My journey across seven decades since the late 1960s as a student and then a teacher has included an overlap between the fields of English and math—which tend to constitute what we call the “basics” or “core” subjects in formal education.

While I always scored high on standardized tests as a student, by high school, I was firmly a math person since I achieved As in math and science courses, but stumbled to mostly Bs and a few As in English. In fact, I graduated high school committed to majoring in physics, possibly the most math of the sciences.

Those of you who know me may be anticipating that in the five years after graduating college, I stood in the same classroom once taught in by my favorite high school English teacher, Lynn Harrill, as a high school English teacher myself.

My teaching career has been exclusively literacy, teaching writing and doing public work on reading policy.

Since my doctoral program, I have also focused often on the history of education, and I routinely argue that we in education stumble into the history mistake cliche—repeating the same approaches and failing because we refuse to learn from history.

I also feel as if I am shouting down a well because we also have contemporary evidence for the reading war mistakes we are currently making: England/UK has been implementing phonics-centric reading legislation since 2006 (paralleling the “science of reading” [SOR] movement here in the US) with growing evidence that the strategy is not working (again, as it has never worked over 80 years in the US).

At the risk of yet more shouting down a well, consider the following two examples of what we persist in doing wrong in education reform and who that directly benefits.

First, nudging its way into the media spotlight where reading has been marathon dancing is the newest math war spurred by PISA and NAEP test data: The Divider (announces The Chronicle).

For those of us slogging through the current and a couple other reading wars over the past several decades, the coverage of the math war will sound disturbingly familiar; some snippets include social media fights, the obligatory and uncritical citing of A Nation at Risk, parent anger, and ideological/political divides over skills:

That “framework” is a policy document that will shape how math is taught in California and beyond, and Nelson, a computer-science professor at the University of California at Berkeley, had major problems with it — and with Boaler, too. He’d seen a series of tweets critical of her, and reposted one of them with his own scathing commentary. Now, Boaler was confronting him….

By the 1980s, Japan’s soaring tech sector was churning out video recorders and semiconductors, and America’s math students were still not doing well at either problem-solving or the “basics.” In a 1983 report titled “A Nation at Risk,” a U.S. panel of education experts warned: “Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world.” Students were dropping out of the math pipeline at staggering rates each year after ninth grade, Hispanic and Black students most of all….

But in the decade in between, traditionalists grew alarmed. California, early to embrace the “new new math,” was a breeding ground of dissent. When Palo Alto’s school district planned to align its program with the 1992 state framework, angry parents organized on the nascent internet under the name Honest Open Logical Debate. Other anti-reform groups followed, like Mathematically Correct and Q.E.D., and their opposition blossomed into a statewide movement backed by irate mathematicians and Republican lawmakers….

By the time Boaler was in graduate school, Britain was in a similar whiplash. It had adopted a national reform-oriented math curriculum, and upset Conservatives were pushing back. For her dissertation, Boaler compared two schools, one in each camp, and found that students using reform methods were better at thinking critically about math skills and applying them to unfamiliar problems. Stanford soon came calling.

The Divider, Stephanie M. Lee

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With little imagination, one could imagine an AI bot cranking out this piece when prompted: “Write a piece on the math war based on the current reading war.”

The history and current reality of both the reading and math wars are basically the same story—one we are determined to repeat again in another decade or so.

A key thread in that recurring cycle of failure, I think, is personified by Jo Boaler, self-identified “warrior”:

In pursuit of that goal, Boaler is helping draft California’s latest math framework, a nonbinding guide for how public schools in the most populous state should teach math. It is expected to shape instruction not only in the Golden State — which flounders in math, despite being home to Silicon Valley — but also the rest of the country, which struggles with it, too. Some of the document’s key ideas are already reshaping math class, as well as admissions at some of the nation’s most selective colleges, much to Boaler’s delight. “Viva la Maths Revolution!” she often declares.

But Boaler can’t shake her critics, whom she sees as elite gatekeepers standing in the way of better lives for young people. Their resistance is merely an invitation to keep marching. “When doing the work of the warrior, it is important to remember this: You should expect and even welcome pushback,” she has written. “If you are not getting pushback, you are probably not being disruptive enough.”

The Divider, Stephanie M. Lee

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Setting aside if Boaler is right or wrong, she is clearly driven by missionary zeal, the belief she is right and the determination to act on that belief.

If nothing else, the SOR movement is a collection of people with missionary zeal, wielding “science” as their broadsword in their crusade to bring reading proficiency to the students of the US.

Here, I want to pause and speak directly to the math folk reading: Please, for the love of learning, take a different approach, finally, or you’ll regret the missionary zeal, and most of all, the tremendous amount of time and money that will be wasted in your crusade.

