Previous posts on Tildes regarding this, for anyone interested: 2018: Why are we still teaching reading the wrong way? 2020: At a loss for words: How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to...
Previous posts on Tildes regarding this, for anyone interested:
I highly recommend the podcast “Sold a Story” in the last link. It’s a short six episodes and succinctly covers the issues at play, including the problems with the cueing system as well as the status in education of the companies that sell it.
+1 for Sold a Story. I couldn't believe what I was hearing when I listened to that podcast. When I saw the title of this post I knew it was about Reading Recovery before I saw it in the tags.
+1 for Sold a Story. I couldn't believe what I was hearing when I listened to that podcast. When I saw the title of this post I knew it was about Reading Recovery before I saw it in the tags.
In case, other people had no idea what "science of reading" was before this. That is interesting that we are moving away from what a lot of people in the U.S. was taught while growing up is losing...
That is interesting that we are moving away from what a lot of people in the U.S. was taught while growing up is losing credibility. So it is interesting to learn about new ways of teaching something that is important like reading.
Edit: this seems to be a better way of teaching kids to read.
Hey! So, I’m a literacy researcher, and I just wanted to note that this debate is not new. Neither is the pedagogy behind science of reading. This whole debate is a recapitulation of the “reading...
Hey! So, I’m a literacy researcher, and I just wanted to note that this debate is not new. Neither is the pedagogy behind science of reading. This whole debate is a recapitulation of the “reading wars,” which have been going on since the 80s between the phonics people (I.e., science of reading) and the balanced literacy people, who advocate for phonics alongside other strategies, like guessing a word based on a picture in a picture book.
Honestly this is the first time I heard about the "reading wars" was in the PBS article, that I linked, about science of reading. And it is interesting that it has been an on going issue on how to...
This whole debate is a recapitulation of the “reading wars,” which have been going on since the 80s
Honestly this is the first time I heard about the "reading wars" was in the PBS article, that I linked, about science of reading. And it is interesting that it has been an on going issue on how to teach kids how to read.
So, I’m a literacy researcher,
Is there any reading s that is accessible for people who is new to this topic?
My kid has just started doing phonics (totally normal in UK schools, as far as I know there's no debate on the topic) and it's bloody magic. They are learning 6-8 phonemes a week at school and kid...
My kid has just started doing phonics (totally normal in UK schools, as far as I know there's no debate on the topic) and it's bloody magic. They are learning 6-8 phonemes a week at school and kid is already reading words to me after only a couple of weeks. We have read with the kid since the day they were born so that helps a lot but even so.
If for some reason my kid's school was using some other method I'd be having very strong words with them. Just because I learned the old way doesn't mean I want that or my kid. At my primary (elementary) school the headteacher would smoke in the classroom and occasionally kids would get hit with a stick as punishment, so I'm not sure the 80s have a great deal to teach us about the right way to do stuff..
There's been plenty of debate about phonics in the UK, but mostly among teachers, it (thankfully) doesn't seem to have got so political. It tends to come in waves, where sometimes the curriculum...
There's been plenty of debate about phonics in the UK, but mostly among teachers, it (thankfully) doesn't seem to have got so political. It tends to come in waves, where sometimes the curriculum gets really phonics heavy, and then other times it gets put more on the back burner.
My understanding from talking to teachers is that it's pretty dependent on the kid - stronger readers tend not to get as much out of phonics because they're already moving ahead to whole-word reading, while it gives really useful tools to weaker kids so that they can read more independently. But you can't design a curriculum for each child independently, so any attempt to find a balance produces some amount of compromise.
I wonder if it's not also teacher dependent. I was taught to read by my mother (who was an English teacher who swore by phonics) and reading was one of my strongest subjects all the way up through...
I wonder if it's not also teacher dependent.
I was taught to read by my mother (who was an English teacher who swore by phonics) and reading was one of my strongest subjects all the way up through high school, with my estimated reading and comprehension levels consistently being several grades ahead. She was extremely skilled at teaching to read, routinely taking kids who'd been struggling for years and turning them into avid readers in a matter of months.
With phonics I learned to read so quickly that I honestly don’t remember learning to read beyond kindergarten ABCs. I vaguely remember reading a series of increasingly difficult books...
