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/).
education, education reform, reading, Teaching, Testing

Mississippi Miracle, Mirage, or Political Lie?: 2019 NAEP Reading Scores Prompt Questions, Not Answers [Update September 2023]

6 Comments

Update September 2023

Grade Retention Harms Children, Corrupts Test Data, But Not a Miracle: Mississippi Edition

UPDATE

CRUMBLING SCHOOLS, DISMAL OUTCOMES: Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education was supposed to change everything for Southern black children, Bracey Harris

UPDATE 15 February 2022

Opinion: Reeves’ Education Mirage

Key points:

To make his case, Reeves — much like the Mississippi Department of Education itself — is chronically selective in his statistics, telling only part of the story and leaving out facts that would show that many of these gains are either illusory or only seem to be impressive because the state started so far behind most of the rest of the nation….

Even the state’s impressive improvement on the National Assessment of Educational Progress may not be quite all that it seems.

From 2013 to 2019, the latest year for which results are available, Mississippi students rose faster in fourth grade reading than anyone on the national test. They improved their ranking from 49th to 29th. The gains in math were even more impressive, jumping from 50th to 23rd during that same time frame.

Reeves attributes the progress to “third grade gate,” the reform pushed through by Republicans in 2013 that requires third graders to demonstrate they are at least minimally proficient in reading before they advance to fourth grade.

The Republican belief is that the threat of having to repeat a grade has prompted students, their families and teachers to work harder to be sure that doesn’t happen.

Another interpretation has been offered, though. It’s that because of third grade gate, Mississippi’s lowest performing students get an extra year of instruction before they take the fourth grade test. With the state failing more than twice as many students in their early years as the national average, that could create a significant advantage, though probably a short-lived one.

The research remains inconclusive on this point. It’s not on the others.

REEVES’ EDUCATION MIRAGE

UPDATE 7 December 2022

Note the trends in Mississippi’s NAEP Reading scores from 1992 through 2022 and the contrast between grade 4 and grade 8:

Note that Mississippi’s grade 4 reading scores on NAEP show:

  1. MS has steadily improved scores over thirty years despite adopting different reading programs, implementing different state standards, and reforming with multiple reading policies.
  2. MS has had two large gains—one from 2005 to 2009, 7 points, and one from 2013 to 2019, 10 points, dropping to 8 with 2022—raising a question about the role of SOR legislation since that first large gain is pre-SOR.
  3. MS remains well below proficient on average, similar to other high-poverty states.

Note that Mississippi’s grade 8 reading scores on NAEP show:

  1. Apparent “gains” made in grade 4 have disappeared by grade 8 (consistent with research on systematic phonics instruction for reading).
  2. MS grade 8 scores on reading have remained relatively flat for 24 years.
  3. MS grade 8 larger increases happened in 2002-2003 and 2017-2019, again one well before and another after SOR legislation.

UPDATE 4 July 2023

Column: How Mississippi gamed its national reading test scores to produce ‘miracle’ gains (see HERE also)

MISSISSIPPI’S MIRACLE: Do we really have a “Mississippi mirage?”

MISSISSIPPI’S MIRACLE: Has the revolution reached the eighth grade?

UPDATE: Mississippi reading isn’t so miraculous after all

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

There is a disturbing contradiction in the predicted jubilant response to Mississippi’s outlier 4th-grade results from the 2019 NAEP reading test. That contradiction can be found in a new article by Emily Hanford, using Mississippi to recycle her brand, a call for the “science of reading.”

This is a great deal to ask of the average reader, but Hanford’s argument is grounded in a claim that most students in the U.S. are being taught reading through methods that are not supported by scientific research (code for narrow types of quantitative research that can identify causal relationships and thus can be generalized to all students).

However, the contradiction lies in Hanford’s own concession about the 2019 NAEP reading data from Mississippi:

The state’s performance in reading was especially notable. Mississippi was the only state in the nation to post significant gains on the fourth-grade reading test. Fourth graders in Mississippi are now on par with the national average, reading as well or better than pupils in California, Texas, Michigan and 18 other states.

What’s up in Mississippi? There’s no way to know for sure what causes increases in test scores [emphasis added], but Mississippi has been doing something notable: making sure all of its teachers understand the science of reading.

To be fair, there is a way to know, and that would be conducting scientific research that teases out the factors that can be identified as causing the test score changes in the state.

In her missionary zeal for the “science of reading,” Hanford contradicts herself by taking most of the article to imply without any scientific evidence, without any research, that Mississippi’s gains are by her fervent implication a result of the state’s embracing the “science of reading”: “In 2013, legislators in Mississippi provided funding to start training the state’s teachers in the science of reading.”

Let me stress here a couple points.

First, scientific research connecting classroom practices to NAEP test scores is rare, but in the 1990s, comparative data were released on 1992 scores in 1997. That research showed a possible link between whole language practices and higher NAEP scores—something that Hanford and her “science of reading” followers may find shocking since they routinely claim that whole language and balanced literacy are not scientifically supported.

Therefore, it is simply far too soon after the release of the 2019 NAEP scores to suggest any relationship between classroom practices (as if they are uniform across an entire state) and NAEP scores. Any implications about Mississippi are premature and irresponsible to make for journalists, politicians, or advocates for education.

Premature and irresponsible.

Second, data from Mississippi are more than 4th-grade 2019 reading—if we genuinely want to know something of value about teaching children to read.

