Hooked on phonics

a-ay-aw

a as in apple

a (ay) as in lake

a (aw) as in claw

gu-je

g (gu) as in gum

g (je) as in gym

It's been nearly seventy years (gulp) since I was sitting in Sister Marie Leo's first grade classroom, reciting the sounds that letters make, with or without the aid of flashcards.

Sometimes phonics was easy. b was just b, the same sound, whatever letter came after it. Other times it was tricky. Soft g (je) when a long i came after the g, as in giant. Hard g (gu) when a short i came after the g, as in gift. Sometimes, any way. (C.f., the word "imagine.")

We may not have been hooked on phonics, but one thing I'm pretty sure of is that most kids - but likely not all - came out of Sister Marie Leo's first grade classroom - a grim and uninviting little house of horrors - knowing how to read. And, yes, I was one of the four kids in the top of the line Our Lady's reading group, paired up - as if, at age 5-6 I was capable of teaching anything to anybody - with a kiddo who was in the Angel group, trying to help them learn phonics and reading. How could they not get gu-je???

(The middle reading group was named Saint Joseph. As a child, I was always trying to come up with some rationale to characterize everything and everybody. Thus, I concluded, based on our first grade reading groups, that Mary was smarter than Joseph (who was sort of a plodder), and that both Mary and Joseph were smarter than angels, who were just sort of pathetic, wispy know-nothings.)

I hadn't really given a thought to phonics until I saw a recent Boston Globe article about:

...two Massachusetts families are suing famed literacy specialists Lucy Calkins, Irene Fountas, and Gay Su Pinnell, their companies, and their publishers, alleging the former teachers used “deceptive and fraudulent” marketing practices to sell curriculums that ignored the scientific consensus about the importance of phonics to early reading.

The families claim that their children were developmentally and emotionally injured, and that the parents incurred costs for tutoring and private schools "to compensate for the flawed reading curriculums used by their children’s public schools."

Apparently, over one-third of school districts in our state use the curriculums designed by the defendants. Interestingly, these districts include Amherst and Brookline, which are widely regarded as having highly rated schools. Amherst has all those professor kids; Brookline is an affluent Boston suburb chocked full of doctors-lawyers-management consultants. And there don't seem to be that many problems associated with Brookline and Amherst kids learning to read. But maybe the Brookline and Amherst parents are supplementing the non-phonics approach by sitting the kids around the kitchen table and drilling them with phonics flashcards. (In much the way parents of children in schools that don't require kids to memorize rudimentary arithmetic formulae sit their kids down and drill them on the times table.)

Anyway, other than knowing that I learned to read using phonics, and, thus, know it's effective - or at least was for me and my Our Lady's reading group colleagues - I don't have a pony in this race. But it sure looks like the alternative to phonics - something called "picture power:" "cueing directions, which instruct children to, for example, look at a picture for context in helping determine an unknown word" - is pretty flawed. (Just off the top of my head: what happens when the books no longer contain pictures?)

The Massachusetts lawsuit represents a new step in the early literacy advocacy movement and could spur new complaints like it nationwide. It follows several years of heightened debate surrounding the “science of reading,” a broad body of research demonstrating how the brain learns to read and which shows a firm grasp on phonics to be key to early reading success.

The suit alleges that the defendants "knew or should have known" that their approach didn't work all that well. In fact, when the evidence started emerging that "picture power" and the like wasn't very effective, the defendants created updated curriculums that incorporate some phonics. Trouble is, school districts have to pay a lot for the updates. Which a lot of them can't afford to. Recognizing that the defendants' curriculums were substandard, the Mass Department of Education has been providing grant money to school districts to update or replace them with "new materials grounded in reading science." And one can imagine  - soft g je sound - that the fact that the government is shelling out money to rid the schools of the defendants' materials can only help the litigants.

It'll be interesting to see how this one turns out. 

As with so much else in life, there may be no one perfect answer for how to get kids to read. Maybe a few kids learn better with "picture power," while most don't. I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't have been a "picture power" learner. As I have often said, for me, one word is generally worth a thousand pictures. I learn by reading about something, not by watching a 'how to' video. And the science sure looks like it leans towards phonics.

The question will be whethe the defendants "knowingly and deceptively" foisted their methods on an unsuspecting world. And made a boodle doing it. Nosy Parker that I am, I found the address of one of the defendants and found their $4.6M home on Zillow. So, deepish pockets.

We'll see. 

a-ay-aw
gu-je