Washing Our Hands of the Reading Wars
It should be an exciting time to be part of the Science of Reading movement. Reading is definitely having a moment. Turn on CNN. Look at the front page of the New York Times. Listen to a hit Serial-style whodunit podcast. In all of these places, you will hear the same refrain. “Our children are struggling to read. The way we teach reading doesn’t work. But there is another way: we need to rediscover phonics and embrace the science of reading.”
So shouldn’t we be gratified by the recent surge in interest in reading? For me, at least, it’s complicated. Let me explain.
While it’s always exciting to see an issue you’re passionate about go mainstream, I’m also worried because we’ve heard this song before. For the last fifty years, we’ve been promised various cure-alls for our country’s reading woes: Whole Language, Reading First, Balanced Literacy, and more. All of them over-promised and under-delivered. When they failed to live up to the hype, we ditched them and moved on to the next fad.
I’m worried that this current moment will become just another passing reading fad that promises the moon and doesn’t deliver. So how do we avoid the hype cycle this time and do it differently?
Here’s what I’ve got:
We need to start talking and thinking about structured literacy not as a cure-all, but as a standard of care. It is not just the initiative of the decade; it’s a non-negotiable that rests at the foundation of all literacy instruction. It’s just how we teach kids to read. It’s how we care for our students, especially our most vulnerable and marginalized.
We also need to be real: structured literacy isn’t going to get every kid reading at grade level. It isn’t going to eradicate poverty, systemic racism, and generational neglect of our public schools and our teachers. These are powerful forces that can’t be defeated by changing how we teach reading.
But here’s the thing about standards of care. We don’t just abandon them when they fail to deliver perfect results. At the beginning of the pandemic, we were told that handwashing would protect us from Covid-19. That guidance turned out to be largely wrong, but we haven’t stopped washing our hands. Handwashing is just something we do after going to the bathroom or getting our hands dirty. Even though handwashing doesn’t stop all contamination in hospitals or restaurants, it’s still mandatory because it’s critical to protecting our health.
We need structured literacy to be like handwashing.
This is not to say that we have all the answers about teaching reading: there are many unanswered questions about all aspects of reading instruction. What content should be prioritized? What’s the optimal phonics scope and sequence? What does phonics look like for English Language Learners? How should a teacher balance whole-class vs. small group instructional time? I could go on…
The answers to these questions will vary depending on the teacher, the students, and their needs, but these are the kinds of thorny conversations educators should be diving into right now, instead of being dragged into yet another hype cycle about the latest, hottest, educational trend.
That stuff is all a distraction. Let’s all agree that the science of reading is not a panacea, but we need it anyway—just like we need to wash our hands after we go to the bathroom.
