Along with Decoding Dyslexia, The Reading League is likely the largest advocacy group for the “science of reading” (SOR). As I have detailed, however, there is a serious problem with the “science” in their advocacy.
Let me remind you of the standards for “science” that The Reading League has proposed:
Now, consider the following:
The problem lies in promoting decodable texts under the guise of SOR when here is the evidence on decodable texts [1]:
Here are the sponsors that promoted The Reading League’s recent conference. Some simply sell decoding books. If aware of peer-reviewed studies that I may have overlooked for any of these programs or assessments, please share.
For those of us of a certain age, well before the era of trending on social media, a simple ad for Wendy’s prompted the catch phrase “Where’s the beef?”
The ad made Clara Peller a star in her 80s, and it certainly helped create a national distinction among fast-food hamburger restaurants in the US.
As early as 2020, literacy scholars identified the bait-and-switch approach being used in the “science of reading” (SOR) movement—demanding science while relying on anecdotes:
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. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.353
Here are two recent posts on Twitter/X that provide an entry point into that bait-and-switch coming true:
Listen, I have yet to see any evidence that Balanced Literacy as theory or actual practice is the reason for reading struggles in kids. Maybe if there was research that proved it I would be more receptive. Unlike folks who use LETRS I do like research to justify my decisions. 😘
There is no point in this article where I discuss reading proficiency for children in Kindergarten. Yet, my work is cited in this way. Please check your claims. SMH…
— Tiffany A. Flowers (Author & Literacy Advocate) (@Prof_Flowers) March 18, 2024
Gilson asks a key and foundational question about the basis of the SOR movement—the unsupported claims of a reading crisis caused by balanced literacy and a few identified reading programs (primarily by Lucy Calkins and Fountas and Pinnell).
To be blunt, there is no scientific research showing a causal relationship between any reading theory or specific programs and a reading crisis. Notably, there simply isn’t any evidence that reading achievement is coherent enough or that reading programs are consistently used across the entire nation in ways that even make that claim possibly true.
And then, more insidious perhaps, SOR advocates not only bait-and-switch with science/anecdotes, the claims of “science” or “research” are often linked to journalism, not cited at all, cherry-picked evidence, or as Flowers calls out, misrepresentations of evidence.
The resulting legislation, then, is forcing successful schools to change programs and practices by sheer fiat, such as in Connecticut, or imposing bans and mandates that are wildly arbitrary.
Note the practices from a literature review of the science of reading below; please note that “not scientific” can mean either that scientific research has shown the practice to be ineffective or that no scientific research yet exists:
Not only must we ask “Where’s the science?” we must also ask why is three-cueing being banned in the same states mandating O-G phonics (multi sensory approaches), decodable texts, and LETRS training although all of there are technically not scientific?
The answer, of course, is that the SOR movement is mostly rhetorical ideological, and commercial.
Bans and mandates are about serving a narrow set of reading ideologies and lining the pockets of certain education markets.
Teachers, parents, and even students are starting to acknowledge that the SOR tsunami is causing great harm to teaching and learning reading.
This is late, but we simply all must start demanding that SOR advocates practice what they preach. When they make their condescending claims about teachers of reading, teacher educators, student reading achievement, and reading programs, we absolutely must ask, Where’s the science?
Many years ago, I was unusually excited to hear the keynote speaker at the annual SCCTE conference on Kiawah Island, SC—Harvey Smokey Daniels.
For many years in my methods courses for secondary ELA certifiers and practicing teachers, I used Best Practice by Steven Zemelman, Daniels, and Arthur Hyde.
Daniels surprised the attendees by noting that he was moving away from the term “best practice” because it had become ubiquitous and thus meaningless. He warned that many, if not most, books being published with “best practice” in the title were anything except best practice.
The term had moved from careful scholarship (the book Daniels co-authored is a wonderful and cautious attempt to translate a wide body of research into classroom practice among the major disciplines) to branding.
And thus, as Daniels lamented, “best practice” was lost in the abyss that is educational marketing.
