Public discourse on education in the US has a long and tedious history of shouting either “crisis” or “miracle” while often basing both of those on misunderstanding or willing misrepresenting students, teacher, and public schools.
Politicians and the media, it seems, are fatally committed to crisis/miracle discourse—especially when the topic is student reading proficiency.
In the current Reading Crisis cycle that has it roots in 2018/2019 media narratives about failed reading instruction and repeated misunderstanding about NAEP reading data, the miracle-of-the-moment is Mississippi, often held up as a template for other states to follow.
As I have detailed, Mississippi reading reform is more mirage than miracle, and states should be skeptical about rushing to (again) adopt copy-cat legislation.
While the Mississippi “miracle” story continues to be sold, a new and insidious version of that story has emerged with an ugly undercurrent of the Trump/MAGA playbook—pitting Red v. Blue states at the expense of students.
The new combatants in the Reading War are Mississippi versus California (see HERE and HERE).
Several problems exist with comparing and then pitting MS against CA in terms of student achievement and teaching/schooling; however, let’s start with the big picture context of poverty and measurable student achievement.
As the US spirals toward disrupting SNAP and punishing people living in poverty, it is worth noting that the largest group in poverty is children, who lack economic or political power:
Related, then, in 2024, Maroun and Tienken replicated a research conclusion that has existed for decades, finding the following:
Almost 63% of the variance in test performance was explained by social capital family income variables that influence the development of background knowledge. Background knowledge is a known predictor of standardized test results. Family income variables are immutable by schools. Only public policies, outside the control of school personnel, can influence family income.
Further, they recommend:
Although some education policy makers in the United States claim that standardized test results are an important component of a comprehensive system of educational quality control, the results from decades of research on the topic suggest otherwise. The influence of family social capital variables manifests itself in standardized test results. Policy makers and education leaders should rethink the current reliance on standardized test results as the deciding factor to make decisions about student achievement, teacher quality, school effectiveness, and school leader quality. In effect, policies that use standardized test results to evaluate, reward, and sanction students and school personnel are doing nothing more than rewarding schools that serve advantaged students and punishing schools that serve disadvantaged students.
Thus, the fundamental problem with comparing MS and CA is the use of NAEP and other testing data to make broad claims and draw conclusions about educational success or failures.
Next, comparing MS and CA falls into the culture of poverty trap by treating poverty as monolithic.
While both MS and CA have significant populations of students in poverty, MS faces racialized and significantly rural poverty challenges while CA confronts a multilingual and racialized poverty challenge that is both urban and rural.
These are not the same, and frankly, since CA has nearly half of the student population as multilingual learners, reading proficiency is incredibly complicated to address in the context of racial inequity as well as poverty.
Even acknowledging those differences, most of the MS/CA comparisons are carelessly simplistic; consider the reading trends for both states based on NAEP grade 4, the most common basis for media discourse about reading:
Since 1998, both states saw growth with CA achieving a more steady improvement. However, there is no data-based evidence of a reading crisis for either state or across the US. [Note that MS has had two spikes in growth, one being well before the so-called MS model, again suggesting that ascribing “miracle” to the current model is misguided.]
MS and CA do demonstrate that educational success and failure are linked to many factors, notably the Covid-dip. That many factors impact student achievement—and that almost 2/3rds of those factors are beyond the walls of schools—discounts claims recently that the MS model, which includes a change in instruction and teacher training, is some sort of silver-bullet for success.
Research shows that only grade retention is causally linked to higher test scores, however.
Education reform, including reading reform, is highly political and even politicized in the US. Neither political leaders nor media are immune to knee-jerk declarations of crisis or miracles.
The reading achievement in neither MS nor CA makes a case for red/blue political theater—unless you have your agenda set regardless of the evidence.
Both MS and CA face tremendous hurdles when teaching literacy in the context of poverty, racism, and multilingual learners. Those hurdles are made more complicated by silly political games, especially when those games are designed to ignore the most important data about the impact of out-of-school factors on student achievement.
One valid comparison between MS and CA is that when the Washington Post falsely claimed CA had adopted the MS model, Martha Hernandez responded by highlighting the unique nature of CA’s needs:
Let’s be clear, AB 1454 is not about narrowing literacy instruction to one approach. Rather, it’s about realizing California’s long-standing, comprehensive vision for literacy that meets the needs of all students — including our state’s 1.1 million English learners.
The bill has been described in the media as California’s new “science of reading” bill, but this shorthand fails to accurately reflect the legislation’s comprehensive scope and intention.
MS, on the other hand, seems determined to lean into the politics of their model, a conservative politics that uses the red/blue tensions to further ideological agendas.
Our students deserve not only better social and educational reform but also not being used as a political football by adults who should know better.
This “Southern surge” narrative tends to center Mississippi but also includes Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana (the most recent “miracle” state based on an incomplete or misleading use of NAEP scores).
Like many media manufactured narratives, the “Southern surge” in reading falls apart when the data are carefully examined.
While I give the Chalkbeat article some credit for admitting that the so-called “surge” is not fully understood, Barnum—as Hanford did when christening Mississippi a “miracle” in 2019 (“What’s up in Mississippi? There’s no way to know for sure what causes increases in test scores”)—gives the “surge” narrative nearly complete credibility even with the headline hedge and a couple points made then glossed over (“Eighth grade results have been less impressive for these Southern exemplars, though”).
