Category Archives: Education

Education, Student Evaluations of Teaching, Teacher Evaluation, Teaching

Student Evaluations of Teaching: Research and Commentary [Updated]

One of the prevalent contradictions in higher education is the high-stakes use of student evaluations of teaching (SET) despite the overwhelming evidence that SETs are flawed measures of teacher/teaching quality and are often harmful for faculty already marginalized in society and academia.

Here is a collection of research and commentary highlighting those flaws and calling for ending this traditional practice:

Education, education reform, literacy, reading

The More Things Change …

As I have previously recommended Jeff McQuillan’s work on reading from the 1990s, I want to highlight briefly another example of the more things change, the more they stay the same.

In 2007, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute released Whole-Language High Jinks: How to Tell When “Scientifically-Based Reading Instruction” Isn’t by Louisa Moats. This report includes on the cover a despondent looking Black girl with her head down near a book, reminding me of the manipulative imaging used in the documentary Corridor of Shame.

Fordham cover

Moates is touted as a “renowned reading expert” and “author of the American Federation of Teachers’ Teaching Reading Is Rocket Science and an earlier Thomas B. Fordham Foundation report, Whole Language Lives On: The Illusion of “Balanced” Reading Instruction.”

The Executive Summary makes a case that may sound familiar to anyone paying attention to media coverage of the “science of reading” since 2018:

While the field of reading has made enormous strides in recent years—especially with the publication of the National Reading Panel’s landmark report and enactment of the federal Reading First program—discredited and ineffectual practices continue in many schools. Although the term “whole language” is rarely used today, programs based on its premises, such as Reading Recovery, Four Blocks, Guided Reading, and especially “balanced literacy,” are as popular as ever. These approaches may pay lip service to reading science, but they fail to incorporate the content and instructional methods proven to work best with students learning to read.

And guess where the failures lie?

Moats exposes popular but scientifically untenable practices in reading instruction, including

  • use of memorization, picture cues, and contextual guessing for teaching word recognition, justified by the faulty “three cueing systems” theoretical model, instead of direct, systematic teaching of decoding and comprehension skills;
  • substitution of “teacher modeling” and reading aloud for explicit, organized instruction;
  • rejection of systematic and explicit phonics, spelling, or grammar instruction;
  • confusion of phonemic awareness with phonics;
  • reliance on “leveled” books and trade books to organize instruction; and
  • use of whole-language approaches for English language learners.

However, a review of this report exposed several key problems that, again, may sound familiar:

In Whole language high jinks: How to tell when ‘scientifically-based reading instruction’ isn’t, Louisa Moats contends that she provides “the necessary tools to distinguish those [programs] that truly are scientifically based… from those that merely pay lip service to science” (p. 10). This review finds that Moats exaggerates the findings of the National Reading Panel (NRP), especially the effects of systematic phonics on reading achievement. She also ignores research completed since the NRP report was issued seven years ago. Perhaps most disturbingly, she touts primarily commercial curriculum products distributed by her employer — products that have far fewer published studies of effectiveness than the products and methods she disparages.

These flaws pervade the report’s subsequent discussion of what “scientifically based reading instruction” should look like. In the end, the Fordham report works more effectively as promotional material for products and services offered by Moats’ employer, SoprisWest, than as a reliable guide to effective reading instruction.

The report and review spurred a few exchanges among Moats, Allington (also here), and NEPC that also capture well the reading debate that will not die.

And here is a fun fact: During the time since NCLB and the NRP that Moats criticizes schools for failing to implement “scientific” reading instruction, Mississippi had an 8-point jump in 4th-grade NAEP reading scores from 2002 to 2009:

MS grade 4 reading 1992 2019.png

Was unscientific whole language/balanced literacy the cause of that jump [1], or is it possible that making any sort of direct causal claim about classroom instructional practices and NAEP score trends is misleading (especially without research to investigate the many causes of test scores)?

