Why We Cannot Go Back to Basics

Recently, the media has presented two sets of stories on what kind of reading should occur in U.S. schools. One set of stories has followed state laws banning books depicting “divisive topics.” According to PEN America there was a 200 percent surge in book bans during the 2023–2024 school year despite 71 percent of Americans opposing efforts to remove books from schools and libraries.

Another set of stories has championed a back-to-basics approach associated with the “Science of Reading” (SoR). SoR is a movement that calls for an increase in explicit, systematic decoding instruction. It was originally spearheaded by families of students with dyslexia, but has been extensively taken up by the media and politicians who argue that phonics instruction, distinct from other teaching methods like balanced literacy or whole language, will increase the number of proficient readers in schools. Forty-five states and Washington, D.C., have enacted new reading education policies, many of which restrict classroom reading materials to scripted phonics curriculum. 

Although the “culture war” and “reading war” have been described as separate causes promoted by disparate organizations, their stories are more connected than they appear. Both book banning and SoR dogmatism limit what teachers can teach and what students can read, narrowing the ability of public schools to address children’s diverse needs. We see this most explicitly in conservative parent groups, including Moms for Liberty, who have made it clear they endorse both. This should be a wake-up call to critically examine the potential impact of phonics-based policies on public school students and teachers. 

The Threats to Learning (and Teaching) Literacy 

Most reading researchers agree that phonics instruction is essential for young readers. Still, disagreements about approaches to reading instruction, including phonics, are more than a century old. The current push to adopt SoR-aligned curriculum is but the newest iteration of the “reading wars,” a decades-long debate that frames different methods of reading instruction as incompatible with one another. These debates, while occurring among scholars, have been exacerbated by the media’s persistent conflict framing, a technique used to create a false binary. This conflict has presented a narrative on reading instruction as a moral panic to “save” children from teachers and/or problematic instruction. 

For example, take the claim that students aren’t reading because they are not taught enough phonics. Regardless of its merit in any one case, conservatives have taken advantage by blaming the reading crisis on teachers and their instructional methods while diverting attention from larger issues, like poverty, housing instability, food insecurity, and access to health care. This conflict framing worked for the Bush administration when it filled the pockets of its benefactors by steering federal funds to commercial reading curricula that ultimately, according to the administration’s own Department of Education assessment, did not improve reading proficiency. It is working now, as states yet again have limited curricular choices offered by some of the very same companies that profited 20 years ago. 

Simultaneously, this framing benefits groups like Moms for Liberty, who see phonics instruction as a means to creating a whitewashed, English-only approach to reading instruction. When we, as teacher educators and researchers, have asked teachers from various states for their opinions on book banning, they unanimously support diverse texts in classrooms. However, these very same teachers are often obliged to restrict their classroom texts to less diverse SoR-stamped curricula dictated by state laws, leaving them fearful of adding in additional diverse texts. This form of soft censorship ultimately has the same impact as book bans and may explain another reason for right-wing advocacy of phonics-heavy curriculum.

On top of this, the recurring trend toward prescriptive and narrow approaches to teaching phonics, now labeled “SoR-backed,” does not even accurately reflect the actual sciences of reading research, nor the importance of skillful teachers crafting quality instruction for children with diverse needs. For this reason, educators need to resist the false binary between approaches to reading instruction and stay focused on the need for diverse materials, research, and instructional practices to support public education in response to both pro-SoR and book banning movements. 

Diverse Curriculum Materials Matter

For decades, scholars like Rudine Sims Bishop have encouraged educators to provide children with diverse books that act as mirrors (reflecting one’s own experiences), windows (giving students access to experiences different from one’s own), and sliding glass doors (encouraging students to step into a character’s shoes and empathize with their experiences). Similarly, educators recognize that no one curriculum would fully meet the needs of all, in part because the same texts cannot respond to each student’s identities. However, current SoR proponents often encourage school districts to look for a fast and simple solution to increased reading achievement by adopting commercially produced phonics programs that fail to provide young learners with a rich array of diverse and intellectually engaging texts.

Although research shows that children benefit from phonics instruction, it also shows that there are costs to devoting too much of the instructional day to phonics and to relying too heavily on prepackaged curricular materials to deliver that instruction. In one district that recently implemented a scripted program, teachers shared with us discouraging stories of being told not to veer from their scripts for assessments, even when they use multiple languages to communicate with children, or when assessing nonverbal children. 

