Monthly Archives: April 2025

Education, education reform, Educational Research, NAEP, reading, Science of Reading

The Zombie Politics of Misinformation about Students Reading at Grade Level

[Header Photo by Daniel Lloyd Blunk-Fernández on Unsplash]

Yesterday, we had our last class session in my upper-level writing and research course that is grounded in students analyzing and evaluating how media covers a chosen education topic.

In that last class, we debriefed about what students concluded about media coverage of education. While some found the coverage valid and informative, much of the discussion focused on why media perpetuates misinformation more often than not—notably about student reading proficiency in the US.

Right on cue, then, I saw this posted on social media, Teaching reading is rocket science, with these two recurring claims that are, in fact, misleading at best and false at worst (see “Recommended” links below):

Eli’s story, and the stories of all my students, are not the exception. They represent the shared reality for two-thirds of our children, here in California and across the country since the 1990s. My students are not at risk because they cannot yet read — they are at risk because not knowing how to read limits their access to opportunities, both academically and beyond.

Research shows when we teach students to read by directly guiding them to break the code of how sounds in letters work, about 95% of them can become strong readers — including multilingual learners and those with dyslexia. So why have only one-third of our fourth graders been reading at grade level for the past three decades? This gap persists because students haven’t had access to evidence-based literacy instruction drawn from decades of vast interdisciplinary research in areas such as cognitive psychology, linguistics, communication sciences and education.

The “2/3 of students are not reading a grade level” claim is one of the most powerful recurring claims in the media. Note these high-profile examples:

Emily Hanford in APM Reports:

The stakes were high. Research shows that children who don’t learn to read by the end of third grade are likely to remain poor readers for the rest of their lives, and they’re likely to fall behind in other academic areas, too. People who struggle with reading are more likely to drop out of high school, to end up in the criminal justice system, and to live in poverty. But as a nation, we’ve come to accept a high percentage of kids not reading well. More than 60 percent of American fourth-graders are not proficient readers, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and it’s been that way since testing began in the 1990s.

Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times:

One of the most bearish statistics for the future of the United States is this: Two-thirds of fourth graders in the United States are not proficient in reading.

And even a college-based literacy professor in The Conversation:

Five years after the pandemic forced children into remote instruction, two-thirds of U.S. fourth graders still cannot read at grade level. Reading scores lag 2 percentage points below 2022 levels and 4 percentage points below 2019 levels.

Despite ample evidence to the contrary and repeated clarifications from many educators and scholars (See “Big Lie” link in “Recommended” below), media characterizations of student reading proficiency continues to be misrepresented, primarily by misunderstanding NAEP achievement levels, because the public has always believed that “kids today can’t read”—despite there being little evidence of a reading “crisis” over the recurring claims of “crisis” reaching back into at least the 1940s.

Two points are important to clarify:

  1. NAEP achievement levels are confusing because “basic” is approximately what most states consider “proficient” and by implication “grade level.” NAEP “proficient” is well above grade level, set at an “aspirational” [1] level that is misleading and creates a perpetual appearance of failure for students, teachers, and schools.
  2. Most states—notably Mississippi and Louisiana—set their “proficient” level just above the mid-point of NAEP “basic” (MS) or just below (LA):
Mapping State Proficiency Standards Onto NAEP Scales, 2007–22

In short, if we consider NAEP and state assessments of reading valid, about 1/3 of students have over the last couple of decades performed below “basic” (NAEP) and thus seem to be below grade level in grade 4.

NAEP Grade 4 Reading National Trends

While the NAEP misinformation and misunderstanding is grounded in the “aspirational” use of “proficient,” the “95% of students can be on grade level” claim is just wildly overstated, and ironically, not based on scientific evidence (despite this being a refrain by the “science of” movement).

I recommend reading Can 95% of Children Learn to Read? to see some of how this claim gained its zombie status.

Historically and currently, many in the US have been and are concerned about student reading acquisition; this, of course, is a valid concern, notably that marginalized and vulnerable populations of students are disproportionately struggling to meet whatever standard we set for “proficient” or “grade level” (see HERE that explores how MS has not closed the race or socioeconomic achievement gaps, for example).

There is an insidious zombie politics to claims about 2/3 of students not reading at grade level, but that if we just did the right thing, 95% of students would read at grade level.

