Tom Ultican was a computer scientist before he became a high school teacher of advanced mathematics and science in California. Now that he is retired, he is a scholar of the corporate reform movement, whose goal is to privatize public schools.
In this illuminating post, Ultican analyzes a documentary called “The Right to Read,” which he compares to the propaganda film “Waiting for Superman.” Behind the film, he writes, is the whole apparatus of the corporate reform movement, armed with derogatory claims about public schools and a simplistic cure for literacy.
He begins:
The new 80-minute video “The Right to Read”was created in the spirit of “Waiting for Superman.” It uses false data interpretations to make phony claims about a non-existent reading crisis. Oakland’s NAACP 2nd Vice President Kareem Weaver narrates the film. Weaver is a full throated advocate for the Science of Reading (SoR) and has many connections with oligarch financed education agendas. The video which released February 11, 2023 was made by Jenny Mackenzie and produced by LeVar (Kunta Kinte) Burton.
Since 2007, Jenny Mackenzie has been the executive director of Jenny Mackenzie Films in Salt Lake City. Neither Mackenzie nor Burton has experience or training as educators. However, Burton did star on the PBS series “Reading Rainbow.” He worked on the show as an actor not a teacher.
One of the first media interviews about “The Right to Read” appeared on KTVX channel 4 in Salt Lake City. Ben Heuston from the Waterford Institute answered questions about the new film and the supposed “reading crisis” in American public schools. Heuston who has a PhD in psychology from Brigham Young University claimed that two-thirds of primary grade students in America read below grade level. That is a lie. He is conflating proficiency in reading on the National Assessment of Education Performance (NAEP) with grade level and should know better.
Ultican shows the graphs of NAEP scores over the past thirty years: reading scores have been unchanged for 30 years. The rhetoric about “the crisis in reading” is a hoax.
Misinterpreting the data shown above is the basis for the specious crisis in reading claims. It is known that students develop at different rates and in the lower grades the differences can be dramatic. That explains some of the low scoring. All but a very small percentage of these fourth grader will be reading adequately when they get to high school.
America’s leading authorities on teaching reading are frustrated. Their voices are being drowned out by forces who want to monetize reading education and privatize it.
Ultican names names and identifies corporate sponsors. Somebody expects to make a heap of money from this latest manufactured crisis.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It is important to misdiagnose problems like those low reading scores in order that the innocent can be blamed, which in turn allows the guilty to be rewarded. Rewarding the guilty is necessary because they are also the powerful.
You’re correct, Eric. Axios posted to day, after reviewing the statistics about the source of charitable giving (not so much charity as political influence), the following, “Now more than ever, the purse strings of the charitable sector are controlled by the rich and powerful.”
When a Church spends $3.5 mil to impact a ballot issue about abortion, when Bill Gates takes over the NIH and Department of Education via his billions, …, it’s clear that the tax codes have to be rewritten to aid democracy’s survival.
Diane, would you be able to link Tom’s post?
Sorry! https://tultican.com/2023/05/27/the-right-to-read-is-horse-manure/
Part of the junk science is grouping the two different processes of 1 discerning the identity of each individual word in a paragraph and 2. comprehending the meaning of the concept that the paragraph is explaining.
A dyslexic student can hear a recording of the paragraph and comprehend it without having the ability to recite the string of words in the paragraph.
No commercial product that claims to improve reading comprehension can enable a person to comprehend individual paragraphs in AP physics, biology, chemistry, geology, etc. textbooks without years of learning the basics of the physics, chemistry, etc.
Decades ago Rick Lavoie pointed out that the U.S. education system basically teaches reading comprehension by lists of vocabulary words. People can be given a list of nonsense non-words can answer questions about a paragraph using the nonsense words. People being given a list of simple words such as set, less, than, greater, line, curve and knowing the meaning of all the words can be completely incapable of understanding what a paragraph using those words means.
For dyslexic students there already exist word decoding programs that have been used successfully for decades by schools for dyslexic students.
The biggest problem with push for the SoR is that is over-emphasizing the act of decoding while ignoring the importance of developing enriched vocabulary. Vocabulary that not only improves reading comprehension but speaking/conversing, writing, and even thinking! Words are the building blocks of language and form the very foundation of what it means to be human. In the right combination, words can work wonders. The goal of having children learn to love reading is overly idealistic and probably unnecessary – as opposed to getting kids to understand the importance of reading. I’d much rather they fall in love with words; and it’s a much more logical sell.
Vocabularies developed not through random word lists with definitions but acquired through listening, conversing, and experiences that provide context. Ask ant Little League player to comprehend a paragraph about bunting, turning a double play, or the take sign and their comprehension will be spot on given the experiences of coaching and playing, yet sans formal definitions. Most vocabulary acquisition works informally so we need to pay closer attention to how we speak to students and make a concerted effort to expand curricular experiences.
Comprehending an essay is similar to a four legged table being upright. All four legs are equally important.
Agreed. But all table legs are not created equal.
In 40 years of teaching science and engineering to middle level students I never once had a kid write a formal definition yet their working vocabularies became quite impressive just like those kids who learn the language of sports.
Agreed. The lack of vocabulary and impedes many of our students from poor families. From my experience this lack of exposure to cognitive language becomes a bigger problem when students get to middle school and the content demands become greater. I think this is one of the reasons for the “middle school slump” in standardized scores. These students have a much harder time with reading comprehension.
My dyslexic son learned how to read because I took him to a tutor for dyslexic people for three years in elementary school. At the elementary school math competitions, he would get a perfect score. By second grade, he was entranced by the PBS NOVA series, which require very little reading of text.
