The media have a long and muddled fascination with children and students reading, especially declaring that we are experiencing a reading crisis. However, even more concerning that this misguided click-bait approach to journalism is that the media more often than not promote crisis rhetoric with misinformation.

[UPDATES IV and V below]

I. Education Week

Possibly the most (un)impressive example of this is from Education Week. In just the last few weeks, EdWeek has posted a catalogue of misinformation about their favorite topic—the science of reading:

Here are a few reminders about the nonsense and misinformation that EdWeek will not set aside:

• Media and Parental Advocacy Not Credible Sources for Reading Policy
• LETRS is not supported by research (but is being promoted by the science of reading movement). See:

• The “Science of Reading” Multiverse
• “Science of Reading” Media Advocacy Continues to Mislead
• How to Navigate Social Media Debates about the “Science of Reading” [UPDATED]
• Dismantling the “Science of Reading” and the Harmful Reading Policies in its Wake [UPDATED]

II. Newsweek

Next is a nonsense article, more misinformation, from Newsweek: Education Expert: A Love to ‘Read by Three’ Is the Answer to Success.

Consider instead this response from Stephen Krashen:

This is a response to Bethlam Forsa, “A Love to ‘Read by Three’ Is The Answer to Success.” (https://www.newsweek.com/education-expert-love-read-three-answer-success-1727222).

Published in the Newsweek Expert Forum, an “invitation-only network of influential leaders, experts, executives and entrepreneurs.” (This response was not invited.) Forsa cannot be reached by email or telephone. She is the president of Savvas, formerly Pearson K12.

It is widely believed that failure at grade 3 predicts school failure later on in school (Forsa, “A love to read by three,” 7/25/22).

If true, we should study what factors predict success by the end of grade 3.

In Lao, Lee, McQuillan and Krashen (2021), we summarized the results of three studies of ten -year old children on a test of reading comprehension, the PIRLS test, 10 year olds in 45 countries in 2006, in 57 countries in 2011 and in 61 countries in 2016. 

The number of children tested ranged from 3349 to 18,245 and was administered in the national language of the country.

In agreement with Forsa’s recommendation, the best predictor was access to reading material, represented here as the presence of a school library). High levels of poverty meant lower levels of reading competence, as did the amount of reading instruction in school and whether children had developed some reading competence before starting school. 

The clear winner: access to books. There was the most popular recommendation among the public, direct instruction in reading, was not a strong predictor. There is plenty of support for this predictor from other studies, see especially the work of Keith Curry Lance. https://keithcurrylance.com and S. Krashen (2004).

Krashen, S. 2004. The Power of Reading. Libraries Unlimited.

Lao, C., Lee, S-Y., McQuillan, J., and Krashen, S. 2021. Predicting reading ability among ten-year olds: Poverty (negative), school libraries (positive), instruction (zero), early literacy (zero). Language Magazine 20,10: 20-21. https://tinyurl.com/cn3nekc4

See also the following:

• Beware Grade-Level Reading and the Cult of Proficiency
• The “Word Gap”: A Reader

III. The New York Times

The NYT certainly is running a close second to EdWeek for misinformation (see here and here). But the newest NYT article is even worse than misinformation because it is really bad (and not surprising) news: New Reading Curriculum Is Mired in Debate Over Race and Gender.

It is important to connect the dots and recall that states have banned reading programs, as reported here:

The Arkansas Division of Secondary and Elementary Education announced in October 2019 that any curriculum that utilizes cueing strategies won’t be approved for use in the state, meaning that Calkins’ materials and another popular program, Fountas and Pinnell Classroom, are effectively banned. Colorado released a list of approved core reading curriculum, and Calkins’ programs weren’t on the list. A group outside St. Louis sent a letter signed by 216 parents, students and taxpayers to the school board asking that Calkins, and Fountas and Pinnell be dropped. The Oakland Unified School District, whose use of Calkins’ products was highlighted in the 2019 APM Reports story, announced it was forming a committee to consider adopting new curriculum. And Student Achievement Partners, a nonprofit consulting group, published a review that concluded Calkins’ curriculum materials are “unlikely to lead to literacy success for all of America’s public schoolchildren.” 

Influential literacy expert Lucy Calkins is changing her views

Republican legislation has begun to erode academic freedom among previously respected academic publishers, such as Heinemann. The combination of politics and the market is bad news for teachers, bad news for education, and bad news for students.

