At the Thomas B. Fordham Wonk-a-Thon, where they ask what should happen next, Elliot Regenstein, a lawyer, states that The science of reading doesn’t start with kindergarten—it starts at birth. Fordham should look in the rearview mirror at the consequences of forcing young children to read before they’re ready, as NCLB and Common Core both began pushing overly demanding standards and high-stakes assessments on early childhood.
The Science of Reading is troubling because it pressures early learners to read, everyone on the same page and earlier than ever before, often through heavy phoneme drilling. After all these years, few consider whether five-year-olds may need more time or whether the introduction of formal reading instruction should, in fact, be delayed until first grade, as it used to be.
High-stakes standards have been foisted on students for years. The expectation is that children move along learning at the same pace, which isn’t how children learn at all. Isn’t it time such standards share the blame for poor NAEP scores? Instead, Regenstein is promoting what already doesn’t work with kindergartners to the earlier years!
We never used to expect kindergartners to read, and yet now that’s the norm. If children need more time, however, they may never catch up, feeling like failures. No wonder kids don’t like to read anymore (Horowitch, 2024).
This “reading starts at birth” jargon is often deceptive. Of course, learning to read involves many language elements that begin at birth, especially oral language. Children hear stories read to them and connect pictures with words. They eventually recognize the letters of the alphabet, practice sounds, and learn to print their names.
Pick up a child development book like Your Baby and Child From Birth to Age Five by Penelope Leach, or Child Behavior From Birth to Ten by Ilg and Ames —my personal favorites —and you can document what to expect from a baby from the moment they’re born.
Instead, the push is now for higher standards in preschool —and for babies, even earlier! One envisions parents holding their infants in front of the computer screen for baby phoneme instruction.
Regenstein preaches more standards out of sync with earlier child development. It’s like pressuring kindergartners to read isn’t enough; they’ve got to go lower.
Some of Regenstein’s points are decent. Expanding free preschool, providing access to great early childcare for all children, and ensuring that early childhood teachers have credentials are long overdue. He can yell that from the hilltops.
But it’s presumptuous to assume that teachers haven’t known how to work with children in developmentally age-appropriate preschool settings. Is he aware of the HighScope Perry Preschool Project?
The study showed:
HighScope’s longitudinal study confirms the lifetime effects of high-quality early childhood education, such as intellectual and social development in childhood and future school success, economic performance, and reduced commission of crime in adulthood. The Perry Preschool Study indicates that the return to the public on its initial investment in such programs is substantial.
See: Educating Young Children by Mary Hohmann and David P. Weikart (p. 358-9, 1997) for great early-childhood friendly activities.
Regenstein’s messaging goes off track. His emphasis on standards and statewide assessments for the preschoolers is nauseating. He and his EduWonk friends are caught up in the world of NAEP to define children as failures who need more of what never worked to begin with!
In his Fordham report he says:
Implement statewide assessments that track progress toward kindergarten readiness goals. These assessments should include a focus on essential pre-literacy and early literacy skills—helping teachers to improve their engagement with children and giving policymakers a window into what is working and what isn’t.
We know what great early learning involves; what’s needed is the will to do it, and for policymakers to follow a child’s development to be connected to how they learn and quit pressuring children to learn earlier.
The disturbing words Regenstein uses include alignment, more instructional minutes which likely means drilling children on sounds, and data driving, and tracking, which raise privacy issues, all which promotes cookie cutter results. If standards are out of line with a child’s development, children who may learn to read well if formal instruction begins later, may be pegged unnecessarily with a learning disability.
While child development experts have clearly outlined the stages children move through to learn and grow, and it’s well understood that children don’t arrive at these stages always at the same time, the SoR is claiming a revolution, rehashing the old, and pushing children to read at an earlier age, now preschool, even at age three or earlier.
But high stakes standards are nothing new. They haven’t worked with older students so why would they work with early learners?
Here’s a great way to help your babies read.
Reference
Horowitch, D. (2024). The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books. The Atlantic, https://readwise.io/reader/shared/01ja6jx0b0ytqhe120wq9hdtdv/
I think there may be some misunderstandings here. For anyone interested in what the science of reading actually involves, the Reading League has clear, evidence-based information at thereadingleague.org.
I appreciate the Reading League, but I disagree with much about the Science of Reading for the reasons stated above.
Kindergarten should not be first grade, and you put this comment on the Chall post. Jeanne Chall was an expert and saw phonics as being important. I do as well. But she also pointed to first grade as the time to teach phonics.
