While the governorship that election shifted to Hodges, mostly because of the wedge issue of gambling in SC, I noted that both candidates and political parties ran on a dishonest but effective platform—SC education was at the bottom in the U.S. In fact, both candidates had billboards lambasting the state’s education ranking that were virtually indistinguishable except for the candidate information.
In 2022, it is important to highlight that SC was popularly and politically identified in crisis and need of reform after two decades of crisis (A Nation at Risk under Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s) and a series of standards and high-stakes testing reform.
I entered education in 1984, right after then-Governor Richard Riley had pushed SC as one of the first adopters into the accountability movement.
As a high school teacher throughout the 1980s and 1990s, I watched and listened as SC political leaders called for modeling SC education policy, standards, and testing on Florida and Virginia; despite its bombastic libertarian proclamations, SC is copy-cat state when it comes to education policy.
And therein lies the problem.
SC remains trapped in a cycle of education crisis, education faddism, and education boondoggles.
After those two decades following A Nation at Risk, SC once again doubled down on reform and accountability during the No Child Behind Era (NCLB) under George W. Bush, and then, stumbled into the Obama era reforms—value-added methods for teacher evaluation, charter schools, and (yes) Common Core.
That Obama/Common Core era is a perfect example of educational dysfunction in SC.
SC rushed to adopt Common Core and the related testing (fadism), purchased teaching and learning materials labeled as Common Core aligned (boondoggle), and then while teachers were being trained and the entire educational system was transitioning to the new standards, SC dropped Common Core (because conservatives falsely labeled the movement as Obama’s although the standards came form the National Governor’s Association and were strongly bipartisan).
This wasteful nonsense was almost entirely partisan politics and had little to do with teaching and learning.
So as we watch 2022 slip into 2023, SC remains trapped in the crisis > fadism > boondoggle cycle that has been demonstrated to fail education since the early 1980s.
The accountability movement phase 1 (mostly a state-level movement) after A Nation at Risk was declared a failure and lead to the accountability movement phase 2 that pivoted on NCLB (and included federal policy mandating “scientifically based” teaching and materials).
About another 20 years after phase 2, we are once again screaming crisis, including a(nother) reading crisis and the really ugly anti-CRT/book banning movements (see how all of these are related historically).
SC has been quick to pass copy-cat reading legislation (see HERE and HERE) for about a decade, and the current budget includes millions and millions of dollars for “science of reading” policy, training, and materials (sound familiar to those who watched the Common Core disaster?).
As one specific example, SC like many other states is simultaneously (again) calling for limiting everything in education to “scientific” while investing huge amounts of tax dollars to non-scientific boondoggles (see here about LETRS).
Education is an incredibly profitable market in the U.S., and the only people who have benefitted from 40 years of constant crisis > reform are those who repeatedly rebrand educational materials to match the fad-du-jour.
The current reading crisis and curriculum crisis in SC and across the U.S. are marketing and political scams—all faddism and boondoggles.
SC does not have a reading crisis, and does not have a CRT crisis.
The real educational problems in SC (and throughout the U.S.) are once again being ignored—poverty, racism, and inequity in both the lives of children and citizens as well as in our schools.
Affluent children continue to have the best access to learning while marginalized and vulnerable children are neglected, ignored, or pushed into the most limited and limiting educational contexts (such as test-prep).
SC is not experiencing a new or unique educational crisis, but we are suffering from a historical and current reality that is reflected in our educational system—a lack of political will.
Crisis, fadism, and boondoggles are the playground of political leaders and education marketers who reap the rewards of misinformation, misdirection, and finding ourselves in a hole while continuing to dig.
After about a decade blogging on other open sites and dabbling in social media as part of my public work, I committed to blogging at WordPress in 2013, and to date, had my highest traffic year in 2014.
Between my Twitter presence and blog, I always expected to have a greater reach at Twitter, but by 2022, I have just short of 8000 followers on Twitter and over 10,000 at this blog.
As part of my current fall sabbatical, I revised and redesigned this blog to make it more appealing and (I hope) to better present the work as professional (blogs continue to be discounted and marginalized despite the vast majority of my posts being heavily cited).
I am on track for 2022 to be the third or second best year:
And here are my top 10 posts of 2022 (eight original to this year):
While the “science of reading” dominated my work, I am quite proud of my comic book posts throughout 2022, notably my series on Black Widow and my frequent posts on my collecting Daredevil.
I also want to highlight two of my scholarly projects:
Primarily, I am a writer and writing is who I am so blogging is a wonderful way to write and draft, a way to think through important issues while also contributing to the public discourse that drives not only what people think but actual policy.
Also, blogs are accessible (essentially free to anyone who have internet access), and I feel far more valuable and effective than traditional scholarship that sits behind paywalls.
I have been an educator for almost 40 years, shouting the entire time that we mostly do this thing called education badly because we are thinking wrong or simply stuck in a rut of doing things only one way (for education, that way is “Crisis!> reform > Crisis! > reform, etc.).
Yet, I think we can do better, and I know we should.
Thank you for reading because that is the thing we writers are mostly seeking—those genuinely and sincerely engaged in the ideas we are drawn to interrogate and explore.
Let us hope for a better, more kind and peaceful 2023.
The word “theory” is a technical term in the sciences that doesn’t mean “guessing.” “Theory” is not “hypothesis,” even as “hypothesis” isn’t really guessing either (maybe it is an educated guess).
Yet, average people tend to use “theory” as just a guess. That tension between laypeople and scientists is central to many problem with attempting to create evidence-based (“scientific”) policy in the context of media, public, and political debate that is mostly among laypeople.
Reading theory is rarely labeled “theory” in those debates among laypeople. Popular labels, such as “whole language,” often lose their theory origin and become teacher practice.
About a decade into teaching high school English, I taught a group of tenth graders with whom I immediately bonded (and was fortunate to teach again as seniors). Many of these students, now well into their 40s, remain friends of mine.
This class was very bright and genuinely eager to learn, but they were also driven to be “pleasers.” I worked hard to help them become more independent thinkers (instead of being incredibly compliant).
The worst way that urge to do the right thing hindered these students is reading. Early in the course, they pleaded with me that they could not read the assigned texts as fast as I wanted. This seemed odd because no class had ever complained about that, and the amount was quite manageable.
