Bubbles and Barney Talk LETRS
A Fictional Account of a Fictional Call to Customer Service
Bubbles thought the impasse between Mrs. Moody and Cassie had been elegantly resolved. Not all distortions in teaching and learning are so easily smoothed. A second grade girl with a love of illustrations in books of all kinds, decodable, leveled, library, birthday present, homemade books, you name it, was given permission to break out the leveled books and put them on shelves alongside the decodables.
Mrs. Moody, who had tiptoed into leveled books the past few years but retreated this year, decided to put Cassie in the lead of a guided reading group with a small group of second-language learners. They would picture walk their way toward automaticity. Relish the pictures one time through; revel in the print the next time.
*
A hot cup of coffee in hand, he was revisiting the roots of his knowledge of psycholinguistics in light of a looming administrative issue Superintendent Goldenrod asked him to take point on.
It seems the same psycho subdiscipline of linguistics, with its cute-by-too-much description of reading as a guessing game, had reinspired Mrs. Moody to stop using leveled readers. Their lack of phonic control, their irresponsible use of naturally occurring vocabulary artfully written for children, had been fingered as the culprit in the current manufactured crisis validated by recent NAEP scores.
Literacy, it seems, he thought, is always in crisis, always on the lookout for the quick fix.
*
Goldenrod was under pressure to require a phonics program, the same program, no eclecticism, no variation, using decodable books, throughout the district. The 3-Cueing kerfuffle was turning into a 3 ring circus.
“It’s the new law and this Science of Reading business—a cult, Sam calls it—it’s come to our district,” Goldenrod said, clearly exasperated. “I need to know what I’m talking about at the next Board meeting. And I need you to meet with a group of parents. And I’ve got Sam to deal with. So here’s what I want from you, Bubbles…”
Goldenrod’s district had to comply with the new 2023 state law mandating a review of permitted reading instructional materials to assure state resources align with the Science of Reading—everything ostensibly decodable (what isn’t, really), blendable, bendable, segmentable, slouching toward automaticity. Bubbles had examined the criteria the state panel was using. Clearly, instructional systems with the strictest definition of decodable texts were included, but so were systems with guided reading and leveled books.
The state had punted.
*
Goldenrod sent him a file with a sales pitch from a publisher the Board chair liked and asked Bubbles to talk to the company. His charge was to find out what Science this company is talking about and what they had to offer. The Board president was a recent convert to the Reading League and had been showing League videos in the community.
“Dr. Moats is calling us idiots for letting this free fall go on,” she said to Goldenrod. “You talk of equity? How can this district have equity without phonics?”
Bubbles wasn’t sure equity in the United States can be achieved simply by teaching children to read. The Superintendent had made a personal commitment to Sam, the district equity director, to begin the hard work of challenging White hegemony in earnest. Sam was hired to lead the administration to higher socioethical ground, a need supported by SoH, the Science of History, as Sam called it.
Sam loved phonics; he enjoyed reading books with his own son; and the SoR movement pissed him off because of its implication that black children have dyslexia and that the International Dyslexia Association can erase the three-fifths clause, the Civil War, and half a century of red lining in real estate.
Sam said you can’t sound your way out of American history. Sam called phonics the White man’s comforter. Who but a White man would think poor Black and Brown people don’t read too good because nobody taught them phonics? He quoted from the pedagogy of the oppressed.
“Don’t forget,” Sam said in a tête-à-tête with Bubbles and Goldenrod during a meeting last semester where the issue of primary source documents in eighth grade U.S. history underwent Sam’s go-to-your-corner public racial metacognitive self-talk analysis. Say it out loud. Own it.
A Black teacher was being coerced by a White department chair to cease assigning passages from diaries written by former slaves during Reconstruction and replace them with the Core aligned district textbook. Anti-CRT was hitting hard in the White community; anti-blackness was being whited out again.
‘It hasn’t been long since Black people weren’t allowed to go to White schools. White people think phonics is going to fix that?”
*
Bubbles pulled up a screenshot of the claims the company made in its general sales pitch for its reading instructional materials favored by the Board President. Google had surprised him by the number of websites peddling reading instructional materials. He found a three-page pdf with a formal chart summarizing lines of research supporting the LETRS program, but wanted to speak first with a customer service representative:
A man who introduced himself as Barney picked up his call to the customer service number.
“My superintendent is considering your series LETRS for our district,” Bubbles said. “Are you someone who can answer a few preliminary questions for me?”
“Yes, sir,” Barney said. “I’ll do my best. If I can’t, I’ll find someone who can.”
“I won’t take too much of your time. So your materials are scientifically certified. Tell me… what does that mean?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” Barney replied. “If you go to the website, there’s a brochure. I’m not an expert on the actual science, though I have some knowledge. It really works. I mean, I hear a lot of good things about it.”
“I see,” said Bubbles, though he didn’t see anything at all. “Such as? What do you hear?”
“Teachers like it. They say it’s easy to use as a resource. The lessons include the words teachers need to teach. It’s transparent, that’s what they say.”
“Simple?” added Bubbles.
“Exactly.”
“So I see your materials call for using decodable books. Why are they better than leveled books?”
“Because they’re decodable.”
“But why not leveled books?”
“Because they come from bad science. They force readers to guess words rather than decode them. Dr. Moats calls it bad thinking done out of idiocy. Leveled readers make too much sense and draw attention away from decoding words, which is what readers need to learn. The words aren’t controlled, the books have pictures, and the whole package gets in the way of proper brain development.”
“Very interesting. I have a few more questions. Do you have time or should I make an appointment?” Bubbles asked.
“Now is great.”
“How do you teach sight words in your LETRS?”
“Dr. Moats doesn’t believe in sight words. She sees sight words as bad thinking.”
“I’m sorry. You may not understand my question,” said Bubbles, taken aback. “Let’s call them high-frequency words spelled irregularly, words like cough or where or yacht.”
“Dr. Moats believes every word has to pass its letters through the eyes to the brain where the letters are sent to a sound loop. There are no sight words.”
“Interesting,” said Bubbles. “Does Dr. Moats believe that there is any relationship between decoding a word in context and the meaning of that word?”
“Dr. Moats believes every word ever read has to pass its letters through the eyes to the brain where the letters are sent to a sound loop. Once the word has been sounded out, it can be connected to meaning. Children must first learn to see every letter and link the letters to sounds whether we’re talking about a real word or a nonsense word.”
“Is meaning involved at all?”
“Not in the phonics lessons. Words are taught and learned as sounds blended together. N—A—N. NA—N. NAN. Nan K—A—N. KA—N. KAN. fan a tan cat. Tom is hot a lot.”
“Is meaning ever involved?”
“To be honest, the focus isn’t on comprehension. It’s on reading.”
“I see.”
*
Bubbles found out that Dr. Moats had been involved with writing the Common Core standards for early reading but was bitterly disappointed that her influence failed to diminish the potency of prior knowledge and comprehension in the final product. He also learned that Dr. Moats harbored a strong disdain for any uses of contextual prediction or priming of words through meaning whether used during instruction or during independent reading. Dr. Moats carried much of the weight of the Science of Reading and in recent years had pivoted from the mainstream of reading research to join the Reading League.
He had much to talk over with Superintendent Goldenrod and Sam. LETRS billed itself as a response to social injustice, a strategy to bring equity to readers who struggle and fail in a system devoted to meaning and comprehension. To reach the stage of reading for meaning, children require long, systematic, homogenized instruction in reading for pronunciation. That’s where the rocket science enters the picture.