Follow the data on teaching reading

Like the author of “No one-sizefits-all solution,” I too was interested in recent Spectator articles about how children learn to read.

While I am not a retired educator of young children, (in fact I have no experience in teaching) I think the author missed the opportunity to teach the authors of the earlier articles. Again, I am not a teacher, but I have a passion for “data.”

All of The Spectator authors on this subject used data to yield their answers (or their opinions). And that is where society today is failing in its efforts to improve what ails us all.

Data does not give you the answers. Data leads you to the solution (s). And the more data you have, the higher the probability of you being led to the correct solution (s).

That’s what makes AI so valuable. It is able to quickly bring all the available data (think of a recent Google search and how many pages of reference material is listed to you).

AI can do this quicker and more efficiently than most of us. If you cut off AI’s access to the internet, then it will give you a blank page for its response.

The author is correct that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. But that does not mean there is not a solution that can mitigate a majority of the problems. She is quick to list a myriad of examples showing there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Is she suggesting it is almost impossible to improve reading? But, ironically, she shows that there is a solution.

It does not take much effort through Google to present you with much data supporting a phonics-based instruction yielding the best results on reading performance. And I agree with that it does not work for every child. But the data shows you that phonics-based instruction is the direction to begin (it is not the total solution) the process of improving reading for all children.

Yet even with all this “data,” we cannot come together provincially and country wide that phonics-based instruction yields the best results and use this as a starting point in our journey to improve reading performance for “all” children.

So, we ensure that every school (provincially and countrywide) uses phonics-based instruction. This will deal with the majority of children.

Next step is to identify the commonality in the children who struggle to read. And that means using data provincially and countrywide. This would separate into social and/or things like dyslexia, autism, etc.

This data would then show children in the same class with similar characteristics, but were able to read at the appropriate grade level.

Now combine this data on a provincial and national level and while it would not give us the answer, it would lead (direct) us to the solution.

Not every child from a low income neighbourhood has difficulty reading. There is a reason for that and the data will help to understand the reason.

I suspect some will look at this type of approach and suggest that it cannot be done for a myriad of reasons. But nothing could be further from the truth.

With today’s technology, it would not be cost prohibitive. By incorporating data provincially and nationally we can establish a uniform reading instructional forum and stop wasting time by different jurisdictions attempting similar methods in search of a solution that should be Canadian and not, for example, Hamilton-specific.