It’s a term that often gets misused, misinterpreted, and—in the process—maligned.
By the general public, it’s poorly understood.
It’s critical policy research. And it’s the topic of the June 2024 issue of the peer-reviewed journal, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. A free webinar on the issue will be held from 2:00-3:30 pm Eastern on May 23rd.
Under the name “critical race theory,” this approach to understanding the world was not only denigrated but legally banned by politicians in multiple states, many of whom had a limited understanding of even its definition.
So here’s what critical policy analysis is—and isn’t—according to the introduction to the special issue, written by guest editors Erica O. Turner of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Dominique J. Baker of the University of Delaware, and NEPC Fellow Huriya Jabbar of the University of Southern California:
1. Approach to existing policies
Traditional policy research: Typically takes policy at face value, presuming it was created for the reasons stated (e.g., “to increase attendance”) or for technical reasons (e.g., “the former policy needs to be updated because it was created before the introduction of artificial intelligence”).
Critical policy research: Starts by examining why policies develop, how they are framed, who benefits, and who does not. In doing so, critical researchers explore the extent to which there may be connections between a policy that on the surface appears to apply to one narrow area (e.g., educational testing) and broader societal issues such as culture, economics, or gender. Critical researchers attend closely to rhetoric, which can provide clues to the values underlying the policy. For example, the use of the phrase “achievement gap” implies students themselves are responsible for the historically lower test scores found among some groups, whereas the phrase “opportunity gap” highlights the idea that some students have more and better chances to learn and prepare than others for exams.
2. Policy implementation
Traditional policy analysis: Often equates policy with the rhetoric with which it is surrounded, viewing implementation as dichotomous (either it’s implemented or it’s not implemented).
Critical policy research: Examines the extent to which those charged with implementing policy have the ability to do so and how factors such as environment, power, and ideology play into that equation.
3. Change
Traditional policy research: May assume that certain societal trends (e.g., changes in technology) are inevitable and immutable.
Critical policy analysis: Examines and questions underlying assumptions about social trends, asking for who benefits from them and who does not. Public policy is viewed as a tool with the potential to shift—rather than simply mirror—phenomena that are sometimes described as natural, common sense, or unchangeable.
Even as critical approaches have been villainized by politicians, they are a robust and growing area of academic research on education. The co-editors of the Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis special issue noted that the call generated nearly 400 submissions—“a clear signal of the excitement and interest in conducting critical education policy research and the real need for more outlets that publish critical policy research in education.”
I am the son of aspirational working-class parents who grew up themselves in the aspirational 1950s.
My sister and I are posed in front of the barn next to our rented house in Enoree, SC, a mill town slowly withering away.
A portrait of an All-American family filled with hope of the American Dream.
My maternal grandparents for most of my life lived in little more than a shack with a wood-burning stove for heat and an outhouse. By comparison, my paternal grandparents were working-class themselves as my father’s father ran a gas station in our hometown.
By the time I was 38, I had achieved a doctorate, and then a few years later, I moved from teaching high school in my hometown to being a professor at a selective university where most students are from a social class I have almost no context for understanding.
In almost all ways, I am an extreme outlier among other people having been born into poverty or working-class homes.
My achievements are not the only ways in which I am an outlier since my journey through many years of formal education also allowed me to set aside the “myths that deform us” [1]—specifically the belief in rugged individualism and bootstrapping that are the basis of the American Dream.
While I am vividly aware that my education (and my parents’ sacrifices for that education) saved my life intellectually and materially, that education also allowed me to recognize that my personal story and my status as an extreme outlier do not prove that everyone from a similar background should or can rise above those beginnings.
That’s the paradox of the poverty trap and the role of formal education in the US.
So when I made the following post on Twitter (X), I was not surprised by the many ideological responses that resist the wealth of evidence behind the comment:
One of the ugliest facts of the US is many Americans believe poor children should (can) perform academically the same as affluent children *as if the poverty/affluence don’t matter*
I was very careful to choose “perform academically” (and not “learn”) because I am addressing the norm of formal schooling in the US over the past 40 years: Schools, teachers, and students are primarily and substantially labeled, sorted, and judged based on test scores of students (what I mean by “perform academically”).
Because many commercially prepared standardized tests of mathematics require large amounts of reading, student background knowledge casts a large shadow over the results because of its influence on reading comprehension skills derived in part from human and social capital. Background knowledge influences students’ ability to comprehend test questions and use their existing knowledge to successfully answer questions or generate answers.
…Almost 63% of the variance in test performance was explained by social capital family income variables that influence the development of background knowledge. Background knowledge is a known predictor of standardized test results. Family income variables are immutable by schools. Only public policies, outside the control of school personnel, can influence family income.
In general students who live in poverty perform significantly lower on standardized testing that students from more affluent backgrounds.
