Read it and Weep—

Why Many Reading Teachers Advocate the Opposite of What Works
By Dr. Sandra Stotsky

Reading instruction is one of the very few areas in which it is not the case that more research is needed. Educational policy makers already have the theory and the evidence supporting it to guide the implementation of effective reading programs from kindergarten through high school. In fact, they have had the theory and the evidence for decades. The central problem they face in providing effective reading instruction and a sound reading curriculum stems not from an absence of a research base but from willful indifference to what the research has consistently shown and to a theory that has been repeatedly confirmed. The evidence has been willfully ignored by schools of education and all those they influence, from teachers, administrators, educational publishers, professional educational organizations, and testing companies, to policy makers.

In The Academic Achievement Challenge , the last book she wrote before her death at the age of 78 in 1999, Jeanne Chall makes this point over and over again, with exasperation and sorrow. One of the world's experts on reading research and instruction, Chall was a major contributor to this body of research through her work on readability, her analysis of the research on beginning reading instruction, and many other studies. Based on her own research, her work with hundreds of graduate students in the course of their dissertations or other research at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and continuing contact with former students over the course of a long professional life, she was in a position to have a comprehensive, inside understanding of the twists and turns in her field and in education in general.

In one of my last conversations with her in 1998, I asked her what kind of reading research she thought was still necessary. Her answer was quick and cutting. We don't need any more. It's clear what we should do. It's been clear for decades. The problem is that we don't do what the research evidence supports, and in fact often do just the opposite.

Most of the issues in the curriculum could be seen, she suggested, as a reflection of the tensions between a teacher-centered and a student-centered approach to instruction and to education in general. Commentators on education over the years have come up with different terms for the dichotomy in approaches: traditional vs. progressive, direct vs. indirect, content vs. process, product vs. process, structured vs. open, and skills vs. conceptual understanding are just a few of them. However, they always reflected how one viewed the learning process and the role of the teacher.

From her examination of trends in national test scores and both quantitative and qualitative studies in all areas of the school curriculum, Chall concluded that teacher-centered approaches led to higher student achievement in all areas of the curriculum including reading, especially in the elementary grades, and especially for low-income children. Yet, ironically, for the past 50 years, the conflicts were almost all about what was best for these children. The research evidence was clear about which approach would be best for these children. But it didn't seem to matter to those who claimed that social justice for the children of the poor demanded nothing but “best practices.”

Two Approaches

Chall noted there have been two basic, competing theories about the development of reading skill. In one theory, repeatedly confirmed, its development takes place in a series of stages, with beginning reading differing from skilled reading. Phonological factors play a major role at the beginning because beginners must learn the various relationships between spoken words and the written symbols for their sounds in order to become skilled readers. In other words, they must learn the alphabetical principle. This multistage theory predicts that a lack of success in the early stages—in sounding out and identifying words in print whose meanings they already know—retards success in later stages when they must, among other things, learn the meanings of words they may be able to sound out with ease but not understand.

In the other theory, known as whole language, a sight word approach, or a psycholinguistic guessing game, beginning reading does not differ as a process from skilled reading. Reading skill, its proponents claim, develops naturally as language and cognition develop, with language and cognition maturing together independent of direct instruction. Proponents of this one-stage theory analogize learning to read and write to the natural process of learning to listen and speak, asserting that beginning readers learn to read through their effort to derive meaning from written language just as they have with oral language.

As is well-known, the evidence has consistently supported the multistage theory and is implemented by a pedagogy emphasizing explicit instruction in skills and mastery to the point of automaticity. The evidence has clearly supported the superiority of highly structured teaching for children deemed “at risk.”

The Philosophical Divide

Chall noted that “powerful forces” other than reason and common sense have kept us doing the same research and answering the same questions over and over again, with no end yet in sight. As she saw it, there has been a steady movement towards student-centered approaches to curriculum and instruction over the century despite the mounting evidence that its results were inferior to teacher-centered approaches, especially for the most vulnerable populations—low-income children and children with disabilities. Chall traced the root of the problem to conflicting philosophical beliefs about the child's inherent nature and the goal of education in a democracy. One group of educators have viewed the child as someone whose intellectual growth needed careful adult-determined direction within a clear pedagogical structure, with the end result of informed citizenship. Their primary goals have been academic. Another group of educators have viewed the child as essentially good, motivated to learn and cooperate with others, and a unique individual whose creative talents needed to be tapped and allowed to unfold naturally—an image befitting children living in a democracy as they pictured it. No authority figures are in charge of what children learn. For this group of educators, the primary goals of education have been social.

Making Reading Political

In her last book, Chall frankly noted that the problem today is the identification of each theory and the pedagogy that best implements it with a political preference.

Phonics instruction was one of the first areas of pedagogy to be politicized, and by the author of Reading: A Psycholinguistic Guessing Game , Kenneth Goodman, with the help of his educator wife, Yetta Goodman. They were the founders of the whole language movement. In an attempt to ascribe the low reading achievement of low-income children to language differences, not language deficits, Goodman claimed that phonics instruction imposed standard forms of speech on dialect-speaking children through the teaching of conventional sound-letter correspondences and led to the failure of these children to connect what they decoded with their native language and a lack of motivation to learn to read.

Because these children could not associate the words they identified with the language they spoke, he argued, they could not read with meaning. Phonics instruction, he also implied, was the preferred strategy of Christian fundamentalists, darkly hinting that it was favored by conservative parents because it fit in with attempts at controlled literal understandings of a text. In effect, Goodman made phonics instruction a civil rights issue and smeared it as a tool of both white middle class oppressors and white fanatics.

