It is telling the Street, Lyon, and Moats don't identify their own bias for phonemic awareness instruction nor their full corporate embrace of publishing phonics-based materials. In essence, these individuals deny that the National Reading Panel was packed with advocates who believe that phonemic awareness, an oral language skill, must be mastered before children can learn to read.
[snip]
After the National Reading Panel was packed and the desired results published, the committees for adoption, and the Reading First program officials acted in collusion to exclude any program that did not fit the original prestidigitation of the NRP results.
[snip]
Lastly, you see Louisa Moats accusing Richard Allington of not being a scholar or a scientist. Anyone who knows Allington's publishing record in peer-reviewed journals and his success in textbook publishing is aware of Moat's dishonesty on this issue. However, the casual reader may not know of her affiliation with corporations that sell phonics-based and phoneme-based reading programs. She has a distinct bias that includes a failure to admit that the National Reading Panel research has been thoroughly repudiated. It was neither scientific nor scholarly.
This conflict will never be resolved, because we have no source of authority with the legitimacy to persuade whole language advocates they've lost.
The same could be said for advocates of SBRR reading programs (scientifically based reading research).
I'm strongly inclined to defer to scientific consensus, with the proviso that because scientific consensus changes with new discoveries I don't absolutely have to accept the prevailing wisdom if I think it's wrong. Occasionally, over the years, I haven't. And occasionally, over the years, I've been right and the consensus has been wrong. Once in awhile.
So I could question the importance of teaching phonics and phonemic awareness if the right person suggested that perhaps I should. As a matter of fact, the right person did suggest such a thing a few years back. When I met Thomas Zeffiro at a NAAR SAB meeting, he told me that in fact dyslexia can involve the visual system as well as the auditory system.
That was interesting, and I assume -- provisionally -- that he's probably right. So perhaps there's some kind of visual approach to teaching reading that the Reid Lyons and the Louisa Moats have missed.
The truth is, though, that while I recognize that the scientific consensus represented by Reid Lyon and Louisa Moats may one day change, there is no one in the world of education schools & NGOs who would cause me to doubt that consensus today.
So my mind is not open to education school evidence and argument, either -- not when it conflicts with NIH-funded, peer-reviewed scientific research. (I am open to, and interested in, personal accounts of experience inside the classroom from anyone, regardless of ideology.)
They can't persuade me, and I can't persuade them.
I remember reading a very nice Michael Barone article explaining why it was that the South abandoned racial segregation so rapidly in the wake of the Civil Rights Act:
In the meantime, Congress had acted. Chief Justice Warren had hoped that the unanimous support on the Court for Brown would move white Southerners to change their ways, but that didn't happen. In contrast, the long deliberative process between President Kennedy's June 1963 endorsement of the Civil Rights Act and President Johnson's signing of the bill more than a year later seems to have changed minds.
The nation watched on television as senators slept on cots during the Southerners' filibuster in the Senate. Opponents of the bill were given every chance to obstruct, but they could not prevent an overwhelming majority of the House from voting for the bill and a two-thirds majority in the Senate breaking the filibuster. Support was broad and bipartisan; contrary to what is often assumed today, a higher proportion of Republicans than of Democrats supported the bill. Its leading advocates included not only Democrats like Sen. Hubert Humphrey and Congressman Emanuel Celler but also Republicans like Sen. Jacob Javits and Congressman William McCulloch.
It was widely expected that there would be massive resistance to the Act, as there had been to school desegregation. But that proved not to be the case. Within a few years, public accommodations were largely integrated in the South and workplace discrimination, widespread throughout the nation, was vastly diminished. I remember traveling in the South not long after the Civil Rights Act was passed and noticing that black diners were treated with courtesy by white waitresses: an astonishing contrast with the anger and violence that greeted the lunch-counter sit-ins and freedom rides only a few years before. The law was the law, and Southern manners took over. Integration was achieved about as rapidly as it had been in the 1950s in the military, where it was based on the president's command authority.
I ran this past Ed, who thought it made sense. (He's not an American historian, but I've found that the perceptions of historians about history, including history outside their own periods, are almost always better than the perceptions of journalists about history.)
The United States Congress had legitimacy in the eyes of citizens in the North and in the South. Once it spoke, the issue was resolved. We are all Americans.
I find that moving.
Nothing of the sort can occur with the reading wars or the math wars or any other war that rages in the realm of public schools.
Congress can't deliberate and declare phonics to be scientifically valid and supported by consensus.
At least, I don't think Congress can do such a thing.
Whether it can or can't, I'm certain that it won't.
Peer-reviewed, NIH-funded science simply does not hold the authority for most professors in schools of education that it does for the rest of us. That's why we see attacks on controlled research as "right wing;"* that's why we have edu-websites devoted to action research; that's why the NCTM advocates a "variety of research methods." (pdf file)
We are simply going to have to agree to disagree.
Which means parents must have the power to choose for their children.
If I want my child taught basic skills via direct instruction, that has to be my call.
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* The author says that he uses the terms left and right "in their spatial and not necessarily their political senses."
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