Ignoring Evidence in the “Science of” Era: Fidelity and Deficit Ideology Edition

[Header Photo by Isabela Kronemberger on Unsplash]

As a writer and a teacher of writing, I am well aware of the need to avoid cliches, but cliches often do, in fact, capture well something that is worth considering.

In this education reform “science of” era, reading reformers are suffering the negative consequences of missing the forest by hyper-focusing on a few trees.

The ugliest of ironies is that reading reform driven by the “science of reading” (SOR) story fails the evidence test, notably that SOR legislation is not based on science. A growing body of research has been detailing how SOR legislation and mandates are misguided and even harmful.

The cautionary tales being ignored [1] are also expanding, and possibly the most powerful evidence that the SOR movement is misguided is in the UK, where a similar reading reform movement was implemented in 2006.

Not surprising, but phonics-intensive reading reform in the UK has not achieved what was promised—and media as well as political leaders are still shouting “reading crisis.” [2]

At the core of education reform broadly and reading reform narrowly are several fatal flaws that mainstream reformers refuse to avoid: (1) manufactured crises, (2) one-size-fits-all solutions, and (3) policies and mandates that are hostile to teacher autonomy and individual student needs.

Digging deeper into the monolithic reading reform cycles over the past 40 years (and reaching back into 80 years of reading crisis rhetoric and fruitless reading wars), some of the most ignored evidence in reading crisis rhetoric and reading reform/policy concerns the failure to address how demanding teacher fidelity to policy and programs reinforces deficit ideology about language and marginalized students.

As I have noted, I was confronted with evidence about Units of Study (UoS) that has never been the focus of the outsized and misguided attacks on that program and Lucy Calkins. Teachers at a conference just weeks before the Covid shutdown explained to me that their problem with UoS was not the program itself but the excessive policing and accountability by administrators that teachers implement the program with fidelity.

Two problems exist with implementing programs with fidelity. First, that shifts the locus of authority away from the teacher and to the program itself. And thus, second, that shift institutionalizes a deficit ideology about language and students since programs tend to impose standardized versions of literacy as well as evaluate students in terms of how they fail to demonstrate standard literacy.

Fidelity to programs creates obstacles for honoring fidelity to student needs.

Few people challenge how efforts to standardized language is a way to standardize humans (and children). Formal schooling’s approach to language is almost exclusively standardizing—systematic phonics, Standard English grammar, and false concepts such as the “word gap” (see Recommended articles below).

What we in the US should not be ignoring is evidence from the UK of how policy manifests itself in the real-world classroom.

One example is a new article: Teachers Challenging Language Discrimination in England’s Schools: A Typology of Resistance by Ian Cushing and Dan Clayton.

Cushing and Clayton offer excellent data based on evidence drawn from the Critical Language Awareness group (CLAW). Here are some of the highlights of that evidence:

“[T]eachers work in contexts where they undoubtedly negotiate a dense array of top-down policy initiatives which may well not align with their language ideological beliefs.” Key here is that policy imposes beliefs about language, thus, there is no such thing as objective or apolitical policy.
And thus: “We understand language discrimination not simply as about individual attitudes which manifest in individual, malicious acts of prejudice, but as a structural phenomenon underpinned by language ideologies which stratify, rank, and hierarchically organise language varieties and the communities associated with them (Lippi-Green, 2012). Schools are particularly key sites of language ideological production and the co-construction of racial, class, and linguistic stratification.”
Language/reading policy legislates national ideology grounded in deficit ideology:

Attempting to justify these structural deficits, the state produced a stigmatising narrative of strivers and scroungers which framed working-class and racialised minorities as responsible for their own hardships, and thus responsible for their own welfare by modifying their individual behaviours, including language (Tyler, 2018).

Austerity, public cuts, and the 2011 nationwide uprisings that followed created an ideological space in which educational reform was deemed by the state to be urgent and necessary, and where the most marginalised members of society could begin to experience upward social mobility and educational success simply by changing their language (see Nijjar, 2018).

The dynamic in place in the UK is being replicated in the US:

These mechanisms include new national curricula, high-stakes standardised grammar tests for primary school students, high-stakes GCSE assessments for secondary school students, revised professional standards for teachers, and Ofsted, the schools inspectorate. These policy mechanisms place teachers into positions where they are encouraged (and rewarded) to perceive marginalised students’ language as deficient, to engage in hostile language policing, and to reproduce ideologies of linguistic correctness which bolster language discrimination. At the same time, post-2010 curriculum changes stripped away units and assessments concerned with spoken language study, leaving little room for teachers to engage in critical debates about language variation, attitudes, and ideologies. These changes coordinated with a resurgence of deficit discourses in policy, such as those clustered around the so-called word gap and an increased focus on technical grammar and vocabulary—at the expense of critical and social aspects of language.

Language/reading policy tends to erase how language ideologies are “intricately connected to race, class, and privilege.” In short, “language ideologies were a proxy for other forms of stigma,” and that stigma impacts both students and teachers, especially those from marginalized backgrounds and identities.
Reading policy ignores and even resists critical approaches to language that “challenge language discrimination.” Yet, Cushing and Clayton document “how students had ‘loved looking at how and why their language got policed’ and how the unit allowed students to see that ‘attitudes about their language were really just about their social class.'”
Literacy instruction not grounded in deficit ideology faces multiple obstacles, then: “internal obstacles (in the form of management) and external obstacles (in the form of Ofsted, national curricula, assessments, and examination boards).”
“What is important to stress here is that schools are under increasing pressure to demonstrate ideological fidelity to externally produced, state-produced education policy, themselves which are underpinned by academic scholarship subscribing to normative ideologies about language and discourses of deficit (Cushing, 2023c).”
Cushing and Clayton build to a typology for anti-language discrimination. Here, I want to emphasize a key component about what counts as evidence: “Teachers grounded their work in a broad research base, including recent developments within critical applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and the sociology of education. They questioned mainstream narratives of ‘the evidence base’ and drew on radical, critical scholarship.”

The article ends by noting that teachers alone cannot change this pattern, and I want to stress that is especially true in the US where teachers are often powerless and have been publicly discredited as not knowing how to teach reading.

However, the evidence is clear that “[l]anguage discrimination is a structural phenomenon” and that reading policy and reading programs are key elements in that structure.

Mandating fidelity to deficit beliefs about language and students is at the core of the SOR movement. Once again, we are missing the evidence by focusing on a few trees and ignoring the forest.

[1] Another Cautionary Tale of Education Reform: “Improving teaching quality to compensate for socio-economic disadvantages: A study of research dissemination across secondary schools in England”; Cautionary Tales of State Reading Legislation: UK; Cautionary Tales of State Reading Legislation: Tennessee; UK PISA 2022 Results Offer Cautionary Tale for US Reading Reform; Research, the Media, and the Market: A Cautionary Tale