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The Oakland example was one cited in Time magazine recently. One of the teachers who earlier advocated eliminating phonics was described as now "heading up a campaign to get his old school district to reinstate many of the methods that teachers resisted so strongly: specifically, systematic and consistent instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics."

The article includes quite a bit of history about reading instruction, insights from neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene [1], a reference to a 2000 report from the National Reading Panel [2], and reports by education reporter Emily Hanford on why the science of reading has not been rapidly adopted [3].

[0] https://time.com/6205084/phonics-science-of-reading-teachers... [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0670021105 [2] https://www.nichd.nih.gov/sites/default/files/publications/p... [3] https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/10/23/hanfordandread...

⬐ ZeroGravitas

If your argument for doing something starts with this:

> The teachers felt like curriculum robots—and pushed back. “This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do,” says Weaver, describing their response to the approach. “So we fought tooth and nail as a teacher group to throw that out.” It was replaced in 2015 by a curriculum that emphasized rich literary experiences. “Those who wanted to fight for social justice, they figured that this new progressive way of teaching reading was the way,” he says.

Then it's a bad sign. I'm glad they don't let us get past the second paragraph before turning it into a culture war.

The Minority View in the 2000 report seems a bit less 'culture war' and more thoughtful:

> In the end, the work of the NRP is not of poor quality; it is just unbalanced and, to some extent, irrelevant. But because of these deficiencies, bad things will happen. Summaries of, and sound bites about, the Panel’s findings will be used to make policy decisions at the national, state, and local levels. Topics that were never investigated will be misconstrued as failed practices. Unanswered questions will be assumed to have been answered negatively. Unfortunately, most policymakers and ordinary citizens will not read the full reviews. They will not see the Panel’s explanations about why so few topics were investigated or its judgments that the results of research on some of the topics are inconclusive. They will not hear the Panel’s calls for more and more fine-tuned research. Ironically, the report that Congress intended to be a boon to the teaching of reading will turn out to be a further detriment.

> As an educator with more than 40 years of experience and as the only member of the NRP who has lived a career in elementary schools, I call upon Congress to recognize that the Panel’s majority report does not respond to its charge nor meet the needs of America’s schools. In spite of the Panel’s diligent efforts and its valuable findings on a select number of instructional practices, we still cannot answer the first and most central question of the charge: “What is known about the basic processes by which children learn to read.” We still do not know what types of instruction are suitable for different ages and populations of children. We still do not know the relative effectiveness of the three models of reading as bases for instruction. We do not even know whether the existing body of research can answer those questions. Therefore, I ask Congress not to take actions that will promote one philosophical view of reading or constrain future research in the field on the basis of the Panel’s limited and narrow set of findings

Needs a lot more replication before I'll believe it. See Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention

http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Brain-Science-Evolution-Invent...

for a good recent, research-based account of how reading works.

The failure begins in most cases with appallingly bad reading instruction in school. See

http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Brain-Science-Evolution-Invent...

and the earlier sources it cites for research on what to do about that.

2008. Great author mentioned in this article, author of a more recent book

http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Brain-Science-Evolution-Invent...

about reading.

Quoted author Maryanne Wolf seems to be saying something that is at least partly contrary to what is said in the new book Reading in the Brain

http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Brain-Science-Evolution-Invent...

by Stanislas Dehaene. He is very up to date on the best research on reading acquisition in children and adult reading performance in countries around the world with different writing systems, and he has some very interesting suggestions in his book about how an electronic device for screen reading could actually SPEED UP human reading with optimal, brain-research-informed design, by presenting the words of the text in rapid succession (up to the word size limit enforced by eye fixation and focusing ability).

Stanislas Dehaene has great comments in his book about the right way to teach reading to children and, as one reviewer notes, "Reading in the Brain isn't just about reading. It comes nearer than anything I have encountered to explaining how humans think, and does so with a simple elegance that can be grasped by scientists and nonscientists alike."