What Heinemann did next
Today's story is about America's $1.33bn literacy market and the long-running reading wars. Are you sitting comfortably? Then let's begin.
In 2005 I started working at Heinemann in Oxford. Our faceless two-storey office on the outskirts of town was sandwiched between a cemetery, a golf course and Oxford University Press’s cricket pavilion.
We might not have had OUP’s doric arches or their leisure facilities, but we were scrappy a community with a shared mission, and when we went into schools and colleges we were welcomed.
One day I arrived at work to find a dozen noisy protesters banging drums and holding placards. At that time Heinemann was owned by Reed Elsevier, and part of Reed Elsevier’s sprawling empire organised exhibitions, including – right at that moment – a trade expo for military weapons at the ExCeL centre in London.
This lifting of the corporate veil sat at odds with our view of ourselves. We were publishing vocational materials, helping children achieve their potential, supporting adults re-skilling for new careers. We were the Rebel Alliance, not the Stormtroopers.
Soon enough the problem went away – we were sold. Eventually the various legacy brands of Heinemann, Rigby, Ginn, Payne-Galway, and so on, were replaced in the UK by the Highlander brand: Pearson.
But the Heinemann brand lived on in the States, where the US operation was bought by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (as it became). There, Heinemann had become a dominant player in the $1.33bn reading programme market, in particular with its leading authors Lucy Calkins, and Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell.
Heinemann’s best-selling reading scheme is the subject of Sold a Story, a six-part podcast investigation into the reading wars by journalist Emily Hanford. All episodes are out and it’s really worth your time.
In this month’s Absolutely Textbook, I’m going to dig into some of the lessons we can learn from resistance to reform.
School of Rock
In 2002, George W Bush brought in the No Child Left Behind Act with bipartisan support. It was designed to raise standards in reading through Reading First, with separate measures for writing and mathematics. The Act would close the gap between evidence about what works and practice in schools.
The findings of years of scientific research on reading are now available, and application of this research to the classroom is now possible for all schools in America. The National Reading Panel issued a report in April 2000 after reviewing 100,000 studies on how students learn to read. The panel concluded:
“effective reading instruction includes teaching children to break apart and manipulate the sounds in words (phonemic awareness), teaching them that these sounds are represented by letters of the alphabet which can then be blended together to form words (phonics), having them practice what they have learned by reading aloud with guidance and feedback (guided oral reading), and applying reading comprehension strategies to guide and improve reading comprehension.”
The Reading First initiative builds upon these findings by investing in scientifically-based reading instruction programs in the early grades.
The Act explicitly called for investment in phonics-based instruction. In principle, the various selection processes for teaching and learning materials at state, district, and school board level should have filtered out ineffective practices.
But it didn’t work out like that. The Act was scrapped in 2015, criticised by Republicans and Democrats alike, and deemed a failure.
The authors of Ending the Reading Wars: Reading Acquisition from Novice to Expert suggest two reasons for the intense battle between phonics and whole-language approaches:
The quality and scope of the scientific evidence today means that the reading wars should be over. But strong debate and resistance to using methods based on scientific evidence persists (see, e.g., Moats, 2007; Seidenberg, 2017). Why should this be the case? We believe that there have been two major limitations in the presentations of the scientific evidence in the public and professional domains. The first limitation is that, although there have been many reviews describing the strength of the evidence for phonics instruction (e.g., Rose, 2006), it is more difficult to find an accessible tutorial review explaining why phonics works. […]
The second limitation is that there has not been a full presentation of evidence in a public forum about reading instruction that goes beyond the use of phonics. It is uncontroversial among reading scientists that coming to appreciate the relationship between letters and sounds is necessary and nonnegotiable when learning to read in alphabetic writing systems and that this is most successfully achieved through phonics instruction. Yet reading scientists, teachers, and the public know that reading involves more than alphabetic skills.
Educating Rita
Heinemann’s Units of Study out-lasted the No Child Left Behind Act. Rather than embedding phonics in early reading, it took strategies from Reading Recovery, which was used with struggling readers, and taught them to all children.
Here’s a lockdown reading lesson from Episode 1 of Sold a Story:
Teacher: I’m gonna read a little bit of this story to you. And if I get stuck on a word, I want you to help me figure out what that word could be.
