Major media reports have been touting the “science of reading” approach to literacy, perhaps at least partially in response to the latest dismal National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) scores in reading and math. Last April, PBS News Hour posted an article titled “Why more U.S. schools are embracing a new ‘science of reading,’” positing that the term “refers to decades of research in fields including brain science that point to effective strategies for teaching kids to read.”

On December 4, the New York Times published an article on this topic under the headline “What Costs $1,000 Per Student and Might Help Children Learn to Read?” which highlighted a newly released Annenberg Working Paper on The Achievement Effects of Scaling Early Literacy Reforms. The paper analyzed and found positive the results stemming from a California program that, while cost-effective, “emphasized training teachers in the principles of the science of reading, a movement focused on foundational skills such as phonics, vocabulary, and comprehension.”

While it may appear to the younger or more casual observer that education “experts” have stumbled upon something revolutionary, these instructional elements are hardly new. What they describe as the “science of reading” is actually the tried-and-true phonics method that education stalwarts like Phyllis Schlafly, Samuel Blumenfeld, Professor Jeanne S. Chall, and many others promoted for decades during their lifetimes.

Mrs. Schlafly, for example, taught her own children to read using phonics starting with her eldest son when he was a preschooler in 1955. She later developed her First Reader phonics system for young children, followed by TurboReader for older learners, to enable everyone to learn to read with phonics. Phyllis’s wisdom in her philosophy of teaching reading transcended political barriers and biases. She knew what worked and how reading should be taught to all children, regardless of their race, ethnicity, or economic status.

A friend and contemporary of Phyllis was phonics proponent, educator, and conservative writer Samuel Blumenfeld, who shared many of her political views and her passion for teaching children to read. Blumenfeld lectured on the topic of systematic reading instruction and was the author of more than a dozen books on education, including Alpha-Phonics: A Primer For Beginning Readers in 1983.

Before his death in 2015, Blumenfeld co-wrote Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children with journalist, educator, author, and editor, Alex Newman. Some consider this book to be Blumenfeld’s most important work, in which he presents the case that America’s government schools were deliberately dumbed down to advance socialism, with the disastrous “whole-word method of teaching children to read” a key element in the decline. Phyllis Schlafly often warned about the fad of “Whole Language” as well, with its emphasis on teaching children to guess at words based on pictures and context rather than teaching them to sound out the syllables that make up words.

The late Harvard Professor Jeanne S. Chall was another devoted proponent of the phonics method. As long ago as 1967, she wrote Learning to Read: The Great Debate, a critical study of research in the U.S., England, and Scotland that proved the superiority of phonics for teaching reading. According to Phyllis, this work was considered for decades to be “the definitive analysis of reading research.”

Shaking the dust off phonics

Since it has long been known that systematic phonics instruction is the single best method for teaching reading — and more recent pesky brain research continues to reinforce this fact — yet to date it has scarcely been implemented, what is prompting this acknowledgement so many years and so many illiterate Americans later?

Observers believe there are several possibilities, not the least of which are the glaringly inconvenient NAEP scores mentioned earlier, which continue to decline annually and which have become impossible to hide or explain away. Even government school teachers are sounding off about the crisis and some are fleeing their classrooms for other educational opportunities, as Education Reporter noted in November.

One theory is that Progressives have been so successful at churning out Marxist foot soldiers in lieu of educating American children that even apolitical parents are noticing and pushing back. The COVID-19 pandemic triggered parental awareness, with many parents witnessing firsthand what their children were and were not being taught. The result was a renewed push for school choice programs, a surge in homeschooling, microschooling, and other educational formats, all in repudiation of government school indoctrination and the failure to teach basic skills.

As the PBS article noted: “The science of reading is especially crucial for struggling readers, but school curricula and programs that train teachers have been slow to embrace it ... a push to teach all students this way has intensified as schools look for ways to regain ground lost during the pandemic — and as parents of kids who can’t read demand swift change.”

The Annenberg study shows modest gains with the California phonics program, which focused on early elementary-school students in “about 70 low-performing schools.” The study compared results from schools that participated in the program to schools that did not. According to the New York Times, the program arose “from a 2020 legal settlement between the state and a group of students and parents. They had sued years earlier, arguing that California was defying its own State Constitution by failing to provide ‘adequate access to literacy’ in its schools. The state agreed to pay $53 million to help 75 low-performing elementary schools overhaul their reading programs.”

Researchers in the study did not specify which classroom-level changes led to improvements, and the focus was on a single outcome of third-grade test scores. Ironically, the plaintiffs in the original legal action did not benefit from the program as they had aged out of the target grades by the time it was implemented.

Will the ‘science of reading’ prevail?

Reactions to the Annenberg study have varied since its release, and it’s unclear whether the high-profile rediscovery of phonics will continue to play a role in government education. According to the Times, literacy expert and University of Illinois, Chicago, Professor Emeritus Timothy Shanahan said he is “very cautiously optimistic” about the study results but that education reforms focusing on the early grades often show success only to fade out later. “Will the schools build on this in any way?” he asked. “I get nervous about interventions that are just aimed at the youngest kids.”

New York University early reading expert, Susan Neuman, called the program gains reported in the study “modest.”

Longtime education researchers armed with information contained in books like Crimes of the Educators wonder if the uncharacteristic interest in actually teaching children to read is little more than a smokescreen to fool parents. “It’s difficult to believe the goals have suddenly changed,” says Phyllis Schlafly Eagles researcher Gwen Kelley. “At least since Dewey there’s been an almost unrelenting push for all kinds of education fads, including the whole language or ‘look-say’ method that fails to adequately teach basic reading skills.”

Kelley may have a point. In 1997, a National Reading Panel was formed “to assess the status of research-based knowledge, including the effectiveness of various approaches to teaching children to read.” The panel’s experts reinforced the decades-old established fact about phonics by declaring “phonics instruction” and its related concepts to be crucial for teaching reading. And yet, a decade later in 2010, phonics instruction was still lacking in elementary-school classrooms throughout the government school system, indicating a deliberate reluctance to fix the problem.

As PBS noted: “What emerged, though, was an informal truce that came to be known as ‘balanced literacy’ and borrowed from both approaches....” But national reading panel participant, Stanford University Professor Emeritus of Education Michael Kamil, said that in practice, “phonics elements often got short shrift. It wasn’t a true compromise.... The [dual] approach often led to students learning how to guess words, instead of how to sound them out.”

Meanwhile, phonics supporters say it will be interesting to watch the “science of reading” play out in the media and the education system, which are declaring the new catch-phrase to mean a focus on “the building blocks of words.” This is phonics instruction, folks; and it’s nothing new.

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