There are parents who sincerely believe, “Phonics didn’t work for my child.”

This is an extraordinary assertion, akin to saying, “Exercise didn’t help my kid.” Phonics experts say they routinely teach nearly 100% of children to read, typically in the first grade. Phonics is as close to a sure thing as anything can be in this uncertain world.

So how could these parents end up with a view that is exactly opposite of common sense and common experience?

Let me mention three factors:

1) THE FIELD OF READING IS INTELLECTUALLY CHAOTIC.

Ever since the Education Establishment introduced a dubious reading theory called Whole Word circa 1931, we have had endless confusion in elementary education.

Theories battle theories. Ideology is a big but unacknowledged force, churning out more confusion. Ideas and methods are constantly renamed and repackaged, with new jargon and sales pitches. Whole Word has many aliases, including Look-say, Whole Word, Whole Language, Balanced Literacy. As the public comes to scorn this thing under one name, the Education Establishment concocts a new name.

Meanwhile, the so-called literacy experts have a mountain of failure to explain. Their alibis always include a relentless anti-phonics barrage. Some of the dirt sticks. Who knows what to believe?

The phrase “sight-words” is used to mean different things. Even “phonics” has several definitions–synthetic phonics, analytic phonics, intrinsic phonics. Beware: these are different things; and two of them are impostors.

Point is, the phonics that a particular child supposedly did not like, or did not learn from, is probably not phonics.

2) EVEN WORSE, SCHOOLS LIE.

The first lie is that Whole Word can actually work. Fact is, virtually no one learns to read with sight-words, not unless they have a nearly photographic memory. (You have to memorize TENS OF THOUSANDS of graphic shapes one by one, for many years.)

The other big lie is that our education officials actually approve of phonics. Not so, but they say they do. Schools use Whole Word; parents complain about the bad results; so the principals instruct the teachers: “Tell the parents we do teach phonics.”

This dishonest approach was already well established by 1981 when Rudolf Flesch wrote “Why Johnny STILL Can’t Read.” This wonderful book is basically built around “The 10 Alibis,” the second of which is “We do teach phonics.”

So nobody–parents, students, teachers–really knows what is going on. No testimony can be trusted. There’s only one certainty: millions of children become illiterate.

3) PHONICS NOT TAUGHT PROPERLY

The public schools may use programs with “phonics” in the title; often, that’s deceptive packaging. The phonics content is small, or actually garbled so it doesn’t work.

If public schools use phonics, it is usually some compromise the textbook companies cook up to placate the parents, while giving education professors what they want: namely, as little phonics as possible.

Bottom line, schools don’t use phonics or, as Flesch carefully explained, they teach only a little of it and/or they teach it the wrong way.

For example, all phonics programs emphasize that you don’t need to do more than 30 minutes a day. You want to keep it light and easy. If children are having trouble, wait a week, and start again later. Devote more time to singing, rhymes, reciting poetry, reading stories, telling knock-knock jokes.

Suppose a parent or school is pushing too hard, or teaching in the wrong way. The child might be stumbling; and the cause of that stumbling might appear to be phonics.

The astonishing thing to me is that all the phonics experts report that children, even the slowest of them, want to know the details. That doesn’t mean they want to learn them so fast that they feel lost. But as they do learn the details and see the sense of them, they are happy. They feel powerful.

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Conclusion: it’s very sad to think of parents avoiding phonics because of these reasons or any combination of them.

Basically, it seems certain to many observers (including this one) that Whole Word is a hoax. The small percentage of people who do learn to read with sight-words always report how difficult and unpleasant it is. These people report tension headaches and upset stomachs.

So, synthetic phonics is the only road to travel. But in our schools, that road might be cluttered with endless lies and false signs. Parents think they’re in Kansas (“We don’t like Kansas”) but they’re really in New York.

The child, even years later, might tell people, “We went to Kansas; I didn’t like it.”

I’ve seen comments on the internet from good readers defending sight-words. In reality, what typically happens is that verbal children see through the sight-words, and perceive the phonics inside the words. They’re reading phonetically (i.e., “sounding out”) but have been told they’re reading with sight-words.

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Here’s the simplest way to understand what phonics is. You memorize the 26 individual letters, never whole words. Then you memorize the 40 or so sounds represented by these letters. Now you can pronounce pairs of letters (called blends), then syllables. Now you’re reading. It’s so easy that most six-year-olds can do it.

Conversely, Whole Word is so hopelessly difficult that sixteen-year-olds can rarely do it.

Reading is everything. If kids aren’t reading in second or third grade, fire people. Find new administrators and better methods.

CODA: recent National Assessment of Educational Progress figures show that TWO-THIRDS of 4th and 8th graders are essentially illiterate. The whole country should be up in arms over this.

(For more on the Reading Wars, see “42: Reading Resources” on the writer’s site Improve-Education.org.)

Bruce Deitrick Price is the founder of Improve-Education.org, an education and intellectual site.
One focus is early literacy; see \”54: Preemptive Reading.\”
Price is an author, artist and poet. His fifth book is \”THE EDUCATION ENIGMA–What Happened to American Education.\”

Bruce Deitrick Price is the founder of http://www.Improve-Education.org, an education and intellectual site.
One focus is problems in the schools; see \”56: Top 10 Worst Ideas in Education.\”
Price is an author, artist and poet. His fifth book is \”THE EDUCATION ENIGMA.\”

Author Bio: Bruce Deitrick Price is the founder of Improve-Education.org, an education and intellectual site.
One focus is early literacy; see \”54: Preemptive Reading.\”
Price is an author, artist and poet. His fifth book is \”THE EDUCATION ENIGMA–What Happened to American Education.\”

Category: Education
Keywords: dyslexia, functional illiteracy, phonics, alphabet, disability, cognitive, sight-words, whole,