With the disclaimers that 1) I am a librarian, though I now work for an advocacy group, not a library, and 2) that I have been a member of the American Library Association, I should like to posit that publishers do far less to promote reading than libraries do with far, far greater access to money.
To say that the publishing industry is losing money is, to begin with, a hard claim to make. Though profits have gone up and down, they are not yet in any danger of tanking: https://www.statista.com/statistics/271931/revenue-of-the-us-book-publishing-industry/. (I'm not going to provide links for everything in this post because I'd never finish it, but anyone who wants more can look around--or hit me, or your local librarian--up.)
ALA doesn't just make posters. Its Washington office regularly lobbies for increased library funding and for laws and policies that expand access to information (including books). Its Office of Intellectual Freedom has been tracking book challenges and bans for years and years--long before book bans became headline news. But more than ALA, it is state libraries and local libraries and their staff who work every day to promote, encourage, and provide books to people. Increasing numbers of libraries are going fine free (library fines are one of the chief barriers to people using libraries). Summer reading programs--held by almost every library in the country (including one in a town of 351 people where I once worked)--can seem just like chases for prizes, but they are intended to encourage reading, to help young (and old) readers find books they will enjoy, to challenge them to read something a little outside their comfort zone.
Libraries provide storytimes, often in languages other than English. They run programs for teens and kids, putting those kids and teens in a place surrounded by books chosen with their interest in mind, free for the taking. In recent years, they have been actively working to diversify their collections. They do outreach to preschools and prisons and many places in between.
The publishing industry, meanwhile, continues to consolidate and to put more and more money into the hands of already wealthy writers--a thing most writers (as you've noted) can only dream of becoming. They have rarely been friends to libraries, repeatedly trying to prevent them from using anything from microfilm to photocopying to owning ebooks as a way to squash the sharing of information and ideas, not promote it (see https://twitter.com/library_futures/status/1640428836180447232, or the paper it references if you want to read more--full disclosure, I wrote the tweets).
I believe there are good and well-intentioned people working at publishing houses and bookstores, particluarly independent presses and bookstores--but in the big picture, I see very little that publishers do that outstrips what libraries and library organizations do when it comes to encouraging reading, promoting reading, and above all making reading accessible. I have plenty of criticisms of ALA and of libraries--no institution is perfect--but not doing much to encourage reading is not one of them.
I agreee that libraries do more than publisher, but my point is that it shouldn't be this way , that publishers are, to some degree free riding without digging in and helping support the culture that would make people more interested in their products. I think it's incredibly short sighted of them.
Ah, well, I have significantly less trust in publishers (especially the Big 4) than you do.
I have no idea what or how they teach reading at my kid's school, but I will say he started hating books around the time he started kindergarten, and he still hates them in sixth grade, but now and again he'll ask me to read him Frog and Toad or Beatrix Potter or Dragons Love Tacos or one of the other books we read hundreds of times before he turned five, so we'll see.
I don't have any trust necessarily, the same way I don't trust huge swaths of the leadership in US higher education, but I also know that (like higher ed) we're talking about an existential threat and they're the ones who have the resources to do something about it, should they engage.
I am proud to number librarians among my family and friends. Our local library, Indian Trails, is OUTSTANDING. All the love to all the librarians. 💖💖💖📚📚📚👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼
I was born in 1943 and entered first grade in an American public school shortly before my 6th birthday. We learned to read in the Dick and Jane books without sounding out any syllables or words whatsoever. Instead we learned words by sight in the same way that children learn to recognize images of distinct animals. I still remember the moment in an early grade when I came across a word 8-10 characters long that I had never encountered in print before, but I knew in a flash what it was because I had heard it in conversation at home. It would seem that building a slowly expanding vocabulary of sight words, which we read aloud in class or read silently while the teacher read them aloud, led us to absorb the principles of phonics unconsciously. Certainly the utility of words -- things as common in daily life as furniture, trees and pets -- is immediately apparent to a child learning to read, whereas hours of phonics is bo-ring -- and patronizing, frankly. I vaguely remember learning that sight reading was abandoned because of the tedium of word drills. I don't remember word drills. What I remember is learning to read as easily as slipping into water at a swimming pool: I wasn't wet, and then I was. (I understand my idyllic recounting breezes past the ignorance of dyslexia at that time.)
