Category Archives: Education

Education, Teaching, Testing, Writing

Teaching Writing: Reconsidering Genre (Again)

[Header Photo by David Pupăză on Unsplash]

My midterm exam for first-year writing invites students to interview a professor in a discipline they are considering as a major. The discussion is designed to explore those professors as researchers and writers.

On exam day, we have small and whole-class discussions designed to discover the wide variety of activities that count as research in various disciplines, and more importantly, what writing as a scholar looks like across disciplines.

The outcomes of this activity are powerful since students learn that research and writing are context-based and far more complicated that they learned in K-12 schooling.

Two points that I often emphasize are, first, that many (if not most) of the professors confess that they do not like to write, and second, I help them see that a profoundly important distinction between their K-12 teachers and professors is that professors practice the fields they teach.

This brings me to two posts on Twitter (X):

First, Luther is confronting a foundational failure of K-12 writing instruction—students being taught the “4 Types/Genres of Writing” (narration, description, exposition, persuasion).

That framing is deeply misleading and overly simplistic, but that framing is grounded in two realities: most K-12 teachers who teach writing are not writers, and the so-called “4 Types/Genres of Writing” are rooted in the rise of state-level accountability testing of writing (not any authentic or research-based approach to teaching composition).

Second, so I don’t appear to be beating up unfairly on K-12 teachers (I was one for 18 years and love K-12 teachers), Dowell is then confronting the often careless and reductive ways in which “academic writing” is both taught and even practiced (academic norms of published writing ask very little of scholars as writers and even impose reductive templates that cause lifeless and garbled writing).

The 1980s and 1990s saw a rise in state accountability testing that asked very little of students. The “4 Types/Genres of Writing” quickly supplanted the gains made with authentic writing instruction grounded in writer’s workshop and the influence of the National Writing Project in the 1970s and 1980s.

Those writing tests prompted students to write narrative or expository essays (for example) that were only a few paragraphs long (likely the 5-paragraph essay). These were scored based on state-developed rubrics that teachers taught to throughout the year.

In other words, as Gerald Bracey warned, writing instruction became almost exclusively teaching to the test. And since K-12 teachers of writers were primarily not writers themselves, this reductive and mechanical way to teach and assess writing was rarely challenged.

Let’s be blunt. K-12 teachers not resisting this dynamic is a logical response to an impossible learning and teaching environment that is dominated by accountability and high-stakes testing.

My criticism is that teachers and students were (and are) put in this situation; I am not criticizing teachers and students, who are the victims of the accountability era of education reform.

Further, while students who move from K-12 to higher ed discover that their K-12 preparation in writing is inadequate and often deeply misleading for how they are expected to write in academia, this new situation is not some idealistic wonderland of authentic writing (as Dowell confronts).

The K-12 to higher ed transition makes students feel unfairly jerked around (many are exasperated when they find out they didn’t need to “memorize” MLA and may never use it again), but navigating academic expectations for writing is equally frustrating (one first-year student this spring noted that my first-year writing seminar is unique, they said, because I teach writing while other professors simply assign and grade writing).

Students deserve better at both the K-12 and higher ed levels so here I want to offer a few thoughts on how to move past the traps I have noted above about teaching writing.

I highly recommend Genre awareness for the novice academic student: An ongoing quest by Ann Johns.

Johns argues for fostering “genre awareness” (addressing in complex and authentic ways Dowell’s concern) and not “genre acquisition” (for example, the reductive “4 Types/Genres of Writing” approach):

The first is GENRE ACQUISITION, a goal that focuses upon the students’ ability to reproduce a text type, often from a template, that is organized, or ‘staged’ in a predictable way. The Five Paragraph Essay pedagogies, so common in North America, present a highly structured version of this genre acquisition approach.

A quite different goal is GENRE AWARENESS, which is realized in a course designed to assist students in developing the rhetorical flexibility necessary for adapting their socio-cognitive genre knowledge to ever-evolving contexts. …After my many years of teaching novice tertiary students who follow familiar text templates, usually the Five Paragraph Essay, and who then fail when they confronted different types of reading and writing challenges in their college and university classrooms, I have concluded that raising genre awareness and encouraging the abilities to research and negotiate texts in academic classrooms should be the principal goals for a novice literacy curriculum (Johns 1997).

Genre awareness for the novice academic student:
An ongoing quest

Here I think is an outstanding graphic (Johns draws from Bhatia) of moving past confusing modes of writing (narration, description, exposition, persuasion) with genres of writing (OpEd, memoir, meta-analysis, literature review, etc.):

At both the K-12 and higher ed levels, then, teaching writing has been reduced to serving something other than students—either the mandates of high-stakes testing or the nebulous and shifting expectations of “academic writing,” which include very dangerous traps such as a maze of citation expectations among disciplines.

My first-year writing students and I are at midterm this spring, and we just held our conferences for Essay 2 with a scholarly cited essay looming once we return from spring break.

In those conferences, we have been discussing the huge learning curve they are facing since I ask them to choose their essay topic and thus develop their own thesis within a genre of writing.

They are making all the decisions writers do in authentic contexts.

Before my class, they have had most of their writing prompted, most of their thesis sentences assigned to them, and most of their genre experiences entirely reduced or erased.

So I explain this to them, assuring them that their struggles are reasonable and not a product of them failing or being inadequate.

These are new and complex expectations of young writers.

But is the only fair thing to offer them, this experience of becoming a writer as an act of them as humans and not as a performance for a test or to fill in a template.

