All posts by plthomasedd

P. L. Thomas, Professor of Education (Furman University, Greenville SC), taught high school English in rural South Carolina before moving to teacher education. He is a former column editor for English Journal (National Council of Teachers of English), current series editor for Critical Literacy Teaching Series: Challenging Authors and Genres (Brill), and author of Teaching Writing as Journey, Not Destination: Essays Exploring What ‘Teaching Writing’ Means (IAP, 2019) and How to End the Reading War and Serve the Literacy Needs of All Students: A Primer for Parents, Policy Makers, and People Who Care (IAP, in press). NCTE named Thomas the 2013 George Orwell Award winner. He co-edited the award-winning (Divergent Book Award for Excellence in 21st Century Literacies Research) volume Critical Media Literacy and Fake News in Post-Truth America (Brill, 2018). Follow his work @plthomasEdD and the becoming radical (https://radicalscholarship.wordpress.com/).
Education, education reform, Educational Research, reading, Science of Reading

“Science of” Movement Repeating Mistakes of Education Reform Cycles

Many years ago, I was unusually excited to hear the keynote speaker at the annual SCCTE conference on Kiawah Island, SC—Harvey Smokey Daniels.

For many years in my methods courses for secondary ELA certifiers and practicing teachers, I used Best Practice by Steven Zemelman, Daniels, and Arthur Hyde.

Daniels surprised the attendees by noting that he was moving away from the term “best practice” because it had become ubiquitous and thus meaningless. He warned that many, if not most, books being published with “best practice” in the title were anything except best practice.

The term had moved from careful scholarship (the book Daniels co-authored is a wonderful and cautious attempt to translate a wide body of research into classroom practice among the major disciplines) to branding.

And thus, as Daniels lamented, “best practice” was lost in the abyss that is educational marketing.

Much more quickly and recently, Common Core experienced a meteoric rise and sudden crash and burn. In the mean time, classrooms materials were quickly labeled “Common Core” even as the movement was hastily erased before some states even implemented the standards or the national tests (my home state of SC did exactly that as a knee-jerk Republican maneuver to reject Obama, they believed).

Spurred in early 2018 with the rise of the “science of reading,” the “science of” movement appears to be in full swing with the addition of the “science of learning,” the “science of writing,” and the “science of math”—mostly following frantic claims of crisis based on test scores (usually NAEP data).

You likely won’t have to wait long because the soar/collapse cycle is already in front of us as the state of Alabama was first included as one of the “soaring” Deep South states adopting the “science of reading” like Mississippi, and then this: Alabama reading scores drop in latest state test results. How many students can read?

While both media assessments lack credibility, the rhetoric itself harkens yet another education reform movement destined for the garbage bin. We seem unable to learn that the crisis/miracle reform cycle never works because the problems are always misrepresented and then the solutions are always mandates that will fail.

Let me note here that what made the original best practice approach a wonderful methods text is that the instructional practices were recommended as “increase” or “decrease”—not mandate or ban:

This helps show how the “science of reading” movement—grounded in media false stories and political mandates—is repeating the mistakes of dozens of reform movements before this “science of” nonsense.

The essential mistakes are framing “science of” as a mandate/ban or science/not science dichotomy.

Legislation across most states is now banning specific reading practices and programs while mandating other practices and programs.

While legislation should never ban or mandate specific practices in education, “science of reading” (SOR) legislation also fails by cherry-picking what counts as science/not science.

To be blunt, SOR legislation is driven by ideology and marketing, not science; the mandate/ban line is subject to cherry picking.

For example, many states are simultaneously banning three cueing as not scientific but mandating or funding decodable texts and multi-sensory approaches such as O-G phonics.

In The Science of Reading: A Literature Review (prepared for Connecticut), however, this literature review shows all of those practices lack scientific evidence:

Unlike the careful work done on best practice by Daniels and others, the “science of” movement suffers from ham-fisted mandates and essential failures to understand what “science” means for classroom practice.

The Reading League, for example, limits what counts as “scientific” to experimental/quasi-experimental research that is published in peer-reviewed journals. While this is a ridiculously narrow use of evidence and research, it also poses several problems.

First, as the literature review above notes, the science/not science dichotomy can include both practices/programs that have scientific research supporting or not the practice/program or practice/programs that do not yet have any or enough scientific evidence (such as the programs LETRS).

Next, and more importantly, many people fundamentally misunderstand what the science/not science distinction means for classroom practice.

If we use medicine as an analogy, once a medication is found to be effective, that means that medicine X under Y conditions will produce Z outcomes for most people (a generalization).

What is often ignored is that there are at least two outlier groups in that claim; one group will not experience the positive outcome, and one group can experience negative outcomes.

As a teen, I fell into that latter group with both Tylenol (a reaction that can be life threatening) and penicillin.

If we insist on using the science/not science distinction, then, for classroom practices we must not translate that into mandate/ban.

The “science of” movement could be effective if we did two things: (a) expand the use of research to include more than narrowly “scientific” evidence, and (b) replace mandate/ban with implement with confidence/implement with caution.

Let me end by briefly considering what implement with confidence/implement with caution should accomplish.

If we use research/evidence/science to drive implement with confidence, that means those practices and programs can be used to plan broadly (year-long and unit plans prepared before teaching and before having evidence from students to guide instruction).

Those practices and programs, like medication, can be trusted to work for most students under defined conditions—recognizing that there will be outliers and conditions can change, thus changing outcomes.

Practices and programs that can be implemented with caution augment those initial plans and can serve the outliers as well as when conditions change.

Here is the key that the “science of” movement is failing most significantly: This process must honor the autonomy of the teacher to serve the individual needs of students.

