For example, third-grade retention states such as Mississippi and Florida had exceptional NAEP reading scores among fourth-graders but scores fell back into the bottom 25 percent of all states among eighth-graders
“Did you write this?” I once asked a sophomore in my advanced English class. The student was one of three siblings I would teach, and their mother was a colleague of mine in our English department.
With students and my own daughter, I have asked questions like that one often, and I always knew the answer. The question was an opportunity for the student to confront what I already knew.
This student, you see, had turned in a cited essay that her older sister had turned in just a few years earlier. I had the paper in my files, and since I immediately recognized it, I had the copy with her sister’s name on the cover page waiting for her reply.
English and writing teachers especially, but all teachers are constantly seeking ways to insure students do their own work.
As long as there have been students, teachers, and formal schooling, however, students have sought ways to pass off writing and reading that they, in fact, had not done.
This student cold-face lied, and I handed her the paper by her sister.
Something like that has occurred several times over my forty-plus years of teaching.
A non-traditional aged woman in a night composition class for a local junior college became enraged when I asked her “Did you write this?”
I had been reading her writing for several weeks, and this essay she submitted wasn’t her work. There was no doubt and no need to prove it.
She became loud and angry, steadfast in her claim the writing was hers. After that night, I never saw her again.
Several years ago in my first-year writing seminar, a basketball player submitted a teammate’s essay from a few semesters earlier. The essay rang a bell, and after a search on my laptop, I found the original essay on my hard drive.
Plagiarism and passing off other people’s work as their own have not been rampant throughout my career, in part because I have implemented reading and writing workshop in courses. Students have been reading and writing in front of me for decades.
Lots of cheating can been avoided by daylight and surveillance.
Part of the workshop approach, as well, stresses for students that the reading and writing processes are acts of learning; further, the emphasis on process helps lessen the importance of the product as a mechanism for acquiring a grade.
“It ought to be unnecessary to say that writing is learned by writing; unfortunately there is need,” wrote Lou LaBrant in 1953. LaBrant then continued and this may sound familiar:
Again and again teachers or schools are accused of failing to teach students to write decent English, and again and again investigations show that students have been taught about punctuation, the function of a paragraph, parts of speech, selection of “vivid” words, spelling—that students have done everything but the writing of many complete papers. Again and again college freshmen report that never in either high school or grammar school have they been asked to select a topic for writing, and write their own ideas about that subject. Some have been given topics for writing; others have been asked to summarize what someone else has said; numbers have been given work on revising sentences, filling in blanks, punctuating sentences, and analyzing what others have written….Knowing facts about language does not necessarily result in ability to use it. (p. 417)
Over the seventy-plus years since LaBrant’s article, students have written original texts far too rarely; in fact, as writers and students in general, students sit in classrooms where the teacher does much of the work the student should be doing as part of learning.
Writing prompts and rubrics have done far more harm to students as writers than any technology work around, but technology has also joined in the fun over those eight decades.
ChatGPT and other forms of AI are the current miracle/crisis forms of technology in education. Seemingly, many people in education, surprisingly, are jumping on the AI bandwagon, much like the coding wave and cellphone bans.
You see, we are trapped in a love/hate binary with technology in education that too often isn’t based in evidence.
Tech and AI products like Grammarly and Turnitin.com have ridden high waves of use despite both products, to be blunt, just being very poor quality. Grammarly gives really bad writing advice, and Turnitin.com is less effective detecting plagiarism than a simple (and free) Google search.
The broader technology problem in education, which parallels the AI problem, is that technology in education is often like a microwave; something can be completed quicker but the product is either hard to stomach or simply ruined.
A recent study, in fact, shows that students using AI to draft tend to produce very similar texts that are shallow at best. Further, students who use AI to compose struggle to recall any of their writing.
Why? Let’s invoke LaBrant again: Writing is learned by writing.