Recommended

Investigating Zombi(e)s to Foster Genre Awareness

Thomas, P.L. (2019). Teaching writing as journey, not destination: Essays exploring what “teaching writing” means. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.

RECOMMENDED: John Warner’s “Why They Can’t Write”

RECOMMENDED: John Warner’s “The Writer’s Practice”

Education, education reform, Educational Research, reading, Science of Reading

Contrarian Truths about Public Education and Student Achievement Should Guide SC Education Reform

[This has been submitted to several newspapers in SC without response so far.]

Ranking member of the US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, Bill Cassidy (R – LA) has issued a report announcing a reading crisis in America: “Two-thirds of America’s fourth and eighth graders are not proficient in reading.”

Here in SC, legislators are once considering new reading legislation, building on over a decade of reforms with Read to Succeed.

However, a report from the progressive NPE and an analysis from the conservative Education Next offer contrarian truths about public education and student achievement, neither of which is grounded in crisis rhetoric or blaming students, teachers, and schools for decades of political negligence.

First, based on NAEP data—similar to Cassidy’s report—Shakeel and Peterson in EdNext offer a much different view of student achievement in the US, notably about reading achievement:

Contrary to what you may have heard, average student achievement has been increasing for half a century. Across 7 million tests taken by U.S. students born between 1954 and 2007, …[r]eading scores have grown by 20 percent of a standard deviation during that time, nearly one year’s worth of learning.

When we examine differences by student race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, longstanding assumptions about educational inequality start to falter. Black, Hispanic, and Asian students are improving far more quickly than their white classmates in elementary, middle, and high school. In elementary school, for example, reading scores for white students have grown by 9 percent of a standard deviation each decade, compared to 28 percent for Asian students, 19 percent for Black students, and 13 percent for Hispanic students. Students from low socioeconomic backgrounds also are progressing more quickly than their more advantaged peers in elementary and middle school. And for the most part, growth rates have remained steady throughout the past five decades.

Shakeel and Peterson’s analysis confirms a concern raised by scholars for decades after A Nation at Risk—the manufactured educational crisis perpetuated by the media, political leaders, and education publishers.

Keeping the US in perpetual crisis has resulted in over four decades of blaming students, teachers, and public schools as failures even though education policy and funding have been exclusively controlled by political leadership at the national and state levels.

That leads us to a state-by-state analysis from NPE that avoids blaming students, teachers, and schools by holding political leadership accountable for the following:

  • Privatization Laws: the guardrails and limits on charter and voucher programs to ensure that taxpayers and students are protected from discrimination, corruption, and fraud.
  • Homeschooling Laws: laws to ensure that instruction is provided safely and responsibly.
  • Financial Support for Public Schools: sufficient and equitable funding of public schools.
  • Freedom to Teach and Learn: whether state laws allow all students to feel safe and thrive at school and receive honest instruction free of political intrusion.

The top five states include North Dakota, Connecticut, Vermont, Illinois, and Nebraska with Arkansas, North Carolina, Utah, Arizona, and Florida sitting at the bottom.

SC ranks 39th, receiving a grade of F for failing to fully support public schools or our democracy. That political negligence has resulted in decades of unwarranted negative messages about our schools, teachers, and students.

These reports combined offer SC an opportunity to resist crisis rhetoric as well as rejecting the ineffective reform cycles since the 1980s.

The problems facing our students, teachers, and schools are social inequities such as poverty and racism, but we also have a history of political negligence in our state that has resulted in a national recognition of our Corridor of Shame.

We can and should do better for our students, schools, and state by recognizing that the real failure is not our schools but our political leadership and the lack of political will to fund and support education as a foundational part of our democracy.

Education, education reform, Educational Research, reading, Science of Reading

Cautionary Tales of State Reading Legislation: UK

“Lack of support for early years language and communication development is leading to a “literacy crisis” that could be costing the economy £830m for each school year group, according to new research,” write Ella Creamer in The Guardian.

The report cited is a February 2024 analysis and heralds another round of reading crisis in the UK.

This is quite interesting considering that in 2006, the UK implemented a phonics-centered reform agenda that has been documented to have been robustly practiced, notably that all students have received systematic phonics in the UK for almost two decades:

Prior to 2006 the teaching of reading in most classrooms in England is best described as balanced instruction, in which some phonics teaching has always been part of the teaching of reading typically for children in the infant years (aged five to seven) although not necessarily ‘systematic phonics’ instruction…. However in 2006 the Rose Report recommended that there should be even more emphasis on phonics teaching….

This was followed by the increased emphasis on discrete teaching of phonics recommended by the Rose Report and the PNS from 2006 onwards. Further intensification of synthetic phonics teaching was seen in England’s national curriculum of 2014, along with a range of other measures to ensure teacher compliance with the prescribed method of teaching reading, including the use of the PSC; the vetting of phonics teaching schemes; and the use of the inspectorate to focus on outcomes in statutory reading assessments as a prime focus in school inspections.

Reading wars or reading reconciliation?

Also of note, that research in 2022 revealed, once again, these reforms were misguided and ineffective. The researchers concluded, calling for a more balanced approach:

In addition to the importance of contextualised reading teaching as an evidence-based orientation to the teaching of reading we hypothesise the following pedagogical features that are likely to be effective. Phonics teaching is most likely to be effective for children aged five to six. Phonics teaching with children younger than this is not likely to be effective. A focus on whole texts and reading for meaning, to contextualise the teaching of other skills and knowledge, should drive pedagogy. Classroom teachers using their professional judgement to ensure coherence of the approach to teaching phonics and reading with other relevant teaching in their classroom is most likely to be effective. Insistence on particular schemes/ basals, scripted lessons, and other inflexible approaches is unlikely to be optimal. Well-trained classroom assistants, working in collaboration with their class teachers, could be a very important contribution to children’s reading development.

