Observations of Young Children Writing Undermine Goldenberg and The “science of reading” Contention that “Phonics is the On-Ramp to Reading”

Children have the right to share freely with others what they learn, think and feel, by talking, drawing, writing or in any other way unless it harms other peopleArticle 13 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC)

This morning while walking my dog along a path in the park I saw a child – perhaps 3 years of age, maybe 4 – making marks with a big stick in the soil at the edge of the path. The stick, which was more like a small branch of a tree, was about 2-feet-long and 2-inches in diameter. She was holding the stick with both hands.

As I approached, I watched her make a vertical line in the soil by dragging one end of the stick towards her and making a furrow in the earth. Her back was mostly towards me, and I watched as she turned her head to say something to her mother who was standing on the path on the other side of her.

Her mother had one hand on the child’s stroller, and she was telling the child they had to go. The child ignored what her mother had said and repeated her question. Her mother answered and the child immediately turned back and focused on making another line in the soil with her big stick.

The child’s mother said “B” or “T” but she did not seem interested in her daughter’s stick writing, and a few seconds later I heard her say, “we have to go.”

“Is she writing her name?” I asked the mother, pointing at the lines in the soil as I was walking past.

“She’s written her name,” she replied looking surprised at my question.

“She knows a lot about writing,” I said, silently counting the letters in the child’s name and then counting the marks she had made with the stick.

“Each line stands for a letter,” I said.

“I’ve never thought about it,” her mother said.

“It’s important,” I said. “She is becoming a writer and therefore a reader.”

Her daughter was now writing in a new spot that was grassier, so it was difficult to see the lines.

“She’s writing my name,” her mother said.

“Next?” the child asked her mother. The truncated question suggesting this was not the first time she had written her name or her mother’s.

As I walked on with my dog, I thought about what the child knows about writing. She understands that she has a name and that it can written down. She’s an emerging semiotician, I thought. She’s using symbolic reasoning –how different symbols can be combined to make words that represent her name and her mother’s name. “She also knows about word boundaries and one-to-one correspondence,” I thought to myself, musing how a math concept had spilled over into writing and therefore reading.

Almost sixty years of observing the reading and writing behaviors of young children both at home and at school has convinced me that the emergence of complex symbolic reasoning begins early in life. In every longitudinal study of children’s early reading development, a key factor has been their meaningful production of written texts. As soon as you link writing with reading then sound-symbol relationships become operationalized. They have a purpose, They have meaning. All but one of these longitudinal studies has taken place in communities that are struggling in extreme poverty, or in communities where there has been a catastrophic weather event, or in regions where there is armed conflict.

If we linger for a moment with the little girl writing in the soil with a big stick, we cannot ignore that the inherent capacity of humans to use their hands and tools to “make things” must be included in any theory of how children learn to write and learn to read. And yet, as I will document on Substack, the Right-Wing alliance has extinguished the professional lives of renowned scholars who have studied writing to read, and their research studies have also been denigrated and erased.

Before we go on it’s worth considering the relationships between morphological and phonological aspects of reading and writing. You and I, all of us, including children, spend our lives trying to make sense of the world. We are meaning driven. Inherent in our very being is the drive to know, to understand. We arc towards meaning and when things don’t make sense, we often spend a lot of time trying to fix things. You can expect Substack posts on the misuse of experimental research in the coming months. The analysis is completed. The papers are written and waiting in the wings

The Relationships Between Morphological and Phonological Aspects of

Reading and Writing

The data is declarative. The Right has promulgated the idea that reading is phonological and not morphological, based on a flawed version of experimental research that imitates experimental studies in the physical and biological sciences.

To fix things for children it is of paramount importance that we are aware of the relationships between the cognitive and social complexity of the relationships between sounds and symbols and meaning. If we drill children using stimulus-response protocols to memorize the relationships between sounds and symbols, we are limiting the capacity of children to build deep understandings of the complex relationships between the production of symbolic representations and higher order thinking skills. Verification of this proposition is provided by the child with the stick writing her name in the soil and with the children’s production of written texts that follow.

It is of vital importance that we are aware that higher order cognitive skills develop in children at home and at school, if they have the opportunity to participate in literacy projects and activities that combine meaning driven learning with the development of their understandings of sound-symbol relationships. Such connections are challenging to appreciate in the abstract, so here are two examples from my own experiences of collaborating with a public-school teacher participating in a project to create biographic profiles of young children learning to read and write.

A class of kindergarten and first grade children were engaged in science projects for most of the morning. The room was filled with children’s books on insects and a few large tomes on the scientific study of insects. There were also insects in large glass jars. Their focus was on the biology of insects, including their appearance, behavior, and body parts, but also on their relationships with their environments and with people.

The first example is a child’s research on bees. The child had written THEA CLACT NACTRE – THE QUYN LAS EGGS. Can you read it? At the bottom of the piece of paper her teacher had written in pencil in small and faint script, “They collect nectar. The queen lays eggs.”

