I am fascinated by the increasing politicization—no other word for it—of reading instruction. How to best teach reading has always been contentious in the United States, from the 1950s look-say method featuring Dick and Jane, accused of letting Ivan slip ahead of us in the space race, right up until last week, when Moms for Liberty jumped into the Faux Science of Reading (FSoR) fray.
It’s unclear why Moms for Liberty has aligned itself with the phonics-forward FSoR movement. I get that white parents, accustomed to being first in line for educational goodies, feel threatened when they’re told that other children may be having their needs met first. I know racism is a thread that has run through the entire history of public education in America. I also know that many ordinary citizens feel bewildered and angered by rapidly changing social beliefs and customs around acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community.
A friend of my says you can measure social progress by observing who can be beat up on Saturday night without consequences—Wives and girlfriends? Ethnic minorities? Gentle souls like Matthew Shepherd and Elijah McLain? I hate living in a country where threats align with archaic ideas about who’s in charge of our customs and institutions, including public schools. I hate it, but I understand why it happens.
What I do NOT understand is why a far-right, power-grabbing, deep-pocket-funded group of purported “concerned moms” are choosing to endorse One Right Way to learn the skill of reading.
Surely some of their children learned to read using cuing systems or word walls or balanced literacy. Surely some of their children picked up reading quickly and easily reading stories on grandma’s lap. Surely some of their children had caring and creative teachers who employed multiple strategies to nurture genuine literacy.
Which makes me think that a lot of the enmity around learning to read stems from free-floating hostility toward public education and schoolteachers in general, greatly exacerbated by recent events: a pandemic, a child-care crisis, growing and dangerous inequities, and terrible political leadership that plays to the worst in human nature.
John Spencer, an especially smart edu-buddy, recently posted a long, thoughtful tweet about what he called the phonics-centric Science of Reading approach for older students— middle school kids, for example, who theoretically should already be ‘reading to learn.’ He muses about encouraging reading for pleasure, and to build endurance, more than discrete skills. He notes that a one-size approach to decoding words is inappropriate for young teenagers. His last two points were key: most of the people advocating for the so-called “Science” of reading hadn’t read or didn’t understand the research, and that there are multiple assistive tools (audio readers, for ex) that can help kids learn to love reading.
What followed was a long discussion thread, mostly probing and expanding John’s well-considered ideas. But a couple of hours later, he posted this:
I wrote a long tweet about my concerns in using Science of Reading approaches with middle school students. Not a critique. Just a set of concerns. Getting some angry responses in my DMs. Each one fails to address my 5 points. All of them resort to personal attacks. Most of them somehow frame this as a partisan political issue. Wild.
And… there it is. Again. Politicizing the very heart of teachers’—TEACHERS’– professional work. Why is that happening?
I have written several published pieces about learning to read. Like John, I have received angry responses, mostly centered on the fact that I am not a reading teacher, and therefore, have no expertise.
The fact is: I have taught approximately 4000 children, over 32 years, to read music, in order to play a band instrument. Most of them were 5th and 6th grade beginners, aged 10-12. They may have had earlier experiences—piano lessons, say, or the church choir—in reading music (similar to first graders who come to school with dozens of sight-words already mastered), but most were not musically literate at all when they came to me.
They learned in large, mixed-instrument groups, using method books in which everyone necessarily goes at a glacial pace. In addition to understanding a completely new set of symbols designating pitch, duration, silence, articulations and tempo, they have to struggle with making pleasant and consistent sounds on a complex device.
It’s incredibly difficult. The interesting thing is that some kids who excel at traditional school tasks—including reading and math, the skills we value most—find learning to play an instrument very frustrating, especially when other students, academic lesser lights, quickly pick up tunes via watching, listening and repetition.
Good instrumental music teachers quickly learn that slogging through the method book, day in and day out, one new note at a time, will kill off the rabid enthusiasm for playing in the band that your average fifth grader displays on the night he gets his new trumpet.
