Category Archives: education reform

Education, education reform, Equity, inequity, Poverty, reading

Reading as a First-Mile Problem: Recognizing the Role of Poverty and Inequity in Literacy Development

January 28, 2020 plthomasedd

Literacy scholar Tim Shanahan answers the question Why Is It So Hard to Improve Reading Achievement? with the following: “Classroom implementation is the last mile in reading reform.” He eventually adds, “The last mile rhetoric shouldn’t be a hair-on-fire message, but one that acknowledges both the current successes and the need to do better.”

Shanahan’s consideration of the persistent public and political concern over low reading achievement appears to offer a balanced admission that many approaches to reading instruction can be successful, but framing reading as a last-mile problem is finding yourself in a hole and deciding you just need to dig a little deeper.

Shanahan seems to accept a number of different “levers” as valid approaches to improving student reading, including a somewhat veiled endorsement of Common Core standards; in fact, he concedes: “Let’s face it. Our problem in reading isn’t that nothing works. It’s that everything does.”

In 2020, what Shanahan’s last-mile argument reveals, however, is that there is a mistake in teaching reading that can be addressed, but as a society, we refuse to acknowledge that reading is a first-mile problem.

That first mile is much larger than formal schooling, and what we refuse to recognize is that measurable reading achievement is a marker for the disadvantages of poverty and inequity in both the lives and schooling of vulnerable populations of students (students in poverty, black and brown students, English language learners, special needs students).

The accountability movement driven by ever-new standards and ever-new tests has been paralyzed by in-school only reform. That movement is both an example of last-mile reform and why last-mile reform has failed.

First, let’s acknowledge that Shanahan does make a key argument about how reading is taught; for example, a recent review of meta-analyses of systematic intensive phonics has shown that most approaches to teaching reading are about equally effective, as Shanahan suggests.

However, the current “science of reading” version of the Reading War argues that systematic intensive phonics must be required for all students; this phonics-first claim has been concurrent with pathologizing most struggling readers as probably dyslexic.

If we shift from last-mile reform to first-mile reform, then, we must avoid both “all students must” and “everything works,” choosing instead to admit that every student deserves the reading instruction they need (regardless of what programs or standards mandate), and we must acknowledge that students living in relative privilege often acquire reading rather easily, suggesting that the conditions within which students live and learn need to be reformed—not the students or the teaching methods.

First-mile reform in reading must start with addressing poverty and inequity in every child’s life. Alleviating poverty, addressing food security, improving work opportunities and security, adopting universal health care—these are issues of equity that would allow all students to acquire reading in ways that are now common for affluent students (often before entering formal schooling).

Stable communities and homes not overburdened by poverty and inequity would have the opportunities to provide children with language-rich environments that send children to formal schooling already highly literate, often reading before direct instruction.

First-mile reform of reading, however, is not a narrow commitment to out-of-school only, but it makes primary equity-focused out-of-school reform while also including equity-focused in-school reform as secondary but essential.

Instead of digging the accountability hole deeper by seeing reading reform as a last-mile challenge, we must climb out of that silo and think differently about in-school reform.

Equity-focused reading reform starts with the conditions of teaching and learning—guaranteeing students small student/teacher ratios in early literacy classes, insuring all students have experienced and highly-qualified teachers, and funding fully the materials needed for rich literacy experiences (authentic texts for all students and robust libraries in the schools and in children’s homes and communities).

This new approach to reform would also avoid tracking students and then would monitor more directly equitable learning opportunities as opposed to narrow measurable outcomes. For example, all students should be in rich and challenging courses—and not in test-prep classes or highly prescriptive programs (reading programs or systematic phonics for all).

Last-mile reading reform continues to focus on students as inherently flawed humans who need to be fixed; first-mile reading reform recognizes that systems are flawed, and that all students can flourish if their living and learning environments are equitable and conducive to learning.

Ultimately, continuing down the current road to reading reform as if we just need to be more demanding of teachers and students in the crucial last mile is continuing to recognize the negative impact of poverty and inequity on children’s ability to read and teachers’ effectiveness in teaching reading.

We mustn’t keep our heads down, we mustn’t keep digging.

We need finally to acknowledge that reading is a first-mile problem.

Education, education reform, Equity, reading

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

January 24, 2020 plthomasedd 1 Comment

The current “science of reading” climate surrounding public education in the U.S. has its roots, ironically, in misreading (or at least reading uncritically) A Nation at Risk, a report during the Ronald Reagan administration that was widely reported by mainstream media. The politically driven and deeply flawed report also prompted the accountability movement in the U.S.—state standards and high-stakes testing—that eventually enveloped the entire country by the 1990s.

The report established a false but compelling cultural truism that is too rarely interrogated: Public schools in the U.S. are failing. Since the early 1980s, political leadership has decided that the failure is due to a lack of accountability, but accountability of whom or what has shifted over the past 40 years.

