Nancy Bailey critiques PBS for running a feature about dyslexia that misrepresents the current state of reading instruction.
The report was presented on the PBS Newshour and co-sponsored by Education Week.
She writes:
Schools must provide adequate reading programs and reading remediation for students who need more assistance. But the recent report on dyslexia recommending intensive phonics for all children by the PBS News Hour, through Education Week, is irresponsible, short on facts, and presents biased reporting…
This report took place in Arkansas, heavily influenced by the Waltons, who seek to privatize public education. Arkansas funds Teach for America. The state is anti-teachers and does not support teachers unions.
In the report, parents claim: We absolutely know that this is the best way to teach children to read! This approach works well for all students not just those with dyslexia. We know without a doubt that reading is not a natural process.
Numerous opinion pieces and articles have flooded the media recently, often through Education Week, about reading failure. Most are entrenched in misconceptions and refer to discredited sources like the 2000 National Reading Panel, and the astroturf National Council on Teacher Quality (an organization funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation). This threatens to damage how children learn to read, how teachers learn to teach reading, and public schooling.
Bailey points out that there is nothing new about phonics. She learned it in the 1970s.
I might add that there is nothing new about the so-called “Reading Wars.” I wrote about their history in my book Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform (2000).
The definitive work on the Reading Wars was written by Harvard Professor (and former kindergarten teacher) Jeanne Chall, titled Learning to Read: The Great Debate in 1967.
Nothing new has been said since then.
Chalk the latest brouhaha up to the tendency (or desire) to find a new crisis in education every other day of the week.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I watched this PBS program on phonics for dyslexics and thought to myself that this entire program was completely misleading. As a teacher educator for 35 years, I have lived through the reading wars and knew that extolling phonics as the best way to teach reading was totally bogus. Thanks for this post and thanks to Nancy Bailey for putting the program in a political context. PBS programs on education have been a big disappointment to me, in general, since they frequently aren’t accurate.
David Sirota demonstrated that PBS had accepted millions from billionaire John Arnold to create a programs out “the pension crisis.” PBS returned the money. Carol Burris and I criticized PBS for accepting political funding from libertarian foundations to run a two-part show on the virtues of school privatization and for-profit schools. We didn’t see it until after it aired.
This privatization/for profit issue is global and a clear threat to democracy and to democratic thinking. Please continue to use your influence to work against efforts to privatize schools. Charters and vouchers alike are eroding our public education system, not to mention the effects of standardized testing on the thinking capacity of our children.
Yes; on education in general, PBS has been more than a disappointment: it has also been devastatingly MISLEADING.
The PBS piece rings true to me. I don’t teach early elementary, so I don’t teach decoding, but everything I’ve read suggests that explicit phonics instruction is the way to go. I believe the teacher, Miranda Mahan, who said her teacher education school never taught her how to teach phonics. I’m glad these parents took on the smug education establishment whose members often don’t know how dubious their “truths” are. This is the same establishment that says constructivism works better than direct instruction, that restorative justice works better than daunting consequences, that teaching reading skills –not background knowledge –is the way to teach reading comprehension, that teaching science and history skills is more important than teaching science and history facts. Given that the education establishment is wrong about most things, I’m inclined to believe it’s wrong about explicit phonics instruction.
While I have never considered myself a part of the “education establishment,” I have spent many, many hours in classrooms over my lifetime and I do respect my own experience. Yes, phonics instruction has become the mainstay of reading pedagogy but the point that’s worth repeating is important. Children don’t learn to read by one method alone. Phonics instruction may be useful but the experiences that children have as they grow may be just as responsible for their literacy. Having family that read to them and watching how they remember the sequence of the pictures and can point to key words can also be critical. I have been in first grade classrooms where the teacher embraced whole language instruction and I’ve watched children thrive in that environment. Most important, I think careful assessment of what a child needs is a very important part of this process. I am sure that phonics is important for some special needs children but I think the PBS program was misleading. Differentiating instruction to meet the needs of the child is crucial, in my experience.
“I don’t teach decoding,” Ponderosa wrote, “but everything I’ve read suggests that explicit phonics instruction is the way to go.”
