The science of reading: a socialist take
Over the last year, I kept hearing rumbles about something called "the science of reading debate" and stuff about the "reading wars." I didn't know what it was all about since literacy is its own world in education and not my specialty. But it seemed like a kerfuffle and I'm drawn to kerfuffles. They reveal a lot. Plus, as someone involved in education politics and research I wanted to know what was going on.
After asking some colleagues what I should look at to understand the situation, a couple people pointed me to Emily Hanford's podcast "Sold a Story." It's based on a few years of her reporting on the politics and policy of literacy in the US. Since the podcast is pretty recent, it tells the story right up until 2022. What follows here is basically a review of the podcast with some socialist riffs.
Basically, Hanford shows that for the last thirty years a majority of kids in the United States across race, class, and regional lines have not been taught how to read at school, even though everyone responsible for teaching them to read at school thought they were teaching them to read.
A war of position in literacy
Remember the moment an aid told George W. Bush that a second airplane had struck the World Trade Center in New York City? Do you remember where he was and what he was doing when he got that news? He was in a school.
Bush was at Emma Booker elementary school in Sarasota, Florida. He was there to visit a classroom where the teacher was using an approach to literacy that his administration was pushing. I remember seeing this photo in the deluge of reporting on the 9/11 attacks, but I had no idea that it depicts the end of a war as much as the beginning of a new one.
Before the war on terror became their focus, the Bush administration was fighting in something called the reading wars. GWB's visit to Booker elementary was a move in that war.
As an aside, before we get to the war itself, it's interesting that the word war can be used to figuratively describe controversial debates and maneuvering by certain groups over ideological issues like literacy curriculum (see the 'culture war' of today), and also be used in the literal sense of mass violence committed by state and insurgent actors against one another. The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci called the former a war of position, a slow hidden conflict where forces seek to gain hegemony in cultural and political institutions, winning the ideological upper hand in civil society.
The concepts of war of position and cultural hegemony are important to talk about up front in this case, because sometimes I think liberals and progressives can get a little pearl-clutchy when there's disagreement between groups with competing interests. There's a tone of breathy disbelief when talking about how anyone could possibly have a material interest that conflicts with someone else's, and that there might be struggle between ideological positions over education policies. Handford does this a bit in the podcast. As if history isn't a constant struggle between contrary interests! I guess this must be an effect of the end of history where everyone thought struggles between ideological positions evaporated in 1989?
Anyway, there was a war of position happening in literacy policy and pedagogy on the eve of the war on terror. The Bush Administration was in the midst of fighting that first war when the second war came calling. So let's get into the reading wars. The question was: how should we teach people to read? There were complicated formations that got into a head-to-head disagreement over the question. Let's look at each side.
Phonics vs. whole language
The disagreement has pedagogical, cultural, historical, and intellectual aspects. Pedagogically, the dispute in the reading wars is over two concrete protocols used to teach reading.
The first pedagogical practice is phonics, which is where you teach people to sound out words they don't know using the letters. If someone encounters a word they don't know and sees a letter or two that they do know, as a teacher, you remind them what the letters sound like and help them get to the word. All the training is oriented towards sounding out.
The second pedagogical protocol has a few different names, but seems to go by the name "the whole language approach." Instead of sounding letters out, whole language cues students to figure out what a word that they don't know might be based on the context. Instead of focusing on the sounds of letters and having students haltingly pronounce phonemes, the teacher will ask the student what the sentence is about, what the story's about, and cue them towards what could the word be in the larger scheme of the text.
The two protocols are very different. Cueing means guessing and ultimately flexibility on what the word actually is, but looks to get the student engaging with the whole language more. But phonics gets to the word itself, the phonemes, before the meaning of the words and story. In phonics, the student gets to the meaning eventually but first students learn how to read the word. In whole language, meaning is first and phonics is second. The assumption being, in the whole language approach, that the students will get the phonemes eventually.