Here are the (likely fatal) flaws in the “surge” narrative:
Although Barnum cites an important and comprehensive analysis of reading reform, he fails to acknowledge its most important findings: States adopting reading reform (often popularly associated with Mississippi’s model even when states explicitly do not mimic those reform policies, such as California) has seen short-term test score gains in reading (note that score gains are not necessarily higher reading proficiency); however, while Barnum lists several reading policy components (“third grade retention, phonics-based curriculum, and statewide teacher training”), this study directly states that only retention is associated with higher scores (with the researchers noting their study did not identify why).
Barnum notes the drop by Southern states’ grade 8 reading scores, but fails to acknowledge that this data point may suggest that retention is inflating scores, not increasing reading proficiency. Notably states such as Florida and Mississippi have had these reform for over one to two decades without the “surge” appearing in grade 8 data.
The retention component also is troubling since these states continue to retain students as high rates. If the other policies were working, we should expect retention numbers to decrease significantly, but they have not.
Possibly the most damning ignored data from NAEP, however: Across all states, but including the so-called “surge” states, the race and poverty gaps remain persistent, typically the same as in 1998.
There are statistical realities also being ignored in the “surge” narrative.
Test scores for the lowest performing students are easier to improve that top-scoring students, for example.
But likely more significant is that early literacy test scores are strongly correlated with student biological age (England has almost twenty years of data on phonics checks that show this); therefore, when grade retention removes the lowest scoring students from the testing population (grade 3 retention laws impact grade 4 NAEP testing) and reintroduces them when they are biologically older, the possibility is that scores are being artificially inflated.
Reading “crisis/miracle” narratives and the phonics gambit should be dead horses; these unfounded claims have existed in the US well back into the 1940s, recurring decade after decade.
At best, “we don’t fully understand it yet,” and at worst, too many people profit off this zombie narrative, and children, teachers, and schools will continue to be sacrificed instead of putting these stories in the ground where they belong.
The “reading wars” that raged in American schools for decades finally seem to be ending. The victor is clear: Phonics is the best way to teach kids how to read.
California is the latest state to re-embrace the tried-and-true teaching method, in which kids learn the sounds that each letter makes and then use them as building blocks for words and sentences. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) on Thursday signed reforms into law that will encourage schools to turn away from other unsupported teaching methods, despite resistance from teacher unions….
Momentum for re-embracing phonics started in Mississippi, which long had a reputation for sitting at the bottom of national education rankings. In 2013, state officials decided to enforce adoption of the old-school instruction method that is often referred to as the “science of reading.” The state explicitly discouraged methods such as cueing and started aggressively holding back third-graders who didn’t meet reading standards, angering many parents.
There are a few problems, however.
First, and most damning, California did not just pass Science of Reading legislation modeled on Mississippi, as detailed by Martha Hernandez:
The bill has been described in the media as California’s new “science of reading” bill, but this shorthand fails to accurately reflect the legislation’s comprehensive scope and intention.
Let’s be clear, AB 1454 is not about narrowing literacy instruction to one approach. Rather, it’s about realizing California’s long-standing, comprehensive vision for literacy that meets the needs of all students — including our state’s 1.1 million English learners.
Phonics and foundational skills are essential for teaching students to read, and they always have been. But effective literacy instruction is not just about sounding out words. Children also need strong oral language, vocabulary, background knowledge, writing and comprehension skills to thrive as readers.
AB 1454 accounts for this reality. At its core, it aligns with California’s English Language Arts/English Language Development (ELA/ELD) Framework, adopted in 2014. This framework is nationally recognized for weaving together multiple strands of research — including phonics and decoding — alongside research on how children learn a second language, how their home language knowledge supports English learning, and how their cultures and life experiences shape how they use and understand language.
For a comprehensive overview of how California’s new reading legislation does not conform to the Mississippi model, please see this excellent overview by Jill Kerper Mora, Edgar Lampkin, Barbara Flores, and Anita Flemington: Pushing back against Science of Reading mandates: The California story.
Next, the Editorial Board perpetuates the whole language Urban Legend about failure in California, a state that saw literacy test scores drop after a decrease in funding and an influx of multilingual learners in the late 1980s into the 1990s (in fact, Linda Darling Hammond found a positive correlation between whole language and higher NAEP scores in the 1990s).
And finally, but not surprisingly, the Editorial Board falls for the Mississippi “miracle” narrative.
There currently is no research showing SOR instruction has succeeded in MS; in fact, research shows only grade retention is associated with some short-term test score increases. MS grade 8 scores remain in the bottom 25% of score in the US, the state continues to retain about 9000 K-3 students each year, and the race/poverty gap is the same as 1998.
I entered the classroom as a high school English teacher somewhat ominously in 1984, an academic year when Orwell’s classic was increasingly assigned but also when in South Carolina, where I taught, the high-stakes accountability era began with a vengeance.
From 1995 until 1998, I completed an EdD in Curriculum and Instruction while teaching full-time and even taking on some adjunct work at local colleges. Unlike most of those in my EdD cohort, I have no plans to leave K-12 teaching once I graduated from the program.