Another feature of my early education is that I was enveloped in my teachers' belief that I could learn (WOULD learn) and their belief that they knew how to teach me. Most articles I read about the poor reading development in children, if I can bear to read them at all anymore, reveal to me that 1) Teachers do not begin with an assumption that children can learn to read in the first place, and this lack of belief is especially apparent in classrooms of low income and non-white children; and 2) Teachers are not confident in their own teaching skills, or in the tools they were indoctrinated with when they earned their degrees in education. I routinely find myself screaming at my television , or even at bare walls in my house, in total exasperation and thereby striking momentary terror in my pets . . . Something that was once accomplished routinely in one room schoolhouses throughout the country . . . . My grandmother even taught Latin in the tiny school in the tiny town near the farm where she and her husband raised their family.
I can tell from the handful of your posts I have read that you know a lot about education, its history and the many transformations it's gone through, that you spent years as a teacher yourself, and that your passions run deep also. I would find it hard to believe that your pets, if you have any, do not experience momentary terror of their own.
I grew up in a home filled with books, and was read to early and often as a child growing up, until I could take over that joy for myself. So, obviously, the home environment plays a big role in how someone approaches reading.
I was in grade school in the 60’s, and my mother helped our first and second grade teacher obtain materials to teach phonics on the sly at the time. We were also rewarded in those years for reading books with crowns with stars for each book read (ah, the simple joys). But also importantly, every teacher we had, up through 4th grade (as I recall) read books to us at some point during the day. I remember that as a special time. Having no children, I do not know if those practices still occur, but they were transformative for me.
John, you and I grow up in the same era, so I think you are making some assumptions based on your experiences in that era. This paragraph contains some of those assumptions:
"With phonics, you only need instruction up to the point the switch flips and you can decode words, after which, you’re reading. Teaching and learning phonics is boring and repetitive, which is one of the reasons it has been resisted by some teachers who have been trained on other methods and one of the reasons why you want to move past it the moment a student is ready."
In fact, there is no reason to accept the idea that phonics is boring. Phonics teaches us how language works. This is in an incredible achievement that touches every aspect of human experience! Being drilled mechanically on phonics in a 1970s classroom, as we both were, doesn't mean teachers use those same methods today. If you actually want to make this argument, I would really challenge you to get into a kindergarten classroom and observe phonics instruction today. (You are welcome to visit Worcester and visit the classroom of my wife any time.) A great teacher can make the love of language come alive, just as a great teacher can make the love of reading come alive. In this column you have waxed poetically about reading, but you also love thinking about how language works, right?
The district where my wife worked bought into one of those whole language programs a few years ago. It became very quickly clear to the teachers that the students were having trouble with the basics of reading. The district chucked the whole program, and now has bought into one that incorporates more phonics. To your point, it is annoying that these swings back and forth inevitably land on the extreme ends of the spectrum. But both phonics and reading whole texts are important. We can appreciate the mechanics of language just as we can appreciate reading stories.
Although I know that you didn't mean it this way, your post makes straw men of phonics instruction and the teachers in the trenches who have learned that phonics helps children read. Get thee into a kindergarten classroom and get a new perspective!
I think if you read the post, you'll see I'm a not against phonics instruction, or the appreciation of language, so this is a very strange response to me. That you believe I'm not familiar with the range of phonics instruction is an assumption you don't have any support for and which is not accurate. My belief is that any district that "buys a program" and requires every teacher to follow that program is asking for bad unintended consequences. There is some weird psychology around phonics instruction going on here, where someone like you, who knows my background and expertise well accuses me of making a strawman argument by making straw out of a post in which I'm pretty careful to be clear on my stance. No one is coming to take away anyone's phonics instruction, but if the notion that students go through high school without reading an entire book start to finish doesn't chill you, I'm honestly surprised.
