P. L. Thomas, Professor of Education (Furman University, Greenville SC), taught high school English in rural South Carolina before moving to teacher education. He is a former column editor for English Journal (National Council of Teachers of English), current series editor for Critical Literacy Teaching Series: Challenging Authors and Genres (Brill), and author of Teaching Writing as Journey, Not Destination: Essays Exploring What ‘Teaching Writing’ Means (IAP, 2019) and How to End the Reading War and Serve the Literacy Needs of All Students: A Primer for Parents, Policy Makers, and People Who Care (IAP, in press). NCTE named Thomas the 2013 George Orwell Award winner. He co-edited the award-winning (Divergent Book Award for Excellence in 21st Century Literacies Research) volume Critical Media Literacy and Fake News in Post-Truth America (Brill, 2018). Follow his work @plthomasEdD and the becoming radical (https://radicalscholarship.wordpress.com/).
Education journalism has been deeply invested in telling negative stories about US public education for many decades. But media coverage of education has also had a long history of relying on sources that are disproportionately not educators or education scholars. [1]
As mainstream and traditional media has contracted, however, education journalism has increasingly become uncritical press-release journalism. Think tanks that are aggressive and produce slick reports that appear to be scholarly are very effective in having those reports —typically not peer reviewed—breathlessly covered by major media outlets.
Three recent reports that were not peer reviewed and are essentially advocacy with ideological agendas represent the current failure of press-release journalism:
The essential problem in this uncritical media coverage of think tank and ideological reports that have not been peer reviewed is that they typically make exaggerated and unsupported claims; and when external reviews fundamentally debunk or strongly caution against viewing the reports as credible, media fails to follow up.
In short, the counter evidence in external reviews do not receive the same sort of coverage from media as the original and flawed reports.
For example, consider the following reviews of those reports:
CREDO charter report reviewed here: Ferrare, J.J. (2023). NEPC review: As a matter of fact: National charter school study III 2023. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http:// nepc.colorado.edu/review/charter-study
For those interested in fair and accurate research in education and education policy driven by evidence and not ideological agendas, we must begin to hold education journalism accountable for the careless press-release journalism that fails students, teachers, and the promise of universal public education.
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
Forty Years of Failure: When Caricature Drives Education Reform in Post-Truth America
P.L. Thomas
Reporting for NPR about A Nation at Risk, Anya Kamenetz (2018) noted:
When it appeared in April 1983, the report received widespread coverage on radio and TV. President Reagan joined the co-authors in a series of public hearings around the country.
The report’s narrative of failing schools — students being out-competed internationally and declining educational standards — persists, and has become an entrenched part of the debate over education in the U.S.
Years later, writing for The Answer Sheet in The Washington Post, James Harvey (2023) explains that the report under Reagan was “gaslighting” for political purposes, and not the clarion call to address education reform that media, the public, and political leaders claimed. In short, A Nation at Risk was a “manufactured crisis” (Berliner & Biddle, 1997).
Yet, education reform has become a central focus of the political agendas for governors and presidents since the 1980s, reaching a critical peak under George W. Bush who turned the discredited “Texas Miracle” (Haney, 2000) into groundbreaking and bipartisan federal legislation, No Child Left Behind (NCLB). In fact, public education in the US has been under an intense public and political microscope over forty years of high-stakes accountability. For educators, that accountability is indistinguishable regardless of the political party in the White House. The Obama administration in many ways continued and even doubled down on the crisis/miracle rhetoric found under W. Bush (Thomas, 2015).
Below, I examine how the current 40-plus year cycle of accountability reform in education represents the power of fake news and post-truth rhetoric to shape not only our perceptions of education, students, and teachers but also the policies and practices we implement in our schools to the detriment of teaching and learning. The following false narratives—fake news since these stories are nested in and perpetuated by the media and political rhetoric—are interrogated: the use of caricature in criticism of education, A Nation at Risk, reading crises, student reading proficiency and National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) testing, balanced reading, the “science of reading” (SOR) and phonics advocacy, teacher knowledge and teacher education, and the crisis/miracle cycles of education criticism and reform.
Who controls the stories is central to who maintains power in the US. Public beliefs are created by the stories media and political rhetoric offer regardless of the facts or credibility in those stories. In education, fake news has been central to those stories well before the popular consideration of “fake news” and “post-truth” associated with Trump era politics.
Fake News, Post-Truth, and the Accountability Era of Education Reform as Caricature
“Fake news” as a term has an interesting history and represents how words and terms often shift in their meaning when they expand out from a narrow technical meaning to popular usage; also, once a word enters popular usage, we are wasting a great deal of energy if we persist in arguing “That’s not what the word means” (a good example being “epitome”).
However, “fake news” originally referred to online news stories that were intentionally fabricated to drive clicks and revenue; these stories were almost entirely false and often included provocative images and headlines—and the creators typically removed these false stories when revenue traffic dwindled. Once “fake news” entered the media and popular discourse, the term broadly identified false claims in news or public/political speech; eventually, during the Trump era, Trump and other conservatives co-opted the term as a paradoxical weapon, calling anything “fake news” that contradicted their ideological agendas (Goering & Thomas, 2018).
