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Comment by Afton | Hacker News Reader

" When asked to identify the number of phonemes in a word, they were correct 62 percent of the time. They struggled more with morphemes, correctly identifying them 27 percent of the time. "

I'm surprised. When I was TAing morphology and phonology courses, people generally had more trouble learning the inverse. That is, identifying morphemes was relatively easy compared to identifying phonemes (although you could choose your examples to get a similar spread. People take a nontrivial amount of training to ignore how things are spelled)

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There are many problems with the US education system, but it does a really good job teaching kids to read; and for the few kids who fail to learn to read, it's usually because of an unstable (or abusive) home, or because the kids don't speak English, not because of "failure to fully understand phonemes."

The main point of the article is a proposal of a new way to evaluate teachers. It says, "let’s agree that the way to evaluate teacher training is to test teachers (it’s tempting to use student outcomes instead)."

To me that seems like a reasonable part of a good method of evaluation.

> it does a really good job teaching kids to read; and for the few kids who fail to learn to read, it's usually because of an unstable (or abusive) home, or because the kids don't speak English

Then how do you know it's the teachers that are teaching the kids to read, and not the parents?

Is that a real question? How many parents do you know who've taught their kids to read?

If you're like me, it's a couple here and there, but most kids learn to read from school. You can compare data of literacy rates before we had widespread schools in the US, and after.

What? Everyone I know who reads books for pleasure had books read to them as children and was taught to read by their parent before they started school. Yes, I asked. People who don't read for pleasure are usually people who weren't read to as children.

Look up US literacy rate you'll be surprised

The point I was making is that it is odd that when teachers are evaluated for their ability to identify phonemes and morphemes, that their abilities don't seem to match what I saw in first and second year university students taking linguistics classes. Just that, that it is odd.

Do schools really teach kids to read? I remember reading lessons, but they presumed some existing ability to read. I think I learned to read by reading things on my own.

Does anyone really get "taught" how to read?

> but it does a really good job teaching kids to read; and for the few kids who fail to learn to read,

Depending how you define illiteracy many children can't read. About 20% of children are functionally illiterate when they leave US highschool.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States

> The study, the most comprehensive study of literacy ever commissioned by the U.S. government, was released in April 2002 and reapplied in 2003 giving trend data. It involved lengthy interviews of over 90,700 adults statistically balanced[clarification needed] for age, gender, ethnicity, education level, and location (urban, suburban, or rural) in 12 states across the U.S. and was designed to represent the U.S. population as a whole. This government study showed that 21% to 23% of adult Americans were not "able to locate information in text", could not "make low-level inferences using printed materials", and were unable to "integrate easily identifiable pieces of information."

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