Jumping the Shark: Phonics Edition
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DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearlyHas “Science of” Education Reform in the UK “Achieved Competitive Advantage Over” the US?
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DonateDonate monthlyDonate yearly“Science of” as Veneer for Conservative Politics
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Science of Reading: Silver Bullet or Fool’s Gold
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Please consider reading:
The Accountability Era of Education Reform Failed
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Education pundits and education reformers (mostly never educators themselves) are some of the most arrogant people you’ll ever encounter.
This is odd because their grand announcements are invariably built on lies, but even more puzzling is that none of their claims and promises about their pet reforms ever work out.
Charter schools and school choice, teacher evaluation based on value-added methods, accountability schemes driven by (ever new) standards and (ever new) standardized tests—none of these have worked, and the evidence for that is quite obvious because we remain always in education crisis regardless of the reforms.
In fact, the real story behind education punditry and reform is that all of these folk profit from perpetual crisis and reform; they are not really invested in improving education or the lives and learning of children in the US.
Education punditry and reform in the US is an industry that relies on two lies—crisis and miracles.
Apropos for the Trump era, in fact, education punditry and reform depend on the Big Lies to promote their baseless attacks on education failure and to recycle their rhetoric as well as their reform plans (that, again, never work).
Jonathan Chait, ironically the author of The Big Con, has jumped on the false Mississippi “miracle” reading reform train as well as doubling down on one of the most offensive Big Lies:
This Big Lie is the “no excuses” lie that some people on the progressive left use poverty as an excuse; this is the George W. Bush “soft bigotry of low expectations” strawman.
The “no excuses” movement was primarily a part of the huge charter school movement popular under Obama, the charter school movement that, not surprisingly, joined the litany of ed reforms that did not work.
Here is the key detail: The “no excuses” rhetoric has been resurrected by the false Mississippi “miracle.” You see, if Mississippi has in fact produced a reading reform miracle, then the “poverty is an excuse” charge has been proven correct!
First, however, there is no one on the progressive left who believes poor children cannot learn or cannot be educated. And no one is arguing education reform cannot work.
The critical and progressive argument is actually evidence-based but possibly more complicated than the average pundit or reformer can understand.
The evidence is overwhelming that over 60% of measurable student achievement is causally related to factors outside the control of schools.
A 2024 study has once again proven this, and that schools alone cannot mitigate that powerful influence on learning:
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.
That same research supports the actual argument from the progressive left: Accountability education reform grounded in standards and high-stake testing will not work, and has not worked since the early1980s:
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.
What we on the progressive and critical left are arguing is that education reform should be grounded in equity policy but it must also be supported by social reform. In short, evidence such as the Department of Defense schools’ success on NAEP show that when students have their healthcare, food, and housing secured, schools are more likely to be effective:
Next, Chait’s primary Big Lie is compounded by perpetuating the Mississippi “miracle” lie.
There is but one kernel of truth in the Mississippi “miracle” lie (and it is the only one the pundits and reformers mention). Like Florida, Mississippi has conjured exceptionally high grade 4 reading scores on NAEP.
However, two analyses [1] have shown that that score increase appears to be the result of grade retention and not instructional, teacher, or program reforms. Both MS and FL have seen their outlier grade 4 reading scores drop into the bottom 25% of state scores by grade 8, suggesting the grade 4 scores are the product of corrupting the pool of students tested through grade retention and not genuine increases in reading proficiency. Again contrast MS and FL with DoDEA schools in grade 8 (top image is the top performing states and bottom image is the bottom performing states):
The Mississippi story has two additional problems.
Mississippi has the same race and poverty achievement gap in grade 4 reading as the state did in 1998:
And possibly the most damning and ugliest problems with the Mississippi “miracle” lie is that the state has not seen a decrease in the number of students retained (who are disproportionately Black and poor); if their reform was working, this number should be near zero:
The truth exposed by the Big Lies of education pundits and reformers is that they are not interested in evidence or improving the lives and education of children.
There is more profit in the Big Lies and maintaining a perpetual state of education crisis and reform; you see, maintaining The Big Con.