Emily Hanford: The teacher reads the story. The kids can see the words on the screen, they’re following along as she reads. And then the teacher comes to a word that she’s covered up with a little yellow sticky note.
Teacher: OK, so we’re gonna stop right here on this covered word.
Parent: And the teacher says “What could this word be? Let’s look at the picture.”
[…]
Teacher: If we think about what’s happening so far in the story – we know Zelda and Ivy’s dad made cucumber sandwiches for lunch. And Zelda and Ivy didn’t want to eat the sandwiches, so they ran away. And now they think their mom and dad will…?
[…]
Teacher: Do you think that covered word could be “miss”? […] Could it be the word “miss”? Because now that they’re gone maybe their parents will miss them?
Emily Hanford: The teacher asks the kids to think about whether “miss” could be the word… using the strategies they’ve been taught.
Teacher: Let’s do our triple check and see. Does it make sense? Does it sound right? How about the last part of our triple check? Does it look right? Let’s uncover the word and see if it looks right?
Emily Hanford: The teacher lifts up the sticky note and indeed the word is “miss”.
Teacher: It looks right too. Good job. Very good job. Go ahead and click the next slide so you can practice this strategy on our next part of our story.
This is triple cuing. Readers are taught to check whether a word makes sense in the context of the story, whether it sounds right, and whether it looks right. Sounding out unfamiliar words is a last resort.
Some parents supporting their children with home schooling during lockdown started to question this method of teaching. It wasn’t the way they had been taught to read. They worried that their children weren’t learning to read – they were learning coping mechanisms that looked like reading.
Dangerous Minds
Although No Child Left Behind received bipartisan support in the Capitol, that cross-party support didn’t extend to the grass roots. Here’s a telling section from Episode 3:
Emily Hanford: Others knew that there was this Bush administration thing called Reading First. And they were not interested. This is Carrie Chee.
Carrie Chee: Forget it. I wasn’t going to do any of that. And, you know, I wasn’t necessarily rejecting the curriculum as much as I was rejecting Bush.
Emily Hanford: Carrie Chee was a teacher in a school district outside Seattle. She was also a liberal Democrat. So were a lot of her colleagues. And they weren’t going to be for the science of reading if the science of reading was coming from from George W Bush.
Carrie Chee: You know, the sense of war with reading wars is very true. You just absolutely reject other pieces of evidence coming at you because you can’t believe their source.
George W Bush was a controversial President. He lost the popular vote in 2000, but came to office having won a recount dispute in Florida. He lead the nation at a time of national crisis, but then ploughed into America’s longest war.
In the 20 years since Bush passed his Act, American politics has become more bitterly divided. School boards and textbooks have become a productive battleground for the rising Republican stars. Florida has turned further to the right under Ron DeSantis, who has taken every opportunity to bash the culture war button. DeSantis is currently the Republican-but-not-Trump favourite for the 2024 election campaign. (This will come as no surprise to regular readers, of course.)
Dead Poets Society
Let’s turn our attention closer to home. The phonics screening check was introduced in England by the Department for Education in 2012. And in the subsequent 2016 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), England scored 559, up from 552 five years earlier. This was a continuation of an improvement in 2011. There will be keen attention to see what happens when PIRLS 2021 results are released in December.
Has England ended the reading wars?
In January 2022 more than 230 academics and researchers signed a letter to then-Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi (remember him? It’s been a long year…) calling for change. Policy, they said, should:
centre on a wider range of approaches to teaching phonics and reading, enabling teachers to use their own judgement about which is best for their pupils.
In support of the letter, the joint general secretary of the National Education Union, said the phonics check should be abolished.
And phonics is just one battlefront.
Labour released its Learning and Skills Council Report in October. Adam Smith, a teacher, felt that the report didn’t represent teachers’ views. So, he started the Campaign for Evidence-Informed Teaching (CEIT), a grass-roots pressure group on Twitter. He wanted to support some of the good policy ideas, and challenge some of the ideas that seemed a step backwards.
