Retired teacher Nancy Bailey wrote on her blog about significant figures in the evolution of the history of reading. In this post, she focuses on the role of Robert Sweet, an important figure in the Department of Edication during the Reagan-Bush era.
Today’s Science of Reading (SOR) was born of a right-wing conservative phonics focus. A Nation at Risk helped advance that messaging, and one of the messengers was Robert Sweet, Jr.
As the country mandates the Science of Reading (SOR) and invests heavily in unproven programs, marketing disputes flourish over which best align with so-called evidence. These programs control teachers’ instruction through one-size-fits-all directives, delivered with manuals or online. It’s easy to see where this is going. States could spend millions more on reading programs that don’t appear to improve learning as teachers are driven out with tech.
During the Reagan administration, A Nation at Risk raised unfounded negativity towards public schools and teachers (See Biddle and Berliner, The Manufactured Crisis). Reading, already controversial, became a vehicle for attacking teachers, their teacher colleges, and public schools, furthering a school privatization agenda that continues to this day. Schools weren’t doing badly, but those who wanted to privatize them worked to make them fail.
The obituary of Robert Sweet, Jr. is glowing. I don’t doubt that, like many SOR enthusiasts, he believed he was doing the right thing. He became instrumental in the phonics movement, working later with the Science of Reading and Reading First promoter Reid Lyon to create No Child Left Behind and Reading First. Yet he’s rarely mentioned today.
Sweet wasn’t a qualified reading teacher. He taught physics, coached, and sold textbooks. He arrived in DC as a member of the US House of Representatives staff during the Reagan administration. He supported Reagan initiatives such as tuition tax credits, low-income voucher programs, student self-help reforms, education savings accounts, and other conservative school initiatives.
He met Dr. Onalee McGraw, a PhD political scientist and a Heritage Foundation representative. McGraw, unrelated to the publishing company, was a Reagan appointee to the National Council on Educational Research (See Robert Sweet interview 4.17 below).
The Heritage Foundation is behind today’s Project 2025. Lindsey Burke, who wrote the education part, works with Education Secretary Linda McMahon. Neither are educators.
McGraw wrote “Family Choice in Education: The New Imperative,” arguing that public schools were in decline, academics had been replaced by social engineering, and humanistic curricula and subjective values had taken over. She believed education was inherently religious, not value-free. She promoted vouchers, minimum competency requirements, and moral education classes.
Sweet initially didn’t see reading as a problem. He and his children learned to read. But McGraw introduced him to Michael Brunner, who convinced Sweet otherwise.
Brunner wasn’t a reading teacher either. He had a degree in library science becoming the director of Title I in Idaho. He connected with the Reading Reform Foundation, created after Rudolph Flesch’s Why Johnny Can’t Read. Brunner wrote Vowelectomy. He believed in the work of well-known reading expert Jeanne Chall, but didn’t think vowel and mixed digraph instruction took place early enough, waiting until the end of first grade.
Both Sweet and Brunner repeatedly claim that students aren’t learning to read and teachers and especially their colleges are failing to teach phonics.
But Berliner and Biddle in The Manufactured Crisis pointed to media claims as being distorted and hostile, describing reporters failing to address cited study details, indicating that research really showed that poverty was the leading cause of reading difficulties (see p. 10-11).
Sweet became the director of the National Institute of Education and later the US Department of Education, bringing Brunner to DC to work on reading. They commissioned a report, Becoming a Nation of Readers. It’s informative, covering phonics importance, but also comprehension, meaning, and environmental influences. Sweet complained it was unfocused (8.45 video below).
He commissioned another report by Marilyn Jaeger Adams Beginning to Read: Thinking and learning about Print. The book, still popular today, stresses the importance of phonics and whole language. I could not find what Sweet thought about Jaeger’s book.
Both Bruner and Sweet favored Spaulding, a reading program spun from Orton-Gillingham (OG). Sweet criticizes Reading Recovery, praising Spaulding at the end of this interview. OG remains popular in the Science of Reading, despite common knowledge that it has lacked high-quality, peer-reviewed studies of its efficacy for 50 years!
Brunner and Sweet traveled the country observing teachers, without being reading experts. They blamed colleges for failing teachers on how to teach phonics. While teacher colleges can always improve, generalizing the same criticism towards all is dangerous. I knew of excellent teacher college programs at that time. Brunner created his own reading program, Phonics Made Plain.