As the swing in rhetoric about Alabama reveals (see also the realities about Florida and Mississippi), the “science of” movement is doomed to fail, doomed by repeating the mistakes of reform cycles we have blindly followed for over four decades.

Dyslexia, Education, education reform, Educational Research, Media, reading, Science of Reading

Close Reading: Evidence, schmevidence: the abuse of the word “evidence” in policy discourse about education, Gary Thomas

[Header Photo by thom masat on Unsplash]

Before the close reading below, let me offer several examples for context concerning how media have weaponized “science” resulting in misguided and even harmful reading legislation.

First, here is an example of a journalist posting an article by a journalist praising a journalist. What is missing? Actual research, evidence, or science.

Gottlieb’s article, oddly, repeats three times at the end that he is a journalist, but in the piece, he seems most concerned about advocating for Hanford:

As brilliantly illuminated by education journalist Emily Hanford’s articles over the past several years, and her 2023 “Sold a Story” podcast, the education establishment in this country — which includes textbook and curriculum publishers, schools of education and school districts — has been guilty of educational malpractice for decades, using now-discredited Whole Language methods for teaching reading.

Too little progress in teaching Colorado kids to read

See this for a critical unpacking of Hanford’s false claims repeated by Gottlieb: How Media Misinformation Became “Holy Text”: The Anatomy of the SOR Movement.

Gottlieb refers to a report and data, but offers no links to any science or research to support any of his claims, again primarily supported by Hanford’s “brilliant” podcast.

Next, Hanford’s There Is a Right Way to Teach Reading, and Mississippi Knows It demonstrates again the lack of science or research and the self-referential nature of media’s false claims about reading and the “science of reading.”

Note that the subhead, written by editors, not the journalist (“The state’s reliance on cognitive science explains why”) is directly contradicted by Hanford, although the article itself implies the opposite of what she acknowledges:

What’s up in Mississippi? There’s no way to know for sure what causes increases in test scores, but Mississippi has been doing something notable: making sure all of its teachers understand the science of reading.

There Is a Right Way to Teach Reading, and Mississippi Knows It

When Hanford makes huge claims about teachers being unprepared to teach reading (“But a lot of teachers don’t know this science“), the link provided circles back to her own journalism, not research, not science.

The consequences of this media cycle of using “science” to give stories credibility while omitting the actual science is reading policy grounded in misinformation, but also given the veneer of “science”:

Legislation that would require Michigan schools to use a reading curriculum and interventions for students with dyslexia that are backed by science has taken a different shape to satisfy school administrators who questioned the timeline in the bills.

Michigan eyes reforms to teach those with dyslexia. Critics say more is needed

And with the rise in reading legislation labeled as “scientific,” the education marketplace has eagerly jumped on board (“story,” “data,” “science”):

And thus, let’s do a close reading:

Gary Thomas (2023) Evidence, schmevidence: the abuse of the word “evidence” in policy discourse about education, Educational Review, 75:7, 1297-1312, DOI: https://tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00131911.2022.2028735

Thomas explains the essay purpose as follows:

I focus in this essay on the way that policymakers in education may promote policy through the use of words and terms used by academics and by the public about education topics – words and terms such as “evidence”, “what works”, “evidence-based policy” and “gold standard”. In particular, I examine ways in which vernacular and specialist meanings of “evidence” and “evidence-based” may become hybridised; ways in which technical terms may be appropriated by politicians and their advisers for public consumption, and, in the process, become degraded and corrupted in the service of their own policy agendas.

One issue with the use of “evidence” (and synonyms) is that policymakers are apt to resort to “’cherry-picking, obfuscation or manipulation.’”

Terms such as “evidence” (and “science”) are designed to create “the ‘almost magical power’ that certain words acquire to ‘… make people see and believe.'”

Thomas’s analysis found:

In not one of the 100 uses was “evidence” used prefatory to an actual itemisation of data in support of a proposition, and in all cases in the non-specific category, “evidence” was used with verbs – e.g. “there is evidence”, “England possesses evidence” – which simultaneously conferred authority via the supposed status of “evidence” at the same time as acting as a proxy for detailed enumeration of specific data. The authority of the non-specific “evidence” was amplified with many qualifications of the word, which, without detail of the data for which “evidence” was a proxy, appeared merely to add rhetorical weight rather than empirical support. These qualifiers included words/terms such as incriminating, overwhelming, strong, weak, little, hard, fresh, preliminary, sufficient, inadmissible, no, verifiable, hearsay, prima facie, disturbing, concrete.

As Thomas walks the reader through a few examples, he highlights: “’Evidence’ is here prefaced with ‘scientific’, seemingly to elevate its status in the absence of specificity – a strategy frequently employed in general discourse, as the analysis of the corpora revealed.”

“Evidence” (like “science” and “research”) is commonly used in place of citing actual evidence throughout media and political discourse. [As my examples above show, US media often link to other media when terms such as “science” and “research” are used.]

“Evidence” is weaponized, then, as Thomas explains:

All the examples given here reveal the fashioning of semiotics, the creation of meaning, and the dissemination of messages to non-specialist audiences in an outlet that, while widely read, offers no obvious route for scholarly interrogation or critique – at least, within a timeframe that might allow meaningful challenge. The putative “evidenced reality” proves on examination not to exist and the attempt is – in the world of retail politics – to craft an illusion of “evidence” in support of particular political agendas, employing devices such as the “negative other-representation” to attempt to augment the writer’s position.

And thus:

“Evidence”, in the pieces examined here, is used often with only a superficial allusion to any kind of research, and the research “evidence”, where any is cited, is often highly selectively sampled, with unconcealed deprecation of alternative interpretations.