Much more quickly and recently, Common Core experienced a meteoric rise and sudden crash and burn. In the mean time, classrooms materials were quickly labeled “Common Core” even as the movement was hastily erased before some states even implemented the standards or the national tests (my home state of SC did exactly that as a knee-jerk Republican maneuver to reject Obama, they believed).
Spurred in early 2018 with the rise of the “science of reading,” the “science of” movement appears to be in full swing with the addition of the “science of learning,” the “science of writing,” and the “science of math”—mostly following frantic claims of crisis based on test scores (usually NAEP data).
While both media assessments lack credibility, the rhetoric itself harkens yet another education reform movement destined for the garbage bin. We seem unable to learn that the crisis/miracle reform cycle never works because the problems are always misrepresented and then the solutions are always mandates that will fail.
Let me note here that what made the original best practice approach a wonderful methods text is that the instructional practices were recommended as “increase” or “decrease”—not mandate or ban:
This helps show how the “science of reading” movement—grounded in media false stories and political mandates—is repeating the mistakes of dozens of reform movements before this “science of” nonsense.
The essential mistakes are framing “science of” as a mandate/ban or science/not science dichotomy.
Legislation across most states is now banning specific reading practices and programs while mandating other practices and programs.
While legislation should never ban or mandate specific practices in education, “science of reading” (SOR) legislation also fails by cherry-picking what counts as science/not science.
To be blunt, SOR legislation is driven by ideology and marketing, not science; the mandate/ban line is subject to cherry picking.
For example, many states are simultaneously banning three cueing as not scientific but mandating or funding decodable texts and multi-sensory approaches such as O-G phonics.
Unlike the careful work done on best practice by Daniels and others, the “science of” movement suffers from ham-fisted mandates and essential failures to understand what “science” means for classroom practice.
The Reading League, for example, limits what counts as “scientific” to experimental/quasi-experimental research that is published in peer-reviewed journals. While this is a ridiculously narrow use of evidence and research, it also poses several problems.
First, as the literature review above notes, the science/not science dichotomy can include both practices/programs that have scientific research supporting or not the practice/program or practice/programs that do not yet have any or enough scientific evidence (such as the programs LETRS).
Next, and more importantly, many people fundamentally misunderstand what the science/not science distinction means for classroom practice.
If we use medicine as an analogy, once a medication is found to be effective, that means that medicine X under Y conditions will produce Z outcomes for most people (a generalization).
What is often ignored is that there are at least two outlier groups in that claim; one group will not experience the positive outcome, and one group can experience negative outcomes.
As a teen, I fell into that latter group with both Tylenol (a reaction that can be life threatening) and penicillin.
If we insist on using the science/not science distinction, then, for classroom practices we must not translate that into mandate/ban.
The “science of” movement could be effective if we did two things: (a) expand the use of research to include more than narrowly “scientific” evidence, and (b) replace mandate/ban with implement with confidence/implement with caution.
Let me end by briefly considering what implement with confidence/implement with caution should accomplish.
If we use research/evidence/science to drive implement with confidence, that means those practices and programs can be used to plan broadly (year-long and unit plans prepared before teaching and before having evidence from students to guide instruction).
Those practices and programs, like medication, can be trusted to work for most students under defined conditions—recognizing that there will be outliers and conditions can change, thus changing outcomes.
Practices and programs that can be implemented with caution augment those initial plans and can serve the outliers as well as when conditions change.
Here is the key that the “science of” movement is failing most significantly: This process must honor the autonomy of the teacher to serve the individual needs of students.
As the swing in rhetoric about Alabama reveals (see also the realities about Florida and Mississippi), the “science of” movement is doomed to fail, doomed by repeating the mistakes of reform cycles we have blindly followed for over four decades.
Before the close reading below, let me offer several examples for context concerning how media have weaponized “science” resulting in misguided and even harmful reading legislation.
First, here is an example of a journalist posting an article by a journalist praising a journalist. What is missing? Actual research, evidence, or science.
