In this post from the National Education Policy Center, you can see a long list of recent articles about the “reading wars,” which was spurred by a broadcast and article by Emily Hanford, complaining that students can’t read because teachers fail to teach phonics, which she says, is based on science.
When I saw Hanford’s article in the New York Times, making that claim, I reacted with a big “Ho hum, here we go again.” I wrote about the reading wars in my book “Left Back” in 2000. I thought that Jeanne Chall’s classic “Learning to Read: The Great Debate” (1967) had settled the matter. Yet here we are in 2018, Long after Rudolf Flesch’s “Why Johnny Can’t Read,” debating the same issues that gripped education researchers 70 years ago.
NEPC posts an interview with Elizabeth Moje, dean of the University of Michigan Education School, that has one stellar feature. Whenever she is asked to examine a claim about what “most teachers” are doing, she stops the conversation to say that no she ne knows what “most teachers” are doing.
I appreciate her care.
We have known for a long time that phonics must be a part of early instruction in reading. We also know that phonics only is not sufficient.
At a time when awareness is breaking through that our schools are underfunded, we have serious teacher shortages due to low pay, and class sizes in the Neediest districts are ballooning, let’s not get distracted by a phony war.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
As someone that has taught many poor non-readers to read, I know that students need both phonics and comprehension to be skilled readers. There is no war! However, it is important to not waste time on unneeded phonics, and phonics can be embedded in content. All reading instruction must include actual reading in order to guide students in understanding that reading is thinking. Writing is a great tool to reinforce reading. English is about 84% regular. Because we borrow so many words from other languages, our spelling patterns are more complicated than some other languages.
There are so many aspects to being fully literate and each of them should be both carefully provided and protected. Our ever-more-impatient “microwave” society keeps producing educational “experts” looking ONLY to bypass this or that element as being unnecessary or too time consuming which simply builds up a long-term handicapping of students.
Well said.
Distract and deflect is all that this is…..and phonics is something that can be taught on a computer. This is just the deformers using free market strategies to get their way (CBE)….again.
“At a time when awareness is breaking through that our schools are underfunded, we have serious teacher shortages due to low pay, and class sizes in the Neediest districts are ballooning, let’s not get distracted by a phony war.”
Never was there a truer word spoken, especially in light of a comment made by Moje in the interview you reference. She suggested that any reading method we use to teach must confront the reality of 20 to 30 students in a class.
I just talked to one of my daughter’s dearest teachers, who retired early in the face of a mounting workload foisted upon the system that included all the inclusion, differentiation, preparation, and consternation piled on primary education by modern administration of policy. She is the fourth teacher I have encountered who got out due to emotional exhaustion. All four of these people were undoubtedly excellent agents of instruction now lost due to requirements imposed by administors in response to the aggressive demands they perceive in the “standards” and on the tests.
We will not have excellent practioners of instruction until we make an effort to make the job possible. If a primary reading teacher has to deal with 20 to 30 children who get excellent care at home, it might be possible. But students who leave schools like that and go home to activities that do not enrich the reading experience will soon be in the wake of those who do.
For some in our society, school is supposed to do just that; it is supposed to create winners and losers so that leaders in society can select from among the winners to run things in business and society. Others suggest stacking children relative to each other is a bad idea. As you might have guessed, I belong to this second camp. If we believe all children deserve to learn to read, we should be willing to fund schools to the end that we do not lose teachers to the enormity of the job.
I meet ex-teachers, many much younger than I, here in north Florida. Many are quitting due to frustration and exhaustion. They are tired of the lack of support, micro-managing. low pay, diminished benefits and tedious test based curricula.
I’ve rarely seen teachers so depressed. I blame the god-awful curriculum –complicated, hateful and ineffective. Kids hate it and they don’t learn. That’s a recipe for teacher demoralization. But few even dream of changing it, in large part, I think, because they know the curriculum is attached to the tests and the tests are inexorable. Or so they think. Teachers need to rise up and overthrow the tests.