Reading wars or reading reconciliation?

More evidence from the UK shows that reducing reading instruction to systematic phonics ignores both the science of reading instruction and the realities of human development. The mandatory phonics checks in the UK show that achievement correlates strongly with birth month, not instruction and certainly not resulting in the sort of reading achievement that avoids another reading war:

The “science of reading” movement in the US is misguided and costly, mostly benefitting commercial interests repackaging reading programs and materials emphasizing phonics.

States are rushing to mimic practices that have already failed in the UK. Our students and teachers deserve better.

See Also

Cautionary Tales of State Reading Legislation: Tennessee

UK PISA 2022 Results Offer Cautionary Tale for US Reading Reform

Big Lies of Education, Education, education reform, NPR

Big Lies of Education: National Reading Panel (NRP)

Similar to A Nation at Risk and a core part of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the National Reading Panel (NRP) was a bi-partisan committee formed under Bill Clinton and then elevated under George W. Bush.

Joanne Yatvin, a panel member who issued a Minority Report, wrote in Education Week in 2003, warning that the NRP’s conclusions would be misrepresented and misused.

Yatvin was right.

And 15 years later, Emily Hanford—among dozens of journalists—continued to prove Yatvin correct:

The battle between whole language and phonics got so heated that the U.S. Congress eventually got involved, convening a National Reading Panel to review all the research on reading. In 2000, the panel released a report. The sum of the research showed that explicitly teaching children the relationship between sounds and letters improved reading achievement. The panel concluded that phonics lessons help kids become better readers. There is no evidence to say the same about whole language.

Hard Words

In 2024, as the “science of reading” (SOR) movement continues to steamroll state reading legislation, journalists persist in misrepresenting the panel’s findings as well as ignoring that the NRP is over two decades old, which means reading science has moved well beyond what the panel claimed to find.

Often ignored, panel members admitted the NRP was underfunded and understaffed, resulting in the panel’s overview of reading research was greatly limited to only a narrow type of published research.

Further, despite the Urban Legends of the findings repeated by Hanford and other journalists, the NRP’s conclusions are not what has been claimed.

First, Tim Shanahan, a panel member, admitted that the report did little to support classroom practice.

But more importantly, the actual findings of the panel in no way support the media claims about what research says about teaching reading, the role of phonics instruction, or the evidence on whole language.

Diane Stephens, University of South Carolina emeritus professor, provides an excellent summary of the findings:

  • Phonemic Awareness: PA is a “means rather than an end”; doesn’t increase comprehension; only one of many elements needed to read independently.
  • Phonics: Minimal value in kindergarten; no conclusion about phonics beyond grade 1 for “normally developing readers”; systematic phonics instruction in grades 2-6 with struggling readers has a weak impact on reading text and spelling; systematic phonics instruction has a positive effect in grade 1 on reading (pronouncing) real and nonsense words but not comprehension; at-risk students benefit from whole language instruction, Reading Recovery, and direct instruction.
  • Fluency: The ability of students to make sense of text grammatically and with understanding of punctuation.
  • Vocabulary: Vocabulary is acquired many ways by readers; number of words acquired cannot be accomplished through direct instruction. About 1/3 of vocabulary learning in grades 3 – 8 linked to reading.
  • Comprehension: Weak evidence in report on comprehension. Emphasizes need for SBRR (scientifically based reading research) and “putting teachers in positions where their minds are the most valued educational resource.”

As many scholars have noted (see below), the NRP found that systematic phonics and whole language were about equally effective, but the key here is that phonics instruction was found to be effective for pronunciation, not comprehension, and only in grade 1.

In short, the NRP was never a definitive overview of reading science (or a confirmation about teaching systematic phonics to all students), and now that we are 20-plus years past the report, citing the NRP should be limited to historical references, not evidence of the current state of reading science.

I recommend the following to understand fully the NRP:

Big Lies of Education: Series
Education

Close Reading: Social in/justice and the deficit foundations of oracy, Ian Cushing

“Schooling in the United States is revered as a societal foundation for possibility, empowerment, and social mobility,” explain Rios, Matthews, Zentell, and Kogut, adding, “However, US schooling systems also serve as institutions foundationally designed for and historically entrenched in the service of white, monolingual, middle- and upper-class populations.”

Further, they argue, “Scholars advocate for acknowledging students’ cultures as assets and incorporating them in teaching, a praxis known as culturally relevant pedagogy.”

One of the significant failures of the “science of reading” (SOR) movement has been the erasure of linguistic and literature diversity in the teaching of reading.

The SOR movement and resulting legislation fits into the larger accountability education reform movement that is grounded in essentialism and conservative ideology.

Here, I offer a close reading of Social in/justice and the deficit foundations of oracy by Ian Cushing as a powerful entry point to understanding how SOR reading reform is conservative ideology that ultimately harms children’s linguistic development and thus the development of Self.

Cushing frames his examination in two points: first, that literacy instruction (specifically in this piece, oracy) is grounded in deficit ideology, adding, “The second is that the oracy agenda’s vision for social justice is flawed in how it relies on a theory of change where marginalised children can experience equality and upward mobility by making tweaks to their language, and that oracy provides the compensatory tool to do so.”

In other words, much of literacy instruction is aimed at “fixing” children in the context of a social norm while ignoring social inequities, such as those norms themselves.