With phonics I learned to read so quickly that I honestly don’t remember learning to read beyond kindergarten ABCs. I vaguely remember reading a series of increasingly difficult books independently, but most of my memory of being taught reading as a young child had me bored to tears waiting for everyone else to catch up with me. Pippi Longstockings read entirely out loud by students was torturous. By the time I was tested for reading level at the start of middle school I was already reading in what they figured was college-level.
Children are knowledge sponges and can learn very quickly with the right teaching. I learned quickly because I also had family members who helped me (especially my big sister) and because I was given books that enthralled me, which encouraged me to learn as fast as I could. When it comes to reading, just having someone who can help them to find books they would be interested can have a huge effect.
Similar story here. In kindergarden we did sight words but no phonics and I couldn't really read. Then in the first grade my school was extremely phonics heavy and it "clicked" for me practically...
With phonics I learned to read so quickly that I honestly don’t remember learning to read
Similar story here. In kindergarden we did sight words but no phonics and I couldn't really read. Then in the first grade my school was extremely phonics heavy and it "clicked" for me practically overnight and from then on I was advanced for my age in reading.
I've never taught reading but I used to teach piano and had a lot of k-2 students so I was able to observe as their reading skills developed and it was very common for them to very quickly go from being unable to read altogether to being quite fluent in it.
I do remember a few students who struggled, too, and it always shocked me when they would straight up guess at words rather than "sound it out" like I was taught as a child. I thought it was some bizarre "silly kid" thing at the time lol but I guess I now know where that habit comes from.
Interestingly, that's how one learns Japanese as well. It doesn't use an alphabet, but two scripts that are syllabaries (if you excuse kanji, which are different). Each character matches a...
Interestingly, that's how one learns Japanese as well. It doesn't use an alphabet, but two scripts that are syllabaries (if you excuse kanji, which are different). Each character matches a distinct phoneme (a, ka, shi, ra, etc), though there are diagrams for ones like "kyo" (ki + yo, written with a smaller version of the second part). So the scripts are entirely phonetic, and by learning the characters you also learn the phonemes applicable to the Japanese language. (Which also makes it easier to understand how palatalization of loan words works.)
If you total up all of the English diagrams and trigrams that exist (composing a larger number of phonemes than Japanese has), and the fact that you need to be able recognize the component letters in capital and lower case forms, beginning to read English is a taller order than basic Japanese. (Ignoring kanji, but that doesn't really apply at a child-just-learning-to-read level.)
I know it’s commonplace in the US that people throw lawsuits in every direction to get an outcome they want, but it honestly feel pretty ridiculous to me in this instance. The company that’s suing...
I know it’s commonplace in the US that people throw lawsuits in every direction to get an outcome they want, but it honestly feel pretty ridiculous to me in this instance.
The company that’s suing the state is trying to say “you’re not allowed to pass this kind of legislation in this kind of way” and I’m wondering, what other option should the state have pursued instead? Maybe the state should have sued that reading program for being not only ineffective but literally harmful to kids’ progress? Is that the “better result” here?
To be fair, the 'proper' way to do this would have been through the state's education board, not through the budget bill. The question then is why wasn't the state board making the change.
To be fair, the 'proper' way to do this would have been through the state's education board, not through the budget bill.
The question then is why wasn't the state board making the change.
I'm not a huge fan of big companies trying to force curriculum to match their products. But I'm even less of a fan of politicians legislating sweeping changes in areas they have no training...
I'm not a huge fan of big companies trying to force curriculum to match their products. But I'm even less of a fan of politicians legislating sweeping changes in areas they have no training instead of letting the department that's actually in charge of it make a decision.
Just went through the whole podcast. Even in the first episode it was just baffling how anyone could have ever thought this "method" was actually teaching reading. Even before they covered the...
Just went through the whole podcast. Even in the first episode it was just baffling how anyone could have ever thought this "method" was actually teaching reading. Even before they covered the origins of what became "cueing." Look at the picture? Guess what word would fit?
How, how, HOW did that ever fucking get past adults thinking this is how to teach basic reading?
And not just random adults, teachers bought into that bullshit. If you can't hand a student, at any level, a piece of paper with grade appropriate words on it for them to reliably read ... that student can't read! Period! Did no teacher who was in favor of cuing ever notice their students couldn't, you know, read when given something other than the cutesy little memorized "books"?
