A Retirement Journal: Back to School Basics: Reading, wRiting & aRithmetic

It is late August, back to school time for millions of kids across America. For the last several years it has been for me as well. I am immensely enjoying one of my retirement gigs as a part time substitute teacher in the Palo Alto Unified School District (PAUSD). My first assignment this year was as a Reading Specialist in one of Palo Alto’s three Middle Schools. While I have been in all grades from Transition Kindergarten (TK) through High School Seniors, I normally focus on K-5. I also normally don’t sign up for Specialist or Special Needs assignment.  To start of a new year, I thought I would check out what a Reading Specialist does in the higher grades of a highly regarded district like PAUSD. The lesson plan in the two classes of 7th and 8th graders last week consisted of asking the kids read a work of fiction to each other, with me joining in. The other part of the assignment was to play Scrabble with the kids. I initially thought Scrabble for 8th graders was just a way to babysit and kill time.

While I was somewhat taken aback by the difficulty several kids had with many fairly common multi-syllable words in the read aloud, I was shocked none of the kids in either class had heard of Scrabble. After I explained the rules, we began to play. To my even further astonishment, these middle schoolers could not put together string of letters to make words and conjoin these words with letters that were part of another word on the board. Wow, this was Palo Alto, one of the premier school districts in the state. With my grade schoolers, I had gone through Phonics lessons, assigned them i-Ready online Reading Assessments, done Read Aloud, and observed much younger kids doing group projects and presenting reports.  How had these 8th graders, all fluent, even sassy, in spoken English slipped through the system?

That very same morning an article in the San Jose Mercury News about Assembly Bill 1454 on early childhood reading had caught my attention. I went back with new interest to find out what was going on. It turns out “reading wars” have been going on for decades in the United States between “whole language” based learning which came into vogue in the 1970s and 80s versus the traditional phonics-based instruction where students sounded out words. While “whole language” instruction sounded hip and had rolled through most of the English-speaking countries, extensive research in the 90s had began to show that many kids weren’t able to progress until they went back to the more traditional “phonics” based system. With entrenched interests having sold millions of dollars of curricula, and with California permitting a fair degree of autonomy to each district, most school districts were holding on to the “whole language” method until recently. In particular, the teachers’ unions held out on switching. This was especially true in many of the wealthier school districts. Other districts followed the lead of the bellwether communities like Palo Alto, Menlo Park, and Beverly Hills.

Along came Covid which forced parents to observe via Zoom how actually their young kids were being taught in class. This included reading. Parents were surprised and shocked at the “whole language” method. This is not how they had been taught to read. They also realized why some of their own kids seemed to be faking it while reading at home. Teacher unions notwithstanding, pressure built up and the dam begun to break. This included my own PAUSD which went back to more of a phonics-based approach.  This is what I had been finding in my lesson plans for younger grades.  AB1454 is a compromise that stresses phonics but allows for leeway by individual school districts to have blended approaches. Palo Alto for example has gone to a holistic approach that reintroduced phonics, but also perhaps wanting educators to save face, argued that a blended approach helps dyslexic kids as well as those in non-English-speaking households. While the “whole language” approach can indeed be considered a “fake it till you make it” approach, many kids do figure out how to “make it”, that is learn to read. Many others do not. Hence the declining reading scores across the state prompting bills like AB1454 along with the 8th graders I observed last week.

While I am still digging into the full backstory, it turns out Red State- Blue State (aka California!) politics is part of the tale. President George W Bush was the one who stressed phonics-based reading instruction as part of his “No Child Left Behind” Initiative*. However, with Deep Blue California charting a contrarian path, and G.W.Bush being ridiculed for not finding Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) in Iraq, many initiatives from the Bush White House were reflexively dismissed. It turns out the research on phonics-based reading was sound. My own daughter Becca Carroll , with her oldest child being born during Covid and having read about the Covid debacle, taught her son J to sound out words well before he began primary school.  J entered Transition Kindergarten already able to read.  We will never know if J would have been one of the children who would have figured out reading even with the “whole language” approach.

Being a person who approaches life top down with heavy emphasis on intuition and hunches, I am by nature sympathetic to the something like the “whole language” approach. For me, context provides so many clues in life just like it does in reading as “whole language” advocates argue.  Given I now have a little knowledge on the reading wars and had my recent experience with Palo Alto 8th graders behind grade level, I can’t resist some fun closing out this blog. I am going to use some hunches that I will frame with the term “it seems”. I will speculate far beyond just early reading curricula disputes.

·      “It seems” we need both the N’s (Intuitives) as well as S’s (Sensers) as characterized in the Meyers-Briggs tool. Most breakthrough inventions and innovations in history came from Ns! However, we N’s need to value the data and results coming from solid S research! (Intuitive vaccine deniers, I am talking to you!)

·      “It seems” that “whole language” approach is like AI LLMs making extrapolations based on context as opposed to really thinking or learning. No wonder these models hallucinate or fake it just like my 8th graders!

·      “It seems” that early humans via evolution naturally “knew” speech but had to learn how to write. This before they taught others to read.  Writing is really a form of coding. The early writing innovators had to explain their code to others so that could understand the message. I say we too should learn to write before we learn to read! It turns out the Montessori System argues for just that.  Also, since arithmetic is a way of “reading” math, the basics should be wRiting, Reading, aRithmetic in that order!

·      “It seems” with new technologies and breakthroughs in neuroscience we will have other direct mind -to-mind ways for communicating nuanced and complex information. We will need to develop new basic skills beyond the 3 Rs in the future.

What do YOU think of the California debate on reading and AB1454? More importantly, what do YOU think of my reordering of the 3 R sequence?! 😊

Jake 

*Ironically President Bush was at an elementary school in Florida that had gone back to phonics-based reading when he was told about the 9-11 terrorist attack.