I was shocked by how high his high school verbal standardized test scores were. I guessed that the high scores reflected his knowledge of the basics and not how slowly he identifies each word in a sentence.
By high school, life experiences seem to play a huge role in verbal test scores.
I spent 40 years teaching basic engineering and the physical sciences at the middle level. Not once did I have students write a formal definition, yet their working vocabularies and reading comprehension became quite impressive given the more natural way they acquired the subject area language.
The natural way to learn language is one of the reasons for the natural advantage that affluent students have. They have a much broader experiential and language base than their poorer peers, and it gives them an advantage in tackling academic subjects. Poor, motivated students that become avid readers can overcome this problem when they start reading to learn.
The ‘gap’ in poor students’ academic achievement is a lot more complex than corporate reformers would lead us to believe. It is not simply a matter of “more phonics” whose goal is to really to sell more products.
Big money that wants to monetize public education is behind the “Right to Read” propaganda. If phonics alone could solve students’ reading difficulties, the ‘Reading First’ that wasted $1 billon dollars would have been the grand solution to reading difficulties. There are many reasons some students struggle in reading. For some it is simply lack of exposure to print and language. Other students have attentional issues, and still others may have neurological problems like auditory or visual processing or memory. Like our students these difficulties vary, and the cause of the reading struggle depends on the nature of the student’s problem. Trained reading professionals are the best source for determining the best course of action, not paid propagandists that want to profit from our young people. BTW, here’s the link to Ultican’s post. https://tultican.com/2023/05/27/the-right-to-read-is-horse-manure/
NCLB’s Reading First (phonics) program was funded at $1 billion per year. It was closed down because of scandals—self-dealing, conflicts of interest—after 6 years. Evaluatuons showed it made no difference. $6 billion wasted.
I did a search using the words right to read. The first link is to an ad for the movie claiming that getting teachers to change teaching methods is “the civil rights issue of our time.” That’s what they said about charter schools and high stakes testing. So, yes, horse manure.
The second link is to the National Council of Teachers of English, which defines the right to read as the right to access books without censoring intellectual freedom.
The third is to the U.S. Congress and a 2022 bill, S.5064, that defined the right to read as the right to libraries, librarians, and teachers.
Next, the American Library Association: “Suggested Right to Read Day actions include: Borrow a library book at risk of being banned. Write a letter to the editor or to an elected leader. Attend a meeting of local officials or library or school board. Stage a public event or peaceful protest in support of libraries. Report censorship. Join Unite Against Book Bans.”
Following the ALA is the International Literacy Association delineating the right to read as the opposite of book bans and censorship. The right to read is an actual right, but is has nothing to do with phonics instruction, and changing the definition takes away the actual right.
There is no such thing as science of reading, but if there were, it would probably have something to do with accurately getting the meanings of words right. I’ll say that again, getting words right is as close as one can get to a science of words. The science of reading would have to do with knowing what the word science means, what the word right means, and what the phrase right to read means. The movie gets all the words wrong. That’s corporate edu-fakery for you, just a bunch of Orwellian word soup using the same modus operandi every time. Find or manufacture a disaster. Get people used to having fewer rights. Sell cheap junk. Move on to the next town of suckers.
Brilliant, LCT!
The very existence of the Right-to-Read movement implies that teachers are denying students the opportunity to learn to read through the use of ineffective methodologies that reject phonics instruction. This is nothing more than a straw man position intended to mislead, misinform, and monetize.
Google the Science of Reading and the first four sites are Sponsored ads.
The truth of the matter is that reading tests based on Common Core standards DO NOT test for basic reading comprehension. Just read the standards as they dictate every test item written.
The other truth of the matter is that kids can understand what they read given adequate background knowledge and a strong working vocabulary.
The other truth of the matter is that most kids do not like to read, especially when given random passages or assigned textbook chapters.
The final truth of the matter is that children, adolescents, and adults cannot understand what they read when they lack adequate background knowledge and a strong working vocabulary in the topic. Try reading the Pulitzer Prize winning book The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes without any background in chemistry or physics. And no sane person would blame you for failing a reading test using passages from that book if you didn’t.
I heard a similar report on NPR Saturday morning. How can those who do not buy this SoR misinformation counter this highly funded narrative? How can we get the national media to understand that there is plenty of data on the results of SoR that shows it to be no more effective than other programs with the general student population? The NAACP fell for the high stakes propaganda two decades ago when they considered it a way toward education equality as it turned out to be the opposite. When will we learn that there is no such thing as this one-size-fits all unicorn we seek with little improvement?
Paul, the search for unicorn solutions is the bane of education.
Diane . . . and Orwell’s double-speak lives. CBK
It’s like a broken record.
I see the science of reading as more of a response to the poor reading strategies that we elementary teachers were encouraged to use for 3 decades by Lucy Calkins and Fountas and Pinnell. They espoused the “3-cueing” method of relying on Meaning, Structural and Visual cues (“MSV”) to guess at what a word might be. It’s based on a theory of how people learn to read called “psycho-linguistic guessing.” We now know that these strategies are actually the ones used by poor readers. Good readers look carefully at the word and all the letters in it, and after practice develop what’s called orthographic-mapping of words and build automaticity in word reading (meaning you no longer need to laboriously decode each word you see, the way a new reader does). That’s why we want to place more emphasis—not just on phonics—but on phonemic awareness and word-level fluency. The rest of the reading rope—language learning, vocabulary, print awareness, text structure—is not being ignored. It’s just that no amount of comprehension strategy instruction will help a student who can’t read the words! That’s why word-level reading requires more emphasis—which, as a teacher and literacy coach, I can assure you it has not been happening!
I’m sad if SoR has now been associated with school privatization, but my perspective is that it’s a very important shift away from poor instructional habits.