[1] See On education miracles in general (and those in Mississippi in particular) and The Effects of Early Literacy Policies on Student Achievement.
[2] Not that, in fact, recent data show retention increased and proficiency decreased in the past two years.
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In an analysis of how media represents teachers and education, Silvia Edling argues, “Newspapers do not just write about education, they also represent to their readers what education is ‘about.’”
Edling notes that teachers and education are often characterized by stereotypes, focusing on “four inter-related propensities”:
- Viewing education as being in more or less permanent crisis
- Taking the role as a spokesperson for teachers and on behalf of the field of education
- Excluding the knowledge and experiences of teacher(s), educators and/or educational researchers in the public press
- Simplifying the notion of being a good teacher through stereotypes and dualistic frameworks that overlook task and relational complexity.
At the core of effective journalism is the importance of compelling stories. However, one truism offers a problem with relying on narratives without ensuring that the broader evidence supports the anecdote: “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”
For media coverage of education, the softer version may be that an exciting story can attain a status of fact before educational research can confirm or refute the narrative as an outlier or misinformation.
One challenge is, of course, that journalism works much more quickly than scientific research, and this is compounded by the inherent complexity of conducting education research and then applying that evidence to the real world.
For about a decade now, education reform has mostly invested in an expanding “science of” movement that began with the “science of reading” and now includes an international focus on the “science of learning” as well as a parallel “science of math” movement.
The origin stories of the “science of reading” movement is grounded, in fact, in the journalism of Emily Hanford, notably Hard Words, the ironically named Sold a Story podcast, and There Is a Right Way to Teach Reading, and Mississippi Knows It.
As I have detailed, the Mississippi “miracle” and reading crisis narratives generated and perpetuated by the media are missing one key ingredient—scientific evidence for the hyperbolic claims and narratives.
In fact, the current “science of” movements fail all four of Edling’s concerns by presenting a crisis absent research to support the claims; creating non-education reading “experts” among journalists and advocates for commercial programs; cherry-picking teacher voices while also misrepresenting teacher expertise through stereotypes and caricatures; and framing both the crisis and solutions in simplistic either/or rhetoric along ideological lines (progressive v. traditional framed as vibe-based v. scientific).
While the most recent wave, for example, of reading reform reaches back to 2012, the tipping point was Mississippi’s 2019 grade 4 reading scores. Since Mississippi has a long history of unfairly being cast as “last in the nation in education,” that these grade 4 scores suddenly rocketed into the top 25% of state scores certainly qualifies as a compelling story.
It also doesn’t hurt that the appearance that Mississippi had proven that “poverty is an excuse” adds fuel to the hyperbole fire.
Quickly, a “science of” narrative erupted, resulting in copy-cat legislation and the same unverified story about a reading crisis and the Mississippi miracle across local, regional, and national media.
The “science of” story has, in fact, traveled around the world several times at this point, but the key element remains missing—the science.
For example, The Reading League and the 95 Percent Group have become powerful advocacy organizations that make narrow and absolute claims about the need for science-only reading instruction linked to the promise that 95% of student will become proficient readers.
Again, ironically, neither of these positions (or the advocacy of the organizations) is grounded in the science.
First, The Reading League simultaneously demands only scientific evidence (first image) while advocating for practices and programs (for example, decodable texts and O-G phonics) that literature reviews on the current state of reading science refute (second image):
And, even more problematic, the 95% claim is not a scientific fact, but a very weakly supported and likely aspirational argument with only a few research studies behind the over-sized claim. As I have noted, the only evidence I have found is a a blog post cited by NCTQ, who twisted the stat to 90% and issued a report on teacher education that failed to match claims with the science.
Recently, the science is now catching up with the Mississippi story—although education journalism has remained silent on the current body of research that contradicts the story.
First, if we stick to the science and not the story, poverty is not an excuse when considering reading proficiency; in fact, over 60% of measurable student achievement is causally linked to “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.”
In fact, these researchers reject continuing to base education reform on testing data such as NAEP:
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.