However in 2002, my former high school English teacher, Lynn Harrill (whose position I had taken where I was teaching English), left his position at Furman University, which was within driving distance for me. In a flurry of a few weeks, I was offered the job, and frankly, I had almost no idea what committing to teacher education would entail.
To be blunt, teacher education was incredibly frustrating and disappointing because much of my work was bureaucracy—nearly endless cycles of new standards and documenting that we were addressing those standards. Accreditation and certification rendered the quality of teaching pre-service teacher to teach a mere ghost of what we wanted to do, what we were capable of doing.
I have written before about how and why teacher education struggles both to foster new teachers and to challenge misleading and inaccurate (mostly by politicians, media, and pundits) attacks about the failures of teacher education, teachers, students, and public schools (see more HERE).
The piece below represents my uncomfortable position in teacher education because I believe in teacher education as a field and degree but am at least skeptical if not cynical about accreditation/certification.
It seems my time in teacher education has come to a close (my department is transitioning away from teacher certification toward education studies), and since the piece below failed to find a journal home, I am offering it here (and I also prefer open-access).
This is a complicated topic, but I hope this does a fair job because I do love teachers of all kinds and find the “bad teacher” myth one of the most misguided narratives in the US.
Teacher Education in (Another) Era of the “Bad Teacher” Myth
P.L. Thomas, Furman University
In 2018, a simplistic but compelling story was established: Teachers do not know how to teach children to read because teacher educators have failed to teach the “science of reading” (SOR) in teacher preparation programs (Aukerman, 2022a, 2022b, 2022c). These misleading narratives about teacher education, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data, and reading have gained momentum and now drive reading policy and legislation in practically every state in the US (Aydarova, 2023, 2024; Reinking, Hruby, & Risko, 2023).
There is an ironic truism—“a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”—most often incorrectly attributed to Mark Twain that describes the misguided SOR movement’s central claims wrapped in the initial mantra that SOR is both simple and settled. Here, though, are two more nuanced and evidenced-based counter-points to the SOR story being sold (Thomas, 2024b, 2024c, 2024d):
Reading instruction can and should be significantly reformed (in the context of addressing wider systemic inequities), but the SOR version of causes and solutions are false.
Teacher education can and should be significantly reformed, but the SOR version of causes and solutions are false.
I have been a strong advocate for education reform, beginning when I entered the field in 1984, and subsequently a strong advocate for teacher education reform, starting with entering higher education and teacher education in 2002. Writing about Maxine Greene over a decade ago, I noted about teacher education: “As teacher educators, we are trapped between the expectations of a traditional and mechanistic field and the contrasting expectations of best practice guided by critical pedagogy” (Thomas, 2010).
Further, critical pedagogy acknowledges that all teaching and learning are political acts (Kincheloe, 2005), which require teachers and teacher educator to reject the norms of teaching being apolitical. The current SOR movement and concurrent re-emergence of the “bad teacher” myth have created a hostile environment for teachers at all levels, and thus, the time is now for re-imagining being teacher educators as well as K-12 teachers who advocate for teacher professionalism and the individual needs of all students.
The Anti-Teacher (and Sexist) Roots of Rejecting Teacher Autonomy
Over the past few years, both traditional and social media have uncritically reanimated the “bad teacher” myth (Bessie, 2010; Thomas, 2023b) with the following stories:
Elementary teachers are failing to teach reading effectively to US students.
That failure is “because many deans and faculty in colleges of education either don’t know the science or dismiss it,” according to Hanford (2018).
Elementary, literature/ELA teachers, and history teachers are brainwashing students with CRT (Pollock & Rogers, 2022).
Elementary and literature/ELA teachers are grooming children to be gay or transgender by forcing them to read diverse books and stories.
Except for teachers themselves and some education scholars, these new “bad teacher” myths are both extremely compelling and almost entirely false. Writing more than a decade ago during a peak “bad teacher” movement in the US, Adam Bessie (2010) explains about the bad teacher stories represented then by Michelle Rhee and perpetuated by the Obama administration and Bill Gates:
The myth is now the truth.
The Bad Teacher myth, [Bill] Ayers admits, is appealing, which is why it’s spread so far and become so commonly accepted. Who can, after all, disagree that we “need to get the lazy, incompetent teachers out of the classroom?” Even Ayers agrees that he, like all of us, “nods stupidly” along with this notion. As a professor at a community college and former high school teacher, I nod stupidly as well: I don’t want my students held back, alienated, or abused by these Bad Teachers.
This myth is also seductive in its simplicity. It’s much easier to have a concrete villain to blame for problems school systems face. The fix seems easy, as well: all we need to do is fire the Bad Teachers, as controversial Washington, DC, school chancellor superstar Michelle Rhee has, and hire good ones, and students will learn. In this light, Gates’ effort to “fix” the bug-riddled public school operating system by focusing on teacher development makes perfect sense. The logic feels hard to argue with: who would argue against making teachers better? And if, as a teacher, you do dare to, you must be “anti-student,” a Bad Teacher who is resistant to “reforms,” who is resistant to improvements and, thus, must be out for himself, rather than the students.
