All posts by plthomasedd

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

The Politics of Blind Faith

Recently, after driving over twelve hours, much of that through darkness and light snow across Kentucky and Indiana, from South Carolina to Wisconsin, I sat the next day around 6 AM in a Starbucks across from the convention center where I would be presenting later that morning.

I was exhausted and quite cold after walking from my hotel in downtown Milwaukee.

One other man was already sitting in the coffee house connected to another hotel. As I sat near him, I heard him talking and laughing on his cell phone. He was loud and clearly from Wisconsin by the sound of his voice.

His animated conversation focused on Trump’s recent firing of people who testified against him in the impeachment hearings. This man and the person her was talking to were exuberant about Trump’s behavior, including a discussion of Trump carrying his revenge even further.

I held my tongue and tried to ignore his loud and adolescent joy, but I could not help being disturbed that I had traveled so far across the U.S. only sit beside a person who, except for his accent, could have been having this same exchange in my home state of SC.

And this joyous glee over bullying among Trump supporters is a constant refrain on social media, mostly among conservative Christians who are included in my connections because I was born, grew up, and then taught in a deeply conservative and small Southern town until I was a couple years past 40.

While there is a range of evidence and informed opinions about who supports Trump and why, a combination of white people, racists (conscious or not), and Christian conservatives form a significant portion of the solid Trump base.

What these groups have in common is a sense of impending loss of a status or “values” that many of these people feel define the U.S. Where there is dominance or privilege, many Trump supporters believe that dominance or privilege has been earned.

Compounding these feelings, of course, is that Trump supporters include people experiencing some sort of hardships, often job insecurity or loss as well as deflated wages.

For a working-class white person recently laid off, being told this person benefits from white privilege is a very hard pill to swallow. There is a kind of pale hypothetical for a person to understand life would have been even harder had they not been white and/or male.

It becomes safer to say that Trump support is mostly visceral and emotional—often a type of blind faith in ideals and rhetoric.

Trump speaks to those ideals and uses the rhetoric that engages that base; whether or not Trump’s claims are factual becomes irrelevant, including whether or not Trump actually embodies those ideals or practices the rhetoric.

Trump the bully can lambast others for bullying with impunity among that base. Any effort by those outside the Trump circle to discredit Trump’s claims or expose his hypocrisy falls on deaf ears among those supporters.

This Trump moment is ongoing and possibly far too of the moment for some people to interrogate it in the way I have above. Few people are able to step back from believing all Trump criticism is simply partisan politics.

A few days after I returned from Milwaukee, however, I watched Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator (Netflix).

Late in the documentary, a lawyer for one of Bikram Choudhury’s accusers keeps referring to Bikram as both an idiot and incredibly self-assured and arrogant. A friend watching with me asked who that reminded me of, and of course, we both mentioned Trump.

If you want to understand Trump’s appeal and how otherwise reasonable people can fall victim to that appeal, I recommend watching this documentary—although (spoiler alert) the outcome for Bikram isn’t all that encouraging for those of us hoping Trump suffers the consequences he deserves.

And I am currently reading The Girl Who Lived Twice (David Lagercrantz after Steig Larsson’s The Millennium Series) where a passage speaks to both Trump and Bikram: “It had been an awful day, and she had just been talking to an idiot of a policeman who, like most idiots, thought he was a genius” (p. 67).

This pulls into the dynamic, I think, a key component of how blind faith allows people to be duped by idiots—authority.

The policeman’s idiocy is buffered by his authority the same way Trump’s privilege and smoke-and-mirrors wealth and celebrity buffer his idiocy.

Organized religion (and cult-like situations such as Bikram’s yoga empire) breeds into people a vulnerability to authority to which they must defer through blind faith.

“It’s God’s will” is a powerful cover that preys on human vulnerability; even when a rational person sees through this ploy, it takes a great deal of courage to confront “God’s will.”

Bikram has been credibly accused by many women of sexual abuse and assault. Watching these women detail those assaults and having remained in his circle, watching men collapse into tears over coming to accept Bikram’s atrocities over their faith in Bikram—these speak to the problem faced with refuting Trump and changing the minds of his faithful supporters.

Like Trump, Bikram remains in power over the fake empire he has created.

Trump benefits from both the flaws inherent in the cult of celebrity that pervades the U.S. and the vulnerability of people raised to have blind faith in authoritarian leaders who use compelling rhetoric and speak to traditional ideals—even when the leader is a hypocrite and the ideals are hollow or false.

To rightfully call that leader an idiot suggests something as awful about those supporting an idiot—and there is little to suggest those followers are compelled in any way by such truth.

As a complicated understanding of Trump and his supporters become clearer, I am less and less optimistic that such a phenomenon can be overcome with truth or by reaching out to Trump’s base.

Before leaving for Wisconsin earlier last week, I was at one of my favorite places to eat when a man and wife with their two young children walked in.

The man had on a T-shirt: Trump 2020. Fuck Your Feelings.

A nuclear All-American family.

He and the gleeful man in the Milwaukee Starbucks would be quick friends.

What are we to do?

education, education reform, Educational Research, reading, Teaching

Education Reform De-professionalizes Women Educators

Who were your teachers?

