In a fiery Salon column, Garrison Keillor tells Democrats to stop bashing No Child Left Behind and Reading First. Teaching kids to read well is a lot more important than Bush bashing.
“Nice, caring, sharing people” — not “Republican oligarchs in top hats and spats” — are running the schools, Keillor writes. The failure to teach low-income students to read competently is their failure.
There is much evidence that teaching phonics really works, especially with kids with learning disabilities, a growing constituency. But because phonics is associated with behaviorism and with conservatives, and because the Current Occupant has spoken on the subject, my fellow liberals are opposed.
Liberal dogma says that each child is inherently gifted and will read if only he is read to. This was true of my grandson; it is demonstrably not true of many kids, including my sandy-haired, gap-toothed daughter. The No Child Left Behind initiative has plenty of flaws, but the Democrats who are trashing it should take another look at the Reading First program. It is morally disgusting if Democrats throw out Republican programs that are good for children.
True, though I don’t think NCLB, which was bipartisan from the start, should be seen as a Republican program. Phonics instruction is not inherently the property of the GOP or George W. Bush.
One of the occassional blessings of life (very occasional actually) is when a person I had written off as a knee jerk ideologue proves himself otherwise. I would not have expected this of Garrison Keillor, but I am grateful.
Keillor, like many libs, is unwilling to sacrifice his own child on the altar of P.C.
Is it true that “phonics is associated with behaviorism and with conservatives”. I’ve always associated behaviorism with the likes of BF Skinner (certainly no conservative) and I’ve never associated phonics with behaviorism. How is “see-speak” any more or less behaviorist than phonics?
Don’t worry about Keillor’s knee-jerks. They’re still in operation. Notice that this piece tacitly assumes that conservatives are still all and always evil. He’s just pointing out that they aren’t the ones, by and large, who are running the system that is failing to teach Minnesota kids to read.
conservatives = unspeakably evil, as always
liberals = inexplicably failing to be perfect on this occasion
Still, I liked this sentence:
The idea that I was right and most other people were wrong stuck with me through my cocksure youth and some of middle age, but then comes the perilous passage of life when a man lies awake thinking about the prostate and the mitral valve, and your interest in Truth fades a little compared to your interest in winged beings who might come and rescue people in serious trouble.
I have always considered Keillor an unmitigated ass (I must be one of the three people in North American who detested ‘Praire Home Companion’), but he is right on target here. Bravo to him for having the courage to speak up (this isn’t going to win him many friends among the people whose opinions he respects), and if he doesn’t think much of conservatives, perhaps this might be the first step in a long journey for him.
Either way, he is on the right side of this debate, and that is what matters.
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and this was the right time for Keillor.
And kudos to Joanne for pointing this out.
Those who are opposed to the teaching of phonics are uninformed.
Those who believe it’s the way Jesus taught the Apostles how to read are nuts.
The reason that NCLB is thought to be partisan is that Bush pushed it and claims it and the teachers’ unions hate it.
Just as it took Nixon to recognize China, it took Bush to say that poor kids don’t have to fail.
I’d like to read a good essay one of these days that would explain what it is about the right wing, Christian mind that causes it to fervently embrace something like phonics.
I have my theories, but what do I know?
…and what is it about the left that embraces LCD teaching?
> Those who are opposed to the teaching of phonics are uninformed.
Some are but most aren’t. They’ve just discovered a reading methodology which appeals to their vanity.
> Those who believe it’s the way Jesus taught the Apostles how to read are nuts.
But “nuts” is such an imprecise term. Do you mean clinically, mentally ill or are you just to lazy to expand on your point of disagreement?
> The reason that NCLB is thought to be partisan is that Bush pushed it and claims it and the teachers’ unions hate it.
NCLB may be portrayed as partisan although that claim’s handily disproved by the voting record. The teacher’s unions hate it because it explicitly injects accountability into the public education system.
> Just as it took Nixon to recognize China, it took Bush to say that poor kids don’t have to fail.
Being a mind-numbed right-wing robot I naturally ascribe NCLB to president Bush but once again the voting record strongly suggests that it was an issue whose time had come.
