CHAPTER 4 Research and the Reading Wars

Controversy over the role of phonics in reading instruction has persisted for over 100 years, making the reading wars seem like an inevitable fact of American history. In the mid-nineteenth century, Horace Mann, the secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, railed against the teaching of the alphabetic code—the idea that letters represented sounds—as an impediment to reading for meaning. Mann excoriated the letters of the alphabet as “bloodless, ghostly apparitions,” and argued that children should first learn to read whole words) The 1886 publication of James Cattell’s pioneering eye movement study showed that adults perceived words more rapidly than letters, providing an ostensibly scientific basis for Mann’s assertions.2 In the twentieth century, state education officials like Mann have continued to voice strong opinions about reading policy and practice, aiding the rapid implementation of whole language—inspired curriculum frameworks and texts during the late 1980s. And scientists like Cattell have shed light on theprocesses underlying skillful reading, contributing to a growing scientific consensus that culminated in the 2000 National Reading Panel report.3 This chapter traces the history of the reading wars in both the political arena and the scientific community. The narrative is organized into three sections. The first offers the history of reading research in the 1950s, when the “conventional wisdom” in reading was established by acclaimed leaders in the field like William Gray, who encouraged teachers to instruct children how to read whole words while avoiding isolated phonics drills. In the 1960s and 1970s, Jeanne Chall’s research on first-grade reading instruction