Two recent media treatments about the blessings of the “science of reading” and the horrors of “unscientific” reading instruction (targeted at Lucy Calkins) tread the same muddy water and are unlikely to result in more children learning to read. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/11/opinion/reading-kids-phonics.html, https://revealnews.org/podcast/how-teaching-kids-to-read-went-so-wrong/
My friend, Laura Roop, points out that the polemics around reading have much to do with market share and branding. “Science of Reading” is an investment category as is Lucy Calkins’s “Units of Study” and others. But there are also political motivations that are less immediately about money.
It helps to think about the controversy over how to teach reading in tandem with controversies over how to teach math if we want to get down to “root causes”.
First, notice that there is a straw man in both controversies. In reading, the proponents of what is called “science,” “brain science,” and more popularly, “phonics,” pretend that the other side of the controversy eschews “phonics” altogether. For example, Kristof writes in his recent article: “we haven’t relied enough on a simple starting point — helping kids learn to sound out words with phonics.” No one who studies reading seriously believes that kids don’t need to learn how letters represent sounds (at least in languages that use alphabetic writing systems). Those of us who distrust “science of reading” pretensions simply point out that reading English involves much more than “phonics”. But no one who studies reading seriously disagrees that “more than phonics” is crucial, too. So focusing on “phonics” is a straw man argument, and doesn’t help us understand what is really at stake.
I put “phonics” in quotation marks because it is a term that isn’t used by linguists and doesn’t describe anything very specific in English. The spelling of English words (unlike Spanish or Italian, for instance) depends not only on letter-sound correspondences but also on the meaning of words. David and Sharon Reinking have an excellent article on the subject: “Why Teaching Phonics (in English) is Difficult to Teach, Learn, and Apply”. They point out that there are no expensive government studies, no reading wars or even controversies about how to teach reading in Italy, because Italian matches letters to sounds in a straigtforward way. In English, however, “health” and “heal” are related morphologically—by meaning. But the “ea” in “health” is pronounced differently from the “ea” in “heal”. Sounding out “healthy” would get you “heal-thee” or “heal-thigh”. There are tens of thousands of similar examples.
Because of this fact, every knowledgeable reading expert knows that children learn to read “health” or “healthy” correctly by realizing that they can’t just “sound it out.” They learn to pay attention to the meaning of what they’re reading, and their brains get used to taking in bigger chunks of text (mostly to the right of the letter or word they’re “on”), and from practice they get the idea that when they see the “th” after “heal”, what would get sounded out as “heel” actually gets pronounced as “health”, whereas when they see “ing” after “heal”, they were right the first time and go ahead with something that sounds like “heeling.” As they get good at reading, which is much more than “decoding” one sound at a time, these processes of incoporating semantic and syntactic context and taking in wider swathes of text ahead of the word they’re sounding out become automatic. They’re fluent readers. A new, odd word out of context makes us all hesitant decoders (try “autochthonous”, for example), but that hesitancy doesn’t mean we don’t know how to read.
Proponents of “systematic phonics” tend to ignore the fact that a complete list of all the rules and exceptions in English would run to thousands of pages. It isn’t even true that there are “basic phonics rules” that work for beginning readers, because a high percentage of the most common words in English have weird spellings (“go” vs. “to”; “come” vs. “home”; “they” vs. “eye”; and on and on). No, the rhetorical purpose of people who like to say “phonics” is to pretend that something simple and basic would make learning to read a snap, and that it’s fancy people with fancy theories that are making reading difficult for normal kids. But it’s just not so. Reading English is tricky.
The straw man is conjured at just this point in the argument by “phonics” people accusing stubborn people like me of not wanting to teach phonics at all. But that’s not so either. Of course, we need to teach how letters correspond to sounds as much as we possibly can and as much as makes sense, because we use an alphabetic writing system. But we also need to do more to help new readers see that “sounding out” is a good place to start, but reading is about communicating and understanding, not simply about pronouncing. In fact, if you try to just pronounce, you’re going to end up not understanding.
As the Reinkings put it: “Anyone helping children use phonics in English needs to be aware of and appreciate its complexity and difficulty. That means not assuming nor giving children the impression that sounding out words by individual letters or letter combinations is foolproof decoding, nor the essence of reading.” They go on to give excellent examples of the “concessions” that need to be made to the complexity of phonics in English. For example, “Putting all your eggs in the phonics basket is not likely to be entirely effective or efficient. Other approaches and strategies might, and often do, fill the gap by supplementing phonics.” Or: “A consequence of phonics’ complexity…is a heightened need for professional judgement and flexibility. Much like a good doctor who will vary treatments and dosages for individual patients, teachers need to merge deep knowledge of phonics and their students with their professional experience to make wise decisions.” The Reinkings and many others go into more detail about what specific supplemental strategies could help and about how good reading teachers pay attention to the things particular students need—directing their attention to a certain phonics issue, or making them less stressed, or appealing to their interests, and on and on.
The point is that reading isn’t simple, but everyone can learn to do it well. The issue being debated isn’t “phonics.” The issue being debated is the bigger subject that we all agree is our goal: how to teach reading. “Phonics” does not solve the problem; it is only a part of the solution. And honestly, almost no one in the reading education field disagrees with this point.
