Balanced literacy and New Zealand’s opportunity to re-write reading instruction history.

 

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This week, I was privileged to speak alongside Emily Hanford (American Public Media; Sold a Story) and Associate Professor Lorraine Hammond, AM (Edith Cowan University)  at the inaugural Cultivating the Literacy Landscape symposia in New Zealand (NZ); one in Christchurch, the other in Auckland. These events were auspiced by the NZ NGO, Learning Matters, under the outstanding leadership of Founder and Managing Director, Carla McNeil. Carla is a former teacher and school principal, as well as being the parent of a young adult who experienced significant learning challenges. She is well-qualified therefore, to comment on the literacy landscape in her homeland.

Readers of this blog and subscribers to the Sold a Story podcast will be well aware that New Zealand has played a key role since the 1970s in ensuring the stronghold of whole language (more latterly, balanced literacy) instruction and support, both in initial teacher education and in school policy and practice, through the influential work, nationally and internationally, of the late Dame Marie Clay.

In an unfortunate but not uncommon case of national cognitive dissonance, NZ’s literacy rates in recent decades do not provide a basis for celebrating Clay’s legacy. To be clear, Australia’s performance with respect to literacy achievement is also nothing to crow about (see also here), with students from disadvantaged backgrounds carrying an unfair burden associated with high-variance teaching. This high-variance, in turn, derives from a stubborn reluctance by higher education providers to end their romantic devotion to balanced literacy and commit to changing the knowledge and skills that undergraduate teaching students receive in exchange for a higher education debt. I have blogged previously about the resistance of higher education providers to engaging with evidence, and the glacial rate of change in that sector as a consequence.

After more than two decades, there’s an inconvenient truth, however, for education faculties and policy makers to face:

Balanced literacy has been an ill-conceived, poorly designed, inadequately monitored, and hence unethical, social experiment.

We would all baulk at revelations of hospitals going rogue in their treatment of child patients, and each taking their own approach to diagnostic assessments and interventions. In rare cases where substandard care does occur, there is community outrage and public naming and shaming of hospitals, if not individual staff. This level of accountability does not apply in education. If education academics want to truly endow education with the status of an esteemed profession, then preparing graduates to be evidence-based and accountable practitioners would be an excellent place to start.

Sadly, in many western, industrialised nations, low respect for the rights and needs of children has enabled vital education protections and checks to be eroded, in favour of the rights of adults to indulge their own ideas and preferences with respect to classroom practice.

Balanced literacy has been the perfect Petrie dish for cultivating eclecticism in reading instruction. It asks next to nothing of education academics in terms of understanding decades of cognitive psychology research on the nature of the reading process and sharing this with the next generation of classroom teachers. Education academics in turn, have exploited this freedom by busying themselves with their own preferred patches of garden, in authentic children’s literature, digital literacy, critical literacy, multi-literacies, and so on.  Teaching reading, however, must be about the time-sensitive needs of children, not the aesthetic preferences and ideologies of adults.

In my keynote presentation at the NZ symposia, I suggested that it’s time for us to have a conversation (some “hard words” perhaps) with balanced literacy and in so doing, engage in some awkward fact-checking.

Here’s a potted summary of what I argued that education academics and policy makers need to come to grips with, as a matter of urgency:

Awkward reality	Implications, fall-out, and discussion points
Putting adjectives in front of the word “literacy” is not an acceptable substitute for teaching children how to read.	Reading is a verb, and literacy is a noun. That means it is something that children need to be able to do. It is not a vague and abstract concept that can have countless adjectives casually placed in front of it (digital, critical, legal, health, maths, etc) to appease the interests of adults. If students can read, write, and spell, there is every chance that they can develop and display multiple forms of literacy. It does not work the other way. Balanced literacy needs to wipe the Vaseline off its lens and address the fact that children need to be able to read before they can become literate.
Reading is a biologically secondary (“unnatural”) thing for humans to do.	Humans have had oral language skills for approximately 200K years but writing systems for only 3-5K years. Reading and writing are social contrivances that happen to carry much currency in contemporary industrialised nations. As numerous cognitive psychologists have noted (e.g., Harvard’s Steven Pinker), we have a language brain, not a reading brain. We can acquire a reading brain, but most of us need exposure to high quality instruction in the early years of school in order to do so. Many other biologically secondary skills also need to be developed in the context of school. Balanced literacy does not have a plan for explicitly and systematically teaching the life-changing skills of reading and writing to all children, regardless of their starting point. The fact that some children get across the bridge from oral language to reading and writing proficiency via balanced literacy does not justify its use as a population-level reading instruction approach.
English has one of the most complex alphabetic writing systems in the world	English has a history of rich borrowings of vocabulary, spellings, and sentence structure from other languages. This reflects centuries of invasions, trade patterns, religious influences, inter-marrying of royal houses, and even the Black Death. Spelling is not “the problem” in English; the extent to which pronunciation is free to shift around is the culprit. Spelling changes slowly, where pronunciation can differ between two members of the same household. Spellings in turn, reflect their ancestral roots, or etymologies, but teachers rarely learn about this in their pre-service education. Balanced literacy has dealt with the rich and complex history of English by ignoring it. It’s been a case of “if you don’t understand it, don’t vote for it”.
Teachers need to be knowledgeable about how their writing system works.	This point is related to the one above. When I go into a school, I want to find that the staff who are the most knowledgeable and confident about what reading is, how to teach it, how to monitor progress, how to intervene for struggling students are….you guessed it….. teachers. Sadly, this is often not the case. There is a raft of international evidence indicating low levels of teacher knowledge of critical language constructs that underpin reading instruction  (see references on this page). Explicit knowledge about how their writing system works is the precious family china that has been systematically eroded from teachers’ possession in recent decades. Balanced literacy, by definition, is not in a position to reinstate this china; when teachers do re-claim it, however, they are encouraged to use their best china every day, for all students, not just those who are struggling.
Reading is a language-based task, but strong oral language skills are not enough.	This relates to the fact that oral language is a biologically primary skill-set and reading, writing, and spelling are biologically secondary, and so need to be taught (and taught well). We want all children to arrive at school with well-developed oral language skills, expressively and receptively, across vocabulary, sentence structure and morphology, discourse, inferential language, and so forth. Balanced literacy wants to leverage this to create an illusion of early reading fluency through children’s recitation of predictable texts, instead of giving children early code mastery so they can foster their ongoing oral language skills through the endless well of opportunities afforded by timely reading proficiency.
We should be successfully teaching 95% of children to read, not 60-70%.	This is a point made by a number of reading scientists, including Dr Kerry Hempenstall in this 2013 academic paper. When reading is taught effectively and efficiently at Tier 1, achievement levels of the whole class go up, and fewer students need to draw on the precious few intervention resources that can be mobilised to support them if they fall behind. This is what Response to Intervention is all about. RTI, in turn, sits within the broader Multi Tiered Systems of Support framework, as synthesised by Dr Kate de Bruin and colleagues in a recent AERO publication, Supporting students significantly behind in literacy and numeracy. Nancy Young's Ladder of Reading and Writing is a helpful infographic for illustrating just how few children achieve success with minimally guided reading instruction.  Balanced literacy is not compatible with RTI and MTSS, as they require evidence-based explicit teaching, with robust progress monitoring (i.e., not Running Records) and intervention (i.e., not Reading Recovery). No child should ever have to recover from their initial reading instruction.
It takes four times as many resources to resolve a literacy problem by Year 4 than it would have taken in Year 1.	This point has also been made by a number of reading scientists, including by Dr Kerry Hempenstall in the paper linked to above. If by year 4, the multiplier is 4, what does it balloon to in Year 7, or Year 10? How do we choose between psychological supports for the emotional and behavioural sequelae of academic struggle on the one hand, and intervention supports targeting weak reading subskills on the other? Why would we teach reading in ways that are known to promote high rates of failure? This is unconscionable in 2023.
There is no scientific evidence that supports balanced literacy and its key elements as a preferred reading instruction approach.	This is probably the most extraordinary “achievement” of those who promote balanced literacy. In spite of the fact that balanced literacy has not been shown through rigorous, empirical research to be the optimal way to produce reading success at a population level, it has been assigned and allowed to retain “untouchable” status. In Australia, the community is protected against rogue health practitioners who want to introduce new medicines and devices through the oversight of the Therapeutic Goods Administration. In the US the Food and Drug Administration fulfils this role. Where is the regulatory authority that protects children from non-evidence-based approaches to reading instruction? How are universities held to account for perpetuating these, year in, year out, in initial teacher education degrees (and charging for the privilege)?
It is not the job of parents to teach children to read, write and spell.	This is a pernicious and damaging spin designed to shift responsibility from the education sector to the home. I have blogged in detail about this here. Suffice to say, we want parents to read to their children and support their language and literacy development wherever they can, if they can. Reading to children doesn't turn them into readers however, any more than playing classical music to them turns them into pianists. Balanced literacy has de-professionalised teachers by abdicating responsibility for ensuring teachers are classroom-ready as reading teachers, and then playing the parent-blame joker when its efforts fail children in the long tail of under-achievement.
Reading instruction needs to be informed by neuroscience, e.g., the work of Professor Stanislas Dehaene.	Professor Stanislas Dehaene’s work in recent years has been instrumental in reinforcing evidence derived from cognitive psychology research and classroom studies concerning optimal reading instruction. Most notably, it assists us to understand how high-quality initial reading instruction helps to transform our evolutionarily-derived language brains so that they can become reading brains. Balanced literacy is silent on this.

 

Balanced literacy epitomises the golden mean fallacy or “argument to moderation”: the idea that when views on a topic are polarised, there must be a logical “sweet spot” in the middle where we all need to meet and strike a compromise. We have tried the sweet spot experiment in reading instruction, and it didn’t work. We can’t unsee the population-level data associated with the failed balanced literacy experiment. Teachers are haunted by the faces of children who they can’t forget; the ones left behind by balanced literacy’s known but brushed-over and forgiven shortcomings.

In response to an audience question about how New Zealand can overhaul its approach to reading instruction and support, given the weighty sentimental attachment to the Clay legacy, Emily Hanford made an incisive observation: New Zealand is about the size of a small US state and has one national government – no states and territories to wrangle to the table, as exist in Australia and the US.

I would add to this that New Zealand has already taken reading policy and practice to scale at a national level, albeit history records that this happened to be based on a then questioned, and now debunked theory of reading and reading support.

There is an opportunity now for New Zealand to re-write its reading instruction history and lead English-speaking countries out of the balanced literacy dark age.  

Now wouldn’t that be a spectacular way for a small nation to truly punch above its weight on the global stage?

(C) Pamela Snow (2023)