Mississippi’s outlier 4th-grade reading scores are way more complicated once we frame them against longitudinal NAEP scores as well as 8th-grade reading scores. These, then, are more data we should using to ask questions about Mississippi instead of making rash and unscientific claims:

MS reading grade 4 trend

4th grade reading trends

MS score gaps grade 4

4th grade score gaps

MS reading grade 8 trend

8th grade reading trends

MS score gaps grade 8

8th grade score gaps

Here are some complicated takeaways from this larger picture:

  • If the “science of reading” is the cause of recent gains in 4th-grade reading in MS, how do we explain that MS has seen a trend of increased scores since 1998 and pretty significant jumps between 2005 and 2009[1], well before the shift identified by Hanford in 2013?
  • Why does MS still show about the same gaps between Black and white students as well as between socioeconomic classes of students since 1998 if how we teach reading is the key factor in achievement?
  • And a really powerful question concerns 8th grade: Are any 4th-grade gains by MS (or any state) merely mirages since many states with 4th-grade gains see a drop by 8th grade and since longitudinal 8th-grade scores are mostly flat since 1998?
  • UPDATE: Todd Collins has raised another important caveat to the 4th-grade reading gains in Mississippi because the state has the highest 3rd-grade retention percentages in the country:

But Mississippi has taken the concept further than others, with a retention rate higher than any other state. In 2018–19, according to state department of education reports, 8 percent of all Mississippi K–3 students were held back (up from 6.6 percent the prior year). This implies that over the four grades, as many as 32 percent of all Mississippi students are held back; a more reasonable estimate is closer to 20 to 25 percent, allowing for some to be held back twice. (Mississippi’s Department of Education does not report how many students are retained more than once.)

This last concern means that significant numbers of students in states with 3rd-grade retention based on reading achievement and test scores are biologically 5th-graders being held to 4th-grade proficiency levels. Grade retention is not only correlated with many negative outcomes (dropping out, for example), but also likely associated with “false positives” on testing; as well, most states seeing bumps in 4th-grade test scores also show that those gains disappear by middle and high school.

UPDATE

(USDOE/Office of Civil Rights) – Data 2017-2018

Sources

Ultimately, if anyone wants to argue that how we teach reading in the U.S. must be grounded only in a narrow view of “scientific” (and that is a terrible argument, by the way), then any claims we make about the effectiveness of those practices must also be supported by scientific research.

Despite efforts to make Mississippi a shining example of how all states should address reading policy, we should be using Mississippi (and the 29 states scoring higher) to examine all the factors contributing to why students achieve at the levels they do on NAEP reading.

Unless of course we have real political courage and are willing to admit that NAEP and any form of standardized testing are the wrong way to make these decisions.

Here’s something to think about in that regard: As long as we use this sort of testing, we will always have some states above the average, several at the average, and some below the average—resulting in the same nonsensical hand wringing we see today that is no different than any decade over the last 100 years.

I recommend instead of all the scientific research needed to make any fair claim, we stop the testing, make teaching and learning conditions better, make the lives of children and their families in the U.S. better, and do the complicated daily work it requires to serve the needs of all students.

NOTE

[1] Hanford contradicts herself again and open the door to another question:

For years, everyone assumed Mississippi was at the bottom in reading because it was the poorest state in the nation. Mississippi is still the poorest state, but fourth graders there now read at the national average. While every other state’s fourth graders made no significant progress in reading on this year’s test, or lost ground, Mississippi’s fourth-grade reading scores are up by 10 points since 2013, when the state began the effort to train its teachers in the science of reading. Correlation isn’t causation* [emphasis added], but Mississippi has made a huge investment in helping teachers learn the science behind reading.

There is an 8-point jump in 4th-grade reading in MS from 2002 to 2009—well before the 2013 shift to the “science of reading”—thus how is that explained? [UPDATED]

* For the record, causation is a key component of “scientific,” which Hanford espouses for reading, yet she stoops to correlation (not scientific) to make her argument.

education, education reform, Educational Research, reading

Back to the Future of Reading Instruction: 1990s Edition

1 Comment

[Header Photo by Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash]

The year is 1997 and the topic, of course, is improving a failing education system in the U.S. Linda Darling-Hammond explains in the Preface [1]:

This follow-up report, Doing What Matters Most: Investing in Quality Teaching, seeks to gauge the nation’s progress toward the goal of high-quality teaching in every classroom in every community. It draws on data about the conditions of teaching that have become available since the original Commission report was released, and it examines policy changes that have occurred.

This report has five recommendations that may sound familiar:

I. Standards for teachers linked to standards for students….

II. Reinvent teacher preparation and professional development….

III. Overhaul teacher recruitment and put qualified teachers in every classroom….

IV. Encourage and reward knowledge and skill….

V. Create schools that are organized for student and teacher success.

We need better standards for teachers and students, better teacher education, better recruitment of teachers focusing on high quality, better reward systems for teacher expertise and outcomes, and better teaching and learning conditions.

Yet, the report also offers some sobering information:

Over the last decade, reforms have sought to increase the amount of academic coursework and the numbers of tests students take, in hopes of improving achievement. These initiatives have made a great difference in coursetaking: In 1983, only 14% of high school students took the number of academic courses recommended in A Nation at Risk—4 units in English and 3 each in mathematics, science, and social studies. By 1994, more than half (51%) had taken this set of recommended courses.

Despite these changes, achievement scores have improved little, and have actually declined slightly for high school students in reading and writing since 1988 (see figure 3). [emphasis added]

Let’s look at that figure 3:

NAEP trends 1980 1990

Notice anything familiar above when we look at 4th and 8th grade reading since the early 1990s?

trend grade 4 reading
trend grade 8 reading

While this report concedes what research has long shown—the largest influences on measurable student outcomes are out-of-school factors (parent income, level of education, etc.)—the focus remains on teacher practices, offering a rare set of correlations between scores and those practices:

Correlates of reading NAEP 1992

Here is where I want to pause to note that while no one has conducted even a correlational graph such as the one above—and no one has conducted scientific research to identify causal relationships—to draw conclusions about 2017 and 2019 NAEP scores, this chart raises some key questions about the current “science of reading” claims about teacher education and the need for systematic intensive phonics (and not whole language or balanced literacy).