> I’d like to read a good essay one of these days that would explain what it is about the right wing, Christian mind that causes it to fervently embrace something like phonics.
Today’s your lucky day: it works. I’m a fervent, right-wing believer in brevity.
> I have my theories, but what do I know?
What’s the list of possibilities? Keep it short.
Make that four.
Dear Garrison: For many years I have enjoyed your radio shows and now I have especially enjoyed your column here regarding Reading First and phonics. It is refreshing to see someone cross political boundaries, from whichever side to the other, to stand up for what is obviously the truth.
I am one of many parents in Illinois who fought the phonics/math battles when our kids were in public school during the 1990s. My wife and I surrendered early for the sake of our kids, pulled them out, home-schooled them, and then sent them to a high-standards prep school (Catholic, incidentally). In parallel with this I spent years participating in the “reading wars” and communicating with other parents about the travesties going on in the public schools. Eventually a friend and I put our assembled data on a site designed to inform parents about all this stuff, at http://www.illinoisloop.org.
Like you I became incensed after reading the NAEP “report card” (of 1994) describing the inconceivable depth of our national reading disaster. Consequently I spent five years of my life producing a phonics-based after-school reading program that I had hoped would eventually become my career. It succeeded brilliantly in teaching about 500 kids to read, but fell victim to the 2001 recession and subsequent job shortage in the Chicago area. But I left the web site up at http://www.projectpro.com/icanread.htm. Maybe you will find some gems there; this site doesn’t just complain about problems - it offers solid solutions.
On behalf of the parents struggling against this arrogant and utterly unreformable system I thank you. I hope you find some solace in knowing that there are many others who share your view, and that you will perhaps find some items that interest you on http://www.illinoisloop.org (try the menu item Subjects->Reading for starters).
Keep up the battle. Maybe enough of us all together can topple this monster.
The fundmentalist right wants to take away our right to mess around. The fundamentalist left wants us to keep that right and give up all the rest.
In a normal alfabetical language, fonics is the obvius way to teech reeding and riting. No question.
English is not a normal alfabetical language; it abuses the alfabet by not organizing its spelling to always follo alfabetical rules.
So, in English, teeching reeding and riting by fonics is not 100% successful. Too menny exeptions. Hence the trial of other teeching methods, hole word, reed and say, and stil the need for remeedial work.
When we upgrade and update our spelling sistem, we wil hav no arguments over fonics, political or pedagogical. And we wil hav mor than 90% of our children reeding, sumthing tru alfabetical languages like Finnish or Swedish can presently clame.
“I don’t think NCLB, which was bipartisan from the start, should be seen as a Republican program.”
You forget: It’s a partisan issue this election. Democrats bash it. Republicans sing its praises. That’s the party line.
The belief that the systematic teaching of phonics can leave fewer than one in five pupils still not reading well by age 11, is based on a misunderstanding why all English-speaking countries have similar levels of illiteracy.
The US has NCLB, the UK is now trying to make Every Child A Reader (ECAR). All Anglophone countries have been trying out different programmes for improving literacy since WW2, and so far none has produced even moderately impressive gains.
In Finland and Korea, nearly all pupils manage to learn to read competently in a few months because their spelling systems makes the acquisitions of this skill very easy. The Italian, Swedish and Spanish orthographies do not leave many pupils struggling either. The Dutch and German ones are trickier and produce more reading failure; more so the Danish, Portuguese and French.
The less regular the spelling system, the higher the proportion of poor readers. As English spelling is phonemically the most complex and least systematic, it defeats more learners than any other. For one in five children, learning to read with the current English spelling system is just too hard.
What helps best is having literate parents. That’s why there is such a close correlation between the educational success of Anglophone children and their home background. Our main problem is that one if five parents cannot read themselves or help their children enough, and so consign their offspring to a similar fate.
Read ‘Understanding English Spelling’ or visit http://www.englishspellingproblems.co.uk if u want to understand exactly why this is so.
