Gaslighting around phonics needs to stop

Phonics is necessary but not sufficient and are we really talking about phonics?

Author

James Shanahan
October 15, 2025

Welcome to Scholastic Alchemy! I’m James and I write mostly about education. I find it fascinating and at the same time maddening. Scholastic Alchemy is my attempt to make sense of and explain the perpetual oddities around education, as well as to share my thoughts on related topics. On Wednesdays I post a long-ish dive into a topic of my choosing. On Fridays I post some links I’ve encountered that week and some commentary about what I’m sharing. Scholastic Alchemy will remain free for the foreseeable future but if you like my work and want to support me, please consider a paid subscription. If you have objections to Substack as a platform, I maintain a parallel version using BeeHiiv and you can subscribe there.

An ongoing commentary

I keep wanting to write about other things, but I feel like the general discourse around education in the media and on the ‘stacks requires me to keep coming back to the same few topics over and over. We’re talking about Mississippi, then about NCLB, then about NAEP, accountability, fraudulent miracles, and so on. Throughout the back and forth, one thing that keeps coming up from both proponents of Mississippi miracles and skeptics is that phonics is not the only thing they’re doing in Mississippi or in the “Southern Surge” states. Allow me to quote at length.

there are some obvious commonalities among the Southern Surge states. White names three, the first of which sounds obvious in retrospect but was in fact novel: The states adopted reading curricula backed by actual scientific research.

“Those states all made a commitment to rigorous reviews of the highest quality published materials for students and some level of incentive — whether it was voluntary or involuntary — for districts to implement those curriculums,” White said.

So identifying the curricula that work, buying them for schools, and telling teachers to use them is part of the solution. But it’s only one part — you also have to ensure that teachers understand how to use the curriculum.

The second pillar, White told me, is “a scaled system of training those teachers on that curriculum — most teaching you get as a teacher is not training on the curriculum.”

The third pillar is everyone’s least favorite, but it’s equally crucial. “Number three is clear accountability at the district level, at the school level, at the educator level, and at the student and parent level,” White said.

Accountability, of course, means standardized tests, requirements that students master reading before they are advanced to the fourth grade, and rankings of schools on performance.

for the love of God, it’s not just phonics

One can debate the best order of operations.6 But one cannot reduce those multilayered reforms, which have been underway for 20+ years in Mississippi, 13 years in Louisiana, six years in Tennessee, and six years in Alabama, to “they just went back to basics with phonics.”

I get that they’re saying that various administrative shuffling and (sigh) ACCOUNTABILITY are crucial in the Mississippi Miracle story, but there’s no DV there - we simply have no research to address such changes, which are always highly contextual and subject to great scaling difficulties.

Now, Freddie is hugely skeptical to the point of assuming it’s all fraud. His whole post is worth a ready because he makes a really important claim about the relationship between research on phonics instruction and the gains being seen in Mississippi.

The gains claimed by the Mississippi Miracle people aren’t a matter of realistic, modest growth like you might expect from the research record; they’re extraordinary, never-before-seen gains of a type not remotely suggested by that research record. The effect sizes of phonics instruction in the relevant contexts are simply not sufficient to explain the explosive growth that Mississippi Miracle proponents are citing.

I’m not sure Freddie (I’m calling him by his first name because that seems to be the convention online when writing about Freddie DeBoer) is right to simply dismiss “administrative shuffling” and accountability as lacking research but it’s also not the focus of his post, phonics is.

coverage that has ensued has vastly oversimplified the situation, reducing the success stories to “more phonics” and “more test-based accountability.” If people take that coverage at face value—and use misleading information to try to replicate the formula for success—we’re likely to see continued widespread failure

Even before the spate of articles on the Southern Surge in the past few weeks, there were plenty of stories about the “Mississippi Miracle,” all of them focusing on phonics instruction.

Phonics-focused reforms can boost state test scores in the elementary grades, but those gains fade out by middle school. That’s largely because as grade levels go up, reading proficiency increasingly depends not just on the ability to decipher, or decode, individual words but also on the ability to understand complex text. The fade-out suggests that something is missing from comprehension instruction.

