Literacy as Smokescreen: How the Trump Administration’s “Science of Reading” Weaponises Education

How the “Science of Reading” Became a Smokescreen for Exclusion, Compliance, and the Erosion of Public Education

This isn’t about reading—it’s about control. The “Science of Reading” is a political project, not a pedagogical one. Real literacy is holistic, relational, and inclusive—not a tool for compliance or ideological sorting.

Introduction

In the shadow of sweeping federal cuts and ideological realignment, the Trump regime’s latest education policy pivot is being branded as a return to “evidence-based literacy.” On the surface, it sounds sensible—even urgent. National reading scores are down. Students are struggling. Surely, a renewed focus on reading instruction is a good thing.

But make no mistake: this is not about literacy. It’s not even about science. It’s a smokescreen.

At the centre of this policy shift lies a manufactured consensus—the so-called “Science of Reading.” Proponents position it as apolitical, empirically grounded, and pedagogically neutral. Its buzzwords—“explicit,” “systematic,” “research-based”—are delivered with such fervent regularity that to question them is treated as heresy. Yet beneath this rhetoric lies a deeply politicised framework. What’s being sold as scientific consensus is, in practice, a technocratic veneer laid over a far more troubling project: institutional defunding, centralised ideological control, and privatisation by stealth.

This is not a genuine return to educational fundamentals. It is a strategic narrowing of what counts as legitimate literacy instruction—one that conveniently excludes multilingual learners, neurodivergent students, trauma-informed practitioners, and anyone whose methods do not align with a rigid, phonics-first, data-driven script.

And crucially, it excludes actual literacy specialists—people like me.

Despite holding advanced degrees, classroom experience, and research credentials, those of us working in inclusive, neurodivergent-affirming, or linguistically expansive frameworks find ourselves without a seat at the table. We are told, implicitly or explicitly, that our expertise does not matter unless it affirms the dominant economic and ideological agenda. We are tolerated so long as we march in lockstep—not only with the current regime, but with capitalism itself. We are expected to convert complex, adaptive human learning into neat metrics and marketable outcomes. Anything less is deemed unscientific.

But literacy is not a product. It is not a profit centre. It is not a one-size-fits-all toolkit to be unboxed by underpaid teachers in underfunded classrooms.

Literacy is human. It is developmental. It is relational.

And any policy that fails to recognise this—any policy that attempts to universalise a single pathway through the incredibly diverse terrain of language acquisition—is not just misguided. It is dangerous.

In this article, I will argue that the current push for “evidence-based reading instruction” is not a sincere attempt to improve student outcomes. Rather, it is a political strategy cloaked in scientific language—a mechanism to redirect funding, reshape public schooling into a privatised service, and erase pedagogies that centre equity, culture, and inclusion.

And I’ll show, drawing directly from Chapter 2 of Holistic Language Instruction, that the “Science of Reading” is not science at all—but ideology with a lab coat on.

Science, or Political Instrument?

In May 2025, the U.S. Department of Education, now under Secretary Linda McMahon, announced a new slate of grant funding priorities that included a renewed emphasis on “back to basics” literacy instruction. At first glance, this might seem like a well-meaning recalibration in light of declining national reading scores. But viewed alongside the administration’s broader dismantling of equity infrastructure, the intentions are anything but neutral.

This announcement did not exist in a vacuum. It was delivered in tandem with the termination of contracts for federal research tools like the What Works Clearinghouse, staff reductions at the Institute for Education Sciences, and an openly hostile stance toward diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Meanwhile, discretionary grant language has been rewritten to promote “patriotic education,” classical charter expansion, and educational savings accounts—schemes that further fragment public education and redirect taxpayer money into ideological pet projects.

The pattern is unmistakable: this is not about strengthening public instruction. This is about narrowing the definition of “valid” pedagogy so that only what aligns with capitalist, white christian nationalist, and neurotypical norms qualifies for support. Literacy, in this context, becomes not a right but a reward—contingent on compliance.

And here’s the deeper danger: what gets marketed as “evidence-based” under this framework isn’t guided by science at all. It’s guided by ideology, repackaged in the language of rigour.