And thus, “Marginalised children routinely experience the hostile policing of their language and public humiliation for their purported inability to speak correctly.”

The essential conservative ideology behind deficit views of language invert reform agendas:

Put another way, I argue that England’s oracy agenda interprets structural inequality as a ‘linguistic problem requiring linguistic solutions, rather than as a politico-economic problem requiring politico-economic solutions’ (Rosa, 2016, p. 165). Whilst the apparent progressivism of oracy may appear to some to be a liberatory means to afford marginalised children greater opportunities, I show here that it is rooted in deficit-based assumptions about language which overdetermine marginalised children as linguistically inferior and blames them for their own struggles.

Social in/justice and the deficit foundations of oracy

A progressive or critical alternative to conservative ideology grounding reform, then, includes this recognition: “Social justice is a long-term project which will only be ever achieved when our efforts are on structural transformations as opposed to tweaking individual behaviours (Gandolfi & Mills, 2023; Kaba, 2021; Picower, 2012).”

However, similar to here in the US, “[S]implistic notions of social justice … have long characterised mainstream education policy, especially in England. … [D]ominant conceptualisations of social justice in education are ones rooted in individualised explanations of inequality, and result in individualised and reductive solutions,” for example, the SOR movement and legislation focusing on reforming teacher practice and raising student reading proficiency scores.

Notable is how progressive veneers in reform hide conservative ideology:

[T]he phrase social justice has been co-opted by the political right since the 1980s, producing a narrative reliant on individual change rather than state responsibility. The Labour Party has reproduced these same logics in relation to oracy and social justice (e.g. Hardy, 2020; The Labour Party, 2023; Starmer, 2023). Whilst my critique is of a bipartisan narrative, then, of particular concern here are the social justice logics emerging from the left, particularly academics and charities who position themselves as liberally progressive. 

[D]eficit and dichotomous framings … essentialise marginalised children as linguistically impoverished and in need of remediation.

Social in/justice and the deficit foundations of oracy

Central to understanding the political nature of reform is to acknowledge the political and ideological nature of language and language acquisition—including the ideological bias in the “word gap” narrative:

Any description of language is ideological, and these ideologies are products of specific sociopolitical contexts. … These deficit perspectives continued into the twenty-first century in terms of the ‘word gap’ (Hart & Risley, 1995), blaming low academic performance on irresponsible parenting and broken homes rather than the structural inequalities within wider society (Valencia, 2010). Whilst the terminology used to represent marginalised communities as displaying linguistic deficiencies has shifted over time, the underlying logics remain the same. Yet oracy has, for the most part, evaded academic scrutiny and been positioned as a progressive linguistic concept which stands in opposition to deficit thinking.

Social in/justice and the deficit foundations of oracy

Deficit perspectives of language and children include overlapping aspects of both classism and racism as well as ableism, reflecting normative biases framed as individual deficits to be overcome through policy:

These representations align with Bereiter and Engelmann’s depictions of working-class African American children in the 1960s, who were deemed to be ‘not simply deficient in their use of words; they are deficient in their repertoire of concepts’, and thus incapable of abstract thought (Bereiter & Engelmann, 1966, p. 127)….

These ableist labels are reflective of a long history of academic scholarship which perceives non-speech languages and their users as disordered and primitive (see Henner & Robinson, 2023). In similar ways to other deficit perspectives of the time and overlooking the structural inequalities marginalised children experience, Wilkinson poses that it is inadequate linguistic abilities which put such children at a disadvantage in school, and that these inadequacies act as an impediment to the interactions required for the middle-class conditions of school….

These framings tie together race, class, and dis/ability in producing discourses of deficiency which continue to circulate in contemporary policy.

Social in/justice and the deficit foundations of oracy

This leads to a key recognition about literacy policy that is fundamentally conservative, normative, and deficit-driven:

The oracy for social justice narrative is, then, a bipartisan one, and one entirely in line with recent, mainstream political conceptualisations of social justice which focus on individualised remediation rather than endemic structures of inequality which require radical transformation….

When children are framed as suffering from gaps in their language, logics follow that they require interventions to close them, which often legitimises language prescription and policing under the purportedly progressive aims of oracy.

Social in/justice and the deficit foundations of oracy

Ultimately, then: “[D]eficit perspectives frame marginalised children as part of an ‘at-risk’ discourse, in which struggling families are both blamed for their own educational failures and responsible for addressing them.”

Education and literacy reform, regardless of the nation, tends to focus on “fixing” children or teachers, and that inidividual gaze is a distraction from addressing systemic causes of the so-called “gaps” in the performances of those students or teachers in formal schooling.

Centering the concept of literacy “gaps” and calling for closing those gaps are offering cures equal to or greater than the disease: “[O]ften framed as a progressive project, then, I have shown here how it has long relied on academic scholarship rooted in deficit, dichotomous, and anti-Black ideologies about language and supposed gaps. This has surfaced without any critical interrogation of language gap ideologies, despite the extensive body of scholarship which has debunked and rejected them (e.g. Aggarwal, 2016, Avineri et al., 2015, Cushing, 2023b, García & Otheguy, 2017, Johnson & Johnson, 2021).”

These failures are, again, bipartisan: “[B]oth sides rely on normative notions of language which rely on deficit and dichotomous framings.” And thus, “we should all be suspicious of bipartisan narratives which position oracy as a pragmatic tool for structural change.”

