A Right Way to Read?
The science, art, and politics of teaching an essential skill
Reading didn’t come naturally for Abigail, a seventh grader at a public middle school in Cambridge. “It was challenging when I started early on, when I was in kindergarten, learning the ABCs,” she remembers. English is her second language, Arabic her first, and when she was younger, the letters and sounds of English weren’t intuitive.
By middle school, she could read individual words and short passages, but struggled to comprehend longer texts. Then, during sixth grade and the first half of seventh grade, she worked with literacy coach Emma Weinreich, Ed.M. ’19, who helped her to understand what she read. Abigail learned strategies for what Weinreich called “reading with a purpose”: asking herself questions before and after reading a passage, or watching relevant videos before tackling a text about an unfamiliar topic. Intervention also provided her a space to focus and receive one-on-one help, Abigail says. (To protect their privacy, Abigail and other students interviewed for this story have been given pseudonyms.)
Today, Abigail is out of intervention and reads at grade level. Her reading skills have not only made school easier, but provided her with new ways of understanding herself, other people, and the world. Her favorite part of reading is “imagining what’s happening in your head,” she says. This is why she prefers chapter books over graphic novels: she gets to direct the scenes. “Sometimes, I change the characters’ looks a little bit in my imagination,” she says. “I imagine them how I like. It makes reading books more fun for me, which is how I read a lot of books this year.”
Abigail isn’t an outlier in her district, Cambridge Public Schools. According to 2023 state test scores, Cambridge was one of only three districts of its size in Massachusetts to make a full recovery from pandemic learning loss in reading and math. Across the country, such outcomes are rare. Analysis by Harvard and Stanford researchers found that the average American student lost a quarter of a grade level in reading achievement during the pandemic—and that, by spring 2023, they had recovered only a quarter of that. Those losses have contributed to an alarming reality: the most recent National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP)—the so-called “Nation’s Report Card,” administered in the fourth and eighth grades—found that two-thirds of students were unable to read proficiently.
Panic over these figures has intensified a broader national reckoning over how students learn to read. The debate is often framed—simplistically—as a battle between “the science of reading,” a term that has largely come to be associated with phonics instruction, and “balanced literacy,” an approach that encourages surrounding students with literature and allowing them to read what interests them. As a result, in their attempts to produce outcomes like Abigail’s, legislators and district leaders have often directed their focus toward curricula, materials, and laws that center phonics and decoding skills. But framing literacy this way, many educators say, is misguided—and may distract from pursuing the more systemic changes required to support students.
“A Very Stable Level of Mediocrity”
The questions animating the debate over how to best teach reading aren’t new. Historically, says Catherine Snow, Hobbs professor of cognition and education, the “reading wars” have been characterized by two sides: a whole-language approach that advocates starting literacy education with words and sentences, and a phonics-based approach that advocates starting with the relationship between letters and sounds. For more than a century, the pendulum has swung between these poles.
The most recent phase of the debate can be traced, in part, to Emily Hanford’s 2022 radio series, Sold a Story, released by American Public Media. Her reporting revealed that many schools were using balanced literacy curricula that lacked systematic phonics instruction and relied on discredited strategies, such as encouraging students to guess words based on context.
Hanford’s series was released in the wake of the pandemic and its attendant drop in test scores—prompting policymakers, parents, and journalists to raise alarms about a “literacy crisis.” A spate of media coverage has called for urgent action, and more than 40 states have passed laws reforming how reading is taught. These laws often promote the “science of reading”—a body of research, spanning disciplines such as psychology and neuroscience, about how children learn to read. Though this research has found that phonics, oral language, and comprehension are all important elements of reading, science of reading reforms have often centered on phonics instruction.
Many educators say they are glad that lawmakers, parents, and the media are focused on literacy. But news coverage can make it seem as if systematic phonics instruction is the only component missing from students’ literacy education, and the frenzy over a “literacy crisis” can make the challenges facing students seem unprecedented. In reality, American students’ reading scores have remained relatively stable during the past 25 years, save for a dip during the pandemic. “I’m not saying we’ve done a great job in the past,” says Snow, who serves as cochair of the Literacy and Languages concentration at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE). “I’m just saying we haven’t created a crisis. We’ve just created a very stable level of mediocrity.”
