Monthly Archives: July 2023

Education, education reform, Educational Research, miracle schools, No Excuses Reform, Poverty, race, racism, Social Context Reform, Teaching, Testing

Moving Beyond the Cult of Pedagogy in Education Reform

As a teacher for forty years and a teacher educator for more than half of that career, I have always struggled with the tendency to oversell teacher quality and instructional practice.

Does teacher quality matter? Of course.

Does instructional practice matter? Again, of course.

But both teacher quality and instruction (pedagogy) are dwarfed by teaching and learning conditions within schools and more significantly by the conditions of any child’s life.

As I have noted recently, the peak era of focusing on teacher quality, the value-added movement (VAM) occurring mostly under the Obama administration, instead of identifying high-quality teachers as a driver for improving student achievement found out something much different than intended:

VAMs should be viewed within the context of quality improvement, which distinguishes aspects of quality that can be attributed to the system from those that can be attributed to individual teachers, teacher preparation programs, or schools. Most VAM studies find that teachers account for about 1% to 14% of the variability in test scores, and that the majority of opportunities for quality improvement are found in the system-level conditions. Ranking teachers by their VAM scores can have unintended consequences that reduce quality.

ASA Statement on Using Value-Added Models for Educational Assessment (2014)

Teacher quality necessarily includes two types of knowledge by a teacher—content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge.

Yet the VAM experiment revealed something we have known for decades—standardized tests of student learning mostly reflect the student’s relative privilege or inequity outside of school.

Despite the refrain of Secretary Duncan under Obama, schools have never in fact been “game changers.”

While neoliberal/conservative education reforms leveraged the “soft bigotry of low expectations” and unsubstantiated claims that the Left uses poverty as an excuse, people all along the ideological spectrum are over-focused on instructional practices. And that overemphasis is used to keep everyone looking at teachers, students, and instruction instead of those more impactful out-of-school (OOS) influences on student learning.

A companion to the cult of pedagogy in education reform is the “miracle” school claim, but “miracle” schools rarely (almost never) exist once the claim is interrogated, and even if a “miracle” school exists, it is by definition an outlier and essentially offers no guidance for scaling outward or upward.

The paradox of the cult of pedagogy in education reform is that until will directly address OOS factor we will never have the context for better teasing out the importance of teacher quality and instructional practices.

The current education reform trapped in the cult of pedagogy is the “science of reading” (SOR) movement which oversells the blame for student reading achievement as well as oversells the solutions in the form of different reading programs, reading instructional practice, and teacher preparation and professional development.

The “miracle” of the day in the SOR propaganda is Mississippi, which is very likely a mirage based on manipulating the age of students being tested at grade level and not on teacher quality and instructional practices.

Not a single education reform promise since the 1980s has succeeded, and the US remains in a constant cycle of crisis and reform promises.

Yet, the evidence is overwhelming that many OOS factors impact negatively student learning and that social reform would pay huge dividends in educational outcomes if we simply would move beyond the cult of pedagogy in education reform.

For example, see the following:

My entire career has existed within the neoliberal accountability era of education reform that oversells education as a “game changer” and oversells teacher quality and instructional practices.

Like time-share frauds, we are being duped, and teachers and students need us to move beyond the cult of pedagogy in education reform and focus on the much larger influences on students being able to learn and teachers being able to show that their quality and instruction can matter.

book banning, Censorship, Education, education reform, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, race, racism

FL Whitewashes Black History: A Reader

One of the many ways that Florida has been dismantling education in their state and influencing similar actions across the country is whitewashing Black history.

Below is a reader addressing this assault on history, Black people, and efforts to create a more equitable democracy:

See Also

“Every white person in this country…knows one thing,” James Baldwin (1979)

Listening to Langston Hughes about “Make America Great Again”

Education, education reform, ILEC, reading, Science of Reading

ILEC Response: Reading Reform Across America (The Albert Shanker Institute, July 2023), Susan Neuman, Esther Quintero, and Kayla Reist

1 Comment

International Literacy Educators Coalition

ILEC Vision: To promote literacy learning practices that enable all children and youth to realize their full potential as literate, thinking human beings.