Since neither claim is empirically true, we must confront that basing education claims and reform on misunderstanding and misinformation have not yet worked and are unlikely to work moving forward.

Note

[1] Rosenberg, B. (2004, May). What’s proficient? The No Child Left Behind Act and the many meanings of proficiency. Washington, DC: American Federation of Teachers. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED497886.pdf

Recommended

“Science of Reading” Playing Numbers Games Not Supported by Science

Big Lies of Education: Reading Proficiency and NAEP

Academic Freedom, furman university

The Lines Furman Must Not Cross

[Header Photo by Chloë Forbes-Kindlen on Unsplash]

You can read the resolution here

April 23, 2025

We, the faculty of Furman University, in our role as stewards of this institution, reaffirm Furman’s mission to support “rigorous inquiry, transformative experiences, and deep reflection.” This mission calls us to preserve a community where freedom of thought and expression is actively defended, even when doing so is costly.

We are gravely concerned that our mission is in danger. Growing political pressures seek to curtail international education, narrow institutional autonomy, restrict academic freedom, and suppress open discourse. These pressures—whether through legislation, policy threats, or public intimidation—undermine the core values of the liberal arts and the very foundation of higher education. The coercive tactics used to enforce such restrictions jeopardize not only our institutional mission but also the well-being of individuals who contribute to it—students, employees, and the communities we serve.

We are troubled to see other institutions respond to these pressures by compromising their values, narrowing the boundaries of inquiry, and chilling protected speech. Furman must not follow this path. Our Statement on Free Expression and Inquiry is based on the “foundational belief that diverse views and perspectives deserve to be articulated and heard, free from interference.”

Furman’s leadership must continue to support policies that safeguard expression, uphold human dignity, and foster inclusive dialogue. As faculty, we pledge to defend these commitments, and to hold ourselves and our institution accountable to them—especially in moments of crisis.

To that end, we assert that we will not betray the following principles: 

Academic Freedom is Nonpartisan and Nonnegotiable

We will not permit external pressures to determine what or how we teach, whom we hire, or the direction of our research. Furman’s academic mission exists not to serve ideology, but to pursue truth through open, critical, and disciplined inquiry.

Free Inquiry is Foundational to a Learning Community

In accordance with Furman’s Statement on Free Inquiry, we commit to defending the right of all members of the Furman community to express differing—even controversial—views without fear. Offense is not a sufficient justification for censorship.

Dignity, Respect, and Inclusion Enhance—Not Inhibit—Freedom of Thought

We affirm the worth of every individual and the necessity of diverse voices in the search for understanding. We reject any effort to pit freedom of expression against the dignity of persons; both are essential to a thriving community.

Solidarity with Vulnerable Members of Our Community

We will advocate for and protect students, faculty, and staff who may be targeted due to their political beliefs, immigration status, or identity. Furman must remain a place of open and active inquiry—not surveillance or exclusion. Faculty will use our academic freedom and resources to push for legal protection and other support for any of our campus community who requests it in the face of bullying and intimidation.

We affirm our responsibility not only to preserve Furman’s mission in the present, but to also ensure that in years to come, we can look back with pride—knowing that we upheld the values that make this university a place of real learning, meaningful dialogue, and thriving community.

—With appreciation to the model provided by “The Lines We Must Not Cross” of the Emory Faculty Council, 4/15/2025

Education

Wherefore Art Thou, Jesus?

[Header Photo by Stephanie Klepacki on Unsplash]

With Easter just behind us, mainstream Christians in the US have experienced a high period of religious holidays and celebrations starting around Thanksgiving and then intensely punctuated with Christmas and Easter.

As an atheist/agnostic who seeks to live a good life as a humanist, I witness during these celebrations that much of what passes as religious is mostly pagan rituals and free market capitalism.

The irony, of course, is that these contradiction do, in fact, represent well what mainstream Christianity is in practice and reality for most people in the US.

To further that irony, the claim by the most fervent Christians in the country that the US is a Christian nation is perfectly reflected in the Bacchanalian orgy of branding and spending in the name of Jesus born, crucified, and risen as the stories go.

I was born, raised, and have always lived in the Bible Belt, specifically in the Upstate of South Carolina where many people are Southern Baptist or some other type of fundamentalist Christian.

