[Header Photo by Natasha Hall on Unsplash]

US education reform is an industry.

Simply put, since Ground Zero under the Reagan administration, A Nation at Risk, the US has experienced a constant cycle of education crisis followed by the same template for education reform.

Despite some of the actors in this reform process having good intentions, education reform has been driven primarily by those reaping political and financial rewards from those perpetual reform cycles.

In fact, the political and financial incentives for reform are not improving education, but simply waiting a few years for the crisis/reform cycle to be re-initiated.

This is a capitalism.

Owning a new car, for example, is the lifeblood of the car industry—not producing a car that serves the owner well for decades.

This is consumerism, the dirty underbelly of capitalism.

There is no distinction, then, in the US between public institutions grounded in service and the free market.

For over forty years, the US has been trapped in the foundational Lie of A Nation at Risk, a partisan report that Reagan manufactured in order to break the public’s support for public education, and as Reagan’s own marching orders revealed, to shift that support to school choice and return prayer to the classroom (the latter being one of the ugliest political lies since voluntary prayer is allowed in public schools, while forced prayer is restricted).

Regardless of the reform of the moment—charter schools, teacher evaluation, school choice, accountability, reading legislation, standards and testing, etc.—the ideology and claims remain constant: students are failing, teachers are failing, and public schools are failing.

Also consistent is a paradoxical lack of credible evidence for the claims—either for the crisis or the solutions.

Decades of charter school advocacy have been devoid of carefully unpacking that outcomes for private, public, and charter schools are essentially the same, mostly grounded in the population of students being served.

Yet, charter school advocates decry traditional public school in crisis and charter schools are miracles.

The teacher evaluation movement grounded in value added methods of evaluation also produced a stunning outcome, showing that teacher quality’s impact on student achievement remains minor, only about 1-14% as measured in testing. Concurrently, research for decades have shown that out-of-school (OOS) factors remain the dominant causal influence on learning, 60% and higher.

There is enormous political and financial profit in shouting educational crisis and promising educational miracles, but that profit also depends on the rest of us not engaging with the lack of credible evidence for both.

The current mania to reform reading is yet another cycle grounded in a manufactured crisis (easily shown to be a false claim based on the data critics use) and equally manufactured and false miracles, such as Mississippi and Florida.

Perpetual reading reform may be the best (or worst) example of education reform as industry since reading is a foundational and incredibly important aspect of education for children; further, reading instruction in the US has been fatally linked to reading programs—commercial reading programs.

It would seem that eventually we could admit that no reading program (despite all of them being marketed as research-based) has led to a nation satisfied with reading proficiency in student.

It would seem that eventually we could admit that reading programs are neither the problem nor the solution for reading proficiency.

The only value in reading programs is political or financial; and both depend on constantly replacing old programs with new programs (again, this is the car industry).

Frankly, what remains absent in education reform narratives about crisis and miracles is confronting the conditions in which students and teachers live and learn/teach.

Low and so-called delayed reading proficiency remains mostly among students facing tremendous inequities in the lives and education.

High-poverty and minority-majority neighborhoods and schools present students and teachers with barriers to learning and teaching that are immune to simply adopting a new reading program, or demanding that those teachers be retrained (again).

Constant teacher retraining is also an industry.

If you can pause, step back, and genuinely examine this round of reading reform, many, if not most, of the strongest advocates for new reading programs and teacher training are profiting politically and/or financially.

Ironically, those advocates have spent a great deal of energy demonizing the reading programs they want to replace as sources of enormous profit.

As I have argued for decades, the problems are not programs or necessarily even instructional theories, but our failure to invest in social and educational systems that are equitable.

It is not that any reading program so far has failed because of the program itself; the failure is hyper-focusing on programs and instruction without regard to the systemic forces in society and schools that remain significant barriers to student and teacher success.

States are dumping huge amounts of tax payers’ money—$100 million a year is a recurring price tag—into doing the exact same reading reform committed to just a couple decades ago under NCLB.

In fact, reading programs that have been identified in research as failing are now being mandated in states across the US.

Even more frustrating is that early research on states having already committed to reading program shuffling reveals significant problems with that implementation—erasing text diversity and de-professionalizing teachers.

Yet, who benefits from another round of program shuffling?

Politicians grandstanding and commercial reading program companies.

When I explain to people that they likely would be better off not buying a new car with that concurrent loan and monthly payments or at least acknowledging that choosing between an Accord or Camry is no real choice at all, I generally get smirks or soft nods.

When I argue that education reform is an industry, I am personally attacked, often with lies and anger.

To me this suggests we have far more people invested in perpetual education reform in the US than even our precious fetish for new cars.

That’s a damn shame.

A goddamn shame.

The cost is our democracy, not just the lives and liberty of our children—although it is hard to imagine anything more important than that for a people claiming to be committed to freedom.

A people hiding behind flags and freedom in hope of cashing in.

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