Next, two analyses of reading reform—one targeting the larger early reading reform movement and another specifically addressing Mississippi reading reform—find that the early grade reading score increases are not linked to changes in teacher training, reading instruction, and reading programs, but are grounded in grade retention policies.
In the broader study, Westall and Cummings found that only states with grade retention in their reading reform achieved increased reading proficiency scores, and those increases faded from elementary to middle school (paralleling the drop from top 25% to bottom 25% of states in NAEP from grade 4 to grade 8 by Mississippi and Florida).
They, however, drew no conclusions about why retention appears to result in higher scores.
Now, however, Howard Wainer, Irina Grabovsky and Daniel H. Robinson offer a conclusive connection between retention and reading scores:
But it was the second component of the Mississippi Miracle, a new retention policy, perhaps inspired by New Orleans’ Katrina disaster a decade earlier, that is likely to be the key to their success….
Prior to 2013, a higher percentage of third-graders moved on to the fourth grade and took the NAEP fourth-grade reading test. After 2013, only those students who did well enough in reading moved on to the fourth grade and took the test.
It is a fact of arithmetic that the mean score of any data set always increases if you delete some of the lowest scores (what is technically called “left truncation of the score distribution”)….
It is disappointing, but not surprising, that the lion’s share of the effects of the “Mississippi miracle” are yet another case of gaming the system. There is no miracle to behold. There is nothing special in Mississippi’s literacy reform model that should be replicated globally. It just emphasises the obvious advice that, if you want your students to get high scores, don’t allow those students who are likely to get low scores to take the test. This message is not a secret….
The science now suggests that reading proficiency score gains do not equate with improved reading proficiency due to classroom teaching learning reform. Mississippi reform is a statistical veneer for a harmful policy.
Notably, the current science on grade retention also confirms a body of evidence that retention does more harm than any possible good:
[T]hird-grade retention significantly reduces annual earnings at age 26 by $3,477 (19%). While temporarily improving test scores, retention increases absenteeism, violent behavior, and juvenile crime, and reduces the likelihood of high school graduation. Moreover, retained students exhibit higher community college enrollment but lower public university attendance, though neither estimate is statistically significant.
We are left with a significant problem and a question that must be answered: Since, as Edling shows, media controls what most people know and believe about education, teachers, and students, why are journalists committed to a story not grounded in evidence while also ignoring the science that seems essential for creating an authentic “science of” education reform movement?
Research Highlights “Science of Reading” Fails Equity, Teacher Autonomy, and Social Media Discourse
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My entire career in education, begun in the fall of 1984, has been during the accountability era of education that is primarily characterized by one reality—perpetual reform.
The template has been mind-numbingly predictable, a non-stop cycle of crisis>reform>crisis>reform, etc.
Another constant of that cycle is that the crisis-of-the-moment has almost always been overblown or nonexistent, leading to reforms that fall short of the promised outcomes. Reforms, ironically, just lead to another crisis.
But one of the most powerful and damning elements in the crisis/reform cycle has been the education miracle. [1]
Two problems exist with basing education reform on education miracles. First, and overwhelmingly, education miracles are almost always debunked as misinformation, misunderstanding of data, or outright fraud. Research has shown that statistically education miracles are so incredibly rare that they essentially do not exist.
Second, even when an education miracle is valid, it is by definition an outlier, and thus, the policies and practices of how the miracle occurred are likely not scalable and certainly should not be used as a template for universal reform.
Those core problems with education miracles have prompted the attention of Howard Wainer, Irina Grabovsky and Daniel H. Robinson, who have analyzed the reading reform miracle claims linked to Mississippi:
In 1748, famed Scot David Hume defined nature. He elaborated such a law as “a regularity of past experience projected by the mind to future cases”. He argued that the evidence for a miracle is rarely sufficient to suspend rational belief because a closer look has always revealed that what was reported as a miracle was more likely false, resulting from misperception, mistransmission, or deception….
A careful examination confirms that enthusiasm to emulate Mississippi should be tempered with scepticism….
