Category Archives: Education

Education, education reform, Educational Research, Science of Reading

Misunderstanding Mississippi’s Reading Reform: The Need to Resist Copycat Education Reform

[Header Photo by BABAMURAT USMANOV on Unsplash]

Another flurry of over-the-top commentary has resurfaced on social media concerning reading reform in Mississippi; for example:

Since 2019, the discourse around reading reform in MS has been consistently hyperbolic and misleading because, frankly, there is little solid evidence supporting the rush to copy the state’s reform.

Even a historically top-scoring state, Massachusetts, is poised to join the “science of reading” reform fad.

Along with the new round of Mississippi mania, however, comes a bit of sobering news: The grades are in: Mississippi schools backslide on academic progress.

The relentless cycles of ever-new education reform since the 1980s and the fatal mistake of copycat reform movements are being replicated by the rush to “be like Mississippi.”

The belief that MS has performed a miracle in reading instruction and achievement is likely at least misleading if not a mirage (increased test scores due to manipulating the population of students being tested but not due to greater reading proficiency). Regardless, states must resist copycat education reform.

Questions Remain Unanswered about Popular Reading Reform: The Mississippi Model

Because of the state’s exceptional National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) grade 4 reading scores in 2019, Mississippi was anointed as an education “miracle” in The New York Times.

However, one admission in that NYT’s christening has yet to be fully addressed: “What’s up in Mississippi? There’s no way to know for sure what causes increases in test scores, but Mississippi has been doing something notable: making sure all of its teachers understand the science of reading.”

At best, Mississippi’s grade 4 reading scores challenge the overwhelming evidence that standardized test scores mostly correlate with race and social class. However, in 2019, the outlier NAEP scores were merely correlated with Mississippi’s comprehensive reading reform that has now been implemented for well over a decade.

Since the early 1980s and the release of the highly politicized A Nation at Risk, education reform has remained in a permanent series of crisis/reform cycles, driven by copy-cat legislation.

Much of that reform, unfortunately, has been the result of media, politicians, and reformers failing to understand test data—such as misunderstanding and misrepresenting NAEP achievement levels—and thus passing reform that fails to match the needs of students, teachers, and schools.

Despite the lack of robust research on why Mississippi has achieved and maintained outlier scores in grade 4 reading, many states have rushed to implement the Mississippi model of reading reform, often identified as the “science of reading.”

That reform has some common features: mandates about what reading programs meet the standard of “scientific,” teacher retraining in the “science of reading,” bans on some reading instructional practices, and third-grade retention based on state assessments of reading.

Research by Westall and Cummings offers insight into the current state of reading reform, acknowledging that those reforms have resulted in some short-term test score gains similar to Mississippi’s.

However, that study has an important caveat: Only states implementing third-grade retention are seeing those score increases. The researchers note that this study does not conclude why retention correlates with short-term score gains, however.

While Reading Wars are often contentious and driven by hyperbole and confrontational rhetoric, most people would agree that the US can and should do a better job of teaching children to read, and our most vulnerable populations of students are those being carelessly left behind despite a permanent state of education reform in the US for over five decades.

Before we commit to more reform, there are at least three questions needing to be answered about the Mississippi model for reading.

The first question may be the most important: What is the role of grade retention in reading reform?

Research on grade retention continues to raise red flags about the practice, often resulting in negative consequences for students and disproportionately impacting minoritized and impoverished students.

Mississippi has been retaining about 9,000+ K-3 students since 2014, and those retention numbers seem to be relatively consistent. If the reading reform is working, MS should have seen a significant drop in students being retained.

It seems possible that grade retention impacts the population of students being tested, and thus, distorts the test data. In short, grade retention may be raising test scores without improving student reading proficiency.

A second question must seek why Mississippi’s exceptional grade 4 scores do not erase the race or poverty gaps. As NAEP reports in 2024: “In 2024, Black students had an average score that was 25 points lower than that for White students. This performance gap was not significantly different from that in 1998 (26 points). … [And] students who were identified as economically disadvantaged had an average score that was 26 points lower than that for students who were identified as not economically disadvantaged. This performance gap was not significantly different from that in 1998 (26 points).”

The opportunity and achievement gaps in education in the US are by far the most pressing needs in our schools, and yet, these reforms seem to be inadequate for closing them.

One reason may be that we are pursuing the wrong reform agendas, as Maroun and Tienken argue:

The influence of family social capital variables manifests itself in standardized test results. 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.

