Same! I was reading at 10th grade level in the 5th grade and SRA allowed me to move at my pace.
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You young thing! for me it was Romper Room and Captain Kangaroo. The Captain was always reading us Mike Mulligan, Make Way for Ducklings, Are you My Mother? and we had those books so I’d get them and read along. Also, no Kindergarten for us, so this was it for pre school reading.
I went into first grade in the highest reading group, so it worked.
I had one slow reader and one who was pretty good. The slow reader enjoyed books on tape she could read along with, but they were SO SLOW that it drove me crazy. It could take her 5 nights to finish a book, but she remembered all of it. The other one often missed things in the books because she was a speed reader.
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I learned to read using phonics. My kids were taught using Montessori. They were taught the sounds of the letters rather than the names, and even learned to sing the ABC song using the sounds of the letters. They learned phonics(Spaulding method) and my son can still recite verbatim all the ways to pronounce “ough.” They also did SRA. My kids all read well. I tutored a kindergarten kid who’s school was using something else—sight words and context based on illustrations for everything. He was just making guesses at words and with a lot of repetition it worked, but he hated it and didn’t have the patience. It was way too much for his attention span. I had another student in third grade who had been taught like that and could not read well enough to understand the word problems in their math homework.
My kids were taught Montessori math and it was fantastic. Very hands on and visual. Two of them used Montessori materials through sixth grade until they started pre-algebra. One kid was doing long division in second grade and when we switched him to a non montessori public school closer to home in fourth grade he told his teacher he had learned long division in 2nd grade and she didn’t believe him.
In Montessori, multiple grades in the same classroom is common and works well. There’s a lot of independent work and it’s easy to keep kids working at the appropriate level for each individual. My kids’ school had K-1, 1-2, 1-3, 2-4 and 4-6 classrooms. Each classroom had a teacher and an aide to about 25 kids, and it was common to move kids between classrooms for spelling groups and such. It was very structured but with a lot of flexibility too. We loved it. It was a public school with a Montessori program. They never had homework all the way through 6th grade except 15 minutes of reading per day in kindergarten.
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It’s great to hear that Montessori taught well yielded great results for your family. Several of the kids I know who attended Montessori school had pretty different results—one had to hire a private tutor to learn to read as he wasn’t taught it and the school told the family what it was up to them to find and hire a tutor. Another two were asked to leave, even though their moms begged to be allowed to have them at that HS.
Montessori really depends on the teacher and the school. My mom was a Montessori teacher, used phonics, still had the kids memorize multiplication tables in addition to Montessori math, kept track of what everyone was doing and at what level.
I sent my daughter to Montessori though and it was a mess. Very freewheeling with too much child led choice and little monitoring by the teachers. D23 had a work folder with 100 pictures of princesses. We pulled her out.
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We read aloud to ds at bedtime practically beginning at birth.
I taught him letter sounds as we would work an alphabet puzzle. I would give the name of the letter with the sound it makes. I’d state multiple sounds if applicable. “G says, ‘guh,’ and, ‘juh.’” Not unlike a cow says, “Moooo.” Pretty sure he knew all the letter sounds by around 2 1/2. No one told me this was a, “right,” or, “wrong,” way to do this. I am not an educator by trade. It just seemed like a good approach at the time.
We started Hooked on Phonics at age 3 years and 3 mos and completed all of it by age 4. Just did a little each day. There are some sight words incorporated in that program. Ds entered kindergarten reading on a nearly third grade level. We kept him in public school for kindergarten and first grade. He loved participating in the accelerated reader program. Some district zoning changes inspired us to pull him out and homeschool him for the 2nd grade. The public school he was in had been fairly accommodating to his need to be taught above grade level (in first grade, he went to 2nd grade math), but we were going to be transferred out of that school with the district changes. With a mid-summer birthday, ds wasn’t a good candidate at the time for a grade skip. He really was not being challenged even with their accommodations. Homeschooling was the right choice for us at the time.
Ds was always a voracious reader, but we also continued to read books aloud in our homeschool. Reading aloud to an older child allows for more advanced books to be consumed, vocabulary building, and discussion to occur about concepts in real time.
I homeschooled him for six and a half years. He entered a charter school halfway through 8th grade, age-wise, but the grade skip occurred then, and he was bumped up to 9th.
Most public schools simply do not have the resources for good differentiation among skill levels. IME, it is mostly a teaching to the middle. At least until the middle school/junior high level.
