THANK YOU AND YOUR CAPS-LOCK KEY IS STUCK.
Very late to the party. Balanced Lit is at least ten years old and has already been judged a fraud by real educators (like me). There’s very little balance.Lip service is paid to phonics and reading matter is student chosen based on levels. The teacher needs to be very familiar with any number of works if she is to assess and guide the reader. That’s functionally impossible, so teacher assessment and input is also functionally impossible.
It works like magic.
Some people think if you can read out loud, you're functional.
Colleges of Education where enthusiasms like “whole language” a.k.a. “look-say” in reading and “discovery learning” as a replacement for (not supplement to) learning math facts come from are the real source of rot in American K-12 education. Not the teachers unions, not the U.S. Department of Education, though these have abetted them in their destruction. Yet the legislatures of almost all of the several states have given a monopoly to colleges of education to produce certified teachers (or qualified or licensed or whatever the term used in the given state). Until those monopolies are broken, neither breaking the teachers union nor abolishing the U.S. Dept. of Ed, nor throwing more money at K-12 education will have any beneficial effect.
As to English not being phonetic, it is not. At least not in the strong sense that Russian (in Cyrillic) or Korean (in written in hangul) are, in which there is an exact one-to-one correspondence between the symbol strings and the sounds they represent. The words ocean, women, machine and mine suffice to demonstrate this. (The old gag spelling of “fish” as “ghoti” — gh as in tough, o as in women, ti as in nation — was a jocular way of making the point.)
Nonetheless, the notion that English reading is best taught by pretending that English words are pictograms to be memorized is absurd and has baleful consequences for literacy. It is another idea of the sort Orwell characterized as “so stupid only an intellectual could believe it.”
I taught all three of my children to read before they went to school with the aid of a book I made illustrating all the sounds of English with all the various spellings organized by the letter which began the most commonly used spelling of the sound. (For instance, ship and ocean depicted together, with the words written out and the letters making the “sh” sound underlined. Pictures of a zebra and a rose, labeled with the words with the z and s underlined, illustrating spellings of the “z” sound, and the like.)
My little sister with no college sent both her kids to kindergarten being able to read . They were reading 5th grade level before their 1st day of school.