Merchants of Illiteracy?

A Tasmanian kid's chance of leaving school literate is currently roughly the same as winning a coin toss (48% of Tasmanians of working age are functionally illiterate). Teachers say (and genuinely believe) that they're using evidence-based teaching methods, but scientists are saying schools are 30-40 years behind the evidence. Teachers aren't the problem, though, it's the academics who are teaching the teachers that science has nothing to offer, and now they're also advising our education department staff at the highest levels.

Something is rotten
in the state of Tasmania

Podcast (18:30) summary
Read the full paper (v2)Audiobook of the paperToo long; didn't read"My science is different":
At a Loss for Words
Emily Hanford podcast
View the Parliamentary petition
(Taswegians only)
My blog

Executive Summary (TL;DR)

Around half of Tasmania's working age population is functionally illiterate. We know that poor literacy has a swathe of impacts, including on career opportunities, broader societal productivity costs, mental health, and criminality.

The optimum window of opportunity for reading and writing instruction is narrow - around three years of schooling - after which, if a child has not learnt, it takes four times as much investment to achieve the same results.

Advances in brain imaging techniques in the last few decades have comprehensively proven that the theory underpinning the predominant literacy instruction approach is, despite well-meaning origins, based on little more than an ill-informed ideology.

Similarly, current efforts to align literacy instruction with recent findings in the science of reading are resisted by academics wedded to views that treat teacher-led, explicit, repetitive instruction as an imposition on the rights of the child. This in turn perpetuates the cultural inertia that sees teaching methods at the classroom coalface continue without being informed by the available science.

Tasmania's Premier, while Minister for Education in 2021, committed to an ambitious plan to improve Tasmania's literacy outcomes. However, this plan appears to be being systematically undermined from within the education department itself. The Department for Education, Children and Young People has engaged education consultants who appear to be actively undermining the notion of scientific consensus, in a similar vein to the obfuscation engaged in by the tobacco industry and fossil fuel lobbyists.

My petition, sponsored by independent The Honourable Meg Webb MLC, calls on the government to defer to the advice of the independent body that was created specifically to evaluate the available research pertinent to education.

Sign the Tasmanian Parliamentary PetitionConsider an analogy...

Think of it this way...

Illiteracy & COVID

There's a science of reading just like there's a science of COVID. The comparison is useful. With the study of COVID you'll have people across multiple fields involved in research, e.g.: virologists, immunologists, and biochemists on the nitty gritty of the invasion of the body by the virus; histologists, cardiologists, nephrologists on the effects on the human body's organs and systems; epidemiologists and other public health experts tracking spread and making recommendations, and sociologists looking at the social factors that create inequalities in disease distribution. An equivalent variety of fields contributes to the collective science of reading.

Similarly, there are ideological factors at play influencing the reception of both of these bodies of scientific knowledge. One's views are likely to impact the reception of vaccination and other social controls around disease. The same is true of reading science: there's a strong ideological basis of self-determinism and social constructivism behind much of the 'balanced literacy' resistance to the role of explicit and repetitive instruction in the classroom.

The most useful analogy to be drawn between the science of COVID and the science of reading is, I think, in the "where are we at?" aspect. Science knows far more about how we acquire COVID than about how we acquire the skill of reading. If we draw a timeline of our knowledge of the SARS-CoV2 virus and the related disease(s), and had to put an arrow on that timeline to represent where we are with our equivalent knowledge of reading, my guess is we'd be around the point at which we started developing a COVID vaccine. At that point we knew enough about the human body and the virus to be able to develop a vaccine, but we didn't know how effective it would be in reality, what its side-effects would be, how long it would remain effective, what 'long COVID' was or how prevalent it would be, how easily the virus would be able to 'mutate its way around the vaccine', and so on. Similarly, we now know a lot about reading and how the brain does it, but we're nowhere near knowing all the nitty-gritty details, and we have some general principles from the data about how best to make it happen, but we're also nowhere near knowing the full story on that front and we will quite possibly discover there are aspects of our current knowledge that are wrong and need to be corrected.

So, that's where the arrow is representing where we are in our knowledge in the science of reading journey, relative to the science of COVID journey. If we had to put another arrow on the COVID timeline to represent the science-based practice (as opposed to knowledge) in the majority of classrooms in terms of reading instruction, that arrow would be back at the point where we were bleaching our groceries and saying masks won't make any difference (and half of the trailblazers who are wearing masks, have their nostrils poking over the top of them). In the science of COVID, there was a delay of only weeks, sometimes months, before our knowledge influenced our practice.

That's the real travesty in this issue: that there is such a discrepancy between the scientific knowledge of reading acquisition, and the application of that knowledge in classrooms, and that this discrepancy has persisted for decades. E.g. many of our schools have already implemented air purifiers to lower the risk of acquiring COVID, but they're yet to implement an early-years phonics screening test, which reading researchers have known for decades can identify those children at higher risk of reading failure before they fail and fall behind.

In Tasmania, the situation is particularly dire, and there currently appears to be some kind of active political faction within our department of education which is committed to preserving Tasmania as the last great bastion of ignorance of reading science.

View the Tasmanian Parliamentary Petition
Reading and writing learning aids