Dr. Patrick Groff, Professor of Education Emeritus San Diego State University, has published over 325 books, monographs, and journal articles and is a nationally known expert in the field of reading instruction.

Editor's Note: This is the official response to the Strauss article from The National Right to Read Foundation.

This open letter, from Steven Strauss, M.D., Ph.D., is addressed to the Director of the Human Learning and Behavior Branch, of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the U.S. It is published by the official organ of the American Educational Research Association. The AERA is a highly influential organization made of up of many of the nation's leading educational researchers. This, and the fact that the letter is from a man of science who strangely enough represents the antiscientific, ideological position on reading instruction, signals that the content of Strauss' missive deserves critical examination.

Strauss expresses "serious concerns" about the fact that Lyon has been instrumental in promoting recent scientific research of how children are best taught to read. The "most striking aspect" of this experimental research, Strauss complains, "is its narrowness." In this regard, the research in question has not dealt with either "the social underpinnings of illiteracy," nor "certain psychological components of reading," he protests.

Specifically, these crucial "underpinnings" and "components" are the "failure to learn to read adequately" of "poor" children, "nonwhite" children, and those who are "nonnative speakers of English," Strauss contends. These supposedly are far more pertinent research topics on reading, he continues, than the experimental studies on "phonics, phonemic awareness, and similar topics" that Lyon's agency has funded. In short, according to Strauss, Lyon should have directed his agency's funds to studies of what effect "the vast socioeconomic discrepancies that exist in the United States" have on how well children learn to read competently.

That Lyon did not fund such studies is true, but the fact he acted in this manner should be lauded not disparaged, as Strauss would have it. That is to say, the federal "war on poverty" in the U.S. since the 1960s has spent trillions of dollars on that problem, without creating any appreciable effect on it. Thus, the relatively small amount of federal money, that Lyon could direct toward resolving this dilemma, doubtless would have no impact on resolving it.

However, Strauss does pose a far more rational question. This is whether federal funds at Lyon's disposal should be used for "descriptive studies" of reading instruction. It is Strauss' view that this unscientific "qualitative" type of research is imperative since the scientific kind that Lyon sponsored is likely to be "deceptive and misleading." Strauss expects us to believe in this regard that the scientific research on reading that Lyon approved of does not "reflect real components of the larger reading process." That is a readily identifiable, and longtime complaint of researchers who favor the nonnumerical, anecdotal, highly subjective, loosely designed, and unreplicable (qualitative) form of reading research, whose findings almost always reflect the researcher's predisposed biases. They agree with Strauss that "real reading" bears "no obvious similarity to experimental stimuli." For example, this charge has been strongly voiced by advocates of the scientifically discredited Whole Language (WL) approach to children's reading development since its inception.

It thus is pertinent to note that Strauss quotes as proof for the validity of his presumptions the writings of Kenneth and Yetta Goodman, founders and leaders of the WL movement. Strauss accepts without question their scientifically invalid view that the application of phonics rules (how letters regularly represent speech sounds), for the purpose of recognizing single words, actually leads to "poor reading." Strauss stresses his belief in the false notion of "advocates of descriptive research," who claim that children who do "accurate reading of individual words in a text lose out on text meaning."

It doubtless was the Goodmans who also influenced Strauss' acceptance of the false proposition that because there are many different ways that letters represent speech sounds, it is not worthwhile to have beginning readers learn speech sound-letter correspondences. Strauss has either never read, or oddly rejects, the experimental findings that the application of phonics rules only have to result in approximate pronunciations of familiar words in order for such children to be able to readily recognize them. There thus is no empirical credibility in his argument that the "departures from letter-sound regularities" in written words signify that children should expect that the spelling of a word will not "reflect its pronunciation."

Even more shocking in Strauss' letter is the fact that this member of a hospital division of clinical neurophysiology views "learning to read as analogous to learning to speak and listen." As far as I know, there is no reputable neurologist, psychologist, linguist, nor cognitive scientist who agrees with Strauss in this regard. The seeming fact that he stands alone in this respect, i.e., in his strange attempt to forward such a disreputable idea, may be the most troubling of Strauss' remarks in his letter.

In any event, this embarrassing intellectual faux pas by Strauss certainly diminishes the attractiveness of his contention that research is immaterial that seeks to find out scientifically how well children taught with contrasting methodologies can understand "character, action, plot, motivation, conflict, and so on" in written material. Instead, Strauss wants the limited amount of U.S. federal dollars to be aimed at discovering "microlinguistic processes" that trigger the child reader's thought. That is to say, he unconvincingly maintains that studies of "what happens in the mind of a reader during ordinary, real-life reading situations," something he calls "mental physiology," must receive preference in federal funding.

In the final section of Strauss' letter one is further startled by the full exposure of a learned man who blithely impugns the motives of an ethically respectable government official whom he addresses. It is unimaginable what personal sentiments would bring Strauss to seriously charge, for example, that Lyon is a main player in a foul conspiracy led by "Corporate America" to advance its dastardly "political goals." Or that Lyon is guilty of "the stripping away of any semblance of professionalism from the teaching profession."

I thus exit Strauss' letter not sure whether I have more pity toward him for the harm his letter has done to his professional reputation, than concern over the danger to children's full opportunity to learn to read his letter would engender if taken seriously. Outside its contribution to this conflict in my mood, I accuse the AERA of a shameless act in accepting Strauss' manuscript for publication. Any manuscript submitted to the AERA that accuses honorable people of being "Orwellian" in their "promotion of rigid thinking," without any objective evidence to support this calumny, surely deserves a rejection slip.

September 2001

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