Never Underestimate The Power Of People To Band Together And Resist the Right-Wing Authoritarian “Reshaping” of How Children are Taught to Read in American Public Schools
Hello Everyone, It’s nine weeks since the Iaunch of Teaching In Dangerous Times on Substack, and I’m getting messages from Substack that state “your post is getting lots of traffic over the last 24 hours.” I had no idea what to expect when I started a Substack site. I have not come up for air for five years and I am so deep in data that I worried I would not be able to make my research accessible. But I’ve learned that Substack has readers who are up for posts of 20 pages, and who are willing to listen to audio recordings that are “homemade” on a MV7-shure microphone bought especially for the Substack recordings.
For all of this I am immensely grateful. The support and encouragement I have received means a lot. Getting serious, my hope is that my posts will provide readers with fine-tuned, data-driven analysis of the inexorable – seemingly inescapable and unstoppable – march to authoritarianism, and the harmful impact that the lurch to the Right is having on children.
I think of my Substack site as a virtual four-dimensional jigsaw puzzle which includes elements from our past, present, and future. You’ll smile — with the help of Ray Bradbury’s Sound of Thunder — I have written a post about the interrelationships between past, present and future and the dire consequences actions taken now will have on the lives of children in the near and distant future.
Always, Always, It Is Children Who Have Had Adverse Life-Experiences That Are Central To My Research And Substack Posts
In the past few months JAMA has published multiple articles on the indisputable fact that children in America are in crisis. As of November 1, 2025, 16 million children in America will go hungry unless voluntary organizations step up to feed them. In the U.S. 42 million people including children who receive the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program known as SNAP will not receive food assistance. The fight over the extension of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) premium tax credits, has shut down Congress, and SNAP benefits are being withheld by the President and his Administration despite court rulings that SNAP cannot be withheld and the funds must be dispersed. The dispute between the Trump administration and the judiciary over who has the legal authority to disburse funds during a government shutdown is compounded by logistical challenges. In the meantime, 16 million children have no food unless states find the money to feed them or private organizations fill the breach.
There is no doubt that children in America are being exploited for political gain. Food is being used as a political weapon, and on October 31, 2025, on MSNBC the Vice President said that “the suffering is going to get worse.” At the same time that children who are hungry are being threatened with starvation, authoritarian laws have been passed that restrict children’s reading development to “science of reading” commercial reading programs approved by state laws that require the fidelity of their teachers to authorized scripts.
There is empirical evidence that the lock-step imposition of the NRP “five pillar” commercial reading programs interferes with children’s development of resourcefulness and resiliency, suppresses creatively, interferes with the problem-solving capabilities and limits children’s capacity to respond to adverse life experiences.
On Substack I will present research on the impact of the deeply flawed and harmful “science of reading” laws and mandates on the health, well-being and academic development of children who have experienced individual and mass traumas – children who live in extreme poverty, who have experienced catastrophic events, who have been sexually and physically abused, who experience food insecurity, who are homeless, who have lost a parent to a drug overdose, who have no home, sleep in shelters, on buses, in subways, and hospital waiting rooms.
The research also documents the harm done to children by gun violence. Gun violence is the leading cause of child deaths in America, and suicide is the eighth leading cause of death for children aged 5-11, and the second leading cause of death for children and youth aged 10-14 and 15-24.
I will share recommendations for ways to support children in their homes, schools, and communities based on many years of fieldwork and transdisciplinary research documenting the lives of children who have experienced adverse life experiences and who have used reading and writing to cope with adversity. You have already read the account of five-year-old Nicola writing as a means of reaching out to her teacher to communicate her grief, her anger, and her pain caused by being sexually and physically abused by her father from the time she was a baby.
There are millions of children surviving in harmful life circumstances who need to write and draw to communicate their suffering. Like Nicola there are many young children who are communicating through writing before they have learned all the grapheme-phoneme relationships of standard orthography. My files are filled with detailed documentation of young children communicating through writing before they are derailed by commercial reading programs that over-emphasize systematic, explicit, phonics instruction and require “fidelity” to the “science of reading.”