Download a PDF of the response.

ILEC Response: Reading Reform Across America (The Albert Shanker Institute, July 2023), Susan Neuman, Esther Quintero, and Kayla Reist

The report asserts, “Our goal is to provide a basic yet systematic description of states’ efforts to improve reading instruction.” And is grounded in the following:

Furthermore, legislative efforts have at times been criticized widely, but our analysis reveals significant variation among states, rendering blanket characterizations unhelpful….Whether we see the current state of American students’ reading achievement as a new crisis or as part of a stable trend, the truth remains that more than one-third (37 percent) of the nation’s fourth-graders performed below the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) “Basic” level in 2022. Because there is no achievement-level description for below “Basic,” it is difficult to make full sense of this statistic. (p. 1)

Reading Reform Across America

While the report is ambitious, the increase in reading legislation is framed as a positive reform effort motivated by “answering teachers’ calls for better support with regard to reading.” This positive spin ignores the media, market, and political influences on another reading war and avoids confronting how many states are passing legislation that mandates and bans reading practices based on advocacy and not the full body of reading science.[1]

Positive Aspects of the Report:

  1. The report makes a strong case for reading achievement being significantly inequitable among marginalized groups of students.
  2. The report acknowledges the concerns raised about grade retention policy.

ILEC Concerns:

  1. State reading legislation is not a response to teachers, but to an orchestrated political reform movement grounded in misinformation about reading achievement, teacher expertise, and teacher education.
  2. The report fails to fully engage with patterns of extreme measures in several states’ legislation that bans three cueing, reading programs, balanced literacy, etc., as well as legislation that mandates universal dyslexia screening, structured literacy programs, etc.—both of which are based on advocacy and not the full body of research.
  3. The report does not address the contradiction of calling for scientific practice while mandating and funding programs and practices not fully supported by research; for example, mandating LETRS training for all teachers of reading.
  4. Posing the current reading legislation movement as positive is idealistic bordering on irresponsible.

[1] Reading Science Resources for Educators (and Journalists): Science of Reading Edition [UPDATED]; The Negative Legislative Consequences of the SOR Media Story: An Open-Access Reader

Recommended

What Do We Really Know about Reading Proficiency in the US?

Neoliberal Education Reform: “Science of Reading” Edition

Education

Something Compares: “I’m Not Down”

When I read that Dolores O’Riordan died, I experienced an irrational emptiness that defies explanation.

Then I cried.

I have cried several times since then as well.

Yesterday, from behind me as she sat at her desk looking at her phone, my partner said, “Sinéad O’Connor died.”

Once again, an irrational emptiness.

I resisted at first. But then I cried.

I have cried several times since then as well.

And now I carry the news of O’Connor’s death with me in my partner’s voice along side the emptiness I feel for the death of O’Riordan, who was only 46. A decade younger than O’Connor at her death, 56.

Like most people familiar with O’Connor, I associate her with tearing up the Pope’s picture on Saturday Night Live, which I watched live, and “Nothing Compares to U”—the mesmerizing and chilling video especially.

But the very first thing that comes to me when I think of O’Connor is the image of her with Kris Kristofferson.

When I was growing up, Kris Kristofferson was a famous actor and musician, but I wasn’t a fan of country music even though I enjoyed him in movies. It isn’t hard to do the right thing when you are a wealthy and famous white man, but Kristofferson did the right thing at that moment.

And when I think of that singular act of kindness, I have a Grinch moment—my heart swelling nearly out of my chest.