Because of these developments, we are in a post-truth era in which using the term “fake news” can mean either exposing false claims or masking false claims behind rhetorical histrionics. None the less, we must pull back from this current and convoluted status of “fake news” to place how we arrived here and to avoid framing either “fake news” or “post-truth” as an essentially Trump-based phenomenon. Consider, for example, how mainstream media has worked historically and currently in terms of shaping public narratives not grounded in valid evidence.
In 2017, the New York Times published an article shaming poor people for their grocery shopping habits (O’Connor, 2017), speaking into the “Food Stamp Fables” that were immediately debunked by a scholar of public service who cited and corrected the journalist’s misrepresentation of a USDA report (Soss, 2017). Further, the NYT’s article is eerily like a parody article in The Onion (Woman a leading authority, 2014) that offers an excellent window into how popularly held beliefs allow compelling stories to trump evidence, facts, and valid claims (Thomas, 2019a). There is a long history of media and political rhetoric speaking into and perpetuating false stories to appease and attract their customers and their voters.
Although the sections below examine in detail how the “science of reading” (SOR) education reform movement reflects the power of “fake news” to drive public perception and policy, that movement is paralleled by another powerful example of narratives, especially false stories, in media, public, and political discourse—the book banning and anti-CRT (Critical Race Theory) movement. At the core of book and curriculum bans is the use of “caricature”:
We put “CRT” in quotation marks throughout this report because so often the conflict campaign’s definition of “CRT” (like its description of actual K–12 practice) is a caricatured distortion by loud opponents as self-appointed “experts.” The conflict campaign thrives on caricature — on often distorting altogether both scholarship and K–12 educators’ efforts at accurate and inclusive education, deeming it (and particularly K–12 efforts to discuss the full scope of racism in our nation) wholly inappropriate for school. (Pollock & Rogers, et al., 2022, p. vi)
From Rush Limbaugh to Christopher Rufo (Beauchamp, 2023), conservative pundits have refined a strategy that involves misidentifying a term or phenomenon without credible evidence, but then moving quickly to attacking that misidentification as factual. This ideological use of “caricature” is a subset of “fake news” that is extremely effective, especially over the four decades of high-stakes education reform.
A Nation at Risk: The Original Manufactured Crisis
Ground zero of the use of caricature/fake news to drive public opinion about education and then a constantly recurring cycle of education reform (initially at the state level and then the federal level with NCLB) is the Reagan-era report, A Nation at Risk. What that report represents, however, is not credible evidence that US education was an international failure or that the US was on the precipice of collapse due to a crumbling education system, but a blueprint for politicizing education and education reform for partisan gain.
Many scholars have discredited A Nation at Risk as political propaganda, an effort by Reagan to shift public opinion in support of conservative agendas (school choice, prayer, etc.) regardless of the evidence about educational quality in public schools (Bracey, 2003; Holton, 2003). Over the past 20-plus years as well, A Nation at Risk has been characterized as a “manufactured crisis” (Berliner & Biddle, 1997) and “gaslighting” (Harvey, 2023). In short, announcing that the US was a “nation at risk” due to educational failures was both an extremely compelling story for media, public, and political consumption and a series of claims that represent the power of fake news to mask and even erase more nuanced and credible explanations for education quality as well as needed educational reform.
Although the report has been repeatedly discredited, the story has established a recurring belief that public schools, teachers, and students are failing as a crisis level in the US; further, we have entered several decades of perpetual reform. The narrative created by A Nation at Risk has some enduring elements:
Educational failure is grounded in the educational system itself, and thus, education reform has been in-school-only reform policies.
Identifying systemic societal, community, and home influences on measurable student learning is rejected as using poverty/inequity as an “excuse.”
Teachers are simultaneously the most important factor in education and the agents of failure due to poor training and/or low expectations for marginalized student populations.
The rhetoric is grounded in crisis/miracle binary.
Policies tend to be one-size-fits all solutions to overstated and unsupported problems.
A Nation at Risk has become the education “fake news” reform template, then, for a (never-ending) series of education crises that politicians must address.
The discussion to follow details how the SOR movement depends on and perpetuates that “fake news” template, as outlined by Aukerman (2022a):
From how much of the media tells it, a war rages in the field of early literacy instruction. The story is frequently some version of a conflict narrative relying on the following problematic suppositions:
a) science has proved that there is just one way of teaching reading effectively to all kids – using a systematic, highly structured approach to teaching phonics;
b) most teachers rely instead on an approach called balanced literacy, spurred on by shoddy teacher education programs;
c) therefore, teachers incorporate very little phonics and encourage kids to guess at words;
d) balanced literacy and teacher education are thus at fault for large numbers of children not learning to read well.
And as I have documented (Thomas, 2022b), the following elements of the media SOR story are misleading or “fake news”:
The US has a reading crisis because of reading programs not aligned with SOR and based in balanced literacy instead.
SOR is settled science that is reflected in NRP reports and the simple view of reading (SVR).
Students have not been afforded systematic phonics instruction that must be implemented for all students before they can comprehend or even “love” to read.
The reading crisis includes misidentifying and under-serving students with dyslexia, who represent a large percentage of students struggling to read at grade level.
The evidence of a reading crisis is NAEP data.
Next, the repeated reading crisis, our reading proficiency myths, and the nearly universal misunderstanding of NAEP data are examined in the context of education reform as “fake news.”
