The responses to AI writing in the form of ChatGPT have run the gamut from thoughtful to frantic (see both in my own consideration), but the International Baccalaureate response has added a new battle in the citation gauntlet for students and teachers:
Schoolchildren are allowed to quote from content created by ChatGPT in their essays, the International Baccalaureate has said.
The IB, which offers an alternative qualification to A-levels and Highers, said students could use the chatbot but must be clear when they were quoting its responses.
ChatGPT has become a sensation since its public release in November, with its ability to produce plausible responses to text prompts, including requests to write essays.
While the prospect of ChatGPT-based cheating has alarmed teachers and the academic profession, Matt Glanville, the IB’s head of assessment principles and practice, said the chatbot should be embraced as “an extraordinary opportunity”.
This hamfisted move by IB has prompted another layer to the debate:
This is exactly wrong.
The real problem isn't that students might use ChatGPT without citing it. It's that ChatGPT is a plagiarism machine. It's not a secondary source; it shouldn't be used like one.
Citation is a means to an end, and that end is checking the quality of the sources used, as well as the validity of the use that's been made of them. Bad sources don't become good by being cited accurately.
You may as well cite a “personal conversation” with a random guy who says he’s read a lot of texts but doesn’t distinguish between them and has no independent knowledge of the subject and no responsibility for being accurate or consistent. Getting his name right isn’t the issue.
IB’s “exactly wrong” response to ChatGPT and McCormick’s criticism come on the heels of my first-year writing students submitting their second essay of the semester, an assignment that introduces them to academic citation at the college level through using hyperlinks to support their claims and discussions.
This assignment is grounded in two concerns.
First, students often come to college having learned “to do MLA” and “to write research papers,” which inculcates in them writing like students instead of writing in authentic ways or as scholars/academics.
Second, first-year students are often buried under the weight of formatting citation and less engaged with why and how citation works in authentic texts.
Therefore, hyperlinking as citation and incorporating online sources into original writing allow students to navigate that why and how of citation and using sources while primarily focusing on original ideas and claims in the context of finding and using credible sources to establish their authority as writers.
The next essay assignment requires students to do scholarly citation using APA; therefore, essay 2 is a type of scaffolding to address student misconceptions learned before college.
My teaching style is grounded in workshop structures—students doing holistic behaviors and producing authentic artifacts of learning—as well as providing less upfront direct instruction, models of products being created by students, and then individualized instruction grounded in the artifacts students submit. Of course, much of the learning comes from, in writing-intensive courses, conferencing and revising.
One student, for example, who seems sincerely engaged in the course submitted their essay 2 with the first hyperlink being to Wikipedia.
I had given the class the standard Wikipedia talk I offer: Academia frowns on Wikipedia so you should never cite it, but Wikipedia may be a good place to start thinking and brainstorming, although it certainly isn’t a solid source to end your research.
I reminded them of that in my comment, and once again, reminded the class of this aspect of finding and using credible sources in academic writing.
Essay 2 is once again proving to be a valuable instructional tool about seeking out sources to understand topics and claims better, incorporating citation into writing to support claims and give writing (and the writer) authority, and the seemingly arbitrary standards for citation that vary among different fields (journalism has a much different standards for citation than academia, for example).
Now that IB has christened ChatGPT as citable, students and teachers have yet another layer of problems in the tensions between plagiarism and citation.
Despite IB’s stance, as McCormick rightfully notes, ChatGPT is not citable, not a credible source.
Part of the reason reminds me of the SAT writing debacle that also included computers—machine grading of the writing portion of the test.
As Thomas Newkirk mused in 2005, machine graded writing on the SAT allowed students to “invent evidence” because the computer rubric rewarded the appearance of evidence, not the credibility or even accuracy of evidence; simply putting words in quote marks and ascribing that to someone could fulfill the rubric for proof.
This, as some have noted, is what ChatGPT will do, along with other forms of fabrication.
Citation and incorporating sources in original writing are about the conversation of deep and critical thinking as well as about the ethics of attribution of ideas; in academia, we often call that standing on the shoulders of giants.
It doesn’t have to be that grand, but scholarship and thoughtful thinking and writing should acknowledge that knowing and knowledge are communal, not the product of the solitary mind.
I have come to recognize citation as an unnecessary gauntlet for students, something like academic hazing.
As I tell students, I hope someday we all simply hyperlink as citation to eradicate the mindless formatting nonsense from an otherwise noble behavior: Simply acknowledging that I am not alone in this thinking and many smart and careful people have wrestled with this also in diverse and engaging ways.
Until then, sigh, we teachers and our students are now confronted with another battle tossed in the heap of traps for the emerging students-as-writers.
Added to our lessons on choosing sources, warnings about Wikipedia, and fervent fist-waving about plagiarism, the Brave New World of ChatGPT—and the likelihood that students will arrive in higher ed not only trapped in “doing MLA” and “writing research papers,” but citing AI because their IB program told them it is ok.
I was pretending to stay awake or fighting to wake up, but when I slightly opened my eyes, I realized I was in my bedroom from my teen years.