Thomas then addresses the need for scholars to correct the misleading stories of media and political leaders instead of jumping on the bandwagon of reform for financial gain or prestige:

Academics must take a share of responsibility in the way that this process proceeds unimpeded. Such is the pressure inside universities for staff to be winning research grants and earning research income that there is inevitably willing involvement in con- tract research involving the kind of steering groups I have just mentioned.

Yet, Thomas ends by acknowledging that the weaponizing of “evidence” (and “science” along with other synonyms) immediately frames anyone challenging the stories negatively [1]:

In realising this, astute politicians can kill two birds with one stone. The knack is to enlist conspicuously with “science”, ostensibly adhering firmly to principles of reason and empiricism, while simultaneously projecting silliness, unreason and disengagement from research findings onto one’s interlocutor – as did Gibb in the phrase cited in illustrative case study 2: “The evidence is clear – however much it may shock the pre-conceived expectations of some education experts”, or as did Cummings in declaring that the “education world” handles scientific developments “badly”. Utter the phrase “the evidence is clear” and one straightaway affiliates oneself with reason, wisdom and unequivocal allegiance to empirical inquiry. One’s interlocutors, by contrast, are immediately forced onto the back foot, compelled to defend themselves against charges of not engaging with evidence – of subjectivity, sloppiness, credulity and narrow-mindedness borne of ideology.

Therefore, as Thomas concludes about “evidence,” here in the US we too must accept about “science” in media rhetoric and political policy”

On the basis of the analysis here, “evidence-based” is next to meaningless, given that the evidence in question is habitually unspecified and given that any evidence that is actually specified is carefully selected and/or offered as if it were superior to other evidence which suggests conclusions at variance to those being proffered. Protean and manoeuvrable, terms such as “evidence-based” are powerful rhetorically. They drop easily into conversation, speeches and documents to add weight to an assertion. Filling any gap, taking any shape, as instruments of retail politics they serve politicians’ purpose perfectly, but in any discourse with pretensions to scholarly independence and disinterestedness, their mutability ought to be troubling. Our responsibility as an academy is surely consistently to question these terms, to call for specification of evidence, to be ready to provide alternative evidence, to engage energetically with a broad range of media and social media (i.e. not just peer review and academic publications) and to question the validity of concepts such as “impact”.

[1] Compare this framing with how the Education Writers Association and Hanford frame the role of journalists and the expectation that implementing the “science of reading” may fail:

No Excuses Reform, Poverty

Big Lies of Education: Poverty Is an Excuse

George W. Bush built his path to the presidency on education reform, the discredited Texas “miracle,” and manufacturing his persona as a kinder and gentler conservative. One of his most effective rhetorical flourishes was evoking the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”

He spoke into cultural mythologies in the US that embrace bootstrapping and claim a rising tide lifts all boats—mythologies uncritically embraced by mainstream media.

During the Bush era of education reform in the 1990s and 2000s, charter schools increasingly received bipartisan support, notably under the Barack Obama administration.

The darling of that charter school movement was KIPP charter schools that popularized “no excuses” education.

More recently, declaring poverty an excuse in education was established in the “science of reading” manufactured reading crisis: “One of the excuses educators have long offered to explain America’s poor reading performance is poverty” (Emily Hanford, Hard Words).

While Hanford’s misleading and false story caught fire, fueling another reading crisis and state-by-state dismantling of reading instruction, Gerald Coles‘s careful and evidence-based discrediting of Hanford’s claims went mostly unacknowledged:

Can poverty and inequality be taken “out of the equation” in creating literacy and academic success? From Rudolf Flesch onward, the deplorable, unsubstantiated, simple-minded answer is supposed to be “yes, if a phonics-and-reading-skills-heavy early-reading program is employed.” However, as the current rendition reveals, just as over the past 60 years, the answer once again is “no, that’s not why Johnny can’t read.”

Cryonic Phonics

Decades of research, notably including the evidence created by the value-added methods of teacher education under Obama, confirm Coles, not Hanford or Bush or KIPP.

For example, consider the overwhelming evidence that poverty and out-of-school factors are causally linked to at least 60% of measurable student achievement:

Teachers Matter, But So Do Words
ASA Statement on Using Value-Added Models for Educational Assessment (2014)
Family Background Accounts for 40% of SAT/ACT Scores Among UC Applicants
Maroun, Jamil, and Christopher H. Tienken. 2024. “The Pernicious Predictability of State-Mandated Tests of Academic Achievement in the United States” Education Sciences 14, no. 2: 129. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci14020129

For any education reform to work, out-of-school factors must be addressed along with confronting the impact of inequity in schools.

Poverty is not an excuse, but a reality that education reformers refuse to acknowledge to the detriment of students, teachers, and public education.

Update

Private schools: Who benefits?

Update 2

Burrell, N., & Harbatkin, E. (2024). Beyond the school building: Examining the association between of out-of-school factors and multidimensional school grades. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 32. https://doi.org/10.14507/epaa.32.8497

Update 3

Dearing, E., Bustamante, A. S., Zachrisson, H. D., & Vandell, D. L. (2024). Accumulation of Opportunities Predicts the Educational Attainment and Adulthood Earnings of Children Born Into Low- Versus Higher-Income Households. Educational Researcher, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X241283456

Abstract

Scholars theorize that “opportunity gaps” drive achievement disparities between children born into poverty versus affluence. In a 26-year longitudinal study (N = 814), we examine (a) economic disparity in children’s accumulation of opportunities—from birth through high school—at home, childcare, school, afterschool, and in the neighborhood; (b) the extent to which opportunity is linked with educational attainment and earnings in early adulthood; and (c) whether opportunity is most strongly associated with these adult outcomes for children from low-income households. We document large opportunity gaps between children from low- versus higher-income households. These opportunity gaps are strongly linked with educational attainment and earnings, particularly for low-income children, helping explain why household income in early childhood predicts these outcomes in adulthood.