Perpetual Reading Crisis, Reading Proficiency Myths, and Misunderstanding NAEP
Since at least the 1940s (Thomas, 2022b), phonics-centered caricatures of a reading crisis have been compelling for the media, the public, and more recently political leaders; yet, “there is no indisputable evidence of a national crisis in reading, and even if there were a crisis, there is no evidence that the amount of phonics in classrooms is necessarily the cause or the solution” (Reinking, Hruby, & Risko, 2023). Even though no evidence exists to justify a reading crisis, major media outlets have repeated the same inaccurate claim over and over to manufacture that crisis: 60% (or more) students are not reading at grade level (see Hanford, 2018, and Kristof, 2023b, for examples).
While claiming the US has a reading crisis has been based in several “fake news” causes over the past eight or nine decades—progressive education, whole word readers, whole language, etc.—the current focus of a crisis in the SOR movement is NAEP data and the misleading achievement levels used for reading. NAEP uses “proficient” for student reading well above grade level and “basic” for what may be common across state-level measurements of grade level reading (Loveless, 2016, 2023; Rosenberg, 2004; Scale scores, 2021). As a result, SOR advocates claiming a reading crisis imply and directly state that 60-70% of students aren’t proficient readers based on the long-time trend of students scoring only about 35% at NAEP reading proficiency in reading. Historically that data point is relatively flat (so not a crisis) and is not a reflection of students reading at grade level (ironically, using NAEP fairly would mean claiming that about 60-70% of students are at or above grade level reading).
But more troubling than using NAEP reading data as “fake news” to manufacture a reading crisis is a rarely admitted fact about reading in the US: There is no standard measure of grade level reading; therefore, we genuinely have no real idea what the status of reading proficiency is in the US. We do know that reading achievement, like all measures of student learning, are significantly correlated with race and socioeconomics. Yet, we remain focused on grade-level reading, specifically grade 3, and misrepresenting test data because the reading crisis itself is far more lucrative for the media and political leaders than genuinely addressing reading or educational quality.
The caricature as “fake news” in the SOR movement is possibly most extreme, however, in the media’s targets of blame for the manufactured reading crisis—balanced literacy, three cueing, guessing, and reading programs (specifically programs by Lucy Calkins and Fountas and Pinnell).
Scapegoating Balanced Literacy and Reading Programs
The genesis of the intensified media-based reading crisis (Hanford, 2018) established both the manufactured reading crisis and a convoluted blame game that gradually included false claims that balanced literacy (identified primarily as lacking phonics instruction while depending on three cueing and prompting children to guess at words) and specific reading programs (Calkins’ Units of study and Fountas and Pinnell’s programs that constituted only a fraction of programs implemented in the US) were failing children as readers (see for example, Goldstein, 2022; Hanford, 2020).
Throughout mainstream media and among many political leaders—like how whole language was misrepresented in the 1990s (Krashen 2002a, 2002b)—SOR advocates offer descriptions of balanced literacy that range from oversimplification to outright misinformation. Balanced literacy is a philosophy of language acquisition that seeks to serve individual student needs, honor teacher autonomy, and neither prescribe nor ban any literacy practice that would serve a student’s needs (Spiegel, 1998). None the less, SOR advocates have blamed balanced literacy as the primary source of the reading crisis while also reducing balanced literacy to overly simplistic characteristics that include reductive definitions of three cueing and guessing.
Three cueing is better identified as multiple cueing, and despite SOR claims, multiple cueing has a wealth of research supporting the practice. However, SOR advocates, the media, and political leaders have successful created the “fake news” that three cueing is most of what balanced literacy entails and that it is essentially having students guess at words through looking at pictures instead of decoding:
This rally against multiple-cueing systems models has been reiterated by scholars (Paige, 2020) and journalists (Hanford, 2018, 2019, 2020). Although it may be true that as readers become more proficient, they attend less to illustrations, this does not negate the role that illustrations play in helping young students learn to attend to meaning while reading. In short, drawing students’ attention to illustrations is one means of helping them attend to the stories and information presented in texts. Learning to attend to meanings that emerge while reading is essential for understanding both the simple and increasingly complicated texts that students encounter as they become skilled readers. Describing multiple-cueing systems models as having students draw on “partial visual cues to guess at words (Adams, 1998; Rayner & Pollatsek, 1989; Solman & Stanovich, 1992; Stanovich, 1986)” (Paige, 2020, p. 13) misrepresents these models and ignores the important role of illustrations as tools for learning to access and monitor meaning construction. (Compton-Lilly, Mitra, Guay, & Spence, 2020, p. S187).
Connected to this caricature of three cueing is the SOR attack on guessing.
Ken Goodman (1967) established the roots of how SOR advocates can construct their caricature of balanced literacy as “guessing” when he identified “reading [as] a psycholinguistic guessing game”:
It involves an interaction between thought and language. Efficient reading does not result from precise perception and identification of all elements, but from skill in selecting the fewest, most productive cues necessary to produce guesses which are right the first time. The ability to anticipate that which has not been seen, of course, is vital in reading, just as the ability to anticipate what has not yet been heard is vital in listening. (p. 127)
While Goodman noted later that “guessing” may have not been the best choice, whole language proposed a theory of reading that valued holistic meaning making over decoding every word. And while the pervasiveness of whole language in K-12 education, I think, is greatly overstated, elements of holistic and workshop approaches certainly impacted practice and informed what would later be called “balanced literacy.”