Similarly with the “math wars.” Here the straw man is the idea that left-leaning or constructivist math teachers and math education professors somehow think that students don’t need to learn how to multiply and divide. The accusers get this idea from our reluctance to introduce concepts to young people through hard-and-fast rules and algorithms. For example, there’s supposed to be something tough-minded and serious about teaching the usual algorithm for addition: line up the columns; start at the right-most column; add the numbers in the column; “carry” the “tens digit” to the next column to the left; add the next column; and so on. Of course, that’s a silly method if your problem is 199 + 1, for example. However, there are times when I find myself using that usual algorithm. The point is not that the algorithm is useless in all cases.
The point is that the algorithm only makes sense if you understand place value in our notation system. But if you understand place value in our notation system, then you often don’t need to bother with the algorithms.
One way I decide how comfortable a student is with place value and our notation system (at pretty much any age over 8) is to see how they do a simple arithmetic problem like adding a bunch of two or three digit numbers, or multiplying or dividing some two or three digit numbers (if the question happens to come up). A student who starts to lay out 200 x 47 by lining up the columns and multiplying 7 x 0, writing down “0”, etc., shows me off the bat that they’re not quite sure what’s going on. Of course, they say that that’s how their teacher showed them to do it. I’m sure they’re right. It’s just not what people do if they understand that the columns represent increasing powers of 10 or that multiplying by two means “doubling”, or that 47 is almost 50. Someone who understands those things says, maybe, “100 x 47 is 4700” (because that’s what multiplying by 100 means in our notation), and then 200 x 47 is 100 x (47 + 47) (because multiplying by 2 means doubling), and 50 + 50 is 100 so 47 + 47 is 94 (because 47 is 3 less than 50, and the other 47 is 3 less than 50, so together they’re 6 less than 100 or 94). All in all, 200 x 47 is 9400.”
Many children from 4th grade on who have had small class sizes and well-trained constructivist teachers do something like this very quickly in their heads. They aren’t any more brilliant than anyone else. They just aren’t handicapped by the algorithms.
I completely understand that many people reading descriptions like the above claim that it’s completely confusing, way too complicated, little kids can’t understand that, and much more. But this is just because many people reading descriptions like the above have never seen how small children do actually develop this kind of mathematical reasoning in ways very similar to how they develop language skills, as long as they aren’t stymied by poor teaching or large class sizes or both.
So it isn’t that we leftists don’t want children to learn to multiply and divide. That’s a straw man. We want children to learn to understand multiplication and division, addition and subtraction, fractions, equations and much, much more in ways that allow them to build the more complicated mental representations that they need in order to master advanced mathematics later on. We don’t want them to learn meaningless manipulations of numbers in columns that get marked correct or incorrect on a worksheet because those meaningless manipulations prevent them from developing the complex mental representaitons of mathematical objects (like functions, slopes, derivatives, ratios, and vectors, for example) that they need to fully participate in 21st century science, business, and, in fact, citizenship.
The straw men that certain participants in the reading and math wars try to shoot down are only the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the surface is the much bigger problem of the way education works in complex 21st century societies. In one sense, education is never problematic: human beings instinctively organize ourselves to help children grow up into the society they live in. Today what that looks like in America is that the schools for high caste children help them grow up to be in command, to expect that they will be in command, to believe that there are solutions to most problems if you are willing to spend the time and money to solve them. Children in families that are struggling but middle class generally go to schools that help them learn to strive hard but also accept that everything in life isn’t fair; there are winners and losers, and if you lose, it’s usually because you lack the grit or talent to win. And schools for children in the caste of surplus labor, the historically disenfranchised caste, teach that you are probably wild, ignorant, and out of control unless the authorities use very strict and harsh policies to keep you and your peers in your place; you should expect little to nothing from society; and you should remember that the few people who come from your caste and are accepted (at least temporarily) into the higher castes are proof that the problem of your own status arises from your inadequacy, not because of any systemic social structures.
The reading and math wars are symptomatic of our general unwillingness to confess that education is working just fine as an institution of cultural transmission. Part of the dominant ideology requires a belief in education as opportunity—opportunity to “reach your dreams.” The hard evidence of at least the last 70 years (since Brown v. Board) is that greater attention to and investment in education has not resulted in amelioration of the country’s caste structure for those in the lower castes. This is because education works as opportunity only for those castes that are seen as worthy to enjoy what the society has to offer. For those castes which are seen as unworthy, education is not opportunity; education for those castes is training in how to accept subordinate roles.
Our unwillingness to acknowledge this truth about the different role for education in different caste settings produces frustration in the policy-making class—a frustration that is reflected, though for different reasons , in the places where people are most oppressed. The policy-makers are frustrated because their self-regard is tied to the idea that they are not power-hungry and racist; they see themselves as generous and enlightened. Evidence of widespread poverty and despair threatens the view they have of their own goodness. Families, on the other hand, who live in poverty do put hope in the next generations. They do believe that education should be opportunity, and they are frustrated that the schools for their children are so ineffective in creating the literacies of the 21st century. The schools either say they and their children are at fault and are not doing well academically, or they say that their children are doing great, until the children graduate from high school and it turns out they aren’t qualified for any kind of employment beyond very menial work.
A simple “solution” is therefore attractive to many people: School should “go back” to teaching phonics and simple arithmetic. All children will then get started on an equal footing and caste disparities will be ameliorated. But learning to read is in fact more complicated than a phonics workbook, and learning math is more complicated than the standard addition and subtraction algorithms. We who believe in freedom must devise methods to demonstrate how the actual complexity of 21st century literacies ineed not be a barrier to learning in oppressed communities, but is a huge opportunity for attacking and changing the status quo.