A final question concerns the evidence about short-term score increases among states implementing reading reform. Similar to another high-retention state, Florida, Mississippi has remained in the bottom 25% of states in grade 8 reading NAEP scores.

This data evidence also suggests that retention may be distorting test scores and not supporting robust or valid reading achievement by students.

Regretfully, the “science of” era of education reform is repeating a problem found in reform cycles since the Reagan era: Focusing on trends and failing to do the hard work of identifying what our problems are and then seeking reform to improve teaching and learning for all students.

The crisis/reform approach has not worked and likely is not working now.

However, the truth is that we simply do not know what is needed or what works because we are not committed to doing the complicated work needed and we remain too often trapped in market forces as well as political and ideological agendas that fail to serve the needs of the children who need reading the most.

Education, free speech

Celebrating Violence Is a Type of Violence—But So Are Words

[Header Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash]

Somewhere around tenth grade, I began to recognize in myself a strong belief in nonviolence.

One day in English class remains a seminal moment in my life—one that included people who would shape my life profoundly as an educator.

I was in Lynn Harrill‘s class. Lynn would become my mentor and friend, the man influenced who I am in ways that rivaled my own father’s influence.

Lynn’s English class was unlike any English class I had ever sat in before. We had to write essays (English classes in junior high had been mostly working in grammar textbooks and diagramming sentences), and Lynn grounded his teaching in robust class discussions.

And many of us loved those discussions, and him.

One class period, we found ourselves in a heated class debate about who would willingly fight in a war if drafted. Coincidentally, that day the principal, Mr. Clark Simpkins, was observing Lynn, and Mr. Simpkins was the husband of my 6th-grade math teacher (who I loved) and father of two sons around my age. Most significantly, Mr. Simpkins would be the person who hired me for my first job teaching English.

As the debate unfolded, a clear division developed—all of the male students eagerly expressed a desire to fight in a war, except for me, the lone male student speaking for nonviolence with the young women in the class.

The day of my interview about 7 years later, Mr. Simpkins reminded me of that day, and honestly, there was a bit more than a veiled implication that my beliefs could keep me from being hired—one of many moments when, even after I was hired, these implications were used to keep me in my place.

Being a advocate for nonviolence in the South was perceived as unmanly, unpatriotic; it certainly was one of many of my beliefs that made me unlike the culture of my home and my career.

None the less, one of my recurring units as a teacher, one that my students appreciated and seemed to strongly engage with, included an exploration of nonfiction writing through the writings and activism of Henry David Thoreau, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.

The thread running through these men and their lives, of course, was advocacy for civil disobedience and nonviolence.

The goals of this unit were primarily about helping students grow as critical readers and writers, but I also very much wanted my students to consider and reconsider their own beliefs about violence.

I had grown up in the same Southern culture of my students, and I know most of them had not had that opportunity.

This, of course, is a long way to say emphatically that I without qualification believe that celebrating violence is a type of violence.

And I reiterate that in the wake of the inexcusable killing of Charlie Kirk.

Here I want to add that I am also concerned about the aggressive whitewashing of Kirk’s rhetoric and agenda by many conservatives who are using Kirk’s death for political and ideological gain.

That, I believe, is almost equally as offensive as callously celebrating or joking about the gruesome public murdering of a person in what should be a free and safe society.

As just one example of the debates on social media about what Kirk did and did not promote, let’s look at the claim that Kirk advocated for the death penalty for being gay, linked to his quoting Leviticus 20:13 and calling that “God’s perfect law.”

[I will not link the video here because I do not want to platform Kirk, but this is easy to search and confirm. If you doubt anything here, please find the clip yourself.]

This moment by Kirk is, in fact, an example of words as violence because simply mentioning stoning gay people to death because of God’s law is, at best, a veiled threat to the lives of anyone who is gay.

It is a reminder of what has been. It is a warning about what could be again.

History is replete with religious and institutional torturing, imprisoning, and killing people simply for being gay, and often these acts were grounded in religious dogma.

If Kirk was as smart as his advocates claim, he was quite aware of what he was doing by citing Leviticus and saying the law is “perfect.”

This was a threat, a form of rhetorical violence.

But what strikes me as the most concerning aspect of this moment is that Kirk is grinning and smiling throughout. He sees this little reference to stoning gay people to death as a joke, just a cool guy making a “by the way” point to engage in civil debate and discourse.