SoR devotees have heavily criticized the use of trade books (i.e., general reading books designed to either entertain or inform) and leveled texts (i.e., books organized by reading level based on factors like vocabulary, text features, and syntax), advocating that students should apply only newly taught phonics skills in decodable texts (i.e., books that only use high frequency words and phonetically controlled vocabulary that students read in sequence aligned to phonics instruction). 

However, there are also critiques of emphasizing solely decodable texts. These books rarely contain complex plots or character development and do not provide opportunities to engage in meaningful comprehension work. Even kindergarteners we know have noted the differences between decodable texts and trade books. Implicitly, when instruction focuses on decodable texts, students learn that reading is about getting the words right, not about thinking deeply or critically, or seeing their experiences reflected in affirming ways and learning about other people’s experiences.

Moreover, many decodable texts have few characters of color, little to no linguistic diversity, and virtually no disability representation. And, although there are some recent examples of decodable books that aim to be more culturally representative, these texts do not capture the stories and experiences of children from diverse backgrounds in short decodable sentences. We recently asked an audience of more than 50 educators at a national literacy teaching conference if they had ever encountered a curriculum-mandated decodable text that featured a character with a hidden disability such as ADHD, autism, or dyslexia (identities SoR advocates claim to support) and not a single teacher could think of an example. In other words, students who SoR advocates claim to help don’t see themselves in the very texts adopted to center their needs. 

In effect, SoR-based policies can be hijacked for the same purposes as culture war-based book bans. Multiple conservative parents’ rights movements, such as No Left Turn in Education and Parents Defending Education, have argued that the “failure” of balanced literacy is evidence of the “failure” of progressive education, and a back-to-basics approach is the solution. This parallels the rhetoric of “Make America Great Again,” advocating for a return to a curriculum that centers dominant white Christian ideologies. This is a new chapter in a long history of reading curriculum’s lack of representation and diversity, especially in historically marginalized, low-income communities. 

All students deserve to see themselves, their cultures, and their families reflected in their classrooms. Educators should use a mix of reading materials, including decodable and trade books. To enable that flexibility, we need to roll back legislation that mandates curricular tools as a silver bullet solution for all students but actually crowds out other essential learning opportunities. 

Diverse Reading Research Matters

A persistent argument for why certain materials are given priority over others is the myth that the science of reading is settled. The 2001 No Child Left Behind law referred to “rigorous scientific research” more than 100 times. That law, as well as today’s SoR advocates, largely draw on the same research. In the Report of the National Reading Panel (NRP), initially issued in 2000, a group of experts in reading, psychology, and higher education were charged with identifying the most effective instructional methods to teach reading through review of decades of published research. 

Claims are frequently made that the NRP report proves the efficacy of phonics instruction over other methods. In 2022, Dana Goldstein in the New York Times linked to the NRP stating it “shows phonics . . . is the most effective way to teach reading.” Yet, then and now, scholars have called out these egregious claims about what the NRP actually reported. Look no further than the NRP’s own introduction, where the authors articulate the scope of their report: 

It should be made clear that the panel did not consider these questions and the instructional issues [addressed in the report] to be the only topics of importance in learning to read. The panel’s silence on other topics should not be interpreted as indicating that other topics have no importance or that improvement in those areas would not lead to greater reading achievement.

Too often, histories of the NRP ignore this quote as well as the contributions of Joanne Yatvin, then elementary school principal and districtwide administrator who served on the panel and submitted its minority report. In it, Yatvin lists other aspects of reading instruction not selected in the panel’s synthesis, including early language development, writing, second language learning, and home contexts; she solicited some of these topics directly from teacher groups and argued that early reading teachers and their knowledge were left out of the conversation about research in reading instruction. 

The findings of the NRP report are myriad, and have only been further complicated by scholarship in the 24 years since it was published, including a 2020 review of 12 meta-analyses of systematic phonics research from multiple countries. There, educational psychologist Jeffrey Bowers digs into the NRP and other metasyntheses showing that the assertions on the efficacy of phonics are not as strongly supported in the data as claimed. This scientific work, too, is rarely discussed in context with the NRP’s findings, or current SoR policies. 

Perhaps the most comprehensive review of research in relation to the SoR movement comes from the International Literacy Association, which recently published two special issues in their top journal, Reading Research Quarterly, comprising 50 articles from nearly 150 scholars. Together, they illustrate the diversity of thought and scientific methodology applied in reading research and many things that we do not yet know about reading acquisition. Most of these authors agree that the narrowed view of reading research depicted in media is inaccurate and not reflective of the larger research community.

