Phonics, Failure, and the Public Schools

By David Boaz by George Selgin.

"Could the public schools finally be “following the science” on how to teach reading? It would be about time. Dana Goldstein reports in the New York Times:

For decades, Lucy Calkins has determined how millions of children learn to read. An education professor, she has been a pre‐​eminent leader of “balanced literacy,” a loosely defined teaching philosophy.

In a classic Calkins classroom, teachers read aloud from children’s literature; students then chose “just right” books, which fit their interests and ability. The focus was more on stories — theme, character, plot — less on sounding out words.

Her curriculum, “Units of Study,” is built on a vision of children as natural readers, and it has been wildly popular and profitable. She estimates that a quarter of the country’s 67,000 elementary schools use it. At Columbia University’s Teachers College, she and her team have trained hundreds of thousands of educators.

[the title of the Times article was "In the Fight Over How to Teach Reading, This Guru Makes a Major Retreat: Lucy Calkins, a leading literacy expert, has rewritten her curriculum to include a fuller embrace of phonics and the science of reading. Critics may not be appeased."]

But increasingly parents and teachers are pushing back against “whole language” and “balanced literacy” theories. They cite decades of research on how children actually learn to read and write. In 1997 Congress instructed the National Institute on Child Health and Human Development to work with the Department of Education to establish a National Reading Panel that would evaluate existing research and evidence to find the best ways of teaching children to read. The panel reviewed more than 100,000 reading studies. In 2000 it reported its conclusion: That the best approach to reading instruction is one that incorporates:

• Explicit instruction in phonemic awareness
• Systematic phonics instruction
• Methods to improve fluency
• Ways to enhance comprehension

And yet more than a quarter of American school districts use this one particular curriculum that doesn’t reflect those conclusions. Other districts use other curricula built on similar principles. A 2019 investigation by American Public Media revealed “American education’s own little secret about reading: Elementary schools across the country are teaching children to be poor readers — and educators may not even know it.”

It’s not like people were unaware of the problems with such approaches to reading before the 2000 report. In 1995, after state test results showed that the vast majority of California public school students could not read, write, or compute at levels considered proficient, Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin appointed two task forces to investigate reading and math instruction. The reports were clear — and depressing. There had been a wholesale abandonment of the basics — such as phonics and arithmetic drills — in California classrooms. Eastin said there was no one place to lay the blame for the decade‐​long disaster. “What we made was an honest mistake,” she said. Or as the Sacramento Bee headline put it, “We Goofed.” Eastin promised to put more emphasis on phonics, spelling, and computation in the classroom. What an excellent idea. But cold comfort for about 4.5 million students who suffered from the system’s decade‐​long “honest mistake” of not teaching them to read, write, or compute. The mistake didn’t come cheap for taxpayers, either. California spent about $201.7 billion on public schools during the “mistake” decade.

Phonics seems like a good idea to me, but I’m no expert. As noted, though, there’s a lot of research recommending phonics that a lot of school districts still aren’t following. As a libertarian, I don’t usually spend much time telling government agencies how to do their jobs, except as their actions impinge directly on individual rights. My focus is more on defining what activities ought to be undertaken by government and what ought to remain in the private sector, with individuals, businesses, churches, clubs, nonprofits, and civil society. And I think there’s a lesson here on that.

Government agencies tend to be sluggish monopolies, with little incentive to improve and subject to political influence. When the California superintendent promised to fix the mistake, the teachers union head warned, “It’s like turning an oil tanker around. You just don’t do that quickly,” and the governor’s spokesperson said it would be a hard slog because “there is such partisan politics going on.” Private organizations, especially profit‐​seeking businesses, are under constant pressure to serve customers better than their competitors. Businesses fail to meet that test every day and go out of business. When’s the last time you heard of a failed government agency being shut down? That includes schools. Private schools must keep families happy or they can go elsewhere, and the school could be forced to shut down. Public schools, no matter how unhappy parents are, are almost never closed. As long as the tax money keeps coming in, they stay in business.

The problem is that the schools are run by a bureaucratic government monopoly, largely isolated from competitive or community pressures. We expect good service from businesses because we know–and we know that they know — that we can go somewhere else. We instinctively know we won’t get good service from the post office or the Division of Motor Vehicles because we can’t go anywhere else.

So why, in the 21st century, are we still running our schools like the post office instead of Federal Express? We need to open up education to competition. Let parents choose the schools they think will be best for their children, without making them pay once for government schools and again for an independent school. American schools spend about $17,000 per student per year, or something like $340,000 to $425,000 per classroom. What if we let parents keep that $17,000 to spend on education at the public or private school of their choice?

You can bet that if schools had to depend on satisfying customers, there wouldn’t be many that decided to skip phonics and math for 10 years and then say, “We made an honest mistake.” Long before 10 years had passed, the students and their families would be gone."