In elementary school, nearly 9 of 10 teachers are women; by high school, about 6 of 10 are women. And nearly all of your teachers, 80%, were white (see NCES data).

As a student and a teacher, then, I have spent a great deal of my life in spaces where women are the overwhelmingly majority; often I am the only man in the room.

Recently, while I was presenting at two education conferences (South Carolina Council of Teachers of English and Wisconsin State Reading Association), I had several important experiences with recognizing teaching as a profession constituted by mostly women.

At SCCTE, I attended a session led by SC for Ed, making eye contact with one of the organization’s leaders at one point in recognition that I was the only man in the room. This session was on teacher activism and the need to inform state legislators about education while the state considers a major education bill.

As the discussion focused on many of the state representatives being condescending, I offered to the group that many of the problems faced in education can be traced to men in political leadership (and administration) not trusting or allowing the full professionalism of teachers since the field is primarily women.

Alia Wong explains that teaching continues to see a rise in the percentage of women in the field while other professions have the opposite gender trajectory:

Ingersoll and his research team highlight the rising proportion of women who are, for example, physicians (from 10 percent in 1972 to 40 percent in 2018, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data and federal surveys), lawyers (from 4 percent to 37 percent over the same time period), and pharmacists (13 percent to 63 percent).

Wong then confirms what we confronted at the SC for Ed session at SCCTE:

What explains these contradictory trends? Much of it comes down to misunderstandings of what teaching entails and how those assumptions intersect with gender norms. Unlike in many other countries, in the United States, teaching has long been seen as a relatively low-status profession. In 2018, a survey of people in roughly three dozen countries asked respondents to rank 14 different professions—including teaching, medicine, law, social work, and website engineering—by each career’s perceived social status. On the one hand, survey participants in the United States gave teachers a middling ranking, and tended to liken them to librarians; respondents in countries such as China and Malaysia, on the other hand, put teachers in first place, analogizing them to doctors.

This cultural disregard for teaching has a gendered consequence: The status of a given career tends to correlate with the share of men in that profession—higher status equals more men, generally speaking. And that has its own consequence: Research has found that employers place less value on work done by women than on that done by men. These trends reinforce each other in perpetuity.

Even in education, as the status of the position within education rises, so does the proportion of men, Wong notes: “Notably, close to half of all principals today, including two-thirds of those serving high schools, are men, as are more than three-quarters of school-district superintendents.”

Administration also reflects greater power and higher pay than classroom teachers.

I gave a presentation and spoke on a panel just a week later at WSRA; my session was attended by almost all women, and then I was the only man on a 6-person panel.

During my presentation, Misreading Reading Again and Again: The Media, Reading Policy, and Teaching Reading, two comments by teachers and the discussions around them help navigate the nearly constant state of reform occurring in education and more directly the current “science of reading” movement that is driving many states to adopt new reading legislation.

First, as I was discrediting the myth that whole language failed in California in the 1980s and 1990s—when the state experienced a significant drop in education funding and an increase in English language learners—a woman interjected that she taught in California during this time.

Her class was 32 second graders, including 6 ELL students (hers was an inclusion/ELL class). Her direct statement was that the teaching and learning conditions made effective teaching of reading (or anything) nearly impossible, regardless of the reading program or philosophy she implemented.

Here, we must recognize that teaching and learning conditions can and often do de-professionalize teachers.

Later, I was discussing the recent attacks on Lucy Calkins Units of Study reading program, emphasizing first that I do not endorse any reading programs (including Calkins’s). Many attending the session clapped for the idea that schools should not spend funding on programs, but provide teachers all the books and materials needed to teach reading.

But as we interrogated the problem with Calkins’s program, several teachers enthusiastically announced their hatred for not only the program but Calkins herself, as the name on the program.

What we unpacked was that even despite Calkins own warning not to implement the program as a structured mandate to teachers, many administrators have turned this and other reading programs into a way to manage and monitor teacher practice.

In other words, the valid anger felt by teachers about Unit of Study is their awareness that the program is used to further de-professionalize them.

And that brings us back to the “science of reading” movement that has some disturbing elements. First is the argument that the “science of reading” is settled (suggesting that science is a fixed prescription)—even though the evidence on teaching reading is rightfully described as compelling even as that evidence base is diverse (both in types of research and what that evidence supports).

Next, building off that misrepresentation of science, this movement is calling for systematic intensive phonics (phonics first) for all students; without too much imagination here, we can see that this is a blanket mandate that de-professionalizes teachers and certainly will have the same negative impact on teacher attitudes that misguided implementation of Calkins’s program currently exposes.

But the most disturbing aspect of the “science of reading” movement is that it is the next step feeding the over forty years of education reform that has plagued U.S. education.

Public education has experienced relentless political intrusion since the early 1980s, mandates standards, testing, and programs that have erased nearly every aspect of professionalism from the field of teaching.

And political intrusion, we must recognize, is almost entirely the work of men.

Think of the recent anti-abortion laws in Alabama. While the press highlighted a woman governor signing the bill, Alabama has 23 women out of 140 legislators, a mere 16.4% (see gender balances in state government here).