Something in my DNA, I think, made me not just immune but resistant to authoritarian environments—in my home and family, in schooling, and most significantly in church and religion.

I don’t care much for commandments and blind faith.

My relationship with religion evolved into the sort of embarrassing sardonic nonchalance of adolescence that spilled over into being downright mean during my first two years of college.

In high school, it was a joke. I was elected president of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes as a ploy by some of my friends to have me on student council (they knew I would speak up because I was already viewed as anti-authority).

I think I was the lone person in my peer group openly admitting non-belief, and I had also exposed myself among those friends as a heavy beer drinker—something I had honed growing up on a golf course and playing golf.

That experience working at the golf course is one the most formative moments of my life. The golfers, you see, were adults I knew from my hometown, all very Christian men and most holding jobs that were well regarded with a few much wealthier than I could imagine anyone being (my own family was solidly working class, aspiring to middle class).

The golf course, however, served as an alternate universe of sorts, a perverse sanctuary where these Christian men used profanity, drank heavily, smoked marijuana, and hurled racist and sexist language at a nearly compulsive rate.

And several of these men as well used the golf course for their adultery sanctuary; a few had me monitoring their phone calls as I was tasked to distinguish between calls from their wives and their girlfriends.

The message was clear: Being a Christian was almost entirely rhetorical so that everyone could pretend to embrace the norms of what people were supposed to believe and do (even as almost no one practiced what anyone preached).

I also had to sit quietly and patiently occasionally while good Christians witnessed to me, quoting from the Bible in order to justify their racism and sexism.

Black people descended from Cain mating with apes, I was assured, for example. Something they had learned in church.

By college, I was a nasty atheist to my peers, attending a Methodist college where many were naive, even sweet, true believers.

In those first two years of college, I immersed myself in Sartre, Camus , and Kierkegaard, but that intellectualism lacked the very things I found infuriating in the Christians I was determined to discredit—kindness, human dignity, and love.

Fortunately for me, I found literature and gradually settled into a relatively harmless state of agnosticism anchored to Kurt Vonnegut’s missives on humanism:

So I sit here post-Easter 2025 when the US has fully realized the very worst warnings I have anticipated about being a Christian nation since I was a teen in the 1970s.

Almost 70% of registered voters did not vote for a second Trump term as president, but his base is mostly driven by Christians, specifically fundamentalist Christians.

And his hellscape of policy since January has been punctuated with Christian intent.

This Christianity reminds me of a larger-scale version of the golf course experiences I had—lots of hypocrisy, almost entirely rhetorical without a single ounce of Christian love or respect for human decency.

This Christianity is authoritarian and fueled by hate, fear, and judgment bereft of any logic, morals, or ethics.

US Christianity has proven that distinguishing between a cult and a religion is a distinction without a difference.

There has been an insidious long game reaching back to the Reagan era, the rise of the so-called Moral Majority, that has gradually eroded both Christianity and democracy in the US (watch Shiny Happy People to understand this).

Regardless of the historical accuracy of the stories about Jesus—and the validity of the mystical aspects of miracles and such—there simply is nothing in the cult of Trump that is remotely Jesus-like, just as his behavior as president lacks any hint of democracy.

But there is ample evidence that any optimism anyone has had for the human race is at least naive if not delusional.

I am confident that stories about crucifixion and resurrection are not literally true; I am also confident that Jesus’s simple messages of love each other, lay down your worldly possessions, and do unto others are the very least each human can do to live the good life for ourselves and for others.

Commandments otherwise are mere authoritarianism, ways for a few to control the many.

But a rabid minority in the US has rejected that Jesus nonsense and fully embraced hatred, fear, judgment, and punishment in the embodiment of one the most vile people existing in the US today.

Fools will choose fools to lead them.

And here we are.