•

My first infatuation as a reader was science fiction, Arthur C. Clarke and others. But my first literary crush as a reader was British writer D.H. Lawrence, who believed in “blood consciousness”:

Lawrence had long believed in the duality of human consciousness, seeing a polarity between blood and mental consciousness. For him, mental consciousness was characterised by the exertion of human will, something that was demonstrated by an emphasis on science, mechanisation and materialism. In contrast, he viewed the consciousness of the blood as something inherent and more intuitive; it was as if the blood remembered older religious ideas than those imposed by Christianity, a different kind of relationship between humankind and the cosmos. Thus Lawrence’s particular interest in the notion of blood-consciousness indicates his preference for a more instinctive, rather than scientific, response to questions about man’s place in the world.

Lawrence’s “Best Adventure”: Blood-Consciousness and Cornwall

Then, and now, blood consciousness appeals to me because I often feel connections deep in me, in my bones, in my blood.

There was a hedonism to Lawrence, of course, that appealed to me as a late teen into my early 20s, but Lawrence’s work was also about language, the dialects that join us, the dialects that separate us.

Lawrence was writing about blood consciousness but class consciousness as well (priming me for reading Marx).

And there is a pattern to my affinities.

In college English courses, I found myself drawn to Irish writers, William Butler Yeats and James Joyce. Throughout my life, that Irish thread has repeated itself—George Carlin (who often spoke of his Irish heritage), Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, and others.

Of course as well, there was music—U2, The Cranberries, and O’Connor.

Listening to Irish actors and singers resonates with my deep Southern drawl since we in the South owe a bit to Irish descendants who came to the Southern US among others from the British Isles. I am Scotch/Irish on my father’s side, which compels me to trust Lawrence’s faith in blood consciousness.

Regardless, there is something about language running through my love for the Irish, and that is where O’Connor and O’Riordan speak to me both literally and metaphorically.

These smallish women, physically frail, with powerful voices, daring to say what shouldn’t be said.

There is a deep humanity in O’Connor’s and O’Riordan’s lyrics, but there is also a confrontational politics that demands that we not just listen, but that we really hear what they are saying:

It’s the same old theme, since 1916
In your head, in your head, they’re still fightin’
With their tanks and their bombs and their bombs and their guns
In your head, in your head, they are dyin’

“Zombie,” The Cranberries

O’Riordan’s death came well past the pop stardom years for The Cranberries.

For O’Connor, the Pope incident on SNL likely derailed her career as a pop star because O’Connor committed the Great Sin for a woman.

Speaking with her own voice. Daring to claim her voice and body as if it were her own:

I don’t wanna be no man’s woman
I’ve other work I want to get done
I haven’t travelled this far to become
No man’s woman
No man’s woman

“No Man’s Woman,” Sinéad O’Connor

Yesterday, alone in the apartment, I played through several of O’Connor’s songs. Today, I did the same in the car with The Cranberries.

There was more crying, and my chest feels eerily empty even as my heart swells with each song.

In O’Connor’s and O’Riordan’s songs and voices, there is a longing, a humanity, a demand, and a frailty.

We humans can be very lonely and at times very lost. Longing for that Other to be by our side, to love and cherish.

To reach for, to hold.

But also wanting to be comfortable with ourselves, our true selves, the one in our bones, in our blood.

Crying and feeling sadness for people I did not know is irrational. It is uncomfortable to think about being able to listen to their songs any time, their existences somehow captured forever.

I am aware much of this sadness is about what these women and their death’s represent: We humans are incredibly frail.

And even as we may often admit physical frailty, we resist admitting our mental frailties.

We lose people all the time due to our own carelessness.

O’Connor’s death again makes me wish we could be better with and for each other.

We should all be willing, no, eager, to walk on stage into the jeers and booing of others, take that other person in our arms and say, “Don’t let the bastards get you down.”

Fecking hell. If only.