When the conservatives are promoting liberal ideas, and liberals appear to be opposing them, be warned: the real liberals are not even part of all that: we are social outcasts; we are spelling reformers. Idiosyncratic spelling has been proven time and time again to be what underlies reading difficulties in English-speaking countries. Wake up and smel the coffee.
So now we’ve got a new excuse to add to the litany: if we want to teach kids to read we’ve got to have a better class of language.
Just out of curiosity, how’d people learn to read before the inadequacy of the language was revealed? Maybe bumblebee-like, we didn’t know we weren’t supposed to be able to learn to read so we just went ahead and learned to read anyway?
Yeah, the claim that illiteracy in English results from English spelling is nonsense and the evidence used in the above post isn’t really very convincing - for one thing, German, and even more so Dutch are languages that are extremely phonetic. And any claim that fails to address the success that the French have in teaching literacy - considering how non alphabetic French is - seems to be cherry picking.
(Seriously, how alphabetic is, for example, “comment est-ce que cela s’écrit?”)
Reading First is an euphemism for profit. The initiative is more about royalties for favored researchers with ties to corporations, publishers, and assessment companies than research. Many educators and parents are unaware of how children are being used for institutional and individual money making. Congress should enforce disclosure policies and penalties for violations of conflict of interest. It is against the law to work both sides of the transaction.
The researchers, professors, and universities must be held accountable and their financial ties must be exposed.
No, allen, spelling as a cause is not a new excuse for literacy problems. It’s always been thare, befor and after Samuel Johnson codifyed it with his 1755 English Dictionary.
Until recently the problem was hidden, because there was work avalable for the illiterate, work that has largely disapeerd in the IT age.
Menny of us hav been able to lern litracy in spite of the spelling caos, but in doing so we hav had to memorize a fairly large section of the dictionary.
With sensible spelling those not so wel endowd with literacy ability, or literat parents, or able teechers/tutors would be able to master the skil.
Sensible spelling, as observd in studdys of Italian lerners, for instance, could be the circuit-braker to end English’s worldwide 20%-plus iliteracy rate.
Allan -
You’re falling for the one-shape-must-equal-one-sound fallacy.
While there are more than 26 sounds in English, they are adequately represented by the 26 letters, and can be systematically spelled out in a framework of 26 ABC’s, 29 Rules, and 70 Spellings for 44 Sounds. Explicit, logical teaching of this framework as the core of a phonics program would do a lot to increase the literacy rate, since it greatly decreases the number of “exception” word in the language.
If the problem is the English language, how is it that all of the kids in my first grade class (in 1963) could read by the end of the year, despite large class sizes and an inflation-adjusted funding level about 30% of today?
Some of those kids, like my friend George Demotsis, had immigrant parents for whom English was a second language, too.
You don’t start kids off with the stuff that is hard to spell, you start off with “See spot run. Run Spot, get the ball.” They’ll pick up the rest by reading on their own.
My wife puts this even better by saying, “When I was in first grade, ‘look’ was my favorite word. It had those two eyeballs in the middle and everything.”
Rob, the problem is not the English language; its the spelling of that language.
Yep, menny of us did well with our reeding and riting at scool. Amung my career jobs was being a proofreeder.
When i was a teecher i had pupils who just could not spel, and i had either to draw their atention to it, teech and reteech, and try to fite their discurragement, or go eesy on it and hav their parents on my bak for not teeching what i was being payd to teech.
Its horses for corses. Sum of us hav the ability to overcum spellings deficiencys. But sum dont, including one very good teecher at one of the scools i taut at.
If we want those who struggle to master spelling, and with it reeding and riting, as do Italian children at age 7 and 8, we need to make our spelling as child frendly as Italian. At the moment, its child abusiv.
Spelling, like pronunciation (but much more slowly) evolves.
Fonemic spelling codes have succeeded in teaching literacy in a few months, an interval comparable to that of fonemcally logical Finnish and Korean, but thrusting a totally fonemic sstem nn learners without gradated transfer later to TS (traditional spelling) has not been well designed. The literacy gains of officially rationalizing spellings will be only marginal if the moderization is gradual euf to be acceptable to most who are literate in TS, judging by the reluctance of German users to transfer to spellngs recommended by experts commissioned by the 3 countries most concerned. The exceptional unpredictaby of English compared to every other letter-based language will demand a longer transition in any official reform series. Official support might be hastened if lexicografers agreed on a standard fonetic key to pronunciations.