THEA CLACT NACTRE THE QUYN LAS EGGS

They collect nectar The queen lays eggs

In the second example a child has written, TS ES A BLK WD SiD – HYE HA A RAD AWRGRS O HA BAK. Can you figure it out? The child has considerable knowledge of phonics. AWRGRS, in particular, is an impressive construction. An upcoming Substack will unpack the complexity. Again, at the bottom of the paper the teacher had written in pencil in tiny writing, “This is a black widow spider He has a red hourglass on his back”

TS ES A BLK WD SiD HYE HA A RAD AWRGRS O HA BAK

This is a black widow spider He has a red hourglass on his back

Both children have advanced knowledge of sound-symbol relationships, and their spelling was rapidly becoming conventional. Even so there are differences, and these were documented by their teachers and discussed at length by my graduate students.

In the high poverty public school in which the children produced the Queen Bee and Hourglass Spider paintings and texts there were no commercial reading programs, and children did not participate in any explicit phonics lessons. Their development of sound-symbol relationships occurred in their production of texts. Their teachers had deep knowledge of child development and the cognitive development of written language structures in young children. In addition, their teachers had taken courses in linguistics, and they were not limited by commercial reading programs that presented simplistic phonics activities that distort the phonological elements of the language. There is indisputable scientific evidence that the ““science of reading”,” which is based on the National Reading Panel report and the idea of the “five pillars,” is not only wrong but also has the capacity to impede children’s cognitive development.

The “Science of Reading” is Based on an Obsolete View of Science that is Consistent with Right-wing Ideology and is in Alignment with Demands of Textbook Publishers

Let’s dig a little deeper into how the NRP phonemic awareness and phonics meta-analyses have influenced the thinking of a whole generation of reading researchers.

In three zoom conversations available on the web, Claude Goldenberg and Andrew Johnson, who have opposing views on how we read and how children become readers, have an energetic exchange. Goldenberg is on the Literacy Instruction Panel of the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) which was founded by the Fordham Institute and funded by Right-Wing doners. There are accounts of his participation in the 2001 initial policy meetings of the Bush Administration that focused on the research behind the No child Left Behind (NCLB) and Reading First legislation. You will meet Goldenberg again when we get to the Substack post Student Achievement Partners.

You have probably guessed that for Goldenberg and Johnson the sticking point is phonics. Johnson’s viewpoint which is close to my own is clearly stated in the three videos which are in the references. Also, during the conversation Goldenberg referenced a paper by Linnea Ehri which he said exemplified the research on beginning reading instruction. Johnson critiqued the paper, and he published it on Substack. I have included it in the references to this paper. It is a provocative piece that you might like to read.

We’re picking up the back and forth between Goldenberg and Johnson near the end of the second zoom interchange.

“This gets up back to the differences between acquiring oral language and acquiring written language,” Goldenberg says. “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 when he stated, “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?”

The irony of Goldenberg stating that he is not a neuroscientist is significant because as you will read in a few seconds. Goldenberg proceeds to explain how the brain processes written language without having any qualifications to do so, while at the same time dismissing the research and professional standing of Steven Strauss who has a Ph.D. in Linguistics and has been a Board-Certified neurologist for almost 40 years.

Goldenberg calls Strauss an “MD and Clinician.” If you have not had a chance to read The Linguistics, Neurology, and Politics of Phonics: Silent “E” Speaks Out, by Strauss, add it to your high-priority reading list. Strauss runs circles around Goldenberg, just as he does most of the cognitive psychologists who perseverate on phonics and make erroneous assumptions about how the brain works.

Following his statement that he is not a neuroscientist Goldenberg says, “but what I believe is true and I think has demonstrated and I’m not going to say settled science – it’s a toxic term – but it’s been 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, which I have argued in an upcoming Substack paper can be traced back to an arcane false premise about science.

There’s a common myth in the reading field that the “scientific method” is synonymous with experimental and quasi-experimental research. In the early 1970s when I studied for a master’s degree in the Psychology of Reading, a branch of cognitive science, I took a course called “Information Processing Approaches to Cognition.” We studied “maps” proposed by reading researchers based on the work of George Miller, who helped to establish information processing theory (IPT) as a cognitive framework that views the brain as a computer, with processes like encoding, storage, and retrieval.

The mechanistic frameworks of informational processing approaches to cognition provided reading researchers with opportunities to devise experiments that ‘looked like’ experiments in the medical and physical sciences. The studies selected by the National Reading Panel fall into this category.

The National Reading Panel fell into the trap of equating “science” with “experiments” and “reading” with the hypothetical mechanisms of “processing.” The Panel discounted entire fields that focus on language, literacy and learning. The testimony of Reid Lyon to the U.S. Congress confirms that this view of “reading” framed the NRP’s phonemic awareness and phonics meta-analyses. On multiple occasions Lyon testified that “reading is not a natural process,” that “reading is a mechanical process,” and that “reading must be taught.” Lyon was often referred to as George W. Bush’s reading czar, and he played a significant role in establishing the NRP, No Child Left Behind, and Reading First.

Turning to the establishment of the National Reading Panet. Lyon’s view of reading as a mechanical process that must be taught framed the selection of the panel and the studies that were selected. They were rigid, with the expectation that the methodology and analysis followed the step-by-step processes that were appropriate for clinical trials in medicine, or chemistry or physics. The criteria were appropriate for studies of reading as a mechanical process but were inappropriate for studies of young children learning to read and write in classroom settings where the social dynamics are complex and a more flexible approach to science is essential.