In short, the authors followed a key point of logic: If something seems too good to be true, then it is likely not true.
In their analysis, On education miracles in general (and those in Mississippi in particular), they focused on two of the key problems with the story about Mississippi’s outlier grade 4 reading scores (in the top quartile of state scores) on NAEP: What is the cause of the score increases? And, why are Mississippi’s grade 8 reading scores remaining in the bottom quartile of state scores?
They found, notably, that Mississippi’s instructional reform, teacher retraining, additional funding, and reading program changes were not the cause of the score increases, concluding:
But it was the second component of the Mississippi Miracle, a new retention policy, perhaps inspired by New Orleans’ Katrina disaster a decade earlier, that is likely to be the key to their success….
Prior to 2013, a higher percentage of third-graders moved on to the fourth grade and took the NAEP fourth-grade reading test. After 2013, only those students who did well enough in reading moved on to the fourth grade and took the test.
It is a fact of arithmetic that the mean score of any data set always increases if you delete some of the lowest scores (what is technically called “left truncation of the score distribution”)….
In short, Mississippi has inflated grade 4 NAEP scores, but that is unlikely evidence that student reading proficiency has improved. This is not a story about reading reform, but about “gaming the system”:
It is disappointing, but not surprising, that the lion’s share of the effects of the “Mississippi miracle” are yet another case of gaming the system. There is no miracle to behold. There is nothing special in Mississippi’s literacy reform model that should be replicated globally. It just emphasises the obvious advice that, if you want your students to get high scores, don’t allow those students who are likely to get low scores to take the test. This message is not a secret….
Wainer, Grabovsky and Robinson’s analysis also needs to be put in context of two other studies.
First, their analysis puts a finer point on the findings by Westall and Cummings, whose comprehensive review of contemporary reading reform found the following: Third grade retention (required by 22 states) is the determining factor for increased test scores (states such as Florida and Mississippi, who both have scores plummet in grade 8), but those score increases are short-term.
Next is a recent study on grade retention. Jiee Zhong concluded:
[T]hird-grade retention significantly reduces annual earnings at age 26 by $3,477 (19%). While temporarily improving test scores, retention increases absenteeism, violent behavior, and juvenile crime, and reduces the likelihood of high school graduation. Moreover, retained students exhibit higher community college enrollment but lower public university attendance, though neither estimate is statistically significant.
Grade retention masquerading as reading reform, then, is fool’s gold for inflating test scores, but it is also harming the very students the reform purports to be helping.
The evidence now suggests that reading reform should not be guided by miracle claims; that no states should be looking to a miracle state for reading reform templates; that the so-called “science of reading” movement is mostly smoke and mirrors, and should be recognized as the “science of retention”; and that grade retention policies are distorting test scores at the expense of our most vulnerable students in life changing ways.
[1] Thomas, P.L. (2016). Miracle schools or political scam? In W.J. Mathis & T.M. Trujillo, Learning from the Federal Market-Based Reforms: Lessons for ESSA. Charlotte, NC: IAP.
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This fall was the start to year 42 for me as an education, the first 18 as a high school English teacher and the rest as a college professor. I have been noting that career in my presentations at NCTE 2025 in Denver, adding that I am toying with at least making it to year 50.
As I ponder that number, I often return to the sense of awe I always feel when I mention my doctoral work, an educational biography of Lou LaBrant—a former NCTE president (1954) who lived to be 102 and taught for a staggering 65 years (1906-1971).
Approaching 100 and with declining eyesight, LaBrant typed her memoir for the head of the Museum of Education at the University of South Carolina and a key member of my doctoral committee, Craig Kridel.
I was thinking about LaBrant during my presentation yesterday, Recovering Our Reading Dream from a Long Crisis Nightmare, because in her memoir, LaBrant expressed her frustration with the back-to-basics movement during the Reagan administration that orchestrated the 80s education crisis with the melodramatic and misleading A Nation at Risk.
LaBrant noted that over eight decades as an educator she worked through several education crisis cycles and multiple back-to-basics movements—notably the 1940s reading crisis spurred by low literacy rates for draftees during WWII.
