Understanding the Zombie Politics of the National Reading Panel in 2022
A core aspect of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation in 2001 was the report from the National Reading Panel (NRP) [1].
The NRP report represents a key feature of NCLB that isn’t being interrogated fully during the current “science of reading” (SOR) movement: NCLB mandated that instructional practices must be scientifically based (similar to the call for reading instruction to be “scientific” today).
If federal legislation already mandated reading instruction must be research-based two decades ago, why are we experiencing yet another Chicken Little moment claiming that teachers and teacher educators do not know or simply refuse to implement the SOR?
First, the NRP demonstrates key problems with identifying the research base along with then finding practical ways to inform day-to-day classroom instruction with that evidence.
The best way to describe the results of the NRP, then, is that it was a highly contested report that claimed to identify the then-current state of scientific research on how children acquire reading and how best to teach reading.
When the report was issued, Joanne Yatvin, a panel member, challenged the panel for lacking classroom teachers, protested the narrow definition of “scientific” the panel used to review the then-current state of evidence on reading, and predicted (accurately) that the panel findings would be misrepresented.
See Yatvin’s work here:
- Yatvin, J. (2002). Babes in the woods: The wanderings of the National Reading Panel. The Phi Delta Kappan, 83(5), 364–369
- Yatvin, J. (2003). I told you so! The misinterpretation and misuse of The National Reading Panel Report. Education Week, 22(33), 44–45, 56. https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2003/04/30/33yatvin.h22.html
- NRP minority view
The NRP findings also were challenged by scholars such as Elaine Garan; see here:
- Garan, E. M. (2001, March). Beyond smoke and mirrors: A critique of the National Reading Panel report on phonics. Phi Delta Kappan, 82(7), 500– 506. https://doi.org/10.1177/003172170108200705
The NRP report and the debates prompted by the report are a stark lesson in the problems surrounding establishing the “science” of anything in education, but the report also demonstrates the essential problem with politicizing both research and educational policy/practice.
The NRP was a political vehicle similar to Reagan’s A Nation at Risk, and the result is not a dispassionate overview of research on reading but a distorted report driven by internal and external ideological biases.
That political element, in fact, brought the promises of the NRP and scientifically-based reading practices to its ultimate demise — a Reading First scandal grounded in federal funding and textbook adoption.
When the NRP was released and throughout the 2000s, then, the only fair way to describe the findings of the NRP was that the report was contested within the field of literacy, overly narrow, and ultimately derailed by political and ideological bias.
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