Despite Kirk being framed as a champion of free speech and an advocate for civil discourse, the content of what Kirk said often contained misinformation and hostile claims about marginalized people; that isn’t civil discourse, and “free speech” doesn’t mean people are not held accountable for what they say.

If Kirk’s agenda cannot be fully articulated after his death, that suggests it wasn’t valid to begin with.

For LGBTQ+ people, quoting Leviticus devalues to their lives and threatens their happiness; it is not a podcast joke, not simply a way to play “gotcha” in an online debate.

This is their lives, and all they request is that they have the same access to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that Kirk along with his family and followers also want and deserve.

To be blunt, there are many examples like this that discredit the whitewashing of Kirk being perpetrated by people with political and ideological agendas, people who seem unconcerned about using Kirk’s death for their gains.

There are only a few fair options among those of us who fully condemn and reject the killing of Kirk; we all must start with the truth about who Kirk was and what he advocated for, and then we must reject it or embrace it. The latter is the only way praise and honoring Kirk by his advocates can be taken seriously.

If anyone has to misinform or lie to praise someone, that calls into question whether that person, in fact, deserves praise.

For me the only way to honor Kirk is to condemn the senseless killing and then to accurately describe who Kirk was and what he championed.

To cheer for his death or to misrepresent his life’s work is to dishonor not only Kirk but all of use.

Crisis, Education, education reform, reading, Science of Reading

New: Public spaces, politics, and policy: historical entanglements with irrational momentism (Bloomsbury)

Thomas, P.L. (2025). Breaking free of the “war,” “crisis,” and “miracle” cycles of reading policy and practice. In T.A. Price & M. McNulty (eds.), Public spaces, politics, and policy: historical entanglements with irrational momentism (pp. 93-112). Bloomsbury. [Click link in title to access and order]

Education, education reform, Educational Research, Lou LaBrant, Writing

Persistent Straw Man Claims about Literacy Skills: Grammar Edition

[Header Photo by Anthony on Unsplash]

Since the “science of reading” (SOR) has now expanded into a “science of learning” (SOL) movement, the same problems among SOR advocates have appeared among SOL advocates—misinformation and misunderstanding about teaching and learning combined with a bait-and-switch approach that offers anecdotes as if they prove the so-called “science,” for example:

There is so much wrong with this that it is mind boggling, but let’s focus on, first, this is merely an anecdote, which proves nothing except that it happened.

Second, that direct instruction can be effective for students demonstrating simple recall is not very shocking; in fact, many would recognize that direct instruction/recall is asking far too little of students, especially in literacy instruction.

At one point in my education, I could name all the presidents in order as well as all the state capitals. It would have been better if I had developed a more sophisticated understanding of the presidency and the political realities of the US.

Through direct instruction over a brief amount of time, I can say one word, “inside,” and my poodle will happily trot into our apartment. I didn’t let her discover that; direct instruction produced pretty reliable recall in that sweet dog.

But she isn’t smarter; she is well trained.

Here, then, I am going to expand some on a third point: Furey clearly does not understand the issue he seems to be attacking, grammar instruction (with the implied agents being woke progressives who worship at the alter of discovery learning).

Let’s start by acknowledging Stephen Krashen’s explanation of “three different views of phonics”:

Intensive Phonics. This position claims that we learn to read by first learning the rules of phonics, and that we read by sounding out what is on the page, either out-loud or to ourselves (decoding to sound). It also asserts that all rules of phonics must be deliberately taught and consciously learned.

Basic Phonics. According to Basic Phonics, we learn to read by actually reading, by understanding what is on the page. Most of our knowledge of phonics is subconsciously acquired from reading (Smith, 2004: 152)….

Zero Phonics. This view claims that direct teaching is not necessary or even helpful. I am unaware of any professional who holds this position.

Furey seems to be posting a Gotcha! aimed at what he believes is a Zero Grammar view so let me follow Krashen’s lead and clarify: “I am unaware of any professional who holds this position.”

The Big Irony of a “science of” advocate attacking a straw man position on grammar is that there is pretty solid body of research/science on grammar instruction (note that many people use “grammar” to encompass grammar, mechanics, and usage).

To understand the research on direct (and isolated) grammar instruction, we first must clarify our instructional goal. If a course is a grammar course, and the goal is for student to acquire grammar knowledge, then some or even a significant amount of direct instruction can be justified and effective.

