Making the Moats of it with Hildy Johnson

Pretend you’re Hildy Johnson, the just-can’t-help-himself reporter from The Front Page. Don a battered fedora, plant an unlit cigarette in your lips, park a pencil behind your ear and prepare to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

Here’s your assignment. Interview Dr. Louisa C. Moats, a very prosperous professor of education who flits about here and there, afflicting the afflicted and comforting the comfortable. Under the imprimatur of the American Federation of Teachers—a notorious teacher’s union that has the virtue of being not as notorious as the National Education Association—Dr. Moats has published a book (booklet? pamphlet?) called “Teaching Reading IS Rocket Science.”

The book is 32 pages long. Presumably that includes dedications, prologues, epilogues, acknowledgments, maybe even one or two pages left blank so that fevered readers can record their “Notes”.

Within the book, Dr. Moats argues that:

• “Learning to read is neither natural nor easy for most children. Reading is an acquired skill.” (We are quoting from an article published in the Baltimore Sun. Alas, the reporter was not Hildy Johnson.)
• “Teaching reading ‘is a job for an expert,’ requiring considerable knowledge and skill, which must be acquired over several years through focused study and supervised practice.”
• “Teachers must understand the basic psychological processes involved in reading, how children develop reading skills, the ways in which good readers differ from poor readers, and how the English language is structured in spoken and written forms.”
• Et cetera.

Your job, Hildy, is to pose some of those pointed questions for which newspaper reporters used to be famous. Like this:

Dr. Moats, in saying, “Reading is an acquired skill,” are you saying anything substantially different from, “Using the toilet is an acquired skill?” Ignoring the embarrassingly obvious question about what kinds of skills could not require acquisition, how is it possible for non-professionals to teach flawless toilet use while you professionals fail so completely to teach reading? (We are reminded of an amusing essay called, “Why Johnny Can’t Walk,” which was about the consequences of turning over to the professionals of education what they might call “early-childhood ambulatory studies”.)

Dr. Moats, if teaching reading “is a job for an expert,” how is it that so many people who learn to read well are taught by non-experts? Even ignoring the fact that everyone who can read was taught by a non-expert, by your standards, the ACT test results released this week reveal that home-schooled children as a group did better than the students of any state except Rhode Island, whom they tied; how can this be, when they were taught to read by rank amateurs?

Dr. Moats, isn’t it true that no one who actually learns to read learns to read in school? Isn’t it the case that all competent readers were taught by amateurs—their parents, their grandparents or the children themselves, puzzling things out on their own? Taking account that the purpose of your walking a high-wire stretched from the obvious to the inane is to secure more funding for more meaningless mandated education courses while excusing the failure of all the other meaningless mandated education courses to achieve the promised results, in what way should we expect to notice a difference once teachers are fully grounded in the pseudo-psychological underpinnings of the work they are already not doing?

And finally, Dr. Moats, how did you come by such a surfeit of gall as to insist that “Teaching Reading IS Rocket Science” and then dispatch the topic in 32 pages? Mind you, this is not a request for elaboration; one extra page would be 33 too many. But how dare you spit on the actual rocket scientists—and all of the other very serious, very rigorous, very scientific minds who do work in real sciences and can damn well teach a child to read without your useless advice—how dare you spit on them by comparing what they do with what you fail to do?

Teaching a child to read is not rocket science. It’s not even difficult. Millions of people do it every year. Teaching newspaper reporters to work like Hildy Johnson instead of Caspar Milquetoast is harder, clearly. And teaching Americans to stop giving tax money to charlatans who produce newer and bigger disasters as the supposed cure to the older, smaller disasters—that is difficult.

—GSS

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