On our summary comparison chart of Grade 1 Reading programs as approved for 2000 Texas adoption, Saxon Phonics scored 36% in "Intensiveness" compared to Open Court's 100%. Open Court was our standard here because it had the most student practice (ie., seeing, hearing, saying, and writing) in three ramdomly chosen introductory sound-spelling lessons, and also in randomly selected blending lessons.

Our chart tries to define the best standard review criteria for ranking those eight very different series along one spectrum. We knew the "intensiveness" percentage by itself did not credit Saxon's "rolling review" feature for all its additional student practice on successive days throughout the program. To offset this we added the "consistency" category, which shows that in its totality Saxon does a fine job teaching sound-spellings.

We organized our chart for the Texas adoption. Its "conforming" and "nonconforming" sections refer to Texas' (not our) decision on whether or not these programs meet all state standards, most of which have nothing to do with phonics. In our ratings, "better" is worse than "good." We judge many textbooks "better" than others, but we still would not call them "good," and that is the case on this chart.

Home | About Us | About Phonics | Resources
Research | Topics | Reading Reform | Links | Search

Unless otherwise noted, you may copy and distribute any information on this site as long as The National Right to Read Foundation at www.nrrf.org is given credit. The National Right to Read Foundation is a 501(c)(3) publicly supported organization.