Alas! The more things change, the more they stay the same.

[1] According to advocates of the “science of reading,” Mississippi did not adopt the “science of reading” until 2013.

Education, education reform, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Nina Simone

James Baldwin (1979): “you can’t change a school without changing the neighborhood”

Every time I make the case that in order to offer every child the very highest quality education all children deserve, we must address the socioeconomic inequity of homes and communities as well as the schools that serve them, I am chastised by some that teachers and schools cannot control any of those out-of-school conditions.

Yet there remains a historical and current fact that social inequity is almost always reflected in educational inequity; schools, then, mostly perpetuate inequity, but they almost never fulfill their promise as the great equalizer.

In California recently, we see this in action: California students sued because they were such poor readers. They just won $53 million to help them.

Students and teachers have won a lawsuit that exposes political negligence, a failure to fully fund the most burdened schools serving students most burdened by inequity, as Kohli and Lee report:

A Los Angeles Times analysis of the 75 lowest-performing schools on the state’s English language arts test, based on California’s Common Core standards, illustrates the depth of the reading problem. Seven out of 10 third-graders in these schools did not meet the standards, according to state data from 2018 and 2019. The schools have about double the English learners of other elementary schools, and more than 90% of students at those schools qualify for free or reduced-price lunch — a poverty indicator.

While this is now, we must not ignore that social and educational inequity is a historical reality of the U.S.

James Baldwin, speaking in 1979, argued: “the billion-dollar industry [education] is more important than the life of the child,” and “you can’t change a school without changing the neighborhood.”

It is here, “changing the neighborhood,” that the U.S. as a political body balks. We will label and attempt to change children; we will constantly reform our standards, our tests, and our schools; but we dare not “build a new social order.”

Baldwin criticizes a public school system that cheats Black students, calling for Black people to take their children out, to keep their children off the busses. Baldwin notes that any people (white people) who cannot educate their own cannot educate “other people’s children.”

On today’s date, February 21, Nina Simone was born, and Malcolm X was assassinated. Voices and lives such as Simone and Malcolm X as well as Baldwin, I imagine, are mostly ignored in classrooms across the U.S.—even during Black History Month.

Why? As Baldwin recognized, Black people, especially well educated and literate Black people “are a threat to the machinery.” Baldwin noted about himself: “I’m a disturber of the peace,” a label perfect for Simone and Malcolm X as well.

It takes very little imagination to understand why the U.S. has always cheated and continues to cheat some students, those students already being cheated in their lives by class inequity, racism, xenophobia, and other inequities.

Education and especially literacy can foster power; therefore, equitable access to education and literacy is equitable access to power.

The law suit in California is about equity and access; it is about power.

In a country based on value, we put out money where it matters most. Underfunded and under-resourced schools point at damning finger at what, as Baldwin recognized, the U.S. continues to disregard.

Education, education reform, reading, Teaching

The Real Reading Debate and How We Fail to Teach Reading

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Sometimes cliches hit the nail on the head: It’s deja vu all over again.

Sometimes hackneyed metaphors paint the best picture: When you find yourself in a hole, keep digging.

And that brings us to the “science of reading” version of the Reading War.

Here, I want to address the often misunderstood real reading debate as well as outline how there has been a historical failure in teaching reading that continues today.

First, let’s clarify some facts about reading.

For over a century, measurable reading achievement (test scores) has been mostly correlated with socio-economic factors (the students home, community, and school) and not significantly correlated with how students are being taught to read.

In that same time period, there has never been a moment when the U.S. hasn’t declared “reading crisis.” And as a result of this myopic view of reading achievement, the U.S. has a recurring Reading War; some notable moments include the 1940s, the 1950s-1960s, and the 1990s (see especially McQuillan).

