Oklahoma Superintendent Ryan Walters declared the first week of October "Teach Kids to Read Week." This is controversial, reports Sarah Schwartz in Education Week.
Moms for Liberty, a parents' rights group which has challenged school library books as "anti-racist" and LGBTQ "indoctrination," created the week in response to the American Library Association's "Banned Books Week," also the first week in October.
Co-founder Tiffany Justice called for a “back to basics approach,” charging educators are focusing on diverse, "culturally responsive" books while neglecting to teach students to read.
(Many challenged books are graphic novels and memoirs with sexual images, so kids who can't read well can still "access" the content.) States and districts are changing reading instruction to align with the "science of reading," writes Schwartz. It's a bipartisan movement. However, "explicit instruction in phonics, and a core foundation of knowledge" have been seen as conservative.
Reading reformers have fought hard to persuade people that systematically teaching decoding and background knowledge is the most effective way to build reading competence.
Still, deciding what knowledge students should learn is subjective, writes Schwartz. "It means prioritizing some knowledge and some authors above others." "Some popular knowledge-building programs don’t include varied enough perspectives," says Callie Patton Lowenstein, a literacy coach. However, "what’s not legitimate is saying that there’s something fundamentally conservative about holding our literacy instruction to higher standards, or being careful about the ways that our instruction aligns to research.”
We really do need to teach the kids to read.
There's no Republican or Democratic way to teach reading, writes Robert Pondiscio in response to the Ed Week story. "Are we meant to understand that progressive support for evidence-based instruction will collapse if conservative parents, too, want their children to be taught to read?"
He recalls the partisanship that doomed President George W. Bush's 2001 Reading First initiative, despite "evidence of effectiveness," after a brief bipartisan moment.
"If your views on instructional practices are shaped not by evidence, data, personal experience, or even common sense, but are instead a knee-jerk response to people whose politics you despise, you have lost the plot," he concludes. "And you’re not going to do kids any good in the classroom."
Natalie Wexler explains effective reading instruction here.