Good education announcement from National today. I have been waiting for anyone to announce this for a couple of years now. So I'm pleased someone’s finally done it.
If the Nats win the election, they will require all primary schools to teach little ones to read using structured literacy – which is basically going back to phonics.
Now let me explain to you why this is potentially a game changer.
For the last 50 years, our schools have not been teaching phonics. They have been teaching what’s called whole language.
And basically what that does is assumes that kids will naturally learn to read just like they learn to talk.
If you leave books with pictures lying around for them and if the book has the word apple next to a picture of an apple – that will teach them to read.
It is rubbish. It does not.
It is such a fail that 36 percent of our 14-year-olds failed the NCEA pilot reading exam last year.
The reading ability of our 10-year-olds is the worst it’s ever been and is apparently the worst in the English-speaking world.
So what's been going on is that a lot of schools have been spending thousands of dollars of their own money to pay consultants to come in and help them teach in another way, which is called structured literacy. And as I say – basically goes back to phonics.
And they have been getting amazing results, the kids are learning to read again.
Here's an example:
Kaiapoi North School in Canterbury spent $20,000 and the principal said it was worth every cent.
After two years: the principal said 68 of their 72 kids learning it were at or above the curriculum standards and scoring not around 70 percent – but in the 90 percents.
The Education Ministry knows this.
There have been campaigns for years to get them to go back to phonics.
New South Wales has just gone back to phonics, and yet our Education Ministry has dragged their heels.
And now finally, the Nats have seen the light.
And they say if they win in October, teachers will all be teaching structured literacy to kids, and the way it’s phrased – they will not have the option of doing anything else.
There will be tests on Year 2s to make sure it’s working, and every new teacher will be taught it too.
And that is brilliant.
I tell you what: this could be a game changer.
It could genuinely be the thing that lifts our reading rates again and turns our education system around, because if you can’t read... you can’t do any education.
Good, simple, practical announcement.
Heather du Plessis-Allan is a journalist and commentator who hosts Newstalk ZB's Drive show.
2 comments:
This should have happened in 2000 when the parliamentary inquiry into reading was held . However it didn't despite hundreds upon hundreds of submissions from reading teachers and researchers requesting that phonics be returned. Guess who principally blocked it ? Damn academics including Dame Marie Clay and her buddy Stuart McNaughton.
Last year the evidence against Clay's whole Language (balanced literacy) Reading Recovery (RR) was overwhelming conclusive, in an enormous US research study. The results of this showed, shockingly.that students who did not participate in the very expensive RR, had better reading scores, in the long term than those who were given RR. This has been the death warrant for the whole nonsense balanced literacy movement that has dragged us to the very bottom of the international reading test scores. With Labour we are the only country that persisted in subsidizing this demonstrably failure of a proramme, RR.
Great news, now if we can only get removed all the wholly inappropriate gender identity /conversion nonsense which only unsettles and confuses our young, and also the fixation on matauranga, which demonstrably did Maori little good, we would be well on the way to recovering our education system. Concentrating on English, rather than the made-up, Te Reo would also be sensible. But then good sense and prevailing teaching ideologies seem to be mutually exclusive terms. In recent decades it's been all about indoctrination and dependency, and those responsible for robbing our children of their futures need to be identified and purged.
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