Throughout the history of reading instruction, phonics instruction has always been a key component of how students are taught to read in school. The Urban Legend that in some eras (such as the 1990s) and that some philosophies/theories of literacy (whole language, balanced literacy) have rejected completely phonics instruction has been compelling to the media and the public, but it is factually false.

The Real Reading Debate

Phonics instruction, however, is at the core of the real and enduring reading debate. That debate includes three approaches to phonics instruction detailed by Krashen: “(1) intensive, or heavy phonics, (2) basic, or light phonics, and (3) zero phonics.”

Here is where mainstream media, the public, and politicians fumble the debate; the popular framing is that the Reading War is about phonics versus zero phonics.

The real debate is between intensive phonics (systematic intensive phonics for all students or phonics first for all students to be able to read) and basic phonics (phonics as one component of teaching reading among many). But as Krashen clarifies: “Zero Phonics. This view claims that direct teaching is not necessary or even helpful. I am unaware of any professional who holds this position.”

From late 2018 until today, the “science of reading” movement has promoted intensive phonics and misrepresented the current field of teaching reading as being in the nonexistent zero phonics camp (this is how whole language and balanced literacy are typically mischaracterized, especially in media coverage).

This intensive phonics/phonics first advocacy also misrepresents that position as settled science, which it isn’t.

The basic phonics position (whole language, balanced literacy) embraces the following:

  • Phonics instruction is one of many instructional practices that can be effective in teaching early reading, but many students enter formal schooling already able to read without any formal instruction in phonics; therefore, formal reading instruction must be guided by student needs, not commitments to instructional practices (such as systematic intensive phonics for all students).
  • In-school reading instruction should include direct phonics instruction for students who need that, but reading instruction should recognize those students for whom direct phonics is ineffective or unnecessary. Broadly, beware any one-size-fits-all claims about teaching reading.
  • Phonics must always be an instructional means (never phonics for phonics’ sake), but evaluating the role of phonics in fostering fluency, comprehension, joy, and critical literacy is often incomplete or absent.

The current “science of reading” movement is also misguided in its claims about research. Systematic intensive phonics must be evaluated in terms of its effectiveness for student reading fluency and comprehension (not simply does systematic intensive phonics produce phonemic awareness, pronunciation).

The research base, in fact (and including the National Reading Panel), suggests that systematic intensive phonics is limited in effectiveness to first grade and only when that direct instruction is grounded in holistic and authentic literacy instruction. Isolated systematic intensive phonics is ineffective for fostering comprehension and necessarily wastes time better spent on other literacy instruction and practices.

There also is a large and compelling research base that shows out-of-school factors and access to books in the home and school are far more important in students learning to read than how much phonics they receive in formal schooling.

The paradox, then, is that every time the Reading War reignites, the media misrepresent the debate (phonics v. no phonics) while the real debate (intensive phonics v. basic phonics) is never really addressed.

How We Fail to Teach Reading

And thus, the paradox about how we fail to teach reading.

Historically and currently, we have mostly failed U.S. public education and reading in the same ways (but not how most mainstream critics claim).

The first level failure is that we consistently ignore the impact of out-of-school factors on all student learning and measurable achievement, including especially reading. Poverty, racism, sexism, and all sorts of systemic inequities are reflected in reading scores on tests such as NAEP.

Yet, most education reform, including reading legislation, targets in-school policies only, misdiagnosing the problem but also setting up the reforms for appearing to fail.

Next, responses to reading as a crisis are clouded by presentism, a lack of historical context. The reading crisis always includes the same flawed arguments and offer the same solutions that have never succeeded in the past.

However, the third level is grounded in more recent history, the accountability era in education begun in the 1980s and 1990s and driven by standards and high-stakes testing. This recent historical trend has failed reading instruction because student needs have been ignored because schools and teachers have been hyper-focused on standards (always changing) and high-stakes tests (always changing).

Connected to those distractions is that over the last 40 years districts and schools have overcommitted to reading programs that are correlated with those standards and high-stakes tests; most teachers have been held accountable for implementing those prescriptive reading programs, instead of being professional stewards of student literacy needs.