Reading is looking at the page, deciphering the letters into the words they're arranged to form, and knowing what those words mean. If you can also pronounce the words, that's a nice bonus but I think most of us know we run into words we can't verbally articulate from time to time, and if we had to pick between knowing the meaning and usage versus being able to flawlessly say it, we'd pick the knowledge over the illusion.
Cuing sold the illusion. As was brought up repeatedly in the episodes, cuing allowed students to sound like they could read. But, as was also pointed to, the moment they handed the student a non-memorized piece of text ... they couldn't read it.
Maybe I need to go through some of the middle episodes again, since I might have missed something from the politics that led to cuing. However, I can't help but wonder about tinfoil hat territory. Assholes with an investment in selling "their systems" so they get to enjoy paydays is obvious enough, a tale as old as time. But how did basically everyone in the country's educational apparatus, everywhere, get suckered into willingly tossing millions of students into a lifetime of inability to perform what we consider to be a fundamental basic skill in modern society?
If it was a conspiracy or purposefully crafted scheme, it was held close to the vest. Because on the local level, her reporting was covering just as many conservatives as liberals who were aghast at discovering the damage cuing is doing. In this case, it seems to me the obvious targets you'd need to don your tinfoil to ward off would be based on political schemes, racial schemes, or wealth privilege schemes.
One side or another of the political spectrum might have decided to suppress reading skills in the populace. Same for someone deciding to try and target along racial lines, knowing that some groups of parents might or might not be more or less likely to notice and/or be able to fix what the schools were breaking in their children. And the same along wealth lines; that (as was mentioned) parents with at least some level of means were more likely to be able to correct the deficiency schools were inflicting.
I don't know about the tinfoil, but it's just staggering to me that this apparently went on for most of my adult life. I apparently missed the changeover schools underwent from teaching actual reading to bullshit by just a matter of years, if I understand the loose timelines the reporter covered.
In my case, I showed up in kindergarten already reading, since my mom read to me most nights and I apparently started getting impatient for the chapter (or two) I'd get before bed and began investigating the book myself. But it's not like my schools didn't teach me reading; they did a little more than just refine my gifted reading status. They expanded my vocabulary, taught me spelling, and then later we took the basic blocks reading provides and went into grammar and proper English knowledge. All extremely important things in today's world.
While I love movies, I grew up reading because I enjoyed reading. Books take me places I can't go in reality, and things like that help keep me sane. As a teenager, exploring my city from public transit (and then later as an adult going to and from work on those same buses and trains) I used to silently marvel and quietly shake my head at how many people I'd see riding with me. Who'd just sit down and ... stare at nothing. I always had a book. Always.
Without literacy, you can't function in society beyond the most basic level. It opens you up to untold avenues of abuse and being taken advantage of when you can't read. If someone doesn't want to read fiction and read for pleasure, okay fine I think that's silly but I understand tastes differ and everyone has their own hobbies. But not reading as a regular activity is wholly different from being unable to look at the printed word as more than gobbledygook.
It's criminal what all those educational departments have wrought upon two generations of students. Absolutely criminal. It's crippled those kids (some of whom have grown up into citizens by now) in real and horrifying ways as they attempt to function in this country. And I can't help but wonder why all those "educators" just signed off on it. They couldn't have all been in on the grift.
Sometimes you do need a tinfoil hat. Sometimes there is some sort of conspiracy. I just don't think we know enough here to as yet be able to pierce through these layers to figure out where this all tracks back to. This is beyond a couple of "authors" and publishers who simply wanted their shit sold so they could be rich. It's too widespread, and too obvious. Fifty states, thousands of counties, millions of school districts ... and it took decades before anyone truly noticed that the kids couldn't read?
We're on the same page in terms of being aghast, but, uncommonly for me, I'm not sure this passes the bar of justifying conspiratorial thinking. My impression of those middle episodes can be...
