Deception: How the 100,000 Studies Lie and the “Five Pillars” Lie are Jeopardizing the Future of Children in America

There is credible evidence that two deceptions have been perpetrated on the American people, and that these inseparable deceptions have been codified in federal and state laws that are ubiquitously accepted as based on “settled” science.

There are university professors and classroom teachers who have been silenced and their careers ended because their research and teaching expose the lies.

The first of these deceptions is the lie that the National Reading Panel (NRP) conducted a rigorous analysis of 100,000 reading studies. It did not.

The lie is invariably written with authority. MASS READS/NCTQ presents it as “REALITY” to the Massachusetts State legislature in support of Senate Bill 338 which is currently under consideration by the MA Joint Committee on Education.

The MASS READS Right-wing consortium states, “Thousands of meta-analyses and peer-revied studies support evidence-based literacy, including the 2000 National Reading Panel’s report, which reviewed tens of thousands of citations.”

The 100,000 lie framed the Student Achievement Partners (SAP) report on Lucy Calkins’ Units of Study curriculum issued in January 2020 by Susan Pimentel, co-founder of SAP. The SAP deception changed the public’s perception of how young children should be taught to read and the report was used against Calkins in the Massachusetts lawsuit in which she was a defendant.

Pimentel’s biography states that she specializes in standards-driven school reform. She is the Vice-Chair of the National Assessment Governing Board created by Congress to set policy for NAEP, also known as “The Nation’s Report Card.”

On November 8, 2018, Pimentel published an article that populated several Right-Wing websites including the Thomas B. Fordham Institutes’ Flypaper, Education Week and Reading Rockets, in which she stated, “Almost two decades ago, the National Reading Panel reviewed more than 100,000 studies and arrived at recommendations for how students should receive daily, explicit, systematic phonics instruction in the early grades.”

“Why is this literacy research not more widely known?” Pimentel asks, “Why is the fact that reading skills need to be taught, and that there is a well-documented way to do it.”

Pimentel responds to her own question, stating, “Recently, a remarkable audio-documentary by Emily Hanford went viral shining a spotlight on such crucial literacy research.”

Hanford’s “audio-documentary” as Pimentel describes it, was the focus of the September 9, 2025, Substack post, “How Emily Hanford’s “Sold a Story” Became a Conduit for the Public Dissemination of the Right-wing’s Project 2025 Agenda to Affect State Laws and Reshape Reading Instruction in Public Schools.”

In the September post, I wrote that Hanford was wrong about the thousands of studies, wrong about the findings of cognitive psychologists, wrong about Lucy Calkins, wrong about and Units of Study, wrong about Marie Clay, and wrong about Reading Recovery, and wrong about all the other great scholars whose lives and work she has eviscerated.

What is important here is that the 100,000 studies lie is embedded in multiple sectors and it has been weaponized. The upcoming Substack post in which I deconstruct the 2020 SAP report on Calkins’ Units of Study and the 2025 Massachusetts lawsuit in which Calkins was a defendant, along with Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell of Fountas and Pinnell, provides credible evidence that both the report and the lawsuit were politically and financially motived and that neither the SAP report or the Massachusetts lawsuit were based on science.

I have presented the actual number of studies in my December 8, 2025, Substack, but I am repeating them because they are central to this post. The NRP did not review 100,000 studies. It’s propaganda. The NRP identified 1,962 Phonemic Awareness (P/A) studies and 1,373 Phonics studies. Key words and phrases in the abstracts were used to reduce the number of P/A studies to 52 and Phonics studies to 38. The entire P/A and Phonics meta-analyses were reduced to 90 studies. Written numerically:

100,000 = 52 + 38

But the actual number of viable P/A and Phonics research studies was even smaller. Between 2005 and 2017 the Institute of Education Sciences – What Works Clearinghouse (IES-WWC) reviewed and rejected another 14 of the P/A studies and 11 of the phonics studies, primarily for non-equivalent treatment and control groups of children, but also for other failings.

Thee 100,000 studies lie hid from Congress and the American people that there were only 38 viable P/A studies and 27 viable phonics studies in the NRP‘s meta-analyses that has been used to reshape reading instruction in U.S. public schools. Again, numerically stated:

100,000 = 38 + 27

For the record: Fluency = 91; Comprehension = 254 or 259; Teacher Education & Reading Instruction = 32; Computer Technology = 21; Grand Total High = 500; Grand Total Low = 462.

The reason it is important that the public knows the actual numbers is that the 100,000 lie is the basis of the “five-pillars” lie. All, or almost all, federal and state laws from 2001 to the present day include five “essential components of reading instruction” which means explicit and systematic instruction in:

(A) phonemic awareness

(B) phonics

(C) vocabulary development

(D) reading fluency, including oral reading skills, and

(E) reading comprehension strategies

The following iconic graphic of the ““five pillars”” has become ubiquitous. There are many versions used in multiple sectors of U.S. society, but they are all basically the same. This one is on the Arizona Department of Education website.

The 100,000 studies lie is also used by the federal and state governments to impress on the public that the NRP selected experimental studies that employ systematic, empirical methods that draw on experiments. The NRP did not. We are also told that the NRP used rigorous data analyses to support the finding that there are “five-pillars” of reading instruction. They did not. There are not.

The quantitative Forensic Analysis applied these criteria both to the Phonemic Awareness and Phonics meta-analyses of the NRP and to the individual research studies the NRP selected and include in the P/A and Phonics meta-analyses. My next Substack post will focus on this quantitative analysis and will provide documentary evidence to support the statement that the NRP did not apply the criteria used in empirical experimental research as they state.

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Reading First were Built on the 100,000 Studies and Five Pillars Lies

Phonemic Awareness and Phonics are two of the foundational pillars presented by George W. Bush to the U.S. Congress. In a letter to Congressional leaders transmitting his Education Reform Plan the President wrote:

January 23, 2001

Dear Mr. Speaker:

Enclosed please find my blueprint for nationwide education reform entitled, ‘‘No Child Left Behind.’’ I look forward to working with the Congress to ensure that these principles are turned into acceptable legislation that leaves no child behind.

Sincerely,

GEORGE W. BUSH (caps in record)

In the subsection “Improving Literacy by Putting Reading First,” Bush and his administration state:

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.

In the blueprint Bush also states, “The Reading First initiative builds upon these findings by investing in scientifically-based reading instruction” – signifying his intent to reshape how children are taught to read in U.S. public schools.

NCLB presented the NRP view of phonemic awareness and phonics as distinct skills that are deeply interconnected and considered by the Panel to be the “engine” that allows a child to transition from hearing spoken language to decoding written text. The NRP, and subsequently the proponents of the “Science of Reading,” regard the reading process as a mechanical skill that begins with the smallest units of print (letters/graphemes) and mechanically builds up to sounds, words, sentences, and finally meaning.

My remit is to present sufficient scientific evidence and associated documentation to expose the massive and unprecedented deception that has taken place. On the surface, the focus on the teaching of phonemic awareness and phonics seems reasonable enough. It is when these alphabetics are reduced to explicit skill sets that are devoid of meaning with the requirement of fidelity to approved commercial reading programs that children are thrown off kilter has reshaped how children are taught to read in U.S. public schools, negatively impacting their cognitive processing, reasoning, problem solving, and creativity.

The idea that P/A and phonics must be explicitly taught is a widely held belief in the reading field. Barbara Foorman et al, who conducted the Houston Reading Studies, which is the focus of the book Beginning to Read and the Spin Doctors of Science, states in the opening paragraph of an article published in 1998 in the Journal of Educational Psychology, “to speak one’s native language is a natural process in that explicit teaching is not required. Reading, in contrast, has been called an “unnatural act” (Gough & Hillinger, 1980) to emphasize the fact that one’s writing system relates to speech in an arbitrary way and, therefore, has to be taught.”

Foorman had three research articles selected for inclusion in NRP Phonics meta-analysis, including the 1998 article I just quoted which is, “The Role of Instruction in Learning to Read: Preventing Reading Failure in At-Risk Children.” All three Foorman and her co-researchers papers were subsequently rejected by the WWC, verifying the legitimacy of the analysis I presented in Beginning to Read and the Spin Doctors of Science in 1998.

The claim that there are 100,000 research studies to support the belief that phonemic awareness and phonics have to be explicitly taught is a central premise held by empiricists who consider themselves cognitive scientists or neuroscientists. Reid Lyon, whose PhD is in Student Placement Services but has long held that he is a neuroscientist, has ten maxims on teaching reading. The first is “Almost all children learn to speak naturally; reading and writing must be taught.” Lyon added “writing” in recent years.

Known as George Bush’s “Reading Czar” it was Lyon who was the Director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), who took up the request of Congress, in consultation with the Secretary of Education, to convene a national panel “to assess the status of research-based knowledge, including the effectiveness of various approaches to teaching children to read.” Lyon is also recognized as the chief architect of NCLB, and he is attributed have with writing Reading First. We will return to Lyon in a few pages when we begin the chronology of the 100.000 studies lie.

The Outmoded View Of “Science” Held By A Cadre Of Reading Researchers Has Contributed To The Spread Of The 100,000 Studies Lie And “Five Pillars” Lie

The false premise that reading is an “unnatural act” about “science” and about “reading” that is deeply rooted in the 100,000 studies and “five pillars” lies. In future Substack posts I will focus on the history of the narrow reductive view of “science” that remains widely held in the reading field. Here I will just give a few examples of the dysfunctionality of the field that provide insights and some indication of why the NRP report was not dismissed at the outset even though the NRP’s core principles about science were and still are fundamentally flawed.

You might at this juncture consider reading the Substack post I published on October 7, 2025, Observations of Young Children Writing Undermine Goldenberg and The “science of reading” Contention that “Phonics is the On-Ramp to Reading,” that provides a different scientific account of children early literacy development.

The post includes an interchange via zoom between Claude Goldenberg and Andrew Johnson, whose Substack handle is “Dr. Johnson’s Substack,” and I am going to pick up that thread. My focus here is on Goldenberg’s views on neuroscience and brain research on reading.

