Readers of a certain age may be familiar with the wonderfully clever line, “If you can read this, thank a teacher.”  Of course you can read it–you just did!!–which implied that you ought to be grateful for teachers.  Attributed to former President Harry S. Truman, the line is now associated with Teacher Appreciation Week, which began as Teacher Appreciation Day in 1953 with the strong support of former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

But what about those who cannot read that line, or anything else, with confidence?  Who’s responsible? Whose fault is that? And what can be done to rescue them from the darkness of semi-literacy?

The number of non-readers in the USA is huge.  About 50% of living American adults read at or below a Sixth Grade level, and literally millions of Americans have lived and died as functional illiterates.  Scary headlines to the contrary, today’s students are performing slightly better, but even those who are reading above grade level–more than half of 4th graders–can read but don’t. Yes, they have TikTok, Instagram, and other social media at their disposal, but that doesn’t explain why they are seemingly uninterested in reading.   The numbers are daunting:  

1. Young people are reading less than half the number of books that older generations read;
2. Americans between the ages of 15 and 44 spend ten minutes or less a day reading books; and
3. More than half of adult Americans haven’t read a full book in over a year. 
4. The percentage of 13-year-olds who ‘never or hardly ever’ read for fun has increased dramatically, from 22 percent in 2012 to 31 percent in 2022.   

All of these non-readers, whether dead or alive, are victims of what are called “the Reading Wars,” an ongoing battle over the ‘right way’ to teach reading.  Like actual shooting wars, the Reading Wars are a stupid and dangerous waste of human potential.  

In a rational world, reading instruction is straightforward: children need to learn two important truths: 1) Letters and combinations of letters make sounds, technically called “Phonics and Phonemic Awareness;” and 2) The English language often violates the rules of Phonics, making it necessary for learners to recognize words that break the rules.  One quick example: by the rules of Phonics, ‘there,’ ‘where’ and  ‘here’ ought to rhyme, but they obviously do not, and so readers need to recognize words that don’t follow the rules. 

In sum, Phonics and Phonemic Awareness are the engine, and Word Recognition is the chassis.  Teaching both “sounds” (Phonics) and “shapes” (Word Recognition) is essential if one is going to be a competent, confident reader.

There’s one more important point: In a rational word, reading is recognized as the means to many desirable ends, such as navigating the world around you, or assembling a toy, or following a recipe, but, unfortunately, too many educators and politicians act as if reading were the goal, the end game–and something to be tested, over and over. 

Because rationality isn’t our strong suit, we’ve been fighting the Reading Wars for nearly 200 years.  Noah Webster, who gave us Webster’s Dictionary, believed that children needed to know that the 26 letters of the English language have sounds associated with them, and those sounds (44 in all) are determined by the combinations of the letters. To read individual words, first decode the sounds. That’s the gist of Phonics, the method supported by Webster, Dr. Rudolf Flesch in his 1955 bestseller, “Why Johnny Can’t Read,” Harvard’s Jeanne Chall in 1968, and the very popular “Science of Reading” movement today.  

On the other hand, Horace Mann, the founder of American public schools, rejected Phonics because of the frequent irregularities of the English language.  And irregular it is. By the rules of Phonics, anger, danger, and hanger ought to rhyme, as should good and mood.  It turns out that English breaks the rules of Phonics with depressing regularity.  To avoid confusing young readers, Mann and many others believed they must learn to recognize words.  Originally called ‘Look-Say,’ the approach morphed into Whole Language in the late 1970’s and later into Balanced Literacy. While these approaches  include some sounding out of words, their central thrust is learning what words look like and then inferring (and guessing) meanings based on context, including pictures. If you are of a certain age, the first books you read may have been “See Spot Run” and other word/picture books.

So, whose fault is that so many of us cannot read with confidence?  As it happens, the list of possible culprits begins–sadly–with the non-readers themselves and includes elementary school teachers, parents, the education professors who failed to train the teachers, ideologues crusading for their chosen way of teaching reading, test-crazed leaders, politicians looking to score points, and profiteers.

If students cannot read, it’s their fault:  NO, IT IS NOT!!  By all rights, teaching every First Grader to read with understanding ought to be a national priority.  Set the bar there, put the most competent teachers there, and then devote whatever resources are necessary to help children get where they want to be.  Sadly, we have not done that. Instead, even though 5-, 6-, and 7-year-old children are ready to learn and eager to be challenged, we have actually lowered the bar.  For nearly 25 years, our stated national goal has been to have all children reading at “Grade Level” when they finish Third Grade. That’s a 2-year lowering of expectations. 

