computer. And it should be good. It should be recording right now. So, yeah, as I was telling
Dave, I said, welcome, you know, I'm tutoring some kids online and every kid is different.
What works with one? I think, okay, I'll do that same winning formula with my other one. And I have
to change it up every time. Some like to do their writing before reading, some reading, you know,
every kid is different. And that's why these one size fits all programs. Why some of us in the
meeting based community just don't appreciate it because teachers think they have to implement them
with fidelity, meaning you have to read the directions and follow the directions just as.
And good teachers take these things and they implement them, but yet they adopt and adapt
them based on the needs of their students. And that's why we must empower teachers, school
districts and schools that are trying to force teachers to do the curriculum as written are
really practicing educational malpractice. So everything has to be adopted and adapted.
Sorry, I was off on attention, David. No, no, no, you're just doing your stick and I get
my stick is who I am. I live. Yeah, exactly. Well, yeah, something's got to pay the rent there,
right? So I get that. Yeah, how much money do I make? And listen, I agree with,
when I talk with teachers, I tell them the most important thing they can bring to teaching is
their own learning, right? They've got to be constantly learning to modulate what they're
doing in an adaptive response to what the learners are doing. That said, you know, there's
prerequisites, right? So if somebody somebody wants to be a good quarterback or a good whatever,
you know, play some sports position, it's not like they're going to just throw them out there
without doing certain prerequisite things to build them up to being proximately ready for
that challenge. So, you know, there's an argument, you know, with respect to reading where there
are things that it's helpful to kind of exercise, I mean, knowing the names of the letters of the
alphabet, right? There are certain abstract building block things that are necessary prerequisites.
After that, yeah, I agree with you, everything should be adaptive.
And I'm glad you talked about that teacher knowledge and teacher preparation. You know,
the difference between experts and novices is having that body of knowledge and expert teachers,
this isn't me, but not being roboticized by it. Well, there's four kind of knowledge. You have
to have knowledge of learners and learning how humans learn. You have to have pedagogical knowledge,
which is general teaching strategies, pedagogical content knowledge, which is strategies for the
content areas, math, methods, reading, method science methods, and you have to have knowledge
of content. Those are the four types of knowledge. And experts have more knowledge,
novices have less of it. We've got three semesters in a teacher preparation program,
plus student teaching. There's absolutely no way we can create even close to an expert teacher.
And it's silly to think that way. They come into us with little knowledge, but they leave with
shallow and disjointed bits of knowledge. They're ready to start the journey, but they are far from
experts. And I think people think you can come from three semesters of a teacher preparation
program and be a finished teaching product. Was that a tangent? Yeah, you know, I know,
no, I mean, I first of all, I'm kind of good with going where we're going. I think our meta intent
today was to get into science in general and the science of reading in particular. And this is a
decent take off ramp to get into those spaces. I would say with respect to teaching, I had
the honor and pleasure to interview some people who studied teachers on a macro level,
from people at the Hoover Institute, like Hannah Schaik, to Martin Haberman, who runs the Haberman
Institute and up in your neck of the woods, I think, or at least he did, and Richard Allington
before being involved in whole language, he spent or parallel to his involvement in whole
language related to enterprises. He was very focused on understanding teacher behavior. And
what was most amazing to me about the convergence of all of those studies about what makes effective
teaching was that it was not necessarily how much they were paid, it was not necessarily how much
they knew was not so much the credentials they had, it was not necessarily how touchy-feely they
were and how good they made people feel, how good they made the students feel, it was not their warm
demeanor, it was their invitation to turn taking participation so that they weren't just cramming
something, they were putting forth something and then seeing what the learner brought back and
constantly encouraging the learner to inform them about what to be doing. So, which directly lines
up with what was the most effective thing. If you look at the, I mentioned Hart Risley worked
the last time, the studies of the early language patterns of children coming out of different
kinds of families from tasseturn to more talkative. And in those conversation spaces, what they found
was is that the parents that engaged children in the most term-taking, elaborative conversations
were the ones that were building children's kind of vocabulary and verbal musculature, so to speak,
and predicted their later success with reading. So, in all these cases, teachers and parents,
it's not so much what they know, it's not so much following some script, it's about how
they're live on the edge themselves learning to differentiate what they're doing. So, they still
got to bring what you're talking about, but they can't bring it statically or mechanically or
robotically. So, what you talked about was general pedagogical knowledge, general teaching strategies,
and knowledge of learners and learning. As informing what I described, that's not what I
described. Those are things that are in the background informing what I'm describing, but
they're not. Well, probably you have to have that knowledge. You have to have that knowledge to be
an expert teacher, and that's part of it. And, you know, reading the research on teacher education,
colleges of education matter, comparing the fast-track teacher programs, we'll just throw
them in there and see who sticks, that teachers who have gone through teacher preparation programs
have better success with students as measured by achievement tests, and are rated as better teachers.
Linda Darling-Hammond did this research by their supervisors when compared larger sample size.
This idea that anyone can teach, we'll just throw them into the classroom. How would you like your
kid having a teacher who's learning on the job? That's not fair to our kids. We need well-prepared
expert teachers. I'd much rather have them learning on the job than being a robot of what they've been
taught. No, I want both. I want somebody who's well versed in the field that they're going to be
interacting with the children with, and that that's in the background, not the foreground,
that's informing how they're learning to adapt that to the students. And I don't think-
If they're following that robotically, then they should be replaced.
And I don't think anyone wants a robot except maybe the science of reading people.
We want teachers with background knowledge to apply what's in front of them. Nobody wants a
robot, absolutely not, but you have to have a teacher toolbox full of research-based strategies.
That's the best way to teach reading.
Well, research-based strategy seems like a good segue to get into science.
Oh, good one. Yes. Master of the segue. Yeah, well, so what is science? What is reading science?
What is knowledge? Yeah, let's start. I think let's take some time with science because on the one hand,
I think Einstein said with respect to the rational mind in general, and I think
referring to science as well, that it's a fantastic slave and it's a terrible master,
you know, that science is the way that we fill in the paradigms, but it's rarely the way that we
create them. So let's just let you get started with where you wanted to go with science and then
I will- Well, in general, and probably when you look at the social sciences and educational science
specifically, there's often a different paradigm. And sometimes people coming from the hard sciences,
when you only know the experimental model, they tend to think, well, that is the model that must
be used in all of reality. When in essence, science at its basic is asking a question,
using data to answer the question. That's what science is at its basic level. And science is a
verb, it's a process to science. Yeah, I mean, science is a learning modality. And it's a consensual
collective learning modality, consensual and collective in the sense that in order for it to
have any meaning outside of the person that's doing it, it has to adhere to and conform with
certain accepted standards of what constitutes good evidence, what constitutes good practice, right?
