Self-proclaimed ‘angry farmer’ Marshall Roberts has a bone to pick with Tasmania’s education department and those who have guided – or misguided – the ongoing system-wide adoption of the science of reading. 

In 2001, in the face of abysmal adult literacy rates, then Education Minister Jeremy Rockliff was presented with a roadmap for school literacy reform, a blueprint devised by the Tasmanian 100% Literacy Alliance. 

Roberts, who now works as a director for Code REaD Dyslexia Network and also tutors at a speech language pathology clinic, contends that despite Rockliff’s immediate commitment to “[do] better” for the state’s students, pushback from ‘balanced literacy stalwarts’ kicked in and hindered progress. 

“I think the standout one for me was when a consultant was actually quoting Mark Seidenberg, who’s a cognitive neuroscientist working in the education space,” he tells EducationHQ. 

“He’s been working on reading research for decades, and he raised a concern around the science of reading. 

“He was saying, ‘it’s great that we’ve got the science of reading being rolled out, but we need to be careful – we need to do it carefully. We need to make sure that we don’t just jump on a bandwagon’.”

Seidenberg’s key message was that there’s a huge amount of research on the science of reading that hadn’t yet been translated into practical applications for teachers, Roberts says. 

“He’s really concerned about how you can make that change from getting it from psychology departments into education departments at universities in a practical way, to get that translational research,” he adds.  

But Roberts maintains that one consultant used by the Department cherry-picked the academic’s argument and “actually used his statement to suggest that the science of reading has nothing to offer”. 

“…rather than taking on his thrust, which was that ‘we have to get this rolled out into schools’, the consultant actually used it in a Government submission to say ‘even the scientists are saying this stuff is still immature – it’s not ready for service yet’.

“Which isn’t what he was saying at all.” 

The Taswegian also notes that education researchers who are members of the Australian Literacy Educators’ Association (ALEA)  – an organisation he says is known to have ties to whole-language/balanced literacy and inquiry-based learning – have previously featured on the Department’s podcast and have been engaged to deliver PD to its staff. 

The motivations of those seemingly working against structured literacy teeter on unfathomable, Roberts suggests. 

“I don’t know what the motivation is. I actually can’t understand it. 

“It actually worries me that it may even be something like an unconscious cultural eugenics where people don’t actually want to deal with the kids for whom [reading is] hard.

“…we end up effectively with a two-class society: those who find it easy to read and those who really struggle with it.” 

Academics wedded to the ideological view that all children learn to read via natural processes is another factor, he says. 

“I mean, I was one of those kids. I can remember just feeling like one day I knew how to read. I can’t remember how that happened. And I’m a very good statistical learner,” Roberts says. 

“I didn’t know anything about morphology until I started studying structured literacy. And I was surprised to learn that the Latin root, ‘ject’, means throw. It’s in rejection. It’s in injection. 

“Those things had never occurred to me ever until I studied it explicitly.”

Roberts is well aware he’s ‘just a parent’, but is determined to shed light on the the state of literacy instruction in Tasmanian schools. He says teachers are as much a victim of the balanced literacy approach as anyone else and have paid for degrees that are not fit-for-purpose. 

Somewhat ironically, Roberts says he could be seen as the ‘poster kid’ for balanced literacy. 

“It worked well for me. But there’s 40 per cent of kids it won’t work well for. And you can’t just try and say the ‘joy of reading’ is going to get those 40 per cent of kids over the line.”

You might ask how a farmer came to be so heavily invested in sharing the science of reading. 

Like many parents whose children struggle to progress at school, be that due to a learning disorder, ineffective instruction, or otherwise, Roberts took it upon himself to find a solution. 

“I had two older twins and am now a parent to two younger girls, in primary and high school, and each of them have at least one specific learning disorder. 

“When the first two went through, I kind of resigned myself to the fact that they weren’t going to get any support…” he reflects. 

The breakthrough came via a training course in the Orton-Gillingham (‘OG’) approach to literacy instruction, which the hopeful but credulous parent had signed up to alongside 30 teachers. 

Initially sceptical that an approach that was developed more than 80 years ago could possibly rival what we know now to work best, Roberts was soon sold.

“When the trainer said, ‘OK, come up with a list of words for the kids to spell and remember that you’re only allowed to use the grapheme-phoneme correspondences that we’ve already taught up to this point’, there’s a room full of people going, ‘ohhh’. 

“That moment was what made me think, ‘oh, hang on, what’s been happening if that isn’t what’s happening? That’s what really got me interested in looking into it deeper…”

Armed with a balanced literacy and an Orton-Gillingham teacher handbook, Roberts presented his local school principal with the two resources. 

“I said ‘this is what you guys are teaching’, because it was actually the balanced literacy handbook that they were using within the school as a school-wide approach, ‘and this is what structured literacy looks like, and this is the difference, and this is why it’s got to be better’.”

Emails fired back and forth over the following weeks. 

“It really seemed to make a little bit of a breakthrough there, so that’s when I thought, ‘well, it’s all it really took with that one meeting, then obviously this isn’t widely known and should be’, so that’s when I really dived in deep,” he shares. 

Those clinging to constructivist theories that put children in the driver’s seat of their own learning fail to recognise that decades of cognitive science research show this to be ineffective, because children first need a solid base of foundational knowledge and skills to draw upon, Roberts notes. 

 “It’s fantastic theory, but it doesn’t work – (that) is the problem.”  

“Once they’ve got those skills, then, yeah, let them go and do the things that they want to do.

“But it’s actually a hard bridge to cross for some kids, and they need to do the repetition and the work to actually get there, just like you do with learning any skill, whether it’s an instrument or [something else].

“I mean, we know that if you’ve got raw talent, but any musician will tell you that it’s the people who do the practice who end up successful.” 

As for the state of play currently, Roberts is ‘quite positive’ about the state’s transition to structured literacy. 

“I think the change isn’t happening fast enough for my liking. I’m still seeing examples of some apparently quite low understanding of the science around it, especially around the kids who find it really hard.

“You know, it’s almost like they’re expected to do things that are actually impossible for them currently, because the granularity in the approach isn’t there in terms of knowing what needs to be tackled and so on,” he adds. 

Yet on a national level, the movement has gained some real momentum, Roberts says. 

“So now it’s a case of keeping it on track and keeping up with the research.”