Part 1 traced our rocky start: ignored 2018 comments, 2020 mute suggestions, and Snow’s dodge of multilingual miracles. Now comes the meat—her Science of Reading (SoR) sermons on phonemes, foundations, and why kids “disengage.”
Spoiler: She misses the mark by miles, harping on comprehension and fluency while kids trip at the starting gate. My proof? Fifteen years remediating shutdowns with pure sounds: /k/, not “kuh.” Results: Fluency in months, not years. Snow’s response? “Narrow focus.” Reality: She’s tunnel-visioned on symptoms, ignoring the cause: extraneous-sound sabotage.
The Phoneme Fight: Foundations Ignored
Snow preaches systematic phonics, but in a September 2020 Twitter dust-up (recapped in “Sound-Symbol Skills is the Foundation of Phonics”), she conceded: “Ensure accurate pronunciation, but... systematic scope and sequence too.”
Emina McLean echoed: mispronunciation plays a role, but the “biggest issue” is non-systematic teaching. Wrong. If sound-symbols are botched, blending is dead on arrival. Phonics = sounds + blend. Garbage in, garbage out.
In a recent tweet, I argued: "No child struggles if consonants are taught correctly." This sparked quick pushback. Emily Hanford called it "one piece" of a bigger puzzle, while Geraldine Carter dismissed it as "simplistic."
The science is clear: Children's brain plasticity peaks early (Shaywitz, 2003). Nail the sounds during these sensitive windows, or risk cementing lifelong failure. As Thorndike noted over a century ago (1913), early inputs are the ones that stick hardest. Yet Snow sidesteps this urgency, prioritizing vocabulary and comprehension instead. That's putting the cart before the horse—if decoding basics drain every ounce of cognitive energy, how can kids even access those higher skills? Let's focus on the foundation first.
Disinformation and the Backfire Effect
By July 2023’s “Disinformation by SoR Advocates,” Snow’s 2016 myth resurfaced: reading is a 6,000-year “contrivance,” no neural pathways. Retraction needed. Evidence shows innate reading circuits.
Literacy researcher Monyka Rodrigues, PhD, pushes back on rote memorization, arguing instead for decoding syllables right from the start. But I counter that it's smarter to drill high-frequency Dolch words through repetition first, layering in phonics —this combo builds fluency way faster. Meanwhile, Pamela Snow and her echo chamber keep parroting neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene's ideas without a shred of critical thought. Herd mentality much?
Back in my May 2020 blog post, "The Era of Stupid," I took Snow to task over one of her tweets: "Kids with correct pronunciation still struggle." Her point? Basically, don't sweat fixing those sound errors if the kid can sort of say the word right. That's not just shortsighted—it's downright foolish.
When reading expert Tim Shanahan calls for hard evidence on effective teaching methods, I've got it: In my own trials with 80 kids (none with hearing or acuity problems), we hit reading fluency in just 30 targeted lessons. But good luck getting a response—Robert Slavin ghosted my email pitching the data, Diane Ravitch nuked my comments on her site, and Snow? She just keeps peddling outdated myths around phonological awareness deficits (PAD), ignoring the proof that shakes her whole worldview.
In my June 2020 post, "Make the Best of the Little Time We Have Left," I cut straight to the chase: With literacy crises mounting and time running out, it's time to drop the egos and actually fix the mess. No more posturing—just solutions.
Take my breakthrough on "extraneous sounds"—that nagging interference in early reading that trips kids up. I first unpacked it back in 2010, well ahead of the curve. But Jennifer Buckingham? She brushed it off as "not unique," as if originality doesn't matter when the evidence stares you in the face.
And the accusations flying my way? Slurs against her or Pamela Snow? Give me a break—those are just desperate deflections. I'm slinging facts, not mud. Yet here we are: The muting and stonewalling drag on, silencing voices that could actually turn this around.
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