So About That ALA Presentation: Low Expectations and Learning Styles (Part 2)

What follows is the second part of a blog series about a presentation recently hosted by the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC), a division of the American Library Association (ALA). The presentation raises concerns about the science of reading and its effect on school and public libraries. You can read one part of the series here, and part three of the series here. The link to the video is here. The link to the slides is here.

In the second part of the ALA presentation, Dr. Erekson presents a series of claims that science of reading advocates make and explores how to refute these claims. In this post, I will again share direct quotations from the presentation and provide a brief commentary of my own.  

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Quotation 1: Down with Samuel Orton! Up with William Gray?!

“In Samuel Orton’s day, a comparable figure who was active in the research community and understood and knew the comprehensive research was William S. Gray. So if you wanted to look up a name of somebody who…had the reputability, it would be William S. Gray.”

After Dr. Erekson criticizes Samuel Orton for not being an educator, he suggests that we should look to William Gray, a contemporary of Orton’s, instead. This is a curious choice. Gray is best known for his promotion of the “look-say” reading method and the development of the Dick and Jane books. The “look-say” or “whole word” reading method teaches young readers to memorize the “look” of an entire word and then “say” what it says. I don’t believe I know anyone who recommends this approach to teaching or learning how to read.

Quotation 2: Low expectations for low SES students.

“Large scale statistical research keeps telling us that out-of-school factors are a much larger source of variance in the current achievement gap…60% percent of the variance is explained by home and community, only 20% is explained by the school.”

No one denies that reading progress is strongly correlated with family income and wealth as well as parental education level. What jumps out to me here is that Dr. Erekson is content to blame home and social factors for low reading achievement; he has no interest in interrogating how we can improve in-school instruction to achieve better results for our most marginalized students. To quote Kareem Weaver, “the soft bigotry of low expectations sustains the belief that kids can't learn to read because of poverty and trauma.”

Quotation 3: Low expectations for SN and ELL students. 

“The law required that schools had to bring in and mainstream special education students…and English Language Learners…the job for teachers got harder. They had kids who were more challenging to teach in their classrooms…The reading scores should have gone down significantly in the 80s and 90s because of the inclusion of students who are harder to teach, but the scores stayed about the same.” 

Here, Dr. Erekson shares his low expectation for special needs and ELL students, characterizing them as “more challenging” and “harder to teach” and expecting them to bring down test score averages. The same Kareem Weaver quotation cited above applies here as well.  

Quotation 4: Science of Reading means no books. 

“What I have noticed walking into model [SoR] classrooms…my first thought is where are the books? We see classrooms frequently and sometimes even schools that have had their classroom libraries and school libraries purged of authentic text.”

I’m not sure which model classrooms Dr. Erekson is visiting, but I know that the model classrooms and teachers that I highlight through my work keep authentic, complex texts at the center of everything they do. He also insinuates that SoR leaders are akin to right-wing extremists who are attempting to ban and remove books from their schools and libraries. This is patently false.   

Quotation 5: LEARNING STYLES (I will let the slide speak for itself.)

Dr. Erekson uses the above slide to explain why a balanced literacy approach is superior to any other instructional approach. While he does not comment on the “learning styles” content directly, the slide clearly states that whole language reading instruction is best for “hands-on learners” and “visual learners,” whereas phonics is best for “auditory learners” and “learners who thrive on structure.” As readers of this blog likely know, there is no evidence supporting auditory, visual, kinesthetic, or structured learning styles.  

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This concludes my deep dive into the second part of this presentation. Next week, I’ll share the final post in this series.