Big Lies of Education: Series
Education, Teaching, Testing, Writing

Teaching Writing: Reconsidering Genre (Again)

[Header Photo by David Pupăză on Unsplash]

My midterm exam for first-year writing invites students to interview a professor in a discipline they are considering as a major. The discussion is designed to explore those professors as researchers and writers.

On exam day, we have small and whole-class discussions designed to discover the wide variety of activities that count as research in various disciplines, and more importantly, what writing as a scholar looks like across disciplines.

The outcomes of this activity are powerful since students learn that research and writing are context-based and far more complicated that they learned in K-12 schooling.

Two points that I often emphasize are, first, that many (if not most) of the professors confess that they do not like to write, and second, I help them see that a profoundly important distinction between their K-12 teachers and professors is that professors practice the fields they teach.

This brings me to two posts on Twitter (X):

First, Luther is confronting a foundational failure of K-12 writing instruction—students being taught the “4 Types/Genres of Writing” (narration, description, exposition, persuasion).

That framing is deeply misleading and overly simplistic, but that framing is grounded in two realities: most K-12 teachers who teach writing are not writers, and the so-called “4 Types/Genres of Writing” are rooted in the rise of state-level accountability testing of writing (not any authentic or research-based approach to teaching composition).

Second, so I don’t appear to be beating up unfairly on K-12 teachers (I was one for 18 years and love K-12 teachers), Dowell is then confronting the often careless and reductive ways in which “academic writing” is both taught and even practiced (academic norms of published writing ask very little of scholars as writers and even impose reductive templates that cause lifeless and garbled writing).

The 1980s and 1990s saw a rise in state accountability testing that asked very little of students. The “4 Types/Genres of Writing” quickly supplanted the gains made with authentic writing instruction grounded in writer’s workshop and the influence of the National Writing Project in the 1970s and 1980s.

Those writing tests prompted students to write narrative or expository essays (for example) that were only a few paragraphs long (likely the 5-paragraph essay). These were scored based on state-developed rubrics that teachers taught to throughout the year.

In other words, as Gerald Bracey warned, writing instruction became almost exclusively teaching to the test. And since K-12 teachers of writers were primarily not writers themselves, this reductive and mechanical way to teach and assess writing was rarely challenged.

Let’s be blunt. K-12 teachers not resisting this dynamic is a logical response to an impossible learning and teaching environment that is dominated by accountability and high-stakes testing.

My criticism is that teachers and students were (and are) put in this situation; I am not criticizing teachers and students, who are the victims of the accountability era of education reform.

Further, while students who move from K-12 to higher ed discover that their K-12 preparation in writing is inadequate and often deeply misleading for how they are expected to write in academia, this new situation is not some idealistic wonderland of authentic writing (as Dowell confronts).

The K-12 to higher ed transition makes students feel unfairly jerked around (many are exasperated when they find out they didn’t need to “memorize” MLA and may never use it again), but navigating academic expectations for writing is equally frustrating (one first-year student this spring noted that my first-year writing seminar is unique, they said, because I teach writing while other professors simply assign and grade writing).

Students deserve better at both the K-12 and higher ed levels so here I want to offer a few thoughts on how to move past the traps I have noted above about teaching writing.

I highly recommend Genre awareness for the novice academic student: An ongoing quest by Ann Johns.

Johns argues for fostering “genre awareness” (addressing in complex and authentic ways Dowell’s concern) and not “genre acquisition” (for example, the reductive “4 Types/Genres of Writing” approach):

The first is GENRE ACQUISITION, a goal that focuses upon the students’ ability to reproduce a text type, often from a template, that is organized, or ‘staged’ in a predictable way. The Five Paragraph Essay pedagogies, so common in North America, present a highly structured version of this genre acquisition approach.

A quite different goal is GENRE AWARENESS, which is realized in a course designed to assist students in developing the rhetorical flexibility necessary for adapting their socio-cognitive genre knowledge to ever-evolving contexts. …After my many years of teaching novice tertiary students who follow familiar text templates, usually the Five Paragraph Essay, and who then fail when they confronted different types of reading and writing challenges in their college and university classrooms, I have concluded that raising genre awareness and encouraging the abilities to research and negotiate texts in academic classrooms should be the principal goals for a novice literacy curriculum (Johns 1997).

Genre awareness for the novice academic student:
An ongoing quest

Here I think is an outstanding graphic (Johns draws from Bhatia) of moving past confusing modes of writing (narration, description, exposition, persuasion) with genres of writing (OpEd, memoir, meta-analysis, literature review, etc.):

At both the K-12 and higher ed levels, then, teaching writing has been reduced to serving something other than students—either the mandates of high-stakes testing or the nebulous and shifting expectations of “academic writing,” which include very dangerous traps such as a maze of citation expectations among disciplines.

My first-year writing students and I are at midterm this spring, and we just held our conferences for Essay 2 with a scholarly cited essay looming once we return from spring break.

In those conferences, we have been discussing the huge learning curve they are facing since I ask them to choose their essay topic and thus develop their own thesis within a genre of writing.

They are making all the decisions writers do in authentic contexts.

Before my class, they have had most of their writing prompted, most of their thesis sentences assigned to them, and most of their genre experiences entirely reduced or erased.

So I explain this to them, assuring them that their struggles are reasonable and not a product of them failing or being inadequate.