We set aside a class period to discuss how they read and such. What I learned was that these students in the early 1990s had been taught (or learned) that reading is done letter-by-letter to create words and word-by-word to create complete thoughts.
And there was their problem with reading speed.
I shared with them an epiphany I had in my MEd program during a course on early literacy. In that class we discusses how proficient and fast readers actually read. The process is much closer to what many would call skimming (“reading” large chunks at a time) and includes skipping as well as continually reading faster until the reader senses a loss of meaning before circling back.
My epiphany was that this described me perfectly as a reader, but I had always thought I was doing something wrong for not sticking to letter-by-letter and then word-by-word.
The discussion freed many of these students from a perception of reading that simply wasn’t accurate.
That explanation of highly proficient readers is also a story about reading as guessing and why reading theory remains a debate and not settled science.
The current “science of reading” movement depends heavily on melodramatic anecdotes to drive a narrative about reading and teaching reading that is overly simplistic and often simply wrong (see Media Coverage of SOR HERE).
One of those anecdotes portrays a teacher prompting a student struggling to read simply to guess at the words instead of using any sort of decoding strategy (what most people would call “sounding it out”).
So a key issue in the current reading debate is “guessing.”
To understand how “guessing” is part of the debate, we have to return to “theory.”
Whole language is a reading theory that is strongly associated with scholar Ken Goodman (see Whole Language HERE). In the 1960s, Goodman published Reading: A Psycholinguistic Guessing Game.
Goodman’s stated purpose in the piece is as follows:
Simply stated, the common sense notion I seek here to refute is this:
“Reading is a precise process. It involves exact, detailed, sequential perception and identification of letters, words, spelling patterns and large language units.”
In phonic centered approaches to reading, the preoccupation is with precise letter identification. In word centered approaches, the focus is on word identifications. Known words are sight words, precisely named in any setting.
And his alternative, where the issue with “guessing” has its roots:
In place of this misconception, I offer this: Reading is a selective process. It involves partial use of available minimal language cues selected from perceptual input on the basis of the reader’s expectation. As this partial information is processed, tentative decisions are made to be confirmed, rejected, or refined as reading progresses.
More simply stated, reading is a psycholinguistic guessing game. It involves an interaction between thought and language. Efficient reading does not result from precise perception and identification of all elements, but from skill in selecting the fewest, most productive cues necessary to produce guesses which are right the first time. The ability to anticipate that which has not been seen, of course, is vital in reading, just as the ability to anticipate what has not yet been heard is vital in listening.
While Goodman noted later that “guessing” may have not been the best choice, whole language proposed a theory of reading that valued meaning over accurately reading every word. And while the pervasiveness of whole language in K-12 education, I think, is greatly overstated, elements of holistic and workshop approaches certainly impacted practice and informed what would later be called “balanced literacy.”
The problem with “guessing” is the same as the problem with “theory”; both have very specific meanings in science and quite different (and often negative) meanings in day-to-day use.
And when theory is translated into practice, it is entirely possible, even likely, that some practitioners misunderstand and misuse “guessing.”
But it is quite a huge leap, as the “science of reading” movement has done, to announce that we have a unique reading crisis now that can be traced to teacher education teaching “guessing” and a couple reading programs that rely exclusively on “guessing.”
That “guessing” is also being identified (and even banned by some states) as “three cueing.”
So there are a few things to note about Goodman’s “guessing.”
First, that essay and idea is well over forty years ago; Goodman himself noted that he would later in his career have written a much different piece.
Next, the line between Goodman’s theorizing and the use of “guessing” or “three cueing” is complicated and extremely long.
Finally, it is much better to have a debate about reading theory and practice if we all agree to use important terms accurately. Here is a great and well cited overview of “multiple cueing”:
In some cases, proponents of structured literacy approaches have denigrated instructional practices that attend to multidimensional aspects of reading. For example, Spear-Swerling (2019) argued against encouraging students to attend to multiple-cueing systems when reading. Arguing that explicit teaching of decoding/phonics skills should dominate reading instruction, she warned against coaching students to use “meaning in conjunction with print cues and having students ‘problem-solve’ with teacher guidance (e.g., Burkins & Croft, 2010)” (p. 205). Spear- Swerling cited two reports (Foorman et al., 2016; National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000) to argue that “research on students’ reading development… has conclusively disproven the multiple-cuing-systems model” (p. 206), although neither of these reports directly addressed or tested that model.
This rally against multiple-cueing systems models has been reiterated by scholars (Paige, 2020) and journalists (Hanford, 2018, 2019, 2020). Although it may be true that as readers become more proficient, they attend less to illustrations, this does not negate the role that illustrations play in helping young students learn to attend to meaning while reading. In short, drawing students’ attention to illustrations is one means of helping them attend to the stories and information presented in texts. Learning to attend to meanings that emerge while reading is essential for understanding both the simple and increasingly complicated texts that students encounter as they become skilled readers. Describing multiple-cueing systems models as having students draw on “partial visual cues to guess at words (Adams, 1998; Rayner & Pollatsek, 1989; Solman & Stanovich, 1992; Stanovich, 1986)” (Paige, 2020, p. 13) misrepresents these models and ignores the important role of illustrations as tools for learning to access and monitor meaning construction.
Compton-Lilly, C.F., Mitra, A., Guay, M., & Spence, L.K. (2020). A confluence of complexity: Intersections among reading theory, neuroscience, and observations of young readers. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S185-S195. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.348
In 2022, scholars of literacy have moved beyond Goodman’s initial theories of whole language, but they have also moved on from the “simple” view of reading (yet, SOR continues to blame whole language and balanced literacy while endorsing the “simple” view).
And the current state of reading theory remains a debate, not settled science. And that debate has those who focus on letters, sounds, words, and meaning versus those who envision proficient readers who scan text and create meaning through dozens of strategies, many of which aren’t grounded in letters and words.
This is more of a theory than a guess, but our only hope of not continuing the cycle of reading crisis, reform, reading crisis, reform, etc., we must begin to understand the complexities of reading and teaching reading instead of declaring winners and losers in order to play the blame game.
This is the story of a religiously and politically conservative couple who committed to changing how children are taught in the U.S. (see HERE or HERE):
The Gablers’ views are straight-forward and comprehensive. They believe that the purpose of education is “the imparting of factual knowledge, basic skills and cultural heritage” and that education is best accomplished in schools that emphasize a traditional curriculum of reading, math, and grammar, as well as patriotism, high moral standards, dress codes, and strict discipline, with respect and courtesy demanded from all students. They feel the kind of education they value has all but disappeared, and they lay the blame at the feet of that all-purpose New Right whipping boy, secular humanism, which they believe has infiltrated the school at every level but can be recognized most easily in textbooks.