So there's a series of conventions that are associated with science and any one particular
discipline. Inside of that, it's a learning modality. It's a way of learning that's consensualizable,
you might say. Way of understanding the world around us. And methods, methods of science are
the systematic processes we use. And you are right, they are conferred by the field. And science,
and it's part of research. And the thing that separates science and research from my thinkisms
and data is peer review, blind peer review. So I often say this. Which doesn't necessarily make
anything right. It just makes things consensualize. As I was saying, research is not research,
unless and until it has been subjected to blind peer review. There's no such thing as a perfect
objective science. It is simply one more filter. But without that filter, it doesn't even get in
the conversation. So blind peer review, published in academic journals, no, there's no such thing
as the perfect article. Science does not prove. Science supports a hypothesis. But it's ever
evolving. So you can never say it has proven once in for all that. At one time, gravity, you know,
the theory of gravity, we get into theories, but you know, that has been changed based on data,
but that has been changed. Yeah. Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, and there's current
thinking that changes even that. So yeah, for sure. And this brings up an important point,
how science changes, and the resistance to change within science. I interviewed a guy who was the
head of the Stanford Free Press. He was a geologist, friend of Stephen J. Gould, if you know that
field in the kind of punctuated equilibrium of evolution theories. Anyway, he interviewed 600
geologists just before the tectonic plate revolution changed the geological understanding
of the planet. And then he interviewed them after. And if you compare it, the 600 scientists before
the plate, the tectonic plate revolution in geology all said that it was never going to be that way.
He's got 600, the transcripts. I mean, it's an amazing body of work. It's a historian of science.
They were all against this theory. And then once it was adopted, 10 years later, we went back to
interview them, and they had all said, well, that's what we were all about all the way, all in the
beginning. This story goes on and on. There's a big famous movie character coming out right now,
Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer is another example of what I call paradigm inertia in science,
just like I just described with geology. In the case of Oppenheimer, one of his students at Caltech
that was responsible for a major theoretical component of the atom bomb by a physicist by the
name of David Bohm. For a number of reasons, Bohm wrote the textbook that would become the
standard textbook for quantum mechanics in colleges throughout the world. Became a friend of Einstein.
He was Einstein's dialogue partner, Einstein's spiritual son by Einstein's recollection,
went on to become the Dalai Lama science teacher, right? So he was all over the place,
as a giant of a physicist. At one point in time, he proposed an alternative theory for quantum
mechanics, right? One that's just now the world's catching up to. And at the time, Oppenheimer calls
a conference of the world's leading physicists without inviting this guy, Bohm, to it and says,
listen, we're going to do everything we can to disprove him. And if we can't disprove him,
we're going to all agree to ignore him. And they did. And the same thing goes on. If you study the
history of nuclear reactors and how we got into the mess as we did, the same kind of paradigm
inertia paralyzes science, just like it does our individual psychology. So science is an instrument
that can be trusted when it's looking inside of a space that we kind of can agree on. But it's not
very good at seeing outside of its box. And there's just the history of science is full of examples
of this paradigm inertia, which is at the heart of what's going on in the reading wars and in the
sciences of today. So I'm glad you made that segue. You know, there is no reading wars, by the way.
Science is used to create research and a research study becomes a data dot and at this dot to dot
picture called a theory. A theory is the way to explain a set of facts and the facts are created
by research. You have a whole bunch of dots out there and different theories explain different
data dots differently. That's why you can have two sets of research based theories, both explaining
the same thing differently. Theories are either robust or weak. Now, people become data resistant
when they cling too tightly to a particular theory. And that's what I was just describing,
what I call paradigm inertia. In reading terms, that's what happens with the science of reading
who are clinging to this phonological processing model, this simple view of reading this bottom
up theory. And just like the people you mentioned, data or people that do not conform to that theory
are called COOX or it is that's not valid, you know, it becomes data resistant, the data is ignored.
That is very hyper specific. I think it's paradigm. It's the whole paradigm because the
paradigm is what interprets the data. You can take the data and look at it from this lens or
look at it from this lens. So the paradigm creates a frame of reference for the interpretation of
data inside the mental model sets within that paradigm. And that's where the problem lies,
not in the data. I mean, the science of reading people would say the exact same thing about
you guys, your side of the equation. You know, I differentiate between a paradigm in a theory.
A paradigm is a general way the field perceives. A theory is a way to explain a set of facts and
understand phenomena. Now, when I do get in discussions, try to with science of reading
people and ask what I got wrong. I usually get a lot of name calling and pejoratives without
actually addressing the facts. And that is what is frustrating for me. I can point specifically
to research data that is ignored by the simple view of reading those that cling tightly like pigs
at their mother's teat to this theory without letting go. Miscue analysis, eye movement research,
these sorts of things, priming studies and cognitive science, these all provide data
for an interactive that supports an interactive theory of reading that's what's in the head
interacts with what's on the page. Sure, I don't think anybody argues with that.
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. The bottom up as you just stated that that that that that I mean, reading
is not a passive process. It's an interactive process. The brain is involved in constructing
the meaning. There's no question about that. Absolutely. You and I agree on that.
But they agree on it too. They just agree. They just their difference with you is in what is the
what is informing the construction of meaning, whether or not it's internal to the word working
out the word or to what degree is the word understanding the word, recognizing the word,
identifying the word, getting the meaning of the word, popping the word, whatever word you want
to use for that process. Do you go extraneous to the word to get information that informs it?
That's the difference, not whether or not there's an interactive process, whether or not the
interactive process is in decoding, differentiating, recognizing the word from the word or recognizing
the word from its surrounds and from its position in the flow. That's what's the difference.
This is a good thing that you brought up, Dave, you know, really, if we can David, I'm sorry,
do I, Dave or David? I don't care. Okay, I can call you whatever. You can call me whatever.
Okay, I'll be fine. It'll be I'll put it in a badge here called he called me.
Okay, I don't care. Okay, I really like how you started to differentiate between, you know,
what are the differences? And yeah, that's why we're here, right? That is why we're here. And
it's not necessarily, I think you and I agree on many things, but it becomes the level of the word.
You have to identify the word before meaning is created. That's more science of reading stuff.
And people with an interactive meeting base says they sometimes you don't have to know what the
word is. As a matter of fact, you actually skip over 60% of the words that you're using top down
information more than bottom up. Doesn't mean that letters are important, but brain research shows
there is 10 times more information flowing from the cortex down in the thalamus up during the act
of reading. Yeah, look, I mean, as you know, I mentioned I spent quite a bit of time with Keith
Rainer. I spent a lot of time with the neuroscientists and cognitive scientists that are behind the
science of reading that are the kind of archetypal godfathers of what became today's science of
reading. And they would differ with this. I mean, for example, with the eye movement stuff, Keith
Rainer would say, you can watch the eyes and infer the processing. And there's no question about it
that the eyes are stuttering when they encounter an unfamiliar word that the more difficult the word
is, not in terms of some abstract understanding of what makes a word difficult, but the actual
experience of it being difficult for the reader themselves causes a bog in attention that disrupts
the whole process and that that's directly related to the difficulty of recognizing a word. And that
they're doing this across not only isolated words, which we've had that conversation before, but
across the flow of sentences and paragraphs and larger bodies of text and then meta analyzing that.