Cushing concludes in a way that is equally relevant to education and reading reform in the US: “Genuine social justice efforts require transformative methodologies which target the root causes of injustices and reimagine the societies which our schools are part of, generating solutions which modify systems as opposed to individuals.”

Sources

  • Overwhelming whiteness: a critical analysis of race in a scripted reading curriculum, Amanda Rigell, Arianna Banack, Amy Maples, Judson Laughter, Amy Broemmel, Nora Vines & Jennifer Jordan (2022) Overwhelming whiteness: a critical analysis of race in a scripted reading curriculum, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 54:6, 852-870, DOI: 10.1080/00220272.2022.2030803
  • Social in/justice and the deficit foundations of oracy, Ian Cushing
  • Rios, A., Matthews, S. D., Zentell, S. & Kogut, A. (2024). More being, different doing: Illuminating examples of culturally relevant literacy teaching. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 67, 283–293. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaal.1329

For Further Reading

Crisis, Education, education reform, Educational Research, Media, NAEP, NPE, reading, Science of Reading, Testing

Contrarian Truths about Public Education and Student Achievement

“The 2022 NAEP results show that the average reading score for fourth graders is lower than it has been in over 20 years. For eighth and twelfth graders, average scores are at about a 30-year low,” states Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) in his new literacy report, adding, “The 2022 NAEP LongTerm Trend assessment for nine-year-old students showed average reading scores not seen since 1999.”

Cassidy’s alert about a reading crisis fits into dozens and dozens of media articles announcing crises and failures among students, teachers, and public schools all across the US. Typical of that journalism was Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times about a year ago:

One of the most bearish statistics for the future of the United States is this: Two-thirds of fourth graders in the United States are not proficient in reading.

Reading may be the most important skill we can give children. It’s the pilot light of that fire.

Yet we fail to ignite that pilot light, so today some one in five adults in the United States struggles with basic literacy, and after more than 25 years of campaigns and fads, American children are still struggling to read. Eighth graders today are actually a hair worse at reading than their counterparts were in 1998.

One explanation gaining ground is that, with the best of intentions, we grown-ups have bungled the task of teaching kids to read. There is growing evidence from neuroscience and careful experiments that the United States has adopted reading strategies that just don’t work very well and that we haven’t relied enough on a simple starting point — helping kids learn to sound out words with phonics.

Two-Thirds of Kids Struggle to Read, and We Know How to Fix It

As I have noted, education and reading crises have simply been a fact of US narratives since A Nation at Risk. But as I have also been detailing, these claims are misleading and manufactured.

In fact, a report from the progressive NPE and an analysis from the conservative Education Next offer contrarian truths about public education and student achievement, neither of which is grounded in crisis rhetoric or blaming students, teachers, and schools for decades of political negligence.

Based on NAEP data—similar to Cassidy’s report—Shakeel and Peterson offer a much different view of student achievement in the US, notably about reading achievement:

A Half Century of Student Progress Nationwide

This analysis demonstrates that the current reading crisis is manufactured, exclusively rhetorical and ideological, generating profit for media, politicians, and commercial publishers.

In short, the manufactured crises are distractions from the other contrarian truth about education as highlighted in the analysis from NPE:

Public Schooling in America

This educational grading from NPE is unique because it doesn’t grade students, teachers, or public school, but holds political leadership accountable for supporting universal public education and democracy. The standards for these grades include the following:

  • Privatization Laws: the guardrails and limits on charter and voucher programs to ensure that taxpayers and students are protected from discrimination, corruption, and fraud.
  • Homeschooling Laws: laws to ensure that instruction is provided safely and responsibly.
  • Financial Support for Public Schools: sufficient and equitable funding of public schools.
  • Freedom to Teach and Learn: whether state laws allow all students to feel safe and thrive at school and receive honest instruction free of political intrusion.

These two examples come from contrasting ideologies, yet they offer contrarian truths about public schools and student achievement that would better serve how we talk about schools and student achievement as well as how we seek ways in which to reform those schools in order to better serve those students and our democracy.

Recommended

Big Lies of Education: Reading Proficiency and NAEP

Big Lies of Education: A Nation at Risk and Education “Crisis”

Opinion: Should California schools stick to phonics-based reading ‘science’? It’s not so simple

Thomas, P.L. (2022). The Science of Reading movement: The never-ending debate and the need for a different approach to reading instruction. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/science-of-reading

Accordingly, when policymakers explore new guidelines,
they would be wise to do the following:

• Be wary of overstatements and oversimplifications within media and public advocacy, acknowledging concerns raised but remaining skeptical of simplistic claims about causes and solutions.

• Attend to known influences on measurable student reading achievement, including the socioeconomics of communities, schools, and homes; teacher expertise and autonomy; and teaching and learning conditions.

• Recognize student-centered as an important research-supported guiding principle but also acknowledge the reality that translating such research-based principles into classroom practice is always challenging.

• Shift new reading policies away from prescription and mandates (“one-size-fits-all” approaches) and toward support for individual student needs and ongoing teacher-informed reform.

In rethinking past efforts and undertaking new reforms, policymakers should additionally move beyond the ineffective cycles demonstrated during earlier debates and reforms, avoid ing specific mandates and instead providing teachers the flexibility and support necessary to adapt their teaching strategies to specific students’ needs. Therefore, state policymakers should do the following:

• End narrowly prescriptive non-research-based policies and programs such as:

o Grade retention based on reading performance.
o High-stakes reading testing at Grade 3.
o Mandates and bans that require or prohibit specific instructional practices, such as systematic phonics and the three-cueing approach.
o A “one-size-fits-all” approach to dyslexia and struggling readers.