Note above that whole literacy practices and training correlate with higher scores.

Twenty years after this report from Darling-Hammond have seen at least two significant additional rounds of educational reform, one driven by No Child Left Behind and another sputtering one connected to Common Core.

Just as educational leaders were in the 1990s, we are left with the same data problems, notably flat or dismal reading scores, and can only reach for the same lazy arguments that have never worked before.

The five recommendations from 1997 are echoed today by political leaders and the “science of reading” crowd, all bashing teacher education, teacher expertise, and focusing on standards, tests, and programs.

And little to nothing is done about food and work security, healthcare, or class size—even though these conditions combined would dwarf any measurable impact of teacher quality or program/standards quality.

Ultimately, the “science of reading” and NAEP-crisis rhetoric are doomed because the Christopher Columbus syndrome (thinking you have discovered something that others you ignore or marginalize have known forever) insures that one truism will remain true—those ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it.

Today’s reading crisis is that, back to the future of reading, a 1990s edition recast [2].

[1] Credit and appreciation to Diane Stephens, literacy expert and former professor at the University of South Carolina, who brought this report to my attention.

[2] Don’t forget the 1940s also: “What Shall We Do About Reading Today?”

education, race, racism, reading

White Lies, Black Incarceration, and the Promise of Reading in Prison

1 Comment

“The curiosity that may be deemed a sign of genius in a white male child is viewed as trouble making when expressed by black boys,” observes bell hooks in Chapter 3 of her We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity.

The book’s title echoes the wonderful and precise poem by Gwendolyn Brooks, which also in its powerful concision offers a portrait of the dire consequences of toxic masculinity for Black men.

I came to this work of hooks along with The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love through an online documentary, The Feminist on Cellblock Y:

The documentary features Richie Reseda who, while incarcerated, began seminars on the patriarchy and toxic masculinity grounded in the writings of bell hooks.

hooks begins Chapter 3 with “More than any other group of men in our society black males are perceived as lacking in intellectual skills,” a claim both represented and refuted by the men who animate the documentary through personal reflections and candid filming of them investigating the texts written by hooks and then navigating prison seminars that rival and even surpass the sorts of college classrooms these men have been systematically denied.

From reading hooks, Reseda came to recognize the systemic forces—patriarchy, toxic masculinity, rape culture—that shaped him and his cellmates into criminals:

Nowadays in the imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarch culture, most boys from poor and underprivileged classes are socialized via mass media and class-biased education to believe that all that is required for their survival is the ability to do physical labor. Black boys, disproportionately numbered among the poor, have been socialized to believe that physical strength and stamina are all that really matter.

Reseda explains in the documentary that he also found so-called rehabilitation programs in prison using the same ideologies grounded in patriarchy and toxic masculinity, reducing prisoners, for example, to narrow expectations for manhood and the black body.

The result of his awareness spawned his patriarchy seminars as well as his political activism that helped create an opportunity for him and others to learn their way out of incarceration.

The CNN documentary has a bit over 25,000 views on YouTube and Reseda has around 800 followers on Twitter; the awareness of Reseda, his story, and how it represents the U.S. culture that turns Black men into criminals are far below the magnified lens being afforded Pete Buttigieg, a former mayor running for president.

Buttigieg has fashioned a personae, Mayor Pete, that includes a powerful mix of compelling narratives in the U.S.—military veteran, genius, and the monogamous (and nonthreatening) gay man.

Yet, Buttigieg is a product of systemic forces very similar to the pattern confronted by Reseda in both society and prison rehabilitation; Buttigieg is the embodiment of white male privilege and the bootstrap myth.

While the media have celebrated Buttigieg in ways that are disproportionate to his polling, Michael Harriot has taken Buttigieg to task for possibly the best example of the former mayor’s unexamined privilege and racism.

In 2011, Buttigieg mansplained/whitesplained that poor minorities struggle because they do not have adult role models who value education. He offered a compelling and popular narrative in the U.S. that is grounded in gross stereotypes that have been refuted by scholarship on social class and race, as Harriot highlights:

“Kids need to see evidence that education is going to work for them,” Buttigieg explained whitely, when he was running for mayor in 2011. [“]You’re motivated because you believe that at the end of your education, there is a reward; there’s a stable life; there’s a job. And there are a lot of kids—especially [in] the lower-income, minority neighborhoods, who literally just haven’t seen it work. There isn’t someone who they know personally who testifies to the value of education.”

Yet, Harriot explains, “I am from what most people would call ‘the hood.’ The bad section of town. You know—where black people live.” And then he deconstructs both Buttigieg and the culture of poverty Buttigieg voices:

I never said fuck it.

But if I did, it wouldn’t have been because of a lack of role models. If I had chosen to keep my mama’s lights on instead of making that daily trek, my decision wouldn’t have been based on a tropological dearth of “motivation” or communal ambivalence. As I grow older, I realize that I was not gifted, talented or even diligent.

I’m just a lucky motherfucker.

Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg is a lucky motherfucker, too.

He attended one of the best private schools in the country that was quite literally on the campus of one of the best colleges in the country, Notre Dame University, where his father worked as a professor for 29 years. His mother taught at an even better, more elite school. And if you ask how he got into Harvard or became a Rhodes Scholar, Mayor Pete would probably insist that it had nothing to do with whiteness. He would likely tell you that he valued education and had great role models, both of which are probably true. There is no question that he is intelligent, hard-working and well-educated.

But he didn’t have to jump a ditch.

Buttigieg is culturally popular in the U.S. because he helps keep the focus on the individual; this is in stark contrast to the systemic arguments made by hooks and then demonstrated in the lives of prisoners such as Reseda.