Better worded, we should think of “writing” as composing. Composing is the art of simultaneously creating meaning, developing understanding, and drafting communication in words, sentences, and paragraphs.
AI generating functional text in some real-world contexts may be a time saver, a net positive. But for students, scholars, and writers, using AI at any point of the composing process is a new form of plagiarism.
Let me be clear, this is about the composing process because AI has long been useful for surface editing; grammar and spell check is not cheating, and AI can relieve the writer some of the burden of editing (a role humans often play for other people in the world of writing an publishing).
Maybe AI will prove valuable in many ways for humans, but AI that does for students the very behaviors students must perform to learn is never justified—just as teachers doing the work for students has never been justified.
“As citizens we need to be able to write and to understand the importance and difficulty of being honest and clear. We will learn to do this by doing it,” LaBrant offers bluntly.
“Did you write this?” is an enduring question between teacher and student.
In 2025, using AI is just as damning as putting your name on your sister’s essay before turning it in as your own.
So that’s why you cannot spell “plagiarism” without “AI.”
Here are the highlights, although I recommend reading the entire piece:
In 1748, famed Scot David Hume defined nature. He elaborated such a law as “a regularity of past experience projected by the mind to future cases”. He argued that the evidence for a miracle is rarely sufficient to suspend rational belief because a closer look has always revealed that what was reported as a miracle was more likely false, resulting from misperception, mistransmission, or deception….
A careful examination confirms that enthusiasm to emulate Mississippi should be tempered with scepticism….
This provides a boost of about $111.63 of extra funding annually for each pupil. Comparing this amount to what are annual contemporary per pupil expenditures nationally, we have to agree that if such small expenditures can make a visible difference in student performance it truly is a miracle – a Mississippi version of St. John’s loaves and fishes.
But it was the second component of the Mississippi Miracle, a new retention policy, perhaps inspired by New Orleans’ Katrina disaster a decade earlier, that is likely to be the key to their success….
Prior to 2013, a higher percentage of third-graders moved on to the fourth grade and took the NAEP fourth-grade reading test. After 2013, only those students who did well enough in reading moved on to the fourth grade and took the test.
It is a fact of arithmetic that the mean score of any data set always increases if you delete some of the lowest scores (what is technically called “left truncation of the score distribution”)….
Strangely though, for the eighth-grade literacy test, the state’s rank dropped to a tie for 42nd place!…
(Note that this works especially well for student height, for after retaining the shortest third-graders for an extra year they will likely be taller when they are measured again a year later. It would be nice if the same were true for students struggling in academic subjects.)…
Were we to do this we would find that most of Mississippi’s gains are due to the retention rate.
It is disappointing, but not surprising, that the lion’s share of the effects of the “Mississippi miracle” are yet another case of gaming the system. There is no miracle to behold. There is nothing special in Mississippi’s literacy reform model that should be replicated globally. It just emphasises the obvious advice that, if you want your students to get high scores, don’t allow those students who are likely to get low scores to take the test. This message is not a secret….
Find a way to prevent the lowest test scorers from taking the exam and the average score will increase….
Second, besides weak empirical data, educational reformers like Patrinos should have given greater weight to the extant literature on the Mississippi Miracle. The miracle had already been convincingly debunked.10 Fourth-grade gains had vanished by the time the students reached eighth grade.
Question 1: Why is Mississippi retaining about 9000-12,000 K-3 students annually since 2014?
One of the key assertions of the “science of reading” (SOR) movement is that students across the US are mostly not proficient readers because teachers rely on balanced literacy to teach reading.
Certainly, a decade is enough time to reach the 95% rate of proficiency, and thus, retention numbers should have dropped dramatically or be near 0.
Question 2: How is Mississippi a “miracle” if the achievement gap for race and socioeconomic status is the same as 1998?
As shown in MS’s 2024 NAEP reading scores for grade 4:
Question 3: Why has Mississippi’s grade 8 NAEP scores remained in the bottom 25% of states despite the grade 4 NAEP scores jumping into the top 25%?
