Reading wars more evidence that Canada needs educational sovereignty.

“If you can not read, you can not learn…we have seen such…failure in our schools, because we are not teaching our children to read.”

This rather succinct summation of all that ails American schools was offered by Education Secretary Linda McMahon a few weeks ago at a congressional budget hearing. The hearing was called in response to Trump’s evisceration of the Department of Education, a move which saw thousands of employees laid off and federal funding reduced by approximately $12 billion.

Although perhaps of questionable accuracy, McMahon’s statement sends a very strong signal about where her department will be focusing their ever-shrinking resources in the coming months. Back to basics reading instruction will once again become the clarion call of educational policy makers in the US.

The debate over how to best teach children to read has been going on for an awfully long time. Back in the 1800,’s, an American educational reformer named Horace Mann worried that having students decode individual letters as opposed to recognizing “sight words” would distract them from understanding meaning. Mann’s methodology, (more widely understood as ‘whole language’) became a mainstay of public education.

This went against the common pedagogy of the time which purported that teaching students the sounds of individual letters (phonics) was the best approach. Phonics argued that students should learn letters before words, as opposed to Mann’s theory of words before letters.

This see-saw, back and forth battle went on for decades, and was thrust into the modern spotlight in 1983. That year, American President Ronald Reagan commissioned a report on the state of education in the US, and the resulting report “A Nation at Risk”, fundamentally upended the educational apple cart. The report essentially said that the reason America was struggling economically on the world stage was because its schools were failing.

To be clear, they weren’t, nor was there much evidence to connect America’s economic system with its schools. However, the resulting hysteria led to a massive effort to reform that country’s schools, and through the 80’s and 90’s, reading reform took center stage.

As the decades passed, and the argument of phonics versus whole-language ebbed and flowed, Canadian schools availed themselves to overwhelmingly American research and pedagogy. The latest high-profile donnybrook in this debate, however, has a decidedly Canadian origin.

In 2022, the Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC) released a scathing report on how that province had handled reading instruction over the years. The report claimed quite unreservedly that “Despite decades of multi-disciplinary research on what is most effective for teaching students early reading skills…Ontario is systematically failing” in teaching kids to read.

According to the authors, the reason is clear: foundational word-reading skills had been overlooked in favour of contextual word reading strategies.

In other words, too much whole-language, not enough phonics.

One of the largest criticisms levied by the OHRC was that many jurisdictions use “ineffective, commercial programs that have little basis in science”; programs that, for the most part, originated in America.

One of the programs specifically called out by the commission was something called Reading Recovery. The OHRC commission was concerned because “…it focuses on cueing systems, levelled readers and running records… the adequacy of the program and research has been consistently contested”.

Reading Recovery, and the use of running records, has been a staple of the Nova Scotia education system for decades, although its implementation has not been without controversy. Tracing its origins all the way back to 1988 , the program was set to be scrapped by the NDP government in 2011. Stephen McNeil’s Liberal Government recommitted in 2016, and the Houston Tories continued to laud the program as late as 2021. In their 2020-21 accountability report, government trumpeted their success in implementing the program in all English elementary schools, and promoted their plan to offer it in French in the coming years.

Since the release of OHRC report, the Nova Scotia education system has attempted a pivot, announcing in March of 2023 that a new approach to teaching literacy was on the books and would be ready for full implementation in the fall of that same year.

Considering the embeddedness of Reading Recovery, one can perhaps give the DoEECD a bit of grace on this switch taking some time. However, questions about the actual scientific basis for the use of Reading Recovery have been raised since the early 90’s with questions continuing well into the 2010’s.

More recently, the authors of Fountas & Pinnell’s Leveled Literacy Intervention and Reading Recovery, still a staple of many Nova Scotia classrooms, found themselves in court, facing allegations that they had oversold the benefits of their program, thus, in effect, hindering thousands of students from learning to read. That case was ultimately dismissed, because the judge decided the court did not have the capacity to determine the effectiveness of a reading program.

Linda McMahon’s qualifications for her position are essentially non-existent, and I’ve been pretty clear on my views of Trump in general. However, this particular fight pre-dates the current administration, and if, as some have suggested, Reading Recovery was in effect, a scam, then far greater educational minds than either Trump or McMahon have been duped.

One can only imagine what sort of reading program an administration like the current one will be looking to pander to the American public in the name of “back-to-basics”; a reading program that will undoubtedly happily be made available to Canadian jurisdictions in nice, shiny new packages.

Over the past few months, there has been a tremendous amount of focus on Canadian sovereignty. Whether it be in the energy sector, or in critical minerals, or in manufacturing, Canada’s capacity to determine our own destiny in any of these sectors has been shown, rather starkly, to be a myth of capitalist creation.

As we struggle to untangle ourselves from America’s vice-like grip on our economy, I would suggest that now is the ideal time to not just re-establish our economic sovereignty, but our educational sovereignty as well.

It’s far beyond time we cut the umbilical cord of American educational ideology flowing into our country and stood firmly on our own two unapologetically Canadian-based-research feet.