Further, unlike my own personal story, despite access to public education, more people remain in the social class of their birth than not; in short, social mobility in the US has been decreasing for decades.
In fact, advanced education is often merely a marker for the affluence of people who would have remained affluent with or without the education.
The double paradox here is that if we in the US would set aside those “myths that deform us,” formal education could, in fact, become the great equalizer—but not on its own.
First, the “no excuses” approach education now embraces (students and teachers must not use poverty as an excuse) is both dehumanizing and cruel since it demands that children somehow set aside the negative consequences of lives they did not choose and cannot change (and lives that their families cannot in general change either).
“No excuses” approaches are deficit ideologies that center the failures in the children and not the systemic forces that are reflected in those students’ academic performances (test data). The result is seeing education as a way to “fix” children instead of addressing social inequity.
Evidence shows that living in poverty reduces cognitive function the same as being sleep deprived, and thus, demanding that children in poverty simply perform the same academically in our schools while refusing to address the poverty and inequity of their lives (and too often of their schooling) is both dehumanizing and unrealistic.
Here is an analogy of what I mean.
When people discovered the dangers to children of lead-based paint, the current approach in education (fix the child and not the systemic poverty) would have meant that we simply taught children not to eat lead paint
However, that isn’t what we did. We of course did teach children not to eat lead paint, but we also removed lead from paint.
Today’s educational ideology is only focusing on our students (don’t eat the paint), but we refuse to address the larger systemic burdens (in effect, saying there is nothing we can do about lead in paint).
Absolutely no one is arguing that since poverty and inequity are the overwhelming causal factors in student achievement that we should throw up our hands and do nothing.
However, most people are saying we cannot do anything about poverty so let’s just fix the children (for example, the discredited work of John Hattie and Ruby Payne represents how that ideology is embraced by mainstream education).
Continuing to insist that simply finding the right curriculum and instruction, focusing only on in-school education reform, or identifying the “miracle” schools (so-called “high-flying” schools with high poverty and high achievement) [2] to scale up is not only misguided but also a disservice to children and our society.
Wanting something to be true doesn’t make it so.
Yes, in the US we want to believe our democracy is a meritocracy, we want to believe in the rugged individual, we want to trust in bootstrapping.
And we want to believe that a rising tide lifts all boats; however, we also want to pretend that some people have no boats—and some insist that is their own fault (even children).
Demanding that every child born into poverty must be exceptional is among the cruelest demands a culture can make. That cruelty is magnified by a wealthy society that throws up its collective hands and declares there simply is nothing we can do about poverty, even for children.
I am convinced by the evidence that a different ideology must guide us, one embraced by Martin Luther King Jr.: “We are likely to find that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished.”
And as I showed with how we addressed the dangers of lead paint, we must work to eradicate poverty and simultaneously choose equitable and humane ways to offer children from inequitable backgrounds the greatest opportunities to learn possible—while not blaming them for the lives they did not choose or create.
[1] “[A]s we put into practice an education that critically provokes the learner’s consciousness, we are necessarily working against myths that deform us. As we confront such myths, we also face the dominant power because those myths are nothing but the expression of this power, of its ideology.” (Freire, 2005, p. 75)
Since the early 1980s, the US has been in a constant cycle of accountability-based reform in education. By 2001 and the implementation of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and the central role of the National Reading Panel (NRP), that education reform cycle intensified by adding a much more robust federal accountability, but as well, the focus on reading was magnified (although education reform and testing have over the past 80 or so years primarily targeted reading and math).
I recently posted that the “science of reading” (SOR) era of reading/education reform is rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic. In that analogy, the Titanic is the current reform paradigm, and with reading reform, one example of rearranging the chairs is the move by states to ban some reading programs and then mandate other (or different) reading programs.
Having engaged now for about six years in the public debates about reading, reading reform, and the SOR movement (the media story and the legislation that has resulted from that), I recognize that resisting SOR and SOR-based reform is mostly pointless since virtually every state has implemented some aspect of SOR, and despite the SOR story being misinformation, the vast majority of media, the public, and political leaders uncritically buy what is being sold.
Briefly here, I want to offer a series of evidence-based conditions that form the basis of the reading reform I think the US has refused to choose (primarily for ideological reasons grounded in rugged individualism and bootstrapping mythology).
First, consider these evidence-based conditions:
Since the 1940s, the public and political beliefs about student reading proficiency have been primarily described as a reading “crisis.” Despite an enormous amount of variety across the US for 80-plus years, at no point has anyone declared reading proficiency or student reading as a success or even adequate.
The national focus on public education in crisis has been NAEP testing, which has (for reading specifically) basically flat for thirty years, and the public and political discourse about student achievement has been significantly distorted by misunderstanding and misrepresentations about what NAEP achievement levels and data mean:
The current SOR movement has grounded claims in the use of the term “science” but depended primarily on anecdotes and citations that are not in fact scientific, such as the 90-95% rule that suggests student reading proficiency should be at 90-95% as opposed to the NAEP pattern of about 60+% (NAEP “basic” and above; see chart above).