IV. Time [UPDATED]

Time has joined the mainstream media misinformation parade with Inside the Massive Effort to Change the Way Kids Are Taught to Read.

The expansive piece follows a now old and tired pattern of misrepresenting nearly everything about reading and teaching reading. In fact, the article almost comically fails the fact checking guidelines I developed years ago.

The post opens with a garbled defense of the reading program Open Court, blaming (of course) teachers for abandoning the program (and characterizing those teachers as driven by wokeness, not concern for students). Here is what is left out: Open Court was at the center of the Reading First scandal, and careful reviews of the program have shown that it simply does not meet the exact standards the science of reading movement calls for. (See McQuillan’s review and the review at phonics-friendly EdReports.)

Misinformation by omission.

Luscombe offers yet another, and somewhat breezy, inaccurate portrayal of whole language:

There are many schools of thought on how best to aid this process, but the main contretemps has been about whether kids need to be taught how to sound out words explicitly or whether, if you give them enough examples and time, they’ll figure out the patterns. The latter theory, sometimes known as whole language, says teaching phonics is boring and repetitive, and a large percentage of English words diverge from the rules. (Hello there, though, thought, through, trough and tough!) But if you immerse children in beautiful stories, they’ll be motivated to crack the code, to recognize each word. The counterargument is that reading is as connected to hearing as it is to sight. It begins, phonics advocates say, with speech. This understanding, and the data that supports it, has become known as the science of reading.

Massive Effort to Change the Way Kids Are Taught to Read

The goal is to frame whole language (and balanced literacy; see later in the article) as nothing more than a whim and elevate the real “science of reading.” See here for a full and accurate understanding of whole language, and here and here for balanced literacy.

Of course misinformation articles on reading must cite and greatly misrepresent the National Reading Panel (NRP). Once again, the NRP reports were deeply flawed since the panel was underfunded and understaffed; the panel also lacked any teachers and limited their review of research to narrow quantitative studies. See a fuller examination of NRP here.

The piece builds as expected to focusing on dyslexia and making a pretty huge (and inaccurate) claim:

Just as most children, no matter how many times they’ve been in a car, still need to be taught to drive, most readers benefit from being explicitly taught how sounds and letters go together. This is true not just for dyslexics (who represent about 10% of all learners) but for the majority of readers.

Massive Effort to Change the Way Kids Are Taught to Read

One of the worst aspects of the “science of reading” movement and the state legislation it has prompted is that all students are being treated as if they are dyslexic, or struggling. Not only are the movement and parent advocate misrepresenting the research on dyslexia, they are pathologizing all reading. See here and here for a more nuanced and complex understanding of dyslexia and addressing struggling readers.

And no misinformation piece on reading is complete now with the “Mississippi Miracle” propaganda. To be brief, there is no credible research showing Mississippi improved NAEP scores by using the “science of reading”; in fact, it is likely the score bumps come from excessive grade retention. See a full analysis of Mississippi’s NAEP scores here.

Part of the Mississippi and “science of reading” propaganda relies on general readers simply accepting that everything being endorsed is, well, “scientific”; however, once again, the article champions the power of LETRS, a program to train teachers in phonics and reading instruction. Another example of misinformation by omission since:

A growing number of U.S. states have funded and encourage and/or require teachers to attend professional development using Moats’s commercial LETRS program, including Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, and Texas. This is despite the fact that an Institute of Education Sciences study of the LETRS intervention found almost no effects on teachers or student achievement (Garet et al., 2008). (p. S259)

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

The article ends by praising Emily Hanford and trashing teacher education—the former has no credibility and the latter is simply more misinformation. See just one example on Hanford here, and here for teacher education.

Just like cries of reading “crisis,” the Time article offers nothing new by traveling down a well-worn path of misinformation that now seems the only direction mainstream media can see.

V. The New York Times (Again) [UPDATED]

Let’s end 2022 with some context.

I recommend this scholarly analysis of media coverage of SOR by MacPhee, Handsfield, & Paugh (2021):

I also recommend the series of blogs posts from Aukerman addressing media coverage of SOR (HERE, HERE, and HERE).

Now to the (potentially) last example of 2022, again from the NYT: In Memphis, the Phonics Movement Comes to High School.