The problem with “guessing” is the same as the problem with “theory”; both have very specific meanings in technical usage (as Goodman did) and quite different (and often negative) meanings in day-to-day use. And when theory/philosophy is translated into practice, it is entirely possible, even likely, that some practitioners misunderstand and misuse “guessing.” But it is quite a huge leap, as the SOR movement has done, to announce that we have a unique reading crisis now that can be traced to teacher education teaching “guessing” and a couple reading programs that rely exclusively on “guessing.”
In this context, the most problematic aspect of cause and effect in the manufactured reading crisis is the “fake news” that two reading programs—Calkins’s Units of Study and programs by Fountas and Pinnell—are the primary if not singular causes of that crisis. This campaign has resulted in Teachers College and Calkins parting ways (Calkins forming her own new entity) and several states effectively banning the use of these programs (Goldstein, 2022; Hanford, 2020). Reading programs across the US over several decades have varied greatly, not only in the programs themselves but also in their implementation; and over those decades, reading proficiency has remained relatively flat. Further, there simply is no research currently that draws any clear causal relationship on a national scale of reading programs and student reading proficiency.
Declaring balanced literacy and specific reading programs associated (often falsely) with balanced literacy as failing children as readers is simply “fake news” in the same way that media and political leaders demonized whole language throughout the 1980s and 1990s (and even after Ken Goodman’s death).
Bad Teachers Redux
Writing during a peak bad teacher movement in the US, Adam Bessie (2010) explains about the bad teacher stories represented by Michelle Rhee and perpetuated by the Obama administration and Bill Gates:
The myth is now the truth.
The Bad Teacher myth, [Bill] Ayers admits, is appealing, which is why it’s spread so far and become so commonly accepted. Who can, after all, disagree that we “need to get the lazy, incompetent teachers out of the classroom?” Even Ayers agrees that he, like all of us, “nods stupidly” along with this notion. As a professor at a community college and former high school teacher, I nod stupidly as well: I don’t want my students held back, alienated, or abused by these Bad Teachers.
This myth is also seductive in its simplicity. It’s much easier to have a concrete villain to blame for problems school systems face. The fix seems easy, as well: all we need to do is fire the Bad Teachers, as controversial Washington, DC, school chancellor superstar Michelle Rhee has, and hire good ones, and students will learn. In this light, Gates’ effort to “fix” the bug-riddled public-school operating system by focusing on teacher development makes perfect sense. The logic feels hard to argue with: who would argue against making teachers better? And if, as a teacher, you do dare to, you must be “anti-student,” a Bad Teacher who is resistant to “reforms,” who is resistant to improvements and, thus, must be out for himself, rather than the students. (n.p.)
Bessie concludes, “The only problem with the Bad Teacher myth, as anyone involved with education is intimately aware of, is that problems in education are anything but simple,” and ultimately, in 2023, these myths are not supported by the evidence, but are yet another example of “fake news” and caricature.
The bad teacher myth in 2023 is grounded in caricature and anecdotes (Hoffman, Hikida, & Sailors, 2020) that are very compelling but ultimately not only lack credible evidence (Valcarcel, Holmes, Berliner, & Koerner, 2021) and logic, but also cause far more harm than good in terms of reforming education, serving student needs, or recruiting and retaining high quality teachers. The bad teacher myth in the SOR movement sits within the “fake news” that students today are uniquely underperforming in reading achievement, yet the bad reading teacher myth is perpetuated by misrepresenting reading achievement through incomplete messages around NAEP reading data (noted above).
Again, as Bessie (2010) acknowledged over a decade ago, the real problems with education, teaching, and learning are very complex and far larger than pointing fingers at teachers as “villains.” For most of the history of US education, student reading achievement has been described as “failing,” and vulnerable student populations (minoritized races, impoverished students, students with special needs such as dyslexia, and MLLs) have always been underserved.
The ignored issues with teacher quality related to student reading proficiency is that those vulnerable students are disproportionately sitting in class with early-career and uncertified teachers who are struggling with high student/teacher ratios. Are too many students being underserved? Yes, but this is a historical fact of US public education not a current crisis. Are low student achievement and reading proficiency the result of bad teachers? No, but these outcomes are definitely correlated with bad teaching/learning conditions and bad living conditions for far too many students (Benson, 2022).
As a foundational element of “fake news,” the myth of the bad teacher is a lie, a political and marketing lie that will never serve the needs of students, teachers, or society. Teacher and school bashing, shouting “crisis”—these have been our responses to education over and over, these are not how we create a powerful teacher workforce, and these will never serve the needs of our students who need great teachers and public education the most. The myth of the bad teacher is a Great American Tradition in terms of the power of “fake news” to drive popular and political perceptions and ultimate policy.
The Crisis/Miracle Cycle that Never Ends
Finally, the “fake news” template in education reform begun with A Nation at Risk as a manufactured crisis relies on a duality of crisis/miracle. For the last forty years of educational crisis, the media has perpetuated several educational “miracles” that have all been debunked as “mirages” (Thomas, 2016)—the Texas “miracle,” the Chicago “miracle,” the Harlem “miracle,” to name the most high-profile examples. In the SOR movement, the media has perpetuated the “miracle” of this moment, Mississippi (Hanford, 2019), despite, again, there being essentially no credible research showing a causal relationship between Mississippi’s 2019 NAEP gains in grade 4 and policy changes (Thomas, 2019a, 2022b).