These are new and complex expectations of young writers.

But is the only fair thing to offer them, this experience of becoming a writer as an act of them as humans and not as a performance for a test or to fill in a template.

Recommended

Investigating Zombi(e)s to Foster Genre Awareness

Thomas, P.L. (2019). Teaching writing as journey, not destination: Essays exploring what “teaching writing” means. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.

RECOMMENDED: John Warner’s “Why They Can’t Write”

RECOMMENDED: John Warner’s “The Writer’s Practice”

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

Contrarian Truths about Public Education and Student Achievement Should Guide SC Education Reform

[This has been submitted to several newspapers in SC without response so far.]

Ranking member of the US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, Bill Cassidy (R – LA) has issued a report announcing a reading crisis in America: “Two-thirds of America’s fourth and eighth graders are not proficient in reading.”

Here in SC, legislators are once considering new reading legislation, building on over a decade of reforms with Read to Succeed.

However, a report from the progressive NPE and an analysis from the conservative Education Next offer contrarian truths about public education and student achievement, neither of which is grounded in crisis rhetoric or blaming students, teachers, and schools for decades of political negligence.

First, based on NAEP data—similar to Cassidy’s report—Shakeel and Peterson in EdNext offer a much different view of student achievement in the US, notably about reading achievement:

Contrary to what you may have heard, average student achievement has been increasing for half a century. Across 7 million tests taken by U.S. students born between 1954 and 2007, …[r]eading scores have grown by 20 percent of a standard deviation during that time, nearly one year’s worth of learning.

When we examine differences by student race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, longstanding assumptions about educational inequality start to falter. Black, Hispanic, and Asian students are improving far more quickly than their white classmates in elementary, middle, and high school. In elementary school, for example, reading scores for white students have grown by 9 percent of a standard deviation each decade, compared to 28 percent for Asian students, 19 percent for Black students, and 13 percent for Hispanic students. Students from low socioeconomic backgrounds also are progressing more quickly than their more advantaged peers in elementary and middle school. And for the most part, growth rates have remained steady throughout the past five decades.

Shakeel and Peterson’s analysis confirms a concern raised by scholars for decades after A Nation at Risk—the manufactured educational crisis perpetuated by the media, political leaders, and education publishers.

Keeping the US in perpetual crisis has resulted in over four decades of blaming students, teachers, and public schools as failures even though education policy and funding have been exclusively controlled by political leadership at the national and state levels.

That leads us to a state-by-state analysis from NPE that avoids blaming students, teachers, and schools by holding political leadership accountable for the following:

  • Privatization Laws: the guardrails and limits on charter and voucher programs to ensure that taxpayers and students are protected from discrimination, corruption, and fraud.
  • Homeschooling Laws: laws to ensure that instruction is provided safely and responsibly.
  • Financial Support for Public Schools: sufficient and equitable funding of public schools.
  • Freedom to Teach and Learn: whether state laws allow all students to feel safe and thrive at school and receive honest instruction free of political intrusion.

The top five states include North Dakota, Connecticut, Vermont, Illinois, and Nebraska with Arkansas, North Carolina, Utah, Arizona, and Florida sitting at the bottom.

SC ranks 39th, receiving a grade of F for failing to fully support public schools or our democracy. That political negligence has resulted in decades of unwarranted negative messages about our schools, teachers, and students.

These reports combined offer SC an opportunity to resist crisis rhetoric as well as rejecting the ineffective reform cycles since the 1980s.

The problems facing our students, teachers, and schools are social inequities such as poverty and racism, but we also have a history of political negligence in our state that has resulted in a national recognition of our Corridor of Shame.

We can and should do better for our students, schools, and state by recognizing that the real failure is not our schools but our political leadership and the lack of political will to fund and support education as a foundational part of our democracy.

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

Cautionary Tales of State Reading Legislation: UK

“Lack of support for early years language and communication development is leading to a “literacy crisis” that could be costing the economy £830m for each school year group, according to new research,” write Ella Creamer in The Guardian.

The report cited is a February 2024 analysis and heralds another round of reading crisis in the UK.

This is quite interesting considering that in 2006, the UK implemented a phonics-centered reform agenda that has been documented to have been robustly practiced, notably that all students have received systematic phonics in the UK for almost two decades:

Prior to 2006 the teaching of reading in most classrooms in England is best described as balanced instruction, in which some phonics teaching has always been part of the teaching of reading typically for children in the infant years (aged five to seven) although not necessarily ‘systematic phonics’ instruction…. However in 2006 the Rose Report recommended that there should be even more emphasis on phonics teaching….

This was followed by the increased emphasis on discrete teaching of phonics recommended by the Rose Report and the PNS from 2006 onwards. Further intensification of synthetic phonics teaching was seen in England’s national curriculum of 2014, along with a range of other measures to ensure teacher compliance with the prescribed method of teaching reading, including the use of the PSC; the vetting of phonics teaching schemes; and the use of the inspectorate to focus on outcomes in statutory reading assessments as a prime focus in school inspections.

Reading wars or reading reconciliation?

Also of note, that research in 2022 revealed, once again, these reforms were misguided and ineffective. The researchers concluded, calling for a more balanced approach:

In addition to the importance of contextualised reading teaching as an evidence-based orientation to the teaching of reading we hypothesise the following pedagogical features that are likely to be effective. Phonics teaching is most likely to be effective for children aged five to six. Phonics teaching with children younger than this is not likely to be effective. A focus on whole texts and reading for meaning, to contextualise the teaching of other skills and knowledge, should drive pedagogy. Classroom teachers using their professional judgement to ensure coherence of the approach to teaching phonics and reading with other relevant teaching in their classroom is most likely to be effective. Insistence on particular schemes/ basals, scripted lessons, and other inflexible approaches is unlikely to be optimal. Well-trained classroom assistants, working in collaboration with their class teachers, could be a very important contribution to children’s reading development.

