Denny Taylor, a distinguished scholar in the teaching of literacy, has done impressive research to identify the origins of the “science of reading.” The roots of this latest fad are deeply entwined in the work of behaviorist Edward Thorndike. She explains how one view of literacy got embedded in the report of the National Reading Panel. Other views, other research was excluded.
She writes:
This Substack post documents how George Bush and the Texas Business Council took control of how children are taught to read through their alignment with Reid Lyon and reading researchers on the Thorndike-Skinner-Engelmann-Carnine, stimulus-response, operant conditioning continuum, and delivered American children to technology companies, owned by hedge funds and private equity firms that capitalize on the profits of adaptive AI technology that constantly evaluates a child’s performance to adjust their instruction in real-time.
The post provides the historic foundations of how the integration of real-time adaptive AI into K-3 reading programs marks a shift from education as a social exchange to a closed-loop feedback system between child and machine. In future Substack posts I will focus on how this dynamic reshapes the learning process into a form of “distributed cognition,” where the boundaries between human and artificial thought – the child and the machine begin to blur.
**
Taylor then goes on to document the relationship between Reid Lyon and George W. Bush in the late 1990s. From 1992 to 2005, Lyon served as the Chief of the Child Development and Behavior Branch within the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the National Institutes of Health. He met up with Texas Governor George W. Bush and persuaded him that he had the key to reading success. Bush became a true believer in Lyon’s ideas and embedded them in No Child Left Behind after he was elected President in 2000.
In 1997, Lyon created the National Reading Panel, whose research leaned strongly towards one side of the “reading wars.”
Taylor narrates a historical account that should interest anyone interested in the origins of the “science of reading.”
She concludes:
The damage to the American public school system is extreme and for children the Science of Reading laws are catastrophic. The state laws that have been passed mandate beginning reading instruction in public schools that is developmentally inappropriate, and children’s health and wellbeing, as well as their academic development are at risk. The digitization of reading instruction exponentially compounds the risks.
For children in crisis in America the situation is dire, and we must respond. There is substantial evidence that between 60%and 70% of children in U.S. public schools have had Adverse Childhood Experiences and many of these children are coping with ongoing toxic stress which is compounded by 45 state lawswhich mandate state approved “Science of Reading” programs and excessive standardized assessments developed by technology companies owned by hedge funds and private equity firms….
The six year forensic analysis has provided extensive evidence that the experimental research studies that form the four cornerstones of the “Science of Reading” have no scientific validity. Of particular concern are the dog-whistles and lies that have been “sold” to policy makers and the public about the National Reading Panel Report, which has no scientific legitimacy. A compelling case can be made for the removal of the NRP Report from all documents that policy makers have used to require by law the fundamentally flawed “evidence-based reading instruction” in U.S. public schools. Such an action would remove the ban on cueing and the requirement of direct instruction in the “five pillars,” and thus, nullify the 45 state laws that mandate the Science of Reading. It would also mean that universities would be able to base reading courses on the peer-reviewed articles and books of reading researchers whose scholarship has been banned, and curriculum decision-making would be returned to teachers, parents, and local school districts.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thank you for this comprehensive review of literacy initiative over the past fifty plus years. In reading the article I saw my career flash before my eyes as I remember most of the various approaches and materials and have used many of them. This post was a trip down memory lane. It is unfortunate that learning to read has become politicized and monetized. It was interesting that, in the study of various reading methodologies, one of the studies revealed that Whole Language was an effective way to teach, but positive results of the study were deliberately suppressed because it did not fit the political agenda du jour.
The so-called science of reading is yet another top down scheme designed to make lots of money for investors and keep teachers from actually driving instruction. We see public education as a way to bring students together and prepare them for the future, but hedge funds and private equity see a multi-billion dollar business opportunity. All they have to do is bribe enough politicians to gain access to all that public money, and it continues to work for them as we keep investing in failure.
The last three paragraphs summarizes, better than I could, why we continue on the wrong track in literacy instruction.
“By putting “findings” in quotation marks, the author suggests that the National Reading Panel (NRP) report was not an objective truth, but a selective interpretation of data used to justify a shift away from holistic, humanistic teaching. It implies that the “five pillars” have been used as a reductionist tool to strip away the social-emotional context of the classroom.
It suggests that what we call “Science” is often just Behaviorism in a digital wrapper, funded by a powerful network of commercial and political interests.
By linking the 20th-century behaviorists to the 21st-century state mandates, you are proving that the current “catastrophe” isn’t an accident—it’s the logical conclusion of a century-old philosophy that prioritizes the machine (the curriculum) over the organism (the child).
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Ellen Lagemann, in her book “An Elusive Science: The Troubling History of Education Research,” reports that Thorndike advised his students not to waste time working in classrooms. Teachers were viewed as technicians to be held accountable for implementing the scientific evidence gathered in laboratory experiments. Indeed, SOR is a regressive movement with the emperor only claiming shiny new clothes.
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the Russians invested much more in the Pavlov laboratories; Vygotsky didn’t get translated until Bruner encouraged it in the 1960s. The ABA practices have been extended through the special ed programs for children ; I would like more time spent on Bettleheim’s concept of “The Uses of Engagement” when it comes to the reading curriculum (or an older theory “from learning for love to love of learning”. Even Skinner when he wrote memoir said there is “too much stick” when training horses.
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Agreed.
Behaviorism was the leading “science of learning” in the early decades of the 20th c.
It never goes away.
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What is striking about this essay is not merely its hostility toward the Science of Reading, but the degree to which it substitutes a totalizing ideological narrative for empirical engagement. The argument unfolds less like a scholarly critique of literacy instruction and more like a grand unifying theory in which behaviorism, Bush-era politics, hedge funds, AI systems, standardized testing, private equity, Thorndike, Skinner, Reid Lyon, adaptive software, and the National Reading Panel are woven into a single seamless structure of domination. The effect is rhetorically powerful but intellectually unstable. Nearly every institutional development in modern literacy instruction is absorbed into a single explanatory framework. At a certain point, the theory begins explaining too much, which is often a sign that it is explaining too little.