As Harriot asserts, Buttigieg’s message and the entire bootstrap/ rising tide narrative is a lie.

The reality of the ditch in Harriot’s life becomes a metaphor for blackness as an obstacle, for patriarchy and toxic masculinity as a prison.

Reseda’s story, however, has a key—reading and education. When Reseda and other prisoners begin to read for their own liberation, when they become a community of scholars behind bars, they effectively unlocked their intellectual cells and, for some, created avenues to lives outside of incarceration.

While the U.S. fails significantly with its history of mass incarceration, disproportionately impacting Black men, The Feminist on Cellblock Y demonstrates that life inside and outside of prison for Black men, brown men, and poor men has a disturbing similarity to Albert Camus’s musing on life in The Stranger because in both settings these men are prisoners of the patriarchy and toxic masculinity.

Reseda through his own agency working against the system found liberation in the books of hooks so we should not be surprised by this: West Virginia Is Charging Its Inmates $0.03 Cents a Minute to Read Free E-Books. Here’s Why That Matters.

Books, you see, as Ray Bradbury demonstrated in Fahrenheit 451, are dangerous for those with unearned power and liberating for everyone else.

As hooks concludes in her Chapter 3:

If black males can educate and/or reeducate themselves in prisons, it is all the more feasible that concerned black folks can school black male children rightly in the communities and homes where they live. In subcultures where such schooling is already taking place, black boys and black men reclaim their will to learn, to be educated despite the attempts by this society to crush the spirit and silence inquiring minds. Progressive schooling of black males can become a norm only as we begin to take their education seriously, restoring the link between learning and liberation.

$0.03 per minute seems like a small cost, but it is another significant ditch to maintain an imbalance of privilege that elevates Buttigieg while attempting to keep Reseda behind bars.

See Also

Pete Buttigieg Called Me. Here’s What Happened, Michael Harriot

Image
education, race, racism

Racial Slurs in Academic Spaces: A Reader

1 Comment

Four of us—three university professors and a high school English teacher—were talking enthusiastically right through the last call in an ale house across from the Baltimore Convention Center hosting the 2019 National Council of Teachers of English annual conference.

Fulfilling stereotypes of those who would attend such a convention, we were hotly debating the place of racial slurs in academic spaces. One of the university professors argued for the distinction between using a racial slur (the n-word) and voicing a racial slur included in an instructional text.

He believes voicing that word in context is not only acceptable, but necessary.

The other three of us, notably all teaching in the South, were leaning strongly toward never voicing the n-word—especially as a usage but even when reading a text aloud.

While some white people still want to argue that if Black people can say the n-word, then white people should be allowed as well. I think in schools and colleges, this flawed reasoning is fairly universally rejected, and using the n-word is not allowed by white people and possibly banned entirely across campuses (zero-tolerance policies).

However, what has increasingly become an issue is challenges to voicing of the n-word as well as referencing to the use of the n-word.

Below is a reader that highlights the current controversy along with the unintended problems with zero-tolerance polices connected to the n-word:

[Update] Banning the N-word on campus ain’t the answer — it censors Black professors like me, Vershawn Ashanti Young

The Idea That Whites Can’t Refer to the N-Word, John McWhorter

It’s Time to Completely Ban the N-Word in Schools (Education Week)

N-Word at the New School (Inside Higher Ed)

Professor who quoted James Baldwin’s use of N-word cleared by university

Too Taboo for Class? (Inside Higher Ed)

2 More Emory Law Professors Reportedly Said the N-Word in Class (Inside Higher Ed)

Emory Law Professor faces termination hearing for using ‘n-word’ in discussion of civil rights case, discussion with student

Professor who used N-word in class announces resignation

Universities repeatedly discipline professors for referring to the n-word

Black student calls out white professor who used the n-word in class as an ‘experiment’

How a Dispute Over the N-Word Became a Dispiriting Farce (The Chronicle of Higher Education)

MNPS teacher placed on leave for homework about the n-word

Should Schools Have an N-Word Policy? Uproar Over Guard’s Firing Forces Hard Questions (Education Week)

‘I’m not your n-word’: school guard fired for repeating racial slur

“Incident,” Countee Cullen

UPDATE

Claremont McKenna denies professor’s account of censorship

Pedagogy and the N-Word

education, education reform, reading

Worst NAEP Reading 2019 Hot Take of the Week

This is really a hard feat, but Put “Whole Language” on Trial by the King of Know-Nothing edureform Michael J. Petrilli is easily the worst NAEP Reading 2019 Hot Take of the week.

Dumb doesn’t get any dumber than this:

An equal-opportunity challenge related to shoddy teacher preparation would likely face the same roadblock. Further, there is little, if any, legal precedent for suing schools of education; even medical schools enjoy significant protections from charges of malpractice related to the physicians they train.

All of which is why it would be important to go after states, and in particular states that have already lost finance-adequacy cases. It would also help if the chosen target states do not require elementary-school teachers to pass an in-depth test of the science of reading before entering the classroom, and if the states host several big education schools that earn failing grades when it comes to preparing candidates to teach reading effectively. States that appear to meet those criteria include Kentucky, South Carolina, and Washington.

Petrilli has entered the “science of reading debate” a little late but just as fact-challenged as the other advocates have been.

So here are a few questions:

  • Where is scientific research that how teacher education programs prepare teachers to teach reading is actually how they teach reading once in the field? (Not any.)
  • Where is scientific research that there is a causal relationship between how reading is taught (and if those approaches are uniform across an entire state) and NAEP scores? (Not any.)
  • And where is scientific research to explain—as Petrilli highlights above—these outcomes for Kentucky, South Carolina, and Washington? (Not any.)

