At rethinking schools, these writers point out that the push for science of reading and the culture war over “divisive concepts” are not two separate discussions.
Although the “culture war” and “reading war” have been described as separate causes promoted by disparate organizations, their stories are more connected than they appear. Both book banning and SoR dogmatism limit what teachers can teach and what students can read, narrowing the ability of public schools to address children’s diverse needs. We see this most explicitly in conservative parent groups, including Moms for Liberty, who have made it clear they endorse both. This should be a wake-up call to critically examine the potential impact of phonics-based policies on public school students and teachers.
Most reading researchers agree that phonics instruction is essential for young readers. Still, disagreements about approaches to reading instruction, including phonics, are more than a century old. The current push to adopt SoR-aligned curriculum is but the newest iteration of the “reading wars,” a decades-long debate that frames different methods of reading instruction as incompatible with one another. These debates, while occurring among scholars, have been exacerbated by the media’s persistent conflict framing, a technique used to create a false binary. This conflict has presented a narrative on reading instruction as a moral panic to “save” children from teachers and/or problematic instruction.
For example, take the claim that students aren’t reading because they are not taught enough phonics. Regardless of its merit in any one case, conservatives have taken advantage by blaming the reading crisis on teachers and their instructional methods while diverting attention from larger issues, like poverty, housing instability, food insecurity, and access to health care. This conflict framing worked for the Bush administration when it filled the pockets of its benefactors by steering federal funds to commercial reading curricula that ultimately, according to the administration’s own Department of Education assessment, did not improve reading proficiency. It is working now, as states yet again have limited curricular choices offered by some of the very same companies that profited 20 years ago.
Simultaneously, this framing benefits groups like Moms for Liberty, who see phonics instruction as a means to creating a whitewashed, English-only approach to reading instruction. When we, as teacher educators and researchers, have asked teachers from various states for their opinions on book banning, they unanimously support diverse texts in classrooms. However, these very same teachers are often obliged to restrict their classroom texts to less diverse SoR-stamped curricula dictated by state laws, leaving them fearful of adding in additional diverse texts. This form of soft censorship ultimately has the same impact as book bans and may explain another reason for right-wing advocacy of phonics-heavy curriculum.
On top of this, the recurring trend toward prescriptive and narrow approaches to teaching phonics, now labeled “SoR-backed,” does not even accurately reflect the actual sciences of reading research, nor the importance of skillful teachers crafting quality instruction for children with diverse needs. For this reason, educators need to resist the false binary between approaches to reading instruction and stay focused on the need for diverse materials, research, and instructional practices to support public education in response to both pro-SoR and book banning movements.