Learning To Read

The wise bureaucrats in Madison, Wisconsin, are not about to be bullied or bribed with Federal education dollars. They've settled on their technique to teach children to read, and that's the end of it. Does their system work better than the one proposed by the Federal Government? Doesn't matter, does it?

To get federal aid dollars, the elementary schools have been told to teach reading via phonics. If you went to Catholic school, back when there were flocks of nuns, that's how you learned to read. Given that the Church is so unchanging, the private primary schools continue to use phonics for reading, and with good results. Catholic schools routinely show higher test scores, even in impoverished areas where the public schools use excuses about lack of resources and difficult home lives to explain away their failures. Wouldn't want to take a page from the Catholics, Lord no, because that's too religion-oriented for the secular world.

So Madison insisted that they were entitled to the $2 million grant because they had data that showed their teaching method was effective, even though it was not purely phonics-based. They were hitting the mark on the goal sheet. Did they think that maybe they could do better? What difference, as long as they did just enough to satisfy requirements and no more. Who cared that government data showed phonics to be the superior method to teach reading? The government study was probably overloaded with former Catholic pupils who looked back fondly on the old nun who made them sound out words. Why, accept that and the next thing you know it's orders to offer up morning prayers and such.

There were some in Madison who felt that they were under pressure to buy particular teaching packages or risk losing the funding. Then there were the teachers who felt that they were smart enough to figure out their own way of doing things. No doubt some were. No doubt the rest were not.

In the end, the Madison school district opted out, gave up the money, and went off to teach reading in their own way. An example cited in the New York Times described a child looking at a word, and rather than sounding it out, deciding between 'pumpkin' and 'pea' based on the size of the word. Two words that don't sound alike at all. Two words that phonics separates in the blink of an eye.

Thank you God for the Ursuline nuns and their steely dedication to phonics. God help the children of Madison, Wisconsin, who will soon tire of all the work involved in measuring words and examining context as they plough through a paragraph. They'll not be reading much once school is done.