It’s undeniable that education reform has quietly eaten crow, so the trendy new pivot is to early childhood education interventions. That being said, a focus on interacting with infants is not a bad idea, since kids are coming to kindergarten with severe delays from being put in front of a phone since infancy.
It’s certainly critical to interact with infants, as stated, and I’m always interested in research on reading picture books to babies. I swear my own child learned a bunch of vocabulary from Richard Scarry’s Busytown books, and reading came easily. Language development involves much more than is usually discussed or promoted by the SoR proponents.
But are kindergartners coming to school with delays? Or are the expectations increasingly more difficult? My point. I get what you’re saying about iPhones and cringe when I see parents handing them to kids in waiting rooms, etc., instead of books, but this idea that kindergartners are behind before they get started and then said to be failing is a huge concern.
Thank you for your comment.
The question isn’t just when to teach phonics but how and toward what end. Two excellent sources on this topic that, among other things, call out the Reading League’s propaganda by name: Robert J. Tierney and P. David Pearson, Fact-Checking the Science of Reading (Literacy Research Commons, 2024 – available at https://literacyresearchcommons.org/); and David Reinking et al., “Legislating Phonics: Settled Science or Political Polemics?”, Teachers College Record 125 (2023): 104-31 – available at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/01614681231155688.
Thank you, Alfie Kohn! Two terrific resources. I appreciate the links.
Propaganda, you say?
The word fits. What Robert Tierney and P. David Pearson call “Fact-Checking the Science of Reading” is, by any honest measure, propaganda disguised as analysis — the kind that hides in plain sight and whispers rather than shouts.
Propaganda does not mean lying. It means writing that mimics neutrality while steering readers toward a foregone end. It borrows the voice of scholarship, the manners of civility, the trappings of empiricism — not to clarify, but to close the argument. That is the method of this book.
They begin with the mask of objectivity: “neither bias nor negativity,” they promise, only “fair witnessing” (p. v). Yet within a page they state that Hanford’s reporting “motivated us to accelerate our response,” chiefly because of “(1) a consistent misinterpretation of the relevant research findings; and (2) a mean-spirited tone in her rhetoric, which bordered on personal attacks.”
Every phrase does a job. Accelerate makes advocacy sound like duty. Consistent misinterpretation pronounces error without proof. Relevant research smuggles in the right to decide what counts. Mean-spirited tone turns disagreement into vice. And bordered on personal attacks translates critique into misconduct. It is a lesson in how to dismiss an opponent without ever answering her.
This is what Hannah Arendt warned of when she said propaganda begins not with lies but with the blurring of fact and opinion. Tierney and Pearson blur that line with care. When they write that “it is neither necessary nor wise to regard some science as settled,” they turn empirical caution into moral superiority, as if to recognize evidence were an act of arrogance. What passes for humility is confusion by design: if every fact is only an interpretation, then no fact can compel action.
They call their work a “conversation,” admitting that it “did and didn’t follow” the four-step method of true fact-checking. Jürgen Habermas had a phrase for this kind of talk: a distorted conversation — polite, endless, and rigged from the start. Here, civility itself becomes a tool of control. Any challenge only proves the authors’ patience; dissent confirms their reasonableness. It is dialogue as containment.
The irony is that a school once scolded for unfalsifiable theories now denies that falsifiability is even possible. Karl Popper’s test still stands: if a claim cannot, in principle, be proven wrong, it is not science. For years, whole-language theorists were faulted for that very flaw. Tierney and Pearson’s epistemic modesty, taken literally, erases the very idea of falsifiability. To say no science is ever settled is to say no truth can ever be known. What remains is taste masquerading as tolerance.
Yet the surface shines: citations, balance, courtesy. Jean Baudrillard would have recognized it at once — the simulation of objectivity that defines the hyper-real. Fact-Checking the Science of Reading looks more empirical than empiricism itself, but every scholarly gesture exists to prevent judgment. It is a mirror-image of science: method without discovery, inquiry that circles back on itself.
Consider again that sentence: “Hanford’s series motivated us to accelerate our response…” Each word serves its purpose — motivated turns partisanship into professionalism; accelerate makes indignation sound like duty; consistent misinterpretation asserts authority without showing evidence; relevant research sets the rules of proof before the trial begins; mean-spirited tone and bordered on personal attacks replace reason with virtue. Popper would call it pseudoscience; Arendt, organized unreality; Habermas, bad-faith civility. It is not analysis. It is choreography — precision in the service of evasion.