Wexler, interestingly enough, argues that Piper and Vaites are wrong about all the Southern Surge states sharing similarities: “Louisiana and Tennessee have been much more focused on encouraging the adoption of knowledge-building literacy curricula than the other two states.” I think this is interesting! We should look at these differences more and see what we can learn from them. We should look at all of the reforms taking place and do research to help understand the relative impacts of each one. Maybe 100% of the improvement is from teacher training and support? Maybe 0% is from retention? How will we know unless we look?

Yet, as soon as we leave the territory of “education people” — Wexler has a long history as an education journalist and curriculum developer, Vaites is a curriculum developer and advocate, and DeBoer has a PhD in, I think, education statistics and a long history of writing about education — things start to look very different. As Wexler hinted, so much focus is going on phonics that it’s overstating the role it plays in Mississippi’s or the south’s reforms. If we look deeper, though, phonics is just a gateway for other political priorities.

The gaslight is shining brightly

Writing for the Atlantic, Idrees Kahloon says that America is Sliding Toward Illiteracy. He chalks this up to the old George W Bush yarn about the soft bigotry of low expectations. After rejecting only two potential causes, social media/phones and insufficient spending, Kahloon comes to the only possible explanation for the decline in NAEP scores: low expectations. And the key form those low expectations take is, apparently, not teaching phonics.

In 2013, Mississippi enacted a law requiring that third graders pass a literacy exam to be promoted to the next grade. It didn’t just issue a mandate, though; it began screening kids for reading deficiencies, training instructors how to teach reading better (by, among other things, emphasizing phonics).

Not only are the southern states that are registering the greatest improvements in learning run by Republicans, but also their teachers are the least unionized in the country. And these red states are leaning into phonics-based “science of reading” approaches to teaching literacy, while Democratic-run states such as New York, New Jersey, and Illinois have been painfully slow to adopt them.”

When I talk about how unhelpful the discourse around Mississippi’s and the south’s recent NAEP gains have been, this is going to be a prime example. Since early this year, the discourse around Mississippi has shifted from a focus on retention to phonics and now, it seems, to being anti-union. Not only are we supposed to model Mississippi, but we also have to model other southern states like Tennessee and Louisiana who have also seen NAEP gains, albeit more modest ones than Mississippi.

David Brooks, who I mentioned in last Friday’s links, makes a similar point in the New York Times. The discussion about curriculum, accountability, teaching methods, and retention policy is morphing into something broader. See if you can notice it.

The so-called Southern Surge came about because the red states built around a reading curriculum based on science, not ideology. The schools provide clear accountability information to parents and give them more freedom to choose schools. They send coaches to low-performing classrooms. They use high-quality tutoring, and they don’t promote students who can’t read, reducing the bureaucratic strings that used to control behavior in the classroom. They also hold schools and parents accountable. In Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee, a child who isn’t reading at the end of third grade has to repeat it.

Where the hell are the Democrats?

Okay, so, what Brooks and Kahloon above are saying is that the way to improve schools is to elect republicans. That’s really the point here. The Science of Reading, it seems, has become a political tool for accomplishing ends beyond teaching reading. We need the Science of Reading, so get rid of teachers unions. We need the Science of Reading, so elect republicans like Jack Ciattarelli. We don’t learn, for example, that Louisiana’s policy changes happened under Democratic governor John Bell Edwards and that under the new Republican governor and more conservative legislature, Education Savings Accounts, vouchers, are rolling out this school year. I’m sure the GOP is happy to take credit for NAEP gains but anyone want to guess what vouchers will do to those NAEP scores? We don’t remember the recent history of Republican governors in New York and New Jersey and their adoption of the kinds of curricula and reading approaches that are now supposedly a Democratic thing? Republican mayor Michael Bloomberg made Lucy Calkins Units of Study the NYC reading curriculum. Chris Christie won the 2013 election in large part because of education issues yet it was Democratic governor Phil Murphy who signed the new law from the Democratic led New Jersey legislature requiring “evidence-based literacy instruction” and undoing many of Christie’s policies.

