Lucy McCormick Calkins
The New York Post has a terrific editorial calling out Columbia for the incredible damage it has inflicted on the nation without any acknowledgment, much less apology or restitution.
See here :
[EXCERPT]
Columbia University is trying to quietly walk away from a disaster it imposed on generations of American children.
The least we can do is call out the damage done.
Just before the Labor Day weekend, Columbia announcedthat it’s “dissolving” the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project and sending its creator, Lucy Calkins, off on indefinite sabbatical.
For decades, Calkins and her colleagues pushed “literacy” programs based on ideology, not science; programs failed the children who most needed help.
Her “balanced literacy” approach gave short shrift to phonics — by teaching children to look at pictures and guess words, for example, instead of sounding them out — and failed to foster the building of knowledge and vocabulary vital to learning the love of reading.
Sight words
The stupidest thing to come out of academia in the history of man kind
Lucy McCormick Calkins
This error had a highly disparate impact. Most people born to proactive, intelligent parents went to school already reading.
We (my siblings and I) were reading at age 3. My children were reading at age 3. My nephews were reading at age three. My parents were reading at age 3 .... And so on.
A high proportion of the middle class in any country is like this. This early reading thing is a highly socially stratified skill.
The issue with phonics vs whole language is teaching to illiterate small children in a classroom environment. And these are the children, largely, of the lower 80%.
“One of the main reasons our literacy skills are so abysmal is the rejection of traditional phonics-based pedagogy in favor of trendier, “ground-breaking” or “leading edge” methodologies pushed by prominent schools of education at prestigious universities.”
I told people that Phonics works and was DIRECTLY responsible for my kids being fluent readers by age 5. They laughed at me (behind my back, of course) and instead trusted the ‘experts’.
But I did get the final laugh in, as the ‘competition’ that my kids were subjected to was reduced by at least 90% in college and the job market, with the only decent competition coming from the kids of Asian immigrants - kids who had parents that knew better.
-PJ
It’s really easy to dump the blame off on one person. No one challenged it, even while the good teachers were saying it was trash. How many state boards of education were duped? How many counties?
No sir, we all get to eat this due to collective apathy and few fathers attending PTAs or school board meetings.