Moving Beyond Scientifically Sanctioned Phonics Instruction

Starting a movement to repeal the phonics laws

Skilled Reading

It seems clear from the neurosciences that, in terms of brain function at least, we activate the same neural pathways when we read no matter how we were taught. Such a fact isn’t surprising. Reading emerged as a possibility through species-specific biological changes in brain size, not through differential adaptations.

What is surprising is the number of state legislatures that have been sold a story about some sort of science proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is one way to teach reading, to rewire the brain in fact, and that way is direct, explicit, systematic instruction in phonics. They point to the fact that we all use the same brain structures as evidence that we all need the same sort of instruction.

As near as I can tell not being an expert in brain science, they’re right about the brain. Printed input enters the occipital visual cortex, then converges in the left ventral occipitotemporal system, where letter patterns are rapidly identified. Signals interact with temporoparietal circuits that map graphemes to phonology and with inferior frontal regions supporting sequencing, articulation, and control.

These loops recruit posterior middle temporal and anterior temporal areas for lexical-semantic activation, so orthographic form, sound structure, and meaning resonate together until the word becomes consciously available as recognized language to the skilled reader.¹

Casting about for a means to understand how the field got from a brain map to a method of instruction, I decided to look at another dimension of human behavior that is like reading in some ways. Eating, for example. Our brain is equipped to make sense of food and to make decisions about when and what to eat. The neuro-technology is wired. How can we learn to become skilled eaters on this model?

Skilled Eating

My first impulse was to look at systematic, direct, explicit instruction in eating. What could an educator do to support eaters everywhere in comprehending the significance of particular food cues for their mental and physical health?

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has proven to be a crucial tool for understanding the neural processes underlying eating, appetite regulation, and obesity. By measuring blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) signals, which indicate areas of increased blood flow and neural activity, researchers can observe how different parts of the brain respond to various food stimuli.

fMRI scans show that the amygdala is heavily involved in detecting flavor intensity and inducing the desire to eat more. Interestingly, this activity operates somewhat independently from the regions that register how "pleasant" a food tastes, meaning desire can drive consumption even if the taste isn't particularly enjoyable. Stress has also been shown in fMRI data to increase the amygdala's response to food, mirroring the hyperactive responses often seen in obese individuals.

Note on fMRI limitations in food studies: Because fMRI requires the subject to lie perfectly still in a magnetic tube, subjects cannot physically chew solid food during these scans. Most of the direct "eating" data comes from administering liquid foods (like milkshakes or sugar solutions) via a tube directly into the subject's mouth, or by studying the brain's reaction to visual food cues (pictures of food).

When neuroscientists use fMRI to map the pathways of eating—specifically the distinction between homeostatic eating (driven by the hypothalamus for energy) and hedonic eating (driven by the amygdala, striatum, and orbitofrontal cortex for pleasure and reward)—they open the door to "neuro-pedagogical" approaches to dietary education.

Interestingly enough, teachers who aim to teach eating skills do not rely on scripts to build paired-associations, though their goal is, like reading teachers, to rewire the brain regarding how to read food. Direct, explicit instruction isn’t among the approaches mentioned. Instead, the learning objective is to promote “mindfulness,” a three-cueing system for making meaning of food.

One cueing system might be “the homeostatic system” wherein the eater locates signals regarding the need to refuel the body, a type of thinking that is portfolioesque. A second is “the hedonic system” wherein the eater identifies celebratory icons which promise pleasure and sociability. A third is the “time-and-value system,” an assessment of the advantages and disadvantages of eating this particular food at this particular time.

Indeed there is even a neuroscientific reason for seeking “mindfulness” as a cure for food disorders:

“The prefrontal cortex is involved in executive functions such as decision making and impulse control. Neurons in the prefrontal cortex likely suppress homeostatic signals from the hypothalamus and brainstem to cause dysregulated food intake.”

No one is mandating scripts for kindergarten lunch.

Skilled Reading: Behaviorist Instruction Mandated by Law

Walk into a kindergarten classroom in most American states today during reading and you will likely encounter a teacher facing twenty-five children, each with vibrant occipital visual cortexes, holding up stimulus cards, soliciting responses in unison, correcting errors briskly, moving on.

The routine has the quality of a well-rehearsed performance, which is, more or less, what it is. The teacher is following a script; the cards are props. The children are pigeons following cues. The program is in charge.

No accident, this. It is a design philosophy, one embedded in every major state-approved phonics curriculum on the market. To understand what that philosophy is and where it came from, it helps to first know what is actually being sold.