John, I was definitely not responding to your argument about the importance of reading books--I completely agree with that! But you and I both, perhaps me even more than you, sometimes swing freely from the hip based on our instincts and experiences, and the paragraph I cited seemed like it was one of those moments. Read my response as directed to the paragraph I cited, and the short section in which it is embedded, and not to the whole essay.
But the first sentence of the paragraph I cited implies that we only need phonics until people read ("you only need instruction until the switch flips") and then phonics instruction can stop. You maybe didn't mean that, but that's how it reads. And I will absolutely disagree with that. As with the categorical statement that "teaching and learning phonics is boring and repetitive."
My wife is actually preparing to become the reading specialist in her building, so she has spent the summer engaged with these debates, and has become a little frustrated with the arguments about phonics from academics who have never taught in an elementary classroom. I get her frustration, (although I believe deeply in the value of academic research) and perhaps that drove my own hip-swinging response.
You're accusing me of things that are not accurate or true ("swinging from the hip"), but I don't really have a desire to run around in circles on this stuff, so I'm going to go enjoy the holiday.
I learned to read at home and don't remember how that worked, like the reader who said that it was like jumping into a pool, one minute I couldn't read, and then I could. Adults read to me, and I was surrounded by books, so that must have helped. I could not understand how anyone would not know how to read, or not love it. When I became a K 12 teacher in an ESL/bilingual program, naturally I learned a lot more about barriers to reading and the mechanics of teaching it. Curiously, reading is something you learn by practicing and that is so much easier when you enjoy it. I am dismayed that schools are so pathetic at fostering a love of reading, because it's key to learning almost anything else. These programs that teach students to read short passages in order to answer test questions are greatly responsible, but there is a latger societal issue. We can examine the reasons that schools adopt these programs, and are so invested in the tests for which they prepare students 🙄 but again the schools are short sighted. They talk about educating the "whole child," but really they are in the business of producing test taking machines. We are poorer culturally for this. It makes me sad.
With the disclaimers that 1) I am a librarian, though I now work for an advocacy group, not a library, and 2) that I have been a member of the American Library Association, I should like to posit that publishers do far less to promote reading than libraries do with far, far greater access to money.
To say that the publishing industry is losing money is, to begin with, a hard claim to make. Though profits have gone up and down, they are not yet in any danger of tanking: https://www.statista.com/statistics/271931/revenue-of-the-us-book-publishing-industry/. (I'm not going to provide links for everything in this post because I'd never finish it, but anyone who wants more can look around--or hit me, or your local librarian--up.)
ALA doesn't just make posters. Its Washington office regularly lobbies for increased library funding and for laws and policies that expand access to information (including books). Its Office of Intellectual Freedom has been tracking book challenges and bans for years and years--long before book bans became headline news. But more than ALA, it is state libraries and local libraries and their staff who work every day to promote, encourage, and provide books to people. Increasing numbers of libraries are going fine free (library fines are one of the chief barriers to people using libraries). Summer reading programs--held by almost every library in the country (including one in a town of 351 people where I once worked)--can seem just like chases for prizes, but they are intended to encourage reading, to help young (and old) readers find books they will enjoy, to challenge them to read something a little outside their comfort zone.
Libraries provide storytimes, often in languages other than English. They run programs for teens and kids, putting those kids and teens in a place surrounded by books chosen with their interest in mind, free for the taking. In recent years, they have been actively working to diversify their collections. They do outreach to preschools and prisons and many places in between.
The publishing industry, meanwhile, continues to consolidate and to put more and more money into the hands of already wealthy writers--a thing most writers (as you've noted) can only dream of becoming. They have rarely been friends to libraries, repeatedly trying to prevent them from using anything from microfilm to photocopying to owning ebooks as a way to squash the sharing of information and ideas, not promote it (see https://twitter.com/library_futures/status/1640428836180447232, or the paper it references if you want to read more--full disclosure, I wrote the tweets).