The media has persisted, however, to make dramatic and unsupported claims that Mississippi’s outlier grade 4 reading scores on NAEP in 2019 prove that SOR reading policies directly cause improved student reading proficiency even in the face of high populations of Black and impoverished students. The problems with claims of “miracle” lie in the likely distorting impact of grade retention (a similar dynamic as seen in Florida for decades) and disregarding that Mississippi, again like Florida, has a significant drop in reading scores in grade 8 even after enough years of policy implementation (over a decade) impacting those students (Thomas, 2022a).
Further, reducing Mississippi’s reading score improvements on NAEP lacks the appropriate historical context that notes the states steady score improvement over three decades, well before any SOR legislation or practices and excessive grade retention. In short, like claims of a reading crisis; the failures ascribed to balanced literacy, three cueing, and reading programs; and reading teachers as well as teacher educators, the claim of a Mississippi “miracle” is frankly absent any credible evidence, especially scientific evidence. The “fake news” dynamic of education reform includes manufactured crises and manufactured miracles.
Although we associate “fake news” with the most recent cycles in national politics, education reform in the US into its fifth decade reflects that same grounding in caricature and ideological misinformation. In politics and education reform, “fake news” serves the powerful as well as the political and market interests of those perpetuating misinformation. As a result, students, teachers, and our democracy lose, and we squander the resources needed to examine credibly how well or not our students are reading and what we can and should do better to serve the needs of every single student.
Bracey, G. W. (2003). April foolishness: The 20th anniversary of A Nation at Risk. Phi Delta Kappan, 84(8), 616-621.
Compton-Lilly, C.F., Mitra, A., Guay, M., & Spence, L.K. (2020). A confluence of complexity: Intersections among reading theory, neuroscience, and observations of young readers. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S185-S195. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.348
Goering, C., & Thomas, P.L., eds. (2018). Critical media literacy and fake news in post-truth America. Boston, MA: Brill.
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
Holton, G. (2003, April 25). An insider’s view of “A Nation at Risk” and why it still matters. The Chronicle Review, 49(33), B13.
Pollock, M., & Rogers, J., et al. (2022, January). The conflict campaign: Exploring local Experiences of the campaign to ban “Critical Race Theory” in public K-12 education in the U.S., 2020-2021. UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access. https://idea.gseis.ucla.edu/publications/the-conflict-campaign/
Reinking, D., Hruby, G.G., & Risko, V.J. (2023). Legislating phonics: Settle science of political polemic? Teachers College Record. https://doi.org/10.1177/01614681231155688
Rosenberg, B. (2004, May). What’s proficient? The No Child Left Behind Act and the many meanings of proficiency. Washington, DC: American Federation of Teachers. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED497886.pdf
Spiegel, D. (1998). Silver bullets, babies, and bath water: Literature response groups in a balanced literacy program. The Reading Teacher, 52(2), 114-124. www.jstor.org/stable/20202025
Thomas, P.L. (2015). Ignored under Obama: Word magic, crisis discourse, and utopian expectations. In P. R. Carr & B. J. Porfilio (Eds.), The phenomenon of Obama and the agenda for education: Can hope (still) audaciously trump neoliberalism? (pp. 45-68). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.
Thomas, P.L. (2016). Miracle schools or political scam? In W.J. Mathis & T.M. Trujillo, Learning from the Federal Market-Based Reforms: Lessons for ESSA (pp. 223-232). Charlotte, NC: IAP.
Thomas, P.L. (2019a). The ethical dilemma of satire in an era of fake news and the brave new world of social media. In K.H. Turner (ed.), The ethics of digital literacy: Developing knowledge and skills across grade levels (pp. 171-177). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Thomas, P.L. (2022b). The Science of Reading movement: The never-ending debate and the need for a different approach to reading instruction. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/science-of-reading
Valcarcel, C., Holmes, J., Berliner, D. C., & Koerner, M. (2021). The value of student feedback in open forums: A natural analysis of descriptions of poorly rated teachers. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 29(79). https://doi.org/10.14507/epaa.29.6289
As we work toward my first-year students’ first essay submission in their first-year writing seminar, I invite them to reconsider essay forms, specifically reimagining the standard one-paragraph academic introduction as a much more engaging and purposeful multi-paragraph opening.
My beginnings activity is grounded in the openings of essay collections by Barbara Kingsolver—High Tide in Tucson and Small Wonder. The latter volume includes a number of essays prompted by 9/11, and during the fall semester, this activity often coincides with the anniversary of the tragedy.
In “And Our Flag Was Still There” (originally published as a different version here), I focus on the opening, which creates tension for the reader and incorporates dialogue to create that tension. Kingsolver uses the interaction between her daughter and her to dramatize the tension that Kingsolver feels about the US response to the 9/11 attacks.
When her daughter explains that their school is asking children to wear red, white, and blue to acknowledge the attacks, Kingsolver replies: “I said quietly, ‘Why not wear black, then? Why the colors of the flag, what does that mean?'”
Later in the revised essay from the collection, Kingsolver confronts the issues around 9/11 that I think remain inadequately examined in the US:
In one stunning statement uttered by a fundamentalist religious leader, this brand of patriotism specifically blamed homosexuals, feminists, and the American Civil Liberties Union for the horrors of September 11. In other words, these hoodlum-Americans were asking me to believe that their flag stood for intimidation, censorship, violence, bigotry, sexism, homophobia, and shoving the Constitution through a paper shredder?”
