Yesterday the NY Times published an article about angry parents, activists and teachers who are pushing school boards to adopt phonics-based reading curriculums. The Times correctly points out that evidence strongly suggests phonics is the best way to teach reading, even if some teachers don’t like it.

Ohio may become the latest state to overhaul reading instruction, under a plan by Gov. Mike DeWine.

“The evidence is clear,” Mr. DeWine said. “The verdict is in.”

A revolt over how children are taught to read, steadily building for years, is now sweeping school board meetings and statehouses around the country.

The movement, under the banner of “the science of reading,” is targeting the education establishment: school districts, literacy gurus, publishers and colleges of education, which critics say have failed to embrace the cognitive science of how children learn to read.

Research shows that most children need systematic, sound-it-out instruction — known as phonics — as well as other direct support, like building vocabulary and expanding students’ knowledge of the world.

The story offers an example from eastern Pennsylvania where the school district took out a loan to cover the $100,000 cost of a new curriculum. But it soon became clear the curriculum didn’t work.

It wasn’t working. Just a quarter of third graders were meeting benchmarks…

Panther Valley, though, used grants, donations and Covid relief money to buy a new phonics curriculum. The school also recently added 40 minutes of targeted, small-group phonics at the end of every day.

Nearly 60 percent of third graders are now proficient in decoding words, up from about 30 percent at the beginning of the school year, progress Mr. Palazzo hopes will translate to state tests this spring.

One of the most striking things about this story is just how little politics gets mentioned in it. Here’s one of the few times it is mentioned:

In 2000, at the behest of Congress, a National Reading Panel recommended many strategies being argued for today. And the Bush administration prioritized phonics. Yet that effort faltered because of politics and bureaucratic snafus.

The reality is that politics has played a much bigger role in the battle over how to teach reading and progressives have pretty consistently been on the wrong side for decades. Forbes published an article about this inconvenient history last year.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Dick-and-Jane method was replaced by the whole-language approach, which was vaguely associated with the left. The theory was, essentially, that if you surround children with high-quality, engaging children’s literature, they will acquire the ability to read. The approach proved wildly popular with teachers, but the movement encountered a serious obstacle in the 1990s when reading scores in California—which had adopted whole language statewide—took a serious plunge.

The debate over phonics erupted again, this time with heavier political overtones. Leaders of the whole language movement charged that those who advocated phonics were allies of the “far right.” As Diane Ravitch recounts in her book Left Back, one of them, Kenneth Goodman, argued that opponents of whole language were afraid it would work too well. They wanted to use phonics, he said, to keep people from becoming empowered through literacy…

Advocates of whole language—and its wildly popular successor, balanced literacy—are generally opposed to direct, explicit instruction. They say students need the freedom to learn in various ways and teachers need the freedom to teach as they believe best. That orientation has led many to see phonics as a regimented, one-size-fits-all prescription that prevents children from developing a love of reading.

As Time pointed out, “balanced literacy” was a middle-ground between the phonics which President Bush tried to push in 2000 and whatever else teachers thought was working:

This debate was supposedly settled in 2000, when the National Reading Panel, a big group of literacy experts that examined hundreds of studies on what instruction kids need to read, released a report. It recommended explicit instruction in the things Weaver’s petition asks for: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. This was a victory for the phonics camps. But it is one thing to declare a war is over and another to parcel out territory.

Thus was born the notion of balanced literacy, which was an attempt to correct the ship’s course, rather than turn it around completely. Schools would introduce more instruction in the link between sounds and letters, but that could be sprinkled in with other methods teachers thought worked, like prompting kids to use context clues (including, say, pictures) when they came to a word they didn’t know.

What finally sobered people up was the state of Mississippi. In 2013 Mississippi passed a law called the Literacy-Based Promotion Act which was focused on phonics. By 2019, it was the only state in the US which saw improvements on reading proficiency. Suddenly other states and cities started trying to replicate that success.

This is a battle that mostly conservative promoters of phonics have been fighting against more progressives proponents of other reading programs for decades. It’s funny that now that phonics is sweeping the nation that long partisan battle and who was on the right side of it barely gets a mention in the NY Times.