What I Object to Most About the Cult of the Simple View

My Objection to Taking an Unscientific View of Public School Teacher Expertise and Development

The defining movement the Reading League has in mind for teachers ignores emerging scholarship about the efficacy of teacher professional learning communities both within and across schools. Instead of moving the field toward coherent, systematic teacher inquiry into their practices with colleagues and researchers in their school community, SoR advocates want teachers to function in accordance with lesson plans created and approved externally for abstract learners and ventriloquist teachers.

My Bernie Sanders Objection

As Peter Afflerbach points out, SoR advocates denigrate certain authors and publishers for making money on educational materials while simultaneously running ads for other authors and materials online. We live in a capitalist society. The government does not control education publishers. Not yet.

But SoR advocates tout their victories in over 40 states since 2018 where dyslexia laws have been passed. These laws require school districts to use reading instructional materials approved by SoR. This cult has legal stature now.

Faulting talented education writers for making money from their talent is like faulting Bernie Sanders for owning some real estate.

My Herschel Walker Objection

The world got a glimpse into our cultural penchant for dehumanizing others for personal or political gain in the past election. Using real people as props signifies a disregard for the values the cult purportedly seeks to foster. From the Vietnam Vet on an SoR podcast telling his heart-wrenching story about his inability to write a final letter home for a dying soldier, the fault of teachers, to the mother during the pandemic who finds out her child is struggling to read watching a Zoom session, these human props do not replace the ubiquitous failure of the cult to document their assertions.

I strenuously object to their use of Bill Honig’s conversion from whole language to phonics as a model and invitation for sinners to confess and join the SoR congregation. Honig, former California State Superintendent of Education in the 1990s, was on my radar when I served on a state assessment committee. Honig showed me barely a surface understanding of reading theory.

My Marie Clay Objection

While the cult raises Bill Honig as a model, the disrespect toward Marie Clay and Lucy Calkins is an ill-informed pose. Marie Clay created a sophisticated, effective, flexible pedagogical model that attracted the most talented reading teachers among us. Blaming the cueing systems as they do is frankly disgusting—cult members are bulls in a china shop, bashing into a delicate tool easily misunderstood by the simple minded that serves teachers and children well.

Where is the evidence proving that careful observation and scaffolding of a young reader’s use of what we know are reciprocal and complementary language and semiotic channels to do the provisional work of achieving lexical access is harmful? Do cult members understand that the proximal goal of recoding is lexical access? Do they get the central role of self-correction in reading? Do they understand that children do indeed construct their own knowledge of alphabetic code, orthography, and morphophonemics?

My Objection to the Simple Ignorance of the Nature of Science

The complete absence of documentation beyond Gough and Tunmer (1986) is stunning. Apparently, reading scientists need not discuss the relative merits of research evidence, nor do they need to document sources. There are online lists of sanctioned publications, but they are not peer reviewed nor even research that I can find. Much of these resources are of the ilk of Englemann’s DISTAR—scripted lessons and worksheets.

The cult has taken to revision of history. How long would you say reading has been the subject of scientific research? SoR advocates would say you’re probably wrong:

Forty years? Don’t tell that to Phil Gough, who used the science of eye movements to call out the fraud of speed reading in the 1960s. Don’t tell that to Dr. Goldstein who studied by way of scientific experiments differences in comprehension between listening to the radio vs reading a text silently.

The kicker for me is the new peer-reviewed journal in the works for the Reading League. There is now just one. Witness:

My Objection to Holistically Distorting Why and How We Read

Advocates of SoR put all their money on one horse—decoding. There is absolute silence on vocabulary, world knowledge, genre knowledge, comprehension, and motivation. If it were true that teachers could put on hold these other aspects—wait six months or a year to teach language, epistemological dispositions, and discourse patterns—maybe. But full bodied reading instruction acknowledges that attention must be paid to full bodied reading behaviors.

My Objection to the Invisibility of Writing Instruction

I’ve found no discussion of writing instruction at all in the cult materials. I dread bringing it up because ther might be a Science of Writing cult in the offing. For me, writing is the place where reading becomes salient as a unique and idiosyncratic human capacity. Traditionally, American schools have bifurcated literacy instruction into developmental compartments: Elementary grades focus primarily on reading; secondary grades focus on writing. SoR exacerbates an existing problem.

Simply Too Cultish for Credence

I’ll end with a testimonial from the cult. What disturbs me beyond the use of a parent as an ideological prop is the sentiment. Sacred trust runs both ways. Society has a right to trust schools to teach reading, but schools have no right to trust society for resources.