See Also

Should We Be Nice?: The Banshees of Inisherin

Sinead O’Connor Danced on the Edge of the Dark All Her Life, Susan McKay

Auden wrote of Yeats, “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.” Cruel Ireland hurt Ms. O’Connor into song. She called Ireland a theocracy. She was furious that in a country that had supposedly fought for and won its freedom, women and children were so silenced and disempowered. She understood and had experienced pain, neglect and injustice and sang for those who also knew these things….

On Wednesday night I watched videos of Ms. O’Connor performing and read some of the tributes on social media. Two stood out for me. One quoted the Yeats poem that inspired her extraordinary “Troy”: “What could have made her peaceful with a mind/That nobleness made simple as a fire. … Why, what could she have done, being what she is?/Was there another Troy for her to burn?”

Sinead O’Connor Danced on the Edge of the Dark All Her Life
Dyslexia, Education, education reform, reading, Science of Reading

What Do We Really Know about Reading Proficiency in the US?

A data-rich but disappointing report on reading legislation in the US from 2019-2022 has been released by the Shanker Institute.

The report concedes “legislative efforts have at times been criticized widely,” but chooses to applaud the “science of reading” (SOR) movement without considering the considerable scholarly criticism raising cautions about claims of a reading crisis and mandates in that legislation.

Further, the report ignores how the SOR movement fits into decades of political education reform since the 1980s, reforms that have repeatedly failed to produce positive outcomes for students or teachers.

While the report lacks critical grounding, it also offers a couple key points to consider. First:

There are no quick fixes: The path to improvement will require time, consistent investment and a holistic approach to reform. The magnitude of the task should motivate us to persevere and collaborate more effectively. Yet, we are concerned about the polarizing rhetoric surrounding reading and hope that this review can foster a more measured dialogue about the strengths and limitations of state efforts and reading improvement more broadly.

Reading Reform Across America

The emphasis on avoiding one-size-fits all solutions is important and supported by many critics of the SOR movement. And certainly the “polarizing rhetoric” of the SOR debate is harmful; yet, this report’s positive spin on harmful legislation is certain to trigger, not ameliorate that caustic debate.

Valid criticism isn’t any more “polarizing” than idealistic endorsements.

Next, and more importantly for this post:

Whether we see the current state of American students’ reading achievement as a new crisis or as part of a stable trend, the truth remains that more than one-third (37 percent) of the nation’s fourth-graders performed below the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) “Basic” level in 2022. Because there is no achievement-level description for below “Basic,” it is difficult to make full sense of this statistic.

Reading Reform Across America

Here is the central problem with the SOR movement as well as nine decades of reading wars: The truth is that we know very little empirically about reading proficiency in the US because we have no stable or unified metric or assessment to understand what proficiency is or how well students are developing as readers.

There simply has never been a single day in the US since at least the 1940s that the media, public, and political leaders have declared reading proficiency adequate.

What does it mean to have been in a continual reading crisis in the US for almost a century and yet the country has experienced no major or catastrophic decline?

What does it mean to have been in a continual reading crisis in the US for almost a century because we claim reading is essential for student and societal success and yet the dooms day messaging never materializes?

That leads us to this: What do we really know about reading proficiency in the US?

As the report notes, one aspect of reading proficiency in the US is quite clear and easy to document with multiple data points: Reading proficiency data expose a significant inequity among marginalized groups of students—notably Black and brown students, students in poverty, multi-lingual learners (whom the report advocates for admirably), and special needs students.

Yet this fact about reading is replicated in all other educational measurements, and thus, is not a unique reality about reading proficiency, suggesting something other than reading legislation (or any educational legislation) is needed in the US.

Also, it seems fair and supported by the evidence that we have to note that reading progress by students (how well any students gains reading proficiency in relationship with their peers) is a strong marker for educational progress in general.

While over-emphasizing reading proficiency at grade 3 is problematic, no one suggests that early reading progress should be ignored. Yet, many states persist in adopting harmful grade 3 retention that has been shown to correlate strongly with negative consequences.

The report does concede about grade retention: “Consequently, there are reasons to be cautious about the policy.”

