On January 26, 2022, education researcher and author Dr. Richard Gentry made waves with a blog post on Psychology Today entitled  “5 Popular Reading Programs May Be Harmful to Children.” Sometime after February 10th, the post disappeared from the website. Many readers reported Dr. Gentry’s post to be valuable, so I’m going to recap it here, and I welcome discussion about the issues it raises. 

In the post, Dr. Gentry summarizes cognitive science research that questions five popular reading programs for containing “too little explicit and systemic instruction for teaching foundational skills such as phonics, spelling, and handwriting.” In essence, they use minimal guidance to teach students how to decode, spell, write, and above all, read as opposed to teaching these skills explicitly and systematically. 

The above programs tend to encourage students to use context and syntax clues to predict unfamiliar words (three-cueing), to memorize words by sight, and to skip unfamiliar words, among other things. 

Teachers and researchers have been disagreeing about the best way to teach reading for generations. But this current battle is different because, according to Dr. Gentry, we finally now have three decades of cognitive science and neuroscience to support explicitly and systematically teaching foundational skills such as phonics, spelling, and handwriting. None of the above programs follow this science. 

When Gentry’s work was published, it was widely shared on social media. A brief review of Facebook data tells us that the post was shared over 200 times in the United States, over 400 times in Canada, and nearly 100 times in New Zealand (New Zealand!!). Overall, the post saw more than 2,300 interactions (posts, comments, and reactions) on Facebook alone, not to mention reportedly over 30,000 clicks worldwide.

But when you try to access the blog today, it’s no longer available on the Psychology Today website. It was removed sometime between February 10th and February 22nd, when I found a cached version, linked here. 

I’m not in a position to speculate about why the post was removed. I’ve asked Psychology Today for comment but have not heard back. 

But since I was able to retrieve the post, I ask that you share it widely and loudly! We need outlets outside the education world, like Psychology Today, to publish work like this if the Science of Reading movement is to grow and prosper.