Ret and Pond: your comments are correct and coincide with my own experience. This, of course, supports the idea that we need realistic goals and realistic implementation of those goals. If we know parents are not pitching in with us in our attempt to teach the children, we as educators have only to demand that we not be squeezed between stakeholders who want services but do not want to pay for them.
Before I read the report from NEPC, I looked up Emily Hanford. She has made news in a PR network where many readers are either clueless about teaching reading or seduced by phonics and read-by-grade three mandates as if panaceas.
You know her claims are a PR stunt when they cite the National Center on Teacher Quality as if an authority, and the Education Post plays a key role in circulating simple-minded views of “what works.”
The nuanced commentary in the NEPC report will not make headlines, even if it is highly informative. I am not a reading specialist, but I once looked at reading lists and could not fathom the assignment of measures of difficulty and “grade-level” appropriateness to specific words. The experiences of children and teens are often so remote from the texts they are asked to read that many end up “word calling” (a new phrase for me) with no understanding of what the words and combinations of words mean, especially in sentences and entire paragraphs. Add David Coleman’s theory of reading to the list of simplistic solutions floated by amateurs.
It was good to see the firm putdown of the “read by grade three” requirements that have been legislated in many states, including Ohio. Read-by-grade three mandates are the result of a campaign initiated by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. The campaign was funded by at least 14 major foundations among other supporters. The aim of the campaign was to ensure that all students, by 2020, are reading at grade level or above.
“The Campaign focuses on an important predictor of school success and high school graduation—grade-level reading by the end of third grade. Research shows that proficiency in reading by the end of third grade enables students to shift from learning to read to reading to learn, and to master the more complex subject matter they encounter in the fourth grade curriculum. Most students who fail to reach this critical milestone falter in the later grades and often drop out before earning a high school diploma. Yet two-thirds of US fourth graders are not PROFICIENT readers, according to national reading assessment data. This disturbing statistic is made even worse by the fact that more than four out of every five low-income students miss this critical milestone.”
Here are two keys definition from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Fourth-grade students performing at the PROFICIENT level should be able to integrate and interpret texts and apply their understanding of the text to draw conclusions and make evaluations.
Fourth-grade students performing at the ADVANCED level should be able to make complex inferences and construct and support their inferential understanding of the text. Students should be able to apply their understanding of a text to make and support a judgment.
Almost all of the activity on behalf of read-by-grade-three comes from a single 2011 correlational study by Donald J. Hernandez, “Double Jeopardy: How Third-Grade Reading Skills and Poverty Influence High School Graduation.”
The study is not peer reviewed. It was funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. An abstract as well as a complete pdf is available at https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED518818
The Annie E. Casey Foundation also has a number of publications that point to factors other than reading at grade level that correlate with high school graduation.
One of the most important being present or being absent from school.
Laura, thanks for sleuthing the origins of the 3rd grade reading laws. It’s a scandal that a bill with such flimsy and dubious foundations should become law. Depressing.
It’s equally dismaying that the folks at NAEP don’t seem to know what they’re doing either. They claim they can tell whether a fourth grader has the ability to “integrate and interpret texts and apply their understanding of the text to draw conclusions and make evaluations.” This ability is completely contingent upon what the text is about. If a text is about baseball, a baseball player will be able to do this whereas a non-baseball player will struggle. The NAEP standard that there is a teachable ability that will enable one to interpret Captain Underpants and “Hamlet* and the GAO’s Budget Report equally. This is ludicrous. Interpretation ability depends entirely on one’s knowledge base. Knowledge is measurable and that’s what an honest reading test would measure.
The tests based on the CCSS have never been validated. Some of these tests have vague and misleading questions with answers that could be interpreted more than one way. The tests are often unfair and are written above grade level in order to confirm that our schools are “failing.”
