Few debates in the field of education are more corrupted by politics than the debate about how America’s schools teach reading — and that’s no small feat given today’s alphabet soup of education-related controversies such as CRT (critical race theory), DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), and SEL (social and emotional learning). What we know for certain is that schools have been lousy at teaching kids how to read: National data show that only about a third of fourth-graders, and a significantly smaller portion of poor and minority fourth-graders, can read well. It’s a sad state of affairs — malpractice, really — that so many children are denied the foundation of literacy development required to succeed in school and in life.

The fierce ideological tug-of-war over reading pits those who advocate “phonics” against those who favor “whole language” (a more recent offshoot of which goes under the anodyne name “balanced literacy”). This fight, practically unknown not only to the general public but to teachers themselves, has a long, tortuous history; in fact, people have been arguing for centuries about how children should be taught to read. The stubborn persistence of differences between advocates of these two dueling approaches has been akin to a holy war in which evidence and argument alone — despite a trove of research clearly supporting what’s called, somewhat clumsily, the “science of reading” — will not decide the matter. The science of reading — also referred to as “evidence-based reading instruction” — is the converging evidence about what matters and what works in teaching reading. Phonics is part of it, but the science of reading reflects a broader body of research, across multiple disciplines, showing that most children can learn how to read if they’re taught with the right methods.

In the 1840s, Horace Mann, known as the “father of American education,” argued that children should be taught to read whole words instead of individual letters, which he described as “skeleton-shaped, bloodless, ghostly apparitions” that make children feel “death-like, when compelled to face them.” This malformed opinion morphed into the broader whole-language theory, whose proponents hold that learning to read is analogous to learning to speak, coming naturally, as if through osmosis. Disciples of whole-language instruction believe that if a word is unfamiliar to a child, it can be skipped, guessed at, or picked up from context. To wit, Kenneth S. Goodman, the founder of whole language, once referred to reading as a “psycholinguistic guessing game.”

Phonics takes exactly the opposite approach. Mastery of a set of symbols is the initial step; an analogy for learning how to read might be learning music notation or Braille. Children should be taught that words are made up of discrete parts and shown how different letters and letter combinations convey the English language’s 44 phonemes. Also dating back to the 1800s, the theory behind phonics is that learning to read requires knowledge and understanding of the relationships between letters and sounds, with the aim of helping early readers develop decoding skills (i.e., sounding out and recognizing words) that will eventually become automatic.

Those with allegiances to either phonics or whole language have ever since fought to determine how reading is taught in America’s classrooms. By the 1980s, the debate had become so intense that people began referring to it as “the reading war.” Things got so hot between the two opposing camps that Congress was pulled into the fray, convening the National Reading Panel in the late 1990s to review all the research on reading in the hopes of facilitating a truce. The upshot from the panel’s report was that phonics lessons help kids become better readers. The same could not be said for whole language.

The myths about the efficacy of whole language / balanced literacy are legion nonetheless. Its proponents assert that children don’t all learn to read in the same way and that a whole-language approach meets their different needs, and they confidently claim that kids learn more when teachers use this method. Research has shown that neither is true. On the contrary, reading researchers have found that, unlike learning to speak, a natural process that occurs by being surrounded by spoken language, learning to read does not come naturally. That’s because the written word is a relatively recent addition in human history, dating back just a few thousand years. To crack the code of how the spoken word connects to the word on a printed page, children need explicit, systematic phonics instruction. This is the premise undergirding the science of reading.

Despite decades of scientific research debunking the misbegotten whole-language approach, it has been the prevailing orthodoxy in how reading is taught in many, perhaps most, elementary schools for the past 50 years. The fault lies in no small part at the university level, in schools of education, whose faculties have turned a blind eye to the science of reading. Instead, they’ve unapologetically and enthusiastically peddled whole language / balanced literacy to teachers-in-training while tagging phonics as boring and tedious. Textbook publishers perpetuated this flawed understanding of how children read, and school districts have followed suit.

The National Council on Teacher Quality, a think tank based in Washington, D.C., recently reviewed the syllabi of teacher-preparation programs across the country and found that only half of them appeared to be teaching the components of evidence-based reading instruction. While this reflects some progress (a 2013 review by the same think tank showed that only about a third of teacher-prep programs did), it is still disastrously unacceptable. Literacy has real stakes. Children who don’t learn to read by the end of third grade are likely to remain poor readers for the rest of their lives, facing longer odds of graduating from high school. And those who don’t graduate from high school are more likely to commit crimes and have higher rates of incarceration.

But even if educator-preparation programs were suddenly to see the light on the science of reading, there’s a lot more to literacy than what’s being contested through the pitched battles of the reading wars. Lost in the wrangling is the importance of the background knowledge needed for broad reading competence. Think of this as the mental furniture of history, science, literature, and the arts that provides the underpinnings of a child’s ability to understand adequately what she is reading. Background knowledge is used to draw inferences, clarify ambiguity, and store information in memory. And although it’s where the magic of literacy happens, it is too often overlooked or ignored.

To put a finer point on this, teaching content is teaching reading. Unlike math, which is sequential and hierarchical, reading is cumulative. Children who have well-educated parents, who grow up amid books and are exposed to enriching experiences such as travel, begin their schooling with an incalculable leg up when it comes to knowledge and vocabulary. In contrast, those raised in language-poor households begin their schooling far back from the starting line. (By comparison, it is much easier to help a child catch up in math than in reading.) This gap is a problem that phonics alone cannot fix, and the deficits become even wider if schools fail to address them; but the science of reading is the best approach to begin doing so.

Today, the renewed interest in solving the problems of poor reading instruction focuses on putting the science of reading into practice. In the never-ending reading wars, however, supporters of whole language / balanced literacy aren’t ignorant of the research; they simply don’t care. They adhere to their beliefs and continue to deny reading science. The latest battle, then, is as much about politics as about improving reading instruction, in that one layer of the reading wars associates support for phonics with the Right and support for whole language with the Left. On both the pedagogy and the politics, though, there is reason for guarded optimism.

Over the past decade, more than two dozen states have passed laws or implemented new policies related to the science of reading. The current wave of reading laws started in Florida but gained strength after Mississippi, having passed such legislation, saw its reading scores improve dramatically on national exams. From coast to coast, states such as Colorado, Tennessee, and North Carolina have adopted legislation with the aim of emulating the “Mississippi model.” The old adage “Thank God for Mississippi” no longer applies when it comes to teaching kids how to read.

What’s promising about these new laws is not only the substance behind them — requiring teachers to be trained in and to implement evidence-based reading instruction — but also the strong bipartisan backing for them. North Carolina’s law, for instance, passed both the state’s house and its senate in just three days, with nearly unanimous support. Mississippi’s legislation was adopted with similarly overwhelming majorities.

As with most things in education, arguments and disputes are often won or lost based on how they’re framed, not on facts or evidence. The hostilities around reading have been no different. Many teachers resist efforts to dictate reading instruction and continue to advocate and practice teaching methods divorced from the growing research consensus; in most cases this is probably because they have simply been poorly trained by a higher-education establishment that resists any challenge to its way of doing things. What this means is that children haven’t been taught to read in ways that are consistent with what we know about how they actually learn. But in the last few years the momentum has been in the right direction. With a well-informed consensus on what constitutes effective reading instruction ascendant, an end to the reading wars could finally be in sight.