Gottlieb’s article, oddly, repeats three times at the end that he is a journalist, but in the piece, he seems most concerned about advocating for Hanford:
As brilliantly illuminated by education journalist Emily Hanford’s articles over the past several years, and her 2023 “Sold a Story” podcast, the education establishment in this country — which includes textbook and curriculum publishers, schools of education and school districts — has been guilty of educational malpractice for decades, using now-discredited Whole Language methods for teaching reading.
Gottlieb refers to a report and data, but offers no links to any science or research to support any of his claims, again primarily supported by Hanford’s “brilliant” podcast.
Note that the subhead, written by editors, not the journalist (“The state’s reliance on cognitive science explains why”) is directly contradicted by Hanford, although the article itself implies the opposite of what she acknowledges:
What’s up in Mississippi? There’s no way to know for sure what causes increases in test scores, but Mississippi has been doing something notable: making sure all of its teachers understand the science of reading.
When Hanford makes huge claims about teachers being unprepared to teach reading (“But a lot of teachers don’t know this science“), the link provided circles back to her own journalism, not research, not science.
The consequences of this media cycle of using “science” to give stories credibility while omitting the actual science is reading policy grounded in misinformation, but also given the veneer of “science”:
Legislation that would require Michigan schools to use a reading curriculum and interventions for students with dyslexia that are backed by science has taken a different shape to satisfy school administrators who questioned the timeline in the bills.
I focus in this essay on the way that policymakers in education may promote policy through the use of words and terms used by academics and by the public about education topics – words and terms such as “evidence”, “what works”, “evidence-based policy” and “gold standard”. In particular, I examine ways in which vernacular and specialist meanings of “evidence” and “evidence-based” may become hybridised; ways in which technical terms may be appropriated by politicians and their advisers for public consumption, and, in the process, become degraded and corrupted in the service of their own policy agendas.
One issue with the use of “evidence” (and synonyms) is that policymakers are apt to resort to “’cherry-picking, obfuscation or manipulation.’”
Terms such as “evidence” (and “science”) are designed to create “the ‘almost magical power’ that certain words acquire to ‘… make people see and believe.'”
Thomas’s analysis found:
In not one of the 100 uses was “evidence” used prefatory to an actual itemisation of data in support of a proposition, and in all cases in the non-specific category, “evidence” was used with verbs – e.g. “there is evidence”, “England possesses evidence” – which simultaneously conferred authority via the supposed status of “evidence” at the same time as acting as a proxy for detailed enumeration of specific data. The authority of the non-specific “evidence” was amplified with many qualifications of the word, which, without detail of the data for which “evidence” was a proxy, appeared merely to add rhetorical weight rather than empirical support. These qualifiers included words/terms such as incriminating, overwhelming, strong, weak, little, hard, fresh, preliminary, sufficient, inadmissible, no, verifiable, hearsay, prima facie, disturbing, concrete.
As Thomas walks the reader through a few examples, he highlights: “’Evidence’ is here prefaced with ‘scientific’, seemingly to elevate its status in the absence of specificity – a strategy frequently employed in general discourse, as the analysis of the corpora revealed.”
“Evidence” (like “science” and “research”) is commonly used in place of citing actual evidence throughout media and political discourse. [As my examples above show, US media often link to other media when terms such as “science” and “research” are used.]
“Evidence” is weaponized, then, as Thomas explains:
All the examples given here reveal the fashioning of semiotics, the creation of meaning, and the dissemination of messages to non-specialist audiences in an outlet that, while widely read, offers no obvious route for scholarly interrogation or critique – at least, within a timeframe that might allow meaningful challenge. The putative “evidenced reality” proves on examination not to exist and the attempt is – in the world of retail politics – to craft an illusion of “evidence” in support of particular political agendas, employing devices such as the “negative other-representation” to attempt to augment the writer’s position.
And thus:
“Evidence”, in the pieces examined here, is used often with only a superficial allusion to any kind of research, and the research “evidence”, where any is cited, is often highly selectively sampled, with unconcealed deprecation of alternative interpretations.