Reading wars or reading reconciliation?

More evidence from the UK shows that reducing reading instruction to systematic phonics ignores both the science of reading instruction and the realities of human development. The mandatory phonics checks in the UK show that achievement correlates strongly with birth month, not instruction and certainly not resulting in the sort of reading achievement that avoids another reading war:

The “science of reading” movement in the US is misguided and costly, mostly benefitting commercial interests repackaging reading programs and materials emphasizing phonics.

States are rushing to mimic practices that have already failed in the UK. Our students and teachers deserve better.

See Also

Cautionary Tales of State Reading Legislation: Tennessee

UK PISA 2022 Results Offer Cautionary Tale for US Reading Reform

Big Lies of Education, Education, education reform, NPR

Big Lies of Education: National Reading Panel (NRP)

Similar to A Nation at Risk and a core part of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the National Reading Panel (NRP) was a bi-partisan committee formed under Bill Clinton and then elevated under George W. Bush.

Joanne Yatvin, a panel member who issued a Minority Report, wrote in Education Week in 2003, warning that the NRP’s conclusions would be misrepresented and misused.

Yatvin was right.

And 15 years later, Emily Hanford—among dozens of journalists—continued to prove Yatvin correct:

The battle between whole language and phonics got so heated that the U.S. Congress eventually got involved, convening a National Reading Panel to review all the research on reading. In 2000, the panel released a report. The sum of the research showed that explicitly teaching children the relationship between sounds and letters improved reading achievement. The panel concluded that phonics lessons help kids become better readers. There is no evidence to say the same about whole language.

Hard Words

In 2024, as the “science of reading” (SOR) movement continues to steamroll state reading legislation, journalists persist in misrepresenting the panel’s findings as well as ignoring that the NRP is over two decades old, which means reading science has moved well beyond what the panel claimed to find.

Often ignored, panel members admitted the NRP was underfunded and understaffed, resulting in the panel’s overview of reading research was greatly limited to only a narrow type of published research.

Further, despite the Urban Legends of the findings repeated by Hanford and other journalists, the NRP’s conclusions are not what has been claimed.

First, Tim Shanahan, a panel member, admitted that the report did little to support classroom practice.

But more importantly, the actual findings of the panel in no way support the media claims about what research says about teaching reading, the role of phonics instruction, or the evidence on whole language.

Diane Stephens, University of South Carolina emeritus professor, provides an excellent summary of the findings:

  • Phonemic Awareness: PA is a “means rather than an end”; doesn’t increase comprehension; only one of many elements needed to read independently.
  • Phonics: Minimal value in kindergarten; no conclusion about phonics beyond grade 1 for “normally developing readers”; systematic phonics instruction in grades 2-6 with struggling readers has a weak impact on reading text and spelling; systematic phonics instruction has a positive effect in grade 1 on reading (pronouncing) real and nonsense words but not comprehension; at-risk students benefit from whole language instruction, Reading Recovery, and direct instruction.
  • Fluency: The ability of students to make sense of text grammatically and with understanding of punctuation.
  • Vocabulary: Vocabulary is acquired many ways by readers; number of words acquired cannot be accomplished through direct instruction. About 1/3 of vocabulary learning in grades 3 – 8 linked to reading.
  • Comprehension: Weak evidence in report on comprehension. Emphasizes need for SBRR (scientifically based reading research) and “putting teachers in positions where their minds are the most valued educational resource.”

As many scholars have noted (see below), the NRP found that systematic phonics and whole language were about equally effective, but the key here is that phonics instruction was found to be effective for pronunciation, not comprehension, and only in grade 1.

In short, the NRP was never a definitive overview of reading science (or a confirmation about teaching systematic phonics to all students), and now that we are 20-plus years past the report, citing the NRP should be limited to historical references, not evidence of the current state of reading science.

I recommend the following to understand fully the NRP:

Big Lies of Education: Series
Education

Close Reading: Social in/justice and the deficit foundations of oracy, Ian Cushing

“Schooling in the United States is revered as a societal foundation for possibility, empowerment, and social mobility,” explain Rios, Matthews, Zentell, and Kogut, adding, “However, US schooling systems also serve as institutions foundationally designed for and historically entrenched in the service of white, monolingual, middle- and upper-class populations.”

Further, they argue, “Scholars advocate for acknowledging students’ cultures as assets and incorporating them in teaching, a praxis known as culturally relevant pedagogy.”

One of the significant failures of the “science of reading” (SOR) movement has been the erasure of linguistic and literature diversity in the teaching of reading.

The SOR movement and resulting legislation fits into the larger accountability education reform movement that is grounded in essentialism and conservative ideology.

Here, I offer a close reading of Social in/justice and the deficit foundations of oracy by Ian Cushing as a powerful entry point to understanding how SOR reading reform is conservative ideology that ultimately harms children’s linguistic development and thus the development of Self.

Cushing frames his examination in two points: first, that literacy instruction (specifically in this piece, oracy) is grounded in deficit ideology, adding, “The second is that the oracy agenda’s vision for social justice is flawed in how it relies on a theory of change where marginalised children can experience equality and upward mobility by making tweaks to their language, and that oracy provides the compensatory tool to do so.”

In other words, much of literacy instruction is aimed at “fixing” children in the context of a social norm while ignoring social inequities, such as those norms themselves.

And thus, “Marginalised children routinely experience the hostile policing of their language and public humiliation for their purported inability to speak correctly.”

