A Revolution In Literacy
by Alice Roberts
In 1969, a Marxist militant organization called the Weather Underground was co-founded by Bill Ayers. He espoused revolutionary positions including the destruction of U.S. imperialism and the achievement of a classless world. Additionally, the group supported world communism (Source: FBI FOIA Library) as well as the objective of ending the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. The Weather Underground argued the need for a revolutionary youth movement to raise anti-racist consciousness.
The Weather Underground wasn’t especially unique during the anti-establishment cultural revolution of the 1960’s. However, Bill Ayers and crew found themselves wanted by the FBI due to their intentions to disrupt the government by trying to blow it up. They claimed credit for bombing the U.S. Capital, the pentagon and more than 20 other locations. To avoid arrest, members of the Weather Underground went underground.
In 1980, after 11 years in hiding, Ayers and his wife, a fellow revolutionary, turned themselves in. Shockingly, they were not prosecuted due to the FBI’s violation of surveillance rules. They then joined academia.
Once a student of Columbia Teachers College, William Ayers went on to teach the teachers who are teaching our children. With his passion for social change always at the forefront of his work he replaced bombs for academic papers and books on social justice, democracy and education reform.
In 2008 he was elected as vice president in charge of curriculum studies at the American Educational Research Association (AERA), and was granted the Social Justice in Education award in 2011. His influence on the way that American teachers are educated has been significant.
In their efforts to right perceived wrongs in the world, social justice educators don’t prioritize teaching students how to sound out words for fear it promotes colonialism. Instead they explore how identity, power, privilege and oppression lead to inequity. Neglecting to teach letter-sound relationships is perhaps the greatest hinderance to the civil rights movement in the past two decades.
The last generation of students was taught to read using a “whole language” or “balanced literacy” approach, relying on sight words and picture cues to figure out the text. Some phonics lessons were included in the mix, but not in any systematic way. The current result is that an estimated 23% of the US adult population lacks literacy skills, according to this research:
From sciencenews.org: It’s time to stop debating how to teach kids to read and follow the evidence.
In 2008, the National Early Literacy Panel, a government-convened group considered dozens of studies on phonological awareness (including phonemic awareness) plus phonics instruction in preschool and kindergarten. Children who got decoding instruction scored substantially better on tests of phonological awareness compared with those who didn’t. The benefit was equivalent to a jump from the 50th percentile to the 79th percentile on standardized tests, suggesting those students were better prepared to learn how to read.
Likewise, a 2007 meta-analysis of 22 studies conducted in urban elementary schools found that minority children who received phonics instruction scored the equivalent of several months ahead of their minority peers on several academic measures. Studies have not addressed whether phonics might help close demographic achievement gaps, but research suggests that whole language approaches are less effective in disadvantaged populations than in other groups.
“There are several thousand studies at least that converge on this finding,” Moats says. “Phonics instruction has always had the edge in consensus reports.”
One of the casualties of Bill Ayer’s revolution was the effective teaching of “phonics,” ironically harming the very people he thought he was protecting.
Literacy equals liberty, and literacy is failing.
Parents, the NAACP and others who are exhausted by the decline in progress are beginning to demand an educational focus on The Science of Reading. In contrast to “balanced literacy,” The Science of Reading is structured literacy comprised of phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. The Science of Reading is backed by decades of neuroscience and psychology, as it teaches kids how to decode words using systematic explicit instruction. Balanced literacy/whole language focuses on “3 cuing”, a guessing strategy that has been debunked by cognitive scientists.
Just this year, after media attention exposed their failures, the Columbia Teachers College ditched the popular balanced literacy program, founded by Lucy Caulkins in 1981. Bi-partisan efforts in 15 states passed laws that would better follow the science of reading, with some states banning failed methods. One of those states, Ohio, is being sued by The Reading Recovery Counsel of North America. Reading Recovery curriculum is based upon the 3 cuing/balanced literacy method that is falling out of favor. Curriculum sales net big profits.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/us/science-of-reading-phonics-dewine-ohio-reading-recovery.html
In following the social justice framework provided by Ayers and others long entrenched in the education establishment, we find ourselves categorizing students based on race, income, gender, sexuality, environment, family life, traumas, and physical and mental health, all with the stated mission to be inclusive, fight racism and close achievement gaps. It isn’t working. Students are falling further behind in reading profiency.
The current trend of promoting tribalism does nothing but create anger and prejudice. Even though it’s 2023 the emergence of blatant antisemitism is akin to 1933. Children are not born to hate, they must be taught to hate.
“You’ve got to be carefully taught” is a song from the Rogers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific, pointing out that racism is taught year after year to dear little ears. The musical is based on the Pulitzer Prize winning book Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener. Michener wrote many epic novels rich in detailed, well researched history.
The recent surge in antisemitic attacks have reasonable people wondering: What have dear little ears been taught? Why not teach all the children to read and give them James A. Michener’s books so they can learn history? It may not be as thrilling as rebel activism, but it would be a more productive way to combat failure and discrimination.
Perhaps the revolution we now need is one in literacy.