ABSTRACT
In answering the two questions that form the title of this chapter I aim to talk about what governments need in terms of clear, simple one-page policy, what Phil Gough actually said about the Simple View of Reading (Reading = decoding × linguistic comprehension, or R = D × LC), how the Simple View has been taken up by right-wing groups in the USA such as the Core Knowledge Foundation, for example (Davis 2006), and how it has become associated with the ‘first, fast and only’ model of phonics, and a technicist view of the pedagogy of reading. Then, most importantly, I want to give attention to all the things that might get missed with such a narrow emphasis, including fluency, vocabulary, cognitive flexibility, and morphology. My conclusion will be that the Simple View is elegant and compelling, and partly correct, but dangerously over-simple, with shortcomings as well as some merits.
