The absurdity of claiming to solve the problems of teaching children to read by defining what is and isn't scientific research and how the findings of sanctioned research must be applied in classroom reading instruction is no better illustrated than in Jacqueline Edmons on and Patrick Shannon's Politics of Reading column in the latest Reading Teacher (2/02). They report a case of teachers in one school district being told to stop sustained silent reading because the federal govenement says there is no research to support it. They cite a quote from Tim Shanahan in EDWeek "If it isn't proven through research, you can't count it toward reading instruction" Decartes posponed his own publication when he saw what Galileo was made to suffer for his heresy of supporting with research evidence the Copernican view that the sun was the center of the solar system. Now federal and state law is being used to define what is and isn't literacy research and educational research in general, which materials can claim a basis in research and precisely what teachers may and may not do. And the National Reading Panel among other federally funded efforts is being used to excommunicate and brand as heretical, researchers, their methodologies and their findings. Whole language is now the catch-all term for anything not supported by sanctioned research and is a heresy to be eliminated on penalty of law. The motivation is political as it always has been. 

1. To settle by law what cannot be settled by scholarly argument. 

2. To secure the power of those whose power is challenged by the findings of research. 

3. To marginalize those who persist in conducting and publishing the results of research which threaten dominant theory. 

4. To protect believers from new ideas. In 1633, his friend Bishop Piccolomini wrote to Galileo

...I will say you deserve this and worse, for you have been disarming by steps those who have control of the sciences and they have nothing left but to run back to holy ground. Science cannot be advanced by legal limitations and definitions which restrict its questions, methods, or findings. Nor can the problems of society be solved by restricting access to knowledge and limiting innovation. the sanctioned applications to pre-school education have been launched in the past few days. I console myself that the attempts in Galileo's day to limit science failed and few remember who his prosecuters were.
 

Ken Goodman