From the Civil War to the dawn of the new millennium, one book has held a secure spot in American classrooms: the basal reader.
These anthologies of excerpts, poems, and other short works have been used for more than 200 years to teach reading and writing in U.S. classrooms, mostly in elementary and lower secondary grades.
Despite their persistent presence, they’ve also been a longstanding locus of controversy—over pedagogical approaches, what constitutes appropriate and educational content, and the purpose of education itself. Now, the debate is heating up again amid the “science of reading” movement.
Basal-type programs, which structure their main reading comprehension lessons around a core anthology of short full-length texts and excerpts from longer books, are included on many states’ suggested or required lists of curricula. Some of these programs have seen swift market growth in the past five years.
Many companies’ most recent versions of basal-style curricula have received high marks from the external reviewer EdReports, a national nonprofit that evaluates materials. Still, some researchers have raised questions about whether the materials offer a cohesive educational experience, and a few voices in the education field have lamented these programs’ lack of required whole novels.
Where did this constant feature of the reading classroom come from, why has it remained so popular over time, and what do the basals of today look like? Read on in this Education Week explainer.
When did basal readers originate?
The 19th century ushered in the era of the popular anthology in England and the United States—edited collections of excerpts from novels, poems, and essays.
These anthologies were widely popular with adults, but they were used in schools, too, said Seth Lerer, a visiting professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, Calif., and the author of Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter.
“The job of these things was … to give people immediate access to high culture,” he said. But they were also designed for what Lerer called “moral instruction,” with excerpts selected to teach dominant social mores and civic values.
In the United States, the first anthologies designed specifically for classroom use emerged around the same time. Most notable among them were the McGuffey Readers, first published in 1836, named after the original editor, William Holmes McGuffey.
McGuffey Readers for younger children included reading, spelling, and vocabulary lessons, while original versions for older students included instruction in elocution and dictation, and excerpts of poetry, prose, and the Bible. Lessons for secondary students were structured in a way that might seem familiar to teachers today—readings prefaced with key vocabulary and followed by comprehension questions.
In later editions, the emphasis on biblical lessons was “weeded out in favor of play, materialism, and other pursuits more palatable to the ever more earthly nineteenth-century middle class,” wrote reading researcher Richard L. Venezky in a 1990 journal article on the history of American reading textbooks.
This marked the birth of “a highly aggressive marketing strategy,” Venezky wrote, “backed by frequent revisions to appeal to changing tastes and to compete with new materials brought out by other publishers.”
But these readers didn’t just reflect social norms, they also aimed to perpetuate them, Lerer said.
“Many of the anthologies, readers, modes of teaching were not just about good or beautiful literature, they were about values; they were about features of citizenship,” he said.
How long have basals been popular?
Basals reigned in elementary school classrooms until the 1950s and ’60s. But they underwent continuous changes in form and pedagogical approach over that period.
The late 19th century saw the introduction of accompanying teachers’ manuals, for example. How to Teach Reading, published for use with the Monroe Readers of the 1880s, included scripted suggestions for how to teach phonics.
In the 1930s, a new set of readers rose to prominence, bringing with it a new approach to word-reading. Dick and Jane, short stories published by Scott Foresman with simple words about the titular brother-and-sister duo, popularized the look-say method of learning to read. Students were expected to memorize whole words, rather than learn the letter-sound correspondences that would enable them to sound words out.
Just as basals did half a century earlier, Dick and Jane readers embraced a specific set of values. “Dick and Jane live in a suburban house surrounded by a white picket fence,” reads a 1996 New York Times article on the books’ legacy. “Mother cheerfully does the housework. Father wears a suit to work and on weekends mows the grass and washes the car.”
By the 1960s, a few multicultural basals emerged, some representing a broader diversity of the American experience, and others including excerpts from recently published children’s literature.
At the same time, some education experts began advocating for students to have more choice over what they read, said Tim Shanahan, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago who studies reading. In practice, though, this typically happened outside of lessons. “The teachers weren’t so much supposed to teach [novels] as make them available to the kids,” Shanahan said.