He authored numerous articles on reading, including a Republican policy paper “Illiteracy: An Incurable Disease or Educational Malpractice?” Sweet’s paper was supported by the U.S. Department of Education and the Center for the Study of Reading at the University of Illinois. It called for enlarging the restoration of the instructional practice of intensive, systematic phonics in every primary school in America.
Next, under President George H.W. Bush, Sweet became administrator for the Juvenile Justice Department. Brunner writes Retarding America: The Imprisonment of Potential, highlighting that juvenile crime is due to current reading methods (i.e. little phonics), while ignoring other variables. A good thing is that they establish reading programs in some detention facilities.
Sweet learns of the National Institute of Health and Human Development and met Reid Lyon. He seemed then to form the idea that reading must be based on scientific principal and one assumes he’s talking about phonics (11.58 video below).
In 1993, Sweet became co-founder and president of the now defunct National Right to Read Foundation which focuses again on phonics (12:41 video below). He still implied that teachers didn’t know about phonics.
Brunner criticizes the All Handicapped Children’s Act (PL 94-142) throughout the book listed above implying children simply lack phonics instruction.
But, public schools were working to accommodate children with reading difficulties in schools using phonics in resource classes especially after the 1975 passage of PL94-142. And phonics may have been taught later.
Sweet eventually helps pass the Reading Excellence Act in 1998 under President Clinton, although he doesn’t care for Clinton’s America Reads program where college students read to students (14.18 video below).
Under President G.W. Bush he collaborates with Reid Lyon, an advisor to the president, crafts language for the No Child Left Behind Act. Sweet becomes the primary author of the Reading First initiative which saw “scientifically based research” noted more than 100 times. Reading First turned out controversial.
Lyon immensely disliked educational schools, stating in 2002, a year after 9/11, You know, if there was any piece of legislation that I could pass, it could be to blow up colleges of education. He supports today’s Science of Reading initiative.
Around this time Reid, according to the NYTs, advised his former boss, Dr. Duane Alexander, about candidates for the National Reading Panel (Schemo, 2007). No early childhood teachers who teach reading were included on the panel. It’s controversial findings are still promoted by SOR enthusiasts, including some whom were on the panel. [I mention the lack of early childhood teachers but one teacher/principal was selected for the panel. Joanne Yatvin wrote many reports about her concerns about the panel itself. Minority View]
Robert Sweet and those described here were given much clout over teachers and how they teach. Yet after all these years, focusing heavily on phonics, and adding billions in technology often for SOR online programs, teachers, and their teacher colleges are still blamed as failing.
References
Berliner, D. C., & Biddle, B. J. (1995). The manufactured crisis : myths, fraud, and the attack on America’s public schools. Addison-Wesley.
Gursky, D. (1981, August 1). After The Reign Of Dick And Jane. Education Week, Retrieved from https://www.edweek.org/education/after-the-reign-of-dick-and-jane/1991/08
Schemo, D. J. (2007, March 9). In War Over Teaching Reading, a U.S.-Local Clash. The New York Times, Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/09/education/09reading.html
This post is adapted from my panel presentation at the 2025 Network for Public Education meeting.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I am a semi-retired reading teacher. In this case I only teach one day a week although this group meets five days a week four times with a special educator to read a book and learn comprehension. They also meet once for Phonics five times a week with a different special educator. So they are pulled out for all reading and their classroom teacher does not see them read pretty much ever.
The group includes four fourth graders: 1. one very well-informed and well-spoken dyslexic, 2. a boy who does not speak English and can’t read, and 3. and 4. two misbehaving boys whose vocabulary and familiarity with books is quite low. These two, however, read close to grade level. … They make up a group because it is literacy time for the fourth grade, so…
The book chosen for them is at all of their frustration levels as calculated by error rates (Fountas & Pinnell) as well as Benchmark testing.
They are taught their phonics using the Wilson Reading system. When I teach the reading group, I notice that the dyslexic child regularly guesses at words after managing the first few letters, after the first syllable sometimes, and that he does not correctly read final morphemes such as /ing/ or /ed/. However, the phonics teacher, because she is following a Wilson curriculum, is focused on blends or open syllables, a sequence which does not take into account where this child is and what he needs. Nor is the phonics he is learning reinforced in his reading group since it is not the same teacher. Also, he does not stop to reread when errors cause the sentences to make no sense despite the fact that he is a very intelligent boy.