In order to say, then, that the science is settled, one has to dismiss an awful lot of literacy research, researchers, and institutions, including the largest organization of literacy researchers and educators. While the notion of a singular science of reading persists, the consensus among literacy researchers acknowledges multiple sciences of reading. One strand, also noted by Yatvin as excluded from the NRP, is teacher research — sometimes called translational research, practitioner research, or action research — which is immensely valuable in understanding literacy teaching with diverse learners. The myth of settled science dismisses valuable insights and questions from teachers, and implications for classroom practice that multiple bodies of knowledge inform.

Teacher Autonomy Matters

The media narrative about students who aren’t reading — failed by their teachers, their literacy curriculum, and the research it is founded upon — villainizes the autonomy of teachers, when, on the contrary, teacher autonomy is crucial for adapting curriculum to the needs of students. To illustrate this, consider Laurie’s work with Kelly, a 3rd-grade special education teacher, to co-plan one-on-one literacy tutoring sessions. Kelly was teaching Talia, a 3rd grader identified as having a speech- and language-based disability, using a systematic phonics approach referred to as “synthetic.” Using this approach to phonics instruction, which involves a student sounding out each letter or letter combination in a word and then blending each sound into a word, Talia was making minimal, if any, progress.

Laurie and Kelly assessed Talia’s literacy skills. Talia’s reading comprehension ability was just below her grade-level peers when stories were read aloud to the class. When reading on her own, however, she was working on decoding three-letter words, a skill typically mastered by the end of kindergarten. 

As Kelly and Laurie listened to Talia read, they noticed that memory played a role in Talia’s word reading. In response, Laurie and Kelly shifted to a different type of phonics instruction called an “analogy-based” approach. Instead of sounding out each individual letter, Kelly guided Talia to work with chunks of words such as “an” to read “can,” “pan,” and “tan.” 

Within a few weeks of this instruction, Talia started to decode three-letter words that included the short a vowel. Talia’s family was shocked to find that such a small shift in the methods used to teach their daughter phonics led to her rapid reading improvement. 

Although some SoR narratives claim that a uniform approach to phonics is the solution for all children with reading difficulties, this example illustrates that knowledgeable teachers are essential to navigate the nuances of instruction. 

In 2022, scholars from University College London shared the problems with overemphasizing synthetic phonics instruction in elementary school in a paper that analyzed results from 55 longitudinal experimental trials and a survey of more than 2,000 teachers. They found that the “synthetic phonics approach requires a too-heavy emphasis on teaching about phonemes (sounds), and so minimizes attention to other vital aspects of teaching reading.” They emphasize that the overuse of synthetic phonics instruction used in England “doesn’t give teachers enough flexibility to do what they think is best for their pupils, nor to encourage pupils to enjoy reading.”

Literacy teachers know this, and students need them to move flexibly between different methods to teach reading. Even when the highest priority for a student is phonics instruction, teachers still need the autonomy to draw on diverse teaching methods. 

Scripted programs are not a pathway to equitable instruction. In fact, they often lead to inflexible expectations that don’t allow teachers to respond to their students’ needs and realities, and even remove access to other learning opportunities. A 1st-grade student teacher we know was scolded this fall because it took too long to get her students back from music, and therefore, she was seven minutes behind on the scripted program she was expected to implement. In essence, this novice educator was told to remove time for her students to develop self-regulation skills as they transition classrooms and content areas, an important social-emotional skill often developed in early childhood settings, in favor of non-responsive curriculum. 

 Achieving equitable public education requires forgoing dogmatic allegiances to commercial instructional programs. Rather, our allegiance should be to children and giving teachers flexibility to best meet their needs. 

Reclaiming the Right to Learn (and to Teach) Literacy 

Literacy is about more than recognizing words on a page; it is also about connecting people to identities and cultures and the myriad ways that we express ourselves and communicate within and across communities. Fostering a rich vision of literacy instruction that values all children’s needs and interests should be the cornerstone of public education. Doing so requires vigilance and advocacy, as there are both direct and indirect threats to the kinds of schools necessary for a robust multiracial democracy. 

For better or worse, parents have frequently had power to shape curriculum in schools, but we have to make sure not to let the most privileged of those voices drown out the expertise of teachers and the needs of all students over the concerns of their own children. As groups like Moms for Liberty have made clear in their xenophobic contributions to Project 2025 and their counter-programming of Banned Books Week with Teach Kids to Read Week, the line, for them, between a pro-phonics and a white nationalist English-only education agenda is thin. 

We are all stakeholders in the outcomes of public education, so rather than ceding to division over book choices or scientific methods, we must unite our efforts toward a better, more nuanced literacy instruction for all.