On Phonics and Democracy

In the Schoolhouse, Vol. 5

Hey y’all.

In Vol. 3 I recommended Emily Hanford’s podcast, Sold a Story, produced by American Public Media. I think it’s indispensable listening for every American citizen right now. Actually, anyone currently residing in a Western democracy. But I’ll get to why in a moment. First things first:

Have you voted yet? If you can vote early–and you almost assuredly can–get thee to the ballot box posthaste!

We’re all inundated with content about the election right now, but I want to focus on one particular element of this election cycle that pertains directly to K-12 classrooms. (This post is not about books bans, though we should all be paying attention to those, even the ones being passed outside our own states.)

There’s been a lot of talk recently about the gender divide in politics, particularly among people under 30. The Daily did a segment on October 23 called “The Gender Election.” Journalists and researchers are trying to figure out: Why are young women moving sharply left while young men are moving sharply right? The gap is larger than the political divide in any other generation and at any other time in history.

Part of the answer comes down to a sociological pattern: Boys who struggled in school and opted out of college are more likely to support Trump, while women of all classes, but especially those graduating from college at record-high rates, are more likely to support Harris and the Democratic Party. (Fun fact: Gender inequality in higher education is wider today than it was fifty years ago, but in favor of women rather than men.)

What’s happened in schools over the past few decades matters here. NYT reporter Claire Cain Miller explains:

You’ve probably heard this phrase, “Kindergarten is the new first grade.” And basically what that means is that school has become much more academic much earlier. Starting at five, kids are expected to sit still for longer, to learn to read earlier, to do assignments. And this has really ended up benefiting girls more than boys, because girls tend to mature earlier than boys. So they’re more able to act like this in kindergarten and that continues through school...the message that boys are receiving is that they’re just not measuring up.

The person doing the most substantive research on men and boys right now is

Richard V Reeves

, and he has tons to say about boys’ schooling. He wrote a feature for The Atlantic in 2022 arguing that we should “redshirt” boys–send them to kindergarten a year later than girls–and he posted a Substack follow-up in response to some of the counterarguments. Reeves writes:

The biggest reason for boys’ classroom struggles is simply that male brains develop more slowly than female brains—or at least those parts of the brain that enable success in the classroom. The gaps in brain development are clearly visible around the age of 5, and they persist through elementary and middle school…The brain-development trajectories of boys and girls diverge further, and most dramatically, as adolescence progresses—with the widest gaps around the age of 16 or 17. I hardly need to say that these are crucial years for educational achievement…the biggest sex difference is not in how female and male brains develop, but when.

Reeves notes on Ezra Klein’s show that the gender gap in educational success has widened in part because texts have gotten a lot more complex in K-12 schools as more and more students have pursued higher education. Long story short: If everyone needs to go to college to earn a spot in the middle class, then texts in classrooms need to get harder faster for younger kids. If the texts are harder, you need to sit still for longer to process them. And if you need to sit still for longer, you need to have enough developmental maturity to deal effectively when the end of your stamina comes into conflict with the teacher’s demands. Most of the girls can hang. Many of the boys cannot, through no fault of their own.

Reeves adds in The Atlantic: “Once boys begin school, they almost immediately start falling behind girls. A 6-percentage-point gender gap in reading proficiency in fourth grade widens to an 11-percentage-point gap by the end of eighth grade.”

This leads to lots of obvious problems. Kindergarteners go to school wanting to make new friends and please their teachers. There are no six-year-olds with a coherent “Screw this System” worldview. Not yet. But boys who struggle with academic expectations in elementary school are likely to start “acting out.” Behavior problems further compromise their learning, which in turn exacerbate their problematic behavior. All vicious systems go.

And here is where we need to bring in Emily Hanford’s reporting. Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong is a podcast about literacy pedagogy and the educational theories that have governed that pedagogy for the past several decades.

In the first episode (the original 6-episode podcast dropped in 2022), Hanford notes the obvious:

If you get off to a good start, you tend to like reading more, you tend to do it more. And the more you read, the better you get at reading. But the opposite can happen. You don’t get off to a good start. Reading is confusing and frustrating and you don’t really like it.