Though they have gained most of their notoriety for protests that reflected ultra-conservative political and religious views, the Gablers have consistently — and rightly, in my view — stressed basic academic skills, with particular attention to the use of intensive phonics to teach reading. Their handbook on phonics is a helpful collection of articles and references that thoroughly documents the superiority of the phonetic over the “look-say” method of reading instruction, a method whose wide use in American schools seems to me not only to negate the chief advantage of an alphabet over pictographs but also to deserve much of the blame for the depressingly high rate of functional illiteracy in this country.
But the Gablers also feel that even those students who learn to read through intensive phonics, memorize their “times tables,” diagram sentences perfectly, and win spelling bees and math contests must still cope with an educational system that is geared to undermining their morals, their individuality, their pride in America, and their faith in God and the free enterprise system. Much of this corrosive work is accomplished through textbooks in history, social sciences, health, and homemaking.
First, this is from 1982 and concerns the Gablers’ activism reaching back two decades before this news article:
Norma and Mel Gabler entered the field of textbook reform twenty years ago, after their son Jim came home from school disturbed at discrepancies between the 1954 American history text his eleventh-grade class was using and what his parents had taught him. The Gablers compared his text to history books printed in 1885 and 1921 and discovered differences. “Where can you go to get the truth?” Jim asked.
Second, the religious and conservative crusade of the Gablers represents that reading wars emphasizing the lack of phonics and the need for systematic phonics as well as conservative censorship of what students can read and learn are historical patterns found over many decades in the U.S.
The “science of reading” movement and the anti-CRT/book banning movements of the 2020s are nothing new in 20th- or 21st-century America.
And third, most controversially, phonics-centric reading wars and censorship have deep overlaps as conservative movements—as I have noted about the current literacy movements.
Compare this graphic from the 1982 article to the reading war and censorship today:
The rhetoric used by the Gablers sounds disturbingly familiar. They justified their censorship by calling for textbooks that are “‘fair, objective and patriotic'” (although these terms are contradictory). And they were unapologetically “protective of Christianity.”
The Gablers also fought for traditional (unequal) gender roles, again based on their Christian beliefs: “When texts note that the desire of women to earn pay equal to that of men, the Gablers complain that such equality could come only if women ‘abandon their highest profession— as mothers molding young lives.'”
Eerily similar to the attitudes of journalists and parents in the “science of reading” movement, the Gablers were expert at erasing actual expertise:
Norma says she has read so many textbooks that “I figure I know enough to be a Ph.D.” It is clear, however, that they have little appreciation or understanding of the life of the mind as it is encouraged and practiced in many institutions of learning. They tend to cite the Reader’s Digest as if it were the New England Journal of Medicine and to regard a single conversation with a police chief or a former drug user as an incontrovertible refutation of some point they oppose.
The Gablers were also early versions of conservatives who frame being privileged as an oppressed group: “‘When we try to get changes made,’ Norma said, ‘it’s called censorship. When minorities and feminists do the same thing, nobody complains.'”
As we reach the end of 2022, if we care about universal public education and academic freedom as essential for a free people, we need to recognize that the essentially conservative and ideological elements of the “science of reading” and anti-CRT/censorship movements are antithetical to those foundational principles.
Reading wars and culture wars fought over education are often driven by misinformation, melodramatic narratives, and the erasure of expertise and historical context; and ultimately, these movements are destined to do far more harm than good, regardless of anyone’s sincerity or intentions.
Since around 2013 and then increasingly since 2018, states have been adopting new or revised reading legislation often prompted by or identified as the “science of reading” (SOR).
As a result districts, schools, and teachers are experiencing major changes to reading programs and materials. Some states and districts have banned and removed materials that teachers have been using for decades, and many reading teachers are required to attend new PD as well as training in new reading programs.
This upheaval is not only common in K-12 education, but also highly disruptive to teaching as well as learning by students.
At a fundamental level, this cycle of crisis and reform has never worked, and only serves to de-professionalize educators and, once again, fails to address the individual literacy needs of all students.
In this policy brief, I offer an overview of the current SOR movement and recommend a different approach to reading policy and practices, including:
On a more local level, school- and district-level policymakers should do the following:
• Develop teacher-informed reading programs based on the population of students served and the expertise of faculty serving those students, avoiding lockstep implementation of commercial reading programs and ensuring that instructional materials support—rather than dictate—teacher practice.
• Provide students struggling to read and other at-risk students with certified, experienced teachers and low student-teacher ratios to support individualized and differentiated instruction.
Thomas, P.L. (2022). The Science of Reading movement: The never-ending debate and the need for a different approach to reading instruction. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/science-of-reading
In order to achieve my recommendations, local districts and schools must have access to high-quality research and resources in order to support well informed teachers who can then be tasked with developing the sort of reading programs that match the unique and individual needs of the student populations they serve.
Additionally, journalists and mainstream media have been recycling the original claims (see Aukerman below) made by Hanford’s Hard Word, despite a lack of science behind those claims.
Therefore, below I am providing a resource collection by topic that matches the current media, parent, and political pressure that educators, schools, and districts are facing.
Links to resources are being provided for PD and educational purposes only and anyone accessing these resources are asked to respect fair use of scholarship. Further, I am available for educators or journalists who want to investigate the “science of reading” movement critically.