A key lesson we are not learning is that standards, high-stakes testing, and reading programs have been incredibly harmful for student learning and reading achievement. Changing the reading programs to ones that are systematic intensive phonics will not correct this flaw.

Finally, and cumulatively, we fail to teach reading well in the U.S. because we are negligent about the conditions of our students’ lives and then negligent about the teaching and learning conditions of our students’ schools.

Here is a very sad fact: It is easier for most people to say for the hundredth time that all students need systematic intensive phonics than to admit and then address the following:

  • All children deserve universal health care.
  • All children deserve food security.
  • All children deserve to have parents with work security.
  • All children deserve a stable and safe home.
  • All students deserve the highest quality learning environment (low student/teacher ratios, experienced certified teachers, well funded supplies and school).
  • All students deserve access to reading materials in their homes, their communities, and their schools.
  • All students deserve individual and patient instruction from their teachers and their schools.
  • No student is merely a test score.

Once again, however, we are faced with a very real reading debate and with how we are still failing to teach reading.

Once again, we are failing both.

Education, education reform, Educational Research, reading, Teaching

What Federal and State Reading Legislation Should and Should Not Do

Since the early 1980s, a significant role of state government has included funding and mandating public school practices and policies. Spurred by A Nation at Risk under Ronald Reagan, most states committed to the accountability era in U.S. public education grounded in state standards and high-stakes testing.

Bringing that state-based process to the federal level, George W. Bush ushered in the federal role in the accountability era with No Child Left Behind in the early 2000s.

The federal and state templates for education policy and reform have been fairly consistent for forty years, and currently, most political leaders and media pundits continue to claim that public education is failing, specifically targeting reading achievement by students.

Since most states have passed or are rushing to pass education legislation targeting reading practices and policies, here are guiding principles for what any federal or state legislation directly or indirectly impacting reading should and should not do:

  • Should not publicly fund private vendor comprehensive reading programs.
  • Should not endorse private vendor reading programs or reading materials.
  • Should not adopt “ends justify the means” policies aimed at raising reading test scores in the short term (for example, 3rd-grade retention policies).
  • Should not prescribe a narrow definition of “scientific” or “evidence-based.”
  • Should not prescribe a “one-size fits all” approach to teaching reading, addressing struggling readers or English language learners, identifying and serving special needs students, or teacher education and preparation of teachers of reading.
  • Should not ignore the limited impact in-school only practices have on measurable student outcomes (test scores).
  • Should not prioritize reading test scores over a wide range of targets and types of evidence to insure all students have high-quality access to learning to read.
  • Should not teacher-proof reading instruction or de-professionalize teachers of reading or teacher educators through narrow prescriptions of how to teach reading and serve struggling readers, English language learners, or students with special needs.
  • Should not prioritize advocacy by parents and non-educators over the expertise and experiences of K-12 educators and university-based scholars of reading and literacy.
  • Should not conflate general reading instruction policy with the unique needs of struggling readers, English language learners, and special needs students.
  • Should not over-react to short-term measurements of reading achievement (test data).