Sold a Story is a long overdue response to the fact that too many kids for too many years didn’t get off to a good start. They didn’t like reading because they weren’t being taught properly how to do it.

Much of the podcast is Hanford’s deep dive into the history of “the reading wars.” Basically, some presumably well-intentioned but disastrously wrong and highly resourced educational researchers challenged the merits of phonics sixty years ago. (Forgot what “phonics” is? It’s an instructional method by which children learn to read by associating sounds with letters and specific clusters of letters. If you ever had a parent or teacher say, “Sound it out!” to you when you got stuck on a word, you were learning phonics.)

The theorists Hanford profiles came up with the “whole language” theory and the “cueing” theory of reading instruction, which became the foundation for the extremely lucrative Reading Recovery program. It began in Australia in the 1970s and migrated to the US a little later. These theories claimed that good readers don’t sound out words. They use other “strategies” for decoding text–like looking at the first letter only, or thinking of words that might make sense in the larger context of a sentence. Part of the idea was that kids learn to read the way they learn to talk. We learn to talk from our parents’ vocabularies; they speak to us, and eventually we speak back to them using the words they’ve used around us. These theorists essentially said: Expose kids to enough words on enough pages, and eventually they’ll just know all of them.

Some pretty wild errors ensued. Hanford notes in the intro to Episode 1: “A middle school teacher gave me the example of a kid who thought that in 1939 Poland invited the Germans into their country.” Invited is…not the same as invaded. And a child who doesn’t know much history doesn’t have the contextual or content knowledge to differentiate between the two words. To read properly, a child has to know how to sound out individual words, and the sounds of individual words are composed of the sounds of individual letters. There is simply no getting around this fact in literacy pedagogy.

When I was teaching high school, I saw little signs of the absence of phonics instruction in my own classroom. Sometimes a 9th grader (or, hell, an 11th grader) would get stuck on a word and call out to me. If I wasn’t near them in the room, I’d say, “Sound it out!” And often, the student would say, “What do you mean?”

What do you mean what do I mean? I had no idea how to explain this most basic of reading strategies, and even if I had known, we didn’t have the time. This was high school. There were too many Other Things To Do.

Teacher comrades: How many of you have experienced something similar?

Reading Recovery took off and became a multi-million dollar enterprise. It seeded entire libraries of books and textbooks for elementary school students. But belief in phonics didn’t die. The federal government tried to jumpstart a Reading First program that would tie public dollars to phonics instruction.

I shudder to even write this, but the person who launched that initiative was President George W. Bush. Reading First was one of the programs outlined in the No Child Left Behind Act. NCLB had a plethora of problems which we’re still dealing with today and will be for a while yet, but Sold a Story explains in great detail that Reading First, at least, had value. A lot of value.

I wish this particular historical moment got a bit more attention in the podcast. I hope Hanford will explain in other places exactly how literacy pedagogy became a partisan issue. This was an uncomfortable, but important part of the story for me: Liberals largely joined the Reading Recovery camp, while conservatives endorsed phonics instruction as part of the GOP’s platform in 2000.

Hanford quotes a teacher from Seattle, Carrie Chee. Chee and her colleagues, by her own admission, “weren’t going to be for the science of reading if the science of reading was coming from George W. Bush.” On record, Chee said: “You know the sense of war with reading wars is very true. That you just absolutely reject other pieces of evidence coming at you because you can’t believe their source.” 

The proposal for Reading First passed in December 2001 with huge bipartisan support. But officials in Georgie W’s administration didn’t want schools just to have phonics resources; they wanted them to get rid of all their “whole language” and “cueing” materials, which had been thoroughly debunked by neuroscientists. Hanford explains what happened next:

In 1996, the science of how people learn to read was clear. There were studies. There were books. There was lots of research. But there were powerful people who already believed in that other idea. The cueing idea. They had an approach for teaching children to read that was based on that idea. And they were selling that idea to schools. So, when the scientific research on reading came along, it had adversaries…The government’s Reading First initiative could not survive the ensuing controversy. By the end of 2007, Democrats in Congress had cut the budget for Reading First by more than 60 percent. Within a couple of years, the funding had been cut completely.

