I began my teaching career in 1984, coinciding with the current era of high-stakes accountability driving education reform in the wake of A Nation at Risk.
One of my favorite units as a teacher of American literature to tenth and eleventh graders in the rural South was the Transcendentalism era—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and (the often ignored) Margaret Fuller.
Students did not enjoy reading these authors, I must confess, but the unit itself was often very compelling.
In the late 1980s, I added a consideration of the “Reeboks let U.B.U” campaign featuring Emerson:
I tracked down the advertising agency responsible for the ad, and my students wrote a letter calling out the campaign for being contradictory.
Shockingly, we did receive a letter from the person over the campaign. They confessed that my students’ were on target with their criticism, but added that Reebok believed they were a unique shoes company and felt their campaign highlighted that fact.
As a part of that unit also I had a recording from MTV News covering a Madonna look-alike contest.
Among the dozens of prepubescent girls, one was interviewed and she excitedly stated that the girls were there to express their individuality.
While students were no more eager to read Emerson, teens soon found themselves compelled by Emerson’s “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”
Over the past 40-plus years, I think about this unit and my students often—as well as Emerson’s enduring arguments in “Self-Reliance.”
The world of education reform, I regret to acknowledge, is dominated by “little minds,” drawn to and selling the same false stories of educational crisis and miracles.
I would amend Emerson’s list a bit, adding to “statesmen” education journalists.
The current reading crisis, often identified as the “science of reading” (SOR) movement, is yet another example of selling the manufactured reading crisis and education reform miracles that are actually mirages.
Since the 1980s, no education reform has worked.
New standards after new standards have not worked.
New high-stakes tests after new high-stakes tests have not worked.
Accountability for students, teachers, and schools has not worked.
No a single fear-mongering prediction or promise has been fulfilled.
With each new hot reform, the missionary zeal doesn’t fades; it just switches teams.
I am drawn to a line from Blade Runner as I contemplate the fate of the current SOR movement: “The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long – and you have burned so very, very brightly, Roy” (Tyrell).
The uncritical support for the SOR story has been as fervent as any reform movement, so I must wonder if we are on the cusp of buyer’s remorse.
Are these canaries in the coalmine foreboding an end to yet another era of unfounded claims of a reading crisis?
A judge in Massachusetts rejected a frivolous lawsuit grounded in the story being sold that a reading crisis was caused by a few reading programs and the scapegoat of the moment, balanced literacy (and three cueing).
Unlike mainstream media, Snopes corrected Trump-appointed Secretary of Education’s claim about student reading proficiency based on the Big Lie about NAEP.
Possibly most surprising is this call from Perry Bacon Jr. to set aside the crisis rhetoric around education, including this acknowledgement about NAEP:
The overwhelming majority of American students are reaching “baseline proficiency” in math, reading and science, according to PISA. That’s almost certainly because of our public school systems, where about 87 percent of students in grades K-12 get their education. U.S. politicians for a while were pushing the aspirational idea that most students should score proficient or above on the NAEP tests. That is a very high and probably unrealistic standard. Most of America’s students are reaching the NAEP “basic” level, mirroring the PISA results.
The impending buyer’s remorse for buying the reading story being sold will come with tremendous costs.
As Bacon warns: “But the alarmist portrayals of our schools are wrong and undermine support for public education.”
The SOR movement has wasted huge amounts of public funding and time; students are also paying a high price because of the caustic nature of scripted reading programs and grade retention.
As I read mainstream journalists and political leaders parrot the same false reading story over and over, I cannot help thinking about the preteen girls dressed like Madonna and the Reebok add that even my high school students were able to shake their heads at in disappointment.
Responding to the symposium question “What Shall We Do about Reading Today?” Emmett A. Betts, professor of Education at Pennsylvania State College, opened the first article in a professional journal for elementary education with a broad claim:
In a democracy, the people get the kind of schools they want. One of the many functions of an educator is to point the way to ever better schools. If the people want many public and private institutions for the preparation of teachers regardless of the quality of the work or the teacher supply and demand, the people get them. If the people want better schools plants and instruction, they make their will known at the polls and they get what they want. In a democracy, the quantity and quality of educational opportunity is the product of what people want, and what they want is to no small degree conditioned by the educational leadership they have elected to follow. (p. 226)
This may read a bit idealistic or naive, but Betts, I think, offers an accurate characterization of the very complex public education system in the US—a system bound necessarily to the political system itself.
Betts then warns:
Very soon strong pressure will be felt by elementary school teachers to intensify instruction in certain areas, such as reading. This pressure will be brought to bear by non-educators who have found a deficiency but who may may offer no other solution than a “stronger prescription.” Years of fruitful research on learning many be cast aside in order to “do something about reading instruction….” To prevent this wastage, educators must be prepared to bring to bear a considerable accumulation of information that permits an adequate resolving of this problem. (p. 226)
Later in that issue, William S. Gray, University of Chicago, expands on Betts’s warning:
[R]ecent editorials…maintain that current deficiencies in reading are the product of “pseudo-scientific bungling and the innovation of so-called progressive methods of teaching. The solution advocated by one editor was the elimination of “impractical non-essentials,” which were not defined, and of “undisciplined dabbling with practical essentials. The implication of these vague criticisms is that recent innovations in teaching reading have been adopted without due consideration of essentials and of methods of achieving desired ends. Such assumptions are as unsound and merit no more consideration than a purely defensive attitude. (p. 235)
In forty-plus pages, eleven literacy scholars confront the same problems with a reading crisis that may sound familiar to people in 2025.