Students using READS Lab materials visualize the relationship between words like “producer” and “resources.” | Photograph courtesy of the Harvard READS Lab
Improving literacy is urgent, but the “crisis” framing can encourage quick fixes over substantive change—and promote top-down solutions that exclude the perspectives of professionals in the classroom. Many successful districts, like Cambridge, have relied not only on new curricula, but also on best practices that educators have long known about, such as compensated, hands-on professional development and tailoring literacy education to individuals or small groups. In many cases, it’s a lack of resources—not stricter state guidance—that prevents schools from implementing these solutions.
The Unscientific “Science of Reading”
From 2019 to 2023, Caitlyn Bacom Dominguez, Ed.M. ’24, worked as a fourth- and fifth-grade teacher at a Texas public school. During that time, she noticed a trend that worsened each year: some of her students could sound out each word of a passage but struggled to understand the passage’s meaning. “Kids could decode the words,” she remembers—they could associate letters with sounds and blend those sounds together. “But it didn’t help them, because they didn’t have the background knowledge to build off of to really understand the text.”
At the time, Texas was overhauling how reading is taught. In 2019, the legislature enacted a law requiring that school districts use a curriculum that provides “systematic direct instruction” in phonics. The law also revamped teacher training and qualification: all kindergarten through grade three teachers were required to complete a course on reading called the “Reading Academies.” And, starting in January 2021, teachers seeking new certifications to teach pre-kindergarten through grade six were required to take a “science of teaching reading” exam.
The new emphasis on phonics certainly helped students to become better decoders. But phonics was overemphasized, Bacom Dominguez says, at the expense of other important elements of reading. One popular model of literacy education, Scarborough’s reading rope, compares reading to a braided rope comprising eight different strands. Decoding is an important one. But many others, like vocabulary and background knowledge, must interact with decoding to make a skilled reader. In Bacom Dominguez’s district, those other elements sometimes went ignored. “If we didn’t build any comprehension skills when you were younger,” she asks, “how are you going to read as you’re going up in the grades?”
Experiences like hers demonstrate that American literacy education may be moving toward another pendulum swing, rather than an effective middle ground. Because balanced literacy curricula lacked systematic phonics instruction, “the reaction that we’re seeing now is a plethora of reading curricula that are focused on the foundational skills of phonics,” says Pamela Mason, an HGSE senior lecturer and the other cochair of the Literacy and Languages concentration. “Sometimes we think if a little bit of something is good, a lot of it is better..…So sometimes we have a little bit of an overreaction to what we know in the research and how it’s applied in practice.”
It’s important, educators say, to include those who will actually use curricula when making decisions about them. Legislatures don’t always “have access to the expertise that would be required to make those decisions,” Snow says—and might therefore choose programs mismatched to students’ needs. Sarah Symes, Ed.M. ’19, a reading interventionist at a Cambridge public middle school, agrees: “With literacy being such a hot-button issue, there are a lot of trendy or buzzword-filled curriculums,” she says. But “just because a curriculum…contains a lot of these buzzwords or has great marketing doesn’t mean it’s necessarily right for your particular students.”
Curriculum mandates carry another risk: often, mandated materials haven’t been tested over the long term. The problem exposed by Sold a Story “is just the specific instance of a much more general problem throughout K-12 education,” says Gale professor of education Thomas Kane: “that there are practices that some researcher sometime claimed are ‘evidence-based,’ and then they became ubiquitous without anybody ever testing whether they were effective or not.” Simply replacing older, ineffective curricula won’t prevent that from happening again. Doing so requires a “structural” change: “publishing annual reports on achievement gains of students using different curricula,” Kane says. “We don’t do that now. Most states don’t even know what curricula schools are using.”
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