“This gets up back to the differences between acquiring oral language and acquiring written language,” Goldenberg says to Johnson. “I just want to delve into the brain for just a minute I gave my disclaimer of not being a neuroscientist.”

Goldenberg’s “disclaimer” occurred at 23:40 to 24:04 minutes into the audio which is available on Johnson’s Substack site, when he states, “I’m not a neuro, full disclosure I’m not a neuroscientist, … but what I know, what I believe I know, what, what, I think is true from the neuroscientists I’ve read, and interacted with, is that certain things need to happen in the brain in order to read, right?”

Following Goldenberg’s statement that he is not a neuroscientist he says, “but what I believe is true and I think have demonstrated … the data support the proposition that in order to be able to read there’s got to be created something that’s known as the ‘reading circuit’ or the ‘literacy circuit’ where areas of the brain that are involved in processing sound- phonology – and processing the visual representations – the orthography – connect with oral language how that makes meaning – the semantic aspects.”

Goldenberg says it himself – this is his “belief” system.

“How do you get kids to be able to read?” Goldenberg asks Johnson and then answers the question himself. “Once their word recognition skills are adequate, which means their decoding skills are adequate, then kick in context and meaning.” Goldenberg’s view is in-line with the NRP. It is reductive and linear. His argument is built on a false premise that can be traced back through Siegfried Engelmann and B.F. Skinner to Edward L. Thorndike at the beginning of the 20^th century – again expect future Substack posts.

“How do you get them to that point?” Goldenberg persists. “You can’t recognize a word unless you know it’s a word ahead of time and that you can recognize it.”

Goldenberg is declarative, “I think the evidence supports the idea that decoding it is the best first step towards word recognition because that’s the most reliable predictor of what the word is going to be. Far better predictor than context, pictures, syntax, anything – those kick-in after you use the first best clues.”

When Goldenberg states “the evidence supports the idea that decoding it (a “word”) is the best first step to word recognition,” he names Linnea Ehri and identifies one of her research studies as an exemplary example of research on explicit phonics approach to teaching children to read. Ehri was a member of the NRP, and her published articles defending the findings of the NRP that have been the focus of much attention in the forensic analysis.

The forensic analysis of the NRP phonemic awareness and phonics meta-analyses found that the NRP meta-analyses are so confounded that they do not provide the empirical evidence to support Goldenberg’s position. The Institute of Education Sciences - What Works Clearing House (IES-WWC) validates this finding of the forensic analysis. Many of the phonemic awareness and phonics studies were rejected by the WWC, and the forensic analysis concurs with the WWC and found that many of the studies selected by the NRP for the P/A and Phonics meta-analyses did not meet the scientific criteria that the NRP itself established. You will find an analysis of the Ehri paper that Goldenberg references that were written by Johnson posted on his Substack site, The Reading Instruction Show.

“With Regard To Cognitive Science, We’re Kind Of Pre-Galilean, Just Beginning To Open Up The Subject” Noam Chomsky

In a few paragraphs I will add Seidenberg to the Goldenberg thread, but before we go on, I want to draw your attention to the research and writings of Noam Chomsky who was one of the founders of cognitive science. Chomsky is important here because his views on cognitive science, neuroscience, language, and reading underscore the fundamental errors made by the NRP and why the country is on the wrong path in the way it is teaching children to read.

The fact that there only 52 P/A studies and 38 Phonics studies included in the NRP meta-analyses is of serious concern, but even more concerning is the fact that these 90 studies distort the science of how children learn to read and write, making the 100,000 studies lie and the “five pillars” lie both originating in the NRP report a double whammy in the deception of the public and compounding the consequences for children.

In an extended conversation with Yarden Katz, published in The Atlantic, November 2012, Noam Chomsky states, “It’s worth remembering that with regard to cognitive science, we’re kind of pre-Galilean, just beginning to open up the subject.”

Katz reminds us that in 1959 Chomsky wrote a searing critique of B.F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior. Chomsky argued that Skinner’s focus on external stimuli and reinforcement couldn’t account for the vast, generative nature of language whose inner workings remain largely a mystery. In his critique published in 1959. Chomsky writes, “It seems that Skinner’s claim that all verbal behavior is acquired and maintained in “strength” through reinforcement is quite empty, “ After a few sentences he states, “The claim that instruction and imparting of information are simply matters of conditioning is pointless.”

Chomsky’s 1959 critique of Skinner’s book is worth reading. Chomsky could have been writing about the compromised state of the reading field, the flaws in the NRP report, the studies the Panel selected that did not meet the criteria they had established for inclusion, and the consequences for children, and for American democracy. His critique of Skinner’s theories of operant conditioning and behaviorism is as relevant today as it was almost seventy years ago when Chomsky wrote it. But further insights can be gained from the preface to the critique of Skinner’s book that Chomsky added when the review was republished in the 1967 book Readings in the Psychology of Language.

“I find little of substance that I would change if I were to write it today,” Chomsky writes in the preface. “I had intended this review not specifically as a criticism of Skinner’s speculations regarding language, but rather as a more general critique of behaviorist (I would now prefer to say “empiricist”) speculation as to the nature of higher mental processes.” I added the italics to empiricist. The brackets and quotation marks are in Chomsky’s text.

Skinner is not referenced in the NRP report, but Siegfreid Engelmann is referenced 35 times. The public should know that Engelmann’s Direct Instruction (DI) methodology is deeply rooted in the radical Behaviorism of B.F. Skinner. The public should also know that Skinner ascribed the origination of his theories to Edward Lee Thorndike, who is attributed with establishing educational psychology as a distinct scientific field. Thorndike introduced quantitative methods using empirical data and statistics to develop tests for intelligence and learning.

Thorndike’s research and writings remain deeply embedded in twenty-first century educational psychometric research and empirical research in the reading field. This is so even though in 2020 Teachers College, Columbia University removed Thorndike’s name from “Thorndike Hall” – the building that was named for him – because Thorndike was a member of the American Eugenics Society (AES) and he held and promoted racist, sexist, antisemitic, and eugenicist views which he espoused in his writings.

In 1978 Thorndike was posthumously inducted into the Reading Hall of Fame, and he is recognized on the RHF website as a “pioneer” of the reading field. In an essay posted on the Reading Hall of Fame website in 2006 Lou Ann Sears writes that Thorndike was “key to educational psychology becoming a separate discipline.” She credits him with influencing No Child Left Behind and she states, “Thorndike’s thoughts and practices continue to dominate the public schools, colleges, and universities. The current obsession with lectures, quickly scored tests, midterms, finals, SATs, ACTs, GREs, and memorization may be crowding out real learning.”

Sears writes that Thorndike’s influence on teaching and learning was “profound” but not “positive.” She states, “What is often missing is the making of connections, the quest for the long term, and the genuine experiences that result in learning. Proponents of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (2002) may argue that this method works because it has measurable outcomes, and if testing equals learning, this statement may well be true. Thorndike can have no better advertisement” (pp. 134-135).

Thorndike recognized that his research and writings placed him in a position of power. Together with a cadre of psychologists and psychometricians at the beginning of the 20^th century, he weaponized science to manipulate men’s responses to government, religion, and education. Women could not vote, and except for teachers who he denigrated, Thorndike ignored them. The following quote is from Thorndike and Arthur Gates’ 1929 book, Elementary Principles of Education in which they focus on the use of Thorndike’s Law of Effect that is a central tenet of the NRP report and undergirds the ““five pillars”” of the “science of reading” today. Here’s Thorndike and Gates,

By it (Law of Effect) animals are taught their tricks; by it babies learn to smile at the sight of the bottle or the kind attention… It is the great weapon of all who wish – in industry, trade, government religion or education – to change men’s responses … (p. xx).

You don’t have to rely on my telling you that teaching children to read has been captured and weaponized, Thorndike and Gates told us so a hundred years ago.

While many scientific fields have moved on in the reading field, behaviorist and empiricist thinking endures because it has been politically and financially weaponized. It is a Thorndikian tool of the politically powerful, and a cash cow for the publishers of commercial reading programs that use the stimulus-response, operant conditioning protocols of Direct Instruction as the basis for lucrative, predominantly digital, reading programs. It has also become a money source for private investment pools of wealthy investors, using complex, aggressive strategies to generate high returns from textbooks, digital platforms, and assessments for public schools and universities, driving EdTech, digital learning, and AI, with key players that provide “science of reading” reading programs like Pearson, McGraw Hill, HMH, Lexia and Amplify.

Despite the extensive documentation, there has been no reckoning for the fact that the U.S. education system originates in the research and writing of a cadre of early 20^th century scholars at Harvard, Stanford, Columbia and other renowned universities, who were racists, antisemites, and eugenicists, and whose Behaviorist views of science were considered a great weapon. To this day there has been no accountability, and this set of circumstances frames the U.S. education system and it adversely impacts children’s lives and threatens the future of democracy

The links between Thorndike, Skinner and Engelmann are immutable, making it a priority that the public is aware that there are 35 references to Engelmann in the NRP report and that there are 83 references to Behaviorist Direct Instruction –the majority, if not all, of the studies that were selected for the P/A and Phonics meta-analyses are exemplars of Thorndike, Skinner, and Engelmann’s stimulus-response, operant conditioning, protocols of direct instruction.

The reading research studies initiated by Reid Lyon at NICHD in the 1990s were mostly, if not all, empirical studies grounded in Behaviorism. Similarly, the NRP’s P/A and Phonics meta-analysis, NCLB, Reading First, the Every Student Succeeds Act, the subsection on definitions codified as 20 USC 6368 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the “science of reading” state laws in more than 40 states, and the Massachusetts literacy bill moving through the state legislature, are all grounded in Behaviorism.

Returning to Chomsky to recap, Chomsky raised concern that Skinner’s behaviorist paradigm is fundamentally flawed. He argued that Skinner’s laboratory concepts are inadequate. I would add that Thorndike’s laboratory concepts were also inadequate. Chomsky asserted that terms like “stimulus,” “response,” and “reinforcement”—which have precise meanings in controlled laboratory experiments with rats or pigeons—become “vacuous” and “metaphorical” when applied to human speech, rendering these concepts unscientific. I agree with Chomsky and would add that the use of these laboratory concepts originating in Thorndike’s starving cats research and applied to children and subsequently to teaching reading are also unscientific.

