For decades, phonics was the gold standard for teaching children how to read.
There’s a pretty good reason for that: the alphabet and written word are symbolic visual tools used to convey sounds, words, and phrases that are aural. Finding a way to associate the aural with the visual is an obvious way to bridge the gap.
The human brain is wired for spoken language, which is why children focus on words, facial expressions, and lip movements very early in life and begin speaking fairly young, and also why people with fairly profound intellectual disabilities still learn to speak and understand. We are speaking beings.
Not so with reading, and especially not so with alphabets, which is why pictograms preceded alphabets, which associate individual letters with sounds. That is a level of abstraction one step beyond pictures. Alphabets just beg to be taught with phonics.
That is a concept so obvious that, of course, “education specialists” decided that it couldn’t be so, and they went in search of alternatives. The result? More and more kids can’t read.
Could phonics solve California’s reading crisis? Inside the push for sweeping changes https://t.co/efHluaorbf
— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) June 2, 2025
So phonics is making a comeback!
To look inside Julie Celestial’s kindergarten classroom in Long Beach is to peer into the future of reading in California.
During a recent lesson, 25 kindergartners gazed at the whiteboard, trying to sound out the word “bee.” They’re learning the long “e” sound, blending words such as “Pete” and “cheek” — words that they’ll soon be able to read in this lesson’s accompanying book.
Celestial was teaching something new for Long Beach Unified: phonics.
“It’s pretty cool to watch,” she said. “I’m really anticipating that there’s going to be a lot less reluctant readers and struggling readers now that the district has made this shift.”
The Los Angeles Times reports this as an innovative approach to the literacy crisis, which to me is dispiriting. I really can’t say for sure how I learned to read–I did so long before I went to school, and was an avid reader even before I became a motormouth–in a family of 4 kids, there was little point to interjecting myself into the chaos. But I certainly remember phonics being used to teach others to read, and parents have been using it to teach kids at home forever (in families where reading is prioritized and parents don’t rely on teachers to mess up their kids’ education).
Years ago, Mississippi threw the experts in reading out of the classroom and reimplemented phonics, and as a result, the state went from the bottom of the pack toward the top–hey, did you know Mississippi is doing well in education now?–and it is liberal California that is having to rediscover common sense after trying every single other thing.
The bill is the capstone to decades of debate and controversy in California on how best to teach reading amid stubbornly low test scores. Gov. Gavin Newsom has pledged his support, setting aside $200 million to fund teacher training on the new approach in the May revise of his 2025-26 budget proposal.
“It’s a big deal for kids, and it’s a big step forward — a very big one,” said Marshall Tuck, chief executive of EdVoice, an education advocacy nonprofit that has championed the change.
California has long struggled with reading scores below the national average. In 2024, only 29% of California’s fourth-graders scored “proficient” or better in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP.
It’s been called the “Mississippi Miracle.” Reading scores still suck, as they do overall in America, but the state ranks #1 when you adjust for demographics, and it has seen the fastest improvement of all the states over the past decade.
In 2013, Mississippi implemented a multifaceted strategy for enhancing kindergarten to third grade literacy. The Literacy-Based Promotion Act focuses on early literacy and teacher development. It includes teacher training in proven reading instruction methods and teacher coaching.
Relying on federally supported research from the Institute of Education Science, the state invested in phonics, fluency, vocabulary and reading comprehension. The law provided K-3 teachers with training and support to help students master reading by the end of third grade.
It includes provisions for reading coaches, parent communication, individual reading plans and other supportive measures. It also includes targeted support for struggling readers. Students repeat the third grade if they fail to meet reading standards.
California has been using a totally insane method of teaching reading that only an “expert” can love:
For decades, most school districts in California have been devoted to a different approach called “whole language” or “balanced literacy,” built on the belief that children naturally learn to read without being taught how to sound out words. Teachers focus on surrounding children with books intended to foster a love of reading and encourage them to look for clues that help them guess unknown words — such as predicting the next word based on the context of the story, or looking at the pictures — rather than sounding them out.
“The majority of students require a more intentional, explicit and systematic approach,” Zoroya said. “Thousands of kids across California in 10th grade are struggling in content-area classes because they missed phonics.”
What is so infuriating about all this, aside from the obvious fact that generations of kids have been unnecessarily hampered in their education and hence their lifetime achievements, is that liberals are always given a pass for ruining things, and when they shift to proven methods, they somehow get credit for doing the obvious.
We see this in how the COVID response is evaluated. The liberal approach was going to be an obvious disaster, and now that everybody agrees that closing schools, mandating vaccines, and so many of the authoritarian methods failed, there is no accountability. We are still supposed to “trust the experts” who ruined everything.
Hell, we are supposed to increase their resources–they need it, right?!
It’s insane.
