November 1989

As Ullin Leavell wrote in these pages, in December 1943, “reading ability is a premier skill basic to an efficient participation in the American way of living” (p. 52). For our schools, teaching children to read is at the top of the list of essential tasks. And perhaps that’s why reading instruction has attracted so much controversy. Across several decades, advocates of phonics or whole language or balanced literacy or the science of reading have argued back and forth, often fiercely, armed with competing research findings, teaching models, and ideologies. And Kappan has provided space for all sides to make their case.

The 1960s: The fall (?) of phonics

To a large extent, debates about how best to teach reading have centered on the role that systematic phonics instruction should play in the early grades. Writing in May 1960, Leo Fay (“Trends in the teaching of elementary reading”) declared that:

These approaches are periodically tried and found wanting. They have never been the panacea that some people hopefully look for. The phonetic programs that were given a big play five to ten years ago have now for the most part been quietly dropped. They did contribute to the overall teaching of reading by re-emphasizing the importance of the skills of word study in any approach to the teaching of reading. Their weakness is that they are only part of what reading really is and as a result will never become the major way of teaching reading. (p. 348)

This prediction proved to be wrong, of course. Although the popularity of phonics instruction has waxed and waned since then, most educators have viewed it as a major way to teach reading (if not necessarily the major way). And researchers have continued to seek evidence of its efficacy. Thus, in June 1965, Kappan’s editor, Stanley Elam, prefaced an article by Emery Bliesmer and Betty Yarborough (“A comparison of ten different reading programs in first grade”) with a comment noting that reading instruction was among the most common areas of research in education. However, he explained, “much of this research is poorly designed, its results inconclusive or contradictory. Sometimes it even appears that the conclusions are distorted by vested interest.” By contrast, noted Elam, Bleismer and Yarborough’s research-based case for phonics “manages to avoid most of the pitfalls” (p. 500).

Bleismer and Yarborough studied 10 approaches to reading instruction, five of which used what they called the analytic method, in which children begin by learning whole words, and five of which used the synthetic method, in which children begin by learning letter-sound relationships and how to combine letters into words. They analyzed how well students being taught with each program performed on assessments of word reading, paragraph meaning, vocabulary, spelling, and word study skills and found that, for the most part, results favored the more phonics-based synthetic method. When analytic methods performed better, they observed, the differences were small.

“Instructional programs in U.S. schools focus on ‘essential’ reading skills; yet these skills have no demonstrable relationship to learning how to read books.” — Anne Bussis, December 1982

The 1980s: Debating what works

In December 1982, Anne Bussis (“‘Burn it at the casket’: Research, reading instruction, and children’s learning of the first R”) questioned whether the field’s growing emphasis on phonics was capturing the whole picture. She opened her article with an example of an early elementary student named Tim, who had trouble with some phonics skills but was, nonetheless, able to read and comprehend text, suggesting that his assessed reading level did not reflect his actual ability. Bussis asserted that:

Instructional programs in U.S. schools focus on “essential” reading skills; yet these skills have no demonstrable relationship to learning how to read books, and they impose definitions of reading and standards of reading progress that are contrary to common sense. (p. 239)

In February 1987, Kappan included a special section on reading in which Marie Carbo (“Reading styles research: ‘What Works’ isn’t always phonics”) likewise argued that the ability to decode text is not necessarily an accurate indicator of reading ability:

Logic dictates that, if a youngster can score poorly in decoding skills and still score above grade level in reading comprehension, that child does not need the particular decoding skills being tested in order to learn to read. Furthermore, the very fact that a student who reads fluently and with good comprehension can do poorly on the section of an achievement test that focuses on decoding invalidates that part of the test for that youngster. Surely, we cannot give greater weight to a student’s performance on a reading test than to his or her actual reading ability. (p. 434)

Instead of focusing on phonics, she suggested, teachers should look to learning styles theory and try to understand which specific strategies are most likely to be effective for each child.

February 1992

Carbo continued her argument against phonics research as a lynchpin of reading instruction in a November 1988 article (“Debunking the great phonics myth”) that critiqued Jeanne Chall’s influential 1967 book Learning to Read: The Great Debate. According to Carbo, while the book was “the major citation used to support the teaching of explicit phonics in the early grades” (p. 227), the research Chall cited did not, in fact, present a definitive case for the benefits of phonics for reading comprehension. Chall responded in March 1989 (“Learning to read: The great debate 20 years later”), writing that “it is counter to research evidence and to the experience of practitioners for the Kappan article to imply that programs that include phonics do not give proper attention to reading for understanding” (p. 530).

In the November 1989 issue on “The many keys to literacy,” additional authors weighed in on the debate. Denny Taylor (“Toward a unified theory of literacy learning and instructional practices”) disagreed with both Carbo and Chall and expressed consternation “that the complex subject of children’s early literacy development has been reduced in their debate to a battle over ‘methods’” (p. 185). And Richard Turner (“The ‘great’ debate: Can both Carbo and Chall Be right?”) did his own analysis of the studies Chall cited and determined that “systematic phonics appears to have a slight and early advantage over a basal-reader/whole-word approach as a method of beginning reading instruction” but that the effects don’t persist into later grades (p. 282).

