Artfully Teaching the Science of Reading: A Way to Empower Teachers to Help Kids by Dr. Sam Bommarito ©2026
My name is Dr. Sam Bommarito. As regular readers of this blog know. I am a not-so-retired reading teacher/reading professor. Over my 60-plus-year career in education, I have taught every grade from kindergarten through graduate school. I retired from full-time teaching in 2016. I began taking on a variety of activities, including tutoring, staff development, making presentations and, of course, writing this blog. For more information about me, see my blog post from 07/30/26: LINK. This entry is the third in the series Artfully Teaching the Science of Reading: A Way to Empower Teachers to Help Kids. For more information about the Phonics to Meaning program in South Africa, where a team I helped to organize is currently using the work of Rasinski and Fresh to provide help for over 1000 non-reading 3rd and 4th graders. That help uses the instructional methods suggested by Rasinski and Fresh. LINK
In the previous entries in this series, I have documented problems with the Social Media Point of View. This week, I want to address claims made by social media gurus like Emily Hanford. Among the claims are that Balanced Literacy resulted in teachers adopting failed practices, practices that were not grounded in research, and that Balanced Literacy is the cause of our current literacy crisis. Was Balanced Literacy a failure, as Hanford and others claim? Let’s look at the evidence.
The first contrary evidence comes from places like Wilton, Connecticut (see the screen capture below).
Here is the LINK from the screen capture: https://goodmorningwilton.com/board-of-education-stories/
Wilton is not the only example of a place that was forced to stop using Balanced Literacy practices, despite being HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL. This alone is enough to cast doubt on the claim that these practices failed.
Add to the analysis of what the NRP scores show about what’s been happening in the reading world in the past 20 years or so. Consider the next two screen captures:
The first slide shows that NRP scores from 1992 to 2022 remained flat. The second slide provides information on two literacy experts who have consistently criticized claims made by SOR advocates, including Emily Handford. They have both posted extensively online, and each has a well-researched book detailing the many issues surrounding claims made by SOR advocates. A major point to be made here is this:
If Balanced Reading is the cause of all the current problems in reading achievement, then
WHY WASN’T THERE A DIP IN THE SCORES WHEN BALANCED LITERACY WAS ADOPTED IN THE EARLY 1990s?
Some background: Balanced Reading came into widespread use starting in the early 1990’s. Dr. Michael Pressley was its creator. Its success led many programs to claim they were Balanced Literacy when they were not. In the long run, this misuse of the term became so widespread that there is no longer agreement on what constitutes Balanced Literacy. Folks like Shanahan say the term is virtually meaningless today. Seidenberg fears the term Science of Reading may suffer a similar fate.
Recently, Tim Pressley did an interview with me about his newest book. It provides documentation that, as defined by the two Pressleys, Balanced Literacy has a strong research base and a successful track record. Many programs/teachers say they use Balanced Literacy, but they don’t meet the Pressleys’ definition. See my interview with Tim Pressley, where he talks about all these details LINK.
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Dr. Sam
The guy in the middle taking flak from all sides
Coming up soon: Interviews with Nora Chabazi from EBLI, Laura Robb, Bruce Howett and Rachel Gabriel. (Please note I am talking to people from both sides)
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My dear Doctor,
I was especially taken with the elegance of the evidentiary method here.
We begin with the proposition that Balanced Literacy has been criticized as having incorporated ineffective practices. We answer this by finding a district that used something called Balanced Literacy and obtained good results.
Excellent.
For if one successful implementation is sufficient to cast doubt upon criticism of a method, we have discovered a wonderfully economical principle. One need never ask what actually happened in the district, which elements of the program were used, what other instruction accompanied them, what population was served, or whether the successful features were the very features under dispute. One need only locate a successful example bearing the desired label.
The possibilities are immense.
But I confess still greater admiration for the national-score argument.
Balanced Literacy became widespread in the 1990s. National reading scores did not collapse immediately thereafter. Therefore, we are invited to wonder how Balanced Literacy could have caused poor reading outcomes.
There is something almost artistic about this.
A national trend aggregates millions of children, thousands of districts, innumerable curricula, demographic changes, policy changes, interventions, improvements in some places, deterioration in others, and a great many things having nothing whatever to do with Balanced Literacy. Yet all this troublesome heterogeneity can be made to disappear, leaving us with the wonderfully simple proposition: no national dip, therefore no serious instructional problem.
One might as easily observe that American life expectancy rose during decades in which people smoked cigarettes and ask why, if smoking were harmful, there was no corresponding collapse in national longevity.
The little difficulty, of course, is causation.
Then there is the especially useful formulation: “If Balanced Reading is the cause of all the current problems in reading achievement…”
“All” is a splendid word. It does so much work.
I had not understood the opposing claim to be that Balanced Literacy, by itself, caused every problem in American reading achievement. Poverty, absenteeism, language differences, disability, family circumstances, school quality, teacher preparation and the thousand other variables may apparently be dismissed from consideration. One need only inflate the opposing proposition into the claim that Balanced Literacy caused *all* our troubles, and the proposition becomes remarkably easy to defeat.
Our old friends used to call this a straw man. I always thought the term rather unkind to straw.
There is another delightful maneuver nearby. We are told that authentic Balanced Literacy, properly understood through Pressley, possesses a strong research base—but also that many programs calling themselves Balanced Literacy were not really Balanced Literacy at all.
This provides a most useful arrangement.
Successful implementations may be counted as evidence for Balanced Literacy. Unsuccessful implementations may be excluded as not truly Balanced Literacy.
A doctrine equipped with that particular ratchet can travel only in one direction.
None of this demonstrates that Balanced Literacy is worthless. Nor does it demonstrate that its critics are correct about every practice associated with it. Indeed, those are empirical questions, and empirical questions are tediously resistant to slogans from either camp.
But surely if we are to demand careful causal evidence from the Science of Reading advocates—and we should—we ought not relax the requirement precisely at the moment when the evidence favors our own position.
Otherwise “the guy in the middle taking flak from all sides” risks acquiring the curious habit of standing exactly in the middle of whichever evidence he has already decided to accept.
Your affectionate observer,
Screwtape
Interesting point of view. I’ll stick by my main point, critics who use strawmen versions of BL have not done their job very well. I agree with you that there are MANY factors that contribute to the reading crisis including the ones you mentioned. I just wish more of the folks on the SOR side realized that.