And thus,

  • Should fully fund and guarantee to all students the highest quality teaching and learning conditions for learning to read: low student/teacher ratios, well funded and supported instructional materials for learning to read chosen by teachers to fit the needs of their unique populations of students (prioritizing authentic texts for students in the classroom and in their homes), guaranteed and extensive time to read and learn to read daily.
  • Should reduce significantly the amount of and consequences for standardized testing and adopt accountability structures that include a wide range of types of evidence of student learning over a long period of time.
  • Should support the professionalism of K-12 teachers and teacher educators.
  • Should adopt a complex and robust definition of “scientific” and “evidence-based.”
  • Should embrace a philosophy of “first, do no harm.”
  • Should acknowledge that students needs across the general population, struggling readers, English language learners, and special needs students are varied and complex.
  • Should acknowledge the teacher as the reading expert in the care of unique populations of students and prioritize evidence-based student needs over complying with uniform standards or prescriptive programs.
  • Should provide funding and oversight for guaranteeing all students access to high-quality teachers (certified, experienced) and challenging, rich reading/literacy experiences regardless of student background or geographical setting (equity [input] standards over accountability [output] standards).
  • Should recognize that the research base and evidence base on reading and teaching reading is diverse and always in a state of change (i.e., there is no settled science of reading).
  • Should acknowledge and support that the greatest avenue to reading for all students is access to books and reading in their homes, their schools, and their access to libraries (school or community).
  • Should prioritize longitudinal data (test scores) on reading achievement as guiding evidence among a diversity of evidence for supporting instruction and teaching/learning conditions.
  • Should guarantee that all students are served based on their identifiable needs in the highest quality teaching and learning conditions possible across all schools.

Education legislation targeting reading needs to be guiding concepts and not prescriptions. But the overarching guiding principle should be grounded in the abundant evidence of failure by education reform over the past four decades; at the very least, federal and state legislation should not continue to do the same things over and over while expecting different outcomes.

Education, education reform, Educational Research, reading, Teaching

Education Reform De-professionalizes Women Educators

Who were your teachers?

In elementary school, nearly 9 of 10 teachers are women; by high school, about 6 of 10 are women. And nearly all of your teachers, 80%, were white (see NCES data).

As a student and a teacher, then, I have spent a great deal of my life in spaces where women are the overwhelmingly majority; often I am the only man in the room.

Recently, while I was presenting at two education conferences (South Carolina Council of Teachers of English and Wisconsin State Reading Association), I had several important experiences with recognizing teaching as a profession constituted by mostly women.

At SCCTE, I attended a session led by SC for Ed, making eye contact with one of the organization’s leaders at one point in recognition that I was the only man in the room. This session was on teacher activism and the need to inform state legislators about education while the state considers a major education bill.

As the discussion focused on many of the state representatives being condescending, I offered to the group that many of the problems faced in education can be traced to men in political leadership (and administration) not trusting or allowing the full professionalism of teachers since the field is primarily women.

Alia Wong explains that teaching continues to see a rise in the percentage of women in the field while other professions have the opposite gender trajectory:

Ingersoll and his research team highlight the rising proportion of women who are, for example, physicians (from 10 percent in 1972 to 40 percent in 2018, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data and federal surveys), lawyers (from 4 percent to 37 percent over the same time period), and pharmacists (13 percent to 63 percent).

Wong then confirms what we confronted at the SC for Ed session at SCCTE:

What explains these contradictory trends? Much of it comes down to misunderstandings of what teaching entails and how those assumptions intersect with gender norms. Unlike in many other countries, in the United States, teaching has long been seen as a relatively low-status profession. In 2018, a survey of people in roughly three dozen countries asked respondents to rank 14 different professions—including teaching, medicine, law, social work, and website engineering—by each career’s perceived social status. On the one hand, survey participants in the United States gave teachers a middling ranking, and tended to liken them to librarians; respondents in countries such as China and Malaysia, on the other hand, put teachers in first place, analogizing them to doctors.

This cultural disregard for teaching has a gendered consequence: The status of a given career tends to correlate with the share of men in that profession—higher status equals more men, generally speaking. And that has its own consequence: Research has found that employers place less value on work done by women than on that done by men. These trends reinforce each other in perpetuity.

Even in education, as the status of the position within education rises, so does the proportion of men, Wong notes: “Notably, close to half of all principals today, including two-thirds of those serving high schools, are men, as are more than three-quarters of school-district superintendents.”

Administration also reflects greater power and higher pay than classroom teachers.

I gave a presentation and spoke on a panel just a week later at WSRA; my session was attended by almost all women, and then I was the only man on a 6-person panel.