I was my age now, in my sixties, and my father was standing over me. The room was brightly lit; my father was in his late 30s—although he died about six years ago.
This was a very vivid dream the last night I was in Hilton Head recently. Although I was born in and lived my entire life in South Carolina, this was only my second trip to Hilton Head, the first time just a couple years before.
We were a Myrtle Beach family when I was growing up, and those vacations were usually off-season, in winter. For a while my maternal grandparents managed a hotel in Myrtle Beach (after doing so in Asheville); both places provided us cheaper ways to vacation like we could afford it.
You see, my parents were solidly working class in my childhood during the sixties—but decidedly middle-class aspirant.
My teens were spent in the 1970s at the house my parents built on the golf course just north of my home town. By then, they were middle-class adjacent, having bought the first lot as the course was being developed.
It took everything my parents had to buy the lot and then build the house. The house payment was less than $100 per month, and Mom always paid extra so they eventually paid off the house early, their way of proving they belonged in the middle class.
When I graduated high school, my father had just turned forty so I have a very powerful set of naive memories of him in his 20s and 30s, just before I was able to confront the realities of my parents as deeply flawed people.
That golf course—being members and living there—was incredibly important for my parents, materially and symbolically. But the private course was segregated, and I lived in a sort of hazy awareness that institutional racism was both an entrenched fact and really disturbing.
One club member had a wife who was Native American (we said “Indian” then); that was a whispered scandal every time he came to play a round alone with her simply walking the course beside him.
She had incredibly black straight hair, and members would stand in the club house pointing and mumbling among themselves as he and his wife walked along the fairway.
The larger scandal was the very dark Indian family who joined the club, a doctor who had come from India to earn his medical degree in the US and then settled in our small town to practice.
Those children were at the course pool where I worked one day. The board president drove by and went directly to the club pro to complain that Black people were at the pool (I feel certain he did not say “Black”).
By college and my early adulthood, I recognized the racism I had been raised in, both in my home and community. My parents were mostly passively matter-of-fact in their racism, but my father could spew pretty vile racist rhetoric when upset.
That dream while in Hilton Head was clinging to my naive memories of my young, fit, and smiling father—who I loved and who was mostly incredibly loving and supportive of me, although in his hard-ass 1950s sort of toxic male way that included being whipped with a belt as a child and wrestled to the ground or tossed across the room as a teen.
But that naive memory of him I still love—that smiled at me in the dream—wasn’t my father really or fully; that was only a ghost.
And a fitting dream in Hilton Head where plantation ghosts past and present haunt everything.
As I said, we were Myrtle Beach people, working-class rednecks who fully embraced the tackiness and crass commercialism of Myrtle Beach as the black eye of the SC Grand Strand that stood in stark contrast to the golf courses and coastal islands that run all down the coast and attract mostly very wealthy people not from the South.
During my family trips, we met dozens of people from Ohio and Canada, and my father—as was his way—spoke at length to everyone of them as if they had been friends forever. He did this with everyone, everywhere, regardless of who those people were or the color of their skin.
Eventually, my father’s gregariousness weighed on me against the man I knew at home.
At least Myrtle Beach was open about the shitty thing it has always been, I tend to feel, but Hilton Head, like Kiawah, takes on a disturbing pose of nature preservation to cloak the crass commercialism and obscene wealth.
Signage and lighting laws and dozens of notices asserting preserved land reinforce the narrative that Hilton Head, and other coastal islands, are very concerned about the sea turtles, the moss, and the trees.
Except for where they have carved out golf courses and the McDonald’s and Starbucks you can barely see through the moss in those trees allowed to stand between the highways and parking lots.
Although just before sunrise or at night, you can’t see a damn thing.
Because of the sea turtles, Hilton Head is very dark. But there is more than a little symbolism in that darkness since many of the areas and several of the establishments still carry the monicker “plantation.”
Governor DeSantis ain’t got nothing on the ability of the rich in SC to act as if nothing really happened here and to cling to our past like Emily clutching her dead lover’ corpse each night.
“Plantation” down here is somewhere between a “Bless your heart” and “Fuck you,” depending.
The drive from and to the Upstate takes about four hours, a grueling trek along I-95 and I-26, with some of the most stark poverty lining the pot-holed I-95.
At least the tourists can drive 70-80 miles an hour and keep their eyes focused on the crumbling roads, lest they catch a glimpse of the squalor between their luxurious homes and the vacation plantation of their dreams.
During the drive home, I could not shake the dream of my father, and once back home, the shower didn’t ease the feeling that I was very dirty having visited for a few days that island punctuated repeatedly with “plantation,” indelibly so.
Plantation ghosts invade the skin, burrow into your bones, seer into your eyes.
Well, if you allow yourself to feel the weight of that past—and the present.
Not feeling, not thinking, and not giving a good goddamn are special talents among many in the South.
That’s one way to get filthy rich.
That’s one way to get elected.
I do not hold any sort of false pride about living in the Upstate and not among those island ghosts because we have plantations up here also, places marketing for tourists as well.
But I was very happy to return to the soil of my working-class roots, where we have garish signs and so much lighting you can see everything—except what you choose to ignore.