WRONG! There is no one “way to go”.
Children do not all learn the same way. While phonics will work for some children it will not work for all children.
That is why highly educated professional teachers are necessary for all classrooms so they can determine what method works best for each student in their classrooms. This is not easy and usually means a lot of work for teachers when they plan and implement lessons.
When I was teaching I learned to plan my lessons to reach as many learners as possible. It wasn’t easy and is one reason why I taught only 25 hours a week but spent another 35 to 75 hours a week planning lessons and correcting student work late into the night on weekdays and weekends.
I learned to read with both Dick-and-Jane plus phonics.
My younger son learned to read at age 4, with no instruction. I read to him every night, and we read his favorite books over and over.
I don’t remember learning to read through phonics. I remember Dick and Jane type books and painfully learning how to decode through word recognition. When I say painfully, that is because my mother felt desperate and resorted to a wire coat hanger to wack me with when I refused to try and learn the words from the page of those early learning books.
They didn’t know what dyslexia was back then. Both my older brother and I were severely dyslexic.
To be clear, I later learned that our mother tried and failed to teach my older brother (14 years older) when he was my age (seven) how to read without a wire coat hanger. By the time I was seven and he was 21, he was already serving his first prison sentence and was into illegal drugs. My brother was illiterate his entire life and most of his seven children also grew up illiterate and ended up on the poverty-to-prison pipeline.
That coat-hanger as a motivator to learn served me well.
You know, Lloyd, I think you might have learned to read without the coat hanger. Some kids are late to read, as late as seven or even older. Pasi Salhberg explains that’s how the Finns approach reading. Would that we were so kind to our kids.
My parents both dropped out of high school at 14 during the Great Depression. My mother was abused by her KKK father (she find his KKK hood and cloak at the bottom of a cedar lined chest when she was cleaning his house), and she ran away from Deadwood and went west across the country on her own at age 14 and ended up working as a waitress. My mother was also abused (physically and mentally) by her first husband and to escape that abuse she opened a bedroom window and crawled out into the rain and then ran barefoot to a friends house. She told me she was sick with the flu when that happened. She was pregnant with my brother at the time and my sister was probably two or three. That was in the 1930s sometime.
My father lost his mother when he was born and his father was so depressed that he walked away from a VP job with an insurance company in Indiana and became an alcoholic. My father, still an infant was fortunate enough to have an aunt and uncle in Pasadena willing to take him in and raise him. He was also 14 when he dropped out of high school.
Finland didn’t properly reform their education system until after 1968, the year I got out of the U.S. Marines at 23.
Most if not all of the common sense knowledge about how to raise children and introduce them to reading at an early age was out of their reach of my paernts if it existed back in the 1930 – 40s. My brother and sister were both born in the early 1930s.
If your brother was severely dyslexic, your mother could have read to him 24 hours a day and he probably never would have been a fluent reader. If you learned to read with Dick and Jane, you probably learned by the whole word method. I remember our first big word in those books was “something.” I would not recommend it for a dyslexic child without a lot of more intensive intervention that would include phonics instruction. I have had students where the breakdown came with making meaning, which required a different type of intervention although sometimes they were spending so much energy in decoding that making meaning was too much. Children who just need a little more time usually are fairly easy to see. All their pre-reading skills are developing without concern. There are usually other issues like slow or late language development when reading is perhaps going to require extra support.
I think I did learn from the whole word method but context also played a role.
That still happens today but when I see the wrong word and it does not fit the context of a sentence or paragraph, I go back and read the paragraph/sentence over again and then I see the correct word instead of the one I thought I saw in the first reading.
Does that make sense?
Yup.
Balance is the name of the game! Why can’t education get that and stop this war about which is best. Many children came to me with many different backgrounds. Some had never been read to nor had they seen an adult sit down to read. They need a balance in their reading instruction and it doesn’t harm anyone else.
It is a shame that PBS is offering misleading programming due to the influence of individuals that pay their bills. Bailey provides a more enlightened version of why students may be struggling in reading including all the deforms of the past twenty years.