This latest coverage of reading by Sarah Mervosh almost reads like parody now since the mainstream media is recycling over and over the initial and inaccurate coverage by Emily Hanford (see the links above), but this time suggesting this false narrative applies to high school.

What does this newest article get predictably wrong?

First, the uncritical acceptance of the “science of reading” movement and then of course the mischaracterization of balanced literacy:

The program in Memphis is an extension of a growing national movement to change the way younger children are taught to read, based on what has become known as “the science of reading.” And it is a sign of how sharply the pendulum has swung in the decades-long, contentious debate over reading instruction, moving away from a flexible “balanced literacy” approach that has put less emphasis on sounding out words, and toward more explicit, systematic teaching of phonics.

In Memphis, the Phonics Movement Comes to High School

Next a quick reference (no citation) to “brain research” and then a hyperlink to the out-dated and (again) misrepresented NRP report:

Brain science has shown that reading is not automatic, and longstanding research supports the need for sequenced sound-it-out instruction, along with books that build vocabulary and knowledge.

In Memphis, the Phonics Movement Comes to High School

I recommend seeing the recent and much more complex research base on brain research and phonics instruction HERE.

Tennessee like many other states have turned to retraining teachers, a market boom for education business (again):

Tennessee has aggressively pushed for statewide change. Last year, the state’s Republican legislature and governor, Bill Lee, passed a law that required all elementary schoolteachers be trained in a phonics-based approach, with optional literacy training for middle and high school teachers. More than 40,000 teachers have participated in the training so far, according to the state’s education department.

In Memphis, the Phonics Movement Comes to High School

The article returns to misrepresenting balanced literacy by linking to Hanford, a discredited article by Goldstein in the NYT, and Education Week, which routinely repackages Hanford’s narrative:

In the early to mid-2010s, when high schoolers today were in elementary school, many schools practiced — and still practice — “balanced literacy,” which focuses on fostering a love of books and storytelling. Instruction may include some phonics, but also other strategies, like prompting children to use context clues — such as pictures — to guess words, a technique that has been heavily criticized for turning children away from the letters themselves.

In Memphis, the Phonics Movement Comes to High School

The article ends by mimicking Hanford’s original article and her misleading coverage of Mississippi; here the implied “miracle” is Tennessee.

As Coles exposed in Hanford’s original coverage of Pennsylvania, don’t buy it.

The great irony facing us now is that the very worst place to read about reading is mainstream media—unless you are prepared to do the hard work journalists are not doing and interrogate the tired and relentless misinformation at the center of all the misguided crisis rhetoric around reading.

Recommended

Making sense of reading’s forever wars, Leah Durán and Michiko Hikida

A core aspect of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation in 2001 was the report from the National Reading Panel (NRP) [1].

The NRP report represents a key feature of NCLB that isn’t being interrogated fully during the current “science of reading” (SOR) movement: NCLB mandated that instructional practices must be scientifically based (similar to the call for reading instruction to be “scientific” today).

If federal legislation already mandated reading instruction must be research-based two decades ago, why are we experiencing yet another Chicken Little moment claiming that teachers and teacher educators do not know or simply refuse to implement the SOR?

First, the NRP demonstrates key problems with identifying the research base along with then finding practical ways to inform day-to-day classroom instruction with that evidence.

The best way to describe the results of the NRP, then, is that it was a highly contested report that claimed to identify the then-current state of scientific research on how children acquire reading and how best to teach reading.

When the report was issued, Joanne Yatvin, a panel member, challenged the panel for lacking classroom teachers, protested the narrow definition of “scientific” the panel used to review the then-current state of evidence on reading, and predicted (accurately) that the panel findings would be misrepresented.

See Yatvin’s work here:

• Yatvin, J. (2002). Babes in the woods: The wanderings of the National Reading Panel. The Phi Delta Kappan, 83(5), 364-369
• Yatvin, J. (2003). I told you so! The misinterpretation and misuse of The National Reading Panel Report. Education Week, 22(33), 44-45, 56. https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2003/04/30/33yatvin.h22.html
• NRP minority view

The NRP findings also were challenged by scholars such as Elaine Garan; see here:

• Garan, E. M. (2001, March). Beyond smoke and mirrors: A critique of the National Reading Panel report on phonics. Phi Delta Kappan, 82(7), 500– 506. https://doi.org/10.1177/003172170108200705

The NRP report and the debates prompted by the report are a stark lesson in the problems surrounding establishing the “science” of anything in education, but the report also demonstrates the essential problem with politicizing both research and educational policy/practice.