I believe there are good and well-intentioned people working at publishing houses and bookstores, particluarly independent presses and bookstores--but in the big picture, I see very little that publishers do that outstrips what libraries and library organizations do when it comes to encouraging reading, promoting reading, and above all making reading accessible. I have plenty of criticisms of ALA and of libraries--no institution is perfect--but not doing much to encourage reading is not one of them.
I agreee that libraries do more than publisher, but my point is that it shouldn't be this way , that publishers are, to some degree free riding without digging in and helping support the culture that would make people more interested in their products. I think it's incredibly short sighted of them.
Ah, well, I have significantly less trust in publishers (especially the Big 4) than you do.
I have no idea what or how they teach reading at my kid's school, but I will say he started hating books around the time he started kindergarten, and he still hates them in sixth grade, but now and again he'll ask me to read him Frog and Toad or Beatrix Potter or Dragons Love Tacos or one of the other books we read hundreds of times before he turned five, so we'll see.
I don't have any trust necessarily, the same way I don't trust huge swaths of the leadership in US higher education, but I also know that (like higher ed) we're talking about an existential threat and they're the ones who have the resources to do something about it, should they engage.
I am proud to number librarians among my family and friends. Our local library, Indian Trails, is OUTSTANDING. All the love to all the librarians. 💖💖💖📚📚📚👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼
I was born in 1943 and entered first grade in an American public school shortly before my 6th birthday. We learned to read in the Dick and Jane books without sounding out any syllables or words whatsoever. Instead we learned words by sight in the same way that children learn to recognize images of distinct animals. I still remember the moment in an early grade when I came across a word 8-10 characters long that I had never encountered in print before, but I knew in a flash what it was because I had heard it in conversation at home. It would seem that building a slowly expanding vocabulary of sight words, which we read aloud in class or read silently while the teacher read them aloud, led us to absorb the principles of phonics unconsciously. Certainly the utility of words -- things as common in daily life as furniture, trees and pets -- is immediately apparent to a child learning to read, whereas hours of phonics is bo-ring -- and patronizing, frankly. I vaguely remember learning that sight reading was abandoned because of the tedium of word drills. I don't remember word drills. What I remember is learning to read as easily as slipping into water at a swimming pool: I wasn't wet, and then I was. (I understand my idyllic recounting breezes past the ignorance of dyslexia at that time.)
Another feature of my early education is that I was enveloped in my teachers' belief that I could learn (WOULD learn) and their belief that they knew how to teach me. Most articles I read about the poor reading development in children, if I can bear to read them at all anymore, reveal to me that 1) Teachers do not begin with an assumption that children can learn to read in the first place, and this lack of belief is especially apparent in classrooms of low income and non-white children; and 2) Teachers are not confident in their own teaching skills, or in the tools they were indoctrinated with when they earned their degrees in education. I routinely find myself screaming at my television , or even at bare walls in my house, in total exasperation and thereby striking momentary terror in my pets . . . Something that was once accomplished routinely in one room schoolhouses throughout the country . . . . My grandmother even taught Latin in the tiny school in the tiny town near the farm where she and her husband raised their family.
I can tell from the handful of your posts I have read that you know a lot about education, its history and the many transformations it's gone through, that you spent years as a teacher yourself, and that your passions run deep also. I would find it hard to believe that your pets, if you have any, do not experience momentary terror of their own.
I grew up in a home filled with books, and was read to early and often as a child growing up, until I could take over that joy for myself. So, obviously, the home environment plays a big role in how someone approaches reading.
I was in grade school in the 60’s, and my mother helped our first and second grade teacher obtain materials to teach phonics on the sly at the time. We were also rewarded in those years for reading books with crowns with stars for each book read (ah, the simple joys). But also importantly, every teacher we had, up through 4th grade (as I recall) read books to us at some point during the day. I remember that as a special time. Having no children, I do not know if those practices still occur, but they were transformative for me.