The brain is not a computer, and the computer model is an outdated metaphor – a belief system -- still used in the reading field by experimentalists. It is part of the arcane approach to reading research that is the basis of the “science of reading.” Rigid methodology, badly controlled trials, narrowly focused experimenter designed flawed tasks.

I rejected it all in 1970s and transferred to a program at Teachers College and studied with some of the most renowned sociologists, anthropologists and psychologists of that time. I used the opportunity to develop transdisciplinary frameworks for studying reading and writing in family, school, and community contexts, and it’s through this multifaceted lens that I view Goldenberg’s explanation of the reading process.

To repeat, Goldenberg told Johnson who wasn’t having it, “In order to be able to read there’s got be something created that’s known as the ‘reading circuit’ or the ‘literacy circuit’ where areas of the brain in processing sound- phonology – and processing the visual representations – the orthograph – with oral language that makes meaning the semantic aspect,”

‘I said something about a three-legged stool,” Goldenberg continued. “That three-legged stool has an analogy in our brain. You’ve got to connect phonology to orthography to semantics. That connection is what makes reading possible without that connection reading is extremely difficult. Some might say impossible. That’s what needs to happen what needs to happen in the brain phonology, orthography, semantics – the reading circuit.”

Goldenberg describes “reading” taking place in a vacuum. The child in the park writing in the soil with a big stick proves him wrong. And yet, Goldenberg’s description of the reading process is consistent with the view of NCTQ and the “science of reading” definition of reading. It was perhaps in his capacity as a member of NCTQ’s Literacy Instruction Panel, that Goldenberg testified at the September 16 hearing on Senate Bill S338 before the Massachusetts Joint Education Committee, which was dominated by Mass Reads and NCTQ speakers in favor of the bill. (My last post focused on August 19, 2025, Mass Reads monthly meeting, at which Ron Noble of NCTQ made a presentation. Noble called S338 “our bill” and he peddled lies to get people to testify on September 16^th hearing in support of the bill, and Goldenberg did.

On September 16, 2025, in Goldenberg’s oral testimony he stated his Stanford credentials but not his long association with NCTQ or his connections with the publishers of phonics-based reading programs.

“Neuroscience research has shown that you have to link the sounds of the language to the written representation,” Goldenberg tells the Massachusetts Joint Education Committee when he testified at the S338 hearing. “These are typically known as phonics or decoding. These foundational literacy skills are necessary and non-negotiable for anyone learning to read.”

In their written testimony to the Joint Education Committee entitled, “Against Mandating the “science of reading,” September 16, 2025, Steven L. Strauss and Bess Altwerger raise concern about the lack of empirical support for the science of reading and the adoption of “a theory from the past.” I agree with Strauss and Altwerger and in future posts I will unpack the past of the science of reading which is pernicious and still harmful to the health and well-being of children. Strauss and Altwerger state,

SoR is internally contradictory and externally lacking in cogent and convincing empirical support about real reading. It has failed in a major way to adequately investigate several of its own theoretical pillars. It has no reading theory of its own, but has merely adopted a theory from the past, which was discredited by advances in science, advances which led to a different understanding of reading, and which provided, and still does provide, far better explanations of all the available empirical evidence (p.9).

Strauss and Altwerger follow this indictment of the “science of reading” with recommendations with which I also agree,

… rather than mandate one highly suspect model of reading, classroom instruction should be informed by the professional expertise of all those whose work involves the study and practice of reading. This is not limited to neuroscientists, whose investigations only scratch the surface of the phenomenon we call reading. It must also include educators specially trained and experienced in reading theory and practice; psychologists, especially those with special expertise in how people construct meaning and interpret the world; and linguists, especially those specializing in written language and language learning (p.10).

What is of critical importance is the fact that not only do Strauss and Altwerger challenge the Goldenberg’s “science of reading” belief that phonics is the on-ramp to reading, but young children themselves undermine his position when they engage in the production of symbolic images and written text that are meaning driven. Decades of research support this finding.

Decoding is Not the First Step to Reading – Contesting Goldenberg and the “Science of Reading”

In his conversation with Johnson, Goldenberg says decoding is “the on ramp to meaning,” which sounds logical, but he is wrong. Often the reverse is true. This paper and the research of many scholars banned by NCTQ demonstrate that Goldenberg’s view of reading is based on a false premise that can have negative consequences for children.

“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 reductive and linear. His argument is built on a false premise that can be traced back through Sigrid Engelmann and B.F. Skinner to Edward L. Thorndike at the beginning of the 20^th century – again expect 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 an explicit phonics approach to teaching children to read. Ehri was a member of the National Reading Panel (NRP )and in this context her research has been a key element of the forensic analysis.

The forensic analysis of the National Reading Panel 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 that a large number of the phonemic awareness and phonics studies did not meet the scientific criteria that the NRP established. (A reminder to read Johnson’s paper on Ehri’s research.)

The NRP analyzed 52 phonemic awareness studies. After the report was published the IES-WWC reviewed 19 of the NRP phonemic awareness studies in a large corpus of studies that were not included in the NRP report. The WWC disqualified 14 of the 19 NRP phonemic awareness studies they reviewed. Once the 14 studies that the IES-WWC rejected are eliminated only 38 studies survive.