You can read an account of how writing was central to Nicola’s healing in the Substack post, Observations of Young Children Writing Undermine Goldenberg and The “science of reading” Contention that “Phonics is the On-Ramp to Reading”
“The World Changes According To The Way People See It, And If You Alter, Even By A Millimeter, The Way A Person Or People Look At Reality, Then You Can Change It” - JB
In an interview published in The New York Times Book Review, September 23, 1979, James Baldwin said:
“The bottom line is this: You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t. … In some way, your aspirations and concern for a single man (or woman, or child) in fact do begin to change the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person or people look at reality, then you can change it.”
Baldwin was right and what he wrote is true. I know from my own research and writing that the world can be changed, even if only by a millimeter. My doctoral research is proof.
The concept or family literacy originates in my doctoral research and now it is ubiquitous throughout the world. Between 2016 and 2019, while I was conducting ethnographic research at the United Nations High Level Political Forums (HLPF) on Sustainable Development, I had an opportunity to trace the family literacy initiatives taking place around the world.
The concept of family literacy has been, and probably still is, the basis for literacy initiatives in more than 140 U.N. Member States by governments, NGOs, academia, and the private sector, and by the UN system, including UNESCO and UNICEF.
I take no credit for the trajectory of the concept once it left my pen, but I have sometimes contemplated how a thought that I wrote down with a pen – it was before computers – ended up on five continents and has been and might still be the basis of family literacy initiatives in the Africa, Australia, China, Europe, South Korea, the Middle East, Russia, South America, the U.K. and the U.S.A.
In 2020 I was invited by an organization connected with the U.N. to give a webinar on the role of family literacy in response to COVID, More than 1,200 people participated from organizations associated with the U.N. from many of the countries listed above.
In addition to family literacy programs that focus on young children learning to read and write, many U.N. Member States, have established family literacy initiatives to encourage peacebuilding, address health issues, support marginalized people, and empower women and girls. Some programs address the psychosocial needs of women and their concerns about health and family planning. In countries including Afghanistan and Iraq, where the human suffering is extreme, family literacy programs focus on war trauma and PTSD. There are multiple papers on my website about these initiatives, and there is a report on family literacy and the HLPF Sustainable Development Goals that I uploaded to my website in October 2018.
The reason I am sharing with you the fact that an idea – family literacy – which originated in a young woman’s doctoral dissertation could became actionable throughout the world, is that it is a sign of hope. It encourages us to think of mechanisms of action that counter the Right’s reshaping of how children are taught to read and write in American public schools.
On Substack I Will Share With You Some of The Mechanisms Used By The Right To Reshape (Lindsey Burke’s Word) Reading Instruction in U.S. Public Schools
The political shift to authoritarianism that I have been researching focuses on how Right-wing groups have established false narratives to silence researchers and teachers who challenge them. The study also documents how some researchers have wittingly or unwittingly promulgated the false findings of reading research undertaken at the behest of the U.S. Congress.
My research also documents how the mainstream media – both paper and digital – have functioned, again wittingly or unwittingly, as the spreaders of disinformation, gaslighting the public and endangering the present and future lives of children. An example of media support of the Right-wing agenda is presented in the Substack post Calling Out The Washington Post Editorial Board for Gaslighting the Public: Defending the Right of Children to Learn to Read and Write without Political Restraint
One way to think of these posts is that they are scenes from a true-life American story, of events taking place that have cascading effects that amplify expected and unexpected consequences. Following the threads of events in a linear fashion loses the significance of the many parts of the story. For more than thirty years I’ve been unravelling the threads and making sense of the muddle. So, the Substack posts that follow are all interconnected and “going somewhere.”
The Key Elements of The Strategies The Right Is Using To Reshape Reading Instruction In American Public Schools
Massachusetts Senate Literacy Bill S338 is Not Based on Science and will Not Result in “Evidence Based” Literacy Instruction
Observations of Young Children Writing Undermine Goldenberg and The “science of reading” Contention that “Phonics is the On-Ramp to Reading”
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
The Anthropologist Margaret Mead, Once Said, “Never Underestimate The Power Of A Small Group Of Committed People To Change The World. In Fact, It Is The Only Thing That Ever Has”
My hope is that my Substack posts will provide small groups of people – especially parents and teachers – with first-hand knowledge of how the alliance of Right-wing organizations, including NCTQ, has reshaped reading instruction in public schools, and that my posts will be useful in pushing back against the changes that are taking place that are harmful to children. We all need primary authentic and accurate data sources, and not second, third- and fourth-hand accounts that are tainted by Right or Left ideology. That’s where my Substack posts come in.
