From Forbes…
For decades, the standard approach to teaching kids how to decipher, or “decode,” text has rested on the assumption that it’s not necessary to explicitly teach the vast majority of them how to connect sounds in words to the letters that represent them. Teachers may throw in some of that instruction, often called “phonics,” but they’re guided by their training and materials to encourage kids to guess at words, using context or pictures. Scientific evidence has clearly shown, however, that many if not most children will struggle to become fluent readers unless they get systematic instruction in phonics.
The difference between my oldest learning to read and my youngest, 15 years, is night and day. The oldest was just barely getting some of this crap, and the youngest only got a little bit of phonics. The middle kid, was somewhere inbetween. As a result, the amount of reading done for pleasure is the same. The oldest devours books, unfortunately a lot of HP fanfic, and learns by reading. The youngest, possibly the brightest, struggles absorbing via text. Doesn’t read very naturally.
We tried to counter this by teaching phonics at home, but the hammering in of “guessing” the word I believe has harmed her and her older sister for life. If she doesn’t know a word she essentially skips it, and her vocabulary is both wide and oddly narrow.
This is a method of teaching that has been proven not to work, but the speed the national standards change is so slow it’s not changing. It’s also supposed to somehow help disadvantaged kids, but doesn’t, which makes the inertia just that much harder to overcome to make a change. I believe this is worse than new math, since at least new math teaches you some method to get there. Even though it would have just been simpler to memorize simple addition and multiplication tables in elementary school instead of high school.
The new reading methods don’t actually give you tools to learn new words on their own. Given a difficult word they are left just staring at it until they give up, or use a traditional method they weren’t well taught on.