So, instead of harnessing the incredible curiosity and energy of our 6-year-olds, we said to them and their teachers, “No rush. Take your time.”   That goal was set during the Administration of George W. Bush, and—surprise!!–lowering expectations has not worked.  Reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)  have barely budged.  On NAEP’s 0-500 scale, Fourth Graders scored 217 in 1992, 220 in 2019, and–back to Square One–217 in 2022.  Eighth graders followed the same pattern: 260 in 1992, 263 in 2019, and–Square One again–260 in 2022.   Post-COVID, the average reading score for Fourth and Eighth graders decreased by 3 points. In 2022, fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores declined for most states/jurisdictions compared to 2019.

But rather than questioning the wisdom of the ‘low expectations’ policy, many politicians and policymakers are choosing to, in effect, “blame the victims” by requiring them to repeat Third grade. Currently, 18 states and the District of Columbia require retention for students reading below grade level at the end of 3rd grade. Another 7 states, including Texas, New Jersey and Maryland, allow but do not require retention. 

Does making poor readers repeat Third grade work?  It can, if the retention year includes lots of special attention.  More important than remediation, however, is serious attention to reading instruction in Kindergarten, First, and Second grades and to the retraining of elementary school teachers in reading instruction. Prevention works!  But retention without attention is more likely to doom those children to continued failure and eventual dropping out of school. 

The strongest evidence for ‘The Science of Reading’ comes from Mississippi, whose Fourth graders scored 199 (out of 500) on the 1992 NAEP test, 18 points below the national average. The state invested in pre-school and teacher training, and it required retention of third graders who read below grade level.  At one point, 9.6 percent of Third graders were being retained, but in 2019 Mississippi was the only state in the nation to post statistically significant gains on the Fourth grade NAEP test.  The so-called “Mississippi Miracle” has received significant praise, including this gushing piece from the New York Times columnist Nick Kristoff. Omitted from most coverage of Mississippi’s reading program, however, are the racial disparities; to wit, white Fourth graders score 25 points higher than Black Fourth graders, a discrepancy that mirrors the national gap. Shouldn’t a ‘miracle cure’ work for all children?  

The deep thinkers who now support retention began with a catchy–but misguided–slogan, “In the first three grades, children learn to read; from then on they read to learn.”  Treating reading as an end, instead of a means to an end, is dangerous nonsense, because children learn to read so they can understand the world around them. Full stop!  Imagine if those same deep thinkers were in charge of teaching children to walk.  They’d have kids walking in place for a year or two (learning to walk), after which they could walk around (walking to get somewhere). 

If children cannot read, it must be their parents’ fault: NO!  Perhaps you are wondering,“Why don’t all parents read to their kids? What’s wrong with them?”   Well, some parents simply don’t have the time; they are too stressed by their own challenges, perhaps holding down two jobs or working long hours at one job to make the rent and keep food on the table. Others never learned to read with confidence when they were in school, and some speak English poorly or not at all.  While their circumstances are different, most parents who do not read to their children share the belief that education is the ladder to a better life.  These parents hope–and expect–that their children will be taught to read, speak, and write English with fluency and confidence.

Sarah Part, a policy analyst at Advocates for Children, told The Gothamist that inadequate reading instruction actually widens the achievement gap. “Parents who have resources are going to find a tutor,” she said. “They’re going to get help outside of school. But families who don’t have resources …  are very, very dependent on what happens at school.” 

If students cannot read, it’s their teachers’ fault:  NO, NO, AND NO, because most elementary school teachers were not taught how to teach reading. The exceptional elementary school teachers I got to know when I was reporting learned how to teach reading on the job. For example, Rachel Hunt, a First Grade teacher at PS1 in The Bronx, NY, told me that her training program at the University of Connecticut never mentioned Phonics or Phonemic Awareness. When I checked the 2008 curriculum offerings at UCONN, I found no courses that concentrated on Phonics. Today, UCONN’s curriculum includes a course on ‘teaching reading and writing in the elementary school’ and another on ‘teaching language arts in the elementary school,’ bland descriptions which reveal nothing useful about content.

