As I wrote about recently, the “science of reading” movement fits into a 40-plus year cycle of neoliberal (conservative) education reform.

However, using terms such as “neoliberal” or “conservative” means very little to most people since these are broad (and often shifting) terms about ideologies or beliefs.

Education reform since the early 1980s has been almost entirely conservative in the following ways:

• The structure of reform has been entirely accountability, which has often been punitive (school report cards and grades that have led to school takeovers, value-added evaluation of teachers that resulted in ranking and firing teachers, exit exams that kept students from graduating, grade retention, etc.).
• Reform has used standardized testing to justify reform and to monitor reform outcomes despite well-known concerns about inequity in such testing.
• Reform has been entirely in-school only, depending on and perpetuating education guru marketing such as that by Hattie (although his research and ideologies [can’t do anything about poverty] have been refuted).
• The rhetoric around reform has depended on a false crisis/miracle dynamic without either being verified by evidence; reform has primarily been perpetuated by political rhetoric and media stories.
• Reform has surrendered public institutions (schools) to the marketplace, choosing indirect reform over directly reforming how schools works or addressing any social inequity that is reflected in school data.
• Reform is grounded in rugged individualism myths—students and teachers just need to work harder (and they will do so only if held accountable), downplaying or ignoring systemic forces.
• Reform is often trapped in over-sold programs and one-size-fits all approaches that seem more efficient.
• Reform reaches for technology at the expense of teacher autonomy and authority as well as individual student needs.

Progressive education has never really been practiced in the US, and the US has certainly never implemented progressive education reform.

Considering what progressive education reform would entail may help clarify how our current cycle of education reform is essentially conservative. Progressive education reform would include the following:

• Acknowledging that out-of-school factors (systemic forces) have the greatest impact on measurable student achievement, progressive education reform would reject either/or thinking and advance social reform and in-school reform grounded in equity, and not accountability.
• Progressive education reform would reduce or eliminate the role of standardized testing in driving what reforms are needed and how well reforms work. Evidence for effective teaching and student learning would be much more broadly and deeply defined.
• Collaboration, community, and transparency would replace punitive accountability.
• Aspirational and idealistic outcome goals would be replaced by patience and realistic expectations for human behavior.
• Progressive education reform would center individual student needs and teacher autonomy over market and political interests.
• Progressive education reform would reject one-size-fits all solutions, crisis rhetoric, and competitive models that pit stakeholders against each others’ interests.
• Progressive education reform would be critically skeptical of fads and pre-packaged programs.
• Progressive education reform would put individual freedom and democracy above market/career goals.

I believe progressive (and especially critically progressive) education reform has great promise for serving the needs of students and society much better than our schools have done historically or currently.

I also recognize that we lack the political or public will to set aside our grounding of neoliberal/conservative ideologies.

Ironically, too often people are not well educated enough to step back and challenge their beliefs even as all the evidence around them shows those beliefs are not working.

I suspect that even though we find ourselves in a very deep neoliberal education reform hole, we are going to just keep digging.

After 18 years teaching high school English, I transitioned to higher education in 2002. For well over a decade, I have been teaching first-year writing to incoming college students, who in many ways struggle with the contrast between what it means to be a high-achieving high school student and a successful college students. [1]

One of the first discussions I have with those first-year students is about student behaviors, ways in which students are expected to behave that are unlike behaviors outside of the classroom.

We often discuss hand raising, asking permission to go to the restroom (or being denied access to the restroom), bell systems for being late and class dismissal, and taking tests (and the focus on not cheating).

The discussion is designed in part for students to interrogate the norms of being a student and schooling, but also to begin to consider how college norms are different.

I start here advocating for students to stop behaving as students since many of those behaviors center the authority of the teacher/professor and erase the humanity and autonomy of those students.

My university has recently committed to an expanded advising program that guides students purposefully through their first two years. Since I enjoy working with first-year students, I just volunteered for the program and attended training last week.

One of the sessions addressed the community norms that the program seeks to foster in students, norms of classroom behaviors that should be applied across all of their courses.

Although we didn’t spend much time on this, what stood out to me was the tension between “community” and “norms”—terms that are too me positive, the former, and negative, the latter [2].