Education, education reform, Educational Research, literacy, NAEP, politics, reading, Science of Reading

Webinar: The Manufactured Crisis: Exposing the False Narrative of Public Education’s “Failure” (A4PEP)

The Manufactured Crisis: Exposing the False Narrative of Public Education’s “Failure”

[Click HERE for recording]

Date & Time

Apr 16, 2025 08:30 PM EST

Description

Join us for a timely and vital conversation on April 16 at 6:30 p.m. ET with Dr. P.L. Thomas, Professor of Education at Furman University. For decades, media and policymakers have pushed a narrative that America’s public schools are “failing.” But who benefits from this story, and who is harmed by it? Dr. Thomas will expose how the education reform industry has fueled a false crisis, undermining trust in public schools while advancing corporate-driven reforms. Drawing on his experience as a teacher, scholar, and national award-winning writer, Dr. Thomas will offer critical insights into how we can challenge disinformation and reclaim a narrative rooted in equity, democracy, and community empowerment.

6:30 pm, April 16

[Click HERE for presentation]

Education, education reform, Educational Research, literacy, reading, Science of Reading

Recommended: Effective practices for literacy teaching

Effective practices for literacy teaching, Colin Harrison, Greg Brooks, P. David Pearson, Sari Sulkunen, Renata Valtin (2025)

In light of the PISA 2022 student results, which showed a decline in performance in basic reading skills across Europe, this report presents a detailed literature review of the most recent European and international research on effective approaches to literacy teaching. It highlights practices that have been properly evaluated and are supported by evidence of impact.

Targeted primarily at policymakers, but also relevant to teachers, parents, and all those contributing to children’s literacy development, the report analyses over 600 studies on effective teaching practices (both pedagogical and content-specific), support programmes, and policies that promote literacy for all children across the EU. It covers different levels of education and takes into account gender perspectives as well as the needs of vulnerable and special needs groups.

Based on the key findings, the authors discuss the teaching of comprehension beyond letters and words (e.g. drawing inferences, judging relevance and trustworthiness), the role of dispositional characteristics such as motivation, metacognition, and world knowledge, and the teaching of digital literacy skills, including critically evaluating online information. Building on these findings, they present 20 research-informed recommendations for policymaking.

Education

The Great Gatsby at 100: Failing Students and America

Teaching high school English has a Groundhog Day dynamic that people who have not taught may never consider.

Over my 18-year career as a teacher of high school English, I taught some works of literature more times than I’d like to admit. But let me also note that I often taught some works of literature several times a day and then year after year.

One of those works—that I in some ways loathe—is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, which turned 100 this week in 2025.

My well-worn teaching copy of The Great Gatsby used to teach high school English from 1984 until 2002.

Setting aside my own skepticism about the canon and requiring all students to read certain so-called “classics,” among the American literature works I was required to teach year after year after year—The Great Gatsby, The Scarlet Letter, The Crucible, and The Sun Also Rises at the core of those required lists—I must admit that Gatsby was often the most accessible for students (easy to read and the Robert Redford film was a great supplement to the unit).

I prefer Hemingway as a writer to Fitzgerald, but I prefer student choice and more diverse and contemporary works as well.

However, a century on and many students in the US still read and study Gatsby in high school along with a fairly conservative list of works from the slightly expanding canon of American literature.

My point here is not to crucify Gatsby or Fitzgerald or modernist literature (lots there that is worth interrogating), but to confront that how secondary (and college) teachers teach along with how students read and learn from Gatsby in traditional and reductive ways that cheat the novel, cheat students, and ultimately cheat the democratic purposes of public education in a (for now) free country.

“Gatsby Believed in the Green Light”

In a bit of ironic symbolism, if you want to see (literally) my concern about the cultural failure of Gatsby, click here: The Empire State Building is turning into a green light for The Great Gatsby’s centennial (See also It’s Gatsby’s World, We Just Live in It).

This act, of course, is a nod to the color imagery running through Gatsby, culminating in the penultimate paragraph of the novel:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther … And one fine morning—

This reductive and figurative language approach to what this novel shows the reader is about more than the often mechanical way students are required and taught to analyze text (more on that next); while teachers, students, and then the public often “get” that Gatsby is about the American Dream, too often that becomes completely disconnected from the novel itself.

Partly, that happens because that next-to-the-last paragraph can become a sort of idealistic doubling-down on the American Dream that Fitzgerald pretty clearly dismantles over fewer than 200 pages.

