On the Science of Reading: How Social Justice, Behavior Analysis, and Literacy Instruction Converge

The main responsibility of our educational institutions is to develop competent readers and, thus, a literate citizenry. Indeed, literacy is requisite to access valued opportunities our society offers, which leads to a worthwhile quality of life. Unfortunately, our educational institutions persist in a stalemate on how best to effect reading competence in our children. This impasse has left generations of children and adults behind. The literacy deficits resultant from pedagogical difference, often termed, “reading wars,” are magnified and exacerbated by other confounding factors such as increasing levels of poverty, social and economic inequalities, the COVID-19 pandemic, and more. Recently published reading data of fourth graders in the United States exhibit some of the most disparate performances to date, especially when contextualized by race or ethnicity. Increasingly, educational and political leaders are calling for the return to systematic and explicit phonics instruction, which has been empirically shown to improve reading ability. When taken together, it is clear that providing demonstrably effective reading instruction for children and youth with social and economic vulnerabilities is more than a political debate; it is an issue of social justice. The authors of this paper illustrate how the foundations of behavioral principles can inform reading instructional practices that will bolster our fledgling literacy rates and ultimately frame what it means to provide socially just literacy education for all.