So I think their perspective would be that, yes, there's no question that what you've read
is informing is particularly when you come to homophones and other words where there's
possible multiple meanings that could come out of the word even after you recognize it,
that the flow of meaning is definitely informing how you're experiencing the words that you're
recognizing. But that recognition itself is fundamentally tied to working out recognition
from the words rather than backfilling it or guessing it or inferring what it must be based
on extraneous to the word information. That's where I think the argument is.
And Keith Reiner says, what's in the head is directing the eyes. That's what Reiner says.
What is in the head is directing eye movements, not what's on.
Yeah, and the eye movements are stopping and stuttering according to the complexity
or the difficulty that the brain is having in recognizing a word.
Absolutely. The sight words, the function words like in the of are skipped over the content words
that are more difficult are fixated more. Absolutely.
And depending upon their difficulty and recognition, that's where the gradient is.
That's where the problems. That's where the bottleneck to fluid processing is.
And here I would go to research by Stephen Koser who says, you know,
the length of the word has nothing to do with.
I agree with that.
Yeah. When I said difficulty, I was careful to clarify that what I meant by difficulty was not
an abstract description of its difficulty, like by word length, etc., but the actual experience
of difficulty by that particular reader. So perhaps unfamiliarity with the word or letter
patterns. Now I used unfamiliarity before and we got into all kinds of about that, right?
Whether it was identification or recognition. Whatever words you want to use, the time when
the word gets into the flow, into the stream, right? Whatever, however we want to describe that,
the various layers of that. And my understanding is that, yes, there's certainly all kinds of
sight words that is particularly even a beginning reader picks up on and they're blowing through
those fast. It's the, there's words that, that the bottleneck to processing, the bottleneck that's
causing the stutter, that's causing it to be frustrating, that's causing it to be build up
to shaming out all the rest of that stuff. The bottleneck to proceeding progressively into
becoming a better reader is stuttering and stumbling on unfamiliar words, on words that are
difficult to recognize. That that's what I understand the consensus is amongst the science of reading
scientists from a cognitive neuroscience and from an eye movement study point of view. Well,
it's interesting. I read the same research and get different interpretations of that research,
even when I read. There we go to paradigms. That's what I was saying a few steps back. Yeah, but,
you know, the idea, this is why getting back to the what happens in preschool, kindergarten, first
grade. This is why there are some sight words like in the, and you have to recognize on site.
That's why they're called sight words. And you should leave kindergarten having about 40 sight
words that you know. There are some words that you recognize patterns. If we focus only on
phonics, if we over-phonicize now, everyone believes in phonics, but if that's all we do,
that's what's crazy. Don't put me in the everyone camp. I don't believe in it at all. I think it's
a bastardized patch overlaid on a messed up orthography that just happens to have gotten
traction because of the arguments that have gone on in the reading wars that you don't think are
reading wars. If people overemphasize phonics that creates the bottleneck, and I can give you a hint,
and this is why we do a lot of different types of activities. So that we're fully using the brain
I think I had a young girl who would stop and spend about 10 seconds going letter by letter.
And when I told her, it would take 10 seconds, when I said, well, just try saying blank and
moving on, it would take her two seconds. She'd get the word and she came back. That freed up
that bottleneck. That doesn't mean you don't use phonics, but it means you help students
incorporate all parts of their brain. Another girl said, young lady, third grader, she called me Dr.
Hay, you're magic because now the word just pops into my head. Well, she'd been struggling with
phonics and she wasn't good at that. And the trouble is, and this is from the National Reading Panel
Report that says, after first grade, if you're a struggling reader, phonics has limited impact.
But what do we do with struggling readers? We give them more phonics so they can be not good
at what they're not good at even more. Look, look, look, I'm like, I'm, if you've been tracking me,
first of all, we're starting to recycle on things we've talked about before, which is okay.
Thank you. Let me, all right. One, two, I think that all of these strategies to try to get a word
to pop, whether they're phonics, or they're searching around the word for extraneous to the word
cues and information to inform recognition, or it's, you know, interpreting from a picture,
all of these extraneous to the word and internal to the word strategies for recognizing a word
are only necessary because the orthography is not transparent. And that they're all
bastardized adaptations to work around the fact that we've got a fundamentally messed up code.
I don't think we're going to change the code, David, unless you're more powerful than I think you are.
Yeah, some day, I would guess it'll probably take another decade or so. But yes, it'll be just
insane that we ever had these kind of conversations. Here's the thing, you know,
is there some research that you can point me to? And there may be, I don't know. That says,
children in a rules based orthography learn to read faster and are further ahead at fourth,
fifth grade than people. Yeah, I'll send you stuff. Martina Caravola is probably the international
leader in, she's in Scotland, I think, on orthographic depth hypothesis studies and research.
But I cited before and you kind of blew it off and I didn't challenge you on the blow it off part.
I didn't blow it off. I said, the thing about the Italians that kids and Italians can read
and learn to read in three months and it takes English students two to three years. So why that
big magnitude of difference? And he and other neuroscientists would say, well, it's the complexity
of the orthography. I didn't blow you off. I said, it may be, it sounds logically, but in the world
of academia, we don't come to conclusions based on I thinkisms, based on studies. But this is why
I hesitated coming to a conclusion. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, blow it off was a too strong a word.
You're right. But you just basically said, look, I don't know about that research. So I let it go
at that point. I'm just saying there's plenty of research out there that does show from multitude
of vectors that when the when the orthography is transparent, right, that the least the kind
of reading problems that our kids suffer with don't don't exist. Other problems may exist,
depending on the language's other levels of ambiguity, but it's not at the word recognition
that there's no word recognition bottleneck in the same way. And that gets back to the bigger point
of what is science, what is knowledge, how many people have said to me the research says,
sciences studies, I understand. It's like, it's like Bible interpretation, especially these days.
Yeah. Yeah. So that's why I'm one of my goals is to teach people how to be responsible consumers
of educational research. Because when someone just blurts out, science says research says
whole language has been debunked. That's my favorite one. Oh, everyone knows that. Oh, research
shows. Okay. I'm always looking at research. Yeah. Like I said, like I said, I agree with you on that
and I apply it to what you're saying, just as much as I apply it to the other side, right? I mean,
as far as I'm concerned, you're all extruding your paradigms in different ways, right? But you're,
you see the world through a particular set of mental models and that interprets, you know,
how you see. Speaking of research, though, one of the things you brought up that I think would be
an interesting question. You think that they going back to Keith Rayner and the eye movement studies
and how they relate to interpreting where the bottleneck in processing is for a beginning reader,
you're saying, well, they're over-fonetized. They're trying to use phonics too much. And
that's what's causing the stutter. Well, has anybody put through that kind of eye movement
studies a comparison between the students that were taught the way you're talking about and
students that were taught in a more phonic science of reading thing that were kind of
otherwise peers and then put through the same process of eye movement, observation, and studies
of where their attentional bogs were. And therein lies the difficulty of educational research.