When I taught Gatsby, in fact, I required students to read John Gardner’s bi-centennial essay, “Amber (Get) Waves (Your) of (Plastic) Grain (Uncle Sam),” where he makes a distinction that is often missed when studying Gatsby:

That idea—humankind’s inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—coupled with a system for protecting human rights—was and is the quintessential American Dream. The rest is greed and pompous foolishness—at worst, a cruel and sentimental myth, at best, cheap streamers in the rain. (p. 96)

Taking Gardner’s figurative language, then, Gatsby’s American Dream (a sort of singular obsession with wealth and Daisy) is just “cheap streamers in the rain,” what has for the most part replaced the essential American Dream—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Fitzgerald’s own life being sold to the capitalism of Jazz Age America, both in his relentless production of short stories for income and his alcoholism and partying, sits behind the fictional dramatization of what America had become, what America kept becoming, and how America now has nearly fully erased “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for “filthy lucre” (as D.H. Lawrence warned just a year after Gatsby was published).

Two dynamics are at play here, I think.

The first is most students like Gatsby because it is short and easy to read (notably more so than reading Edgar Allan Poe or Nathaniel Hawthorne, for example); students also enjoy the melodramatic plot of the novel centered on partying, violence, and adultery.

The second is my larger concern—how we traditionally teach literature in high school through a narrow and distorted New Criticism lens.

Not to wander to deep into the weeds of literary criticism and classroom pedagogy, but most of us can recognize how often high school English classes become “guess what the English teacher wants you to say about this text”—and that guess often includes some literary technique, what I call the “literary technique hunt.”

For high school teachers and students, then, Gatsby become likes most texts being studied—a vehicle for identifying techniques.

Students begin what amounts to an Easter egg hunt; there’s lots of green and yellow (gold) throughout the novel (hint: money), and the job students have is to find the color and identify the symbolism. (It’s how we ruin poetry, for example.)

About mid-way through the novel, Daisy encounters Gatsby’s “‘beautiful shirts'” (her own Easter egg hunt), and readers encounter the green light:

“If it wasn’t for the mist we could see your home across the bay,” said Gatsby. “You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock.”…

Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.

I want to emphasize here, I am not blaming high school English teachers necessarily because the “literary technique hunt” is a consequence of how formal public education has been reduced to testing (easier to test students finding and identifying literary terms than having them do complex analysis of texts) and teachers and schools are expected to be non-political.

The reductive New Criticism of high school English classes seems objective, then, and offers what appears to be a fixed way to assess students.

It is frustrating, however, that Gatsby is reduced to color imagery and symbolism while most of the racism and bigotry are skirted over or ignored entirely.

“They Were Careless People, Tom and Daisy”

Not that I want to “save” Gatsby on its centennial anniversary, but I am particularly invested in literature and how we teach it (and how we often ruin it for students)—and I am also deeply committed to the role of literature/literacy in our democracy, which is currently in Hospice.

But if we could set aside our reductive New Criticism approaches, and then shift our focus away from Nick and Gatsby and toward Tom and Daisy, we could make Gatsby work for our students and for this country that we seem uninterested in saving.

In the last pages, Nick explicates Tom, and Daisy:

I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they made … .

Fitzgerald showed us 100 years ago that America was a wasteland, a product of “vast carelessness.”

Because of our idealism, “our rigid refusal to look at ourselves,” we have chosen to walk to the precipice of America no more.

We seem eager and even gleeful to have chosen “cheap streamers in the rain.”

This is not who we have become, this is who we always were.

Recommended

‘No one had the slightest idea what the book was about’: Why The Great Gatsby is the world’s most misunderstood novel

Gatsby’s Secret

#BlackLivesMatter, James Baldwin, Margaret Atwood, race, racism, Whiteness

What Every White Person in the US Knows: 2025

[Header Photo by Walid Hamadeh on Unsplash]

Here are two texts that may not immediately appear to be saying something similar about the state of the US in 2025.

Let’s start with On Language, Race and the Black Writer by James Baldwin (Los Angeles Times, 1979):

Every white person in this country—and I do not care what he or she says—knows one thing. They may not know, as they put it, “what I want,” but they know they would not like to be black here. If they know that, then they know everything they need to know, and whatever else they say is a lie.

And then, just a few years later, there is Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, specifically the closing “Historical Notes” where readers learn about the context behind how Gilead comes about.