However, this is from 1942
And in a mere two decades, guess what the state of reading the US entailed?
“After half a century of [progressive reform and expanding public education],” wrote Jacques Barzun in Tomorrow’s Illiterates: The State of Reading Instruction Today (1961), “we who run businesses, carry on professions, work for the government, or engage in teaching itself are forced to admit that illiteracy is still with us” (xii-xiii).
Barzun adds, “the citizen who is interested (and who has managed to learn to read) [may have their] hair [stand] on end at hearing what folly has been condoned as educational theory during the past thirty years” (p. xiv).
Editor of this volume and author of chapters 1 and 7, Charles Child Walcutt argues: “One way to describe the reading problem is to say that it is a teacher problem and—even more—that it is a problem of the teaching of teachers” (p. 18).
And of course: “The assertion that the reading experts do not understand the theory of their system can be demonstrated if we point out the false assumptions, the faulty extrapolations from scientific research, and the absolute contradictions that appear in its central propositions and procedures” (pp. 19-20).
Over sixty years ago, a reading crisis was declared (twenty years after on just before it), teachers were blamed, and reading experts were accused of not understanding the science behind their own field.
Déjà vu all over again.
There is a recurring story—one that is profitable and easy to sell—that education in the US is a failure, notably reading and math education.
The problem with this story is that it has existed since the mid-1800s in some fashion; but as I share above, an intense era of education (reading and math) crisis is at least 80 years and running.
And then, the last 40 years has been characterized by perpetual education reform, several cycles of new standards, new tests, and constant high-stakes accountability.
At no point in the US has the public, the media, or political leaders declared education (reading or math) effective.
But since the 1980s, after the hyper-crisis panic of A Nation at Risk, the US has doubled and tripled down on in-school only reform—”pressure will be brought to bear by non-educators,” as Betts noted in 1942.
The story that isn’t compelling and is hard to sell is this: The history of education crisis and reform has been grounded in misdiagnosing educational problems, casting misguided blame, and mandating solutions that are destined to fail—and even cause harm.
However, here is a story told in research that the US will not accept:
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)
In other words, the ways we measure school and teacher effectiveness as well as student achievement are in fact mostly measuring out-of-school factors.
So, what is really wrong with education?
Ideology/politics and market forces.
The disconnect between public, political, and media beliefs about education and decades of research reinforced by Maroun and Tienken is entirely ideological/political.
Many people in the US are bound to rugged individualism and the meritocracy myth, both of which feed into another belief that education transforms society.
So we are now at the story the US hates, refuses to acknowledges, and thus, does not sell: Schools reflect our society, but do not (cannot) transform it (reread the opening quote from Betts above).
There is a core libertarian belief in the US rejecting the dominance of systemic forces that drives crisis rhetoric about education as well as the politics and policy mandating how we implement our schools.
US public education has never been a singular process. There has never been one program or learning/teaching theory driving schools.
However, the ideological attacks on schools, teachers, and students have always reduced claims of crisis to simplistic problems and blame (reading the entire journal issue from 1942 or the book from 1961 is eerie and frustrating).
But possibly as powerful and problematic as ideology/politics is the impact of market forces on educational practices.
To be blunt, the education market benefits from perpetual education crisis, not from successful education reform. (See also: The healthcare market benefits from perpetual illness, not curing diseases and healthy people.)
Education crisis and reform, then, have been almost entirely ideological/political and market driven.
Ironically, perpetual crisis/reform benefits both ideology/politics and the market.
Regretfully, perpetual crisis/reform does not benefit schools, teachers, or students.
This also is a story that doesn’t sell: The current “science of” movement (science of reading, science of math, science of learning) is nothing new; in fact, this is simply the science of ideology (again).
Because of the outsized impact of ideology/politics and the market on how we talk about, judge, and implement schooling in the US, we do not have a crisis, but an entrench set of failures we lack the political will to address: perpetual opportunity and achievement gaps between affluent, white students and minoritized/marginalized students (Black and brown students, impoverished students, multilingual learners, and special needs students).
Yet those gaps have been about the same for many decades and across all areas of learning (there is no gap in reading, for example) that isn’t also in math or science, or even civics).
But as Maroun and Tienken show, those measured gaps are more about social inequity than education—even though those measures also show in-school inequity as well that magnifies systemic inequities.
The ideology/politics driving how we view and implement our schools is corrupted by a fatalism about needed social reform.
It isn’t that we cannot build a better society; it isn’t that we cannot build better schools.
It is that we simply have chosen that neither matters more than our sacred—and misguided—beliefs and market.
The overwhelming majority of American students are reaching “baseline proficiency,” in math, reading and science, according to PISA. That’s almost certainly because of our public school systems, where about 87 percent of students in grades K-12 get their education. U.S. politicians for a while were pushing the aspirational idea that most students should score proficient or above on the NAEP tests. That is a very high and probably unrealistic standard. Most of America’s students are reaching the NAEP “basic” level, mirroring the PISA results.
While many fear the irrevocable decline of the US from Presidential executive orders, there appears to be some hope that courts may save us—and recently specifically save public education.
Although likely not as prominent on the national radar, more good news:
While parents, the media, and political leaders have uncritically supported false claims about reading for about a decade now, this ruling supports what scholars have noted about the “science of reading” (SOR) movement.