Allan -
If you’re going to insist that it’s just Italian spelling that’s easier, then you’ve got a slight problem. The Italian language has far fewer phonemes than does English, mainly because of its descent from a single language. This difference in number is largely in the selection of vowels available to the speaker. English, having been descended from many languages, offers many more shades of vowel than does Italian. So, in a phonological sense, Italian *is* easier than English.
The English language presents a unique problem, in that it has significantly more sounds than its alphabet can represent in a one-to-one relationship. There are three ways to resolve this: 1. Increase the number of alphabetic symbols available to symbolize sounds (maybe introduce symbols from IPA) 2. Decrease the number of sounds to allow for a 1-to-1 correlation 3. Use multi-letter phonemes and functional silent letters, such as silent “e”, to allow the alphabet to express more phonemes that it otherwise could
Solution 3 is the one that has been collectively decided upon by billions of English speakers over the last several centuries.
Your spelling appears to be an attempt at solution 2, substituting “menny” for “many” as an example. If one listens to a well-spoken person, one will hear a difference in pronunciation between these two. The vowel in “menny” will be a fairly closed “eh”, rhyming with “penny”, while the vowel in “many” will be between “eh” and “ah” in openness. Also, if one listens carefully, one can hear a difference in length bewteen the “nn” in “menny” and the “n” in “many”.
My point? In simplifying spelling, you are actually changing the phonetic structure of the language. While this might not be a bad thing in terms of usability, applying such simplified spelling to literary works where it was not originally contemplated could significantly change their aesthetic character, if not their meaning.
Kendra,
I assume you want to expose the financial ties to those on the whole language front, as well, in the interest of transparency.
Most of the people who argue one side or the other as experts have been paid by someone to do so. That makes it worth knowing, but a far cry from the evil intentions you seem to be assigning to them.
From what I understand Reading First is about teaching reading using 5 components: Phonics, Phonemic Awareness, Vocabulary, Fluency, and Comprehension. Phonics is only a part of it.
Starting learners with phonemic awareness and phonics is the best way to go. The research is crystal clear on that.
But can anyone help me on the Reading First controversy? I can’t figure out whether the Reading First folks are simply developing good materials, as some say, or whether they are corruptly profiting from lobbying efforts, as others say.
U ar rite, Quincy. Italian is a mor strateforward language than English, being based almost entirely on Latin. And we dont hav enuf vowels for our sounds. Hence the use of magic or silent ‘e’. If only we didnt confuse that device by mixing it with silent ‘i’ and uther variations, eg, ‘rain’, ‘mane’.
Rationalizing our spelling wont be simple, as it mite be in Italian or Korean, but we hav to cut our suit to fit our cloth. I’m not a linguist, but i think a solution can be workd out. But first, there has to be the wil. Until we see that our present spelling is causing lots of problems, we wont do ennything.
Dus changing spelling change pronunciation? Ocasionaly as in ‘clerk’. And as in menny! I’m in New Zealand, where we dont heer a difrnce in ‘menny’ and your ‘many’.
We heer liv now with spellings that ar rufly based on uther dialects, and we can do so with new spellngs based on US and Brit dialects.
The problem with learning how to read and spell the English language is that you have to learn it. It requires a certain amount of effort to memorize the rules of the English language, and the few exceptions to each rule.
As a former English teacher, I am almost ashamed to admit that I can understand the arguement that you really need to perfect spelling or handwriting anymore. I see no reason why students can’t learn them….but let’s be honest…these kids are growing up in the age of texting, e-mail, l33t speak, and spell check. They honestly see no relevance in spelling or cursive.
I have students who still haven’t learned the parts of speech in the 8th grade…not because they haven’t been exposed to it, or taught how to recognize them, but because it takes too much effort to memorize the rules for them. I even used to go the entertainment route, and show the kids the Schoolhouse rocks videos while trying to get them to learn the parts of speech. By the end of the week they had the definition of the part of speech down, and could even demonstrate the skill, but 3 months later could not identify the parts of a sentence.
