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/).
I should clarify that I taught high school English throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and then, I have been a college professor (teaching mostly first-year students) since 2002.
I know a great deal about students as readers and writers.
In fact, when I was a student in the 1960s and 1970s, most students did not read assigned writing, and we were almost never asked to write anything of substance (I did lots of grammar book assignments and diagramed a metric-ton of sentences).
My students in the 1980s and 1990s (including my AP Lit students and advanced students) confessed to me that they often did not read assigned writing and my class was almost the only place they had to write (including other English classes).
Now, before I go further, I must note that Kotsko’s take is a tired and lazy one that also does identify a fact about students as readers—a lack of engagement with extended texts—that is in no way unique to the last decade, but a common reality for a century (or more) of formal schooling.
Except for a brief shining moment of possibility in the 1970s and into the 1980s when the National Writing Project promoted writing workshop and a few key literacy advocates introduced reading workshop (both of which offered structure for students choosing to read and writing in authentic and extended ways), traditional schooling and especially the accountability era of schooling since the 1980s have created students who are non-readers and non-writers.
Multiple times Applebee and Langer have shown that students are rarely asked to write in authentic and extended situations, and Gallagher’s Readcidedirectly confronts how schooling creates nonreaders.
We as a culture in the US have a very long history of handwringing about “kids today” while simultaneously working furiously to insure that those same kids are underperforming because our expectations are nonsense, our shouts of “Crisis!” are nonsense, and our education reform approaches are nonsense.
My own reading and writing lives were created outside of school—a love of science fiction and comic books laying the groundwork for me as a writer and academic.
I was an incredibly good student, reader, and writer in spite of school (although I was also lucky to have a few wonderful and encouraging teachers who worked outside the norms of schooling).
Since I have spent my entire career as a literacy educator and as a writer/scholar, I certainly deeply value reading and writing, but I also recognize that false rhetoric and narratives are equally common for a century and harmful in terms of actually achieving anything like most students being proficient and eager readers and writers.
The “kids today” approach combined with perpetual reading/writing crises is, again, tired and lazy while successfully keeping our blame-gaze on students and their teachers without rightfully pulling back and confronting the systemic forces at play.
The most profound barriers to reading and writing for students are social inequities; recent research once again confirms that a significant majority of measurable student learning is causally linked to out-of-school factors.
Yet, our obsession with reading/writing crises and “kids today” is typically paired with back-to-basics calls (More phonics! More grammar!) and in-school only reform (that looks exactly like the previous reform).
I recently sat in on a book club. Adults decided to have the book club, chose the book, and then sat around drinking wine and simply talking about the book.
And this past weekend, a friend excitedly told me they were posting an informal blog about rewatching a TV series.
People read and write.
By choice.
And it makes their lives richer.
Formal schooling has never looked like that for children as beginning readers and writers.
If we are not happy with “kids today,” we might be better off finding a mirror and taking a long look.
If and when that happens, however, we will not be able to declare victory quite yet. Defeating the open conspiracy to deprive students of physical access to books will do little to counteract the more diffuse confluence of forces that are depriving students of the skills needed to meaningfully engage with those books in the first place. As a college educator, I am confronted daily with the results of that conspiracy-without-conspirators. I have been teaching in small liberal arts colleges for over 15 years now, and in the past five years, it’s as though someone flipped a switch. For most of my career, I assigned around 30 pages of reading per class meeting as a baseline expectation—sometimes scaling up for purely expository readings or pulling back for more difficult texts. (No human being can read 30 pages of Hegel in one sitting, for example.) Now students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding. Even smart and motivated students struggle to do more with written texts than extract decontextualized take-aways. Considerable class time is taken up simply establishing what happened in a story or the basic steps of an argument—skills I used to be able to take for granted.
Among the truisms that make up the eschatology of American cultural decline, one of the most banal is the assumption that Americans don’t read. Once, the story goes–in the 1950s, say–we read much more than we do now, and read the good stuff, the classics. Now, we don’t care about reading anymore, we’re barely literate, and television and computers are rendering books obsolete.
None of this is true. We read much more now than we did in the ‘50s. In 1957, 17 percent of people surveyed in a Gallup poll said they were currently reading a book; in 1990, over twice as many did. In 1953, 40 percent of people polled by Gallup could name the author of Huckleberry Finn; in 1990, 51 percent could. In 1950, 8,600 new titles were published; in 1981, almost five times as many.
It is hard for me to overemphasize the profound impact discovering irreverent humor had on me as a young human in the 1970s.
The list is long—George Carlin, Richard Pryor, The Firesign Theater, National Lampoon, Monty Python, Saturday Night Live, and so many films.
I was 13 when Blazing Saddles (1974) was released, now celebrating its 50th year anniversary. I came to love all of Mel Brooks’s films, but Blazing Saddles found a spot not only in my consciousness but also among my mother’s side of the family.
For many years our gatherings were punctuated with quotes from the movie followed by outbursts of laughter.
But witnessing how people have responded to the film over the years raises an important question: How can anything so misunderstood also be so beloved and enduring?
Just as conservatives and anti-woke warriors have misrepresented and dishonored George Carlin, claiming that the film could not be made today because of the woke mob completely misses that Blazing Saddles is a woke film (ironically, suggesting otherwise erases the brilliance of Black contributions to the film by Cleavon Little and Ricard Pryor).
And this leads to another question: When are misrepresentations of racism racism and when are they anti-racism?
We have ample literary evidence of this problem, also recently center stage in the rise of rightwing censorship: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird are excellent examples of representations of racism that offer extremely complicated ways to understand the texts and their appropriateness for exploring racism.
Both novels suffer from centering white characters, and TKAM is likely a poor text for examining racism since it perpetuates the white savior myth.
The reignited but jumbled public debate about Blazing Saddles comes in the wake of my first audiobook experience, Yellowface by R.F. Kuang.
Soon after that listening, I also sat mostly listening to a book club discussion among almost exclusively women.
One of the points brought up, and one of my central reactions, overlaps strongly with the Blazing Saddles/ Huck Finn/ TKAM issues noted above: How does a work become popular while being either misunderstood or not fully understood?
Broadly, I read Yellowface as a scathing satire of the publishing industry (and the insider’s view of MFA and creative writing programs) and a cautionary tale about the corrosive influence of capitalism/The Market on literary quality (sort of the myth that publishing is a meritocracy) as well as DEI commitments among publishers (the novel unmasks DEI as mostly marketing and tokenism).
I mentioned to my partner that I think much of that insider satire has to be lost on many readers in the same way I think Jeffrey Eugenides’s sort of English major perspective is missed by the average reader.
Regardless, Yellowface is incredibly rich and complex in terms of what we are experiencing and how readers might best navigate the storytelling.
First, I think storytelling is central to this work about writers, of course, but Kuang—like Twain and Lee—chooses to center a white character and her white voice (often one we find hard to feel any sympathy for) in order to interrogate storytelling and even story ownership in the context of race and racism.
Here, two important elements come to mind—the use of the unreliable narrator and the overlap between Yellowface and The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood.
“Many of Edgar Allan Poe’s works include obsessed narrators who are plagued by their unconscious in order to discover their true selves,” Rachel McCoppin writes. And this description in many ways perfectly describes June Hayward, narrator of Yellowface.
June is relentlessly plagued by her Self to the exclusion of others and ultimately, it seems, to the exclusion of the Self she seems to be seeking.
Here, I must highlight Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale since, similar to Yellowface, the novel centers a white woman and her voice while also repeatedly disorienting the reader’s perception of that storytelling.
The narrator in HMT often tells an event and then confesses that version is wrong, only to tell it differently. Then, in the Historical Notes, we discover this story is a transcript recreated by a scholar from audio recordings.
Yellowface also significantly challenges the storytelling while also directly raising questions about who tells the stories as well as who should.
Does the scholar in HMT own the story simply by discovering the tapes? Does June have a right to Athena Liu’s manuscript that is also Liu’s retelling (claiming?) of the stories of Chinese laborers in WWI?
Whether intentional or not, I am also struck not only by the many names by which June Heyward goes (June Hayward, Juniper Song, Junie) but also how that mirrors the imposed name of June on the narrator of HMT:
When I first began “The Handmaid’s Tale” it was called “Offred,” the name of its central character. This name is composed of a man’s first name, “Fred,” and a prefix denoting “belonging to,” so it is like “de” in French or “von” in German, or like the suffix “son” in English last names like Williamson. Within this name is concealed another possibility: “offered,” denoting a religious offering or a victim offered for sacrifice.
Why do we never learn the real name of the central character, I have often been asked. Because, I reply, so many people throughout history have had their names changed, or have simply disappeared from view. Some have deduced that Offred’s real name is June, since, of all the names whispered among the Handmaids in the gymnasium/dormitory, “June” is the only one that never appears again. That was not my original thought but it fits, so readers are welcome to it if they wish.
Atwood and Kuang invite readers to consider the importances of names, and these works are complex dramatizations of the complexity of not only storytelling but also the storyteller.
I have been a teacher and a literary critic for many decades so after my initial urge to connect Kuang’s novel to Poe’s unreliable narrator (and his foundational role in genre fiction such as horror), I was drawn to the many wonderful referential aspects of Yellowface.
Kuang masterfully blends and fictionalizes high-profile controversies in literature and publishing. [1]
Two are linked to Oprah Winfrey’s book club: A Million Little Pieces and American Dirt.
A Million Little Piecessparked a public debate about the nature of genre since James Frey was accused of bogus claims in his published memoir (which began as a novel).
I use this debate often with students as a way to interrogate what we mean by genre, by fiction versus nonfiction, and by modes of expression. Among writers, teachers, and literary scholars, these lines are blurred, not distinct. But in the general public, there is little patience for anything other than black and white.
American Dirt, mentioned in the novel, is a recent and key publication that raised the questions many are exploring because of reading Yellowface—who has the right to a story and what constitutes appropriation (Jeanine Cummins’s novel was criticized as “brownface”).
The third reference is one of the most effective turns of Yellowface, when June discloses that Athena had co-opted a sexual assault situation experienced by June. This parallels the short story controversy around “Cat Person.”
While I struggle to feel compassion for June (or frankly any characters in the novel), the storytelling gradually reveals that Athena (and maybe all writers?) traffic in claiming other people’s stories as her own. One later scene involves June talking with Athena’s ex-boyfriend who directly confronts Athena’s willingness to use other people for her literary gain.
As I have continued to think and talk about Yellowface, I am more and more certain about what I don’t know for sure.
The end of the novel includes a revengeful character eventually (maybe?) bringing June’s charade to light, only to parlay that into her own book, Yelllowface.
Kuang has directly noted: “Who has the right to tell a story? It’s the wrong question to ask.”
For me, I am more fascinated by the storytelling than the storyteller. And Yellowface—again, like HMT—forces us through so many twist and turns that we are left unsure what story is true, or even if anything like the truth can exist.
Entering the sixth year of detailing how the “science of reading” (SOR) movement uses “science” as a cover for claims that are primarily rhetorical and ideological, I once again must highlight that this misinformation campaign continues to be “holy text” in mainstream media.
What remains stunning about the relentless misleading and factually wrong series of articles in mainstream media is the sheer absence of understanding about the topic of reading by those promoting SOR with missionary zeal.
SOR advocates lack scientific evidence for their claims and seem mostly driven by market/commercial or political/ideological agendas.
Durig’s misinformation is not only the exact same series of false claims you can find weekly since about 2018, but also a disturbingly careless recycling of Emily Hanford’s copycat misinformation articles initiated by “Hard Words” and then recycled into the melodramatic and misleading Sold a Story podcast.
If you follow that link, you find a reference to MO’s NAEP grade 4 reading scores:
Using the exact same misinformation tactic as Hanford in 2018 and Nicholas Kristof in the NYT, Durig either doesn’t understand NAEP achievement levels or is being purposefully misleading; in either case, readers would be better served by not reading further since her argument is built on a lie.
NAEP “basic” is approximately grade level reading, and thus, 60% of MO students are reading at grade level or above, not 30%. [1]
One must ask, if you have to lie to make your case, do you have a case?
The follow-up claims—”The numbers are even more alarming for Black and Hispanic students in the state. They drop to 17% and 7%, respectively”—do not seem corroborated by the NAEP link, showing 31% of Black students at grade level or above and 56% of Hispanic students at grade level or above:
In the US, achievement inequity along racial lines is a historical failure of all achievement, not just reading. But again, if this is a serious issue, misinformation isn’t needed.
But it gets worse, if that is possible, because, Durig claims, “We are in the midst of a reading revolution. The way kids are taught to read in Missouri — and across the country — needs to be overhauled. And any rebuild should be based on the science of reading, including phonics.”
What is most disturbing is the lack of “science” in what follows, notably these well-worn but false series of claims and the links to anything except “science”:
Unfortunately, a lot of early reading teachers in the United States still practice what’s known as balanced literacy. That approach relies heavily on teacher choice and professional judgment. Teachers are taught to have many tools in their toolbox, and to use the methods that they think are most appropriate for their students.
One common practice in balanced literacy is guided reading, in which teachers coach students in a variety of comprehension strategies as they read a book matched to their level. Teachers encourage students who struggle over individual words to use pictures and context, in addition to looking at the letters, to guess at what the word could be.
But should kids be guessing at words when learning to read? There’s a ton of research that says no.
Note that these claims include two hyperlinks—the first to NCTQ (which links to a blog post to prove the 90% claim), and the second to Education Week, more misinformation journalism, not science.
As many have demonstrated by conducting external peer-review, NCTQ is an ideologically conservative think tank founded by The Thomas B. Fordham Institute. NCTQ releases non-scientific reports that are not peer-reviewed. In other words, no NCTQ report meets even the minimum standards of “science,” and in fact, the reports have been shown to use shoddy methods to draw predetermined conclusions about teacher education. [2]
Durig also depends on the Balanced Literacy Big Lie, reducing BL to a caricature of guessing using pictures instead of decoding. Notably as well, Durig offers no links for the “ton of research” claim (because there is none).
The accurate claim about BL is that we have no scientific research to support claims of a reading crisis, no scientific research proving BL has failed, and no data proving any universal application of BL or reading programs. The media and political attacks on BL and reading programs are entirely rhetorical and ideological.
With this careless and misleading article, we find ourselves trapped in the sixth year of the Hanford SOR lie, and it seems too few people are willing to tell the real story of reading, the one that students deserve instead of using “science” to promote the same baseless reading war we have been waging since at least the 1940s.
Fuller, E. J. (2014). Shaky methods, shaky motives: A critique of the National Council of Teacher Quality’s review of teacher preparation programs. Journal of Teacher Education, 65(1), 63-77. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0022487113503872
Cochran-Smith, M., Stern, R., Sánchez, J.G., Miller, A., Keefe, E.S., Fernández, M.B., Chang, W., Carney, M.C., Burton, S., & Baker, M. (2016). Holding teacher preparation accountable: A review of claims and evidence. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/teacher-prep
your eyes are green today
you still don’t look anything like your father
she tells me
on a chilly day in february
while we are playing fetch
with our dog
the first and only day
she met my father
he died in front of us
asking to go to the bathroom
this is just a fact
we carry with us
a thing
a coincidence
my eyes are brown
and my father’s eyes
were startlingly green
nestled still there underneath my sadness
there was nothing anyone could do then
just a million things we all could have done
over dozens of indistinct years
when we were doing almost anything else
that’s a poem i said
you can have it she smiled
like i ask permission i laughed
thinking about my lips on her chilled skin
we didn’t acknowledge this unspoken
the time she asked me the color of her eyes
lying in the dark together
and i said blue about her brown eyes
this is just a fact
we carry with us
a thing
a coincidence
Let’s start with paired texts, one from X/Twitter and one from media:
With more than half of Connecticut’s third-graders failing to meet reading benchmarks, education stakeholders across the state agree that existing strategies must change in order to boost student scores.
How to go about that change is where the consensus ends.
State education officials are doubling down on their support of “Right to Read” legislation they believe will provide equal opportunity for all children learning how to read, despite local school leaders’ misgivings about the implementation of the law.
One of those critics is Westport Supt. of Schools Thomas Scarice, who after state officials refused to grant the town a waiver from the new program, expressed “disappointment as a result of the endless hours our faculty and leaders have spent on this waiver process.” He was responding to a request for comment from the Westport Journal in December.
In Westport, 73.8 percent of third graders achieved reading proficiency last year — 10 percentage points lower than the year before — but still among the highest in the state.
The state Department of Education “moved the goal posts throughout the process, and we continued to flex to meet those expectations,” Scarice contended.
“Programs do not teach kids. Materials do not teach kids. Highly skilled professional educators teach kids, and that is what we have in Westport,” he said.
In the midst of the reading program shuffle that the second text above is addressing, we must answer Katie’s question with a not-so-fun fact: “Science of Reading” (SOR) foundational claims that balanced literacy programs have cause a reading crisis in the US are not supported by science.
In fact, research for decades (including NRP reports) have shown that whole language, balanced literacy, and systematic phonics are about equally effective for student reading proficiency (comprehension); for example:
Bowers, J.S. (2020). Reconsidering the evidence that systematic phonics is more effective than alternative methods of reading instruction. Educational Psychology Review, 32(2020), 681-705. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10648-019-09515-y
Wyse, D., & Bradbury, A. (2022). Reading wars or reading reconciliation? A critical examination of robust research evidence, curriculum policy and teachers’ practices for teaching phonics and reading. Review of Education, 10(1), e3314. https://doi.org/10.1002/rev3.3314
The really frustrating fact about the SOR movement is that “science” is the rhetoric of the advocacy and legislation, but anecdote is the primary evidence used to perpetuate essentially ideological claims:
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
Like CT, most states and notably NYC have passed legislation mandating districts and schools drop existing programs falsely labeled as “failing” and choose among a few reading programs falsely labeled SOR.
As one vivid example of this charade is the fate of the program Open Court, which has had a recent turn as program-of-the-day in the wake of the NRP/NCLB mandate that all programs had to be scientifically-based.
Although written in 2017, this overview of Open Court by McQuillan could have been written today, or sadly, several years from now:
Translation: Open Court does no better, and often worse, than the alternatives.
This most recent study is by no means the only evidence against phonics instruction or programs such as Open Court. The list of studies that show the failure of phonics is too long to repeat here, but you can whet your appetite by looking at what happened with the U.S. Department of Education’s spectacularly expensive and utterly ineffective Reading First program (here, here, and here, for starters).
Journalists and politicians get to move on to the next Great Cause, but the teachers and kids stuck in Open Court classrooms often have no such option.
And thus, the really not-so-fun fact is that despite ample evidence to the contrary, some states have included Open Court in the new mandates!
Here is the real issue that is at the core of our obsession with manufacturing a reading crisis and then demanding the exact same reform strategies, again—mostly declaring some programs failures and mandating new programs instead: Reading programs have not caused a reading crisis, and different reading programs are not the reform solution regardless of our reading goals.
Since I have been making this argument literally for decades, I end here with a reader to emphasize that I endorse no reading programs—never have, never will:
And it bears repeating: “’Programs do not teach kids. Materials do not teach kids. Highly skilled professional educators teach kids, and that is what we have in Westport,’ [Westport Supt. of Schools Thomas Scarice] said.”
All PK-12 teachers in our public schools—especially those who teach reading and language arts; those who work with English Language Learners; and those whose practice includes teaching content-area reading—as well as their administrators, plus those who prepare teachers, are part of this plan Illinois State Board of Education notes is designed to “guide and unify literacy efforts across the state.”
Our panel will help attendees understand the national context within which this plan was developed, along with how ISBE defines the problems in current Illinois literacy teaching. The core components of the plan, and how they will affect the curricular and instructional choices made by classroom teachers and teacher education program faculty, will be described and discussed.
One focus of the panel will be on examining critiques of the plan, what was left out, what the next steps will be for school districts, and the extent to which its provisions promote the complexity and nuances of literacy acquisition and teaching. The crucial question—What do teachers really need to support their literacy instruction? —will be considered from multiple viewpoints by the panel and attendees.
PANELISTS INCLUDE:
Dr. Marie Donovan, Associate Professor & Program Director, Early Childhood, College of Education, DePaul University
Cathy Mannen,Professional Issues Director, Illinois Federation of Teachers; Early Childhood and Literacy Teacher & Mentor
Cristina Sanchez-Lopez, Co-President Paridad Education; Bilingual, Bicultural Instructor, College of Education, DePaul University
This forum will build upon the Spring 2023 forum on the ‘reading wars,’ where expert panelists discussed the ‘science of reading’ as well as what we now know from research are hallmarks of effective literacy instruction. Here is the link to that forum’s recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/wlM4kOgXikU?si=4m8AzgttSKDzj-Rp
All attendees must register individually. If you register and can’t attend you will receive a recording of the forum the following week. Please share this notice and flyer with colleagues and friends.
One brief analogy I use when asking students to consider both literacy and teaching literacy (as well as teaching and learning in general) is to recall a time when they had to assemble something like a bookshelf or a large toy for children.
The point is to consider the ways in which we navigate the directions and assembling the item. I nudge them by asking how well they feel the written directions help them and then what they do when they find themselves confused while assembling.
A typical moment of community in this thought experiment is that many of us rely on the picture on the box to help guide us.
Yes, we turn to look at the picture to help us make meaning of the process.
I recently assembled two large filing cabinets and cannot express the relief of having the detailed directions, the image of the completed filing cabinet in several angles on amazon, and a video of someone assembling the cabinets.
My point is that the most compelling part of assembling an item for many people is the whole, finished product. We really want and even need is to see the whole authentic thing.
But that does not mean that the step-by-step instructions do not matter; they certainly help, and following the instructions carefully often makes assembly successful.
In my case, I also found that the second cabinet was a breeze because I had the experience of building the first one.
All of this is to say that literacy, like the assembling analogy, is a holistic and authentic human behavior that is both natural (speaking and listening) and requires a learning process (reading and writing).
And like my experience with building two cabinets, literacy development is best learned when grounded in its holistic state but greatly aided by attending in some ways with identifiable parts (so-called skills). Ultimately, as well, literacy development requires a great deal of authentic experiences as part of that growth.
I have again been thinking about all this after presenting at LitCon 2024 and having several people approach me about my stance on nonsense words as a way to asses students’ phonics knowledge.
The reason issues about how to teach phonics in reading instruction (parallel to how to teach grammar, mechanics, and usage in writing instruction) remains a point of debate, I think, is that most literacy debate is driven those who are missing the forest for the trees, committed to implementing inauthentic and decontextualized practices.
My standard position is that using nonsense words to assess phonics knowledge in students is misrepresenting the purpose of reading skills (all of which are ways in which readers seek to make meaning) and misrepresenting reading achievement (testing phonics knowledge is not testing reading, which must include comprehension).
For a century, alas, we have remained mired in a literacy debate that itself is mostly nonsense.
I know of no one who advocates for no phonics (or no grammar) instruction.
Again, the debate is mostly between those hyper-focusing on the trees (such as the “science of reading” [SOR] mandates for phonics-first and systematic phonics for all students) and those arguing that regardless of how we teach, we must keep the forest in sight (the holistic and authentic acts of literacy, reading and writing).
A key question is not whether students have acquired phonics knowledge but if students can read for meaning and are eager to do so.
The SOR movement and the concurrent rise in SOR legislation, policy, instructional practices, and programs are mostly a recycling of many eras of reading crises followed by reading reform.
We have in recent history a reading crisis/reform movement grounded in scientifically-based mandates, NCLB, that has led to, yes, the exact same reading crisis and nearly the exact same reform agendas.
And once reading research and science have been diluted by ill-informed media and even more ill-informed politicians, we are faced with mandates that are banning some practices as not “scientific” (often without any citation to that science) and mandating practices and programs that are themselves not supported by scientific evidence—LETRS training, Orton-Gillingham, so-called SOR programs (see blow), decodable texts, phonics checks using nonsense words, etc.
In short, reading wars often fail reading, students, and teachers because ideological biases are wrapped in veneers such as “science” and research. The agents of that failure are often non-literacy experts and non-educators—notably journalists, politicians, and corporate entities eager to rebrand and market new educational materials and programs.
As I documented in my SOR policy brief, the problems with SOR are mostly not that we should avoid reading reform (specifically the need to do a much better job of serving the needs of marginalized and minoritized students since literacy, like all of formal education, remains inexcusably inequitable), but that reform must be (1) grounded in accurate identification of the problems, (2) informed by educators and educational researchers without market stakes in that reform, and (3) designed to serve the individual needs of all students (and not one-size-fits all mandates).
The current wave of SOR stories and legislation fails all of those guidelines and is proving to be another attempt at doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.
Let’s now consider a couple examples of why SOR is misguided.
First, assessments using nonsense words and systematic phonics for all students are not supported by reading science; further, these practices can in fact cause harm:
Advocates of the phonics screening tests claim that they are fun. In fact, for fluent readers, it can destroy their recognition as competent readers. In one school example, a boy who came to school reading, and who continued to flourish as a fluent reader, scored 2/40! Since the test includes nonsense words in the quest to focus on decoding (he read “elt” as “let,” “sarps” as “rasp,” and “chab” as “cab,” to foreground a few!) What he seemed to be doing was re-arranging the letters or sounds and reconstructing them into recognizable words that he knew made sense. Meanwhile, another child whom the teacher regarded as not being a fluent reader was able to sound out the nonsense words as well as regular words and achieve a score of 16/40, all without knowing their meaning. Thus, the raw scores from the test of each child give us no information about them as readers and how they can make meaning from text; they simply show how they decode words out of context.
When any instruction starts with the content or skill without regard for what the student knows or needs to know, that practice is wasting precious time better spent on what that student needs and in some cases mis-teaching students (nonsense words make the phonics knowledge the goal and misleads students to see making meaning as unneeded).
Next, as noted above, the SOR reform movement is once again making the fatal mistake of misreading the importance of reading programs while simultaneously falsely blaming some programs as failures while endorsing programs that have (ironically) been discredited through research.
Once at the center of the Reading First scandal during NCLB, Open Court is now being mandated in states such as Virginia (as one of a few districts can choose).
Endorsing Open Court is evidence that the SOR movement remains mostly ideology and not “scientific”; in fact, the resurfacing of Open Court is deja vu all over again:
Back in the 1990s, the Los Angeles Times was a big fan of the scripted reading curriculum, Open Court, designed to teach reading in the elementary grades through a heavy dose of explicit, systematic phonics. The Times reporters wrote lots of favorable articles about phonics instruction in general, especially then-education reporter, Richard Lee Colvin. Others got in on the act, too, including Jill Stewart of the LA Weekly, whose “The Blackboard Bungle” article should be a case study in the lack of “fact checking” in reporting.*
Open Court ended up being adopted by Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), among many other districts around the country – never mind that the evidence for the effectiveness of phonics was (and is) severely lacking. (LAUSD eventually abandoned the program in 2011.)
And after Open Court was adopted in a major US city (think about the outsized anger leveled at Units of Study in NYC), what does the scientific evidence show?:
Translation: Open Court does no better, and often worse, than the alternatives.
This most recent study is by no means the only evidence against phonics instruction or programs such as Open Court. The list of studies that show the failure of phonics is too long to repeat here, but you can whet your appetite by looking at what happened with the U.S. Department of Education’s spectacularly expensive and utterly ineffective Reading First program (here, here, and here, for starters).
Journalists and politicians get to move on to the next Great Cause, but the teachers and kids stuck in Open Court classrooms often have no such option.
As McQuillan warned, we are now in the throes of the “next Great Cause,” and students and teachers are trapped, again, by mandates driven by ideology, politics, and market interests.
If you take the time to look, the greater the missionary zeal about a reading crisis and reading reform, the more likely the person is blinded by beliefs, motivated by political gain, or cashing in.
Regretfully, centering the use of nonsense words in the SOR movement does capture what all the reading crisis histrionics ultimately are—nonsense.
As is typical of education reform, SOR advocates are missing the forest for the trees.
Megan Chaffin, Holly Sheppard Riesco, Kathryn Hackett-Hill, Vicki Collet, Megan Yates Grizzle & Jacob Warren (25 Oct 2023): “Phonics Monkeys” and “Real Life Reading”: Heteroglossic Views of a State Reading Initiative, Literacy Research and Instruction, DOI: 10.1080/19388071.2023.2271085
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
For many years I have been raising concerns about the use of “crisis” rhetoric around education [1], specifically challenging the default use of “crisis” and “miracle” in mainstream media.
The central role of “crisis” rhetoric in the accountability era of education reform has been characterized as a “manufactured” [2] crisis.
The current subset of education reform, the “science of reading” (SOR) movement, fits into the same patterns of the broader accountability era of education reform, I have argued.
Here, I am using Edling excellent work on the relationship between mainstream media and education to reinforce the claims that SOR as a reform movement is both mainstream accountability reform and essentially conservative.
I want this overview to be accessible, but I also highly recommend reading the piece in it entirety (click title above for access).
Edling’s first sentence establishes: “What is of particular interest in this paper is how professional teachers repeatedly, although not always, seem to be pictured in a de-contextualized and non-relational manner by actors outside education, and especially how the media often fails to take educational complexity and practice into account.”
Media representations of education, then, are often overly simplistic. Note that a key aspect of the SOR movement [3] is the claim that reading science is simple (the simple view of reading) and settled, effectively erasing the complexity of reading science and of reading instruction.
Edling’s explanation about the relationship between media and education also describes well the story of reading found in the SOR movement:
Newspapers do not just write about education, they also represent to their readers what education is ‘about’ (p. 392, see also McLure, 2003; Thomas, 2004). Similarly, Fairclough (1995) stresses that the media has the power: ‘to shape governments and parties … influence knowledge, beliefs, values, social relations, social identities’ (p. 2). From this way of reasoning, the media can be seen as an important power source for the construction of certain ideologies that can either exclude or include (Fairclough, 1995, p. 14), depending on how they are positioned and what sets the agenda for what is to be framed as true or false in society (cf. Johnson-Cartee, 2005).
There is no doubt that critical analyses of education in general are necessary in order to improve quality. Education is here understood as a broad concept that includes institutions such as (pre)schools, teacher education and the ideas behind them (cf. Sa ̈fstro ̈m & Ekerwald, 2012). However, what is highlighted here is not criticism of the media itself, but how the media’s recurring simplifications and often negative images of education and teachers are understood and how they might affect people who are seen or define themselves as teachers. Moreover, teachers in teacher education and teachers at (pre)schools are dialectically interconnected, in that teacher education aims to educate teachers, who are capable of acting as professionals in various educational positions—not the least in (pre) schools. For that reason, the term teacher includes teachers at (pre) schools and teacher education (cf. Hallse ́n, 2013).
In the paper, four interrelated propensities are problematized concerning the media’s portrayals of teachers and education:
Viewing education as being in more or less permanent crisis
Taking the role as a spokesperson for teachers and on behalf of the field of education
Excluding the knowledge and experiences of teacher(s), educators and/or educational researchers in the public press
Simplifying the notion of being a good teacher through stereotypes and dualistic frameworks that overlook task and relational complexity.
The SOR movement is yet another reading crisis in a long line of similar reading crises reaching back to the 1940s. Also the SOR movement is being driven by journalists who are identified as literacy experts, and those journalists have repeatedly characterized teachers as ill-equipped to teach reading because the entire field of teacher education has failed those teachers.
As the fourth bullet point above notes, as well, the SOR movement depends on simplistic characterizations of balanced literacy and reading programs as well as cartoonish caricatures of “three cueing” and “guessing” as pervasive failures of reading instruction across the entire US.
Edling details next “educational crisis discourse”:
Although crisis in the media is generally pictured as having specific causes that can be limited to a certain time in history (Wiklund, 2006), research indicates that the notion of educational crisis has been used as a more or less constant image ever since the 1950s and 1960s, and can be associated with the progressive school vs. conservative school problematic…. [C]risis is something that originates in the clash between different world views. As it is reasonable to assume that different world views will exist as long as there are humans, it is equally reasonable to assume that crises—including educational crises—will too.
The repetition of the word crisis is closely related to ideas that teachers and teacher education are incapable of dealing with education in a proper way. Crisis is used as a blanket to cover the field of education and, as in a situation of social crisis, groups outside education feel the need to step in and take control. The phenomenon can be described as an outside-in vs. an inside-out professionalism (cf. Stanley & Stonach, 2013). It is argued that the way in which people from the outside have assumed the right to define what is good and bad education has created a systematic disbelief in teachers in ways that have reduced their professional autonomy (Ball, 2011; Beach & Bagley, 2012; Krantz, 2009; Lauder, Brown, & Halsey, 2009).
Other researchers point to how the media refers to teacher education and teachers as lacking the necessary qualities and blames them for the crisis in school without taking the purposes and contexts of education into account (cf. Cochran-Smith & Fries, 2008; MacLure, 2003; Thomas, 2004; Warburton & Saunders, 1996).
The SOR movement has manufactured a reading crisis (mostly from misrepresenting NAEP data) and then placing soft or indirect blame on reading teachers and direct blame on teacher educators.
Edling notes that blame for educational crises do vary across countries (Sweden, for example, portrays teachers as victims of the crisis as well as the authorities who can overcome that crisis, contrary to the SOR story of teacher blaming). However, Edling adds that in most crisis discourse about education “teacher educator(s) and educational researchers were degraded and silenced,” similar to the current SOR movement.
Broadly, Edling emphasizes “a tendency to repeatedly fixate the debate on education in a dualistic and simplified image that omits the task and relational complexity,” resulting in “[s]tructural violence”:
Structural violence is generated through social practice and law, and hence becomes closely entwined in a specific culture and the norms that govern it, which implies that people in general, including members of group who suffers from their consequences, risks upholding the norms in their every-day actions since the norms are taken for granted as true. From this sense, people or groups of people, such as teachers, are not neutral or simply passive victims but partakers in the weaving of social structures. Violence is produced as a recurring beat through endorsed ideals, speech, gestures, choice of focus and solutions to world problems. The violence that becomes materialized as a consequence of these structures does not necessarily have to do with ill-will, as in deliberately wanting to do harm. On the contrary, what characterizes these acts is that they appear to be normal, harmless and sometimes have the ambition to do good, whereas in reality, they make life difficult for certain groups of people (cf. Cudd, 2006, p. 127, Epp & Watkinsson, 1997, p. 6).
Here is a key point: Journalists and teachers do not need to be bad actors for the media stories and resulting consequences to be bad actions. Hanford and other journalists as well as elected officials likely see their work as good work even as their messaging and policy endorsements are oversimplified, misguided, and harmful (to teachers and students).
This helps explain why Hanford and other journalists have teacher support:
She argues that our identity is not just shaped by how we see ourselves, but also through the way others see us, and that seeing is often coloured by stereotypes and norms (Young, 1990, p. 46–47). In accordance with the associative model, teachers can choose to see themselves as part of the professional group of teachers, which research describes as complex and multidimensional. At the same time, the group affinity model helps to illuminate how teachers’ identity as a group is shaped from the outside based on stereotyped and simplified images of teachers and educational researchers. Hence, people can identify themselves as members of the group known as ‘teacher professionals’ that is associated with certain practices. At the same time, they may have to face contrasting images of a teacher created by the media.
Parallel to the role of NAEP in the media-manufactured reading crisis, the role of standardized tests is acknowledged by Edling: “In a sense, one could argue that reports such as TIMMS and PISA have presented evidence of the failure of education in many countries, which might suggest that the negative criticism of teachers and education is justified. The results in the reports have been used to motivate several reforms focusing on measurability, accountability and control.”
Ultimately the stories perpetuated by media are stereotypes: “Once people have become accustomed to stereotypical thinking, they may not be able to see individuals or situations for what they are. Accordingly, a problem with stereotypes is that they are used to judge and pigeonhole people, without really taking into account context and unique individuals.”
The crisis story of reading in SOR is a simplistic story of caricature about teachers, teacher educators, balanced literacy, and reading programs. the complexity of the real world of teaching and learning reading are erased. As Edling notes:
Parallel with the recurring waves of crisis that wash over the field of education and the recurring stereotyped images of teachers, the curriculum complexity of the purposes and practices of education generally goes unnoticed in the media debate on education. What is forgotten is that teachers are not free to do as they want, even though their profession often allows them some kind of freedom to judge. Indeed, as the teaching profession is politically defined, it is obliged to pay attention to a multitude of different policies (Ball et al., 2012) and curriculum purposes (Hopmann, 2007). In a sense, it is possible to assert that teaching in many countries have come to be restricted to a standard and accountability movement; and hence, rendered more mechanical and simplified than before—very much following the logic presented in media (cf. Apple, 2011; Berliner, 2013).
Consequently, Edling explains: “Rather than beginning the discussion with the various demands that are embedded in teachers’ professional assignments, there are tendencies within the media to portray the good teacher as someone who is capable of efficiently transferring knowledge to pupils, where the epistemology of knowledge stems from science rendering it equal with truth and fact about a world (Wiklund, 2006, p. 177).”
The weaponizing of “science” in the SOR movement, in fact, has begun to creep broader into the science of learning, the science of writing, and the science of math.
The great paradox of crisis rhetoric in media coverage of education is it insures failure:
The implication is that whatever they do, they will end up as failures in the sense of being unable to embrace the multitude of requirements at the same time. Hence, drawing on the task and relational complexity of teachers’ work, one might ask whether it is possible to be an impeccable teacher in the relational midst of education if a multitude of educational purposes and relational inconsistencies have to be taken into account. If it is not, perhaps there is a point in adhering to more nuanced judgements of teachers’ quality in accordance with curriculum content, purposes and the ways in which relations are played out in educational spaces.
Edling warns: “[T]he power of the media and the damaging consequences of repeatedly judging groups of people through a grid of stereo- types need nevertheless to be taken seriously,” concluding:
Consequently, when the media systematically define teachers as working in a field of crisis and need exterior help to sort things out, it automatically excludes the professional knowledge and experiences of teachers and educational researchers and their task and relational complexity, which are already present in their day-to-day work, from the debate.
In the light of these tendencies, research on structural violence helps to remind us that: (a) teachers are unwillingly forced into a paradoxical (in)visibility (even in Sweden, where it is pointed out that their voices need to be heard), (b) they are squeezed in-between two pressuring external demands, namely the complexities in their professional assignment that are politically steered and stereotypes of the good and bad teacher produced by, in this case, the media, (c) they risk wasting time and energy on addressing prejudices that have nothing to do with the specific work they are expected to do, and d) the logic of binary stereotypes is a power issue that brands teachers into a position of permanent failure.
While Edling is writing about media coverage of education in general, her examination matches exactly how the SOR movement works as well as how that movement is grounded in misinformation to the detriment of teachers, students, and democracy.
[3] See an overview of the story about reading now commonplace in media, grounded in Emily Hanford’s journalism, specifically her article “Hard Words.”
educator, public scholar, poet&writer – academic freedom isn't free
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 