Bessie (2010) concludes, “The only problem with the Bad Teacher myth, as anyone involved with education is intimately aware of, is that problems in education are anything but simple,” and ultimately, these myths are not supported by the evidence.
One challenge of doing public work and advocacy addressing education, education reform, and teachers/teaching is framing clear and accessible messages that avoid being simplistic and misleading. Since I have spent years of challenging the overly simplistic and misleading SOR movement (Thomas, 2022), I have attempted to carefully craft some direct and brief messages, including “not simple, not settled,” “teach readers, not reading” (Afflerbach, 2022), and my core commitments to teacher autonomy and the individual needs of all students.
One would think that these core commitments attract support even among those who disagree on other aspects of teaching and education policy. Yet, I face a persistent resistance to supporting teacher autonomy, grounded in a fundamental distrust of all teachers. Teacher autonomy is essential for teaching to be a profession (Kraft & Lyon, 2024), but autonomy is also essential because education is a high-accountability field. One of the historical and current mechanisms to reduce or eliminate teacher autonomy is the norm of teaching as apolitical, discouraging teachers at all levels from advocating for themselves or their students.
The problematic tension in education is that teachers are routinely held accountable for mandates (not their professional decisions and practices) and how well they comply with the mandates, repeated currently in the SOR movement. Since many education mandates are flawed (such as current SOR reading legislation) and for decades have failed, teachers are then blamed for that failure even though they didn’t impose the mandates and were simply the mechanisms for required practices.
Most education crisis rhetoric and education reform have been grounded for decades in anti-teacher sentiments. Currently, the reading crisis movement blames reading teachers for being ill-equipped to teach reading (failing children) and teacher educators for not preparing those teachers, for example (Aukerman, 2022a). One of the strongest elements of rejecting teacher autonomy, in fact, is among SOR advocates who promote structured literacy, often scripted curriculum (Compton-Lily, et al., 2020) that reduces teachers to technicians and perpetuates holding teachers accountable for fidelity to programs instead of supporting teacher expertise to address individual student needs.
Let me be clear that all professions with practitioner autonomy have a range of quality in that profession (yes, there are some weak and flawed teachers just as there are weak and flawed medical doctors). To reject teacher autonomy because a few teachers may not deserve it is a standard not applied in other fields. But the heightened resistance to teacher autonomy is likely grounded in gender bias.
K-12 teaching (especially elementary teaching) is disproportionately a woman’s career since about 8 in 10 public school teachers are women. And while teacher pay is low compared to other professions, the pay inequity is more pronounced in areas where the proportion of women is even higher at the elementary level (Will, 2022). As a frame of reference, a more respected and better rewarded teaching profession is in higher education where professor have professional autonomy, except the gender imbalance exposes a similar sexist pattern. While the gender balance is better in higher education than K-12, the pay and security of being a professor increases where men are a higher proportion of the field (Quinn, 2023).
Autonomy, pay, and respect track positively for men and negatively for women in teaching, and the resistance to autonomy for K-12 teachers strongly correlates with the field being primarily women. A key but ignored element of education reform must include better pay for all K-12 teachers and supporting teacher autonomy so that individual student needs can be met. The historical and current resistance to teacher autonomy exposes the lingering sexism in how we view, treat, and reward educators.
Therefore, at its core, the “bad teacher” myth and requiring teachers to remain apolitical, objective, or neutral serve indirectly to further de-professionalize teachers at both the K-12 level and in teacher education. This leads to the role of science in de-professionalizing teachers when examined as part of the SOR movement.
“Science of Reading” Playing Numbers Games Not Supported by Science
One of the most effective elements of the SOR movement that helps reinforce the “bad teacher” myth is the rhetorical power of “science” in the claims. It appears that the use of “science” has reinvigorated the push to impose scripted curriculum on schools, a central effort of George W. Bush while governor of Texas. While that wave of scripted curriculum failed, in the 2020s, many advocates and legislators have completely caved on teacher autonomy as state after state is mandating scripted reading programs based on stories in the media that misrepresent teacher expertise about reading, teacher educators, and a reading crisis.
At the core of the SOR movement, then, is the pernicious use of numbers games within the rhetoric of “science.” A foundational example is the misrepresentation of NAEP reading scores to declare that 60% or 2/3 of students are not proficient readers and/or not reading at grade level (Hanford, 2018; Kristof, 2023). This numbers shell game is based in the misleading use of “proficient” by NAEP as well as the combination of ignorance about those achievement levels and willful ignorance about those achievement levels (Loveless, 2016, 2023; Thomas, 2025). The NAEP numbers game is frustrating because the claim shuffles “not proficient” and “not on grade level” while literally inverting the valid claim based on NAEP. In fact, for 30 years, NAEP grade 4 reading data show that about 60%+ of students are reading at grade level and above since NAEP “basic” (not “proficient”) is equivalent to grade level reading (See NAEP National Achievement-Level Results, n.d.).
Further, and even more frustrating, is that this numbers game distracts us from the real issues: (1) The US has no standard for “grade level” reading, (2) we have never fully interrogated the need for a standard “age level” instead of “grade level” metric, and most importantly, (3) the real challenge (even failure) is the disproportionate number of marginalized and minoritized students in the below grade level data pool.