Brooks and Kahloon don’t care about those details because they’re too busy building an association between phonics instruction, taking down teachers unions, and getting republicans elected. And, look, I’m not penning a defense of teachers unions here. I’m largely ambivalent about them and when I was a K-12 teacher, it was in a state that didn’t have teachers unions. I have no firsthand experience with unions. My point today isn’t to register a position one way or another on unions or on republican governance. My point is that what started as a conversation about how to best teach kids to read became a conversation about totally different and only partially related things. We’re being sold a story about a series of reforms that is 1) incomplete, 2) ahistorical, and 3) doesn’t comport with the evidence base for the recommended practices.

Let’s take a step back. When I started writing this newsletter/blog/thing in January, I had to think about an overarching purpose for the writing and how I might communicate that in a name. At the time, I was annoyed by repetitive expressions of frustration by parents and the public with phones and other screens in schools. The overall sense you got from reading these complaints was that schools were inexplicably tied to permissive technology policies and that this was a fault at the local level, even down to venting frustrations that classroom teachers were not doing a better job at removing phones from their rooms. What I reacted to most of all, though, was the sense that everybody knew phones in school was a bad idea but that stupid schools and teachers did it anyway. My first post and the series that kicked off this newsletter/blog/thing was an attempt to explain how it was, in fact, parents and an overly credulous media environment, combined with a sense that schools existed entirely as training for high-prestige tech jobs, that led schools to adopt lots of classroom tech and to try and include students’ devices in the mix. It was public advocacy and policy that drove the adoption, not school admins or teachers. We were told by slick videos and marketing campaigns that 21st century learners needed 21st century tech for learning.

The name, Scholastic Alchemy, came about as a way to explain both those promises and their failure to live up to expectations. Alchemists were more showmen than scientists, though their failures may have prompted some of the first empirical chemistry in the west. They promised and sometimes faked turning common substances, often lead, into gold or other precious metals but when earnest attempts were made to “induce” gold they always failed. Alchemists told a good story and offered an attractive result: limitless riches. This is much the same as what education reformers offered in the 2000s-2010s. If Americans would just adopt a series of reforms, then we’d have the best educated workforce in the world and that would lead to unparalleled economic growth and riches for all. It was, and still is, scholastic alchemy. Just let kids use phones for learning, and they’ll be ready for competition with China to dominate the 21st century. Just standardize everything and test annually, and 100% of children will reading and doing math at grade level by 2014, it’s the only way to accomplish equity. And yet, we look back on this era as one of misfires and incomplete or illusory improvements. We look at phones in school and wonder “who thought this was a good idea?”. Scholastic alchemy is believing the gaslighting. It’s giving credibility to anyone proposing reforms simply because they’re proposing reforms and we always assume reforms are needed no matter what.

Back to the science of reading

What does any of this have to do with phonics and why am I saying there’s gaslighting? Well, if you want the long version, go read Freddie deBoer’s post about the evidence base for phonics. He reviews a variety of analyses and meta-studies and, as I quoted above, indicates that the research on phonics does show it’s effective but does not show anywhere near the amount of effect you’d need to explain Mississippi’s successes. But, Freddie is a firebrand and exhibits a kind of maximalism in his writing style that often rubs people the wrong way. Perhaps you simply don’t trust him to accurately report the state of the art on teaching reading. That’s fine. And you don’t have to trust me either! The person I want you to trust right now is Robert Savage.

