Blast from Past: This blog first posted on October 9 and 16, 2021, and was reposted on June 6, 2026. The original was issued in two parts over two weeks. Those pieces have been combined here. That, along with some minor text revisions and updates, are the only changes. It is not that we have made no progress over the past five years – that would be unfair — but these issues are still annoying. This version includes a link to the 30 and 84 comments elicited by their first appearance.
Pet peeves are, by their very nature, complaints. I assume no one wants to hear a lot of whining these days. If they did, they’d be on X or in Congress.
Nevertheless, like lots of people in reading education, I get annoyed by the tenor of our disputes and the sluggishness of our progress. Accordingly, here are 10 of my gripes.
Pet peeve #1: Balanced literacy proponents who don’t tell what’s being balanced or whose idea of balance is woefully unbalanced.
Many school districts still brag about their “balanced literacy” programs. Balance, according to my dictionary, is a condition in which “different elements are equal or in the correct proportions.” That to me means that a balanced literacy program is one in which the elements of literacy get equal amounts of instruction. Or, that the time devoted to each is in correct proportion.
What elements are balanced in balanced literacy?
According to one guide, there must be three balances: one between reading and writing instruction, another between teacher-directed and student-directed activities, and a third between skills-based and meaning-based approaches (Frey, et al., 2005).
If that’s the case, then few of these so-called balanced literacy programs are accomplishing balance.
Many schools, for instance, offer 90 minutes of daily reading instruction and 30 of writing. That obviously fails to strike that reading-writing balance.
The idea of balancing teacher- and student-directed activities is of some concern given the research on the issue. Carol Connor and her colleagues found that students tend to need more of one than the other. Learning is more likely to accrue from explicit teaching than from discovery learning or independent practice (e.g., Foorman, et al., 2006; Gallagher, Barber, Beck, & Buehl, 2019). Rupley, Blair, & Nichols, 2009), and this is especially true for struggling students (Connor, Morrison, & Katch, 2004; Connor, Morrison, & Petrella, 2004). This balance seems like a good way to hold back some kids, particularly the most disadvantaged. That can’t be good.
Then there’s that third kind of balance, skills-based and meaning-based teaching. Half the instructional time would be devoted to phonemic awareness, phonics, spelling, handwriting, and text reading fluency, with the rest going to guided reading, shared reading, independent reading, writing, oral language and the like.
With two hours of ELA, kids would get an hour of skills and an hour of meaning/language. That kind of balance makes sense, but I’ve never seen that much skills in any of the balanced literacy schools I’ve visited. Despite the balanced label, skills tend to get short shrift in those classrooms.
I hunted up some more recent descriptions of “balanced literacy” online. One site says a balanced program “strikes a balance between both whole language and phonics.” I’m not sure what they mean by whole language, but an hour of daily phonics instruction would be excessive (NICHD, 2001).
That same site claims there are 5 components of balanced literacy: read aloud, guided reading, shared reading, independent reading, and word study. Kids in a class that balanced those would be unlikely to become very good readers; there is just too little skills time.
Another site said that the balance is between “explicit skill instruction and by the use of authentic texts,” while another called for a balance among reading workshop, writing workshop, and word work.
I gave up at that point.
It should be obvious that “balanced literacy” isn’t really a thing. It’s a shell game. No one agrees on the essential components or even on what balance means, it’s just another feel-good term, socially appealing, but without any real meaning. Advertisers like such terms because they “counter consumers’ negative emotions” while requiring nothing (Labroo & Rucker, 2009). The term may be reassuring to parents, but it camouflages the fact that key aspects of literacy programs will receive inordinate amounts of attention at the expense of other essentials that would greatly benefit their children’s progress.
Pet peeve #2: Calls to end the Reading Wars.
I love the idea of peace. A world without reading wars would be lovely.
I thought the two years that I’d contributed to the National Reading Panel would have ended that silliness more than two decades ago.
These latest skirmishes seems attributable to Emily Hanford’s (2018) radio documentary that complained about the neglect of phonics. She showed, through an examination of surveys and teacher and parent interviews (e.g., Joshi, et al., 2009), that kids weren’t getting much phonics. That program led to public outcries, particularly from parents of struggling readers and to a growing body of state legislation requiring reform.
We shouldn’t have been surprised about the inattention to decoding, given the popularity of reading programs with no phonics or with decoding instruction poorly aligned with research.
