You might have heard that in Croydon, our superintendent admitted, on two separate occasions, in public, that even for $1 million per student per year, he wouldn’t be able to teach the two dozen kids in the Croydon Village School (CVS) to read.
What you probably haven’t heard (unless you were at my talk at PorcFest this year) is that at a recent school board meeting, the principal of CVS admitted that ‘we don’t really know how to teach kids to read.’
What you definitely should hear is the podcast Sold a Story, which explains how one publisher, and a few academics, made a pile of dough (enough that one of the academics drives a Maserati), pushing a theory of reading that is contradicted by basic facts, known for decades, about how brains process the written word.
(It’s also contradicted by common sense, although teachers enamored with the approach don’t seem to recognize that. As you listen to the description of the ‘reading recovery’ method, ask yourself how you might, when reading a book on biology, be able to guess a word you’ve never seen before — like ribosome or mitochondrion, or chirality — from context, without being able to sound it out. Or how you might, when reading a book on history, be able to guess the name of a city or country, or historical figure that you’ve never heard of. And so on. The very idea boggles the mind.)
There is a reasonable chance that this approach is being used in your local schools, as it is in Croydon. (At least one in four schools across the country uses it.) You might want to check with your school board.
As I listened, I couldn’t help thinking about all the parents in Croydon who were terrified at the prospect that privately-run micro-schools might ‘make a profit off the children.’
Oh, the irony.