TheCCSS have never beeen validated.
on-target. “What the text is about” is everything. If it’s about baseball, 3rd-graders who play/ follow the game will be integrating the text into a base of known info & moving quickly while others are pausing to visualize & re-reading to connect dots. At age 8, girls may more swiftly decode the intricacies of social scenarios. Description of a mechanical process will require more or less pondering, depending on reader’s experience/ math-sci inclination. No wonder test-writers talking pineapple Q’s, at least no one can relate [equity 😉 ]
How much can stdzd text-reading/Q&A assessment really tell you, re degree of reading proficiency? should a score on such a blunt tool determine whether to advance to 4th grade?
Cx: “The NAEP standard implies that…”
We need to start a reading comprehension war! Most teachers I talk to have no idea how to teach comprehension. Understandable, because Common Core and the main education authorities imply that teaching comprehension is a matter of teaching metacognitive skills and having kids analyze texts to death (a.k.a. close reading). This is wrong. To comprehend a text one must, above all, recognize the words on the page. Re-cognition depends on a prior cognition –e.g. prior learning of the word. Ergo teaching broad knowledge (which is the natural way of acquiring a broad vocabulary) is the royal road to reading comprehension. Doing Common Core test prep, the dominant mode today, is the wrong road. If only there were a debate/war about this issue! Instead most teachers slog along in their benighted state. Kids toil away at fruitless activities in ELA classes or bogus reading intervention classes. We must liberate teachers from their chains of ignorance and thereby liberate the children from their Blakean toils.
I agree. This is one of the reasons that poor students often see a middle school slump. As students go into middle schools, those without prior knowledge, mostly poor students with a limited experience base, will see reading comprehension scores decline unless they are avid readers.
Can anything but intense investigation, carried out over a lifetime, produce real depth of comprehension? I am thinking of my present occupation, that of reading Les Miserables. In order to really get the book the way his readers did, you must know intimately both the history of the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras of French history and be imbued with the emotional essence of what it was to be French in Hugo’s own later period of time. It would not hurt you to be familiar with philosophical debates in Christianity as well. Or you could just admire Jean Valjean and think Cossette must have been beautiful.
It strikes me that an understanding of much writing is just like that. It is understandable by degrees, with help and discussion, and with time to mull over the material. Sometimes, you need a lifetime. That falls outside the scope of evaluation by a teacher.
Yup. Yet we persist in treating reading comprehension as a muscle that grows through workouts –scandalously, this is what’s happening in CCSS ELA classrooms across the country. This is the metaphor that lies at the root of CCSS as well as most teachers’ conceptions of reading. But it’s a false metaphor. Reading comprehension is not a muscle. It’s something that emanates from background knowledge. Build background knowledge and you build reading comprehension; there is no other way.
I’ve been fighting this war for ten years. I’m encouraged to see more and more people joining the right side.
Ponderosa,
I’m an original in the Core Knowledge battle. I met Hirsch in 1983 and encouraged him to write the book, “Cultural Literacy,” he had already written an article. By that name. The book was a big best seller. I served on his board and left it only when he warned me he was selling it to Joel Klein.
That said, I think you should stop fighting ed schools. They are not the enemy. The reformers would love to abolish them and replace them with test prep practice, TFA, Doug Lemov, and nothing more.
I think the various ways to teach children can coexist easier than religious philosophy. If we agree that our common goal is old people who can argue reasonably, forcefully, and kindly.
It’s different for every child. Per each child’s needs, you need an artful and ever evolving blend of (not necessarily in this order):
Oral language development.
Background and content knowledge.
Phonics and phonemic awareness.
Strategies taught to help children develop their metacognition in both decoding and comprehension.
Actual minimum time spent reading alone, partnered reading, chorally, echolalically, aloud, and silently.
Practice. Reading is a muscle of sorts, and specialized topics need even more practice. Also, readers must be, to some extent, willing to read and comprehend content that may not be very interesting to them. Although, throughout the life of a reader, one tends to read what interests them and what is purposeful to their goals and agendas.