More than two decades after Kingsolver wrote those words, as we once again faced September 11, I noticed that our fervor for the anniversary has both waned and remained mostly deeply inadequate.
In the wake of the attacks, the US retreated into a patriotism, a nationalism, that we have failed to examine because we committed to a self-righteous quest for retribution.
Although we are more apt now than then to name it, Kingsolver was confronting the paradoxical Christian nationalist response to an attack by Fundamentalists Muslims. And as a result, too many Americans, then and now, have failed to recognize that the core problem is fundamentalism.
From fiction, such as The Handmaid’s Tale, to a current reality, such as the documentary Shiny Happy People, there is ample evidence to warn us of the dangers of those people trapped in fundamentalism, people who believe they know the Mind of God and thus feel righteous in their behavior to fulfill God’s Will.
I share Kingsolver’s anger at the Christian fundamentalist response to 9/11, but I also regret that so few in the US—again trapped in a state of nationalism—are able to see that the fundamentalist response to a fundamentalist act of terror is self-defeating: An eye for and eye makes the whole world blind.
The core failure of fundamentalism is a combination of over-simplification and authoritarianism.
In religious fundamentalism, God’s Will is a veneer for the interests of a few in power, almost always entirely men, to control the rest.
While the US continues to drift further and further from our founding ideals of a secular democracy, a people committed to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness shielded by a solid wall between church and state, I think we would be making another mistake by simply waving a fist at the religious part of “religious fundamentalism.”
We are equally susceptible to the dangers of scientific fundamentalism as well.
One of the most powerful and harmful examples of scientific fundamentalism is scientific racism, the long history of using science to entrench racial stereotypes in the US (primarily in terms of measuring intelligence, such as IQ).
Similar to the US response to 9/11, the public and political responses to Covid—during the pandemic and since—expose the dangers of fundamentalism. Too often the promises of science (medicine) have been and are squandered because scientific fundamentalism creates unhealthy and equally overly simplistic resistance (such as the Joe Rogan phenomenon).
Overstating and misrepresenting, for example, masking or cleaning surfaces during the pandemic created a platform for anti-scientific beliefs.
“Science proves” and “research shows” are often misused clauses that are followed by a fundamentalist reduction, not the nuanced and complex reality that science tends to offer.
In education the pursuit of science to inform practice has a long history, but increasingly, the use of “science” over the last forty years of reform has drifted toward scientific fundamentalism—represented by the National Reading Panel (NRP) as central to NCLB and then the current “science of reading” (SOR) movement.
The NRP report was an incomplete overview of research on reading, never peer-reviewed, and essentially a political document, not “science.”
Yet current advocates of a very narrow use of “scientific” in reading instruction and legislation not only cite the NRP report, but misrepresent it and cling to anything that supports their ideology regardless of its scientific validity.
That is scientific fundamentalism; it is reductive and used as a shield from genuine inquiry or, ironically, a scientific approach to how students learn and how to best teach.
In all aspects of society and government, we need healthier aspects of belief and science, not an erasure of either, that recognizes that fundamentalism can exist and be corrosive in any context.
Simplistic uncritical faith in religion or science fails both, in fact.
Education above all else is no place for fundamentalism of any kind.
Student knowledge and beliefs about literacy and literature are necessarily a reflection of their teachers’ knowledge and beliefs about literacy and literature.
I teach first-year writing at the university level; much of my work is helping students unlearn and reconsider that knowledge and those beliefs they brings from K-12 education.
Teacher posts on social media are often windows into the misconceptions those students bring to college. I recently fretted for a few days after seeing Advanced Placement teachers refer to book-length nonfiction as “novels,” which triggered a recurring situation when I ask students what novels they read in high school.
The answers often include The Crucible and Shakespeare as well as more recently Between the World and Me—prompting me to note that none of those are novels. Students have mis-learned to call any book assigned and studied in school a “novel,” the seeds of having weak or even flawed understanding of genre (see also here), medium, and mode in reading and writing.
Before I could spend any time on that social media post, however, I came across this:
Oh this is a bad take. I would say the worst thing that happen to English education is the assumption that all books a group of folks determined as “the best” are the best for all kids. Also takes like this are bad for English Education. I mean people might take you seriously.
I agree with both challenges here, but think Anger’s post is way more than a “bad take.” Here are a couple reasons why before a fuller discussion of how to center students in novel and play study.
First, I have little experience that assigning a single novel/play for all students to study under the guidance of the teacher is somehow mostly absent from high school literature classes.
Second, whole class study of novels and plays centers the teacher’s authority (the teacher guides the students through the work and then assesses students on that teacher’s framing of the work) and acquisition of knowledge about a singular work (essentially trivia).
Dropping the whole-class study of assigned novels/plays is not only a needed shift in literature study with students, but also a better approach to fostering student autonomy and healthier beliefs and deeper knowledge about literacy and literature.
One instructional and assessment shift is fostering students’ skills at text analysis instead of knowledge acquisition about a specific text. Traditionally, we assign The Scarlet Letter, walk students through the novel page-by-page, and then test students on knowledge they have retained about that novel.
Instead, we should be giving students multiple experiences interrogating texts and then putting them in new text situations to assess their ability to analyze texts. For example, we can do whole-class instruction on a short text by Hawthorne as preparation for having students analyze a text by Hawthorne students haven’t read before.
