re: Ohio Lawsuit Punches Back in Battle Over How to Teach Reading 

In highlighting the big money spent by the Reading Recovery Council  to influence state reading policy, the New York Times offers a slight variation on the same old meme of reading science vs reading catastrophe. 

As a longtime reading teacher, I await an article on the billions spent by leading publishers to promote something called the science of reading so they can continue selling their textbooks and billions of pages of   peripherals that accompany these texts. I mourn the hours children spend trudging through Big Business workbook pages traveling as “science.”

In “Ohio Lawsuit Punches Back in Battle Over How to Teach Reading,”  readers are offered the 23-year-old National Reading Report as evidence of the validity of science of reading.  The claims embedded in this report have been disputed by respected researchers since the day of publication. It’s time to scrap that old rolodex and expand the contact base. For starters, here’s a new report published in The Reading Teacher: “Stories Grounded in Decades of Research: What We Truly Know about the Teaching of Reading.” 

Table 1 offers “Highly Respected Researchers Whose Research Challenges the Science of Reading,”  Here are the names of 7 reading researchers New York Times reporters can contact the next time they decide to write about reading instruction in public schools.

Finally, I offer the evidence of a deaf child who entered public school in 3rd grade. Her residual hearing was helped by special equipment. she and I both wore. After some weeks of sobbing she couldn’t do it, this child triumphed. I attended her high school graduation, where she was on the honor roll. She contacted me 30 years later, telling me that she had graduated from college and enjoyed sharing Amelia Bedelia and knock-knock jokes with her children.

This is called teacher wait time.

Susan Ohanian