As I detail in Chapter 2 of Holistic Language Instruction, the so-called “Science of Reading” is neither holistic nor scientific. What masquerades as consensus is in fact a curated, heavily politicised body of behavioural research, often produced under unethical or unregulated conditions. In my capacity as an Institutional Review Board (IRB) Chairperson, I have reviewed what qualifies as “evidence” in many of these commercial literacy programs. Time and again, I’ve found studies conducted without adequate oversight, without informed consent, and with random assignment of children to interventions that risk educational harm.

To be clear: no parent would knowingly consent to their child being assigned to a literacy program that deprioritises comprehension, that strips cultural context from language, or that treats reading as a series of mechanised drills. And no ethical review board would authorise such an experiment on children, particularly if the so-called control group is knowingly denied effective instruction. But because the vendors conducting this research operate outside of independent oversight—and because the results align with a desired policy narrative—they are welcomed without question.

This is how a political instrument gains scientific legitimacy. It’s how “evidence-based” becomes a euphemism for “politically sanctioned.”

Phonics-heavy, one-size-fits-all approaches are held up as the gold standard, whilst alternative or supplemental models—especially those responsive to neurodivergent, bilingual, or trauma-affected learners—are either dismissed as “unproven” or demonised as ideologically suspect. Whole populations of language learners who do not conform to the normative model of development—gestalt processors, narrative thinkers, oral learners, English learners—are written out of the conversation entirely.

It is not that structured phonics has no place in literacy instruction. It is that when phonics becomes the only recognised form of legitimacy—when instruction is reduced to decoding drills without meaningful engagement—it ceases to be about literacy at all.

It becomes control.

And that, more than any claim of data or science, is what this shift in federal policy reveals: the reclassification of reading as an instrument not of liberation, but of standardisation, surveillance, and stratification.

“Back to Basics” as Dog Whistle

The phrase “back to basics” may sound like common sense—almost nostalgic in its appeal—but in today’s political climate, it functions as a dog whistle. It signals a return not to some pedagogical golden age, but to a rigid, exclusionary model of schooling built on white, able-bodied, monolingual norms. It is not benign. It is not neutral. It is a rhetorical cudgel—wielded to flatten the complexity of education into a narrow, mechanised, skills-first ideology that has long been used to deny access to students who do not conform.

We’ve seen this manoeuvre before. In the early 2000s, the Reading First initiative under George W. Bush pushed billions of federal dollars into phonics-heavy curricula with the same promise: improve reading outcomes through scientifically backed methods. In practice, it boosted decoding scores but failed to deliver meaningful gains in comprehension or engagement. It also ushered in a new era of curriculum control, where state and district leaders felt compelled to align with approved programs or risk losing funding—regardless of what their students actually needed.

The echoes are unmistakable.

Under the Trump administration, “back to basics” has been recast not just as a pedagogical correction, but as a weaponised value system. As Secretary McMahon plainly stated, the new grant priorities are designed to strip “divisive ideologies” from the classroom. The language may be couched in technocratic calm, but the subtext is clear: anything that acknowledges systemic racism, multilingual realities, neurodivergence, queer or trans embodiment, or trauma-informed practice is now suspect. The mere act of including these truths becomes politicised.

What this signals is not a concern for literacy. It is a desire for ideological purity.

Curricula that ask students to interrogate power, that validate non-standard dialects or community language practices, that centre students’ lived experiences—these are now reframed as dangerous. Not because they lack rigour, but because they threaten the ideological project of control. In this calculus, diversity is not a strength to be scaffolded. It is a liability to be managed or eliminated.

The so-called “literacy crisis” becomes the perfect policy foil. It is presented as urgent, apolitical, and evidence-based—exactly the kind of bipartisan-sounding issue that garners uncritical media attention and legislative momentum. But this urgency is manufactured. It is engineered to bypass deliberation and suppress dissent. When the public is told that our children are failing to read, there is little room left to question the methods being used to “fix” them.