The central maneuver here is familiar. Instead of seriously engaging the core empirical question — whether explicit instruction in phonemic awareness, decoding, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension improves literacy outcomes for many children — the essay attempts to morally contaminate the entire Science of Reading movement through genealogy and association. Bush. Texas business interests. Thorndike. Behaviorism. Hedge funds. AI. Operant conditioning. The implication is that because some actors within the ecosystem had technocratic, corporate, or behaviorist tendencies, the underlying literacy research itself must therefore be suspect. But this is not how serious inquiry works. Jeanne Chall’s Learning to Read: The Great Debate, Marilyn Jager Adams’s Beginning to Read, the work of Linnea Ehri, Keith Stanovich, Louisa Moats, Sally Shaywitz, Hollis Scarborough, Mark Seidenberg, Tim Shanahan, and decades of converging research in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, dyslexia research, and educational practice do not suddenly evaporate because George W. Bush supported Reading First. Nor does the existence of commercial interests invalidate underlying findings about how many children acquire literacy skills.
There is also a profound category confusion running through the piece. One may reasonably criticize excessive standardized testing, over-digitization of classrooms, adaptive learning software, data extraction, or the replacement of human relationships with screens. Many advocates of the Science of Reading themselves share those concerns. But the essay repeatedly conflates those developments with the core principles of structured literacy itself, as though explicit phonics instruction and AI-driven educational surveillance are somehow identical phenomena. They are not. A teacher explicitly teaching decoding strategies to first graders is not the same thing as a hedge-fund-owned adaptive learning platform harvesting performance data. The refusal to distinguish between these things creates an atmosphere of moral panic in which every form of explicit literacy instruction becomes implicated in a larger dystopian technological project.
What emerges is less a critique of reading science than a critique of managerial modernity itself. In that sense, the essay is actually much closer to Foucault and Baudrillard than perhaps its author realizes. Foucault described how institutions create regimes of knowledge and normalize forms of observation, measurement, and behavioral regulation. Baudrillard warned about systems in which symbolic narratives eclipse direct engagement with reality. Ironically, however, the essay reproduces some of the same dynamics it condemns. The concrete question — are children becoming literate? — recedes behind an expanding symbolic architecture of privatization, behaviorism, capitalism, AI, and state power. The symbols become more vivid than the underlying educational outcomes.
Paulo Freire’s work is relevant here too, though not in the simplistic way often invoked in education debates. Freire argued that education should remain grounded in the liberation of actual human beings rather than the preservation of ideological systems. One of the uncomfortable realities largely absent from this essay is that many families turned toward structured literacy approaches because existing literacy systems were not serving their children well. Parents of dyslexic students, working-class families, literacy specialists, speech-language pathologists, pediatric-development experts, and classroom teachers across the political spectrum increasingly supported more explicit literacy instruction not because they were agents of hedge funds or operant conditioning, but because too many children were reaching third and fourth grade unable to read fluently. That material reality matters.
The repeated assertion that the National Reading Panel has “no scientific legitimacy” is especially revealing. Serious scholars may criticize aspects of the panel’s methodology, scope, exclusions, or emphasis. That is normal scholarly debate. But to leap from methodological critique to the claim that the entire body of work lacks legitimacy begins to resemble the very kind of epistemic absolutism the essay claims to resist. The Science of Reading is not a monolith, nor is it reducible to one federal panel, one administration, one political coalition, or one instructional program. It is a broad and evolving interdisciplinary body of research spanning decades and multiple fields of inquiry.
In the end, the essay reads less like a careful analysis of literacy instruction and more like an attempt at narrative consolidation — an effort to absorb a complicated educational debate into a single morally coherent story about power, capital, technocracy, and control. But literacy is stubbornly concrete. Children either learn to read fluently or they do not. Parents, teachers, and clinicians confronting that reality tend to become impatient with symbolic genealogies that explain everything except why so many students struggled with reading in the first place. That is ultimately where the essay’s premise begins to collapse under its own weight.
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I will leave it to Denny Taylor to defend her essay, but I’ll add one note.
There is no evidence that I have seen to substantiate the belief that there is one way of teaching reading that is correct for every student.
The last time we tried “the science of reading” was in 2002, when the findings of the National Reading Panel were incorporated into No Child Left Behind. The law endorsed a six-year trial for $1 billion a year. The evaluation of that trial concluded that students in it were better at all the practices stressed by NRP, but their comprehension was no different from those who were not in the trial and not treated with “the science of reading.”
I will say this about Taylor’s piece: she was absolutely correct in establishing the importance of the connection beteeen Reid Lyon and George W. Bush. Lyon chose the members of the National Reading Panel. Only one was an experienced teacher and principal, and she dissented from the NRP findings. After Bush’s inauguration, Reid Lyon was the literacy advisor to President and Mrs. Bush.
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Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I think it is important, though, to notice how much the terrain of the argument has now shifted. The original essay presented the Science of Reading not merely as an incomplete or overstated instructional framework, but as part of a much larger ideological and technocratic system involving behaviorism, Bush-era politics, hedge funds, AI surveillance, operant conditioning, private equity, and the erosion of democratic education.
Your response narrows the dispute considerably into three much more modest and defensible claims: first, that no single instructional method works equally well for every child; second, that Reading First and No Child Left Behind produced mixed outcomes, particularly around comprehension; and third, that Reid Lyon exerted substantial influence over the National Reading Panel. But none of those narrower claims actually establish the broader thesis advanced in the original essay.
There are several rhetorical and conceptual mechanisms operating here that are worth identifying clearly. One is a shift from genealogy to empiricism without acknowledging the transition. The original argument relied heavily on genealogical critique — tracing institutional and political connections between Bush, Lyon, behaviorism, corporations, and literacy policy in order to morally and intellectually contaminate the Science of Reading itself.
Your response, by contrast, moves away from that framework and toward empirical caution: perhaps there is no universally correct method, perhaps Reading First showed limits, perhaps comprehension gains proved elusive. Those are legitimate points for debate. But they are very different arguments from the original claim that the Science of Reading is fundamentally an ideological-technocratic project lacking scientific legitimacy.
A second mechanism is strategic narrowing. The original essay made extraordinarily expansive claims: that the Science of Reading is catastrophic, developmentally inappropriate, scientifically invalid, behaviorist in essence, intertwined with AI-driven behavioral conditioning, and fundamentally illegitimate as a research tradition. Your response retreats to a much narrower criticism centered on implementation outcomes and institutional influence. Again, those are arguable positions. But the narrowing itself is revealing because it implicitly concedes how difficult the larger thesis is to sustain under scrutiny.
