The politics of public education makes for strange bedfellows indeed. With test scores continuing their post-pandemic downward spiral, even the leftists at Slate realize that American education needs serious change to turn the tide.
This past weekend, mother and writer Kendra Hurley applauded Columbia University’s decision to close its Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. She held the institution responsible for what she called a “decades-long travesty” of foisting an ineffective “balanced literacy” curriculum on the unsuspecting American public.
In her essay, Hurley details the struggles her own family faced while dealing with the failure of New York City Public Schools to teach her children how to read. The school district adopted the balanced literacy curriculum 20 years ago. She describes expensive tutoring sessions, her failed effort to convince her kids’ school to change its reading curriculum, and the damage the distraction wrought on her writing career. Amid these descriptions, she bemoans how the educational establishment broke its “unspoken contract” with her to teach her kids, so she didn’t have to.
It’s tempting to feel some schadenfreude at Hurley’s tale of woe. After all, many other parents have been struggling with the boneheaded policies of educrats for decades. Meanwhile, people like her resolutely stuck their heads in the sand. Still, we should celebrate the fact that more and more left-wing parents finally see the need for education reform.
Phonics Versus Whole Language Instruction
The core of Hurley’s argument is rock solid. “Balanced literacy” (also often called “whole language”) is an unrealistic methodology for