Enter “sustained silent reading,” a period of uninterrupted time in the school day for students to read a book of their choosing. The practice, popularized in the 1970s, was in part a reaction to the perception that reading was, as one reading researcher put it in 1976, “overtaught and underpracticed.”
Into the next decade, “holistic, language-based strategies” were in vogue, leading to growth in literature-based basal readers, wrote reading researchers in a 1998 journal article about these versions.
“While the primary rhetoric during this period focused on abandoning the basals in favor of the use of trade books in the classroom, basal publishers apparently got the message and attempted to respond to the shifts in the market.”
A 1995 analysis of four major publishers’ 1st grade offerings adopted in Texas found that while 17% of the stories in 1987 reading textbooks were excerpted from trade books, that proportion jumped to 87% in 1993.
This “whole language” movement also deemphasized foundational reading skills, such as phonics, teaching students how written letters represented spoken sounds. But phonics came back in force during the era of Reading First, the George W. Bush administration’s push to align reading instruction with evidence-based practices.
The federal grant program specified that reading instruction should include all five of the components identified in the 2000 National Reading Panel report—phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. But in practice, many educators contended, the policy led to an overemphasis on basic skills that drove book-reading out of classrooms. The program also reshaped the reading market yet again; California, for instance, famously selected a basal, Open Court, as just one of two approved elementary reading textbooks in 2002.
A large-scale evaluation study of Reading First found it improved students’ word-reading skills, but not their reading comprehension overall.
What do basal reading programs look like today?
Over the past five years, more districts have returned to basal-type programs as the reading “workshop” model has been caught in the crosshairs of the “science of reading” movement.
Reader’s workshop programs, which spread starting in the 1980s and remained popular through the 2010s, called for students to practice reading skills independently in books of their choosing, with some teacher support. But recently, researchers have argued that the model doesn’t provide enough systematic instruction in foundational skills, like phonics, or in text comprehension. And, they have said, the common practice of assigning readers deemed to be at their instruction level could relegate lower-performing students to a steady diet of below-grade-level text.
As more than 40 states have passed legislation mandating evidence-based reading instruction, some have also issued lists of required or recommended materials. Workshop programs aren’t usually included. But programs that have anthology readers at their center feature prominently.
In these programs—such as HMH’s Into Reading, McGraw Hill’s Wonders, or Benchmark Education’s Benchmark Advance—units are structured around themes: “Technology’s impact on society,” for example, or “How do your actions affect others?” Documents that outline lessons for the year—the curriculum’s scope and sequence—note which reading and writing skills each lesson is designed to address, listing tasks such as determining the author’s perspective, or making predictions about the story.
They also offer a host of optional other books, such as novels, memoirs, and nonfiction, that teachers can assign for small group work or provide for students’ independent reading.
Just as reading programs of the past adapted and rebranded to follow shifts in educational trends, today’s curricula also say they align to currently accepted best practices—claiming to include culturally responsive teaching methods and build students’ background knowledge, which research shows is a key factor in reading comprehension ability. Education advocates disagree about which of the programs do the most coherent job in attempting to teach background knowledge.
Reading researchers have previously described today’s basal-style programs as a buffet of options, including a variety of pedagogical approaches and types of content that avoid aligning too rigidly with one side of the “reading wars.”
The result creates programs with strong components, but that rely heavily on teacher curation to deliver a coherent experience, said researchers tapped by the nonprofit Student Achievement Partners to review one of these curricula in 2021.
“The basal contains much research-aligned foundational skills content,” they wrote. “It is chock full of English-learner supports built into the very architecture of the program. Ample grade-level-appropriate complexity can be found across the grades in the rich anchor texts. These anthology readings are rich and varied—many are worthy of a deep dive.”
Still, they said, the “sheer bulk” of the program “dilutes its many strengths.”
The report quoted one reviewer, who said that implementing the curriculum was “similar to eating at a buffet when you are on a diet. Healthy choices are there, but not all the food is good for you.”