Similarly, the NRP analyzed 38 phonics studies. After the report was published the IES-WWC reviewed 11 articles from these 38 phonics studies and disqualified all 11 of them, 9 for using non-equivalent (NE) group assignments of children to the experimental intervention and control groups, leaving only 27 eligible studies.

Goldenberg’s ”evidence” is also undermined by the empirical study by Camilli and his colleagues that has been “drowned-out” by reading researchers, including Tierney and Pearson in their factually questionable review of the National Reading Panel in their book, Fact Checking the “science of reading”.

Camilli et al. in 2003, 2006, and 2008 raise concerns about the National Reading Panel failing to produce a scientific report that met the requirements of Congress. In their Education Policy Analysis, August 2008, article Camilli and his co-authors focus on research articles included in the NRP phonics meta-analysis.

They state, “For example, a pretest-posttest study which did not meet the NRP inclusion criteria (experimental or quasi- experimental design), yet this study provided 8 of 66 contrasts in the NRP database.”

Camilli et al identify a recurring problem in the NRP meta-analyses. They state that “three studies identified by the NRP that met documented inclusion criteria were inexplicable omitted.” They also state, “It is unclear how such serious errors survived the peer review process in place at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.”

Stepping back, even though Goldenberg is wrong about the evidence, he is not wrong when he describes phonics as an “on-ramp” to reading. In classrooms in which “reading” is treated as a phonological skill that must be taught through stimulus-response, direct instruction, children are taught to read, albeit mechanistically. However, many children are traumatized by the process. You will meet Patrick in Learning Denied when I upload the book to Substack, but I’m including here the long term impact of his scripted direct instruction reading experiences in first and second grade.

When Patrick was sixteen, I asked him if he remembered his school experience of being taught to read in school. Patrick said he tried not to think about it. He said that when he thought about his experiences in first and second grade he would start to sweat, and he would have difficulty breathing. Patrick is not alone in having a physical reaction when remembering being taught to read in school. IN my family literacy research when I have asked parents “Do you remember being taught to read in school?” many parents of children in my literacy studies shared traumatic memories of the adverse experience. In one case a father said he would start retching when it was his group’s turn to work on reading skills with the teacher, and that if he thinks about it now his throat tightens, and he feels like he is going to gag.

Close observation of children who are learning to read in environments in which reading is morphological are quite different undermining the proposition that phonics is the only on-ramp. Disciplined, systematic observation of children learning to read and write in print-rich environments has found that there are many “on ramps” that children use when they learning to read and write.

The Complexity of Young Children Communicating through Writing Undermines the Erroneous Belief that Decoding is the First Step in to Reading

Again, I’m thinking of the young child with a stick writing her name and her mother’s name in the soil and what she teaches us about young children learning to read. I’m thinking of the children’s queen bee and hourglass spider, and what they teach us about children using multiple cueing systems – especially pictorial images – in the production of their written texts.

In almost six decades of observing and teaching young children to read, the children I have worked with have come from communities that are marginalized and excluded. There have always been children for whom equity and equality do not exist. Growing Up Literate: Learning for Inner city Families is an example of my ethnographic research, and the book is now digitized and ready to be uploaded to Substack.

There are many examples of inner-city children living in urban poverty writing to communicate from the time they are two and three years of age. Many of their early text productions are in Growing Up Literate, but in response to Goldenberg and reading researchers who share his false premise that phonics is the “on-ramp” to reading. I’ve had included the written productions of one child to challenge the idea that “decoding is the first step” in learning to read.

The child’s name is Allison, but her family and friends call her Allie. She makes a continuous green line with a marker. She says, “This is a green snake.” At 2 years and 1 month she understands that the marks she makes on paper can represent objects. Observations of the child indicate that the emergence of symbolic reasoning could be observed early in her second year of life and possibly before her first birthday.

Green Snake. 2 years and 1 month

Brown Snake. 2 years and 1 month

Allie took another piece of paper, and she picked up a yellow marker and draws curved lines. She put the yellow marker down and picked up an orange maker and made lines, gripping the marker as her whole arm moved in circular motions. She then shifted the way she was holding the marker and made “dots” that she mostly placed on the orange lines. She put the orange marker on the table and picked up a green marker. The green marks were less vigorous than the orange marks. and she quickly placed the green marker on the table and picked up a brown marker. She made a few cursory marks and then said, “Brown snake. Green snake.” She carried her symbolic representation of a “snake” from one drawing to the next, raising interesting possibilities about the emergence of textual cohesion in the early morphological productions by two-year-old children.

Charlotte and her Web 2 years and 5 months

Allie had watched the animation of Charlotte’s Web many times. Charlotte and Wilber became her imaginary friends. When she was three her mother read the story to her, and by the end of first grade, Allie was reading the book herself.