NAEP R 2019 4

NAEP R 2019 7

NAEP R 2019 8

Kentucky, South Carolina, and Washington have 2017 and 2019 NAEP reading scores all over the place—above, at, and below the national average; dropping from 4th to 8th; and dropping from 2017 to 2019 (except one increase by SC, which remains below the national average in every test).

Petrilli is yet another know-nothing that is grasping as “scientific” straws with no evidence on his side.

This is all hokem, rhetorical grandstanding that proves to be hollow.

Shouting the “science of reading” proves itself once again to been mere ideology.

education, education reform, literacy, reading

Research, the Media, and the Market: A Cautionary Tale

Reporting in The New York Times, Gina Kolata offers a compelling lede:

The findings of a large federal study on bypass surgeries and stents call into question the medical care provided to tens of thousands of heart disease patients with blocked coronary arteries, scientists reported at the annual meeting of the American Heart Association on Saturday.

The new study found that patients who received drug therapy alone did not experience more heart attacks or die more often than those who also received bypass surgery or stents, tiny wire cages used to open narrowed arteries.

And Julie Steenhuysen adds an interesting detail to this new major study: “At least two prior studies determined that artery-clearing and stenting or bypass surgery in addition to medical treatment does not significantly lower the risk of heart attacks or death compared with non-invasive medical approaches alone.”

But these details may prove to be the most important ones of all: “Over $8 billion worth of coronary stents will be sold annually by 2025, according to a new research report by Global Market Insights, Inc. The increase over the years will be created by an increase in artery diseases coupled with a growing demand for minimally invasive surgeries,” explains Stephen Mraz.

So now let’s do the math. If heart doctors shift to what the new research shows, “The nation could save more than $775 million a year by not giving stents to the 31,000 patients who get the devices even though they have no chest pain, Dr. Hochman said,” reports Kolata.

Better and less intrusive patient care, lower overall medical costs for a U.S. healthcare system already overburdened—what is there to keep the medical profession from embracing compelling scientific research?

Well, the market of course.

Lower costs come from fewer heart surgeries, meaning heart surgeons lose income—and possibly patients.

Keep in mind that while the medical profession decades ago emphasized best practice in prescribing antibiotics (only when bacterial infections are detected), many doctors found that following best practice led to dissatisfied patients, who flexed their consumer muscles by finding doctors who would usurp best practice and prescribe the requested antibiotics even when they weren’t warranted.

The new research on stents and heart disease treatment is a cautionary tale involving research, the media, and the market—a cautionary tale that should inform the current call for the “science of reading,” especially as that impacts children with dyslexia.

That several studies now show the use of stents should be reduced or at least delayed, but that doctors have resisted that evidence calls out for us to ask an important question about scientific research: In whose interest is the research being applied?

At the International Literacy Association 2019 conference, P. David Pearson, University of California, Berkeley, lays out in about 11 minutes a compelling unpacking of What Research Really Says About Teaching Reading–and Why That Still Matters.

In this framing talk before a panel discussion, Pearson confronts the role of media in misinforming the public about research, challenges advocates of “scientific research” who fluctuate between endorsing research and following “common sense,” and calls for not ignoring “scientific research” but expanding the types of research relied upon to make teaching and learning decisions (recognizing a broad spectrum of evidence-based research that trumps ideology or assumptions).

One of the most compelling examples offered by Pearson is how the media framed research on reading after the report from controversial National Reading Panel (NRP), at the center of No Child Left Behind’s mandate for scientific research. The headline Pearson highlights is “Systematic, explicit, synthetic phonics improves reading achievement.”

Yet, the specific study being cited actually was far more complicated, and less endorsing of systematic phonics; along with “many other elements…, a small but robust effect for a subset of the population is found on a measure that requires kids to read a lists of pseudowords.”

Pearson adds that even if we accept the larger NRP report as valid (and several scholars do not), the report calls for systematic phonics for K-1 students, not older struggling readers. Yet, as Pearson explains, many calling for the “science of reading” push for systematic phonics programs throughout grades well beyond grade 1.

So there exists several traps in calling for scientific research in education, and more narrowly, in the teaching of reading.

As another example, consider Timothy Shanahan’s response to the effectiveness of dyslexia fonts:

Over the past decade or so, three new fonts have appeared (Open Dyslexia, Dyslexie, and Read Regular), all claiming—without any empirical evidence—to somehow aid dyslexic readers.

Since then there have been 8 studies into the value of these fonts.

Most of the studies found no improvement in reading rate, accuracy, or eye fixations (Duranovic, et al., 2018; Kuster, et al., 2018; Rello & Baeza-Yates, 2013; Wery & Diliberto, 2017). The studies even found that dyslexics—children and adults—preferred reading standard fonts to the special ones (Harley, et al., 2016; Kuster, et al., 2018; Wery & Diliberto, 2017).

Only one study reported a benefit of any kind—the dyslexic students in this study read faster (Marinus, et al., 2016). This benefit apparently came, not from the font design, but from the spacing within and between words. The researchers increased the spacings in the standard fonts and the same effect was seen. Masulli (2018) likewise found that larger spacings improved the reading speed of dyslexics—but that effect was apparent with non-dyslexic readers, as well.

Reading faster is a good thing, of course, as long as reading comprehension is maintained. Unfortunately, these studies didn’t look at that.

The use of dyslexia fonts, then, are driven by the market—consumer demand being met by businesses—but not supported by evidence; neither the claims of the businesses nor the outcomes from implementing the fonts are justified by “scientific evidence.”

Just as Hooked on Phonics flourished in two different iterations (the first felled by court rulings that exposed the lack of research backing market claims), many reading and phonics programs in education are buoyed by ideology and the market but not by research.