The Hanford documentary exposed this neglect, which should have stimulated an easy endorsement from the professional community; phonics should have a clear place in primary grade instruction.
Anyone who has ever gone through the grievance cycle would recognize the professional response to these calls for more phonics. These responses included claims that phonics was already being taught universally (denial); that this push for phonics was illegitimate because it came from journalists and parents (anger); that there are lots of other ways to teach reading (bargaining); and that we need to end these reading wars (depression).
Those who profess to want to end the reading wars seem to think the best way to do that is for the pro-phonics people to stand down, so that the anti-phonics people can continue to ignore the impressive body of research supporting its teaching.
My peeve here is that we need less angst over the wars and more emphasis on what a solid, comprehensive, research-based reading program looks like. Such a program would include a lot more than phonics (Castles, Rastle, & Nation, 2018). but in the primary grades, phonics and phonemic awareness would get more than the 5-10 minutes often accorded to it.
Pet peeve #3: Educators who seek research to support their actions, rather than to determine them.
I get far too many letters from state legislators, school board members, superintendents, curriculum directors, and school principals asking for my help with a new program or policy they have recently adopted. Usually, they have made some decision or choice, and when the time came to implement it, they ran into some pushback.
Their missives to me ask if I know of any research that could be used to support their action.
This offends me even when I’d have endorsed the action they’ve taken.
That they made a sound decision by accident is not heartening.
Educators who must make major decisions that will affect student learning should review the research first and then make an informed decision. Asking a buddy in the next district if their recent implementation went well (e.g., no complaints) is not a sufficient basis for establishing a new policy or buying a major new program.
Putting the research horse before the adoption coach is one way of increasing the chances that we will improve students’ reading achievement (and avoid those surprising pushbacks that often accompany bad decisions).
Even more annoying are those who support the idea of research when it agrees with what they’re telling everybody what to do, but who ignore it or reject it when it doesn’t. Somehow these “experts” can intuit what works best without research evidence – and often without any relevant practical experience with it either. Talk about annoying!
Pet peeve #4: The claim that 2-minute individual conferences promote the same depth of thinking as a 20–30-minute group/class discussion.
Too many teachers have been led to believe that they can effectively guide students to deep understandings of text or proficient strategy use through brief one-on-one conferences.
There is no research supporting this weird idea. I can’t understand why anyone would believe it.
My hunch is that those who make the claim have never, themselves, participated in any kind of rich, rigorous discussions of literature or “great books.”
For those, I’d suggest they sign up for a great books discussion group experience. Many public libraries host these as do some local university extension programs. There are even online opportunities.
When teachers see what a high-quality discussion group can do with a book, and how much it stretches your thinking, they’re amazed. I took part in a film discussion group this summer (thank you, Stanford University) and every week I was staggered by the insights and observations of the teacher and other participants who saw what I may have missed.
Brief individual conferences do little more than allow teachers to determine whether the kids have read the text. But they elicit little more than superficial responses. Probing below the surface takes time and it benefits from the diversity of reactions from a group of readers.
Pet peeve #5: Teachers who love one aspect of literacy instruction.
Teachers tend to devote more time to what they’re comfortable with, and less to what they know less or care about less (e.g., Blank, 2013).
Let’s say Mrs. Anderson loves science. The boys and girls lucky enough to be in her class are going to do a lot of science this year. Conversely, those assigned to Mr. Ferguson may get little more than an occasional foray into the science textbook (perhaps for some round robin reading).
This happens with reading instruction, too. Some teachers skip or severely limit fluency work because it’s too noisy or they may be uncertain about how to teach it. With other teachers, fluency may be front and center.
When a teacher lacks confidence in or has antipathy towards some part of the curriculum, it just doesn’t get addressed. It may be in the lesson plans, but it evaporates from the life of the classroom, as other lessons choke off the oxygen.
Teachers need to develop schedules with sufficient attention to all major reading components. Instead, the time is often divided among different activities (e.g., guided reading, word study, shared reading, conferencing, independent reading) rather than to different learning goals (e.g., vocabulary, comprehension, writing, fluency, decoding).
Instead of avoiding what you don’t like, bone up on the areas you don’t know. Talk to colleagues, arrange classroom visits, work with the reading specialist, read a book.
But don’t skip what you don’t feel like teaching or that you’re not comfortable with.
Pet Peeve #6: Research claims based on the wrong kinds of research.
There’s a basic communications problem in many literacy discussions.
