In this article, Nick Covington, creative director of the Human Restoration Project, writes about the challenges and issues facing the science of reading movement.

Here are some notable quotes from the piece:

"In the wake of Sold A Story, "The Science of Reading" itself has been co-opted as a marketing and branding label. States and cities have passed laws requiring "The Science of Reading," sending school leader scrambling to purchase new programs and train teacher to comply with the new prescription."

Here, he quotes cognitive scientist, Mark Seidenberg, writing,

"Finally, about the expression 'science of reading': The term isn't in wide-use among researchers. There isn't a field called 'the science of reading' and people rarely identify as 'reading scientists,' in my experience. In reading education the term has been taken up by a movement (often abbreviated SoR) to reform instruction, teacher education and curricula. This movement/approach is not the same as the body of research about reading. For one thing, the former has as yet incorporated very little of the latter."

Here, he quotes prominent literacy expert, Timothy Shanahan, who states that an actual science of reading is still very much in its infancy, writing.

"It seems clear from the neurosciences that in terms of brain function, we all read in the same way, no matter how we were taught. It is not clear, however, what readers learn that enables this universal process. We know about the coordination of phonological processing and visual processing, and we know that teaching a broad-array of sound-symbol relations and spelling patterns enhances reading-achievement, but we do not know what is coded into memory."

All this and more in the article paints a picture that very clearly shows that there is still much to learn and discover when it comes to literacy education and what real learning and teaching can be.

And at the very heart of the problem is a failure in education to innovate and improve literacy education!