Balanced Literacy and the Reading Wars

by Brian Dunning
June 16, 2026

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Most of you listening to this right now probably got a terrible start when you first learned to read in school. Since about the 1970s, a teaching method reigned supreme in the United States, and in most other English-speaking countries, that resulted in history’s lowest reading scores. Only over the past decade or two has the historically most effective method recovered its popularity in schools, and American reading scores have begun to return to where they should be. This period of massive upheaval in how we teach children to read has been called “the reading wars” — accurately. Do you know which method you learned?

Mainly, the reading wars were between two methods. The first is called phonics, and it involves sounding out the words, letter by letter, and learning all the pronunciation rules like the silent e. People who learned to read in the 1960s and 1970s were among the last generation where most received a primarily phonics-based approach. Even outside the classroom, popular PBS programs like Sesame Street and The Electric Company gave children a daily immersion in phonics:

Phonics has been described as a “bottom-up” approach, starting with the basic building blocks of each word.

But even as the PBS shows entertained and instructed every morning, a new method was spreading through the schools called whole language. In whole language, you didn’t need to sound out the words at all; instead, you used a “top-down” approach where you relied on three primary cues from beyond the words themselves:

• Semantic cues: Looking at the rest of the sentence for enough context to allow you to guess the word;
• Syntactic cues: Looking at the sentence’s grammar to determine what word would fit there; and
• Visual (or graphophonic) cues: Noting the shape of the letters and of the word, and even looking at an accompanying picture, to confirm what the word is.

In whole language reading, learning how the phonics worked — how each letter and combination of letter sounds — didn’t have to be explicitly taught. The idea was that that understanding would form on its own, organically. (Obviously this is an abbreviated description, but it captures the basic idea.)

So phonics and whole language are our two major players — not quite the only players, but the ones to understand first. The reason it’s important to understand has to do with where we are now, and by “we” I mean most English-speaking countries, where reading instruction tracks one another pretty closely. So although the numbers I’m going to give come from the United States, the situation has been similar across the globe.

What’s commonly called “the nation’s report card” is formally the NAEP, or National Assessment of Educational Progress. In 2024, the NAEP showed that 40% of US 4th grade students were reading below their expected level, and 33% of 8th graders were below their expected level — the most ever recorded. Even worse, the groups of students with the lowest reading skills, measured at the 10th and 25th percentiles, were both at the lowest levels ever recorded. At present, students are the worst readers since we started tracking it.

Now before we go any farther, some of you are already pointing the finger at an adversary totally unrelated to reading instruction methodology: smartphones. Kids are spending tons of time on their phones, and they didn’t used to have phones. That’s true. Kids are reading fewer books than at any time in modern history. That’s true as well. It’s virtually certain that this has some impact, but it is not responsible for the drop in reading skills we’re talking about. Here are two basic reasons we know this:

• The drop in reading skills has been mainly found in those lowest percentiles, which has brought down the average for everyone. This does not conform to the distribution of smartphones, which are found more or less evenly across socioeconomic strata. Every way the researchers looked for a correlation between increased smartphone use and decreased reading skills, they did not find one.
  
  
• Where they did find the major correlation was in changes in reading instruction methods. The biggest change (which we’ll come to in a moment) called “the Mississippi Miracle” was when a change in methodology directly resulted in one of the biggest gains in reading skill ever seen — and smartphone usage was not addressed at all.

Fingers are quickly pointed at smartphones for just about any drop in educational performance; however, researchers are well aware of the need to control for confounding factors, and this is probably the one they looked at most closely. In this case, at least, it wasn’t the phones.

Ever since the dawn of formal reading instruction, phonics had always been the method that was nearly universal. It’s what your parents received. But all through the years of Sesame Street and The Electric Company, change had been in the wind. Some have compared it to the counterculture movement in general that arose through the 1960s. When a series of popular books were published — such as 1971’s Understanding Reading: A Psycholinguistic Analysis of Reading and Learning to Read, state education boards began pushing the idea of whole language. The idea wasn’t brand new — it had been around in some form or another since the 1830s at least — but it felt revolutionary.

California was one of the first states to go all-in on whole language, which they did in 1987, although it had already spread through much of the state. The result was fast and alarming. In the 1992 and 1994 NAEP reports, California’s reading scores for 4th and 8th graders had collapsed to among the nation’s very worst (and this was more than 20 years before smartphones were in every student’s pocket).

Over the past half century, every state has, at some point, adopted whole language into its curriculum. And by now, most have pulled back: some completely, some partially, others still struggling with reading wars of their own.