Third, there is a subtle but important shift from criticism of claims to criticism of authority structures. The repeated emphasis on Reid Lyon’s influence over the National Reading Panel and the limited number of classroom educators on the panel functions rhetorically to cast suspicion on the findings through institutional genealogy. But this still does not directly engage the broader interdisciplinary body of evidence around structured literacy. Even if one granted every concern about the NRP’s composition, the Science of Reading would still not reduce to the NRP. The work of Jeanne Chall, Marilyn Jager Adams, Linnea Ehri, Keith Stanovich, Louisa Moats, Sally Shaywitz, Hollis Scarborough, Mark Seidenberg, Tim Shanahan, and many others spans decades, disciplines, methodologies, and political contexts. The field is much larger and more internally diverse than the essay suggests.
And finally, there is an important conflation between “Science of Reading” as a broad research tradition and particular federal implementations such as Reading First. One may reasonably criticize aspects of Reading First, standardized testing regimes, scripted curricula, excessive digitization, or technocratic overreach without concluding that explicit instruction in phonemic awareness and decoding lacks empirical support. Those are separable questions.
Indeed, many advocates of structured literacy themselves criticize over-testing, commercialization, and screen-based instruction. I suspect this is where the conversation becomes most important. The real question is probably not whether there exists one universally correct reading method for every child. Very few serious scholars claim that. The more grounded question is whether large numbers of children — especially struggling readers — benefit from explicit, systematic instruction in foundational literacy skills alongside rich language exposure, knowledge-building, and comprehension work. Decades of converging evidence suggest many do.
At some point, debates about genealogy, institutional influence, and symbolic politics have to return to material outcomes. Children either become fluent readers or they do not. That reality is stubbornly concrete. And it is ultimately why many parents, teachers, clinicians, and researchers across ideological lines became dissatisfied with literacy approaches that appeared unable to consistently produce strong reading outcomes for substantial numbers of students.
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My own views: I am and always have been an admirer of Jeanne Chall’s work, especially “”Learning to Read: The Great Debate.” Nothing that has happened in the decades since it was published (1967) has controverted her conclusions.
One of them was that we should try to steer a course between the extremes. We should do the best we can to stop the pendulum swings between “whole word-whole language” methods and “phonics first” methods. Teachers should know the various ways of teaching reading and use the methods that they think is right for different children.
I think that Jeanne would be appalled that states are mandating how to teach reading. That is a direct assault on teacher professionalism.
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Apparent– I find your critique naïve. With SOR– as with every other ed fad preceding it– it is impossible to untangle the ed research from the private-profit and political agendas of those who jump on the bandwagon (or even fund the research).
In our country’s form of capitalism– barely-fettered in either the early 20thC when the basic research on which SOR was being established [behaviorism], and in our recent 5+ decades of govt— the delivery of public goods is intrinsically intertwined with political and for-profit agendas.
It is important to point this out in any forensic study of how some public policy came to be. It’s not an attempt to frame a recommended public policy in a biased narrative of tainting because of “potential” political/ for-profit motives. It’s essential to tease out the different threads of $clout that routinely warp bona fide attempts to improve delivery of better education/ better health outcomes etc. We have to be aware that this is how things go at present in our society, if we hope to change that paradigm.
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Ginny,
Your point about profit is right-on.
These days, we must always ask, “Qui bono??”
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Actually, in reading the full post at the link, I found numerous rejections of the foundational papers/ reports resulting in SOR methods imposed by states– by IES and peer-reviewed vetting– due to lack of empirical evidence— and in most cases countering results when put to the test.
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@bethree500 — your terms are acceptable. And if we accept those terms, we need to bury balanced literacy, right here, on this thread.
The publisher of Lucy Calkins, Fountas and Pinnell, and the entire balanced literacy canon — Heinemann — is owned by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which was taken private in 2022 by Veritas Capital, a New York private equity firm.
Veritas Capital’s portfolio is built primarily around defense and government technology contractors. Peraton, the federal IT business spun out of Northrop Grumman, which holds active contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and provides background investigation services supporting DHS immigration operations.
Frontgrade, supplier of radiation-hardened electronics for national security and space missions. Cubic, a defense and transportation systems contractor. The firm’s CEO has publicly described defense as one of the three sectors where serious capital is flowing.
Industry analysts noted at the time of the 2.8 billion dollar acquisition that the deal gave Veritas the largest direct K-12 education position of any private investor in the United States. Heinemann was described in the trade press as the crown jewel of the portfolio.
You wrote that it is essential to tease out the threads of capital and political agenda warping the delivery of public education. I agree. Let us apply the standard honestly.
The materials at the center of the balanced literacy tradition — the Units of Study curriculum, the leveled reading systems, the professional development apparatus that has trained two generations of American elementary teachers — are the principal profit engine of a private equity firm whose other holdings include ICE contractors, military electronics suppliers, and federal national security technology vendors.
If the genealogical argument is that the Science of Reading is contaminated by its association with hedge funds and behaviorist-technocratic capital, then by your standard the balanced literacy tradition is contaminated more severely. The ownership is current rather than historical. The parent firm’s primary business is military and national security contracting, including direct involvement in immigration enforcement infrastructure. The dollar volumes are not hypothetical or rhetorical. They are on the balance sheet.
Either commercial ownership taints the research it surrounds — in which case the case against balanced literacy is stronger than the case against structured literacy, and we should be having an entirely different conversation in this thread — or commercial ownership does not, by itself, tell us whether a body of research has merit.
Those are the only two coherent positions. The third option, in which capital contamination matters when discussing one tradition and does not matter when discussing the other, is not a forensic study. It is a political preference dressed in the language of structural critique.
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Apparent– I’m having difficulty following your argument, and I am not a stupid person. If you are looking for agreement that “balanced literacy” a la Lucy Calkins is questionable pedagogy that helps only some students, you’ve got it. If you are looking for agreement that education-for-profit does not undermine delivery of quality K12 public school education, cannot agree.
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I think this is a much more productive and grounded framing of the discussion, and I appreciate the invocation of Jeanne Chall because she represented something increasingly rare in education debates: intellectual seriousness without absolutism.
I also agree with an important part of your point: no single method will work identically for every child, and teachers need meaningful professional judgment.
But I respectfully think the current direction of many Science of Reading standards is closer to the opposite of deprofessionalization than to its fulfillment.
One of the defining characteristics of a profession in the United States is precisely that it operates within state-recognized standards, competencies, licensing requirements, and evidence-based guardrails.
Physicians are licensed by states. Nurses are licensed by states. Dentists, pharmacists, attorneys, engineers, psychologists, architects, pilots, physical therapists, accountants, and social workers all practice within legal and regulatory frameworks established by states, licensing boards, accreditation systems, and professional standards bodies. Medical schools are expected to teach anatomy, physiology, pharmacology, and evidence-based standards of care. Law schools prepare students for bar examinations tied to defined bodies of legal knowledge. Nursing programs are aligned with state licensure requirements and clinical competency standards. Even within medicine itself, specialties establish minimum standards around training, residency, procedural competency, and continuing education.