In his 2012 conversation with Katz, Chomsky states, “it could be—and it has been argued in my view rather plausibly, though neuroscientists don’t like it—that neuroscience for the last couple hundred years has been on the wrong track.”

“I mean neuroscience is nowhere near as advanced as physics was a century ago,” Chomsky states, later in the conversion. “In fact, the reductionist approach has often been shown to be wrong.” Chomsky adds, “the core science might be misconceived as in the physics-chemistry case, and I suspect very likely in the neuroscience-psychology case.” Once again, I agree with Chomsky.

Chomsky has argued that human language is “infinitely creative.” Children can produce and understand an infinite number of sentences they have never heard before. He contends that a stimulus-response model cannot account for this productivity because the number of possible sentences is far too large to be learned through individual reinforcements.

“It should have been anticipated that NCLB would have a negative effect on teaching,” Chomsky is quoted as saying in an interview with Ryan Leach that occurred in 2010 and has been republished on multiple occasions. “If the purpose of teaching is to help children develop their sense of curiosity and independence of mind; and help them explore topics of interest to them and so on. If the goal is to create automatons, then it’s an effective program.”

Cognitive Scientists Who Studies Reading Are Short On Ways To Respond To The Linguistic And Cognitive Questions That Are Raised By Chomsky

It’s time to add Mark Seidenberg to the conversation. He mentions Chomsky in a sentence in Language at the Speed of Sight about the “generativity of language” on page 112, and in another sentence on “SIGN” and “sine” on page 133, but otherwise Seidenberg steers clear of Chomsky.

Seidenberg ignores Chomsky’s Skinnerian critique and his views on Behaviorism and Empiricism, and he doesn’t go near Chomsky’s concept of a “Language Acquisition Device” (LAD) that contains universal principles and parameters common to all human languages. Chomsky used LAD to support the idea of a shared mental blueprint that explains why all languages have features like questions, negation, and nouns/verbs, though specific rules vary. If reading is mechanical (it is not) LAD is largely irrelevant.

Cognitive scientists who studies reading are short on ways to respond to the linguistic and cognitive questions that are raised by Chomsky. It doesn’t seem to matter that the questions Chomsky raises challenge the underlying assumptions of their empirical research. Some cognitive scientists and reading researchers ignore the fact that Chomsky’s cognitive and linguistic research, and his political writings, call into question the legitimacy of the Federal and state laws that require “fidelity to the science of reading,” or that he calls out political and business leaders whose economic goals and business interests politicize and monetize how children are taught to read. They also ignore or quietly accept how behaviorist, empiricist approaches to teaching children to read are central to the Right’s openly stated political goal to reshape public education to impose authoritarian rule and ensure global US economic dominance.

For Chomsky, democracy is dependent on children becoming generative readers and writers and ultimately young people who seek out, read, and critically understand information that holds the existing power structures accountable, and enables a genuine, participatory democracy to function. Chomsky argues that a functioning democracy is dependent on people being informed, and in his writing, he makes the case that a functioning democracy is inextricably linked to reading and education. He argues that reading is a primary tool for individuals to “think through the way the world works” rather than merely accepting official narratives of “our place” in society and the world. If that was the case, I would be cooking on an open fire and carrying slops out the back.

The 100,000 studies lie and the ““five pillars”” lie are roadblocks that stop people questioning whether the ways children are being taught to read will prepare them for life in the 21^st century. For Chomsky and many scholars, including myself, reading is a language process for knowing the truth and for sustaining a functioning democracy. For Seidenberg, who enters the conversation here, like Goldenberg, Lyon, Ehri, Foorman, and the majority of the NRP, and many others in the reading field, “reading is a mechanical skill that must be taught.”

In a paper entitled “The Science of Reading and Its Educational Implications,” which is available in the NIH National Library of Medicine, Seidenberg writes “reading” is still a learned skill, an “unnatural act” in Gough’s memorable phrase.”

Seidenberg states, “the act of reading and comprehending text involves the coordination of cognitive, linguist, perceptual, motoric, memory and learning capabilities.” His conceptualization of “reading” is defined by a 1970s informational processing approach to cognition. Each of his descriptors becomes a category – “a thing.” “Reading” depends on the coordination of each conceptualized phenomenon. It’s a hypothetical mechanical view of the brain and of reading. The “categories” are important but not in the way Seidenberg conceptualizes the relationships between them.

Seidenberg calls this view of learning to read a “Modern Synthesis” that emerged from work conducted in the 1970s. I can attest that this is an accurate depiction. I studied for a Masters in the Psychology of Reading with Edward Fry between 1974 and 1977. One course was called “Informational Processing Approaches to Cognition.” I remember this because at the time it seemed the course was about pretending “this is the way the brain works.” There was no scientific evidence, just theories and models that were all based on assumptions that had no foundation in reality.

When I was inducted into the Reading Hall of Fame for my transdisciplinary research on literacy in both family and school settings, Ed Fry shook my hand and said, “You were one of us and we lost you.” I shook my head and said, “I was never one of you, but I am grateful for what I learned, even if it was not what you taught me.” I had two hearings for the masters degree in reading psychology. The first took place when it was time for me to analyze my data on the teacher-child dyadic interactions in two second grade reading classes. The hearing was arranged so I could gain the approval of my committee to use non-parametric statistics instead of parametric statistics. The professor who taught statistics was perplexed by my refusal to use parametric stats and he said at the hearing that in his forty years of teaching the advanced statistics course, I was the only student who had not dropped a point on any of the tests and exams. So, he said, it was beyond him why I wouldn’t use parametric statistics.

It was because I found the laissez-faire attitude experimental research in reading so problematic that I transferred to Columbia University to studies literacy from a transdisciplinary perspective that included anthropology, linguistics, sociology, and psychology. I used every course to do research on theories of knowledge, with special regard to language, literacy, and learning, and I wrote papers based on field research on how young children learn to read and write.

Seidenberg writes in the NIH National Library of Medicine paper that, “the empirical findings underlying the Modern Synthesis” of reading research have been summarized in several white papers and he names the 2000 National Reading Panel without any kind of analytic work to check out the NRP’s meta-analyses.

“The panel reviewed the scientific literature relevant to learning to read,” Seidenberg states, “having established explicit a priori criteria for what kinds of studies would be considered.” He writes, “Those criteria excluded studies that educators value: mainly, observational, quasi-ethnographic studies of individual schools, teachers, classrooms, and children that do not attempt to conform to basic principles of experimental design or data analysis.”

“The NRP report again offers a good illustration of the zeitgeist,” Seidenberg adds, a few pages on. “The report did a good job describing the main elements involved in learning to read, and the supporting evidence.”

No, it did not. The public should know that the “five-pillars,” as they became known, were established a priori. The panel began with them and ended with them. You can check this for yourselves. In the final NRP report on page 1-2, under the heading “Adoption of Topics to Be Studied.” The NRP states “the following topics for intensive study: Alphabetics - Phonemic Awareness Instruction and Phonics Instruction; Fluency; Comprehension; and Teacher Education and Reading Instruction. The “findings” were a foregone conclusion.

Seidenberg knows as a scientist that he has written these statements taking the NRP findings at face value without doing the work required of him as a scientist to establish the veracity of the findings of the NRP findings. Blind faith has no place in science.

The “scientific literature relevant to learning to read” that Seidenberg states the NRP “did a good job describing,” and the “supporting evidence” that he notes the NRP provided, have all the hallmarks of behaviorism. They favor predictable stimulus-response protocols and rejecting all theoretical and conceptual frameworks that challenge both the officially sanctioned arcane views of “science” and the maladaptive views of the teaching young children to read (and write) that can be traced back through Engelmann, to Skinner and finally to Thorndike.

Juxtaposing Chomsky With Seidenberg Focuses The Argument On Whether Reading Is A Language Process Along With Speaking, Listening, And Thinking, Or A Mechanical Skill That Is Not A Language Process And Has To Be Explicitly Taught

It should be noted here that the NRP considered the pronunciation of meaningless pseudowords as “reading” in the P/A and phonics meta-analyses.

For Chomsky phonics and the pronunciation of words is not a prerequisite for reading. He argues that other things are going on when people read. Talking with Katz in 2012 Chomsky states, “It has to do with fine motor coordination and things like that. Which takes place in the use of language, like when you speak you control your lips and so on, but all that’s very peripheral to language, and we know that. So for example, whether you use the articulatory organs or sign, you know hand motions, it’s the same language. In fact, it’s even being analyzed and produced in the same parts of the brain, even though one of them is moving your hands and the other is moving your lips. So, whatever the externalization is, it seems quite peripheral.”

Again, the Substack I posted on October 7^th is relevant. Remember the little girl with a big stick, drawing lines in the earth and each line representing a letter of her name and her mother’s name? Remember Nicola using a marker to write what letters she knew on her arms and legs and on her face to communicate her terror and her grief? Both children had agency, and they made signs to which others could read and respond. Think of the higher order cognitive skills of the child, two years and two months of age, drawing Charlotte and her web in a visual representation that we can all interpret (read) that was based on her listening to the story of Charlotte’s Web.

It is important that children learn to isolate and blend sounds, segment and manipulate phoneme-graphemes, and that they are taught to recognize anomalous aspects of “the code” like the schwa – the common vowel sound in unstressed syllables -- but it is equally important that children establish ownership, that they have agency, and that they gain a sense of their own capacity to communicate through reading and writing. We will pick up this thread on after a few more paragraphs on Seidenberg.

“People coming from the education side have little opportunity to gain an understanding of how research is conducted in relevant disciplines such as cognition, development, and neuroscience,” Seidenberg states. “Educators are unprepared to engage this science in a serious way because they lack the tools to understand what is studied, how it is studied, what is found, what it means, and its relation to other kinds of research.”