And so we find ourselves in a policy environment where trauma-informed instruction is framed as indulgent. Where culturally responsive teaching is recast as indoctrination. Where critical literacy is demonised as radicalisation. Where neurodivergent learners, bilingual students, and anyone who doesn’t conform to the phonics-first, compliance-oriented archetype is treated as an obstacle to efficiency.

This is not a return to core skills. It is a reassertion of cultural dominance and centralised curriculum control. It is a retrenchment—a state-sponsored narrowing of educational imagination, couched in the language of standards and science.

And in the process, it weaponises the very concept of literacy—turning it from a shared human right into a sorting mechanism that rewards conformity and punishes complexity.

The Myth of a Universal Reader

The so-called “Science of Reading” rests on a myth—one that, though rarely spoken aloud, sits at the core of its pedagogical architecture: the myth of the universal reader.

This imagined reader decodes fluently by Year 1, progresses through phonemic awareness and systematic phonics with minimal need for contextual support, responds predictably to scripted instruction, and demonstrates comprehension through standardised, text-based assessments. This reader—neurotypical, monolingual, middle-class, behaviourally compliant—is treated not as one profile among many, but as the benchmark for all literacy development.

But that reader is a fiction. A convenient one.

As I write in Holistic Language Instruction, my own story is a living contradiction to that model. I graduated from high school functionally illiterate—not because I lacked intelligence or curiosity, but because I was a gestalt language processor in a world built for analytical ones. The system wasn’t designed to recognise my way of learning. It punished my differences and missed my meanings entirely.

The “Science of Reading” doesn’t just neglect learners like me—it actively erases us.

It assumes language acquisition is linear, skills-based, and universally replicable. It treats variation as deviation. Cultural context becomes noise. Narrative reasoning becomes a problem to be fixed. Gestalt processing becomes a ‘Specific Learning Disability.’ Instead of recognising the validity of diverse linguistic pathways, the SOR model pathologises them—relegating anyone outside the norm to intervention groups, pull-out sessions, or remediation tracks.

Children who enter school with rich oral traditions, dialect variation, multilingual fluency, or non-standard language processing styles are not seen as assets. They are flagged as “at-risk,” “delayed,” “disordered,” or “non-compliant.” They are handed decodable readers stripped of meaning and told to “sound it out” until the magic of comprehension presumably arrives. But meaning doesn’t arrive through compliance. It arrives through connection.

In classrooms where SOR reigns uncritically, language becomes mechanical. Children are taught that reading is not about storytelling, perspective-taking, or curiosity—it is about decoding isolated phonemes, performing fluency, and aligning one’s development to pre-approved benchmarks. The result is not just poor pedagogy. It is institutional gaslighting.

And let us be honest: this is not a neutral process. It is a form of linguistic containment.

When we reduce reading to decoding, we centre a white, standard-English, print-dominant paradigm and call it “normal.” We then fund it, scale it, and legislate it—making it the gatekeeper to educational advancement, college access, and, ultimately, economic survival. Those who do not conform must either perform their compliance or be left behind.

As I argue in Chapter 2 of Holistic Language Instruction, the real disorder lies not in the student but in the system itself—a system that has spent decades building an entire infrastructure around a single reading profile and calling it science. The result is a literacy policy that cannot distinguish between difference and deficit, between divergence and dysfunction. And that failure is not just pedagogical—it is political.

If we are serious about literacy, we must start by dismantling the myth of the universal reader. We must recognise that reading is not a singular skill set but a dynamic, culturally situated, neurologically diverse act of meaning-making. And we must design systems flexible enough to meet learners in the full complexity of their human difference—not punish them for failing to fit a mould they were never meant to wear.

Literacy as Containment, Not Liberation

We are not witnessing a renewed national commitment to literacy. We are witnessing its weaponisation.

In this latest iteration of federal education policy, “literacy” is not being framed as a liberatory act—an invitation into expanded meaning, self-expression, or collective understanding. It is being used as a mechanism of containment. A sorting tool. A performance of compliance.

And now, under the Trump regime’s new grant priorities, federal dollars will flow not toward the most contextually responsive or inclusive learning environments—but toward those who most faithfully perform that compliance.