My formative years stretched over the 1960s and 1970s. Even through the amber haze of nostalgia, many things from those decades are forgettable, even regrettable.
I wrapped up the end of the 70s in a body brace for scoliosis—nerdy, scrawny, and possessing of 7000 Marvel comic books.
I recently completed an entire run of Daredevil launched in 1964 and had completed the much smaller runs of Black Widow before that while I wrote a series of blogs addressing how the character has been underestimated and hypersexualized.
My recommitting to collecting comic books started out very targeted, but since I completed my Daredevil collection, I have floundered a bit where to turn next. I have been collecting Daredevil appearances in other titles and started working on Moon Knight volume 1 after finding issue 1 in an antique store.
Then, the other day, Nova issue 1 from the summer of 1976 popped up on my Instagram feed. As a beginning collector and a wanna-be comic book artist, I was immediately drawn to Nova as possibly the first #1 of a comic that occurred during my early collecting days. I also was drawing Nova by later that year:
This is, then, a sort of nostalgia post, about my turning to recollecting some of those comic books from my 1970s Marvel collection that still have a special place in my heart—Nova, the Ross Andru Amazing Spider-Man run, Conan the Barbarian, and Deathlok (premiering in Astonishing Tales and once in Marvel Spotlight).
Below are my scans of my newest nostalgia collecting including those titles and some wandering when an issue catches my eye.
Nova v1 was key for me as a Sal Buscema fan, although this title only ran 25 issues (at the writing I am about 2 issues from a full run):
It is a bit cliche, but my immediate love as a comic book collector was Amazing Spider-Man. My introduction to Spider-Man was during the Gil Kane and John Romita years, a truly wonderful era that may even rival Steve Ditko’s original run.
However, my purchasing years were mostly during the Ross Andru run on Amazing Spider-Man (issues 125-185) and that work still has a special place in my heart.
Here are a few older issues and some initial grabs of those Andru issues:
One of my more embarrassing confessions is my delayed nostalgia for Conan the Barbarian. My dad and I made two large purchases of a collection early in my collecting; that included many (if not all) of the early 1970s Marvel titles.
One of which was the Barry Windsor-Smith Conan run. At the time, I wasn’t really all that engaged with BWS’s work, and during my main collecting days, John Buscema took over (often with wonderful Kane covers and Ernie Chau inking).
I purchased the The Barry Windsor-Smith Archives Conan (v1, v2), but haven’t quite fully committed to collecting, again, those excellent issues:
Here are scans of a few early Conan issues in my recollecting stack:
When I began collecting again, I immediately searched for Deathlok, who first appeared in Astonishing Tales. I was actually a Rich Buckler fan, although I think his work was considered second-tier, and this character series fit perfectly into my science fiction obsession.
Recently, I completed this run, although I need to find a better quality AT 25:
Above are galleries of some of my favorite covers, but I am a huge fan of those 1970s covers and the gradual increase in issue prices. I collected many comics costing 12¢, 15¢, 20¢, and 25¢, and watched as they creeped into the 35-40¢ era.
I find the dramatic “Still only 25¢” endearing and miss that era of comic books. There is something we have lost since the basic coloring and newsprint from the 1960s and 1970s—although there is much to enjoy and praise in the current era of comic books.
Hope you enjoy the walk down memory lane that I am taking, recollecting the issues I held in my hands as a teen who fell in love with Marvel way before it was cool.
As an aging adult, I have returned with mature gusto to childhood things—comic books, Lego, and puzzles.
Puzzles are, like Lego, incredibly satisfying, and I have discovered a wonderful puzzle company, Magic Puzzle Company, that combines fascinating original art with its own version of “magic”; once the main puzzle is completed, you can move sections, reveal an open section in the middle, and then complete the puzzle for a big reveal:
I have a daughter and three grandchildren so I have watched child development paralleled with puzzles for many years.
Babies and small children often start with simple one-piece puzzles that challenge them with fitting that one piece into a basic shape. As the child develops, the puzzles become progressively more complex—more pieces and piece shapes more varied and unpredictable.
That sequential process is incredibly compelling for adults trying to teach children. In other words, most adults want learning to be that simple, and yes, predictable from child to child.
However, many human behaviors are not that simple even when they are linked to what we might call natural behaviors. Language is typically viewed as natural, yet reading and writing are somewhat artificial and constructed extensions of that natural inclination.
The current media-driven reading crisis, the “science of reading” movement, is fatally attracted to oversimplification, caricature, and fanning an ugly and misleading blame game.
According to journalists, student reading achievement is abysmal because teachers are trapped in balanced literacy and not the “science of reading.”
That is a one-piece puzzle view of reading and teaching reading.
If we just take one step forward, the three-piece puzzle, this caricature falls apart.
The problem at the three-piece puzzle level is that since about the 1990s, we can fairly identify three forces surrounding how reading is taught in the US.
The first piece, although not universal, is that balanced literacy (BL) has been a dominant reading philosophy (although popularly identified as a “theory”) since about the 1990s when media and public attacks on whole language, while misguided, were very effective in challenging that philosophy/framework.