But the traps around programs and “scientific” are extremely complex from two different angles.

First, as noted in several examples above, teaching and learning are likely not served well within a market dynamic whereby parents and students are the consumers and teachers and the schools serve the inexpert demands of those consumers.

Yes, parents and students have a right to express their need, but they most often lack the expertise to demand how that need should be met.

Parents of children with reading problems or dyslexia should be demanding that their children be served better and appropriately. But calling for specific policy and practice is outside the purview of those “consumers.” (This is the same dynamic in patients seeking doctors who prescribe antibiotics when they are not needed, creating a health hazard for themselves and others when medical best practice is usurped by market demand.)

The second trap, however, is “scientific” itself. As I have detailed, experimental and quasi-experimental research (what we mean by “scientific,” as Pearson discusses) draws causal relationships that can be generalized. By definition, then, generalizable research doesn’t address outliers or real-world situations where several factors impact the effectiveness of teaching and learning.

The “scientific” trap positions a parent of a child struggling to read, diagnosed with dyslexia, into a problematic corner if that child finds success with dyslexia fonts, a practice not supported by research.

Teaching and teachers must be guided by evidence, both the evidence of a wide range of research and the evidence drawn from the individual students in any classroom.

To teach is to quilt together what a teacher knows about the field, reading for example, and then to match instruction to where any student is and where any student wishes to go.

This, ironically, is the philosophy behind balanced literacy, the approach demonized (usually with false claims and without evidence) by those calling for the “science of reading.”

Each time advocacy for systematic intensive phonics for all students gains momentum, I ask the key question: In whose interest is the research being applied?

Go back to the new research on stents, a true life-and-death matter, and think about that question when you read the media demand the “science of reading.”

For Further Consideration

Flu Outbreak Reduces Class Sizes To Level Appropriate For Learning

education, Lou LaBrant, Progressivism, reading

The Wrong “Scientific” for Education

1 Comment

The release of National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 2019 scores in math and reading, announced as an “emergency” and “devastating,” has thrown gasoline on the rhetorical fire that has already been sweeping across media—a call for “scientific” research to save public education in the U.S.:

While the media and the public seem historically and currently convinced by the rhetoric of “scientific,” there is a significant irony to the lack of scientific evidence backing claims about the causes of NAEP scores; for example, some have rushed to argue that intensive phonics instruction and grade retention legislation have caused Mississippi’s NAEP reading gains while many have used 2019 NAEP scores to declare the entire accountability era a failure.

Yet, none of these claims have the necessary scientific evidence to make any of these arguments. There simply has not been the time or the efforts to construct scientific studies (experimental or quasi-experimental) to identify causal factors in NAEP score changes.

Another problem with the rhetoric of “scientific” is that coinciding with that advocacy is some very disturbing contradictory realities:

And let’s not forget that for at least two decades, “scientific” has been central to No Child Left Behind and the Common Core—both of which were championed as mechanisms for finally bringing education into a new era of evidence-based practices.

We must wonder: If “scientific” is the answer to our educational failures, what has happened over the past twenty years of “scientific” being legislated into education, resulting in everyone shouting that the sky is falling because 2019 NAEP scores are down from 2017 as well as relatively flat since the early 1990s (30 of the 40 years spanning accountability)?

First, there is the problem of definition. “Scientific” is short-hand for a very narrow type of quantitative research, experimental and quasi-experimental research that is the gold standard of pharmaceutical and medical research.

To meet the standard of “scientific,” then, research in education would have to include random-sample populations of students and a control group in order to draw causal relationships and make generalizations. This process is incredibly expensive in terms of funding and time.

As I noted above, no one has had the time to conduct “scientific” research on 2019 NAEP data so making causal claims of any kind for why NAEP scores dropped is necessarily not “scientific.”

But there is a second, and larger, problem with calling for “scientific” research in education. This narrow form of “scientific” is simply wrong for education.

Experimental and quasi-experimental research seeks to identify causal generalizations. In other words, if we divide all students into a bell-shaped curve with five segments, the meaty center segment would be where the generalization from a study has the greatest effectiveness. The adjacent two outer segments would show some decreasing degrees of effectiveness, leaving the two extreme segments at the far ends of the curve likely showing little or no effectiveness (these students, however, could have learned under instruction not shown as generally effective).

Yet, in a real classroom, teachers are not serving a random sampling of students, and there are no controls to assure that some factors are not causing different outcomes for students even when the instructional practice has been shown by scientific research to be effective.

No matter the science behind instruction, sick, hungry, or bullied students will not be able to learn.

The truth is, in education, scientific studies are nearly impossible to conduct, are often overly burdensome in terms of expense and time, and are ultimately not adequate for the needs of real teachers and students in real classrooms—where teaching and learning are messy, idiosyncratic, and impacted by dozens of factors beyond the control of teachers or students.

Frankly, nothing works for all students, and a generalization can be of no use to a particular student with an outlier need.

While we are over-reacting to 2019 NAEP reading scores, we have failed to recognize that there has never been a period in the U.S. when reading achievement was adequate; over that history teachers have implemented hundreds of different instructional strategies, reading programs, standards, and high-stakes tests—and we always find the outcomes unsatisfying.

If there is any causal relationship between how we teach and how students learn, it is a cumbersome matrix of factors that has been mostly unexamined, especially by “scientific” methods.

And often, history is a better avenue than science.

The twenty-first century has not been the only era calling for “scientific” in educational practice.

The John Dewey progressivism of the early twentieth century was also characterized by a call for scientific practice. Lou LaBrant, who taught from 1906 until 1971 and rose to president of the National Council of Teachers of English in the 1950s, was a lifelong practitioner of Deweyan progressivism.

