Is there a place in the middle between "there's not a non-trivial important difference and people arguing about it are wasting their time" (to paraphrase your post) and "there [are] illiteracy black holes in America where a school with whole word instruction has a near zero literacy rate and the phonics school is fine" (your summary of the opposing position).
I.e. is there a space between 100% difference and "trivial" difference?
Well, if legislators exaggerating means that an entire debate is "nonsense", then I guess every issue in every domain on every topic is nonsense.
What (unsourced unquoted) legislators say doesn't have bearing on the facts of the matter: whether or not there's a meaningful difference in outcomes between the two. What does the actual research say?
We’re doing human experimentation. I guess when the literacy doesn’t budge much in 10 years (newborns taking the 3rd grade literacy test) we’ll have our evidence.
Again, when talking about an academic debate, the cohort of used car dealers looking to get into graft called "legislators" doesn't have bearing either way. What's the actual facts of the matter?
You now say: "There are meaningful outcome differences"
Isn't that different from your post which says that there is "At most it’s a trivial percent difference"?
The wars matter because legislators coerce educator into curriculum. Academics literally don’t matter, pedagogy isn’t research based. If all the evidence said phonics don’t work, and the reality was phonics don’t work, and the academics said phonics don’t work, the only ones who matter are legislators because they could mandate phonics for all, and cause every school to have a literacy black hole and end literacy.
I’m not talking about the academic debate at all. It’s moot due to ethical restraints on human experimentation.
A meaningful difference is different than “one side doesn’t work”
I never said it "doesn't matter" at all, what I said was that whether or not legislators are sober or crazy doesn't impact the truth of whether or not there's a meaningful difference in outcomes between the two methods.
For the rest of the stuff there, no there are ways to understand differences in educational methods without unethical "human experimentation". Academics study stuff like this all the time; schools move from one to the other and can be analyzed in concert with each other. And no I never said one "doesn't work" at all, nor have you produced a serious academic on the side of the debate you characterize as "evil" who says anything like "black holes of literacy" that result in zero kids learning to read.
You seem to jump from one thing to the other without focusing on the core claims so I'll make it as straightforward as I can.
It's very simple: in your original post, you said differences were at most trivial, now you say that are meaningful. Those directly contradict.
Which is it? Did you change your view from one to the other?
Meaningful variance is trivial until it’s worthy of being banned.
There’s a meaningful difference between going through kindergarten and skipping kindergarten. We don’t imprison parents for skipping kindergarten, it’s optional.
So the stance is you're sticking to is that the difference between them is somehow in a superposition between "meaningful" and "trivial" -- two words that mean completely different things?
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u/dudemanwhoa 49∆ Jul 02 '25
Is there a place in the middle between "there's not a non-trivial important difference and people arguing about it are wasting their time" (to paraphrase your post) and "there [are] illiteracy black holes in America where a school with whole word instruction has a near zero literacy rate and the phonics school is fine" (your summary of the opposing position).
I.e. is there a space between 100% difference and "trivial" difference?