This is what propaganda looks like in an age of seminars and webinars. It does not silence; it suffocates by nuance. It does not forbid judgment; it delays it forever. It turns skepticism into paralysis and politeness into armor. In this form, propaganda no longer destroys truth. It drains it — until exhaustion feels like balance.
So when this book is cited as proof that “propaganda” exists on the other side, the irony is complete. Fact-Checking the Science of Reading does not expose propaganda. It demonstrates its modern form: quiet, courteous, laden with footnotes — and absolutely certain that nothing can ever be certain.
P. David Person, an emeritus Berkeley professor with many reading research credentials and Robert J. Tierney Dean Emeritus of Education, University of British Columbia and Professor Emeritus of Language and Literacy Education and previously Dean of Education and Social Work and is currently Honorary Professorship at University of Sydney so I’d hardly call it propaganda. It’s more like pushback for inaccuracies.
You don’t seem to be addressing the point I made here, that children are pushed to read before they’re developmentally ready. Apparently, you don’t agree with Jeanne Chall either, another researcher, who spoke of starting formal reading in first grade. My belief is that children are falling down in reading because they’re expected to do it too soon. Some children will arrive to K reading already, but others will need much more time. Moving children along with the same expectations and calling it failure when children aren’t reading by first grade is my concern. I once worked with third graders on phonics skills and they made excellent progress. Now they’ll be retained if they’re not reading by then.
Not sure you have access to Education Week but this is a recent report and I am betting we’ll see more of this in the weeks to come. “A Popular Method for Teaching Phonemic Awareness Doesn’t Boost Reading:
Teaching letter sounds in isolation might have limited effects” By Sarah Schwartz — November 04, 2025 https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/a-popular-method-for-teaching-phonemic-awareness-doesnt-boost-reading/2025/11
You open with a list of titles meant to impress, not persuade. Trofim Lysenko held the Order of Lenin and magnificent cheekbones—both as relevant as credentials when what one pushes collapses in public debate. António Egas Moniz, inventor of the lobotomy, had his Nobel. Galen, revered for millennia, drained his patients to balance their humors. Respectability isn’t evidence.
Calling Tierney and Pearson’s book “pushback for inaccuracies” is euphemism. The same book declares that “settled science … is an oxymoron,” a sentence so self-defeating it collapses under its own weight. If no finding can ever be called settled, then no claim can ever be tested—and what can’t be tested can’t be trusted. That’s the core flaw of balanced literacy: it defines itself so it can never be proven wrong. As Karl Popper noted, what can’t be falsified isn’t science.
And I’m not interested in the claim that children are being “pushed to read before they’re developmentally ready.” That’s a straw man. No one’s forcing toddlers to decode novels. But balanced-literacy classrooms are forcing first-graders to memorize sight-word lists and copy long essays from the board. That’s what my own child’s Units of Study classroom looked like. “Developmentally appropriate” has become code for “don’t change anything to make it actually developmentally appropriate.”
You cite Education Week on Heggerty. The flaw there is self-evident: testing a sound-only phonemic-awareness routine and then concluding it “doesn’t boost reading” is like testing a steering wheel without a car and declaring driving doesn’t work. Phonemic awareness builds reading only when paired with print, as the researchers themselves admit. Heggerty was the patch my district used to cover a broken Units of Study curriculum—a band-aid over neglect. Studies from the Florida Center for Reading Research and Education Week itself show the same: it may raise phonemic awareness but doesn’t improve reading or fluency.
What’s truly developmentally appropriate gets dismissed as “pressure,” while malpractice is defended as “child-centered.” That isn’t balance. It’s inversion.
https://news.virginia.edu/content/uva-researchers-find-kindergarten-new-first-grade
Every accusation a confession.
You state: “If no finding can ever be called settled, then no claim can ever be tested—and what can’t be tested can’t be trusted.” You need to explain this. All claims can be tested. Even claims that have existed for hundreds of years can and should be tested. If the science of reading’s tenents seem settled in some peoples’ minds, then why can they not be questioned? The “whole language” or “linguistic” reading programs needed to be tested and their flaws identified. THe same is true for every reading program. You are accurate in saying that a lot of reading curriculums are poor especially when they are dogmatic. I had an instructor at the U of MN in the 70s who insisted on using the early tenents of the science of reading (operant conditioning) and her reading scope and sequence based on Orton-Gillingham). If we did not use this method we were where not teaching. I also had P. David Pearson as an instructor at the U of MN. He did not say such a thing. Doug Carnine is advocating that teachers should only use the pedagogy that is based on science and evidence-based materials. A Rand study on teachers use of materials to teach reading called teachers who do not use evidence-based materials cobblers. The science of reading and evidence-based series Reading Mastery is also a poor curriculum. It teaches children to read language that is invented to focus on one phoneme in each lesson which is not how normal language is spoken. They master letter-sound associations but can only comprenhend factual information like, “Who sat on the mat?” The answers is the “Pat, the fat cat and Nat the fat rat.”
