Whole Language Harms Children - Maybe Most Children. We Must Now Pivot to Science-Based Reading Education. Part 3.
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Whole Language Harms Children - Maybe Most Children. We Must Now Pivot to Science-Based Reading Education. Part 3.
The George W. Bush administration sought to improve reading in US school children. The program was hijacked and derailed.
In this episode, Emily Hanford reviews in great detail how the well-intended political process went awry, with interview commentary by experts who used to support the Whole Language method who now realize it was a profoundly bad mistake. Learn how science-based reading technique teaching lost the battle. At stake - billions of dollars in marketed teaching materials sold to schools and teachers, and the academic performance of hundreds of millions of US school children.
The further I get into this series, the more evidence there is that decisions about reading instructional methods were based on feelings, not facts. People who called themselves liberals were so convinced that people who called themselves conservatives "didn't care about poor minorities" and "only cared about money" (because that's what they told themselves, one 'liberal' to another), that they actually did something that was destructive to the groups they claimed to care about, while people whom they held in high esteem because of the way they made them 'feel' about reading instruction fleeced them.
This podcast was FANTASTIC!