The Learning Curve: A Crash Course in the ‘Science of Reading’

When I first started as an education reporter for Voice of San Diego, I didn’t know much about education. So, like any good reporter, I did some digging. That’s how I ended up on the podcast ‘Sold a Story’ from American Public Media. It exposed me to one of the highest-stakes conflicts I’d never heard of: the “reading wars.”

At their core, they are a battle of methods for teaching children to read, and they have been around for decades.

In one corner are practices like whole language and balanced literacy models that, while they have relied on faulty strategies, are ubiquitous in schools across the country. In the other corner are practices that have been proven to be effective and that more fully incorporate what we have learned from the research called the science of reading.

For years, the “reading wars” were largely an academic debate among educators, but recently they have been thrust into the spotlight, thanks in large part to compelling reporting like “Sold a Story.” The podcast created a firestorm that confirmed what many researchers, teachers and parents have known for years: we’re teaching children to read all wrong.

While that realization is frightening and likely explains why so many children across the country are not reading at grade level, the good news is that we do know how to teach children to read.

Ever since I listened to “Sold a Story,” I wanted to investigate how local schools are teaching reading, and whether they have dropped the ball like so many schools across the country. More on that later – but first I needed to better understand the science of reading. Let’s get into it.

What is the science of reading?

The science of reading is less a curriculum than an interconnected body of research that spans from neuroscience to developmental psychology to linguistics and everything in between. That work has allowed researchers to better understand not only how children learn to read, but also how best to learn to do so.

One important thing to keep in mind is that learning to speak and learning to read are very different processes. Over millennia, human brains have developed an innate ability to speak, so much so that learning to speak can be a kind of unconscious process.
Written language, on the other hand, is a much more recent development that our brains still haven’t quite caught up to. So it is not so obvious, which makes it crucial that teachers have the right tools.

Many of the criticisms of approaches to teaching children to read that rely on the science of reading are that they are a kind of one-trick pony that focuses exclusively on phonics instruction. While research-backed methods certainly incorporate phonics and encourage children to pronounce words in ways that other methods may not, there is much more to these approaches than just just now sounds.

The science of reading, on the other hand, shows that learning to read is a delicate mix of skills that must be balanced.

The reading rope: One way to think about those skills is a rope – or a “reading rope,” to be more specific. This metaphor was coined by psychologist and researcher Hollis Scarborough to demonstrate that the ability to read involves a whole range of separate but related skills. In metaphor, these skills can be roughly divided into two groups: language comprehension and word recognition.

For example, language comprehension includes things like vocabulary, background knowledge and language structures. The word recognition bucket includes skills such as being able to recognize sounds in written and spoken language, being able to recognize known words by sight and being able to decode the words themselves. Only when all these threads are interwoven can children become competent readers.

While many children will learn to read without much difficulty, many more will not. Schools – and parents – must be prepared to teach them, armed with strategies that are proven to work, not the flawed systems that have failed so many children. This is a very broad overview of only a small portion of what the science of reading has taught us. Diving deep into the weeds would require many more thousands of words than one newsletter allows.

And if this all sounds complicated to you, you’re right: it is. The good news is that we know what works, and there are tools available. Reporter Emily Hanford, whose journalism, both in ‘Sold a Story’ and in written form, has informed much of this conversation, has put together a great list of resources. Some of it is very dense, but it’s all thought provoking. Give it a read and let me know what you think.

Content bounces around in my mind palace

California State Superintendent Tony Thurmond is pushing a bill that would give California teachers and assistants new training in teaching math and reading, specifically referring to the science of reading. There’s one catch: There’s no price tag, and given the state’s funding crisis, it’s not clear where the money would come from.

Warner Unified, a small school district in rural East County, spends $12,000 a year on bottled water. That’s because the district has had unsafe levels of arsenic in its drinking water for more than a decade. Despite looking for solutions, the district has not made much progress.

For more than a year, parents have been pushing San Diego Unified to change the name of Henry Clay Elementary, whose namesake was a 19th-century politician and slave owner from Kentucky. On Tuesday, the district’s Board of Education approved the change, voting unanimously to rename the school Dr. Bertha O. Pendleton Elementary School, after the first Black woman to serve as the district’s superintendent. Despite praising the change, some parents are still angry about what they see as a lack of transparency in the process.

What we write

Over the years, schools have embraced different methods of teaching children to read. But in the latest installation of The Progress Report, I detailed how one organization is embracing research-backed methods to help children at four schools in southeast San Diego learn to read—and how that work is paying off.

Poway Unified Superintendent Marian Kim Phelps has been under fire since November when students and parents alleged she harassed members of the Del Norte High School softball team on which her daughter plays. The harassment allegedly stems from an incident in May during a banquet for the softball team, in which some members did not clap for Phelps’ daughter. Now the district’s board has voted unanimously in favor of it, writing in a statement that an investigation into her conduct has revealed evidence that contradicts statements she made to the public and district officials.