And yet another good idea

In my personal life, I have known only a couple of people who've been in prison. One was a childhood neighbor (kiddie porn on this hard drive), the other a former colleague who snapped and stabbed her children. These individuals were both released back into society while in their mid-to-late sixties, so they didn't have all the re-entry problems - like finding a job - that so many prisoners do face.

But in my volunteer life, working in a homeless shelter, I see plenty of folks with criminal records. 

Sometimes I know that they've been to jail or prison because they tell me. Sometimes they tell me directly, as in "I just got out of prison," to which I always say, "Welcome back!" Sometimes I learn indirectly, as when someone will say "Thank God you don't still give out Bob Barker soap." (Bob Barker is a mega-supplier to the prison system, and while some guys like the Bob Barker soap, claiming that it's good for hand-washing clothing, a lot more of our guests find Bob Barker brand triggering. So we try not to stock it.) Sometimes the guests have tear-drop or other prison tats, which are dead giveaways that someone's been on the inside. And sometimes I'm just curious about a guest and I google their name. (And sometimes I wish I hadn't.)

Anyway, I know that many of those who are coming out of jail or prison have an especially difficult time finding work. Yes, there are plenty of "CORI-friendly" employers who will hire those with CORIs (Criminal Offender Record Information).  But it's still harder than it should be. Even if they worked while in prison, the jobs they held - like making license plates - may not come with skills that are easily transferrable to the outside world. Plus the money that prisoners get paid for their work is typically pretty pathetic. 

Which is what makes a remote work program for prisoners in the state of Maine so worthwhile and wonderful.

Unlike incarcerated residents with jobs in the kitchen or woodshop who earn just a few hundred dollars a month, remote workers make fair-market wages, allowing them to pay victim restitution fees and legal costs, provide child support, and contribute to Social Security and other retirement funds.

Like inmates in work-release programs who have jobs out in the community, 10 percent of remote workers’ wages go to the state to offset the cost of room and board. All Maine DOC residents get re-entry support for housing and job searches before they’re released, and remote workers leave with even more: up-to-date résumés, a nest egg — and the hope that they’re less likely to need food or housing assistance, or resort to crime to get by. (Source: Boston Globe)

Not that the Maine woodworking program isn't great. I've been to the Maine State Prison Showroom (sensibly placed on Route 1 to capture the tourist trade) a couple of times and have gotten a few things there, including my toast tongs. But the ability to work remotely at a job more current and techie - and make market wages while you're at it - is far better preparation for re-entry, and it enables prisoners to actually help support their families and/or save up for the future. 

About 40 prisoners participate in the Maine program  "some of whom work full time from their cells and earn more than the correctional officers who guard them."

There are downsides to the program, of course. Crime victims and their familes may see the job opportunities, the market wages, as way, way, way too cushy. And friction has been known to build beween the haves with the high-end jobs and the have-nots working in the kitchen, carving duck decoys, and making license plates. (The good news on the latter front is that those who land the remote work jobs have often held the more desirable and glam prison jobs, which now become up for grabs.)

The benefits are undeniable, [Maine DOC’s director of adult educationLaura]Rodas said. "The systems that we’ve set up to send people home with virtually nothing makes no sense at all if we want them to become good neighbor.

...More than anything, incarcerated residents say, these jobs give them a sense of purpose and dignity. And hope.

To have prisons focused solely or just overwhelmingly on the punishment aspect of incarceration is so short-sighted. Most prisoners will go back into their communities, and how much better if they arrive back with well-developed skills, jobs lined up, money set aside to get them back up and running. 

Something seems to be working. In Maine, 10 percent of people who served time in state prisons are back in custody within a year, on average, compared to 31 percent in a survey of 18 states.

Here's how the system works:

Remote workers’ paychecks are sent to the state, which deducts room and board, child support, and other court-ordered fees, then transferred into personal accounts that can be accessed to buy snacks and supplies at the canteen or to send money home. Workers are also required to build up at least $1,000 in savings.

...In the Maine prison system, residents who want to work for private companies must comply with treatment plans and behavioral standards, and abide by internet limits and laptop monitoring. Phones aren’t allowed, but video calls are. The corrections department is also considering finding a way to designate an additional portion of their salaries for funds to assist fellow inmates, though some remote workers don’t like the idea of having more of their earnings taken away.

