When I was in kindergarten, parents were told not to teach us to read. They might "do it wrong." Reading was for first-graders, and teaching was for teachers. My mother obeyed, but my sister, who was in first grade, using a Dick, Jane and Sally book surreptitiously brought home from school.
These days, as reading scores keep falling, it's become fashionable to blame parents. "Reading starts in the home," tweets a school defender. "If it doesn't, 99% likely the kid is screwed."
Most children need to be taught to read, explicitly, writes Pamela Snow, a cognitive psychologist in Australia who specializes in reading. Reading, writing and spelling are not "natural skills" like speaking, she argues. "The overwhelming majority" of children won't learn to read by living in a house with bookshelves and nightly readings of Goodnight Moon.
"There’s no shortage of odd, confusing, infuriating, ill-founded and contentious claims in education, and in the wider social chattersphere that sits around it, but surely there’s one that we can put to bed for good and for all: the idea that it is the job of parents to teach their children how to read – and by extension, that parents are to blame when children struggle in this endeavour."
"A misguided folklore" has taken over education schools, Snow writes. It allowed academics to "indulge their own love of children's literature" without preparing future teachers to teach novice readers.
"An illusion of early reading could be created cleverly and quickly in the first year of school, by having children draw on their oral language skills and basic vocabulary knowledge to recite predictable texts," she writes. But children who don't understand the code -- often a slow, difficult process -- will not become good readers.
Parents were "positioned as the primary agents of reading instruction, so that when children did not successfully become readers after three years of formal schooling, responsibility could be laid squarely at the feet of parents," writes Snow.
Of course, some parents do a lot to develop their children's vocabulary, language skills and knowledge of the world. They "model reading as a valued, worthwhile activity in their own lives," and read to their children. They buy quality children's books or borrow them from the library. They provide feedback and encouragement to their children.
All that is great, writes Snow. But schools shouldn't rely on parents being able to do it. It's the school's job to figure out why a student isn't learning to read well, and what instructional approach would work better.
Years ago, I volunteered to help first graders with reading. I worked with a bright kid who was good in math, but very, very frustrated by his inability to read. One day, he broke through. He could read simple words, slowly. He kept improving. A few months later, he read If You Give a Moose a Muffin. He laughed.
"I don't know what happened," I told the teacher.
"I know," she said. "His parents took him to Kaplan, and they taught him phonics."
Why hadn't she taught him phonics? I didn't ask. What would have happened if his parents hadn't been able to afford a professional tutor? I don't know.
Beanie tweets about her year as a reading interventionist for intermediate elementary students who could not read words. Despite her teaching degree, she had "little or no training" in how to teach students to read, but improvised phonics instruction when it was clear the "magic" computer program was useless.
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