Richard V Reeves

is telling us that school is hard for elementary-aged boys, perhaps too hard, even when school goes well. Emily Hanford is telling us that in many classrooms in many cities in many states, the primary purpose of school–teaching children how to read–is not being met. It’s hard not to sympathize with young men who decided early on that they were over the whole endeavor of schooling. It’s miraculous that so many of them stuck it out to a high school diploma.

In her recent reporting for the NYT, Claire Cain Miller talked to a lot of men in their twenties who are leaning towards Trump for the 2024 election:

A lot of them told me that they hadn’t really considered college…and that they were eager to get out of school and get into some sort of work that allowed them to use their hands…[but] the jobs that men without college degrees used to do that earned them enough to support a family were largely in manufacturing. And these are the jobs that, since the 1980s, have really disappeared from the United States in large numbers. They have either been replaced by robots or they’ve been sent abroad.

Miller notes that most young men want the same thing their fathers and grandfathers wanted, and had more often: the ability to support a family.

So the expectations that these young men have are the same as previous generations, but the reality is different…They can no longer meet those expectations. And as we know, unmet expectations are a principal ingredient of political change…And then enters Donald Trump talking about providing an economy in which men can do better than they are right now…And then we have JD Vance providing this sort of return to traditional families, with men as breadwinners and women having lots of kids and taking care of them. And we have this ticket offering these young men a script to follow.

I can’t help wondering if so many young men would be attracted to the sound of Vance’s script if their reading instruction twenty years ago had prioritized the sounds of letter clusters.

More research needs to be done on all this. Research that ties together Hanford’s findings with Reeves’s. (If boys and girls are getting poor reading instruction in equal measure and in the same classrooms, why are girls so dramatically outpacing boys in school? How much does ineffective reading instruction compound all the other factors contributing to boys’ disadvantage when they start school? And how much better are the boys who do get phonics instruction doing–five years later? Ten years later? Twenty years later?)

The gender divide in politics is a potentially fatal flaw for democracy. Check out

Richard V Reeves

’ Substack for fascinating data about how it’s not just happening here. It’s a global phenomenon and a global problem. Reeves writes:

In the centrifugal dynamic of culture-war politics, the more the Right goes to one extreme, the more the Left must go to the other, and vice versa. The Left dismisses biology, the Right leans too heavily on it. The Left see a war on girls and women; the Right see a war on boys and men. The Left pathologizes masculinity; the Right pathologizes feminism.

And in terms of passing effective policies, we all wind up in Carrie Chee’s situation–not supporting what the evidence says is best, only rejecting the proposals of our presumed enemies.

Note: This is not a pitch to join any part of the contemporary conservative movement. I voted for Kamala Harris last Monday. Trump is a unique and unprecedented threat to democracy in ways that Harris is not.

But calling out a threat to democracy is not the same as preserving it. This is what worries me about the contemporary “left”–too many leaders in the Democratic Party seem to have forgotten this.

In a bonus episode, Hanford covers the recent rise in bipartisan efforts to ban the cueing method and emphasize phonics instruction in states like Indiana. She says:

I worry about the science of reading getting caught up in partisan politics. That’s what happened with Reading First, the Bush era effort to get the science of reading into schools. And I see some people trying to do that now. To dismiss the science of reading as right wing. But it’s not. All I need to do is look at my social media feeds and I see people on the left and the right who are passionate about this issue. Because it’s their kids. Their students. Their lives.

She takes a call from a liberal Democrat who accepts what science says about how kids learn to read, but worries about Democrats making deals with Republicans over books at all. I get the impulse. Books bans are real. But there is a difference between banning books based on their content and eliminating ineffective literacy pedagogy. Anyone who thinks otherwise or thinks we shouldn’t take the risk of this differentiation has already given up on democracy and made it vulnerable to exploitation. If we do not ban literacy pseudoscience, we’ve effectively banned books ad infinitum, and not just a select few. Pretty much all of them. It makes little sense to worry about what people can find in libraries if we don’t first pay close attention to whether or not they can read at all.

We’re acting like democracy begins in a ballot box. It does not. Democracy begins in kindergarten classrooms, with books, and the pages in those books, and the words on those pages, and the letters in those words. Junk reading science is part of the origin of democratic discontent and dissolution. MAGA just arrives at the end of the line.