K-12: Phonics Is Winning

America had 2 canaries in her coal mine - one was Whole Language and the other was Ebonics. Both supported the education departments goal of producing an illiterate population - which after all is much easier to control.

Using phonics, and effort, you can teach a three year old to read in about three weeks. Simple books. But then watch as they look at every word they see and see them trying to sound out the word. Thats when you beed to give them the harder ohonics rules/exceptions. After about two months, they are set. Which....makes me frieakin irate that any kid cant read

Whatever success I have had in my 80 years goes back to the fact that my evil big sister taught me to read when I was 3 or 4 years old. I began first grade at age 5, attended a 2 room school in rural NW Pa. And because I knew how to read, write, do basic math, I was able to listen to the teacher as she taught 2nd, 3rd, and 4th graders. Then when I moved over one row to 2nd grade, and knew the stuff, the teacher allowed me to read independently. When I moved upstairs to 5th grade, I played it the same way. Phonics, coupled with my altar boy latin (pre-Vatican II, all prayers at Mass were in latin) helped me to figure out definitions. (Latin, which used to be required in 9th grade in Pennsylvania, is no longer required. Too bad.)

I am astounded that the NY Times acknowledged the failure of whole word sight reading and the need to return to phonics. We now have an entire generation crippled by illiteracy. Educational fads become especially dangerous BECAUSE of the lock-step synchrony of teacher training where 'new' is automatically presumed to be better and parents don't know how their children become the unwitting victims of education experiments at the hands of un-supervised 'professional'.

Call me an old lady, I don't care, but after teaching phonics (hallelujah), teach children to write cursive again. Grown adults writing at a first grade level is ridiculous. Computer generated letters will never replace a beautifully handwritten note. It used to be a rite of passage when a child no longer printed letters but moved on to cursive. I miss those days.

The biggest fraud perpetrated on our children. Whole Language is inferior and goes against basic common sense. Like language, children don't start out with calculus, they have to learn basic math first. We learned easy basic words and then figured out the harder ones that couldn't be sounded out. That method also helped when learning a foreign language. The teachers unions must be destroyed. The idea that in this country children cannot read (no matter how poor) is totally outrageous. Incidentally, my mother went to a one-room rural school in the later thirties until the third grade. When she went to a regular school, she was way ahead of the other children her age.

Whole states are now going back to phonics and paying to have their teachers go through training to learn how to teach kids how to read. The TRULY sad thing is that most K-5 teachers do not take one COURSE about literacy instruction -- how to teach reading. The colleges of education suck and the professors there are territorial and don't want to teach another expert's (proven programs) approach. They "develop" and publish their own stuff and teach that -- and its all BS. Who suffers in the end? Our kids.

While I am delighted that our children may soon be educated in a manner that actually works, there has been and continues to be a very grim undertone to this. It is how evil our education specialists and bureaucracy have been in ruining the education of our children. These people claim the role of "expert" and yet are dead wrong. Many of them must REALIZE they are wrong but allow the fraud to continue and perpetrate it.. The drone "educators" in the schools follow like sheep. The school boards endorse the failed methods. The WHOLE education system has been corrupted to push propaganda and fail to educate our children effectively. The media reports the "experts" pontifications like gospel. People ask, "After spending ALL THIS MONEY, and placing enormous resources into play, WHY are our children still underperforming?". The answer is becoming ever more apparent; our "expert" "educational" system doesn't know how to teach children. The even scarier truth is that the same failure scenario is being duplicated in many educational/bureaucratic endeavors. Examples: climate change, foreign affairs, land and forest management, business and banking regulation, and many others. Mistakes may certainly be made. But we now exist in a system where DELIBERATE and INCOMPETENT abuse of reality is becoming commonplace. We are making bad decisions based on fraudulent information. There should be a high price paid for systemic fraud. Maybe then, "experts" might exercise more care in their pursuit of the truth and might actually manage to find some.

My 10-year-old daughter taught my son to read before he was four—by using phonics, of course. He was soon reading books from the library. In kindergarten, he taught classmates to read by the same method, startling their parents.

This is good news. Let's also consider all of the time spent teaching kids how to spell a word. Each letter we have should stand for a unique sound, if we need a consonant blend to get the job done fine (skool rather than school) what does the letter u in the word guard accomplish. There are national contests and awards given to students who can essentially memorize a dictionary. Why not just spell words with letters that specifically stand for a unique sound? Think of all of the wasted school time teaching kids to spell words the way they look in a dictionary like tomatoe.

It sure took a long time. The necessity of phonics instruction has been known for years. Whole language only works for kids who figure out the letter-sound associations on their own.

True, poster #2. I started my son on Hooked on Phonics when he was 19 months old, and he was a fluent reader by age five. He was in kindergarten for two months when his teacher called me, hyperventilating as she told me he could read. When I finally got her to calm down, I told her that I knew he could read. I didn't know I needed to warn her in advance that he could read; I assumed all kindergarteners could read. However, I decided to put more advanced books in my son's face and asked him to read, and I was blown away by his reading level. He was reading at a much higher level than I even knew. When I started school back in the sixties, we had to know how to read. My parents said we'd better not embarrass them in school acting like we couldn't read.

My mother tells me that I taught myself to read at four years old by reading the newspapers and sounding out the words. I was a solid reader by Kindergarten and blew through the "Dick and Jane" books in first grade. I remember my teacher allowing me to choose other books to read since I obviously didn't need the beginner books. All through elementary and high school, my favorite place was the library, where I could check out books and lose myself in them. I have loved to read my whole life, and even now, I have a paperback sitting on the table to read in a bit. And my mother wonders why I can answer so many Jeopardy questions correctly!!