LaBrant called repeated for closing the “gap” between research and practice, but she also balked at reading and writing programs—singular approaches to teaching all students literacy.

While progressive education and Dewey are often demonized and blamed for educational failure by mid-twentieth century, the truth is that progressivism has never been widely embraced in the U.S.

Today, however, we should be skeptical of the narrow and flawed call for “scientific” and embrace instead the progressive view of “scientific.”

For Dewey, the teacher must simultaneously teach and conduct research—what eventually would be called action research.

To teach, for progressives, is to constantly gather evidence of learning from students in order to drive instruction; in this context, science means that each student receives the instruction they demonstrate a need for and that produces some outcomes of effectiveness.

In an elementary reading class, some students may be working in read aloud groups while others are receiving direct phonics instruction, and even others are sitting in book clubs reading picture books by choice. None of them, however, would be doing test-prep worksheets or computer-based programs.

The current urge toward “scientific” seems to embrace the false assumption that with the right body of research we can identify the single approach for all students to succeed.

Human learning, however, is as varied as there are humans.

This brings us to the current “science of reading” narrative that calls for all students to receive intensive systematic phonics, purportedly because scientific research calls for such. The “science of reading” narrative also rejects and demonizes “balanced literacy” as not “scientific.”

We arrive then back at the problem of definition.

The “science of reading” advocacy is trapped in too narrow a definition of “scientific” that is fundamentally wrong for educating every student. Ironically, again, balanced literacy is a philosophy of literacy (not a program) that implements Deweyan progressive “scientific”; each student receives the reading instruction they need based on the evidence of learning the teacher gathers from previous instruction, evidence used to guide future instruction.

Intensive phonics for all begins with a fixed mandate regardless of student ability or need; balanced literacy starts with the evidence of the student.

If we are going to argue for “scientific” education in the U.S., we would be wise to change the definition, expand the evidence, and tailor our instruction to the needs of our students and not the propagandizing of a few zealots.

For two decades at least, the U.S. has been chasing the wrong “scientific” as a distraction from the real guiding principle, efficiency. Reducing math and reading to discrete skills and testing those skills as evidence for complex human behaviors are as misleading as arguing that “scientific” research will save education.

Teachers as daily, patient researchers charged with teaching each student as that student needs—that is the better “scientific” even as it is much messier and less predictable.

Bicycling, memoir

Rule 5: HTFU

In many ways, this past Tuesday was mostly a typical flight night at a local tap house, Growler Haus. We gathered and took over the room to the right, what we have come to call “The Office.”

But this Tuesday we were 15 gathered to say goodbye to a friend moving, as we say around here, “up North,” or in his case, back up North.

CJennings FW3-X2

The “we” in this case is the Spartanburg, SC, cycling community—or at least a part of it. Cycling is vibrant—although the people change and the intensity shifts over the years—in the Upstate of SC from Spartanburg to Greenville especially.

Chris, pictured above holding a mock-up of a plaque in his honor, is moving away, and we spent a couple hours over pints, flights, and food smiling and laughing about his moving to Spartanburg years ago and finding his way into our not-so-warm-and-fuzzy cycling clique; in many ways we are worse than high school, we road and MTB cyclists who have also branched out to gravel riding (anything to justify even slightly the code of bicycle ownership—Rule #12: The correct number of bikes to own is n+1).

If you zoom in, you see the plaque mock-up includes below his name Rule #5—one of the dilemmas faced by those organizing the gesture of farewell.

You see Rule #5, among The Rules at Velominati, is mostly NSFW—Harden the fuck up, or as we say in most public settings, HTFU.

The 15 in attendance and pictured above range in ages from their 20s into their 60s, much like our cycling community, and we all at one point or another have found ourselves stressed to our limits, probably questioning why we were voluntarily participating in a hobby, for fun, something that left us near the brink of death—or simply wishing death would offer a bit of relief.

Recreational cycling is often competitive, both spontaneously on any bicycle ride including more than one rider and during organized events (even the ones that explicitly announce “this is not a race”).

When we are the ones dishing out the pace and pain (a few above are always in that group), we smile and quip: “You know what to do when you are getting dropped? Speed up.”

It is that sort of nonsense that has bonded this group, nonsense that is about the same percentage sincerity as nonsense.

I have been cycling “seriously,” as we say, for well over thirty years. Those early years, I was mere fodder, a peon, but several of the elite locals gave me the treatment that we honor to this day, a sort of loving hazing, a relentless demand that “do better, damnit” is about the same as saying “love you.”

One of my friendly torturers was Fred; I still see him from time to time at mountain biking trails. He has shifted to solitary riding, and I have throttled back significantly my mileage and intensity. But I feel something unnameable every time I see Fred (Rule #3: Guide the uninitiated).

Fred was ruthless and his ability on a bicycle left me in awe. I never came close to Fred in ability, but I creeped toward his tenacity—and I certainly for a few years was a much better cyclist.

And I still know a hell of a lot about bicycling.

Several people in the photograph were shepherded into the flock as I was many moons ago. Now the grasshoppers have become masters; we guard our own Rules vigilantly even as we quote The Rules with a bit of a smile.

I hear our 20 and 30 somethings sigh and lament things aren’t like they used to be, shaking their heads at new riders. And I understand.

We are varied people. Bicycles and most of all riding bicycles join us, even when we don’t think alike, even when we can barely raise our heads or turn the crank in exhaustion.

Maybe especially when things are the toughest.

Only a few years ago four of us above were struck by a motorist (with six others), and a few of us were injured, some badly, one permanently.

And very recently, we were all visiting Chris in the hospital after a freak cycling crash that sent him to the hospital with a broken collarbone that put his cycling on pause for many weeks.

You see, it is just riding a bicycle, something children do, and it is far more than just riding a bicycle.