Thomas then addresses the need for scholars to correct the misleading stories of media and political leaders instead of jumping on the bandwagon of reform for financial gain or prestige:
Academics must take a share of responsibility in the way that this process proceeds unimpeded. Such is the pressure inside universities for staff to be winning research grants and earning research income that there is inevitably willing involvement in con- tract research involving the kind of steering groups I have just mentioned.
Yet, Thomas ends by acknowledging that the weaponizing of “evidence” (and “science” along with other synonyms) immediately frames anyone challenging the stories negatively [1]:
In realising this, astute politicians can kill two birds with one stone. The knack is to enlist conspicuously with “science”, ostensibly adhering firmly to principles of reason and empiricism, while simultaneously projecting silliness, unreason and disengagement from research findings onto one’s interlocutor – as did Gibb in the phrase cited in illustrative case study 2: “The evidence is clear – however much it may shock the pre-conceived expectations of some education experts”, or as did Cummings in declaring that the “education world” handles scientific developments “badly”. Utter the phrase “the evidence is clear” and one straightaway affiliates oneself with reason, wisdom and unequivocal allegiance to empirical inquiry. One’s interlocutors, by contrast, are immediately forced onto the back foot, compelled to defend themselves against charges of not engaging with evidence – of subjectivity, sloppiness, credulity and narrow-mindedness borne of ideology.
Therefore, as Thomas concludes about “evidence,” here in the US we too must accept about “science” in media rhetoric and political policy”
On the basis of the analysis here, “evidence-based” is next to meaningless, given that the evidence in question is habitually unspecified and given that any evidence that is actually specified is carefully selected and/or offered as if it were superior to other evidence which suggests conclusions at variance to those being proffered. Protean and manoeuvrable, terms such as “evidence-based” are powerful rhetorically. They drop easily into conversation, speeches and documents to add weight to an assertion. Filling any gap, taking any shape, as instruments of retail politics they serve politicians’ purpose perfectly, but in any discourse with pretensions to scholarly independence and disinterestedness, their mutability ought to be troubling. Our responsibility as an academy is surely consistently to question these terms, to call for specification of evidence, to be ready to provide alternative evidence, to engage energetically with a broad range of media and social media (i.e. not just peer review and academic publications) and to question the validity of concepts such as “impact”.
[1] Compare this framing with how the Education Writers Association and Hanford frame the role of journalists and the expectation that implementing the “science of reading” may fail:
Bracey, G. W., & Jer. (2007). Interview: [Gerald W. Bracey]. The Journal of Educational Research, 100(5), 324–326. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27548196
First, based on NAEP data—similar to Cassidy’s report—Shakeel and Peterson in EdNext offer a much different view of student achievement in the US, notably about reading achievement:
Contrary to what you may have heard, average student achievement has been increasing for half a century. Across 7 million tests taken by U.S. students born between 1954 and 2007, …[r]eading scores have grown by 20 percent of a standard deviation during that time, nearly one year’s worth of learning.
When we examine differences by student race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, longstanding assumptions about educational inequality start to falter. Black, Hispanic, and Asian students are improving far more quickly than their white classmates in elementary, middle, and high school. In elementary school, for example, reading scores for white students have grown by 9 percent of a standard deviation each decade, compared to 28 percent for Asian students, 19 percent for Black students, and 13 percent for Hispanic students. Students from low socioeconomic backgrounds also are progressing more quickly than their more advantaged peers in elementary and middle school. And for the most part, growth rates have remained steady throughout the past five decades.
Shakeel and Peterson’s analysis confirms a concern raised by scholars for decades after A Nation at Risk—the manufactured educational crisis perpetuated by the media, political leaders, and education publishers.
Keeping the US in perpetual crisis has resulted in over four decades of blaming students, teachers, and public schools as failures even though education policy and funding have been exclusively controlled by political leadership at the national and state levels.
