The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Kids' Schools

[Sympthsical]

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Grade school in the late 80s. We had phonics drilled into us in first and second grades. To this day, I have no idea what a schwa is. No intention of finding out. I like the mystery that deep in my childhood, there lurked this unknown entity, the schwa, that was traumatizing and forgotten.

Then we moved on in 3/4/5 to those color-coded manual thingies. You basically worked your way through the boxes.

Out of curiosity, I looked up the current curriculum at my old elementary school. They now use the EL Education Core Reading Program that uses structured phonics. One thing that caught my eye while reading through it is that they note how most old systems assume kids are proficient enough by 3rd grade to move on to deciphering texts. However, they say testing does not bear out the effectiveness of this old thinking, so they have created and included instruction for grades 3-5.

So, at least in my old district, they're teaching more phonics than they used to.