For 2024, MS NAEP grade 8 reading scores drop to eleventh from the bottom of state scores:
An analysis of reading reform found that states with comprehensive reform that includes grade retention have experienced short-term increases in test scores.
However, the analysis does not identify why these comprehensive reforms (including grade retention) are correlated with those short-term scores increases.
Research on education “miracles” have found that virtually none exist, and even when a school or program appears to be “high flying” there is little evidence those can be scaled up meaningfully.
Mississippi’s grade 4 NAEP scores in reading, then, raise questions that must be answered; instead, it is now politically cool to adopt copy-cat legislation from the state without proper evidence that there is valid success or a solid understanding of what is happening and why.
If more parents who were themselves the recipients of a decent education could be made aware of the asinine statements about the teaching of the English language which are being spewed forth by today’s educational theorists, there would be an armed uprising among the Parent-Teacher Associations all over the United States.
Yes, 1959.
And where does the blame lie?
That inheritance is being endangered by various forces operant in our society: by the hucksters of Madison Avenue, by the tiresome circumlocutions of the bureaucrats; by the tortured locutions of the sociologists, psychologists and symbol-haunted critics. However erosive these may be, the root responsibility for the decline in standards of English rests, I think, with the teachers of English in our primary and secondary schools, and even more so, with the teachers of education who produced them. These are the people whom you can chiefly thank for the fact that so many college entrants cannot spell, punctuate, or put together a coherent sentence in their own tongue, let alone any other….
[And] THERE is an organization called the National Council of Teachers of English, whose attitudes and activities constitute one of the chief threats to the cultivation of good English in our schools.
65 years ago, it seems, schools were focusing, alas, on the wrong things:
Today, the emphasis is placed, with unutterable stupidity, upon teaching the things that cannot be taught, the things that have to be learned, by trial and error, by oneself, such as social adjustment. High schools undertake to teach safe driving: you can teach someone to drive, but you cannot teach him to drive safely; the temperamental and emotional factors involved are beyond the reach of the instructor. But reading, spelling, punctuation, grammar and arithmetic can be taught: yet students enter college badly lacking in these fundamental skills, and with the most fragmentary notions of geography and history.
In the US, teacher education as well as teachers have suffered a long history of low respect and support.
A significant aspect of that dynamic, I think, is that the profession in over 70% women.
During the accountability reform movement since the early 1980s, teacher education and teachers have been held accountable without having the autonomy to set the conditions for teaching and learning needed for success.
During the recent rise in “science of” education reform, teacher autonomy and teacher education have been even more significantly eroded, notably with increased education legislation and the shift to scripted curriculum and programs (specifically in reading).
Here are further pieces to consider along with the new report above:
Critics blasted the film, but the cataclysmic ending—the actual destruction of earth—put the fate of the series in a sort of science fiction quandary that the next three films had to navigate.
Kurt Vonnegut was fond of playing with end-of-the world scenarios, such as his brilliant Cat’s Cradle and the threat of ice-nine.
Like Cat’s Cradle, Beneath the Planet of the Apes is an exploration of the intersections of militarism, religion, and the self-destructive nature of sentient beings.
The shocking end to the original Planet of the Apes—the astronaut Taylor discovering the collapsed Statue of Liberty and realizing he is on Earth, then ruled by apes—was likely impossible for the first sequel to match, but this second film does have surprising reveals.
It is 3955 when a second spaceship lands, but only one astronaut, Brent, survives to later reunite with Taylor and Nova from the first film.
And as the title suggests, beneath the planet, Brent, Taylor, and Nova discover that this new world of apes is the result of nuclear holocaust. Mutated telepathic humans and the new religion are also encountered:
Two lines from the film seem eerily significant now:
John Brent: That thing out there, an atomic bomb… is your god?…
Fat man: You don’t understand, Mr. Brent. The Bomb is a holy weapon for peace.
