A Dangerously Simple View of Schools
Political Demagoguery Masquerading as Learning Science
SVR and its bundling with SoR is metastasizing quickly. As a social and political movement organized by conservatives radicalizing parents with a thin veneer knowledge, it is of a piece with political pressures to simplify racial and gender issues. Phonics affords great opportunities to script the words that come from teachers in parallel with laws that muzzle teachers.
SVR organizers set up a straw man by demonizing teachers and schools and then punch. Who can parents trust? Not the 3-cued school, a bit more complex view. How crazy is it to teach a kid to look at a picture in a book instead of the words? Kids need to learn to read letters, not pictures. Keep it simple.
Reading League hero antecedents include Marion Joseph, a grandmother in California in the 1990s who has been called the Paul Revere of the Reading War, who single-handedly (so goes the legend) reversed course in literacy instruction in the state because her grandson, Isaac, was having trouble reading. Joseph’s obituary from March, 2022, highlights her effort to break the back of Whole Language infidels and crown King Phonics. It clearly was her legacy,
I was thinking of Marion Joseph this morning as I listened to a new Reading League zoom session of 90 minutes introducing a group of Wisconsin parents and educators to the SVR truth in a clear effort to proselytize. The presentation opened with a demolition of the Five Pillars of Reading from the National Reading Panel (2000) and segued through permutations of SVR materials. Per usual, name dropping of neuroscientists was done reverently with no discussion of findings, just assertions and conclusions. “Where have all the findings gone?” to paraphrase Bob Dylan.
Nobody mentioned that neurobiologists study the brain in the act of hearing or playing music, playing chess, recognizing faces, reading, singing, even playing the harmonica, I’m told. They don’t study teaching methods. I’m looking for research by neuroscientists into pedagogy. If I told you I wanted to research brain activity that occurs during sight reading of a piece of music, would my findings have relevance for music instruction? I would have to lay out the relevance very, very clearly. SVR takes this relevance for granted,
Before moving to the Q and A at the end of the zoom session, one presenter read aloud a quote, a sentence from a brain scientist author with a flair for poetry which became an expression of brain worship, a sentence from Stanislas Dehaene, a French neuroscientist who studies reading and the brain. I struggled to find its relevance.
Then the presenter read the quote again, more slowly, more breathlessly, participants unmuted, and the quote morphed into a chant. It was an eerie, chilling moment in a session billed as Science of Reading. It was spiritual.
The strategy of mobilizing partisan parents for phonics is achieving a political outcome in a big way. Emily Hanson, the ideological child of Marion Joseph, recently spoke to a gathering of 1,000 policy makers in Salt Lake City1. A writer covering the event published a story about it for Chester Finn’s Fordham Institute2. I’ll end with a quote from the piece titled “The Noose Tightens Around Failed Reading Programs.” Choosing the metaphor of a noose is worrisome.
https://excelined.org/national-summit/
https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/noose-tightens-around-failed-reading-programs-schools