Even in the context of teaching students to acquire distinct grammar knowledge, however, many would caution against viewing grammar as “rules” and instead would encourage seeing grammar as a set of contextualized conventions that also carry some degree of power coding.

For example, subject/verb usages are a feature of so-called standard English, and some dialects can be identified by varying from those standards. It is important to acknowledge that one is not “right” or “better” linguistically, although the so-called standard forms tend to carry some cultural or social capital. And there may be cultural/social negative consequences for using dialects considered not standard.

As an analogy, direct (isolated) grammar instruction can be effective for teaching students grammar knowledge just as having students diagram sentences can be effective for teaching students how to diagram sentences.

The problem is when we make our instructional goal teaching students to write with purpose and with awareness of language conventions (grammar, mechanics, usage).

There is a long and deep research base reaching back into the early 1900s showing that direct (isolated) grammar instruction fails to transfer into student writing and can even have negative outcomes for the quality and amount of student writing.

For example, LaBrant (1946) noted: “We have some hundreds of studies now which demonstrate that there is little correlation (whatever that may cover) between exercises in punctuation and sentence structure and the tendency to use the principles illustrated in independent writing” (p. 127).

This does not mean “do not teach grammar,” but does mean that direct grammar instruction needs to in the context of student writing.

Students who are writing by choice and with purpose are much more likely to engage with and understand (and thus apply) language conventions (grammar, mechanics, usage) than when we directly teach those in isolation.

So let me be clear: Teaching students to write without direct instruction would be inexcusable, but teaching grammar through direct and isolated instruction is malpractice when our goal is teaching writing.

Here, then, are some ways to insure direct grammar instruction in the context of student writing is effective:

  • Establish direct instruction of grammar in context based on student writing and demonstration of need. This can be effective for both individual student writing conferences and whole-class instruction (if most student demonstrate the same needs).
  • Recognize that some language conventions are abstractions that may be difficult to grasp for students at early stages of brain development; holding students accountable for usage should be tempered by their development (see Weaver below).
  • Avoid the “error hunt” (see Weaver below) and do not frame language conventions as “right/wrong” or revising and editing as “correcting.” The goal is language convention awareness and purposeful writing by students.
  • Avoid traditional grammar textbook and exercises. Prefer instead research-based direct instruction that transfers to writing such as sentence combining and lessons on the history of the English language (see Style below).
  • Adopt either a workshop approach to writing or integrate workshop elements (choice, time, and feedback) into the course.
  • Forefront and help students understand that revising writing is their primary responsibility as writers in order to communicate as well as possible; however, editing (addressing language conventions) is a part of that process, although it may be delayed until a piece is worthy of editing and before publishing or submitting. As LaBrant (1946) cautioned: “I am not willing to teach the polishing and adornment of irresponsible, unimportant writing” (p. 123).
  • The surface features of student writing need not be perfect when writing is part of a course. Seeking perfect surface features can and often is a goal for published writing.

As this discussion shows, another failure of the “science of” movement is the urge to attack caricatures and to oversimplify.

Teaching grammar is not a simple thing to address, and, again, I will note using Krashen, there simply is no credible professional saying teachers should not teach grammar. In fact, no credible educator would reject direct instruction of grammar as long as that instruction is in the context of student writing.

LaBrant (1947) made an assertion about teaching almost 80 years ago that may sound familiar: “A brief consideration will indicate reasons for the considerable gap between the research currently available and the utilization of that research in school programs and methods” (p. 87).

I have always regarded this as accurate, and have repeated the claim myself for decades.

Straw man fallacies, caricature, and anecdotes, I fear, are not the path to making this less true.

The “science of” movement is failing here, and the consequences are to the detriment of students and teachers who deserve better.

Recommended

Teaching Writing as Journey, Not Destination

Teaching High-School Students to Write (1946), Lou LaBrant

Research in Language (1947), Lou LaBrant

The Individual and His Writing (1950), Lou LaBrant

Writing Is Learned by Writing (1953), Lou LaBrant

Inducing Students to Write (1955), Lou LaBrant

Writing Is More than Structure (1957), Lou LaBrant

Blueprints or Houses? Lou LaBrant and the Writing Debate, P.L. Thomas [access HERE]

Revisiting LaBrant’s “Writing Is More than Structure” (English Journal, May 1957), P.L. Thomas

Teaching Grammar in Context, Connie Weaver

Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace, 12th Edition, Joseph M. Williams, Joseph Bizup

The Writer’s Practice: Building Confidence in Your Nonfiction Writing, John Warner

This Ain’t Another Statement! This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice! (CCCC)

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

The Reading Proficiency Bait-and-Switch: Manufacturing Crisis for Profit [SC Update]

[Header Photo by Ines Kopu on Unsplash]

First, the bait.