Additionally, I am certain that our current political climate around education—anti-CRT legislation, curriculum bans, and book censorship—that suggests teachers and schools (especially higher education) are indoctrinating and grooming children and young people would result in some people finding these norms “woke indoctrination.”

Ironically, these goals are designed to encourage a more free and considerate exploration of ideas; in short, this is about the importance and power of community:

But teachers like McLaughlin and a growing group of parents are starting to realize that for our children to be healthy, happy and successful, we need to teach them a more profound lesson: interdependence — that is, how to rely on others and how to be a person whom others can rely on, too.

What McLaughlin knows and what research suggests is that lasting self-worth cannot come from approval based solely on external rewards, such as trophies, college acceptance letters and fancy job offers. Rather, an understanding of one’s inherent value comes from knowing one’s place in a community — from the sense that others value you and that you add value to others. Researchers call this feeling “mattering”: Only by building interdependence can kids gain social proof that they do indeed matter.

Forget independence. Teach your kids this instead.

I have two vivid and humbling experiences from college. The first in Mr. Pruitt’s class as a first-year student and the second in Dr. Predmore’s class, likely when I was a junior.

As an eager students who had a great deal of success engaging in classroom discussions in high school English (Mr. Harrill’s classes), I found myself excitedly speaking up in Mr. Pruitt’s class until I suddenly realized I was embarrassing myself.

That day I recognized I had much left to learn and not speaking up, listening with new ears, was often a better option.

Just a couple years later, after I had declared as a secondary English education major, I had grown some as a student, but I entered class one day for Dr. Predmore’s Southern literature course and once again found myself embarrassed at my lack of knowledge (but I had learned not to speak up too quickly by then).

I was then evolving in my quest for academic/intellectual humility.

Much of my grounding as a teacher for forty years has rested on those experiences and how to foster high engagement, intellectual humility, and intellectual curiosity in students. I also recognize that a great deal of the norms of schooling are counter to human dignity and deeply engaging with knowledge in critical ways.

There is also another layer to the paradox of community norms in the classroom; along with the tension between education and indoctrination is how teachers/professors and students can navigate academic freedom in a space that has a diversity of beliefs and experiences.

Academic freedom is incredibly important in an education system dedicated to fostering democracy and individual freedom; however, “freedom” is not license, and neither teachers/professors nor students are “free” to simply say anything.

Further, learning is often uncomfortable (student discomfort having been politicized, even weaponized, by conservative recently), but while intellectual discomfort may be expected or even necessary, no one should feel emotionally or physically threatened or unsafe.

Few people have a genuinely good grip, though, on where that line is, and often, the teacher/professor is left to determine that threashhold.

Currently, issues around safe spaces, trigger warnings, and other mechanisms designed to encourage respectful and open discussions are also under attack (and some of the debate around this is certainly warranted).

In the real world, students and teachers/professors will make mistakes, but I remain convinced that formal education must seek to balance academic freedom, free speech, and seeking ways not to further marginalize or dehumanize anyone—recognizing fully that some topics and comments are necessarily inappropriate for class discussions.

Free speech and academic freedom, however, fall back under the problem of norms.

If you spend just a few minutes on social media, you soon learn that billionaires, politicians, and the so-called average citizen all have very weak or even distorted understanding about free speech and academic freedom.

Simply put, what we can say and should be allowed to say on Twitter/X simply is not the same as a classroom, and technically, free speech is grounded in the role of government to monitor or control speech (made even more complicated by the recent over-reach by states such as Florida).

The paradox of community norms in the classroom then becomes that a classroom setting is the ideal place to identify norms and then interrogate that if those norms are ultimately fair and healthy.

Community matters, but share values are not without problems—unless we are willing to continually revisit and revise those shared values in the context of avoiding either/or thinking in which we reduce “value” to either supporting the individual or the community.

As John Dewey and other progressives have argued, we simply do not have to choose one or the other since in a democracy, community and the individual are sacred.

So I return to the problem I have with “community norms.”

Often “norms” are fixed and work in ways to control or police human behavior; community is. a thing in progress, an evolution that is made stronger by its constant state of possible flux.

Norms, you see, are the seeds of indoctrination, and while I fully reject the current conservative histrionics around indoctrination, I am a critical educators who also fully rejects indoctrination.