The first blame narrative focused on students and schools, ushering in high-stakes testing at 3rd grade, 8th grade, and high school (exit exams) as well as school and district report cards. Eventually high-stakes accountability of students and schools seemed not to change the measurable outcomes that advocates had promised; there were also unintended consequences such as exit exams increasing drop-out rates.

Gradually after No Child Left Behind, the blame narrative moved to teachers, in part driven by George W. Bush’s popularizing the slogan “soft bigotry of low expectations,” the rise of charter schools embracing “no excuses,” and the same messages and buy-in for Bush era education policy by Barack Obama’s administration and Department of Education.

For about a decade the blame narrative focused on teachers, and political leaders rushed to intensify teacher evaluation, notably the use of value-added methods (VAM). Once again, the outcomes promised by advocates did not come to fruition. Recently, in fact, the tide is turning hard against the use of VAM and other types of punitive teacher evaluations.

The vacuum left in the blame narrative did not remain long. Concurrent with the “science of reading” movement that claims public school teachers are not teaching reading guided by the “science of reading” is the next round of blame—teacher education [1].

The blame narrative makes for strange bedfellows. While mainstream media have begun to pound the drum of blame about teacher education fairly consistently, the leading literacy professional organization, the International Literacy Association (ILA), has join the story as well.

Education Week has led this charge; for example, Madeline Will writes in Preservice Teachers Are Getting Mixed Messages on How to Teach Reading:

Decades of research have shown that teaching explicit, systematic phonics is the most reliable way to make sure that young students learn how to read words. Yet an Education Week analysis of nationally representative survey results found that professors who teach early-reading courses are introducing the work of researchers and authors whose findings and theories often conflict with one another, including some that may not be aligned with the greater body of scientific research.

EdWeek‘s survey data are being confirmed, it seems, by ILA’s survey data: 60% of respondents claim their teacher education programs did not prepare them well to teach reading.

First, we should pause at media and professional organizations citing survey data while also embracing a very rigid and narrow demand for the “science of reading.” Survey data have many problems, and in this case, we may want to know if disgruntled teachers were disproportionately motivated to reply.

None the less it is quite a different thing to say “60% of respondents claimed X” than “60% of teachers claimed X.” Are these survey data representative of all teachers of reading?

Let’s assume this is true, that more than half of teachers charged with reading instruction are not properly prepared to teach reading. But let’s also unpack how that came to be, and ultimately answer in a fair way, where is the blame?

For the past 30-40 years, teachers and teacher educators have had less and less professional autonomy; or stated a different way, the professional autonomy of teachers and teacher educators has been reduced to how well they can implement mandated standards and produce measurable outcomes that prove those standards were implemented and effective.

In the high-stakes accountability era, then, if we are going to accept that 60% of teachers were not well prepared in their teacher education programs, we must be willing to acknowledge that those programs were governed most often by the accreditation process. Organizations such as NCATE and CAEP have been holding teacher education accountable along with the coordination of professional organizations.

How teacher education approached literacy broadly and reading specifically was grounded in standards designed by ILA (elementary) and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) (secondary), and those programs were periodically monitored by ILA and NCTE for if or how well the programs met those standards.

If we currently believe that the teaching of reading in our public schools is failing our students, we must also acknowledge that teachers are implementing state standards of reading and preparing students for state tests of reading; those teachers were also taught how to teach in teacher education programs implementing national standards determined by ILA and NCTE.

Accepting the survey data as valid, then, the blame for these failures lie in the accountability and accreditation process, of which teachers and teacher educators are mere agents.

After being a classroom teacher of ELA for 18 years and then a teacher educator for the last 18 years, I believe I have a strong and well informed view of what is really happening. This is a better explanation, but not a simple one that the media would prefer or a politically expedient one that politicians would prefer.

Education was never the type of failure determined by A Nation at Risk, and a lack of accountability was never the cause of what the true failures in education were then and are today.

Formal education is a reflection of and a perpetuating force for inequity in the U.S. Public schools are not game changers.

Therefore, it is true that far too many students are not being taught to read well enough, and that on balance, public education is failing far too many students.

Those failures are about inequity—inequity of opportunities both outside and inside schools that disproportionately impacts poor students, black and brown students, English language learners, and special needs students (the “science of reading” movement has correctly identified these vulnerable student populations, in fact).

And as jumbled as the journey has been, the logic experiment I offer above reaches a credible conclusion: the accountability era has failed. Miserably. Once again disproportionately impacting vulnerable populations of students.

But accreditation has failed just as much. Accountability grounded in standards and high-stakes assessment are not conducive to teaching, learning, or scholarship.

