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[quote=Anonymous]
[quote=Anonymous]Wait MCPS is still using balanced literacy in 2024? How has there not been more outcry about this?
-parent of rising K kid  who recently listened to Sold a Story[/quote]

I think the last year or two they’ve been using phonics materials to supplement their reading curriculum and having great results, although their main curriculum had problems.  I believe they’re replacing it with a new curriculum that should have a built-in focus on phonics instruction.

I was on the reading curriculum committee before Curriculum 2.0.  People would ask the curriculum department directly if MCPS taught phonics.  The curriculum department would assure them that they taught phonics despite the fact that kids were not given decodable books that they could sound out, but rather given books containing sight words they hadn’t been taught the letter-sound correspondences for yet and despite the fact that when kids encountered an unknown word they were given a list of strategies to use (including look at the picture and guess), with actually sounding out the word being their option as a last resort.

Their idea of teaching phonics was to do things like pick a letter of the day and circle it where it occurred in the story.  Here’s a comparison from Reading Rockets of different types of phonics instruction.  The practices this link describes as embedded phonics is basically what MCPS was doing as a part (not the primary focus) of their reading instruction.

https://www.readingrockets.org/topics/phonics-and-decoding/articles/phonics-instruction

Why wasn’t there an outcry?

Because everyone knew that “MCPS is one of the best school systems in the country”,

because the “experts” knew better and  if parents agreed with the official reading orthodoxy it was because they were too ignorant to know better and obviously curriculum decisions needed to rest with the experts who had studied the subject (usually from ed schools that didn’t believe in phonics),

because some individual teachers may have taught phonics under the radar (among other skills they realized are necessary) in spite of the curriculum,

because some parents taught phonics at home or hired a tutor resulting in a capable reader with excellent test scores that MCPS could brag about - providing clear evidence that “MCPS is one of the best school systems in the country”,

because some kids eventually subconsciously internalized enough of the patterns on their own (even if inefficiently) to get the gist,

because some kids were able to memorize enough sight words that they were declared readers - even if they hated reading and later ran into problems when memorizing thousands of words became overly burdensome,

and because those who still had problems were probably just considered dyslexic. [/quote]

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