Importantly, none of this is generally understood as “deprofessionalization.” Quite the opposite. Historically, professions become professions precisely by developing shared standards, codified competencies, formal preparation pathways, ethical obligations, licensing structures, and minimum evidence-based expectations. A surgeon still exercises enormous judgment. A trial attorney still exercises enormous judgment. A physician still adapts treatment to individual patients. But none of those professions treats the existence of foundational standards as an assault on professional autonomy.
Structurally, this exists because modern societies delegate enormous responsibility to professionals while also recognizing asymmetries of knowledge between professionals and the public. Parents generally cannot independently adjudicate competing theories of literacy acquisition any more than patients can independently adjudicate cardiac surgery techniques or pharmaceutical interactions. The state therefore creates broad frameworks intended to ensure minimum competency while still preserving room for professional discretion. That is not an unusual feature of professions in America. It is one of their defining characteristics.
I think it is certainly possible to argue that particular Science of Reading laws are poorly designed, overly rigid, too centralized, too vendor-driven, or too narrowly implemented. That is a legitimate debate. One can also reasonably argue about the proper balance between state standards and teacher autonomy.
But I do not think one can coherently argue that introducing evidence-based guardrails, foundational competencies, and minimum instructional expectations into teaching is inherently “deprofessionalization” when those same structures are widely recognized as normal features of virtually every mature profession in the country.
Indeed, one could argue the opposite: that treating teaching as a serious profession requires precisely the combination seen elsewhere in professional life — shared evidence-based foundations combined with substantial room for informed professional judgment.
Explicit phonics instruction is probably not a sufficient condition for excellent literacy education. But the converging evidence suggests it is a necessary component for many children, especially struggling readers. Recognizing that reality does not diminish teacher professionalism. Properly understood, it reflects the seriousness with which the profession itself is being treated.
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States regulate professions but they do not tell them how to do their job.
They don’t tell surgeons how to perform surgery. They don’t tell lawyers how to win cases, how to defend their clients, etc.
Legislators know there are too many variables. It’s wrong to impose the One and Only Right Way because there is none.
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I actually agree with much of this, particularly the point that no single method works identically for every child and that excessive rigidity can become counterproductive.
But I think there is still an important distinction between broad professional guardrails and highly prescriptive scripting.
States may not tell surgeons precisely how to perform every operation step-by-step, but medicine is nevertheless filled with evidence-based standards, competency requirements, required procedures, standards of care, prohibited practices, continuing education mandates, infection-control rules, reporting obligations, and professional expectations grounded in accumulated research.
Attorneys are not told exactly how to argue every case, but legal practice is still structured by extensive procedural rules, evidentiary standards, ethical obligations, licensing exams, and continuing education requirements.
Nurses, pharmacists, pilots, psychologists, and engineers all operate within similar frameworks.
Professional judgment in mature professions generally exists within evidence-based boundaries rather than in opposition to them. That is why I think it is important to distinguish between “there is only one permissible way to teach reading” and “certain foundational components of literacy instruction appear important for many children and should therefore be included in teacher preparation and instructional practice.” Those are very different claims.
Indeed, many current Science of Reading laws are actually much narrower than the caricature sometimes presented in these debates.
Requiring teacher preparation in phonemic awareness, decoding, fluency, dyslexia identification, and language structure is not the same thing as mandating one scripted curriculum, one publisher, or one mechanistic instructional sequence for every child in every classroom.
I suspect this may ultimately be the productive middle ground Jeanne Chall herself was searching for: neither romantic anti-structure nor rigid one-size-fits-all methodology, but a profession grounded in both evidence and judgment. Foundational literacy skills matter. Teacher expertise matters. Human variability matters.
Those truths are not mutually exclusive.
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You skirt close to my view but leave intact your belief that legislatively mandating the “science of reading” is a legislative guardrail that is a necessary component of professionalism, no different from other professions.
I don’t agree. Mandating how to teach, what methods must be used, reduces teacher professionalism and autonomy. It’s especially noxious since there is no independent evidence, accumulated in valid studies, that the “science of reading” is either effective or scientific. Anecdotal assertions are not evidence.
The fact that the SOR typically requires that about 10% of third grade students must be flunked every year is proof that this approach leaves many students behind.
Personally, I find it obnoxious that some states have literally banned “three-cuing,” when the legislators have no idea what they are banning. There may be some teachers who like “three-cuing” and believe that it works for some children. Is it now a crime for them to exercise their professional judgment?
To me, this is analogous to the legislators telling surgeons which tools they should use and which they must never use when performing open-heart surgery. They wouldn’t dare.
One of the impressing things I witnessed in Finland was the great respect for teacher professionalism. Here, we treat teachers as automatons that need to be guided at every moment by prescriptions written by people who never taught.
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think this response actually helps clarify where the real disagreement now exists, and in many ways it is a much narrower and more productive disagreement than where the conversation began.
I agree completely that legislators should not micromanage classrooms or impose rigid one-size-fits-all scripts on teachers. I also agree that professional judgment matters enormously. But I still think there is an important distinction between broad evidence-based guardrails and highly prescriptive pedagogical control, and much of this debate continues to blur those categories together.
For example, surgeons are not told precisely how to perform every operation step-by-step. But medicine nevertheless contains extensive standards of care, prohibited practices, competency requirements, evidence-based protocols, continuing education mandates, infection-control rules, residency standards, licensing expectations, and legally recognized boundaries around acceptable practice. Attorneys are not told exactly how to argue every case, but legal practice is still structured by procedural rules, evidentiary standards, ethical obligations, licensing exams, and professional oversight. Professional autonomy in mature professions generally exists within evidence-based frameworks rather than in opposition to them.
That is why I think it is important to distinguish between:
“There is only one permissible way to teach reading”
and
“Certain foundational components of literacy instruction appear sufficiently well-supported that teacher preparation and early literacy instruction should include them.”
Those are very different claims.
And importantly, many current Science of Reading laws are much narrower than the caricature often presented in these debates. Requiring teacher preparation in phonemic awareness, decoding, fluency, dyslexia identification, and language structure is not the same thing as mandating one publisher, one curriculum, one pacing guide, or one mechanistic script for every classroom.