These changes are not just a redirection of funds. They represent a wholesale rewriting of legitimacy itself. In this policy architecture, the only practices considered “scientific” are those that conform to a narrow, phonics-dominant framework—regardless of whether they meet the needs of actual students in actual classrooms. This new orthodoxy actively excludes emergent bilinguals, autistic gestalt language processors, students with specific learning disabilities, trauma-affected learners, and many others. In doing so, it reasserts a racialised, ableist, and monolingual norm—now under the convenient cloak of neutrality.

And that neutrality is a lie.

The students who are most marginalised by this framework are not “unscientific.” They are simply not built into the model. The “science” in question has always been selectively applied—its evidence base constructed through filtered data, unregulated vendor studies, and performance measures designed to reward compliance rather than comprehension. The standardised reader it champions is not only fictional but exclusionary, and its metrics are designed to disqualify those who speak too differently, process too intuitively, or think too narratively.

Meanwhile, pedagogical practices that honour student language, build upon home discourse patterns, or incorporate principles of trauma-informed care and social-emotional learning are summarily dismissed as “ideological.” That is, they are seen as contaminating the supposed objectivity of instruction with context, culture, and care.

The irony is staggering.

It is somehow “ideological” to acknowledge that a child’s language is shaped by their community, their neurotype, or their lived experience. But it is not ideological to demand that they abandon all of that—to standardise their pronunciation, suppress their narrative impulses, and master a sequence of phonemes divorced from meaning—in order to be deemed “literate.”

This is not a pedagogy. It is a containment strategy.

And it is one that functions at multiple levels: psychological, institutional, and political. It teaches children to perform a narrow version of reading not to understand the world, but to survive within it. It trains teachers to disregard the intuitive, relational, and culturally rich aspects of language in favour of drillable metrics and testable fluency. It positions difference as deficiency, and then disciplines those who resist that framing.

Literacy, in this model, becomes less about expression and more about assimilation. Less about human flourishing and more about system conformity.

And for those of us who refuse that logic—for those of us who work with students whose language does not conform, whose learning profiles do not translate neatly into standardised data points—the message is equally clear: you do not belong in this version of education.

But we do. We always have. And we will continue to resist any system that says otherwise.

Closing: The Path Forward: Holistic Inclusion

The answer to this moment of policy regression is not to reject literacy instruction. It is to reclaim and redefine what literacy means.

Real literacy is not phonics alone. It is not decoding in isolation, nor compliance dressed as fluency. It is comprehension. Expression. Connection. It is the deeply human act of meaning-making—the ability to interpret, create, and relate across context, culture, and form. True literacy cannot be standardised because human experience is not standardised. And any instructional model that flattens that reality in the name of “science” is not education—it is conditioning.

The path forward is not “back to basics.” That phrase is a trap—a nostalgic fantasy of uniformity that never existed for those of us on the margins. The only path forward is through inclusion.

Through classrooms that honour the full spectrum of neurological, cultural, and linguistic diversity—not as an afterthought, but as foundational design.

Through curriculum that offers mirrors in which students see themselves reflected, and windows into worlds beyond their own.

Through pedagogy that does not fear difference, but sees it as fertile ground for relational learning, co-constructed meaning, and collective growth.

We do not need more scripted phonics lessons. We need trauma-informed, home language celebrating, GLP-affirming literacy practices. We need instruction that accounts for how meaning is carried in tone, gesture, pacing, and metaphor—not just in graphemes. We need approaches that trust children to bring knowledge into the room, not just absorb it on command.

We need the actual science—not of reading, but of learning.

And we need the courage to say, clearly and without euphemism, that the Trump administration’s reading agenda is not about helping students. It is about reshaping the purpose of public education into something narrower, harsher, and more exclusionary. It is about reducing literacy to a compliance metric—another gatekeeping device in a long tradition of sorting children into winners and waste.

Let us resist the bait. Let us name the smokescreen.

Let us teach forward—not back.

Because literacy, at its best, is not a cage. It is a key.