Repeated reading no less than 3 times but no more than 5 times is among the most effective of tools to read well according to major research.
A willingness to use technology and the instantly accessible moving image to develop content knowledge. If not, screen addiction in this epoch will actually weaken reading acumen rather than support it.
Reciprocal reading and writing as a practice is very powerful when done well pedagogically.
Robert Rendo – Nice post. Anecdotal reactions:
“Reading is a muscle of sorts.” My dyslexic brother struggled in K12 [pre-SpEd for LD’s], but eventually became a voracious reader in adulthood. He describes it as similar to an exercise regime; if he slacks off for a month or two, difficulties returned like a backache.
“[Read] chorally, echolalically, aloud… repeated reading no less than 3x no more than 5 times.” These ring bells w/me as someone who (like my mother) was reading at 3yo, near pitch-perfect/ ease of sight-reading music, linguist, vocal mimic. The activities you list here are pure fun for me [still] – but I think they engage attention & memory & encourage phonemic awareness for anyone at any age. As a PreK Spanish teacher, I would advise: add rhythm, add melody. My students are pre-reading, but learning conversational phrases is parallel, I think.
Ponderosa: the “reading wars” –as glossed for lay consumption– seem to stumble over decoding methods & get stuck there, leaving comprehension to take care of itself.
Yes. E.D. Hirsch made it clear to me that there are two distinct aspects of reading: there’s decoding, and then there’s comprehension. They are separate and distinct things. As a profession, I think teachers are getting better at teaching the former, now that Whole Language has been discredited, but we’re still in the Dark Ages with respect to the latter (teaching comprehension).
This is almost comical.
We taught nothing but Whole Langiage for awhile. Then we switched to all phonics. Then Whole Language. Then we were told to scrap the whole mess because we needed to focus more on math and extracting info from reading via Close Reading.
Now back to step one.
I don’t understand why it has to be all of one and not a synthesis of all. What am I missing here?
Retired Teacher wrote: “…and phonics can be embedded in content”
That sentence speaks volumes about the problem well beyond the “way” to teach reading.
All of these reading war mongers and “this way works” proponents ignores teachers.
(And, “hire more reading teachers and reading specialists” ain’t going to happen as budgets dwindle – especially in secondary schools).
Kids spend all but about an hour a day if that “in” reading. The rest of their day is spent with teachers of literacy (not necessarily reading), mathematics, social studies, science, the arts…
We boldly state “Oh, we embed reading in the content areas” – and the we offer a 1 hour sit and get workshop in August… and then we ignore the teachers and expectation throughout the year.
Teachers are all that matter –
but saying “ok, the social social teacher can incorporate vocabulary, decoding, enunciation, context clues, prefixes and suffixes, comprehension…”
and NOT providing the teacher with time, real time coaching, materials, ongoing development and other supports…
and NOT providing the teacher with information about his/her students reading zone is how we got where we are
(and that’s why the quick fixers are making millions on useless technology).
Children who are PHONICATED to DEATH struggle with reading. Plus the materials they read is NONSENSICAL.
I had a third grade girl tell me, “I am too STUPID to learn how to read.” When I asked her why she thought this about herself, she said, “I am still reading those same stupid books I read in first grade.” BTW, there was NOTHING wrong with this child. What was wrong is that she was PHONICATED to death. I took this 3rd grade girl to the school library and she selected the books she wanted to read. We read together it was obvious that she was phonicated. Guess what? Only took me 4 sessions reading with her and just telling her the words that I knew she would USE phonics to decipher and she was fluent and she has NEVER stopped reading since. The parents and teachers told me.
I posted this earlier, but think it warrants another look. Those Reading WARS are JUST SO STUPID.