The essential conservative ideology behind deficit views of language invert reform agendas:

Put another way, I argue that England’s oracy agenda interprets structural inequality as a ‘linguistic problem requiring linguistic solutions, rather than as a politico-economic problem requiring politico-economic solutions’ (Rosa, 2016, p. 165). Whilst the apparent progressivism of oracy may appear to some to be a liberatory means to afford marginalised children greater opportunities, I show here that it is rooted in deficit-based assumptions about language which overdetermine marginalised children as linguistically inferior and blames them for their own struggles.

Social in/justice and the deficit foundations of oracy

A progressive or critical alternative to conservative ideology grounding reform, then, includes this recognition: “Social justice is a long-term project which will only be ever achieved when our efforts are on structural transformations as opposed to tweaking individual behaviours (Gandolfi & Mills, 2023; Kaba, 2021; Picower, 2012).”

However, similar to here in the US, “[S]implistic notions of social justice … have long characterised mainstream education policy, especially in England. … [D]ominant conceptualisations of social justice in education are ones rooted in individualised explanations of inequality, and result in individualised and reductive solutions,” for example, the SOR movement and legislation focusing on reforming teacher practice and raising student reading proficiency scores.

Notable is how progressive veneers in reform hide conservative ideology:

[T]he phrase social justice has been co-opted by the political right since the 1980s, producing a narrative reliant on individual change rather than state responsibility. The Labour Party has reproduced these same logics in relation to oracy and social justice (e.g. Hardy, 2020; The Labour Party, 2023; Starmer, 2023). Whilst my critique is of a bipartisan narrative, then, of particular concern here are the social justice logics emerging from the left, particularly academics and charities who position themselves as liberally progressive. 

[D]eficit and dichotomous framings … essentialise marginalised children as linguistically impoverished and in need of remediation.

Social in/justice and the deficit foundations of oracy

Central to understanding the political nature of reform is to acknowledge the political and ideological nature of language and language acquisition—including the ideological bias in the “word gap” narrative:

Any description of language is ideological, and these ideologies are products of specific sociopolitical contexts. … These deficit perspectives continued into the twenty-first century in terms of the ‘word gap’ (Hart & Risley, 1995), blaming low academic performance on irresponsible parenting and broken homes rather than the structural inequalities within wider society (Valencia, 2010). Whilst the terminology used to represent marginalised communities as displaying linguistic deficiencies has shifted over time, the underlying logics remain the same. Yet oracy has, for the most part, evaded academic scrutiny and been positioned as a progressive linguistic concept which stands in opposition to deficit thinking.

Social in/justice and the deficit foundations of oracy

Deficit perspectives of language and children include overlapping aspects of both classism and racism as well as ableism, reflecting normative biases framed as individual deficits to be overcome through policy:

These representations align with Bereiter and Engelmann’s depictions of working-class African American children in the 1960s, who were deemed to be ‘not simply deficient in their use of words; they are deficient in their repertoire of concepts’, and thus incapable of abstract thought (Bereiter & Engelmann, 1966, p. 127)….

These ableist labels are reflective of a long history of academic scholarship which perceives non-speech languages and their users as disordered and primitive (see Henner & Robinson, 2023). In similar ways to other deficit perspectives of the time and overlooking the structural inequalities marginalised children experience, Wilkinson poses that it is inadequate linguistic abilities which put such children at a disadvantage in school, and that these inadequacies act as an impediment to the interactions required for the middle-class conditions of school….

These framings tie together race, class, and dis/ability in producing discourses of deficiency which continue to circulate in contemporary policy.

Social in/justice and the deficit foundations of oracy

This leads to a key recognition about literacy policy that is fundamentally conservative, normative, and deficit-driven:

The oracy for social justice narrative is, then, a bipartisan one, and one entirely in line with recent, mainstream political conceptualisations of social justice which focus on individualised remediation rather than endemic structures of inequality which require radical transformation….

When children are framed as suffering from gaps in their language, logics follow that they require interventions to close them, which often legitimises language prescription and policing under the purportedly progressive aims of oracy.

Social in/justice and the deficit foundations of oracy

Ultimately, then: “[D]eficit perspectives frame marginalised children as part of an ‘at-risk’ discourse, in which struggling families are both blamed for their own educational failures and responsible for addressing them.”

Education and literacy reform, regardless of the nation, tends to focus on “fixing” children or teachers, and that inidividual gaze is a distraction from addressing systemic causes of the so-called “gaps” in the performances of those students or teachers in formal schooling.

Centering the concept of literacy “gaps” and calling for closing those gaps are offering cures equal to or greater than the disease: “[O]ften framed as a progressive project, then, I have shown here how it has long relied on academic scholarship rooted in deficit, dichotomous, and anti-Black ideologies about language and supposed gaps. This has surfaced without any critical interrogation of language gap ideologies, despite the extensive body of scholarship which has debunked and rejected them (e.g. Aggarwal, 2016, Avineri et al., 2015, Cushing, 2023b, García & Otheguy, 2017, Johnson & Johnson, 2021).”

These failures are, again, bipartisan: “[B]oth sides rely on normative notions of language which rely on deficit and dichotomous framings.” And thus, “we should all be suspicious of bipartisan narratives which position oracy as a pragmatic tool for structural change.”

Cushing concludes in a way that is equally relevant to education and reading reform in the US: “Genuine social justice efforts require transformative methodologies which target the root causes of injustices and reimagine the societies which our schools are part of, generating solutions which modify systems as opposed to individuals.”