However, the media version of BL is caricature (often presented as a cartoonishly incomplete reading theory or program) instead of its intent as a philosophical framing:
Next, the second piece of the puzzle, most pre-service teachers have been taught the “simple view” of reading (SVR) as the dominant reading theory over that same era (including currently). [1]
If we pause and consider the first two puzzle pieces—balanced literacy and the “simple view” of reading—the media messaging falls apart since the SOR movement has demonized BL as the core cause of reading failures, yet embraced SVR as settled science.
In the real world of teacher education, however, these two have equally informed how teachers are prepared to teach reading—although teacher prep is , in fact, highly diverse in the application of both.
And now the third puzzle piece—most teachers are required to implement reading programs once they are in the classroom, regardless of the their teacher education program.
Here the puzzle becomes incredibly complicated because despite the media’s misinformation campaign, reading programs are not all BL inspired; many of the dominant programs, in fact, assert reading philosophies and theories that are explicitly not BL.
While the media messaging is stuck in the one-piece puzzle and by moving to a three-piece puzzle the inherent logic falls apart in that oversimplification, the reality is that the reading puzzle is much more like the Magic Puzzle Company’s highly complex puzzle with moving parts and remaining work to be done:
The one-piece puzzle blame game, regretfully, is very compelling so the media message remains mostly unchallenged at the popular and political levels.
Culturally, the large and very complicated reading puzzle with moving parts may be more than we can handle, but even if we just move to the three-part puzzle, the story being told about reading proves to be a simplistic blame game.
Reading, teaching reading, and students deserve a bigger, better picture that simply isn’t easy to piece together.
[1] See the discussion of the SVR in this policy brief. Note that in this brief, BL is included in reading theories because of the popular use of the term as a theory, even as that contrasts with its original intent as a philosophical grounding, similar to whole language.
Compton-Lilly, C.F., Mitra, A., Guay, M., & Spence, L.K. (2020). A confluence of complexity: Intersections among reading theory, neuroscience, and observations of young readers. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S185-S195. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.348
Duke, N.K. & Cartwright, K.B. (2021). The science of reading progresses: Communicating advances beyond the simple view of reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(S1), S25-S44. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.411
Elementary and literature/ELA teachers are grooming children to be gay or transgender by forcing them to read diverse books and stories.
Except for teachers themselves and some education scholars, these new bad teacher myths are both extremely compelling and almost entirely false. Writing in 2010 during a peak bad teacher movement in the US, Adam Bessie explains about the bad teacher stories represented by Michelle Rhee and perpetuated by the Obama administration and Bill Gates:
The myth is now the truth.
The Bad Teacher myth, [Bill] Ayers admits, is appealing, which is why it’s spread so far and become so commonly accepted. Who can, after all, disagree that we “need to get the lazy, incompetent teachers out of the classroom?” Even Ayers agrees that he, like all of us, “nods stupidly” along with this notion. As a professor at a community college and former high school teacher, I nod stupidly as well: I don’t want my students held back, alienated, or abused by these Bad Teachers.
This myth is also seductive in its simplicity. It’s much easier to have a concrete villain to blame for problems school systems face. The fix seems easy, as well: all we need to do is fire the Bad Teachers, as controversial Washington, DC, school chancellor superstar Michelle Rhee has, and hire good ones, and students will learn. In this light, Gates’ effort to “fix” the bug-riddled public school operating system by focusing on teacher development makes perfect sense. The logic feels hard to argue with: who would argue against making teachers better? And if, as a teacher, you do dare to, you must be “anti-student,” a Bad Teacher who is resistant to “reforms,” who is resistant to improvements and, thus, must be out for himself, rather than the students.
Bessie concludes, “The only problem with the Bad Teacher myth, as anyone involved with education is intimately aware of, is that problems in education are anything but simple,” and ultimately, in 2023, these myths are not supported by the evidence.
For example, as the authors of a report out of UCLA assert about anti-CRT attacks on teachers:
We put “CRT” in quotation marks throughout this report because so often the conflict campaign’s definition of “CRT” (like its description of actual K–12 practice) is a caricatured distortion by loud opponents as self-appointed “experts.” The conflict campaign thrives on caricature — on often distorting altogether both scholarship and K–12 educators’ efforts at accurate and inclusive education, deeming it (and particularly K–12 efforts to discuss the full scope of racism in our nation) wholly inappropriate for school.
The bad teacher myth in 2023 “thrives on caricature” and anecdotes that, as noted above, as very compelling but ultimately not only lack credible evidence [1] and logic, but also cause far more harm than good in terms of reforming education, serving student needs, or recruiting and retaining high quality teachers.
The bad teacher myth in 2023 is targeting educators who are 70-90% women, and those teachers under the most intense attacks tend to be elementary teachers who are even more disproportionately women and the lowest paid educators [2]:
Further, there is little evidence that students today are uniquely underperforming in reading achievement, yet the bad reading teacher myth is perpetuated by misrepresenting reading achievement through misleading messages around NAEP reading data (see Hanford’s chart that ironically suggests gradual improvement, not a crisis).
