If you want to create an illiteracy crisis such as the one we’re living through, you have to do two things. First of all, adopt ideas that don’t work. Second, you have to brainwash young teachers into thinking these flawed ideas actually do work. In this way, you can manipulate your teachers into doing a bad job but they never know it.

A public school teacher sent me this brief history of her decades in the classroom:

I began to notice students in the intermediate grades intermixing sight words. They would read words like ‘is’ as ‘the’…If I think back to my time in the classroom, I spent way too much time trying to address comprehension. This is what was tested and this is what I thought was needed because all of my data pointed to deficits in these areas. I did not notice reading errors in the way I do now because I did not understand the nature of the well-hidden details of what I was looking for.

If I could only go back…Now, I’ll fast-forward to the time I met a 70-year-old Montessori veteran who re-taught me what I thought I knew about literacy. I watch my children flourish and realize what my students whom I taught years before were missing, foundational skills needed for reading. Today, in my work, I check letter sounds and listen to a child read while tracking miscues on a running record. I have been shocked by what I have noticed.

Overall, what I found is that as a child’s letter/sound knowledge increases, his/her reading accuracy increases. I thought this would help a student in the intermediate grades who was barely reading. I did not think it would be helpful for those who seem stuck but it has been helpful for those students as well.

First of all, please note that she’s talking about children who are 10 or 12 and can’t read the simplest words in the English language, kids that have been taught by these flawed methods for many years! Nothing captures the essential craziness of Whole Word than 12-year-olds who read “is” for “the,” or anything similar to that.

Now here is what this teacher is saying reduced to the basics. She was using the usual gimmicks –- picture clues, pre-reads, context, and many others— to help the children guess what the words meant. But none of that is reading.

You need to have what she calls “foundational skills.” You see a “b” and you say buh. That is reading.

This woman is honestly telling something that she is deeply embarrassed about. Due to her inferior training, she knew very little about teaching children to read. She did not know what every phonics teacher knows. As a result, she was crippling hundreds of children over many years. And here’s what is really horrible. There are another million teachers just like her.

Please dwell on the malfeasance of an Education Establishment that creates failure by forcing teachers to use the wrong methods.

The funniest word in all of the discussion above is the word “comprehension,” also known as “finding meaning.” In this sophistry, if there’s a picture at the top of the page of an animal and the child reads “horse” but the actual word on the page is “pony,” the teacher exclaims, “Oh, you got the meaning. You comprehend the word. You are a good reader.”

Nothing could be more absurd but this is the essential sophistry of our Education Establishment. Teachers need to understand that reading is not first about meaning but about sounds. Once the word is spoken, even if silently, then the brain finds meaning in the sounds. (Think for a moment about that instant when another person says the word “horse” to you. You hear the sound only; you do not see a picture or letters on the page. And that sound is sufficient. You know completely what the person is saying. Similarly, when your brain sounds out the word “horse,” you know immediately what the writer is saying.)

This teacher for many years was evaluating a child’s guessing skills, not the child’s reading skills. This is the great swindle that people like Frank Smith and Ken Goodman pulled off and the Education Establishment promotes to this day.

Please look at this short video “Reading Is Easy” which shows what phonics experts think should be the norm. Everybody is reading in the first or second grade, versus a system that has children illiterate in middle school.

The simplest way to save our K-12 schools is to eliminate all variations of Whole Word, and insist that children learn in the one way that always works: systematic phonics.

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Bruce Deitrick Price’s education site is Improve-Education.org. (For info on his new novels, see his literary site Lit4u.com.)