One California school district admits that scrapping phonics was a bad idea. We can only imagine how it came to this . . .
One California school district admits that scrapping phonics was a bad idea. We can only imagine how it came to this . . .
T he Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) is returning to a phonics-first reading program after the unmitigated disaster that has been its more “progressive way of teaching.”
Time published an interview with OUSD teacher Kareem Weaver explaining why the district shifted from phonics in the first place:
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 [phonics] 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.
Now Weaver is 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.
Phonics are colonizing? It reminds me of a story I heard in a smoke-filled bar on Coronado:
As the Phonemics Flotilla, a vast amalgamation of ships and weaponry, neared the shoreline, the captain, one Jon Jak, with a glass to his eye, espied Oakland’s Chappell Hayes Observation Tower fortress. The captain was a lean man of indeterminate race and lineage, with a neatness of motion that matched his fastidious nature.
Jak allowed himself a weary smile as he pondered the Oak-Land before him — of the enlightenment that phonics instruction would bring the schoolchildren there. You see, Jon Jak was a colonizer not of lands and peoples but of education. He was feared along the coasts, for the teachers’ unions knew him to bring verifiable results to the classrooms they had endeavored for so long to transmogrify into bogs of ignorant progressiveness. The excellent captain brooked no insipidity.
Once anchored in the Oakland Middle Harbor, the longboats took him and his men ashore, each with carronades in the prows loaded with Hooked on Phonics flechettes. As he planted the Flag of Phonology in the sand, Jak listened as a faint chanting tweaked his ear.
He and his marine forces, numbering 4,400 — each phoneme in English represented by a century military unit — marched up Seventh Street to Prescott School, the first of many elementary schools to be saved from foolishness. As the Phonemecians approached, they noted a mob of sign-toting teachers outside the school, a picket line hundreds-thick demanding that the school district pay teachers more even as their students’ grades dropped into the void.
With the teachers distracted by their self-interest, Jak and his men got to work. Marines dug artillery emplacements on Eighth and Campbell and put up barricades of phonics workbooks. Suddenly a clamor arose from the public educators as they saw the colonizing force arrayed behind their position.
As if with one mind, the teachers whirled about and faced their peacoated nemesis. Now was their chance to end the career of one so damnably interested in children’s success. The Phonemecians watched as the Teacher Unionists wheeled out weapons platforms capable of belching forth the works of such soul-searing authors as Nikole Hannah-Jones, Ibram X. Kendi, and John Dewey. Against Phonics, they waged Folly, Mendacity, and Sloth.
A grating voice, which witnesses would later swear was that of Randi Weingarten, called out to Jak: “Leave this place. These children are ours to corrupt and impoverish. They exist to enrich us and nothing more. We are legion.” The teachers then surged forth, some of them screaming passages from their favorite woke writers, others flying LGBTQIA+ flags, with the very latest meaningfully multicolored geometric designs, through the Oakland smog.
Jak nodded to his marine commander, who gave the signal to the ranks. Shells daubed “Student Achievement” and “Answerable to the Public” plumed among the pedagogues, silencing many. A battle cry could be heard among the marines, “A-a-apple, b-b-ball, c-c-cat . . .” But to this the teachxrs responded with chants of “1619, America was never keen.”
Just as the two sides dug in, paratroopers began descending from a dirigible with the letters “NAACP” emblazoned on its side, and the shock troops set upon not Jak’s forces but the teachers.
From the skyship unfurled a banner reading, “Even we sometimes get it right. Phonics for all students, that they may succeed no matter their economic or ethnic or racial background.”
Thus did the battle turn.
Time would later explain this juncture with more clinical language: “In January 2021, the local branch of the NAACP filed an administrative petition with the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) to ask it to include ‘explicit instruction for phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension’ in its curriculum.”
However it has come to pass, the return of phonics-based reading instruction to Oakland schools is a most welcome development. Such an approach undergirds literacy and communication. It shouldn’t be controversial to say that the primary concern of schools is to have their students succeed.