Two problems with the bad reading teacher myth is that NAEP reading proficiency is not grade level reading, as Loveless examines:
NAEP does not report the percentage of students performing at grade level. NAEP reports the percentage of students reaching a “proficient” level of performance. Here’s the problem. That’s not grade level.
In this post, I hope to convince readers of two things:
1. Proficient on NAEP does not mean grade level performance. It’s significantly above that. 2. Using NAEP’s proficient level as a basis for education policy is a bad idea.
If we want to rely on NAEP reading scores, however flawed that metric, the historical patterns suggest a relatively flat state of reading achievement with some trends of improvement in the 1970s (which was followed by the manufactured myth of schools failing with A Nation at Risk [1983]) and steadily from about 1990 until 2012 (an era demonized as a failure due to reliance on balanced literacy).
Notably, the “science of reading” movement tends to be connected to legislation starting around 2013 and Hanford’s journalism beginning in 2018, and that NAEP data has remained relatively flat except for the Covid drop.
Again, as Bessie acknowledged over a decade ago, the real problems with education, teaching, and learning are very complex and far larger than pointing fingers at teachers as “villains.”
For most of the history of US education, student reading achievement has been described as “failing,” and vulnerable student populations (minoritized races, impoverished students, students with special needs such as dyslexia, and MLLs) have always been underserved.
The dirty little secret about teacher quality related to student reading proficiency is that those vulnerable students are disproportionately sitting in class with early-career and uncertified teachers who are struggling with high student/teacher ratios.
Are students being underserved? Yes, but this is a historical fact of US public education not a current crisis.
Are low student achievement and reading proficiency the result of bad teachers? No, but these outcomes are definitely correlated with bad teaching/learning conditions and bad living conditions for far too many students.
In 2023, just as in 2010, the myth of the bad teacher is a lie, a political and marketing lie that will never serve the needs of students, teachers, or society.
Way back in 1984 when I entered the classroom, I was excited to begin my career but quickly discovered that despite my respect and even love for my English professors and teacher educators in my undergraduate degree, I simply was not prepared well enough to do my job, notably as a teacher of writing.
I set out to learn by teaching, and do better. During the late 1980s, I was fortunate to learn further through the Spartanburg Writing Project (Nation Writing Project), where I discovered that much of my on-the-job training was misguided (thanks, Brenda Davenport).
Anyone who teaches knows that becoming an effective teacher is a journey and that those first 3, 5, or even 10 years are challenging and include a great deal of growth that cannot be accomplished in teacher certification programs.
None the less, everything surrounding teaching, and especially the teaching of reading, can and should be better.
That was true in 1940 and every decade since then.
Teacher and school bashing, shouting “crisis”—these have been our responses over and over; these are not how we create a powerful teacher workforce, and these will never serve the needs of our students who need great teachers and public education the most.
The myth of the bad teacher is a Great American Tradition that need to end.
[1] Valcarcel, C., Holmes, J., Berliner, D. C., & Koerner, M. (2021). The value of student feedback in open forums: A natural analysis of descriptions of poorly rated teachers. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 29(January – July), 79. https://doi.org/10.14507/epaa.29.6289
For people not in the field of education, A Nation at Risk is either a hazy (or nonexistent) footnote of history or a pedestrian (and obvious) claim that didn’t need a government committee to announce—US public education is a failure.
However, for all its fanfare and eager media coverage, the real significance of the politically driven report is that it set in motion a pattern still vibrant in 2023; mainstream media is constantly fanning the flames of “manufactured crisis.”
A Nation at Risk was a media, public, and political hit, but scholars were quick to note that the claims in the report were overstated, oversimplified, and lacking any credible evidence [1].
In short, manufactured.
From the early 1980s and into the 2020s, mainstream education journalism has hopped feverishly from crisis to crisis and endorsed boondoggle after boondoggle—never once stopping to say “My bad!” or to pause, step back, and reconsider their template.
When the state takes the quantified depiction of schooling that educational researchers provide and uses it to devise a plan for school reform, the best we can hope for is that the reform effort will fail. As the history of school reform makes clear, this is indeed most often the outcome. One reform after another has bounced off the classroom door without having much effect in shaping what goes on inside, simply because the understanding of schooling that is embodied in the reform is so inaccurate that the reform effort cannot survive in the classroom ecology. At worst, however, the reform actually succeeds in imposing change on the process of teaching and learning in classrooms. Scott provides a series of horror stories about the results of such an imposition in noneducational contexts, from the devastating impact of the collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet Union to the parallel effect of imposing monoculture on German forests. The problem in all these cases is that the effort to impose an abstract technical ideal ends up destroying a complex distinctive ecology that depends on local practical knowledge. The current efforts by states across the globe to impose abstract technical standards on the educational village bear the signs of another ecological disaster.
As a result, a stunningly harmful pattern has emerged:
Amanda Ripley was wrong about Michelle Rhee.
Jay Matthews and Paul Tough were wrong about “no excuses” charter schools and Teach For America.
David Brooks was wrong about “miracle” charter schools (and everything else).
[Insert journalist] was wrong about Common Core and VAM.
And now, rest assured it will come to pass, Emily Hanford and Natalie Wexler are wrong about the “science of reading.”