Media and political claims of education and reading “miracles” are not grounded in credible evidence, but do distract from evidence of exceptional student achievement (again, notably in reading on NAEP)—the Department of Defense schools:
These related series of evidence inform the following conclusions for me:
US public education and student reading are not in crisis, but are trapped in decades of being incredibly inequitable (marginalized and minoritized students are disproportionately under-served or mis-served).
Decades of intense education reform have not improved that inequitable status quo, but education and reading do, in fact, need to be reformed.
A new reform paradigm for education and reading must include both a new set of social reforms as well as a different approach to in-school reform, both of which must be equity and not accountability based.
What does that last point look like, focusing on reading?
I want to address OOS reform first—not as an argument that we do nothing in terms of in-school reform (which I detail next) but because until we address OOS reform, in-school reform will continue to appear to fail.
For most people in the US, this is counter-intuitive, but the following social contexts must be reformed because social policy is education policy:
Universal healthcare, food and home security, and stable work for parents are all essential reforms that would impact reading proficiency measurements in the US.
Student access to books/texts in their homes and their communities (public libraries) is an evidence-based and highly correlated mechanism for increasing student reading proficiency.
Let me emphasize here that the US has committed directly and indirectly to a “no excuses” ideology that demands students and teachers set aside the impact of OOS factors and simply do the work of learning and teaching. This is not only a self-defeating ideology but also a dehumanizing ideology.
The people who are most likely to advocate “no excuses” for other people do not live by that dictum themselves.
Acknowledging poverty and inequity is not using that as an excuse to do nothing but a call to address the lives of students and teachers so that learning and teaching can be reformed in robust and important ways.
Now, the sort of reading reform we refuse to choose must include the following:
Stop the reading program merry-go-round. Reading programs have not failed and reading programs will not save reading proficiency. We must shift from demanding that teachers implement reading programs with fidelity and toward making it possible for teachers to teach students to read with fidelity to every students’ strengths and needs.
Set aside the trivial debates over reading ideologies and instructional practices. Similar to the bullet above, there is no evidence that any ideology or practice is singularly or pervasively failing students or would better serve students. This aspect of reading reform has always been about the adults and not the students.
Focus on learning and teaching conditions in terms of equity. What would better insure teachers the conditions necessary to serve individual student needs? Access to courses, teacher assignments, class sizes/student-teacher ratios—these are learning and teaching conditions that are currently inequitable and must be reformed. (Again, learning and teaching conditions are indirectly improved by addressing OOS factors.)
Reform standardized testing of reading at the national and state levels. NAEP needs to be reformed to address misleading achievement levels, and the nation needs a uniform set of standards for age-level reading proficiency. Shifting from grade-level to age-level removes the incentive for harmful practices such as grade retention, and a standard age-level proficiency allows for more accurate assessments of success or weaknesses across the US. State-level reading assessment must use those uniform achievement levels and should be reformed to provide instructional support for teachers and not simply label and sort students.
Address student access to books/texts in their classrooms and libraries.
I have been advocating for this different approach for many years and remain skeptical that the US will make this shift.
My experience is that many people force my work into the paradigm I am rejecting (I don’t endorse or promote reading programs, reading ideology, or instructional practices) because there is a powerful ideological reason we have remained mired in the same reform cycle for decades.
Education/reading reform as industry is American as apple pie.
We seem fatally addicted to “crisis” and “miracle” rhetoric as well as making claims about education and reading that are grounded in beliefs, not evidence (see my opening evidence-based conditions).
As a consequence, the media and political leaders perpetuate a false story about the Mississippi “miracle” while almost entirely ignoring the valid success of DoDEA schools—the former appears to prove the bootstrapping myth, the latter concedes the power of systemic forces on individual behavior. And ironically, the empirical evidence only supports the latter.
The sort of reform I am advocating isn’t appealing to the market or political power structures; the sort of reform I am advocating isn’t very sexy; the sort of reform I am advocating resists American mythology.
Regretfully, the issue is not whether or not we make sincere efforts to reform reading in the US. The issue is that we are reforming with ideological blinders on, adults rearranging chairs on the deck of the Titanic to prove they are right and students be damned.
The rhetoric of education reform over the past six or so years has embraced a now pervasive labeling, the “science of”—grounded in the “science of reading” (SOR) movement.
Some of the defining features of the “science of” movement include significant doses of arrogance and idealism.
A turning point for me in terms of engaging in the heated SOR discourse on social media was when a prominent literacy scholar with roots in the National Reading Panel (NRP) pointedly referred to scholarship challenging the SOR story and movement as “stupid.”