We have failed our young at so many levels re: their education. Here’s one. Many objected and were ignored.
https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2015/11/11/study-rti-practice-falls-short-of-promise.html?cmp=SOC-EDIT-FB&fbclid=IwAR266_BIgAa7tqTHhqO-M78l4hZBRoMDUdadBoDFq8B5Bzp7yyuNfymtKn4
And now the pundits want our kids to be gritty? Really, how insane.
You are so right. “Barking” at phonemes in isolation without much meaning behind them is a wasteful exercise. Yet, students do need phonic skills to read. Meaning is the ultimate goal of reading. Connecting students to meaning will encourage students to develop a love of reading.
Opening myself up to being piled on, but here goes.
It’s not a phony war. I spent 20 years teaching middle and high school English. For most of those years, I had to teach a remedial reading class as a part of my day. Every year, the size of the remedial class grew.
It took me too long to ask myself why that was happening, but about seven years ago I did pose that question to myself, and I began to read everything I could get my hands on (Chall, McPherson, Willingham, Dehaene, Wolf, and particulary Seidenberg, to name some I found to be most enlightening). It didn’t take me too long to realize that the students I was remediating were predominantly struggling decoders and word guessers due to faulty early reading instruction.
I took two different introduction to reading instruction classes at two different nearby universities, just to see what they considered to be good early reading instruction. Almost everything I was taught in those two classes conflicted with the science I had read or was reading. For example, I was taught to have children use pictures on the page to help figure out what unknown words were, I was taught that there were “good” mistakes (if the word was “horse” but the child looked at a picture on the page and said the name of another animal, that wasn’t so bad, because they used the clues), I was taught that hundreds of decodable words had to be memorized as sight words.
Yes, teaching the English orthographic system is more complicated than some other languages – notably, Finnish, which is has a one-to-one symbol to sound correspondence. Therefore, the vast majority of Finnish children can decode with almost 100% accuracy within the first year of reading instruction. Because English, as noted above, borrows from other languages, its orthographic is opaque (which doesn’t mean irregular) and therefore takes longer to learn.
It also requires teachers to have extensive knowledge of its structure, knowledge I believe few teachers are taught in their prep programs.
I have never worked with a colleague who knew what Systematic Synthetic Phonics is. That’s ridiculous.
Of course the point of reading is to get to meaning. But if a child can’t decipher the code, then they’re never going to get to the meaning. I’m convinced that students who claim to hate to read feel that way because they weren’t effectively taught how to decode, and therefore decoding is far too laborious for them. So much of those children’s working memory is tied up with attempting to decode, there’s no room left in WM to remember how the sentence even started, never mind how the paragraph started.
I had a reading specialist colleague who told me that when a student she was working with came to a word the student couldn’t decode, she told the student to look at the first couple of letters, back up, and “take another run at it.”
Just last week I read the blog of a reading teacher who claimed that learning to read was every bit as natural as learning to speak.
It most definitely is NOT a phony war, in my opinion.
Excellent comment. You demonstrate that snake oil is still being purveyed in schools of education.
Not going to pile on. I would, however, remind you that you can decide Saint Just all day but you have to know what happened in the French Revolution. Who can know when you need what skill? You need it all.
By the way, I have never heard of Systematic Synthetic Phonics. Is that the process of putting parts of words together so you can hear them in your mind?
Sorry, I just realized my auto-correct changed decode to decide above.
Students should have a command of the sound system by middle school and high school unless they are dyslexic. Some learning disabled students remain slow decoders for life, and they continue to struggle in reading. Some of them learn by a visual-kinesthetic approach in which they write the word until they learn it. Many of these students have poor auditory discrimination and memories.
Diane is absolutely correct that there are more important issues over which to fight a “war” than phonics versus whole language. There is a war against democracy, against public education, against unions, and against pensions and health benefits. It is a war of wage suppression and privatization wherein those who invest to own rob from those who work to create.
Where phonics and whole language become part of the war against creators is in standardization. Teachers need professional autonomy and authority over what they do. We do not need to find “the right way” to teach. If there were a right way to teach, it would be made a scripted program. No one needs that. When we blame each other’s methods for reading difficulties (note that’s difficulties not deficits) instead of blaming the economic injustice and segregation that caused the problems, we fall into a dangerous trap, the standards trap.