The US is experiencing a rise in Christian Nationalism, boosted by the MAGA movement and re-election of Trump.
And recent events are terrifying with the assassination and shooting of Minnesota Democrats by a radicalizedreligious zealot:
But this extreme example shouldn’t distract us from what is now being normalized:
WELCH: "Mike Johnson is a rapture prepper — just like Ted Cruz. You have a sect of MAGA that supports Israel because they want the Jews to be in Israel so Jesus can come back for the rapture."
Neither the dynamics in Beneath nor the examples of our current political climate in the US are extreme or unique.
History is replete with religion justifying and inciting hate, intolerance, and violence.
Most major religions use dogma and invoke God to deny women their full humanity, to require corporal punishment of children (and women), to justify war, and to criminalize and persecute non-normative people such as people who are LGBTQ+.
Organized religions tend to lose the focus of love and humanity because, as Bertrand Russell argued:
Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown, and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing—fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion has gone hand-in-hand. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things.
I fell in love with science fiction as a child and teen about the same time I came to realize that I, too, am not a Christian, that I am not religious.
That realization in my Self is grounded in that I have come to recognize that I choose love and the human dignity of all people—not dogma, not sword rattling, not pretending that I know the mind of God.
The world is proving to us now that religion is the enemy of moral and ethical behavior because humans—like Cruz and Johnson—too often get lost in the worst of human beliefs, like the mutants and apes in a science fiction film.
The great irony, of course, is that the fatal flaw of end-times religiosity is that it likely is a self-fulfilling prophesy, a final destruction that, unlike in Hollywood, there is no plot twist that will rectify the eradication of humans and Earth as we know it.
Two more lines from Beneath makes me shudder:
Negro: Mr. Taylor, Mr. Brent, we are a peaceful people. We don’t kill our enemies. We get our enemies to kill each other.
Cornelius: [reads from the holy scripts] “Beware the beast man, for he is the devil’s pawn. Alone among God’s primates, he kills for sport or lust or greed. Yea, he will murder his brother to possess his brother’s land. Let him not breed in great numbers, for he will make a desert of his home, and yours. Shun him… for he is the harbinger of death.”
The truths of love and peace that can save humanity are often lost or ignored, regretfully, because religion, again, seems bound to fear and hate.
We are living in the real world, not some post-apocalyptic fiction, but the last line of Beneath seems to be our most likely fate:
Ending Voiceover: In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe, lies a medium-sized star, and one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead.
As a literacy educator for over 40 years, specifically as a teacher of writing, I have stated a solid “no AI” policy both in my courses and as a public stance.
While I am certainly not anti-technology, I am a technology skeptic and have acknowledged that popular technology used in education tends to be quite bad—for example, Turnitin.com.
My core reason for a “no AI” policy in my courses, specifically my writing courses, is that AI such as ChatGPT tends to do for students the very behaviors they need to be practicing in order to learn.
As a comparison, I have a “no AI” policy for the same reason I reject rubrics and writing prompts for teaching writing since rubrics and prompts, again, are making decisions for students that they need to be making as developing writers.
Here are key findings that support my “no AI” policy:
I want to stress that my experience with students is that they often either fail to use useful technology (such as the grammar and spelling check in Word) or they are quite bad at using technology, despite being seen as technology natives.
That students need help in formal education with being better at using technology is a given, but it is not a contradiction to acknowledge that some technology is counter-educational; and that is the case with AI/ChatGPT.
“Red herring” perfectly describes the bulk of education reform in the US since the Reagan administration because thosee reforms have been based on false claims to distract from needed social and educational reform in the interests of students, teachers, and public education.
The US (and many English-speaking nations around the world) have remained in a perpetual state of education and reading crises for decades.
The US has never stopped using crisis rhetoric or blaming schools, teachers, and students, but policy has been a revolving door of new standards, new tests, and new “miracle” solutions—none of which ever produce the positive outcomes promised.