Katrina Kickbush, a special education teacher in Baltimore, Maryland, told me that she graduated from Drake University in 1992 with training only in Whole Language. “Ugh. What a mess. It was not until I taught at a school for students with learning disabilities that I was trained in Phonics, and it was life changing.”

Mark Gaither, who began his career teaching in a Baltimore elementary school, wrote, “I certainly started out in the Whole Language side of things. Quaker schools, Bank Street College of Education, friends at Teachers College. It was the way I, and many others, approached things. Eighteen years ago I was introduced to Direct Instruction, high level of structure, Phonics, and Phonemic Awareness. A lot of things fell into place.”  

Joanna Cohen went to Teachers College, part of Columbia University. “We had only two ‘literacy methods’ class sessions devoted to phonics instruction during a yearlong course. My takeaway was that phonics was not at all important for the teaching of reading.”

If students cannot read, it must be the fault of the education professors who trained the teachers:  YES, IT IS!!  Whole Language continues to dominate reading instruction in schools of education. A 2019 survey by the newspaper Education Week found that 72 percent of K-2 teachers use that method, which is no surprise because the majority of the education professors who trained them believe in Whole Language.  Education Week’s survey of “about 530 professors who teach early-reading courses found that 57 percent of professors ascribe to what’s known as a balanced literacy philosophy. Just 22 percent said their philosophy of teaching early reading centered on explicit, systematic Phonics with comprehension as a separate focus.”  Ed Week also found that two-thirds of education professors choose their own materials, and that their ‘Top Ten’ list of favorites was dominated by Whole Language believers.  That means that, even though most states have endorsed Phonics-based methods and even though many schools of education now claim to have incorporated Phonics into their teacher training, the same professors are doing the training. 

Research conducted by the right-leaning National Center on Teacher Quality is also depressing.  NCTQ surveyed nearly 700 teacher-training programs and concluded that only 25 percent of them were providing adequate training in the core components of scientifically based reading instruction, adding “perhaps more alarmingly, another 25% of programs do not adequately cover even a single component.”

If students cannot read, it’s the fault of the crusaders on both sides:  YES, IT IS!!  If Phonics had a Hall of Fame, its charter member would be Rudolf Flesch, who ignited the current Reading Wars with his full-throated attack on the ‘Look-Say’ approach to reading instruction, “Why Johnny Can’t Read.”  About 1930, Dr. Flesch told The New York Times, ”Our schools switched from teaching reading to teaching word-guessing, using the so-called look-and-say method rather than systematic Phonics.” Dr. Flesch maintained that all alphabetic languages except English are taught with systematic Phonics.  ”Why do we do it differently?”

The current commander of the Phonics army is probably Dr. Reid Lyon, the former Chief of Child Development and Behavior at the National Institute of Health (NIH), during the George W. Bush Administration.  

The charter members of a Word Recognition Hall of Fame would be Dr. Frank Smith (1928-2021) and the husband and wife team, Dr. Kenneth Goodman (1927-2020) and Dr. Yetta Goodman, the developers of Whole Language.  As Nicholas Lemann observed in The Atlantic in 1997, Ken Goodman and Frank Smith “present whole-language instruction as a joyful, humanistic, intellectually challenging alternative to deadening phoneme drills — one that turns the classroom from a factory floor into a nurturing environment in which children naturally blossom.”  

When I interviewed Dr. Yetta Goodman for NPR in 1979, she was scornful of the drill she associated with Phonics. “I’ve been in classrooms where kids spend all morning filling in blanks, matching letters and sounding out things. Reading becomes a luxury in a classroom like that. “You have free reading on Friday for an hour but only if you finish your work.”  And ‘work’ is focusing on those little bitty things that may have no meaning for children.’

Phonics, she suggested, treats reading as the goal instead of as the means to achieving goals. “There’s a function to reading. You want to read what’s significant for your own particular life’s purposes.  Then reading takes place. You learn to read by reading; you learn to write by writing. And there are some people who feel that you have to get ready for that by sort of having things checked off on a competency sheet, and there’s no evidence that having those things checked off is going to lead you to reading and writing. We have no evidence of that.  It leads you to doing better on a competency test, and I guess you have to decide what your goal is. Is your goal to develop people who can read and write, or people who can do well on competency tests? I don’t think you can do both.”