While Maine is the gold standard, a number of other states - but still far too few - have implemented or are considering similar programs. Massachusetts, alas, is not among them. (Massachusetts is not totally unenlightened. We do have a number of other training, work, and educational programs in place for prisoners. Just not enough. Nowhere are there enough.)

With all the remote work opportunities out there, having prisoners take advantage of some of them seems like an excellent idea. I know that call centers have for years operated out of some prisons, but, while call center jobs do teach transferrable skills, they pay low wages, not the market rate. The remote work jobs in Maine are real jobs, with the same compensation that those jobs would demand in the outside world.

Definitely an idea whose time has come!

Now here's an idea!

Throughout my career, I invariably worked for organizations that were in perpetual reorgnization mode. The word "reorganize" was always used, but one colleague observed that it wasn't quite the right word, as "reorganized" would imply that the company was organized to begin with. Which was seldom (never?) the case.

In one company, with a re-org looming, the managers tasked us rank and file workers with coming up with suggestions for how our group - a 100 person outpost of a larger organization - should be set up. Permission granted to officially do what we'd been doing all day anyway, i.e., sitting around speculating on how the re-org was going to go down, my buddies and I happily commandeered a meeting room and spent the workday with a little set of cards we'd created - one with each employee's name on it - laying out possible organization structures. 

I can't remember if we ever submitted a suggested org, and, if we did, whether anything came of it. I also don't remember if this was the reorganization when I overheard my boss and another manager debating who would get me on his team. My boss wanted to keep me, if only because everyone wanted to bail out of his group and join that other manager's team and he wanted to keep at least some sort of respectable headcount under him. 

My boss' argument for keeping me wasn't that I was so great. On the contrary, as I clearly overheard, he was telling the other manager - who ran the group of financial consultants where all my buds were heading - "she doesn't know anything about finance." Which was mostly true, yet still.

Anyway, I ended up staying under my original boss. I liked him well enough, even though he was something of a stiff. Case in point: one year when it came to reviews, HR told all the managers that the vast majority of employees - as near as possible to 100% - should be rated a "3," and that only the most exceptional should be rated a "4" or a "5." My goody-two-shoes boss gave us all "3's." Every other manager gave their peeps "4's" or "5's." 

Although the party line was always that raises and reviews are decoupled - hah! - when the raises came down, all the "4's" and "5's" got good raises, while us "3's" got a pittance.

This stroll down re-org/de-org lane was prompted by an article I'd seen (from Fortune, as picked up by Yahoo) on a pretty radical step that Bayer took: it got rid of its managers and let the rank and filers organize themselves.

Things have not been going well for Bayer for a while now. 

The company has a colossal amount of debt. In 2024, its maket cap plummeted. The company - known for that life saving, health preserving miracle we call the aspirin - had paid a boatload to acquire Monsanto - better known for death-dealing products like the weed killer Roundup. With the acquisition of Monsanto, Bayer also acquired a boatload of lawsuits claiming that Roundup causes cancer. (Personal aside: my husband's wonderful Aunt Ruth worked for years for Monsanto, and died, not young-young, but relatively so, from a cancer related to the products she had worked on.) On top of everything else, Bayer's patent for its blood-clot medication, Xarelto, expires next year, opening the door for competitors and closing the window on unbridled profits. 

With lots of not such good stuff going on, why not fire the managers? After all, so many of them are nothing more than paper-shuffling bureaucrats, no? (Not that I was ever a paper-shuffling bureaucrat of a manager...)

In place of managers, Bayer got rid of annual budgets and asked staff to organize themselves into 90-day “sprints” in self-directed teams. Anderson promised the vast majority of his staff would be operating under this model by the end of 2024.

“Rather than a lumbering corporation, Bayer will emerge as agile and bold as a startup—but one with operations in more than 100 countries. I’m convinced that this dramatic change will accelerate and unlock the value creation in each of our businesses,” Anderson wrote in a commentary piece for Fortune in March.