I also think the claim that there is “no independent evidence” supporting the Science of Reading overstates the case considerably. Serious scholars can absolutely debate implementation quality, comprehension outcomes, over-testing, curriculum rigidity, or the limits of particular interventions. But decades of converging work from cognitive psychology, dyslexia research, developmental psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience — including the work of Jeanne Chall herself — do suggest that many children benefit from explicit foundational literacy instruction. That body of work may be incomplete, evolving, and imperfect. But it is difficult to argue in good faith that it simply does not exist.
And interestingly, I think the Finland example actually illustrates part of the point here. Finland is not a system without standards, preparation requirements, curricular frameworks, or shared professional expectations. Quite the opposite. It is an extraordinarily professionalized system with rigorous teacher preparation, national curricular coherence, and high institutional trust. The autonomy Finnish teachers enjoy exists alongside strong professional formation and shared expectations, not in the absence of them.
Which is why I continue to think the productive center here is neither rigid technocratic scripting nor purely unconstrained discretion. Mature professions generally combine evidence, standards, judgment, adaptation, and human variability all at once.
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Can we agree that the standards you cite are developed and upheld by the professions themselves, not by the legislature? Politicians are not the ones who write professional standards.
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“Politicians are not the ones who write professional standards.”
I want to pause on this claim directly, because I do not think it is historically or institutionally correct.
Legislatures and public governance structures routinely establish, shape, authorize, and enforce professional standards, and have throughout the history of modern professional regulation.
Congress wrote Sarbanes-Oxley and fundamentally reshaped accounting practice.
Congress wrote HIPAA and established healthcare privacy requirements.
The FDA’s authority to regulate pharmaceutical and medical-device practice is a legislative creation.
OSHA standards governing engineering and construction exist through statutory and regulatory law.
FAA aviation safety requirements are federal law.
State legislatures write scope-of-practice laws governing what physicians, nurses, pharmacists, psychologists, and other professionals may legally do.
The Americans with Disabilities Act imposed binding architectural standards regardless of professional preference.
This is not an aberration or edge case. It is the historical norm across virtually every mature modern profession.
Internally generated professional standards matter enormously, of course. But serious professions in the United States generally operate through both simultaneously: internal professional standards and external legal guardrails.
The AMA exists. So does the FDA.
The ABA exists. So do legislatures, courts, licensing boards, and statutory legal frameworks.
These are not competing systems. They are complementary ones.
And importantly, nobody looks at the existence of the FDA and concludes that medicine has therefore been “deprofessionalized.” Nobody looks at OSHA and concludes that engineering has been deprofessionalized. The existence of external legal guardrails and genuine professional autonomy are not opposites. They are how the same institutional system functions.
Which is why I continue to find the current framing difficult to reconcile.
If teaching is to be treated as a serious profession analogous to medicine, law, architecture, engineering, or aviation, then some combination of internally generated professional standards and externally imposed public guardrails is not unusual or aberrational.
It is largely how mature professions function.
That combination exists across virtually every professional field: credentialing systems, evolving standards of practice, licensing requirements, continuing education obligations, public accountability structures, professional associations, regulatory frameworks, and legal oversight all operating simultaneously. Professional autonomy exists, but within broader institutional expectations and public responsibilities.
One can certainly argue that education is exceptional. But looked at closely, every serious profession is exceptional. Medicine is exceptional. Architecture is exceptional. Aviation is exceptional. Law is exceptional. Each involves high levels of judgment, human variability, contextual complexity, and professional discretion. Yet across all of them, the combination of professional autonomy balanced against professional and legal standards remains the norm.
One can also argue that public education is uniquely democratic. But publicly funded institutions entrusted with broad civic responsibilities are typically subject to public governance frameworks and democratic accountability structures. In that context, some degree of publicly established guardrails around professional practice is structurally predictable.
And of course one can argue that particular literacy laws or standards overreach, are poorly designed, or are too rigidly implemented. But at that point we are finally having the right debate — not whether broad standards and public guardrails may legitimately exist around professional practice, but which standards are appropriate, how they should be implemented, and where professional discretion should properly remain.
That is exactly the kind of debate that occurs continuously inside mature professions. Physicians debate scope-of-practice laws. Engineers debate building codes. Accountants debate regulatory frameworks. Those are normal and healthy features of professional life.
But there is a major difference between arguing that particular guardrails are poorly calibrated and arguing that external legal frameworks are somehow illegitimate in principle.
The former is an ordinary professional debate.
The latter ultimately rejects one of the defining structural features through which professions are ordinarily organized, governed, and held publicly accountable.
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The problem is that you are advocating for politicians to tell teachers exactly which method to use when teaching reading, and which are banned.
Will teachers who like “three cuing” be jailed?
You describe “professional guardrails” but state legislatures and even Congress have redefined the work of teachers. Their mandates go far beyond professional mandates and tell teachers how to teach, which is something that they cannot do. With few exceptions, our elected legislators have never taught and know nothing about teaching.
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I do not think that fairly characterizes the position I actually argued. And honestly, I suspect we both recognize the distinction I am drawing here.
Throughout this discussion I have repeatedly distinguished between broad competency expectations and rigid pedagogical micromanagement. Those are very different things institutionally and professionally.
And I am not going to seriously engage the remark about jailing teachers because no serious participant in this discussion is proposing anything remotely like that. The actual question is whether publicly funded school systems may establish broad evidence-based guardrails around foundational literacy instruction while still preserving substantial professional discretion in implementation.
I also think we should be careful not to treat education as uniquely exempt from the way mature professions ordinarily function within democratic societies.
Legislatures routinely establish legal frameworks around fields they themselves do not personally practice. States establish building codes without every legislator being an architect. Aviation safety standards are not written exclusively by pilots. Medicine, law, engineering, accounting, and countless other professions all operate within some combination of professional autonomy, public accountability, regulatory standards, licensing structures, and democratic oversight.
And importantly, part of functioning as a mature profession is making specialized expertise legible to broader civic institutions and stakeholders, including elected governments entrusted with public responsibilities. That interaction between expertise and democratic governance is not an aberration. It is a normal feature of professional life in modern societies.
Of course legislators should not micromanage every classroom any more than they should dictate every surgical technique or litigation strategy. But it also does not follow that any publicly established literacy standards are inherently illegitimate simply because elected officials participate in creating them.
I suspect everyone in this discussion already understands that broad public guardrails and genuine professional autonomy routinely coexist across mature professions. They already do.
The real debate is not whether such guardrails may exist in principle. It is where they should be drawn, how prescriptive they should become, and how much discretion should remain with practitioners themselves.
