Why so many schools started telling kids to guess at words instead of sounding them out:

In the 1960's a woman in New Zealand named Marie Clay thought that good readers read by guessing at whole words from context (the words around them, the letter they start with, or any pictures).

This theory meant teachers wouldn't have to spend time drilling letter sounds, so it becomes very popular even though it's completely false.

Marie Clay's Reading Recovery program spread across the US in the 1980s and 1990s. Marie Clay becomes an education mini-celebrity.

Other programs begin to appear, selling these same "whole-word" guessing strategies to schools.

Fountas and Pinnell (started by Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell) is one of the most popular programs and convinces many schools to adopt the "3-cueing" strategy.

In 3-cueing, students are told to use context, syntax, and pictures to guess at a word, instead of using the letters to sound it out.

This "word guessing" approach becomes deeply embraced by the field of education.

Lucy Calkins is the professor who founded the prestigious Teachers College at Columbia University in 1981. She believed that kids would learn to read and write naturally, the same way people learn to talk.

This is a strange thing to believe, given that there are many, many people who can't read (1 in 3 fourth graders now can't read at a basic level) but almost no one who can't talk.

Nevertheless, it becomes an incredibly popular belief and even today there are still teachers in my replies loudly claiming it's true.

Lucy Calkins loves Fountas and Pinnell's approach, and she tells teachers that all they have to do is help students acquire a love of reading.

Teachers don't need to drill letter sounds, or teach kids to sound out words. They just need to build cozy reading nooks, have a lot of books in their classroom, and read to their students.

Obviously, this is an incredibly appealing idea, and through the 1990's and 2000's it sweeps through the field of education.

Lucy Calkins becomes almost a cult-like figure and holds revival-style training institutes in churches. Her supporters call her books "bibles". Songs are written about her.

But at the same time, neuroscience is advancing.

New research and brain scans make it clear that Lucy Calkins, Fountas and Pinnell, Marie Clay, and all of their teachers that they trained are completely wrong.

Trying to memorize whole words is briefly effective when a beginning reader only needs a few words, but quickly becomes an inefficient and ineffective way to read.

It turns out that learning 44 English sounds is way more efficient that memorizing 100,000 English words (why did the field of education need decades of neuroscience research to tell them this?)

When readers have a solid phonics foundation, their brains more easily map the connections between written words and their spoken forms (even when those written representations are imprecise like in English).

With a phonics foundation, most readers only need to see a new word 1-4 times to remember it (this is called "orthographic mapping"), as opposed to trying to memorize every word as a separate "picture".

So in 2000, George W Bush decides that schools should teach reading with methods that are supported by scientific evidence. Phonics actually becomes part of the Republican party platform.

And of course this is where everything goes off the rails.

Opponents of the phonics regulation said it was just a way to push money to political cronies. Some people decided that if the Bush administration was pushing phonics, they didn't want anything to do with it.

Even today, progressive school districts tend to be much more opposed to phonics.

Southern states (Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Alabama) are switching to systematic phonics instruction and seeing good results, and progressive commentators are trying to explain those results away.

The best reporting on this entire debacle is the recent podcast Sold a Story. It's won a number of awards and is actually driving legislative change by exposing the absurdity of the situation.

If you want a quick video explainer, John Stossel also did a recent segment on the topic (I'm in it!)

Ultimately, the important thing to remember is that "sounding out words" didn't disappear from schools because that's what people wanted. It disappeared because people weren't paying attention.

Modern education policy (getting rid of phonics, banning middle school algebra, eliminating honors classes, prioritizing equalization instead of education) isn't happening because that's what families want.

These policies happen when families and voters aren't paying attention, and if we want schools to switch their focus back to education and excellence, it will only happen if families and voters demand it.

https://x.com/NielsHoven/status/1996615915266576518

Correction: Lucy Calkins founded the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project in 1981

The Teachers College itself was founded in 1887

https://twitter.com/jerseygeneral34/status/1996660874850062636

Since roughly the 1990’s, the main goal of education policy has been to “close the achievement gap”.

When high achieving students excel, they grow the achievement gap, and so education policymakers look for ways to hold them back

https://twitter.com/abcflowe/status/1974928561141387319

The National Education Association opposes allowing students to learn and progress at different rates

They also noticed that kids in honors classes did better in life, but in this case the response was to get rid of honors classes in order to reduce inequality

https://twitter.com/austen/status/1879406504371232957

Sometimes "getting rid of honors classes" is disguised as "making honors classes available to everyone".

Like when San Francisco ended merit-based admissions at its magnet high school and failure rates tripled

Alphabet books teach reading wrong. They’re based on an outdated understanding of English and have barely changed in the last 500 years. So we wrote one that does it right, and we’ve made it available for free. (link in next tweet)

Here’s what makes ours different.
There are 44 sounds in the English language. Half of English sounds are written with more than one letter and alphabet books just ignore them. Can you imagine being a kid, trying to learn a language but only being taught half the sounds?

Parent don’t realize that reading became politicized in the 1990’s and as a result most schools teach it wrong. Teaching kids to guess at words, to rely on pictures, and other bad habits are standard teaching practice for schools now

https://twitter.com/jamesafurey/status/1814739695051452613

This is a training video for teachers, demonstrating how to teach kids to “read” by guessing at words they can’t even see

https://twitter.com/nielshoven/status/1800981479595585810

I've tried all the top reading apps, including ABC Mouse, Duolingo ABC, HOMER, Hooked on Phonics, Khan Academy Kids, and Reading Raven.

I was shocked.

I left the gaming industry bc I started to feel like a drug dealer. But I never sold drugs by marketing them as health food.

These companies market their apps by saying “we make learning fun” but they’re just low-quality games masquerading as education. They’re full of jigsaw puzzles, sticker books, drawing games, and tons of videos designed to turn kids into passive consumers of cheap edutainment.

I would like to discredit the entire field of education research by creating a compendium of popular and widely-cited results and showing how shoddy the underlying research is

Please point me to studies that I should look into.

I'll list a few that I'm already aware of below

https://twitter.com/JoshuaLelon/status/1796728764409188763

The claim that grouping students by ability has no impact. The study split students by ability but didn't vary the curriculum between groups.

https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1391751698943729668

Seattle Public Schools replaced their gifted program with an "equity-driven STEM program", claiming gifted kids will be supported in regular classes.

These construction paper houses are a showcase “engineering project” from the new program

This is a school of 6th-12th graders

The “Technology Access Foundation” (TAF) program replaced Washington Middle School’s Highly Capable Cohort (HCC), ending the classes that offered advanced curriculum to high-achieving students, and instead requiring them to return to general education classrooms.

When I tell parents that we teach 2- and 3-year-olds to read, they get excited.

Often they ask me “My child isn’t 2 yet, what should I be doing to get ready?”

My answer surprises them: If you want to accelerate your child's education, the most important skill you can teach is the ability to make a mistake.

I finished calculus in 8th grade. Many other kids could do the same but they were never given the opportunity.

This is how my parents beat the system to make sure I always had the opportunity to learn.

Thanks, mom and dad! I’m not sure exactly when my dad realized that our education system is actively hostile to fast learners, but thankfully he realized it early on, and he was determined not to let it hold me back.