Cycling is not our entire lives—we have family, careers, and beer—but most of us cannot imagine our lives without cycling.

We will miss Chris, and I am sure, Chris will miss us, and this community.

In any moment of sadness, tugs of weakness, however, we have something to guide us through—HTFU.

Rule #1: Obey the rules.

education, literacy, poetry, reading

On Poetry and Prose: Defining the Undefinable

As a professor of first-year writing, I spend a good deal of time helping students unpack what they have learned about the essay as a form and about writing in order to set much of that aside and embrace more nuanced and authentic awareness about both.

Teaching writing is also necessarily entangled with teaching reading. In my young adult literature course, then, I often ask students, undergraduate and graduate (many practicing teachers), to do similar unpacking about their assumptions concerning writing and reading.

I have noted before that my first-year students often mangle what I would consider to be very basic labels for writing forms and genres—calling a short prose piece a poem and identifying a play as a novel because they read both in book form.

Because of the ways students have been taught writing to comply with accountability and high-stakes testing of writing, they also confuse modes (narration, description, exposition, and persuasion) for genres or types of essays.

These overly simplistic or misguided ideas extend to distinguishing between fiction and non-fiction as well as prose and poetry.

I am always adding to my toolkit, then, lessons that ask students to investigate and interrogate genre, form, and mode, instilling a sense that literacy remains something undefinable that we none the less try to define so that we feel we have greater control over it.

This post details a lesson about recognizing all literacy as a journey, and embracing defining the undefinable.

The seeds of the lesson, in fact, start with my own stumbling through my journey with literacy. The first time I read Gate A-4 by Naomi Shihab Nye, I assumed the piece was a personal essay.

I think I may have shared with students and even referred to the passage as such. At some point after that, I ran across the piece being referred to as fiction, a very brief short story.

This week, as I was planning a lesson on how we distinguish poetry from short fiction, I considered using “Gate A-4” along with four poems by women poets—Adrienne Rich’s “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,” Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones,” Emily Dickinson’s “Wild night – Wild nights!,”  and Margaret Atwood’s “Siren Song.”

As I searched online for “Gate A-4,” I noticed that the piece was routinely identified as a poem. However, when I did a “Look Inside” search of Naomi Shihab Nye’s Honeybee: Poems & Short Prose, I discovered that the piece is clearly prose, one of what the book description identifies as “eighty-two poems and paragraphs.”

I also discovered a wonderful video of Nye reading the passage:

This became the opening for the lesson, which began with asking students to watch the read aloud without a text in front of them. After viewing, I asked them to identify the text form—what is this thing she is reading?

The students were cautious, even hesitant to answer, exposing, I think, the many elements of a text that advanced readers use to make a significant number of decisions in a very brief moment. We know poetry from prose simply from seeing the text, even before reading.

As we struggled, I handed out a copy of “Gate A-4” and explained it is prose (although some guessed poem). I also pulled up the amazon link and showed them the piece in the original book.

Next I placed them in small groups with the four poems noted above, asking them to use one or as many of them as they wanted to create a quick lesson on what makes a poem, a poem.

The first group decided to use all four poems, and began by noting students would identify what most people associated with poetry in “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers”—rhyme and stanzas.

They also recognized that turning to “Good Bones,” those assumptions were challenged, as they explained, since this poem didn’t rhyme and has no stanzas (which we later clarified to note it is simply one stanza, constructed of lines).

Since “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” and “Wild night – Wild nights!” tend to conform to narrow and traditional characteristics associated with poetry and “Good Bones” and “Siren Song” look poetic but sit outside those characteristics, we began to brainstorm how to have broader concepts; for example, we explored that all the poems have repetition (noting that rhyme is sound repetition) and concluded that poetry is often driven by purposeful line form and stanzas.

Possibly the key moment of this discussion was when the second group added that the best we can say is that a poem is a poem because the writer identifies it as such. We have come to a similar conclusion about the genre of young adult literature.

Another important part of this exploration came from a student who explained that he had always been bothered by trying to write poetry in high school, specifically the concept of line breaks. The how of breaking lines eluded him.

Here is something I always emphasize when teaching someone to write poetry—the art and craft of line breaks.

Broadly, we can help students better understand form and genre by keeping them focused on prose as a work driven by purposeful sentence and paragraph formation and poetry as a work driven by purposeful line and stanza formation (recognizing that even poetry sometimes is prose poetry).

To help answer this student’s concern about line breaks, I pulled up my newest poem about my father’s death, “quotidian,” and walked the class through my first draft (typed in Notes on my iPhone and emailed to myself) as well as how I came to choose and then work within the stanza pattern.

The big-picture lessons from this activity include the following:

  • Helping students understand that writing forms, genres, and modes are driven (not constrained) by some conventions, but also fluid.
  • Exploring that writers of all types of genres and forms work from a very similar toolbox—writers of poetry and prose care about sound, for example.
  • Emphasizing form and meaning are related in writing, but as soon as anyone finds a firm definition, a piece challenges that.
  • Identifying how writers and readers navigate form, genre, and mode with purposefulness as well as awareness. As I explained about line breaks and stanzas when writing poetry, there is no magical formula, but most poets do seek some guiding pattern or patterns and then shape poetry within or against those patterns.

Many years ago as a high school English teacher, I gradually shifted away from defining poetry during our poetry unit, and choosing instead to ask throughout, “What makes poetry, poetry?” We simply came to understand poetry better by asking a question instead of finding a clear definition.

I remain convinced that seeking greater awareness about text is a long journey, best guided by always seeking a definition rather than imposing one.

Regardless of the definition we discover, or fail to uncover, I hope that students remain in awe as I am each time I read “Gate A-4” even as I also remain conflicted about just what the thing is she is reading aloud on the video.