Debates about whole language versus phonics and knowledge versus skill are for teacher colleges and for teachers lounges. (My teachers lounge has been stripped of everything but a few tables and plastic chairs.) The debate is not for Congress, not for think tanks, not for “policy centers”, not for the media. Corporate investment vultures circle above, looking to put “the right way” to teach into a standard, onto an iPad, and to sell it as a replacement of pensions, unions, public schools, and the middle class.
“Where phonics and whole language become part of the war against creators is in standardization. Teachers need professional autonomy and authority over what they do.”
That resonates with me. So I copied and pasted it. It felt good.
We have much bigger ‘fish to fry’ when the whole of democracy is under attack.
Not again (or still)!! I taught special ed. students from early childhood (for 13 years), then middle school L.D. Resource (for 13 years). Also taught Grade 4 L.D. resource & Transitional (Summer School) Kindergarten. Based on my experience &, in middle school
(w/some of the kids I’d taught in E.C.), LOTS of kids diagnosed w/L.D. reading, simply because they’d been taught strictly whole language reading–NO phonics–& did NOT have a clue as how to decode. I was involved in using Lexia (a computer phonetic-based program; good in combination w/standard instructional methods); we kept meticulous records (through observation, statistics, data) & the results were favorable in that many kids learned to decode who had not in the primary grades, which lead to improved reading comprehension.
What Roy quoted in his first paragraph, 12/8 @ 4:14 PM.
And STOP w/the “standardized” tests & endless test prepping, where NO child is taught
A.N.Y.T.H.I.N.G.!!!!
I’m with you!!!!
Resonance in this arena of erudition and thoughtfulness feels good. Thank you all.
As Diane and I discussed last evening, we’re on the same page.
Having dyslexic and non dyslexic students using the same curriculum does not work.
Statistically, the average class of 25 students has 3 to 5 students on the dyslexia spectrum. Public schools continue to ignore dyslexia, despite the fact that it is the root cause of the vast majority of reading problems. Dyslexia is ignored because screening is expensive and time consuming. This intentional omission on the part of educators should be a national scandal.
I was in 3rd grade when phonics was first introduced.
I also was around for the first BIC ballpoint pen.
And the cartridge fountain pen before that, by crackee!
Anyway: I was already a fluent reader by the third grade. I was brought up on “Dick and Jane” and my parents read a lot to us at home. I remember being a little confused as to why we were doing this thing called, “phonics”. It seemed like an unnecessary add on at the time. But at that age, we tend not to think far beyond our own experiences.
My attitude changed in a big way once I started teaching, thirty some years later. My 5th and 6th graders were struggling with 1st grade level reading. I started using a strict phonics based remedial program and found truly wonderful success with it.
What I particularly loved about the program was the scaffolding. You always went back to the previous skill, quickly, in order to reinforce it. And as the series went on, they started gradually including and building on comprehension skills.
My star pupil from those days went from a K level to grade (4th) in a year and a half. He had serious support at home, which made a big difference.
I can understand a kid who can already read not finding a need for phonics, but I don’t understand a reluctance from anyone who’s taught reading delayed students.
But maybe I’m still in my personal experience bubble…?
The force-feeding of stdzn is no doubt behind stirring the phonics pot [again]]– another $-backed attempt to justify $-making accountability apparatus for publics geared to push the overtested into unmonitored publicly-funded privatized alternatives while shamelessly appealing to partisan politics. ‘Phonics’ is an anti-public-schools dog-whistle just like A Nation at Risk, making broad-brush unbacked claims about what is or isn’t done to what degree in “every” classroom and ed school.
Its time to wage war against the use of standardized tests to “measure” subjective skills (see CCSS: ELA). Subjectivity cannot and should not be standardized