That is a serious and worthwhile debate. But it is a very different debate from the caricature that any externally established literacy expectations are somehow equivalent to abolishing teacher professionalism altogether.
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SOR is not evidence based. The only genuine evaluation of SOR was carried out after the federal government had spent $6 billion on a project called “Reading First” to implement the recommendations of the National Reading Panel, whose report is the basis for SOR.
As I explained, the evaluation found that students had mastered the elements of SOR, but their comprehension was no better than students who were not in the project.
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This is a horrific and spot-on endictment of the SOR methods being imposed by an increasing # of states’ legislation for public-school reading pedagogy. It is rooted in 100+-yo behaviorist methods that are imbued with eugenic, racist, & antisemitic beliefs— and animal studies [featuring practiced on starving cats] that are counter to the way human children learn from appropriate pedagogy.
All handily aligned with methods easily adapted to educational tech (including now AI) -> commercialization -> privatized profits.
The author’s tour de force is the AI summary of two paras toward the end of this piece. AI gives a thorough analysis, with this concluding remark: “By linking the 20th-century behaviorists to the 21st-century state mandates, you are proving that the current “catastrophe” isn’t an accident—it’s the logical conclusion of a century-old philosophy that prioritizes the machine (the curriculum) over the organism (the child).”
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The essay at the top of this thread and the position now being defended at the bottom of it are not the same argument. The distance between them is the story.
This discussion illustrates two concepts worth naming. The first is the motte-and-bailey dynamic. The second is Brandolini’s Law. Together they explain quite a lot about why debates like this one feel so difficult to pin down — and why the original essay, whatever its merits, cannot be defended by the arguments now being offered on its behalf.
But there is a third thing worth noting, and it is perhaps the most revealing of all. The arguments themselves are an interesting archaeology of the habits of mind of a half century ago.
The original essay — and the defense of it offered in this thread — form a kind of layer cake of rhetorical tropes that were ascendant from the 1970s through the 1990s: the genealogical contamination of ideas by their institutional origins, the moralization of empirical disputes, the substitution of structural critique for evidentiary engagement, the assumption that identifying corporate or political interests in a research tradition is sufficient to discredit it.
These were the signature intellectual moves of the New Left — the coalition that gathered around George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign and the academics who reached their prime in that era, more than half a century ago now. They were once vital and generative moves. They produced genuine insights about power, institutions, and knowledge.
But to be frank, they have not aged well — and the fields they once sought to critique have largely moved on to harder, more specific, more empirical questions that these tools were never well designed to answer. What was radical in 1972 is now the establishment. And the establishment, it turns out, has a reading problem.
This exchange began with an essay making extremely sweeping claims: that the Science of Reading lacks scientific legitimacy, that the National Reading Panel was fundamentally invalid, that SOR laws are catastrophic for children, and that the broader movement represents a behaviorist-technocratic project tied to corporate interests. Those claims were introduced, endorsed, and described as impressive and fascinating.
But over the course of this discussion, the conversation has steadily narrowed into a much smaller and more defensible set of claims: that teacher judgment matters, that some literacy mandates may become overly rigid, that Reading First produced mixed results, and that reading research remains complex, evolving, and contested.
Those are serious arguments. They are also very different arguments from where this conversation began.
The motte-and-bailey dynamic describes precisely this pattern: broad, rhetorically expansive claims retreating under scrutiny into narrower and more defensible positions. The bailey is the dramatic, sweeping claim — SOR is a catastrophic corporate behaviorist conspiracy with no scientific validity.
The motte is the defensible redoubt — particular implementations showed mixed results, teacher judgment matters, some laws may overreach. The bailey does the political work of energizing opposition and contaminating the entire SOR enterprise through guilt by association, a technique with a long pedigree in ideological debate reaching back generations. The motte is where the argument retreats when pressed.
The two are presented as the same position. They are not.
And every future time someone reads a sweeping anti-SOR claim and watches it retreat under scrutiny to modest defensible ground, they now have a name for what they are watching.
Brandolini’s Law explains the other half of the dynamic. The amount of energy needed to refute misinformation is an order of magnitude larger than the energy needed to produce it.
Broad accusations are made and then abandoned when pressed — but the abandoning happens quietly while the original charge has already done its political work.
Refuting a sweeping claim takes real effort. The zinger lands instantly — a technique that defined an era of policymaking a generation or two ago, when soundbites fed into broadcast media could shape public opinion before any serious rebuttal had time to circulate.
The genealogical argument — tracing institutional connections between Bush, behaviorism, hedge funds, and reading instruction to morally contaminate an entire research tradition — is similarly a product of a particular moment in progressive intellectual culture.
It carries the unmistakable imprint of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when a generation of intellectuals coming of age in the shadow of Vietnam, corporate power, and institutional betrayal developed a habit of mind in which exposing the origins of an idea — who funded it, who promoted it, whose interests it served — was widely treated as equivalent to refuting it.
That habit of mind produced genuinely important insights about power and knowledge. It also produced a generation of arguments that have aged less well than their authors, in fields that have since moved on to ask harder and more specific empirical questions.
The information environment has changed considerably since then. The arguments, it seems, have not. And in the meantime audiences spend their energy unpacking what are, on close inspection, half-truths and distortions.
To be brief about what the actual evidence shows: Reading First produced genuinely positive results on decoding and fluency — the comprehension gap represents one contested finding in a complex evaluation, not a comprehensive refutation of explicit foundational instruction.
Project Follow Through — the largest controlled study of elementary education ever conducted, run under Head Start across hundreds of sites and tens of thousands of children in the late 1960s and 1970s — showed direct instruction winning comprehensively, not just on basic skills but on problem solving and self-concept measures. Results so inconvenient for the educational establishment of that era that they were largely buried.
And Steubenville, Ohio — a high poverty district next to a public housing project, routinely scoring in the top one to ten percent of schools nationwide for third grade reading, teaching virtually every child to read well for twenty five years using structured direct instruction — exists right now, today, as a living answer to the claim that this approach has no evidence behind it.
These are not anecdotal assertions. They are exactly the kind of evidence the argument claims does not exist.
And like the claim that elected leaders in democratic institutions at local, state, and federal levels do not play a role in shaping professional standards — dismissed simply by observing how medicine, law, engineering, aviation, and scores of other professions actually function — the Reading First argument does not bear the weight being placed upon it here.