We're on the same page in terms of being aghast, but, uncommonly for me, I'm not sure this passes the bar of justifying conspiratorial thinking. My impression of those middle episodes can be summarized so: The vast majority of teachers spend their time, in order of decreasing amounts, with the students who are doing poorly, then excelling, then just kind of trotting along. Teachers have always had students who struggled with reading, and for kids with dyslexia and similar, after they'd been taught the basic mechanics and still struggled, cueing was a revelation. It bridged a developmental gap, if not a fundamental disability. Those kids had already spent time on mechanics and phonics, and would either learn how to read on their own eventually, and use context clues to get by until then, or were never going to read "properly" anyway. As the research showing the effectiveness of these methods continued to pile up, more and more special educators deployed them, and more and more teachers had the experience of seeing a student go from tearful struggle to relatively easy time keeping up in class. This emotional impact eroded some of the basic checks that should have been asked. Furthermore, any kid whose parents taught them the basics before school would not be hindered by this, nor would any kid whose parents had time to tutor them after school, as they'd have just assumed they were struggling more than usual. So, the research and dialog became one-sided, as nobody really enjoys phonics or listening to entire classrooms sound words out. It continued down that path due to the continued pressure and increasing class sizes for teachers, and in the past twenty years teachers have gone from silently protesting "teaching to the test" to generally throwing up their hands since nobody is listening anyway. Then, every time any educational regulator would propose reexamining the methods, the tiny portion of parents and teachers whose kids and students absolutely benefitted from these methods would drown it out as being what we'd now call an ableist position.
I'm a very conspiratorially-minded person, but that all tracks to me. No need for a big bad, just a culture that's more afraid of being wrong than interested in doing right.
Previous posts on Tildes regarding this, for anyone interested:
2018: Why are we still teaching reading the wrong way?
2020: At a loss for words: How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers
2022: Inside the massive effort to change the way kids are taught to read
2022: Sold a Story: How teaching kids to read went so wrong
I highly recommend the podcast “Sold a Story” in the last link. It’s a short six episodes and succinctly covers the issues at play, including the problems with the cueing system as well as the status in education of the companies that sell it.
+1 for Sold a Story. I couldn't believe what I was hearing when I listened to that podcast. When I saw the title of this post I knew it was about Reading Recovery before I saw it in the tags.
The team behind Sold a Story also did an episode of Reveal, if one would prefer to not listen to an entire podcast series.
In case, other people had no idea what "science of reading" was before this.
That is interesting that we are moving away from what a lot of people in the U.S. was taught while growing up is losing credibility. So it is interesting to learn about new ways of teaching something that is important like reading.
Edit: this seems to be a better way of teaching kids to read.
Hey! So, I’m a literacy researcher, and I just wanted to note that this debate is not new. Neither is the pedagogy behind science of reading. This whole debate is a recapitulation of the “reading wars,” which have been going on since the 80s between the phonics people (I.e., science of reading) and the balanced literacy people, who advocate for phonics alongside other strategies, like guessing a word based on a picture in a picture book.
Honestly this is the first time I heard about the "reading wars" was in the PBS article, that I linked, about science of reading. And it is interesting that it has been an on going issue on how to teach kids how to read.
Is there any reading s that is accessible for people who is new to this topic?
There is a podcast called Sold a Story that is both accessible and in-depth.
My kid has just started doing phonics (totally normal in UK schools, as far as I know there's no debate on the topic) and it's bloody magic. They are learning 6-8 phonemes a week at school and kid is already reading words to me after only a couple of weeks. We have read with the kid since the day they were born so that helps a lot but even so.
If for some reason my kid's school was using some other method I'd be having very strong words with them. Just because I learned the old way doesn't mean I want that or my kid. At my primary (elementary) school the headteacher would smoke in the classroom and occasionally kids would get hit with a stick as punishment, so I'm not sure the 80s have a great deal to teach us about the right way to do stuff..
There's been plenty of debate about phonics in the UK, but mostly among teachers, it (thankfully) doesn't seem to have got so political. It tends to come in waves, where sometimes the curriculum gets really phonics heavy, and then other times it gets put more on the back burner.
My understanding from talking to teachers is that it's pretty dependent on the kid - stronger readers tend not to get as much out of phonics because they're already moving ahead to whole-word reading, while it gives really useful tools to weaker kids so that they can read more independently. But you can't design a curriculum for each child independently, so any attempt to find a balance produces some amount of compromise.
I wonder if it's not also teacher dependent.
I was taught to read by my mother (who was an English teacher who swore by phonics) and reading was one of my strongest subjects all the way up through high school, with my estimated reading and comprehension levels consistently being several grades ahead. She was extremely skilled at teaching to read, routinely taking kids who'd been struggling for years and turning them into avid readers in a matter of months.
With phonics I learned to read so quickly that I honestly don’t remember learning to read beyond kindergarten ABCs. I vaguely remember reading a series of increasingly difficult books independently, but most of my memory of being taught reading as a young child had me bored to tears waiting for everyone else to catch up with me. Pippi Longstockings read entirely out loud by students was torturous. By the time I was tested for reading level at the start of middle school I was already reading in what they figured was college-level.