Here are the variables they consider in The Hechinger Report.
None of these have anything to do with how teachers teach reading. I agree with Bailey that phonics is a component of reading, but not all students need intensive phonics. It depends on their level of preparedness upon entering school. PBS is misleading viewers by blaming teachers’ reading instruction. How does PBS or Bill Gates for that matter know what is happening in classrooms across the country? Once again Gates and the Waltons have weaponized their wealth to disseminate misinformation and blame teachers.
Not all students with dyslexia are the same. Some students with the problem have visual impairments. Others have auditory processing or memory difficulties. There may be more than one type of dyslexia. That is why reading and LD teachers pinpoint the problem and design programs that will address students’ weaknesses and build on their strengths.
The foundations that took over PBS funding get nothing right. Bill and Mel are the worst offenders. Greed and hubris are a toxic mix.
I’m sorry you had a tough time Lloyd.
But you seem to write well now! I had students with severe reading disabilities who could not write.
They could not physically maneuver the pen or pencil to make the letters. Yet their verbal skills were amazing! Learning disabilities are very interesting. Every child is different.
I learned to read with Dick and Jane in first grade. Kindergarten was half day and nothing but play, cookies and milk, and nap time. Maybe we learned our ABCs.
In third grade, I remember reading sounds with a green phonics chart. We each had a card and a strip with corresponding sounds and we would recite these sounds together.
But I already liked reading. This helped with spelling.
We had recess 4 times a day in Michigan even when it was cold! It must have taken so much time to dress up and undress with the snow pants and boots etc. Ha Ha. I don’t know how teachers did it! I guess when you don’t have high-stakes testing hanging over your head you let children have fun.
I would highly recommend going to Nancy’s blog and reading through the essay and the comments. She has a very gentle way to confront problems with ideas that draw in commentary from a fairly wide audience.
I second that.
Richard Rothstein also discussed this issue — phonics vs. whole language — in his 1998 book, The Way We Were?
The combination of parents, teachers and children applauding the changes made me optimistic that the kids are indeed benefiting.
A shame that Bailey’s skepticism started off with stuff like this: “This report took place in Arkansas, heavily influenced by the Waltons, who seek to privatize public education. Arkansas funds Teach for America. The state is anti-teachers and does not support teachers unions.”
In the comments, Audie advises:
“Before I would comment on the political nature of a movement I would probably get a feel for the political landscape of the state. Every law we have passed regarding Literacy has been bipartisan…. just so you know this movement was started by a democrat state senator. That same senator is a retired teacher and ex-head of the union in one of the biggest districts in the state.
“Look up Senator Joyce Elliott.”.
On the other hand, it is plausible that, as Bailey suggests, additional resources could further improve circumstances by allowing increased individualization of supports for children with varying needs.
Stephen,
Just so you know, Nancy Bailey is an experienced teacher who recently retired. She taught reading and special education. Would you agree that there is no “one size fits all” in any instructional method?
Why don’t you read the history of this debate in my book “Left Back”?
And yes, I think the Walton involvement always matters. These are people determined to eliminate public education, not to help it.
Diane: “Would you agree that there is no ‘one size fits all’ in any instructional method?”
Absolutely. See my last sentence above. That’s why I’m greatly a fan of the intensive individualized tutoring offered at the MATCH charter school here in Boston. And will be attending an end-of-session celebration tomorrow evening at the Quincy Public Library for ESL adult students who received weekly two-hour individual tutoring sessions.
But let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the excellent. The Arkansas program seems especially helpful for many of the kids who are most in need of assistance in developing reading skills, not harmful to the kids who need it least. And the session with just four kids and a teacher was especially impressive.
Diane: “And yes, I think the Walton involvement always matters. ”
You might be more sympathetic if the program were in the state where Patagonia or Costco were headquartered? Oops, no… CA and WA… they might try to personalize, rather than individualize, the instruction.
Ben and Jerry’s?
Would you send your child to a “NO EXCUSES” charter school? I would not. But apparently the white Disrupters think that black and brown children need to be trained so they can fit in to a white world.
No thanks!
