[Header Photo by thom masat on Unsplash]
Before the close reading below, let me offer several examples for context concerning how media have weaponized “science” resulting in misguided and even harmful reading legislation.
First, here is an example of a journalist posting an article by a journalist praising a journalist. What is missing? Actual research, evidence, or science.
Gottlieb’s article, oddly, repeats three times at the end that he is a journalist, but in the piece, he seems most concerned about advocating for Hanford:
As brilliantly illuminated by education journalist Emily Hanford’s articles over the past several years, and her 2023 “Sold a Story” podcast, the education establishment in this country — which includes textbook and curriculum publishers, schools of education and school districts — has been guilty of educational malpractice for decades, using now-discredited Whole Language methods for teaching reading.
Too little progress in teaching Colorado kids to read
See this for a critical unpacking of Hanford’s false claims repeated by Gottlieb: How Media Misinformation Became “Holy Text”: The Anatomy of the SOR Movement.
Gottlieb refers to a report and data, but offers no links to any science or research to support any of his claims, again primarily supported by Hanford’s “brilliant” podcast.
Next, Hanford’s There Is a Right Way to Teach Reading, and Mississippi Knows It demonstrates again the lack of science or research and the self-referential nature of media’s false claims about reading and the “science of reading.”
Note that the subhead, written by editors, not the journalist (“The state’s reliance on cognitive science explains why”) is directly contradicted by Hanford, although the article itself implies the opposite of what she acknowledges:
What’s up in Mississippi? There’s no way to know for sure what causes increases in test scores, but Mississippi has been doing something notable: making sure all of its teachers understand the science of reading.
There Is a Right Way to Teach Reading, and Mississippi Knows It
When Hanford makes huge claims about teachers being unprepared to teach reading (“But a lot of teachers don’t know this science“), the link provided circles back to her own journalism, not research, not science.
The consequences of this media cycle of using “science” to give stories credibility while omitting the actual science is reading policy grounded in misinformation, but also given the veneer of “science”:
Legislation that would require Michigan schools to use a reading curriculum and interventions for students with dyslexia that are backed by science has taken a different shape to satisfy school administrators who questioned the timeline in the bills.
Michigan eyes reforms to teach those with dyslexia. Critics say more is needed
And with the rise in reading legislation labeled as “scientific,” the education marketplace has eagerly jumped on board (“story,” “data,” “science”):
And thus, let’s do a close reading:
Gary Thomas (2023) Evidence, schmevidence: the abuse of the word “evidence” in policy discourse about education, Educational Review, 75:7, 1297-1312, DOI: https://tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00131911.2022.2028735
Thomas explains the essay purpose as follows:
I focus in this essay on the way that policymakers in education may promote policy through the use of words and terms used by academics and by the public about education topics – words and terms such as “evidence”, “what works”, “evidence-based policy” and “gold standard”. In particular, I examine ways in which vernacular and specialist meanings of “evidence” and “evidence-based” may become hybridised; ways in which technical terms may be appropriated by politicians and their advisers for public consumption, and, in the process, become degraded and corrupted in the service of their own policy agendas.
One issue with the use of “evidence” (and synonyms) is that policymakers are apt to resort to “’cherry-picking, obfuscation or manipulation.’”
Terms such as “evidence” (and “science”) are designed to create “the ‘almost magical power’ that certain words acquire to ‘… make people see and believe.'”
Thomas’s analysis found:
In not one of the 100 uses was “evidence” used prefatory to an actual itemisation of data in support of a proposition, and in all cases in the non-specific category, “evidence” was used with verbs – e.g. “there is evidence”, “England possesses evidence” – which simultaneously conferred authority via the supposed status of “evidence” at the same time as acting as a proxy for detailed enumeration of specific data. The authority of the non-specific “evidence” was amplified with many qualifications of the word, which, without detail of the data for which “evidence” was a proxy, appeared merely to add rhetorical weight rather than empirical support. These qualifiers included words/terms such as incriminating, overwhelming, strong, weak, little, hard, fresh, preliminary, sufficient, inadmissible, no, verifiable, hearsay, prima facie, disturbing, concrete.
As Thomas walks the reader through a few examples, he highlights: “’Evidence’ is here prefaced with ‘scientific’, seemingly to elevate its status in the absence of specificity – a strategy frequently employed in general discourse, as the analysis of the corpora revealed.”
“Evidence” (like “science” and “research”) is commonly used in place of citing actual evidence throughout media and political discourse. [As my examples above show, US media often link to other media when terms such as “science” and “research” are used.]
“Evidence” is weaponized, then, as Thomas explains:
All the examples given here reveal the fashioning of semiotics, the creation of meaning, and the dissemination of messages to non-specialist audiences in an outlet that, while widely read, offers no obvious route for scholarly interrogation or critique – at least, within a timeframe that might allow meaningful challenge. The putative “evidenced reality” proves on examination not to exist and the attempt is – in the world of retail politics – to craft an illusion of “evidence” in support of particular political agendas, employing devices such as the “negative other-representation” to attempt to augment the writer’s position.
And thus:
“Evidence”, in the pieces examined here, is used often with only a superficial allusion to any kind of research, and the research “evidence”, where any is cited, is often highly selectively sampled, with unconcealed deprecation of alternative interpretations.
Thomas then addresses the need for scholars to correct the misleading stories of media and political leaders instead of jumping on the bandwagon of reform for financial gain or prestige:
Academics must take a share of responsibility in the way that this process proceeds unimpeded. Such is the pressure inside universities for staff to be winning research grants and earning research income that there is inevitably willing involvement in con- tract research involving the kind of steering groups I have just mentioned.
Yet, Thomas ends by acknowledging that the weaponizing of “evidence” (and “science” along with other synonyms) immediately frames anyone challenging the stories negatively [1]:
In realising this, astute politicians can kill two birds with one stone. The knack is to enlist conspicuously with “science”, ostensibly adhering firmly to principles of reason and empiricism, while simultaneously projecting silliness, unreason and disengagement from research findings onto one’s interlocutor – as did Gibb in the phrase cited in illustrative case study 2: “The evidence is clear – however much it may shock the pre-conceived expectations of some education experts”, or as did Cummings in declaring that the “education world” handles scientific developments “badly”. Utter the phrase “the evidence is clear” and one straightaway affiliates oneself with reason, wisdom and unequivocal allegiance to empirical inquiry. One’s interlocutors, by contrast, are immediately forced onto the back foot, compelled to defend themselves against charges of not engaging with evidence – of subjectivity, sloppiness, credulity and narrow-mindedness borne of ideology.
Therefore, as Thomas concludes about “evidence,” here in the US we too must accept about “science” in media rhetoric and political policy”
On the basis of the analysis here, “evidence-based” is next to meaningless, given that the evidence in question is habitually unspecified and given that any evidence that is actually specified is carefully selected and/or offered as if it were superior to other evidence which suggests conclusions at variance to those being proffered. Protean and manoeuvrable, terms such as “evidence-based” are powerful rhetorically. They drop easily into conversation, speeches and documents to add weight to an assertion. Filling any gap, taking any shape, as instruments of retail politics they serve politicians’ purpose perfectly, but in any discourse with pretensions to scholarly independence and disinterestedness, their mutability ought to be troubling. Our responsibility as an academy is surely consistently to question these terms, to call for specification of evidence, to be ready to provide alternative evidence, to engage energetically with a broad range of media and social media (i.e. not just peer review and academic publications) and to question the validity of concepts such as “impact”.
[1] Compare this framing with how the Education Writers Association and Hanford frame the role of journalists and the expectation that implementing the “science of reading” may fail:
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 