Returning to this drawing, Charlotte is represented at the bottom left, by the carefully drawn circle and short pointed line inserted in it. Both the circle and line were gone over multiple times requiring Allie’s considerable concentration and eye-hand coordination. The web is a jagged continuous zigzag line. At first the line is dark blue. When Allie shifted direction, she pressed down and the paper absorbs more ink, perhaps to indicate the nodes on Charlotte’s web. Approximately one third of the way around, Allie changed her approach to the representation of the web. The dark blue line lightens, zig-zagging quickly and lightly until Allie joined the blue lines that represent the threads of the web at the point where Charlotte is located. Multiple papers could be written about this drawing. It is a semiotic representation with a deep structure. A paper could be written about the intertextuality of the drawing both in the moment it was created and also over time, as Allie repeatedly watched the video, listened to the story, and then read the story herself.

We could hypothesize that Charlotte’s Web was one of the “on-ramps” to her becoming a reader. But it was never about phonics, it was always about meaning. Morphological not phonological. She created representations on paper of elements of the stories read to her and of the videos she watched. Also, at the same time the child was learning that written representations could be used to communicate, as the next example exemplifies.

A note to grandpa 2 years and 6 months

The note to Allie’s grandfather demonstrates that she knew that the marks she made on paper could be used to communicate. It would be easy to impose alphabetic signification onto these scribbled forms. There are a few letter-like forms that are uncanny – O, J, M – but they are still just the curves and straight lines that are universal to all writing systems and cultures. Within a matter of months Allie recognized the letter-like forms herself and she would say “look, a C!” And in that moment, as is frequently the case, Allie decided that the “C” stood for Charlotte, and she added a “C” to one of her most recent drawings of the spider.

Self-portrait 3 years and 1 month

Early in her second year Allie made circles and named them – Mom, Maisy (the family dog), Papa (her grandfather). She also drew herself and the evolution of her self-drawings at three years and one month are represented by this self-portrait. I’ve included Alie’s self-portrait to emphasize that children’s drawing and writing reflect their conceptual development of the world around them and their conceptual sense of self. Morphological representations of self are critically important to children’s social-emotional development as well as their development as readers and writers.

Allie was just three when she drew this pictorial representation of herself. Again, a future Substack, already written, will expand upon this aspect of a child’s written language development to include children who have had traumatic experiences in their young lives, including the death of a parent, seeing dead bodies in the water in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and depictions of self in regions of armed conflict. Here we continue with our child’s exploration of communicating through writing as an “on-ramp” to reading.

“I’m writing” 3 years 5 months

Allie produced five pages of “writing” – purple, red, brown, yellow, and green. Allie repeated several times “I’m writing.” Her fingers gripped the marker, and her arm movements were rhythmic in an anti-clockwise direction, melding both complex innate predispositions to use tools and create symbolic representations, as a means of human communication.

To sum-up. Put a crayon in the hand of a twelve-month-old baby, even earlier, and the baby will make curved and straight lines on a piece of paper. The curves come from the circular motion of the child’s arm and the straight lines come from jabbing movements with the crayon sometimes almost hitting the paper. This is the primitive beginnings of the use of tools which is constitutive of sign making. I have taught young children in the U.K., New Zealand, Spain, and four U.S. states.

On every continent, in every country, and in every state, in the public schools where I taught, writing has been the “on-ramp” to reading.

Similarly, in every longitudinal ethnographic study of young children learning to read and write that I have conducted, very young children’s use of various tools including crayons, pencils, markers, and sticks (and mud “ink”) as the on-ramp to reading. This has also been the case with children I have taught and observed for whom learning to read is challenging. Learning Denied is now digitized to upload to Substack. For anyone who thinks Direct Instruction helps children learn to read, Patrick’s story is highly likely to change your mind.

Parenthetically, Goldenberg says phonemes and graphemes have no meaning, but this is not the case. Young children write individual letters to signify words. I have already shared accounts of Nicola’s use of writing as a means of responding to her father’s sexual and physical violence from the time she was two years of age. Her classroom teacher and the teachers taking part in the Biographic Literacy Profiles Project I had established worked together to understand how Nicola – who could name some of the letters of the alphabet but did not know the sounds the letters made – was using her writing to cope with the traumas she had experienced.

At first Nicola’s scribbles resembled writing, but there were no distinguishable letters in her textual productions. On one occasion she picked up pieces of paper on her way to school – a bubblegum wrapper, a torn envelop—and she wrote on them and gave them to her teacher. On one occasion Nicola gave her teacher a Post-it note and told her teacher that her husband had called on the playhouse telephone and that she had taken a message. Role-playing, a conversation followed between the teacher and the child about the message and about how Nicola had written it.

Nicola knew written language was meaningful, and it was the only way she would communicate in her first months in kindergarten. Her classroom was a print-rich environment in which children wrote on a daily basis. Gradually, letter-like forms could be identified in Nicola’s notes. A letter could stand for a word. A string of letters for a sentence. Nicola used her written productions to convey messages. Often, she wrote messages to express her distress. She found it difficult to speak, but her written communications came through loud and clear. She had been thrown down the stairs by her father and her knees were damaged.

Once, when her teacher was absent, a male substitute teacher took her place. The teacher had a ponytail like Nicola’s father. Nicola was terrified and hid in a corner of the playhouse, and with a marker she wrote all the letters she knew on her arms, legs and face to express her grief. Letters mean something to children beyond the sound. Phoneme-grapheme relationships are important, but they come later.