Along with the misleading NAEP story, as well, is a numbers game that hasn’t been fully unpacked—the claim that 90-95% students can be proficient if we simply implement SOR. As a side note, those SOR advocates making this shifting claim (sometimes it is 90%, sometimes it is 95% or 96%) have not, along with most of mainstream media, clarified how this claim is based in scientific research while also avoiding a compelling example of the possibility that the 90-95% proficiency is achievable: Department of Defense (DoDEA) schools have close to that rate of achievement (see below).
Now as the SOR movement has grown over the past 6 years, the 90-95% claim has been repeated more and more although that numbers game still has less traction than the 2/3 not proficient claim. However, when I began my review of a recent National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) report (Thomas, 2023a), I took the time to interrogate the 90% claim by the anti-teacher education think tank: “With effective reading instruction, we could take that [student reading proficiency] to more than 90%” (Teacher Prep Review, 2023, p. 4)
That claim by NCTQ has a footnote to a few studies, but the most interesting evidence is the final citation to a blog post by Nathaniel Hansford (2023) who admits at the beginning, “it has always stuck out to me as a strange figure” because:
First, most academic research does not typically use percentages in this sort of manner. Second, I often see this figure unaccompanied by a citation. And third, it seems low; I find it hard to believe that 5% of students just cannot learn how to read.
When Hansford (2023) asked for scientific evidence for the claim, this is what he discovered:
Some of the citations I was sent were policy papers, by authors and institutions that used this claim. However, these papers were not experimental and usually cited popular Science of Reading books, not experimental research. There was also, interestingly, one research paper sent to me from the 1980s, that made the claim, but did not cite any evidence to support it. So it appears that this claim has been in circulation for a long time. The most common source listed for this claim seemed to be Louisa Moats, who has written about this rule on numerous occasions. However, she does not claim that 95% of students can reach grade level, based on just core instruction, but rather in totality. Louisa Moats cites 4 sources in support for this rule. In Kilpatrick’s book Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties; a 2009 paper by Lim, et al. on students with Down Syndrome; a 2005 paper by Mathes, et al, examining the rate of risk reduction for struggling reading, with intensive intervention instruction, and a literature review of risk reduction, by Joseph Torgersen. In my opinion, the last two citations provide some experimental evidence to support this claim.
I have found no better conclusion about the 90-95% claim than the one offered by Hansford (2023); there is scarce and dated scientific evidence to support, at best, that the 90-95% claim is a valid aspirational goal of reading proficiency: “This all said, it does seem there is some level of support for 96% being a benchmark goal [emphasis added], for reading proficiency rates.”
Key here is that like the NAEP misrepresentation, the 90-95% claim is in no way a scientific claim being used by a movement that has used “scientific” as a rhetorical lever to promote their ideological (not scientific) agenda targeting K-12 teachers and teacher educators. The SOR numbers games are essentially distractions. Regretfully, we certainly need to address reading proficiency in students, especially for marginalized and minoritized students.
But the real problems and achievable solutions are likely not to make the education marketers money but will require a different way to view education, one that acknowledges the key number that education reformers and SOR advocates ignore. That number is 60+%.
A recent study confirms a statistic that has been repeated by scientific research for decades—about 60+% of measurable student achievement is causally linked to out-of-school (OOS) factors (not reading programs, not instructional practices, not teacher quality, not teacher education): “Almost 63% of the variance in test performance was explained by social capital family income variables that influence the development of background knowledge” (Maroun & Tienken, 2024).
That fact of measurable student achievement discredits claims that reading proficiency, for example, is mostly a problem of reading programs and reading instructional practices. Reading reform for decades has simply shuffled programs and reading theory, which amounts to rearranging chairs on the deck of the Titanic. Yet as I noted above, there is credible evidence that something approaching 90% reading proficiency is achievable; this evidence does not rely on the “bad teacher” myth but does require addressing those OOS factors. Notable, yet mostly ignored, the reading achievement of DoDEA students on NAEP in 2022 are impressive—79% at or above grade level in grade 4 and 91% at or above grade level in grade 8 (See State achievement-level results, n.d.).
The DoDEA story isn’t one of reading programs, reading theory, or teacher/teacher educator bashing; in fact, there is a compelling story here that demonstrates the importance of addressing living as well as teacher and learning conditions so that students and teachers can be successful:
How does the military do it? In large part by operating a school system that is insulated from many of the problems plaguing American education.
Defense Department schools are well-funded, socioeconomically and racially integrated, and have a centralized structure that is not subject to the whims of school boards or mayors….
But there are key differences.
For starters, families have access to housing and health care through the military, and at least one parent has a job.
“Having as many of those basic needs met does help set the scene for learning to occur ,” said Jessica Thorne, the principal at E.A. White Elementary, a school of about 350 students.
Her teachers are also well paid, supported by a Pentagon budget that allocates $3 billion to its schools each year, far more than comparably sized school districts. While much of the money goes toward the complicated logistics of operating schools internationally, the Defense Department estimates that it spends about $25,000 per student, on par with the highest-spending states like New York, and far more than states like Arizona, where spending per student is about $10,000 a year .