That leads us to a state-by-state analysis from NPE that avoids blaming students, teachers, and schools by holding political leadership accountable for the following:
Privatization Laws: the guardrails and limits on charter and voucher programs to ensure that taxpayers and students are protected from discrimination, corruption, and fraud.
Homeschooling Laws: laws to ensure that instruction is provided safely and responsibly.
Financial Support for Public Schools: sufficient and equitable funding of public schools.
Freedom to Teach and Learn: whether state laws allow all students to feel safe and thrive at school and receive honest instruction free of political intrusion.
The top five states include North Dakota, Connecticut, Vermont, Illinois, and Nebraska with Arkansas, North Carolina, Utah, Arizona, and Florida sitting at the bottom.
SC ranks 39th, receiving a grade of F for failing to fully support public schools or our democracy. That political negligence has resulted in decades of unwarranted negative messages about our schools, teachers, and students.
These reports combined offer SC an opportunity to resist crisis rhetoric as well as rejecting the ineffective reform cycles since the 1980s.
The problems facing our students, teachers, and schools are social inequities such as poverty and racism, but we also have a history of political negligence in our state that has resulted in a national recognition of our Corridor of Shame.
We can and should do better for our students, schools, and state by recognizing that the real failure is not our schools but our political leadership and the lack of political will to fund and support education as a foundational part of our democracy.
“Lack of support for early years language and communication development is leading to a “literacy crisis” that could be costing the economy £830m for each school year group, according to new research,” write Ella Creamer in The Guardian.
The report cited is a February 2024 analysis and heralds another round of reading crisis in the UK.
This is quite interesting considering that in 2006, the UK implemented a phonics-centered reform agenda that has been documented to have been robustly practiced, notably that all students have received systematic phonics in the UK for almost two decades:
Prior to 2006 the teaching of reading in most classrooms in England is best described as balanced instruction, in which some phonics teaching has always been part of the teaching of reading typically for children in the infant years (aged five to seven) although not necessarily ‘systematic phonics’ instruction…. However in 2006 the Rose Report recommended that there should be even more emphasis on phonics teaching….
This was followed by the increased emphasis on discrete teaching of phonics recommended by the Rose Report and the PNS from 2006 onwards. Further intensification of synthetic phonics teaching was seen in England’s national curriculum of 2014, along with a range of other measures to ensure teacher compliance with the prescribed method of teaching reading, including the use of the PSC; the vetting of phonics teaching schemes; and the use of the inspectorate to focus on outcomes in statutory reading assessments as a prime focus in school inspections.
Also of note, that research in 2022 revealed, once again, these reforms were misguided and ineffective. The researchers concluded, calling for a more balanced approach:
In addition to the importance of contextualised reading teaching as an evidence-based orientation to the teaching of reading we hypothesise the following pedagogical features that are likely to be effective. Phonics teaching is most likely to be effective for children aged five to six. Phonics teaching with children younger than this is not likely to be effective. A focus on whole texts and reading for meaning, to contextualise the teaching of other skills and knowledge, should drive pedagogy. Classroom teachers using their professional judgement to ensure coherence of the approach to teaching phonics and reading with other relevant teaching in their classroom is most likely to be effective. Insistence on particular schemes/ basals, scripted lessons, and other inflexible approaches is unlikely to be optimal. Well-trained classroom assistants, working in collaboration with their class teachers, could be a very important contribution to children’s reading development.
More evidence from the UK shows that reducing reading instruction to systematic phonics ignores both the science of reading instruction and the realities of human development. The mandatory phonics checks in the UK show that achievement correlates strongly with birth month, not instruction and certainly not resulting in the sort of reading achievement that avoids another reading war:
The “science of reading” movement in the US is misguided and costly, mostly benefitting commercial interests repackaging reading programs and materials emphasizing phonics.
States are rushing to mimic practices that have already failed in the UK. Our students and teachers deserve better.