These teachers turn to ideas similar to what John Spencer references: Playing by ear for pleasure or long tone contests to build endurance. Multiple modalities of playing (watching, repeating, chord-building) besides straight-up note-reading. Playing with CDs. Bringing in older students who demonstrate what fun it is to play music in groups. Encouraging students to make up songs, or pick out a popular tune.
The key is the first performance where everyone (including the kids who don’t yet know correct note names or how to interpret a key signature) plays that six-note version of Jingle Bells, and families go home happy. A huge part of being a beginning band teacher is herding all the kids forward, even though they’re learning different things at wildly different rates, and making the whole process joyful.
There are, of course, instrumental music teachers who insist that there is only one way to teach kids to read music and play an instrument. How can you play music if you don’t know that the third space treble clef is a C, and a dotted note gets one and a half times the value of the original note? Start at the beginning, and don’t move ahead until everyone gets it. The method book as ‘settled science.’
The truth is that breaking down music-reading skills into discrete bits—like phonics, in reading– is only one of a palate of options; the motivated student can always cycle back to pick up new knowledge or techniques once curiosity and love are established.
Good teachers at all levels and subjects set kids free, tapping their natural abilities and making things joyful. The Faux Science of Reading wants every child to learn in the same way, just like the Moms for Liberty want children to read the same books and believe the same things about who has power in this country.
Teacher in a strange land 
Then you have those professional musicians who never learned to read music, but who can give a master class in their instrument. I can think of no faster way to kill all interest in ever reading than by forcing a rigid phonics program on struggling middle schoolers. I did have students who needed those tools taught through direct instruction, but if they were going to fall in love with the content, they needed the opportunity to access the content through other means. Hurray, audiobooks! Hurray, movies! Music videos,… art museums, hands on projects.. you get the idea. My daughter was talking about how she mentors new hires in her professional career(not teaching), which I immediately translated to, “I do, we do, you do.” There are many situations in which written instruction falls far short of the goal, in school or out.
Thanks for sparking a new way for me to think about far more than reading!
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I used to play in a rock band– congas and flute and backup vocals– with a bunch of guys who didn’t read music. They watched each other all the time (they weren’t watching the music, after all) for chord changes and rhythmic transitions. They were all good, natural musicians.
Once, they wanted me to play something on my flute–maybe some Jethro Tull song. I listened to it, then jotted it down in musical notation. They were fascinated— how can you just listen, then translate that into notes? Not so hard, I told them. They teach you to do that in music school, and it’s handy, because you don’t have to memorize. Still– the idea was daunting to them. On the other hand, nearly everything they were doing was daunting to me. I learned to play the blues with them, feeling instead of reading the changes. I learned improv around chords. It was a different kind of music education, but it made me vastly smarter about music.
I took a lot of grief from the HS band director who inherited my middle school kids. Grief because I used modeling to teach rhythms, re-wrote parts so the piece would sound better, was open to 7th and 8th graders improvising, and taught theory through experience (playing) instead of packets. He used to give a speech to the incoming 9th graders that started “Mrs. Flanagan isn’t here to spoon feed you any more.”
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Music to my ears! And, of course, a REAL teacher understands that not every student responds to a particular approach. That’s why a true professional knows an array of ways to connect with particular students. There is no ‘best’ way that is good for every student.
Loved your comments on ‘improv’. I didn’t actually learn that until High School. Back then, it was called ‘faking it’, but over 60 years later it serves me well.
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I am a retired college professor who spent more than a decade preparing early childhood teacher education students to teach. I also have many years working in the field in many different venues.
When I was in fifth grade in New York City in the 1950s, I was tested for musical ability and put in a special music class. The test was not about whether I could read music or play by ear, it was a test of hearing sounds and patterns of sound, recognizing when they were the same or different. I have always wondered why the testing was done that way. It was repeated with similar test prior to entering junior high school where, again, I was placed in a special music cohort that stayed together for the three years of junior high school and whose academic skills, otherwise, were heterogenous. Some of the students in my class were indeed extremely talented, well beyond my level.