The 1990s: Widening the debate

In February 1992, Frank Smith (“Learning to read: The never-ending debate”) suggested that the debate over methods was missing the point. The real argument about reading instruction had to do with different philosophies about how people learn. Is it formal and deliberate, which would align with phonics, or informal and spontaneous, which would align with a whole language approach? Smith favored a more spontaneous model, but he expressed concern that whole language approaches were being implemented in systems that were too structured.

And so, a new back-and-forth ensued. In January 1993, Kenneth Smith, Valerie Reyna, and Charles Brainerd (“The debate continues”) suggested that Frank Smith mischaracterized the evidence for formal reading instruction, making it appear more artificial than it is, and that he failed to provide his own research-based ideas:

We have a “philosophy” that learning to read is “natural” and need not be taught; that no formal assessment is needed; that learning requires no effort; that children from particular socioeconomic groups need no special attention; that the role of the teacher is little more than reading to children and providing them with interesting books. No evidence whatsoever, either research or theory, is presented to support any of these claims. (p. 409)

“The ‘great debate’ isn’t a clash over phonics or educational research at all, but rather a symbolic skirmish in the broader culture wars.” — Steve Zemelman, Harvey Daniels, and Marilyn Bizar, March 1999

Frank Smith replied in the same issue that his research was simply of a different kind than his interlocutors preferred:

The debate pivots on what the two sides would regard as relevant or acceptable research. Most of the “evidence” that I presented or alluded to was based on many years of observing actual children, teachers, and classrooms — working with people, not “subjects.” The “research” that proponents of the skills approach . . . prefer is derived from experimental situations under manipulative conditions. As long as we are on divergent courses, we will never meet. (p. 411)

In March 1999, Steve Zemelman, Harvey Daniels, and Marilyn Bizar (“Sixty years of reading research — but who’s listening?”) took an even wider lens and stated that research would not settle the debate (although they believed research favored holistic approaches over skills-based ones) because the debate is not really about teaching methods at all:

February 2005

The “great debate” isn’t a clash over phonics or educational research at all, but rather a symbolic skirmish in the broader culture wars between two opposing camps on matters of teaching and learning, of child development, and of human nature. In a sense, research studies and journal articles are beside the point; this is a religious controversy. After all, if you believe that children are intrinsically flawed beings who need to be tightly controlled and amply punished, you will design a very different kind of classroom from the one you would design for people who were seen as basically good, worthy of love and respect, and capable of self-actualization. (p. 515)

Into the 21st century: The NRP

A new skirmish broke out in March 2001, with “Beyond the smoke and mirrors,” Elaine Garan’s critique of the 2000 report of the National Reading Panel (NRP), which was commissioned by the U.S. Congress to review the existing evidence on the teaching of phonemic awareness, phonics, reading fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and other aspects of reading instruction. Garan claimed that when it reviewed the research on phonics instruction, the panel had relied too much on experimental studies and that “phonics had no statistically significant impact on tasks requiring authentic application” (p. 503). This would not be a problem, she went on to explain, if the report were not being presented as scientific truth and used to inform policy decisions. Garan further criticized the NRP in February 2005 (“Murder your darlings: A scientific response to the Voice of Evidence in Reading Research”), in a special section of Kappan that focused on findings detailed in the Voice of Evidence in Reading Research, a 2004 volume edited by Peggy McCardle and Vinita Chabra that discussed the NRP’s methods and findings.

Also writing in the 2005 special section, Timothy Shanahan (“But does it really matter?”), an NRP member, complained that the back-and-forth critiques of the panel and its report had become “unpleasant, unproductive, and — more worrisome — misleading” (p. 452). Further, these exchanges weren’t providing practitioners with the guidance they needed:

As an administrator, I could ill afford to immerse myself in the vagaries of this kind of academic infighting; the only real issue for me was what appropriate conclusions I could draw about how to best meet the reading needs of the children for whom I was responsible. To that, the answer is clear. The findings of the NRP are a good starting point for providing the most effective teaching to children. (p. 455)

“Good teaching, effective teaching, is not just about using whatever science says ‘usually’ works best. It is all about finding out what works best for the individual child and the group of children in front of you.” — Richard Allington, February 2005

However, Richard Allington (“Ideology is still trumping evidence”), while less critical of the NRP than Garan, urged readers to remember that research has limits:

I think everyone can agree that children differ. Therein lies what worries me about “evidence-based” policy making in education. Good teaching, effective teaching, is not just about using whatever science says “usually” works best. It is all about finding out what works best for the individual child and the group of children in front of you. (p. 462)

The fact that the reading wars have come and gone and come again so frequently demonstrates just how important reading is to educators and the general public. But it also demonstrates how difficult it is for researchers and practitioners to come to a definitive conclusion about matters as complex as student learning.


This article appears in the May 2022 issue of Kappan, Vol. 103, No. 8, pp. 5-7.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Teresa Preston

Teresa Preston is editor-in-chief of Phi Delta Kappan and director of publications for PDK International, Arlington, VA.

Visit their website at: https://pdkintl.org/