Beyond these two points, however, claims about reading proficiency are at best speculation and at worst ideological assertions without empirical support.

The latter, regretfully, is the crux of most reading wars for decades.

So here is what we don’t have but urgently need in order to address reading in ways that are supportive of students and teachers and avoids the “polarizing rhetoric” with which the report seems deeply concerned:

  • A standardized definition of “proficiency” that is age-based and not grade-based.
  • A comprehensive documentation of reading programs and instructional practices implemented in the US over the last decade.
  • A set of diverse assessments grounded in a standardized definition of “proficiency.”
  • Patience and a willingness to admit that human behaviors occur on a spectrum; not all students learn at the same rates.
  • Reading legislation that neither mandates nor bans practices or policies, but provides a funding framework that supports educators as autonomous professionals.

The polarization in public and political debates about reading is in part driven by all that we do not know and do not have regarding reading proficiency, allowing too many people (some without good intentions) to make melodramatic claims that reinforce political, media, and market interests, not student achievement or teacher/teaching quality.

Ultimately, this current trend in reading legislation is far more dangerous than promising since the decisions being made for teachers and students are not grounded evidence-based claims.

The inequity exposed in data on reading achievement is itself enough to justify that we do something, but continuing to do the same thing over and over while expecting different results is a tremendous political and educational mistake.

We simply do not know what we need to know about reading proficiency, but we do know that reading achievement is not uniquely inequitable; and thus, education reform broadly has failed for decades, and we are far past time to re-evaluate political educational reform.

This report eagerly endorsing more of the same political educational reform; therefore, it fails in its central mission.

A Nation at Risk, Capitalism, Disaster capitalism, Education, education reform, Media, NAEP, Neoliberalism, reading, School choice, Science of Reading

Neoliberal Education Reform: “Science of Reading” Edition

[Header Photo by Mike Erskine on Unsplash]

Cliches become cliches often because they do capture a truth, and “fish don’t know they are in water” may sound trite, but the saying captures well our five decades of education reform in the US.

Since A Nation at Risk under Ronald Reagan and then reinforced and expanded under George W. Bush (with Rod Paige and Margaret Spelling as Secretaries of Education), education reform in the US has been grounded in neoliberal ideology, the foundational beliefs of Republicans and conservatives.

“Neoliberalism” is a challenging term. First, it is hard to define, and second, the use of the word “liberal” has two contrasting meanings in the US—”liberal” as in “classic liberalism” is “conservative” or politically “right,” yet in common usage “liberal” is typically associate with “progressive” or politically “left.”

However, to simplify, in education reform, we can fairly interchange “neoliberal” with “conservative” and “Republican”—even though, as I want to discuss here, it is incredibly important to understand that neoliberal education reform is embraced and perpetuated by both Republicans and Democrats.

Look at the education reform landscape since the 1980s to understand.

A Nation at Risk established the neoliberal education reform playbook: manufacture an education crisis; declare that students, teachers, and public schools are failing; and mandate accountability policies to “fix” students, teachers, and schools (in-school reform only).

Insiders exposed that Reagan gave marching orders to the committee that created A Nation at Risk; Reagan wanted the US to embrace school choice (neoliberalism is a market ideology) and to “put prayer back in schools” (although voluntary prayer has always been allowed in public education, Reagan and Republicans depended on culture wars).

A key component of neoliberal education reform is the buy-in of the media. Until decades later, after numerous scholars discredited the report as a “manufactured crisis,” the media uncritically declared US education—teachers and students—failures.

And thus we set out on several cycles of the same accountability reform grounded in new standards, new tests, and new political mandates.

Governors scrambled to show they took education seriously, and George W. Bush in Texas turned his role as education reform governor into a launching pad for the White House.

Here is another key element.

Although Bush claimed a Texas “miracle,” again as with A Nation at Risk, after the political success and media as well as public buy-in, scholars showed that the “miracle” was a “mirage” (or better yet, a lie).