This is not my experience. On the contrary, my lifetime of working with teachers negates Seidenberg’s prejudice. Some of you might have read the accounts of teachers documenting children’s learning in From the Child’s Point of View or you might have a copy of Teaching without Testing which Garn Press published as a separate book. My plan is to share digital copies of these books on Substack once I have posted the major research findings of the forensic analysis of the NRP P/A and Phonics meta-analyses.

“Educators have assumed that basic skills are relatively easy to acquire,” Seidenberg states, expressing his opinion, then adds that in his view educators believe that “the teacher’s role is to promote literacy, not teach reading. “

I have never met a teacher who thinks basic skills are easy to acquire. I have spent years studying how teachers create collaborative instruction frameworks and document their students’ participation in authentic learning activities. It’s hard work. The teachers I know establish a teaching-learning continuum, teaching children directly when needed, and “standing back” when children are engaged in reading and writing projects and they need space to learn. The teachers with whom I have worked have had deep knowledge of child development and a similar advanced knowledge of linguistics. They know reading and writing should not be separated. They can identify the patterns that emerge of sound-symbol correspondence, and they can document the ontology of individual children’s knowledge of standard grapheme-phoneme relationships by analyzing their writing.

The following diagram was produced by a teacher in the Biographic Literacy Profiles Project (BLiPP) and illustrates the collaborative teacher-child teaching-learning continuum:

Like Goldenberg, Seidenberg Creates Hierarchical Structures With Scientists All-Knowing And Teachers Not Knowing Much

In the previous pages I have presented some serious challenges to the empiricist paradigm that Goldenberg, Seidenberg and others equate with being “a scientist.” Along with some notable cognitive scientists in the reading field and individuals in Right Wing Foundations like the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Goldenberg and Seidenberg have been vocal critics of Lucy Calkins, Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, personally denigrating them while attacking the reading programs – Calkins’ Units of Study and the reading resources that are named for Fountas and Pinnell. reading resources.

What the public might not know, probably doesn’t know, is that Units of Study, Fountas and Pinnell, and Reading Recovery are the only large scale reading programs for children that are not based on the false findings of the NRP, and that cannot be traced back through Engelmann to Skinner and ultimately to the eugenicist, Edward Lee Thorndike, who considered Behaviorism “a great weapon.” It is the ultimate irony that the reading programs like Units of Study and Fountas and Pinnell that are not based on the false findings of the NRP have been all but destroyed by the right wing foundations and Emily Hanford and her slick, fabricated, Sold a Story, while commercial reading programs sold by McGraw-Hill, HMH, Lexia, Amplify have been politically and financially weaponized – to use Thorndike’s turn of phrase.

The impact on teachers and children has been severe. The following interchange on Facebook in which classroom teachers expressed their concerns and tried to figure out how they could respond to the literacy bill that is pending in Massachusetts, provides verification that the state literacy acts that are based on the “100,000 “research studies lie and the ““five pillars”” lie are taking reading instruction in public schools in the wrong direction. Here is the teacher interchange:

“Ugh. I was hoping this grift wouldn’t hit MA which has such high results academically.”

“It is imperative for educators to not only be aware of these ‘trends and threats’ related to curriculum and educational policies and practices, but to also be willing and available to advocate for our profession and equitable delivery of quality services for each and every student.”

“Teachers need agency in their learning and provided the time to studies student learning needs necessary to change their practices.”

“I am living this nightmare in MO. I have watched as our state has pushed out similar mandates. We, too, gave up YEARS of work to move to a similar resource from a very similar list, which has shown no growth in our student’s achievement over the past two years. It is disheartening.”

“Same here in Alabama.

“Same Wisconsin.”

“Connecticut went this way two years ago. I’m on the BOE in my town raising all the questions, making all the points, but it doesn’t matter if the state mandates specific programs.”

“Texas is sinking with this sort of mess now. I had a large grant to do work with process writing in area middle schools. Tons of work. Nobody bit — several citing our legislation requiring vetted curricular materials. Some of our approved curriculum has bible stuff in it. Not even joking.”

Cognitive Research And Neuroscience In The Reading Field Is Way Behind The Research Of Scientists In The Media Lab At MIT And At The Cognitive Tools Lab At Stanford University Who Are Using Converging Approaches From Cognitive Science, Computational Neuroscience, And Artificial Intelligence To Reverse Engineer How People Use Physical Representations Of Thought To Learn, Communicate, And Solve Problems

I am interjecting here two references that I would have included discussions of if this post was not already too long. In an upcoming Substack being conducted at the Media Lab at MIT and at the Cognitive Tools Lab at Stanford University.

Nataliya Kos’myna and a team of scientists at MIT are studying cognitive engagement and cognitive load, to gain a deeper understanding of neural activations during the essay writing task. The research supports Chomsky’s view of reading as a language process and statements he has made that I have quoted in this 100,000 studies post.

The other scientist that is not only informing my thinking but also is verifying the positions I have taken is Judith E. Fan, the Director of the Cognitive Tools Lab in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University. Fan begins with the premise that drawing is a cognitive tool that makes the invisible contents of mental life visible. Fan and the team of scientists working with her are using converging approaches from cognitive science, computational neuroscience, and artificial intelligence to reverse engineer the human cognitive toolkit, especially how people use physical representations of thought to learn, communicate, and solve problems.

It is important to emphasize here that the research and thinking of Kos’myna and Fan on neuroscience, mind, brain, cognition, language, reading, writing and drawing are light-years ahead of the empirical research of cognitive psychologists in the reading field whose outdated research is controlling how children learn to read in U.S. public schools.

When I studied for a masters in the psychology of reading and took courses in informational processing approaches to cognition I wrote with a pencil and a typewriter. Similarly, my doctoral research and my doctoral dissertation were accomplished using a typewriter. The research paradigms framing federal and state reading laws in the middle of the third decade of the 21st century were developed at the beginning and first half of the twentieth century, before television let alone computers. It is the equivalent of teaching children to drive a horse and cart when they are living in an age of self- driving cars.

We will pick up the Kos’myna and Fan research in future posts, but here we will focus on the 100,000 studies lie that has been used to gaslight the public about how young children should be taught to read as the U.S. transitions from a democracy to authoritarianism.

Transitioning To Demonstrate How The 100,000 Studies Lie And Five Pillars Lie Are The Basis Of Federal And State Laws, The Foundation of Educational Publishers’ Reading Programs, And The Basis Of For Profit And Non-Profit Organizations That Evaluate Reading Programs– None Have Any Scientistic Legitimacy In Determining How Children Are Taught To Read In U.S. Public Schools

I am picking up the thread from the beginning of this post. On January 23, 2001, two days after his inauguration President George W. Bush sent to Congress a “Blueprint” which, he states in the foreword to the document, “represents part of my agenda for education reform.” In blue ink and in a bold font the Blueprint header states, “Transforming the Federal Role in Education So That No Child is Left Behind.”

In the subsection “Improving Literacy by Putting Reading First,” Bush and his administration state:

The Reading First initiative gives states both the funds and the tools they need to eliminate the reading deficit. 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.”

In the blueprint Bush also states, “The Reading First initiative builds upon these findings by investing in scientifically-based reading instruction” – verifying that Reading First was built on a lie.

On the same day that Bush introduced the “Education Reform Blueprint” to Congress, the NRP 100,000 studies lie was recorded in the Congressional Record:

The report clearly articulates the most effective approaches to teaching children to read, the status of the re- search on reading, reading instruction practices that are ready to be used by teachers in classrooms around the country, and a plan to rapidly disseminate the findings to teachers and par- ents. The report also constitutes the most comprehensive review of existing reading research to be undertaken in American education history. Panel members identified more than 100,000 research studies completed since 1966, developed and submitted them to rigorous criteria for their review.

A major finding of the report was that systematic phonics instruction is one of the necessary components of a total reading program. Similarly, the NRP also found that the sequence of reading instruction that obtains max- imum benefits for students should include instruction in phonemic aware- ness, systematic phonics, reading fluency, spelling, writing and reading comprehension strategies.

Lies about the 100,000 studies supporting the false finding that explicitly teaching phonemic awareness and phonics in kindergarten, first and second grade rapidly populated government, academic, corporate, public and private communication networks including conservative think-tanks focused on shifting public policies to the Right. Lobbyists of every stripe, along with the mainstream and social media, political, ideological, and financial foundations, and for profit and non-profit organizations joined in. All these groups had invested interests in controlling the nation’s public education system and remaking the thinking of the public about how young children should be taught to read as the U.S. transitions from democracy to authoritarianism.

Twice, the NRP stated in their report that they did not review 100,000 studies. Nevertheless, members of the NRP did not correct the use of 100,000 studies lie when they reviewed subsequent government reports in which the NRP 100,000 studies lie is restated, making some of the Panel complicit in the deception.

By 2002 the lie that the NRP reviewed 100,000 studies was embedded in the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and had also become embedded in people’s thinking. It had become a truthless “fact.” The lie became ubiquitous, reshaping the nation’s thinking about teaching children to read. But there was no mention of how young children learn to write.

On February 26, 2002, The Washington Post published an article by Valerie Strauss entitled “Relying on Science in Teaching Kids to Read,” in which she pushed back against the 100,000 lie:

The Department of Education says on its Web site that the reading Panel reviewed 100,000 studies on how students learn to read. Yet Donald N. Langenberg, chancellor of the University System of Maryland and head of the Panel, said the group rejected at least 90 percent of all reading studies because they were not up to scientific standards. In the end, Langenberg said, about 100 studies were considered; critics say it was closer to 40.

On July 10, 2002, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute published Put Reading First: The Research Building Blocks for Teaching Children to Read, Kindergarten through Grade 3. Janet Heffner was the author:

In April 2000, the National Reading Panel released Teaching Children to Read, its rigorous analysis of 100,000+ scientific studies concerning reading education. “Put Reading First,” by the “Partnership for Reading” (a collaborative effort of the “National Institute for Literacy”, the “National Institute for Child Health and Human Development”, and the “U.S. Department of Education”), summarizes the findings of that comprehensive studies in non-technical language. Intended for teachers and parents, the new Report stresses the value of an early start and analyzes five key areas of reading instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension.