Betts, E., Dolch, E., Gates, A., Gray, W., Horn, E., LaBrant, L., . . . Witty, P. (1942). What shall we do about reading today?: A symposium. The Elementary English Review, 19(7), 225-256. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41382636
Seidenberg, M.S., Cooper Borkenhagen, M., & Kearns, D.M. (2020). Lost in translation? Challenges in connecting reading science and educational practice. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S119-S130. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.341
Yaden, D.B., Reinking, D., & Smagorinsky, P. (2021). The trouble with binaries: A perspective on the science of reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(S1), S119-S129. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.402
Johnston, P., & Scanlon, D. (2021). An examination of dyslexia research and instruction with policy implications. Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice, 70(1), 107. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1177/23813377211024625
Stevens, E. A., Austin, C., Moore, C., Scammacca, N., Boucher, A. N., & Vaughn, S. (2021). Current state of the evidence: Examining the effects of Orton-Gillingham reading interventions for students with or at risk for word-level reading disabilities. Exceptional Children, 87(4), 397–417. https://doi.org/10.1177/0014402921993406
Hall, C., et al. (2022, September 13). Forty years of reading intervention research for elementary students with or at risk for dyslexia: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Reading Research Quarterly. Retrieved October 17, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.477
[UPDATE]
Odegard, T. N., Farris, E. A., Middleton, A. E., Oslund, E., & Rimrodt-Frierson, S. (2020). Characteristics of Students Identified With Dyslexia Within the Context of State Legislation. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 53(5), 366–379. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022219420914551
Hoffman, J.V., Hikida, M., & Sailors, M. (2020). Contesting science that silences: Amplifying equity, agency, and design research in literacy teacher preparation. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S255–S266. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.353
Hoffman, J.V., Hikida, M., & Sailors, M. (2020). Contesting science that silences: Amplifying equity, agency, and design research in literacy teacher preparation. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S255–S266. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.353
MacPhee, D., Handsfield, L.J., & Paugh, P. (2021). Conflict or conversation? Media portrayals of the science of reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S145-S155. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.384
Compton-Lilly, C.F., Mitra, A., Guay, M., & Spence, L.K. (2020). A confluence of complexity: Intersections among reading theory, neuroscience, and observations of young readers. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S185-S195. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.348
Simple View of Reading (SVR) and Structured Literacy [access materials HERE]
Compton-Lilly, C.F., Mitra, A., Guay, M., & Spence, L.K. (2020). A confluence of complexity: Intersections among reading theory, neuroscience, and observations of young readers. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S185-S195. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.348
Duke, N.K. & Cartwright, K.B. (2021). The science of reading progresses: Communicating advances beyond the simple view of reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(S1), S25-S44. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.411
Filderman, M.J., Austin, C.R., Boucher, A.N., O’Donnell, K., & Swanson, E.A. (2022). A meta-analysis of the effects of reading comprehension interventions on the reading comprehension outcomes of struggling readers in third through 12th grades. Exceptional Children, 88(2), 163-184. https://doi.org/10.1177/00144029211050860
Barber, A.T., Cartwright, K.B., Hancock, G.R., & Klauda, S.L. (2021). Beyond the simple view of reading: The role of executive functions in emergent bilinguals’ and English monolinguals’ reading comprehension. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(S1), S45-S64. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.385
Cervetti, G.N., Pearson, P.D., Palincsar, A.S., Afflerbach, P., Kendeou, P., Biancarosa, G., Higgs, J., Fitzgerald, M.S., & Berman, A.I. (2020). How the reading for understanding initiative’s research complicates the simple view of reading invoked in the science of reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S161-S172. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.343
Burns, M. K., Duke, N. K., & Cartwright, K. B. (2023). Evaluating components of the active view of reading as intervention targets: Implications for social justice. School Psychology, 38(1), 30–41. https://doi.org/10.1037/spq0000519
[UPDATE]
Reading a philosophical investigation, Andrew Davis
Bowers, J.S. (2020). Reconsidering the evidence that systematic phonics is more effective than alternative methods of reading instruction. Educational Psychology Review, 32(2020), 681-705. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10648-019-09515-y
Wyse, D., & Bradbury, A. (2022). Reading wars or reading reconciliation? A critical examination of robust research evidence, curriculum policy and teachers’ practices for teaching phonics and reading. Review of Education, 10(1), e3314. https://doi.org/10.1002/rev3.3314
Bowers, J.S. Yes Children Need to Learn Their GPCs but There Really Is Little or No Evidence that Systematic or Explicit Phonics Is Effective: a response to Fletcher, Savage, and Sharon (2020). Educ Psychol Rev33, 1965–1979 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-021-09602-z
Connor C. M. (2016). A Lattice Model of the Development of Reading Comprehension. Child development perspectives, 10(4), 269–274. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdep.12200
Flanigan, K., Solic, K., & Gordon, L. (2022). The “P” Word Revisited: 8 Principles for Tackling Today’s Questions and Misconceptions about Phonics Instruction. The Reading Teacher, 76, 73– 83. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.2101
[UPDATE}
Bowers, J. S. (2023, September 29). There is still little or no evidence that systematic phonics is more effective than common alternative methods of reading instruction: Response to Brooks (2023). https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/5ut7x
As a career educator for about 40 years, including almost two decades in K-12 teaching, I am advocating for teacher autonomy and professionalism to serve the individual needs of students.
Therefore, I think curriculum and instruction must be driven by classroom teachers—not media narratives, parental advocacy, or political mandate.
Regretfully, media, parental, and political pressure for policy and practice are too often oversimplified and misleading, but honored over teacher experience and expertise.
My foundations of American education course serves as an introduction to public education and our education majors, but the course also fulfills a general education requirement.
The class comprises mostly first- and second-year students, and those considering education as a major or career can be most of the class or very few. None the less, virtually all of them are a bit disoriented when we begin the course reading philosophers—Foucault, Deleuze, and Freire specifically.
I invite them to read some relatively brief passages from all three, warn them that reading philosophy is challenging, and then reassure them that we are simply using these ideas to begin our semester-long interrogation of how we have public schools and why.
When 2022 NAEP data were released, I immediately thought about a few things.
First, with the dramatic coverage of math scores dropping (see HERE and HERE), I told a few friends to brace themselves for the inevitable next step. And it took only about one day for my prediction to happen with an ad popping up on Facebook:
In the U.S., notably since the release of A Nation at Risk (see HERE and HERE) in the early 1980s, the easiest thing to predict is that the education market place is going to profit from educational crisis.
This fits into my second thought, which is the current and ongoing “science of reading” crisis that was prompted in 2018 by Emily Hanford, but was significantly boosted by the cries of “reading crisis” after the release of the 2019 NAEP data (see HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE).