As has been dramatized brilliantly in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (and the Netflix adaptation), tokenized women, such as the governor of Alabama, often work in the service of men.

While many faces on the “science of reading” movement are women, their agenda is being used mostly by men in political power to mandate education policy and further de-professionalize teachers.

My home state of South Carolina has about the same gender imbalance as Alabama (28 women out of 170 legislators, 16.5%), and many of the SC for Ed teachers interacting with state representatives and senators are receiving angry and condescending responses that demonstrate a lack of respect for teachers.

What people fail to recognize about the systematic intensive phonics movement as an attack on balanced literacy is that phonics programs fit well into the top-down authority model implemented in many schools and driven by accountability mandates (legislation included). Balanced literacy, on the other hand, is intended as a guiding philosophy of literacy that depends on teacher autonomy and professionalism to provide all students what they need to learn.

Balanced literacy does not mandate any practice for all students, and does not bar any practice where students demonstrate a need.

Accountability, education legislation, and reading programs have mostly worked against teacher professionalism, against the autonomy and professionalism of women.

Teachers need teacher and learning conditions that make their work as professionals possible, but the current movement to legislate the “science of reading” will further erode teacher autonomy and distract from the real work needed.

Teachers do not need yet more reform; teachers need their profession to be respected and supported.

deficit thinking, education, education reform, race, racism, Segregation

Clarifications: Greenville desegregation: Academic achievement gap slowly closing, but inequities persist

Ariel Gilreath offers a strong overview in her Greenville desegregation: Academic achievement gap slowly closing, but inequities persist. A key point in this look at desegregation confronts the disturbing consequences of South Carolina’s libertarian streak:

The public school district in Greenville County became the last major district in South Carolina to integrate in 1970. South Carolina was the second-to-last state in the nation. On Feb. 17, Greenville schools will mark 50 years since the district was integrated.

In those 50 years, though policies and tests have changed, the academic achievement gap has persisted, and so has inequity.

Desegregation of schools in SC spurred the growth of private schools (white racists fleeing public schools) and provided the foundation for what would become known as the Corridor of Shame, a label that captures the historical political negligence in the state that has failed black, brown, and poor students in weak economic communities across the state.

Academic achievement, usually test scores, is strongly correlated with socioeconomic statuses of students homes and communities as well as with race (as the article notes, so-called racial minorities tend to be over-represented in poverty, and poverty is a key marker of low test scores).

Three aspects of the article deserve a bit of clarification and resources for better understanding them.

First, a growing number of scholars and advocates for public schools are rejecting the term “achievement gap” (a foundational concepts in No Child Left Behind), as Gilreath reports:

Paul Thomas bristles when he hears “academic achievement gap.” The education professor at Furman University doesn’t like the connotation, and he’s not alone.

“It’s an equity gap,” Thomas said. “Children are not given the same opportunities. They’re not given the same resources, either in their lives or in their schools. So the outcomes are inequitable because the input is inequitable — not because the children are different.”

By focusing on equity and opportunity, the gaze of blame moves away from the student (the agent of achievement) and toward the systemic forces that create the inequity of academic outcomes for students.

[See: School Rankings as Racist, Classist Propaganda; The Lingering, and Powerful, Legacy of “Scientific Racism” in America; Kristof, How Much Inequity Is the Right Balance?; Achievement Gap Misnomer for Equity Gap, pt. 1; Achievement Gap Misnomer for Equity Gap, pt. 2]

And thus, we must not be mislead by Teach for America’s effort to rebrand the floundering organization:

Teach for America, a nonprofit organization that funds additional educators for low-income schools, refers to the achievement gap as an “opportunity gap” to describe the different test outcomes between subgroups of students.

One of the greatest mechanisms of inequity by race and socioeconomic status in the U.S. is teacher assignment: Poor, black, and brown students; English language learners; and students with special needs are disproportionately assigned year after year to under-/un-certified and inexperienced teachers—the exact teaching pool TFA is offering to those populations of students.

[See: Listen to Gary Rubinstein: “TFA…thrives on greed, deception, and fear”; REVIEW: Teach For America and the Struggle for Urban School Reform, Crawford-Garrett; Teacher Quality: On Hyperbole and Anecdotes]

Second, along with rejecting the term “achievement gap” for “equity” or “opportunity gap,” we must avoid both deficit ideology and deficit language when referring to students who are the targets of that inequity:

Students in poverty are ‘at a deficit from the beginning’

Schools alone cannot fix poverty or issues at a student’s home, said Jason McCreary, director of accountability and quality assurance with Greenville County Schools….

But schools do serve as a central hub and identifier of the issues that typically trail a student living in poverty. If a student comes into a classroom hungry or dealing with trauma, it’s often reflected in behavior and performance, and schools are expected to identify those issues and address them.

While the points here about the power of systemic inequity in the lives of students outside of school and the inability of school alone to overcome those forces is important and well supported by research, it places the focus on the students to describe those conditions as “deficits.”

Differences should not be framed in evaluative ways, and certainly we should avoid putting the deficit gaze on the students themselves.