“I doubled my income,” said Heather Ryan, a White Elementary teacher . Starting her career in Florida, she said she made $31,900; after transferring to the military, she earned $65,000. With more years of experience, she now pulls in $88,000.
Competitive salaries — scaled to education and experience levels — help retain teachers at a time when many are leaving the profession. At White Elementary, teachers typically have 10 to 15 years of experience, Ms. Thorne said. (Mervosh, 2023)
The SOR movement is playing a harmful and duplicitous numbers game that fits into decades of ineffective and harmful education reform. But the SOR movement is also following the corrosive playbook of using “science” as a rhetorical veneer for ideological agendas. Like scientific racism, the SOR movement is disturbingly absent science for many of their foundational claims, and the collateral damage is not just students but teaching as a profession.
Numbers games have consequences, and ironically, the research emerging from SOR policies is beginning to show that SOR legislation is whitewashing the curriculum (Rigell, et al., 2022) and de-professionalizing teachers (Blaushild, 2023). While there are several shifting numbers in the SOR movement, no science supports the foundational claims. And the numbers that are being ignored are the huge taxpayers’ costs for shuffling reading programs to line the pockets of many of the people promoting those numbers games. Unless teacher educators and K-12 teachers use their political voices to reject and resist the false stories and numbers games, the teaching profession will continue to be eroded.
If Teacher Education Is Failing Reading, Where Is the Blame?
The current SOR climate surrounding public education in the U.S. has its roots, ironically, in misreading (or at least reading uncritically) A Nation at Risk, a report during the Ronald Reagan administration that was widely reported by mainstream media. The politically driven and deeply flawed report also prompted the accountability movement in the U.S.—state standards and high-stakes testing—that eventually enveloped the entire country by the 1990s.
The report established a false but compelling cultural truism that is too rarely interrogated: Public schools in the U.S. are failing. Since the early 1980s, political leadership has decided that the failure is due to a lack of accountability, but accountability of whom or what has shifted over the past 40 years.
The first blame narrative focused on students and schools, ushering in high-stakes testing at 3rd grade, 8th grade, and high school (exit exams) as well as school and district report cards. Eventually high-stakes accountability of students and schools seemed not to change the measurable outcomes that advocates had promised; there were also unintended consequences such as exit exams increasing the number of students not completing high school.
Gradually after No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the blame narrative moved to teachers, in part driven by George W. Bush’s popularizing the slogan “soft bigotry of low expectations,” the rise of charter schools embracing “no excuses,” and the same messages and buy-in for Bush era education policy by Barack Obama’s administration and Department of Education. For about a decade the blame narrative focused on teachers, and political leaders rushed to intensify teacher evaluation, notably the use of value-added methods (VAM). Once again, the outcomes promised by advocates did not come to fruition. Eventually, in fact, the tide turned against the use of VAM and other types of punitive teacher evaluations (ASA, 2014).
The vacuum left in the blame narrative did not remain long. Concurrent with the SOR movement that claims public school teachers are not teaching reading guided by the SOR is the next round of blame—teacher education. The blame narrative makes for strange bedfellows. While mainstream media have begun to blame teacher education consistently, a leading literacy professional organization, the International Literacy Association (ILA), reinforced the story as well. Education Week has led this charge; for example, Madeline Will (2020):
Decades of research have shown that teaching explicit, systematic phonics is the most reliable way to make sure that young students learn how to read words. Yet an Education Week analysis of nationally representative survey results found that professors who teach early-reading courses are introducing the work of researchers and authors whose findings and theories often conflict with one another, including some that may not be aligned with the greater body of scientific research.
EdWeek‘s survey data were confirmed, it seemed, by ILA’s survey data: 60% of respondents claim their teacher education programs did not prepare them well to teach reading (Top takes, 2020).
First, we should pause at media and professional organizations citing survey data while also embracing a very rigid and narrow demand for SOR. Survey data have many problems, and in this case, we may want to know if disgruntled teachers (and disgruntled for many valid reasons unrelated to teacher preparation or literacy) were disproportionately motivated to reply. None the less, it is quite a different thing to say “60% of respondents claimed X” than “60% of teachers claimed X.” Are these survey data representative of all teachers of reading?
Let’s assume this is true, that more than half of teachers charged with reading instruction believe they are not properly prepared to teach reading. But let’s also unpack how that came to be, and ultimately answer in a fair way, where the blame rests.
For the past 30-40 years, teachers and teacher educators have had less and less professional autonomy; or stated a different way, the professional autonomy of teachers and teacher educators has been reduced to how well they can address mandated standards and produce measurable outcomes that prove those standards were addressed and effective. In the high-stakes accountability era, then, if we are going to accept that 60% of teachers were not well prepared in their teacher education programs, we must be willing to acknowledge that those programs were governed most often by the accreditation process. Organizations such as NCATE and CAEP have been holding teacher education accountable along with the coordination of professional organizations (often generating tensions between accountability and teacher autonomy).