I’ll be happy if I can get my students to understand the difference between “can I ” and “may I” by the end of the year.
That’s “…don’t really need …..” in the above post.
Allan -
Now that you mention it, I can hear the New Zealand accent in your simplified spelling. You’ve brought up an interesting point about capturing regional variations in pronunciation.
Gahrie -
You said that it takes too much effort for your eighth graders to memorize the parts of speech. That just plain scares me.
Gahrie,
I assure you they aren’t teaching the 8 parts of speech in grade school. They’re journaling, my friend. So, please be careful about blaming texting or anything else when the kids can’t write. They don’t get any practice past the naval-gazing of their 3-sentence journal entry.
Then, by third grade they leap dramatically to the 5-paragraph essay required by the state, which is crammed into them by the most rote process possible (in accordance with the newfangled writing curriculum developed specifically to ace such tests).
Somewhere around the 4th or 5th grade they may get a little grammar packet to fill out for a couple of weeks. That’s about it. If you don’t teach them at home, they will be woefully unready for writing by middle school.
So, that’s what you get. Good luck getting them ready for high school. You are their only hope.
> No, allen, spelling as a cause is not a new excuse for literacy problems.
You’re right about that. It’s been an excuse, one among the battery, of those for whom reading instruction is a celebration of vanity rather then a means to teach kids/adults to read, for decades. Antiquity, however, does not confer veracity.
> It’s always been thare, befor and after Samuel Johnson codifyed it with his 1755 English Dictionary.
Kinda makes you wonder how Samual Johnson learned to read then.
> Until recently the problem was hidden, because there was work avalable for the illiterate, work that has largely disapeerd in the IT age.
Yet there are all those volunteer-run adult literacy centers filled with people who teach reading and learn to read without waiting for the language to improve. Doesn’t sound like the problem was all that well hidden or even all that much of a problem once a reasonable approach is taken to instruction.
The notion that the arrival of computers on the scene precipitate “end times” for illiterates is just laughable even if the problem of illiteracy is anything but. Jobs for illiterates haven’t disappeared but it’s the increasingly large component of skill in every product and job that’s making the already tough situation of illiteracy gradually tougher.
Quincy: ‘Kinda makes you wonder how Samuel Johnson learned to read then.’ Or me or u or menny others. I guess he, like us, must hav had a good memory when yung (i dont now!), and a bent towards language.
I also for a yeer (i found it too tuf by then) had an ESL student. There wer menny at the time, but obviusly not all non-litrats wer intrested enuf to face the music agen after disastrus experiences with reeding in their youth.
Comments about the need to lern ar natural. We do need to lern litracy. But do we need obstacles to that lerning? Do we supply aprentice carpenters or motor mecanics with inferior, unreliable, broken-down tools so they can lern their trade? Or do we find the latest, most eficient devices to help them get on with the reel tasks of constructing fine furniture and fixing cars?
The reel litracy task in life is not lerning to spel. Its lerning to reed and rite. The tool to help atane that gole is spelling. Why not make it lerner-frendly and helpful insted of lerner-hostile?
Correctio: in my previus reply i used the term ‘ESL student’ when i should hav ritten ‘adult litracy student’.
Age is telling!
Allan, your own spelling shows the argument against your proposal. You want English spelling to reflect English pronunciation, but there isn’t just one English pronunciation. For example, your use of “litrat” and “litracy” confused me initially. I’m sure you do pronounce “literate” and “literacy” that way– you’re from New Zealand, right?– but the majority of English speakers don’t. Americans pronounce “literate” LIT-er-it. To me, “litrat” looks like it’s talking about a flaming rodent.
There’s no way English spelling can conform with a language that’s constantly changing and that has different dialects with different pronunciations.
Allan -
The English Language is not an “inferior, unreliable, broken-down tool”. I linked earlier to the 26 Letter, 29 Rules, and 70 Spellings for 44 sounds. You (and everyone else reading this) should visit that link and read it. When English is considered from that standpoint, which is built on the historical and orthographical roots of the language, it makes an incredible amount of sense. While that might make it more complex than say, Italian or Spanish, it still makes it much less complex than other languages, such as Chinese.
