Stories Grounded in Decades of Research: What We Truly Know about the Teaching of Reading – Compton‐Lilly – The Reading Teacher – Wiley Online Library
It is November of 2023, and humans continue to choose war.
I do not mean justifying war; I mean choosing war.
A decade ago, I published a piece about centering peace in a literature unit: 21st Century “Children’s Crusade”: A Curriculum of Peace Driven by Critical Literacy.
That multi-genre unit was grounded in part on a war poetry unit I taught for many years, anchored by R.E.M.’s “Orange Crush.” Traditional poems found commonly in anthologies included the following:
The unit on peace (click on the title above and the article begins on page 15) includes work by Howard Zinn, music by CAKE, and fiction by Kurt Vonnegut, specifically Vonnegut’s explanation of how he crafted his most recognized work, Slaughterhouse Five:
Also in 2023, there is a pervasive national narrative that K-12 teacher and professors in higher education are indoctrinating students with leftist/Marxist ideology. While this argument is old and inaccurate, almost no one is confronting the real ways in which traditional schooling indoctrinates children.
Most traditional approaches to history, in fact, portray war as normal, characterize the US as an ethical victor of war (freedom fighters), and offers almost no concession that peace is ever an option for violence and acts of terrorism and aggression.
I suspect that conservatives will consider a peace-oriented liberal indoctrination but will never admit traditional approaches to history are indoctrination.
If we care about academic freedom and humanity, then offering peace as an option seems to be the least we can do for children and all students.
Why did you listen to that man, that man’s a balloon
“Friend of Mine,” The National
Many years ago when I was teaching high school English in the Upstate of South Carolina, my hometown, I had a student turn in an essay about the legendary rock performer Pink Floyd.
Yes, this student wrote an entire essay praising Pink Floyd as an individual, not accurately as the group.
This sort of ignorant bravado was not uncommon for a teen, and was a bit funny—although I used that situation to send a clear message to the young man that ignorance wasn’t funny or impressive.
And then decades later, this:
And this ignorant bravado by the billionaire owner of the Social Media Site Formerly Known as Twitter prompted well deserved derision:
Decades after the nonsensical essay on Pink Floyd by a high school student , I suspect that my lesson was simply another adult lie, one grounded in the meritocracy myth.
You see, in the real world, ignorant bravado can lead to you being a billionaire.
And I guess, this reality is no different than a joke I often use in my classes—one that isn’t funny—when I cover citation and plagiarism.
I explain to students that academic citation is essential in college writing and that plagiarism will result in failure or even expulsion. But the good news is that plagiarism in the real world is a stepping-stone to being a senator (Rand Paul), First Lady (Melania Trump), or even president of the US (Joe Biden)!
The celebrity billionaires and millionaires (like Trump) are not smarter than most of us, are not more innovative, and are definitely not working harder.
Most of them have outsized privilege and then the sort of black heart that allows them to exploit their way to wealth.
Ethical people, we must admit, do not become billionaires; ethical people probably never get elected as well.
And you’ll notice that billionaires and people with enormous power are the ones leading the charge to deny that privilege exists, to promote above all else the meritocracy myth.
That’s because the denial and the myth serve their unearned power and wealth. Privilege, none the less, is a fact, but it isn’t a condemnation.
Simply considered, look at the NBA. Every player in the NBA is an elite athlete, and then there are the elite among the elite—Michael Jordan, LeBron James, and Larry Bird (an outlier heralded as a “hard worker” as a veneer for his whiteness).
If we set aside the racism in how white and Black NBA players are described (a big ask), let’s focus on Bird as a hard worker and elite-of-the-elite in the NBA.
Yes, Bird has white privilege, but his working-class roots complicate that status; however, the essential privilege Bird possessed was his height. Being 6’9″ allowed his other accomplishments, including the outcomes from being hard working.
At 5’5″, Bird would have never been known as an NBA elite.
Height, then, is an unearned advantage, and that is what privilege means.
Celebrity billionaires are almost all white, but also, they all had huge financial advantages that they did not create. Like Bird being 6’9″, they started with unearned advantages.
So we are left with the meritocracy myth that is at least an exaggeration, if not a lie.
Hard work matters, but so does work within an ethical and moral context.
Hard work matters, but that work may not see fruition in ways that people achieve through, mostly, the advantages of their privilege.
Let me end by returning to my early days of teaching high school.
A state college at the time was riding high with football success, and one of the players, a very large lineman who went on to NFL fame, was a bit of a celebrity.
On a segment of ESPN, that player did not represent himself or his education well with some garbled use of the English language.
When I made a joke about the university based on that player’s non-standard language usage (and I was actually just kidding), a student blurted out, “Yea, but he’s rich, richer than you.”
And there it was, a lesson by a student for his teacher.
Just get rich. Nothing else matters.
‘Merica.
The list is mind-numbingly long—education lies that won’t die.
I have detailed often the standard manufactured crisis/miracle rhetoric surrounding discussions of education in media, among the public, and by politicians.
And currently, the manufactured reading crisis is grounded in the Big Lie about NAEP and reading proficiency.
Many education lies that won’t die are ideological beliefs masquerading as evidence-based claims; two of the most persistent of those involve assertions about teacher value and merit pay schemes.
Of course, teacher value is incredibly important to student learning; however, this argument is misleading at best, at worst a lie: “Research has shown that the number one factor influencing individual student achievement is the quality of the teacher in the classroom.”
It is an incredibly compelling misrepresentation of the data available, primarily because it appears to support the value of teachers.
Yet, the evidence over many years shows that measurable student achievement is mostly driven by out-of-school factors (OOS) with in-school factors and teacher quality as a subset of that, both significantly overshadowed by those OOS factors:
The paradox is that teacher value is very difficult to measure through student achievement tests. Further, claims about teacher value that misrepresent that value force teachers and students into nearly impossible conditions to be successful.
Locally, a district is revisiting value-added efforts to attract and retain teachers in high-poverty, majority-minority school, paired with merit pay schemes (that have been tried multiple times in South Carolina unsuccessfully).
Value-added methods of teacher evaluation and merit pay are ideological commitments, and both are strongly refuted by a large body of evidence.
Simultaneously with these failed schemes, education is increasingly hostile to teachers—parent organizations framing teachers as groomers and indoctrinators along with states and districts trending toward curriculum bans and scripted curriculum that de-professionalize those teachers:
If we genuinely value teachers—and having been in this profession 40 years, I suspect that on balance we do not—we would address teaching and learning conditions (class size, teacher autonomy, etc.) within a larger effort to address social inequity in children’s communities and homes.
Ideology is not evidence, and education, teachers, and students deserve much better than political leaders and administrators using our schools as experiments of that ideology—especially when we have ample evidence that ideology is flawed.
VAM: Why Is This Zombie Policy Still Around? Peter Greene
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
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to determine the predictiveness of community and family demographic variables related to the development of student academic background knowledge on the percentage of students who pass a state-mandated, commercially prepared, standardized Algebra 1 test in the state of New Jersey, USA. This explanatory, cross-sectional study utilized quantitative methods through hierarchical regression analysis. The results suggest that family demographic variables found in the United States Census data related to the development of student academic background knowledge predicted 75 percent of schools in which students achieved a passing score on a state standardized high school assessment of Algebra 1. We can conclude that construct-irrelevant variance, influenced in part by student background knowledge, can be used to predict standardized test results. The results call into question the use of standardized tests as tools for policy makers and educational leaders to accurately judge student learning or school quality.
One of the most significant failures of media, public, political, and educational responses to the Covid/post-Covid era of traditional schooling is claiming that the Covid disruption created the problems being addressed about student mental health and student achievement.