Just thinking about the protocols themselves, you might think that they're both important aspects to reading. Of course you have to learn what the words sound like to be able to get the meaning, but being able to grasp the meaning is ultimately the point and pleasure of being literate. Thinking about it naively, it seems like we'd want to do phonics first and then whole language a close second, keeping phonics in as needed. Get the words down but let people be playful and enjoy the whole language.
But that's not at all how things have eventuated. The technical-pedagogical distinction between these protocols is nested in historical, intellectual, cultural, political, and economic tendencies that have put them into war footing against one another.
Whole language industrial complex?
Phonics is old as dust. But the whole language approach started with a New Zealand reading specialist named Marie Clay in the 1960s who was interested in how good readers read. Frustrated with rote phonics instruction, she observed some classrooms and noticed that young people who read well in these spaces used certain strategies to get through the sentences and pages. Those strategies became the centerpiece of the cueing protocol. She was clear that these good readers didn't sound words out.
After creating a program around her research called Reading Recovery, the schools she worked with saw big gains in literacy, which caught attention of national education officials. They championed Reading Recovery nationally in New Zealand, which got the attention of educators elsewhere, namely the US. Ohio State University brought Clay to its school of education to train students and teachers in the new exciting method.
Some of those students went on to make Reading Recovery their brand, including Gae Sue Pinnell, Irene Fountas, and Lucy Calkins'. Each of these researchers became powerhouses in the research and publishing industries, bringing in millions of dollars to the educational publisher Heineman (who, incidentally, became well-known for publishing left wing analyses of education during this period). A single set of literacy resources authored by them can cost in the thousands of dollars, bringing in millions of revenue to the publisher from public school districts and raining upon the authors a shower of prestige and celebrity.
Reading Recovery became hegemonic in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, morphing into a literacy industrial complex of researchers, publishers, politicians, and big-name universities, most notably Teachers College, Columbia University (where I got my doctorate), who gave the Clayite researchers plum professorships. Since Clay had been anti-phonics, that protocol excluding sounding out phonemes became normal.
Contrary political fantasies
Effectively, this meant that kids all over the US for decades weren't sounding out letters. They were cueing. Teachers were using Reading Recovery and the whole language approach. My sense is that Clay's method offered a more participatory, less traditional, and less conservative literacy protocol that appealed to a generation of progressive educators. Rather than making students repeat syllables in kind of rote pedagogy, the Clay/cueing approach emerged as a way to appease every teacher's inner John Dewey.
Hanford's interpretation is a little different. She says that the Reading Recovery approach stems from a kind of privileged, academic/intellectual, and gauzy fantasy about reading: let's get every kid nestled into a comfy chair with a book, let them love reading, and forgo the painful stop-start rhythm of sounding out.
The traditional-ness of phonics contrasted sharply with the progressive-ness of cueing. And the politics that grew up and around these political fantasies of reading in the waning moments of the twentieth century solidified into acidic disagreements between factions, spurred by an inconvenient intervention from positivist empirical science.
Republican science
As psychology and brain technology evolved, researchers employing these methods got interested in literacy. You could track eye moment now. You could map brains. You could do all kinds of tests that Marie Clay in New Zealand couldn't. And when researchers tested Clay's thesis, their results proved her wrong. Actually, cueing is something that struggling readers do. It sounds pretty dumb and obvious but, yeah, these positivist empirical researchers found that good readers know how to sound out words.
Thus, 'the science of reading' was born. Positivists showed that there's no getting around phonics, no matter how good whole language feels. After not getting a hearing for their results because of the strength of the Clay hegemony, they found a ready audience in neoconservatives like Karl Rove, who's big idea for the 2000 presidential election was to re-conservativize education. Phonics was the perfect policy for that ideological project: let's get back to basics. Hanford smartly points out that right before Bush was told about the planes flying into the towers, the teacher at Booker elementary in Sarasota had been leading her students in a plainly 19th century-style recitation of syllables.