How teacher education approached literacy broadly and reading specifically was grounded in standards designed by ILA (elementary) and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) (secondary), and those programs were periodically monitored by ILA and NCTE for if or how well the programs met those standards. If we currently believe that the teaching of reading in our public schools is failing our students, we must also acknowledge that teachers are implementing state standards of reading and preparing students for state tests of reading; those teachers were also taught how to teach in teacher education programs implementing national standards determined by ILA and NCTE under duress to produce measurable student outcomes linked to state-mandated standards and high-stakes testing.
Accepting the survey data as valid, then, the blame for these failures rests at least in part in the accountability and accreditation process, of which teachers and teacher educators are mere agents. After being a classroom teacher of ELA for 18 years and then a teacher educator for the last 24 years, I believe I have a strong and well-informed view of what is happening. This is a better explanation, but not a simple one that the media would prefer or a politically expedient one that politicians would prefer.
Education has never been the type of failure proclaimed by A Nation at Risk, and a lack of accountability was never the cause of what the true failures in education were then and are today. Formal education reflects and a perpetuates inequity in the U.S. Public schools are not game changers. Therefore, it is true that far too many students are not being taught to read well enough, and that on balance, public education is failing far too many students.
Counter to the story being sold, however, those failures are about inequity—inequity of opportunities both outside and inside schools that disproportionately impacts poor students, Black and brown students, multi-lingual learners, and special needs students (populations the SOR movement has correctly identified as being under-served). And as jumbled as the journey has been, the logic experiment I offer above reaches a credible conclusion: the accountability era has failed and once again disproportionately impacting vulnerable populations of students.
But accreditation has failed just as much. Accountability grounded in standards and high-stakes assessment is not conducive to teaching, learning, or scholarship. As a former K-12 classroom teacher, I can attest to that fact; as a teacher educator, I can confirm that the bureaucracy surrounding compliance with accreditation and certification mandates often dilute my courses and overburden my professional work to the exclusion of scholarship and research as well as teaching. Accountability structures are disproportionately bureaucracy within a political system, and thus can be a distraction from effective teaching, learning, or professional behavior.
While I am frustrated with mainstream media misrepresenting reading and reading instruction, I am concerned with the necessity for professional organizations such as ILA and NCTE to work within and through the political bureaucracy of accountability, accreditation, and certification because of the necessary tensions related to accountability and teacher autonomy. Those professional organizations are put into no-win situations similar to the experiences of K-12 teachers and teacher educators. The result is well intentioned and hard-working professionals often work against our bests interests.
Here, then, is a larger lesson of this entire four-decades mess: Let’s stop looking for people to scapegoat in the blame narrative, and recognize instead that systems are failing us, especially when we are complying to them. Professional autonomy for K-12 teachers and teacher educators is a process we have not tried, but one far more likely to give our schools and our students a better chance if we also acknowledge that social and educational equity need the same financial and administrative focus we have given accountability since the early 1980s.
Teacher Educators and the Politics of Resisting Systemic Failure
Media and political stories have for decades perpetuated a story of student, teacher, and school failure. The current SOR movement has expanded the false story of the “bad teacher” by blaming “bad” teacher educators for producing reading teachers ill equipped to serve the most vulnerable students in our schools. The effectiveness of these myths depends on maintaining the blame gaze on individuals to mask systemic failures and the politics of calling for no politics.
What often appears to be student or teacher failure, however, is the negative consequences of failed systems. Both the larger inequity of society and schooling combined with the inherently flawed accountability paradigm constitutes the cause agents for the outcomes (almost always high-stakes testing data) used to determine student achievement. If we want something to change, then, teacher educators must assume a political stance against systemic failures, and part of that stance must include preparing future (and current) teachers also to assume a political stance.
At mid-twentieth century, Lou LaBrant (1952), who would soon after serve as president of NCTE, wrote on English Journal: “When I finished college my teachers thought I was ‘prepared to teach English’” (p. 345). Yet, what she recognized, and advocated for in this article, was a need for change: “It is time to examine the patched and worn bottles into which we have put this magnificent, live wine of language” (p. 347). I suspect, if LaBrant were still with us today, she would make the same call for how we prepare our teachers in the 2020s, acknowledging that to have different outcomes, we need to change the systems that overwhelmingly cause those outcomes.
Teacher educators, to be change agents, must embrace a new politics of resisting systemic failures, which have been unfairly portrayed as “bad teachers.” We are in the same place of crisis and reform after forty years of accountability linked to standards and testing, all of which has driven repeated cycles of new standards for certification and accreditation. Those systems have not only failed but have distracted from the sort of systemic reform needed to address the inequity of living and schooling that guarantees failure. For all teachers, our only option is a new politics of teacher education and teaching.
References
Afflerbach, P. (2022). Teaching readers (not reading): Moving beyond skills and strategies to reader-focused instruction. Guilford Press.
Aydarova, E. (2024). What you see is not what you get: Science of reading reforms as a guise for standardization, centralization, and privatization. American Journal of Education. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/730991
Aydarova, E. (2023). ‘Whatever you want to call it”: Science of reading mythologies in the education reform movement. Harvard Educational Review, 93(4), 556–581, https://doi.org10.17763/1943-5045-93.4.556
Blaushild, N.L. (2023). “It’s just something that you have to do as a teacher”: Investigating the intersection of educational infrastructure redesign, teacher discretion, and educational equity in the elementary ELA classroom. The Elementary School Journal, 124(2), 219-244.