The dirty little secret is that perpetual crisis/reform in education (and reading) is its own goal because constant crisis/reform is politically and economically profitable to those fanning the flames of crisis.
In 2018, the “science of reading” (SOR) became a tired and constant refrain of the media, spreading to parent advocacy and then legislation and policy.
By 2025, the “science of” has added “math” and “learning,” including many English-speaking countries where a reading crisis is the norm.
And thus, education reform in the US and other countries has now adopted at the core of education reform “science of” rhetoric, claims, blame, and policy.
Parallel to education reform since the 1980s, the “science of” education reform is not grounded in credible claims about education crisis or problems, and therefore, the blame and solutions are also not credible or effective.
The “science of” approach to education reform has been extremely effective since “science” is being weaponized, and when anyone dare to challenge the movement, those people are accused of being anti-science, often compared to the anti-vaccination movement.
Here’s the problem: Those of us challenging the “science of” movement are not rejecting scientific research in education; we are acknowledging that “science of” advocacy is misrepresenting educational challenges, educational research, and educational practice for ideological, political, and market purposes.
Journalists, educators/scholars, education “celebrities,” the education marketplace, and politicians have made their careers on false “science of” claims and unfounded attacks on anyone calling them out for not being credible.
Ironically, the evidence supports those of us who are critics of “science of” education/reading reform, and consequently, “science of” claims are red herrings, distractions from the valid education challenges and potential reforms that would serve the interests of students, teachers, and public education.
Here, then, is the core evidence that the “science of” movements are, in fact, red herring education reform.
Further, “science of” advocates tend to move quickly from the false claims of “crisis” to offering false blame.
Just as there is no evidence of crisis, there is simply no scientific studies showing, for example, that the US has a reading crisis caused by a few reading programs, the implementation of balanced literacy, or the failure of teacher education to prepare teachers.
Again, there is a paradox in the “science of” movement whereby the advocates of “science of” themselves do not adhere to the narrow use of “science” to support their major claims.
For example, in the US, SOR advocates and SOR-based policy and legislation include support for a number of practices, claims, and programs that lack scientific evidence—decodable texts, LETRS, 95% rule, Orton-Gillingham, systematic phonics first for all students, nonsense word assessments (DIBLES), etc.
Broadly, also, “science of” advocates’ most damning red herring is that they are weaponizing “science” as a veneer to take a non-ideological pose although “science of” advocates are themselves mostly making ideological claims.
Direct instruction and skills-based instruction have long been at the core of conservative ideology.
Once we acknowledge that “science of” claims of crisis and who/what they blame are not evidence-based, we can also acknowledge they are mostly making ideological arguments, and then, we must unpack why.
Noted above, there is a great deal of profit in crying education/reading crisis and maintaining a constant state of reform.
As long as that reform never works.
And it never has, it never will.
The “science of” movements, then, are grounded in misinformation, oversimplification, and ideological bias.
The “science of” movements are another form of red herring education reform.
The distraction is also ideological, grounded in a rejection of the power of systemic forces and a belief in rugged individualism as well as the bootstrapping myth.
The “science of” movement is also a distraction from other ulterior motives, such as de-professionalizing teachers with scripted curriculum and imposing AI/computer program approaches for teaching students.
More irony: Education reform is designed to keep our eyes on individual people—students, teachers—and not the overwhelming evidence:
Almost 63% of the variance in test performance was explained by social capital family income variables that influence the development of background knowledge. Background knowledge is a known predictor of standardized test results. Family income variables are immutable by schools. Only public policies, outside the control of school personnel, can influence family income….
Policy makers and education leaders should rethink the current reliance on standardized test results as the deciding factor to make decisions about student achievement, teacher quality, school effectiveness, and school leader quality. In effect, policies that use standardized test results to evaluate, reward, and sanction students and school personnel are doing nothing more than rewarding schools that serve advantaged students and punishing schools that serve disadvantaged students. (Maroun and Tienken, 2024)
Here is the science that critics of the “science of” movement recognize.