On April 30, 2003, Joanne Yatvin, the dissenting member of the NRP, published an article entitled, “I Told You So! The Misinterpretation and Misuse of The National Reading Panel Report” in Education Week. Yatvin states:

Using electronic databases, the Panel estimated that over 100,000 studies of reading had been published between 1966 and 1998, when it began its review of the research literature. … In the end, 432 studies on nine topics were reviewed and Reported on.

Parenthetically, in her earlier Kappan article, January 2002 “Babes in the Woods: The Wanderings of the National Reading Panel,” Yatvin writes that 428 studies were reviewed. In the Education Week article, she puts the number at 432. The forensic analysis has established that the NRP reviewed between 462 and total 500 studies. The lack of a definitive number reflects the lack of clarity, especially in the Fluency category in which the sub-Panel did not conduct a meta-analysis and seemed to be disorganized and unclear about how to fulfill the objectives of their task authorized by Congress.

Irrespective of whether the total number of studies reviewed was 428, 432 or between 462 and 500 the low number of studies reviewed by the NRP did not come close to the 100,000 studies lie. Yatvin states in her 2002 Education Week article:

Government documents and press releases, and news articles based on those sources have continued to assert that the Panel reviewed 100,000 studies. Even the subtitle that the NICHD put on the Panel’s Report: “An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction,” misleads readers by implying that a comprehensive review of the field of reading research was undertaken.

Yatvin was ignored even though what she wrote was true. There were many publications in 2002 and 2003 that repeated the 100,000 studies lie. As noted previously, ignominiously, professional organizations also spread the lie.

In 2004 (no month) The National Association of School Psychologists (NASP) published a Report, Reading Instruction – Effective Strategies from The National Reading Panel, by Rhonda Armistead, Leigh Armistead, at Charlotte Mecklenburg. They write:

In 1997 Congress established the National Reading Panel to review research in reading instruction. The Panel reviewed more than 100,000 studies and then analyzed those of the highest quality, comparing the effectiveness of various instructional practices. The resulting Report of the National Reading Panel, Teaching Children to Read, provides parents and educators with evidence-based recommendations on how to teach basic reading skills to children.

By 2006 government agencies ensured that there was total coverage of the U.S. by the NRP 100,000 studies lie. In that year the federal government published a booklet entitled Put Reading First Booklet – Kindergarten Through 3^rd Grade. It was a collaborative initiative by the National Institute for Literacy, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the U.S. Department of Education. The booklet states:

The National Reading Panel (NRP) issued a Report in 2000 that responded to a Congressional mandate to help parents, teachers, and policymakers identify key skills and methods central to reading achievement. The Panel was charged with reviewing research in reading instruction (focusing on the critical years of kindergarten through third grade) and identifying methods that consistently relate to reading success. The Panel reviewed more than 100,000 studies. …

This guide, designed by teachers for teachers, summarizes what researchers have discovered about how to successfully teach children to read. It describes the findings of the National Reading Panel Report and provides analysis and discussion in five areas of reading instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension.

The Subgroup Chairs of the National Reading Panel are thanked in the front matter for their thoughtful and thorough comments. The NRP chairs named in the booklet are Linnea Ehri, Michael L. Kamil, S.J. Samuels, Timothy Shanahan, and Gloria Correro. Shanahan is included supporting the 100,000 studies lie, even though he stated in his 2003 article in The Reading Reacher entitled, “Myths About the National Reading Panel, he stated “the claim that we read and reviewed more than 100,000 studies is obviously ludicrous,” emphatically restating, “we definitely did not read and analyze 100,000 studies.”

Common sense would expect the 100,000 lie to eventually be forgotten but it hasn’t worked out that way. The forensic analysis found that the lie remains ubiquitous. Tracing the documents and the webs that connect would be a great civics lesson for high school or college students on how democracies die.

Fast forward to 2018, by which time the belief that the NRP reviewed 100,000 studies was firmly embedded in the American psyche. As noted at the beginning of this Substack post, it was in 2018 that the Fordham Institute published a blogpost on Flypaper by Susan Pimentel in which she stated, “Almost two decades ago, the National Reading Panel Reviewed more than 100,000 studies and arrived at recommendations for how students should receive daily, explicit, systematic phonics instruction in the early grades.”

November 5, 2019, the American Reading Company published an article by Brian Kingsley, entitled,“ Scaling Literacy Through Reading Science,” that was also published on the website of The School Superintendents Association (AASA)

“Twenty years ago, the National Reading Panel reviewed more than 100,000 studies and made evidence-based recommendations on how we teach reading — yet those practices continue to be missing from most classrooms. Today, the alarms are still sounding about the quality of reading instruction in K-12 education.”

February 20, 2020, the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), that was founded by the Fordham Institute, published a blogpost written by Amber Moorer entitled, “Better Reading Starts With Better Teacher Preparation.” Moore stated:

“In 2000, the National Reading Panel—convened by Congress and the National Institutes of Health—led an exhaustive review of more than 100,000 reading studies and generated incontrovertible evidence of what is effective in terms of reading instruction.

April 21, 2020, The 74 published an article by Patrick Riccards, entitled, “Twenty Years After the National Reading Panel, It’s Time for a Reading Rights Movement.” He states:

20 years ago, on a beautiful April morning in our nation’s capital, with the sun shining and the remnants of cherry blossoms hanging in the air, a crowd gathered in a room under the Capitol dome. In this same room, individuals written about in our history books debated wars, new national policies, constitutional amendments and federal budgets. But on this particular day in 2000, the room was used for a different yet equally important purpose: Congressional leaders gathered to hear the findings of the National Reading Panel. …

After determining that “Johnny can’t read” and that we were living in “a nation at risk,” the country was finally ready to shift from what was wrong to what could be done to fix it. The members of the Panel detailed nearly two years of examination of decades of research, and more than 100,000 experimental and quasi-experimental research studies, on what works to get virtually every child reading at grade level by fourth grade.

April 3, 2022, Riccards published another article on Medium.com entitled “Let’s Follow the Science of Reading - All the Science.” Riccards states:

It was followed in 2000 by the groundbreaking Teaching Children to Read report from the National Reading Panel, an effort that analyzed and documented more than 100,000 research studies on effective literacy instruction for young children.

June 14, 2023, David Boaz, who played a key role in the development of the CATO Institute and in establishing the libertarian movement, published on the CATO Liberty Blog, “The Phonics Resurgence.” Boaz writes:

Despite the fact that in 1997 Congress instructed the National Institute on Child Health and Human Development to work with the Department of Education to establish a National Reading Panel that would evaluate existing research and evidence to find the best ways of teaching children to read. The panel reviewed more than 100,000 reading studies. In 2000 it reported its conclusion, that the best approach to reading instruction is one that incorporates:

o Explicit instruction in phonemic awareness

o Systematic phonics instruction

o Methods to improve fluency

o Ways to enhance comprehension”

July 18, 2023, Dennis Ciancio at the IES Regional Educational Laboratory Program (REL) published an article entitled, by “The Importance of Comprehension in the Science of Reading.” Ciancio states:

Seminal work in the science of reading includes efforts by experts across multiple disciplines. The report of the National Reading Panel summarized more than 100,000 research studies about effective ways to teach children to read including emphasis on alphabetics, reading fluency, and reading comprehension.

July 20, 2023, RN Bookmark published an article by Anne Hauth entitled, “Scientific Findings on the Best Approach to Teaching Reading.” Hauth states:

In 1997, Congress asked the National Reading Panel to do the following four things: (1) Review all the research available (more than 100,000 reading studies) on how children learn to read. …

Based on its thorough analysis of the research, the National Reading Panel stated in 2000 that the best approach to reading instruction addresses five key components: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency and comprehension.

September 18, 2023, the Orton Gillingham Online Academy published “The National Reading Panel and The Big Five.”

Congress appointed a National Reading Panel (NPR) in 1997 to review reading research and determine the most effective methods for teaching reading. The NRP reviewed over 100,000 studies and analyzed them to see what techniques actually worked in teaching children to read.

September 23, 2023, Jean Davis of the Facebook Community Solutions Focus Group posted “Twenty-three years ago the National Reading Panel’s report refuted the whole language movement.” Davis writes:

In 1997, Congress called for a National Reading Panel to determine how best to teach reading. It reviewed more than 100,000 studies and in 2000, the panel published a 449-page report that was a crushing blow to the whole language movement. There was no evidence to show whole language worked and lots of evidence that teaching children the relationship among sounds, letters and spelling patterns improves reading achievement.

October 20, 2023, Christy Jones published on the Logic of English website “What is the Science of Reading?

Research studies show that unlike learning to speak, learning to read is not intuitive. The brain learns to read through explicit and systematic instruction. There are five main components to good reading instruction: phonemic awareness, systematic phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. These components were identified by the National Reading Panel when they released a report in 2000 that reviewed 100,000 studies.

Autumn 2023,Robert Bellafiore Jr., the research manager at the Foundation for American Innovation, (FAI) published an article in City Journal, entitled, “New York’s Literacy Flip - Gotham’s Overdue Embrace Of Phonics Reinforces The Need To Make Educational Research Available To Schools.” This article was also published on the FAI website on December 12, 2023. Bellafiore states:

A major government research effort in the late 1990s shows the problem. In 1997, Congress asked the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the Department of Education to develop a National Reading Panel to studies how kids learn to read. After reviewing 100,000 studies, the panel concluded in its 2000 report that the “best approach to reading instruction” incorporates “explicit instruction in phonemic awareness” and “systematic phonics instruction”—precisely what New York is adopting now, more than 20 years later.

Reading Programs Aligned With The National Reading Panel and the Deception that there are Thousands of Studies that Support the “Five-Pillars” of Reading instruction

Here are some of the commercial reading programs that have based their reading programs on the false findings of the NRP that have become ubiquitous in U.S. society. None of these programs are based on the findings of scientific research. These abridged verbatim notes are based on Internet searches using both AI and publishers’ websites conducted on December 10, 2025.

HMH Into Reading is based on the findings of the National Reading Panel (NRP), particularly its emphasis on the five core pillars: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. The program explicitly incorporates NRP principles for foundational skills.