The Five Best-Selling Sanctioned Programs

UFLI Foundations, developed by the University of Florida Literacy Institute, is currently the most widely used foundational reading program in the country. A 2026 survey found it in use by 38% of early reading teachers, a staggering market share for any single curriculum. Free lesson slides are available at ufli.education.ufl.edu. Whole-class lessons run 30 minutes daily in K–2, following an eight-step routine executed in the same sequence every day.

Wilson Fundations (wilsonlanguage.com/programs/fundations) is among the oldest and most thoroughly institutionalized of the Orton-Gillingham-derived (OG) programs, covering K–5 since Wilson’s recent expansion to grades 4 and 5. It is what the structured literacy movement calls “multisensory” instruction: children tap phonemes on their fingers, echo-drill letter-sound correspondences, and sky-write letters in the air. Lessons in K–3 run 30 minutes; in 4–5, 20 minutes. It appears on approved lists in Ohio, Washington D.C., and dozens of other jurisdictions.

The 95 Phonics Core Program (95percentgroup.com/curriculum/phonics-core-program) is published by the 95 Percent Group, marketed aggressively on the legislation-compliance angle and has secured approvals in more than a dozen states Designed as a 30-minute daily supplement that runs alongside any existing ELA curriculum, it provides what its publisher calls “the missing piece” — targeted phonics instruction in grades K–5 delivered through a tightly scripted whole-class routine.

Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA), published by Amplify (amplify.com/ckla), is the most academically ambitious of the five. Developed from E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Framework, CKLA combines systematic phonics in K–2 with explicit content-area knowledge building on the theory that reading comprehension depends on background knowledge as much as decoding skill. It explicitly resists reducing reading to a phonics delivery mechanism, though its phonics strand in the early grades shares the structured, explicit, sequenced architecture of the others.

Benchmark Advance (benchmarkeducation.com/benchmark-advance) serves approximately 19% of early elementary teachers according to 2026 Fordham Institute survey data. It is a comprehensive basal program marketed primarily to districts seeking a single-adoption solution. It includes a phonics strand built on structured Science of Reading principles.

The Thread that Runs So True

The differences among these five programs are notable except for their treatment of phonics. CKLA carries intellectual ambition with its focus on knowledge building. UFLI’s non-profit origins have kept its price accessible. But they are all built on the assumption that phonics knowledge is best acquired through explicit, externally controlled, sequenced repetition behaviorist style and that the teacher’s job is to execute a prepared script with fidelity.

This is a theory of learning at odds with mainstream learning science with its emphasis on participation and learner agency — and it is an old one. As we have seen, the argument that fMRI data support these instructional choices reflects a categorical error. While knowledge of neurological wiring explains where the brain processes printed text, it does not explain how to teach the brain.

Thorndike’s Barnyard and Skinner’s Laboratory

Edward Thorndike, working at the turn of the twentieth century, studied how cats escaped from puzzle boxes and how chickens navigated mazes. From these observations he derived his Laws of Learning, the most enduring of which is the Law of Effect: behaviors followed by satisfying consequences are strengthened; behaviors followed by unsatisfying consequences are weakened.

Thorndike believed that learning consisted of the formation of bonds between a situation and a response, and that those bonds were forged by trial, error, and outcome. But his was a barnyard theory in the best sense — it was embedded in real organisms doing real things in environments that had genuine complexity. The cats in Thorndike’s boxes were hungry in the homeostatic sense. They were motivated. They were trying to get somewhere.

Crucially, Thorndike did not strip thinking from the equation. His cats were solving problems. His framework allowed that organisms bring something to the learning situation — a drive, a purpose, a prior history in the world. The associationist bonds he described were formed in the service of the organism’s own ends. Learning, in Thorndike’s model, was still, at some level, the learner’s project.

B.F. Skinner came along several decades later and performed a surgery on this framework in his laboratory at Harvard. Using operant conditioning chambers with lever-pressing rats and pecking pigeons, Skinner produced a theory of behavior in which the organism’s internal states — purposes, desires, expectations, mental representations of any kind — were not merely unknown but inadmissible. What counted was the behavior, the stimulus, and the reinforcement schedule. Everything between stimulus and response was a black box that science had no business opening.

In his 1950 paper “Are Theories of Learning Necessary?”, Skinner argued explicitly that internal cognitive constructs added nothing to a science of behavior. You did not need to posit thinking. You needed to engineer contingencies. If you wanted a pigeon to peck a particular sequence, you shaped that sequence through differential reinforcement. The pigeon did not need to understand the sequence; it needed to produce it. Cognition was not just irrelevant to this project — it was an obstacle, a source of unfalsifiable theorizing that cluttered the clean experimental surface.

