Reading Science Built the Rope. Now Let Children Climb.
- Karyn Allee
- 12 hours ago
- 5 min read
The Science of Reading Needs the Science of Play
Reading education is in an unusual moment, but the argument I keep wanting to make is not about who is winning.
Southern states that enacted structured literacy legislation have drawn national attention for measurable gains in early reading achievement. My co-authors and I have been examining what some are calling the "Southern Surge" for a forthcoming piece in The Conversation, and the data are encouraging. The policy momentum deserves serious, nuanced analysis.
But what the current debate is mostly missing is a conversation about children. About joy. About agency. About what it actually looks and feels like to learn to read when you are five years old, and the world is still wide open.
Even as attention builds around Science of Reading (SoR) reform (the movement to ground reading instruction in what decades of cognitive science and linguistics research tell us about how children learn to read) the programs most closely associated with that reform are drawing scrutiny. And the scrutiny, however warranted, rarely asks the questions that matter most to the children sitting in those classrooms.
LETRS and i-Ready Are Facing Legitimate Questions
LETRS (Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling) has been widely adopted as professional development in states pursuing SoR reform. Questions have emerged about its cost relative to measured outcomes, the consistency of implementation, and whether professional learning translates to classroom change without sustained coaching.
These are reasonable questions. Purchasing a program is not the same as transforming instruction. Scripted professional development rarely preserves the teacher judgment and responsiveness that children need.
i-Ready has drawn criticism on multiple fronts. Researchers and practitioners have raised concerns about whether its instructional components (and educational technology in general) align as fully with the Science of Reading as its diagnostic tools do, and about the evidence base underlying its learning pathways. More recently, Curriculum Associates has faced scrutiny over student data privacy practices, and growing numbers of educators and families are raising concerns about how much screen-based instructional time the platform requires — time that could otherwise be spent in conversation, movement, and play.
These critiques are not coming from opponents of structured literacy. Many originate within the SoR community itself.
And They Are Not Alone
LETRS and i-Ready are not the only programs under review. Several phonics curricula marketed as SoR-aligned have been questioned for their fidelity to the research base, and some states are revisiting their initial adoptions after implementation revealed gaps between program promises and classroom realities.
Implementation science has documented this pattern for decades: what a program does in controlled conditions is rarely what it does at scale, across varied contexts, without deep and sustained support. The field asking harder questions about SoR-aligned products is not a sign of the movement collapsing. It is the movement maturing.
What tends to get dropped from these conversations, though, is the question of what surrounds the instruction. Not just which program, but what kind of classroom. What kind of relationship between teacher and child. Whether there is any room left for joy, play, and the agency that young children need to become readers who actually want to read.
Phonics and Play Are Not Opposites: The Climb Model
When phonics programs are evaluated, the questions tend to center on decodable text ratios, phoneme-grapheme correspondence sequences, scope and sequence, and fidelity metrics. These are legitimate considerations.
What is less often asked: Is the instruction joyful? Does it honor how young children actually develop? Does it treat early learners as children, not as decoding machines? Are we prioritizing developing lifelong readers?
A framework I worked on with colleagues — the Climb Model of Reading — takes up these questions directly. Drawing on the metaphor of top-rope climbing, the model positions reading as a purposeful, scaffolded ascent. Foundational skills like phonological awareness, decoding, and oral language form the rope that secures the reader. Comprehension strategies are the holds that help readers progress. The teacher functions as the belayer, adjusting the tension between support and independence as the reader builds confidence. And the learner's internal resources — motivation, executive function, background knowledge — make up the harness.
That harness is not incidental. It is where play lives. Agency develops the harness. Belonging develops the harness. A child who feels safe, curious, and capable brings a well-fitted harness to every climb. A child who has spent the school year on worksheets and screens may be arriving at the wall without one.
The Climb Model extends Scarborough's Reading Rope and Duke and Cartwright's Active View of Reading by making visible what those frameworks leave implicit: that reading development is cognitive, social, and motivational — and that structured literacy and developmentally responsive, playful teaching are not opposites. They were never supposed to be.
What My Research Found
My dissertation, published across three peer-reviewed studies, examined what happens when you give the same SoR-aligned curricula to two very different kinds of kindergarten classrooms.
Both Title I classrooms at the same school used the same district-mandated programs: Fundations phonics, Wonders reading, and i-Ready for assessment and instruction. The difference was not curriculum. It was classroom.
One classroom was joyful. Children had choices — which center to work in, where to sit and with whom, what to explore. The day included thirty minutes of purposeful learning stations (literacy games, writing, math manipulatives) and thirty minutes of free play (block building, dramatic play, art, puzzles). Morning circle included singing and movement. Books were everywhere and accessible. The teacher used her phonics curriculum with fidelity and built in time for children to be children — to collaborate, to investigate, to laugh, to choose.
The other classroom was more austere. Desks in rows. Whole-group, teacher-directed instruction. i-Ready Reading and Math on iPads. Minimal student agency.
By the end of the year, the children in the joyful, play-infused classroom had statistically significantly greater reading gains and stronger executive function health than their peers. A related study found they also spent significantly less time sitting, and that sedentary time was negatively correlated with reading and math outcomes.
The play-based teacher used the same phonics program. The difference was how she taught, and who she let children be while she did it.
The Science of Reading Needs Room for Joy
The Southern Surge matters. It offers real evidence that high expectations and systematic literacy instruction can move the needle on achievement, particularly for children who have been historically underserved by inadequate reading instruction. Those gains deserve to be protected.
Protecting them, though, does not require stripping classrooms of joy.
The developmental science of early childhood is consistent: agency, purposeful play, and belonging are not soft extras. They are the conditions under which learning takes root — including the learning that shows up on reading assessments. A phonics lesson can be systematic and still be warm. Decoding instruction can be explicit and still be engaging. Word work can follow a scope and sequence and still feel like something a child wants to do.
If SoR implementation becomes another iteration of scripted, compliance-oriented schooling, we will have addressed one problem while creating another. We will have produced children who can decode but have learned that reading is something done to them, not something they reach for.
The goal was never decodable texts for their own sake.
The goal was readers. Children who reach for books long after anyone stops asking them to.
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