As I have detailed, the mainstream media, education reformers and pundits, and politicians repeat a misleading claim that US students are not “proficient” readers, and thus, we are experiencing a reading crisis.

The bait in this misinformation is almost always misrepresenting NAEP scores. Again, the confusion and misinformation is grounded in NAEP’s achievement levels that use “proficient” as an aspirational goal for students that is well above grade-level reading as measured on state assessments of reading, as I recently explained:

The disconnect lies with the second benchmark, “proficient.” According to the NAEP, students performing “at or above the NAEP Proficient level … demonstrate solid academic performance and competency over challenging subject matter.” But this statement includes a significant clarification: “The NAEP Proficient achievement level does not represent grade level proficiency as determined by other assessment standards (e.g., state or district assessments).”

NAEP provides a correlation that shows almost all states set “proficient” at the NAEP basic level:

The bait, however, manufactures the perception of a crisis by making claims about NAEP proficient—2/3 of students are not proficient—that at least exaggerates the state of reading achievement among students:

Next, the switch.

Since about 2012, most states have revised or introduced new reading legislation grounded in the “science of reading” (SOR); in other words, states have made significant political and financial investments in both that there is a reading crisis and that the reforms will improve student reading achievement.

Mississippi, for example, has been christened a “miracle” and many states are rushing to copy their reforms despite a lack of research or evidence about the impressive grade 4 reading scores (which disappear by grade 8). [See three questions that need to be answered about MS.]

Many states are also beginning to adjust their proficiency cut scores [1], complicating any claims of reform being effective versus a misleading change in how students are labeled:

Wisconsin isn’t the only state that recently instituted changes that effectively boost proficiency rates. Oklahoma and Alaska recently made similar adjustments. New York lowered passing or “cut” scores in reading and math last year, while Illinois and Colorado are considering such revisions.

Now, here is the switch.

SOR advocates use the proficient level of NAEP to manufacture a crisis, but then celebrate state-level proficiency (that correlates with NAEP basic) to make claims that the SOR reforms are working:

Here are some fun facts, however, about Indiana and other states: These state proficiency gains are equal to NAEP basic, which, again, SOR advocates refuse to acknowledge when discussing the state of reading the US today; note the correlations below of states with NAEP proficient (appears to be nothing to celebrate, right, if we accept the original bait that NAEP proficient is the correct standard?):

While I do maintain that crisis rhetoric isn’t an effective approach to education reform—especially when that crisis is built on misinformation and misunderstanding test data—I will concede there is a reading reform crisis driven by market, political, and ideological agendas among the adults who seem more interested in scoring gotcha points and profiting off reform than improving student reading.

First, the most current evidence available suggests that reading reform that appears to raise test scores in the short term only is primarily driven by grade retention, not changing reading programs, teacher training, or instruction.

Next, recent research again reveals “63% of the variance in test performance was explained by social capital family income variables that influence the development of background knowledge,” leading the researchers to argue:

The influence of family social capital variables manifests itself in standardized test results. 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.

One of the political purposes of NAEP is to hold states accountable for state assessments. If you look carefully at the correlation above, students moving from one state to another would result in that student being labeled differently in terms of reading achievement [2].

Despite the negative responses to my argument, I maintain that the US needs a common standard for age-level reading that includes clear achievement levels that can support valid reading reform and develop a data base that better reflects if reform produces higher student achievement.

We cannot and should not be shouting “crisis” because we do not have the data to draw any valid conclusions about the overall state of reading in the US.

What we do have is permanent reform for the market and political benefit of those perpetuating crisis rhetoric and selling solutions.

The current state of NAEP and state testing allows rampant market and political manipulation of claims about reading and reading reform.

To maintain permanent crisis and reform, many are willing to sacrifice students, teachers, and public schools.

I am not.

[1] For some background on changes to how tests measure student achievement, I recommend exploring the controversial and often misunderstood re-centering of the SAT.

