Here we go again with another shocking national report on the incredibly high, embarrassing, and costly level of illiteracy in the United States. U.S. taxpayers have generously built and equipped the most expensive and beautiful school system in the history of the world, but we have one of the world’s highest rates of illiteracy.
Nothing could be a more devastating indictment of the public school system than this abysmal failure to teach children to read. Nothing has done more to create a permanent underclass of our society than the failure to teach children to read.
You are just kidding yourself if you think they are all minority, rural, old, or poor. The illiterates are overwhelmingly urban, the largest subgroup is white, and the majority are under age 50 and have attended high school.
The illiterates are the young adults who have been in the public schools during the last two and three decades when so many billions of dollars have been spent on education. This most recent of some 30 national reports on the failure of the public schools was made by the U.S. Census Bureau and released by the Department of Education.
The Census Bureau survey shows that only 8 percent of illiterates live in rural areas, whereas 41 percent live in metropolitan areas and 51 percent live in small towns and suburbs. The survey shows that 41 percent of illiterates are English-speaking whites, 22 percent are black, 22 percent are Spanish speaking, and 15 percent are other non-English speaking.
The survey shows that these illiterates cannot address an envelope that the post office can deliver and cannot write a check that a bank can cash. Of course, illiterates cannot read the “help wanted” section of the newspapers or fill out a job application.
The news stories reporting this new survey included statements from educators who criticized the Federal Government for not spending more money to solve this problem. But the Federal Government is not to blame directly or indirectly for this situation. The Federal Government doesn’t control, direct, guide, or finance the first grade in elementary schools across the country, and that is where reading should be taught.
Illiteracy is not a matter of money at all. It’s a matter of whether first-grade children are taught by the proven best method, “phonics first,” which teaches children the sounds and syllables of the English language and how to put them together to read.
A recent Department of Education booklet called “What Works: Research About Teaching and Learning,” offers 65 pages of common sense about education methods which produce positive results. This booklet says it is a fact that “Children get a better start in reading if they are taught phonics. Learning phonics helps children to understand the relationship between letters and sounds and to ‘break the code’ that links the words they hear with the words they see in print.”
So why do 85 percent of the public schools today NOT teach first-grade reading by the phonics-first method? Teaching a child to read is NOT a complicated or difficult process. It becomes so only when children are not taught the rules of the game.
For the past 40 years, more or less, most public schools have not taught first-graders by the phonics-first method. Because of local textbook purchasing, the censorship of phonics out of first-grade readers reached school districts in different years during the 1940s and ’50s.
When my eldest child started the first grade in 1955, there was not one iota of phonics instruction in any first-grade reader in my local school district. (That’s why I taught my six children to read at home so they would learn by the phonics-first method and start on their road to high academic achievement.)
When parents ask their schools if phonics is taught, they are usually given one of two answers: “Of course, we use phonics,” or “We teach a mix of phonics and other methods.” Parents should be on guard against deception about phonics.
Many schools falsely tell parents that phonics is used when, in reality, the child is only taught to recognize the letter-sound at the beginning of a word and perhaps at the end, but is taught to guess what is in between by its shape, length, and the picture on the page. A child taught by this “whole-word” method might read “home” for “house” and never know the difference. This is NOT the phonics method.
The answer to the illiteracy problem is not more tax dollars, not more remedial reading classes, not more bureaus to combat illiteracy. The answer is to teach first-graders to read using an intensive phonics-first method.