In terms of learning to read, I would like to reference the writing of Natalie Wexler with whose analysis of how to teach I do not totally agree but . . . Wexler points out in her book The Knowledge Gap that along with explicit teaching of phonics, which she supports and I do as well, reading good literature to children and expanding their vocabularies through that venue is critical for reading comprehension and also for learning to write. In addition, I would say, as Wexler also writes, that we need to provide all children, even more so for children from less wealthy families, information about the world outside their familiar world through content exposure and teaching as well as field trips outside the immediate neighborhood. This, as Wexler believes, will help level the playing field for many children.
On the other hand, I have seen formal reading instruction started too early for many children – when they are not developmentally ready for it. I have seen how this leads many bright young children to doubt their abilities and see reading as a chore to be avoided unless required. Of course, some children pick it up quickly, sometimes even before kindergarten. We are a very competitive and selfish society, a society where many are driven by a ‘me, first” attitude, not what is good for the greater community.
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Thanks for your great comment, Nora. I’m familiar with Wexler’s work–and like you, think she’s on to something regarding content knowledge as a big piece of reading comprehension. I also agree that we have pushed early reading way too far down the developmental spectrum. I wrote about that, here: https://www.bridgemi.com/guest-commentary/opinion-dont-punish-schools-because-johnny-cant-read-invest-them-instead.
The test you took in the 60s was probably the Seashore Music Aptitude test. It was widely used for a time, but has fallen out of favor, paralleling the use of tracking. The thinking now is: if you want to play an instrument, try out some instruments and jump right in. I used to do similar exercises with my class– patterning, pitch discernment— just to improve their listening skills. Lots of my beginners were terrible listeners— I think they had been marinating in random, layered, loud sounds for so long they’d lost the ability to perceive more subtle differences because they had developed great proficiency in tuning out background noise.
I have worked with many candidates for National Board Certification– hundreds— most of whom are preparing portfolio entries around developing literacy in early or middle childhood. So these are committed, experienced teachers. And I’ve never met a teacher who did not embrace some phonics when teaching children to read. In fact, I am deeply suspicious of those who claim that teachers who were newly minted in the last decade or so have no experience with the use of phonics in early literacy–that they were all taught nothing (or the wrong things) about phonics. Perhaps there are some Colleges of Education where coursework around early reading is that narrow or ideology-driven–you’d know that better than I do.
But I think the great pushback — like OK Sec of Ed Walters’ comment about how Hooked on Phonics was right all along— is 100% political and not about learning to read well, at all.
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There are ideologues out there who hop on a bandwagon and throw out everything from “before”. That was not the case when I was preparing teachers, at least not in the program, of which I was in charge. Phonics was included. I am also shocked that there are teachers that say they do not know how to teach phonics or phonemic awareness with prekindergarten children.
When I taught in Switzerland at the UN School in Geneva, phonics were critical because I had students from all over the world. Not including phonics would have made decoding very difficult for many of them.
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[…] Flanagan, retired teacher in Michigan, wonders why the extremist Moms for Liberty have jumped into the reading wars on the side of the “Science of Reading.” The politicization of […]
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Nancy, I teach 9th grade earth science so the strategies for teaching reading are unfamiliar to me, altho’I am aware of the so-called reading wars. Literacy is still important in my practice…I read a few pages of Andy Weir’s “The Martian” every day in class, and assign a book reading project later in the year. I have learned the value of these efforts in improving literacy, even in a science class.
That said, I never connected the teaching of reading to the teaching of reading music. I see it now, after your insightful description of the process. My mind has expanded a bit more today, and I am grateful for it.
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[…] in their teacher training. (Seriously?) Some thoughts about media baloney re: reading instruction. Learning to Read in Middle School. […]
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