[2] State achievement levels vary widely:

Update

The reading proficiency bait-and-switch has come to South Carolina (another grade retention state that has much lower grade 8 reading scores than grade 4; see below):

This is more partisan political grandstanding, but the grandstanding in on incredibly thin ice.

SC, like IN above, sets state reading proficiency in the NAEP basic range; however, note that SC is toward the lower end of basic (see the correlations above).

SC sits just above the national average in grade 4 reading (2024), but like MS and FL, the impact of grade retention seems to be in play because by grade 8, SC falls down toward the bottom, again similar to MS and FL:

Crisis, Education, education reform, Educational Research, opportunity gap, reading, Science of Reading

Why I Reject Crisis Rhetoric about Reading and Education: My Agenda

[Header Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash]

When I had my OpEd on the manufactured reading crisis and NAEP misinformation published in The Washington Post, I anticipated that SOR advocates would continue their misinformation campaign, including targeted attacks on me that repeat false claims and innuendoes (“hidden agenda”).

I do find it a bit odd that my OpEd claims have ruffled so many feathers because, to be blunt, the OpEd is pretty moderate and factual. For those not interested in reading the piece, here is the TL;DR:

  • Many SOR advocates and education reformers misrepresent or misunderstand NAEP data and achievement levels, reading “proficiency” and “grade level,” reading programs, and reading theories. I call for accurate and honest discourse and claims.
  • The wide range of achievement levels between NAEP and state accountability testing should be standardized, and in my informed opinion, that should be a shift to a standard for age-level reading proficiency.
  • Many states have chosen as reading policy to implement third-grade mandatory retention based on state testing, and current research shows that SOR-based reform is only raising test scores in the short term when states have retention. Grade retention disproportionately impacts Black and brown students, poor students, multilingual learners, and students with special needs; as well, retention is punitive with many negative consequences. I caution states against choosing grade retention since it likely distorts test data and does not contribute to authentic achievement gains.

However, most of the negative responses to this commentary that I have seen focuses on one element—my rejecting crisis rhetoric about reading.

Since I began teaching in 1984, I have worked as an educator entirely in the post-A Nation at Risk era of high-stakes accountability education reform.

I reject crisis rhetoric about reading and education for the following reasons:

  • The test-score gap by race and socioeconomic status is not unique to reading; all standardized testing exposes that gap regardless of content area. There is no unique gap in reading.
  • Reading and education crisis have been declared every moment over the past 100 years (at least), and thus, I maintain that the current status of education in the US is the norm that our society has chosen to accept. That norm, by the way, is something I have worked diligently to change for over 40 years as an educator and scholar.
  • “Crisis” in reading and education is manufactured to feed the reform industry, and not to improve teaching or learning. Two things can be true at once: Education reformers manufacture hyperbolic stories about education and reading crisis to maintain a culture of perpetual reform (for market and political/ideological reasons), and the US public education and social safety net are historically and currently grossly negligent about the serving individual needs of all students (notably those vulnerable populations most negatively impacted by test-based gaps).
  • “Crisis” reform in the US has created a culture of blame for students, teachers, and public education that distracts from the evidence on the primary sources for low test scores and test-based gaps. Over 60% of those test scores and thus that gap is causally driven by out-of-school factors. Current research suggests that test-based evaluations of schools and students have failed and must be replaced for most effective reform.
  • There simply is no settled evidence that the US has a “crisis” in reading or that any specific reading program or reading theory has contributed significantly to low student reading proficiency. As well, there simply is no monolithic settled body of science or research on how to teach reading that supports a one-size-fits-all reading program or theory (such as structured literacy); there is a century of robust and complex research on teaching reading that can and should be better implemented in day-to-day classroom instruction; however, the greater causes for ineffective instruction and inadequate student achievement are, again, out-of-school factors and a failure to provide students and teachers the learning/teaching conditions necessary for better outcomes.

Again, to be clear, the US does not currently have the data to make any sort of valid claim about reading proficiency in the US. The only verifiable claim we can or should make is that there is clearly an opportunity gap grounded in race and socioeconomic status as well as ample evidence that multilingual learners and students with special needs are far too often neglected in our schools.

As I argue in the commentary, we need better data, and we need a more honest and nuanced public discourse about reading and education that is not corrupted by market and political/ideological agendas.

Further, journalists, politicians, and even parents should not be controlling the discourse or the reform in reading and education.

Yes, they are and should be stakeholders with a voice in a democracy, but ultimately, education is a profession that has never had autonomy—and I suspect that is because more that 7 out of 10 educators are women (notably even higher in the early grades when students are first taught to read).

I do not—like many in the SOR and education reform movements—have a “hidden agenda.”

I have never and would never sell a reading or education program. I have never and would never endorse any program or theory or ideology. I provide the vast majority of my work for free, open-access publications and my blog.

Over 40+ years, I have presented many dozens of times with well over 90% of that for free or at my own expense.

I am a critical educator and scholar, and I have never been paid to make any claims or to endorse any organization. My published and spoken work is mine and mine only.

I am fortunate to be a university-based scholar, and thus, I have academic freedom and am beholden to no one except me.

My agenda?

I work to support the professional autonomy of teachers so that the individual needs of students can be fully served in our public education system.

And thus, my agenda includes calling out misinformation, identifying the market and political/ideological agendas driving permanent education reform, and providing for all stakeholders counter-evidence to the crisis story being sold.

Since I am an older white man with university tenure in the US, I am not much impacted by the persistent lies and distortions about me and my “hidden agenda”; however, those lies and distortions are in the service of other people maintaining the education reform gravy train that feeds their bank accounts and political/ideological agendas.

Here is another TL;DR version of my WaPo commentary: If you have to misinform or lie to make your argument, you likely do not have a valid argument.

SOR advocates and education reformers are mostly misinforming and outright fanning the flames of crisis to promote their own agendas.

Suggesting I have a “hidden agenda” is a whole lot of projection.

We can and should do better in our rhetoric and our claims.

We can and should create better systems of assessment and thus better data.

We can and should reform reading and education in ways that address the lives of our students as well as the learning and teaching conditions of our schools.

Punishing thousands of Black, brown, and poor students with grade retention because we are addicted to permanent education reform is inexcusable; test-based grade retention is not reading reform.

The accountability era of education reform begun in the early 1980s has never worked, except to perpetuate constant cycles of crisis/reform.

There is no reading or education crisis.

There is a culture of political negligence in the US that has existed for many decades—that culture is grounded in rugged individualism and bootstrapping myths of the US that are contradicted by (ironically) scientific evidence and research.

Students and teachers (mostly women) are not broken beings that need to be fixed.

Students and teachers reflect the negative systemic forces that somehow we as a society refuse to acknowledge or reform.

I should not be surprised that in the Trump/MAGA era there are many people offended by a call for honest and accurate rhetoric about reading, education, students, teachers, and schools.

I think those people being offended says more about them than me.

Recommended

Big Lies of Education

English Journal Series: We Teach English in Times of Perpetual Crisis

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

Washington Post: There is no literacy crisis in the U.S. Here’s what’s really happening

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Thomas, P.L. (2025, July 28). There is no literacy crisis in the U.S. Here’s what’s really happening. The Washington Post. https://wapo.st/474j758

The evidence/links in the articles:

Recommended

English Journal Series: We Teach English in Times of Perpetual Crisis

Big Lies of Education: Reading Proficiency and NAEP

Three Questions about the Mississippi Reading “Miracle”

ai, ChatGPT, Education, plagiarism, Writing

Did You Write This?: Or Why You Can’t Spell “Plagiarism” without “AI”

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“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.”

Education, education reform, NAEP, reading, reading proficiency, Science of Reading

Three Questions about the Mississippi Reading “Miracle” [Updated December 2025]

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Update [December 2025]

Here I want to note that Q1 and Q3 have been answered, and the answer is exactly what I have been suggesting.

First, let me recommend How much of “Mississippi’s education miracle” is an artifact of selection bias?, which examines the analysis answering two of the questions below: On education miracles in general (and those in Mississippi in particular), Howard Wainer, Irina Grabovsky and Daniel H. Robinson.

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.

And then, SOR advocates argue that 95% of students can be proficient readers, and the key to that success is SOR.

That raises an important question about Mississippi, which has implemented both SOR reading policy and grade retention for over a decade.

SOR advocates have called MS’s jump in grade 4 NAEP scores a “miracle”; however, MS has continued to retain about 9000-12,000 students annually in K-3.

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.

Recommended

Big Lies of Education: Grade Retention

Education, literacy, NCTE

1959: “yet students enter college badly lacking in these fundamental skills”

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It is 1959, and J. Donald Adams in the New York Times is lamenting the lack of basic skills among college students in the US:

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.

One must wonder how we survived …

H/T Ralph Pantozzi