And Reading First is a poor fit for this discussion in any case: its results, which you assert were a failure, are themselves debatable and actively debated among your contemporaries. Reading First was a federal funding and implementation initiative launched more than a quarter century ago, rooted in the policy frameworks, accountability structures, and research understandings of the late 1990s — a period whose debates, assumptions, and institutional arrangements look quite different from where the field now stands.
It involved a broad package of assessments, interventions, funding incentives, and administrative mechanisms extending far beyond phonics or explicit foundational literacy instruction alone.
Contemporary Science of Reading advocacy draws on a substantially larger and more recent body of research — including neuroscience and MRI-based reading research that was far less developed, and in some cases technologically unavailable, to researchers of that generation. The fact that two different literacy movements from different eras draw on portions of the same broader research corpus does not make them synonymous.
Otherwise one could dismiss virtually any contemporary framework merely by identifying partial overlap with some earlier initiative that produced mixed results. That is not how mature evidence-based fields evaluate themselves. That is not how any field moves forward.
And interestingly, the position this discussion has gradually arrived at — that reading research is complex, that evidence matters, that teacher judgment matters, that implementation quality matters, and that some mandates may overreach — is a position many serious Science of Reading advocates working today would themselves recognize as broadly reasonable.
Jeanne Chall, whom you rightly admire, reached similar conclusions more than half a century ago. The researchers who have built on her work since — Ehri, Stanovich, Shaywitz, Scarborough, Seidenberg, and others who have spent their careers in the field — have only deepened the evidentiary foundation she helped establish.
The conversation has moved. The research has accumulated. The field looks considerably different from the one being described in the essay at the top of this thread.
Which is why the distance between the original essay’s sweeping conclusions and the much narrower claims now under discussion is actually quite significant.
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That’s a lot of words to deal with a straightforward proposition: is there a “science of reading” and is it effective?
I say there is no such thing as a “science of reading” because there are many effective ways to teach reading, not just one.
I agree that a knowledge of phonics is a component of effective reading instruction.
I staunchly oppose legislative mandates for HOW to teach reading, because teachers should not be constrained by mandates written by people who have never been teachers. I respect professional judgment, which is honed by sound preparation and classroom experience.
Proponents of SOR rely on the report of the National Reading Panel (2000) as the source of SOR.
That report was the basis of the Reading First program, which was part of NCLB. Reading First spent $6 billion over six years.
It was evaluated by professional, respected evaluators. https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/2025/01/20094038-pdf
They found:
Executive Summary
This report presents findings from the third and final year of the Reading First Impact Study (RFIS), a
congressionally mandated evaluation of the federal government’s $1.0 billion-per-year initiative to help
all children read at or above grade level by the end of third grade. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001
(PL 107-110, Title I, Part B, Subpart 1) established Reading First (RF) and mandated its evaluation. This
evaluation is being conducted by Abt Associates and MDRC with collaboration from RMC Research,
Rosenblum-Brigham Associates, Westat, Computer Technology Services, DataStar, Field Marketing
Incorporated, and Westover Consulting, under the oversight of the U.S. Department of Education,
Institute of Education Sciences (IES).
This report examines the impact of Reading First funding on 248 schools in 13 states and includes 17
school districts and one statewide program for a total of 18 sites. The study includes data from three
school years: 2004-05, 2005-06 and 2006-07.
The Reading First Impact Study was commissioned to address the following questions:
1) 2) 3) What is the impact of Reading First on student reading achievement?
What is the impact of Reading First on classroom instruction?
What is the relationship between the degree of implementation of scientifically based reading
instruction and student reading achievement?
The primary measure of student reading achievement was the Reading Comprehension subtest from the
Stanford Achievement Test—10 (SAT 10), given to students in grades one, two, and three. A secondary
measure of student reading achievement in decoding was given to students in first grade. The measure of
classroom reading instruction was derived from direct observations of reading instruction, and measures
of program implementation were derived from surveys of educational personnel. Findings related to the
first two questions are based on results pooled across the study’s three years of data collection (2004-05,
2005-06, and 2006-07) for classroom instruction and reading comprehension, results from first grade
students in one school year (spring 2007) for decoding, and aspects of program implementation from
spring 2007 surveys. Key findings are as follows:
• Reading First produced a positive and statistically significant impact on amount of
instructional time spent on the five essential components of reading instruction promoted by
the program (phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension) in
grades one and two. The impact was equivalent to an effect size of 0.33 standard deviations
in grade one and 0.46 standard deviations in grade two.
• Reading First produced positive and statistically significant impacts on multiple practices that
are promoted by the program, including professional development in scientifically based
reading instruction (SBRI), support from full-time reading coaches, amount of reading
instruction, and supports available for struggling readers.
• Reading First did not produce a statistically significant impact on student reading
comprehension test scores in grades one, two or three.
Final Report: Executive Summary xv
• Reading First produced a positive and statistically significant impact on decoding among first
grade students tested in one school year (spring 2007). The impact was equivalent to an effect
size of 0.17 standard deviations.
Results are also presented from exploratory analyses that examine some hypotheses about factors that
might account for the observed patterns of impacts. These analyses are considered exploratory because
the study was not designed to provide a rigorous test of these hypotheses, and therefore the results must
be considered as suggestive. Across different potential predictors of student outcomes, these exploratory
analyses are based on different subgroups of students, schools, grade levels, and/or years of data
collection. Key findings from these exploratory analyses are as follows:
• There was no consistent pattern of effects over time in the impact estimates for reading
instruction in grade one or in reading comprehension in any grade. There appeared to be a
systematic decline in reading instruction impacts in grade two over time.
• There was no relationship between reading comprehension and the number of years a student
was exposed to RF.
• There is no statistically significant site-to-site variation in impacts, either by grade or overall,
for classroom reading instruction or student reading comprehension.
• There is a positive association between time spent on the five essential components of
reading instruction promoted by the program and reading comprehension measured by the
SAT 10, but these findings are sensitive to both model specification and the sample used to
estimate the relationship.
Back to my comment:
The initial goal of the Reading First program was “to help
all children read at or above grade level by the end of third grade.”
This goal was not met; not by the children assessed two decades nor by children today. Every state that has adopted SOR is flunking kids who can’t pass the 3rd grade reading test. That is close to 10%. If you were an auto repairman or selling tires, would you boast that “only” 9% failed. I would look for another supplier.
I just read that Missouri is about to endorse SOR legislation and flunking 3rd graders is a critical part of their program.
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Welcome to the 21st century. Your comments do not survive Google.
You called this a lot of words to deal with a straightforward proposition. It is a lot of words because you keep moving the proposition, and I keep checking Google.
And then you shift the goalposts.
