teaching kids to read & educational fads

how an educational fad let down a generation

I have not been teaching for a significant amount of time in the grand scheme of things, but you don’t need to spend a lot of time in the classroom to see how prone educational institutions and educators are to fads.

Here’s the equation: you take a decent-sounding idea, do a few small-sample targeted studies that show the idea works (or isn’t a complete catastrophe), hold up the progenitors of this idea as educational gurus, preach this new idea as gospel to a cohort of education majors, and 20 years down the road figure out that the theory was totally wrong.

And then you pivot to the next theory. Sort of.

One of the more persistent of these ideas in my experience has been the importance of learning styles. The theory held that each student has a preferred style of learning; the major ones were audible, visual, and kinesthetic (learning by moving around). This theory was preached as revealed truth in education classes and most states adopted some requirements for its licensed teachers along the lines of varying instruction for learning types. Sounds great, right? Why not tell a child that he has one way of learning and its incumbent upon the teacher to cater to this preference?

Well, for one, every major study shows that there is virtually no difference in learning when teachers create lessons to appeal to students with different “styles.” It’s mostly a myth and a potentially self-limiting myth at that. I used to joke with my freshmen boys—all kinesthetic learners, imagine that!—that I was going to give them an incredible lesson that would help them immensely with their future: it was called, Sitting Down, Shutting Up, and Paying Attention. If kinesthetic learning is a thing, it might just be the most important lesson a kinesthetic learner could experience. I have had multiple students thank me for teaching them to Sit Down, Shut Up, and Pay Attention. It turns out that it is a useful skill for life.

The problem with these theories—apart from being generally wrong—is that they are not immediately cast aside once they are debunked. After all, you have a generation of teachers already in the classroom who were taught that these theories were Inspired Truths delivered from on high by the prophets at Columbia Teachers College. You have administrators whose jobs involve making sure the teachers in their schools teach these Inspired Truths. You have state legislation mandating instruction in these Inspired Truths. That educational wheel can be awfully sticky at times.

Surprisingly, debunking learning styles was not the original intent of this post. But it makes a nice case study for what I want to talk about. I just finished reading an incredible article in Time (it still exists as a magazine! good for them) about a renewed push for phonics-based instruction in elementary classrooms. People my age or older were raised with phonics instruction and probably remember the Hooked on Phonics commercials from the early 90s or Brian Regan poking fun at the concept.

However, there was a shift toward what was called “balanced literacy” based on a theory called “whole language.” The premise was that phonics instruction was boring—both for students and teachers—and should be discarded in favor of something more entertaining. Because we all know that the real purpose of education is entertainment. I’ve read somewhere that the Greek word paideia actually most accurately translates to “entertaining children.”

Well, it turns out that this new theory did not work at all. Are you shocked? Educators and politicians, especially in urban areas where reading acquisition tends to lag, have noticed the abject failure of balanced literacy and are mandating (or attempting to mandate) phonics instruction. That seems good, yeah?

But how many guesses do you need to figure out who the people are who are most reluctant to switch back to phonics? I’ll give you a second. . .

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It’s teachers! Apparently elementary school teachers do not like teaching phonics to their students. Because it doesn’t work? No, silly. Because it seems rote, boring, and demeaning to them as educators. And we all know that what really matters in education is not student learning but teacher enjoyment.

Seriously. The article begins with the case study of Oakland, a school district that for seven years “was the fastest gaining urban district in California for reading.” Their curriculum at the time: Open Court, a phonics-based curriculum. Seven years in a row seems like a stunning success (and probably indicates a pretty low floor for the district). So, in response to their success, Oakland teachers preached the success of phonics education, assuring that the greatest social justice cause a teacher can take on is making sure all of his students learn how to read.

Just kidding. They kicked the successful method to the curb. The reason: “the teachers felt like curriculum robots.” An Oakland teacher who has since repented and is trying to restore phonics-based education to Bay Area classrooms put it like this: “[Phonics-based instruction] seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do. . . Those who wanted to fight for social justice, they figured that this new progressive way of teaching reading was the way.” I promise this is the last one: Because we all know that the real purpose of education is not teaching kids how to read, write, and math (using it here as a verb for parallelism’s sake) so they can make it in the real world but to have teachers vicariously fighting for social justice through their lives. Okay, I’m done with those.

That teacher, Kareem Weaver, is now fighting to reintegrate phonics education. But it’s an uphill battle. And most of the fire he and others are receiving is ostensibly friendly fire from other teachers and “literacy specialists” still married to the debunked methods of “whole” language.

Meanwhile, two successive generations of students—the current ones doubly upended by deficient literacy education and the shutdown stemming from Covid—are left functionally illiterate. Whatever your feelings about public education, this is a tragedy. Moreover, it is only exacerbating what we’ve been enduring since the 1970s: a further stratification of our society into the haves and the have-nots. If you never learn to read, it is nearly impossible to become successful.

But, hey, at least the failed method used on you was entertaining, enjoyable to teachers, and socially just.