How nay-sayers say "nay"

What's in "Phonics Denialism?"

Over on Andrew Old’s Education Battleground, Andrew Old writes about matters educational form his practical perspective within the context of the United Kingdom system. You might have encountered his work on his previous publications, “Teaching Battleground” (a Wordpress blog he abandoned in January 2024) or his Schools Week podcast (also older content). That is to say, Mr. Olds has a history, but that’s not why I'm pointing to his work here.

He has some good💩to say¹ these days, and I want to focus on some of his posts in this article. Those posts are about recent criticism of phonics in the UK that uses slippery reasoning based on only semi-relevant data.

• Phonics Denialism and the Education Policy Institute. Part 1: The EPI asks "What can quantitative analyses tell us about the national impact of the phonics screening check?" and then gives a ludicrous answer (26 May 2025).

• Phonics Denialism and the Education Policy Institute. Part 2

  The EPI asks "What can quantitative analyses tell us about the national impact of the phonics screening check?" and then gives a ludicrous answer (10 June 2025).

It’s fascinating to see how detractors about teaching decoding flop and flounder about data. The detractors may not be only the ones who spin evidence inappropriately, but these examples that Mr. Old examined are pretty egregious

Talk about the need to teach comprehension! Mr. Old’s analysis showed the importance of teaching reasoning.

You know, there are logical and illogical forms of argument. Mr. Old showed how using the illogical forms makes your position look a bit like, well, a horse winnying or maybe 🐴💩.

Makes me think I should write a series of posts about interpreting time series data. Meanwhile, while I’m waiting to start that, for fun I’ll add an image of a true neigh sayer:

Photo of a neighing horse by Joshua Morley on Flickr .

Now, wasn’t that fun?

Footnote

1. And I’m not sneaking in a swear word on you. That emoji stands for “poop” in my book…a word most of we special educators know and even say to our children. However, this reminds me that one of the first teachers from whom I learned a lot, Phil Leen, used to ask his primary grade students why they were going to the restroom right across the hallway. He would ask, “Are you going to urinate? Are you doing to defecate?” I wondered about why he would ask such a personal question, albeit in a pretty clinical way. When I asked him one time about questioning kids, he whipped off multiple answers: “Why ask them? Well, how long will they be gone? Are they going to defecate again because they have bowel problems? Are they just getting out of class?”