[See: Quitting Grit, Ditching Deficit Ideology, and Embracing an Equity and Justice Approach to Poverty and Education: A Conversation; From Deficiency to Strength: Shifting the Mindset about Education Inequality; Poverty and the ideological imperative: a call to unhook from deficit and grit ideology and to strive for structural ideology in teacher education]

Finally, but more about language and ideology, we must be careful about “culture”:

“There’s cultural gaps, opportunity gaps, community gaps, economic gaps, access gaps — it all leads to achievement gaps. So that’s why this is one of the most complex issues that I know,” McCreary said. “So it takes complex solutions to really make a dent, make a change.”

Most sociologists would caution against overly simplistic uses of the term “culture,” but to suggest there are “cultural gaps” is again to blame not only the students but their communities and families for the systemic inequities that are reflected in their academic outcomes.

To suggest there is a cultural gap is to privilege whiteness as an unspoken and unacknowledged “norm” against which all other races are measured; this at its roots is racism and the driving force behind white nationalism.

As I note in the article, desegregating schools is the ethical process for a democracy, but the proximity of all students of many different races is not enough.

Our language must change, as noted above, but until our policies and behaviors change, the rhetorical shifts will be hollow gestures.

Kurt Vonnegut, politics, Trumplandia

Trumpublicans and the Gotcha Politics of the Right

This is now the third installment that frames the presidency of Trump as a real-life Harrison Bergeron, the often misread totalitarian clown in Kurt Vonnegut’s eponymous dystopian short story.

For the U.S., February 4, 2020, now stands as the peak moment of converting the Republican Party into the Trumpublican Party. No longer are we citizens of this so-called free country confronted by empty-suit politicians or even an emperor with no clothes, but by the most brazen and crass reality that the very worst types of adolescents now run the country bolstered by a loyal base that revels in believing that being stupid is cool and that bullies are funny.

Two moments calcify this new reality of U.S. gotcha politics—Nancy Pelosi ripping up the State of the Union address behind Trump as he spoke and Trump awarding the Medal of Freedom to Rush Limbaugh.

Instead of using the Pelosi ripping meme either to demonize Pelosi (see Trump supporters) or to lionize Pelosi (see partisan Democrats), we would all be better served to pause at this reduction of democracy to the cult of celebrity that ultimately distracts from the real politics of government policies that directly impact people’s lives.

Let me turn again to Vonnegut, his brilliant novel Cat’s Cradle, as I have discussed before:

Readers soon learn that Bokonon creates a religion “’to provide the people with better and better lies’” (p. 172), foma, and a central aspect of that strategy involves the fabricated war between the government of San Lorenzo and the religion, Bokononism. Readers discover that this plan fails:

“’But people didn’t have to pay as much attention to the awful truth. As the living legend of the cruel tyrant in the city and the gentle holy man in the jungle grew, so, too, did the happiness of the people grow. They were all employed full time as actors in a play they understood, that any human being anywhere could understand and applaud.’” (pp. 174-175)

The false choice between McCabe and Bokonon in the other world created by Vonnegut happens to represent well the delusion of choice that exists in the U.S. (not to be examined here, but McCabe/Bokonon reflect the false choice currently in the U.S. between Republican/Democrat; it’s a fake fight, and a false choice).

Pelosi and Trump are the current actors of the moment in the false war between Democrats and Republicans.

However, with Trump, we are not treading the same worn path, but down a newly cut road to hell.

I certainly concede that Trump is a disturbingly know-nothing anti-intellectual president, seemingly having no redeeming qualities that qualify him for this role as leader of the U.S. But many presidents have been noticeably less bright than even the average American—George H.W. and George W. Bush, for example.

And while it is true that Trump is also relentlessly crass and incapable of rising above his essential urge to lie and bully, Trump is no more crass and profane than other presidents, such as Lyndon Johnson.

We mustn’t also omit that Trump is a serial adulterer and abusive to women—not unlike Bill Clinton.

Trump is unique, though, in that his most crass and abusive qualities are front-and-center in his public and private lives; other presidents were able for much of their careers to be empty suits, presenting one mostly dignified persona in public while being vile men behind closed doors barricaded by a loyal machine.

Never just an empty suit, Trump is a totalitarian clown 24-7, much like the high school star athlete flaunting his free pass daily while coaches and administrators contort themselves to keep the player in school and eligible for the big game.

You see, for Republicans in 2020, there is only the ends—winning—regardless of the means—Trump in his disgusting and brazen role as the emperor with no clothes.

That brings us to the Medal of Freedom bestowed upon Limbaugh who recently confessed he suffers from advanced lung cancer.

Limbaugh himself has been a cancer on celebrity media and U.S. politics for decades. On the radio, Limbaugh seemed to represent the worst case scenario of the free market producing celebrity.

His racism, sexism, and general gluttony attracted U.S. conservatives, including a harbinger of things to come; the religious right also became ditto heads despite Limbaugh’s hedonism and (brazen and crass) unethical and immoral lifestyle.

Many, I think, would have never thought that the same dynamic that created and sustained Limbaugh would be how the U.S. elected Trump president in the wake of audio evidence of him making the infamous “grab them by the pussy” comment.