• Form state reading panels, consisting of classroom teachers, researchers, and other literacy experts. Panels would support teachers by serving in an advisory role for teacher education, teacher professional development, and classroom practice. They would develop and maintain resources in best practice and up-to-date reading and literacy research.

On a more local level, school- and district-level policymakers should do the following:

• Develop teacher-informed reading programs based on the population of students served and the expertise of faculty serving those students, avoiding lockstep implementation of commercial reading programs and ensuring that instructional materials support—rather than dictate—teacher practice.

• Provide students struggling to read and other at-risk students with certified, experienced teachers and low student-teacher ratios to support individualized and differentiated instruction.

A Nation at Risk, Education, education reform, Educational Research, literacy, NAEP, politics, reading, reading proficiency, Science of Reading

Responses Needed to Senator Cassidy’s Report on Literacy

U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy, M.D. (R-LA) has released a report on literacy that opens with yet another example of misrepresenting NAEP reading scores to manufacture a reading crisis for political gain: “Two-thirds of America’s fourth and eighth graders are not proficient in reading.”

The report is an embarrassing recycling of the media misinformation campaign about reading in the US.

In fact, most of the footnotes cite news articles (including the Washington Times, a conservative outlet that lacks credibility) and conservative think tanks (ExcelinEd, Fordham). [1]

Notably missing are citations to scientific research on reading or credible analyses of NAEP data.

Responses are needed and can be sent to Literacy@help.senate.gov by April 5, 2024.

Here is my response:

I am very disappointed in this report, notably since it starts with misinformation about NAEP: https://www.help.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/literacy_report.pdf

The report is deeply flawed and relies on misleading and false journalism (footnotes) to support misleading and inaccurate claims:

How Media Misinformation Became “Holy Text”: The Anatomy of the SOR Movement

ILEC Response: Mainstream media coverage of reading proficiency, teachers of reading, NAEP scores, and teacher preparation

Good intentions are not enough and government policy on education has done more harm than good since A Nation at Risk. We can do better, and we should. But we must start with accurate claims and credible solutions.

Big Lies of Education: Reading Proficiency and NAEP

Big Lies of Education: A Nation at Risk and Education “Crisis” 

Stop using misinformation and crisis rhetoric for political gain [2] and genuinely address what students and teachers need to be successful.

US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions

[1] Analysis of 33 footnotes for the report:

Preventing a Lost Generation: Facing a Critical Moment for Students’ Literacy

Senator Bill Cassady, MD, Ranking Member

US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions

NAEP/PISA Data/ Government Reports

National Achievement-Level Results, National Assessment of Educational Progress (Oct. 24, 2022), https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/nation/achievement/.

National Achievement-Level Results, The National Assessment of Educational Progress (Oct. 24, 2022), https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/nation/achievement/.

Trends in High School Dropout and Completion Rates in the United States, National Center for Education Statistics (Jan. 2020), https://nces.ed.gov/programs/dropout/index.asp.

Thomas G. Sticht, Vice President, Basic Skills in Defense, Human Resources Research Organization (June 1982), https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED237776.pdf.

Scores Decline in NAEP Reading at Grades 4 and 8 Compared to 2019, National Assessment of Educational Progress (Oct. 24, 2022), https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/reading/2022/

NAEP Report Card: 2019 NAEP Reading Assessment, National Assessment of Educational Progress (2019), https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/reading/2019/g12/.

NAEP Long-Term Trend Assessment Results: Reading and Mathematics, National Assessment of Educational Progress (Sept. 1, 2022), https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/ltt/2022/.

Program for International Student Assessment 2022 Results, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (Dec. 5, 2023), https://www.oecd.org/publication/pisa-2022-results/.

AEP Report Card: Reading State Achievement-Level Results, National Assessment of Educational Progress (Oct. 24, 2022), https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/states/achievement/.

Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction, National Reading Panel (Apr. 2000), https://www.nichd.nih.gov/sites/default/files/publications/pubs/nrp/Documents/report.pdf.

National Achievement-Level Results, National Assessment of Educational Progress (Oct. 24, 2022), https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/nation/achievement/.

NAEP Long-Term Trend Assessment Results: Reading and Mathematics, National Assessment of Educational Progress (Sept. 1, 2022), https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/ltt/2022/.

Joint Dear Colleague Letter, U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights (Jan. 8, 2014), [LINK OMITTED, apparent error]

Resource on Confronting Racial Discrimination in Student Discipline, U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights (May 2023), https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1585291/dl?inline.

Think Tank/Advocacy Reports

Donald J. Hernandez, Professor, Double Jeopardy: How Third-Grade Reading Skills and Poverty Influence High School Graduation, The Annie E. Casey Foundation (2012), https://assets.aecf.org/m/resourcedoc/AECF-DoubleJeopardy-2012-Full.pdf.

Anthony P. Carnevale et al., Director and Research Professor, Recovery: Job Growth and Education Requirements Through 2020, Georgetown Public Policy Institute – Center on Education and the Workforce (June 2013), https://cewgeorgetown.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Recovery2020.FR_.Web_.pdf

Economic Impacts of Dropouts. National Dropout Prevention Center (n.d.), https://dropoutprevention.org/resources/statistics/quick-facts/economic-impacts-of-dropouts/.

Erin Fahle et. al, Research Scientist, The First Year of Pandemic Recovery: A District-Level Analysis, The Harvard University Center for Education Policy and Research & The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University (Jan. 2024), https://educationrecoveryscorecard.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/ERS-Report-Final-1.31.pdf.

