[Header Photo by Nappy on Unsplash]

Despite growing up in a working-class family with two parents who never finished college, I entered formal schooling with a turboboost provided primarily by my mom.

I was a reader, and by traditional school norms, I was a reader way above grade level.

Both my mother and my teachers taught me to read through whole-word methods that were popular in the 1960s. I am of the Dick and Jane reader generation.

I always tested in the 99th-percentile and made As and Bs, but I found school only mildly tolerable, at best; I did, however, love my teachers.

It was a jumbled journey that led to me being a high school English teacher. I recognize now that the foundation of that path included my high level of literacy that eventually drew me to literature, a love of reading, and being a writer.

When I entered the classroom in the fall of 1984, I soon realized that I was not prepared to teach. Almost all of the literature I had studied in college was not or could not be taught in public high school; I also was almost completely ill-equipped to teach adolescents to write.

My first years included what I now perceive as the fatal flaw of teaching—seeking The Way to teach students to read and write.

My saving grace came in the late 1980s and early 1990s, significantly because I entered the regional National Writing Project summer workshop (Spartanburg Writing Project) and was introduced to the workshop model.

Two books and two people were foundational for my journey into workshop teaching—Nancie Atwell’s reading workshop and Lucy Calkins’s writing workshop.

Atwell and Calkins offered a great deal of practices and structures in their seminal works, but, honestly, I paid little attention to the details—fortunately.

I did take away a philosophical structure that included a frame for teaching—time, ownership, and response—and a nearly compulsive commitment to be a student-centered teacher.

Over my 40 years as a teacher, I have witnessed wonderful concepts, theories, and philosophies in education gradually be reduced to programs, structures, and scripts that necessarily fail students and teachers.

Throughout my career, I have resisted and challenged all programs and templates for teaching and learning.

By the 1990s, I had more opportunities to publish and present as a practitioner-scholar, and then after I completed my doctorate in 1998, that credential further reinforced my ability to advocate against programs and, worst of all, educational faddism.

For many years, I had to caution teachers and administrators about the missionary zeal around Four Blocks® and 6+1 Traits of Writing.

In traditional schooling, we lack the political will to provide students and teachers with the learning/teaching conditions that could support best practice and thriving students. Instead, we remain committed to in-school only reductive practices such as adopting new standards, implementing new standardized tests, and shuffling through an ever-revolving series of reading programs.

Here’s the problem: All reading programs fail students and teachers because when we center reading programs, we de-center the individual needs of students and the professional autonomy of teachers.

Let me be very clear: All reading programs fail students and teachers.

During my teaching career across five decades, I have watched as advocates scapegoat X and promise the success of Y—whether the scapegoat is whole language or balanced literacy (the two favorites over those years).

The “science of reading” movement fits into the manufactured reading crisis cycles that have occurred in the US for a century; almost nothing new is being claimed or promised, but the outsized attack on specific reading programs (Fountas and Pinnell, Calkins’s Units of Study) does represent a disturbing lack of logic (across the US dozens of different reading programs have been implemented over decades with reading proficiency remaining stable) and another fatal mistake of centering reading programs.

To be blunt, reading programs labeled as whole language, balanced reading, or structured literacy carry no guarantee that those programs or the implementation of the program does in fact reflect the theory/philosophy of the label.

One marketed, theory/philosophy is corrupted or erased.

But more importantly, all centering of reading programs is a distraction because teachers are held accountable for teaching with fidelity to the program and students are reduced to mere metrics of that fidelity.

I have remained outside the ideology and program game for 40 years (that’s what critical pedagogy is), but all those trapped inside that game cannot hear my persistent message: Don’t depend on reading programs and reading theories to teach children to read.

I do not support or adhere to whole language, balanced literacy, or structured literacy; I do not endorse (and certainly would never create) any reading program.

As a critical scholar and educator, i recognize that the moment we reduce philosophical structures to scripts or programs, both the ideologies and the humans impacted (students and teachers) are erased.

Most literacy instruction I do these days is with college students and adults, who are still learning to read and learning to write.

I remain guided by time, ownership, and response as my philosophical structures, but I always start with and center who each student is and where is student is.

I have a teaching tool kit that is incredibly full and diverse from my many years as a practitioner, yet I continue to seek new and different ways to teach because each student is a new challenge and a new possibility.

The current media, market, and political story that Reading Program X has failed children but Reading Program Y will save those children is a lazy argument that lacks logic or evidence.

If anyone can step off the reading program merry-go round, they could see that if there was a problem with Units of Study it was that teachers were held accountable for fidelity to that program and not provided the teaching conditions to serve the needs of individual students.

If anyone can step off the reading program merry-go round, they could see that banning some scapegoated reading programs and mandating new structured literacy programs that are scripted (thus erasing teacher autonomy and individual needs of students) is jumping out of the reading program frying pan into the fire.

The rhetoric of missionary zeal exposes the failure of centering when we argue about “teaching phonics” or “teaching comprehension” or “teaching fluency,” for example, because our goal should never be a so-called reading skill, but teaching children how to be eager and critical readers.

In formal schooling we have for decades and currently are failing disproportionately marginalized and minoritized students who are over-represented in those students identified as below proficiency in reading.

As long as we center reading ideologies and reading programs, we are de-centering those students’ individual needs and de-centering the autonomy of their teachers to serve those neglected children.

Reading programs are the folly of petty adult allegiances that are manipulated for political and market purposes.

Reading and writing like teaching reading and writing are complex and unpredictable journeys that are ultimately human behaviors that should be the center of all we do—not beliefs, practices, or, especially, yet another false promise packaged as a silver-bullet reading program.