That turning point included not engaging with that aspect of the debate at all while continuing to make the case I was certain is well supported by the evidence—the SOR movement is yet another example of rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic.
And as the scholarly responses to the media and political SOR movement increased, that assessment has become more and more valid.
In short, the SOR era of education reform targeting reading is nothing new and the consequences of simply rearranging the chairs are harming students and teachers.
However, just recently a major organization that has promoted SOR has doubled down, oddly calling scholarly presentations on SOR at the national AERA conference nothing more than “myths.”
AERA is a rigorous organization and conference, thus, such as assertion seems at best careless and at worst incredibly negligent.
One aspect of the “myth” post that is worth examining more carefully is the claim that we all must either stay on the SOR bandwagon or revert to a so-called failed status quo.
Let’s start by clarifying exactly what the criticism of the SOR movement and SOR-based legislation and policy is addressing:
As John Warner asserts: “When you see the construction the ‘science of…’ as applied to education you are looking at a marketing term, not a reflection of something real when it comes what most of us think of when it comes to scientific inquiry and the standards of proof for claims.”
“‘Is there a sudden reading crisis right now?’ [ Shayne] Piasta said. ‘I see it more (as) this has been chronic. And I think COVID just put more of a spotlight on it.'” (Debunking myths about co-opted reading science)
According to Reinking, Hruby, and Risko, “there is no indisputable evidence of a national crisis in reading, and even if there were a crisis, there is no evidence that the amount of phonics in classrooms is necessarily the cause or the solution.”
To be brief, the SOR movement is grounded in a manufactured crisis orchestrated by the media and then amplified by the education marketplace and political leaders who are deeply invested in education reform as industry.
While the SOR movement and mainstream education reform are permanently invested in “crisis” rhetoric and endless cycles of in-school only reform initiatives (rearranging the chairs), there are alternatives to the current SOR reform agenda and the inadequate status quo (which, ironically, is little different than the SOR reform itself).
First, rhetorically, we must stop using the word “crisis” since, as Piasta noted, the state of reading proficiency among US students is chronic—essentially for thirty years or more about 2/3 of students seem to be performing roughly at grade level or above with the remaining 1/3 over-represented by minoritized, marginalized, and vulnerable populations of students.
Second, we must acknowledge and then address that well over 60% of measurable student achievement (including reading proficiency) is causally related to out-of-school factors. Thus, social reform is education reform, and addressing healthcare, home and food security, and children’s access to books in their homes and communities would likely improve measurements of student reading proficiency.
Third, as Reinking, Hruby, and Risko show, there simply is little evidence that reading programs, reading instruction, or teacher quality are uniformly failing students in terms of reading. Over those thirty years of flat reading scores across the entire US, reading programs and instructional practices as well as the teacher workforce have never been uniform.
Fourth, as Warner notes, education reform in the US is almost always a market initiative. In reading, the constant cycling through different reading programs and the hyper-focusing on fidelity to those programs (notably, not fidelity to the needs of students) have never produced the results promised (and never will).
And finally, along with refusing to address out-of-school factors, the inability to move beyond rearranging chairs distracts from the sort of in-school reform we have never attempted—addressing teaching and learning conditions.
Likely the very worst aspect of the SOR movement is that SOR reform has made teaching and learning conditions worse; for example, these are some of the realities of legislation that defy the idealism and willful ignorance in continuing to endorse SOR reform:
Grade retention. Grade retention creates a mirage of increased grade 3 and 4 reading scores that disappear by grade 8 [1], but that mirage benefits political leaders at the expense of students (grade retention remains strongly correlated with student low self-esteem and dropping out of school).
Scripted curriculum. Along with “science of” as marketing rhetoric, “structured literacy” is a central term in SOR reform, created by the IDA to “help us sell what we do so well.” The problem with structured literacy programs is that they are often scripted curriculum that increases the accountability focus on fidelity to teaching the program and not students. Structured literacy mandates have de-professionalized teaching by replacing teacher autonomy with market authority.
“Whitewashing” the curriculum. The structured literacy programs that are phonics-forward have also decreased the diversity of texts presented to students and significantly reduced the amount of authentic and extended texts that students read. As noted above, the chronic failure of reading in the US has impacted disproportionately diverse populations of students who are now being feed a white bread curriculum devoid of nutrients.
Education reform broadly and the current SOR movement (along with the growing “science of” cousins) are fatally committed to idealistic and aspirational rhetoric and claims that ironically are not supported by either the science or the evidence in our day-to-day classrooms.
If we are serious about addressing the chronic state of reading proficiency in the US, we must not stay on the failing SOR bandwagon, but we cannot simply throw up our hands and stay the course—continuing to rearrange the chairs on the deck of the Titanic.
To do the right thing, we must do something different, and doubling down on idealism while pretending the ship isn’t sinking is not something different.
