Rejoice, rejoice, as somebody once said. Last week saw two major victories in the long war against institutionalised prejudice and wilful ignorance. Two important truths were finally accepted and proclaimed from the heights of the new Labour establishment. Those of us who have been saying these things for years must resist the temptation to sneer about reinventing the wheel.

The first truth is that though black boys are doing badly in school compared with other children, the reason is not racism. The second truth is that the only sure way to teach children to read is the simple old-fashioned method of sounding out letters, as in c-a-t says cat, which is now unattractively called “synthetic phonics”. Both these truths have been obvious to the open-minded for years. They are also, I believe, closely linked.

New Labour has finally recognised that its much-vaunted national literacy strategy (following years of disastrous old Labour experiments in teaching) is failing miserably: 20% of 11-year-olds are still unable to read properly. The strategy was bound to fail from the first, being a confused and confusing jumble of concessions to fashionable orthodoxies that paid only lip service to synthetic phonics.

Last week, however, in a breathtaking about-turn under pressure from Lord Adonis, the new schools minister and Blair intimate, a forceful select committee of MPs and a vast weight of independent evidence, Ruth Kelly, the education secretary, announced a return to synthetic phonics. She put it tactfully, of course, and has therefore called for an independent “review” — as if one were needed — of phonics in teaching reading. It will involve rewriting the literacy strategy and introducing synthetic phonics in schools by September 2006.

At the same time Trevor Phillips, the head of the Commission for Racial Equality, has boldly attacked the attitudes of “liberals like myself”, as he puts it, and “our historical bleating about racist teachers”. He points out that statistics don’t justify the usual presumption of racism in schools.

It’s true that only 27% of Afro-Caribbean boys leave school with five GCSEs at A to C grade, and this is far below the national average of 47% for boys and 57% per cent for girls. But 44% of Afro-Caribbean girls do reach that standard, many of them sisters from the same families. Poor Indian and Chinese boys do roughly three times better in exams than poor Afro-Caribbean boys. So another explanation is needed.

It is courageous of Phillips to admit that he and leftist orthodoxy have been wrong. He has also admitted that multiculturalism has been a mistake, as right-wing commentators have been arguing for years. However, it is outrageous of him to suggest last week, not for the first time, that the solution to the problems of Afro-Caribbean schoolboys is segregation. Apartheid! Having seen some black-only classes in America — where he admits conditions are different — he is recommending them here.

How humiliating for the children, how racist, how illegal probably, and how doomed to failure. The problem for Afro-Caribbean boys who do badly is not their colour. It’s the way they’re taught — or rather not taught — to read. If a child can’t read, he can’t learn anything at school. It must be like watching television with the sound turned off for at least 10 maddening years. His entire school career is finished before it starts. All he can see ahead is boredom, shame and failure. He will be driven with other angry and resentful boys out of school and into trouble.

Most children will learn to read anyway, somehow, especially with encouragement at home. The test of good teaching is how good it is for the 25% who do not pick it up any old how. Of that 25% some will deal with the inevitable frustrations much worse than others and will behave much worse — culture, gender, absent fathers and lack of family discipline play their part here. But none of that would matter if the child was already learning to read — early, easily and fast — in the first place.

This is why black boys are over-represented in special needs lists, exclusion, unemployment, crime and prison (68% of people in jail are illiterate). So it is that illiteracy leads straight to rage on all sides, which is practically the same thing as saying illiteracy leads straight to racism.

I passionately believe that the single most powerful weapon against racism — and the social breakdown that is part of it — is the teaching of reading. And the simple old-fashioned secret to teaching reading is synthetic phonics with setting by ability. That means putting children together according to their progress in reading, regardless of age, colour or anything else.

One of the most charismatic reformers in the world of literacy is Ruth Miskin. Once the head of a famously successful primary school in Tower Hamlets, east London, she’s now the creator of a programme called Read Write, which schools can buy to turn literacy problems round quickly and easily. She gave expert evidence to the Commons select committee that so galvanised Kelly.

Her view is that nearly every child can learn to read, no matter their background or problems. I’ve always thought that myself. As children my brothers and I taught my sister to read as we’d been taught ourselves, and she has marked learning disabilities. For nearly everyone reading is fun and easy, and teaching reading is fun and easy with simple synthetic phonics like Miskin’s.

The Ofsted reports her schools have had clearly bear that out. They back up her view that the black boys she sees doing her programme all over the country have no problem learning to read. “Black boys learn to decode just as fast as any white middle-class girl,” she says, if they are taught properly and have the joy of rapid success. There is, according to Miskin, no problem with discipline; they love learning and there is no gap between them and any other group.

This is a historic moment to get things right at last, for all children. Adonis and Kelly should tear up the useless, complicated national literacy scheme and let heads choose between the synthetic phonics programmes that Miskin and other reformers have developed. That would be a real victory against illiteracy and racism, and against injustice and inequality too.