[Header Photo by Joël de Vriend on Unsplash]
The fall of 2024 will mark year 41 for me as a literacy educator, scholar, and advocate.
About half of that career was spent in K-12 public education in rural Upstate South Carolina, where I was born and live. I have witnessed daily race, social class, and gender inequity at some of the most extreme levels in the US.
At the core of my work as an educator, as well, I have named, challenged, and advocated to correct all forms of inequity. That work has often been in very hostile environments in the South where the power structures deny these inequities exist and persist at calling for traditional values as code for maintaining the status quo.
Also throughout my career as an educator and scholar, I have developed a solid grounding in the history of education and the field of literacy. Having written an educational biography of Lou LaBrant and serving as Council Historian for the National Council of Teachers of English were foundational experiences for that commitment to the history of education.
Further, having begun as an educator in 1984, I have lived and worked my entire career in the high-stakes accountability era of education reform. At every point along the way, I have raised a hand in opposition to this reform paradigm because it is driven by media, the market, and politicians who are more committed to education reform as industry than to serving the needs of our students or honoring the professionalism of America’s teachers, who are more than 70% women.
The “science of reading” movement and the offspring “science of” reform agendas are nothing new, except they are incredibly harmful—notably for the very students some of the advocates use as shields against criticism.
Once again, “science,” “crisis,” and “miracle” are being weaponized to not only label and punish students but also de-professionalize teachers.
One of the most effective and dishonest tactics is the “crisis” claim about reading in the US.
First, this claim lacks a basic understanding of educational testing, and further, the claim is ahistorical.
At least since the 1940s in the US, two facts can be proven: (1) at no point has student reading achievement (“proficiency”) been declared adequate; there has been a perpetual cry of reading “crisis” in every decade by media and political leaders, and (2) throughout the history of US public education, there has been a pervasive so-called “achievement gap” (better referred to as an “opportunity gap”) with marginalized populations of students performing well below average or white and affluent students.
That means that current reading achievement however measured and current “achievement gaps” are not a crisis but a historical and current reality maintained by political negligence.
Since current “science of” advocates have a fetish for misrepresenting and citing NAEP, let’s look at how NAEP in fact proves my point.
Consider Mississippi, the darling of reading reform and media crowning as a “miracle:
At grades 4 and 8 in reading, Black students in MS were BELOW basic (approximately below grade level) at a rate of 51%, about the national rate for Black students.
Note that despite well over a decade of SOR reading reform, the achievement gap for Black students remains about the same as in 1998.
Education and reading reform is not addressing the inequity Black students suffer in MS or anywhere in the US. However, the SOR movement has been doubling down on labeling and punishing Black students through grade retention, which serves to inflate grade 4 scores but not better prepare students.
MS has consistently retained about 9000-12000 students (mostly Black students) since 2014; if SOR policy and instruction were actually working, these retention number should drop or even disappear (since SOR advocates claim to be able to have 95% students reach proficiency).
Weaponizing “science,” “crisis,” and “miracle” are veneers for denying what the actual science and evidence have shown for decades: far more than 60% of measurable student achievement is causally related to out-of-school factors.
And thus, my advocacy for my entire career has been for both social and education reform that focuses on equity and refuses to blame teachers and students for that inequity.
For the past forty-plus years, however, education reform has solely targeted blame on schools, teachers, and students.
Those racially minoritized students and students living in poverty have routinely been characterized by deficit ideology, and reform has sought to “fix” those students by inculcating grit or growth mindset—or simply imposing a systematic phonics regime on those students, treating them all as if they have reading “disorders.”
And if those students don’t perform, retain them (punish them) and label them. Yet, there is never any consequences for the reformers when none of their reform promises are fulfilled (see the charter fiasco in New Orleans).
Hyper-focusing on MS (and Florida) is not just a lie, but a distraction.
Again, let’s look at NAEP:
DODEA (Department of Defense) students are the most successful in reading in the US, but you see almost no media or political coverage of this fact.
Students in military families are often from impoverished backgrounds, yet Black students BELOW basic are at rates of 25% (grade 4) and 18% (grade 8), dramatically less than the national average and MS.
And here is what the media, the market, and politicians refuse to acknowledge: DODEA students have medical care, food security, housing security, and parents with work stability.
Also, DODEA teachers are paid above most public school teachers.
Unlike the false claims about MS, DODEA achievement shows that both in- and out-of-school reform must be addressed for the in-school achievement to rise in authentic ways.
I am tempted to say the real crisis is how media and political leaders mislead the public about education and education reform—as well as demonize students and teachers.
But that is also nothing new.
There is great profit in perpetual crisis so don’t hold your breath that anything will change any time soon.
Recommended
Grade Retention Harms Children, Corrupts Test Data, But Not a Miracle: Mississippi Edition [UPDATED]
Reading Reform We Refuse to Choose
When Exceptional Publicly Funded Schools Are Not a Miracle, and Why
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 