John, you and I grow up in the same era, so I think you are making some assumptions based on your experiences in that era. This paragraph contains some of those assumptions:
"With phonics, you only need instruction up to the point the switch flips and you can decode words, after which, you’re reading. Teaching and learning phonics is boring and repetitive, which is one of the reasons it has been resisted by some teachers who have been trained on other methods and one of the reasons why you want to move past it the moment a student is ready."
In fact, there is no reason to accept the idea that phonics is boring. Phonics teaches us how language works. This is in an incredible achievement that touches every aspect of human experience! Being drilled mechanically on phonics in a 1970s classroom, as we both were, doesn't mean teachers use those same methods today. If you actually want to make this argument, I would really challenge you to get into a kindergarten classroom and observe phonics instruction today. (You are welcome to visit Worcester and visit the classroom of my wife any time.) A great teacher can make the love of language come alive, just as a great teacher can make the love of reading come alive. In this column you have waxed poetically about reading, but you also love thinking about how language works, right?
The district where my wife worked bought into one of those whole language programs a few years ago. It became very quickly clear to the teachers that the students were having trouble with the basics of reading. The district chucked the whole program, and now has bought into one that incorporates more phonics. To your point, it is annoying that these swings back and forth inevitably land on the extreme ends of the spectrum. But both phonics and reading whole texts are important. We can appreciate the mechanics of language just as we can appreciate reading stories.
Although I know that you didn't mean it this way, your post makes straw men of phonics instruction and the teachers in the trenches who have learned that phonics helps children read. Get thee into a kindergarten classroom and get a new perspective!
I think if you read the post, you'll see I'm a not against phonics instruction, or the appreciation of language, so this is a very strange response to me. That you believe I'm not familiar with the range of phonics instruction is an assumption you don't have any support for and which is not accurate. My belief is that any district that "buys a program" and requires every teacher to follow that program is asking for bad unintended consequences. There is some weird psychology around phonics instruction going on here, where someone like you, who knows my background and expertise well accuses me of making a strawman argument by making straw out of a post in which I'm pretty careful to be clear on my stance. No one is coming to take away anyone's phonics instruction, but if the notion that students go through high school without reading an entire book start to finish doesn't chill you, I'm honestly surprised.
John, I was definitely not responding to your argument about the importance of reading books--I completely agree with that! But you and I both, perhaps me even more than you, sometimes swing freely from the hip based on our instincts and experiences, and the paragraph I cited seemed like it was one of those moments. Read my response as directed to the paragraph I cited, and the short section in which it is embedded, and not to the whole essay.
But the first sentence of the paragraph I cited implies that we only need phonics until people read ("you only need instruction until the switch flips") and then phonics instruction can stop. You maybe didn't mean that, but that's how it reads. And I will absolutely disagree with that. As with the categorical statement that "teaching and learning phonics is boring and repetitive."
My wife is actually preparing to become the reading specialist in her building, so she has spent the summer engaged with these debates, and has become a little frustrated with the arguments about phonics from academics who have never taught in an elementary classroom. I get her frustration, (although I believe deeply in the value of academic research) and perhaps that drove my own hip-swinging response.
You're accusing me of things that are not accurate or true ("swinging from the hip"), but I don't really have a desire to run around in circles on this stuff, so I'm going to go enjoy the holiday.
I learned to read at home and don't remember how that worked, like the reader who said that it was like jumping into a pool, one minute I couldn't read, and then I could. Adults read to me, and I was surrounded by books, so that must have helped. I could not understand how anyone would not know how to read, or not love it. When I became a K 12 teacher in an ESL/bilingual program, naturally I learned a lot more about barriers to reading and the mechanics of teaching it. Curiously, reading is something you learn by practicing and that is so much easier when you enjoy it. I am dismayed that schools are so pathetic at fostering a love of reading, because it's key to learning almost anything else. These programs that teach students to read short passages in order to answer test questions are greatly responsible, but there is a latger societal issue. We can examine the reasons that schools adopt these programs, and are so invested in the tests for which they prepare students 🙄 but again the schools are short sighted. They talk about educating the "whole child," but really they are in the business of producing test taking machines. We are poorer culturally for this. It makes me sad.