You have to have number one, it's hard to find equal sample sizes, teachers that do this, comparative
populations. It is very tough to do. And that's why we have to look at the research carefully.
There are very few comparisons of a meaning-based approach versus a bottom-up approach.
What often happens, let me think that's not the answer.
That was a no, I guess. There isn't any of that research.
Have I read? If I have it slip my mind, I do remember years back comparing one to the other.
And a whole language approach, and I use meaning-based now, showed superior. But
all this stuff has to be looked at in context. When you say more effective, more effective for
what? For who? How much? I was particularly looking at, again, Keith Rayner's work and it
lined up with cognitive and neuroscience and other kinds of studies that I've been exposed to,
or that I've paid attention to, basically said, look, if we watch the stream of a reader's mind
and their attention over the course of a sentence or two or a paragraph or two, and we looked at
what their eyes are doing and what that reveals about what their attention is doing,
then we can see that when it is the encountering of difficult words, not difficult by any abstract
external measure, but difficult as experienced by the person doing the reading, when they hit
difficult words, that's when their attention busts down and their process busts down or gets
less efficient. So what I'm saying is that have you been able to put in people trained in phonics,
early kids, young but trained in phonics versus the whole methods and seen whether or not there's
a difference at the level I just described? Meeting based. And I would have to go back and look at
research to see if I can find that. And it's very difficult to do good research. Okay, well,
because I bring it up because you said 10 minutes ago, five minutes ago or whatever it was, that
the reason that the Keith Ranner study was showing this bog happening in relation to the
difficulty of words was because those readers were trained to use phonics to work out those words.
Oh, over. So how you couldn't you couldn't possibly know that unless you also had the
counter example, right? Yes, I can go back to that. But I was I got a lot of my information from the
National Reading Panel report that said that very thing that students that phonics is becomes less
effective with struggling readers after first grade too much. Yeah, I think it becomes I
yeah, I totally agree with that. I the National Reading Model to multiple reasons. Yeah, balanced
approach, a balanced approach to reading instruction.
Yeah, I don't know. I spent six or eight hours with Shanahan.
And I wouldn't have said that he was pro balanced.
And I'm quoting and he is one person but I'm quoting to you exactly from the National Reading
Panel report. It said it's phonics should be part of a balanced reading program unquote.
Yeah. Inside the paradigms. I don't disagree with that. I don't disagree with that.
That's quite a mug you got there, man. That's a big one. And it's not a paradigm difference.
It's is I'm adhering to a theory. My theory, the interactive theory or neurocognitive theory
is how I interpret the data, the experience, what reading is. And I happen to think a neurocognitive
theory is a robust theory explains a lot more stuff than a top down or a simple view of it.
No, you guys share the same paradigm at a level that's different than me, right? You share the
paradigm that that the code is immutable fixed object that we've got to train brains to work with.
Right? I'm more comfortable with theory rather than paradigm because paradigm really is a bigger
construct. Paradigm really has to do with the whole field and the way of seeing reality.
I'm more comfortable with the world of theory. Theory is a look that's that's semantics. I'll
go along with that. I would I think I think if you I assume you've read Thomas Kuhn's
structure of scientific revolutions definition to paradigm. So it's a superset that organizes
the perception of theories, right? So you're so for example, you have a different theory about
reading than the science of reading. Yeah. Many advocates, most advocates, I would say yes.
Okay. And I'm saying that that even though you guys have really different theories at one level,
you're inside the same paradigm with respect to the orthography. Tell me more about respect to
orthography, that you have to have some working knowledge of orthography.
Well, that the orthography is fixed and static.
Orthography is fixed and static. Well, as far as the spelling of words, the arrangement of letters.
Yeah. The arrangement of letters, the spelling of words, yes, that that is it. It's immutable,
meaning that we're not going to change the spelling and we're not going to change the
alphabet. And it's static, meaning that at the point that a learner is hitting an unfamiliar word,
the word can't help them. They have to bring to the word everything they need to get to keep moving.
The word can't help them.
The word alone can't help them at some point sometimes. Yes, I think we agree on that.
That's what I'm saying. So you share that paradigm. That's a paradigm that's wrapped around the
technology, wrapped around the artifact of the orthography.
The paradigm again is a larger construct and there's theories within it.
Okay. So what would you call if you guys share, if you guys are different on the core theories
about reading, but you share this theory. So you're saying you share the theory about the
orthography, but you share a different theory. You have different theories about how to read with it.
Picture a dot to dot picture again. That is a fact or an idea that is shared by both theories.
There are overlaps between a simple view of reading and a neurocognitive view of reading.
There are overlapping. There are data dots that we both share and that sounds like one of them.
Yeah, it's definitely one of them. Yeah. So okay, look, I don't want to, I would, I differ with you,
but I don't want to spend the rest of the day kind of differing on the terminology of things.
So if you want to call that, you share the theory of orthography and you differ on the theory of
how to read with it. I share data dots, ideas that say that orthography is less immutable.
Words evolve, I'm sure the spelling of words are different now than they were 500 years ago. I mean,
it evolves. But sadly, we are stuck with this conventional way. Our convention says that English
is spelled this way. And until and unless you become the grand poob of the universe, I don't think
that's going to change. I would vote for it. Thank you. I'm not talking about changing the
alphabet or the spelling. I'm talking about, like I said before, and I don't mean to take us off into
this prematurely. I'm talking about a digital virtual interactive overlay that is available
to help anybody learn any word they encounter by conducting them through learning how the letters
relate to the sounds, relate to the spelling, relate to the meaning of the word in whatever
language and according to whatever background they bring to it. And that that's the necessary and
inevitable part of the evolution of orthography in a digital world. And we guys are arguing,
you know, we're in the Stone Age of thinking about orthography. Yes, I agree. We're back in the 60s
and we have to think 30 years ahead. Absolutely. 30 years from here. That's what 30 years from now,
that's what I'm saying. I think the whole language and reading thing will, the size of
reading thing will be like, it'll be next to phrenology in the obsolete paradigm
area of the library. Well, there's, there's going to be differences. And I agree that you'll be able
to touch things and words will sound them out and we'll have much more technology to draw on to
teach us how to read. Yeah. But in 20 years, if people are still using a phonics only bottom-up
approach and assuming everyone learns the same way, they learn the same way and you must have
prescribed methods, which they're doing now in Minnesota, that will still be back in the 60s.
Yeah, I agree. I agree. I agree. As far as I'm concerned, that it's just mind bogglingly. This
is what I mean by paradigm inertia, the way that people's reputations and income streams are welded
and tightly bound to defending how they think about all of this is paralyzing our progress and
has for decades and is going to continue to until something makes it obsolete. And I think what will
make it obsolete is a change in the, in the orthography at the, in the digital ways that I'm
describing it. And that's why I would vote for you for Grand Puba of the universe. Because I think
that was a huge thought, people's reputation and income. And that's why I'm glad I have no reputation.