Why The Three-Cueing Systems Model Doesn’t Teach Children to Read, Excel in Ed (2022), https://excelined.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/ExcelinEd_FactSheet_ThreeCueingDoesNotTeachChildrenToRead.pdf.

2023 Voice of the Superintendent Survey Executive Brief, EAB (Feb. 16, 2023), https://pages.eab.com/2023SuperintendentSurveyExecutiveBrief.html.

Daniel Buck, Soft-on-Consequences Discipline Is Terrible For Teachers, Thomas B. Fordham Institute (Feb. 9, 2023), https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/commentary/soft-consequences-discipline-terrible-teachers.

Max Eden, The Trouble with Social Emotional Learning, House Committee on Appropriations – Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies (Apr. 6, 2022) AEI, https://www.aei.org/research-products/testimony/the-trouble-with-social-emotional-learning/.

Chronic Absenteeism: 2017-2023, Return2Learn Tracker (Oct. 23, 2023), https://www.returntolearntracker.net/.

Media

Micaela Burrow, Army Qualification Test Scores Plummeted Further In 2022, Daily Caller. (Sept. 16, 2022). https://dailycaller.com/2022/09/16/army-qualification-scores-plummeted-2022/.

April Rubin, ACT Test Scores Fall to Lowest Levels in 32 Years, Axios (Oct. 11, 2023), https://www.axios.com/2023/10/11/act-test-scores-lowest-2023.

Matt Barnum & Kalyn Belsha, Blizzard of State Test Scores Shows Some Progress in Math, Divergence in Reading, Chalkbeat (Oct. 2, 2023), https://www.chalkbeat.org/2023/10/2/23896045/state-test-scores-data-math-reading-pandemic-era-learning-loss.

Linda Jacobson, Science of Reading Push Helped Some States Exceed Pre-Pandemic Performance, The 74 Million (Oct. 17, 2023), https://www.the74million.org/article/science-of-reading-push-helped-some-states-exceed-pre-pandemic-performance/.

Liana Loewus, Data: How Reading Is Really Being Taught, Education Week (Dec. 3, 2019), https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/data-how-reading-is-reallybeing-taught/2019/12.

Sarah Schwartz, Teachers College to ‘Dissolve’ Lucy Calkins’ Reading and Writing Project, Education Week (Sept. 5, 2023), https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/teachers-college-to-dissolve-lucy-calkins-reading-and-writing-project/2023/09.

Sarah Schwartz, Reading Recovery Sues Ohio Over Ban on ‘Cueing’ in Literacy Instruction, Education Week (Oct. 18, 2023), https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/reading-recovery-sues-ohio-over-ban-on-cueing-in-literacy-instruction/2023/10.

Susan Ferrechio, Teachers Unions Worked with CDC to Keep Schools Closed for COVID, GOP Report Says, The Washington Times (Mar. 30, 2022), https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/mar/30/republican-report-shows-teachers-unions-helped-cdc/.

Sarah D. Sparks, Two Decades of Progress, Nearly Gone: National Math, Reading Scores Hit Historic Lows, Education Week (Oct. 24, 2022), https://www.edweek.org/leadership/two-decades-of-progress-nearly-gone-national-math-reading-scores-hit-historic-lows/2022/10.

Arianna Prothero, Student Behavior Isn’t Getting Any Better, Survey Shows, Education Week (Apr. 20, 2023), https://www.edweek.org/leadership/student-behaviorisnt-getting-any-better-survey-shows/2023/04.

Sarah Mervosh, Who Runs the Best U.S. Schools? It May Be the Defense Department., The New York Times (Oct. 10, 2023), https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/us/schools-pandemic-defense-department.html.

Commercial Blogs

TPT Survey Report: What 2,000+ Teachers Think About SEL, Teachers Pay Teachers (May 2022), https://blog.teacherspayteachers.com/tpt-survey-report-what-2000-teachers-think-about-social-emotional-learning/.

[2] See:

A school for students with dyslexia continues to stay open despite two F grades from the BESE, Louisiana’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. The Louisiana Key Academy is run by Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and his wife, Laura. Both are physicians. Neither are specialists in reading disorders, although they have a child with dyslexia.

A Nation at Risk, Big Lies of Education, Crisis, Dyslexia, Education, education reform, Educational Research, Florida Miracle, grade retention, Grit, growth mindset, literacy, Media, miracle schools, NCTQ, No Excuses Reform, Poverty, race, racism, reading, School choice, Science of Reading, Social Context Reform, social justice, Teacher Autonomy, Teacher Evaluation, teacher preparation, Teaching, Testing, VAM

Big Lies of Education: Series

Series

Big Lies of Education: A Nation at Risk and Education “Crisis”

Big Lies of Education: Reading Proficiency and NAEP

Big Lies of Education: National Reading Panel (NRP)

Big Lies of Education: Poverty Is an Excuse

Big Lies of Education: International Test Rankings and Economic Competitiveness

Big Lies of Education: Grade Retention

Big Lies of Education: Growth Mindset and Grit

Big Lies of Education: Word Gap

Big Lies of Education: Miracle Schools

Big Lies of Education: “Science of” Era Edition [Access PP PDF Here]

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book banning, Censorship, Daredevil, Education

Only Monsters Attack Libraries and Books

[Header Photo by Jen Theodore on Unsplash]

One of the most powerful texts I use in teaching writing is the Prologue to Louise DeSalvo’s memoir, Vertigo.