The Covid/post-Covid era has heightened those problems in many ways, but the core issues were always the worst features of traditional schooling, notably the reductive behaviorism that drives testing/grading and classroom/school discipline.
Although I taught in K-12 education 18 years, I have been in higher education now for 22 years, working often with first-year students in my writing seminar (and this semester, in our advising program).
My first-year writing seminar students this fall are both very predictably similar to those I have taught for a couple decades and significantly exaggerated versions of those students.
We are at midterm, and students have just submitted Essay 2, a public essay in on-line format designed to help students ease into a formal cited essay (Essay 3). Essay 2 requires students to use hyperlinking for citation (and thus practice evaluating on-line sources, etc.) and incorporate images.
My first-year writing course is grounded in both writing workshop and minimum requirements instead of grades. This minimum requirements include the following:
I recognize that I must not only teach students how to write at the college level, but also how to fully engage in a process writing course.
That last point is where students have always struggled, but Covid/post-Covid students are struggling mightily.
I provide students a wealth of support material and models for assignment, such as the following for general support:
And these specifically for Essay 2/hyperlink cited essay:
For context, I should note that I do not grade assignments throughout the semester (I must submit a course grade, which is based on a final portfolio as the final exam), and I do not take off for late work because I require that all work must be completed.
Historically, despite no grades or late penalty, my students have submitted work fully and on time at about a 90+% rate. Students typically receive As and Bs in the course with a sporadic student or two who do not meet the minimum requirements and thus fail (which is a consequence of simply not being able to fully engage in process writing).
A couple weeks ago, my first-year students submitted Essay 2; only 4 out of 12 did so on time.
So, yes, Covid/post-Covid education is different, but the issues are not new, just heightened.
What I am noticing is that students struggle to follow guidelines (see above), and I spend a great deal of time prompting students on their essay submission to review the sample and checklist provided.
One recent example struck me because a student submitted their Essay 2 rewrite, which was not significantly different than the initial submission—although I provided comments, directed them to the sample/checklist, and conferenced with the student (conferences end with revision plans and students choosing their rewrite due date).
I did not respond to the rewrite, but returned it with the original submission, noted my concern about almost no real revision, re-prompted the student to review the sample/checklist, and recommended another conference to insure the student and I are using our time well with another resubmission.
Two aspects of the essay were not addressed at all; the essay failed to mention the focus/thesis throughout the body of the essay (three subhead sections), and despite the checklist explicitly requiring students use journalistic paragraphing structure (noting restricting paragraphs to 1-3 sentences), the resubmission included (as in the original submission) opening and closing paragraphs of 5-6 sentences.
The student’s response is notable because they explained how hard they worked on the rewrite, including working with our writing lab, and then apologized.
I want to emphasize that I have over 40 years of teaching writing had to help students let go of the fear of mistakes and the urge to produce “perfect” writing in one submission. Most students simply can’t engage in process writing because the dominant culture of their schooling has been reductive behaviorism that hyper-focuses on student mistakes, fosters a reward/punishment culture, and shifts student concern from authentic artifacts and learning to securing grades.
As I have examined before, students are apt to view all feedback as negative even as I carefully and consistently urge them to see feedback as necessary for growing as writers.
One strategy I incorporate is showing students the real-world process of submitting and publishing academic writing; for example, my own experience publishing a policy brief:
This context, I think, helps some with the anxiety students feel about feedback and their tendency to view that feedback as negative (even though I am not grading them and they are performing in a low-stakes environment).
None the less, students at the college level have been so powerfully trained into the reductive behaviorism of success/failure, tests/grades, and avoiding mistakes that authentic process writing and writing outcomes (students write on topics by choice) are too foreign for them to fully engage.
What concerns me beyond why and how my students are struggling (in justifiable ways) is that I also see teachers and professors complaining about “students today” on social media.
Those complaints are quintessentially American responses—blaming the individuals while ignoring the systemic influences.
