It may not correlate, but it does condition.
That is to say, one can have 100% interest in reading, but if you can only read 1% of published works, you will be just as good as someone who is a perfect reader but only 1% interested in reading.
Similarly, with comprehension.
Reading well is necessary to be interested enough to read more and to comprehend.
Whereas at least 75% of elementary students nationwide are learning cueing, so starting there makes more sense.
San Francisco Unified School District implemented math sequencing changes that failed. District Leadership claimed they worked. Those changes were then cited by the authors of the latest California Math Framework.
Because California is a big state (and with some popular state universities), the California Math Framework will influence curricula and teaching methods far beyond California.
It has had a nationwide impact already. It's not a hypothetical.
Jo Boaler and her organization have done consulting not only in SF and not only in California.
Her impact on K-12 math education is directionally the same as Lucy Calkin's impact on reading instruction.
Can you show me direct evidence that these policies have been adopted nationwide to the broad degree necessary to explain the data as presented in the original post?
You say it's a local thing only. I explain how local things expand. You say it's a hypothetical. I say no these things have expanded already. You say that doesn't fully explain the data.
If you will dismiss any hypothesis that doesn't fully explain the data, you will never receive a satisfying answer.
I have not seen any evidence that this policy, loosely defined, has spread in any considerable way nationally.
I won't comment on those opinions, but what you've written earlier in the paragraph is broadly correct, at least in San Francisco.
However, private schools are not a panacea. Most of them still group kids by age and do not tailor content to each kid's level, or even do single-subject acceleration.
Phonics is not about "teaching English" in some fuzzy generic sense, it's specifically aimed towards teaching English written orthography, starting from its phonetics. I.e. teaching fluent speakers of English to read.
I could also see it resulting in more subvocalization, but my assumption is that subvocalization is actually a very important short-term strategy that almost always goes away quickly.
Individual letters don’t have sounds, but trigrams do.
food, good
rough, dough
two, to, too
If you go read old documents, you'll note they spelled English much more phonetically .
It's a fairly modern thing to use these standardized spellings
English is fairly phonetic. There's a few options for each phoneme and a few common words, but the vast majority follow obvious phonetic structures.
Calling English "fairly phonetic" is laughable. In most languages, they don't have spelling bees because they don't understand the concept. How would you not know how to spell the word after someone speaks it?
It's a nearly global trend that literacy and numeracy are decreasing and not just in students, but in adults. I can only wave my hands and say "pandemic" otherwise I have no clue what's going on.
Edit - I don't mean to challenge the value of literacy so much as speculate whether falling test scores necessarily indicate the loss of that value. Language, how it's used, and how changes spread are all very different in the information age. How do we know traditional literacy tests accurately measure the role it plays in people's lives now?
As an example, written communication used to primarily take the form of writing letters. With instant communication, ability to put thoughts into words quickly has a higher relative impact on communication compared to being able to spend as much time as needed to find the perfect words to convey a message.
Communication isn't all or nothing. The more expressive power you have, the wider the scope of ideas you can communicate. It may be minimally sufficient to be able to communicate "me hungry" or "that crazy", but more is probably still better.
Tests are only as useful as what they measure. The qualitative changes to communication could have impacted the quantitative changes we're seeing (i.e. lower literacy rates). How much, in what ways, I have no idea; I was hoping to learn more by sparking discussion.
Unfortunately (and ironically) my poor choice of words has instead led to my apparent taking of an anti-literacy stance. Oh well.
It isn't this simple. Literacy plays an important role in information assessment and in decision making. It's strongly associated with health, success in personal finances and career path, and relationship satisfaction, to name just a few areas that have published papers readily accessible online.
To get a look at the ugly side of this, high demand religious groups are a fascinating case study. Constant circulation of repetitive cliches is a key mechanism for isolating their members and making them easier to manipulate.
I live in an extremely poor city and I would estimate about half the adults I interact with cannot read, write, or articulate anywhere near the level you'd expect from the high school I went to twenty years ago. And I believe the problem is getting much, much worse with the rise of youtube and the collapse of diction into a shared set of social-media memes—if you can't express yourself through those memes, you may not be able to communicate well at all.
Some portion of this can be written off to being a very attractive immigration target for those, like most, who don't speak english as their native language. I don't want to entirely write this off to a money/social/government/education problem—it's more complicated than any single narrative can convey. But I am firmly convinced we are looking at decades of literacy continuing to fall. If we can't figure out a way to collectively parent each other and resolve this, I can't imagine this is going to result in the kind of social and economic stability most people generally desire.