A lot of people think the Reading Wars are a case of he said, she said.

One expert says X, another expert says Y, and a third expert says Z. These different approaches are tossed back and forth, and the casual observer is persuaded there must be no important difference, otherwise the experts would  pick a winner.

Result: the public is always confused and parents are at the mercy of school officials. 

Result: 50 million functional illiterates.

Reading is the fundamental skill. If we don’t address the crisis in this area, then all the other things are beside the point. Virtually every discussion in the last 10 years conveniently ignores the fact that a great percentage of children never learn to read very well. The Education Establishment seems to assume that you can teach all kinds of 21st-century skills, even though the children are semi-literate. Isn’t this clearly dishonest?

NAEP scores suggest that two-thirds of fourth-graders and eighth-graders are “below proficient.” Clearly, the people in charge of the schools don’t know what they’re doing.

Meanwhile, phonics experts going back to Rudolf Flesch state that all children can be taught to read in the first grade, or the second at the latest. Wouldn’t common sense dictate that you go with these experts? Certainly you would carefully test their claims.

In fact, instead of testing, what we have seen since 1930 is an unrelenting propaganda campaign to drive phonics out of the schools, and to force all children to learn with Whole Word, with devastating results for most of them.

Conclusion: the country was relentlessly lied to, and that’s putting it mildly. I was looking for ways to sum up this weird saga and finally got this title: “America, you’ve been punked.” A short article that covers the whole subject.

http://www.rightsidenews.com/2013091333189/life-and-science/health-...