During my presentation, Misreading Reading Again and Again: The Media, Reading Policy, and Teaching Reading, two comments by teachers and the discussions around them help navigate the nearly constant state of reform occurring in education and more directly the current “science of reading” movement that is driving many states to adopt new reading legislation.

First, as I was discrediting the myth that whole language failed in California in the 1980s and 1990s—when the state experienced a significant drop in education funding and an increase in English language learners—a woman interjected that she taught in California during this time.

Her class was 32 second graders, including 6 ELL students (hers was an inclusion/ELL class). Her direct statement was that the teaching and learning conditions made effective teaching of reading (or anything) nearly impossible, regardless of the reading program or philosophy she implemented.

Here, we must recognize that teaching and learning conditions can and often do de-professionalize teachers.

Later, I was discussing the recent attacks on Lucy Calkins Units of Study reading program, emphasizing first that I do not endorse any reading programs (including Calkins’s). Many attending the session clapped for the idea that schools should not spend funding on programs, but provide teachers all the books and materials needed to teach reading.

But as we interrogated the problem with Calkins’s program, several teachers enthusiastically announced their hatred for not only the program but Calkins herself, as the name on the program.

What we unpacked was that even despite Calkins own warning not to implement the program as a structured mandate to teachers, many administrators have turned this and other reading programs into a way to manage and monitor teacher practice.

In other words, the valid anger felt by teachers about Unit of Study is their awareness that the program is used to further de-professionalize them.

And that brings us back to the “science of reading” movement that has some disturbing elements. First is the argument that the “science of reading” is settled (suggesting that science is a fixed prescription)—even though the evidence on teaching reading is rightfully described as compelling even as that evidence base is diverse (both in types of research and what that evidence supports).

Next, building off that misrepresentation of science, this movement is calling for systematic intensive phonics (phonics first) for all students; without too much imagination here, we can see that this is a blanket mandate that de-professionalizes teachers and certainly will have the same negative impact on teacher attitudes that misguided implementation of Calkins’s program currently exposes.

But the most disturbing aspect of the “science of reading” movement is that it is the next step feeding the over forty years of education reform that has plagued U.S. education.

Public education has experienced relentless political intrusion since the early 1980s, mandates standards, testing, and programs that have erased nearly every aspect of professionalism from the field of teaching.

And political intrusion, we must recognize, is almost entirely the work of men.

Think of the recent anti-abortion laws in Alabama. While the press highlighted a woman governor signing the bill, Alabama has 23 women out of 140 legislators, a mere 16.4% (see gender balances in state government here).

As has been dramatized brilliantly in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (and the Netflix adaptation), tokenized women, such as the governor of Alabama, often work in the service of men.

While many faces on the “science of reading” movement are women, their agenda is being used mostly by men in political power to mandate education policy and further de-professionalize teachers.

My home state of South Carolina has about the same gender imbalance as Alabama (28 women out of 170 legislators, 16.5%), and many of the SC for Ed teachers interacting with state representatives and senators are receiving angry and condescending responses that demonstrate a lack of respect for teachers.

What people fail to recognize about the systematic intensive phonics movement as an attack on balanced literacy is that phonics programs fit well into the top-down authority model implemented in many schools and driven by accountability mandates (legislation included). Balanced literacy, on the other hand, is intended as a guiding philosophy of literacy that depends on teacher autonomy and professionalism to provide all students what they need to learn.

Balanced literacy does not mandate any practice for all students, and does not bar any practice where students demonstrate a need.

Accountability, education legislation, and reading programs have mostly worked against teacher professionalism, against the autonomy and professionalism of women.

Teachers need teacher and learning conditions that make their work as professionals possible, but the current movement to legislate the “science of reading” will further erode teacher autonomy and distract from the real work needed.