So here you go, a little evidence if anyone cares:

In a January 2022 letter to CSDE, Fran Rabinowitz, the president of Connecticut Association of Public School Superintendents, said the new mandate [Connecticut’s “Right to Read” law] will cost districts collectively more than $100 million in the school year 2024-25. Cheshire Public Schools, for example, estimates that replacing its highly effective PreK-3 curriculum will cost $536,292 for licenses, texts, and supporting materials. The estimate does not include the cost of training. Wilton Public Schools puts the price tag at upwards of $1 million….

CSDE ordered the remaining 68 applicants to either augment their existing programs or replace them entirely. These districts include New Canaan Public Schools, where 83.2 percent of their students read proficiently. Darien, Westport Eastford, Wilton, Colebrook, Cheshire, Ridgefield, Bethany were also denied in part or all together, even though their third graders scored near or above the 80 percent level.

One objective of the Right to Read legislation was to “address systemic racial injustice by closing the literacy opportunity gap.” CSDE seems intent on closing the “literacy opportunity gap” by dismantling successful programs instead of demanding that underperforming schools do right by their students and fix theirs.

Cost of Reading Mandate Could Top $100 Million in 2024-5

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That’s right, Connecticut has bought into the SOR mania, passed aggressive reading legislation that will cost taxpayers at least an extra $100 million, and even very successful schools with over 80% of students at or above reading proficiency must ditch effective reading programs to adopt the new mandated programs.

In the Reform Crusade, everybody has to reform, regardless.

And this is the basis of the reading crisis in CT?:

That’s also right, CT sits in the top quintile of grade 4 reading achievement on NAEP reading in 2022.

“Crisis” in education is mere rhetoric devoid of evidence, decontextualized from history, and driven by missionary zeal.

Math and reading have been in a state of manufactured crisis for as long as we have focused media and political attention on our schools. The US has not had a single moment in the last 100 years when anyone found math or reading achievement acceptable—always a crisis.

Math and reading have been in a state of perpetual reform since that other holy text of manufactured crisis, A Nation at Risk, from the early 1980s.

These cycles of crisis and reform have been driven by people with missionary zeal and the only profit from these crusades has been for commercial education interests eager to rebrand and sell you the next shiny promise that will be replaced by the next shiny promise in about a decade.

For the math folk out there still reading, something about all that doesn’t add up.

But why listen to me, I teach literacy.

As a ideological and political strategy, creating a simplistic caricature to attack and drum up support has proven to be extremely effective for conservatives in the US. Notably, a key caricature to attack in higher education has been Critical Race Theory (CRT):

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.

Pollock, M., & Rogers, J., et al. (2022, January). The conflict campaign: Exploring local experiences of the campaign to ban “Critical Race Theory” in public K-12 education in the U.S., 2020-2021. UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access.

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The caricature of CRT being leveraged to dismantle higher education among conservatives and Republicans is nothing like the theory itself; further, the presence or even influence of CRT in higher education instruction and courses is wildly overstated by the attacks as well.

But caricature works in public rhetoric designed to score ideological/political points.

Using caricature from the right to attack education perceived as being liberal has a very long tradition from public critics of progressive education and John Dewey to the more recent scapegoating of whole language and balanced literacy in the Reading War.

Ideological criticism in education based in caricature isn’t valid and does far more harm than good. A current example is the outsized attacks on three cueing (see V. here) that is a foundational part of the “science of reading” (SOR) movement and legislation across the US.

A window into a much more serious problem in education can be found in Lou LaBrant’s criticism of the Project Method:

The cause for my wrath is not new or single. It is of slow growth and has many characteristics. It is known to many as a variation of the project method; to me, as the soap performance. With the project, neatly defined by theorizing educators as “a purposeful activity carried to a successful conclusion,” I know better than to be at war. With what passes for purposeful activity and is unfortunately carried to a conclusion because it will kill time, I have much to complain. To be, for a moment, coherent: I am disturbed by the practice, much more common than our publications would indicate, of using the carving of little toy boats and castles, the dressing of quaint dolls, the pasting of advertising pictures, and the manipulation of clay and soap as the teaching of English literature. (p. 245)

It is doubtful, however, whether playing with toy furniture will produce in the average adult an ambition to own his own house, or whether enjoyment in carving a boat for the Lady of the Lake will induce one to read Cavender’s House. Quite the contrary may be the result. In encouraging much of handwork in connection with the reading of literature, it seems to the writer, wrong emphasis is made. The children may be interested, yes. But it makes considerable difference whether the interest be such as to lead to more reading or more carving. Soap is doubtless an excellent material, and important in present civilization. The question is whether carving out of soap a castle or a horse or a clown will stimulate interest in the drama, or even in daily bathing….On the contrary, the need of the reader is to secure a picture from the written word. (p. 245)

That the making of concrete models will keep interested many pupils who would otherwise find much of the English course dull may be granted. The remedy would seem to be in changing the reading material rather than in turning the literature course into a class in handcraft. (p. 246)

LaBrant, L. (1931, March). Masquerading. The English Journal, 20(3), 244-246. http://www.jstor.org/stable/803664

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If we fast-forward about 60 years, Lisa Delpit offered similar criticism of workshop approaches that she noted often failed minoritized and poor students who had different lives outside of school than more affluent students who were often white:

Good liberal intentions are not enough.

