[Header Photo by Diggity Marketing on Unsplash]

My partner and I were discussing this YouTube video by Nick Lewis, who explains in the beginning how social media influencers make profits (watch the first few minutes, by the way, for his explanation):

The key point here is that social media influencers need consumers to always be interested and buying the next thing, the new thing.

Influencers are not incentivized to find for their audiences The Thing, something that lasts, something that solves a problem, because the value is in churn—consumer buying the thing and then almost immediately positioned to want to replace that thing with the new thing.

That dynamic is exactly what is working in the perpetual reading war where influencers (journalists, education reformers, politicians) are incentivized to keep the public in a constant state of crisis/reform.

Those crisis influencers must first create market space (“Reading programs X and Y have failed!”) and then promote the New Reading Program—and then in just a few years, that reading program will be declared a failure so if we will only adopt this Next New Reading Program …

Reading reform influencers are like social media influencers as well in that they lack expertise in the issue; their only expertise is the influencing and the creation of constant churn.

The “science of” movements in education are just that—influencers creating market churn—and not in most ways about addressing real educational problems and certainly not about solving them.

If education and reading were satisfactorily improved, what would they do?

We need to deinfluence reading (and education) reform if we are genuinely concerned about improving student achievement.