The best classroom, one where human dignity and humanity are honored in the pursuit of democracy and individual freedom, is a community, and the best community is a thing in progress, stable enough to support us and malleable enough to serve us better as we grow together.

[1] What Do College Professors Want from Incoming High School Graduates?

[2] See:

On Normal, ADHD, and Dyslexia: Neither Pathologizing, Nor Rendering Invisible

Normality in Sayaka Murata

A Vision of Being Human: “Am I normal?”

[Header Photo by S O C I A L . C U T on Unsplash]

My father wasn’t a reader or very well educated, but he loved telling stories. Mostly about his growing up and then his courtship and marriage of my mother.

Born and raised in rural South Carolina with one set of grandparents in rural North Carolina, I was repeatedly warned as a child not to “tell stories.”

My father’s storytelling and those warnings never confused me as a child because I knew this about “telling stories”:

That I became an avid (even voracious) reader and writer is easily traced back to my father’s oral storytelling. But as I evolved from a writer of fiction and poetry into being mostly an academic writer (although still a poet), I remained grounded in narrative.

While it has been a struggle, as my status as a scholar has grown, I became more assertive when editors asked me to cut narrative openings from my academic submissions. I stood by print it as is or don’t print it at all, and mostly, that has worked.

Over 40 years of teaching students to write, I have also remained committed to fostering students as effective and compelling writers. Specifically I urge that openings be narrative even as I caution students that academia shuns anecdotes and narrative writing.

The academic rejection of anecdote and the narrative mode is simplistic, I think. Writers should not avoid anecdotes and narrative mode (both of which are very compelling), but must use them ethically, making sure the anecdote and narrative reflect valid claims supported by empirical evidence.

For example, scholars and students as writers should never start with the anecdote or narrative since they can (and often are) outliers that do not support making valid and generalizable claims.

Instead, I teach students to do their research first, and once they have a credible literature review, to seek out anecdotes and narratives that fairly represent that data set.

Scholarly claims can often be abstract or complex, but giving readers what those claims look like in reality—real people doing real things—provides a concrete basis for reader understanding.

As a concrete example, if a student, journalist, or scholar were writing a piece on police in the US shooting and killing citizens, there are options for writing compelling openings.

A retelling of George Floyd’s death would be a valid opening for a piece making the claim that police shoot and kill Black people at about a 2.5 times greater rate than white people.

This narrative opening is both compelling and valid because the data supports that this narrative is representative of a supportable generalization.

However, opening with a narrative about police shooting and killing a white person to make the claim that police shootings of citizens is not racist is a not a valid opening because white people are underrepresented in police killings by rate.

This is a brief but specific example of why anecdotes or narrative mode is not the problem. The problem—one that is persistent in mainstream journalism—is that relying on compelling narratives that are not representative of valid generalizations is an ethical failure of writers.

Over the years I have interacted with many journalists, and their pursuit of stories is vivid. In recent years, the media obsession with reading has been hyper-focused on stories, grounded in a podcast titled Sold a Story.

The problem with the “science of reading” (SOR) movement is ironically grounded in telling stories.

The stories of parents and students trapped in situations where children are not progressing as readers are very compelling and likely credible individual stories. Some documentaries include equally compelling stories of adults who struggled in life due to low literacy.

Again, individual stories are deeply moving and are themselves mostly credible anecdotes.

But the SOR movement’s reliance on stories has two essential problems: First, those stories are paired with false definitions and misleading claims without taking any scientific effort to match the stories in causal ways to the claims; and second, the SOR movement (notably in the media) is calling for a narrow application of “scientific” in reading instruction while relying on non-scientific claims based on stories.

In short, journalists are telling stories that are also breaking the rule I warned about as a child—telling stories.

Yes, anecdotes and narrative mode are compelling ways to communicate, and I strongly endorse those approaches.

However, what is too often missing in mainstream media is a rich and nuanced understanding of education and literacy that must inform what stories are told and what claims those stories can offer valid evidence for.

Mainstream media fails the ethical standard of using narrative because of a nearly all-consuming pursuit of stories that will grab readers, listeners, and viewers.

Yet, as my grandparents and parents warned me, we shouldn’t be telling stories, especially at other people’s expense.

Recommended

The NY Times Again Goes After Public Schools, Susan Ohanian

Telling the Truth in a Story-Haunted South