In a nation of 50 disparate educational systems — every one of them riddled with private schools also doing their own thing according to their own notions — it’s been the example of the Mississippi Miracle that has been the clearest example of finding the problem, fixing it, and reaping the rewards.

In 2012, the state of Mississippi found that they were ranked dead last in reading skills. They implemented a program called the Literacy-Based Promotion Act which had four fundamental provisions, most significant of which was professional development for all the state’s teachers. This focused on the total abandonment of whole language, which had dominated, and a strict return to phonics. This was accompanied by other improvements, such as individualized support for struggling readers. The result was so profound that the name Mississippi Miracle seems hardly hyperbolic. In just ten years, Mississippi’s reading scores went from 49th to 9th. When adjusted for demographics, 2025 NAEP data showed Mississippi ranked first in the nation in both reading and math — the gains in math being largely attributed to being able to read their math textbooks.

49th to 9th, in ten years. The return to simple phonics is universally cited as the most impactful part of Mississippi’s program. Other poor southern states are following Mississippi’s example, resulting in gains that have been called the Southern Surge.

It’s fair to point out that if you go out to research the Mississippi Miracle on your own, you’re going to come across claims that it was grossly exaggerated or misrepresented or even the result of outright fraudulent data manipulation. That perspective is out there. But it is the minority view, and it has a high bar to clear since the data supporting the Mississippi Miracle is both strong and thoroughly replicated. See the references at the end of this episode on skeptoid.com for some recommended reading.

Since around the year 2000 — give or take a decade in some states — education boards have been giving whole language the heave-ho and bringing back phonics. Or, in many cases, attempting to bring back phonics, but finding themselves sidetracked by the third teaching methodology to know: balanced literacy; and finding their scores not improving one whit as a result.

Balanced literacy began to rise in the 1990s, just as it was becoming clear that whole language was the main culprit in America’s poor reading scores. Balanced literacy was pitched as a combination of the best parts of phonics “balanced” with the best parts of whole language. A compelling sales pitch, perhaps, but an inaccurate description. It’s reminiscent of “integrative medicine,” which promises to integrate alternative medicine with real medicine. But when you integrate a cowpie into an apple pie, you don’t make the cowpie better; you make the apple pie worse. So just as integrative medicine remains a poor substitute for real medicine, so did balanced literacy remain as poorly performing as whole language. When phonics works well, you don’t improve it by integrating components of a method that works badly.

Balanced literacy is, ultimately, little more than a last-ditch rebranding of whole language by its former advocates, hoping to make it more palatable via the worthless pitch that it integrates some of phonics — which, according to many critics, it really only does in name only.

The use of the term balance was a deceptive marketing ploy from the beginning. It plays off how common it is to think the truth lies somewhere between the two extremes; a “balanced” perspective is more likely correct. No. When one method works and the other doesn’t, a “balance between the two” gives you something that’s only marginally less wrong. The Earth is round though some say it’s flat; do we teach a third model that’s somewhere in the middle? We don’t. Balance is an insidious weasel word.

Today, balanced literacy is in sharp decline when you look at state policies; but in practice, what teachers actually do in the classroom often lags behind policy changes. District libraries and warehouses remain loaded up with balanced literacy materials, and that’s often what teachers and schools are resupplied with when they run out. Five years ago, about three quarters of American K-12 teachers favored balanced literacy; today that’s down to about one third. One third of classrooms in the United States is still a lot.

So why is there so much inertia? Why can’t all the teachers just switch? Well, there are a lot of reasons. One is the sunk cost. Having invested so much in whole language materials and techniques over years or decades, it’s a lot easier to rebrand as balanced literacy than it is to admit the whole investment was misplaced, throw everything out, and return to phonics. Another is the ideological and philosophical commitment that was made to whole language and the cultural trends that shaped it. Phonics was cold, mechanical, and reductive; whole language and balanced literacy reflected the flowery New Age emphasis on natural, unstructured learning; letting children spread their wings; and a more holistic approach that appealed to the culture of the 1960s and 1970s.

In addition, the science of teaching children to read does evolve, like every science; and it’s not unreasonable to resist major, mandated upheavals when the science may change again tomorrow.

Yet what we have now is pretty solid. Between 2000 and 2006, major scientific reviews were conducted in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia. The National Reading Panel reviewed 100,000 studies in the United States in 2000, the Rowe Report was published in Australia in 2005, and the Rose Report was published in the UK in 2006; and all three reached the same conclusion: that systematic, explicit phonics is essential to early reading instruction, and that whole language and balanced literacy had failed to achieve that objective.

Sometimes the simplest solution — brought to you by friendly hosts and fuzzy muppets — turns out to be the best.

By Brian Dunning
Follow @BrianDunning