At a satirical symposium in Gileadean studies dated June 25, 2195, the keynote, Professor James Darcy Pieixoto, explains that context:

Men highly placed in the regime [of Gilead] were thus able to pick and choose among women who had demonstrated their reproductive fitness by having produced one or more healthy children, a desirable characteristic in an age of plummeting Caucasian birthrates, a phenomenon observable not only in Gilead but in most northern Caucasian societies of the time.

The reasons for the decline are not altogether clear to us. Some of the failure to reproduce can undoubtedly be traced to the widespread availability of birth control of various kinds, including abortion, in the immediate pre-Gilead period. Some infertility, then, was willed, which may account for the differing statistics among Caucasians and non-Caucasians.

…But whatever the causes, the effects were noticeable, and the Gilead regime was not the other one to react to them at the time. Rumania, for instance, had anticipated Gilead in the eighties by banning all forms of birth control, imposing compulsory pregnancy tests on the female population, and linking promotion and wage increases to fertility.

What are these texts from over four decades ago telling us about the current political and cultural state of the US during the era of Trump/MAGA?

White Americans, notably the white political and cultural leaders, are openly concerned about the low birthrate among white people. And thus, restricting and banning abortion have swept much of the country after the overturning of Roe v. Wade. [1]

Not that long ago, mainstream thinkers believed Roe v. Wade and abortion rights were safe in the US; people raising concerns were considered alarmists.

Now, as Republicans and conservatives seem to be coming after birth control next, we cannot hesitate as we did before the dismantling of women’s rights came as we should have known it would.

In the passage from the “Historical Notes,” we have a key point about the birthrates of white people falling against the rise of birthrates about other races.

And thus, the connection to Baldwin’s confronting “every white person in this country—and I do not care what he or she says—knows one thing. … [T]hey would not like to be [B]lack here.”

Not to speak for or over Baldwin, but to help us tease out this connection in 2025, white fear in the US is fear not singularly grounded in race but ultimately fueled by the fear of becoming a minority.

We must next consider fully Baldwin’s recognition that for white people, Black people and the consequences of their minority status in the US are a mirror for who white people are—more so than any commentary on Black people themselves.

For all the histrionics denying white privilege, white people know one thing—that white people as the majority, that white people with the balance of power, used that majority status and power to the detriment of any and all minorities.

If and when white people become the minority, they fear that they will then suffer the same consequences of minority status that white people have imposed on other races in the US.

White people cannot fathom a world in which majority and minority statuses do not result in some winning because others are losing.

The Great Whitewashing is upon us—one foreseen by Baldwin and Atwood.

One that is coming to fruition before our eyes.

What every white person knows may destroy everything for everyone.

What each white person does now will tell everyone everything we need to know.

[1] See Things Fall Apart for Women (Again): Leni Zumas’s Red Clocks

Eugene V. Debs, Kurt Vonnegut

“May Auspiciousness Be Seen Everywhere”

[Header Photo by Ditto Bowo on Unsplash]

Through my journey with clinical anxiety, I have come to realize that anxiety is not a monolithic thing for all of us even as our own personal anxiety may be of a specific kind.

None the less, I think it is fair to say that anxiety comes from a disconnect between our inner selves and the the world around us, especially when that disconnect seems oppressive, judgmental, and inescapable.

Sometimes anxiety is the result of recognizing who we truly are is unlike how we are expected to be or how we perceive most other people to be. Other times, anxiety is the result of becoming (too) aware of impending doom—both the possibility of something real that is foreboding but (too) often a manufactured doom that isn’t realistic or rational.

For what most or many people simply consider living or the human condition, we anxious are fully charged with an awareness, an expectation of impending doom.

I suspect that all humans long for a sort of life that allows us to be fully who we are, and thus, I have always been drawn to a simple but now fully dismantled American ideal, guaranteeing all humans life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

What a beautiful thing, filled with a sort of relief that allows our full humanity—the pursuit of happiness.

My existential self finds this wonderful because I believe the pursuit of happiness is itself happiness, like Sisyphus and his rock, “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a [hu]man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

There is a sort of paradox to this pursuit of individual happiness, however, a paradox that is expressed by Eugene V, Debs:

Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

And then, in this fiction of Kurt Vonnegut, whose life and work were inspired by Debs:

There is another paradox.

Writers and thinkers were the first experiences I had with recognizing other people who thought like me existed, unlocking a sort of awareness that I was mostly unlike the people and place of my birth and young life.