We read only the first page, but it is charged with purposeful writing and engaging storytelling of a young woman fleeing the angers of her home and seeking sanctuary:

The narrative voice of DeSalvo as an adult, a Virginia Woolf scholar, echoing herself at thirteen helps establish that tension, that dichotomy—an emotionally unsafe home contrasted with the “welcoming lights a few blocks away,” the library.

This memoir is one of trauma, but DeSalvo develops a motif of the sanctuary that libraries and books offer her throughout her life.

Her life story challenges the idealizing of family and the demonizing of schools, libraries, books, and frankly, education.

Not as dramatically but similar to DeSalvo, my own life story is one of breaking free of the intellectual and ethical shackles of my home where racism and other bigotries were the norm; like DeSalvo’s experiences, my sanctuaries were school and books, and education.

I had a former friend and colleague who died relatively recently, and I will carry with me always his telling me that he had an argument with his father once about how the two of them had diverged dramatically in beliefs and ideologies. His father shouted that his greatest regret was sending his son to college.

That fills me with a tremendous sadness, and I also feel fortunate because despite the same dynamic in my family with my parents—I am dramatically unlike them in beliefs and ideology—my parents, now deceased, always encouraged my books, my thinking, my learning, and my education.

In fact, my father often stopped strangers to tell them I earned my doctorate, a thing both embarrassing and heart warming.

It is 2024. And the world is filled with monsters:

On Monday, bill sponsor  Del. Brandon Steele, R-Raleigh, called for support of his legislation in a fiery speech, in which he said libraries were “the sanctuary for pedophilia” where people needed to be held accountable for exposing children to obscene content.

“I’m voting to protect children from being groomed and targeted by pedophiles and get rid of the sanctuary that was set up in our code 25 years ago,” Steele said to members of the House Committee on the Judiciary.

He continued, “If it’s a crime in the parking lot, it’s a crime in the building — period. I hope the chilling effect chills the pedophiles. We’re not going to create a safe space for them.”

West Virginia House to Vote on Bill That Could Lead to Librarians Facing Jail Time

The culture wars in the US have taken an ugly turn, and the core of those battles is that tension between the family and the child as well as the ways in which every child can and should find their true Self often masked by the expectations of that home life.

As adults, most of us have experienced that break, that necessary journey that includes disagreeing with our parents, seeing that who we are is not the same as who our parents want us to be.

Sometimes it is ideology, sometimes it is sexuality, sometimes it is gender.

These tensions, these breaks are none the less difficult and even painful.

I was talking with a colleague about the ways in which education, especially higher education, is often popularly and falsely characterized as institutions of indoctrination. The dynamic is actually very similar to DeSalvo’s opening story in her memoir.

For many college students, college is a first major opportunity to be free of home expectations, a place to not only explore who they truly are but a place to discover who they are or want to be.

If a young person seems to suddenly be a different person, parents and the public may misinterpret that as college or professors causing the change. What is more likely is that college is the place where young people have the first opportunity to express that true Self.

Exposure to new or different ideas, in fact, are not necessarily what causes anyone to change who they are, but allows people to see who they are.

Ironically, places that indoctrinate and groom children the most are their homes and their churches—the sources today of those most likely to accuse others of indoctrination and grooming.

Also ironically, universal public education was a foundational commitment (ideologically well before afforded everyone) of the US because being educated was recognized as necessary for a democracy and individual freedom.

There is a little parable by Haruki Murakami. In it, the manufactured terrors by conservatives seem to come true. A boy finds himself imprisoned in a labyrinthine library, confronting a horrifying fate:

The sheep man cocked his head to one side. “Wow, that’s a tough one.”

“Please, tell me. My mother is waiting for me back home.”

“Okay, kid. Then I’ll give it to you straight. The top of your head’ll be sawed off and all your brain’ll get slurped right up.”

I was too shocked for words.

“You mean,” I said, when I had recovered, “you mean that old man’s going to eat my brains?”

“Yes, I’m really sorry, but that’s the way it has to be,” the sheep man said, reluctantly.

The Strange Library

Murakami’s brief Kafkan nightmare, it seems, parallels what some people believe is a reality of libraries—a place where the brains of children are eaten.

The Strange Library is a sort of twisted fantasy, fitting into the tradition of children’s fears like the belief that a monster lurks under your bed or in your closet.

State representatives attacking libraries and books—that is no twisted fantasy. It is real and it is wrong.

Only monsters attack libraries and books.

And they aren’t hiding under our beds or in our closets.

They are elected officials filing bills and making outrageous pronouncements.

We have been rewatching the Daredevil series that ran for three seasons on Netflix. In the season 3 and series finale, Matt Murdock (Daredevil) gives a eulogy for Father Paul Lantom, Murdock’s surrogate father after his father’s death:

For me, personally, he spent many years trying to get me to face my own fears. To understand how they enslaved me, how they divided me from the people that I love. He counseled me to transcend my fears, to be brave enough to forgive and see the possibilities of being a man without fear. That was his legacy. And now it’s up to all of us to live up to it.

A New Napkin (S3 E13)

Culture wars are mostly about fear, but the worst thing about them is that they are about irrational fears, manufactured horrors.

Libraries and books are sanctuaries, not labyrinths where children have their brains eaten.

Once Murdock embraced being the man without fear, he became Daredevil, a superhero, a person who saves those in need. And by assuming this alter-ego, he found his true Self.

Fear of libraries, books, education, and knowledge is a fear of our Selves, our true Selves.

Only monsters attack libraries and books.

Update

West Virginia House passes bill allowing prosecution of librarians