I'm okay being a kook and I have no income tied to any of this stuff. How do you afford the barbie
land behind you if you don't have any income? Right? I have income, but it's not related to my
speaking or my books or anything else. My thing. I've been a nonprofit since before. Yeah, exactly.
So people can't say I'm doing this to make money. Yep. Yep. I hear you. I spend more on websites
and other stuff than I take in. But I thought that was a very big thought. People are defending
their reputation so they can get speaking gigs and consulting gigs and look at me, I'm important.
And they're, which is tied to their income, which is tied to their prestige or pride to their
self-esteem. And this is what I was saying. This goes all the way back. This is what,
there was a famous conversation that Einstein and Bohr had where they got together for some
conference. And as you may recall, Einstein was really against the whole quantum theory and its
unpredictabilities and all that kind of stuff. And Bohr was thinking Einstein was outdated and
their students all could, you know, gathered together. And it led the historians of science to
say the only reason that science advances is that scientists die. Right? Because of the same
phenomena. This paradigm inertia, it runs right through the center of science, which runs right
through the center of our world in so many different dimensions. And at the root of paradigm inertia,
it's not about the paradigms, it's about the human psychology and its investments and the ways that
we defend ourselves where we've psychologically invested ourselves. And I'm seeing, I'm going
to break it down even more. I see greed and avarice getting in the way of paradigm shift.
You know, in Minnesota, we have people with no understanding of reading, making these
reading bills who went to first grade, that's their level. But then people want to be the next
famous person. They want to be recognized. You know, it's, and it's greed, they want to make money.
Instead of how can I help these teachers be ready to teach? How can I help this?
The bigger problem though, this comes back to where we started with teachers in a way,
is that we've got a society that that has been trained out of its learning and needs to become
believers. Right? So we need people that want to believe in something in order to stabilize
themselves. So they want to believe in your view or somebody else's view or some politician whose
name will go beyond us today or whatever. They've got to believe in something to become part of
something to feel secure, to become, to be stable, to feel good about themselves. And that's a
consequence of them not having any faith in their own first person learning.
That is very deep and it goes beyond reading, David. Absolutely. They want simple answers
for complex problems. And Phonics first is a simple answer. This is why sometimes people
gravitate towards extreme religious views that are black and white. Well, that's an answer.
That helps me or just about any religious view, which is based on a belief rather than, I mean,
spirituality is about learning, religions about belief. Right? So the way that I put it is,
I mean, as much like a religion, zealous. Yeah, so if you were to line up the million people who
are lined up behind whole language and the million people that were lined up behind science of reading,
95% of them would be believers. There'd be a few that were piloters, you know, and the rest would
be believers, right? That they're going along with the program because they don't trust their own
first person learning agency to figure out for themselves what's really best. This back to
becoming a good consumer of science. What adjuxtaposes for me is that I always ask teachers
this question, you ever met a toddler who gave up on learning to walk because it was a pain in the
ass to fall? No, kids have an innate faith in their own agency, their own capacity to learn until
they learn they can't trust it anymore. And it's that that's what ties into this bigger conversation
about believers. And and also if you say where is it most kids learn that they can't trust their
learning anymore? It's when they hit the artificial learning challenges of things like reading.
And when reading instruction is not aligned with their natural way of learning.
Yeah, yeah, which doesn't in and of itself say anything about whole language or phonics.
And the thing about whole language is it's not a method or approach. It's a philosophy about
how languages best learn. It's best learned when it's kept whole and meaningful to the greatest
extent possible. So the fact I don't know if we have thousands of believers in whole language,
you know, it's become so muddled. But back to teachers and teaching knowledge is important.
And people are beginning teachers are getting beat up out there and I hate to see it.
People are not trusting teachers. They're saying teachers are failing when we jam their classes
for the kids and we don't provide professional development. You cannot learn everything you
need to know about being a teacher in three semesters. You need continued professional
professional development. It takes 10 years of gaining knowledge and experience to approach
teaching mastery. 10 years. Yeah, I don't know about that. I would say that I mean,
I agree with you that there's things to that they should learn. Right. And again,
like I quoted at the beginning of our last session, not that I want to go down that rabbit hole
all over again. But in my interviews with leading thinkers in the other side of the pond here,
what amazed me the most was that what they were arguing for was that teachers actually
put themselves in the position of being a struggling reader. Try to understand that from
the inside out, not from the outside in. So it's not that it doesn't require both,
but there's just no substitute for first person learning. There's never any substitute.
There's first person learning and there's roboticize. Yes. Okay, I'm going to I'm going to give you
this citation because I was writing a chapter and I just happened to quote it. Kersky and Robinson
2017 moving from novice to expertise and its implication for instruction to become an expert.
I think you have to spend 10,000 hours in something and you'll have to have this body of knowledge.
Those are all big sweeping generalizations, right? This is their research comparing knowledge
and comparing experts and novices in any field. Absolutely. And to be an expert in the field,
you have to have knowledge and experience. And so these are the things that makes the
difference between if you look at it, if you look at anybody who's out, then I'll let you
are saying we don't need teachers with any of that stuff. We just need the approved curriculum,
shut up and follow the directions. Yeah, absolutely. I'm totally against that. Me too. Thank you.
And I I spent quite a lot of time arm wrestling with Siegfried Engelman, you know him,
you know of him? Probably read him, but I don't have a member.
Grand Puba of direct instruction. He was the one that Washington DC said, well,
after I talked to Allington and the rest of the cooks on the one side, they said go send David
should go talk with Engelman. He'll set him straight. So I spent six hours or something with
Engelman. He's on the direct instruction side, right? Scripting the shit out of everything.
I was totally again. I'm totally against that. Right. So what we could agree on, though, was
minimizing extraneous ambiguity, reducing the amount of unnecessary ambiguity that we're
keeping on the learner as they're moving through any particular learning challenge.
There's been poobers of direct instruction going back 40 years ago with Robert Major and
Madeleine Hunter. And he goes back he goes back 50 or 60 years. I think he started in the early
60s. I mean, he's the one that if you look up direct instruction, I think the general consensus
is he's the kind of father of that movement. And the idea is they tried to teach or proof the
curriculum. If you just do this, all will learn. And the difference between a strategy and an
approach direct instruction is an important strategy that every teacher should have for
certain things. But if that's all you're doing, and that's the problem with the DI people, it's a
large DI, they think you need to do direct instruction for everything. It's good for low level
skills. Well, we must use direct instruction. Yeah, I think I think that the argument for
direct instruction is very much like the argument for phonics, which says that if children are below
a certain level of prerequisite skill proficiency, in terms of their language background or speed
of all kinds of variables, right, then the more explicit and direct the instruction,
the more probably will be effective, right? So that's their general equation. They wouldn't
be talking about using direct instruction or phonics instruction in the same way with kids that are
coming out of really well prepared trajectories in life and that don't need that kind of
hyper scripting. And that that goes to your point to a kid that's got the right kind of
vocabulary, the right kind of processing skills, verbal dexterities, confidence in themselves,
confidence in their learning, their level is lying and many others that said they can learn with any
damn system. It's the ones that are way behind the curve that we've got to bring more specific,
highly scripted or highly structured takeoff ramps for. And this is what direct instruction is one
method of teaching phonics. Now, according to the National Reading Panel report, there's direct
instruction with this synthetic phonics. There's analytic phonics, there's embedded phonics,
teaching phonics by spelling, and there's analogy or word parts or large unit phonics.
