Reply to MCPS Leadership: Mississippi, yes Mississippi is better than you

Forum Index » Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS)

Reply to "MCPS Leadership: Mississippi, yes Mississippi is better than you"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP here. No there is little or no direct instruction in MCPS -- and certainly not phonics based instruction.  This is why nearly half of our kids are underperforming in reading in MCPS.  Not to mention the kids who have dyslexia are suffering in our schools: phonics is essential for them but good for all.  The Friedman's lawsuit plus Decoding Dyslexia's great work at the state level to force change in the county will hopefully change this in the next thirty years.  (yeah, it will probably be that slow)

https://wamu.org/story/19/05/20/many-school-districts-hesitate-to-say-students-have-dyslexia-that-can-lead-to-problems/

https://www.decodingdyslexiamd.org/[/quote]

There absolutely is phonics based reading instruction in MCPS elementary schools.

-MCPS reading specialist[/quote]

There are different types of phonics instruction:

https://www.readingrockets.org/article/phonics-instruction

https://lincs.ed.gov/publications/html/prfteachers/reading_first1phonics.html

I was on the reading curriculum committee before 2.0. If asked at that time, MCPS  claimed that they taught phonics. But they did it backwards. They were having the kids read books that they couldn't sound out. When a word gave them trouble, the kids were given a list of strategies to solve the word. These strategies included things like look at the picture and guess, guess a word that starts with the first letter of the word, if the book rhymes, etc. There were several strategies listed (maybe 5?), but the last strategy on the list that students were supposed to resort to when the others had failed was to actually sound out the word.

The MCPS version of phonics at that time, might have been categorized (according to the descriptions in the above links) as embedded phonics.  The teacher and students would go over a text together, focusing on a letter.  (Hypothetical example:  they might read a passage about frogs, circling all the Fs in the story and talking about the sound the F makes.)  While they did teach phonics elements - they emphasized sight words.  In the given hypothetical example, students weren't being told to sound out frog - the might not have been taught what sounds Rs, Os, and Gs made.  Instead, they learned that the letters F-R-O-G together made the word frog.

I haven't heard details, yet, about how the new curriculum teaches phonics.  I hope they explicitly teach synethetic phonics and use decodable readers.  I think that would more accurately reflect what most parents expect from a phonics program.[/quote]

OMG what a joke.  My preschooler was sounding out words at age 3 using flash cards.  Thank God we did that because he excelled because of it.  I do not give MCPS any credit for my son's educational success.  In fact, I would go as far to say that the only reason the W schools have such high test scores has nothing to do with the quality of the teachers or schools.  It is the parent intervention.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics