[Header Photo by Natasha Hall on Unsplash]

US education reform is an industry.

Simply put, since Ground Zero under the Reagan administration, A Nation at Risk, the US has experienced a constant cycle of education crisis followed by the same template for education reform.

Despite some of the actors in this reform process having good intentions, education reform has been driven primarily by those reaping political and financial rewards from those perpetual reform cycles.

In fact, the political and financial incentives for reform are not improving education, but simply waiting a few years for the crisis/reform cycle to be re-initiated.

This is a capitalism.

Owning a new car, for example, is the lifeblood of the car industry—not producing a car that serves the owner well for decades.

This is consumerism, the dirty underbelly of capitalism.

There is no distinction, then, in the US between public institutions grounded in service and the free market.

For over forty years, the US has been trapped in the foundational Lie of A Nation at Risk, a partisan report that Reagan manufactured in order to break the public’s support for public education, and as Reagan’s own marching orders revealed, to shift that support to school choice and return prayer to the classroom (the latter being one of the ugliest political lies since voluntary prayer is allowed in public schools, while forced prayer is restricted).

Regardless of the reform of the moment—charter schools, teacher evaluation, school choice, accountability, reading legislation, standards and testing, etc.—the ideology and claims remain constant: students are failing, teachers are failing, and public schools are failing.

Also consistent is a paradoxical lack of credible evidence for the claims—either for the crisis or the solutions.

Decades of charter school advocacy have been devoid of carefully unpacking that outcomes for private, public, and charter schools are essentially the same, mostly grounded in the population of students being served.

Yet, charter school advocates decry traditional public school in crisis and charter schools are miracles.

The teacher evaluation movement grounded in value added methods of evaluation also produced a stunning outcome, showing that teacher quality’s impact on student achievement remains minor, only about 1-14% as measured in testing. Concurrently, research for decades have shown that out-of-school (OOS) factors remain the dominant causal influence on learning, 60% and higher.

There is enormous political and financial profit in shouting educational crisis and promising educational miracles, but that profit also depends on the rest of us not engaging with the lack of credible evidence for both.

The current mania to reform reading is yet another cycle grounded in a manufactured crisis (easily shown to be a false claim based on the data critics use) and equally manufactured and false miracles, such as Mississippi and Florida.

Perpetual reading reform may be the best (or worst) example of education reform as industry since reading is a foundational and incredibly important aspect of education for children; further, reading instruction in the US has been fatally linked to reading programs—commercial reading programs.

It would seem that eventually we could admit that no reading program (despite all of them being marketed as research-based) has led to a nation satisfied with reading proficiency in student.

It would seem that eventually we could admit that reading programs are neither the problem nor the solution for reading proficiency.

The only value in reading programs is political or financial; and both depend on constantly replacing old programs with new programs (again, this is the car industry).

Frankly, what remains absent in education reform narratives about crisis and miracles is confronting the conditions in which students and teachers live and learn/teach.

Low and so-called delayed reading proficiency remains mostly among students facing tremendous inequities in the lives and education.

High-poverty and minority-majority neighborhoods and schools present students and teachers with barriers to learning and teaching that are immune to simply adopting a new reading program, or demanding that those teachers be retrained (again).

Constant teacher retraining is also an industry.

If you can pause, step back, and genuinely examine this round of reading reform, many, if not most, of the strongest advocates for new reading programs and teacher training are profiting politically and/or financially.

Ironically, those advocates have spent a great deal of energy demonizing the reading programs they want to replace as sources of enormous profit.

As I have argued for decades, the problems are not programs or necessarily even instructional theories, but our failure to invest in social and educational systems that are equitable.

It is not that any reading program so far has failed because of the program itself; the failure is hyper-focusing on programs and instruction without regard to the systemic forces in society and schools that remain significant barriers to student and teacher success.

States are dumping huge amounts of tax payers’ money—$100 million a year is a recurring price tag—into doing the exact same reading reform committed to just a couple decades ago under NCLB.

In fact, reading programs that have been identified in research as failing are now being mandated in states across the US.

Even more frustrating is that early research on states having already committed to reading program shuffling reveals significant problems with that implementation—erasing text diversity and de-professionalizing teachers.

Yet, who benefits from another round of program shuffling?

Politicians grandstanding and commercial reading program companies.

When I explain to people that they likely would be better off not buying a new car with that concurrent loan and monthly payments or at least acknowledging that choosing between an Accord or Camry is no real choice at all, I generally get smirks or soft nods.

When I argue that education reform is an industry, I am personally attacked, often with lies and anger.

To me this suggests we have far more people invested in perpetual education reform in the US than even our precious fetish for new cars.

That’s a damn shame.

A goddamn shame.

The cost is our democracy, not just the lives and liberty of our children—although it is hard to imagine anything more important than that for a people claiming to be committed to freedom.

A people hiding behind flags and freedom in hope of cashing in.

Although my book publishing career includes a couple works from 2001, I consider my first “real” book a volume from 2004, Numbers Games: Measuring and Mandating American Education.

I wrote a brief piece for a colleague at the time that she included in a book she was working on for Peter Lang USA under the guidance of Joe Kincheloe. Joe asked her if I could write a book for Lang based on that passage.

Kincheloe was a kind and generous scholar who launched my official scholarly career, although I had been writing seriously for two decades before we met.

Five years later, 2009, I co-authored 21st Century Literacy: If We Are Scripted, Are We Literate?, another work supported by Kincheloe.

Here in 2024, I am somewhat discouraged that I find reason to mention those works since, it appears, the evidence and arguments included in both fell on deaf ears, specifically with the widespread adoption of “science of reading” (SOR) legislation blanketing the US.

Many advocates and legislators have completely caved on teacher autonomy as state after state is mandating scripted reading programs based on false stories in the media that misrepresent teacher expertise about reading and a reading crisis.

At the core of the SOR movement, then, is the pernicious use of numbers games.

A foundational example I have addressed often is the misrepresentation of NAEP reading scores to declare that 60% (the seminal claim of Emily Hanford) or 2/3 of students are not proficient readers and/or not reading at grade level (see dozens of media articles such as one by Nicholas Kristof).

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 (see I. here about the NAEP Big Lie).

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:

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 issue is the disproportionate number of marginalized and minoritized students in the below grade level data pool.

Swirling around the NAEP Big Lie, 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%) have not, along with most of mainstream media, noted a powerful example of the possibility that the 90-95% proficiency is achievable: DoDEA schools have close to that rate of achievement (see below).

Now as the SOR movement has grown over the past 6 years, I have seen the 90-95% claim 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 NCTQ report, 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%” (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 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.

Can 95% of Children Learn to Read?

When Hansford 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.

Can 95% of Children Learn to Read?

I have found no better conclusion about the 90-95% claim than the one offered by Hansford; 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.”

But key here is that like the NAEP Big Lie, the 90-95% claim is in no way a scientific claim being used by a movement that has used “scientific” as a rhetorical baseball bat to promote their ideological (not scientific) agenda.

The SOR numbers games are essentially lies and 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 new 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): “Almost 63% of the variance in test performance was explained by social capital family income variables that influence the development of background knowledge.”

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 if we address those OOS factors, the reading achievement of DoDEA students:

The DoDEA story isn’t one of reading programs, reading theory, or teacher bashing; in fact, there is a compelling story here:

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.

Who Runs the Best U.S. Schools? It May Be the Defense Department.

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.

Numbers games have consequences, and ironically, the research emerging from SOR policies is beginning to show that SOR legislation is whitewashing the curriculum and deprofessionalizing teachers.

While there are several shifting numbers in the SOR movement, there is in fact very little science to back them up. 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.