And what does the National Reading Panel Holy Book report say? All are equally effective,
meaning that if I'm only doing direct instruction with synthetic phonics, I'm falling far
short of the glory. Teachers need to use the approach that's working with their kids and use
them all. Well, the last part of what you said is what's most important, right? Is that all these
things may be generally relevant. What's particularly relevant depends on the particular child.
And there we got it. Research can support something. Research shows that, but it's effective for who,
for what, for what purpose. Exactly. Yes. And it doesn't matter if it's effective with 80% of the
population, if it's not effective for your kids. It gives us a sense of what might work. But the
teacher is the ultimate filter. How is this working with my kid? Yep. And I can't tell you how many
times I have it all planned out how I'm going to work with a kid, sit down with the kid, plans go
out the window. That's what... Yeah, well, that's because you're paying attention to the kid. Yes.
So not running robotically according to what you think they should, how they should be taught.
Your knowledge and skills as being differentially adapted to what feedback you're getting
from observing the actual child following you. Absolutely. As you're pushing the child, right?
Agree on that. And that we totally agree. Yeah. Teachers should be able to use their experience
and expertise. At the same time, they should have some knowledge of research-based tools. Science of
reading is saying, shut up and follow the directions. This is the way you do it.
Yeah, I think that's an unfortunate characterization. I'm not sure. I don't, I can't speak for the entire
country and all the different ways that science of reading is being rammed down the throats of
people all over the country. I can't speak to that. I can tell you that the people that I talk to that
are the foundational core people to the emergence of the science of reading that's in prominence
today, that those people would say, no, it's not about following some mechanical script. It's about
getting teachers to really ask themselves, what does it take to learn to read? To actually be,
like you were just describing, sync up with what's going on in the child and unfold a pathway that
works for them. And we can have the researchers over there who are saying these things, but when
it becomes to state legislatures, the political and the for-profits get involved, and all of a
sudden you're having curriculum that is mandated. You're having approaches. You're having professional
development like letters. Yeah, now this cuts into another conversation. I know you don't like
these characters, but I'm just going to use them as a quick reference point. I interviewed the people
that were the architects of the no child left behind movement, right, back in the Bush administration.
And they said, building on Haberman's work and Allington's work and Hennessex work at the Hoover
Institute and a bunch of others, they came up with this model that said roughly one-third of the
teachers out there understand what they're doing and care about the students. One-third of the
teachers out there, right, care about the students but don't know what they're doing. And one-third
of the teachers out there don't care about the students and don't know what they're doing. So
in other words, two-thirds of the teacher population was pretty much incompetent and about two-thirds
of the teacher, two-thirds cared, but two-thirds were incompetent. Well, two things, of course,
you know, how did that no child left behind work out? How did that work out? It didn't.
And characterizing teachers that way is very hurtful. I understand. I understand. I understand.
But that is a common perception. Exactly. That is why, that is that common perception that leads
to what you were just describing, the reason why state houses and for-profit organizations are able
to force this kind of a structural, systematic way of doing things is because they don't trust
the teachers to be first-person learning agents that can differentiate them what's necessary for
each child. And so because they don't trust the teachers, huh? Why don't they trust it? Two things,
the teacher bashing, it's a become a political football. It's easy to bash a teacher, overcrowding
all the other variables, including healthcare nutrition and add on top of that this myth that's
created that there's a crisis in reading. That is a myth. That is a myth, but they're perpetuating
that at the expense of learning, at the expense of teachers. So according, so you don't think
NAEP is accurate. How much would you discount NAEP? Oh, I think NAEP is a good, reliable source.
And NAEP says 84% of African-American fourth-grade children are underwater in reading,
imperfection with reading. And that's still 80% of African-American kids are that way in the 12th
grade. Overall, it says almost two-thirds of all the kids in this country are chronically not good
enough at reading on grade level from the time they enter school to the time they leave. And let's
take a look at the NAEP data. NAEP shows that in general scores are had been rising slightly since
1972. They can go very, it's near it's closer to flat line than rising. So look from 72 to 2022.
I do. I've got it all over my website. I can show you an image of it. It's pretty much flat line.
Is there a, well, flat line, is there a statistically significant difference? And it has that little
asterisk between 1972 and today. When you look at it from that, you know, the graph can look kind
of flat, but look to see if there's statistically significant. Yeah. So we, so we went from 90%
African-American to 86%. Right. They have that progress. They have these categories called
proficient, not proficient. These are arbitrarily defined categories, arbitrarily defined. They
do that in Minnesota. They don't report scores. They report percentages of students who fall in
categories. That gives us no comparative data. Is there an achievement graph? There is an equity
gap, meaning that students of color, students in low SES, they have an unfair disadvantage
based on. We're still talking about almost 60% of all kids are imperfection by their standards.
Are imperfection. Improficient. Improficient. Below the level of being proficient. Where my
understanding from talking with the people that design NAPE is that proficiency is the threshold
at which if they're below proficiency, then their, their reading is interfering with learning in
their grade level. They're not able to read transparent. Reading is not transparent to
learning in their grade level. And here's how you solve that. You just lower the level of what
you decided proficiency is. And that is the snake oil, the scan that goes on. So then you don't
trust NAPE. I tried to ask you a minute ago. You think NAPE was, I asked you, what did you think
of NAPE? And you said you thought it was a good source of information. It was. It was. I don't
agree with the categories. It is a good, it is a good source of data. It gives us a general sense
of how. So how does it, how does it really, isn't it amazing to you that the now and NAPE line up so
well? Now that the national adult literacy studies, the US Department of Education has the K12 and it
has now, which studies the adult literacy, right? And the adult literacy, when you look at the number
of adults that are reading at fifth or sixth grade level, for example, kind of matches up with the
number of kids coming out of K12 that are below proficient. How can these two different systems
fit so well together? This is why I can't compare children in K12 to adults. It's two different
populations. Well, when you're talking about 12th graders coming out of school and their reading
scores pretty much match up with adult literacy in the country. Adult literacy is something
different. But let me just mention that. Reading is a skill that continues to grow and get better
as you get older. I'm a better reader. You continue to learn to be better, grow as something happens,
as a sponge. It's like playing the piano. You're able to process things and you have knowledge that
helped you read better. I'm a better reader now at 65 than I was at 55 because I've had millions of
more words poured over my head. Yeah, yeah, I'm with you on all that. I don't see how that
it's just anything I just put up for though. Well, when they're making these comparisons
to kids in school or even in 12th grade with adults, now if you want to talk about people.