Remember Waiting for Superman?
Sold a Story and The Truth about Reading are the same melodramatic misinformation campaign depending on an uninformed public to sell yet another educational crisis.
There will be no reckoning; there never is.
But some day (soon?) the “science of reading” histrionics will be a faint memory while everyone scrambles to the next education manufactured crisis.
The only things not to be addressed, of course, are the actual needs of students, teachers, and universal public education.
From late November of 2022 through late February 2023, I have (or will have) presented at 6 major literacy conferences, both national and state level.
Two dominant literary issues have been curriculum/book bans and the “science of reading” (SOR) movement. A few important patterns occurred with the latter.
Many teachers are overwhelmed and discouraged about the heavily negative messaging around SOR, but I also interacted with teachers not fully aware of the magnitude of this movement and remain puzzled about the controversy.
Further, the media, public, and political story around reading and teaching reading is the primary message reaching both educators and the public. The robust scholarly criticism of SOR [1] is often welcomed by teachers and administrators, but unless they are attending conferences, these critique goes unnoticed.
Scholars and educators have been backed into a corner since the SOR story is grounded in a great deal of blame, hyperbole, misinformation, and melodrama.
The media SOR story is simple to the point of being false, but simple in a way that is very compelling for people outside the field of literacy.
Here, I want to put some pieces together, and offer a place to hold the SOR movement/story to the same standards demanded by advocates of SOR (specifically The Reading League).
First, let’s start with the core of the scholarly critiques of mainstream media’s story:
Hoffman, J.V., Hikida, M., & Sailors, M. (2020). Contesting science that silences: Amplifying equity, agency, and design research in literacy teacher preparation. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S255–S266. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.353
While scholarly critiques (see note 1) are far more nuanced and substantive that this central point, this is a manageable way to interrogate whether or not the SOR story is valid based on the standards the movement itself established.
The debate, then, is well represented by conflicting evaluations of SOR and SOR criticism on social media: a literacy scholar and co-author of an SOR reading program called the scholarly criticism “stupid,” and a policy scholar not in literacy noted that the media story is “facile.”
To determine which is valid—the SOR story or the scholarly criticism—that story must be checked against the standards for science established by the movement itself, here from The Reading League:
Finally, the components of the SOR story must be identified in order to check the science behind the claims and the anecdotes; consider Aukerman’s overview:
Below, I outline the SOR story and identify current scientific research, or lack thereof, limiting the evidence to TRL’s guidelines (experimental/ quasi-experimental, published in peer-reviewed journals).
1
First, for the rest of the SOR story to hold up to scientific scrutiny, we must establish whether or not there is a unique reading crisis in the last 10-20 years in which students are failing to learn to read at acceptable rates; this must be true for the blame aspects of the SOR movement to be true.
What is the status of scientific research supporting this claim? There is no current scientific research to support this claim; most scholars have identified that NAEP [2] (and other measures of reading achievement) have remained flat and achievement gaps have remained steady as well for many decades predating the key elements blamed for reading failures.
Note that the age 9 longitudinal data including actual scores appears mostly flat with some fluctuation. (Source)NAEP age 9 reading appears mostly flat after A Nation at Risk, mostly flat with some trending upward during the 1990s BL era, increasing after the federal pressure of NCLB in 2001, and then flat since the rise of SOR legislation around 2013.
Notably the long-term NAEP data during the recent SOR era for 9 and 13 year olds is relatively flat or unchanged except for lowest performing students:
2
Next, the SOR story claims teachers are not well prepared to teach reading and teacher educators either fail to teach evidence-based methods or willfully ignore the science.
What is the status of scientific research supporting this claim? There is no current scientific research to support this claim [3] although scholars have demonstrated that credible research is available on teacher knowledge of reading and teacher education:
Hoffman, J.V., Hikida, M., & Sailors, M. (2020). Contesting science that silences: Amplifying equity, agency, and design research in literacy teacher preparation. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S255–S266. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.353
3
The media story claims the current settled reading science is the “simple view” of reading.
What is the status of scientific research supporting this claim? Scientific research refutes this claim:
Duke, N.K. & Cartwright, K.B. (2021). The science of reading progresses: Communicating advances beyond the simple view of reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(S1), S25-S44. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.411
[UPDATE]
Burns, M. K., Duke, N. K., & Cartwright, K. B. (2023). Evaluating components of the active view of reading as intervention targets: Implications for social justice. School Psychology, 38(1), 30–41. https://doi.org/10.1037/spq0000519
4
The SOR story centers a claim that systematic phonics instruction is superior to all other approaches to teaching beginning readers and thus necessary for all students.