The good news for Bayer is that, when it comes to employees that Bayer does not want to attrit, attrition is down. Which is a good thing - between recruiting, onboarding, time to effectiveness, training, it costs a lot more to bring in someone new than it is to retain the services of someone you want to keep - but may not be enough to get Bayer fully back on track.

Still, eliminating the managerial layer - except, obviously, in the upper echelons - is an interesting approach. Mid-level managers have been under the gun since forever, but now, if the Bayer approach takes off, it looks like there's even more reason for those middies to make sure that they're working managers, not just paper-shuffling budgeters; "3," "4," and "5" review conductors; powermongers hell bent on keeping folks in their fiefdoms. 

Caveat, managers! (Take two aspirins and call us in the morning.) 

Unmade Men

Like pretty much every city of any size in the Northeast (and the Midwest, for that matter), my hometown of Worcester had it's share of organized crime. Cosa Nostra, it was called then, and Raymond Patriarca, who ran the Providence mob and had his hand in the Worcester mob as well, was Worcester-born.

But most of what I knew about gangsters came from watching The Untouchables. (Rico! Youngfellow!) I loved the show, but wasn't always able to see it, as my mother thought it was too explicit and violent for a ten year old. Somehow, though, I guess when she was distracted, I was able to watch. My father enjoyed it, and I became a fan, too.)

I also knew about organized crime from reading the newspapers and magazines like Newsweek, and from watching the televised news as well. (I was an avid consumer of the news pretty much from the time I could read.)

Once I reached the age of reason and moved to Boston, I became more aware of the Mafia, which had a major local presence. The Irish mob - Winter Hill Gang, Whitey Bulger - did, too. (That's a Whitey Bulger mug shot.)

The mobs were big news, so I learned plenty about the local gangs. 

In addition to reading about organized crime in the Boston Globe, there was plenty of popular culture to consume. 

Despite the sometimes terrible Boston accents, I loved The Departed, which was loosely based on the life and times of Whitey Bulger. And although they were not Massachusetts-mobbed up related, I also loved the Godfather movies (the first two, anyway), Married to the Mob, Wise Guys, etc. And I adored The Sopranos.

In terms of knowing much about the gangs, it was the Boston Mafia and the adjacent Irish mob that I knew most about. And I grew to understand that - as the wire taps and other surveillance methods worked, as the head guys went to prison and/or died, as the underlings decided that omerta wasn't worth it if you could acquire a get-out-of-jail-free card for ratting out the top dogs - organized crime in Boston wasn't what it used to be. 

(Steven O'Donnell, the former head of the RI State Police has recently "estimated there are currently only about 30 “made” members of the New England Mafia, compared to hundreds during its heyday decades ago.")

The local FBI has apparently come to the same understanding about the local branches of the mob dying out. 

So much so that the FBI’s Boston office, which oversees much of New England, quietly disbanded its organized crime squad recently and re-assigned agents to other priorities, according to several people familiar with the move.

The agency will still monitor any organized crime groups, as needed. But the disbandment of a unit that was largely built to target the Mafia signaled a death notice of sorts — an end of a dark era — for what was once one of the most powerful criminal organizations in the region, as well as the storied unit that was built to combat it.

“I don’t think there’s much of anything left with traditional organized crime,” said Fred Wyshak, a former federal prosecutor who won the convictions of local Italian and Irish organized crime figures, including the late former Mafia boss Francis “Cadillac Frank” Salemme, notorious gangster Stephen Flemmi, and South Boston crime boss James “Whitey” Bulger. “I think the leadership was destroyed and nobody really has the strength to step in and fill that void. I don’t think there’s a lot of desire to do so.” (Source: Boston Globe)

That these ruthless hoods are out of business is certainly for the better. While they were in their shoot-'em-up prime, there were plenty of stories in The Globe about cold blooded mob hits - often in broad daylight- and about mysterious disappearances. 

Organized crime may be romantic when the bad guys are played by Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino. It may provide some comic relief like the episode of The Sopranos when Christopher Moltisanti and Paulie Walnuts are stranded overnight in the NJ Pine Barrens with nothing to eat but the dried up contents of a ketchup packet, found in the glove compartment. 

But in real life, organized crime is bloody, violent, sickening, and really, really stupid.