Now, I regret to note, math will be the next over-reaction, as the ad above shows now that edu-businesses scramble to add math to their offering for reading—solutions need a problem, and high-stakes testing is a problem machine. [1]
And the big picture thing I thought about was Deleuze, from the reading I have students consider:
We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure—prison, hospital, factory, school, family….The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons….In disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in the societies of control one is never finished with anything—the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation. (pp. 3-4, 5)
Deleuze builds to a powerful and prescient warning:
For the school system (emphasis in original): continuous forms of control, and the effect on the school of perpetual training, the corresponding abandonment of all university research, the introduction of the “corporation” at all levels of schooling. (p. 7)
As a key example, many (if not most) teachers of reading in the U.S. now are being told that their university training was useless, and that they need new training in the “science of reading.” And education corporations are lining up to sell schools that training, a story sold with the “science of reading” label (see about LETRS).
Just to be clear, this is not about the failure of teacher certification or about teaching teachers to teach or students to read; this is about profit through perpetual crisis and (re)training.
And here is the disconnect.
While I carefully help students over the course of a semester examine the claimed democratic foundations of public education (well documented in the writings of Thomas Jefferson and key figures in American education such as John Dewey), we quickly uncover that those democratic ideals are often secondary—or even erased—by market commitments.
So here we are in 2022 still riding the wave of accountability, standards, and high-stakes testing that began with A Nation at Risk and built to George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB).
As early as the 1990s, however, many education scholars warned that this education crisis was manufactured—essentially a political lie that was bolstered by a media frenzy and a market grab.
The education crisis/education market place dynamic has been in full swing for over forty years now, and the ugly truth is that all of the crisis rhetoric used to justify incessant accountability layered onto a constant process of new standards and new tests is, as Berliner and Biddle documented, manufactured, a lie.
As compelling as it is, we simply do not now have a reading crisis; we have never had a reading crisis.
And NAEP 2022 data do not expose a math crisis.
“Crisis” suggests something new, immediate, and pressing to address.
Student learning has been about the same for nearly a century. Some students thrive (mostly correlated with affluence and being white), many students learn in spite of the system, and too many students are neglected or mis-served (correlated strongly with poverty, minoritized race, multi-language learning, and special needs).
Just to swing back to reading, there is no decade (or even year) over the last 80 years that public, media, and political opinions expressed satisfaction in reading achievement; student reading proficiency has always been characterized as failing, and a crisis.
Always.
As we creep toward an election, we need to admit a few things.
First, the market and commercialism matter more in the U.S. than democracy or even freedom.
We not only want schools to produce (compliant) workers, but also have turned public education into a crisis-based education market place.
Take a little journey to Education Week‘s web site and note that flurry of ads for the “science of reading,” for example:
[Update] Or see what pops up “promoted” on Twitter:
And monitor over the coming weeks; you’ll see more and more addressing math.
Since 2018, media has generated millions of clicks with coverage of the “science of reading,” journalists are winning cash awards and receiving huge speaking fees to discuss the “science of reading,” and education corporations are pulling in millions for software, programs, and training labeled the “science of reading.”
Please take just a brief historical overview since the 1980s. Not a single reform has worked, not a single crisis/reform cycle has been deemed a success.
As Deleuze explains, the point of crisis/reform is to remain always in crisis/reform because that cycle creates a market, and for some people, that market generates profit.
But that crisis/reform cycle has a high cost for students, teachers, and society.
The “science of reading” crisis ironically follows just about two decades after the reading crisis identified by the National Reading Panel and at the center of NCLB—which mandated that teachers had to implement only scientifically-based practices (notably in reading).
That failed (apparently) and the current response is to shout (once again) “crisis!” and demand that mandates restrict teaching to the “science of reading.”
Four decades-plus into a crisis/reform hole and we continue to dig.
Part of me feels sorry for what is about to happen to math, and part of me feels really bad that I hope the coming math nonsense will relieve a little pressure from reading.
But mostly, I hate the lies, political, media, and commercial interests that are eager to shout “crisis!” because in the spirit of the good ol’ U.S. of A., there is money to made in all that bullshit.
Thomas, P.L. (2022). The Science of Reading movement: The never-ending debate and the need for a different approach to reading instruction. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/science-of-reading
Please access this policy brief on the “science of reading” movement from NEPC:
Thomas, P.L. (2022). The Science of Reading movement: The never-ending debate and the need for a different approach to reading instruction. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/science-of-reading
The policy brief emphasizes the need to avoid one-size-fits-all reading policy and practice. For context, please see:
We should acknowledge that one-size-fits-all metrics do not fairly measure what matters most in many schools. Right now, what matters most is finding ways to address and improve students’ mental health so they can get back on track with learning. We should reward schools for innovation, for creating programs that will take time to evaluate.
Simple numbers promote simple solutions and can prevent promising programs with long-term positive implications from taking root. Before we head into another school year, let’s look at dismantling the ranking systems that are burdening our administrators with busywork and preventing authentic improvement.
States across the U.S. continue to revise and introduce new reading legislation. As well, states are updating reading standards—all of which is being strongly influenced by the “science of reading” (SoR) movement.
While the SoR movement maintains that powerful influence over policy and classroom practice, I have strongly criticized the media and marketing aspects because of central concepts that are overly simplistic and ultimately harmful for teaching and learning reading. Those key fatal flaws are a commitment to the “simple view” of reading (SVR) [1] and practicing phonics-first with beginning readers (systematic phonics for all students in K-2 that is often without context or isolated from comprehension goals).
Recently on social media, a literacy educator raised concern that proposed revised state standards in K-2 ELA do not include comprehension in foundational skills. As I commented, this is the exact problem I have been criticizing and expecting as a result of embracing SVR, an out-of-date and simplistic theory of reading (see note 1 below).
Many, if not most, SoR advocates endorse intensive systematic phonics for all students before they are expected to demonstrate comprehension; some argue K-2 students can’t comprehend. Begun several years ago, this aspect of the SoR movement has re-energized the use of DIBELS, an assessment tool that evaluates student ability to pronounce nonsense words in isolation. This nonsense is often presented as “reading,” even though simply decoding (pronunciation) words in isolation is not reading.
As I will explain later, saying students pronouncing nonsense words is reading proficiency is the same as saying children riding bicycles with training wheels are cyclists.
In short, commitments to SVR and phonics first are a distortion of goals in reading instruction, replacing the authentic goal (critical comprehension) with measuring if students have acquired the entire set of phonics rules. Phonics instruction and emphasizing decoding must remain some of the means and not the ends of instruction; however, the SoR movement too often has created that fatal flaw.
I want to examine here why these commitments are not reading science, but more significantly, why these commitments are harmful to students.
