A recent New York Times article threatens to revive longstanding misconceptions about phonics. Teaching children to sound out words in a way that’s backed by science shouldn’t carry political baggage.

WASHINGTON — Back in the 1980s, when Mary Pat Donoghue completed her bachelor’s degree in elementary education, “Units of Study for Teaching Reading” was a popular new program that celebrated children ...

“When we know better, we do better.” There is something forgiving and medicinal about that teaching mantra. I am regularly realizing that I could have taught something more effectively or that I ...

A lovely aphorism holds that education isn’t the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire. But too often, neither are pails filled nor fires lit. One of the most bearish statistics for the future ...

On a chilly Tuesday back in January, my 7-year-old son’s classroom in Minneapolis was humming with reading activities. At their desks, first- and second-graders wrote on worksheets, read independently ...

For decades, there’s been an overwhelming scientific consensus on the best way to teach kids to read. But millions of kids still don’t get the kind of instruction that works. In the early 1950s, ...

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 ...

In 1955, Rudolph Flesch wrote a simple book, Why Johnny Can’t Read, in which he pointed out that education was failing simply because we were no longer teaching reading by using phonics. It seems no ...

The International Literacy Association has put out a new brief endorsing “systematic and explicit” phonics in all early reading instruction. “English is an alphabetic language. We have 26 letters.

Hua-Chen Wang does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond ...