One of the most heated debates in education right now is over approaches to teaching students to read. Although forty states and the District of Columbia have adopted laws to implement the “science of reading,” it is becoming increasingly clear that these policies are about using science as a branding tool to promote a policy strategy with a record of centralizing and privatizing control over what happens in schools.
Most educators will tell you there is no single correct way to teach reading—reading instruction is not “one size fits all,” and imposing methods of teaching reading that ignore student differences has not worked in the past. Educators most frequently find success with using some strategies from multiple styles and ideas, not from using a strict prescriptive teaching method. But the idea that the science of reading—an approach that, while loosely-defined, emphasizes explicit and systematic instruction in phonics—is the best and only way to effectively make students literate is being pushed by organizations and companies pushing their products as panaceas.
Before the pendulum swung towards state policies favoring the science of reading, “balanced literacy” was considered the dominant strategy of the past twenty years. Balanced literacy aimed to mix instruction of reading skills with approaching literacy holistically, which looked like reading books and writing in response to reading. Strategies for instruction included teaching students to figure out a word based on phonics, context, pictures, and/or word order. The result of teaching students to use multiple sources of information to solve an unknown word is that some students could get by reading simple texts without having really mastered basic phonics—a hole in their knowledge that eventually makes reading longer words slower and less accurate. The balanced literacy emphasis on exposure also involves having quiet independent reading time, and providing students with children’s literature that interests them. This method includes phonics instruction, but teaches it in a less structured way. As Dana Goldstein writes in The New York Times, in a classroom using the balanced literacy approach, “letter-sound relationships may be introduced as they come up in stories or through classroom games, instead of in a sequence designed to build foundational skills.”
Most of these ideas are not controversial on their own, but where the disagreement comes is in how much weight to put on each aspect of these approaches. For example, most educators agree that teaching phonics is important, but may disagree about how much to emphasize phonics, or whether all children need the same amount of phonics instruction. Most people agree that instruction should be organized to instill in students a love of reading, but may disagree about whether and how students’ interests should drive their instructional experiences.
Education mandates have been controversial in the past (remember Common Core?), and the science of reading approach has its detractors; even the two largest teachers unions are on opposite sides of the issue. While the National Educators Association (NEA) cautioned that the science of reading movement “has major impacts on students and teachers, reducing diversity in texts, and deprofessionalizing teaching,” the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) claims to have dedicated decades to advocacy for the science of reading.
Standards for instruction mandated by state or federal government are not inherently good or bad, but should not be the key measure of quality, since studies of standards-aligned instruction tend not to have positive results—possibly because aligning lessons tightly across the board with mandated standards leaves less room for teaching that tailors to individual student needs. Mandating some literacy instruction approaches and outlawing others is not about science, quality, or equity: It’s about tightening state control over which education companies are awarded contracts and which test outcomes matter.
Unlike previous reading legislation, science of reading policies do not mandate or empower schools to use evidence-based practices. Instead, they focus on using products such as reading programs, assessments, and professional development. Often, these products come from for-profit companies that have lobbied state legislators to require public school classrooms to use their materials. Some products, such as Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS) trainings, are written directly into state laws, while others appear on lists of state-approved options to which districts must transition with tight timelines for compliance.
Districts contracting with state-approved curriculum vendors could serve as the blueprint for how states exert more control over the skills, perspectives, ideas, authors, topics, and tools to which students are exposed in more grades and subjects.
It’s also not clear whether parents are completely behind the ideas represented by the science of reading or the policies written to address it. As one parent with a child at Alice Deal Middle School in Washington, D.C., tells The Progressive, “D.C. Public Schools is making concentrated efforts to improve students’ reading levels. But many parents like myself were shocked by a recent change to the English Language Arts curriculum at Deal Middle School.” The change that upset parents, she says, was the decision to remove all novels from the curriculum in favor of a back-to-basics curriculum that mirrors the shifts mandated at the elementary level by science of reading legislation. The curriculum now features text excerpts instead of full books, as well as made-for-test-prep passages.
While culture war-motivated book bans are removing books about diversity, equity, and inclusion from classrooms and libraries, teachers in fourteen states now trade all novels for newly approved “high quality instructional materials”—not because of book bans, but because of legislation aimed at mandating the “right to read,” “structured literacy,” or the science of reading programs. These science of reading programs preselect all book titles, or center around short passages rather than whole books. There is no need to ban novels deemed inappropriate if a state passes science of reading laws that mandate programs which replace novels completely.
Education reforms like the science of reading often take on a life of their own in the realms of media and policy because they touch already inflamed nerves about certainty, equity, authority, and democracy in relation to public education. They also benefit from outsized momentum and energy because so many groups’ interests and anxieties converge on issues related to reading. Those who want to ban books and those who want a back-to-basics movement can find common ground in promoting textbooks with controlled passages instead of allowing teachers and students to choose their own books for learning to read.
In some ways, this story is just history repeating itself. The recent wave of state laws about reading instruction seems, from afar, to be one more round of the familiar ten-to-fifteen-year swing and counter-swing between back-to-basics movements of drill-oriented, direct instruction and more liberal and ambitious meaning-focused, inclusive beginning reading instruction. These cycles are familiar to most educators who have taught for a decade or more, but the swing towards the science of reading was distinctly different. It was abrupt. It was complete. It was nation-wide. And it was divisive.
Schools initially aimed to address questions about whether there was enough phonics instruction by adopting a new phonics program, or sending teachers to phonics-focused professional development. This, however, was not enough for advocates of the science of reading, such as The Reading League. Efforts to increase instruction in phonics became known as merely adding “a phonics patch” to a larger problem and not rooting out the unscientificness policymakers assumed to be rampant in schools.
The movement took what used to be a descriptive phrase—“science of reading”—turned it into a brand, and used it as a cudgel. The mandates contained in science of reading legislation are not scientific. Policies about literacy instruction that are branded as scientific become difficult to push back on, even as they are minimizing, restricting, and stripping decision-making from educators rather than ensuring children learn to read.
Legislative solutions to earnest concerns about literacy beg a different question about the ways literacy policies can pave the way for authoritarianism to control content and direct schools toward products and policies that look like silver bullets, but perform like blanks.