Robert Savage is Dean of the Faculty of Education at York University in the UK. He’s an experimental psychologist who specializes in how reading works in the brain and how young humans learn to read. He just completed his term as president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading and has numerous publications related to the scientific study of reading. As an experimental psychologist, Savage is in the business of conducting experiments. Now, Kahloon wrote in his Atlantic article that “lottery studies, comparing students who got into those schools (charters) with those who didn’t based on random chance alone” were the “gold standard for policy research.” That may be the case for policy research, but lottery studies are not the gold standard for educational research. The gold standard in educational research, as well as in all the social science that I’m aware of, is the randomized controlled trial (RCT). Robert Savage’s reading research includes conducting randomized controlled trials and he is well versed what a good RCT study looks like, how to interpret the results of RCTs and lesser methodologies, and what kinds of limitations exist in drawing conclusions, causal or otherwise, from research. As a citizen of the United Kingdom and a professor and dean at a university there, Savage has no skin in the game when it comes to America’s school reform debates. He doesn’t gain or lose anything if Mississippi’s reforms succeed or fail or if teachers are more unionized or less. And, unlike Fredde deBoer, Savage is not an out and out skeptic of the science of reading (notice I am keeping it lowercase to differentiate the research base from the political branding exercise that is the Science of Reading). Robert Savage has worked for many years to bring a scientifically sound form of reading instruction into classrooms. He’s an independent 3rd party who has every desire to see the science of reading succeed.

Lucky for us, Robert Savage penned a review of the research on teaching children to read in 2022. Let’s see what he has to say about the evidence for the science of reading.

What are the implications of this evidence [the research literature he reviews] for how teachers should teach children to read? First, the evidence shows that “systematic” phonics instruction is important, but it should be delivered in the context of high-quality wider language instruction. More specifically, in terms of methods of delivery, teachers can deliver or facilitate small-group instruction during regular classroom practice. They can also use tutoring to provide differentiated learning opportunities in well-organized classroom contexts. The use of classroom teaching assistants to run smaller group interventions can also be effective in supporting early literacy teaching. However, systematic phonics tutoring does not appear needed for all children; as the National Reading Pannel data show, the reported effects are nearly always derived from studies of young at-risk children or older struggling readers, rather than from studies of typically developing readers.

This is a very different story from the one we get from Piper & Vaites or the one we get from partisans like Kahloon and Brooks. We are supposed to believe that whole classrooms of students should be receiving explicit systematic phonics instruction and that this is where the evidence base points us but that is not true. Savage also comments on re-analyses of this data. He reviews

a subsequent meta-analytic study by Torgerson, Brooks, & Hall (2006) that only considered phonics interventions using randomized controlled trial designs.

And what did these actual gold-standard studies show regarding whole-class systematic phonics instruction?

Torgerson et. al. (2006) identified 20 such studies. Most were, however, small (the largest study had n=96 participants), and nearly all focused on struggling or atypical readers. Only one focused on whole-class teaching (Johnson & Watson, 2004). This study also investigated synthetic versus analytic phonics contrasts, but has been the subject of some substantive methodological critique (e.g. Torgerson et al., 2019; Wyse & Goswami, 2008). More recent meta-analyses of evidence since the National Reading Pannel report (2000) do not speak to the issue of whole-class teaching.

There is one other set of studies Savage looks at that comes out of the UK and it turns out that those studies also do not tell us much about rebuilding an entire nation’s system of elementary schooling around doing phonics.

In the United Kingdom context, the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) has funded 14 intervention studies of phonics. [note: not RCTs]

Of these, 9 out of the 14 studies are with struggling older reader samples and the rest are focused on young at-risk samples. Only one completed EEF study focused on regular class teaching of all young children: Success for all, a whole school approach to improving literacy in primary schools with all teachers and senior leaders involved.

Interestingly enough, Success for All was promoted by Emily Hanford herself earlier this year (she’s the Sold a Story podcaster journalist who got us into this mess). Hanford writes,

Numerous studies show Success for All can be effective at boosting student achievement. But relatively few schools use it. Currently, only about 800 schools in the United States and Europe use Success for All.

As a whole-school reform effort, it’s probably the package of reforms most similar to what we see in Mississippi and includes a doubling-down on evidence-based reading instruction. So, Rober Savage, how did the intervention study of Success for All turn out?

Outcomes for the full sample yielded a modest and nonsignificant effect of the intervention.

Oh. Hmm. But Hanford said there were “numerous studies” that showed it’s an effective reform! Maybe we’re just missing those studies but Hanford didn’t cite any of the studies in her reporting so I can’t tell you which studies she’s referring to.