What does it mean to say that an approach “works” in the teaching of reading?
“It works” can mean that kids (or some kids) can or will learn to read if taught that way. If it is used, then many kids are likely to become readers.
Another meaning? “It works” may mean that it works better than another approach. That’s what researchers usually mean.
For instance, when we study the effectiveness of an instructional approach, we must show that it outperforms something else. These days the comparisons are with what are called, “business as usual” approaches (BUA). If we can’t demonstrate that students do better than in the BUA classroom practices, then the experimental practice “doesn’t work.” It’s not that no one learns anything from it, just that they do no better than they would have without it.
Too often, the evidence used to promote an approach is from observational or correlational studies (e.g., the highest achieving schools are the users of a program).
The problem is that it ignores all the other sources of learning. Control or comparison groups are what allow us to separate out the causes of reading improvement.
I checked out one of those observational studies and found that in those high achieving schools using the target program had family incomes 42% higher than averages, and that the parents were 150% more likely to be highly educated professionals than would be typical). Do you think the parents may have had something to do with their children’s remarkable learning success?
These kinds of studies have a purpose, but they are useless when it comes to determining whether a teaching approach is beneficial to learning.
Teachers may make the same mistake when evaluating their own efforts. They may conclude that an approach “works” based on their personal experience. They see that their students are learning, but their observations cannot reveal why or whether they may have done better if taught differently. Without a comparison group we can’t know if kids would have done even better with some other instruction.
Please don’t claim that something works without appropriate comparative data.
Pet Peeve #7: Teaching reading comprehension by asking certain kinds of questions.
Principals and teachers often contact me. They are trying to develop testing or instructional materials that will give the students practice with the kinds of questions implied by their state reading standards.
They want to know which standards the kids need help with, and they assume that asking (and teaching) questions aligned with the standards should do the job. That seems like a great idea.
But my mama told me that just because something seems right doesn’t make it right.
She was right. There is no evidence that these so-called comprehension skills even exist, and there is considerable evidence that they don’t (ACT, 2006; Shanahan, 2014; Shanahan, 2015).
Study after study (and the development of test after test) for more than 80 years have shown that we cannot distinguish these question types one from another. Likewise, there is no convincing evidence that we can successfully teach kids to answer the types of questions used on tests.
If you want your kids to excel in reading, teach them to read the texts you’re asking questions about. Engage them in discussions of those texts. Get them to write in response to the texts. Reread the texts and talk about them again. Come back to them later to compare with other texts or have them synthesize the info from multiple texts for presentations or projects.
Ask them questions that are relevant to the understanding of those texts. Don’t worry about the question types. Worry about whether you’re stimulating a deep interpretation of the texts and whether students learn and can use the information. Reading comprehension is about making sense of texts, not about answering certain types of questions.
Pet Peeve #8: Teaching reading with books that are too easy.
The original idea of teaching with “instructional level” texts was reasonable enough. If kids find reading too difficult, they won’t engage, and if they find it too easy, they won’t learn much from engaging. There are research studies on teaching that say that if there is too much difficulty, students withdraw rather than learning. Protecting against that problem makes sense.
How to ensure that learning is neither too onerous nor inconsequential? Answering that question is where things have gone afoul.
We got too formulaic. We set text placements mechanically, with no real justification. For years, teachers have been told to place kids in texts they could read with certain levels of accuracy and comprehension. I’ve long criticized these levels as being too easy (Shanahan, 2025). They put kids in books that they can already read reasonably well.
I’m annoyed by this “just the right books” approach for two reasons. First, it prevents students from learning to read at the highest levels they could attain. Second, it assumes the teacher’s role in reading instruction is remarkably limited. It would make greater sense to place students in challenging books, while providing adequate scaffolding and support so that they’re not overwhelmed.
Pet Peeve #9: Efforts to control the difficulty of children’s independent reading.
Just as the instructional level idea has limited kids’ opportunity to learn, there are efforts afoot to limit the challenges of children’s own reading.
To me, personal reading should be personal.
Limiting students’ reading choices to texts at Level H, and so on is boneheaded. There’s no research supporting these prohibitions. I often hear from parents upset that their children aren’t allowed to read books of interest because the books are supposedly too hard.
Some commercial programs direct teachers to curb kids’ ambitions in this regard, and others that do so through the use systems of testing, point assignments, and rewards.