And there's no forgetting that some of G-men in the local Boston FBI office were pretty much running a Whitey Bulger protection racket out of said office. (FBI Agent John "Zip" Connolly went to prison for his involvement. He  had, like Whitey, grown up in South Boston. And, hey, what are friends for?)

In any event, it's good to see that the FBI will be focusing on terrorism, cybercrime, and other dangers that are clearer and more present than the old school mob. After all:

...the New England Mafia is now “a shell of itself,” said Steve Johnson, a retired Massachusetts State Police detective lieutenant and longtime organized crime investigator.

“It’s mostly figurehead people and wannabes ... people pretending they are doing their best Sopranos act,” he said. “It’s mostly just in name. They are certainly not what they used to be.”

I'm happy to see that fewer of these men, both made and unmade, remain in our midst. But they live on within a few degrees of separation.

My cousin's grandson had a classmate/teammate who was the grandson of the man who was responsible for 20 or so murders while he served as Whitey Bulger's trigger man. Another classmate/teammate was the great-nephew of another member of Whitey's gang. The uncle was a member in good standing until he pissed Whitey off. Bad move! The man who finished the uncle off was none other than Whitey's trigger man, who was just following orders. 

Good riddance to them all. (The hoods, not the classmates/teammates.)

Sugaring Off

We're still a month or so away from sugaring off season, when New England's maple trees are tapped and the sap boiled down to make maple syrup and maple sugar. Is there anything better for breakfast than pancakes with real maple syrup - not the corn syrup abomination you get in crappy restaurants? Yummer! And I'm also partial to maple sugar candy, with its tooth enamel piercing, diabetic coma inducing, sweetness. 

I've never seen sugaring off. But I sure do like the idea of it. 

Most real maple syrup in the United States comes from the Northeast, with Vermont being the Number 1 producing state. 

But New Hampshire's right up there, too, and one of the farms that's still producing the real deal is North Family Farm, which Tim Meeh and his wife Jill McCullough have been doing for 50 years now, since 1974 when they took over the Meeh family farm. And now the couple is facing the facts of all life, but especially farming life:

Now 72, Meeh and McCullough won’t be able to farm forever, and the farm’s future is to be determined. Like many aging farmers in the region, the couple is facing the thorny problem of how to hand off their life’s work — a complicated task involving money, family, and a deep connection to the land.

Farmers around New England are facing this precarious situation in the top region for maple syrup production in the country. The transition to the next generation will determine how much of the region’s agricultural roots — and identity — remain intact.

Maple farming is part of a multimillion dollar industry in New Hampshire but many farms are on the brink of disappearing. As of 2022, more than 40 percent of New Hampshire farmers are over 65 years old, while only 7 percent are under 35, according to the latest Census of Agriculture by the US Department of Agriculture. And some small farms are struggling to stay in business. (Source: Boston Globe)

Meeh and McCullough are hoping that one or both of their sons, Gemini and Daimon, will take over. (Gemini, huh? Ya think Meeh and McCullough might have been on the hippy spectrum back in the day?) 

Certainly, Meeh and McCullough have done everything they can to keep the operation going and self-supporting. 

Their operation now taps around 2,500 trees, producing about 1,250 gallons of organic syrup a year, according to Meeh. The maple syrup, maple cream, and maple candies they produce are sold online and at farmer’s markets, in addition to being distributed around the state to restaurants, grocery stores, and food co-ops. The couple has made the finances work through a diversified operation, growing hay and selling firewood in addition to making maple syrup.

Still, they're concerned about the farm's future.  Over the last few years, the number of maple farm operations in NH has declined by roughly 10%, from 528 to 471. 

While neither of the Meeh boys has fully declared, it sounds as if Gemini is leaning toward taking over the farm. A carpenter, hes been working the farm a few days a week. 

“There’s nothing like farming,” he said. “It’s the most enjoyable and fun work that I could imagine.”

He said he wants his young daughter to grow up around the same farm that he did. 

I'm sure that there is nothing like farming. I'm sure there aren't a lot of professions that are more demanding and just plain bone-wearying hard. (My husband's Uncle Bill grew up on a tobacco farm in Western Massachusetts, and farmed it for many years before turning it into a golf course. Uncle Bill made no bones about how hard farming is. In comparison, running the golf course was a breeze.) Still, tapping trees, the smell of maple during sugaring off...There sure is plenty of romance associated with it.