Anyway, Savage concludes his overview of the reading research with a “Summary of effective evidence-based whole-class teaching.” Let’s take a look.

Together, then, there seems to be a picture of effective whole-class teaching that places a focus on systematic or “intentional” synthetic phonics work, likely strongly nuanced by aptitude and by treatment effects (e.g. Connor et al., 2009; Machin et al., 2018). It follows that teachers should ideally use formative assessments to guide their teaching so that it is sensitive to individual differences in children’s decoding, and language and meaning-focused needs. Different forms of activity may be used in a range of different contexts, for example, teacher-led, small group, individual work (Connor et al., 2020). Assessment-to-teaching activities are most likely to be cyclical in nature to be maximally effective. At-risk young readers may also need additional phonological awareness training to benefit from phonics and print exposure (Hatcher et al., 2004).

Wider evidence suggests the importance of placing phonics within the context of a quality language enrichment curriculum for all children (Stuebing et al., 2008). One way to do this might be to link phonics to the use of children’s books in whole-class teaching (e.g., Tse & Nicolson, 2014). Attention to the morphological aspects of English is likely to be important too (Goodwin & Ahn, 2013), though we currently lack evidence on effective whole-class interventions and their precise content. Finally, teacher PD to scale up principled interventions requires renewed attention. Most current attempts at professional development are “atheoretical” in not drawing strongly from relevant theories (Basma & Savage, 2021).

If you did spend the time on Freddie’s post, you’ll see that the research he reviews comes to similar conclusions. We just don’t have a strong evidence base for massive whole-school phonics overhauls or even for whole-class phonics instruction. When it comes to teaching phonics to whole classes of children, we have one RCT study that “has been the subject of some substantive methodological critique” and we have one intervention study that “yielded a modest and nonsignificant effect of the intervention.”

What should we do? What does the evidence say that teaching based on the science of reading should look like?

  • All students receive some systematic phonics instruction as they learn to read

  • Phonics instruction is only one part of a larger language learning curriculum

  • Students are frequently formatively assessed (this doesn’t necessarily mean a standardized test)

  • The results of those assessments target further phonics instruction for students who are struggling to learn to read

  • Kids considered at-risk or older children who struggle to read will also need further phonics instruction

That’s the science of reading folks.

Unfortunately, there’s some indication that instead of deploying their phonics instruction as part of “quality language enrichment curriculum” as “the science” suggests, schools are instead doing phonics and comprehension strategies almost exclusively. To quote Karen Vaites once more,

the three most book-rich curricula in America have the lowest market share, and “passage popcorn” programs have the largest share.

And almost no one discusses the issue. It’s a problem hiding in plain sight.

It’s understandable why schools might act this way. After being harangued for years about the need for phonics and how the Science of Reading demands getting rid of curriculums like Calkins’ Units of Study, where the focus is on reading high volumes of whole books, schools (or more likely state legislatures) did what the people asked. They got rid of book-rich balanced literacy and whole language curriculums and replaced them with highly structured phonics curriculums. Yet, when I pointed this out in a comment on that very article, the Curriculum Insights team lumped my comment in with several others and gave it the following treatment:

Our most recent column – “Why have books disappeared from many ELA curricula?” – quickly became our most-read, befitting the trend. It generated plenty of reactions.

As expected, we heard a loud chorus of concern, all the way up to Influential journalist Matt Yglesias, who featured our work in his recent column.

Yet we were surprised to see numerous comments from educators questioning the importance of reading whole books.

It seems pretty dishonest for the Curriculum Insights project to conclude that I am somehow against reading whole books! All I’m trying to point out is that the loss of whole-book reading is a response to demands to… drop whole-book reading curriculums. Acting surprised that schools are behaving in a way that they’re being asked to behave is silly and presents the problem as one originating in the schools rather than with the ever-changing demands that society places on them.