ILEC Vision: To promote literacy learning practices that enable all children and youth to realize their full potential as literate, thinking human beings.
At the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), …I witnessed the spread of serious misinformation about reading research and related reforms. In this post, I aim to address four particularly troubling ideas I encountered. For each, I will not only provide factual corrections but also contextual clarifications, highlighting any bits of truth or valid criticisms that may exist within these misconceptions.
The post, however, misrepresents valid concerns about SOR messaging and the growing reality of negative consequences for SOR-based legislation and mandates[1]. Further, many of the bullet points under “facts” do not refute but support valid criticisms framed as “myths.” The post focuses on idealized possibilities of SOR to the exclusion of the current implementation of SOR-based programs and instruction.
Positive Aspects of the Post:
Under Myth #1, Quintero acknowledges the problems with misrepresenting National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data[2] on reading and minimizing the impact of poverty and inequity on student achievement[3].
Quintero concedes: “Reading science (indeed, any science!) is not settled; science is dynamic and evolving.”
ILEC Concerns:
Myth #1(“The reading crisis is manufactured”) is self-contradictory in that the “fact” bullets repeat the valid concerns raised among SOR critics about misrepresenting NAEP data and ignoring out-of-school factors in education reform. Once again, the SOR reading “crisis” is in fact manufactured[4].
Myths #2 (individualized instruction) and #3 (SOR restricts teacher agency) misrepresent the trend across the US of banning some reading programs and mandating other programs that tend to be structured literacy and too often scripted curriculum. Scripted curriculum does in practice impose on-size-fits-all instruction and de-professionalizes teachers[5].
Myth #4 (“The Science of Reading harms English learners”) fails to acknowledge concerns raised among Multilingual learner (MLL) scholars and teachers about SOR’s one-size-fits-all mandates[6] and “whitewashing”[7] the texts offered students from diverse backgrounds[8].
Quintero poses a false binary between SOR reform or reverting to an inadequate status quo, ignoring credible alternatives to reading reform grounded in equity/diversity and teacher agency.
May 4 has become a special day in pop culture, especially for fans and nerds who love Star Wars. May 4, 2024, proved to be a doubly special day since it fell on Free Comic Book Day.
That morning, I had two of my grandchildren—my granddaughter, 9, and my grandson, 7. With some trepidation that they would be far less excited than I was, I offered to take them to Free Comic Book Day at my local comic book shop, The Tangled Web.
The store was filled with adult faces I knew from visiting the shop at least weekly, but I was pleased to see many children there also as we weaved through the pay line to reach the back room tables stacked with free comic books.
The sign read “Three Books Only,” and the store owner greeted us, adding that the comics for children were on the first table.
My grandson said he saw the book he wanted, Pokemon, as we shuffled forward in line.
When we reached the end, where the owner was sitting, my granddaughter was holding three books when she saw one at the end she wanted so we told her she could swap out one she was holding.
The owner heard us and told her to keep all four.
We looked around a bit—my grandson wanted to see the high-priced Pokemon cards behind the case—and then as we walked to the car, my granddaughter took my hand and said the owner was nice for letting her have an extra book.
Immediately in the car, my grandson began flipping through his Pokemon book, saying some times he just likes to look at the pictures. I told him that over my comic book life sine the 1970s, I almost always do a first “read” of the books just looking at the artwork.
Back at the apartment, my granddaughter took one book in to read, a teaser copy of Monster High (IDW). My partner was setting up for her and the children to play Smash Bros. on the TV while my granddaughter consumed her new comic book.
Soon, she moved over to the couch, sitting down heavily and sighing. The story ended in a cliff hanger, and she was sad there wasn’t more.
My granddaughter was hooked. The magic of free comic book day.
No tests. No assignments. No chastising children not to look at pictures while making meaning.
Just a few encouraging adults, access to books, and the freedom to read for pleasure.
We had to drop the children off with their father just after midday to head to my partner’s book club. I tend to be a passive observer, although I did read their first book.
The book club consists of mostly friends in a gamer group, and the anchor for the monthly gathering is a series of wines for tasting.
The discussions are relatively haphazard, often wandering off into very interesting tangents punctuated with attending to children and dogs or grabbing snacks provided by everyone.
This Saturday the food was supposed to be Star Wars themed because of May 4.
As time passed and some needed to leave, the group chose the next book—this month had been nonfiction and the next category is works in translation (something I was particularly excited about)—by sharing blurbs about several suggested books (including three from my partner).
To say the least, my partner and I are as excited as my grandchildren were in the wake of Free Comic Book Day.
The next day, however, I read Dan Kois writing about the “Decline by 9”:
[A] child’s attitude towards reading enjoyment and importance is a predictor of reading frequency, which is why it also is striking to note the drop between ages eight and nine in the percentage of kids who think reading books for fun is extremely or very important (from 65% to 57%). Similarly, the number of kids who say they love reading drops significantly from 40% among eight-year-olds to 28% among nine-year-olds.