Now moving to the reading instruction, there’s a narrative that has been sold to the American public and policymakers. There’s a literacy crisis because teachers do not teach the science of reading because they were not taught the science of reading in colleges of education. I have tried to identify the evidence that was used to construct this claim, and I actually have not found this evidence yet.
A perceived crisis demands attention and creates an impetus for urgently needed solutions. The Course takes that tack, arguing that there is a national crisis in reading and then promoting phonics as the cause (there is not enough of it) and the solution (more of it is needed). As we argue here, there is no indisputable evidence of a national crisis in reading, and even if there were a crisis, there is no evidence that the amount of phonics in classrooms is necessarily the cause or the solution.
To be blunt, the mainstream argument that the US has a reading crisis caused by a few balanced-literacy based reading programs lacks scientific research—a disturbing fact considering that claim is the basis for the SOR movement.
This court decision also comes on the heals of Snopes confronting Secretary of Education McMahon’s claim on social media, “When 70% of 8th graders in the U.S. can’t read proficiently, it’s not the students who are failing—it’s the education system that’s failing them”:
National Assessment of Educational Progress scores are not representative of grade-level performance, per the Department of Education’s website. According to 2022 data, most state reading standards are closer to the NAEP Basic level, and 67% of eighth-graders in 2024 met that standard.
You can add to the fact-free claims of the SOR movement, then, that 2/3 of students are not “proficient” (used incorrectly to mean not on “grade level”) readers based on misrepresenting or misunderstanding NAEP data.
As a country, we have never been happy with the reading achievement of our students. But decades of education reform and the current reading crisis based in misinformation and hyperbole are not serving our students, teachers, or schools well.
All of this reinforces a garbled truism: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes” (a quote misattributed to Mark Twain, somewhat ironically).
Maybe the truth about reading is finally putting on its shoes and will finds its legs.
In the pages of English Journal, we look to publish well-crafted poems that connect our readers to topics central to English education: the impact of reading and writing on young people, words and language, classroom stories, and reflections on teaching and learning. Poetry reminds us, as educators, how to live in this world. Submit your work by emailing a Word doc attachment to paul.thomas@furman.edu. Use the subject line “Poetry Submission for Review.” The first page of the attached document should be a cover sheet that includes your name, address, and email, as well as a two-sentence biographical sketch. In your bio, include how long you have been a member of NCTE, if applicable, and a publishable contact email. Following the cover sheet, include one to five original poems in the same document. Finally, please fill out and attach this form granting English Journal permission to publish your poem: https://ncte.org/app/uploads/2018/10/NCTE-Consent-to-Publish-No-Assignment-EJ-poems-Collective-Work-4845-4342-1491-1.pdf
Though we welcome work of any length, shorter pieces (30 lines and under) often work best for the journal. Poems must be original and not previously published. Simultaneous submissions are welcome, though writers must immediately withdraw from consideration any poems that are to be published elsewhere by contacting the editors via email.
Poets whose work is published will receive two complimentary copies of the issue in which their work appears. Additional inquiries about poetry submissions may be directed to the editor at paul.thomas@furman.edu. We look forward to reading and celebrating your work.
Poets
Please submit poem(s) as a Word doc only.
Use this form to grant English Journal permission to publish your poem: Poet CTP
Likely the most influential standardized test in the US is the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), under the purview of the beleaguered US Department of Education.
Also without question, NAEP is one of the most misunderstood and misrepresented standardized tests since the mainstream media, political leaders, pundits, and the public routinely shout “Crisis!” with each release of NAEP data.
NAEP’s achievement levels are misleading at best, but at worst, those achievement levels were designed to create the appearance of perpetuate educational failure, and yes, crisis.
“Proficient” is almost always conflated with “grade level” resulting in false claims, for example, that 2/3 of fourth graders are reading below grade level. NAEP’s “basic” is approximately what most states identify as “proficient”—suggesting on grade level (see an extensive analysis here).
What most people misunderstand as well about NAEP is its purpose: NAEP was born in the fertile soil of high-stakes accountability education reform spurred by the Reagan administration’s propaganda A Nation at Risk. Reagan sought to reintroduce forced prayer in schools and wanted to close the Department of Education, labeled an “abomination.”
However, what Reagan spawned was over four decades of ever-changing standards and tests to hold schools, teachers, and students accountable. In short, NAEP was created as a test of random samples of students to hold states accountable for their educational standards and outcomes (historically, public education has been the responsibility of the states, and NCLB in 2001 was a departure toward more federal oversight).
Frankly, NAEP was designed as an accountability mechanism, not a way to provide feedback on individual student achievement. (Note that state-level accountability testing was designed to provide individual student assessment that should provide evidence for instruction.)
In 2025, on the heels of recent shouts of “Crisis!” (again) because almost everyone has misunderstood and misrepresented NAEP scores across math, reading, and even civics, Reagan’s dream may be coming true since the Trump administration has promised to end the USDOE, and that move imperils the future of NAEP.
As Peter Greene has confronted, some have taken this uncertainty about NAEP to propose turning NAEP into (you should pause here to prepare yourself for the inanity) the failed Common Core experiment that sought to replace the state-based public education accountability process with national standards and testing.
Into the nonsense that is NAEP historically and the current doubling-down on Common Core Redux, I want to make a modest proposal about the future of NAEP.
Actually I want to make two modest proposals, acknowledging that the first is never going to happen (although it is the one more strongly supported by empirical data; you know, the “science” that so many education reformers claim to worship).
I strongly reject standardized testing as well as traditional classroom testing and grades. That has been at the core of my 40-plus-year career, and again, this is informed not just by my experiences as an educator but by a very robust body of research.
Therefore, my first modest (and completely unrealistic in the US) proposal is the conclusions reached by Maron and Tienken:
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.
The United States has one of the highest levels of childhood poverty among Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. It is well known that the social safety net in the United States is not as strong as some nations in Europe and other parts of the world [20]. Neoliberal policies have greatly reduced government support for families in the United States. Important social policy frameworks that reduce poverty, such as monetary, labor, fiscal, and health policies, have been weakened over the last 40 years, causing increases in childhood poverty in the United States compared to other democratic countries [41].
Although some education policy makers in the United States claim that standardized test results are an important component of a comprehensive system of educational quality control, the results from decades of research on the topic suggest otherwise [42]. 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.
Alas, the US will never follow this last point because we refuse to acknowledge systemic forces and remain a people fatally committed to rugged individualism and bootstrap mythologies.
And thus, here is my compromise, a modest proposal that can and should be explored for the future of NAEP:
Rename achievement levels in standardized testing that share a national standard metric for the levels (all states and NAEP would share the same achievement levels and metric).
Achievement levels must be age-level and not grade-level(currently, using “grade level” allows states to game scores through grade retention, for example). A clear system of “below age level,” “age level,” and “above age level” would simplify reporting and allow for more accurate political, media, and public responses to data.
This proposal would be a first step, I hope. The problem at first is that this doesn’t address the excessive testing culture the US has embraced without positive outcomes for over forty years.
This first step, I think, can create a new basis for evaluating and viewing our public schools, and then, we may be primed to begin dismantling the standardized testing machine—or at least become more acclimated to reducing it dramatically.
The great irony of the power of high-stakes testing in the education accountability era is that it has proven only one thing: Weighing a pig does not make it fatter.
Testing, testing, and testing has not improved schools, teachers, or students, but it has created a perpetuate state of educational crisis.
Perpetual educational crisis serves only political agendas and the unquenchable education marketplace.
If we can entertain for a moment of idealism that the Trump disaster doesn’t destroy both the USDOE and public education, let’s consider how to more forward in ways that better serve the promise of public education and our fragile democracy.
If not an end to NAEP, at least a better NAEP that serves the interest of students and not political or market agendas?
The story is simple and may sound obvious: Poor children suffer from a significant “word gap” (WG) when compared to middle-class and affluent children.
To re-cap, the WG Story runs as follows: Parents from lower-class backgrounds do not talk enough to their children in the early years of life, in contrast to affluent European American parents who talk a great deal. This relative deficit impedes children’s vocabulary development, which, in turn, leads them to under achieve in school. It is a small step from this narrative to a rationale for intervention: If these parents could be taught to behave more like their privileged counterparts, marginalized children would develop larger vocabularies, which would boost their success in school.
As is typical in the Big Lies of Education, compelling and enduring stories do not necessarily prove to be accurate. And the resilience of Big Lies often rests on a complex matrix of causes, detailed by Miller, Sperry, and Sperry:
In sum, nearly 20 years after its inception, the WG Story had gone from academic obscurity to celebrity status. Biases of class, race, and method paved the way for this juggernaut, which gathered force with the convergence of two events, NCLB and LENA, in its Life History. The WG Story flourished by traveling back and forth between academic, policy, and public spheres, illustrating the permeability of discourses (Bakhtin,1981), and inadvertently reproducing the educational inequality it was intended to reduce.
The WG Story and its impact are driven by deficit ideologies (what most people believe regardless of empirical evidence) despite flawed methodology in the foundational research, which, according to Miller, Sperry and Sperry, “did not arise from virgin ground but rather from soil already cultivated with the language deprivation story” that began in the 1960s.
They also acknowledge the role of the media and advocacy:
But the WG Story did not remain sealed off in the academy (Bakhtin, 1981, 1986). It was widely covered in the popular press, and high-profile foundations amplified the Story by funding initiatives to close the Gap.
Again, uncritically embracing the WG Story reflects core deficit beliefs: “The most fundamental historical through-line between the WG Story and its backstory is the fixation on the language defects of marginalized families.”
There is an enduring and false set of beliefs that link deficit ideologies about social class and language: So-called nonstandard or underdeveloped literacy reflects moral and intelligence deficits in not just individual people but entire classifications of people.
In short, any person’s functional vocabulary is not a measure of that person’s character or intelligence, particularly when framed against a norm or standard based on cultural and ideological beliefs instead of valid empirical evidence.
Dyson, A. H. (2015). Research and Policy: The Search for Inclusion: Deficit Discourse and the Erasure of Childhoods. Language Arts, 92(3), 199-207. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24575568
Currently, US education is under one of the most intense eras of criticism—although there has never been a moment over the past century and a half absent cries of education “crisis.”
Notably during the accountability era begun in the early 1980s, permanent (and manufactured) education crisis has been further eroded by the education marketplace and fads promising to end that crisis.
One enduring tension in the field of education as well is between calls for high-quality and narrowly “scientific” evidence for educational practices [1] and the pervasive embracing of education fads that promise more than research supports.
Two of the current examples of this “gap” [2] between research and practice are growth mindset and grit theories and interventions.
I am now revising a chapter on the current research on growth mindset and grit, and offer here an overview of what educators should know before embracing or continuing to embrace advocacy for both theories and interventions that promise to address student achievement.
In short, the research does not support claims by advocates for growth mindset and grit. Here is a list of what we currently do know about both:
Advocates for growth mindset and grit significantly overstate the casual relationship between these theories/interventions and student achievement.
Research published and cited by advocates is often plagued by flawed research design and/or population concerns, expectancy bias, and reporting errors (including financial conflicts) (Macnamara & Burgoyne, 2023).
Advocates tend to acknowledge that implementation of both growth mindset and grit is often suffers from oversimplification, misunderstanding, and reducing the theories and interventions to slogans and isolated lessons.
Meta-analyses and high-quality independent studies tend to have mixed results with weak effectiveness measures that may not be significant. Increasingly, research on both is negative, in fact (see chart below).
Despite the lack of evidence to support either growth mindset or grit, both continue to be implemented in many schools; some scholars raise concerns that this support is driven by ideology (deficit ideology, bootstrapping/ rugged individualism/ meritocracy) and racism/classism.
Scholars also warn that overemphasizing growth mindset and grit allows educators and policy to ignore the more significant impact of out-of-school factors [3], and as a result, often messaging and interventions manifest as “blaming the victims.”
Below, I include a chart of recent public commentary and a research overview of growth mindset and grit. I also provide the references after the chart with a few key quotes in some of the more powerful studies.
Positive Dweck, et al. Dweck & Yeager, 2019 Hecht et al., 2021
Mixed Haimovitz & Dweck, 2017 Miller, 2019 Sisk et al., 2018 Tipton et al., 2023 Yeager et al., 2022 Yeager & Dweck, 2020
Negative Brez et al., 2020 (Burnette et al., 2018; Dixson et al., 2017; Sisk et al., 2018; Schmidt et al., 2017) Burgoyne et al., 2020 Ganimian, 2020 Li & Bates, 2019 Macnamara & Burgoyne, 2023
Cushing, I. (2021), Language, discipline and ‘teaching like a champion.’ British Educational Research Journal, 47(1), 23-41. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3696
Dudley-Marling, C. (2007). Return of the deficit. Journal of Educational Controversy, 2(1), 1–13.
Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of freedom: ethics, democracy, and civic courage. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Thomas, P.L. (2023). The “Science of Reading,” education faddism, and the failure to honor the intellectual lives of all children: On deficit lenses and ignoring class and race stereotyping. Voices in the Middle, 30(3), 17-21. https://publicationsncte.org/content/journals/10.58680/vm202332439
Brez, C., Hampton, E. M., Behrendt, L., Brown, L., & Powers, J. (2020). Failure to replicate: Testing a growth mindset intervention for college student success. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 42(6), 460–468. https://doi.org/10.1080/01973533.2020.1806845
“The pattern of findings is clear that the intervention had little impact on students’ academic success even among sub-samples of students who are traditionally assumed to benefit from this type of intervention (e.g., minority, low income, and first-generation students)” (p. 464)
Burgoyne, A. P., Hambrick, D.Z., & Macnamara, B.N. (2020). How firm are the foundations of mind-set theory? The claims appear stronger than the evidence. Psychological Science, 31(3).https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797619897588.
Burnette, J. L., Russell, M. V., Hoyt, C. L., Orvidas, K., & Widman, L. (2018). An online growth mindset intervention in a sample of rural adolescent girls. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 88(3), 428–445. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjep.12192
Dixson, D. D., Roberson, C. C. B., & Worrell, F. C. (2017). Psychosocial keys to African American achievement? Examining the relationship between achievement and psychosocial variables in high achieving African Americans. Journal of Advanced Academics, 28(2), 120–140. https://doi.org/10.1177/1932202X17701734
Ganimian, A. J. (2020). Growth-mindset interventions at scale: Experimental evidence from Argentina. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 42(3), 417–438. https://doi.org/10.3102/0162373720938041
Haimovitz K., & Dweck, C.S. (2017). The origins of children’s growth and fixed mindsets: New research and a new proposal. Child Development, 88(6), 1849–1859. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12955
Hecht, C. A., Yeager, D. S., Dweck, C. S., & Murphy, M. C. (2021). Beliefs, affordances, and adolescent development: Lessons from a decade of growth mindset interventions. In J. J. Lockman (Ed.), Advances in child development and behavior (Vol. 61, pp. 169–197). JAI. https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.acdb.2021.04.004
Li, Y., & Bates, T. C. (2019). You can’t change your basic ability, but you work at things, and that’s how we get hard things done: Testing the role of growth mindset on response to setbacks, educational attainment, and cognitive ability. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 148(9), 1640–1655. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000669
Macnamara, B. N., & Burgoyne, A. P. (2023). Do growth mindset interventions impact students’ academic achievement? A systematic review and meta-analysis with recommendations for best practices. Psychological Bulletin, 149(3–4), 133–173. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000352
“Taken together, our findings indicate that studies adhering to best practices are unlikely to demonstrate that growth mindset interventions bene t students’ academic achievement. Instead, significant meta-analytic results only occurred when quality control was lacking, and these results were no longer significant after adjusting for publication bias. This pattern suggests that apparent effects of growth mindset interventions on academic achievement are likely spurious and due to inadequate study design, awed reporting, and bias” (p. 163)
Petrik, R. L., Vega, J., & Vindas-Meléndez, A. R. (2022). A reflection on growth mindset and meritocracy. Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, 12(1), 408–421. DOI: 10.5642/jhummath.202201.3
Schmidt, J.A., Shumow, L., & Kackar-Cam, H.Z. (2017). Does mindset intervention predict students’ daily experience in classrooms? A comparison of seventh and ninth graders’ trajectories. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 46(3), 582–602. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-016-0489-z
Sisk, V. F., Burgoyne, A. P., Sun, J., Butler, J. L., & Macnamara, B. N. (2018). To what extent and under which circumstances are growth mind-sets important to academic achievement? Two meta-analyses. Psychological Science, 29(4), 549-571. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797617739704
Tipton, E., Bryan C., Murray J., McDaniel M., Schneider B., & Yeager D.S. (2023, March/April). Why meta-analyses of growth mindset and other interventions should follow best practices for examining heterogeneity: Commentary on Macnamara and Burgoyne (2023) and Burnette et al. (2023). Psychological Bulletin, 149(3-4), 229-241. doi: 10.1037/bul0000384
Yeager, D. S., Carroll, J. M., Buontempo, J., Cimpian, A., Woody, S., Crosnoe, R., Muller, C., Murray, J., Mhatre, P., Kersting, N., Hulleman, C., Kudym, M., Murphy, M., Duckworth, A. L., Walton, G. M., & Dweck, C. S. (2022). Teacher mindsets help explain where a growth-mindset intervention does and doesn’t work. Psychological Science, 33(1), 18-32. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976211028984
Yeager D. S., & Dweck C. S. (2020). What can be learned from growth mindset controversies? American Psychologist, 75(9), 1269–1284. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000794
Allen, R.E., Kannangara, C., & Carson, J. (2021). True grit: How important is the concept of grit for education? A narrative literature review. International Journal of Educational Psychology, 10(1), 73-87. https://doi.org/10.17583/ijep.2021.4578
Barcza-Renner, K., Shipherd, A. M., & Basevitch, I. (2024). An examination of the relationship between burnout and grit in college athletes. Asian Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, 4(3), 138–143. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajsep.2024.10.007
“This study was one of the first to examine the relationship between burnout and grit in student-athletes. The results indicated that student-athletes who were high in grit, also self-reported symptoms of burnout and that this relationship was strongest during the first two years of college. It is plausible athletes who are grittier are also more likely to persevere through stress and challenges, including burnout symptoms. Athletes higher in grit may also be investing more effort into their sport, which could be increasing symptoms of burnout, as well.” (p. 142)
Credé, M. (2018). What shall we do about grit? A critical review of what we know and what we don’t know. Educational Researcher, 47(9), 606-611. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X18801322
“For all its intuitive appeal, the grit literature is currently characterized by a number of serious theoretical and empirical challenges ranging from a lack of construct validity, discriminant validity, and predictive validity. At present there is no empirical support for the idea that grit is the combination of perseverance and passion or for the claim that grit adds to our understanding of success and performance. Indeed, the best available evidence strongly suggests that grit is largely a repackaging of conscientiousness—a widely studied personality trait” (p. 610)
Credé, M., Tynan, M.C., & Harms, P.D. (2017). Much ado about grit: A meta-analytic synthesis of the grit literature. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113(3), 492–511. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000102
Cushing, I. (2021), Language, discipline and ‘teaching like a champion.’ British Educational Research Journal, 47(1), 23-41. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3696
Goodman, S. (2018). It’s not about grit: Trauma, inequity, and the power of transformative teaching. Teachers College Press.
Gorski, P.C. (2016). Poverty and the ideological imperative: A call to unhook from deficit and grit ideology and to strive for structural ideology in teacher education. Journal of Education for Teaching, 42(4), 378-386. DOI: 10.1080/02607476.2016.1215546
Kohn, A. (2014). Grit? A skeptical look at the latest educational fad. Educational Leadership, 74, 104–108.
“Make no mistake: Duckworth is selling grit, not dispassionately investigating its effects” (para. 6).
Stahl, G. (2024). “Pedagogies of the poor” to “pedagogies on the poor”: Compliance, grit, and the corporeal. In P.P. Trifonas & S. Jagger (eds) Handbook of curriculum theory, research, and practice. Springer International Handbooks of Education. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_39
Tewell, E. (2020). The problem with grit: dismantling deficit thinking in library instruction. Libraries and the Academy20(1), 137-159. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/pla.2020.0007.
“The ideal of meritocracy, much like grit and growth mind-set, assumes that the best and brightest rise to the top based on their hard work and determination, without regard for the historical and present-day subordination of many groups….Deficit models view students as perpetual lacking and at fault. This belief is neither healthy nor accurate. Instead, we need to remain open to broader ways of engaging students and of thinking about their lives, consider what power they really have to effect change, and where we share some responsibility. It is essential to examine how issues of access and equity shape our students’ experiences and to question how success is defined and attained” (p. 150)
[3] Maroun, J., & Tienken, C.H. (2024). The pernicious predictability of state-mandated tests of academic achievement in the United States. Education Sciences, 14(2), 129-142. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci14020129
On April 28, 1967, Muhammad Ali publicly defied being drafted into the Vietnam War, costing him his heavy-weight title and derailing his career for three years during his prime.
Ali’s willingness to put publicly his name and his words on his beliefs reminds me of James Baldwin’s response to William Faulkner’s call for patience when confronting racism and inequity in the US: “There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment, the time is always now.”