“The 2022 NAEP results show that the average reading score for fourth graders is lower than it has been in over 20 years. For eighth and twelfth graders, average scores are at about a 30-year low,” states Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) in his new literacy report, adding, “The 2022 NAEP LongTerm Trend assessment for nine-year-old students showed average reading scores not seen since 1999.”
Cassidy’s alert about a reading crisis fits into dozens and dozens of media articles announcing crises and failures among students, teachers, and public schools all across the US. Typical of that journalism was Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times about a year ago:
One of the most bearish statistics for the future of the United States is this: Two-thirds of fourth graders in the United States are not proficient in reading.
Reading may be the most important skill we can give children. It’s the pilot light of that fire.
Yet we fail to ignite that pilot light, so today some one in five adults in the United States struggles with basic literacy, and after more than 25 years of campaigns and fads, American children are still struggling to read. Eighth graders today are actually a hair worse at reading than their counterparts were in 1998.
One explanation gaining ground is that, with the best of intentions, we grown-ups have bungled the task of teaching kids to read. There is growing evidence from neuroscience and careful experiments that the United States has adopted reading strategies that just don’t work very well and that we haven’t relied enough on a simple starting point — helping kids learn to sound out words with phonics.
As I have noted, education and reading crises have simply been a fact of US narratives since A Nation at Risk. But as I have also been detailing, these claims are misleading and manufactured.
Based on NAEP data—similar to Cassidy’s report—Shakeel and Peterson offer a much different view of student achievement in the US, notably about reading achievement:
This analysis demonstrates that the current reading crisis is manufactured, exclusively rhetorical and ideological, generating profit for media, politicians, and commercial publishers.
In short, the manufactured crises are distractions from the other contrarian truth about education as highlighted in the analysis from NPE:
This educational grading from NPE is unique because it doesn’t grade students, teachers, or public school, but holds political leadership accountable for supporting universal public education and democracy. The standards for these grades include the following:
Privatization Laws: the guardrails and limits on charter and voucher programs to ensure that taxpayers and students are protected from discrimination, corruption, and fraud.
Homeschooling Laws: laws to ensure that instruction is provided safely and responsibly.
Financial Support for Public Schools: sufficient and equitable funding of public schools.
Freedom to Teach and Learn: whether state laws allow all students to feel safe and thrive at school and receive honest instruction free of political intrusion.
These two examples come from contrasting ideologies, yet they offer contrarian truths about public schools and student achievement that would better serve how we talk about schools and student achievement as well as how we seek ways in which to reform those schools in order to better serve those students and our democracy.
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
Accordingly, when policymakers explore new guidelines, they would be wise to do the following:
• Be wary of overstatements and oversimplifications within media and public advocacy, acknowledging concerns raised but remaining skeptical of simplistic claims about causes and solutions.
• Attend to known influences on measurable student reading achievement, including the socioeconomics of communities, schools, and homes; teacher expertise and autonomy; and teaching and learning conditions.
• Recognize student-centered as an important research-supported guiding principle but also acknowledge the reality that translating such research-based principles into classroom practice is always challenging.
• Shift new reading policies away from prescription and mandates (“one-size-fits-all” approaches) and toward support for individual student needs and ongoing teacher-informed reform.
In rethinking past efforts and undertaking new reforms, policymakers should additionally move beyond the ineffective cycles demonstrated during earlier debates and reforms, avoid ing specific mandates and instead providing teachers the flexibility and support necessary to adapt their teaching strategies to specific students’ needs. Therefore, state policymakers should do the following:
• End narrowly prescriptive non-research-based policies and programs such as:
o Grade retention based on reading performance. o High-stakes reading testing at Grade 3. o Mandates and bans that require or prohibit specific instructional practices, such as systematic phonics and the three-cueing approach. o A “one-size-fits-all” approach to dyslexia and struggling readers.
• Form state reading panels, consisting of classroom teachers, researchers, and other literacy experts. Panels would support teachers by serving in an advisory role for teacher education, teacher professional development, and classroom practice. They would develop and maintain resources in best practice and up-to-date reading and literacy research.
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.
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 