Trump awarding Limbaugh the Medal of Freedom has nothing to do with policy, Limbaugh’s contributions to the U.S., or even politics; this was just another way for Trump to play gotcha with so-called “liberals,” as a ploy to pander to Trumpublicans who revel in such high school idiocies.

Peak Trumpublican Party is upon us and everything has now been fully reduced to celebrity sport, including how the mainstream media (above the consequences of all this in many ways) cover the game without bothering to step back and make some effort to end the hollow us v. them distraction.

As a life-long resident of South Carolina, I have lived my entire adult life in a solidly Republican state; most of my trips to vote have been wasted time in which the vast majority of races had only one person running, empty-suit Republicans who somehow kept their clown selves mostly at bay while running for office (but not while in office).

So as I scroll through Facebook posts by a local news station, I read comment after comment about impeaching Pelosi, about the many crimes and failures of Obama, and about the wonderful state of the country because of Trump. SC political leaders recently called to name an interstate exchange after Trump, the pussy-grabbing president who treated Limbaugh equally to Martin Luther King Jr.

The State of the Union Address of February 4, 2020, was all theater, the most extreme and debased theater of the absurd, in fact.

Except there are real consequences to all the theatrics, Pelosi overacting just behind the orange menace spouting his usual litany of lies.

In January of 2016, Trump proclaimed, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”

Crass? Yes. Outlandish for a politician of this magnitude? Absolutely.

And even then, we were warned about the consequences of such an unhinged president: Trump couldn’t be prosecuted if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue, lawyer claims.

We aren’t quite there, but we are pretty damned close.

The U.S. Senate, with a majority of Republicans, will insure that Trump takes one more step toward that hypothetical, except slightly reversed here as Trump is dodging the impeachment bullet.

Beware looking too hard and cheering too loudly for our current McCabe/Bokonon—Pelosi, the speech shredder, versus Trump, the high school bully.

This is by far the worst reality TV yet, and as Trump himself believes, there appears to be no promise of it being cancelled any time soon.

I’d stay away from Fifth Avenue, in fact, just in case.

See Also

Harrison Bergeron 2016

American Emperor: The Harrison Bergeron Presidency

education, education reform, Educational Research, reading

UPDATED: Understanding the “Science of Reading”: A Reader

3 Comments

UPDATE

See Fact checking @DanaGoldstein phonics article @nytimes – a thread

See Also: Gerald Coles, Cryonics Phonics: Inequality’s Little Helper

In one way, ground zero for the “science of reading” movement can be traced to Emily Hanford in 2018, but cognitive scientists (Daniel Willingham and Mark Seidenberg, for example) focusing on reading and advocacy for students with dyslexia (or struggling to read in ways that some label as dyslexia) have also played key roles in the movement.

The “science of reading movement” has not been simply a media event, however. That advocacy has resulted in state education/reading legislation that has included third-grade retention of students based on reading test scores, mandating systematic intensive phonics (phonics first) for all students, and new mandates for teachers of reading and teacher education programs.

What is absent in most of the media and political endorsement of the “science of reading” is a critical lens for the claims as well as historical context.

The “science of reading” narrative, at best, is incomplete, and at worst, is deeply misleading.

Below are the key elements and links to help anyone better understand the issues:

Historical Perspective

What Shall We Do About Reading Today?: Looking Back to See Now More Clearly

Back to the Future of Reading Instruction: 1990s Edition

Recommended: Literacy Crises: False Claims and Real Solutions, Jeff McQuillan

The “Science of Reading,” an Overview

The Big Lie about the “Science of Reading” (Updated)

The Big Lie about the “Science of Reading”: NAEP 2019 Edition

Systematic Intensive Phonics (Phonics First, Phonics versus Whole Language/Balanced Literacy)

Reconsidering the Evidence That Systematic Phonics Is More Effective Than Alternative Methods of Reading Instruction, Jeffrey S. Bowers (2020)

To Read or Not to Read: Decoding Synthetic Phonics, Andrew Davis

Does Phonics Deserve the Credit for Improvement in PIRLS? Stephen Krashen

The Problem with Balanced Literacy

Progressivism and Whole Language: A Reader

National Reading Panel (NRP)

The Enduring Influence of the National Reading Panel (and the “D” Word)

Reading Programs (Lucy Calkins)

Reading Programs Put Reading Last

In Defense of Balanced Literacy: Understanding and Responding to Student Achievement Partners’ Critique of Units of Study

Teacher Education and National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ)

Twitter thread on NCTQ

Measuring Up: The National Council on Teacher Quality’s Ratings of Teacher Preparation Programs and Measures of Teacher Performance

If Teacher Education Is Failing Reading, Where Is the Blame?

Mississippi 2019 NAEP Reading Scores

UPDATED: Mississippi Miracle or Mirage?: 2019 NAEP Reading Scores Prompt Questions, Not Answers

See Also

Checklist: Media Coverage of the “Science of Reading”

sexism

Kobe Bryant’s Celebrity Shield in the #MeToo Era

I experienced the disbelief and fascination in real time Sunday January 26, 2020 (my birthday) as my friends and I walked into Catawba Brewery on the South Slope in Asheville, NC. The place was eerily quiet; soon our smartphones alerted us that Kobe Bryant had been killed in a helicopter accident.