What is the status of scientific research supporting this claim? Current scientific research refutes this claims, showing that systematic phonics is no more effective than other approaches (balanced literacy, whole language) and confirming that systematic phonics can increase early pronunciation advantages but without any gains in comprehension and with that advantage disappearing over time:
Bowers, J.S. (2020). Reconsidering the evidence that systematic phonics is more effective than alternative methods of reading instruction. Educational Psychology Review, 32(2020), 681-705. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10648-019-09515-y
Wyse, D., & Bradbury, A. (2022). Reading wars or reading reconciliation? A critical examination of robust research evidence, curriculum policy and teachers’ practices for teaching phonics and reading. Review of Education, 10(1), e3314. https://doi.org/10.1002/rev3.3314
Bowers, J.S. Yes Children Need to Learn Their GPCs but There Really Is Little or No Evidence that Systematic or Explicit Phonics Is Effective: a response to Fletcher, Savage, and Sharon (2020). Educ Psychol Rev33, 1965–1979 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-021-09602-z
Mississippi has been heralded in the SOR story as a key example of the success of SOR reading policy, based on MS 2019 grade 4 reading scores.
What is the status of scientific research supporting this claim? There is no current scientific research to support this claim, and the SOR story omits that MS has had steady grade 4 reading improvement since the early 1990s (well before SOR) and that MS grade 8 have remained low, suggesting the grade 4 gains are inflated (see also other states with the grade 4 to 8 drop).
6
The source of low reading proficiency, the SOR story claims, is the dominance of balanced literacy and a core of popular reading programs.
What is the status of scientific research supporting this claim? There is no current scientific research to support this claim. In fact, some of the most criticized programs are only adopted in about 1 in 4 schools suggesting that the variety of programs and practices make these claims overly simplistic at best. Journalists also often misidentify reading programs as balanced literacy that explicitly do not claim that label.
7
Often the SOR story includes a focus on dyslexia, claiming that multi-sensory approaches (such as Orton Gillingham) are necessary for all students identified as dyslexic (and often that all students would benefit from that approach).
What is the status of scientific research supporting this claim? Current scientific research refutes this claims:
Johnston, P., & Scanlon, D. (2021). An examination of dyslexia research and instruction with policy implications. Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice, 70(1), 107. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1177/23813377211024625
Stevens, E. A., Austin, C., Moore, C., Scammacca, N., Boucher, A. N., & Vaughn, S. (2021). Current state of the evidence: Examining the effects of Orton-Gillingham reading interventions for students with or at risk for word-level reading disabilities. Exceptional Children, 87(4), 397–417. https://doi.org/10.1177/0014402921993406
Hall, C., et al. (2022, September 13). Forty years of reading intervention research for elementary students with or at risk for dyslexia: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Reading Research Quarterly. Retrieved October 17, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.477
As of this post, the claims made in the SOR story are not supported by scientific research, and the criticisms offered by scholars appear valid.
The media story is overstated and oversimplified even though nearly all literacy educators and scholars agree that too many marginalized students (minoritized students, special needs students, impoverished students, MLLs) are being underserved (which is a regrettably historical fact of US education).
The SOR movement has created a predicament for the media story in that the standards being required for teachers and reading policy is an incredibly high and narrow threshold that (as I have shown above) the movement itself has not reached.
Again, scholarly criticism of the SOR story is nuanced and substantive, but at its core, that criticism is best represented by demonstrating that SOR advocates, especially the media, cannot meet the standard they propose for the field of teaching reading.
Simply put, US reading achievement is not uniquely worse now than at nearly any point in the last 80 years, and therefore, blaming balanced literacy as well as popular reading programs proves to be a straw man fallacy.
Reading instruction and achievement, of course, can and should be better. But the current SOR story is mostly anecdote, oversimplified and unsupported claims, and fodder for the education marketplace.
Media is failing students far more so than educators by perpetuating a simplistic blame-game that fuels the education market place.
Hoffman, J.V., Hikida, M., & Sailors, M. (2020). Contesting science that silences: Amplifying equity, agency, and design research in literacy teacher preparation. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S255–S266. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.353
MacPhee, D., Handsfield, L.J., & Paugh, P. (2021). Conflict or conversation? Media portrayals of the science of reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S145-S155. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.384
NAEP does not report the percentage of students performing at grade level. NAEP reports the percentage of students reaching a “proficient” level of performance. Here’s the problem. That’s not grade level.
In this post, I hope to convince readers of two things:
1. Proficient on NAEP does not mean grade level performance. It’s significantly above that. 2. Using NAEP’s proficient level as a basis for education policy is a bad idea
One challenge of doing public work and advocacy addressing education, education reform, and teachers/teaching is framing clear and accessible messages that avoid being simplistic and misleading.
Since I am in my fifth year of challenging the overly simplistic and misleading “science of reading” (SOR) movement, I have attempted to carefully craft some direct and brief messages, including “not simple, not settled,” “teach readers, not reading,” and my core commitments to teacher autonomy and the individual needs of all students.
One would think that those core commitments attract support even among those who disagree on other aspects of teaching and education policy. However, I face a persistent resistance to supporting teacher autonomy.
At a fundamental level, teacher autonomy is essential for teaching to be a profession, but autonomy is also essential because education is a high-accountability field.
The problematic tension in education is that teachers are routinely held accountable for mandates (not their professional decisions and practices) and how well they comply with the mandates. Since many education mandates are flawed (such as current reading legislation) and for decades have failed, teachers are then blamed for that failure even though they didn’t make the mandates and were simply the mechanisms for practices.
