“The Science of Reading” is a real thing, so real that it’s required by law in schools in 40 states and the District of Columbia.  They have been ordered by politicians to adopt what is known as the “Science of Reading,” which mandates ‘evidence-based’ reading instruction, often in the hopes that test scores will improve. (The three states I have lived in in recent years–Massachusetts, New York, and California–have resisted the pressure to jump on this bandwagon, I’m happy to say.)

While this bandwagon has been picking up steam, something unfortunate has been happening: Our kids are reading for pleasure less and less.  For example, only 17 percent of 13-year-olds say they read almost daily for fun, compared to 27 percent in 2012 and 35 percent in 1984. That’s a huge dropoff. 

While we know that correlation is not necessarily causation, could those two developments be connected?  

Let’s start with ‘The Science of Reading.”  Here’s how the newspaper Education Week explains it (with my emphasis added to some words I want you to pay special attention to):  “In a science of reading framework, teachers start by teaching beginning readers the foundations of language in a structured progression—like how individual letters represent sounds, and how those sounds combine to make words. 

That’s Phonics, sounding out words.  In other words, schools and teachers are required by law to teach kids that letters make sounds and, by implication, that they can trust those sounds….

Makes sense, if reading is in fact a science…..

Hold on for a minute, please!  Very often we cannot trust the sounds,  because our language, English, is about as unreliable and unpredictable as possible.  It breaks its own rules willy-nilly.  

My personal favorite example is these three words, which I ask you to say out loud:  Anger, Danger, Hanger.  By the rules of Phonics and the ‘science of reading,’ those three words should rhyme……

Here’s another demonstration of our English language’s weirdness and irregularity, based on a comic routine I found on YouTube a few days ago.

Say this word aloud: EAR

By the rules of Phonics, this word, BEAR, should rhyme with EAR….but it doesn’t

Now that you have learned to pronounce BEAR, it stands to reason that adding a D, making BEARD, will produce a word that is pronounced BARED.  But it’s not; it’s pronounced BEERD.

Back to the rules: EAR and HEAR rhyme, as they should, but HEARD isn’t pronounced HERE-D; instead, it’s pronounced HERD.

And if we add a T to HEAR to make HEART, we don’t get HERE-T.  No, it’s HART.

Back to hard core phonics:  By its rules,  DEAR, FEAR, HEAR, GEAR, and PEAR should rhyme….and they do, with one important exception. Let’s talk about the exception.  What if we add an L to PEAR, to make PEARL.  It should be pronounced PAIR-L, but of course it’s not.  It’s PURR-L.

I wrote about two competing approaches to teaching reading, Phonics and Whole Language (which includes teaching students to recognize some words, not just sound them out), back in January.  You can find that piece here, but below you will find my description of  how one first grade teacher gets her students interested in reading:  

That First Grade teacher often takes pages out of the Whole Language playbook to talk about words that don’t follow the rules of Phonics.  

One day she writes these sentences on the blackboard: COME HERE!  WHERE ARE THE MACHINES?

“OK, kids. On your toes now, because only one of these words follows the rules.”

She asks them to pronounce each word according to the rules they have learned. They do, pronouncing COME with a long O, WHERE with a long E, ARE with a long A, and MACHINES with a long I.  Then she pronounces them correctly, cracking up the children.

“I told you English was tricky and sneaky, but we won’t let it beat us!”

To finish the lesson, she writes HERE on the blackboard and asks the children to sound it out, which they do with ease.  Then she puts a W in front of HERE and challenges them to sound it out.  They rhyme it with HERE.  She replaces the W with T, making THERE, and again asks her students to sound it out.  WHERE and THERE, she explains, break the rules. They will have to learn to recognize them. 

My point then–and now–is that ‘The Science of Reading’ is wildly over-hyped and arguably even dangerous when reading is reduced to drilling in Phonics.  

Never forget these two truths: 1) Every child wants to be able to read because reading gives them both pleasure and power over their environment, and 2) The teaching of reading is both an ART and a SCIENCE.  That is, Phonics is necessary but not sufficient!

I worry that the fervent acolytes for “The Science of Reading” may be taking the joy out of reading, and I know that hucksters are asking school boards to buy their expensive ‘evidence-based’ blah blah blah reading programs. I fear that the focus on “The Science of Reading” may, inadvertently, be producing children who can read but do not and will not, because what they endured to achieve the status of “reader” (by passing state tests) was painful.