From FreedomProject Media:
The reading program in the Common Core national standards is contributing to an escalating crisis in literacy across America because the standards are deeply flawed and not based on science. That is according to Dr. Louisa Moats, an internationally renowned reading expert who actually served as a contributor to the Common Core’s literacy standards. Now she is sounding the alarm.
In an interview with The Newman Report, Dr. Moats explained that insufficient or poor foundational skills including phonics, phoneme awareness, and automatic, fluent word reading in the early years contributes to later literacy problems and failures in children. Another key problem is forcing children to memorize “sight words,” which are mandated under Common Core in Kindergarten.
“My warnings and protests were ignored at the time,” said Dr. Moats, who founded a firm named Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS) to help teachers. “I knew from my prior experience that the way it was written, organized, would undo a lot of the progress that we had made during the previous eight years And that’s exactly what happened.”
Despite contributing to it, Dr. Moats realized that the early literacy standards would cause major problems. “I wasn’t pleased with the final Common Core document,” she added. “There’s language in Common Core that’s not based in reality, that doesn’t reflect how children learn to read. We have decades of data on what it takes for kids to acquire fluency.”
The sight word approach seeks to have children memorize whole words using their visual memory. “But this is not how a good reader reads,” Dr. Moats explained. “There is lots of evidence showing this, including studies about what happens in the brain as children learn to read. It is a myth that kids learn irregular words or learn any words ‘by sight.’ They don’t.”
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