Although the problem is not necessarily inherent in the method, in some instances adherents of process approaches to writing create situations in which students ultimately find themselves held accountable for knowing a set of rules about which no one has ever directly informed them … If such explicitness is not provided to students, what it feels like to people who are old enough to judge is that there are secrets being kept, that time is being wasted, that the teacher is abdicating his or her duty to teach. A doctoral student of my acquaintance was assigned to a writing class to hone his writing skills. The student was placed in the section led by a white professor who utilized a process approach, consisting primarily of having the students write essays and then assemble into groups to edit each other’s papers. That procedure infuriated this particular student. He had many angry encounters with the teacher about what she was doing.

Lisa Delpit on Power and Pedagogy

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Conservatives latched onto that criticism and quickly (and falsely) aligned Delpit with the basic skills ideologues:

I do not advocate a simplistic ‘basic skills’ approach for children outside of the culture of power. It would be (and has been) tragic to operate as if these children were incapable of critical and higher-order thinking and reasoning. Rather, I suggest that schools must provide these children the content that other families from a different cultural orientation provide at home. This does not mean separating children according to family background, but instead, ensuring that each classroom incorporate strategies appropriate for all the children in its confines.

Lisa Delpit on Power and Pedagogy

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Both LaBrant and Delpit in their criticism represent the reductive faddism of instruction that exists in education, should be criticized, but like attacks based in caricature, should not be confused for the authentic version of the practice.

There are two dominant realities in education that reach back over a century—the failure to translate research and science into classroom practice (the “considerable gap” identified by LaBrant in 1947) and the packaged commercial versions of complex educational theory or philosophy that renders instruction reductive, ineffective, but efficient.

For example, Harvey “Smokey” Daniels often laments that his use of “best practice” quickly became a branding term for commercial education materials, rendering the term useless and the practices pale versions of what research supports.

LaBrant bristled at the Project Method that became a hot thing to do at the exclusion of students reading and writing in their English classes; LaBrant was prone to far less glitzy approaches as can be noted in her scholarly titles: Writing Is Learned by Writing (1957).

Many decades before reading and writing workshop became brands, LaBrant was practicing free reading and students writing by choice in workshop settings. Once you read through LaBrant’s classroom practices, you notice that none of that meant ignoring so-called skills and certainly that didn’t mean letting students do as they please with no mentoring or accountability (the context Delpit rightfully confronted).

While caricature attacks are mostly ideological and political—lacking any real interest in reforming practice for the benefit of students—education does have a reductive practice problem, faddism and simply enough examples of misunderstanding or learning contexts that limit good practice to justify criticism.

Fueling that more credible need for criticism, I think, is the “my instruction can beat up your instruction” approach to educational debate.

Instruction one-upmanship is the wrong way to address how to serve the individual needs of all students because it misses the point of instruction.

“My instruction can beat up your instruction” feeds the idea that there is The Right Instruction out there if only we’d find it and implement it; “my instruction can beat up your instruction” is silver-bullet thinking.

However, as Dewey, LaBrant, and Delpit would assert, instruction is right when it serves the student. There simply is no one right way existing decontextualized from students.

Again, let’s we return to LaBrant, this time exasperated about her need to make a case for students writing:

It ought to be unnecessary to say that writing is learned by writing; unfortunately there is need. Again and again teachers or schools are accused of failing to teach students to write decent English, and again and again investigations show that students have been taught about punctuation, the function of a paragraph, parts of speech, selection of “vivid” words, spelling—that students have done everything but the writing of many complete papers. Again and again college freshmen report that never in either high school or grammar school have they been asked to select a topic for writing, and write their own ideas about that subject. Some have been given topics for writing; others have been asked to summarize what someone else has said; numbers have been given work on revising sentences, filling in blanks, punctuating sentences, and analyzing what others have written….Knowing facts about language does not necessarily result in ability to use it. (p. 417)

LaBrant, L. (1953, Nov). Writing is learned by writing. Elementary English, 30(7), 417-420. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41384113

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The irony here is that for decades, notably in the context of literacy, too many advocates overemphasize discrete skills instruction (often called “direct instruction”) and too many practitioners since the 1980s have misunderstood “workshop” to the exclusion of addressing students’ need to develop skills.

The education debates, then, suffer from oversimplification (caricature) that leads to the same crisis/reform cycles we have experienced repeatedly since LaBrant took aim at the Project Method.

As a first-year writing professor, I can attest that LaBrant’s concerns from 70 years ago ring true today; most students have written way too little and have received almost no direct writing instruction about writing by choice and authentically.

Still.

The problems and the causes are complicated.

The solutions are complicated as well.

But we remain trapped in the simplistic—caricature, faddism, and “my instruction can beat up your instruction.”

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