Kois acknowledges some of the standard reasons cited for children not reading—often over many decades blaming technology such as smartphones today—but then makes this point:
But others also pointed to the way reading is being taught to young children in an educational environment that gets more and more test-focused all the time. “I do not blame teachers for this,” said O’Sullivan, but the transformation of the reading curriculum means “there’s not a lot of time for discovery and enjoyment in reading.” She noted a change I, too, had noticed: Reading in the classroom has moved away from encouraging students to dive into a whole book and moved toward students reading excerpts and responding to them. “Even in elementary school, you read, you take a quiz, you get the points. You do a reading log, and you have to read so many minutes a day. It’s really taking a lot of the joy out of reading.”
The specific reference is to the “science of reading” (SOR) movement that has targeted reading programs by banning some and mandating those that are often scripted curriculum and phonics-heavy.
As Kois’s article acknowledges, the SOR movement is sacrificing important aspects of reading, including pleasure, rich texts, and diversity [1].
But this is a matter of intensity because formal schooling has always been one of the places where pleasure reading goes to die.
I taught high school English for 18 years throughout the 1980s and 1990s, witnessing first-hand that most of my very bright students had become non-readers even though you could visit any K-1 classroom and see a room full of children eager to read.
My high school students all had one thing in common—formal schooling.
This May the Fourth was a truly wonderful day for reading that I was gifted to witness. On a Saturday and nowhere near a school.
I watched children and adults choose to be readers, eager and excited.
And again, no tests. No assignments. No chastising anyone about how to make meaning or what mattered about what they were reading.
This May the Fourth was about The Force, not some Jedi skill set, but reading for pleasure and not reading as a task.
Bella Baxter experiences several awakenings—some gradual, some abrupt—in Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things, a pastiche of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as well as Shelley’s feminist ideals.
A resurrected, manufactured woman, Bella had committed suicide while pregnant. Godwin Baxter, the Dr. Frankenstein to Bella as the Monster, reanimates Bella by replacing her brain with the brain of the unborn child from her womb.
This woman-child must come to terms with this history, but as she matures and that child brain develops, Bella gradually embraces a social justice awareness solidified by an epiphany during her time of temporary escape from Godwin and the doctor to whom she is engaged, Archibald McCandless.
In her letter to Godwin, she details that epiphany in Alexandria:
I had just seen a working model of nearly every civilized nation. The people on the veranda were the owners and the rulers—their inherited intelligence and wealth set them above everyone else. The crowd of beggars represented the jealous and the incompetent majority, who were kept in their place by the whips of those on the ground between: the latter represented policemen and functionaries who kept society as it is. And while they spoke I clenched my teeth and fists to stop them biting and scratching these clever men who want no care for the helpless sick small, who use religions and politics to stay comfortably superior to all that pain: who make religions and politics, excuses to spread misery with fire and sword and how could I stop all this? I did not know what to do. (pp. 175-176)
My eyes paused at “policemen and functionaries who kept society as it is.”
OJ Simpson and Black America
For most people, nuance is a challenge, but two things that seem contradictory can be true at the same time. During O.J.: Made in America, these two things seem abundantly true: Simpson brutally murdered two people, and the LAPD was a disturbingly racist organization that embodied Bella’s realization above.
The Simpson trial became, as prosecution lawyers and family members of the murdered noted, a referendum on Mark Furhman, exposed racist policeman, as the sacrificial racist for all the sins of the LAPD (including, as the documentary includes, the Rodney King beating and the shooting of Eula Love, among others).
While lawyers on both sides either tossed out rhetoric such as the “race card” or refuted that charge as playing the “credibility card,” the trial of Simpson ironically did focus more on Furhman and the LAPD than Simpson and the murder victims, and also ironically, despite Simpson actively spending much of his life distancing himself from being Black, it was in the end being the claimed Black victim of police racism that seems to have led to his not being convicted.
The documentary in many ways is about race as well as about policing and the police. And that trial forces viewers to consider the tension that exists between policing and justice as often not the same thing.
Along with what now almost seems cartoonish—Simpson trying on unsuccessfully the gloves found at the murder scene—a key moment in the trial is Fuhrman denying his regular use of the racial slur, the N-word. A number of audio tapes from Fuhrman assisting in the development of a screenplay proved that Fuhrman almost gleefully used the racial term, forcing him to retake the stand, plead the fifth repeatedly, and likely shift the jury in favor of acquitting.
I grew up in the South throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Nothing about Fuhrman’s use of a racial slur and the culture of racism surprised me. I lived that, and I recognize that for many white people over the second half of the twentieth century, racism wasn’t a belief; it was something they knew.
In 1971, my parents achieved their working class dream, building their own home on the golf course being built just north of my home town. They were early members of that country club—although the course was a country club mostly in that it was for whites only. The members were overwhelmingly rednecks like my parents.