Nonsense, say the true believers in the Phonics camp, pointing to ‘invented spellings’ and guessing at meanings as proof that Whole Language is nothing but a romantic fantasy that fails to give children the skills they will need as adults–while at the same time lying to them by telling them that they can read.  For their part, Whole Language advocates caricature Phonics as an endless series of “cat-hat-rat-sat-bat” drills, an old-fashioned, cold, and boring approach that drives children away from literature.  

Each approach inspires devotion bordering on fanaticism….and the true believers have complete disdain for the other. In this, they resemble religious cults, not academics in search of truth.

The Reading Wars could and should have ended in 2000. In 1999 Congress had appointed a National Reading Panel of scholars to study the issue, and the 449-page report endorsed a balanced reading program that included but should not be dominated by systematic instruction in Phonics. “Phonics should not become the dominant component in a reading program, neither in the amount of time devoted to it nor in the significance attached,” the report concluded.  

However, the Bush Administration— specifically Reid Lyon, the Chief of Child Development and Behavior at the National Institute of Health (NIH)  and his colleagues— took charge of the Report’s summary–arguably the only section anyone reads.  Their “take no prisoners” summary sent a very different message: Phonics rules!  As David Waters noted, “the report’s 32-page summary, widely reported by the media and mailed to every school district in the country, focused on Phonics. It used the word ‘Phonics’ 89 times, and the word ‘balanced’ only once.”

The politicization of reading continued in President Bush’s signature legislation, the “No Child Left Behind Act of 2000.” It called for an emphasis on Phonics and ‘scientifically based reading research’ (a term found in the law and accompanying regulations more than 110 times). 

Today, under the banner of ‘The Science of Reading,’ Phonics has taken control. In recent years at least 29 states and the District of Columbia have passed “Science of Reading” laws or implemented new policies requiring ‘evidence-based reading instruction.’  

If students cannot read, it’s the fault of politicians seeking to undermine public education:   YES, IT IS!!  In our deeply divided country, public education is a favorite whipping boy for ambitious politicians like Governors Glenn Younkin of Virginia and Ron DeSantis of Florida, both of whom vigorously promote what they call “Parents’ Rights” and work to limit what can be taught in classrooms. Groups like “Moms for Liberty” organize slates to run for local school boards, often with remarkable success.   

Race and class prejudice may be factors as well, because failing to teach all children Phonics and Phonemic Awareness is most damaging to low income children, many of whom are also children of color.  Here’s why: children from upper middle class families, whatever their race, are likely to arrive in Kindergarten or First Grade with the reading ‘engine’ in place, because they were born into families that value literacy and have parents who have been reading to them for years.  

However, children arriving in school without the ‘engine’ of Phonics who are then taught the Whole Language method may never become competent, confident readers. As they fall behind, they are likely to be diagnosed as ‘special needs’ students, further lowering their chances of success.  It is as simple as that, sadly.

If students aren’t reading, excessive testing is to blame: YES, in the opinion of some teachers I’ve met.  Here’s one quick story: In June, 2011,I took over two First Grade classrooms at PS 1 in the Bronx, NY, a low income school where only 18 percent of Fourth Graders were reading at grade level. In both First Grade classes, I wrote some nonsense on the blackboard–“The blue pancake went swimming and ate a frog”–which the children read with confidence, competence, and joy.  Why, if PS 1’s First Graders were reading with confidence, did the Fourth Graders do so poorly on the state reading test? I asked Brenda Cartenga, a Fourth Grade teacher. Too much testing, she said. “The system takes the fun out of reading.”

What’s going on here, and in most school systems, is a fundamental misunderstanding of reading. It is NOT the goal but the means to many ends that children care about, beginning with control of their environment.  Children want to read for the same reasons they want to walk. Testing, and teaching to the reading test, kills the desire to read. That’s why, as noted earlier, even children who can read aren’t.

If students cannot read, follow the money:  YES!!  While the Reading Wars are fought by armies of ideologues, one only has to follow the money to discover that reading instruction is big business.  Significant profits flow to the purveyors of the chosen approach through the sales of textbooks, curriculum materials, and (especially) grade-level reading series. In her podcast series, journalist Emily Hanford reported that Heinemann, a publishing company that sells Whole Language and Balanced Literacy reading series and curriculum materials, has made hundreds of millions of dollars doing business with local school boards. As she reported, “Gwinnett County Schools in Georgia, they spent $14 million. Baltimore County in Maryland, $11 million. Chicago, $11 million. Palm Beach County Schools, down in Florida, $9 million. The New York City schools spent $21 million on Heinemann products.”  She notes Heinemann’s three top authors, Lucy Calkins, Gay Su Pinnell, and Irene Fountas, are now multi-millionaires.  When I reported on reading instruction for the PBS NewsHour in May, 2014, approximately 15 percent of US schools were using Dr. Calkins’ Balanced Literacy and its 26 levels of ‘just right’ books, at a cost of roughly $300 per student. 