Sources

  • Overwhelming whiteness: a critical analysis of race in a scripted reading curriculum, Amanda Rigell, Arianna Banack, Amy Maples, Judson Laughter, Amy Broemmel, Nora Vines & Jennifer Jordan (2022) Overwhelming whiteness: a critical analysis of race in a scripted reading curriculum, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 54:6, 852-870, DOI: 10.1080/00220272.2022.2030803
  • Social in/justice and the deficit foundations of oracy, Ian Cushing
  • Rios, A., Matthews, S. D., Zentell, S. & Kogut, A. (2024). More being, different doing: Illuminating examples of culturally relevant literacy teaching. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 67, 283–293. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.1329

For Further Reading

Crisis, Education, education reform, Educational Research, Media, NAEP, NPE, reading, Science of Reading, Testing

Contrarian Truths about Public Education and Student Achievement

“The 2022 NAEP results show that the average reading score for fourth graders is lower than it has been in over 20 years. For eighth and twelfth graders, average scores are at about a 30-year low,” states Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) in his new literacy report, adding, “The 2022 NAEP LongTerm Trend assessment for nine-year-old students showed average reading scores not seen since 1999.”

Cassidy’s alert about a reading crisis fits into dozens and dozens of media articles announcing crises and failures among students, teachers, and public schools all across the US. Typical of that journalism was Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times about a year ago:

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.

Reading may be the most important skill we can give children. It’s the pilot light of that fire.

Yet we fail to ignite that pilot light, so today some one in five adults in the United States struggles with basic literacy, and after more than 25 years of campaigns and fads, American children are still struggling to read. Eighth graders today are actually a hair worse at reading than their counterparts were in 1998.

One explanation gaining ground is that, with the best of intentions, we grown-ups have bungled the task of teaching kids to read. There is growing evidence from neuroscience and careful experiments that the United States has adopted reading strategies that just don’t work very well and that we haven’t relied enough on a simple starting point — helping kids learn to sound out words with phonics.

Two-Thirds of Kids Struggle to Read, and We Know How to Fix It

As I have noted, education and reading crises have simply been a fact of US narratives since A Nation at Risk. But as I have also been detailing, these claims are misleading and manufactured.

In fact, a report from the progressive NPE and an analysis from the conservative Education Next offer contrarian truths about public education and student achievement, neither of which is grounded in crisis rhetoric or blaming students, teachers, and schools for decades of political negligence.

Based on NAEP data—similar to Cassidy’s report—Shakeel and Peterson offer a much different view of student achievement in the US, notably about reading achievement:

A Half Century of Student Progress Nationwide

This analysis demonstrates that the current reading crisis is manufactured, exclusively rhetorical and ideological, generating profit for media, politicians, and commercial publishers.

In short, the manufactured crises are distractions from the other contrarian truth about education as highlighted in the analysis from NPE:

Public Schooling in America

This educational grading from NPE is unique because it doesn’t grade students, teachers, or public school, but holds political leadership accountable for supporting universal public education and democracy. The standards for these grades include the following:

  • Privatization Laws: the guardrails and limits on charter and voucher programs to ensure that taxpayers and students are protected from discrimination, corruption, and fraud.
  • Homeschooling Laws: laws to ensure that instruction is provided safely and responsibly.
  • Financial Support for Public Schools: sufficient and equitable funding of public schools.
  • Freedom to Teach and Learn: whether state laws allow all students to feel safe and thrive at school and receive honest instruction free of political intrusion.

These two examples come from contrasting ideologies, yet they offer contrarian truths about public schools and student achievement that would better serve how we talk about schools and student achievement as well as how we seek ways in which to reform those schools in order to better serve those students and our democracy.

Recommended

Big Lies of Education: Reading Proficiency and NAEP

Big Lies of Education: A Nation at Risk and Education “Crisis”

Opinion: Should California schools stick to phonics-based reading ‘science’? It’s not so simple

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

Accordingly, when policymakers explore new guidelines,
they would be wise to do the following:

• Be wary of overstatements and oversimplifications within media and public advocacy, acknowledging concerns raised but remaining skeptical of simplistic claims about causes and solutions.

• Attend to known influences on measurable student reading achievement, including the socioeconomics of communities, schools, and homes; teacher expertise and autonomy; and teaching and learning conditions.

• Recognize student-centered as an important research-supported guiding principle but also acknowledge the reality that translating such research-based principles into classroom practice is always challenging.

• Shift new reading policies away from prescription and mandates (“one-size-fits-all” approaches) and toward support for individual student needs and ongoing teacher-informed reform.

In rethinking past efforts and undertaking new reforms, policymakers should additionally move beyond the ineffective cycles demonstrated during earlier debates and reforms, avoid ing specific mandates and instead providing teachers the flexibility and support necessary to adapt their teaching strategies to specific students’ needs. Therefore, state policymakers should do the following:

• End narrowly prescriptive non-research-based policies and programs such as:

o Grade retention based on reading performance.
o High-stakes reading testing at Grade 3.
o Mandates and bans that require or prohibit specific instructional practices, such as systematic phonics and the three-cueing approach.
o A “one-size-fits-all” approach to dyslexia and struggling readers.

• Form state reading panels, consisting of classroom teachers, researchers, and other literacy experts. Panels would support teachers by serving in an advisory role for teacher education, teacher professional development, and classroom practice. They would develop and maintain resources in best practice and up-to-date reading and literacy research.

On a more local level, school- and district-level policymakers should do the following:

• Develop teacher-informed reading programs based on the population of students served and the expertise of faculty serving those students, avoiding lockstep implementation of commercial reading programs and ensuring that instructional materials support—rather than dictate—teacher practice.

• Provide students struggling to read and other at-risk students with certified, experienced teachers and low student-teacher ratios to support individualized and differentiated instruction.