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

When I first started as Voice of San Diego’s education reporter, I didn’t know much about education. So, like any good reporter, I did some digging. That’s how I stumbled onto American Public Media’s “Sold a Story,” podcast. 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 between methods to teach kids to read and they’ve been around for decades.  

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

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

Though that realization is a frightening one that likely explains why so many kids across the country aren’t reading at grade level, there is good news – we do know how to teach kids to read.  

Ever since listening to “Sold a Story,” I’ve wanted to dig into how local schools are teaching reading, and whether they’d dropped the ball like so many schools nationwide. I’ll have more on that later – but first, I had to get a better grasp on the science of reading. Let’s get into it. 

What Is the Science of Reading?  

The science of reading isn’t so much a curriculum as it is an interconnected body of research that spans fields from neuroscience to developmental psychology to linguistics and everything in between. Through that work, researchers have been able to better understand not only how kids learn to read, but how best to teach them. 

One key thing to keep in mind is that learning to speak and learning to read are very different processes. Over millennia, human brains have evolved an innate ability for speech, so much so that learning to speak can be something of an unconscious process.  
Written language, on the other hand, is a much more recent development that our brains still haven’t entirely caught up to. So, it doesn’t come as naturally, making it vital for educators to have the right tools. 

Many of the criticisms of approaches to teach kids to read that rely on the science of reading is that they’re something of a one-trick pony that exclusively focus on phonics instruction. Though research-backed methods do certainly incorporate phonics and push kids to sound out words in ways other methods may not, there’s much more to these approaches than just phonics.  

The science of reading, instead, shows that learning to read is a delicate mixture 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 created by psychologist and researcher Hollis Scarborough to demonstrate that the ability to read comprises a whole bunch of separate, but related, skills. In the metaphor, these skills can be roughly separated into two buckets: language comprehension and word recognition.  

Language comprehension, for example, includes things like vocabulary, background knowledge and language structures. The word recognition bucket includes skills like being able to recognize sounds in written and spoken language, being able to recognize familiar words by sight and being able to decode the words themselves. Only when each of these threads are woven together can kids become skilled readers. 

Though many children will learn to read without much trouble, many more will not. Schools – and parents – must be prepared to teach them, and to do so armed with strategies that have been proven to work, not the faulty systems that have failed so many kids. This is a very broad overview of just a little bit of what the science of reading has taught us. Getting deep into the weeds would require many more thousands of words than one newsletter will allow.  

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 resources out there. Reporter Emily Hanford, whose journalism, both in “Sold a Story,” and in written form has shaped a lot of this conversation, put together a great list of resources. Some of it is very dense, but all of it is thought provoking. Give it a read and let me know what you think. 

Content Bouncing Around My Mind Palace 

California’s State Superintendent, Tony Thurmond, is pushing a bill that would provide California teachers and aides to receive new training in how to teach math and reading making specific reference to the science of reading. There’s one catch: there’s no price tag attached and given the state’s funding crisis, it’s not clear where 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 over a decade Despite searching for solutions, the district hasn’t made much progress.  

For more than a year, parents have pushed San Diego Unified to change the name of Henry Clay Elementary, whose namesake was a 19th-century century Kentucky politician and slaveholder. 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 lauding the change, some parents are still sour about what they see as a lack of transparency in the process. 

What We’re Writing 

Over the years, schools have embraced different methods to teach kids to read. But in the latest installation of The Progress Report I detailed how one organization is embracing researched backed methods to help kids at four schools in southeastern 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 had harassed members of the Del Norte High School softball team on which her daughter plays. The harassment allegedly stemmed from a May incident at a banquet for the softball team during which some members did not clap for Phelps’ daughter. Now, the district’s board has unanimously voted to can her, writing in a statement that an investigation into her conduct had produced evidence that contradicted statements she made to the public and district officials. 

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