Good luck to North Family Farm. 

If I needed maple syrup, I'd order me some. But I think that the gift jug I have in my fridge is still good to go. Pancake dinner, coming right up!

_________________________________________

That painting Sugaring Off? Who else but Grandma Moses?

Way to wreck your college career - and maybe even beyond - Greyhounds!

Didn't a college prank used to be a panty raid or stealing a traffic cone? One Christmas, at my all women's Catholic college in the late 1960's - early 1970's, someone in my dorm took the statue of the Christ Child out of the manger scene and left a packet of birth control pills. A friend and I once kidnapped a 3 foot statue of the Blessed Virgin and installed it in her dorm room, surrounded by peacock feathers and with glow-in-the-dark rosary beads wrapped around her piously folded hands. (When a security guard stopped us and asked what we were carrying - which just looked like a mid-sized object wrapped in a madras rainjacket - we answered "art project." So he let us go.)

The ante has apparently been upped and some of today's TikTok and group-think inspired pranks are borderline criminal. And sometimes they even go way over the border.

As happened last October at Worcester's Assumption Univeristy, a Catholic college just down Salisbury Street from my high school. So I'm pretty familiar with Assumption. In fact Assumption's then-president spoke at my graduation. (Assumption's mascot is Pierre the Greyhound, pictured here. When I was a girl, Assumption was for the most part the "French college," where Worcester's French Canadians went; Holy Cross was where the Irish boys went.)

Well, having read about the recent antics at Assumption - which ended up with five students charged with kidnaping and conspiracy, and a couple of them facing additional charges (for one, assault and battery with a dangerous weapon; for another, lying to investigators) - all I can say is that Father Georges Bissonette is spinning in his grave. 

The incident that resulted in the charges (which were filed in early December) occurred on October 1st. From their ages, it looks as if all/most of the students charged were freshmen. So, on campus at that point for a month and change.

On that fateful day, a female student (age 18), on Tinder, had set up a meet and greet, on the Assumption campus, with a young male (age 18) who was in Worcester for his grandmother's funeral. 

The man said he and [his Tinder date] were sitting together for just a couple minutes when a group of people “came out of nowhere” and began calling him a pedophile and accusing him of wanting sex with 17-year-old girls, according to the report filed by Assumption police Sergeant Christopher J. Shea. (Source: Boston Globe)

For starters, the young woman's Tinder profile said that she was 18. For the starter before the starters, the age of consent in Massachusetts is 16. (Note that the Boston Globe article I used as the source for all the quoted info didn't state the man's age; MassLive says he's 18. But whether he's 18 or 48, having consensual sex with an 18 or even a 17 year old is NOT a crime in this state, and the man is NOT a predator.)

The man told police the group surrounded him and held him back, preventing him from leaving. At one point, he said, he was chased by more than two dozen people to his car, where he was punched in the back of the head and had his car door slammed on him as he tried to escape, police said.

While the young man was being chased, the crowd of student faux vigilantes doing the chasing:

...all had their cell phones out in an apparent attempt to record the chase. Additional footage showed the group coming back into the building, laughing and high-fiving each other, the report said.

Fortunately, the man was able to make his escape from campus and call the police. 

So what were these kids up to? 

The students were mimicking a phenomenon that’s become popular on TikTok, police said.

“The goal of the Tinder invite was to simulate the TikTok fad of luring a sexual predator to a location and subsequently physically assaulting him or calling the police,” police said.

One of the stuents charged:

... told police the plot was also inspired by the former reality TV show “To Catch a Predator,” a program hosted by Chris Hansen that showed men arriving at stings expecting sex with minors and instead getting arrested. [He said the mob scene] "was like the Chris Hansen videos where you ‘catch a predator and either call police or kick their ass,’” police said. “[He] reported that catch a predator is a big thing on TikTok currently but that this got out of hand and went bad.”

By "went bad," means that texts went out encouraging fellow students to come on down because there was a predator preying on an underage woman on campus. 

