NC’s superintendent says phonics “won” the reading war. Not so fast.

Catherine Truitt is the North Carolina superintendent of public instruction, but this week she sounded more like a general.

“The science is in. The science of reading won the reading war. Phonics won,” she said.

Truitt announced the alleged victory at a March 29 news conference where she and state Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger pushed for passage of the Excellent Public Schools Act sponsored by Berger and two other Republican senators. The law received unanimous approval by the the Senate on Wednesday and likely will pass the House, but it deserves close scrutiny by Gov. Roy Cooper.

The proposed law would make a concept known as “the science of reading” the basis of teacher training and reading instruction in Pre-K and elementary schools. It would include a heavy emphasis on phonics, which is the sounding out of letters to read a word.

There is considerable division in the education field about whether a renewed emphasis on phonics is the best way to teach reading. Gay Ivey, a University of North Carolina-Greensboro professor and highly regarded expert on literacy, said phonics is a necessary tool, but it is not a cure-all for lagging reading skills. She said the approach has been tried, particularly under the federal No Child Left Behind law.

“Doubling down on phonics alone has never worked to produce better readers,” Ivey told the Editorial Board. She said children must learn not just how to sound out words, but also how to assess the words’ meanings and how they connect. Reading instruction, she said, should not be just mechanical. It should also ignite a love of reading that comes with comprehension and the ability to imagine characters and situations.

“I worry that people have put a lot of faith in this one narrow view and, under this bill, we all will have to subscribe to it,” she said. “It’s worrisome because we’ve been down this road before.”

The national reading debate will ultimately be settled by the results. But it’s already clear that Truitt, a Republican, has erred in casting the proposed switch in North Carolina as some kind of triumph.

Finding an effective way to teach reading is not a matter of back-to-basics traditionalists defeating esoteric innovators in a war over why Johnny can’t read. But that is the tone of this latest Republican-driven approach to one of the public schools’ most pressing issues: How to get more children able to read at grade level.

The Excellent Public Schools Act is effectively Part III of the Read to Achieve program Berger launched in 2012. That program was designed to have children reading at grade level by the end of third grade. It included steps to monitor reading proficiency and provide added reading instruction, including summer reading camps.

The state has spent $150 million on the program since 2012, but third-grade reading skills have declined. In 2019, Cooper, a Democrat, vetoed a revised version of Read to Achieve, calling it “ineffective and costly.” Now Berger is back with another version that instead of imposing stiff reading requirements turns to phonics as a silver bullet.

Truitt, Berger and other Republicans no doubt want more children to become better readers. The problem is with their approach. Any state effort to improve reading instruction should be bipartisan. It should draw heavily on the advice of educators and experts in literacy. And it should allow teachers flexibility to adjust instruction to best suit specific schools, classes and students.

The legislative effort is coordinated with the State Board of Education’s commitment to the science of reading and the emphasis on phonics. Board chairman Eric Davis said North Carolina is joining a broader trend. “We are part of a multi-state effort to leverage our collective experiences in raising the literacy skills of each student as the key element in increasing the academic achievement of all of our students. This is our number one academic priority,” he said.

Improving the teaching of reading should not be approached in isolation with one particular tool. Reading is part of education and education requires well-trained and motivated teachers, teaching assistants, sufficient numbers of school nurses and counselors and well-constructed and well-equipped schools.

Since taking control of the legislature in 2011, Republican lawmakers have not been willing to properly pay teachers or adequately supply other educational resources. How well North Carolina’s public school students read ultimately will depend on what the authors of the state budget choose to write.