I'm not, they're not making the comparison. I'm saying there seems to be a reciprocal,
credible, rising relationship between now's adult literacy studies and NAEP's K12 studies,
that if K12 is speaking, if K12 was really off, you'd see that greater proficiency in adult
population. The fact that they kind of work together, they kind of fit together, even though
they're being arrived at or the kind of data that's underneath getting to them is from two
different planets. And I guess to answer your question that NAEP, I rely on that data. I think
the categories are arbitrarily defined. The data is the... So discount that for me. Do
they make a distinction between basic and proficiency? Forget about advanced and all that
stuff. The majority of kids in the country are below proficiency on their scale, right? Below
and it gets... And if you disaggregate that, the poverty and children of color, it gets worse and
worse and worse up into the 80%, like I mentioned, right? But even though the average white child
well off is in the 50s, more than half of them are below proficient. When I go to the school
districts that I talk to or go to, they don't have any problem saying that they agree with it in terms
of their experience of how much reading is interfering with learning in their classrooms.
I haven't anybody come back. I've had some state legislators come back and push back on that stuff
for political reasons, but I've never had educators go, wow, NAEP is just really off. It doesn't fit
my experience in my school. Quite the contrary. And the question is, comparing now to 10 years ago
to 20 years ago, are those scores going down? And these are arbitrarily not the categories,
but the average scores. The average scores, the categories, what is proficient and basic.
The average scores have changed very, very little in 30 years. They've got... Well,
pop one of them up on the screen. When you look at the fourth grade, the eighth grade, the 12th
grade, it seems if you look at that from a distance, but you'll have to look at statistically
significant change. If you get a large population and a score goes from 257 to 261, that could be a
statistically significant difference. It may not seem like that for the average...
Well, I'm not saying it's not statistically significant, but when you talk about still
half of the kids in this country learning to feel less confident in their mind, in their learning,
because of their difficulty with reading, and that's been going on for more than 30 years,
and it involves a significant dimension of our population, it's hard not to think that there's
a reading problem in this country. Well, the thing was there's a crisis to reading. We must do better.
There has always been problems with how we teach reading. People should be more literate,
absolutely. And if they took a meaning-based approach, that would occur. I know that's a
generalization. But the fact that reading used to be better 10 years ago, 2030, and now it's worse,
and there's this bad crisis, that is a myth, that it's somehow worse right now. That's the
difference between research and data. This is 30 years... Yeah, I want to see the actual scale.
I want to see the NAP data, not how someone chooses to present the NAP data.
This is the... This is why you have to be a responsible consumer of this stuff, David.
This is... This is NAPE data. This is NAPE data right here. Yes. I put this together. I created
this from NAPE. Okay. Every percentage you see, this is across a 30-year span. If you keep going
with this, I'll be muted because you don't need to hear it. No, no, no. That's okay. And it's not
that I don't love and trust you, David, but I want to go back to... Here you go. Here's the scale
scores. Okay? Yes. And I want... That's 217, 220. Fourth grade, 217, 220. Yep. Out of 500. So is it
significant? Three points? Yeah. Does it point still to a massively ugly situation? Yes.
What? Tell me more about that. What this is saying is in 2000, 1992, and I don't know...
Yep. We don't have the statistical significant scores here. It would have a little asterisk.
Is it statistically significant in 2018? The latest one is 2022. Is there a statistically
significant difference? Meaning, are we getting worse? There's going to be natural ebbs and flows
ups and downs in the data. Is it a statistically significant difference? The overall picture is...
So maybe back in 1992, 68% of kids were below proficiency and today only 66. But gee, 66 is
terrible. It's not about the small gain. It's about the overall big picture. We're talking about
general reading scores, the average. Is there this crisis? And we're not talking categories.
We're talking average scores. Those categories are arbitrarily defined. You can't compare
percentages in categories that are arbitrarily defined. They said, I think this is below
proficiency. I think this is basic. Is there a gap in scores? Absolutely. There's an equity gap.
Do we need to address reading differently? Absolutely. Is the science of reading going
to fix that and make scores go up? We tried that with the Reading First Initiative 20 years ago.
That came out of no challenge behind. That's essentially what science... And they would say that
was it a decade long subscription to whole language that occurred in California in the...
What was it? 80s or something like that led to the greatest generational loss of learning in
the state of California's history. And that's what they used as an argument for the science of reading.
So they would come back and say the same thing about what you're saying. No, actually, that study
in California, that wasn't a research study. That was people looking at data. When they actually
looked at NAEP scores and they differentiated between those who identified as whole language
and those who identified as whole language. Now you're quoting NAEP scores?
I absolutely believe NAEP scores are good. It's the categories within. But they found that whole
language teachers actually had higher scores than those who identified as skills base. But that's
one research study. It doesn't prove anything. But this idea that whole language was the variable,
was the cause of something, that is naive, unscientific thinking. Sadly, that's the kind
of thinking that's used by science of reading advocates. There is hard data on the reading
first initiative that it was a billion dollar boondoggle. States got money. If they subscribe
to it, they got lots of money. So on the state level, California and Florida, some of these are
going, oh, this is great. Give me more money. But when the national people looked at it, they said,
this is a billion dollar boondoggle. And that's what science of reading is going to be like.
Five years down the line, people are going to say, that's silly little bald man. Maybe you had a point.
Yeah. Well, unfortunately, the science of reading thing got its power from the decoding
dyslexia groups that have forced the legislators to adopt science of reading as it relates to the
dyslexia movement. Right. So look, there's no question that it's just all about politics in a way.
And money. And the assumption that we can't solve these problems in an entirely different way
by making the orthography elastic. We could have done this decades ago already. Anyway, back to the
point about NAEP. So discount, how many kids do you, if you disagree with NAEP's categorization,
do you agree that there's a line that we should draw somewhere between what you might call
elemental basic skills where somebody who could take a long time to read a label on a pill bottle
is different than somebody who could read fluently at the level of complexity and vocabulary necessary
to be successful at their grade level in school? Right. There's a difference between those. Yeah.
There's differences. Yes. Okay. So would you agree with as a conceptual definition for the moment
that with proficiency, what we hope to mean by that term is that reading would be transparent to
learning in the written content of your grade level? Reading would be comparable to the written
content at your grade level. No, reading would be transparent to you could, in other words,
reading would not interfere with learning. It would be transparent to learning at the grade level.
So when you're reading a fifth grade textbook that requires you to understand the language there,
that reading wouldn't be a problem for you learning from that textbook. Right. Reading wouldn't be a
problem from you doing research or doing what any kind of classroom assignments that required
reading at that grade level. So proficiency means that your reading skills, your reading abilities
are transparent to your ability to learn at the grade level you're in.