Our students are struggling in heightened ways because of the disruptions of Covid/post-Covid formal schooling. But traditional and uncritical commitments to reductive behaviorism are also at the core of their struggling as well.
Many if not most of the traditional approaches to schooling in the US are antagonistic not only to learning but also to the basic humanity of students and teachers.
Learning to write is a journey, a process, but so is all learning.
Students are the canaries in the coal mine warning us that education is too often dehumanizing and reductive. When students choose not to fully engage with that education, they may be making the most reasonable decision by choosing themselves.
i want to live forever
for you
but younger & more beautiful
than who i see
in the mirror
meanwhile
we were all distracted
by the birds
akimbo on the ground
with no concept
of windows
—P.L.Thomas
[Header and all images property of Marvel and artists]
Many fans of Daredevil fell in love with the Netflix series. But when that relationship ended after three seasons and the Marvel/Disney era threatened a permanent end to more outstanding serialized Daredevil, we fans were cast into limbo.
Unlike the Marvel universe(s), in the real world, things can end end; yet, we continued to hope for resurrection.
Death and resurrection are one of the most persistent (and maybe even cliche at this point) motifs of the superhero comic book genre (Batman experiencing about 22 deaths, for example)—powerfully represented by the career of X-Men’s Jean Grey/Phoenix:
When Disney announced a reboot of Daredevil, fans rejoiced, and the death/rebirth motif once again resurfaced. This filmed rebirth, similar to the Netflix series, appeared committed to Daredevil’s print comic book roots:
Yes, the Disney reboot leaned hard into a favorite storyline from the Miller era:
Increasingly in the comic book world, however, any joy we fans feel can be incredibly short-lived (I barely began collecting Black Widow during the stellar Kelly Thomas v8 run before the series ended, along with the Black Widow solo title, after only 15 issues).
As anticipation mixed with dread grew about the Disney reboot of Daredevil (when cast members were announced, Foggy and Karen were noticeably absent), a strike delayed most original productions. In that pause, even more troubling news came: ‘Daredevil’ Hits Reset Button as Marvel Overhauls Its TV Business.
Daredevil canceled.
Daredevil rebooted.
Daredevil paused.
Daredevil rebooted again (for the better?).
During that same time span, print Daredevil also experienced a significant shift after the highly praised Chip Zdarsky run over two (inexplicable) volumes, 6 and 7.
Zdarsky’s Daredevil focused on extended explorations of Frank Miller’s focus on Matt as a Catholic and an increased emphasis on Daredevil in the ninja/supernatural world with Elektra (fully removed from Matt the lawyer and Daredevil the street-level superhero). In short, there was an abundance of spiritual fretting and an inevitable trip to Hell—and back.
The current reboot (v8) of Daredevil with a new creative team—Saladin Ahmed and Aaron Kuder—includes a soft shift back to Daredevil as a street-level superhero with a clever twist, “Recently, Matt somehow returned to life—born again as a Catholic priest”:
As with Zdarsky’s run, the priest/devil duality of the newest volume hints at plenty of Miller still surviving, including a Miller variant cover of v8 issue1:
Fans of Daredevil remain in a sort of nervous limbo while waiting for how Disney finally achieves the series Born Again, but in the mean time, we are gifted a somewhat classic rebirth of Matt and Daredevil as priest and devil with spectacular artwork and spreads:
The superhero genre of comic books provides a bittersweet irony since the one thing readers can count on is the death/rebirth motif sitting beneath the distorted passing of time—Matt/Daredevil barely aging over 60 years of comics.
While we readers can only depend in the real world on time passing and the inevitability of death.
Yes, in this real world, things will end end.
So we cling to the things that matter, the things we love.
Daredevil 1 (1964) and facsimile from 2025:
[Note: This has been submitted to state and local newspapers. So far no responses. Mainstream media resists any narrative other than blaming teachers and schools, regretfully.]
Like dozens of stories in mainstream media, Marion Blank declared in Scientific American, “Biennial testing through NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress] consistently shows that two thirds of U.S. children are unable to read with proficiency.”
