Did you know that phonics is the only reading method that promotes social justice? This is why all children need phonics, phonics, phonics!
The socio-economic bent of dyslexia: did you know that dyslexia is a snob in reverse? It targets the lower strata of society in much greater percentages. Since dyslexia is the disease you get from sight-reading, it affects children from low-income families, on average, even harder than their more affluent peers. The problem of dyslexia is strongly linked to family income. Socio-economic status correlates highly with academic achievement. It is also shows in the performance-differences of children starting first grade. (Of course there are always exceptions, but those exceptions are usually based on whether the child learned horrid sight-reading or not.)
Phonics is the only cure to bring all socioeconomic groups up to the same capabilities. Teaching everyone phonics will create a more prosperous, freer society. It crosses all social, economic, ethnic, and gender strata with success.
"Over a 2.5 year period, investigators recorded naturally occurring conversations in the homes of professional, working class, and welfare families with young children. There was a difference of almost 300 words spoken per hour between professional and welfare parents. The professional families' children at age 3 actually had a larger recorded vocabulary than the welfare families' parents. I will say that again. The 3-year-olds from the affluent families had larger spoken vocabularies than the parents from the welfare families." (Address by Grover J. (Russ) Whitehurst, Assistant Secretary of Education for Research and Improvement, at the White House Summit on Early Childhood Cognitive Development, U.S. Department of Education, July 26, 2001.)
"Preschoolers from low-income homes are particularly likely to be bereft of these supporting experiences, but the problem is not confined to a single social strata, and many low-income parents do an excellent job in this area.
"We need to be very concerned about children who enter school way behind their peers on pre-reading skills because the relation between the skills with which children enter school and their later academic performance is strikingly stable. For instance, the probability that a child will remain a poor reader at the end of the fourth grade if he or she is a poor reader at the end of the first grade is .88 [or 88%]." (ibid.)
"Many proponents see direct-instruction (DI) phonics as a means to promote social justice. All students- including poor and otherwise disadvantaged students- deserve to learn. Learning to read well increases the likelihood of high school graduation and the degree and quality of future employment. Similarly, it decreases the likelihood of incarceration and other socially undesirable outcomes." (Wikipedia.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Instruction).” It also increases the likelihood of college attendance.
Did you also know that DI with phonics has proven to improve inner-city schools?
"Direct Instruction [with phonics] is the most effective model for teaching academic skills and for affective outcomes (e.g., self-esteem of children). Recent large scale studies (1997-2003), such as the Baltimore Curriculum Project, show that it is possible to help schools that are in the lowest twenty percent with respect to academic achievement steadily improve until they are performing well above average. In some cases, school achievement improved from the 16th percentile to above the 90th percentile (Rebar, 2007)." (ibid.)
What the PFT analysis discovered was: Project Follow Through unmistakably documented the most effective instructional approach. The Direct Instruction model placed first in reading, arithmetic, spelling, language, basic skills, academic cognitive skills, and positive self-image.
Models that emphasize basic skills succeed better than other models in helping children gain these skills. Concentrating on basic skills works better than focusing on other skills as the road to basic skills.
Where models have put their primary emphasis elsewhere than on the basic skills, the children they served have tended to score lower on tests of these skills than they would have done without Project Follow Through. Basically, most of the teaching models did more damage than doing nothing at all. All change that glitters is not golden…
Again, models that emphasize basic skills produced better results on tests of self-concept than did other models. Ironically, self-esteem models did not produce self-esteem. Achievement in basic skills did.
Teaching everyone phonics will create a more prosperous, freer society. It crosses all social, economic, ethnic, and gender strata with success.
More than twenty other studies support DI studies. Direct Instruction is successfully and widely used with students from every population sector, regardless of poverty, culture, and race. In Project Follow Through, the DI model was ranked first in achievement for students whether they were poor or not, urban or rural students, African American students, Hispanic students, or Native American students. Many of the Bureau of Indian Affair's highest-performing schools use Direct Instruction materials.
Conducted in a variety of communities throughout the United States, the findings from Project Follow Through conclude that Direct Instruction is the most effective model for teaching academic skills and for affective outcomes, such as self-esteem of children.
So, what does this mean for your children? They will learn faster and easier with Direct Instruction than by any other educational philosophy. There are times for student-led or inquiry-based learning, but not in elementary school. Those work best for older children who have already mastered the basics.
