When it comes to Literacy Practices, I don’t want Old Wine in New Bottles by Dr. Sam Bommarito

When it comes to literacy practices, I don’t want old wine in new bottles. Unfortunately, that is what is being offered up by what I have come to call the social media version of the Science of Reading (SOR). They claim they have a new paradigm. They claim that those of us who question that paradigm are too caught up in the old paradigm to properly understand the “true” path to improving literacy instruction. They say that all of what has come before failed. They take a scorched-earth approach to all that has come before. They effectively ban practices that don’t follow their particular model of literacy. Centrists like myself reject going to extremes and embrace the idea of nuanced approaches. My op-ed today is designed to serve as an introduction to the next two parts of my series about literacy instruction. Those next two parts are as follows:

The history of Structured Literacy and Direct Instruction. Direction Instruction as an instructional method vs direct instruction as a marketing tool.

Let’s not let profit get in the way of real progress. An analysis of what Billy Mollaso and others have had to say, in his blog entitled “Profit over Progress? When Market Hype Masquerades as Science, Kids Lose”   

https://readingrecovery.org/profit_over_progress/.   My take on this is that some SOR advocates seem intent on “selling their product”. Too often, they ignore or discredit alternative approaches.

My next two blogs in this series will look at these two topics in depth. Right now, I want to give a quick overview of where I’m going with this part of the series. Those of us in the literacy world have tried approaches that overdo phonics (synthetic phonics) and underdo comprehension. It has not worked out well. After over a decade of mandated synthetic phonics, England has failed to improve reading instruction in a way that improves student comprehension. In the U.S., programs like No Child Left Behind dumped BILLIONS of dollars into programs that emphasized mainly code-based approaches. There is no evidence that student comprehension improved. Districts that opted for programs that mainly emphasized meaning-based approaches helped many students. They were not the total failures that social media would have you believe. HOWEVER, they did not help students who need direct systematic instruction in phonics. So, this approach also failed to result in improving all students’ (most students’) reading comprehension. Centrists like myself are saying that the one thing we’ve never tried is to draw the most effective practices from all sides and to allow districts to construct programs that draw on the effective practices that best fit their population. There are folks out there that are trying to do just that, but unfortunately the scorched earth policy that some (not all) folks in the SOR community are taking is standing in the way of that progress.

The overall narrative of the scorched earth folks goes like this. Balanced literacy programs, especially like those carried out by folks like Lucy Calkins, were a total, utter failure. We need to replace them with our version of SOR.

One of the problems with that position is that NAEP scores remained flat after BL came on the scene, and they stayed that way. How could BL cause a problem that the NAEP scores indicate never happened. I’ll refer readers to the work of Paul Thomas about the phony reading crisis. Paul also points out that the data was presented in a way that exaggerated the problem. My take on all this is that the folks making the claims that BL resulted in poor scores and the reading crisis are simply wrong. They were interested in getting rid of all that came before them and replacing it with their vision of what literacy is. They showed little or no interest in fixing what had come before. That fact leads me to point out one of the missed opportunities in this ongoing debate.

Today, many literacy leaders from the BL camp have begun modifying their programs. SOR practices are finding their way into Balanced Literacy Programs. Yet so far, there has not been a reciprocal set of actions from the SOR folks. Instead of drawing on things like teaching comprehension (as opposed to checking for comprehension) and taking full advantage of the symbiotic nature of writing and reading, they ignore and ban practices that don’t fit their paradigm. That happens even when the practices work.

Which brings me back to my point about old wine in new bottles. Too often what SOR folks are trying to sell is simply old wine in new bottles. We’ve already tried that path. I’d like to suggest a different paradigm. It is one that embraces effective research based on practices for all sides. The next two blogs in the series will talk about that in depth.

Dare to Dream

Dr. Sam (The guy in the middle, taking flak from both sides!)

This post is an introduction to the next two parts ot the series:

Let’s Stop the Nonsense and Start Using Common Sense to Guide Our Reading Practices

Copyright 2025 by Dr. Sam Bommarito. Views/interpretations expressed here are solely this author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other person or organization.