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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35173 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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It's a Vibes-based World for Us

The New Yorker recently printed a piece about a conflict among parents, politicians, and educators centered on childhood literacy. One group wants teachers to use a variation of whole language learning, a method based on immersing kids in books and showing them how to connect words with images. The other wants teachers to use a method called phonics where children are taught to sound out letters and groups of letters, allowing them voice whole words.

Currently, whole language learning dominates curricula in the US school system, with some 60% of children being taught using it--especially in urban areas. Which is surprising, given that researchers almost uniformly agree that phonics is more effective. It's been settled all the way back in the 60's.

This is why some states and cities have begun ordering their teacher to switch to phonics. It's happening in New York City, for example, where whole language learning has been the preferred method for almost twenty years. It's happening in Oakland, CA, where groups like NAACP or REACH (an educational advocacy group), are putting pressure on local school districts to get teachers to use phonics.

But to what do we owe the pleasure of putting tens of millions of kids through the less effective of the two teaching methods?

The New Yorker piece author points to vibes.

According to what she found, whole language learning gained popularity among both teachers and parents because it painted a rosy, feel-good image of literacy education. The method's supporters maintain that children should be put in a book-rich environment and the rest will take care of itself--"through proximity or osmosis", as the New Yorker writer sarcastically describes it. And the teacher's role? To ask encouraging questions, such as why an author chose to use a certain color or why a character was represented by a certain animal.

The author delicately points out another reason why so many favor whole language learning over phonics: politics. Through some clever rhetoric, whole language learning has positioned itself as a counter to the authoritarian, regimented phonics approach, where children have to go through regular letter-sounding drills and have to read the same set of books.

Kenneth Goodman, a famous proponent of whole language learning, said phonics is steeped in "negative, elitist, racist views of linguistic purity." Basically, phonics codes "conservative", and that often was enough to get whole school districts to move away from it, damn whatever researchers say about its effectiveness.

Well, this is all an interesting story that explains a lot about how the education system works. (I would also recommend this 1997 The Atlantic piece to get an even broader picture). But what really struck me about the whole thing is that it's not just vibes-based literacy, it's literally vibes all the way down:

Whole language learning is a vibes-based approach to teaching kids how to read. It's supported by vibes-based academics doing vibes-based science. It's put into practice by vibes-based policymakers. It's supported by vibes-based parents and vibes-based teachers.

Even the New Yorker writer, despite building a strong case for using science-backed phonics, abandons her position at the end, going instead for vibes. She concludes her piece by stating that it's tempting to focus our energies on changing concrete things like school curricula, but what we should really be doing is attacking larger, more abstract problems like poverty and structural racism.

It's a vibes-based world out there. So lay down your arguments, your charts and numbers, your ideas on cause and effect, and start vibing.

It seems like nothing works well , or that no method is superior to any other method, which agrees with Freddie Deboer's posts on education. Educators have tried every possible approach , and yet nothing can overcome innate individual differences in learning ability. Smarter kids will pick up reading faster regardless of which method is used.

No. Literacy does have to be taught, you don't just "pick it up". Phonics works. Whole word learning doesn't. I suspect that to the extent students in whole-word programs learn, it's because someone has been teaching them another way. So the question is why educators are so attached to a system which doesn't work?

I suspect that to the extent students in whole-word programs learn, it's because someone has been teaching them another way

this is obviously false, I'm confident you'll find someone who was homeschooled with whole-word only and learned it fine. People and intelligence are flexible, you can learn things in poor and slow ways and still learn them, and the claim was that whole-word was less effective than phonics, not that it didn't work. Just compare it to language learning - if you have a smart kid and he does whole-word, even if it is greatly inferior to phonics, couldn't the kid figure out all the tough bits themselves the same way a smart kid does that for other things?

from the article:

These students are more likely to be growing up in homes full of books, Shanahan said, among adults with the time and ability to read aloud to them. It is most likely these lucky children, in fact, who at some point “just know” how to read—who bear out Calkins’s theory of literacy by vibes, because these kids are already marinating in those vibes at home. “And that’s where this gets to be noxious,” Shanahan said. “It’s undoubtedly true that many kids will learn to read with this program. But it’s also probably true that the percentage of kids who learn to read will be lower, and the average achievement level will be lower.”

It’s a common belief among early-reading experts that roughly forty per cent of children can learn to read fluently without much direct instruction. “Those are the people who grow up to say, ‘I don’t remember how I learned to read; I just did it,’ ” Leah Wasserman, a pediatric speech-language pathologist in Brooklyn, told me. “But about sixty per cent need some level of explicit instruction, and those kids are not going to do well with Teachers College. If a kid doesn’t know how to match letters and sounds, or to sound out and segment and blend, they’re not learning to read. They’re not going to naturally intuit how to do that in twenty or thirty minutes of free reading.” And because those blocks of time are mainly devoted to silent reading, children aren’t demonstrating their understanding of letter sounds—they aren’t, to borrow a term from math class, showing their work.

What’s more, Susan Neuman told me, some clever members of the sixty per cent may be able to feint their way through books for early readers, and so the true extent of their lack of decoding skills may not emerge until as late as third grade. (In 2011, a national study of four thousand students found that a child who is not reading proficiently by third grade is four times as likely to drop out of high school or graduate late as those who are, or eight times as likely if that child is also Black or Hispanic and affected by poverty.)

So, this is the kind of argumentation that sounds like "evidence", because "shanahan said!", "wasserman, a pediatric speech-language pathologist, told me", but could easily be wrong. Going with it as true, though - the way the quotes are strung together seems to hint-hint that most of the "roughly forty per cent of children [that] can learn to read fluently without much direct instruction" learned it at home - but I don't think the parents are all doing phonics at home, and nowhere does it say that all of those 40% are explicitly taught it at home, especially with phonics. And taking the claim "It’s undoubtedly true that many kids will learn to read with this program. But it’s also probably true that the percentage of kids who learn to read will be lower, and the average achievement level will be lower." literally also suggests that both work.

None of this is really compatible with "Phonics works. Whole word learning doesn't. I suspect that to the extent students in whole-word programs learn, it's because someone has been teaching them another way".

Homeschoolers hate whole word learning and I doubt you can find a homeschool curriculum that used it.

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