The other children have not yet been taught vowel combinations for example; Wilson evidently saves this for later. Their book is at a level T, many complex words etc. They know some things and not others that would be relevant for the books they read, but no word work is part of this plan. The vocabulary is also beyond them. I do some of this, but it is not part of the plan.
I observed the regular teacher. She reads a considerable amount to them. She is an engaging reader and acts out various responses to the book as she reads. She is focused on comprehension partly in preparation for upcoming state tests for all the three children. She reads over half of each day’s selection to the children herself, they also read parts in turn, making many errors which are corrected without explanation. After the selection for the day is finished, the teacher reads the publisher-provided comprehension questions followed by the multiple choice possibilities. She then lets the group offer answers. The unhappy boys are wrong at least half the time by my count. They are not once asked why they chose what they did. One quickly accedes to the idea of the dyslexic who is always correct. The teacher sometimes explains the correct answer to them quickly.
Why are these kind of plans being made? I think it’s the collective influence of some decades of high stakes testing, and, highly related, the influence of highly prescriptive curriculum.
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Thank you for this detailed account of your experience. It closely mirrors my experience as a K-8 principal, which ended in 2013. We used Wilson and/or O-G with all students who had reading goals* on their IEPs , which later expanded to students with low DIBELS scores. Like your experience, when I visited classrooms, I saw many bored students who were forced to read “predictable texts” which bore no relation to actual literature while their classmates read actual books. Some cried, some “acted out”. Comprehension of these texts could not be measured – though questions were asked that purported to do that – because there was nothing to comprehend: no plot, no characterizations, no ideas. All some of these students improved on were their DIBELS scores, not their vocabulary or reading comprehension.
*I thoroughly read every initial IEP before it went out to parents and saw a lot of cut-and-paste goals derived from quite varied reading assessment results. E.g. low fluency scores were assumed to be an indication that poor phonics skills caused slow reading when they could just as easily have been due to missing background knowledge or vocabulary to make sense of the text. Slowing down one’s reading to make sense of it should be considered as a literacy strength.
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I so agree about the lack of thought on this stuff about fluency. I have a student now who did poorly on fluency and fine on decoding and comprehension. the system has given her teacher vast amounts of instruction to enact on her fluency. without thinking about what it might mean that she readds slowly
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I agree. This is test prep behavior.
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Parents and teachers should be extremely skeptical of self-appointed outsiders that claim they can improve education as they often have ulterior motives for what they recommend. It is even worse when those outsiders like Bill Gates, Betsy DeVos and assorted politicians stand to directly benefit from whatever is presented as the recommended approach. Many so-called conservatives have been trying to dismantle public education for decades. Most of their recommendations do not enhance or improve public education as their goal is to undermine the public service while unleashing various schemes to gain access to the billions of dollars in US public education funding.
The so-called science of reading is another tech heavy scheme designed to marginalize legitimate teachers and provide streams of revenue to favored companies. It is a reboot of G.W. Bush’s failed “Reading First”phonics program under NCLB that wasted over a billion dollars and resulted in little academic success. The so-called Science of Reading has not been validated by any major university that offers degrees in the teaching of reading. SOR is another politically driven program backed by wealthy investors and conservative politicians that can afford to buy political will.https://publicintegrity.org/politics/reading-first-scandalous-and-ineffective/
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RT,
GWB’s “Reading First” wasted $6 Billion.
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Nancy Bailey is always careful. That is why her evaluation of educational issues is always spot on. By contrast, I am quick to distrust, but, given that and given my own inability to research like more professional people, I cannot but see a lot of this as just fraudulent.
Today I read a report on fraudulent activity in the field of hospice. Scams galore. We are filling the country with charter schools that are great targets for scams. These reading programs are no different.
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The SOR supporters like to say that SOR is “evidence based.” What is the evidence? I agree that all students need to know how to understand and use the sound-symbol relationship in order to read in English, but there are other ways to teach these skills. SOR is not the only way. It is the way “big money” is telling us is the best way, but its methodology has never been systematically studied by a major institution of higher education. SOR is a politically driven program.
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Paul Thomas has written that there are no evidence-based, peer-reviewed studies of SOR.
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Thanks, Diane. I have been seeing an increase in so-called evidence-based SoR reading programs often advertised by school administrators and sometimes by professors and teachers. Most are online, and it doesn’t seem like teachers are needed. Students sit in front of screens, and a person guides them or appears to be there to keep the class in order. It looks boring.
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Nancy,
As you well know, when a bandwagon starts rolling, many people rush to jump aboard.
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