donating to Support Education Reform.

http://spot.fund/SupportEducationReform

Additionally, this site presents a brief rundown of the half-dozen different facets of my reform efforts:  Podcast "Let's Fix Education".... 50 YouTube videos.... 150 articles on American Thinker....1000 answers on Quora....ETC.

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The best way to understand problems in public schools
is to read this book: Saving K-12     

Available on Amazon.

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Word-Wise Education
757-455-5020
Bruce Deitrick Price

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LET'S FIX EDUCATION:  OVERVIEW

 Recurring themes. Big ideas. Unifying concepts.

Transcript

LET'S FIX  EDUCATION   --   by   --   Bruce Deitrick Price

Episode 118   --   Oct. 4, 2023


Reading Rescued! Thanks to Lucy Calkins

Good news. The anti-reading armada that has been bombarding our schools for 90 years has suffered a defeat.

For many years, Lucy Calkins was the queen of literacy in the US. Now she has been labeled a failure by her sponsors (Columbia University and Teachers College) because children weren't learning to read. Typically, this wouldn't be acknowledged. Our pseudo-educators would jumble all the jargon and claim that test scores will be better next year. End of problem.

But the Education Establishment, which creates media stars for propaganda purposes, had made Lucy the brightest star in the sky. This myth required some actual reading. Results were flat for many years.

 Here's the good news. Her fail has opened up lovely possibilities for everyone eager to drop the garbage that never worked. Remember, we had near universal literacy 100 years ago. Please, everyone focus on bringing that  back.

Basically, our professors try to teach everything but phonics, the one thing students need above all else. So the air is filled with their bewildering theories, brain-deadening tech talk, and cognitive dead ends.

Phonics is simple. Children see the letter t on a page. The nickname is tee but for reading purposes t is pronounced approximately tuh.  There's no ambiguity, no need to guess or study context. The symbol t has a specific pronunciation.

Consider a parallel situation where a pianist sees a certain symbol on the page and knows which key to press. You don't guess. Doesn't that sound idiotic? Do you guess which way to turn at a left-turn signal? No, it's locked in. It's the schools that pretend that everything is confusing.

Most kids can learn to read in first grade. They memorize the 26 letters. Then they memorize the sounds that the letters stand for. Then they learn the blends of those sounds, for example, tur plus ah plus peh equals tap. There you have the phonetic moment. That's it. The rest is practice.

Using bad pedagogy is insidious. Children are messed up by six or eight, and then the school has an excuse to put them in Special Ed  programs, prescribe endless remediation, probably some medication, and maybe the children are never the same again. If you just TELL kids  how to read, they’ll be fine. So-called dyslexia will usually vanish.

The goal must always be to read something interesting, not to discuss what kind of seating is ideal. Professors love to create meaningless questions about irrelevant factors. Before the anti-literacy attack began, schools would start with nursery rhymes:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, 
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again

That's the idea. You have a story. What's it about?? The students have a first experience with literature, with rhyme and cadence, with fun. Instead, I see lessons about how to recognize the six kinds of syllables. (I’m a professional writer and have no idea what that means.) The result of such nonsense is that we have tens of millions of people who can read in some limited sense, but not really.

Great poems are usually illustrated. Those pictures could begin a student’s love of art.

The anti-literacy strategy is to chatter endlessly about five or ten aspects, and use all that to smother phonics. They're doing it again right now. You'll hear everywhere about the Science of Reading. For a few years it seemed this would point directly to phonics and phonics only.. But already the professors are saying that the Science of Reading refers to phonics plus at least a half-dozen other things such as vocabulary, fluency, comprehension, the ability to decode, syllable instruction. Stop the nonsense. Read something. Don't read to the kids, read with the kids. Enjoy.

The planets have shifted. It's time to rally around reading. It's reading that takes each person’s intelligence to its highest potential. Children who don't learn to read lose several points of their IQ. Boldness is not required now. Start trusting the right people, for a change. Here is one of them.

Marva Collins, one of my heroes, was a public figure, ran her own school in Chicago, and proclaimed to the world: "Children as young as 3-1/2 and 4 years of age are admitted to my school, at the beginning of every year in September. I guarantee that they will all be reading by Christmas, three months later. That has been the results since I started my school in 1975.”

(Hollywood made an inspirational movie about Marva, The Marva Collins Story.)

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Don Potter has been a schoolteacher all his life and he says Blend Phonics by Hazel Loring is the best, cheapest way to go.