I am also compelled by a central motif in the life and work of historian and activist Howard Zinn, who argued that we cannot be neutral on a moving train. In this era of the second Trump administration, our democracy and academic freedom train is heading off a cliff; we are all on board.
At the end of the first Trump administration, I implored academics to do more, to speak more, to use our academic and intellectual capital to advocate for the marginalized and the vulnerable as well as the core principle of what academics and education must preserve—academic freedom.
Yet, most academics and colleges/universities remained committed to the “politics of silence” approach to the threats around us.
We have chosen a sort of self-preserving silence, in fact, despite the danger that poses, one confronted by poet Adrienne Rich:
The study of silence has long engrossed me. The matrix of a poet’s work consists not only of what is there to be absorbed and worked on, but also of what is missing, desaparecido, rendered unspeakable, thus unthinkable.
The current political dismantling of K-12 and higher education is an assault on democracy; real people are suffering in inexcusable ways. The values we claim to hold sacred are being destroyed each moment we hesitate, each moment we remain silent, each moment we fail to act.
We academics may believe that the Ivory Tower allows us to protect our community as our only priority, and thus that we must protect that Ivory Tower. But I have witnessed at the highest level of my 41-year career very real and justified fear among college students, staff, and faculty.
A first-year student writing about their journey as a gay child navigating their family expectations concluded an essay with the following chilling recognition: “No one knows what the future holds for the United States now. Unfortunately, what we face is not simply a political matter, but rather, a threat on individual liberty, and I am scared for what will happen in the next four years.”
And for faculty—especially those most vulnerable due to personal status or rank—who have served the academic community as scholars and teachers, the same fear of the uncertain and hostile world beyond the Ivory Tower is directly impacting how and if we teach as we know we should. Many of us have targets on our backs simply for remaining committed to the academic freedom we hold sacred and fulfilling our moral obligation to address diversity, equity, and inclusion.
That Ivory Tower was never protecting anyone; it isn’t protecting us now in that increasingly hostile world.
Therefore, now is not the time to keep our heads down, now is not the time to retreat into the politics of silence.
As a former high school English teacher, I hear constantly in my mind Willy Lohman imploring “the woods are burning,” and I fear if we persist in a “politics of silence” approach, if we bow to cultural expectations that education and educators must appear to be politically neutral, that fire will consume us all.
We could be better than that, we should be better than that.
The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children.
…This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.
Ultimately, we must make a decision, one reflected in William Butler Yeats’s enduring poem:
The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
The time is now to reject the politics of silence that brought us here, to speak and act in the name of academic freedom, in the name of our students walking our campuses now but who must enter the very real world burning around them.
Yesterday, we had our last class session in my upper-level writing and research course that is grounded in students analyzing and evaluating how media covers a chosen education topic.
In that last class, we debriefed about what students concluded about media coverage of education. While some found the coverage valid and informative, much of the discussion focused on why media perpetuates misinformation more often than not—notably about student reading proficiency in the US.
Right on cue, then, I saw this posted on social media, Teaching reading is rocket science, with these two recurring claims that are, in fact, misleading at best and false at worst (see “Recommended” links below):
Eli’s story, and the stories of all my students, are not the exception. They represent the shared reality for two-thirds of our children, here in California and across the country since the 1990s. My students are not at risk because they cannot yet read — they are at risk because not knowing how to read limits their access to opportunities, both academically and beyond.
Research shows when we teach students to read by directly guiding them to break the code of how sounds in letters work, about 95% of them can become strong readers — including multilingual learners and those with dyslexia. So why have only one-third of our fourth graders been reading at grade level for the past three decades? This gap persists because students haven’t had access to evidence-based literacy instruction drawn from decades of vast interdisciplinary research in areas such as cognitive psychology, linguistics, communication sciences and education.
The “2/3 of students are not reading a grade level” claim is one of the most powerful recurring claims in the media. Note these high-profile examples:
The stakes were high. Research shows that children who don’t learn to read by the end of third grade are likely to remain poor readers for the rest of their lives, and they’re likely to fall behind in other academic areas, too. People who struggle with reading are more likely to drop out of high school, to end up in the criminal justice system, and to live in poverty. But as a nation, we’ve come to accept a high percentage of kids not reading well. More than 60 percent of American fourth-graders are not proficient readers, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and it’s been that way since testing began in the 1990s.
One of the most bearish statistics for the future of the United States is this: Two-thirds of fourth graders in the United States are not proficient in reading.
Despite ample evidence to the contrary and repeated clarifications from many educators and scholars (See “Big Lie” link in “Recommended” below), media characterizations of student reading proficiency continues to be misrepresented, primarily by misunderstanding NAEP achievement levels, because the public has always believed that “kids today can’t read”—despite there being little evidence of a reading “crisis” over the recurring claims of “crisis” reaching back into at least the 1940s.
Two points are important to clarify:
NAEP achievement levels are confusing because “basic” is approximately what most states consider “proficient” and by implication “grade level.” NAEP “proficient” is well above grade level, set at an “aspirational” [1] level that is misleading and creates a perpetual appearance of failure for students, teachers, and schools.
Most states—notably Mississippi and Louisiana—set their “proficient” level just above the mid-point of NAEP “basic” (MS) or just below (LA):
In short, if we consider NAEP and state assessments of reading valid, about 1/3 of students have over the last couple of decades performed below “basic” (NAEP) and thus seem to be below grade level in grade 4.