Focusing on Phonics is also profitable.  When California abandoned its 10-year embrace of Whole Language in favor of Phonics in 1998, it not only whiplashed its elementary school teachers; it also created a veritable gold rush, as the Los Angeles Times reported, because California set aside hundreds of millions of dollars to equip classrooms with new textbooks and retrain teachers.  Today school districts are being urged to purchase ‘Phonics kits,’ which seem to guarantee that everyone will master the critical skills with ease.  So, yes, greed has played a big role in our reading crisis.

What’s To Be Done:  Embracing “The Science of Reading,” as most states are doing, does tamp down the Reading Wars, but that alone will not solve the problem.  Children have an absolute right to read, and they are entitled to be taught by well-trained professionals.  As Bill Clinton said in 1994, “Literacy is not a luxury, it is a right and a responsibility. If our world is to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century we must harness the energy and creativity of all our citizens.” 

To achieve that goal, public policy should turn its attention to making things right.  Children and teachers are the casualties here. Classroom teachers were victimized by inadequate professional training, because almost all their education professors taught them to use the Whole Language approach, full stop. 

Let’s hold the guilty people and institutions responsible: the teacher-training institutions that dismiss Phonics, the ideologues in both camps, the anti-public education politicians, test-crazed leaders, and the profiteering people and businesses who treat children as pawns. 

Public education is supposed to be a ladder to a better life, one that children can climb, rung by rung, on their way out and up. Continuing with either Whole Language or Phonics is akin to removing the bottom rungs of that ladder, because teaching children to read is not an “either-or” matter. Phonics-based instruction that includes elements of word recognition and contextual understanding (i.e. Whole Language), when led by a talented teacher, is enjoyable and challenging.  In sharp contrast, either approach on its own– pure Phonics or Whole Language–is boring and counter-productive.  

The long term solution requires major changes in pre- and in-service teacher education and the removal of financial incentives that now support the Whole Language model.  

In the short term, we need to retrain elementary school teachers so they can be successful.  To make that possible, President Biden should ask the House and Senate to pass “The Right to Read Act,” which would provide block grants to all US States and territories for the retraining of Kindergarten, First, Second and Third Grade teachers in Phonics and Phonemic Awareness, in the importance of Word Recognition, and in the art of teaching those skills in ways that engage students.  Ideally, this Bill would also provide funds for literacy training for any adults seeking to learn to read with confidence.

These paid summer workshops should also be open to teachers in other grades, including Middle and High School teachers, so that all educators are equipped to help struggling readers. 

Retraining several hundred thousand teachers will take time, skill, and patience; after all, we’re asking them to unlearn and abandon habits and patterns, and then relearn a new way of teaching reading.  Imagine asking a saxophonist to play the violin, or a soccer player to play point guard on a basketball team. Those are comparable challenges.  

However, not retraining teachers would inevitably mean a reliance on scripted Phonics drill, often on screens.  Pre-packaged ‘Phonics Kits’ seem to me to be a sure-fire recipe for turning kids away from reading.

For its part, the US Department of Education should fund and make available videos of a dozen or so outstanding teachers at work. In these videos, we should see effective teaching and also hear the teachers explain what they are doing, and why.

And bear in mind, good teaching is more art than science. It cannot be programmed into a machine or taught straight out of a textbook. So, please, let buyers beware of snake oil salesmen peddling Phonics schemes ‘guaranteeing’ that teachers and students will master Phonics in a week or two. 

Never forget that reading with confidence is neither a goal nor an end in itself. It is a means to an infinite number of ends—following recipes, assembling a toy or an outdoor grill,delving into history and biography, and being transported into fictional worlds, etc, etc.  

This is a national crisis, which means we cannot continue teaching reading the way we do.  Embracing both Phonics and Word Recognition as the best way to teach children to read may well be the civil rights issue of our time.  If we truly want our public schools to be a ladder up and a pathway to success for anyone who’s willing to work hard, we must end the Reading Wars now!