We need to read at a certain level, but grade levels are an abstraction. They're not very
abstract. Of course they are, but they do exist. They do exist. They create fifth grade textbooks.
When you say something is at the fifth grade level, therefore a fifth grader should be able to read it.
Well, if one is familiar with the concepts that are being described, sentence complexity,
vocabulary, that's all in that ability to read. So if you're coming here without experiences,
with different experiences, with culturally different experiences, you are going to score
lower on these grade level measures. Doesn't mean that the reading instruction is bad. It's
probably culturally biased. If we tapped into students natural ways of learning and incorporate
that, you can get out by disaggregating all these scores, and that's a different conversation. We
can do that. That wasn't my question. I was just trying to get a handle on where do you,
how would you describe proficiency? To me, what I'm describing, I'm saying proficiency,
grade level proficiency means reading is not interfering. It's making learning possible at
the grade level content of your grade level. And yes, we could say grade levels are blurry and
they're arbitrary. And yes, yes, yes. But nonetheless, there's fifth grade textbooks and
eighth grade textbooks, right? There are all kinds of materials that are generated around the assumption
of grade level categorization. So inside those categorizations, which are part of the conventional
system of education, proficiency means that if you're a sixth grade proficient, that reading is
not an issue for you inside that space. Yeah, you may have background knowledge issues. You may have
vocabulary issues. But if you can read well, you could learn those things as you encounter them in
the classroom or in the textbook. To say it's an issue is a deficiency lens. If you are proficient,
you're able to create meaning with print. There's more complex and less complex. I get uncomfortable
with quantifying students and students learning. I know there has to be some sort of bar. But I
think the bigger question is, are there categories who decided this is proficient, this isn't
proficient? What type of material are you reading? I don't know if we're coming to anything here.
Well, I mean, a whole massive gathering of educational scientists and researchers are
pulled into the Institute of Educational Science to flesh out and work out some kind of consensual
understanding about how to make these categories. So it's not just your thinking or my thinking,
but it's some kind of consensus of the people that study those distinctions. And could they make
mistakes? Sure. But are they making mistakes that are a radical magnitude of order off? I don't think
so. I mean, given the manifest intelligence in our population, I don't think so.
It goes back to the categories are arbitrarily defined, and they said this is proficient,
this is basic, this is that. And I was just trying to say, if you just want to throw them out,
how much should we discount them in order to make it safe for your mind?
If you think that's, where would you draw the proficiency line on the spectrum that we were
looking at? You have to make a decision right now. I don't know. I don't feel comfortable
drawing a proficiency line on a measure like that. So then you don't think, I mean,
then why, if we're not going to do that, then why assess reading at all?
It gives us a general sense of where we're at. We should not rely on that. That should not be,
that is just a general sense of where we're at. And does it support that there's a massive reading
crisis? No, and that was the basis of the argument. There's a massive failure, and NAEP data simply
does not show that. Well, that's, that's totally a matter of interpretation. NAEP says, to me,
80 plus percent of African American kids and 60 plus percent of white and everything in between,
based on socioeconomics and color and all the other variables, that the majority of kids in this
country are underwater with reading, meaning that their capacity for reading is less than what's
required to be successful in school at every level and throughout school. Absolutely. But the thesis
was, then how can that not be a reading crisis? If you just agreed with that, the argument that's
been made is there a crisis, the scores are going down and we have to do something differently.
And my, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. The scores are going down. They have,
not about whether the scores are going down, it's whether the whole big picture is bad.
That we always need to improve our ability to teach reading. Absolutely. How many, let's put
it another way, how many kids should be in proficient? How many kids is an acceptable
percentage of our population to be not good enough at reading in school? What do you think?
A hundred percent of children should be able to create meeting with prints so that they can
succeed, so that they can learn. The argument is scores are going down. We need to do something
radically different. And it's this variable. It's because people aren't teaching phonics,
is the reason why. Yeah, that's different. I'm not about phonics. But that's the argument that's
being made. That's why I'm not. I'm saying the whole system has been chronically not good enough
at getting enough kids to be proficient in reading for as long as we can remember,
as long as we've got data. I agree that. No, it's been not good enough at getting the majority of
our population to read well enough to be successful in school for as long as we've known. I agree with
that. I agree. That's the point. That's the problem. That's the crisis. It doesn't have to do with
little tiny fluctuations in the data line. Well, that's the argument that's being made. There's
this sudden crisis that we well not for you, I'm sorry. That's what the science that's a
manufactured crisis that was in a crisis 10 years ago. Was it a crisis 30 years ago? Why do we want
to go back to the 1960s with our instruction if there was a crisis then and we're using the same
method? Yeah, no, I completely disconnect this from methods of teaching. I'm saying the whole
system is underwater. It's been underwater for as long as we've known and that for me, the big
consequence of this isn't even reading. It's that how does a kid feel who goes through their entire
educational experience feeling not good enough mentally? Absolutely. I think it's due to them.
But I can't connect. I can't disconnect with methods of teaching because that's affecting
real teachers and real kids. All the methods of teaching, despite the fact that you don't think
they're at war, they've been in conflict with each other and the consequence of that is this
near flat line of terrible end results with respect to our whole population and reading. Our
whole population and reading is terrible and has been for as long as we keep track of it and we
keep arguing over how to teach it in different ways. We must continue to think about how to
teach it. Absolutely. That there's been this proven study, that whole language causes something or
this is the variable? Yeah. I don't think that. Again, I think all of these paradigms, theories,
models, whatever you want to call them, are warped around certain assumptions that themselves
are going to be blown up in the next few years and it isn't going to matter that much. But the
big problem is we need to do something about this because the great hope of America and the world
and our kids and our futures is turning up the learning radically, turning up the learning.
One of the biggest obstacles to turning up the learning in our world is how many kids are stuck
in this ladder of learning to read. We agree on that and I agree with you. The next question
and maybe the conversation for next time is how? What can we do to create, to better prepare teachers
but to better prepare our students to read and meet the complexities of the real world? What can
we do differently? Yep. I'd love that. Let's divide up our time next time and I want to give you,
and rather than me kind of pushing you around as you say things and are you doing that with me,
let's take half the time and you just present what you think is the way to go. I will kind of
push back on it but leave you to drive the current and you do the same for me and I'll
give my sense of where the orthography transformation needs to happen. Okay. So what
do I think should be included in a reading program, reading curriculum? Yeah. You're going to change
the world. This whole thing we talked about today, this problem, right? How would you do it?
How would you, if you could be the grandpoop boss you say, right, what would you do to change the
reading trajectory of the country? I will solve that problem next time. So listeners, stay tuned
in two weeks because I'm going to show you how to solve David's smile. How to solve the reading problem.
Yeah. And I'm going to make a suggestion of my own that'll be different.
I love this, David. I love it. Yes. Because I think it's bringing us back to the brass
tax. What do we do? What do we need more of? What do we need less of? Okay. Got a good place to stop?
Good for today. Yeah. I'll stop the recording here.