While the NAEP misinformation and misunderstanding is grounded in the “aspirational” use of “proficient,” the “95% of students can be on grade level” claim is just wildly overstated, and ironically, not based on scientific evidence (despite this being a refrain by the “science of” movement).
Historically and currently, many in the US have been and are concerned about student reading acquisition; this, of course, is a valid concern, notably that marginalized and vulnerable populations of students are disproportionately struggling to meet whatever standard we set for “proficient” or “grade level” (see HERE that explores how MS has not closed the race or socioeconomic achievement gaps, for example).
There is an insidious zombie politics to claims about 2/3 of students not reading at grade level, but that if we just did the right thing, 95% of students would read at grade level.
Since neither claim is empirically true, we must confront that basing education claims and reform on misunderstanding and misinformation have not yet worked and are unlikely to work moving forward.
Note
[1] Rosenberg, B. (2004, May). What’s proficient? The No Child Left Behind Act and the many meanings of proficiency. Washington, DC: American Federation of Teachers. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED497886.pdf
With Easter just behind us, mainstream Christians in the US have experienced a high period of religious holidays and celebrations starting around Thanksgiving and then intensely punctuated with Christmas and Easter.
As an atheist/agnostic who seeks to live a good life as a humanist, I witness during these celebrations that much of what passes as religious is mostly pagan rituals and free market capitalism.
The irony, of course, is that these contradiction do, in fact, represent well what mainstream Christianity is in practice and reality for most people in the US.
To further that irony, the claim by the most fervent Christians in the country that the US is a Christian nation is perfectly reflected in the Bacchanalian orgy of branding and spending in the name of Jesus born, crucified, and risen as the stories go.
I was born, raised, and have always lived in the Bible Belt, specifically in the Upstate of South Carolina where many people are Southern Baptist or some other type of fundamentalist Christian.
Something in my DNA, I think, made me not just immune but resistant to authoritarian environments—in my home and family, in schooling, and most significantly in church and religion.
I don’t care much for commandments and blind faith.
My relationship with religion evolved into the sort of embarrassing sardonic nonchalance of adolescence that spilled over into being downright mean during my first two years of college.
In high school, it was a joke. I was elected president of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes as a ploy by some of my friends to have me on student council (they knew I would speak up because I was already viewed as anti-authority).
I think I was the lone person in my peer group openly admitting non-belief, and I had also exposed myself among those friends as a heavy beer drinker—something I had honed growing up on a golf course and playing golf.
That experience working at the golf course is one the most formative moments of my life. The golfers, you see, were adults I knew from my hometown, all very Christian men and most holding jobs that were well regarded with a few much wealthier than I could imagine anyone being (my own family was solidly working class, aspiring to middle class).
The golf course, however, served as an alternate universe of sorts, a perverse sanctuary where these Christian men used profanity, drank heavily, smoked marijuana, and hurled racist and sexist language at a nearly compulsive rate.
And several of these men as well used the golf course for their adultery sanctuary; a few had me monitoring their phone calls as I was tasked to distinguish between calls from their wives and their girlfriends.
The message was clear: Being a Christian was almost entirely rhetorical so that everyone could pretend to embrace the norms of what people were supposed to believe and do (even as almost no one practiced what anyone preached).
I also had to sit quietly and patiently occasionally while good Christians witnessed to me, quoting from the Bible in order to justify their racism and sexism.
Black people descended from Cain mating with apes, I was assured, for example. Something they had learned in church.
By college, I was a nasty atheist to my peers, attending a Methodist college where many were naive, even sweet, true believers.
In those first two years of college, I immersed myself in Sartre, Camus , and Kierkegaard, but that intellectualism lacked the very things I found infuriating in the Christians I was determined to discredit—kindness, human dignity, and love.
Fortunately for me, I found literature and gradually settled into a relatively harmless state of agnosticism anchored to Kurt Vonnegut’s missives on humanism:
So I sit here post-Easter 2025 when the US has fully realized the very worst warnings I have anticipated about being a Christian nation since I was a teen in the 1970s.
Almost 70% of registered voters did not vote for a second Trump term as president, but his base is mostly driven by Christians, specifically fundamentalist Christians.
And his hellscape of policy since January has been punctuated with Christian intent.
This Christianity reminds me of a larger-scale version of the golf course experiences I had—lots of hypocrisy, almost entirely rhetorical without a single ounce of Christian love or respect for human decency.
This Christianity is authoritarian and fueled by hate, fear, and judgment bereft of any logic, morals, or ethics.
US Christianity has proven that distinguishing between a cult and a religion is a distinction without a difference.
There has been an insidious long game reaching back to the Reagan era, the rise of the so-called Moral Majority, that has gradually eroded both Christianity and democracy in the US (watch Shiny Happy People to understand this).
Regardless of the historical accuracy of the stories about Jesus—and the validity of the mystical aspects of miracles and such—there simply is nothing in the cult of Trump that is remotely Jesus-like, just as his behavior as president lacks any hint of democracy.
But there is ample evidence that any optimism anyone has had for the human race is at least naive if not delusional.
I am confident that stories about crucifixion and resurrection are not literally true; I am also confident that Jesus’s simple messages of love each other, lay down your worldly possessions, and do unto others are the very least each human can do to live the good life for ourselves and for others.
Commandments otherwise are mere authoritarianism, ways for a few to control the many.
But a rabid minority in the US has rejected that Jesus nonsense and fully embraced hatred, fear, judgment, and punishment in the embodiment of one the most vile people existing in the US today.
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 