First, recently I was helping my granddaughter, Skylar, with her homework on parts of speech. See the exercise here:
I had to smile and encourage her as I quietly bled internally. This can only be described by the first word—”silly.” Not only is this isolated activity nonsense, I am certain it is ultimately harmful to emerging readers and writers.
Many of these words can function as several parts of speech once in the context of actual usage; for example, “camp” as in “We camp,” “The camp,” “A camp site,” etc.
Setting aside that many aspects of grammar and usage are intuited by proficient and expert readers (we drive our cars without being able to name all the engine parts, without having to know how to disassemble the engine, etc.), even when there is some instructional value in explicit instruction in grammar and usage, that has been shown for a century to be effective only in holistic and contextual ways.
If parts of speech matter (I suspect they don’t), help young readers and writers interrogate that in the reading of authentic texts and in their own original writing.
This essential problem is analogous to misrepresenting and overemphasizing phonics and decoding—especially when the instruction is isolated and not firmly anchored to the real goal of reading instruction, critical comprehension.
So let’s circle back to the bicycling analogy.
Using training wheels to teach children to ride a bicycle is a traditional and deeply misguided approach, one that is grounded in misreading what riding a bicycle is at its core—not the pedaling but the balancing. Therefore, balance bicycles are the better way to start.
Keep in mind one can coast on a bicycle and still be riding if the person has mastered balancing—as well as several other skills that include braking, holding a straight line, turning, and of course pedaling.
Reading is not dependent on decoding, and a child is only reading if they are making meaning from text. Just as someone can ride a bicycle by coasting, a child can read text for meaning purely by using sight word knowledge.
Yes, to be a cyclist one must eventually (and soon) master pedaling, and yes, no one reads entirely by sight word recognition (although expert readers depend on many comprehension strategies, and likely rarely use phonics rules to accomplish understanding).
And as I noted above, both proficient cyclists and proficient readers exhibit a huge array of skills simultaneously, intuitively, and independently—the ultimate goal of any instruction.
For reading instruction with beginning readers, then, systematic phonics instruction in a phonics-first setting that prioritizes pronouncing nonsense words is misguided and harmful practice.
As Stephen Krashen has shown, both systematic phonics for all students and no phonics instruction are harmful; instead, beginning readers need basic phonics combined with many other reading strategies that are all targeting critical comprehension.
Let’s think more deeply about decoding and phonics in ways I asked us to do with parts of speech. Consider asking students to pronounce “dove” and “wind” out of context, and now consider these sentences:
The dovedove out of the tree and scared Brees.
Because of the fog, you can watch the windwind through the valley.
Phonics first fails in the same way as using training wheels to teach bicycling. Phonics rules provide only one skill in the complex journey to critical comprehension. And phonics is not even foundational or essential when a text includes sight words recognized by the reader.
Finally, again like riding a bicycle, becoming an independent, eager, and expert reader—one who has a large vocabulary and a complex toolbox for making meaning (including phonics)—mostly comes from doing the authentic thing—not from isolated skills instruction as a prerequisite to doing the real thing.
[1] SVR, at best, is one of the major reading theories of the late twentieth century; in my view, it is not even the most compelling. But current theories of reading have moved beyond SVR; for example, (1) according to Duke and Cartwright (2021), current theories have supplanted SVR in three ways: (a) by identifying additional reasons for struggling readers, (b) by demonstrating that rather than being sequential, pronunciation and comprehension overlap, and (c) by stressing the importance of “active self-regulation” in learning to read, and (2) according to Filderman, et al., (2022) SVR is inadequate for teaching students comprehension.
Duke, N.K., & Cartwright, K.B. (2021). The science of reading progresses: Communicating advances beyond the simple view of reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(S1), S25–S44. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.411
Filderman, M. J., Austin, C. R., Boucher, A. N., O’Donnell, K., & Swanson, E. A. (2022). A meta-analysis of the effects of reading comprehension interventions on the reading comprehension outcomes of struggling readers in third through 12th grades. Exceptional Children, 88(2), 163–184. https://doi.org/10.1177/00144029211050860
Peter Greene, former teacher and one of the best public thinkers about education today, found this Tweet “familiar” as a veteran of education reform debates:
Thinking one can just stride into a field and quickly solve/dismiss problems really smart people have thought long and hard about for years takes extraordinary hubris & often fails to honestly acknowledge the multiple forces that led to one’s own success 2/2
Greene and I share long careers in education and the mind-numbing experience of rebuking education reform claims and policies over the last few decades. Education reform, in fact, has followed the exact path Richard Sever warns against in his Tweet.
While some of the larger aspects of the education reform movement that began after A Nation at Risk was released under Ronald Reagan have sputtered—charter schools, Teach For America, standards and high-stakes testing, stack ranking and value-added methods for teacher evaluation—the reform du jour is focused on reading.
Since the mid- to late 2010s—specifically 2018—the science of reading (SOR) movement has been driven by media and parental advocacy, resulting in new or revised reading legislation in dozens of states across the U.S. [1]
The problem is that political leaders are disproportionately influenced by inexpert advocacy such as Emily Hanford’s journalism and parent organizations for dyslexia (Decoding Dyslexia).
Journalists and parents often share missionary zeal for topics, especially issues related to education, but lack historical, disciplinary, and statistical expertise to see clearly both the very real failures in education and the complex solutions that are needed.
Are too many students being mis-served as emerging readers in our schools, as media claim? Yes!
Is the current education system failing to identify and serve students with reading challenges, including dyslexia, as parents claim? Yes!
None the less, media and parental evidence, claims, and demands for solutions are mostly jumbled, misleading, and not scientific.
And the really bad news is that political leaders and the public receive almost exclusively the misleading messaging from media and parent advocates, but not the high-quality scholarship that debunks the claims and offers more credible and needed solutions.
For example, Hanford’s “Hard Words” and Decoding Dyslexia’s advocacy are both compelling on the surface, especially to the general public and political leaders with no background in education or literacy.
Hanford triggered the SOR movement by highlighting the claimed outlier success of schools in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania linked to a phonics-intensive program and increased test scores, for example:
This arguments fits into the larger education reform narrative started decades ago—that poverty is an excuse (and thus the “no excuses” reform movement) and that simply changing how we teach students can increase achievement (in-school only reform absent social change).
As those of us in education have witnessed since the 1980s, this argument is very compelling to the public and political leaders, and it is completely false.
