Enough already with the reading wars

Back in the early 1990s, I worked for a year as a research assistant to a team of scholars — led by the researcher Catherine Snow — who were in the midst of a long-term study of literacy development among children from low-income backgrounds, following their progress from preschool through high school. At the time, the children were in 1st grade, and my job was to visit them both at home and in school to assess their emergent reading skills, observe classroom instruction, interview their parents and teachers, and more.

The study was meant to shed light on why so many poor and working-class students succeed in “cracking the code” by the 2nd or 3rd grade, only to struggle with the more demanding texts they encounter in the upper grades. To learn what might explain their difficulties with higher-level texts, Snow and her colleagues cast a wide net, gathering data on topics such as the children’s home and school environments, their access to learning resources, their physical and mental health, and their varied experiences with oral and written language.

I’m no expert in reading instruction, but I learned enough that year to know that children’s literacy development depends upon a complex web of factors, going well beyond their ability to sound out letters and decode words. So I was genuinely perplexed by the reading war that erupted around that time. Why, I wondered, were the media devoting so much attention to a debate about phonics instruction, while saying nothing about the many other things that matter to students’ long-term success? (Years later, I learned that Snow, too, was put off by the reading war, which she viewed as needless infighting among more-or-less like-minded researchers. As she put it, “the public squabble in the field of reading is a classic case of the narcissism of small differences”; Snow, 2017, p. 8).