When I was a teen, in the mid-/late 1970s, one member had a Native American wife and an Indian family joined. These people from a distance looked “Black,” as some members would say. Routinely, members directly and indirectly harassed these people and the use of racial slurs were common in those awful moments.
However, in the 1990s around the time of the Rodney King beating and the OJ Simpson murder trial, one day I had a confrontation with my then father-in-law. He was a highway patrolman who attended church every Sunday, tithing, as they say, religiously.
What led up to this I can’t entirely recall, but he had criticized me, I think, for not going to church or not taking my daughter, then around 6.
The house was filled with several of his grandchildren, and I said directly to him that at least I didn’t use a racial slur in front of children (he did so regularly and had that day).
He was a policeman, he was a god-fearing man, and this, I want to emphasize, was normal.
After decades of no justice, the Simpson trial seems to tell us that in that moment Simpson’s guilt and his being held accountable for brutal murders was less important in some way, especially in LA and especially to Black Americans, than finally holding the LAPD—in the person of Fuhrman—indirectly accountable.
This moment in history was about “policemen and functionaries who kept society as it is.”
College Students and Red America
Watching the Simpson documentary series, and thinking again about Fuhrman, I was compelled to reconsider my own journey with racism and racial slurs. Yes, I spent many years of childhood into my teen years hearing, using, and thinking the worst of racial slurs and beliefs.
By high school, though, I spent much of my life with Black teammates and friends at school. I had close White male and female friends who lived partially closeted lives because they had romantic and sexual relationships with Black people.
I loved those people and absolutely knew by then that the racism and the words we used against Black people were wrong, inexcusable, dehumanizing.
I trust by college, I would have never uttered the N-word, even as it continued to pop into my thoughts. And I am certain that college is the place where I became a completely different person than I had been raised to be.
This spring, in fact, I did one of my common teaching skits where I overtly mention Marxism or Communism and then look up at the ceiling, alerting the students that I was likely being surveilled by Bill Gates and/or the university president.
This has always been intended as a joke, to ease the expected tension from me mentioning Marxism and communism.
Yes, somehow despite my roots, I grew up to be a teacher/professor who is an agnostic and legitimate Leftist (as Bella wants to be). I have spent much of my life and career actively resisting inequity, racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia—despite remaining in the South where that fight remains necessary even as it is a different culture than the one I grew up in.
But while I had the luxury of joking, a UNC professor, a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, discovered he was, in fact, being recorded by his university without his knowledge.
And during this spring of 2024, while I have been reading Poor Things and watching O.J.: Made in America, college students across the US have formed protests about Israel’s military bombardment of Palestinians.
Once again my life and the lives of the mostly affluent and sheltered students at my university have stood far in the distance, in safety. The way I and many others across the US watched the video of Rodney King being beaten, the LA riots after the acquittal of those police officers, the slow-motion (it seemed) pursuit of Simpson and Cowlings in the white Bronco, and the so-called trial of the century, where Simpson was found innocent.
Daily, now, I think mostly ignored by many in the US, unlike us all being glued to TVs for the pursuits and trial of Simpson, college students and academics are being assaulted and arrested by police officers ushered in by college administration.
This is Red America: “policemen and functionaries who kept society as it is.”
After writing a blog series on Black Widow, I searched for an opportunity to turn that work into a book, despite my own trepidation about committing to another book.
The proposal process proved to be frustrating and even deflating (a couple strong publishers were encouraging before passing on the project). Recently, however, I reached out to a friend/colleague with a series at Brill and found a home for my Black Widow volume.
I have noted often how important having my blogging as drafts for projects is to my work, and with this series-to-book, I am again convinced of the power of blogging as an entry point to more traditional work.
Using the blog posts as first drafts, I have begun the work of rewriting, drafting new material, and replacing hyperlinks with academic citation (the least enjoyable aspect of the work).
So far the most exciting part of this project is the new material, often grounded in my discovering and learning about how Black Widow has been included in the print comics since the early 1960s (and I will have to fully add her MCU appearances since the blog series covered the comic books only).
Comic book scholarship is fascinating and challenging because so much of the work requires writing in text about a visual medium (and for me that seems deeply reductive similar to reducing a poem to “the theme of the poem is X”).
Here, then, I want to allow us to revel in the visual, focusing on the first portrayals of Black Widow in the Marvel Universe:
The three issues of Tales of Suspense are the first appearances of Black Widow, and Black Widow’s first appearances with the Avengers (the team with which she is now popularly associated) are a mixture of her relationship with Hawkeye (initiated in Tales of Suspense 57) and her origin as an enemy agent.
Amazing Spider-Man 86 represents the rebooting of Black Widow as the contemporary super-agent many people recognize today (primarily from the MCU and Scarlett Johansson’s portrayal).