Strangers made eye contact and talked about their shock as if we all had somehow magically been linked because we know of Bryant, because he is a celebrity.

I followed along on Twitter as the story became more garbled and disturbing. Five dead became nine, and Bryant’s daughter along with some of her teammates were identified.

Bryant is recently retired from an elite NBA career. He is too young and too well-known, it seems, for such a tragic end to his life. While the story tended to be either “Kobe Bryant and others” or “Kobe Bryant, his daughter, and others,” I sensed we all were also mourning the entirety of a senseless loss of life.

When it was revealed his daughter was on board, I felt the pain rise in my chest; I had to resist crying.

But I also immediately recognized Bryant’s death was presenting something more than a challenge about how outsized interest in celebrities exists in the U.S. Yes, some quickly noted that the attention afforded Bryant was absent when military deaths were reported—or the hundreds of lives lost daily across the U.S. due to other tragedies left mostly ignored.

But Bryant’s life and death are far more complicated than even that. Jeremy Gordon confronted it directly in his coverage for The Outline:

The facts are not up for interpretation: On June 30, 2003, at the Lodge & Spa at Cordillera in Eagle, Colorado, Kobe invited a 19-year-old employee of the spa into his room after she’d shown him around the facility. They began kissing consensually, but when he took off his pants, she tried to leave. He then groped her, ignored her multiple requests to leave, choked her hard enough to leave bruises on her neck, physically blocked her from leaving the room, ignored more of her requests to stop, and forcibly penetrated her, only stopping when she aggressively resisted. “Every time I said no he tightened his hold around me,” she told police. The day after, a nurse observed the woman and, according to a detective from the sheriff’s office, “stated that the injuries were consistent with penetrating genital trauma. That it’s not consistent with consensual sex.”

Gordon later explains:

I don’t recap this exhaustively to be one of those smarmy people who, in the immediate wake of his death, leapt out of the woodwork to smugly assert “Uh, he was a bad person” to anyone who expresses sadness, but to point out the simple fact that Kobe committed sexual assault — which he literally admitted, in front of the entire country — and any exhaustive recapping of his life should include and reckon with this instead of basically mentioning it as an aside.

Jill Filipovic focused as well on the double assault experienced by the woman victimized by Bryant and then the effort to exonerate him:

The full weight of Kobe Bryant’s money, power and influence came down on this teenager. His lawyers suggested she was sexually promiscuous — I have no idea if that’s true, or even how we define a value-laden term like “promiscuous,” but either way, the number of sexual partners someone has had doesn’t determine whether or not they were raped by one particular person (I would also humbly suggest that someone who has had a lot of consensual sex without making false rape claims has pretty well demonstrated a history of being able to have consensual sex without making false rape claims). They emphasized how excited she was to meet Bryant. They brought up her history with depression and suicide attempts, casting her as a crazy person, a woman not to be trusted. Bryant’s lead defense attorney, Pamela Mackey — the optics of a female lawyer defending an accused rapist are just so irresistible, which is why we see Harvey Weinstein doing the same thing — used the woman’s name six times in the preliminary hearing; she brought up the number of recent sexual partners the woman had. One psychology professor studied the coverage of the case and found that more than 40 percent of news stories questioned the truthfulness of the woman’s account; only 7.7 percent questioned Kobe’s honesty. About a quarter included positive comments about his athletic career; more than 20 percent included positive comments about him as a person. By contrast, only 5 percent of news articles had anything positive to say about the woman.

The Bryant assault and his eventual rehabilitation in the media as a sports hero and celebrity were well before the #MeToo movement. Certainly, Bryant benefited from his celebrity shield over those years.

His death, however, as Filipovic’s mentioning Weinstein denotes, comes in the wake of #MeToo, demanding that greater care is taken with Bryant’s legacy than was afforded in the time after the rape.

The eulogies for Bryant overwhelmingly address his elite stature as an NBA superstar as well as his relationship with his daughter and family as evidence of his much more mature and gracious public self after his retirement from the NBA in 2016. Notably, international accounts tend to include immediately references to Bryant’s sexual assault, but U.S. media seem content with occasional token references to the incident, usually offered by a female reporter (see ESPN).

The helicopter crash that claimed Bryant’s life is tragic, including, of course, the loss of eight additional lives. Despite his celebrity, however, these deaths are no more or less significant than other deaths—some we acknowledge, some we ignore.

What we do with Bryant’s legacy is extremely important. At the very least, his death and the facts of his sexual assault raise important questions.

The first level of those questions is for every single man to interrogate his role in rape culture, sexual assault, sexual coercion, the male gaze, sexist and misogynistic language, and sexism.

Some men are deeply guilty, but all men are culpable, complicit to some degree in these realities for all women. Men must admit their roles, but they must also take action against the ways in which men devalue the humanity of women.

At another level, we all need to rethink the celebrity shield. Men of wealth and celebrity in the U.S. may not be disproportionately sexually abusive, but they certainly are shielded from the consequences when they do assault, when they do discriminate.

A final level that I think is significant in considering Bryant involves how we judge any person in the big picture of their life.