Children are knowledge sponges and can learn very quickly with the right teaching. I learned quickly because I also had family members who helped me (especially my big sister) and because I was given books that enthralled me, which encouraged me to learn as fast as I could. When it comes to reading, just having someone who can help them to find books they would be interested can have a huge effect.
Similar story here. In kindergarden we did sight words but no phonics and I couldn't really read. Then in the first grade my school was extremely phonics heavy and it "clicked" for me practically overnight and from then on I was advanced for my age in reading.
I've never taught reading but I used to teach piano and had a lot of k-2 students so I was able to observe as their reading skills developed and it was very common for them to very quickly go from being unable to read altogether to being quite fluent in it.
I do remember a few students who struggled, too, and it always shocked me when they would straight up guess at words rather than "sound it out" like I was taught as a child. I thought it was some bizarre "silly kid" thing at the time lol but I guess I now know where that habit comes from.
Interestingly, that's how one learns Japanese as well. It doesn't use an alphabet, but two scripts that are syllabaries (if you excuse kanji, which are different). Each character matches a distinct phoneme (a, ka, shi, ra, etc), though there are diagrams for ones like "kyo" (ki + yo, written with a smaller version of the second part). So the scripts are entirely phonetic, and by learning the characters you also learn the phonemes applicable to the Japanese language. (Which also makes it easier to understand how palatalization of loan words works.)
If you total up all of the English diagrams and trigrams that exist (composing a larger number of phonemes than Japanese has), and the fact that you need to be able recognize the component letters in capital and lower case forms, beginning to read English is a taller order than basic Japanese. (Ignoring kanji, but that doesn't really apply at a child-just-learning-to-read level.)
I know it’s commonplace in the US that people throw lawsuits in every direction to get an outcome they want, but it honestly feel pretty ridiculous to me in this instance.
The company that’s suing the state is trying to say “you’re not allowed to pass this kind of legislation in this kind of way” and I’m wondering, what other option should the state have pursued instead? Maybe the state should have sued that reading program for being not only ineffective but literally harmful to kids’ progress? Is that the “better result” here?
To be fair, the 'proper' way to do this would have been through the state's education board, not through the budget bill.
The question then is why wasn't the state board making the change.
I'm not a huge fan of big companies trying to force curriculum to match their products. But I'm even less of a fan of politicians legislating sweeping changes in areas they have no training instead of letting the department that's actually in charge of it make a decision.
Is "three-cueing" the reason why Americans keep using image-based figures of speech like "wag the dog?" Lmao, no wonder! It's heavily picture-based!
Just went through the whole podcast. Even in the first episode it was just baffling how anyone could have ever thought this "method" was actually teaching reading. Even before they covered the origins of what became "cueing." Look at the picture? Guess what word would fit?
How, how, HOW did that ever fucking get past adults thinking this is how to teach basic reading?
And not just random adults, teachers bought into that bullshit. If you can't hand a student, at any level, a piece of paper with grade appropriate words on it for them to reliably read ... that student can't read! Period! Did no teacher who was in favor of cuing ever notice their students couldn't, you know, read when given something other than the cutesy little memorized "books"?
Reading is looking at the page, deciphering the letters into the words they're arranged to form, and knowing what those words mean. If you can also pronounce the words, that's a nice bonus but I think most of us know we run into words we can't verbally articulate from time to time, and if we had to pick between knowing the meaning and usage versus being able to flawlessly say it, we'd pick the knowledge over the illusion.
Cuing sold the illusion. As was brought up repeatedly in the episodes, cuing allowed students to sound like they could read. But, as was also pointed to, the moment they handed the student a non-memorized piece of text ... they couldn't read it.
Maybe I need to go through some of the middle episodes again, since I might have missed something from the politics that led to cuing. However, I can't help but wonder about tinfoil hat territory. Assholes with an investment in selling "their systems" so they get to enjoy paydays is obvious enough, a tale as old as time. But how did basically everyone in the country's educational apparatus, everywhere, get suckered into willingly tossing millions of students into a lifetime of inability to perform what we consider to be a fundamental basic skill in modern society?