Most education crisis rhetoric and education reform have been grounded for decades in anti-teacher sentiments. Currently, the reading crisis movement blames reading teachers for being ill-equipped to teach reading (failing children) and teacher educators for not preparing those teachers, for example.
One of the strongest elements of rejecting teacher autonomy, in fact, is among SOR advocates who promote structured literacy, often scripted curriculum [1] that reduces teachers to technicians and perpetuates holding teachers accountable for fidelity to programs instead of supporting teacher expertise to address individual student needs.
Let me be clear that all professions with practitioner autonomy have a range of quality in that profession (yes, there are some weak and flawed teachers just as their are weak and flawed medical doctors). To reject teacher autonomy because a few teachers may not deserve it is astandard not applied in other fields.
But there may be a gender-based reason for such resistance.
K-12 teaching (especially elementary teaching) is disproportionately a woman’s career:
As a frame of reference, a more respected and better rewarded teaching profession is in higher education where professor have professional autonomy, except the gender imbalance exposes a similar sexist pattern:
While the gender balance is better in higher education than K-12, the pay and security of being a professor increases where men are a higher proportion of the field.
Autonomy, pay, and respect track positively for men and negatively for women in teaching, and the resistance to autonomy for K-12 teachers strongly correlates with the field being primarily women.
A key but ignored element of education reform must include better pay for all K-12 teachers and supporting teacher autonomy so that individual student needs can be met.
The historical and current resistance to teacher autonomy exposes the lingering sexism in how we view, treat, and reward educators.
[1] Compton-Lilly, C.F., Mitra, A., Guay, M., & Spence, L.K. (2020). A confluence of complexity: Intersections among reading theory, neuroscience, and observations of young readers. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S185-S195. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.348
While the Editorial Staff of the Post and Courier rightfully raises cautions about newly elected Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver, who has a history of extremely conservative positions on public education, that caution should also extend to Weaver’s plans for merit pay to address teacher needs in South Carolina.
I am in my fifth decade as an educator in SC, beginning as a high school English teacher in Upstate SC in 1984. Over that career I have witnessed one frustrating pattern: A constant state of education reform that recycles the exact same crisis rhetoric followed by the same education reforms.
Over and over again.
In fact, in very recent history, SC and the nation have experienced a high intensity focus on teacher quality, teacher evaluation, and teacher merit pay models under the Obama administration.
And just like in the so-called real world of business, merit pay models for teachers have failed.
Under Obama and then-Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, federal and state policy helped implement teacher evaluation and pay schemes modeled on Bill Gates’s use of stack ranking. Notably this value-added model of teacher evaluation and pay was famously heralded by the media when Michelle Rhee was chancellor of DC schools.
However, over time, Rhee’s tenure was unmasked as mostly a fraud but also as extremely harmful for teachers and students.
While merit pay remains a popular approach to recruiting and maintaining workers across many fields, research has consistently shown that merit pay does not work, and often has negative consequences, especially in education.
Research by Dan Pink and Alfie Kohn, for example, highlight the disconnect between what merit pay promises and how that plays out in the real world.
Gary Clabaugh challenged Obama’s merit pay polices, offering evidence that remains valid today and suggests not only caution about Weaver’s merit pay plan but also solid reasons not to try the same thing again.
Merit pay fails education, teachers, and students in the following ways:
Merit pay assumes workers need motivation to work harder; teachers are often overworked and their ability to be effective is not a result of how hard they are working, but the conditions under which they work.
Merit pay is often linked to standardized testing in education. As a result, merit pay incentivizes teaching to the tests and corrupts evaluation systems intended to measure learning.
Merit pay creates a culture of competition, instead of cooperation. Research also shows that competition is more harmful than cooperation, especially in the field of education where all educators should be invested in the success of all students.
Measurable student achievement, mostly through standardized testing, is more heavily linked to out-of-school factors (60-80%) than to in-school factors or teacher quality (10-15%). Therefore, merit pay overemphasizes direct and measurable teacher impact and often holds teachers and students accountable for factors beyond their control.
Policy makers in SC are faced with two facts: (1) Teacher pay is important to address and long overdue in the state; however, (2) merit pay is an ineffective and even harmful approach to addressing pay and teacher shortages.
Since SC has tried to use pay incentive to address teacher shortages in struggling districts already, we will better serve the needs of our students if we commit to new and different reforms.
The greatest need in SC is that elected officials directly address poverty across the state—access to healthcare, stable jobs with strong pay, and access to affordable housing.
But we can also do better with in-school reform.
If we want to bolster the teaching profession among our high-poverty districts, we must address teaching and learning conditions, which include the following:
Parent, community, and administrative support for teachers.
School facilities in good repair.
Fully funding teaching and learning technologies and materials.
Guaranteeing students who are struggling have access to experienced and certified teachers.
Recognizing that student success is linked to teacher quality, but that teacher quality is only one element in a complex network of forces that help children learn.
SC remains faced with a very old problem—high-poverty students struggle to achieve well enough or fast enough compared to their more affluent peers.
Those children deserve new solutions, and merit pay is a tired gimmick that has never worked and will fail children and teachers once again.
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 