To ‘Get Reading Right,’ We Need To Talk About What Teachers Actually Do

There’s been a welcome surge of public discussion of the science on reading. But if we want all kids to become good readers, media coverage needs to point out that current practice conflicts with it.

In recent months, thanks largely to journalist Emily Hanford, it’s become clear that the prevailing approach to teaching kids how to decipher words isn’t backed by evidence. An abundance of research shows that many children—perhaps most—won’t learn to “decode” written text unless they get systematic instruction in phonics. As Hanford has shown, teachers may think they’re teaching phonics, but many also encourage children to guess at words from pictures or context. The result is that many never learn to sound out words—and in later years, when they encounter more difficult text, they hit a wall.

Hanford’s work has drawn well-deserved attention. And recently Education Week, a prominent national publication, released a special issue called “Getting Reading Right” that reveals, among other disturbing findings, that 75% of teachers say they encourage students to guess when they come to a word they don’t know.

Hanford and others deserve huge kudos for uncovering a basic cause of our national reading crisis. But as they understand, decoding words is only one part of reading. The other is comprehension. There’s been recent attention to that aspect of reading as well, at least in some segments of the education world. But most media coverage has focused on phonics. Of the eight articles comprising the Ed Week series, for example, only one dealt primarily with comprehension.

When phonics-focused coverage does discuss comprehension, the explanation is often limited to bringing in the “Simple View of Reading” or “Scarborough’s Rope.” Those models include “listening comprehension” or “background knowledge” as vital components of the reading process. The models are important, but they’re not enough to illuminate the deeply rooted, pervasive problems with how teachers currently try to teach reading comprehension—problems that aren’t mentioned even in the three-page Ed Week article focused on comprehension.

True, not every news report can go deeply into all aspects of a problem. And given that I’ve focused on comprehension in my own writing—including in a book called The Knowledge Gap—it could seem that I have a distorted view of its importance. I understand why those objections might be raised. In fact, when I was taken to task by a member of the dyslexia community for not mentioning decoding problems in an article I wrote on comprehension several months ago, I bristled. Look, I thought, I had a limited amount of space; I’ve discussed problems with decoding elsewhere (including in my book); and it’s unfair to criticize me for failing to mention one problem with reading instruction when I was trying to explain another. These are all arguments I’ve heard from journalists who have focused on decoding. And for a while, I agreed with them.

But I’ve changed my mind. I can’t assume that readers of one article will be familiar with things I’ve written elsewhere. Nor is it enough to just say that phonics is important, because many teachers mistakenly believe they’re already teaching it. Similarly, it would make sense for coverage that focuses primarily on decoding to provide the same kind of information about comprehension. If it doesn’t, educators, policy-makers, and the general public will remain unaware of the vast extent of a fundamental problem and ill-equipped to do anything about it.

A hypothetical may help explain why. Imagine there’s a tooth decay crisis, and biologists have found that common dental hygiene practices conflict with science. First, people have been flossing all wrong. Second, it turns out that brushing your teeth is bad for you; what really works is to just drink lots of straight fluoride. (I’m making this up. Don’t try it at home.) The most effective approach is to drink different kinds of fluoride in a particular sequence over a period of years. You need a special kit, and it requires a collective effort.

Unfortunately, in this hypothetical, there’s little communication between biologists and dentists—and their perspectives are radically different. So dental schools don’t change what they teach. Journalists do a great job of explaining the problems with flossing, but when it comes to tooth-brushing they mention only that fluoride is important. Although people change their flossing practice, it doesn’t occur to most to stop brushing their teeth. They’ve heard all their lives that if you want healthy teeth, you need to brush regularly. As for fluoride, they figure they’re getting enough from their toothpaste. Some do get the message to stop brushing, but it’s such an ingrained habit they find it difficult to follow through. Many individuals also never hear about the importance of the fluoride kits or the recommended collective effort. People’s teeth continue to decay.

This isn’t a perfect analogy, but here’s the point: Virtually all teachers believe they are teaching reading comprehension—they spend many hours on it every week, especially at the elementary level, beginning in kindergarten. Their training, their materials, their supervisors have all led them to focus on comprehension “skills and strategies,” which include demonstrating things like “how to find the main idea” and “making inferences,” using texts on a random variety of topics. Children then practice these supposed skills on books at their individual reading level, which may be years below their grade level—and, again, not organized by topic. The theory is that if children master these “skills,” they’ll be able to use them to understand any text that’s put in front of them—including the reading passages on standardized tests and, eventually, things they’ll need to read in high school and beyond.

What scientists have discovered, however, is that “skills” are far less important to comprehension than the amount of knowledge the reader has about the topic. As with the science behind phonics, most teachers are unaware of that finding. And, just as many teachers have been cautioned that “too much” phonics will kill a child’s love of reading, they’ve been trained to believe it’s a bad idea to directly impart information to students—when in fact it’s often a necessary foundation for building knowledge.

Against this background, it’s understandable that—like the people in the hypothetical who thought they were getting enough fluoride in their toothpaste—teachers often feel it’s enough to simply “activate prior knowledge” before reading a text aloud (that’s a comprehension strategy) or briefly explain a few key concepts or words. But kids may not have any relevant knowledge to activate, and a quick, one-time injection of information is unlikely to stick.

What works best is to build knowledge through a coherent curriculum—the fluoride “kit” in the hypothetical—that is implemented across grade levels, beginning in kindergarten (that’s the part that takes collective effort). It’s hard to overstate what a radical departure this represents from current practice. And, like those who couldn’t stop brushing their teeth, even many teachers who want to switch their focus from teaching “skills” to building knowledge find it’s hard to break longstanding habits.

In a 30-page examination of reading instruction like the Ed Week series, there should be room for at least a couple of paragraphs describing the current approach to comprehension and explaining that it conflicts with the evidence. In shorter pieces focused on decoding, a couple of sentences should be doable. And I hope that in the near future we’ll see more articles diving deeply into problems on the comprehension side.

If the media doesn’t balance its incisive coverage of phonics with a more illuminating treatment of comprehension, I’m afraid we’ll end up repeating the vicious cycles of the past. If the pendulum swings back in the direction of phonics without a simultaneous change in the way we approach comprehension, many kids will learn to decode words but—especially as they reach higher grade levels, where assumptions about background knowledge increase—they won’t understand what they’re reading. And some educators and members of the public will inevitably say, as they have before, “You see? Phonics doesn’t work.”