There are forty-four phonemes that make up every word in the English language. Some of these small units of sound occur more frequently than others, but none can be dispensed with entirely when teaching children to sound out words and read with fluency—not even the phoneme /d/ as in “Democrat” or /r/ as in “Republican.”
I feel compelled to bring this up because, despite the fact that those forty-four phonemes are non-partisan and commonly employed by speakers of all political persuasions, it has come to my attention that some in our field are under the misimpression that teaching children to read is a partisan project.
Candor requires me to admit that, despite having taught elementary reading and studied curriculum and instructional issues for more than two decades, I was unaware until this week of the partisan nature of language proficiency. However, a dispatch in our field’s paper of record, Education Week, reported that the Oklahoma State Department of Education was “joining forces” with Moms for Liberty, a “conservative political organization...which some civil rights watchdogs have called an extremist group.” This unholy alliance took the form of Oklahoma declaring the first week in October—reader, brace yourself—“Teach Kids to Read Week.”
Quelle horreur!
Per Education Week, Oklahoma’s announcement “promises to further complicate the thorny political landscape of the ‘science of reading’ movement, by linking what has been a bipartisan—if sometimes uneasy—movement nationwide for improved instruction in foundational literacy to an explicitly political group.” Are we meant to understand that progressive support for evidence-based instruction will collapse if conservative parents, too, want their children to be taught to read?
Given that we have had at least a half century of kids not being taught to read, their instruction dominated by ineffective curricula, untethered pedagogies, and philosophies for which empirical support is limited to nonexistent, this seems a strange time to call the science of reading into question because people from the “wrong” side embrace it. But here we are.
Moms for Liberty, Oklahoma’s State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walter, and their ilk have already been fitted for black hats. And now they must play their assigned role as extremist fringe actors. Should they fail to play that role (by supporting the science of reading, for example), their motivations must be called into question. It’s all tendentious nonsense, of course. Let me say this as dispassionately as possible. If your views on instructional practices are shaped not by evidence, data, personal experience, or even common sense, but are instead a knee-jerk response to people whose politics you despise, you have lost the plot. And you’re not going to do kids any good in the classroom.
Of course, this is not the first time we’ve seen effective instructional practice slip into the maw of partisan politics. The 2001 Reading First initiative, launched under President George W. Bush, enjoyed a brief moment of bipartisan support and was found to have produced “a positive and statistically significant impact on amount of instructional time spent on the five essential components of reading instruction” described by the National Reading Panel. Yet Tim Shanahan, a member of the National Reading Panel, has observed how charges of political cronyism and partisan differences over the Iraq war scuttled Reading First, despite evidence of its effectiveness. “When it came time to reauthorize this expensive program, there was no political will among Democrats to support the president on anything,” he said.
The present “science of reading” movement is fresh rebranding of a elements of sound reading instruction that have been well-understood for decades. This dates back to mid-century, first to 1955’s best-selling exposé by Rudolf Flesch, Why Johnny Can’t Read—And What You Can Do About It, then to a seminal 1967 work of scholarship by Harvard Education Professor Jeanne Chall, Learning to Read: The Great Debate. From then onward, the “science of reading”—of learning to read in the early grades—was settled and should have stayed that way, even if (alas) conservatives like explicit phonics instruction. Indeed, nearly all of us have felt cognitive dissonance and discomfort, even shame, of discovering that our enemies embrace something we also prize. But most of us grow out of it by the time we reach adolescence.
Yet negative polarization, a chronic problem in our sector, reliably thwarts progress even when people of good will rally around effective practice across party lines. E.D. Hirsch, Jr., among the most important education theorists of the past half century, has described himself as “practically a socialist,” yet his work was championed by conservatives, particularly Bill Bennett, Checker Finn, and (at the time) Diane Ravitch. Hirsch’s many voluble critics were never able to see past what they mindlessly derided as a “dead, white male curriculum” and couldn’t be bothered to acquaint themselves with even the most rudimentary basics of how language proficiency is achieved. More accurately, they refused to be bothered because it would force them to grapple with their social and political priors, to which they attached far greater importance than the comparatively trivial matter of whether or not children learned to read.
Much the same thing happened at much the same time to the late Allan Bloom, whose seminal work, The Closing of the American Mind (1987), depicted and foreshadowed the collapse of liberal learning—and free inquiry—that plagues so many of our colleges and universities today. Bloom was arguing for a classically liberal approach to higher education, yet because he was himself described as a conservative, his scholarship and insights were trashed by “liberals.”
Having seen this tired act many times, forgive me if I’m a bit impatient. If the limit of your sophistication on matters of curriculum and instruction is “if people I despise like it, it must be bad,” you’re not on the side of the angels. And you probably shouldn’t be teaching small children to read.