McGraw-Hill’s Wonders and EL Education programs aim to align with the Science of Reading, which builds upon the National Reading Panel (NRP) findings, emphasizing systematic phonics, phonemic awareness, and other core literacy components,

Wonders explicitly states that it is built on the Science of Reading, aligning with NRP’s call for evidence-based methods. The program offers strong phonemic awareness routines (blending/segmenting), sound-spelling cards, and some explicit phonics, according to publisher responses and reviews. Timothy Shanahan, who was a member of the National Reading Panel, is recognized as an author of Wonders on the McGraw-Hill website. Shanahan was also a member of the group of reading scholars who negatively reviewed Calkins’ Units of Study for Student Achievement Partners.

Smarty Ants (McGraw-Hill Achieve 3000) is specifically designed to align with and is based on the findings of the National Reading Panel. The program addresses the five essential components of effective reading instruction identified by the panel. According to research documents provided by McGraw-Hill and Achieve3000 (which offers Smarty Ants), the program’s curriculum incorporates the core areas the NRP identified as critical for reading success. Its research-based curriculum and pedagogy were created under the advisement of a core team of educators from Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, including P. David Pearson, co-author of “Fact-Checking the Science of Reading.

El Education is recognized as a research-based model known for its focus on active learning, character development, and teamwork, supporting high achievement. Like Wonders, EL Education’s instructional strategies stem from literacy research, including the National Reading Panel’s findings that highlight phonemic awareness, phonics, and other key areas.

Amplify publishes core research based literacy programs all grounded in the Science of Reading, and the findings of the National Reading Panel for K-5 foundational skills and supplemental tools, which are adaptive K-8, for personalized practice, plus interventions like mCLASS for assessment and targeted support.

Amplify hosts a Science of Reading podcast on which Timothy Shanahan who was a participant on the National Reading Panel has been interviewed on multiple occasions. Including an episode entitled, “Behind the scenes of the National Reading Panel with Tim Shanahan” (Season 2, Episode 8), published around December 7, 2022

Wit & Wisdom is a “science of reading-aligned” core curriculum that builds on the National Reading Panel’s (NRP) findings, emphasizing systematic skill-building, moving away from balanced literacy by integrating phonics and explicit instruction within engaging, content-driven modules.

LETRS, which is a professional development program, is fundamentally aligned with and uses the findings of the National Reading Panel (NRP). The NRP report established an evidence base for five essential components of effective reading instruction, and LETRS is structured around these components within the framework of the “Science of Reading”

Non-Profit Organizations That Review Reading Programs and Instructional Materials based On the Science of Reading and the Findings of the National Reading Panel Report and Therefore The Reports they Produce Have No Scientific Legitimacy

Again, the text is verbatim from AI and the websites of the organizations.

National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) heavily cites and bases its reading instruction standards on the National Reading Panel (NRP) report, viewing the NRP’s findings (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension) as the authoritative source for “science-based reading instruction.” NCTQ’s reports examine teacher preparation programs to see if they align with these NRP-identified components, using the NRP report as a benchmark for assessing reading coursework.

EdReports states on its website that the National Reading Panel identified five essential components every child must master to be a competent reader: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. A quality reading program, well implemented, teaches each of the five components systematically, explicitly, and with planned connections to the others.

ExcelinEd heavily relies on the National Reading Panel’s findings, using its identification of the five core components phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension as foundational to its “science of reading” initiatives, advocating for research-based approaches.

The Reading League (TRL) uses and references the National Reading Panel (NRP) report, viewing it as a foundational document whose core findings on phonemic awareness and phonics remain valid, while TRL also publishes resources and updates that build upon or provide perspectives on the NRP’s work, aligning with the broader “Science of Reading” movement. They provide access to the report and feature articles that discuss its implications in order to confirm its relevance for understanding how children learn to read.

Reading Rockets heavily relies on and frequently references the National Reading Panel (NRP) Report, using its foundational findings, particularly the ““five pillars”” (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension), as a core framework for effective reading instruction, while also acknowledging ongoing research and balancing perspectives.

Reading Rockets cites the NRP findings and discussions from experts like Timothy Shanahan, who affirms the enduring validity of the National Reading Panel’s evidence-based recommendations.

Reading Programs that Are Not Aligned with the National Reading Panel that Have Been Maligned and Irreparably Damaged by Attacks Based on the False Findings of the National Reading Panel

Units of Study was developed by Lucy Calkins based on her experiences of being a teacher and her writing research in which she collaborated with the renowned scholars including Donald Graves and Nancy Atwell who in 2015 was the first recipient of the Global Teacher Prize.

Calkins’ development of Units of Study can also be traced to John Rawls’ Theory of Justice, and in my opinion, Calkins presents reading and writing as language processes that are in keeping with Chomsky view of language and the research of the MIT Media Lab and Stanford University’s Cognitive Tools Lab.

Here I’d like to encourage you to return to the beginning of this post and to reread the paragraphs on Susen Pimentel. Following the post on the forensic analysis of the National Reading Panel P/A and Phonics meta-analyses I will upload the analysis I did of the Student Achievement Partners report on Calkins Units of Study. Upfront, Pimentel frames the narrative with the 100,000 studies lie and the false findings of the “five pillars” of reading instruction. The damage that was done by that report to Calkins and her life’s work is incalculable, but so is the role Pimentel’s false narrative has had in gaslighting the public.

Fountas and Pinnell developed by Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, both classroom teachers, who collaborated for many years with Dame Marie Clay. The materials they have developed were designed for teachers by teachers, and for literacy leaders and district administrators. Again, John Rawls A Theory of Justice comes to mind and the materials Fountas and Pinnell developed provide a portal through which children can engage in reading and writing in the 21^st century that “fits” with Chomsky’s thinking, and can be adapted to accommodate the findings of the MIT Media Lab and Stanford University’s Cognitive Tools Lab.

Reading Recovery – a lot could be written, all the above and then some. The forensic analysis of the NRP focused for several months on the studies of Tunmer and Hoover and Iversen and Hoover that focused on Reading Recovery. It was possible to numerically demonstrate in the quantitative forensic analysis that the NRP misrepresented the data and the findings of both studies, and that the original studies were also misrepresented. Again, expect a Substack post shortly.

The Greatest Threat To Democracy In America Is The Transmutation Of How Young Children Are Taught To Read In U.S. Public Schools

It’s time to step back. Around the globe democracies are failing and the rise of fascism seems inexorable. In the U.S. individual freedoms are being taken away, voting rights are in jeopardy, freedom of expression is being challenged, and equality before the law is a fading aspiration.

But the greatest threat to democracy in America is the transmutation of how young children are taught to read in U.S. public schools. The flawed science of the NRP that is being used in the production and marketing of digital reading programs that place children for long hours in front of computer screens is interfering with healthy brain development. We will pick up this thread in the post on the research of scientists in the Media Lab at MIT and at the Cognitive Tools Lab at Stanford University.

John Lynch, the CEO of HMH, which publishes Into Reading calls this “a new paradigm in education” and “a new vision for our future.” Lynch states, “The K–12 education paradigm is shifting. As an education community, we know it. We feel it. We have changed. We have seen the accelerated adoption of technology over the past few years.”

A few sentences later Lynch states, “And it is from this vantage point that an ideal future state for K–12 learning comes into view—one that seamlessly integrates the very best of technology.” Wrong. HMH states on the technology company’s website “Building a reading brain requires effective instruction and practice,” and HMH cites “the groundbreaking report by the National Reading Panel in 2000,” for the scientific evidence that HMH is using in the January 2026, HMH eBook, Science of Reading At Your Fingertips: What You Need to Know. Gough is included in the references along with Seidenberg, both of whom consider reading “unnatural.”

The HMH eBook quotes Maryanne Wolf stating, “We were never born to read.” This statement cannot be scientifically verified.

In The Atlantic, 2012 conversation with Katz, Chomsky talks about externalization and the internal thought system. Here’s Chomsky:

A chick in some species acquires the song of that species but doesn’t produce it until maturity. During that early period, it has the song, but it doesn’t have the externalization system. Actually, that’s true of humans too, like a human infant understands a lot more than it can produce—plenty of experimental evidence for this, meaning it’s got the internal system somehow, but it can’t externalize it.

When young children, babies, hold a book and make the sound of someone reading to them, when they make scribble writing on paper and say they are writing a letter to grandpa, when they draw visual representations as young as two years of age and they are drawing Charlotte and her web, it is reasonable to state that they are activating internal thought systems. When children learn to read before they go to school, they are doing the same. Too many children learn to read without formal instruction for reading to be “unnatural” – an external skill that must be taught.

In the HMH iBook Wolf is quoted as stating humans invented reading “and with this invention, we rearranged the very organization of our brain, which in turn expanded the ways we were able to think which altered the evolution of our species.”

Again, a response from the 2012 The Atlantic conversation between Katz and Chomsky, only this time it is Katz who tells a story of the geneticist and Nobel prize winning biologist Sydney Brenner who called a particular approach to mapping brain circuits a “form of insanity.” This is my assessment of the HMH eBook, Science of Reading At Your Fingertips: What You Need to Know. Most of the analysis of the 100,000 studies lie and the five-pillars lie apply to the HMH reading program, On-Reading.

Alarms should be going off at HMH promoting Into Reading’s capacity to “build a reading brain.“ The HMH view of both the “brain” and “reading” is not supported by science. The research of Kos’myna and a team of scientists at MIT studying cognitive engagement and cognitive load and the research of Fan, at the Cognitive Tools Lab at Stanford University on converging approaches from cognitive science, computational neuroscience, and artificial intelligence should impress on us that statements made in the HMH eBook about the brain are nothing more than supposition. HMH is marketing hypotheticals based on bad science. The following graphic, which is on page 17 of the HMH eBook, Science of Reading At Your Fingertips, brings into sharp focus how false narratives about scientific research on reading are being used to deceive all sectors of society about teaching children to read and write.

This is the “research” that is being used by HMH, McGraw-Hill and other educational publishers, now calling themselves technology companies, that can be traced back through the use by the NRP of Engelmann’s research studies using operant conditioning and stimulus-response experiments, through Skinner to Thorndike in the last decade of the 19^th century.