If it was a conspiracy or purposefully crafted scheme, it was held close to the vest. Because on the local level, her reporting was covering just as many conservatives as liberals who were aghast at discovering the damage cuing is doing. In this case, it seems to me the obvious targets you'd need to don your tinfoil to ward off would be based on political schemes, racial schemes, or wealth privilege schemes.
One side or another of the political spectrum might have decided to suppress reading skills in the populace. Same for someone deciding to try and target along racial lines, knowing that some groups of parents might or might not be more or less likely to notice and/or be able to fix what the schools were breaking in their children. And the same along wealth lines; that (as was mentioned) parents with at least some level of means were more likely to be able to correct the deficiency schools were inflicting.
I don't know about the tinfoil, but it's just staggering to me that this apparently went on for most of my adult life. I apparently missed the changeover schools underwent from teaching actual reading to bullshit by just a matter of years, if I understand the loose timelines the reporter covered.
In my case, I showed up in kindergarten already reading, since my mom read to me most nights and I apparently started getting impatient for the chapter (or two) I'd get before bed and began investigating the book myself. But it's not like my schools didn't teach me reading; they did a little more than just refine my gifted reading status. They expanded my vocabulary, taught me spelling, and then later we took the basic blocks reading provides and went into grammar and proper English knowledge. All extremely important things in today's world.
While I love movies, I grew up reading because I enjoyed reading. Books take me places I can't go in reality, and things like that help keep me sane. As a teenager, exploring my city from public transit (and then later as an adult going to and from work on those same buses and trains) I used to silently marvel and quietly shake my head at how many people I'd see riding with me. Who'd just sit down and ... stare at nothing. I always had a book. Always.
Without literacy, you can't function in society beyond the most basic level. It opens you up to untold avenues of abuse and being taken advantage of when you can't read. If someone doesn't want to read fiction and read for pleasure, okay fine I think that's silly but I understand tastes differ and everyone has their own hobbies. But not reading as a regular activity is wholly different from being unable to look at the printed word as more than gobbledygook.
It's criminal what all those educational departments have wrought upon two generations of students. Absolutely criminal. It's crippled those kids (some of whom have grown up into citizens by now) in real and horrifying ways as they attempt to function in this country. And I can't help but wonder why all those "educators" just signed off on it. They couldn't have all been in on the grift.
Sometimes you do need a tinfoil hat. Sometimes there is some sort of conspiracy. I just don't think we know enough here to as yet be able to pierce through these layers to figure out where this all tracks back to. This is beyond a couple of "authors" and publishers who simply wanted their shit sold so they could be rich. It's too widespread, and too obvious. Fifty states, thousands of counties, millions of school districts ... and it took decades before anyone truly noticed that the kids couldn't read?
People suck.
We're on the same page in terms of being aghast, but, uncommonly for me, I'm not sure this passes the bar of justifying conspiratorial thinking. My impression of those middle episodes can be summarized so: The vast majority of teachers spend their time, in order of decreasing amounts, with the students who are doing poorly, then excelling, then just kind of trotting along. Teachers have always had students who struggled with reading, and for kids with dyslexia and similar, after they'd been taught the basic mechanics and still struggled, cueing was a revelation. It bridged a developmental gap, if not a fundamental disability. Those kids had already spent time on mechanics and phonics, and would either learn how to read on their own eventually, and use context clues to get by until then, or were never going to read "properly" anyway. As the research showing the effectiveness of these methods continued to pile up, more and more special educators deployed them, and more and more teachers had the experience of seeing a student go from tearful struggle to relatively easy time keeping up in class. This emotional impact eroded some of the basic checks that should have been asked. Furthermore, any kid whose parents taught them the basics before school would not be hindered by this, nor would any kid whose parents had time to tutor them after school, as they'd have just assumed they were struggling more than usual. So, the research and dialog became one-sided, as nobody really enjoys phonics or listening to entire classrooms sound words out. It continued down that path due to the continued pressure and increasing class sizes for teachers, and in the past twenty years teachers have gone from silently protesting "teaching to the test" to generally throwing up their hands since nobody is listening anyway. Then, every time any educational regulator would propose reexamining the methods, the tiny portion of parents and teachers whose kids and students absolutely benefitted from these methods would drown it out as being what we'd now call an ableist position.
I'm a very conspiratorially-minded person, but that all tracks to me. No need for a big bad, just a culture that's more afraid of being wrong than interested in doing right.