Reading proficiency crisis has been at the forefront of media coverage and state-level policy for over a decade now. However, the basic claim—2/3 of children not at grade-level proficiency—is misleading at best and false at worst.
The misunderstanding lies in NAEP achievement levels. NAEP warns, “It should be noted that the NAEP Proficient achievement level does not represent grade level proficiency as determined by other assessment standards.”
Tom Loveless calls this the “NAEP proficiency myth,” adding Basic represents grade-level proficiency, and thus, 2/3 of students in the US are reading at grade level or above.
Further, Blank begins the article touting achievement in Mississippi, focusing on impressive gains in NAEP reading. The media embracing of the Mississippi “miracle” further compounds the misinformation about both a reading crisis and one state’s ability to beat the odds.
To understand the US is not experiencing a reading crisis and MS is not a “miracle” template for reading reform, we must consider the recent call for Vermont to mimic MS.
On the 2022 NAEP reading test, VT has 62% of students at or above grade level proficiency (grade 4), compared to MS with 63%. Yes, this is an impressive similarity for MS with a state experiencing a significantly higher rate of poverty and minority students.
But that is not the whole story.
States such as MS and especially FL have very impressive grade 4 NAEP scores that plummet by grade 8: Compare VT (73% grade-level proficient and above) with MS (63%) and FL (69%), notably resulting in VT in the top 6 states in the US, MS in the bottom four, and FL ranking in the middle. Researchers have noted that FL students experience some the greatest drops in achievement from grade 4 to 8, in fact.
Another ignored fact is that MS, like FL, likely achieves the test score bump from extreme levels of grade retention—impacting from about 9,000 – 12,000 students per year across grades K through 3. The MS “miracle” is a test data “mirage.”
But the most important ignored truth about reading in the US can be found in the publicly funded schools run by the Department of Defense (DoDEA)—DoDEA schools NAEP outcomes include in 2022 (grade 4) 80% and (grade 8) 90% at or above grade-level proficient.
Now here is the most ignored truth about reading achievement. DoDEA schools are not distinct from traditional public schools because of reading instruction or reading programs, but as Mervosh reports:
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….
For starters, families have access to housing and health care through the military, and at least one parent has a job….
[T]eachers 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.
Who Runs the Best U.S. Schools? It May Be the Defense Department.
The most important and ignored truth about reading proficiency in the US is that reading is a marker for socioeconomic inequity in both our society and our schools. There is no crisis and there are no miracles. But as DoDEA schools demonstrate, if we have the political will, we can and should better serve all our children as developing readers and citizens.
“The administrations in charge,” writes Gilles Deleuze in Postscript on the Societies of Control, “never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons” (p. 4).
Deleuze’s generalization about “supposedly necessary reforms” serves as an important entry point into the perpetual education crisis in the US. Since A Nation at Risk, public education has experienced several cycles of crisis that fuel ever-new and ever-different sets of standards and high-stakes testing.
Even more disturbing is that for at least a century, “the administrations in charge” have shouted that US children cannot read—with the current reading crisis also including the gobsmacking additional crisis that teachers of reading do not know how to teach reading.
The gasoline that is routinely tossed on the perpetual fire of education crisis is test scores—state accountability tests, NAEP, SAT, ACT, etc.
While all that test data itself may or may not be valuable information for both how well students are learning and how to better serve those students through reform, ultimately all that testing has almost nothing to do with either of those goals; in fact, test data in the US are primarily fuel for that perpetual state of crisis.
Here is the most recent example—2023 ACT scores:
I have noted that reactions and overreactions to NAEP in recent years follow a similar set of problems found in reactions/overreactions to the SAT for many decades; the lessons from those reactions include:
The social media and traditional media responses to 2023 ACT data expose a few more concerns about media, public, and political misunderstanding of test data as well as how “the administrations in charge” depend on manipulating test data to insure the perpetual education crisis.