Want to hear some more amazing data about the benefits of phonics? Above, we talked about the Baltimore Project of the 1990s. Here's some more to chew on:
The Baltimore Curriculum Project has many schools with Free and Reduced Lunch Rates above 75% serving student populations that are more than 90% African-American. These schools have shown strong achievement gains using Direct Instruction with phonics. In the past decade Direct Instruction curricula, such as Language for Learning, have become popular tools for teaching language skills to children with developmental disabilities such as autism, dyslexia, and other pervasive developmental disorders. Imagine what teaching with the only method proven to work, Direct Instruction, can do for your child?!
Teaching everyone phonics will create a more prosperous, freer society. It crosses all social, economic, ethnic, and gender strata with success.
If truth be told, I struggled with the idea of Direct Instruction at first, just because I’ve been a home-schooler myself at different times. Many in the home-schooling movement do so to give their kids more freedom in their learning environment. However, the proof is in the pudding. I realized early on that we needed a structure and some measurable goals to home-school properly. So I chose A Beka Books, then wrote my own phonics method to use with my children. The best thing about home-schooling is the ability to work at an accelerated pace, if the child desires. To not hold children back.
The freer philosophies, while great in theory, don’t work well in practice. Most home-schoolers are conscientious, purposeful parents. (There are a few who use ‘freedom’ as an excuse to be lazy, such as one family that ‘home-schooled’ their older kids to babysit the younger kids while mom went to work. Unfortunately, when mom came home from work, she was too tired to do much schooling. Or others who let their son ‘learn from just watching TV.’ These are in the minority of home-schoolers.)
There is currently an “unschooling” movement, a sub-movement of home-schooling, which worries me. We weren’t born knowing everything, and we can flounder without adult direction. I suspect that the movement arose out of frustration with public school methods, especially for children with learning disabilities, which are on the rise. Most likely, unschooling parents probably give their children a little more guidance than they realize, which is good. And they may have been misguided by the “child-led discovery” theories of PFT. Data over dogma; reason over rhetoric. It’s ironic that parents frustrated with one aspect of PFT, the inability of sight-reading to teach their children, are using another faulty aspect, discovery learning, to try to remedy it. Neither is the answer.
While I originally liked the sound of discovery and inquiry-based learning, I realized that they don’t work. Thirty years of Project Follow Through proved that. Luckily by accident, I used Direct Instruction with phonics with my own children. Later, when divorce forced me to finish college and go to work, I had to put my children back into public school; albeit with regret. I still made sure that they kept ahead of the class. I put my kids on the road to achievement with early reading the right way, as well as early math, which were the best things I could have given them.
Recently after getting laid off, I’ve had the chance to homeschool again with my youngest children. Phonics by direct instruction is the best, whether in public, private, or home school. Period.
Did you know that knowledge of Direct Instruction methods is mandatory for any applicant aspiring to become a Board Certified Behavior Analyst (BCBA)? Board certification in behavior analysis sets quality levels for behavior analytic practice. They embrace the data and the reason. That's reason enough to dump the "child-led discovery" dogma.
Confidence vs. confusion. The conclusion is that during the elementary school years, when children brains aren’t able to think abstractly yet, direct instruction is the best method to give them a sound foundation. Then later, in middle and high schools, when their brains start to think more abstractly, may be the time to incorporate inquiry-based learning, student-led discovery, and the less structured teaching methods, but still guided by teachers. The other models may have a place, but not until a strong foundation has been given in the earlier years.
Imagine what making phonics easier – earlier – with The Godfrey Method (TGM) can do?!
In September 2010, Michelle D. Bernard, president & CEO of Independent Women’s Forum (www.iwf.org), wrote:
“…ultimately, our entire country will be affected by the learning- or lack thereof- that takes place in our public schools. [Private & home schools that use sight-words will have the same problems.] The fact that our public school system lets down so many children means that we have more people dependent on government services, higher crime rates, more out-of-wedlock births, and lower overall productivity.
“McKinsey & Company, a management consulting firm, characterized our failure to educate so many Americans as the equivalent of a “permanent national recession” for our economy, leaving everyone poorer as a result.
“…IWF knows that dumping more money into the school system- the favored approach of too many- isn’t going to solve our problems. In fact, per pupil funding has increased and student-per-teacher ratios have declined steadily during recent decades, yet performance has stagnated.”
Teaching everyone phonics will create a more prosperous, freer society. It crosses all social, economic, ethnic, and gender strata with success.