In closing

How many whole books are children in Mississippi reading? Nobody says. Isn’t a curriculum that follows the science of reading and embeds phonics instruction within a larger language learning framework that, presumably, includes reading whole books once kids get older just the thing we called balanced literacy until ten minutes ago when the term went out of fashion? If it’s not balanced literacy, you’ll have to explain to me why not. Why don’t we see any articles penned about the professional development and curriculum alignment work being done in Mississippi? Given that it’s one of the 3 or 4 pillars of Mississippi’s reforms, you’d think that people who throw around terms like “southern surge” would want to showcase the reforms in detail so that schools nationwide could adopt them. But they don’t! How many minutes per day of systematic phonics instruction do kids in Mississippi get? What kinds of interventions are targeted to poorly progressing readers (besides, of course, retention which we are told they don’t even do anyways)? How often are kids assessed for literacy? What kind of assessments are they? How are teachers supported in taking action based on the test results? Are whole classes re-taught phonics? Small groups? Who does that? Literacy Coaches? Teachers? Aides?

Now, I’ve looked into Mississippi’s NAEP scores and I think the gains are real but, I have questions. I have a million questions and, if we’re as curious and desiring of better reading teaching as Kelsey Piper or Idrees Kahloon say we should be, then I expect some goddamned answers! I think it means something when advocates for reforms seem to want to tell us less rather than more. I think it means something when discourse shifts away from the content and structure of reforms and on to someone’s pet political project. Mississippi’s reforms have nothing to do with the status of unions in their state. Teachers unions are not blocking the teaching of phonics any more than they are blocking the teaching of addition. Mississippi’s reforms are not reliant on GOP governance and other southern surge states saw Democrats implement similar reforms while northern states with middling performance saw a totally different set of reforms under their Republican leaders. The national political parties are not the instrumental difference here.

Moreover, Mississippi is bucking present conservative trends. Mississippi legislators rejected a measure to create a state ESA/voucher system and conservatives in that state are finding its schools’ NAEP success to be inconvenient as the Republican governor, “Tater Tot” Reeves (I shit you not) prepares a special legislative session to attempt passing school vouchers again. If the state’s schools are such a success and a flapping banner held high to show that red states with Republican leadership can improve public schools, why are they so adamant to give students a way out of public schools? The move appears to be an effort by national Republican leaders to push the state to accept a federal voucher plan in lieu of Mississippi itself paying for the vouchers. The Heritage Foundation, of course, is leading the charge.

That brings me to a final point which is that all of this discussion is happening internally on the liberal-left spectrum of American politics. Guys, we’re the only ones who care if public schools are good. Conservatives no longer need their erstwhile neoliberal school reform allies in order to accomplish their political goals related to schooling. Indeed, they’ve dropped the language of improving education or getting better outcomes altogether.

ESAs represent a definitive and principled move beyond school choice to parental choice. While these terms have been used interchangeably for decades, education reformers historically have focused on giving parents choices among different types of schools (district, charter, and private) rather than between schools and other educational options.

an underappreciated variable is the shift in messaging by parental-choice advocates. For decades, advocates focused on the imperative of improving academic outcomes among disadvantaged students by giving poor children access to better schools. As Howard Fuller, architect of the nation’s first modern private-school-choice program, once observed, the battle for parental choice has become “more of a rescue mission than a fight for broad societal change.”

Some aspects of this “rescue mission” rhetoric continue to animate the fight for universal ESAs—especially dispiriting evidence about the negative effects on student learning of remote instruction during the pandemic. However, the compelling case for universal parental choice is not about improving academic achievement or spurring competition. It is about empowering parents—all parents—to take control of their children’s education. The battle over universal ESAs, in other words, is “a fight for broad societal change,” centered on the argument that parents should be entrusted with decisions about the education of their children.

I’ve noted previously that one outcome of school reform has been to create a more chaotic public school system, one in which parents are increasingly alienated from school governance, in which administrative burdens do the work of segregating kids from different backgrounds, and in which caveat emptor is at the core of American schooling. If even apparent successes like Mississippi do not have champions on the right, and people on the left are too busy batting around headlines and buzzwords than actually doing policy careful evaluations, I don’t think we’ll have a miracle much longer.

Thanks for reading!