It's as yet not clear that any of the students charged, let alone their fellow mob-sters, has been expelled or suspended, but Assumption (of course) issued a press release stating that the students' behavior was "abhorrent and antithetical to Assumption University's mission and values." The statement also called out the role of social media in stirring up dangerous and irresponsible behavior.

What a bunch of prime knuckleheads. 

Stupid, thoughtless, reckless, silly, dumb, dumb, dumb. And susceptible to stupidly, thoughtlessly, recklessly, etc.-ly jumping into an out-of-control mob.

Whether they do any jail time or just end up with probation and a healthy does of community service, the names of The Assumption Five are all out there. I don't imagine that they'll be allowed to complete their freshman year at Assumption, and may well be expelled. Other colleges, job recruiters, hiring managers will be reading about this "prank" and most/all will be taking a pass. There may well be a civil lawsuit - the parents must be thrilled. And these idiots have pretty much wrecked what they must have imagined when they showed up on the Assumption campus would be a happy college career, only to find themselves in the Internet's educational, social, and professional forever hellscape for miscreants. 

Sure, over time, the news articles end up being a few pages in - especially if The Assumption Five hire reputation managers. But in the Age of AI, it's going to get harder and harder to bury bad deeds. ("Find me everything on Pierre the Greyhoud.")

When I was growing up, Assumption was pretty big basketball school, and their teams got a lot of coverage in the local paper. The cartoon mascot, if I recall correctly, was frequently quoted as saying "sacre bleu" when the ball didn't bounce their way. 

I'm betting that Father Bissonnette isn't just spinning in his grave. I'm betting he's letting out a few "sacre bleus," too.

Way to go, you stupid young Greyhounds!

Sacre bleu, alright. 

No, Madam

It's probably a pretty good rule of corporate thumb to approach HR surveys with more than a bit of wariness and skepticism. Just how anonymous is anonymous? And will employees ever see the results of the survey. (In my experience, probably not.)

Still, I was not prepared for the ardent stupidity of Yes Madam, an Indian startup that provides beauty salon services in the home. 

The company recently surveyed its employees to gauge the level of stress they were experiencing. Then followed up with a social media post that showed a supposedly authentic email supposedly firing the 100 or so workers who said they were stressed. Here's the email (email of sorts, anyway).

"Recently we conducted a survey to understand your feelings about stress at work. Many of you shared your concerns, which we deeply value and respect."

"As a company committed to fostering a healthy and supportive work environment, we have carefully considered the feedback. To ensure no one remains stressed at work, we have made the difficult decision to part ways with employees who indicated significant stress."

"This decision is effective immediately and affected employees will receive further details separately. Thank you for your contributions." (Source: Comic Sands)

As things do happen when haphazardly applied social media posts appear, the wonderful worldwide web was soon abuzz with rumors that the company had fired stressed out employees. 

Not so fast! No one was fired! It was all just a marketing thang promoting a policy that lets employees take "De-Stress Leaves," i.e., what we used to call a Mental Health Day. And the company's employees - one of whom, by the way, posted the supposed email on LinkedIn for all the worldwide webbers to see - were, Yes Madam, all in on it. 

"The social media posts were a planned effort to highlight the serious issue of workplace stress. And to those who shared angry comments or voice strong opinions, we say Thank you. When people speak up, it shows they care - and care is at the heart of our business."

The company claimed the employees in question "weren't fired; they were given a break to rest," "weren't let go; they were encouraged to release their stress," "they weren't laid off; they were offered a chance to relax," and that they "weren't sacked; they were urged to rest and recharge."

Oh.

No mention on whether the stressed out time-off-ers were paid or not for their "chance to relax...rest and recharge." And no word on whether the marketing folks who thought it was a good idea to post the 'hey, you, stressed out survey respondent: you're fired" fake email still have their jobs. Seriously, how dumb is dumb?

In any case, it does sound like the company did identify its stressed out workers. (So much for anonymity.) But at least Yes Madam published something of the results, for all the worldwide web to see. 

Anyway, although I find this colossally stupid marketing, it there's no such thing as bad publicity, then Yes Madam's marketing team succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Certainly, I would never have heard to this company if Yes Madam had been a bit less wacky with their social media. 

Maybe they'll even expand into the US market. Maybe I'd even sign up for a housecall haircut and blow dry.

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