So the positivists, being sweet summer babies, threw in their lot with George W. Bush because they got love from his campaign. These 'scientists' were all aflutter to get recognition and also be offered the possibility of influencing a presidential administration that would, from the top down, get rid of the unscientific cueing protocols and usher in an enlightened time of truth-based flourishing for literacy.
You can maybe detect in my tone what I think about this whole stance. Hanford presents the 'scientists' as innocent truth-givers ignored by a big bad world who correctly got with Rove and GWB independently of whatever that alignment implied politically. I think this is a bullshit read of the situation. The positivists' naïveté is a perfect example of positivist empiricism's lack of groundedness in like, anything social, and reveals a big pet peeve that I have with the way this debate gets described. It's a small point maybe, but positivist empirical research doesn't have a lease on the term 'science'. It's hegemonic, yes, but I think social science and the science of organizing are just as important empirical projects whose basic insight is that we live in a society and any attempt to divorce knowledge from that fact is malpractice. I think these scientists weren't being scientific at all about how to fight for their findings. In terms of the social science and science of organizing required to realize their goals, they were terrible scientists of reading! It wasn't a science of reading at all.
I mean, did these positivists even read Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions? It's philosophy of science 101 that paradigm shifts happen in science for patently non-scientific reasons. (Also, by extension, there's no need to call their findings 'the science of reading'. Just call it phonics.)
So what happened to the pure science babies when they allied with the Rove/Bush machine? Their research got stained with the taint of rapacious conservatism. No one wanted to hear from them, especially after the Iraq invasion fiasco and every other dumb-as-bricks political meme that came out of that cursed administration. 'The science of reading'--a euphemistic way to describe some important and common-sensical findings from positivist empiricists--got lost in the froth of politics, leaving the Clay hegemony unchallenged.
When kids can't read
The thing is, the positivists were right. You can't learn to read unless you learn to read the words. Hanford is at her most effective when she tells the stories of kids who had trouble reading, whose parents were so alarmed they taught them to sound out the letters themselves or with tutors, and got gaslit by school teachers, principals, and district officials who all told them the kids could, in fact, read when they could not, in fact, read.
The Clay hegemony and its literacy industrial complex survived and stayed stubbornly in place. But like so many things on Earth in 2020, it fell ill and broke down during the pandemic. When schools went online and parents worked from home, helping their kids with school, they saw firsthand what was going on. And they were pissed! Their kids couldn't read. They saw that the teachers weren't teaching them to read. And Hanford started reporting on it.
The podcast is pretty triumphalist in terms of her influence here, but I don't see evidence that that's false. She started asking these tough questions and the whole language industrial complex couldn't answer them. I found it ultimately convincing that the Clay hegemony wasn't teaching the basics of what it means to read, which did a massive disservice to American kids between 1970 and 2020.
Thinking about this as a socialist, it seems to me you have to have a perspective that takes the pedagogy and politics altogether. As a former classroom teacher--granted, I was a high school teacher--my sense of the sheer pedagogical protocols is that yeah, let's make sure kids know how to read and sound out the letters first. But let's also instill a love of reading and use the cueing if we need to.
Next, a socialist might ask: what are the political economic ramifications of several generations of people not being able to read that well? Or being pushed out of reading unnecessarily? Could that also be a macro explanation for the rise of images in social media, and the seemingly illiterate political praxis coming out of the right wing?
Third, I think there's a socialist lesson here in understanding that all knowledge occurs in an ideological context underwritten by struggle. You can't just come up with some good numbers and then align with whoever is most complimentary to you and expect your shining findings to change the world. Even the most positivist empirical researcher has to operate in the social balance of forces if they want their work to make a difference. It's partially on the positivists and their allies that they were not scientific enough in properly maneuvering to unseat the Clay hegemony.
Finally, I want to end on a revolutionary note. One thing that communist revolutions were really good at was literacy. The Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions were particularly renowned for the huge gains in literacy they made among their populations, but the same has been said of Russia, China, and elsewhere. Actually, Caroline and Charles Abel argued in 2017 that the Cuban revolution erased illiteracy in a single year by "combining phonics with the constructivist" approach.