“Miracle” schools, in fact, do not exist. [2]
The problem with media covering education miracles is that the basic evidence is both accurate and deeply misleading.
Because of pressures to raise test scores during the accountability era of education, many educators and policy makers have found ways to raise scores, but those test score gains are mostly weak forms of assessment (do they really measure what they claim?) and those gains often disappear over time (see the Florida model that uses grade retention to raise scores [3]).
To the first concern—are the test scores measuring reading?—those of us in the field of literacy recognized that the test data is from DIBELS, a phonics-intensive program that teaches and then measures students’ ability to pronounce real and nonsense words.
In other words, this test defines reading as “pronunciation”—not comprehension, which intensive phonics instruction does not increase [4] and which, in most cases, is what we mean when we are concerned about “reading.”
Therefore, yes, these schools did raise pronunciation test scores among high-poverty students, but no, this is not a reading miracle.
And to the second concern—are increased test scores real, sustained learning over time?—Gerald Coles investigated and discovered:
As I noted above, follow-up studies on the effects of early phonics programs have failed to find long-term benefits on reading achievement. Therefore, I wrote to two administrators in the Bethlehem schools, asking for information about the students’ reading ability in later grades. Neither replied to my request. Consequently, I used the publicly available Pennsylvania reading/language arts tests results, which provided scores for Bethlehem schools. By these measures, the reading achievement for students in SBSL early-reading program either stayed the same as students who had not used the program in previous years or else made only very modest improvement….
[T]here is Hanover Elementary school, where only 15.6 percent of students qualify for free or discounted lunch. There the impact of students’ economic circumstances was clearly in the opposite direction: About 85 percent of its students—virtually the same percentage as lunch standards—met the reading/language arts standards both before and after the introduction of SBSL program. Similar parallels between the beginning reading skills program and literacy outcomes can be found for all other Bethlehem schools.
Like almost all the “miracle” claims before this—often among charter school advocates—Bethlehem, PA is a mirage, not a miracle.
But this misrepresentation is typical of media coverage of SOR in that journalists advocate for “science” but use “anecdotes” as their evidence. In short, Hoffman, Hikida, and Sailors conclude: “the SOR community do not employ the same standards for scientific research that they claimed as the basis for their critiques.”[5]
Parental advocacy has the same problems as media advocacy, as represented by the Decoding Dyslexia movement. Richard Allington has detailed that Decoding Dyslexia is both highly effective in advocating for dyslexia legislation while also being misinformed about the complexity of dyslexia, a highly contested diagnosis within the fields of literacy and special needs.
Parents advocating for struggling readers is grounded in a valid concern. However, recent overviews of the research on dyslexia and the International Literacy Association (ILA) have clearly detailed the following: (1) no clear definition for identifying dyslexia exists, (2) no one instructional approach is appropriate for all students identified with dyslexia (including Orton-Gillingham phonics or systematic phonics for all students), (3) universal screen for dyslexia is likely to cause more harm than good, and (4) teacher expertise and autonomy are essential for teaching any students struggling to read.
Yet, parents advocating for dyslexia endorse policy and practices counter to that research while also likely greatly overestimating the number of students who should be identified as dyslexic.
The irony of the SOR movement promoted by media and parental advocacy is that it is significantly out of touch with the evidence, the research, and the science.
The media and parents certainly can and should play a role in monitoring how well our education system teaches reading and serves the needs of all students. But neither the media or parents are credible advocates for identifying either the problems or the solutions around reading achievement.
Media and parents demonstrate both the hubris Richard Sever warned about in his Tweet and the tragic flaw of hubris portrayed in literature for eons. The expertise and humility that come with understanding the complexity of science and research, it seems, is far more important than good intentions and the sort of arrogance that comes from never having thought long and deeply about an issue.
[1] Cummings, A. (2021). Making early literacy policy work in Kentucky: Three considerations for policymakers on the “Read to Succeed” act. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved May 18, 2023, from https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/literacy
Cummings, A., Strunk, K.O., & De Voto, C. (2021). “A lot of states were doing it”: The development of Michigan’s Read by Grade Three law. Journal of Educational Change. Retrieved April 28, 2022, from https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10833-021-09438-y
Collet, V.S., Penaflorida, J., French, S., Allred, J., Greiner, A., & Chen, J. (2021). Red flags, red herrings, and common ground: An expert study in response to state reading policy. Educational Considerations, 47(1). https://doi.org/10.4148/0146-9282.2241
Huddleston, A. P. (2014). Achievement at whose expense? A literature review of test-based grade retention policies in U.S. school. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 22(18). http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/epaa.v22n18.2014
Jasper, K., Carter, C., Triscari, R., & Valesky, T. (2017, January 9). The effects of the mandated third grade retention on standard diploma acquisition and student outcome over time: A policy analysis of Florida’s A+ Plan. Policy Analysis.
[4] From Coles:
Based on the research on phonics in previous decades, cited in the Report of the National Reading Panel, these results should not be surprising. The conclusions of one study on phonics and similar word-level training represents the overall findings on intensive phonics instruction: Benefits for “reading comprehension were not significant” (Reading the Naked Truth, 92). A recent analysis by literacy researcher Jeff McQuillin drew similar conclusions from a large-scale study in England.20 Once again, “phonics instruction has a modest effect on initial literacy levels, but little to no impact on reading achievement in later grades.”
[5] Hoffman, J.V., Hikida, M., & Sailors, M. (2020). Contesting science that silences: Amplifying equity, agency, and design research in literacy teacher preparation. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S259. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.353
NYC Mayor Eric Adams is proving to be an unreliable source on just about anything he mentions. Adams seems more interested in crying false “crisis” for political gain than doing the hard work of political leadership.
First, crime:
On @fox5ny, @NYCMayor Adams says "I have never in my professional career, have never witnessed crime at this level," which is a very strange thing to say for someone who came up in the NYPD in the '80s and '90s.
Mayor Eric Adams announced Thursday the details of a plan to turn around a literacy crisis in New York City and, in particular, to serve thousands of children in public schools who may have dyslexia, an issue deeply personal to the mayor, who has said his own undiagnosed dyslexia hurt his academic career.
Unfortunately, neither Adams nor the NYT will receive the sort of public correcting for the nonsense in this article, but Lola Fadulu’s coverage of Adams’s dyslexia program is just as much political fearmongering as Adams’s misrepresentation of crime.