When children are in classrooms in which they write to read, the letters of the alphabet are an immense resource, but in classrooms in which phonics is reduced to mechanical sound-symbol, stimulus-response exercises, the complexity of children’s early encounters with written language is lost. This is a huge problem for children who are experiencing adverse life circumstances. In Nicola’s case her teacher and the teachers who participated in analyzing Nicola’s uses of written language, me included, all knew that Nicola’s best chance of recovery from the traumas she had experienced was to be in an environment that valued her learning.

We knew we had to do everything we could to help her develop her knowledge of print, including phonics, before her screening for first grade. And that is what we did. By the end of her kindergarten year her use of written language and her word identification skills were on par with other children in her class. Still, there is not a happy ending to this story. The screening did not go well. She did not know the person who tested her and was unable to cope. She failed the test because of her adverse life experiences. It happens every day.

In his oral testimony before the Massachusetts Joint Education Committee in support of S338, Goldenberg stated that phonics is “non-negotiable.” He told the committee that “classroom research has shown that systematic instruction significantly increases the likelihood that students will acquire these skills.” He then states, “Students who most need this instruction are most disadvantaged when it is missing.” The reading and writing experiences of Nicola and so many of the children with whom I have worked present a different story.

“We are dramatically over identifying students,” a teacher said in the meeting we held when we were told that Nicola was coded. Her teacher had documented the increasing complexity of Nicola’s literacy practices, and she provided specific examples the literacy events initiated by Nicola that demonstrated her deep knowledge of the functions and uses of written language but stacked up against Dibbles it was discounted because Nicola performed badly on Dibbles because she was too frightened to take the test.

It is a serious problem. “science of reading” screeners must have fidelity to the “science of reading”. There is no acknowledgement by profit-driven assessment companies that a child might have been sexually abused by her father or thrown down the stairs, and that their test adds to her grief. Christopher Jones et al published a paper in JAMA Psychiatry, May 8, 2024, entitled “Estimated Number of Children Who Lost a Parent to Drug Overdose in the US From 2011 to 2021.”in which they estimate that 321,566 children in the United States lost a parent to drug overdose from 2011 to 2021.The rate of children who experienced this parental loss more than doubled during this period. The number of children poisoned through exposure to fentanyl increased by 924% among children 12 and younger between 2015 and 2023. Gun violence is one of the leading causes of death for children and young people. Of the 5,151 children and teenagers under 18 who were shot in 2024, 1,403 died. Between 2016 and 2022, children’s hospitals saw a 166% increase in emergency department visits for suicide attempts and self-injury among children aged 5-18. Child suicides are an escalating public health crisis. A full analysis of these data references will be the focus of another upcoming Substack.

Caring for Children and Taking Their Life Experiences into Consideration has Always Been a Part of Teaching Them to Read

Nicola’s teacher was able to work with Nicola in ways that made sense to the traumatized child. Caring for children and taking their life experiences, into consideration has always been a part of teaching. But now across the U.S., “fidelity” is the word used by Right-Wing “science of reading” enforcers. The expectation is that there will be fidelity to the laws and mandates, and implementation fidelity to the “science of reading” programs approved by state legislatures, that in turn, were pressured by NCTQ and ExcelinEd and other Right-Wing individuals and organizations.

“We have to have the freedom to get away from the fidelity to SoR,” a teacher said in a zoom meeting organized by teachers. “The “science of reading” is looking at reading as a set of isolated skills and not as a complete process.”

Both children and their teachers are trapped.

In a telephone call about other things, one of my doctoral students who is now a full professor, told me about a note and a drawing her son had left on the kitchen table. Max was in 5th grade, and she said he had made the note and drawing unprompted. I asked if I could have copy and she said she’d ask her son, who was in 5th grade in their local elementary school. Max agreed and sent it to me himself. Here is his “school as jail” drawing,

Max School as Jail

The only way phonics can be the “on-ramp” to reading is if a child is stranded in space with no experiences of living in a literate society. The only way reading researchers can reach the conclusion that phonics is the on-ramp to reading is if they conduct experiments that disregard the life experiences of children.

Verification of this fact is provided by the studies that were selected by the National Reading Panel. Most of the studies were comparative studies of commercial direct instruction reading programs, with some researchers conducting the studies invested financially in a particular outcome.

But the point here is that there were no children in the National Reading Panel phonemic awareness and phonics meta-analyses, only artificially derived mean (average) effect-sizes for groups of children, which were computed by the Panel or their research assistants because the original studies did not include effect sizes.

Now I know that some readers will have never encountered “effect sizes” before, but in a future post I will provide a detailed explanation of what an ”effect size” is. All that is important here is that readers are aware that the NRP reduced children to abstract numbers that had no scientific validity and that the five-year forensic analysis provides the data to support this statement.

What we do know is that the Panel focused on a small number of highly questionable studies in which anonymous children with no known life histories “read” words and pseudowords. In the NRP phonics meta-analysis, 78% of the reported results were for isolated “word reading” skills. Only 7% of the reported results were for “oral reading,” and only 15% were for “comprehension.”

The NRP privileged phonemes and graphemes over children. In a forthcoming Substack, I will make accessible the scientific requirements adhered to in the biological or physical sciences for experimental research, that the reading field ignores.