I learned with the ITA method as well, but I didn’t and don’t have spelling issues. Ds was a natural speller, and we dropped spelling as a subject in the 5th grade.
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Your instincts in how to interact with your son through everyday activities (puzzles, reading aloud, etc.) paid off!
Can I ask what “resources” you feel a public school doesn’t have (as opposed to private?) that encourages teachers to teach to the middle??? Class size? Additional help in the classroom? Physical resources like books, devices?
Or how you feel a non-public doesn’t teach to the middle?
Private schools can be and in my experience ARE more selective. They choose kids who generally are performing at high levels so their “average kid” was often the standout in public school—at least that is the case with the kids and schools we have experienced.
Public schools by their nature HAVE to take all students in their district that apply and offer them whatever they can. They are of varying abilities and they classes are often quite large, especially in grades above 2nd, up to 30+ kids in a class, single teacher, no aides. When you have a huge range and limited resources, there’s only so much any teacher can do.
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Mostly student teacher ratios. One teacher cannot be expected to come up with individualized learning plans when there are so many students in the classroom. IME, public school teachers are having to deal with so many other issues other than teaching (classroom discipline, difficult family situations for their students, food instability, standardized test expectations) and are so poorly compensated that I don’t see how they would have the time or energy to be able to focus on differentiation much.
I honestly don’t have any personal experience with private schools. From my observations from friends who have had children in private schools, they also have limited differentiation and teach to the middle. However, the, “middle,” usually seems a bit higher. Something I attribute to socio-economic situations. And usually, classroom sizes are smaller.
But, these are only my rambling thoughts. There were no, “fancy,” private schools in my area, so I have no idea how a place like Harvard-Westlake or an elite boarding school might look.
Thank you! Homeschooling was a great fit for us - for a while. It was very hard when ds, “fired,” me by expressing his desire not to homeschool for high school, but it was 100% the right choice by virtue of the fact that he had a fantastic charter school available to him. Granted, I had plenty of documentation establishing where he was in math, but the local, extremely large public high school would have NEVER placed him where he was by ability. It would have been solely by his age/grade level. The charter school placed him in the math course he was doing at the time in our homeschool. He won the award for the highest grade in that course for the school year. Large (imo) often equates to inflexible bureaucracy.
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You were much more succinct and articulate than I in your response!
Thanks for the response. I don’t want to get the thread off track. But I will say that the last few posts alone point out clearly the inequities due to socioeconomic status for a good % of our kids knowing that 80+% of US kids attend public schools.
It’s a shame the labels put on public schools. Maybe I’ll start a thread to share “good news” public school stories. 
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We did spend what for us was a ton of money to transfer our kids from “good” public into top private schools for HS. The driving reason was my kids kept losing their friends to the private HS’s and our kids were developing very lazy habits because they weren’t having to challenge themselves intellectually.
Both kids found their tribe in HS and many of those kids went to private college with them and they’re still friends 2 decades later. The public school teachers have a lot more they have to deal with—discipline, shorter classroom hours, shorter calendar, huge range of kids, lots of kids with food insecurity and family issues and more.
Because private schools don’t have kids with behavior issues, disabilities (often the root issue of behavior), family issues, etc.???
You do know that public schools exist in upper middle class neighborhoods as well right? Public schools does not just mean “urban”.
Shorter classroom hours? Shorter calendar? 
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Yes, I live in a non-urban neighborhood in one of the top school districts but we still had these issues and the hours and school year were union issues. The public schools around here are 8-2, with 8-12:30 on Wednesday. Private school is 8-3 and they have longer school year. Private schools have the option of expelling disruptive kids. public schools are limited on what they can do with disruptive kids.
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I will 
going forward. I know my patience boundaries!
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One important thing that private schools don’t have to do is accept those with learning challenges.
Public school is to educate all, and that’s an important distinction.
One thing my kids learned in public school and integrated classrooms was to accept that kid who didn’t speak English when they came to school, the kid with Down syndrome, the autistic child and the kid who didn’t look like them.
I will admit that we decided on a school system that had low class sizes and high standards. We were lucky that we were able to move into such a good school district and that’s not possible everywhere.
