19 Comments

"As with most basal readers, Into Reading is overstuffed. Teachers can’t possibly cover all the material, and they may not always make the best choices."

This is called 'basal bloat', and it's the bane of our educational existence. What you describe is very disappointig, especially the comprehension skills instruction. Groundhog Day.

Expand full comment

Our Ohio district adopted Into Reading. I am in K, we are housed in our own building, so I don’t know about other grade levels. I have found the that the last several modules are very good at knowledge building; multiple texts on a topic for in depth learning. Not so much for the first 4. We have not used any of the leveled readers. What a waste of money. Now we will be supplementing with Geodes to partner with Fundations. Our teachers did not choose this curriculum. I don’t understand how districts can do so much research and still choose the wrong curriculums.

Expand full comment

So they chose this curriculum because one that works requires too much work/they are unprepared to teach.

Precisely what has plagued students in urban/poor schools for decades.

Expand full comment

I think you might be ascribing a more sinister spin than is reality. I doubt it’s just because they’re lazy demons who don’t want the “work”, it’s because it’s unfamiliar. If you’ve been taught a certain way, and you’ve been told that it’s the correct approach, you’re obviously going to be more likely to gravitate toward a product that aligns with what you know and believe to be worthwhile.

Now clearly the evidence says otherwise regarding it being correct and worthwhile, but the peddlers of balanced literacy and whole language have also done a great job of explaining how the disparities are because of *something else*. It’s society! It’s racism! It’s poverty! Keep the course and it will all work out!

I think most teachers have good intentions. They aren’t a bunch of lazy slags who don’t care if their students learn. This is why I appreciate Natalie Wexler’s work. This is the kind of reporting that will hopefully start to turn the tide.

Expand full comment

After 80 years of continuous failure, there are no longer any excuses for failing to teach teachers how to teach reading, nor can there be any presumption that public school administrators have any intention of teaching reading: http://mychildwillread.org/the-problem.shtml

Expand full comment

The public schools have been failing at literacy instruction for 80 years. Obviously this is intentional and obviously things are not going to get better. Every generation seems to rediscover that the schools are choosing failed curricula and failed ideologies. Start here to begin understanding the problem: http://mychildwillread.org/

Expand full comment

Go to the next page of that same web site to see why we're not going to fix this, and then continue with the rest of the site to see how you can save your child: http://mychildwillread.org/the-problem.shtml

Expand full comment

Side note I don't think where tax dollars come from has anything to do with it. I think the "Sold a Story" podcast does a better job explaining why schools still use disproven methods of teaching reading.

1. A LOT of teachers don't know about the science of reading. So they don't understand how you need to teach kids to read.

2. Teacher phonics is seen as a conservative approach to teaching.

3. The reality of how kids learn, and the imaginary way of how teachers want kids to learn is different. Teachers REALLY want to believe the story that is sold to them by balanced literacy etc

Expand full comment

I don't dispute the motivations you discuss here, but at the end of the day it's the money that talks. We have a socialist system in which there is NO reward for success and NO punishment for continuous failure. Add to that the fact that most school funding no longer even comes from the local property owners, and you have a situation where the schools have absolutely no reason to provide what parents want. In fact, they must be laughing their asses off as they collect their funding from the state and the feds. Imagine those stupid parents thinking they have a say in anything. And in fact that is precisely the attitude we see at school board meetings. The schools know exactly who butters their bread and who doesn't.

Expand full comment

My children are exempt because we taught them to read ourselves. We are homeschooling, but even if we weren't I couldn't imagine leaving that to the school.

Teaching a child to read needs lots of individual instruction. You can do it in 15-20 minutes a night. We started teaching our daughter at 4, and our son at 5. Now at 8 my daughter can read things like "Charlie and the Chocolate factory" on her own, and we are reading through "The Hobbit" together (she does a page, I do a page). Now the struggle is getting her to stop sneak reading when it's time for bed !

Side note, I think this is brilliant at teaching kids to read

https://www.amazon.com/Teach-Your-Child-Read-Lessons/dp/0671631985/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=teach+my+child+to+read+in+100+easy+lessons&qid=1687542568&sprefix=teach+my+%2Caps%2C211&sr=8-1

Expand full comment

In fact, the whole point of my web site is (after explaining why kids aren't going learn to read at school and why there's a problem) is to get them to my final page, where I recommend precisely this same book. And in fact I ran an after-school reading program for five years (1997-2002) using the classroom version of that book: http://mychildwillread.org/teach-your-child.shtml

Expand full comment

Natalie, Thank you for articulating elements of discernment and disparity among education programs. In 2006, my PhD research at Oxford was named "Minding the Gap" for evidence based policy to increase patient safety, because of the different "platform levels of service" that consumers must accommodate when navigating public programs, such as healthcare and education.

Expand full comment

We are home schooling our two kids, 8, and 6. I just finished reading the book and loved it. I'm definitely going to place an increased amount of focus on non fiction historical and civics.

We are looking at the Core Knowledge curriculum and are going to make sure we are covering what's needed.

One thing I was thinking about was that growing up, we had only 1 TV. So that TV was on whatever the parents wanted to watch, and so that included the News every night. We don't have cable anymore so that's not really an option. But I think there are ways to replace it.

For example, I'm also thinking about having the kids pick a Wall Street Journal article each day and have us read and discuss it together.

Expand full comment

Matthew, google “article of the week” for some suggestions for how teachers make this work. The NYT Education section often provides articles with lesson/unit ideas. And Newsela is a great online source for news articles that you can customize to your kids’ reading levels.

Expand full comment

New to your newsletter - substack directed me to it. I found the post interesting but as a parent of a 5yo Im unsure what this means for us at home. He was starting to learn how to read in preschool and then he started public kindergarten (at one of the supposedly best districts in our state) and it’s obvious he has not learned anything and it will be up to me to teach him. So what do I do if I can devote 25 minutes to this a night? Weve started with bob books but not sure how to layer the knowledge gap you address here. The fact that we live in one of three wealthiest counties and parents with zero educational experience are still trying to figure out how to teach our kids to read is nuts.

Expand full comment

My sympathies! For decoding instruction, I've heard that "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" by Engelmann works really well for parents.

For building knowledge, you might just want to follow your child's interests and engage in a lot of back-and-forth dialogue about them, and about books you read together. If you want something more structured, you could check out the "grader" books by E.D. Hirsch (What Your First-Grader Needs to Know, etc.). I know that many parents have used those.

I should add that I haven't used either of those resources myself, so I don't have firsthand knowledge of them.

Expand full comment

My district uses EL and teachers need tons of support when getting it off the ground. The background knowledge and complex text portions are good, but you must supplement the grammar/poetry/writing areas in order to maintain scores.

Expand full comment

You might try adapting The Writing Revolution's method to the EL content. I recently interviewed a first-grade EL teacher for an upcoming podcast, and she said she was trying that and finding it helpful.

Expand full comment

Many advocates are asking NYCPS to use its purchasing power to push the publishers to make the readings more accurate and culturally responsive. Also the Queens Public Library will curate a collection for any teacher in NTC that wants to substitute the curricular materials. Hopefully NYPL and BPL will follow.

Expand full comment