The traditional belief of phonics experts is that you can teach virtually every child to read in the first or second grade. See video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JV0tPGn-Ws ;

If you don’t use the right methods, the kids will be dysfunctional in various ways (but it doesn’t mean there’s anything actually wrong with those kids). 

The underlying problem, according to many investigators, is that the Education Establishment doesn’t really mind If a large percent of the population is semi-literate. So they let these bad methods be used. Teachers can struggle. The kids can struggle. But they will never have good results with bad methods, no matter how hard they work.

For various reasons, this war against reading falls more heavily on boys. I think in cities it falls more heavily on black boys, because in a greater percentage of cases they’ve got poorly educated parents or a parent. These parents cannot stand up against the school, with all their experts saying to the parent, "This is the way we do it, now go home and leave us alone." I’m sure you have the same phenomenon with white kids in the hills of West Virginia, etc.

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 I have been following a literacy forum. One of the constant issues is how do they teach kids in middle school and high school to be interested in books, or even to understand a book.  The unstated problem is that many of these kids are semi-literate at best. They've been taught to read with sight-words 5 or 10 years before. They have been taught a mixed-methods approach that is bound to make a kid crazy. He knows a few hundred sight-words. He knows a bunch of bogus strategies, such as context, guessing. and picture clues. Reading is painful. It makes him feel inferior. And the entire school system pretends that it knows what it's doing and if there is a problem, it's the kid's fault! He probably has dyslexia....

And you want to know why we have a third of the kids in some schools dropping out before the end?

And you want to know why the percentage of boys at the college level is down around 42%?

Because the war against boys of all colors starts early and it's relentless.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/04/what_really_happened_to_boys...