“The only problem is her idea is basically wrong”
Teachers are Ideologically Incoherent
In 1996, prompted by debates about phonics, a group of scholars surveyed over a thousand reading teachers about their beliefs and practices. As you’d expect from Hanford’s reporting, many teachers at the time reported being philosophically aligned with holistic literacy practices.
But the results are way more chaotic than that. On the survey, 99% of teachers stated that phonics instruction was essential or important. At the same time 99% said that “contextual analysis” was essential—that’s the clue-based guessing practice that Hanford reports on, “cueing.” There it is, standing tall next to phonics.
Now, it’s 1999. In an NCES survey of first-grade teachers, 82.6% reported working on phonics daily. (Newer teachers reported teaching phonics at a lesser rate, at only 76.1%).