Compton-Lilly, C.F., Mitra, A., Guay, M., & Spence, L.K. (2020). A confluence of complexity: Intersections among reading theory, neuroscience, and observations of young readers. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S185-S195. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.348
Ellis, V., Gatti, L., & Mansell, W. (2024). The new political economy of teacher education: The enterprise narrative and the shadow state. Policy Press.
Hoffman, J.V., Hikida, M., & Sailors, M. (2020). Contesting science that silences: Amplifying equity, agency, and design research in literacy teacher preparation. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S255–S266. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.353
Kincheloe, J.L. (2005). Critical pedagogy primer. 2nd ed. Peter Lang USA.
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Thomas, P. L. (2010) “Of rocks and hard places—The challenge of Maxine Greene’s mystification in teacher education.” Journal of Educational Controversy 5(1). https://cedar.wwu.edu/jec/vol5/iss1/10
Thomas, P.L. (2022). The Science of Reading movement: The never-ending debate and the need for a different approach to reading instruction. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/science-of-reading
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Abstract: The current reading crisis, the “science of reading” (SoR) movement, is a subset of the perpetual education crisis begun under Ronald Reagan with A Nation at Risk. Ultimately, “crisis” education reform is a sort of industry that works as a distraction and erasure. Consequently, marginalized and minoritized students, often significant populations within Urban education, are never directly served in education reform grounded in accountability instead of equity. The SoR movement, through legislation and policy, is working indirectly to drive book censorship, book bans, and the whitewashing of texts in classrooms and libraries.
Education scholar, leader, wit, gadfly, mentor, father, friend and NEPC Fellow David C. Berliner died September 26th, 2025. He was 87.
As an academic who specialized in educational psychology, Berliner received many of the most prestigious accolades awarded to those in his field. He was elected to the National Academy of Education and the International Academy of Education, and he was given award after award: the E.L. Thorndike Award in educational psychology, the AERA’s Distinguished Contributions Award and its Outstanding Public Communication of Education Research Award, the Friend of Education award of the NEA, and the Brock Prize in Education Innovation. He served as president of AERA and Dean of the College of Education at Arizona State University. He taught at universities around the nation and the world.
David’s Bar Mitzvah, 1951
Although he excelled in the Ivory Tower, Berliner was probably best known as a public intellectual who intrepidly pushed back against lawmakers and education policy that flew in the face of research and (quite frequently) common sense. This work is represented, for instance, in his general-interest books The Manufactured Crisis (1996, co-authored with Bruce Biddle), Collateral Damage (2007, co-authored with Sharon Nichols), and 50 Myths and Lies that Threaten America’s Public Schools (2014, co-authored with Gene Glass).
David and Ursula, March For Our Lives
“In the raging battle over school reform, David wanted to fight—and fight he did,” said NEPC’s Alex Molnar.
In books, articles, op-eds, and speeches, he relentlessly exposed the lies and hypocrisy of neoliberal school reform advocates and the danger posed by their market-based vision of public education. He fought hard but he was a joyous warrior—dancing would have definitely been allowed at David’s revolution! I have never met anyone more full of life. I will miss you terribly, my friend.
David and Ursula
David enjoying the waters of Hawaii, 2025
The 200-plus articles, reports, chapters, and books Berliner authored during his lifetime ranged from scholarly writings on psychology, pedagogy, and assessment to accessible books that used plain language to explain how education research was applied—and misapplied—in the real world. He remained prolific to the end, publishing a book of 19 personal and reflective essays, Public Education for Our Nation’s Democracy: Commentaries on Schooling in America, the month he passed away.
“David was an acerbic critic of the past two+ decades of what was called ‘education reform,’” his friend, the education scholar Diane Ravitch, wrote upon his death.
David laughed at the nonsensical but heavily funded plans to ‘reform’ education by imposing behaviorist strategies on teachers, as if they were robots or simpletons. David had no patience with the shallow critics of America’s public schools. He respected the nation’s teachers and understood as few of the critics did, just how valuable and under-appreciated they were.
Although his work grappled with serious topics, David was known for his lighthearted approach. He was our enthusiastic host of The Bunkum Awards, a satirical “honor” that NEPC used to bestow on the most appalling educational think-tank reports of the year. The videos, which are from 2013 and 2014, are still fun to watch, as David joyfully skewers the award recipients.
2014 Bunkum Awards
David also took great joy in the simple pleasures of life, from sunsets to seltzers to real honest-to-goodness New York City bagels, especially when enjoyed with his many friends, his children and grandchildren, and his beloved wife, Ursula Casanova.
David and Kevin in 2023
At an online memorial held October 4th in his honor, the word repeatedly used to describe him was “mensch.” “Just thinking of David always made my heart smile,” said NEPC’s Kevin Welner. “His presence among us, effusing decency and empathy, was a reminder of why we’re here on earth.”
“He was a great guy, in so many ways,” his daughter BethAnn Berliner told us. “We’ve heard from people how he was a giant in the field, a scholar, a teacher, a mentor, and an advocate. But to me, he was just dad and that was far greater.”
educator, public scholar, poet&writer – academic freedom isn't free
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 