Education in the United States is very uneven. And it’s hard to find the perfect solution. Those of us who have choices, can. And those who can’t… it’s complicated
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My kids did Montessori schools for a couple of years (no older than 2nd grade). My son who was a math whiz did great at math, but when he went to another school for 2rd grade his handwriting looked like a kindergartner. The Montessori school let them pick what to do. He was a huge reader and math guy, but didn’t do much writing.
I homeschooled my kids, but we have friends who use public, private, and homeschooling so we hear the pros and cons of various situations. One of the differences that I see is that private schools have to appeal to parents, so they have to serve the kids in some way that the parents find important. We know one person who took her younger, who they thought needed remediation, out of public school. When enrolled in a small Catholic school, the kid was explicitly taught math and suddenly became a solid student. The appeal to parents was that the student would be taught rather than using ‘discovery math’. So maybe in that case it’s ‘private schools don’t have to follow education fads’?
Along the same lines, if a private school doesn’t have an offering for a student, the parents have no reason to enroll their child. In our area, there are some privates known for academics but there are also some known to offer a supportive environment. Which you choose might depend on whether your student is struggling with behavior or academics. When my older was in a preschool Sunday School class, the teacher, a public school K teacher, pulled me aside and asked my plans for K. She was concerned because she said that in her classroom my kid, who could read and loved negative numbers and square roots, wouldn’t get any attention because she’d be told to focus on getting everybody through the K material. Our co-op has a lot of kids whose parents encountered the same thing. We also have kids who really struggle and need more time with concepts, or are several years behind. In most public schools here, there wouldn’t be much difference in what they were taught. If the parents chose private schools, they would likely be choosing different schools that were geared towards their kids. As homeschoolers they could give instruction at the level of each child, often inexpensively.
I find that it doesn’t take a lot of money or resources to teach well, and schools often spend money in ways that I don’t understand. Our co-op meets in space rented from a church. I teach in a basement room with no windows. During the worst of covid when people were concerned about that, I taught outside. The kids sat at picnic tables or on the ground. I had a dry erase board held to a clothes rack with zip ties. It worked fine. Outside school was so popular that I still do it when the weather is nice. Meanwhile schools buy smartboards. Elementary schools here spend a ton on printing worksheets for math and the kids have no worked examples to look back at if they get stuck. Kids whose parents or afterschool care can figure out what is being asked do fine. Kids who are confused and have parents who aren’t academic have no hope of figuring it out. I can’t overstate how big of a deal I think this is - when I volunteer the groups usually send the kids with ‘weird stuff’ to me because I can figure out what is being asked. But I can’t imagine that a huge percentage of the kids who take this work home have parents who read education blogs or have been homeschooling for years to help them. Meanwhile workbooks to go with the Singapore Math curriculum would be $40 for the year (and that’s at the rate for a parent to buy a single copy, which I’m sure is higher than what a school would pay to buy in bulk).
I know that there is little I could do to change any of this - I’m not a public school parent, I’m not a ‘real teacher’ to anybody but people who know me - so I just help the kids that I can help. I’m hoping that one of the local elementary schools will let me do some pull-out help to work on elementary reading or math with struggling students rather than just trying to help them get through their homework after school. But, from what I’ve seen it can be hard to be allowed to do that sort of thing - not from a security/safety perspective, but because the schools don’t want anybody messing with what they are doing. One of the national labs had a list of workers who wanted to volunteer tutor and the program director said that she called the schools every year and the only request was occasionally for somebody to read to kindergarterners. I’m hoping that I can connect with somebody who will be interested in a year or so when my younger can drive and my mornings are free.
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As I said my kids are always surprised to hear that this is how public vs private is in many/most places. Here the kids who go to private school are the ones who can’t make it in our very competitive highly regarded public school ( considered one of the best open enrollment, i.e NOT a Stuyvesant selective enrollment type public in the country but rather one that admits any student a resident of the district) and have the means to avoid it.
We don’t have that kind of public high school, but it was still the better academic option for my kids. Even though it is a Title 1 school with close to 3,000 students and over 50% low income families, the academic offerings and the IB program provided much more rigor than the very expensive private school across the street. I also think the school diversity really benefitted my children.
Regarding the original topic of this thread, I am so glad I learned about this podcast and I enjoyed reading the whole transcript. It was fascinating to learn more about the reading research findings and the political forces that have kept the ineffective (for many) methods still widely used in school systems across the country. I always thought the non-phonics methods did not make intuitive sense, but it’s interesting and sad to read about so many struggling readers who were not helped with the Reading Recovery methods.
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