In a conversation with a reading researcher who uses parametric statistics in his experimental research I asked him if he was aware that reading researchers violate a particular parameter of parametric statistics, and he smiled as he said he did. Then he added “we all agreed.”

The “scientific method” adopted by the National Reading Panel attempted to establish is obsolete. This approach isn’t used by practicing scientists in multiple fields and disciplines. Strauss and Altwerger identify this problem when they state that the “science of reading” “merely adopted a theory from the past.” It is possible to trace the historical progression in physics, chemistry, evolutionary biology, psychology, sociology, and so on, but in the reading field there is a cadre of researchers who have got stuck in a historical view of science that is being used to advance the Right-wing agenda and is a lucrative profit maker for the, Again, a Substack will follow on this.

Handwriting But Not Writing on Digital Devices Leads To Widespread Brain Connectivity

So, let’s take another tack that should galvanize the public into action. This time it’s an experimental study by two Norwegian scientists, F.R. (Ruudi) Van der Weel and Audrey Van der Meer, entitled, “Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread brain connectivity: A high-density EEG study with implications for the classroom,” published in Frontiers in Psychology in 2024. Van der Weel and Van der Meer write, “Digital devices are more and more replacing traditional handwriting, and as both writing and reading are becoming increasingly digitized in the classroom, we need to examine the implications of this practice” (p.1).

Most of the “science of reading” programs used in public schools are heavily digitized. Assessment companies have also adopted digital protocols that are administered by the screeners. Many teachers have raised concerns that children are spending so much time at digital devices that there is no time left in the school day for them to write with pens and pencils on paper and use rulers and scissors. Van der Weel and Van der Meer explain how important handwriting is for young children in their learning environment,

Handwriting requires fine motor control over the fingers, and it forces students to pay attention to what they are doing. Typing, on the other hand, requires mechanical and repetitive movements that trade awareness for speed.

Our results reveal that whenever handwriting movements are included as a learning strategy, more of the brain gets stimulated, resulting in the formation of more complex neural network connectivity. It appears that the movements related to typewriting do not activate these connectivity networks the same way that handwriting does.

The concurrent spatiotemporal pattern from vision, motor commands, and proprioceptive feedback provided through fine hand and finger movements, is lacking in typewriting, where only a simple key press is required to produce the entire wanted form. …

The present study shows that the neural connectivity patterns underlying handwriting and typewriting are distinctly different. Hence, being aware of when to write by hand or use a digital device is crucial, whether it is to take lecture notes to learn new concepts or to write longer essays (p. 7).

The most important message to all parties – from federal and state governments to administrators, teachers, parents, and the public – is that children in kindergarten, first, and second grades should spend a large part of every school day engaged in reading and writing activities that develop their fine motor skills, and by providing opportunities for children to advance their eye-hand coordination and create strong neurological connections between the muscles in their hands and their brains. Tool use and written language development literally go hand-in-hand. Children’s development of advanced cognitive functioning depends on children working collaboratively on projects. The Right and “science of reading” reading researchers who have a limited experimental and quasi-experimental view of science challenge this scientific fact, but they do so at children’s peril.

A McGraw-Hill video of Smarty Ants provides evidence of how far publishers and the reading researchers who have lucrative contracts to work with them have strayed from teaching children to read and write based on solid scientific evidence. Many discount the advances in fields of inquiry as diverse as anthropology, developmental psychology, epidemiology, functional systemic linguistics, molecular biology, neuroscience, and sociology. Many reading researchers who have contracts to work for corporate publishers rely on a narrow interpretation of cognitive science and are blinkered to the advances in scientific research that challenges their reductive paradigm.

In one of the Smarty Ants videos an ant on a diving board jumps into a swimming pool when a child responds to the oral prompt of a phoneme, and the ant then lands on the correct board in the pool if the child presses the right key. If the child presses the wrong key the ant lands in the water.

It is a classic example of the outdated, operant conditioning, stimulus-response paradigm, championed by Seigfried Engelmann, that can be traced back to B.F. Skinner and finally to Edward Lee Thorndike and his stimulus-response experiments on starving cats. An account of this bizarre history of Thorndike’s research and how his belief that research is a “great weapon” is one of the originating ideas used by the Right-Wing to hold on to power and establish authoritarian rule.

Smarty Ants is an example of one of the many reading programs in which publishers have used Thorndikian stimulus-response templates in their reading research. Collaborators have abandoned their remit to provide learning opportunities for children that are grounded in reading research that is in sync with the research on child development. They ignore the increasing physical and emotional stressors that impact children’s response to the reading instruction in public schools, especially when state laws require fidelity to meaningless scripts.

Extensive peer-reviewed pediatric research in multiple medical fields provides compelling evidence that toxic stress can lead to potentially permanent changes in learning – linguistic, cognitive, and social-emotional skills – and behavior – adaptive versus maladaptive responses to future adversity. Toxic stress has a disrupting effect on developing brain architecture and can negatively impact a lifetime of learning.

An Over-Emphasis On Systematic Explicit Phonics Instruction Crushes Children’s Emergent Knowledge Of Sound-Symbol Relationships

When the “on-ramp” to reading is phonics, “reading” becomes a mechanical exercise. Writing is mostly scrubbed from the curriculum, and in many K-3 classrooms there are no books. In fact, The Atlantic has published multiple articles that raise concern because it is possible for a child to attend K-12 public schools and never read a whole book.