The three early appearances are also examinations of the early days of Marvel, the blur and contradictions of multiple creators working in the Marvel Method, and the relatively less sophisticated publication process of comic books seven decades ago.
So here are some fun examples of the unintended multiverse of portrayals of Black Widow in the beginning.
As I examined in the blog series and will expand in the book, Marvel over the decades has hypersexualized and underestimated Black Widow as a character. Often, Black Widow is trapped in the writer/artist’s and reader’s gaze with her body either bound or exposed.
It is quite interesting, then, to look over the jumbled portrayals of Black Widow’s outfits/costumes and hair in these first representations.
Tales of Suspense (v1) featured Iron Man, and issue 52 introduced Black Widow as “Madame Natasha”:
That fist cover image of Black Widow (by Jack Kirby and George Roussos) reveals a Cold War era temptress-spy with her wearing an exotic hat, fur shoulder wrap, and a purple and white dress in the background as Iron Man fights the Crimson Dynamo. Black Widow doesn’t look very heroic in this first image, and oddly, in the interiors, the hat and dress are green, but the exotic outfit remains mostly the same in terms of the hat and a fur shoulder wrap (although the images are not consistent with the cover):
Tales of Suspense (v1) 52, writers Stan Lee and N. Korok (Don Rico), artist Don Heck
This jumbling of color and outfits along with contradiction between the covers and interiors are a pattern until the somewhat final reboot of Black Widow in ASM 86.
In Tales of Suspense 53 and 57, Black Widow remains essentially as introduced, with the cover of 53 (by Jack Kirby) reflecting better her clothing in issue 52 (except the color scheme is dark blue and brown hair) and announcing her as “gorgeous, but deadly” on the opening splash page (where her clothing is once again green and her hair black):
Tales of Suspense (v1) 53, cover by Jack Kirby
Tales of Suspense (v1) 53, writers Stan Lee and N. Korok (Don Rico), artist Don Heck
Tales of Suspense (v1) 57, cover by Don Heck. Note the bare shoulder with Black Widow smaller at the bottom (patterns that will continue).
Tales of Suspense (v1) 57, writer Stan Lee and artist Don Heck
Next, Black Widow appears in Avengers (v1) 29 about two years after Tales of Suspense. The Don Heck cover reveals a much more identifiable superhero Black Widow with a mask, cape, utility belt, and wrist gadgets; again, the coloring is conflicting with green outfit on the cover and brown hair but blue uniform (with added netting) and black hair in the interior (of note is that Natasha’s hair has a few transformations before settling on red):
Avengers (v1) 29, cover by Don Heck and Frank Giacoia
Avengers (v1) 29, writer Stan Lee and artist Don Heck
Avengers 30 continues Black Widow as Avengers nemesis—the Jack Kirby and Don Heck cover maintaining her black hair but showing a green mask (with this issue interiors having an entirely new black and gray color scheme):
Avengers (v1) 30, cover by Jack Kirby and Don Heck
Avengers (v1) 30, writer Stan Lee and artist Don Heck
John Romita Sr. would guide Marvel toward Black Widow 2.0 in Amazing Spider-Man (v1) 86 with the now familiar black “patent leather jumpsuit,” maskless, and sporting the iconic red hair for good (see Romita’s explanation here). The John Romita Sr. cover stands today as one of the iconic Spider-Man and Black Widow covers (and note that the silhouette suggests a skirt that never appears in the interior):
Amazing Spider-Man (v1) 86, cover by John Romita Sr.
On the splash page of issue 86, Black Widow is announced as “a sensational new costumed adventurer,” and then, she is depicted throughout the opening in a grey classic outfit with a mask and cape:
Interiors of ASM (v1) 86, writer Stan Lee and artist John Romita Sr.
This rebooting issue also includes a couple-page flashback overview of Black Widow in the Marvel Universe, with even more jumbled portrayals:
Interiors of ASM (v1) 86, writer Stan Lee and artist John Romita Sr.
ASM (v1) 86 serves as the foundational reveal of the Black Widow recognizable today—red hair, black skin-tight suit, and the overall look of a super agent:
Interiors of ASM (v1) 86, writer Stan Lee and artist John Romita Sr.
These, I think, are fascinating looks at not only the early evolution of Black Widow (often hypersexualized and underestimated), but also Marvel and comic books themselves.
Words are not enough, it seems, when there is an unintentional multiverse of colors and outfits that seem to be gaslighting readers who pay attention.
NOTE
The Black Widow & Hawkeye (2024) miniseries pays tribute to the origins of Black Widow in issues 1 and 2 variant covers:
Black Widow & Hawkeye 1 (variant), cover by Artgerm Lau
Black Widow & Hawkeye 2 (variant), cover by Jesus Saiz
educator, public scholar, poet&writer – academic freedom isn't free
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 