On paper, it looks good. The Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) has a budget of $750 million to allegedly educate about 34,835 students. This comes to over $21,000 per student. Not only is the district well-resourced, but it is also led by a big-brained thinker of a superintendent who rakes in a salary and benefits package worth over $425,500 per year. Why then do the elementary schools in this district rate in the lower 50% of all California schools and have an average reading proficiency score of 34% as opposed to the state average of 50%? Why are only 18% of Black and 23% of Hispanic kids on track to be able to read by the fourth grade?
It turns out that the perpetrator is a group of teachers who place SJW beliefs above children’s welfare. The story is based on a TIME Magazine article Inside a Massive Effort To Change How Kids Learn . It is not clear that the headline is misleading. This article is about a rebellion against stupidity, which has conspired against students achieving fundamental skills.
A teacher from Oakland, Calif. Kareem Weaver taught struggling fifth and fourth graders how to read using an organized, phonics-based curriculum called Open Court. The students loved it, but the teachers didn’t like it. Weaver recalls that Oakland had been the most rapidly-growing urban area in California seven consecutive years for reading. It was hated .”
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Teachers felt like they were curriculum robots and were pushed back. Weaver describes their reaction to this approach as “this seems dehumanizing”, “This is colonizing,” Weaver says. “So we fought tooth and nail as a teacher group to throw that out.” It was replaced in 2015 by a curriculum that emphasized rich literary experiences. He says, “Those who were determined to promote social justice found that this progressive method of teaching reading was the best way.”
Now Weaver leads a campaign for his school to restore many of the techniques that were so hard to resist by teachers. This includes consistent and systematic instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics and phonics. “In Oakland, when you have 19% of Black kids reading–that can’t be maintained in the society,” says Weaver, who received an early and vivid lesson in the value of literacy in 1984 after his cousin got out of prison and told him the other inmates stopped harassing him when they realized he could read their mail to them. “It has been an unmitigated disaster.” In January 2021, the local branch of the NAACP filed an administrative petition with the Oakland unified school district (OUSD) to ask it to include “explicit instruction for phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension” in its curriculum.
NAACP Petition to Oakland Unified School District by streiff Scribd
This begs the question: If you don’t want to teach children how to read, by associating symbols with sounds and speaking them aloud, until they master it, then what strategy do you have?
There are many schools of thought on how best to aid this process, but the main contretemps has been about whether kids need to be taught how to sound out words explicitly or whether, if you give them enough examples and time, they’ll figure out the patterns. This theory is sometimes called whole language. It states that teaching phonics can be boring and repetitive and that a lot of English words are not consistent with the rules. But, hello there! Children will be more motivated to read beautiful stories and crack the code. Contrary to popular belief, reading is just as closely related to sight as hearing. According to phonics supporters, it begins with speech. The science of reading is a result of this understanding and all the supporting data.
This debate was supposedly settled in 2000, when the National Reading Panel, a big group of literacy experts that examined hundreds of studies on what instruction kids need to read, released a report. The National Reading Panel recommended that Weaver receive explicit instruction on the following topics: Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Fluency, Vocabulary, Comprehension, Fluency and Phonics. The phonics camp won. It is not the same thing as declaring war over, it’s another to divide territory.
The article continues to provide a thorough overview of the activities of different states to return to basics in learning.
I don’t believe the problem that Mr. Weaver has identified is that of many professions. The teacher experiences Third Grade Reading as a Groundhog Day event. While the children may only go through Third Grade reading one time (hopefully). If they make a teaching career, they will teach this same class, mostly the same way, for 45 or so years. Police departments often end up having “taskforces”, SWAT teams and kiddie porn viewing groups, which are all manpower sumps that take the place of patrol cars or officers on the streets. The cop may walk a particular beat several times. For the remainder of his life, the cop will do this every day. As a young lieutenant, I served in a basic combat training battalion at Fort Leonard Wood (MO). Drill sergeants were looking for a break from teaching rifle marksmanship and close order drill. They did it week after week. However, the trainee scores dropped when they abandoned tried-and-true basic techniques.
The problem with teaching reading is that reading is the only thing you can do. They can’t catch up until a child starts reading around the fourth grade. This is the place where you will find the “school to prison pipeline” bullsh. Children leave school at nine years old because they don’t know what they are being taught. We don’t know the best way to teach children. Instead, we allow a small group of teachers to ruin a generation by thinking they know better than them.
Last Wednesday, I wrote about Ron DeSantis’ new program to bring veterans into Florida classrooms. Ron DeSantis Veterans-to-Teachers is a great idea with one big flaw. That post is
I appreciate any effort to get normal people into classrooms who are more interested in teaching the basics than telling students about sexual deviance. The solution to the education system’s problems is not in increasing applicants and putting bandaids on it. New models of public education aren’t subject to fashions, and they don’t make it difficult to retain competent and committed people in the classroom.
Teaching essential subjects such as reading and mathematics cannot be left up to academic educators or to the ignorant who feel attracted like lint to Velcro. You cannot teach the basics if you want to show off your theories or originality. We will continue to waste trillions on systems that fail because they work as intended unless we address the issue of teachers not following a system that actually works.