I wrote a biography for my doctoral dissertation so much of my research in grad school involved scholarship on biography and reading a large number of biographies.

Simply put, exploring the full and exposed life of almost anyone will leave you greatly disappointed in someone you may have admired or considered “great.”

In Bryant’s case, we may argue that the sexual assault was a one-time but tremendous mistake, one that irrevocably changed the life of a woman beyond her control, and that Bryant’s exceptional athletic accomplishments and seemingly good life otherwise can counter that incident so that we should mostly celebrate him after his death.

Or, as I am prone to accept, Bryant’s one-time assault cannot be excused because of his efforts to deny and hide it, and the inexcusable treatment the woman experienced in his efforts to seem innocent; celebrity and athletic excellence cannot justify the immediate physical and emotional harm he caused or his self-serving callousness in its wake.

The irony of Bryant’s celebrity shield is that his life and death against his sexual assault shine a direct light on all of us. He can no longer influence his legacy with his wealth or celebrity.

It is upon us to value the humanity of women in all circumstances, regardless of how much we may value any man or the celebrity status we have afforded him.

Note

Often, people will raise concern about false reports of sexual assault and rape. However, research shows the following:

The majority of sexual assaults, an estimated 63 percent, are never reported to the police (Rennison, 2002). The prevalence of false reporting cases of sexual violence is low (Lisak, Gardinier, Nicksa, & Cote, 2010), yet when survivors come forward, many face scrutiny or encounter barriers. For example, when an assault is reported, survivors may feel that their victimization has been redefined and even distorted by those who investigate, process, and categorize cases….

A review of research finds that the prevalence of false reporting is between 2 percent and 10 percent.

education, education reform, Equity, inequity, Poverty, reading

Reading as a First-Mile Problem: Recognizing the Role of Poverty and Inequity in Literacy Development

Literacy scholar Tim Shanahan answers the question Why Is It So Hard to Improve Reading Achievement? with the following: “Classroom implementation is the last mile in reading reform.” He eventually adds, “The last mile rhetoric shouldn’t be a hair-on-fire message, but one that acknowledges both the current successes and the need to do better.”

Shanahan’s consideration of the persistent public and political concern over low reading achievement appears to offer a balanced admission that many approaches to reading instruction can be successful, but framing reading as a last-mile problem is finding yourself in a hole and deciding you just need to dig a little deeper.

Shanahan seems to accept a number of different “levers” as valid approaches to improving student reading, including a somewhat veiled endorsement of Common Core standards; in fact, he concedes: “Let’s face it. Our problem in reading isn’t that nothing works. It’s that everything does.”

In 2020, what Shanahan’s last-mile argument reveals, however, is that there is a mistake in teaching reading that can be addressed, but as a society, we refuse to acknowledge that reading is a first-mile problem.

That first mile is much larger than formal schooling, and what we refuse to recognize is that measurable reading achievement is a marker for the disadvantages of poverty and inequity in both the lives and schooling of vulnerable populations of students (students in poverty, black and brown students, English language learners, special needs students).

The accountability movement driven by ever-new standards and ever-new tests has been paralyzed by in-school only reform. That movement is both an example of last-mile reform and why last-mile reform has failed.

First, let’s acknowledge that Shanahan does make a key argument about how reading is taught; for example, a recent review of meta-analyses of systematic intensive phonics has shown that most approaches to teaching reading are about equally effective, as Shanahan suggests.

However, the current “science of reading” version of the Reading War argues that systematic intensive phonics must be required for all students; this phonics-first claim has been concurrent with pathologizing most struggling readers as probably dyslexic.

If we shift from last-mile reform to first-mile reform, then, we must avoid both “all students must” and “everything works,” choosing instead to admit that every student deserves the reading instruction they need (regardless of what programs or standards mandate), and we must acknowledge that students living in relative privilege often acquire reading rather easily, suggesting that the conditions within which students live and learn need to be reformed—not the students or the teaching methods.

First-mile reform in reading must start with addressing poverty and inequity in every child’s life. Alleviating poverty, addressing food security, improving work opportunities and security, adopting universal health care—these are issues of equity that would allow all students to acquire reading in ways that are now common for affluent students (often before entering formal schooling).

Stable communities and homes not overburdened by poverty and inequity would have the opportunities to provide children with language-rich environments that send children to formal schooling already highly literate, often reading before direct instruction.

First-mile reform of reading, however, is not a narrow commitment to out-of-school only, but it makes primary equity-focused out-of-school reform while also including equity-focused in-school reform as secondary but essential.

Instead of digging the accountability hole deeper by seeing reading reform as a last-mile challenge, we must climb out of that silo and think differently about in-school reform.

Equity-focused reading reform starts with the conditions of teaching and learning—guaranteeing students small student/teacher ratios in early literacy classes, insuring all students have experienced and highly-qualified teachers, and funding fully the materials needed for rich literacy experiences (authentic texts for all students and robust libraries in the schools and in children’s homes and communities).

This new approach to reform would also avoid tracking students and then would monitor more directly equitable learning opportunities as opposed to narrow measurable outcomes. For example, all students should be in rich and challenging courses—and not in test-prep classes or highly prescriptive programs (reading programs or systematic phonics for all).

