The Real Reason Johnny Can’t Read: Bad Parenting

From PJMedia.com

It’s not often that I agree with education analyst Diane Ravitch, who is rabidly anti-school choice and anti-religious, but she’s right to call out the latest government boondoggle that’s supposed to magically teach kids to read. She opined last month: 

There is no “science of reading.” There is no “science of teaching math” or any other academic skill or study. If someone can identify a district where every single student reads at a proficient level on state tests, I will change my view. I await the evidence.

Like No Child Left Behind and Common Core before it, the “Science of Reading” is just another excuse to line the coffers of education bureaucrats and textbook publishers. 

A story at AMP Reports titled “‘Science of reading’ movement spells financial trouble for publisher Heinemann” notes that “The educational publisher raked in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue during the 2010s selling reading programs based on a disproven theory [the now disfavored Common Core]. The company now faces financial fallout, as schools ditch its products.” More: 

The three biggest educational publishers — Heinemann’s parent company, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, along with McGraw Hill and Savvas — are all now marketing their core reading programs as aligned with the science of reading.

Lather, rinse, repeat. 

My home state of Ohio has allocated “$86 million for educator professional development, $64 million for curriculum and instructional materials, and $18 million for literacy coaches.” 

More money down the drain that will do next to nothing to improve the reading ability of children. 

According to The Nation’s Report Card, reading scores have been essentially flat since 1992, despite billions (perhaps trillions) of dollars spent implementing the Next Big Thing in education. Scores dipped a few points during and after the Covid lockdowns, but overall, there has been little change over the last half-decade. 

Aside: I asked my daughter-in-law, who teaches first grade at a Christian school, what she thought of the “Science of Reading.” She replied: “Don’t get me started.” It turns out that all Ohio teachers—public and private—are required to take a 25-hour course in the faddish teaching method. Public school teachers receive a $1200 stipend for the coursework, but private school teachers have to do it on their own dime. 

Getting back to Ravitch’s point, there is no magic bullet when it comes to teaching reading. It’s really not complicated, despite states coercing kindergarten teachers with 20 years of classroom experience to get master’s degrees, which has been a huge boon for online universities that receive government funding. Follow the money, and it always ends up in the hands of government bureaucrats while they insist it’s “for the children.” 

Back in the ’70s, most children didn’t learn to read until first grade. My first-grade class had 30 students, and we all learned to read without drama, specialists, IEPs, or “interventionists.”  Mrs. Hole patiently taught us using the “Tip and Mitten” book series. We sat in circles, and she used flip charts to instruct us on phonics. She sorted us into reading groups—kids who needed a little extra help got more attention from the teacher—and we learned to read. I know you will find this hard to believe, but we didn’t even have computers back then!!!!! We also didn’t have homework. It was expected that kids would be read to at home and that parents would encourage literacy. 

This wasn’t some upper-crust prep school, either. A majority of the kids in my school had parents who were second-generation immigrants, most of whom were blue-collar workers without college degrees—families with names like Ikeda, Georgeopolis, Ciarniello, and Kibelbek (my maiden name). It wasn’t unusual for two languages to be spoken in these homes, including mine. In fact, my father was held back in first grade because he couldn’t speak English well enough. These days, he’d be placed in an ESL program and encouraged to learn to read in Slovak. 

As a homeschooling mom, I taught both my boys (one a stealth dyslexic and the other with ADD) to read in kindergarten. We started using a phonics-based program in September, and by Christmas, they could read. THIS IS NOT ROCKET SCIENCE. 

Talk to any primary school teacher, and they will tell you that the problem isn’t that teaching reading is complicated.

The problem isn’t that they need a magic bullet program with “science” in the name to unlock the secret to teaching what American children have been learning to do since the first settlers arrived here. 

The problem is that many students come to school unprepared to learn. Their parents are checked out, fathers are absent, the kids stay up playing video games all hours of the night, and their diets consist mostly of highly processed junk food. Many of them have experienced neglect and witnessed violence and drug use by the time they enter kindergarten. 

Pouring billions of dollars down the toilet to pay for fancy new teaching methods is not going to address the real problem. Putting one in ten American children on dangerous stimulant drugs is not going to solve the problem because the problem is cultural. 

A few weeks ago, I saw a video on Facebook showing a high school student who couldn’t read but received passing grades every year until he finally graduated. Most people, including the mother, blamed the school (and COVID) for failing to teach him, but what about that mother? Where was she during his thirteen years of public education? Was she overseeing his homework, looking online at his test scores, attending parent-teacher conferences, and feeding him a healthy breakfast before school? Was she reading to him and making him read aloud to her? 

Illiteracy doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Sure, there are some terrible teachers out there, and a lot of schools are spending more time on woke ideology than the three Rs, but there is no excuse for a child with even a below-average IQ to be unable to read. Again, it’s not rocket science. It’s time we start pointing out that bad parenting is why Johnny can’t read. 

All the government boondoggles in the world cannot fix bad parenting. 

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