I appreciate everything about this. Thank you, Daniel. We are also seeing cracks in the Science of Reading. I have grave concern that many parents and K teachers are pushing children with sounds and neglecting picture books that not only develop interest but also many reading skills. I have been attacked after saying this by SoR advocates who swear they do a lot of picture book reading. Still, it is rarely mentioned in their advocacy of the SoR, and picture cueing is condemned. However, a recent post by Professor Andy Johnson suggests otherwise. Johnson sees the big picture. https://thereadinginstructionshow.substack.com/p/the-interantional-dyslexia-association?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=5465071&post_id=178915413&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=8f3cp&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Well, I have to say, when I write a blog post I’m never sure if anybody is going to read it – so I am glad that somebody did! And I appreciate your points. I wanted to respond because I actually think that we agree about more than your post suggests, and while there may be points of disagreement I hope this response is helpful in clarifying what they are.
In my experience there are two major ideas relating to early childhood policy that are thought of as being in tension that really shouldn’t be. One is the idea that strong early education is necessary to help kids get off to a good start in school, particularly the kids who don’t come from a privileged background; the other is the idea that early childhood education should be play-based, fun, and developmentally appropriate. My blog post focuses on the former, and yours on the latter – but I don’t think those things are in conflict at all. Indeed, I take your response to be informed by years of scar tissue from having K-12 leaders mistakenly push bad practice into early childhood, and I couldn’t agree more with that concern (https://www.flpadvisors.com/uploads/4/2/4/2/42429949/why_the_k12_world_hasnt_embraced_early_learning.pdf_final.pdf)..
I also totally agree that early childhood assessments shouldn’t be used for accountability purposes; indeed, I’m on record saying as much (https://www.startearly.org/resource/uses-and-misuses-of-kindergarten-readiness-assessment-results/). But I do believe that assessment can be a useful tool for improving classroom instruction, as discussed in this article in the National Association for the Education of Young Children’s magazine from a few years back (https://www.naeyc.org/resources/blog/joyful-learning). My blog post did not explicitly state those beliefs and so I can see why you flagged that, but please know that I am absolutely not in favor of early childhood assessments being used for accountability.
The issue of standards may be a little more complicated. I am certainly not here to defend the developmental appropriateness of every single state standard out there, but in general my experience has been that states developing their early learning standards are pretty thoughtful about including experts in child development and paying attention to the “whole child.” When I talk about alignment of standards, I am mostly thinking about pushing that approach upwards; I think we might actually agree that having the K-3 standards look more like the early learning standards would in many cases be a much better approach.
As for teachers, I share your view that many teachers know how to work with children in developmentally age-appropriate preschool settings. But too often that doesn’t happen, for a variety of reasons, including: (1) teachers aren’t actually trained in developmentally age-appropriate practices, so they default to practices that would be better used with older children (or in some cases wouldn’t even be appropriate for those children); (2) instructional leaders in school settings don’t understand child development, and so they push teachers to use practices that aren’t developmentally appropriate; and (3) teachers who are trained in developmentally-appropriate practices for young children are paid so little that they choose to do some other job instead, potentially teaching older children. There is as you say a lot of great teaching going on in the early childhood years, but there’s not enough of it because we don’t pay and support teachers in those years as if we desire to have that great teaching at scale.
I definitely that words like “alignment” and “more instructional minutes” don’t exactly have a positive history with early childhood educators, and I can see how they evoke all of the bad possibilities you identify. My broadest point in the blog post was that if states care about supporting early reading, the best strategy to achieve that will be to include the early learning years in their approach. There are surely strategic and tactical differences in how best to do that, and I don’t want to gloss over that part – especially given the history of state and K-12 leaders misunderstanding how teaching practice and assessment should work in the pre-kindergarten years. But I am grateful for your response to my blog post, and I think we share the hope that policymakers will increase their support for early education and be thoughtful about child development in doing so.
My daughter had an amazing early childhood teacher who understood developmentally appropriate practice and yet was pushed to make my daughter into a reader when she clearly wasn’t ready.