In fact, media, parents, and political leaders have been following a similar and misleading playbook for several years now—one that Fadulu and Adams demonstrate so perfectly it could read as parody:
Currently, there is a well-organized and active contingent of concerned parents and educators (and others) who argue that dyslexia is a frequent cause of reading difficulties, affecting approximately 20% of the population, and that there is a widely accepted treatment for such difficulties: an instructional approach relying almost exclusively on intensive phonics instruction. Proponents argue that it is based on “settled science,” which they refer to as “the science of reading” (SOR). The approach is based on a narrow view of science and a restricted range of research focused on word learning and, more recently, neurobiology, but pays little attention to aspects of literacy like comprehension and writing or dimensions of classroom learning and teacher preparation.
“School officials plan to screen nearly all students for dyslexia.” Universal screening for dyslexia is a crisis response to a false crisis. Johnston and Scanlon explain: “Good first instruction and early intervention for children with a slow start in the word reading aspect of literacy reduces the likelihood they will encounter serious difficulty. Thus, early screening with assessments that can inform instruction is important. Screening for dyslexia, particularly with instructionally irrelevant assessments, offers no additional advantage [emphasis added].”
“School leaders are requiring school principals to pivot to a phonics-based literacy curriculum, which literacy experts say is the most effective way to teach reading to most children.” Systematic phonics for all students, and specifically for students identified with dyslexia, is an old and false solution for students struggling with reading, per Johnston and Scanlon: “Evidence does not justify the use of a heavy and near-exclusive focus on phonics instruction, either in regular classrooms or for children experiencing difficulty learning to read (including those classified as dyslexic [emphasis in original].”
“New York is facing a literacy crisis: Fewer than half of all third to eighth graders and just 36 percent of Black and Latino students were proficient on the state reading exams administered in 2019, the most recent year for which there is data.” The NYT helped fuel the newest round of “reading crisis” in the U.S. with an over-reaction to 2019 NAEP reading scores, but the cold hard truth is that marginalized students have never been equitably served in NYC schools or anywhere in the U.S. as any point in history. (See how the reading crisis around NAEP is misrepresented HERE.)
“It is difficult to say how many children have dyslexia in the city because the department hasn’t been able to systematically identify them, said Carolyne Quintana, the deputy chancellor for teaching and learning. But she noted that national figures estimate that one in five children have dyslexia.” Dyslexia advocacy and political responses to dyslexia are misrepresenting dyslexia by overstating how common dyslexia is (some credible experts suggest dyslexia isn’t even a credible label for reading, in fact), and are ignoring that no common definition for dyslexia exists. “Definitions of dyslexia vary widely, and none offer a clear foundation—biological, cognitive, behavioral, or academic—for determining whether an individual experiencing difficulty with developing word reading skill should be classified as dyslexic,” Johnston and Scanlon conclude.
“Naomi Peña said she has four children with dyslexia, and is one of several parents who helped launch the Literacy Academy Collective, an advocacy group.” Parental advocacy groups addressing dyslexia have had direct impact on reading and dyslexia policy across the U.S.; however, that impact has overwhelmingly prompted misguided legislation and policy. Writing about similar political responses to dyslexia in Tennessee, Allington raises a key concern: “What I find most disturbing about the recent Tennessee dyslexia law is the absence of any input from the Literacy Association of Tennessee (LAT) as well as the absence of members of the Dyslexia Advisory Council drawn from the membership of LAT.”
“The additional support includes more intensive instruction steeped in the Orton-Gillingham approach [1], which teaches reading with more hands-on methods that break down words into smaller, more digestible parts.” While the larger push for systematic phonics instruction for all students is misguided, advocates for dyslexia often focus on Orton-Gillingham specifically. Yet, as the International Literacy Association (ILA) shows: “As yet, there is no certifiably best method for teaching children who experience reading difficulty (Mathes et al., 2005). For instance, research does not support the common belief that Orton-Gillingham–based approaches are necessary for students classified as dyslexic (Ritchey & Goeke, 2007; Turner, 2008; Vaughn & Linan-Thompson, 2003).”
“Under the new plan, school officials will require principals, who can choose their curriculums, shift toward a reading program that is based in reading science. Many currently use one developed by Lucy Calkins, an academic at Teachers College, Columbia University, that has repeatedly come under fire.” The dyslexia movement is part of a larger “science of reading” movement that overemphasizes the role of systematic phonics but also attacks popular reading programs across the U.S. See How to Navigate Social Media Debates about the “Science of Reading” [UPDATED] for a thorough examination of the flaws with misusing the term “science.” See also A Response to EdReports’ Assessment of Units of Study for Teaching Reading, Writing and Phonics.
Media and political leaders as well as parent advocates are trapped in a false belief about reading and dyslexia—paralleling the public misunderstanding about crime rates.
Do students struggling to read, especially marginalized students, deserve to be better served in our schools? Absolutely, whether they are diagnosed with dyslexia or not.
But NYC’s plan is political fearmongering, not good policy or practice.
Political leaders would be well served to heed Johnston and Scanlon’s guidelines, including these:
Although there are likely heritable dimensions to reading and language difficulties, there is no way to translate them into implications for instructional practice….
Legislation (and district policies) aligned with the SOR perspectives on dyslexia will necessarily require tradeoffs in the allocation of resources for teacher development and among children having literacy learning difficulties. These tradeoffs have the potential to privilege students experiencing some types of literacy learning difficulties while limiting instructional resources for and attention available to students whose literacy difficulties are not due (exclusively) to word reading difficulties.
[1] Current research does not support O-G as more effective than other, and less expensive, methods; see here and these recent studies/overviews:
Johnston, P., & Scanlon, D. (2021). An examination of dyslexia research and instruction with policy implications. Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice, 70(1), 107. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1177/23813377211024625
Hall, C., et al. (2022, September 13). Forty years of reading intervention research for elementary students with or at risk for dyslexia: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Reading Research Quarterly. Retrieved October 17, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.477
Stevens, E. A., Austin, C., Moore, C., Scammacca, N., Boucher, A. N., & Vaughn, S. (2021). Current state of the evidence: Examining the effects of Orton-Gillingham reading interventions for students with or at risk for word-level reading disabilities. Exceptional Children, 87(4), 397–417. https://doi.org/10.1177/0014402921993406
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 