The thirty year battle between two methods of teaching kids to read – traditional phonics and “whole language” – may well have been settled with the news that none other than New York City schools have decided in favour of the former, dumping every aspect of the curriculum using the latter:
The chancellor of New York City Schools, David C. Banks, announced a dramatic overhaul of the city’s reading curricula on Tuesday. He admitted that the current system, which is based on progressive ideas of “whole language” instruction, is “fundamentally flawed” and scientifically unsound.
“It’s not your fault. It’s not your child’s fault. It was our fault,” he said of New York’s disastrous reading scores, which show that only 49 percent of children in New York public schools are proficient in reading. “This is the beginning of a massive turnaround.”
I didn’t encounter the whole language method until I landed here in NZ from the US, and I was appalled. It seemed like a completely hit-and-miss system of learning words, whereas with the phonics method, by which my generation was taught, you rapidly learned how to decompose new words you’d never seen before: it built upon itself.
Under the progressive vision of “whole language” instruction, students receive little formal training on how specific letters, consonants, and sounds work together to build words. It is premised on the idea that learning to read is analogous to learning how to speak. In this view, sounding out words is a waste of time, and only unstructured immersion can teach reading.
In addition to producing appalling reading scores, the “premise” has now been scientifically debunked:
journalist Emily Hanford’s 2022 podcast Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong, thoroughly explained how the tenets of “whole language” instruction are neurologically incorrect. Hanford presented scientific evidence that showed that — unlike learning to speak — learning to read is not at all a natural process. She also demonstrated that the systematic teaching of phonetic concepts is the most effective way to teach reading.
Luckily for our kids, they’d all been taught to read by me and my wife (and ex-Chicago school teacher) using the phonics method, as well as reading them books every night, so they just ignored the whole language method at school and progressed on their own.
Incidentally, in case you’re concerned about this effort being derailed by cunning teachers who nod in public and screw the rules in private, the propaganda effort known as “balanced literacy” has also specifically been given the boot, since it was only ever a facade created as the attacks from phonics supporters grew in the 1990’s; it claimed to merge the two approaches, but in fact hardly used phonics at all.
Nice to see the authorities catching up to the propagandists in all ways.
No Minister 
In New Zealand the fight to recapture the education system has only just begun.
Well done New York.
Hello National, its gone beyond tweaks. The Unions wont play ball with you on Education, thats a fact.
National need a whole of Education reform…
What damage done by the whole language method to children of the past decades? My son learnt to read by me reading him books and sounding out words. He grew up loving reading and its stuck as he his a book worm still in his 3 decade of life.
Pedagogy should be about will constructed and tested methods, not fashion… reading and writing are so critical to making your way in the modern world, without them the odds of ending up in a bad place (like jail) increase dramatically…
My wife’s older children don’t read books because of the disastrous whole word recognition. [fixed – Mod]
That all changed for my youngest who was taught phonics at school. He is lucky he learned to read, however he’s now caught up in the whole trans agenda.