While my career pales in many ways compared to LaBrant’s, I feel her pain; with education crisis it is déjà vu all over again.
The only thing, it seems, as common as the media announcing yet another education crisis is people rejecting my arguments against education crisis rhetoric.
And right on cue, after my reading crisis presentation about Tomorrow’s Illiterates: The State of Reading Instruction Today (1961) where I mentioned that our colleagues in math education are now in the crisis crosshair, joining the hyper-intense reading crisis boiling over with “science of reading” advocacy, this morning, I saw this: Editorial: For too many American kids, math isn’t adding up.
The media obsession with declaring an education crisis is so commonplace that I started to just scroll on, but, regretfully, I began to read:
Math scores in the U.S. have been so bad for so long that teachers could be forgiven for trying anything to improve them. Unfortunately, many of the strategies they’re using could be making things worse. It’s a crisis decades in the making.
In the early 20th century, education reformers including John Dewey and William Heard Kilpatrick developed a theory – drawing from the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau – that came to be known as constructivism. The idea was that learning happens best when students immerse themselves in a problem and find their own solution. By the late 1980s, math standards had embraced “discovery-based learning.”
I expected the lazy and unsupported “math scores” opening, but that second paragraph is the stunner. In 2025, the media still looks for a way to blame John Dewey for the education crisis they repeatedly manufacture.
It was at the core of the reading crisis in the 1940s, and again, in Tomorrow’s Illiterates (1961) noted above
Also in my presentation yesterday, I uttered Dewey’s name and suggested the attendees track down Alfie Kohn’s Progressive Education: Why It’s Hard to Beat, But Also Hard to Find, which does an excellent job of detailing how Dewey’s progressive education is simultaneously blamed and almost never implemented in formal schooling [1].
I immediately posted on social media that the editorial writers could have just search on Wikipedia and avoided the utter nonsense they wrote about constructivism.
Just a few weeks ago, as well, I covered in my 100-level educational philosophy course that behaviorism and constructivism are educational theories (grounded in the scientific method), distinct from philosophies (grounded in rhetoric and logic, such as Dewey’s progressivism).
Learning theories like educational philosophies are contested spaces, but as I plan to share tomorrow in a roundtable presentation, this math crisis editorial triggers several red flags, notably opening the commentary by exposing the editors lack the basic expertise on education to be making any claim of crisis.
If they wanted to blame constructivism, they could have and should have invoked Piaget and Vigotsky (and plenty of “science of learning” folk have already been doing that, often badly and with the sort of caricature I expect).
The media’s education crisis narrative, however, follows a script you can count on—including misunderstanding or misrepresenting test scores, ignoring social context for educational outcomes, and blaming some cartoon version of a leftist education system that, again, has never existed in the US.
When I mentioned Dewey in my presentation, I joked that almost nobody understood Dewey, including Dewey, which, I think, is a pretty good joke because Dewey (and LaBrant) represented a sort of beautiful and illusive scientific approach to their philosophy of education and their instructional practices.
You see, when Dewey progressives say “scientific,” they mean an organic type of experimentation whereby the educator is always in the process of experimenting and drawing real world conclusions that are evolving (it is better, in fact, to think of Dewey’s ideology as pragmatism, associated with William James).
Theirs is a science of teaching and learning that is grounded in and starts with each individual student in the pursuit of skills, knowledge, and critical awareness. This is distinct from essentialist and perrenialist beliefs that begin with knowledge, basic skills, and Great Books, for example.
Teaching as an experiment only matters in the practical, not any Platonic ideal, and thus, is never settled (one red flag is when anyone makes a claim and bases that on settled science [2]).
A key reason blaming Dewey or progressive education for any education crisis is misguided is that Dewey himself refused to offer prescriptions, calling for every school and every teacher to seek what works best in the evidence before them, the unique set of students who always change.
In short, in teaching and learning, there is no silver bullet, no script, no program that can or will serve the needs of all students.
You can, if you must, insert any content area—math, reading, writing, civics, science, etc.—and shout “Crisis!” But you will be embarrassing yourself.