Teachers do not need yet more reform; teachers need their profession to be respected and supported.

deficit thinking, Education, education reform, race, racism, Segregation

Clarifications: Greenville desegregation: Academic achievement gap slowly closing, but inequities persist

Ariel Gilreath offers a strong overview in her Greenville desegregation: Academic achievement gap slowly closing, but inequities persist. A key point in this look at desegregation confronts the disturbing consequences of South Carolina’s libertarian streak:

The public school district in Greenville County became the last major district in South Carolina to integrate in 1970. South Carolina was the second-to-last state in the nation. On Feb. 17, Greenville schools will mark 50 years since the district was integrated.

In those 50 years, though policies and tests have changed, the academic achievement gap has persisted, and so has inequity.

Desegregation of schools in SC spurred the growth of private schools (white racists fleeing public schools) and provided the foundation for what would become known as the Corridor of Shame, a label that captures the historical political negligence in the state that has failed black, brown, and poor students in weak economic communities across the state.

Academic achievement, usually test scores, is strongly correlated with socioeconomic statuses of students homes and communities as well as with race (as the article notes, so-called racial minorities tend to be over-represented in poverty, and poverty is a key marker of low test scores).

Three aspects of the article deserve a bit of clarification and resources for better understanding them.

First, a growing number of scholars and advocates for public schools are rejecting the term “achievement gap” (a foundational concepts in No Child Left Behind), as Gilreath reports:

Paul Thomas bristles when he hears “academic achievement gap.” The education professor at Furman University doesn’t like the connotation, and he’s not alone.

“It’s an equity gap,” Thomas said. “Children are not given the same opportunities. They’re not given the same resources, either in their lives or in their schools. So the outcomes are inequitable because the input is inequitable — not because the children are different.”

By focusing on equity and opportunity, the gaze of blame moves away from the student (the agent of achievement) and toward the systemic forces that create the inequity of academic outcomes for students.

[See: School Rankings as Racist, Classist Propaganda; The Lingering, and Powerful, Legacy of “Scientific Racism” in America; Kristof, How Much Inequity Is the Right Balance?; Achievement Gap Misnomer for Equity Gap, pt. 1; Achievement Gap Misnomer for Equity Gap, pt. 2]

And thus, we must not be mislead by Teach for America’s effort to rebrand the floundering organization:

Teach for America, a nonprofit organization that funds additional educators for low-income schools, refers to the achievement gap as an “opportunity gap” to describe the different test outcomes between subgroups of students.

One of the greatest mechanisms of inequity by race and socioeconomic status in the U.S. is teacher assignment: Poor, black, and brown students; English language learners; and students with special needs are disproportionately assigned year after year to under-/un-certified and inexperienced teachers—the exact teaching pool TFA is offering to those populations of students.

[See: Listen to Gary Rubinstein: “TFA…thrives on greed, deception, and fear”; REVIEW: Teach For America and the Struggle for Urban School Reform, Crawford-Garrett; Teacher Quality: On Hyperbole and Anecdotes]

Second, along with rejecting the term “achievement gap” for “equity” or “opportunity gap,” we must avoid both deficit ideology and deficit language when referring to students who are the targets of that inequity:

Students in poverty are ‘at a deficit from the beginning’

Schools alone cannot fix poverty or issues at a student’s home, said Jason McCreary, director of accountability and quality assurance with Greenville County Schools….

But schools do serve as a central hub and identifier of the issues that typically trail a student living in poverty. If a student comes into a classroom hungry or dealing with trauma, it’s often reflected in behavior and performance, and schools are expected to identify those issues and address them.

While the points here about the power of systemic inequity in the lives of students outside of school and the inability of school alone to overcome those forces is important and well supported by research, it places the focus on the students to describe those conditions as “deficits.”

Differences should not be framed in evaluative ways, and certainly we should avoid putting the deficit gaze on the students themselves.