One of those first authors for me was J.D. Salinger and the small novel-in-two-parts Franny and Zooey.

Salinger appeared to be himself on a sort of personal journey to awareness, one that was grounded in something like a Christian mysticism. Eventually the bulk of Salinger’s work was grounded in the Glass family with a Christ-figure, Seymour, who commits suicide but remains the moral core for his siblings.

That is where Franny and Zooey sits, one of Seymour’s brothers, Zooey, and his sister, Franny, continuing their own spiritual quests—”a sort of prose home movie.”

While Salinger’s fiction laid the groundwork for me as a reader and writer, he also taught me a much harder and uglier lesson. Salinger himself, Salinger the real-world man, proved to be not only incapable of fulfilling the idealized spiritual goals he wrote about through Seymour, but also incapable of being a decent human being.

And despite his failures as a person and the now insensitive choices he made for Seymour as the speaker of Jesus-like parables, the end of Franny and Zooey fits into the continuum the reached my embracing Debs and Vonnegut (above) and then, below, David Lynch.

Seymour mentored his siblings while all the children were performers on a radio show; Seymour implored them all the be their best for the “Fat Lady,” his metaphor for the least among us, an uncomfortable but sincere effort at teaching these children Christian charity and love.

As Franny is crumbling mentally, Zooey explains: “But I’ll tell you a terrible secret—Are you listening to me? There isn’t anyone out there who isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady.”

And then Zooey continues: “Don’t you know the goddam secret yet? And don’t you know—listen to me now—don’t you know who that Fat Lady really is? … Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It’s Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy.”

Not a paradox at all, but Salinger’s humanistic and even practical rendition of Christianity makes perfect sense as I found and settled into Vonnegut’s persistent efforts to spread the message of Christian kindness through his own humanism and atheism:

On a smaller scale than Salinger, I had to realize that Vonnegut, too, struggled to be the human he asked all of us to be—although on balance, I think Vonnegut was just flawed in the ways most of us are because we are human.

What causes me greater sadness and, yes, anxiety, is that in our current world, the dominant Christians in the US are collectively as horrible as Salinger was on the individual level.

We are a people bereft of kindness, Christian charity, Christian love.

We are a people aggressively imposing hatred and fear onto others.

I have always been a skeptical person, but now I am slipping—as many do as they grow older—into perpetual cynicism.

I want to believe that it is possible to live the life we want, to be our full and true selves—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—while dedicating ourselves to insuring that everyone has that freedom as well.

Our happiness and the happiness of others are not in tension, in competition.

Our happiness and the happiness of others are dependent on each other.

The weight of my cynicism is harder and harder to carry into my mid-60s.

But there is one person who seems to have found something, found some way to live the ideals that I also embrace and believe with my entire self would make our lives collectively happier, erasing our anxieties.

David Lynch, who wrote in his memoir:

Room to Dream, David Lynch and Kristine McKenna

This seems obvious. It seems simple.

Maybe that’s the problem.

Maybe these ideals are beyond the capabilities of human beings.

Now we are back to Vonnegut who played around with the essential flaw in humans—”the only true villain in my story: the oversized human brain.”

It is harder and harder each day, but I keep trying to have hope, hoping Maggie Smith is right: “This place could be beautiful,/right? You could make this place beautiful.”

Education, education reform, Educational Research, sexism

Education: How the Market and Fads Poison a Robust Field

[Header Photo by Thomas Kolnowski on Unsplash]

My high school English teacher and eventual mentor, Lynn Harrill, told me in my junior year that I should be a teacher.

I laughed, and certainly as teens are apt to do, hurt his feelings.

Almost fifty years later, and I have been a career educator since 1984.

I realized I wanted to be a teacher and a writer during my junior college years—the former because I had a job as a tutor and the latter because my speech teacher, Steven Brannon, introduced my to e.e. cummings.

I declared my secondary English education major when I transferred the fall of my junior year. And then, almost immediately, I learned a harsh lesson about becoming an education major: It was a “lesser” degree.

I took as many English courses as I could as an undergrad, and in ever class, I had to out myself as an education major, not an English major (almost most of my close friends were English majors).