None the less, Bush took Paige into his administration and No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was modeled in the Texas “miracle”/”mirage”—and just as Democrats rushed to embraced Reagan’s lie, Democrats joyfully made NCLB one of the most prominent federal bi-partisan accomplishments in recent US history.

Few things show how pervasive neoliberal (Republican/conservative) education reform has become the water to the fish (education) than the Barack Obama/Arne Duncan education era.

Instead of ushering in a progressive or critical response to the Bush education policy, Obama/Duncan doubled down—fueling the draconian value-added method era of teacher evaluation, launching the deceptive and austere education career of Michelle Rhee, and supercharging the charter school movement (a “school-choice lite” movement that fulfills the market beliefs of neoliberalism).

At 40 years since A Nation at Risk, all we have to show for the constant reform in education is a series of claims of “crisis” and a smattering of “miracles”—both of which are always manufactured.

But if we reach back further, into the 1940s, we see that neoliberalism also depends on sparking culture wars. For example, the reading wars have always been about attacking progressive/liberal ideologies—Dewey in the early to mid-1900s, whole language in the 1990s, and now, balanced literacy.

So now we come to the “science of reading” (SOR).

SOR has its roots firmly in NCLB and the National Reading Panel (SOR cites the NRP report as much or more than any other evidence)—the peak of neoliberal education reform.

SOR was also fueled throughout the 2000s by the Florida model, which depends heavily on grade retention and laser-focusing on grade 3 reading.

Around 2013, states began to revisit or reimagine reading legislation, but in 2018, the media supercharged the SOR movement, echoing the “manufactured crisis” approach of A Nation at Risk.

Notably, the “manufactured crisis” of the SOR movement is firmly grounded in NAEP testing; first, the media misrepresents NAEP data, and second, NAEP is purposefully designed (the test is a neoliberal tool) to create the veneer of failure by students, teachers, and schools.

NAEP allows media and political leaders to shout that 2/3 of students are not proficient in reading even though that claim isn’t what most people think.

Therefore, at its core, the SOR movement is another neoliberal education reform movement, a tool of Republican/conservative ideology and politics.

SOR has the student/teacher/school failure rhetoric, the “miracle” that is a “mirage,” the eager and uncritical compliance of the media, and the compelling use of standardized tests data (NAEP). But most importantly to understand how SOR is neoliberal education reform, the policies are repackaging Jeb Bush’s Florida model, emphasizing punitive reading policies such as grade retention.

However just like all the other neoliberal education reform since the 1980s, it will not work because it isn’t designed to work.

We are only 20 years since NCLB/NRP which mandated scientifically based reading instruction, yet there is a reading crisis?

Here is the dirty little secret about neoliberal education reform: It is a distraction for political gain.

Neoliberalism keeps the public’s gaze on individuals (students, teachers) and away from systemic forces; SOR wants people to believe that a couple reading programs are to blame for reading failures instead of poverty and inequity.

And the neoliberal attacks in SOR on people are yet another swipe at progressive and critical educators.

Like fish, many educators cannot see they are willing participants in neoliberal education reform; almost all Democrats cannot see they are willing participants in neoliberal education reform.

Fish don’t know they are in water, but with the SOR movement (and whatever crisis comes next), the better analogy may be lobsters in a slowing boiling pot.

poetry

POEM: Gono on the verge

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time… like tears in rain… Time to die.

Roy Batty, Blade Runner

Gono had a name with two long O’s
And a distinctive way of talking

When a friend asked What are you doing?
Gono would reply About to make lunch
Or About to go to work

Never Eating lunch
Or Working

Those close to Gono
Grinned at the quirk for decades

About the number of years most humans
Are allowed to answer friends’ questions

And then

When Gono found himself in the hospital
A friend asked How are you doing?

About to die Gono replied
About to die

—P.L. Thomas