Before the Science of Reading

"Today a reader, tomorrow a leader." ~ Margaret Fuller 

The State of Language Arts Education in Today’s Schools

A Grassroots Endeavor in Language Arts Education Revision

A Four-Part Series by Amy Coffey

In last week’s edition of Grassroots, we realized where we now stand with regard to today’s students’ average NAEP reading scores. Now let’s delve into the events that led us to this point.

 As with most events in history, our poor report card for reading education in the U.S. is a cumualtion of several factors. If all the world is a stage, and we are the players, this drama has unfolded with an astonishingly provocative plot and several colorful characters.

Let us begin...

As the curtain rises, we see the McGuffey Readers of the 1800s guiding young readers with a letter to sound approach known as phonics. A phonetic reading lesson teaches students to put together letter sounds; e.g., C + the short A + T, fluently produces the word “cat”. 

Next on the scene, in the 1930’s, Scott Foresman publishers introduced American readers to the Dick and Jane reading series. This “Whole Word” approach was slim on vocabulary, but hefty in repetition. For fifty years children learned to read the “Sally, Dick, and Jane” books by memorizing the sight of individual words. Phonics instruction, the process of associating letters and their sounds, hung back in the wings, rarely used.

Next, from stage left, entered Ken Goodman. Goodman was a professor of Language Reading and Culture at the University of Arizona. The American Educational Research Association met in New York City in 1967, where Goodman presented a revolutionary method for learning to read. 

It presumed that the process of reading was not accomplished by decoding letter-sound relationships, but by focusing upon word meaning. It relied upon the child’s knowledge base to determine an unknown word. His work laid the foundation for the “Whole Language” method to reading which became wildly popular in the 1980s and 90s. Known as the “three-cueing” method, it worked like this:

    1. What word would make sense, given the context of this sentence?

      2. What letter does the word start with? Can you think of a word starting with that letter that would make sense?

      3. (The child thinks of a word.) Does that word work?

This is why a boy once said that the German Nazis invited Poland in 1939, rather than they invaded Poland. It’s a guessing game. 

 A large problem with this method was that most low-income children lacked having a sufficient bank of experiences such as those enjoyed by wealthier children. Thus, their vocabularies were smaller. Furthermore, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, by 2019, 23% of American children did not speak English in their homes. If they had not heard nor spoken, for example, the word “access”, how are they going to guess it? And how would they know that the pronunciation of /acc/ in “access” is different from the /acc/ in “accumulate”?

It’s interesting to note that at the same time Ken Goodman initiated his cueing system of reading, a woman named Marie Clay was doing the exact same thing halfway around the world.

With a doctorate from the University New Zealand, Marie Clay began a program called The Reading Recovery Program. Once again, children were encouraged to guess what unknown words were: Does it make sense? Does it sound right? Does it look right?

Marie’s program caught the attention of people in the U.S., and she was brought to Columbus, Ohio to train teachers at the Ohio State University how to use this method. 

Praised by then President Bill Clinton, the Reading Recovery Program and whole language teaching became all the rage in the 80s and 90s.

Flash forward to 1990. By this time, multiple research studies had told us that children learned to read better using a  phonetics method. The U.S. government wanted to reform reading education, and with fistfuls of millions in taxpayer money, they tried to halt the whole language, cueing system of teaching reading.

  Susan Neuman, a professor of education in Texas, gave a talk at a professional conference in 1990:

“I gave a talk saying that children needed to be taught early on, and they needed explicit instruction [in phonics], and that early childhood methods were failing children by not providing that kind of explicit instruction…and they [the pro-whole language audience] stormed the podium, and yelled at me, and said how I was wrong, and how awful I was…”

(American Public Media, Podcast series, “Sold a Story”, 2022)

There were two interesting people in Susan’s audience that day; (then governor) George and Barbara Bush. Plans were put into place at the highest levels to reform reading instruction. When George W. Bush became president in 2001, Susan Neuman was given a position as his Assistant Secretary of Education.

George W. Bush endorsed the Reading First proposal, which became a part of the No Child Left Behind Act, with $5 billion spent on reading programs.

Suddenly, the plot thickened. Gay Su Pinnell, a reading professor at OSU, and Irene Fountas of Lesley College in Massachusetts, teamed up to write Guided Reading, a book published by Heinemann Publishing. Calling this cueing approach to reading “Balanced Literacy”, it included the work of another whole-language enthusiast, Lucy Calkins. 

As the reading wars fiercely raged on, one character in the background quietly collected the spoils of the war. Heinemann Publishing Company collected $1.6 billion between 2010 and 2019 in instructional materials and resources published by Pinnell, Fountas, and Calkins. Pinnell and Fountas also published the Benchmark Assessment System which tested students’ reading abilities. (APM Reports; “Heinemann’s Billion Dollar Sales Have Nationwide Reach”, by Christopher Peak, 2022)

Next week, we will examine the way our brains learn to read, and determine which side of this war is the most successful approach to reading instruction.