Why Johnny Can't Read

Rudolf Franz Flesch (Vienna, 8 May 1911 – New York, 5 October 1986) was an Austrian-born naturalised American author (noted for his book Why Johnny Can't Read), and also a readability expert and writing consultant who was a vigorous proponent of plain English in the United States. He created the Flesch Reading Ease test and was co-creator of the Flesch-Kincaid readability test. Flesch advocated use of phonics rather than sight reading to enable students to sound-out unfamiliar words.

Flesch was born in Vienna, Austria. He earned a doctorate in law from the University of Vienna in 1933. He fled to the United States to avoid the imminent Nazi invasion and antisemitism. In America, Flesch became a graduate student at Columbia University, where he earned a Ph.D in Library Science. He also met Elizabeth Terpenning, whom he married. They had six children, five daughters and one son. Flesch lived for most of his life with his wife and children in Dobbs Ferry, New York, a village in southern Westchester county.

Not long after finishing his graduate degree, in 1955 he published what became his most famous book, Why Johnny Can't Read: And What You Can Do about It. The book was a critique of the then-trendy practice of teaching reading by sight, often called the "look-say" method. The flaw of this method, according to Flesch, was that it required brute force memorization with no theory behind it so that when confronted with an unknown word, the learner became confused. As a solution, Flesch advocated a revival of the phonics method, the teaching of reading by teaching learners to sound out words using rules. The book inspired Dr. Seuss to write The Cat in the Hat (1957).

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