Almost immediately, there were claims that CEIT was a Conservative astro-turfing campaign. (It is perhaps a pity that Adam Smith shares a name with the father of capitalism, but surely the Tories wouldn’t be that obvious.) A rival group, The Educators Alliance, formed to represent differing views.
At some point between now and January 2025, we will have a General Election. Unless Rishi Sunak is the beneficiary of some extraordinary luck, it’s likely that the Conservative government we’ve had since 2010 will be out of office.
Under the Conservatives, the English curriculum underwent a series of radical reforms beyond phonics. The removal of coursework from GCSEs, the thinning of subject choice, Progress 8 and the English Baccalaureate, and more. There are lively debates (and on Twitter, outright hostility) on literacy, exams, behaviour, exclusions, academies, and private schools to name but a few.
If George W Bush was the unpalatable face of Reading First, who is the equivalent for England? Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education between 2010 and 2014. He was prominent and energetic in these reforms and through them built a reputation as one of the Conservatives’ most competent politicians.
He’s also one of the party’s most well-recognised politicians. Since 2020, the number of YouGov’s respondents who have heard of him has hovered around 90%. Over the same period, the number of respondents who like him has hovered around 10%. In the latest survey, Michael Gove was disliked by 59%.
If Labour’s looking for a political dividing line for a flagship policy ahead of a General Election, presenting something different from Gove’s reforms may have some appeal. But beware: there’s a baby in that bathwater…
Just another brick in the wall
When politics is polarised, people are less likely to accept something that comes from “the other side”. Does that explain the adoption of bitterly divided binary positions in education?
Not wholly.
Lucy Calkins, one of Heinemann’s authors, changed her position. Eventually, she began to integrate phonics into her course. In the final episode of the series, Emily Hanford met her to discuss this change of mind.
Emily Hanford: So much of this research isn’t new. And this idea that readers use context, multiple sources of information to solve words, identify words as they’re reading, that was really taken on by researchers back in the 70s and 80s, as an interesting question. Like, is that what we do? And they showed quite definitively that that wasn’t the case. I mean, were you sort of aware of that research and how clear that was already by the 90s?
Lucy Calkins: Um, again, you’re asking me to go back and figure out what was in my mind at one point or another. Um, but I would say that, that you have to remember that that research was not – I don't think that there were classrooms that were doing classroom-based methods that were exciting, and poignant and beautiful, and, you know, getting kids on fire as readers and writers, that were using that that train of thinking. You know, it was part of an entire gestalt that was different than ours.
Emily Hanford: Hmm.
Lucy Calkins: So, and I'm not trying to say if I'm right or not, but I think that was my impression.
This conversation hits the nail on the head. Who wouldn’t want to deliver lessons that are “exciting”, “poignant”, “beautiful”, and which set “kids on fire” (figuratively speaking)? Let’s triple-cue it:
It makes sense, because children are engaged
It sounds right, because they’re saying what the words they’re “reading”
It looks right, because the children are modelling “avid readers”
But are they actually learning to read…? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Teaching is a vocation – a calling, even. It’s the profession’s greatest strength when it comes to motivation despite heavy workloads. But it’s also an Achilles heel.
Popular culture is full of unconventional teachers who find ways to connect with their students – whether it’s Jack Black unlocking his up-tight students’ potential through Led Zeppelin, Michelle Pfeiffer ditching the textbooks for Gansta’s Paradise, or Robin Williams freeing his students from the straightjacket of conformity.
They paint a picture of great teachers fighting convention and “the system” to make a difference. They’re heart-warming and inspirational. They got all the feels. And they’re a Trojan horse for the idea that taking time to master the foundations prevents children from developing a love of reading, or creativity, or other hard-to-measure-but-intrinsically-desirable characteristics.
The more traditionalist approaches of phonics, a knowledge-rich curriculum, quiet corridors and school rules are exactly the kind of system Hollywood’s mould-breaking role models would fight back against.
Politics rewards binary positions. The Rebel Alliance versus the Empire. Yet even George W Bush wasn’t arguing that phonics was a complete solution to literacy.
It’s hard to change minds from entrenched positions, even when there’s more in common on both sides of the divide. Everyone’s working towards the same objective.
The thing with wars is that they’re much easier to start than end.