The irony that haunts the current Science of Reading movement is this: its justifying theory is cognitive; there is a thinking brain, not a simple associationist brain. Researchers invoke neural pathways, orthographic mapping, phonological processing in the left hemisphere — the interior machinery of the reading brain. But when this cognitive theory goes to scale in commercial curricula, the actual instructional mechanism is Skinnerian.

The eight-step UFLI routine, the Fundations finger-tapping, the choral drill of the 95 Phonics Core Program — these are reinforcement schedules. The teacher presents a stimulus (the letter card, the blend pattern). The child produces a response (the sound, the word). Correct responses are confirmed; errors are immediately corrected. The contingency is engineered. The black box stays shut.

The child, in this model, is not a Thorndikean cat trying to get out of a box. The cat at least had a goal of its own. The child in a scripted phonics program is closer to Skinner’s pigeon: a subject whose behavior is being shaped toward a predetermined output by a systematic schedule of prompts and confirmations. The program does not ask whether the child is curious, or hungry for stories, or bored, or anxious. It asks only whether the child has produced the correct phoneme.

What Skinner Stripped Out

What Skinner removed was the learner’s own purposiveness — the thing that makes learning stick not just in the moment of reinforcement but across time, across contexts, and in the absence of the original reinforcer.

A pigeon that has been shaped to peck a button will stop pecking when reinforcement is withdrawn. The behavior was never the pigeon’s; it belonged to the schedule. A child who has been drilled to decode under supervision may or may not transfer that decoding into independent, voluntary reading.

Whether she does depends on factors the program systematically excludes: whether she believes reading is for her, whether she has encountered texts that made her feel something, whether the act of decoding has ever delivered her somewhere she wanted to go.

Critics like Mark Seidenberg, who helped build the cognitive science that the SoR movement claims as its warrant, now warn against exactly this unintended consequence. Seidenberg explicitly argues that the movement has conflated the cognitive necessity of learning phonics with the behaviorist assumption of single stimulus-single response as the building block of paired association. Teachers have to teach everything about phonics under this regime:

"Instead of cracking the code, the science of reading approach has embraced teaching the code. We’ve gone from recognizing that more instruction is needed than before to thinking that everything has to be taught or it won’t be learned because, well, reading is unnatural. But everything does not have to be taught because people have powerful other ways to learn."

His concern is not that phonics instruction is unnecessary or wrong. It is that the movement has taken a set of findings about how skilled readers process print which say nothing about how they learned these skills, and handed them to curriculum designers who drew on behaviorism as a learning theory.

The thread that runs through the sanctioned phonics materials is not phonics. The thread is Skinner’s laboratory, transposed into a kindergarten with the pigeons replaced by children who, unlike pigeons, came to school with stories ready to write, questions ready to ask, and a nascent desire to find out what the marks on the page are for. Asking about what they want to find out is not anywhere in the scope and sequence. That omission is not trivial. It is high-level theory.

The Historical Lie Embedded Systematically in the Explicit Advocacy

Behaviorist methods have a genuine and well-documented record of success with children whose neurology makes implicit learning unreliable: children on the autism spectrum, children with severe language disorders, children with significant cognitive disabilities. Behaviorist instruction earns its place when the learner cannot rely on the social, contextual, and motivational scaffolding that typical development provides. It was designed for that population and has served that population.

What the current SoR legislative movement has done is take a valid intervention for a specific population and mandate it as the universal delivery mechanism for all children, taught by all teachers, in all classrooms, every day.

The teachers who object are not objecting to phonics. I personally have never met a first grade teacher who couldn’t see great value in phonics instruction, though Chall documented resistance a century ago during the look-say period. They are right to object to the behaviorism. They are defending the presence of a thinking, trained adult professional in the room, responsive to the children in front of her, exercising the judgment that is the definition of a profession.

Scripted programs demote teachers to the rank of program’s delivery device, a role that requires fidelity over expertise, compliance over judgment. When a teacher closes her script to respond to a child’s confusion in her own words—when she asks what the child thinks, rather than what sound the child must produce—she is not being non-compliant. She is refusing to treat a child like a pigeon in a box.

She is being a teacher.

1. “Neural pathways of phonological and semantic processing and its relation to children’s reading skills”
Frontiers in Neuroscience (Volume 16, October 2022)
URL: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2022.984328/full

This paper explicitly reviews how reading is facilitated by interconnected orthographic, phonological, and semantic systems involving the occipitotemporal, temporoparietal, and inferior frontal regions, detailing the dorsal and ventral pathways responsible for word reading and semantic access.