Why Did Schools Stop Teaching Kids How To Read? Live With Robert Pondiscio, Nick Gillespie, and Zach Weissmueller

An “unbearable bleakness” has overtaken childhood education as a “pedagogy of the depressed” pushes a simplistic vision of “America the Problematic” on impressionable young students, wrote Robert Pondiscio in Commentary last year.

A former teacher, Pondiscio is currently a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of the 2019 book How the Other Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, and the Battle Over School Choice (Avery), a behind-the-scenes account of Success Academy, one of America’s most accomplished (and controversial) charter school networks. (Watch Reason’s interview with Pondiscio about that book.)

Public schools have failed to teach kids to read and write because they use approaches that aren’t based on proven techniques based on phonics. Many schools have been influenced by the work of Columbia University’s Lucy Calkins, who is the subject of a new podcast series from American Public Media, Sold a Story, “an exposé of how educators came to believe in something that isn’t true and are now reckoning with the consequences—children harmed, money wasted, an education system upended.”

“The South Bronx