Just do a little searching, and I dare you to find a single moment over the past century when someone declared that “kids today” are excelling in math, reading, etc.
My point, which is often as misunderstood as Dewey, is not that current teaching and learning are fine, that I am somehow endorsing the status quo.
I am a critical educator; I became an educator to change teaching and learning, and I am disappointed to say that over my 5-decades career, very little has changed, including the popular urge to declare education crisis.
And what remains most disturbingly unchanged is that a vulnerable population of students have always been and continue to be under-served or nearly completely ignored.
But my point also includes that education reform alone (while needed, just not the mainstream way most often tried over and over) will never serve those vulnerable students, whose measurable education outcomes mostly reflect the inequity of their full lives of which the school day is only a fraction:
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.
There is some math the education crisis folk never want to calculate.
If you find yourself worrying about your child’s ability to read or do math, I promise you that Dewey is not to blame.
If you find yourself worrying about other people’s children’s ability to read or do math, I promise you that Dewey is not to blame.
Crisis rhetoric, however, doesn’t help; it never has.
Finger pointing and blame probably aren’t very useful either, especially when those pointing fingers go out of their way to show their blame doesn’t quite add up.
In formal education, we have always had and will always have a range of students who excel, struggle, and fail.
As teachers, our job is to serve them all, and serve them better based on who they are and what they need.
However, teachers and schools alone can never be successful.
If evidence of student failure means anything (and those test scores often don’t), it is that we as a democracy are failing not only those students, but also those children, teens, and young adults—many of whom do not have adequate healthcare, food or home security, or the sorts of lives that universal public education, the so-called Founding Fathers, and, yes, John Dewey envisioned that a free people could guarantee.
If you are looking for someone to blame because of those disappointing math scores, well, I hate to tell you that the enemy is us.
[1] I highly recommend also: LaBrant, L. (1931, March). Masquerading. The English Journal, 20(3), 244-246. http://www.jstor.org/stable/803664. Here LaBrant rejects the misunderstood and misapplied project method in the teaching of literature:
The cause for my wrath is not new or single. It is of slow growth and has many characteristics. It is known to many as a variation of the project method; to me, as the soap performance. With the project, neatly defined by theorizing educators as “a purposeful activity carried to a successful conclusion,” I know better than to be at war. With what passes for purposeful activity and is unfortunately carried to a conclusion because it will kill time, I have much to complain. To be, for a moment, coherent: I am disturbed by the practice, much more common than our publications would indicate, of using the carving of little toy boats and castles, the dressing of quaint dolls, the pasting of advertising pictures, and the manipulation of clay and soap as the teaching of English literature. (p. 245)
[2] For example, the math crisis editorial announces authoritatively and with no links to proof:
Unfortunately, a robust body of research has since found that such approaches often fail early math learners (and readers, for that matter). Math rules and facts such as multiplication tables must be taught explicitly, memorized and mastered through practice. Only when this foundation is established can students progress to more complex concepts. Math, it’s often said, is cumulative.
Beyond Caricatures: On Dewey, Freire, and Direct Instruction (Again)
Caricature, Faddism, and the Failure of “My Instruction Can Beat Up Your Instruction”
Deja Vu All Over Again: The Never Ending Pursuit of “Scientific” Instruction
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The metaphors for education reform are far too easy, and thus, becoming themselves cliches—deja vous all over again, beating a dead horse, and for me, the most apt, zombies.
Education reforms are championed, and then implemented; invariably, these reforms never achieve what is promised—charter schools/ school choice, reading reform, accountability built on (new) standards and (new) standardized tests, and then, of course, merit pay for teachers.
The Editorial Staff at the Post and Courier are trying to resurrect the zombie politics of merit pay: SC teacher bonuses show promise, but rules need spelling out:
It took a whole lot of years, and a state education superintendent who advocates some really smart ideas and some really bad ones, but the S.C. Legislature seems finally to have settled into supporting the idea of paying at least a few teachers based at least partially on performance, rather than simply the amount of time they’ve been teaching and the degrees they have.