[See: Quitting Grit, Ditching Deficit Ideology, and Embracing an Equity and Justice Approach to Poverty and Education: A Conversation; From Deficiency to Strength: Shifting the Mindset about Education Inequality; Poverty and the ideological imperative: a call to unhook from deficit and grit ideology and to strive for structural ideology in teacher education]

Finally, but more about language and ideology, we must be careful about “culture”:

“There’s cultural gaps, opportunity gaps, community gaps, economic gaps, access gaps — it all leads to achievement gaps. So that’s why this is one of the most complex issues that I know,” McCreary said. “So it takes complex solutions to really make a dent, make a change.”

Most sociologists would caution against overly simplistic uses of the term “culture,” but to suggest there are “cultural gaps” is again to blame not only the students but their communities and families for the systemic inequities that are reflected in their academic outcomes.

To suggest there is a cultural gap is to privilege whiteness as an unspoken and unacknowledged “norm” against which all other races are measured; this at its roots is racism and the driving force behind white nationalism.

As I note in the article, desegregating schools is the ethical process for a democracy, but the proximity of all students of many different races is not enough.

Our language must change, as noted above, but until our policies and behaviors change, the rhetorical shifts will be hollow gestures.

Education, education reform, Educational Research, reading

UPDATED: Understanding the “Science of Reading”: A Reader

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UPDATE

See Fact checking @DanaGoldstein phonics article @nytimes – a thread

See Also: Gerald Coles, Cryonics Phonics: Inequality’s Little Helper

In one way, ground zero for the “science of reading” movement can be traced to Emily Hanford in 2018, but cognitive scientists (Daniel Willingham and Mark Seidenberg, for example) focusing on reading and advocacy for students with dyslexia (or struggling to read in ways that some label as dyslexia) have also played key roles in the movement.

The “science of reading movement” has not been simply a media event, however. That advocacy has resulted in state education/reading legislation that has included third-grade retention of students based on reading test scores, mandating systematic intensive phonics (phonics first) for all students, and new mandates for teachers of reading and teacher education programs.

What is absent in most of the media and political endorsement of the “science of reading” is a critical lens for the claims as well as historical context.

The “science of reading” narrative, at best, is incomplete, and at worst, is deeply misleading.

Below are the key elements and links to help anyone better understand the issues:

Historical Perspective

What Shall We Do About Reading Today?: Looking Back to See Now More Clearly

Back to the Future of Reading Instruction: 1990s Edition

Recommended: Literacy Crises: False Claims and Real Solutions, Jeff McQuillan

The “Science of Reading,” an Overview

The Big Lie about the “Science of Reading” (Updated)

The Big Lie about the “Science of Reading”: NAEP 2019 Edition

Systematic Intensive Phonics (Phonics First, Phonics versus Whole Language/Balanced Literacy)

Reconsidering the Evidence That Systematic Phonics Is More Effective Than Alternative Methods of Reading Instruction, Jeffrey S. Bowers (2020)

To Read or Not to Read: Decoding Synthetic Phonics, Andrew Davis

Does Phonics Deserve the Credit for Improvement in PIRLS? Stephen Krashen

The Problem with Balanced Literacy

Progressivism and Whole Language: A Reader

National Reading Panel (NRP)

The Enduring Influence of the National Reading Panel (and the “D” Word)

Reading Programs (Lucy Calkins)

Reading Programs Put Reading Last

In Defense of Balanced Literacy: Understanding and Responding to Student Achievement Partners’ Critique of Units of Study

Teacher Education and National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ)

Twitter thread on NCTQ

Measuring Up: The National Council on Teacher Quality’s Ratings of Teacher Preparation Programs and Measures of Teacher Performance

If Teacher Education Is Failing Reading, Where Is the Blame?

Mississippi 2019 NAEP Reading Scores

UPDATED: Mississippi Miracle or Mirage?: 2019 NAEP Reading Scores Prompt Questions, Not Answers

See Also

Checklist: Media Coverage of the “Science of Reading”