The NRP was a political vehicle similar to Reagan’s A Nation at Risk, and the result is not a dispassionate overview of research on reading but a distorted report driven by internal and external ideological biases.

That political element, in fact, brought the promises of the NRP and scientifically-based reading practices to its ultimate demise—a Reading First scandal grounded in federal funding and textbook adoption.

When the NRP was released and throughout the 2000s, then, the only fair way to describe the findings of the NRP was that the report was contested within the field of literacy, overly narrow, and ultimately derailed by political and ideological bias.

None the less, the NRP introduced a framework, the five pillars of reading, that remains influential today: Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Fluency, Vocabulary, and Comprehension.

However, as Yatvin warned, what the NRP found is typically misrepresented, especially related to phonics; one extremely useful source for understanding what the NRP concluded is a teacher’s guide created by Diane Stephens in 2008:

• Stephens, D. (2008). The federal government wants me to teach what? A teacher’s guide to the National Reading Panel report. National Council of Teachers of English.

Here, paraphrased, are the key points highlighted by Stephens (herself quoting directly from the report):

• Phonemic Awareness: PA is a “means rather than an end”; doesn’t increase comprehension; only one of many elements needed to read independently.
• Phonics: Minimal value in kindergarten; no conclusion about phonics beyond grade 1 for “normally developing readers”; systematic phonics instruction in grades 2-6 with struggling readers has a weak impact on reading text and spelling; systematic phonics instruction has a positive effect in grade 1 on reading (pronouncing) real and nonsense words but not comprehension; at-risk students benefit from whole language instruction, Reading Recovery, and direct instruction.
• Fluency: The ability of students to make sense of text grammatically and with understanding of punctuation.
• Vocabulary: Vocabulary is acquired many ways by readers; number of words acquired cannot be accomplished through direct instruction. About 1/3 of vocabulary learning in grades 3 – 8 linked to reading.
• Comprehension: Weak evidence in report on comprehension. Emphasizes need for SBRR (scientifically based reading research) and “putting teachers in positions where their minds are the most valued educational resource.”

A short but accurate point to emphasize here is that the NRP did not (even discounting its contested process) find that systematic phonics instruction was essential for all students throughout the early years of schooling.

NRP in 2018-2022

The SOR movement has resurrected not only the NRP report and findings but also the zombie politics of misrepresenting the NRP findings.

A consistent aspect of the media messaging about the SOR has been citing NRP findings as proof that all students need systematic phonics instruction—from Hanford’s “Hard Words,” ground zero of the movement, to a recent critical piece by Goldstein on Lucy Calkins (the only research cited is the NRP report [2]).

One of the important ironies and contradictions of the SOR movement is that findings from the NRP are now twenty years old, and a robust body of research has both expanded and contested those findings. Notably, since SOR advocates often cite the NRP, many scholars have revisited and carefully detailed the flaws and misunderstandings surrounding the report

• 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. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.341
• 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
• 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

Important to note is that even Seidenberg (a cognitive scientist strongly endorsing the SOR) concludes with Borkenhagen and Kearns: “[T]he main point is that the report was not a sufficient basis for designing an effective reading curriculum, but that is how it is frequently taken—today.”

Further, Bowers offers a solid clarification about drawing conclusions from the NRP reports on phonics:

In sum, rather than the strong conclusions emphasized the executive summary of the NRP (2000) and the abstract of Ehri et al. (2001), the appropriate conclusion from this meta-analysis should be something like this:

“Systematic phonics provides a small short-term benefit to spelling, reading text, and comprehension, with no evidence that these effects persist following a delay of 4–12 months (the effects were not reported nor assessed). It is unclear whether there is an advantage of introducing phonics early, and there are no short- or long-term benefit for majority of struggling readers above grade 1 (children with below average intelligence). Systematic phonics did provide a moderate short-term benefit to regular word and pseudoword naming, with overall benefits significant but reduced by a third following 4–12 months.”