I have enough pieces written to post for a year on the analysis of how the repeated lies spread by the Right for the past twenty-five years about the National Reading Panel have become more believable over time – in science this is called the “illusionary truth effect.” In addition, the empirical forensic analysis of the National Reading Panel phonemic awareness and phonics meta-analyses is ready to upload, and the data shows definitively that the findings have no scientific legitimacy.
So, my plan is to spend the next year working daily on pieces to upload to Substack. Once all my writing is in readers’ good hands I will stop. My Substack readers will then become the keepers of my texts and all the research findings they contain. With a little luck I will still have some time left to paint – my undergraduate degree was in “fine art,” as it was called back then. There are a few of my paintings on my website and I would really like to do a few more before I leave the planet.
We Now Come To My Dilemma – There Is A Very Reasonable Expectation On Substack That There Will Be Paid Content As Well As Free Content
Asking readers to become paid subscribers is causing me considerable concern, but I do appreciate that it is essential that Substack writers help sustain the site.
For years my family teased me that my middle name is “pro-bono,” because I rarely get paid for the work I do.
Years ago, I was in a research meeting at Teachers College in which professors were going around the table reporting on their million-dollar grants. When it was my turn to report, Charles Harrington (Chuck), who was running the meeting, spoke quickly before I could speak. He said, “Denny does the most amount of research with the least amount of money” and professors chuckled good humoredly and the next professor spoke. I had a $5,000 research award for a five-year project, and I shared the funds between the participants in the study I was conducting. This might give you some idea of why I am having such trouble working out the paid piece of this Substack endeavor and making such a song and dance about it.
However, I do appreciate that it is important that Substack receive some remuneration for my participation on their site. It is an incredible environment in which to publish, and I am grateful for this opportunity to share my work.
So, here’s what I propose to do. Most posts will remain free, but some posts that have involved months or even years of work will have a free introduction, and then the entire documents will be available as paid posts. Also, I have digitized my books and I will upload them to Substack throughout the year. Perhaps one a month will be available for download by paid subscribers. I haven’t figured out how to do this yet but I am sure it will be possible.
Hopefully, this seems fair. Basically, I want everyone to keep reading, but I also want to contribute to the on-going development and maintenance of the Substack site.
I am also planning to upload book-length manuscripts – again, I am still figuring out how to do this! One of the manuscripts I want to share is a meditation on four first grade spelling words – fate, gate, rain, pain. It is one of my most favorite works. It is transdisciplinary, melding philosophy and systemic functional linguistics with ethnographic field research. These works have never been submitted for publication, and I will be happy to share them on Substack.
There is also the stockpile of my own books and the books I published through the Garn Press, the philanthropic publishing company I established to support writers of conscience. I would like to find a way to distribute these books to Substack readers who are contributing to this Substack endeavor. I will ask subscribers for recommendations on how to do this – there are at least 240 paper copies , and an endless supply of these digitized works.
A few other thoughts. I am going to invite comments on some posts and add video discussions with some of the eminent researchers and teachers whose research and books have been called “bad stuff” by NCTQ and other Right-wing organizations.
Rest assured, I will stay as close to the primary data as I can and use systems of analysis from multiple disciplines and fields. I have always maintained that education is about gaining knowledge and learning to use what we learn and know. It is important to steer clear of both right and left ideologies that create the conditions for illusionary truth effects that cloud our thinking and distort our understandings of what we know and what we think we know.
Finally, every scientist should include in their writings a statement on conflicts of interest. I have never had any corporate connections. About thirty years ago I gave a keynote for Scholastic on family literacy, and I requested that the $3,000 honorarium be used to send books to an elementary school in Mississippi and an elementary school in Soweto, South Africa. I have been offered but never accepted any other corporate funds.
So, Substack readers, expect free posts to continue and paid posts of my primary research providing access to in-depth reports, and to my manuscripts, and published books – I will upload them for your safe-keeping. I hope you will support this endeavor.
My thanks to everyone for subscribing to Teaching in Dangerous Times.
‘til soon!
Denny Taylor