Mythspt2.htm/21DEC2001

THE MYTHS Part 2

11. "Blame the victim".

When children fall, teachers (as students) have been trained to look for the cause in home/child/family. This is clearly the best way to keep the blame off the teaching.

12. "There is no one way to teach reading. "

Sadly, the Bullock Report 1975 insisted on this. Either you start at the beginning with letters, or you start with some larger unit which is not letters. Starting with words, rhyme, sentences, books, is simply not safe for at least 10% of the population, so that leaves phonics, starting with letters/sounds. So, far from there being no one way, there is ONLY ONE SAFE WAY. (Read Hilde L. Mosse "You can prevent or correct learning disorders" 1982) When you drop whole‑word teaching, and start with systematic phonics, attainment rises not just for dyslexics but for everyone.

After Liz Waterland's book "Read with me" (extolling shared reading, without insisting on the need for phonics) came out in 1985, the spread of apprenticeship, "real books" etc. coincided with a drop of about 5 points nationally. Because individual schools have raised their attainment about 10 points, it seems logical to expect a RISE of 10 points nationally both for average and right across all levels of achievement, when schools provide good phonics‑first, to nursery and/or reception classes. See the graph on the next page. Today's attainment is the solid line; the potential is the dotted line. Standardised tests can be represented on a curve like this, a "curve of normal distribution" where the bulge, the high point (100) is average. This (solid line) curve would be the same whether the tests were run on geniuses or morons, so it is the results of the first trialling that set the standards for any test. As test results improve, there will be calls to re‑norm the test, but these must be resisted because re‑norming breaks the sequence, and we can only compare over time if we keep the same tests, same norms.

Although many LEAs tested soon after 1975 (after the Bullock Report), until the (U.K.) SATs began, these tests were often only used in relation to each individual child, whereas each school should have worked out the average 7+ reading quotient each year, to monitor the effectiveness of their teaching, but this was rarely done, and certainly not made public. This is the most important, most needed league table of all. A goldmine of needed information lies neglected in LEA offices.

CURVE OF NORMAL DISTRIBUTION

The whole curve will shift to the right when schools change to early phonics‑first.

Teachers above all need to know how reading attainment in their school compares with other similar schools nearby, and they need to know what is THE BEST. The best I have known far exceeded my expectations, in Downham Montessori (Stow Bardolph, nr. King's Lynn) which in 1993 achieved a 7+ ARQ of 139.7.(Remember the national average is 100, and these are just ordinary children. Just think of the potential we are losing.) The following year it was 125. I expect it to fluctuate between those points from now on. The school uses this programme.

But other schools can score high too. At Holland House School, Edgware, like Downham, children age 5+ have an average reading age of 7. Raglan School, Bromley, a state school in a not‑well‑off area, achieves a 7+ ARQ of almost 120, and is especially noteworthy because on "real books" all the parents complained, and it is children from the same catchment area, the same families in some cases, who failed on "real books" and who now succeed, using phonics. Another state school in Tunbridge Wells using i.t.a. once achieved a 7+ARQ of 120.

The old way, phonics, suits all, and always will. It is only when the child is visibly struggling (and usually not before age 7) that some teachers nowadays begin to try ways other than storybooks, by which time that first glorious rapture of getting it right with never having failed has been lost, for ever. The gloss has gone off reading. It was only after they introduced a harmful start, look‑say (Schonell 1945), that the "many ways" began to appear. By the 70's it was, "Don't interfere. Using two methods will confuse." The gospel changes over time, but at any one time it is presented as fact, holy writ, and the teachers always think they are right. This is hardly surprising because, if they do look for better ways and go to INSET seminars, for instance, run by the LEA, NATE, UKRA, CLPE, NAPE, etc., they just get a re‑run of the same misleading teaching that they had in their initial training, so they think there cannot be another way. Phonics has been steadily rejected for 40 years, until Chris Woodhead then David Blunkett insisted that we need phonics. But phonicsphobics must still be around. Why was the list of letter‑groups removed from the National Curriculum? Why does TV refuse (up to 1996) to screen a good phonics programme untrammelled by cartoons? We need to aim at all children learning to read before they start school.

"All children are different" is half the truth, but it throws out of the window any possibility of standards, class teaching and minimum expectations. The other half of the truth is "All children have common needs" and one of the main common needs is phonics‑first. The modern theories were never properly tested, but as they failed, so a range of excuses was produced to "explain" the failure. Even now (1996), the new onset/rime studies never include a control group of well‑taught 4‑year‑olds, but are done on failed, or at any rate untaught, 6‑year‑olds.

While the claim is an individual programme for each child, in practice each child starts the same way and merely proceeds at a different pace. Class teaching means that all children are kept together, a principle like a sheepdog keeping all the sheep going the right way, and fast sheep can race ahead so long as they head the right way. Class teaching gives 30 times more, 3000% more teacher‑pupil (eye to eye) contact, which is another reason for faster progress. Phonics lends itself to class teaching; class teaching is the best way. A word is sounded out, and 2‑3 children will blend it and put their hands up. The other children will see what happened, and that the children had somehow got the word from the sound, so they too listen hard, and for the next (3‑letter) word they listen harder, and realise that f ... o ... x makes fox. This is the point where good phonological awareness begins, and it goes on right through the programme until it becomes automatic, unconscious.

Class teaching also allows the teacher to teach the class for ten minutes and then say, "Now get on with it", reading or writing on their own while she can then attend properly to the slower ones.

The Progressives tried to equalise downwards, thinking that when they got rid of the elite ‑ and you never will ‑ the rest would stay put. What happened? When the top band (in Progressive state schools) came down, so did nearly all the rest. The gap between top and bottom is now wider than ever. What manner of people can be so dark of soul as to want to eradicate excellence? We must expand the elite until 90% of us are elite, and with the power of TV this is within our grasp. Up to now, TV has far influenced in the other direction, to coarsen and degrade us. Spared look‑say, the council estates of 1950 would by now be the new stockbroker belts. Look‑say and reading failure are the biggest factor in our social disintegration, and certainly the factor that can most easily be tackled, and SAVE money (about £3 billion a year ‑ mostly by preventing special needs in reading).

Intensive, systematic phonics is the ladder out of the pit. Illiteracy is a prison sentence, a life sentence.