The reality is that the “evidence-based practices” of the new educational technology companies originate in Thorndike’s starving cats research which he used in the development of the Law of Effect, which Thorndike called a “great weapon,” that originates in Thorndike’s doctoral research with starving cats, which he used to describe the learning of babies and small children.

The question we must ask is what if the global shift to digital platforms and “learning technology” is an accelerant of the negative impact of the NRP’s flawed science on teaching children to read? What if shift to digital platforms and learning technologies is a multiplier of Thorndike’s great weapon?

The question we must ask is what are the consequences of using a research paradigm developed over 100 years ago as the basis of reading instruction in U.S. public schools in the 21^st century? What are the consequences for children, for schools, and for U.S. Society?

Happening now, there is considerable evidence that the alignment of renowned researchers in the reading field with right-wing political power-brokers has influenced federal and state legislatures, and that the reading field also bears considerable responsibility for the corporate capture of how children are taught to read in U.S. public schools. Future Substack posts will show that these dangerous liaisons have a long history, and that some interconnections, established more than one hundred years ago, are exacerbating the unpredictable and hazardous conditions in which children live and learn to read and write in school.

Instead of perseverating on the flawed findings of the NRP, federal, state, and local governments should be focused on how we can engage with children to ensure they become resilient, resourceful problem solvers who, of necessity, must develop the capacity to become changemakers if they are to survive in this increasingly hazardous world. This is not hyperbole. A full analysis of the adverse life experiences of children in the U.S. is included in the November 8, 2025, Substack post, Children are Hungry! In The U.S. Children are Experiencing an Unprecedented Acceleration of Life-Threatening Dangers that Constitutes a Public Health Emergency and an Education Crisis.

Children will need to be able to apply scientific insights to many life-threatening circumstances that we cannot even imagine. Events will take place that require of them multiple ways of knowing and that require of them the development of inventive solutions that do not exist in the present day. There is ample scientific evidence that such higher cognitive learning begins well before children enter kindergarten, signified by very young children’s engagement with reading and writing through the meaningful marks they make on paper as early as the second year of life. The October 7, 2025, Substack post, Observations of Young Children Writing Undermine Goldenberg and The “science of reading” Contention that “Phonics is the On-Ramp to Reading” provides a detailed account of the emergence of textual cohesion in the early morphological productions by two-year-old children.

Multiple Intersecting Data Sets Provide Convincing Evidence That From The Beginning Of The 20^th Century Researchers In The Reading Field Have Brought Into Alignment The Political And Corporate Power Structures That Now Control How Young Children Are Taught To Read In U.S. Public Schools.

The domination of the big money is a well-documented fact. George Hruby’s 2023 diagram of Veritas Capital published in Journal of Reading Recovery entitled, “The science of Readingpolitik: A commentary,” provides the evidence that decisions about how young children are taught to read in U.S. public schools are dominated by market forces, and that hedge funds and private equity firms now own the educational publishing companies that produce the reading programs for huge profits.

Veritas Capital states, “We are a premier technology investment firm with an in-depth knowledge and understanding that uniquely focuses on the intersection of technology and government. … The firm seeks to invest in technology companies operating in the software, aerospace & defense, communications, education, energy, national security, ...” (web descriptions retrieved October 21, 2024).

Veritas Capital acquired Into Reading which is published by HMH in 2022. Veritas assets have increased from 2 billion to 44 billion since Ramzi Musallam became CEO in 2012, and his personal wealth has also grown to 9 billion. “Partnering with Veritas will provide HMH with the opportunity to accelerate our momentum and increase our impact.”

Kristal Kuykendall, editor of The Journal, which explores current ed tech trends and issues impacting K–12 educators, quotes the HMH press release which states, “As the promise of digital learning increasingly takes hold across the nation, we are confident this transaction will deepen our ability to bring the power of learning to even more teachers and their students, invest in our purpose-driven team, and have a positive impact on the communities we serve.”

Switching to McGraw-Hill. Platinum Equity originally acquired McGraw Hill in 2021 for $4.5 billion, and still owns McGraw Hill, though they took the company public in a July 2025 IPO, retaining majority control (over 85%), and remaining the largest shareholder as McGraw Hill now trades on the NYSE under the ticker MH.

Primary source data supports the statement that McGraw-Hill tipped the scale on the Houston Reading Studies and was instrumental in the orchestration of George W. Bush becoming President. McGraw-Hill is the publisher of Wonders and Achieve 3000, which includes Smarty Ants. The McGraw-Hill’s website states, “our digital platforms adapt to help meet learners where they are and advance with them as they progress toward their goals” (retrieved October 21, 2024).

In late 2024, when I was researching how hedge-funds and private equity firms now control how children are taught to read, the Platinum Equity, website stated, “The firm specializes in private equity buyouts and has over 29 years of transacting across geographies, industries and transaction types. In addition to our core buyout capabilities, Platinum is active in the credit asset class, investing in the private and public debt of underperforming, undermanaged, undervalued companies, primarily in North America” (retrieved October 21, 2024).

Platinum Equity states on its website that it is interested in accelerating McGraw Hill’s digital growth. Writing in Ed Week Market Brief, June 16, 2021, David Saleh Rauf states, “One of the biggest companies in education, McGraw Hill Education has in recent years become more focused on digital education products, seeking to recast its mission as a “learning science company” McGraw Hill would become the first education company in Platinum Equity’s portfolio.”

Rauf writes, “The private equity firm’s portfolio includes about 40 diverse companies, ranging from a provider of wind turbines to a marine contractor that specializes in cruise ship interiors to a company that specializes in frozen seafood products to the NBA’s Detroit Pistons franchise.” For Platinum Equity, children in school who are being taught to read using McGraw-Hill’s Wonders are a product on par with a shoal of frozen fish.

Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology encourages us to consider how the acquisition of McGraw-Hill and HMH by Veritas Capital and Platinum Equity “exposes the ideas that have sustained inequality for the past millennium.” The acquisition of McGraw-Hill by Platinum and HMH by Veritas reveals how sectors of rich privilege in U.S. society are draining public education tax money that should go directly to teaching children to read and to public education.

We also know that the academics in the reading field have also been complicit by consulting with these companies which requires of them that they hold on to a behaviorist empirical research paradigm that originated with Edward Lee Thorndike who was a self-declared racist and eugenicist – a paradigm that E.F. Skinner and Seigfried Engelmann advanced and that the NRP used as the basis of their P/A and Phonics meta-analyses. Just a reminder, earlier in this post I noted that Engelmann is referenced 35 times and Direct Instruction 83 times in the NRP report. The Right weaponized the lies about the NRP report and used the P/A and Phonics meta-analyses to gaslight the mainstream media and the public. Praised by the Right, Emily Hanford has acted as an accelerant. The damage her podcast, “Sold a Story,” has done is incalculable.

These are the “factors” that made it possible for the Heritage Foundation, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, the National Council of Teacher Quality (NCTQ) that Fordham founded, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Hoover Institution that all have used the false findings of the NRP to take control of how children are taught to read in U.S. public schools.

Chomsky reminds us that language is power and whether the United States has a democratic or authoritarian system of government depends on how children are taught to read and write. The idea that reading is “unnatural” is a fallacy, a false premise, that is rooted in ideological bias that has more to do with politics and finance than language, literacy, or learning.

It is also important that the public knows that children are being monetized and politicized based on the flawed findings of the NRP. In the present political climate these machinations lead to the conclusion that teaching children to read in U.S. public schools is about gaining power and making money. It has nothing to do with children becoming readers and writers in ways that prepare them to live in an increasingly hazardous world in which their survival is uncertain.

We end where we began. The 100,000 studies lie has been used by the federal and state governments to impress on the public that the NRP selected experimental studies that employ systematic, empirical methods that draw on experiments. The NRP did not. We are also told that the NRP used rigorous data analyses to support the findings presented in the report. The NRP did not. In the next post I will present the quantitative evidence from the forensic analysis of the NRP P/A and Phonics meta-analyses, and any doubts left about the dangers of basing reading instruction in U.S. public schools on the findings of the 2000 National Reading Panel will be dispelled.

Thank you for reading. Please share this post if you have an opportunity.

References

Adams, M. J., Fillmore, L. W., Goldenberg, C., Oakhill, J., Paig, D. D., Rasinski, T., and Shanahan, T. (2020, January 16). Comparing reading research to program design: An examination of Teachers College Units of Study. Student Achievement Partners. Downloaded from: https://achievethecore.org/page/3240/comparing-reading-research-to-program-design-an-examination-of-teachers-college-units-of-study

Armbruster, B. B., Lehr, F., Osborn, J., Adler, C.R. (Editor), Noonis, L. T. (Designer).

(2006, 3rd Edition). The research building blocks for teaching children to read: Put reading first, kindergarten through grade 3. The Partnership for Reading: A collaborative effort of the National Institute for Literacy, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the U.S. Department of Education. Downloaded from: https://lincs.ed.gov/publications/pdf/PRFbooklet.pdf

Armstead, R, and Armstead, L. (2004). Reading instruction: Effective strategies from the national reading panel. National Association of School Psychologists. Downloaded from: https://resources.finalsite.net/images/v1683191789/hersheyk12paus/f1joulpfblvfxeznxub0/filedownloadashx_11.pdf

Bellafiore, R. (2023, December 12). New York’s literacy flip: Gotham’s overdue embrace of phonics reinforces the need to make educational research available to schools. Foundation for American Innovation/City Journal. Downloaded from: https://www.thefai.org/posts/new-york-s-literacy-flip and https://www.city-journal.org/article/new-yorks-literacy-flip

Boaz, D. (2023, June 14). The phonics resurgence. CATO at Liberty: The CATO Institute. Downloaded from: https://www.cato.org/blog/phonics-resurgence

Bush, G. W. (President). (2001, January 23). Letter from the President to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President of the Senate enclosing the “Blueprint for nationwide education reform entitled, ‘No Child Left Behind’”. Downloaded from: https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/01/text/20010123.html and https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/reports/no-child-left-behind.html

Chomsky, N. (1967). A review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior. In L. A. Jakobovits and M. S. Miron (eds.), Readings in the Psychology of Language (pp. 142-143) Prentice-Hall. Downloaded from: https://chomsky.info/1967____/

Chomsky, N. (1959). A review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior. Language 35, no. 1 (1959): 26-58, Linguistic Society of America. Downloaded from: https://www.ugr.es/~fmanjon/A%20Review%20of%20B%20%20F%20%20Skinner%27s%20Verbal%20Behavior%20by%20Noam%20Chomsky.pdf

Chomsky, N. (2010, August-September). ., Interview by Ryan Leach. Razorcake, Issue #57, August/September 2010. Downloaded from: https://media-uploads.razorcake.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/20174147/razorcake_issue_57_final_for_web.pdf

Chomsky, N. (2012, November 1). Noam Chomsky on where artificial intelligence went wrong: An extended conversation with the legendary linguist, by Yarden Katz. The Atlantic. Downloaded from: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/noam-chomsky-on-where-artificial-intelligence-went-wrong/261637/

Chomsky, N. and Leach, R. (2015, July 12; Last Updated 2023, November 26).