“That’s why I’m greatly a fan of the intensive individualized tutoring”
Ah, the public school district in California where I taught for thirty years offered after school tutoring. After school tutoring is not exclusive to corporate for profit at any cost charter schools.
The only difference is that charter schools can force students to attend tutoring while public schools cannot. Students were counseled in the district where I taught that they “needed” to take advantage of the tutoring program to catch up, but it was still their choice to stay after school and do it.
In fact, the public high school our daughter attended offered after-school tutoring and our daughter volunteered to be one of the peer tutors. She came home with a story once about one student who because of a behavior modification contract signed by him, his parents and his counselor required him to attend after-school tutoring to catch up or he would not graduate on time or at all.
This young adolescent male was forced to attend after-school tutoring and our daughter said all he wanted was for her to do his work and homework for him. He had no intention to learn. She refused and he vanished never to be seen in tutoring again.
What do those corporate charter schools do with students like that boy? I’m sure they would kick him out and send him back to the public schools.
Good for your daughter! Congrats.
Just because a Democrat introduced a bill into a state’s legislature doesn’t mean that person is not a corporate Democrat or a libertarian Democrat — about the same as a moderate Republican.
All Democrats are not equal. All Democrats are not progressives and/or liberals like Sanders and AOC. Some are fake democrats thanks to the corporate and/or billionaire campaign contributions that helped them with an election. Studies clearly show that the candidate with the most money wins more than 80 percent of the time.
“The candidate who spends the most money usually wins
“How strong is the association between campaign spending and political success? For House seats, more than 90 percent of candidates who spend the most win. From 2000 through 2016, there was only one election cycle where that wasn’t true: 2010. “In that election, 86 percent of the top spenders won,” said Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan research group that tracks campaign fundraising and spending.” …
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/money-and-elections-a-complicated-love-story/
Lloyd,
Please do not use banned curse words to refer to other people who comment on the blog.
Dignity, always dignity (a quote from “Singing in the Rain.”)
what curse word did I use?
See Charles’ latest comment
I saw it.
He accused me of calling him an MF. I did not call him an MF.
I called him and REMF and that acronym has an entirely different definition that even the Oxford English Dictionary uses and there is no way to interpret REMF as meaning the same as MF.
“REMF
(also remf)
noun
US
military slang, derogatory
Origin
1970s; earliest use found in Newsweek. Acronym from the initial letters of rear echelon mother-fucker from rear + echelon + motherfucker.”
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/remf
The Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t have a listing for what Charles alleges I wrote, because he left off the first two letters of the acronym: RE
Thank you.
PBS and NPR are public only in name.
In fact, NPR executives have actually stated that “NPR stands for nothing”.
The latter claim is actually strictly true (and very funny) though not in the way they intended. What they meant, of course, is that NPR no longer stands for National Public Radio.
Since the beginning of this century with their coverage of all the illegal wars of aggression this country has engaged in I’ve called NPR either National Propaganda Radio or National Pentagon Radio.
Yes, and the worst offender in that regard was/is probably Scott Simon, whom lots of people still seem to view as some sort of folks moral beacon.
You really have to laugh when Simon gets all indignant about Trump’s bombing campaigns, when (Simon) was a cheerleader for many of the same things in the past.
The funniest part is Simon’s pretense to being a Quaker, with all the visions of religious, ethical, peaceloving person that that invokes.
If he’s a Quaker, he must be a member of the Faker sect: a Faker Quaker.
PBS and NPR used to get a lot of government funding. When the Republicans killed this, they had to turn to the billionaires. So, it’s not surprising that they have taken this hard neo-liberal turn. Remember when Murdoch bought the Wall Street Journal and its editor assured everyone that the purchase came with a promise to keep hands off editorial policy? Well, it’s now the Wall Street Journal of Corporate Apologetics and Trumpeteering.
The disrupters and vampires of public education are thrashing around looking for a new brand and platform that will keep their sinking ship afloat.
I remember thinking as I watched that it made no sense that understanding the sounds of letters could help with the visual mis-perception of letters in dyslexia. I second that ‘shame on PBS’ for running this propaganda piece.
