More Thoughts about why Johnny Can't Read

Some comments about my post about the book Why Johnny Can't Read got me thinking some more.

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I have a relative who taught first grade for well over a decade.

She swears up and down by a curriculum they used called Open Court Phonics. She could not say enough good things about it. Over the many years that she taught first grade using this curriculum, everybody learned how to read -- quite well, in fact. They read with expression, the understood what they were reading, and many of them read on a third grade level. Virtually nobody struggled with reading, either in first grade or subsequent years.

This always puzzled me for many years, because that is not even close to the typical school experience.

So I wondered: Was she exaggerating? Was she mistaken? Were her students unusual, for some reason?

So now, years later ... here I am reading Why Johnny Can't Read and Why Johnny Still Can't Read by Flesch. In both books -- both in the 1950's and early 1980's -- the author visits a few classrooms in different schools which use a progressive phonics program. (Which was something that made these particular schools rare at the time, he claims.)

Which phonics program doesn't matter, he points out. He lists a few on the market at the time. You could even make up your own at home with lists of words and phonics rules that he has in the back of his own book. However, in these particular schools, it just happens to be called ...

Open Court Phonics.

Anyway, he talks about both his observations and his discussions with the teachers and principals in these phonics-based schools.

He gives random first grade children different selections from the newspaper to read, and they read them almost perfectly. (One of the examples he gives is, "Suburban Riverside's policemen were ordered yesterday to capture, dead or alive, a brown squirrel named Marge. The hunt means a great deal to the 10 year old girl who was bitten by the creature on Tuesday.")

The various principals and teachers claim that there are no non-readers -- not this year, not last year, not the year before. It is completely normal for their students to test above the national norms, year after year.

Also, it is noted that these schools are in what is described as "working-class, industrial suburbs" with "a sizable colored population."

Some people will claim that parent involvement is what has made the difference in these cases, and not the method being used.

Perhaps. But then, on the other hand, I've known involved, conscientious parents who are paying money for reading tutors, or are even putting their children in special schools for dyslexic children, because their children are struggling with learning to read. What to make of that? How come my relative never encountered a dyslexic student in her years and years of teaching? How come there were no dyslexic children, year after year, in these "working-class industrial suburbs" that used a phonics program?

In Typical Jenny Fashion (kinda like this post) I'm not really making a conclusion or even offering an opinion. I'm just throwing out something I find Very Interesting, tossing in the questions it raises, and curious what others have to add.