Many people have confronted the distorting ways in which the ACT data are being displayed; certainly the mainstream graph from Axios above suggests “crisis”; however, by simply modifying the X/Y axes, that same data appear at least less dramatic and possibly not even significant if the issues I list above are carefully considered.
Many causal elements could be at work to explain the ACT decrease, including population shifts, social influences (such as the Covid impact), and the inherently problematic element of using test data for purposes not intended as well as making nuanced claims based on singular data points (averages).
For example, the ACT is exclusively designed to measure college preparedness, like the SAT, and not general educational quality of schools or general evaluations of student learning.
Students who take the ACT are a narrow subset of students skewed by region and academic selectivity (college-bound students versus general population of US students).
Also, while a careful analysis could answer these questions, the ACT score drop may or may not represent a significant event, depending on what that single point (average) represents (how many questions and how large is the change substantively).
Likely, however, there is never any credible reason to respond to college entrance data as a crisis of general educational quality because, as noted above, that simply is not what the tests are designed to measure.
The larger issue remains: Testing in the US rarely serves well evaluating learning and teacher, testing has not functioned in service of achieving effective education reform, but testing does fuel perpetual education crisis.
This crisis-of-the-day about the ACT parallels the central problem with NAEP, a test that seems designed to mislead and not inform since NAEP’s “Proficient” feeds a false narrative that a majority of students are not on grade level as readers.
The ACT crisis graph being pushed by mainstream media is less a marker of declining educational quality in the US and more further proof that “the administrations in charge” want and need testing data to justify “supposedly necessary reforms,” testing as gas for the perpetual education crisis fire.
Consider the following headlines from the New York Times:
The first two are confidently assertive (lots of knowing), and the third tiptoes into a question and a “may be.”
What is fascinating, and frustrating, is that the first two are almost entirely false coverage—the first badly misrepresenting reading achievement in MS and the second inexcusably misrepresenting NAEP reading data.
The key here is that the first article feeds into the misleading “miracle” narrative popular in media and political rhetoric about schools and the second asserts the “crisis” rhetoric about public education.
Media struggles with the third article topic—the exceptional achievement found in Department of Defense schools—and possibly the most telling quote in the article hits the nail on the head:
“If the Department of Defense schools were a state, we would all be traveling there to figure out what’s going on,” said Martin West, an education professor at Harvard who serves on the national exam’s governing board.
Who Runs the Best U.S. Schools? It May Be the Defense Department.
In a rare moment of almost getting things right about education and testing, the article highlights the outstanding achievement found in DoDEA schools:
Looking at reading achievement levels of NAEP is even more revealing:
While the media has dubbed MS a “miracle,” that same media struggles to understand the DoDEA success.
Why? Well, a few clues are in the article itself:
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.
Children with access to healthcare and food security, parents with stable incomes and housing, and well-paid faculty—these are all key to educational outcomes, many of us have argued for years, but the mainstream approach in the US for decades has been entirely focusing on in-school reform only—because the education establishment, conservatives argue, have used poverty as an excuse.
The reason DoDEA success is handled with a question and “may be” is that the evidence here is a message that is politically uncomfortable in the US: Education reform needs to be both social reform and school reform.
Credible reading scores (beyond grade 4) are about more than reading instruction or reading programs, but the DoDEA forces us to reconsider the “crisis”/”miracle” rhetoric and move beyond blaming teachers, reading ideologies, and reading programs.
Media and political leaders likely will let this story pass because “Logistical planning, including a predictable budget, ‘isn’t very sexy,’ but it is one key to success, said Thomas M. Brady, the director of Defense Department schools since 2014.”
So here is something we do know, but we are mostly unwilling to admit it: Poverty and inequity are not excuses, but tremendous barriers to the sort of opportunities all children deserve.
The success at DoDEA is certainly no miracle, but that success is the sort of model we should be using instead of the manufactured “miracle”/mirage of the day.
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 