This lede seems as hastily written (the double “at least) and thought out. However, one aspect of politics and education reform that my students are currently analyzing is that people tend to rely on their beliefs over empirical evidence when advocating for policies.
Further, “performance” and “simply” are doing some heavy and misleading lifting.
Over 15 years ago while I was researching and writing a book on school choice, I found a fascinating research report from a conservative think tank in Wisconsin (renamed in 2017 from the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute), which had one of the longest and most robust school choice policies in the US.
Despite the study [1] finding choice ineffective, George Lightbourn introduced the report as a Senior Fellow, admitting:
The report you are reading did not yield the results we had hoped to find. We had expected to find a wellspring of hope that increased parental involvement in the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) would be the key ingredient in improving student performance.
And later on the WPRI web site (no longer available online), Lightbourne emphasized:
So that there is no misunderstanding, WPRI is unhesitant in supporting school choice. School choice is working and should be improved and expanded. School choice is good for Milwaukee ‘s children.
Here is a key moment in education reform: Despite the evidence to the contrary, the reformers remain steadfast in supporting the policy because they believe in it. [2]
And that brings us to merit pay for teachers, a policy that has been tried over and over (as well as often in the private sector) without ever yielding the outcomes promised.
In fact, research has shown that merit pay produces negative consequences without the positives promised.
A significant aspect of that failure is that decades of research has shown that cooperation and collaboration are more effective that competition, which is at the core of merit pay schemes.
And in education, we must acknowledge that competition is incompatible with the work of educators; under merit schemes, teachers are being incentivized to have their students outperform other teacher’s students—a gross distortion of the ethics of teaching.
Let’s turn back to “performance,” which suggests that all teachers can be objectively or fairly evaluated for the quality of their teaching in the context of dozens of students with an incredibly wide range of abilities.
This always means standardized testing (note here that many teachers work in areas that are not tested, making the merit schemes a nightmare of evaluation or an astronomical increase in testing of students).
The US is only about a decade away from one of the most intense eras of teacher evaluation based on “merit,” the value-added methods policies under the Obama administration.
And here is what the American Statistical Association concluded in 2014:
VAMs should be viewed within the context of quality improvement, which distinguishes aspects of quality that can be attributed to the system from those that can be attributed to individual teachers, teacher preparation programs, or schools. Most VAM studies find that teachers account for about 1% to 14% of the variability in test scores, and that the majority of opportunities for quality improvement are found in the system-level conditions. Ranking teachers by their VAM scores can have unintended consequences that reduce quality.
Teachers have extremely small measurable impacts on tested student learning, and, this is key to note, “the majority of opportunities for quality improvement are found in the system-level conditions.”
Again, the research conflicts with bootstrapping myths in the US, but decades of evidence shows what the ASA discovered, notably in a 2024 study from Maroun 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 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.
The evidence is overwhelming, then, that there simply is no justification for advocating for or trying again merit pay for teachers.
The scheme will invariably be costly, produce negative outcomes, and not worked as promised by those who simply believe merit pay is the thing to do.
We should pay teachers more, and we should fund and support our public schools in ways that improve the teaching and learning conditions in those schools.
However, the policies that will have the greatest impact on teaching and learning remain social policies such as universal healthcare, food security, housing and home security, access to books in the home, and as Mauron and Tienken argue, a matrix of “public policies, outside the control of school personnel.”
You see, what we need to do is not supported by what many in the US choose to believe despite what the evidence shows us.
[1] Dodenhoff, D. (2007, October). Fixing the Milwaukee public schools: The limits of parent-driven reform. Wisconsin Policy Research Institute Report, 20(8). Thiensville, WI: Wisconsin Policy Research Institute. https://www.badgerinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/vol20no8.pdf
[2] Note that choice advocates in Wisconsin have persisted:
NEPC Review: Wisconsin’s Most Cost-Effective K-12 Program (School Choice Wisconsin, August 2025) https://nepc.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/reviews/NR%20Baker_23.pdf
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 