And fun fact, we are not trying to sell you anything or get your vote.
Aydarova, E. (2023). “Whatever you want to call it”: Science of reading mythologies in the education reform movement. Harvard Educational Review, 93(4), 556–581, https://doi.org10.17763/1943-5045-93.4.556
Aydarova, E. (2024). What you see is not what you get: Science of reading reforms as a guise for standardization, centralization, and privatization. American Journal of Education. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/730991
Reinking, D., Hruby, G.G., & Risko, V.J. (2023). Legislating phonics: Settle science of political polemic? Teachers College Record. https://doi.org/10.1177/01614681231155688
Thomas, P.L. (2025). Navigating (another) reading crisis as an administrator: Rethinking the “science of reading” movement. Journal of School Administration, Research and Development, 10(1), 38-48. https://ojed.org/JSARD/article/view/6706
Tierney, R.J., & Pearson, P.D. (2024). Fact-checking the Science of Reading: Opening up the conversation. Literacy Research Commons. https://literacyresearchcommons.org
While there is ample and disturbing evidence to keep our focus on the tremendous destructive outcomes of the second Trump administration, we should also recognize that the seeds of these worst policies for education were planted by George W. Bush as both governor of Texas and president of the US.
So, first, we must note that Bush education agenda in Texas included scripted curriculum, and then, more significantly, Bush’s signature No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was grounded in mandating “scientifically based” instruction and programs.
Ironically, despite NCLB’s “scientifically based” mandate, in the second decade after implementation, the media, politicians, and pundits declared a reading crisis and ascribed the cause to teacher education and teachers failing to know and use the “science of reading” (SOR).
SOR has, then, spawned the “science of math” and more broadly the “science of learning.”
Similar to the bi-partisan support for NCLB and most education reform since the 1980s, a politically diverse coalition has embraced and endorsed the “science of” movement, although few people have acknowledged that the agenda is mostly conservative ideology.
Some are, however, starting to recognize that “science of” policies are working to de-professionalize teachers through mandating scripted curriculum.
There is not enough evidence behind the science of learning to justify it being enshrined in our education system, Jefferson contends.
“It posits science really as an absolute, and it also suggests explicitly that nobody can question its authority because it is the ‘science’ of learning.
“In other words, ‘whatever [teachers have] been doing for the last few decades is unimportant now, we all need to conform to the science’.
“That’s a very heavy-handed way of approaching pedagogy and also approaching teachers in the field who are very, very experienced in this,” Jefferson tells EducationHQ.
The problem here is not “science,” but who controls what counts as science and how “science” is used as control.
What counts as “science” and credible evidence in education—and all fields—should not be abdicated to government bureaucracy (as evidenced by the current Trump administration).
Ultimately, the “science of” movement has proven to be less about teaching and learning or reforming education, and more about political and ideological control (parallel to the current misuse of “science” by Health and Human Services [HHS] Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.)
For teaching and learning, scientific research certainly provides important and powerful evidence for teaching and teachers; however, the “science of” movement is distorting and controlling what counts as “science” for ideological and political agendas.
The Trump agenda for so-called “gold-standard science” is the logical and catastrophic logical outcome of many decades of political mandates for education reform.
Rob Rogers and Melissa Hendrixunpacked the history and grave threat that Christian nationalism is posing to our public education system.
Paul Thomasrevealed how lies and false messaging from the media have been used to try and convince the public that schools are failing, when in fact, they are not.
Derek Blackoutlined some of the history behind this movement and how it still is so relevant today as the Trump administration promotes federal vouchers and more money for charter schools.
Upcoming
Faith, Power, and Public Schools: Christian Nationalism’s Assault on Education in Colorado and Beyond, Katherine Stewart
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 