Goodman's colleagues in education schools across the country took up this argument with eagerness and further support from Paulo Freire's influential Pedagogy for the Oppressed , first published in 1970 and now available in a 30th anniversary edition. A Brazilian educator and a Marxist, Freire, too, ridiculed phonics instruction as an oppressive strategy for teaching illiterate Brazilian fishermen and farmers how to read, advocating instead a whole language approach. To a large extent, his teaching materials consisted of party slogans and Marxist propaganda, so far as I can determine. Although Freire has been judged one of the most influential educators of the 20th century, I have been unable to locate independent evaluations of his work in Brazil or elsewhere.

Did Goodman's ideas make sense at the theoretical level, or have empirical or practical support? No, his ideas were untenable as language theory. Dialect-speaking children in this and every other country can comprehend the standard dialect orally; thus there is no comprehension mismatch when children sound out a word according to its standard pronunciation. (Goodman himself later corrected his claims on this issue.) Nor could Goodman's ideas be implemented consistently by linguists because they could not agree on how to transcribe black dialect or indeed on which black dialect to use for a beginning reading textbook. His ideas were also unsupported by research; no peer-reviewed and published research found black children's reading skills improved by the use of reading textbooks written in dialect. Indeed, dialect readers were opposed in practice by black teachers who didn't want the stereotype of dialect-speaking blacks promoted in children's reading materials. But none of this mattered. Phonics instruction was a civil rights issue—beyond theory, research, and the scientific method. Moreover, the English language itself was now being portrayed as the language of imperialists—and even literacy was being dismissed as the tool of oppressors dating back thousands of years to the very inception of writing systems.

Research Declared Irrelevant

In concluding her book, Chall noted how intractable ideological preferences are. However, rational being that she was, she still ended with the hope that scientific evidence would come to be more respected by educators. Here, I think, is where Chall underdeveloped a crucial piece of the problem she identified. She failed to note that scientific research in education—something the early Progressives did want, John Dewey among them—has itself been consistently disparaged as “positivistic” and irrelevant by the major proponents of whole language since the early 1970s. They have cleverly argued from the start that their theory and its associated pedagogy could not be assessed by scientific methods.

Goodman, now a professor emeritus at the University of Arizona , has regularly and outspokenly disparaged the value of scientific research in education. Other whole language advocates are quoted in a March 20, 1996 , article in Education Week as charging that “researchers have become the unwitting pawns of the conservative and religious right.”

The reading process advocates were joined in their disparagement of experimental research very early on by Donald Graves, the first to emphasize a holistic writing process for teaching writing in the elementary school and the graduate school mentor at the University of New Hampshire of Lucy Calkins, his most prominent student. In 1980, for example, Graves dismissed writing research as “exercises for students to apply statistics to their dissertations.” In his view, most experimental research “wasn't readable and was of limited value.” It was “devoid of context and concerned only with sterile and faceless data.”

If experimental research is declared inappropriate, no evaluation of the efficacy of the reading and writing process approach is possible. How convenient. Its advocates never have to admit that their theory is bankrupt and their pedagogical recommendations have little or no warrant. And because they are true believers, the bankrupt theory spreads. As we all know, it has influenced educators across the curriculum in tandem with another related, unproved, and unprovable theory of learning called constructivism . Both new and experienced teachers are actively dissuaded from teaching discrete skills (except, possibly, in no more than 10-minute “mini-lessons”). Pseudo-teaching strategies like small peer-led group work are touted as ways to teach the content of any subject. But, borrowed theories, bankrupt or not, often lead to unexpected problems in the new domain.

For example, both mathematical and scientific terms have fixed meanings uninfluenced by context. But a theory that views contextual meaning or “prior knowledge” as determining word meanings leads to a pedagogy in mathematics and science that is potentially harmful, especially when there are many words whose everyday meaning differs from their precise scientific definition.

More problematic is the notion that it matters little if students misread the exact words in a sentence if they have “constructed” an approximate “meaning” for the sentence. It is a short leap to the notion that students should be given more credit for spelling out their reasoning for solving a mathematical problem even if they come up with a wrong answer than for getting the correct answer without spelling out the reasoning. It's also a short leap from pedagogical approaches that insist students should choose what they want to read and write about, ground their interpretations of what they read in their life experiences, and write mainly about their life experiences (all in the name of “ownership”) to the notion that children should be expected to induce their own algorithms for basic arithmetical operations and engage chiefly in solving “real-world” problems.

Generations of Willful Ignorance

The problems go deeper than Goodman's and Graves 's indifference to a bankrupt theory and its misapplication to another domain. These two educators communicated their sarcastic dismissal of scientific research to their own graduate students and to other educators for decades. Spread by their students and colleagues in schools of education across the country, their views have kept thousands of graduate students and prospective teachers from studying methodologically sound research in their education courses and discouraged them from using it later in their own work.

Educational policy makers are in an unenviable position. Most of those who prepare new teachers and retrain experienced ones in our schools of education do not appear to accept the results of scientific research on the nature, development, and teaching of reading and writing. They do not accept the results because they have declared scientific research irrelevant. They thus erroneously train those who are preparing to teach in costly licensure programs and continue to erroneously train them in even more costly professional development programs. Rational argument is not possible with those who maintain that evidence does not matter—or that an opinion or an appealing anecdote can also be considered “evidence.”

A society cannot afford to continue funding teacher training institutions whose educational philosophy promotes a bankrupt theory and its associated pedagogy in the name of social justice in order to disguise their own intellectual bankruptcy.

Sandra Stotsky, Ph.D., now an independent education researcher, was Senior Associate Commissioner at the Massachusetts Department of Education from 1999 to 2003. For thirteen years, she directed a summer Institute on Writing, Reading, and Civic Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, sponsored by the Lincoln and Therese Filene Foundation, and now directs a We the People summer institute, co-sponsored by the Filene Foundation and the Center for Civic Education in California.