NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE W hen it comes to the world of literacy, phonics has long been deemed a “political” venture contrived by Republicans. As a result, an increasing number of American education programs now reject it outright — to the detriment of literacy education and K–12 students everywhere.
Through phonics, a method of reading instruction, students learn to decode words by recognizing the sounds of individual letters and letter combinations rather than focusing on memorizing individual words. Phonics provides a system for students to use rules to decode words they haven’t even seen before. This increases reading comprehension and fluency.
Phonics instruction empowers young people to become independent learners. That, in turn, helps them to explore the world of literature with greater ease and enjoyment. Ultimately, through phonics, students develop the foundational reading skills they can use to read increasingly complicated texts with greater understanding.
Research shows that instruction in phonics significantly improves literacy outcomes regardless of the age of the students taking part. One 2018 study in the Journal of Research in Reading found that phonics instruction improved reading skills among first- and third-grade readers who were previously struggling with literacy. Similarly, a 2019 study in the Journal of Educational Psychology found that core instruction of phonological awareness and letter knowledge in preschool lays the foundation for successful reading comprehension in early elementary school. This is critical, for we know that achieving reading comprehension by the end of third grade significantly affects later academic success: At a rate four times greater than their peers who achieve proficiency by third grade, those who are not proficient in reading by then fail to graduate from high school.
Today, however, many have absorbed the belief that phonics is restrictive, “dehumanizing,” and even “colonizing.” It’s increasingly viewed as a right-wing tool in opposition to progressive teaching methods. Indeed, as Nicholas Kristof wrote recently in the New York Times, after spending most of the 1980s and 1990s abroad as a foreign correspondent, he returned to the U.S. to find that even reading had become political: “Republicans endorsed phonics, so I was expected as a good liberal to roll my eyes.”
By 2020, after multiple decades of tribal partisanship over phonics, 72 percent of teachers surveyed by Education Week said their schools use a “balanced literacy” or “whole language” approach, which has no clear definition and varies widely depending on the school program. In general, this “balanced literacy” moves away from systematic phonics instruction; teachers of children from kindergarten through second grade and of elementary special-education students report that they spend only 39 percent of their literacy instructional time on phonics.
In place of phonemic awareness, “whole language” curricula operate on a “top down” approach of having children guess full words and rely on visual cues. Ultimately, it teaches memorization rather than connecting sounds to letters, expecting children to just pick up on phonemic awareness. But it has been proved that they don’t.
Two-thirds of fourth graders in the United States aren’t proficient in reading — and haven’t been in the past three decades. Despite this harsh reality, the political stigma that phonics has come to bear has real-world ramifications. For instance, in 2015, a group of teachers in Oakland, Calif., campaigned to discard their phonics-based reading instruction with a more “progressive way of teaching reading.” Now, some of those same teachers want to reinstate explicitly phonics-based curricula because the experimental instruction has been “an unmitigated disaster.” The recent documentary film The Right to Read features a first-grade teacher, Sabrina Causey, who saw drastic improvement in her students’ reading scores after she discarded the district-approved “balanced literacy” curriculum and implemented a systematic, sequential reading program. Before she switched curricula, only one of her students could read at grade level.
Basic phonetic instruction is, by its very nature, plain and nonpartisan. Any teacher (or parent) who has used phonics to help their kids learn to read can attest to how mind-numbingly dry it is. But we’ve let ideological tribalism and partisan fearmongering blind us to a solution to one of the most dire educational problems facing our nation. Yes, it may require that Americans of all political stripes swallow varying degrees of humble pie — to recognize that we’ve let our political biases prevent us from doing what’s objectively best for our children. After all, it’s those children who are paying the price for our stubbornness.