Also why do we need to assess for policy makers to make educational decisions that aren’t there’s to make? Policy makers should not be determining curriculum. My state has spent 100 million on sor…my state has been implementing a lot of sor before this without results….so instead of changing course, they are just digging their heels in even more.
I got to teach before all of this and I was concerned an expert. I worked hard and researched as well as actively paid attention to what students were doing in their reading to better understand where to take them next.
Let kids play…stop putting all of these silly standards and assessments in place that just make a lot of money for someone while punishing our children.
Thanks for your gracious response and for sharing the links with valuable information, Elliot. I’m glad there are certain areas we can agree upon.
The Reading League is a biased advocacy organization, part of a school reform industry manufacturing a “crisis” to promote their products and disempower teachers. The Reading League cherry picks their evidence; new and old research into eye-movement miscue analysis (EMMA) contradicts much of what they say about orthographics being of primary concern in beginning reading.
I agree with you. The Reading League, however, was started by parents, and I’ve worked with the students who have the same disabilities they care about. I believe they mean well, but are misguided. I’ve tried to stay connected even though I mostly disagree with them.
It’s time for a new National Reading Panel, and I’d include The Reading League.
Nancy, I was forced to take some sor training…full of brainwashing…we were expected to, in unison, say these sor “truths” and then as part of a quiz…the correct answer is that you can’t learn to read through inquiry
I am sorry to hear that. Those SoR pledges are cult like and unacceptable. That teachers are put through that nonsense is offensive and even dangerous.
I’m sure you’ll find this hard to believe but I didn’t recite the pledge! 😀
I’m glad you didn’t get escorted out of the room! Thanks for sharing, Stef. Reading teachers like you are fine gems.
Nancy, I was forced to take some sor training…full of brainwashing…we were expected to, in unison, say these sor “truths” and then as part of a quiz…the correct answer is that you can’t learn to read through inquiry. Also, I kid you not, one of the trainers told me that whole buildings have conversations about how to pronounce the /y/ sound.
There were a few early childhood aides at this training and they said a lot of parents actually cry because their kids aren’t meeting certain reading benchmarks. It’s horrible. The damage we are doing to our babies.
I remember the push for my own kids…all late readers. I refused for them to be pushed too soon. I couldn’t do that now…but all are doing extremely well and actually understand what they are reading and also read for pleasure.
My dad and husband were both labeled dyslexic. I know they had plenty of phonics and yet continued to struggle throughout their schooling.
But my dad built a successful business and read the newspaper every day.
My husband is also very successful and I can’t pronounce the terminology he reads for his job.
How many children care about /y/ sound? Thanks for mentioning your dad and husband and their phonics instruction. Phonics has not been missing. When I student taught in the 70s, it was prominent instruction IN the 3rd GRADE! Children with auditory disabilities may struggle with phonics.
Great comment! Thanks again.
Perhaps the greatest misconception of this entire argument is that too many educators write or speak of reading as if it is synonymous to learning. These are two very different activities in the brain. Reading is about decoding and communicating information based on prior knowledge. I do not believe we can establish deep reading without a motivation brought about from experience. Learning comes from encounters with our environment and although reading can be an important component for significant understanding there has got be a reason to convince ourselves to explore in this way. We have to provide children with a reason to read before we teach them to read.
As long as we continue to use reading as a tracking tool for academic success without exposing young children to the world around them, we will continue to fail children and society. The synapses in our brains are reinforced and increase through sentient and physical encounters that provide the reason to enquire. As I have written to you before, I come from a line of latent readers who later became rabid readers as adults. This happened because reading struggles were never seen as a dead end and our encounters with our world helped us plow through the struggle.
I have recently been fascinated by the development of the homo species that encompasses hundreds of thousands of years where reading has only represented a tiny percentage of that time. Reading, like most technological advances, has been used to take short cuts in our learning that creates deficits in foundational understanding. We ignore our physiological evolution at our peril. Reading is critical for navigating this contemporary world, but if we continue to ignore that true literacy requires engagement with others and the environment, then we will continue to leave too many children with reasons not to read.
Well said. Motivation to read is critical, and Direct Instruction, while it may help students learn sounds and even words, doesn’t appear too exciting. One can argue that by grasping the sounds of words and being able to read words, children will feel capable of reading, but unless it is interesting, what’s the point? That, for me, implies that balanced literacy is what educators should work towards.
To your point about learning being different from reading, that truly makes sense. We have all known students who are bright learners and know much about many things, but who struggle to read, the mystery of dyslexia or learning disabilities. But continuing to work to understand how to read, as it sounds like you did, can always take place.
This is a very interesting comment, Paul. Thank you!