I've stepped back from diving into why kids struggle with reading fluency—it's often like shouting into a void, where well-meaning educators echo the same tired lines without probing deeper. But this morning, an email landed in my inbox with Sam Bommarito's latest blog post, pulling me right back in. His reflections on the "reading wars" and the "science of reading" (SoR) movement are thoughtful, as always, but they skirt the core issue I've been hammering on for years: instructional confusion that causes kids to shut down entirely from learning to read.
The "Reading Wars" Mantra: What Works for One Doesn't Work for All?
Sam writes: The real reason for the reading wars is that what works with one child doesn’t always work with another. Most children thrive on a code-emphasis approach. However, some do not.
This line feels like Sam's signature refrain—he's said variations of it in blogs, tweets, and even our 45-minute podcast chat several years back (one that never aired, likely because my pushback clashed with the polished narratives on education sites). It's not that he's wrong on the surface; individual differences exist. But it stops short of the "why." For anyone insisting phonics doesn't click for every child, have they dug into the root cause? I've asked that question relentlessly, and the answer I've pieced together from two decades of teaching shut down kids isn't some feel-good platitude—it's confusion from muddled instruction.
Roughly 20-30% of kids hit a wall early on, not because phonics is inherently flawed for them, but because they're bombarded with fuzzy letter-sound models—like pronouncing "l" as "luh" or "a" as "ah"—that overload their brains. These are the "shutdown kids": bright, capable learners who disengage completely when the basics don't make sense. Once they're tuned out, re-engaging them is an uphill battle; motivation evaporates, and schools often slap a dyslexia label on them as a quick fix. These aren't innate deficits—they're casualties of poor modeling. They drift through the system, emerging as illiterates, funneled into low-wage jobs or worse, their potential squandered. Think of historical figures like Lincoln or Edison, who clawed through early reading hurdles; imagine how many more could thrive without this barrier.
Meanwhile, the resilient 40-60%—average to high-ability kids—muddle through the confusion via sheer grit. They self-correct by grades 4-6, spotting patterns or leaning on vocabulary to chunk words whole. But here's the rub: they've missed years of foundational content, widening gaps in comprehension and equity. Bilingual kids in my Malaysian classes, for instance, read fluently in Malay or Pinyin but flounder in English—not from some brain wiring glitch, but from the extraneous sounds creeping into English phonics that aren't mirrored in their first languages - Malay and Pinyin.
So, yes, phonics can work for every kid (barring rare acuity issues like hearing loss), leaving no one behind—if sounds are taught crisply and purely from day one. No vowel glides, no added "uh"s; just the raw phoneme, modeled repeatedly in meaningful sentences. It's that simple, yet it's the missing link in so much discourse.
Why doesn't Sam get this? He's in that 40-60% club—the self-rescuers who figured reading out despite the fog. Same for Mark Seidenberg, whose work on language and cognition has sharpened my own thinking, but who still models "lamb" as "luh-ah-muh-buh" in his writings and talks. That slip reinforces the very confusion I'm fighting. And Sally Shaywitz? I've emailed her repeatedly over the years, pointing out how her New York Times piece normalized "duh-ah-guh" for "dog. These experts, brilliant as they are, speak from a place of personal success, not the shutdown trenches.
Emily Hanford: The Untold Story in Sold a Story
Sam nods to Emily Hanford: Emily Hanford has not told the whole story.
Spot on, and understatement at that. I've been emailing her since 2017—pre-Sold a Story—laying out the shutdown phenomenon in detail, complete with video clips of college students in Perth who masked early confusions but paid a fluency price. She gets the phonics urgency right, but skips the "why some kids bail entirely" layer. I offered to discuss it; she wasn't keen. It's not malice—it's the echo chamber of SoR, laser-focused on decoding drills without unpacking the disengagement trigger.
Seidenberg's Slipperiness with "Science of Reading"
On Seidenberg again: Cognitive scientist and psycholinguist Mark Seidenberg, someone who would probably disagree mightily with me pedagogically, but from whom I have learned a lot, apparently feels a similar slipperiness with the “science of reading” label and what it represents.
I've read Seidenberg's books too—they're gold for demystifying how kids crack the code. But that pedagogical chasm? It stems from his (and the field's) blind spot on shutdowns, rooted in those extraneous pronunciations he models. If the foundation wobbles from impure sounds, fluency stalls, and kids check out. We've chatted about this in broader terms before: resilient readers overwrite the glitches through immersion, but the vulnerable 20-30% don't.
The Phonemic Awareness Trap: Prerequisite or Red Herring?
Finally, Sam's sharpest jab: I’m going to lay my cards on the table here: The treatment of PA [phonemic awareness] in the “science of reading”—the idea that a certain level of PA is prerequisite for reading, and that PA training should continue until the student becomes highly proficient at PA tasks regardless of how well they are reading—is emblematic of problems that have arisen within the SoR approach.
For over 50 years, educators pinned reading woes on phonological awareness deficits (PAD)—until I started calling BS, backed by my students who aced Malay and Pinyin (phoneme-heavy systems) but bombed English decoding. If it were a true PAD, no language should click. That theory crumbled, morphing into "phonemic awareness" as the new buzzword, but it's lipstick on the same pig. Did Sam, Seidenberg, or Michelle Rury (another SoR voice) grow up drilling PA explicitly? Probably not—they're the self-figurers, assuming everyone bootstraps the same way. My bilingual kids prove it's not a prerequisite; it's an emergent skill unlocked by correct sound exposure, not endless segmentation games that bore kids into shutdown.
In the end, the reading wars aren't about phonics vs. whole language—they're about ditching the confusion that dooms 20-30% of kids before they start. Sam's post is a solid nudge toward balance, but without addressing shutdowns head-on, we're still leaving brilliant minds on the margins. If educators like him opened the door to pure-sound trials in teacher training, we'd slash illiteracy overnight. Who's ready to listen this time?
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