Last-mile reading reform continues to focus on students as inherently flawed humans who need to be fixed; first-mile reading reform recognizes that systems are flawed, and that all students can flourish if their living and learning environments are equitable and conducive to learning.

Ultimately, continuing down the current road to reading reform as if we just need to be more demanding of teachers and students in the crucial last mile is continuing to recognize the negative impact of poverty and inequity on children’s ability to read and teachers’ effectiveness in teaching reading.

We mustn’t keep our heads down, we mustn’t keep digging.

We need finally to acknowledge that reading is a first-mile problem.

education, Educational Research, NCTQ, reading, teacher preparation

Fact-checking Phonics, NRP, and NCTQ

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The “science of reading” movement often claims that a systematic intensive phonics-first approach to teaching reading is endorsed by science that is settled, that the National Reading Panel (NRP) is a key element of that settled science, and that teacher education is mostly absent of that “science of reading” (a message that has been central to NCTQ for many years).

These claims, however, misrepresent what evidence actually shows. Here, then, are some evidence-based fact-checks of phonics, NRP, and NCTQ.

Phonics

Reconsidering the Evidence That Systematic Phonics Is More Effective Than Alternative Methods of Reading Instruction, Jeffrey S. Bowers (2020)

Abstract

There is a widespread consensus in the research community that reading instruction in English should first focus on teaching letter (grapheme) to sound (phoneme) correspondences rather than adopt meaning-based reading approaches such as whole language instruction. That is, initial reading instruction should emphasize systematic phonics. In this systematic review, I show that this conclusion is not justified based on (a) an exhaustive review of 12 meta-analyses that have assessed the efficacy of systematic phonics and (b) summarizing the outcomes of teaching systematic phonics in all state schools in England since 2007. The failure to obtain evidence in support of systematic phonics should not be taken as an argument in support of whole language and related methods, but rather, it highlights the need to explore alternative approaches to reading instruction.

[For context, note some of the problems remaining in how whole language is addressed in this post.]

National Reading Panel

The Federal Government Wants Me to Teach What?: A Teacher’s Guide to the National Reading Panel Report, Diane Stephens (NCTE, 2008)

An Ever-So-Brief Summary with Book Recommendations

1. Phonemic Awareness. According to the studies cited in the NRP report, this is best taught to very young children (K–1) using letters, and when letters are used, PA instruction is considered to be phonics. Therefore, it is not necessary to have a separate instructional time for PA. Rather, children should have opportunities to learn about how language is made up of parts (e.g., onsets and rimes, or word families) as part of phonics instruction. An effective way to do this in the classroom? Provide time for students to write using invented spelling (pp. 2-1 through 2-86). (See Strickland, 1998, for further information about invented spelling.)

2. Phonics. According to the studies cited in the NRP report, there is no evidence that phonics instruction helps in kindergarten or in grades 2 to 9. It does help first graders learn the alphabetic principle—that there is a relationship between letters and sounds. No one method is better than any other. For example, for at-risk first graders, a modified whole language approach and one-on-one Reading Recovery–like instruction both helped children with comprehension (pp. 2-89 through 2-176). This phonics instruction should be conducted in the context of whole, meaningful text. (See Moustafa, 1997, for information on embedded, whole-part-whole instruction.)

3. Fluency. According to the authors of the Fluency report, the practice of round robin (at any age) does not help children and can indeed hurt them. However, according to the studies cited in the Fluency report, repeated oral reading (K–12) helps with comprehension because reading to readers fluidly instead of word-by-word reading helps them better understand the text. Ways to help with this? Try such things as readers theater (pp. 3-1 through 3-43). (See Opitz and Rasinski’s Good-bye Round Robin: 25 Effective Oral Reading Strategies [1998] for additional instructional suggestions.)

4. Vocabulary (grades 3 to 8). One method is not better than another. Children learn most of their vocabulary incidentally (pp. 4-15 through 4-35). (For further information about vocabulary learning, see Nagy, 1988.)

5. Comprehension (grades 3 to 6). Children need to learn that print makes sense and to develop a variety of strategies for making sense of print (pp. 4-39 through 4-168). (For further information on teaching for comprehension, see the references listed in Chapter 8: Beers, 2002; Sibberson & Szymusiak, 2003; Taberski, 2000; Tovani, 2000; see also Harvey & Goudvis, 2000.)

Across all of these recommendations? According to the studies cited in the NRP report, if we want children to learn something, we need to teach them that something. Want great readers? Then teach children what great readers do.

NCTQ (Teacher Education)

NOTE: This is more complicated, but first I am posting an older (2006) and new (2020) report from NCTQ both making essentially the same claims that teacher education fails to teach the “science of reading.” Then, I include a link to several reviews that show that NCTQ’s “reports” are methodologically flawed and essentially propaganda, not “science.”

What Education Schools Aren’t Teaching (2006)

2020 Teacher Prep Review: Program Performance in Early Reading Instruction

NEPC reviews of NCTQ reports

NCTQ on States’ Teacher Evaluation Systems’ Failures, Again