Over the next five decades, I have had to navigate that “lesser” status when I tried to enter an MFA program while teaching high school full-time (nope), tried to apply for a PhD in English while teaching high school full time (nope), and then completed an EdD (yet another “lesser” degree to go with with my BA in English Education and MEd).

And since 2002, I have had to correct people who assume I am in the English department; nope, I am in Education.

In the good ol’ U.S. of A., as well, the standard beliefs are that education is failing, teachers are people who can’t do (and were mostly weak students themselves), and the discipline of education is a joke.

Just as a recent example, see this on social media:

I have recently submitted a book chapter, in fact, on two “pernicious” fads in education—grit and growth mindset.

However, I believe the standard attacks on education, teachers, and then the discipline of education are gross oversimplifications that miss almost entirely the real problems (what Vainker is addressing above and what I am confronting in my chapter on grit and growth mindset).

There are layers to the problem.

First, education as a discipline is robust and valid. My own recognition of that, however, did not fully develop until my EdD program where I was engaged with the scholarship, philosophy, and theory of the field of education—and not distracted by issues of certification and bureaucracy.

Now, that means when people are attacking “education” and the “pernicious fads” they are in fact not criticizing the discipline.

Here are the layers of problems that dilute a valid field:

  • Certification and accreditation bureaucracy. Regretfully, education is a profession that feels compelled to mimic more respected fields like medicine and law, where credentials are required. However, that layer has more often than not been reductive for the discipline because of the inherent flaws with credentialing and bureaucracy.
  • The education market place. The current “science of reading” (SOR) movement is repeating what happened during the Common Core era—the education market place using branding (SOR, CC) to spur purchasing cycles in education. To be blunt, the single most powerful and corrupting aspect of education as a field is the market. Any credible or valid education research is necessarily reduced when it is packaged and sold; this is exactly what happened with multiple intelligences, learning styles, grit, growth mindset, etc., creating the perception that the research isn’t credible instead of acknowledging that the marketing is the problem (although in some cases, the market is perpetuating flawed research as well). In short, education reform is an industry, not a process for improving teaching and learning in the US.
  • Education celebrities. A parallel problem with education market forces is the education celebrity who corrupts the field of education by selling programs, fads, or themselves as “experts” (and sometimes, all of these at once). This is a problematic concern since many of us who work in education, of course, are paid as professionals. Simply being paid as a professional is not something to criticize in a capitalistic society, of course, but money can and does corrupt. One of the best (worst?) examples of how an education celebrity can distort significantly credible and valid research is Ruby Payne, who cashed in (literally) on NCLB mandates and funding. Payne peddled stereotypes about poverty and teaching children in poverty—even though a robust body of research on poverty refuted nearly everything she packaged, promoted, and sold. Part of the problem here is that education celebrities and the market can easily prey on education and educators because the US has been politically negligent in providing schools, teachers, and students the sort of conditions in which all children can learn.
  • Sexism. Here is a fact at the core of many problems in education: More than 7 out of 10 K-12 teachers and most teacher educators/scholars are women. I leave this as the last point for emphasis because I believe sexism is the foundation of why education remains disrespected as a field and why there is so little political and public support for teachers as professionals (note the current rush to support scripted curriculum as one example). The current focus on “science,” as well, is another sexist movement (repeating the same sort of claims during NCLB) since the quantitative/qualitative divide in what research matters is highly gendered (men do “hard” science, but women do “soft” science).

Bashing student achievement, school and teacher quality, and teaching as a profession as well as education as a field are all a sort of lazy and unexamined national past time in the US.

These sorts of attacks and criticisms are shrugged off as common knowledge and even jokes; again, I believe, primarily because we still see teaching as just something women do with children.

While there is some validity to criticizing educational research that is packaged and sold, this is not something unique to education as a field.

Consider as just one example the perversion of the 10,000 rule in psychology, and the power of Malcolm Gladwell as “celebrity” to do just that.

Psychology and economics, in fact, have experienced crises of replication that should tarnish those fields at least as much as how we marginalize education.

Yet, psychology and economics are seen as men’s professions, and thus, professions, and receive a huge pass when they simply do not deserve that.

We should stop bashing education as a field, but we should also be far more vigilant about protecting educational research and practice from the corrosive impact of bureaucracy, the market, celebrities, and sexism.