It is important that the public is aware that instruction in explicit phonics has been documented to be an impediment to a child learning to read. In one case explicit phonics instruction caused long-term harm to a child’s health and well-being as well as his academic development. All these findings are documented, peer reviewed, published, and available for review. The book Learning Denied will be available in the commons on Substack.

I began this paper with a quote from Hannah Arendt who is my constant writing companion. Arendt wrote in The Human Condition, “The work we do around language is central to the human experience.” She reminds us that engaging with language is a fundamental aspect of human existence that shapes our understanding of ourselves, how we interact with others, and how we respond to our political and social worlds.

If we expand children’s experiences of language when they learn to read and write, we provide an opportunity for them to expand their understandings of themselves and their political and social worlds. Kindergarten and first grade classrooms can be filled with writing and drawings of queen bees collecting nectar and black widow spiders with hourglasses painted on their backs. The excuse that such learning opportunities do not work with children in high poverty schools does not work is discriminatory. Most of my research has been conducted in communities that are economically discriminated against. The book Growing Up Literate: Learning from Inner-City Families, makes this case that such excuses are unjust and prejudicial. I will upload Growing Up Literate to Substack shortly.

We should not underestimate young children’s capacity to use written symbolism before they have learned “phonics” or the conventional spelling system of the American language. A child who was sexually abused by her father and thrown down a flight of stairs when she was two, can take a black marker and write all the letters she knows on her face, her arms, and her legs, to express her anger and her grief.

Political protesters carry signs. Nicola became the protest sign. Her capacity to write shaped how she expressed her perception of her social world and the violence that was done to her. Her knowledge was generative, and her kindergarten teacher understood the importance of creating a pedagogical environment in which Nicola could heal as she learned to read and write. But Nicola “failed” the screening for first grade. The stress of the tests was too much for her, and despite the detailed accounts of her ability to communicate through her writing and the exceptional progress she had made in her knowledge of sound-symbol relationships, she was placed in a special education class, and her reading and writing was reduced to direct instruction workbook pages.

I began with Arendt and will end this Substack post with a quote from her 1954 essay, The Crisis in Education. She writes:

And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.”

In response to Arendt’s essay, Roger Berkowitz writes on the website of the Bard College Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities (HAC), “Education is also a process of saving the world from ruin.”

Establishing Reading And Writing Environments For Children In Which The Importance Their Lived Experience Is Recognized Is A Life-Saving Project In Which We Can All Participate

If we do this it will become imperative that we reject Reid Lyon’s contention, presented in testimony to Congress, that “reading is not a natural process,” that “reading is a mechanical process,” and that “reading must be taught.” These are all false statements that over the past 25 years have become endemic in American society. They have been used by the Right-Wing to build alliances and bring education into alignment with the policy roadmap outlined in Project 2025. The control of how children are taught to read is a vital component of the roadmap to consolidate power and replace the rule of law with Right-Wing ideals that undermine democratic institutions and agencies and bring about authoritarian rule.

A vital aspect of this assault on the U.S. system of government is the steps that have been taken to bring the mainstream media and the public into alignment with the idea that reading must be taught. The result has already proved catastrophic.

“High-achieving students at exclusive schools,” Horowitch writes in The Atlantic, “can decode words and sentences. But they struggle to muster the attention or ambition required to immerse themselves in a substantial text.”

It’s breathtakingly brilliant. Make reading a mechanical process, pass laws that require teachers’ fidelity to scripts of stimulus-response, low-level phonological skills, and you stop children from gaining the higher order cognitive and social skills they will need to undertake something new and unforeseen in the future. Eradicate books from classrooms and children will not be prepared in advance for the task of renewing our shared struggle to make America more democratic.

Mission accomplished. We are now living in a totalitarian state, but we can change that.

On Monday July 14, 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the President to lay-off nearly 1,400 employees at the Department of Education. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissent to the emergency decision that cleared the way for the government to proceed with dismantling the Department of Education.

“When the Executive publicly announces its intent to break the law, and then executes on that promise, it is the Judiciary’s duty to check that lawlessness, not expedite it,” Sotomayor wrote for herself and Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan.

“That decision is indefensible,” Sotomayor argued. “It hands the executive the power to repeal statutes by firing all those necessary to carry them out. The majority is either willfully blind to the implications of its ruling or naive, but either way the threat to our Constitution’s separation of powers is grave. Unable to join in this misuse of our emergency docket, I respectfully dissent.”

We too can dissent and act to bring about positive change. The children included in this paper inform our understandings of how young children learn to read and write, and the research on childhood adverse experiences provides ample evidence for the rejection of the high-stress, test-driven, commercial reading programs that are mandated by law in public schools.

We can prick the bubble of the Right-Wing alliance and the Right-Wing functionaries in the media whose behavior is unbecoming of journalists. Most importantly, we can insist that public schools create reading and writing environments that amplify the possibilities of social resilience, and foster engagement and collaboration. We can maximize the co-benefits for children, their families, their teachers, their communities, by defending the values, principles, and aspirations that underpin children’s lives in democratic societies.

References

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