A quick Google-informed reality check and the catastrophic SoR at the top of the thread becomes “phonics is one component” at the bottom.
Another Google session and the “no scientific legitimacy” claim becomes “let’s discuss Reading First.”
That would be a problem, oh, say, half a century ago. But Google and a little background knowledge knocks that down instantly, too.
In 1984, with three networks and no rewind, you would have won this exchange.
The tire dealer line is a Reagan closer in miniature — quotable, confident, structurally hollow underneath, dependent on the audience not being able to fact-check it before the next segment.
We do not live there anymore. We have Google now. It is like microfiche, except faster. It runs on the internet — that thing Al Gore used to talk about all the time.
On the internet there is no commercial break. And almost nothing you wrote above survives fifteen minutes with it.
Reading First: you posted the document, and it does not say what you said it says.
The auto repairman line: a great punchline that points the wrong way.
You wrote: “Every state that has adopted SOR is flunking kids who can’t pass the 3rd grade reading test. That is close to 10%. If you were an auto repairman or selling tires, would you boast that ‘only’ 9% failed. I would look for another supplier.”
“No science of reading”: the falsification is one comment away.
The rhetorical pattern: it just repeated itself, in real time, in the response to the post that named it.
On teacher judgment: what next, are we going to let civil engineers go by vibes?
Bar exams for lawyers. Standards of care for physicians. Building codes for architects. Board certification for surgeons. Every profession the public depends on operates within evidence-based standards established by something larger than the profession itself. That is not an attack on professional judgment. It is the precondition for it.
On legislatures: so you’re against democracy now?
You are arguing that democratic oversight of public education is illegitimate. That is not a defense of teacher professionalism. It is the claim that one profession should be exempt from the democratic accountability every other publicly funded profession accepts. Doctors at VA hospitals answer to Congress. Engineers building public bridges answer to state inspectors. Lawyers representing the government answer to elected officials. Architects designing public buildings answer to code. Teachers in public schools do too. That is not a bug. It is the system. If you cannot make a coherent case to a lawmaker, in plain language, with evidence they can verify in fifteen minutes on the same Google that disassembled the rest of this thread, the problem is not the lawmaker.
The problem is the case.
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Give it time. We will see what happens.
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Oh. Not those words.
“Give it time. We will see what happens.” Heard that before, when my kid was struggling to read.
If you are a parent and you are on this thread, please learn from my experience. If a teacher says those words to you about your child’s reading, stop. Do not pass go. Go IMMEDIATELY to a good reading tutor outside the school. Every town has one — the one affluent parents quietly send their kids to. If you are lucky there are several. If you are even luckier they are good.
Then go big, go hard, go early. Get a second job. Keep driving the busted-up car. Sell stuff. Cancel that vacation. Intervention will only get more expensive later.
The words “give it time, we will see what happens” are everywhere and always the signal to GET OUTSIDE HELP IMMEDIATELY.
If you’re a policy expert, a school administrator, a pundit — you have time, I suppose. If you’re a parent, time is the last thing you have. Move.
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I don’t know why you are so certain that you are right and anyone who disagrees with you is wrong. I stand behind my original statement. There are no policy miracles in education. There is no piece of legislation that any state could pass that would magically turn every child into a proficient reader.
It takes time for hoaxes to reveal themselves. The Common Core was a policy hoax. VAM was a policy hoax. Merit pay is a policy hoax. I could list more, but I think you get the point. Teaching requires professionalism. Not defined by legislators but by the profession.
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There are four moves in your reply and they all do the same thing. The first is “you think you are right and everyone else is wrong” — a framing I have not used and that the record above does not support. The second is “no legislation can magically turn every child into a proficient reader” — a standard nobody set, knocked down by you alone. The third is calling VAM, merit pay, and Common Core “hoaxes” — a word that means deliberate fraud, applied to policy theories that were overconfident and did not survive evidence. Their advocates believed what they were saying. The fact that evidence eventually caught up to your critique is the system functioning, not collapsing. The fourth is “professionalism, not defined by legislators but by the profession” — a binary the previous comments dismantled in detail. Each move is small. Stacked together, they let the comment land while engaging with none of the substance above it. That is the pattern of the entire exchange. Naming it is part of taking the substance seriously.
As for what I do know. Orwell said that to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle. I sat in my daughter’s classrooms. I saw how reading was taught. I know the names of the methods used. I saw they did not work. So I turned to experts. What they said was internally coherent and aligned with what I saw firsthand. That is the opposite of confidence. That is caution. Not credentials, not how long someone has been in the field, but whether the argument holds its shape under pressure. Does the position stay the same when pressed, or does it change? Do the proponents engage the strongest version of the other side, or only the weakest? Do they show their work, or appeal to their standing? Do they accept falsification when it arrives, or move the goalposts? Do they restate the other side in terms the other side would recognize, or in terms designed to make the other side easier to dismiss? These are not academic tests. They are how careful readers tell arguments from performances.
I also know that the institution that sponsored the development of the curriculum used in my daughter’s classroom has severed ties with it. The school district where it was workshopped — New York City public schools — has walked away from it. And the expert who developed that curriculum has done exactly what the experts whose work I cited above have been suggesting for years: incorporated phonics more deeply and explicitly into her instruction.
Lucy Calkins followed the evidence. Why shouldn’t I?
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I’m arguing against certainty and legislation. You seem certain that you have “evidence ” which is driving the current passion for SOR. I oppose legislating how to teach. I have forgotten why you take so many words to say the same thing over and over.
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Classic projection. I’m cautious; you’re certain.
I’m citing the field. You’re citing a conspiracy theory.
The essay at the top of this thread is a frenetic dot-connecting exercise linking George W. Bush, the Texas Business Council, Thorndike’s starving cats in puzzle boxes, Skinnerian operant conditioning, eugenics, hedge funds, adaptive AI, and “distributed cognition.”
Caution is noticing when the field moves. Lucy Calkins incorporated phonics more deeply into her curriculum. Columbia Teachers College severed ties with Units of Study. New York City public schools walked away from it. California Democrats just passed comprehensive literacy reform — Rubio, Rivas, Muratsuchi, signed by Newsom — in one of the most progressive states in the country.
Somehow I’ve wound up on the same side as the central figures and institutions of balanced literacy itself.
Why are you so certain they’re wrong?
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They are running to catch up with the latest fad.
Why would anyone want to be like Mississippi, still the poorest, most segregated, most racist state, whose scores are below the national average?
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The interesting thing is that none of the examples I cited were Mississippi.
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