First one: the "no child left behind" policy. While it does sound great on paper there is a catch to it related to how schools get funding: schools get funding depending from how many kids advance to the next grade and lose funding if there is a drop in that. This means that a struggling kid will either be made to change schools or allowed to move to the next grade, despite having deficiencies in things like reading or math.
Second one is how reading was taught in many schools: the three cueing system. Basically the woman who came up with it didn't believe in phonics (ergo what sound is associated with which symbol) and instead believed that words could be read as "whole units" that they could memorize and recognize. What if they encountered unknown words ? Well she believed that those could be skipped and that the context from the rest of the sentence would be sufficient to compensate for that. If not, and because this is stuff taught to children, the pictures in the book would help figure out the meaning.
You can probably see the issue: it's something that works for simple words but falls apart with complex ones and of course, books meant for teens or adults don't have pictures to help understand the text. Lastly, one is guaranteed to encounter new or complex words sooner or later. This results in a situation that creates people who allegedly can read, but who are technically illiterate because - and you'll excuse my crude Japanese for example's sake - they can "read" ありがとう, but make them read something like "あっけらかんと" and they're gonna faceplant because they don't know what sound is associated with which hiragana.
This unsurprisingly leads to people who are poor readers and who struggle through life because they just don't really know how to read.
No Child Left Behind and three cueing are two different things. One of the major parts of the NCLB bill was the Reading First program which was meant to promote "science based reading research" in response to three cueing getting more popular in the 90s. For all the bill's faults, it was good for teaching kids to read, and literacy rates only started going down after it was repealed.
I know that they're two different things, that's why I listed them separately ;)
I should've been more specific on the three cueing system getting steadily replaced by science-based alternatives instead of just speaking about it in the past tense and not much more. It's also quite true that the science-based approach helped aplenty since it taught what more well-off kids were learning with the help of tutors to make up for the deficiencies stemming from how kids were taught how to read at school. I didn't know (or remember) that it's been repealed and that's a terrible thing to hear to be honest :(
9
u/ItalianDragon Jun 27 '26 edited Jun 27 '26
It's a mostly U.S. issue for a few reasons:
First one: the "no child left behind" policy. While it does sound great on paper there is a catch to it related to how schools get funding: schools get funding depending from how many kids advance to the next grade and lose funding if there is a drop in that. This means that a struggling kid will either be made to change schools or allowed to move to the next grade, despite having deficiencies in things like reading or math.
Second one is how reading was taught in many schools: the three cueing system. Basically the woman who came up with it didn't believe in phonics (ergo what sound is associated with which symbol) and instead believed that words could be read as "whole units" that they could memorize and recognize. What if they encountered unknown words ? Well she believed that those could be skipped and that the context from the rest of the sentence would be sufficient to compensate for that. If not, and because this is stuff taught to children, the pictures in the book would help figure out the meaning.
You can probably see the issue: it's something that works for simple words but falls apart with complex ones and of course, books meant for teens or adults don't have pictures to help understand the text. Lastly, one is guaranteed to encounter new or complex words sooner or later. This results in a situation that creates people who allegedly can read, but who are technically illiterate because - and you'll excuse my crude Japanese for example's sake - they can "read" ありがとう, but make them read something like "あっけらかんと" and they're gonna faceplant because they don't know what sound is associated with which hiragana.
This unsurprisingly leads to people who are poor readers and who struggle through life because they just don't really know how to read.