The key is not knowing facts about Hawthorne’s canonical novel, but fostering their ability to analyze a text better because they are familiar with that author and have context for anticipating those new texts.
The assigned whole-class novel/play is appealing, I think, because it allows greater control of instruction and, again, centers authority in the teacher and the work being studied. None of that, however, is fostering the sort of autonomy, knowledge, and beliefs students need, and deserve.
In the late 1990s when I was teaching high school AP Literature, I made the switch from assigning whole class novels and plays to complete student choice in the major works my students studied in preparation for the AP Literature exam.
I documented that first experience in English Journal because I learned some key lessons the hard way.
First, this shift requires purposeful and direct instruction that supports students’ ability to choose novels and plays. My students taught me that over a decade of being assigned what to read had failed them as skilled or even eager consumers of works.
Teachers disproportionately do way too much for students (see also the problem with rubrics and writing prompts) and inculcate compliance over agency and autonomy.
Finally, let’s consider how making the shift away from whole-class assigned novels and plays can be navigated by teachers despite the valid challenges that poses.
Novel/play knowledge and instructional strategies are often the two most pressing concerns for teachers accustomed to traditional novel/play study.
Yes, I have had students choose novels/plays I had not read (but often read eventually because students chose them) but that in no way hindered my ability to offer instruction or assess their work. In fact, when students are allowed to be the authority on a text, they often are more fully engaged in both reading and understanding the work.
Next, allowing students tethered choice in texts can fit into traditional practices.
The primary structure of novel/play study grounded in student choice and agency is that I designed thematic units within which students chose their works (tethered choice).
For example, one unit was Black writers and the lives of Black Americans. Students had to choose and justify a novel within that theme (we focused on works that helped prepare them for the AP exam, for example, but in any class the purpose must be established for studying the work—understanding American literature or preparation for college, etc.).
Next, for each work the student chooses, they had to build a resource folder on that work by doing searches in the library; these resource folders had literary analysis and author material that supported the student’s study but also gave me access to knowledge if I had not read the work.
Now, I think this is the key for teachers concerned about how to conduct instruction.
We still had whole-class discussions around the thematic element, but each student was invited to share their journey through their chosen text. All students, then, were encouraged to connect and contrast as the discussions unfolded.
For example, one student would note the use of flying motifs drawn from African mythology in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, prompting other students to share the use of flying motifs in other works.
These organic connections were much more engaging than when I orchestrated page-by-page analysis of a shared novel or play.
These class discussions were embedded in reading workshop structures that allowed students time in class to read and research as well as conference with me and other students (especially when students chose the same work).
Using these approaches, students read more, were more deeply engaged, and gained much healthier beliefs and richer knowledge.
As teachers, we must constantly interrogate when our commitments are grounded in retaining power and authority versus fostering the autonomy and agency of our students as well as the integrity of our fields of literacy and literature.
Despite social media protestations, I doubt whole-class novel/play study has disappeared from high school literature classes, but I also certain that making the shift away from that and toward student agency would be one of the best developments for those students.
Consider the following claims about reading proficiency in students and the teaching of reading in the US:
No one teaches phonics.
There is a phonemic awareness crisis.
Direct, systematic, and sequential phonics is the only way to go.
Decodable texts are important.
I suspect that most people concerned about education and reading who pay even a modicum of attention to mainstream media will find these claims not only applicable to the current state of reading but also true.
However, there is a problem, which prompted this post from Rachael Gabriel:
This 15 year old article could have been written today. The 5 unscientific assertions listed here and in @ILAToday's Reading Today from this month in 1997 aren't SUPER different then and now. https://t.co/6vFkXt7Hqlpic.twitter.com/Tc7sIMLBeU
As Richard Allington details, these claims are simply not scientific, ironically, even as advocates of the “science of reading” repeat claims that have been standard but misleading arguments for decades.
Since at least the 1940s, these phonics-centered claims have been compelling for the media, the public, and more recently political leaders; yet, “there is no indisputable evidence of a national crisis in reading, and even if there were a crisis, there is no evidence that the amount of phonics in classrooms is necessarily the cause or the solution,” as shown by David Reinking, George G. Hruby, and Victoria J. Risko.
At the core of the phonics frenzy is market, and as Allington noted in the late 1990s, “There is a sucker born every minute.”
I recommend reading Allington’s piece in full and the following reader for context and much more complex and accurate understanding of reading proficiency and the teaching of reading:
Thomas, P.L. (2022). The Science of Reading movement: The never-ending debate and the need for a different approach to reading instruction. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/science-of-reading
At my core, I remain an English teacher, and in that role, I have always loved inviting students into interrogating paired texts, especially texts that mix and blend various genres and media/forms.
I essentially do not go to the theater any more to see movies, having become pretty content to view films on streaming services. But I splurged and found myself in a nearly empty theater yesterday to watch Barbie.
I have been agnostic about the social buzz around the film, but I must confess that many years ago I accepted that any movie with Ryan Gosling in it is likely worth the time of viewing.
The film not only fulfilled all my expectations from what I have read, but far exceeded what I anticipated. The short response is Barbie is a very smart and purposeful film, filled with excellent writing, filming, and acting. But most of all, Barbie confronts complex topics in simple but not simplistic ways.