Rather than limiting kids to books they can read easily, it would be better to study the research on motivation which suggests the motivational value of curiosity and challenge.
Pet Peeve #10: Those who promote the “science of reading” but then sneak in approaches not supported by research.
I’m a big science of reading instruction guy. I’ve been chagrined as American reading scores have languished or fallen while students from other nations have progressed. It’s especially upsetting given the reading proficiency gaps that divide us racially, linguistically, and economically.
The best chance we have to raise achievement is to adhere to the research; to teach with the approaches that have been most beneficial to learning.
I’m happy that parents, school boards, and state legislatures are championing the science of reading.
Unfortunately, not everyone who promotes that idea is especially serious about it. They insist on following the science when it comes to phonics, but then sneak in stuff like sound walls, decodable texts, extra heavy doses of phonemic awareness instruction, and whole book teaching with no science in sight.
Nothing wrong with arguing for any of those practices, but there is a real “truth in advertising” problem when those are advanced seemingly under the science of reading flag.
Such promotions should carry disclaimers that separate out the science from the ideas that the promoters happen to favor.
Some experts who play this game tell me they know there isn’t evidence supporting their contentions. But they argue that’s okay since “it’s obvious” that what they’re promoting works.
The history of science often reveals that what’s “obvious” or “logical” just isn’t true. Things don’t always work the way we think they do. Science is how we learned that the earth revolves around the sun, when it was obvious or logical to almost everyone that it was the other way around. That’s the benefit of a science of reading. It depends on evidence, not claims.
What are your pet peeves about reading?
References
ACT. (2006). Reading between the lines. What the ACT reveals about college readiness in reading. Iowa City, IA: Author.
Blank, R.K. (2013). Science instructional time is declining in elementary schools: What are the implications for student achievement and closing the gap? Science Education, 97(6), 830-847.
Castles, A., Rastle, K., & Nation, K. (2018). Ending the reading wars: Reading acquisition from novice to expert. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 19(1), 5-51.
Connor, C. M., Morrison, F. J., & Katch, L. E. (2004). Beyond the reading wars: Exploring the effect of child-instruction interactions on growth in early reading. Scientific Studies of Reading, 8(4), 305-336.
Connor, C. M., Morrison, F. J., & Petrella, J. N. (2004). Effective reading comprehension instruction: Examining child x instruction interactions. Journal of Educational Psychology, 96(4), 682-698.
Duke, N. K., & Cartwright, K. B. (2021). The science of reading progresses: Communicating advances beyond the simple view of reading. Reading Research Quarterly.
Frey, B., Lee, S., Tollefson, N., Pass, L., and Massengill, D. (2005) Balanced literacy in an urban school district. Journal of Educational Research, 98(5), 272-280.
Foorman B.R., Schatschneider C., Eakin M.N., Fletcher J.M., Moats L.C., & Francis D.J. (2006). The impact of instructional practices in grades 1 and 2 on reading and spelling achievement in high poverty schools. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 31, 1–29.
Gallagher, M. A., Barber, A. T., Beck, J. S., & Buehl, M. M. (2019). Academic vocabulary: Explicit and incidental instruction for students of diverse language backgrounds. Reading & Writing Quarterly: Overcoming Learning Difficulties, 35(2), 84-102.
Hanford, E. (2018, September 10). Hard words: Why aren’t kids being taught to read? Minneapolis, MN: American Public Media. https://www.apmreports.org/story/2018/09/10/hard-words-why-american-kids-arent-being-taught-to-read
Joshi, R. M., Binks, E., Graham, L., Ocker-Dean, E., Smith, D. L., & Boulware-Gooden, R. (2009). Do textbooks used in university reading education courses conform to the instructional recommendations of the National Reading Panel? Journal of Learning Disabilities, 42(5), 458-463.
Labroo, A., & Rucker, D.D. (2009). Balance in advertising. Kellogg Insight. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University.
Rupley, W.H., Blair, T. R., & Nichols, W.D. (2009). Effective reading instruction for struggling readers: The role of direct/explicit teaching. Reading & Writing Quarterly, 25, 2-3, 125-138.
Shanahan, T. (2014). How and how not to prepare students for the new tests. The Reading Teacher, 68, 184-188.
Shanahan, T. (2015). Let’s get higher scores on these new assessments. The Reading Teacher, 68, 459-463.
Shanahan, T. (2025). Leveled reading, leveled lives. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.
.jpg)
Comments
See what others have to say about this topic.