Gov. Mike DeWine announced a focus on phonics.
This article shows much of what’s wrong with public education.
While Gov. Mike DeWine announced a renewed focus on phonics-based literacy in his recent State of the State address, several Northeast Ohio school districts told News 5 the transition is already underway.
It should not take the governor of a state to define educational methods. We have a federal Department of Education, state department, regional education research centers and district curriculum directors. What the hell have they been doing for the last few decades?
A phonics approach involves breaking down a word letter by letter and a student sounding out the word.
Other methods can teach words as a whole, not individual letters, based on taking context clues such as other words in a sentence or pictures as a way to recognize and remember the word.
Egyptian hieroglyphics is a character-based language. China’s Mandarin or Japan’s Kanji are modern character-based languages. Learning to read a character-based language is an all-or-nothing deal. Whole word recognition is the only way to learn it.
Western languages use an alphabet where symbols represent sounds, and can be combined to form words. Even Western languages differ in how they are taught because the symbols and sounds are treated differently.
When I was posted near Madrid for a temporary foreign service assignment, I knew almost no Spanish. Arrangements were made to have me attend an English language institute to learn Spanish. My instructor was the headmaster of the school. The lessons did not go well because the school taught English to Spaniards, so weren’t prepared to teach Spanish to an American. The Madrid lisp made it worse.
Everyone knows that “gracias” means “thank you”. Americans would say, “gr-Ah-see-ahs”. In Madrid, it’s pronounced, “gr-ah-Thee-ahs” with “thee” sounding like “theme”. It’s the Madrid lisp. This wasn’t explained to me, and sounded like a speech impediment. I politely asked the headmaster if we were learning a dialect of Spanish. He hit the roof. We were in Alcalá de Henaras, which you may know, is the birthplace of Cervantes, who is the Shakespeare of the Spanish-speaking world.
The point is that the Caterpillar sales manager, who learned English by listening to the BBC, explained to me that Spanish is almost entirely phonetic. After about an hour, anyone can learn to read Spanish pretty well with no comprehension. Verbs are the tricky part. Spanish teachers know this, and teach the language different than English would be taught.
English is a Germanic language with Romance language influence. We have some confusing phonetics, like “Though” and “Through”. Perhaps the trickiness of English left us open to alternative approaches.
It [recent research] showed that 3rd and 4th graders had lower tests scores if they didn’t utilize phonics as a primary teaching approach. This came after decades of alternative teaching programs that came from places such as Columbia University and Ohio State University.
Colleges of Education were moving new teachers away from Phonics, toward innovative new ways to teach kids to read. In education, when you see “innovative”, think “untested”. Teachers did not make the decision to abandon Phonics.
“Some of our teachers feel guilty and they feel they let students down and these are some of the most dedicated, hard working individuals in the field,” he said. “They had been trusting what colleges and universities had been telling them they should be doing.”
In my experience, teachers want students to learn. There is no joy in being ineffective and pointless. Education professors, researchers and experts, need to publish and advocate for new methods to fix problems. They don’t get attention for telling teachers to just keep doing what they are doing.
Teachers and curriculum directors were encouraged to embrace modern methods and that was a mistake.