Noam Chomsky Interview from 2010: No Child Left Behind Act, Rote Learning, Labor Unions, and much more. July 12 2015, Interview by Ryan Leach in Bored Out Magazine, republished by The National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth (NNOMY). Original Interview downloaded from Bored Out Magazine: https://boredout305.tumblr.com/post/123939228463/noam-chomsky-interview-from-2010, republished version downloaded from https://nnomy.org/index.php/en/home-73768/1018-noam-chomsky-interview-from-2010-no-child-left-behind-act,-rote-learning,-labor-unions,-and-much-mor

Ciancio, D. (2023, July 18). The importance of comprehension in the science of reading. Institute of Educational Sciences, Regional Educational Laboratory Program (REL). Downloaded from: https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/rel/Products/Region/west/Blog/107263

Congressional Record—Senate, pp. S2768-S2769. (2000, April 13). S. 2452 - A bill to reduce the reading deficit in the United States by applying the findings of scientific research in reading instruction to all students… Downloaded from: https://www.congress.gov/106/crec/2000/04/13/146/47/CREC-2000-04-13-pt2-PgS2768.pdf

Craig, R. P. (1984, October 1). Developing a Philosophy of Reading: Piaget and Chomsky. Reading Horizon: A Journal of Literacy and Language Arts, Vol. 24, Issue 1, Article 7, pp. 38-42, October 1984. Downloaded from: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1852&context=reading_horizons

Davis, J. (2023, September 23). Twenty-three years ago the National Reading Panel’s report refuted the whole language movement. Facebook Community Solutions Focus Group. Downloaded from: https://www.facebook.com/groups/259348174970101/posts/1317245005847074

Fan, J. (2025, March 20). Cognitive tools for making the invisible visible. BCS Colloquium With Professor Judy Fan Department of Psychology, Stanford University, co-hosted by the MIT Quest for Intelligence. Video available.

Foorman, B. R., Francis, D. J., Fletcher, J. M., Schatschneider, C., and Mehta, P. (1998). The role of instruction in learning to read: Preventing reading failure in at-risk children. Journal of Educational Psychology Vol. 90, No. 1, 37-55. Downloaded from: https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.90.1.37 and https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232515872

Hauth, A. (2025, June 2). Scientific findings on the best approach to teaching reading. Read Naturally (RN) Bookmark. Downloaded from: https://www.readnaturally.com/about-us/blog/scientific-findings-on-the-best-approach-to-teaching-reading

Heffner, J. (2002, July 10). Put reading first: The research building blocks for teaching children to read, kindergarten through grade 3. Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Downloaded from: https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/put-reading-first-research-building-blocks-teaching-children-read-kindergarten

HMH. (2026, January). The Science of Reading at Your Fingertips: What You Need to Know. Downloaded from: https://s3.amazonaws.com/prod-hmhco-vmg-craftcms-public/WF2418950_GatedContent_2025_Science_20of_20Reading_20eBook_Update_HR.pdf.pdf

Hruby, G. G. (2023, August 23). The science of Readingpolitik: A commentary. The Journal of Reading Recovery Vol. 23, No. 1. Downloaded from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/382689153_The_Science_of_Readingpolitik_A_Commentary

Johnson, A. and Goldenberg, C. (2025, February 18). Conversation with Claude Goldenberg. 50:57 minute video available.

Jones, C. (2023, October 20). What is the Science of Reading? Logic of English. Downloaded from: https://logicofenglish.com/blogs/the-red-breve/what-is-the-science-of-reading

Kingsley, B. (2019 November 5). Scaling literacy through reading science. American Reading Company (Social Media) and The School Superintendents Association (AASA) (Organization). Downloaded from: https://americanreading.com/news/scaling-literacy-through-reading-science/ or https://my.aasa.org/AASA/Resources/SAMag/2019/Nov19/Kingsley.aspx

Kosmyna, N., Hauptmann, E., Yuan, Y. T., Situ, J., Liao, X. H., Beresnitzky, A. V., Braunstein, I., and Maes, P. (2025, June 10). Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task. Full paper downloaded from: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872 and abstract downloaded from https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2506.08872

Lynch, J. (2024, July 18). A new paradigm in education. A new vision for our future. HMH. Downloaded from https://www.hmhco.com/blog/a-new-paradigm-in-education-a-new-vision-for-our-future

Lyon, G.R. (2023, May 25). Ten maxims: What we’ve learned so far about how children learn to read by Dr. Reid Lyon. NCTQ Blog. Downloaded from: https://www.nctq.org/blog/Ten-maxims:-What-weve-learned-so-far-about-how-children-learn-to-read-by-Dr.-Reid-Lyon

Moorer, A. (2020, February 20). Better reading starts with better teacher preparation. National Council on Teacher Quality. Downloaded from: https://www.nctq.org/research-insights/better-reading-starts-with-better-teacher-preparation/

Piketty, T. (2020, January 1). Capital and Ideology. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, An Imprint of Harvard University Press.

Pimentel, S. (2018, November 8). Expanding the important national conversation about reading. Downloaded from the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper: https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/expanding-important-national-conversation-about-reading or from: Reading Rockets:

https://www.readingrockets.org/topics/about-reading/articles/three-recommendations-greater-reading-proficiency

Rauf, D. S. (2021, June 16). McGraw Hill to be acquired by private equity firm for $4.5 billion. Downloaded from: https://marketbrief.edweek.org/marketplace-k-12/mcgraw-hill-acquired-private-equity-firm-4-5-billion/

Rawls, J. (1971). A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, An Imprint of Harvard University Press.

Riccards, P. (2020, April 21). Riccards: Twenty years after the national reading panel, it’s time for a reading rights movement. The 74. Downloaded from: https://www.the74million.org/article/riccards-twenty-years-after-the-national-reading-panel-its-time-for-a-reading-rights-movement/

Riccards, P. (2022, April 3). Let’s follow the Science of Reading: All the science. Medium.com Educate. Downloaded from: https://medium.com/educate-pub/lets-follow-the-science-of-reading-41a591148a26

Sears, L. A. (2007). Edward Lee Thorndike (1874-1949): A look at his contributions to learning and reading. In S. E. lsrael and E. J. Monaghan (Eds.), Shaping the reading field: The impact of early reading pioneers, scientific research, and progressive ideas (Chapter 5, pp. 119-139). International Reading Association. Downloaded from the link at: https://www.readinghalloffame.org/shaping-the-reading-field or directly from https://www.readinghalloffame.org/sites/default/files/shaping_the_reading_field.pdf

Seidenberg, M. (2013, August 26). The Science of Reading and its educational implications. Language Learning and Development, 9(4):331–360. NIH National Library of Medicine download available from: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4020782/ or from:https://doi.org/10.1080/15475441.2013.812017

Seidenberg, M. (2017, January 3). Language at the speed of sight: How we read, why so many can’t, and what can be done about it. New York, NY: Basic Books, Hachette Book Group.

Shanahan, T. (2003, April). Research-based reading instruction: Myths about the National Reading Panel report. The Reading Teacher, 56(7), 646-655. Downloaded from: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20205261

Singer, N. (2026, January 2). As schools embrace A.I. tools, skeptics raise concerns.

The New York Times. Downloaded from: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/02/technology/school-ai-chatgpt-estonia-iceland.html

Strauss, VB. (2002, February 26). Relying on science in teaching kids to read. The Washington Post. Downloaded from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2002/02/26/relying-on-science-in-teaching-kids-to-read/7e4c8c10-b08c-4736-bf4a-4799fad297f1/

Taylor, D. (1993, September 1). From the child’s point of view. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Taylor, D. (1998). Beginning to read and the spin doctors of science. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Taylor, D. (2017, April 12). Teaching without testing: Assessing the complexity of children’s literacy learning (B. Kabuto, Ed.). New York, NY: Garn Press.

Thorndike, E. L., and Gates, A. I. (1929, January 1). Elementary principles of education. New York, NY: The MacMillan Company.

United States Senate Subcommittee On Labor, Health And Human Services, And Education, And Related Agencies, Committee On Appropriations. (2000, April 13). Report of the National Reading Panel. Downloaded from: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-106shrg66481/html/CHRG-106shrg66481.htm

Wooldridge, L. (2021, September 9). The National Reading Panel and The Big Five. Orton Gillingham Online Academy. Downloaded from (original link expired): https://web.archive.org/web/20210909011326/https://ortongillinghamonlinetutor.com/the-national-reading-panel-and-the-big-five/

Yatvin, J. (2002, January 1). Babes in the woods: The wanderings of the

National Reading Panel. Phi Delta Kappan, Volume 83, Issue 5, pp. 364-369. Downloaded from: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/003172170208300509

Yatvin, J. (2003, April 30). I told you so! The misinterpretation and misuse of the National Reading Panel Report. Downloaded from: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/opinion-i-told-you-so-the-misinterpretation-and-misuse-of-the-national-reading-panel-report/2003/04