Yogi Berra was right, It’s like deja vu all over again. Marc Dean Millot at Edbizbuzz links to a dogfight between the Fordham Institute, Robert Slavin, and the federal government over a funding cut to the Reading First program, a major mess. See Gary Stager’s summary of the report by the Inspector Generals’ office, in case you forgot what it was all about. Were specific reading programs promoted by government officials with conflicts of interest? And are those programs responsible for raising test scores?

One of the enduring accomplishments of the Bush administration’s education policy is that they’ve propagated a belief in a so-called “science of reading” which is not based in science at all. Ken Goodman counted 120 repetitions of the phrase, “scientifically based research” in the No Child Left Behind law, commenting:

…the phrase “Scientifically Based Reading Research” was put into NCLB over and over as a code phrase for a particular view of reading instruction advocated by a small group centered at the University of Oregon around Distarr, a forty year old behavioral synthetic phonics reading program originally authored by Sigfried Engelmann. Under its current publisher McGraw Hill it became Direct Instruction Reading.

Having a legally encoded “science of reading” matters to publishers because it makes some programs more attractive to consumers, as it eliminates the competition by taking many programs off the shelf entirely. And the very mention of “scientific” research is a redundancy that should make people wonder, as Goodman does, “Isn’t research by definition scientific?”

Joanne Yatvin, a member of the National Reading Panel, the people who defined the science of reading, published a revealing tale about how she came to write her minority report in response to the panel’s conclusions. In it, she described the reading panel’s decision-making process, and how they came to use a hierarchy of skills model to define reading. I’d long assumed that an investigative process led the panelists toward this definition. But Yatvin reports otherwise:

All the scientist members held the same general view of the reading process. With no powerful voices from other philosophical camps on the panel, it was easy for this majority to believe that theirs was the only legitimate view.

Without debate, the panel accepted as the basis for its investigations a model composed of a three-part hierarchy: decoding, fluency, and comprehension.

She observed, “For scientists to take such a quick and unequivocal stance was disturbing, since there are two other models of reading that currently claim legitimacy, each with numerous adherents.” She mentioned a psycholinguistic model, and a simple decoding model that were never considered. Yatvin claims that the panel’s report, the basis Reading First program selections, was hurriedly thrown together and “carelessly read and misinterpreted on a grand scale” by journalists and policy advocates who claimed that 100,000 studies were analyzed when the real number was actually 38. For a critique of the research methodology see Elaine Garan’s Beyond Smoke and Mirrors.

What brings this all forward from me at the moment is Lou Anne Sears’ Short History of United States Reading Research. It’s a paper I found on the International Reading Association’s new History of Literacy site, and it reminds me that this debate is not going away any time soon, if history is any indication. The science of reading is not a new idea. Remember Thorndike, the father of psychological testing? We’ve been at this for a century. The difference now is that one segment of the publishing industry has a regulatory edge over the competition.

People should give some thought to the idea that science is built on inquiry, not settled opinion.