And the topics are quite extensive:
Gender
Social norms
Capitalism and materialism
Democracy
Idealism and reality
Patriarchy
Family
Self-awareness, identity, and the existential crisis of being human
Certainly, the film isn’t exhaustive on these topics, and there are moments that feel shallow. But it works so well at making the viewer able to enter into a consideration of issues that are, frankly, extremely difficult to maneuver because the human condition is complex and these topics are fraught with ideological and political triggers.
I suspect, however, that the people who need the invitation Barbie offers are still not likely to reconsider or even consider what the film graciously offers.
If you don’t feel compassion for the close ups of stereotypical Barbie after she is crying and you can see the tears have created little rivers of no make up on her face, well, I dont’ have much hope for you.
But the people I remain forever hopeful about are students.
As sequential art (comic book/graphic novel), this reimagining of Wonder Woman and the Amazons overlaps with Barbie as a feminist text that refuses to be simplistic.
What pairing the texts add is how the works use mythology as an entry point to interrogate gender, norms, and human frailty in ways that are deeply compelling. And of course, at the heart of both works is the insidious influence of power that can be arbitrary and corrosive to human dignity.
The Ken/patriarchy motif of Barbie is brilliant and provides an excellent space for discussing Historia and the Amazons.
The Barbies and the Amazons represent a woman-centered culture, but both are juxtaposed to the real world that is man-centric. And Historia weaves in classic mythology which is a wonderful pairing with the use of Barbies (women) and Kens (men) as types, even as the main Barbie expresses, stereotypes.
The two works also allow discussions of genres and media/forms since the film is primarily satire and has strong fantasy elements that contrast with the darker and more -hyper-realism of Historia.
Both, although in different ways, provide excellent texts for discussing the impact of the visual on engaging with and understanding these texts. Both works are visually stunning.
And finally, the most important aspect of pairing Barbie and Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons as a unit for students is that the texts are the antithesis of the caricatures conservatives are attacking in the culture war against anything diverse, what they slur as “woke.”
Education is about asking hard and complex questions and coming to know what we don’t know, what we don’t yet fully understand.
Barbie and Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons never stoop to indoctrination, never slip into unfair or sweeping ideological pandering.
Especially when experienced together, it is hard to be on the other side with more answers than questions. And that might be the most beautiful gifts they offer us as their audience.
Thomas, P.L. (2018). Wonder Woman: Reading and teaching feminism with an Amazonian princess in an era of Jessica Jones. In S. Eckard (ed.), Comic connections: Reflecting on women in popular culture (pp. 21-37). New York, NY: Rowman and Littlefield.
ILEC Vision: To promote literacy learning practices that enable all children and youth to realize their full potential as literate, thinking human beings.
ILEC Response: The Right to Read: The greatest civil rights issue of our time.
The Right to Read connects reading instruction, civil rights, and full participation in society by asserting that there is only one approach to teaching reading. The film provides few specific details about the research that supports this stance, and there is little to no discussion about other aspects of teaching and learning that impact student achievement.
Also, there are the repeated examples of what Maren Auckerman refers to as “Errors of Insufficient Understanding”or “errors that reflect inadequate grasp of the field.” Auckerman’s examples include: a weak connection to actual research, misrepresenting research findings and over-relying on a narrow slice of research. The narrators assert: “We know what works” without citing research to back up this claim. The film repeatedly uses wording that illustrates Auckerman’s points such as: “proven,” “what’s working,” “what’s not working,” “evidence-based”, “all research indicates,” “research”, and “consensus.”[1]
As we watched the film, Rachael Gabriel’s words continue to resonate: “Even as debates roiled about approaches to reading instruction, it was clear that individual teacher decisions were important for optimizing students’ opportunities to learn. If teacher decision-making is of paramount importance, then so is a teacher’s individual knowledge base for teaching” (Chapter 7, p. 173).[2]
Positive Aspects of the film:
The film highlights the racialized achievement gap and asserts that solutions are possible.
It emphasizes all people have the right to learn to read to attain a successful life.
The film stresses the critical roles of research and family members in literacy education.
ILEC Concerns:
There is no mention of culturally responsive, research-based practices or research-based practices for multilingual learners.
The film claims there is one right way to teach reading to all students, excluding all other research-based approaches.
The film includes false claims such as: “The root of the problem is that children are being taught in a way that is not working” and “When you tell me that you are choosing not to follow the research….”
The film endorses an approach that takes away teacher agency and decision making while ignoring the importance of ongoing professional learning and the value of teacher experience.
Relying on anecdotes, the film focuses on the story of one “rookie” teacher to make sweeping general claims about a specific reading curriculum.
The film ignores many aspects of literacy such as writing instruction, comprehension, or the joy of reading.
[1] Aukerman, M. (2022) The Science of Reading and the Media: Does the Media Draw on High-Quality Reading Research? Literacy Research Association Critical Conversations. CC BY 4.0 license; Aukerman, M. (2022). The Science of Reading and the Media: How Do Current Reporting Patterns Cause Damage? Literacy Research Association Critical Conversations. CC BY 4.0 license.
[2] How Education Policy Shapes Literacy Instruction: Understanding the Persistent Problems of Policy and Practice Edited by Rachael Gabriel (1st Ed 2022, Palgrave Macmillan).
educator, public scholar, poet&writer – academic freedom isn't free
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 