Shame on them!
RE: “Nothing new has been said since then.”
Actually, the fMRI research coming out of a number of medical schools in recent years is new as the technology didn’t even exist back in 1967. I suggest reading some of it. Google “fMRI Research on Reading” to find some of the articles.
I appreciate Diane posting this. I had some parents upset with me, but I have to say that while some students might need intensive phonics, I think it is wrong to make all children sit through it. Every child with reading difficulties needs a thorough evaluation. Then they need extra help. We used to do this with resource classes.
Also, I think you are speaking of the Sally Shaywitz studies. I like a lot about her book Overcoming Dyslexia. But the difficulty many teachers have with fMRIs is how to analyze what they show as indicating phonics remediation as best for students with reading difficulties, let alone for all children.
We aren’t neurologists, so it’s easy to be intimidated by such studies especially when the word “science” is repeatedly used. Some question the science.
Sally Shaywitz was also on the discredited National Reading Panel. I don’t know if that means anything, but they did focus too much on phonics.
A teacher should assess students to figure out what students know. She should not waste time on phonics if students do not need it.
Everything always comes back to scaling up scripted online curriculums. The billionaires want a one size fits all teaching method so they can package it and sell it. Quality education is not their goal. Their goal is more and bigger yachts, private jets, and now, space ships to other planets so they can escape. From us.
I would LOVE … LOVE … LOVE … it if the 1-percent took off in their space ships and flew away to another planet orbiting another star a few hundred light years away and never returned.
And then I’d love it more when that other start exploded and went nova.
One way tickets available.
Rocket Man
Billionaire
In all his glory:
One way faire
To A-Centauri
Riding high
On Elon’s steed
Bye and bye
With Godly speed
LOL
And when the rocket millionaires arrive around that distant star, they discover an advanced civilization … but do not know it is a totally socialist economic culture and very happy. No war. No hunger. No poverty. Free education for all.
Then they make contact from orbit and ask for asylum for this reason: we left earth to escape the Bern and AOC socialists.
Favorite Poster:
Top 10 Ways to Become A Better Reader:
1. Read
2. Read
3. Read
4. Read
5. Read
6. Read
7. Read
8. Read
9. Read
10. Read
Best way to learn how to teach reading:
Read
Read
Read
Read
Read
Read
Read
Read E.D. Hirsch. Read Dan Willingham. Read Daisy Christodoulou. Read Jeanne Chall. These people will prove to you that simply reading is not the best path to learning to decode and, later, to comprehend texts.
Reading to children from a young age is critical.
Some children need help with phonics. Others benefit with a little phonics for spelling.
Making all children sit through explicit phonics when they are already sounding out words and reading well is creating a standardized approach to reading instruction.
It is simply unfair. It may discourage some children from what was an enjoyable process.
“These people will prove to you that simply reading is not the best path to learning to decode and, later, to comprehend texts.”
Isn’t that where teachers come in?
Simply reading is the first step and learning to decode and comprehend come later.
It is the parents’ job as a parent to instill a love of reading in their children at an early age like starting at age 2 and by the time the child reaches kindergarten, they are already avid readers.
That makes the next steps easier for the teachers.
Then as the child goes through K-12, the teachers show them how to understand the subtleties hidden in what they are reading and they learn to look for figurative meaning instead of just literal meaning. They also learn about irony and satire, et al.
But when a child shows up in kindergarten and they have never held a book in their hands and never read anything, they are starting at zero and teachers end up getting stuck teaching them the basics of reading that must come first before learning how to interpret the hidden meanings in prose and poetry.
Parents are an essential part of the process to raise life long learners who also enjoy reading. Highly trained professional teachers take the children to the next steps beyond what most parents are capable of doing since most of them have other jobs in addition to being a parent,
In this post from 2006, Jim Trelease notes the links between the Bushes and the scions of testing, the McGraw family. The families’ business connections go back to the founding of the resort town of Jupiter, Florida in the 40’s. Testing and education have been the Bushes’ grift for a long while. We can thank them for the Reading Wars as well as the Texas Miracle and NCLB. (And Rod Paige, too.)
http://www.trelease-on-reading.com/whatsnu_bush-mcgraw.html
I love Trelease. The Read-Aloud Handbook should be given to every parent after their child is born and later.
