2: The 21st Century Reading War: “The Science of Reading,” Dyslexia, and Misguided Reading Policy

From the end of 2018 and through the first months of 2019, I was like John Proctor in The Crucible: “I never knew until tonight that the world is gone daft with this nonsense” (Miller, 1954, p. 66). The nonsense that John Proctor faced was the slow boil that became the Salem witch trials. The nonsense for me? The “science of reading”—sweeping across main– stream media and driving educational legislation in several states in the United States.

My first clue, what I designate as “ground zero” in the current reading war, was a news article, “Hard Words: Why Aren’t kids Being Taught to Read?” (Hanford, 2018). But it was several months later before I recognized another key element, the parent movement known as Decoding Dyslexia (Allington, 2019), that merged with what has become Emily Hanford’s “science of reading” mantra, creating a compelling new version of the reading war.