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Did New York City Forget How to Teach Children to Read? This fall, Eric Adams is pivoting to phonics.

By Caitlin Moscatello, Sept. 13, 2023

Illustration: Erin Jang

The debate about the best way to help children learn to read goes back more than 100 years, but an overwhelming body of data has shown the benefit of having kids sound out letters and words.

One of the largest analyses of such studies is a 2000 report by the National Reading Panel, which found that phonemic-awareness instruction helps kids learn to read and boosts comprehension, while teaching systematic phonics “makes a bigger contribution to children’s growth in reading than alternative programs providing unsystematic or no phonics instruction.”

President George W. Bush used the report as the foundation for his own reading initiative, which stressed phonics for early readers.

Even that report left the door open for proponents of balanced literacy, noting that phonics “should be integrated with other reading instruction to create a balanced reading program.”

Plenty of educators listened to this part loudly — despite the fact that those advocating for more phonics were never saying phonics only. “When I started on this journey, I was like, Phonics? That’s what George Bush wanted. Phonics? That’s what happens in red states,” says Danielle, a teacher in New York who, like many of the two dozen people interviewed for this article, requested we use her first name out of concern for professional consequences.

Source: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/09/new-york-city-schools-how-to-teach-children-to-read.html

Current Affairs, Politics

Why the Republican Party Has No Agenda; Why the GOP Is Ideologically Lost

By Eric Levitz @EricLevitz, April 30, 2021 | New York Magazine, Intelligencer, Conservatism

Outraged and confused. Photo: David Ryder/Getty Images

American conservatism has long been an incoherent and hypocritical creed.

There is nothing new about Republicans preaching balanced budgets while practicing fiscal profligacy; or prescribing laissez-faire for the indigent while expanding welfare for conservative constituencies; or equating public investment with communism while fighting to expand the most centrally planned sector of the economy. Ronald Reagan was a “small-government” conservative in the streets, but a Keynesian in the balance sheets.

Nevertheless, the ideological incoherence of the contemporary GOP is unusually severe. The Reaganites could not practice what they preached; post-Trump Republicans can’t settle on a catechism to hypocritically recite.

The party has a set of unwavering transactional commitments (to reactionary billionaires, provincial capitalists, and the Christian right). And some of its factions harbor intelligible agendas. But these contingents are no longer united by any overriding account of how public policy must change. Today’s GOP insists that corporate titans are “job creators” entitled to low taxes, but also “woke” traitors deserving of state persecution. It calls for an end to American nation-building in the Middle East, but also for Joe Biden to push for regime change in Iran. It derides welfare programs as invitations to dependency, but also evinces some interest in expanding refundable tax credits for working-class families. It wants to reassert American economic sovereignty by reshoring supply chains and protecting domestic manufacturing, but also to give multinational firms veto power over U.S. tax policy.

Source: Why the Republican Party Has No Agenda