Education Week is a big fan of charter schools, so it’s no surprise they backed a misinformed “news” segment. I cancelled my subscription two years ago.
Edweek is subsidized by Walton and Gates.,
My reply is late because I initially didn’t have time to comment. I may be retired but retirement for me is a change of occupations.
Nancy Bailey stated:
“The definitive work on the Reading Wars was written by Harvard Professor (and former kindergarten teacher) Jeanne Chall, titled Learning to Read: The Great Debate in 1967.
Nothing new has been said since then.”
What about the psycholinguist Frank Smith who purported that reading is an interactive process? He wrote thirteen books and co-authors a few more.
Who can forget the world renowned Marie Clay?
Marie Clay developed a wider spectrum of teaching tools. Her three-pronged cueing system went beyond just the phonics and sight vocabulary. She utilized semantics, syntax, along with graphophonics. Marie Clay’s and other Constructivists focus is on supporting active learners engaging all the senses, interacting with the text and responding to the text. (A phonetic approach emphasizes that meaning is found in the text- not in the interaction with the students’ experience and background.)
Marie Clay, from New Zealand, taught in the primary schools and then did post graduate study in Developmental Psychology at our prestigious University of Minnesota on a Fulbright Scholarship and completed her doctorate at the University of Auckland with a dissertation entitled “Emergent Literacy.”
Marie Clay believed in teaching to a child’s strengths, not to their weaknesses, viz, connecting their experiences and background to the text.
Her goal: get bottom 20% “ tangled readers” into the average group and need no more services; child becomes an independent problem solver.
Reading Recovery is a one-to-one tutorial where children are pulled out of the regular classroom and complements the programs that operate every day in early years classrooms.
Reading Recovery instruction begins with using the child’s own words- their own sentence. There are many steps that follow the child giving his own sentence. Through his/her sentence is taught phonics, word analysis, meaning, writing. and other skills and strategies. I, know, I am over simplifying the procedure.
Literacy Collaborative & Arkansas Literacy Intervention are programs anchored in Marie Clay’s methodology and Constructivist philosophy. They work with small groups of about 5. To qualify to teach in either program, teachers need special training. Children learn at their own rate; they do not struggle.
Children should not struggle. The text that the students work with for guided reading in order to develop skills, strategies, and higher order thinking skills must be on their instructional level. Students will regress if they are forced to read on a level that is too difficult for them, worse it can cause a learning disability say nothing about squelching the desire to read.
Lloyd Lofthouse stated “They didn’t know what dyslexia was back then. Both my older brother and I were severely dyslexic.”
Dyslexic is an umbrella term covering many aspects of reading problems. When a teacher doesn’t know the exact cause of a problem they too often label it as dyslexic.
No doubt I would have been labeled dyslexic if the term was invented back then. I went to a two-room school house for grades 1 to 8th. Reading instruction was anchored in phonics. But I had an auditory discrimination problem and could not learn through phonics. I finally taught myself to read in 8th grade.
I began my teaching career teaching reading anchored in phonics. I soon realized that there had to be a better way. It was through the Reading Teacher that I was introduced to the Reading Recovery program.
Back then, the term “retarded” was also a catch-all phrase similar to how “dyslexia” is used today. Maybe those who decide “political correctness” got rid of the term “retarded” that they thought would damage children so they changed it to “dyslexia”.
Dyslexia became the new retarded.
That quote at the beginning of your comment was written by me, not Nancy Bailey.
Dr. Ravitch, thank you for drawing that to my attention. I am sorry that I didn’t quote you correctly
I don’t mind the correction. Just wanted you to know they were my words with which you took issue, not Nancy Bailey.
This is a MUST read!!
https://readingrecovery.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Concern-letter-to-PBS.pdf?fbclid=IwAR2JTe7eSgO0BEURZzjMlgTSCpvcoX0q-fFHuyjtGecZ8asx-StAL1yWe-Q