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

Since policy and classroom practice were significantly impacted after the NRP was released, and the NRP again is significantly influencing policy and practice today because of the SOR movement, if we genuinely are dedicating ourselves to scientific research to inform classroom practice, then we must no longer cite the NRP since it is both a politically flawed report carefully contested by literacy scholars for twenty years and since the current understanding of that science is better represented by recent scholarship (including those cited above).

Ultimately, the NRP report is merely an artifact in the history of the long and tedious reading debate that recurs every decade or so, negatively impacts classroom practices, and then recycles itself like scenes in Groundhog Day.

The media, advocates for reading, and political leaders would be better served focusing on current evidence available about how to teach reading and the complicated place of phonics instruction in that process. For example, England implemented systematic phonics mandates in 2006, and recent research has challenged that policy, concluding, once again, a need for balanced approaches to reading instruction that are student-centered and driven by teacher autonomy and expertise.

In 2022, citing the NRP is nothing more than zombie politics that erodes the credibility of anyone who continues to use those reports as proof of the SOR.

[1] See the full report, reports from the subgroups, and the minority view by panel member Joanne Yatvin.

[2] From Goldstein:

But in recent years, parents and educators who champion the “science of reading” have fiercely criticized Professor Calkins and other supporters of balanced literacy. They cite a half-century of research that shows phonics — sound it out exercises that are purposefully sequenced — is the most effective way to teach reading, along with books that build vocabulary and depth.

In the Fight Over How to Teach Reading, This Guru Makes a Major Retreat

Here is something you will never see:

But here is an actual headline:

Both studies (not-yet peer reviewed reading recovery study here, and peer-reviewed UK study here), by the way, are extremely important to anyone genuinely concerned about reading instruction. As a matter of fact, Reading Recovery has issued a thoughtful response to the research in the second, real, headline.

Since Emily Hanford established herself as the “science of reading” journalist in 2018, one would imagine that she would be fully invested in the full story of research on teaching reading. And of course, one would be wrong.

The “science of reading” movement is an ideological movement, not concerned about evidence or even reading achievement by students. There are phonics programs to sell and careers to boost.

When people complain about bias, one aspect of bias often ignored is that all media determine what to cover and what not to cover (Hanford covers anything that seems to further the “science of reading” propaganda, and ignores anything that challenges it). In the case above, the research on reading recovery is easy to twist into the “science of reading” agenda, but the research from the UK is a whole different matter.

To be fair, both studies raise some important questions, but probably do not prove any agenda conclusively. Why is reading achievement in the UK stagnant despite mandating systematic phonics for all students since 2006? Why do students receiving reading recovery intervention seem to score lower than other students over time (in similar ways to grade retention outcomes) in longitudinal studies?

These are damn good questions. And simply asking them is a step in the right direction—recognizing there are no simple answers to teaching or learning how to read.

Yet, they are questions that media and political leaders are unlikely to ask much less answer. Because too many people are invested in the “science of reading” propaganda machine, including Hanford.

Her recent co-authored piece, New research shows controversial Reading Recovery program eventually had a negative impact on children, follows a predictable pattern found in her New York Times mis-reporting on Mississippi’s 2019 NAEP scores: Make an overstated implication about the “science of reading” while including a slight hedge in the article after the Big Claim. See my unmasking here.

We can learn a few lessons from all this.

One is that if you have to lie or distort, you may not have a credible argument (see Hanford’s “science of reading” propaganda).

But a more valuable lesson is that we must have a much more nuanced and complex awareness about what it means to teach and learn reading. While I think many reading recovery teachers are doing important and effective work, we cannot have a simplistic faith that something with the “reading recovering” stamp is universally perfect.

As much as we would hope otherwise, there is no silver bullet.

That realization, however, should temper our understanding of the “science of reading” movement, an agenda that is paralyzed by its missionary zeal—and its persistent misinformation campaign that puts its agenda ahead of real concerns about effective teaching and learning.

Media advocates for the “science of reading,” Hanford and Natalie Wexler, for example, are doing far more harm than good because of their blind advocacy.

Journalists and politicians should not be determining how children learn to read. However, the public is often mislead by sensationalistic media coverage, such as that by Hanford—Mississippi Miracle! (well, “There’s no way to know for sure”), and Reading Recovery is a failure! (but … who knows?).

Here is a lesson: Don’t believe everything you read.

Here is a much harder lesson: Worry about what you don’t get to read.