The fact is that literacy is low not because the language is broken but because the teaching of that language is broken. The mechanics of the sound and spelling relationships are know, but when it comes time to teach them, the powers running the schools replace them with fads like whole language or see-say, which results in your comment: I guess he, like us, must hav had a good memory when yung (i dont now!), and a bent towards language
I’m going to say that if you believe you need a good memory to learn how to spell standard English, you were not taught the rules of spelling correctly. Personally, I have *very* few words memorized, and those that I do are mainly of foreign origin, “rendezvous” for instance. The way I recognize misspellings is that, as I’m reading, something will look wrong to me, and it almost always is a violation of one of the 29 rules.
To do as you’re suggesting would suck a lot of the meaning out of the language as well as making it more difficult for people who have strong regional difference in dialect to read standard English. Imagine a world in which English speakers in New Zealand had one spelling system, while speakers in California had another, where speakers in Liverpool couldn’t read something written by speakers in London. It would be an interesting world indeed.
First, Cardinal Fang: ‘You want English spelling to reflect English pronunciation, but there isn’t just one English pronunciation.’
Tru. I’m happy to let GA (General American) and RP (receevd pronunciation: British English), as represented by NBC and BBC newsreeders, be the bases for deciding on how change should be desined. We Kiwis wil slot in to that.
Quincy: ‘The English Language is not an “inferior, unreliable, broken-down tool”.’ Didnt say it was. Its a very vibrant, living, and rich language.
Just a pitty its spelling is an ‘inferior, unreliable, broken-down tool’.
The ‘historical and orthographical roots of the language’ ar all very intresting to linguists and language students, but ar they of enny intrest to Joe and Jo Blog using it for what language is ment for: evryday comunication?
Just as trane spotters can tel u the history of railway engins and tranes, timetables, and all u mite evver hav wanted to no about changes in engin desine and trak gages, so linguists can studdy all they want on the history and roots of the language.
But the ordinary person in the street just wants to use the langueage to go about their busness. Its primarily a comunication tool, not a museum of Greek and Latin roots.
If we want the populace at large to be good at using it as comunication tool, particularly in riting and reeding, we need our spelling updated.
Allan -
Not even the spelling is a broken tool, only the teaching of that spelling. English spelling can be taught in a systematic, logical manner that makes as much sense as any other language, maybe even more. The problem is the people who’ve taken it upon themselves to do so choose to ignore that fact and teach in faddish, incomplete manner. Updating spelling is a losing proposition, since it introduces far more problems than it solves, as have been elucidated in the thread above.
What we need is the clear, systematic teaching of English spelling. If I, and everyone with whom I went to school could learn it from complete, systematic instruction, it clearly can be taught. It’s just not being taught. Sad.
Quincy: I was taut spelling all the way thru scool, rite up to yeer 12! So wer my classmates. Same teeching, same spelling, very difrent results!
In tru alfabetical languages, eg, Italian, Finnish, Korean, spelling rules ar lernd in a yeer or two, and then the kids aply them and get on with lerning reel subjects.
Gwen Thorstads Italian/English studdy (British Journal of Psychology, #82, 1991) compared 6- to 11-yeer-old Italian children with British children, and also with 6- to 7-yeer-old Brits lerning litracy with the initial teeching alfabet (ITA).
The Italians machd or wer better than the Brits lerning with traditional spelling (TS), 6-yeer-olds eeven being able to spel words they didnt no (eg, percettibile) whereas the older TS Brits had mixd results with sum words they should hav noen (eg, perceptible). The ITA Brits wer as good as the Italians.
Thorstad commented that Italian children took one yeer to acheev in reeding and spelling what took English TS children three to five yeers.
Spelling is a tool subject. It shouldnt need to be taut all the way thru scool as it was in my case. Ideely it should be masterd in a yeer or two, because it is logical, and then taken for granted while subjects of substance ar taut and lernd.