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Comment by cmcaleer | Hacker News Reader

There’s a narrative that fits this buck in the trend: the curriculum simply rejected teachings that didn’t work.

Highly recommend reading about the ‘whole word’ v ‘phonics’ wars. Generations of children have been and continue to be left behind because an ineffective teaching style that doesn’t work became popular among America’s educators. Here’s an oped from a few years ago to get started with. It's honestly a bit depressing, but things have gotten better since and Mississippi is the proof of that.

https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...

Some reading specifically on how Mississippi is responsible for their own success. It wasn’t magic: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/06/education/learning/missis...

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Institutional promotion of this "new style" of teaching reading is garbage cope and grift. Schools have been teaching reading successfully for decades to kids who are prepared to learn it, using a long-proven curriculum.

Middle and lower-middle class kids arrive in primary school already pre-literate and prepared to further learn at primary school level. Due to parental habits.

Statistically speaking, lower class kids arrive without the same number of years of preparation at the same level. They do not arrive pre-literate. They arrive illiterate.

I agree that special attention and programs need to be implemented to make up for this state of affairs, but lets not reward grifters and their unqualified media lackeys with attention simply because the public doesn't understand how literacy development works, in general, and these people are willing to exploit that.

This is a centuries-long debate with both of the two methods I mentioned being centuries old. Who are these grifters you are talking about? What is this new style you are talking about?

This comment reads like ChatGPT being asked to be contrarian for contrarian's sake.

One of the remarkable pieces of data is that lower socioeconomic students actually learn more in school than their peers. That's right. They actually start closing the gap while they're in school.

Unfortunately, their higher socioeconomic peers outpace them significantly over the summer. And this swamps the gains made during the school year so the lower socioeconomic students are again at a disadvantage. This is particularly frustrating to people who really do want things to improve education because it is perniciously difficult to counteract--this is where the "year round school" push comes from.

So, the 3 worst states magically managed to overcome every mechanism arrayed against them simply by teaching phonics in the classroom? Even during the height of a pandemic in which teachers could barely corral the students let alone teach them something?

And, by the way, people have been collecting and pushing data about phonics for years--the data always comes back inconclusive to weak. Many places still teach it. Most places see the same things--focused effort regardless of system results in slight increases in performance.

I wonder how children learn to read Mandarin. There is no analogy to phonics. Rote memorization might be a plausible learning strategy.

There was a thread about Sold A Story a few weeks ago, but tldr while phonics helps test scores in the short term, it craters them in the long term, which is mostly what reading teachers were warning about. The UK is ahead of us here: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jan/19/focus-on-p...

Interesting study, worth noting that UCL study isn't finding in favour of whole word vs phonics, but rather "[the findings] suggest that a balanced instruction approach is most likely to be successful", which seems reasonable and hopefully education boards develop an approach to get the best of both worlds. The NYT article I linked quoted the former State Superintendent of Education who spearheaded the Mississippi project saying "Each year we tweak our methods, but the goals always remain the same" so it seems they have mechanisms in place to react to the new research.

Yeah true, and yeah hopefully. The politics on this have gotten a little out of control but that seems pretty levelheaded.

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