The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America’s Broken Education System — and How to Fix It
by Natalie Wexler
I have been seeing a steady flow of articles about the stunted literacy among high school graduates and college students.* Wexler’s excellent reportage indirectly points to a root cause: flawed reading pedagogy in elementary school. In a nutshell, the book explains the dire consequences of the shift from phonics-based reading instruction to “whole language” (aka “balanced literacy”) methods which focus on reading “skills” independent of content.
Aside from this prevailing method being unsupported by cognitive science—and never mind that the whole point of reading is to comprehend meaning—it creates a compounding problem in other subjects like science, history, and civics because students acquire knowledge and understanding by building on existing knowledge. So, if the seeds aren’t planted in elementary school, high school teachers have no foundation to build upon.
Chapter 11 makes me wonder if the mind-boggling surge in learning disability diagnoses* may be explained, in part, by the trend toward ineffective reading instruction, that is to say reading inabilities rather than cognitive disabilities.
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