As a former classroom teacher, I can attest to that fact; as a current teacher educator, I can confirm that complying with accreditation mandates dilute my courses and overburden my professional work to the exclusion of scholarship and research.

Accountability structures are mostly bureaucracy, mostly a distraction from real teaching, learning, or professional behavior.

While I am frustrated with mainstream media misrepresenting reading and reading instruction, I am baffled that ILA would enter a fray that turns the blame narrative back on the organization itself. Maybe they didn’t think this through, but it is really almost impossible not to blame professional organizations who govern teacher education if we determine teacher education has failed.

Here, then, is a larger lesson of this entire four-decades mess: Let’s stop looking for people to scapegoat in the blame narrative, and recognize instead that the accountability/accreditation systems are failing us, especially when we are complying well to them.

Professional autonomy for K-12 teachers and teacher educators is a process we have not tried, but one far more likely to give our schools and our students a better chance if we also acknowledge that social and educational equity need the same financial and administrative focus we have given accountability since the early 1980s.

[1] See: Contesting Science That Silences: Amplifying Equity, Agency, and Design Research in Literacy Teacher Preparation

In contrast to the claims made by the SOR community, research in literacy teacher preparation has been exten- sive, scientific, and useful for guiding reform efforts. CITE-ITEL, an online database (https://cite.edb.utexas. edu/) of published research articles on literacy teacher preparation, offers a window into contemporary scholar- ship on the same.3 CITE-ITEL is updated regularly and is freely accessible. There are currently 677 research studies in the database, published between 1999 and 2019 in over 90 scholarly journals. These include journals sponsored by professional organizations in literacy (see Table 1) and other highly respected, independent journals (e.g., Teaching and Teacher Education, Reading Psychology).

The term science of reading appears in only four of the 677 research reports, and none of the studies examined the reliability or validity of the assessment tools used to mea- sure the knowledge that preservice teachers hold about the SOR. Despite the political and media attention given to the SOR and the tools on which the SOR community relies, there is no body of evidence that reflects the SOR perspective on literacy teacher preparation by members of the literacy teacher preparation research community
Hoffman, J.V., Hikida, M., & Sailors, M. (2020). Contesting science that silences: Amplifying equity, agency, and design research in literacy teacher preparation. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S255–S266. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.353

The Fatal Flaw of Teacher Education: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Education, education reform, School choice

School Choice Fails Students and Parents

January 22, 2020 plthomasedd 1 Comment

It has been a decade since I raised this question, Parental Choice?, after spending about a year examining all the research available as well as the public and political debate about school choice.

Now, Education Week seems to have finally recognized some of the conclusions I presented in that book: Why Don’t Parents Always Choose the Best Schools? I think it is important that this article does not ask “if” parents choose the best schools, but concedes that parental choice is a flawed part of the school choice as an avenue to educational reform argument.

In short, my research and analysis show that parental choice and school choice fail because they suffer from the same problem concerning all choice driven by America’s idealized perception of individual freedom and market economies. If school choice were a powerful and effective lever for positive educational reform (and it isn’t), market forces remain indirect ways to create the sort of equity of opportunity that a democracy could accomplish directly.

Choice, at best, is slow and erratic, depending on the quality and expertise of the consumers to eventually shape the outcomes desired all along. Pop music is exactly what consumers have created through supply and demand, but we are under no illusion that pop music success equals the highest quality of music possible. High-quality music may have a better chance of being produced by musicians fully publicly funded by NEA grants and left free of corrupting market dynamics.

The consumer choice/quality dynamic in school choice is the problem that Arianna Prothero is acknowledging and confronting in EdWeek.

The research and outcomes related to school choice have always been mixed at best, and the school choice debate has been marred by shifting talking points (different types of choice schemes and different outcomes promised). Since support from school choice is often ideological or driven by the inequity experienced in public education, however, the following patterns continue to characterize the debate:

Parents participating in school choice focus more often on cultural and ideological commitments rather than academic quality. School choice, then, is more likely to create stratified schools and not work as a lever for motivating higher academic quality across all schooling. School choice is not proof that a rising tide lifts all boats, but proof that given the opportunity, people will segregate themselves in a lot of different boats while disregarding the threat of drowning facing some of them.
School choice unintentionally feeds into the tyranny of parents at the exclusion of children’s autonomy and human rights. Secular public schools should be an opportunity for all children to experience a democracy of ideas and become the humans those children choose to be. Students shepherded into academic settings that perpetuate narrow ideals and ideas dictated by the parents are denied their choices and opportunities.
Marginalized and underserved populations (impoverished, Black communities, English language learners, etc.) do often welcome school choice as a possible avenue to greater equity of opportunity; that promise has also proven to be empty, but underserved populations’ support for school choice is also misread. School choice and charter schools have driven school re-segregation (clearly not a positive outcome for Black parents and students) and has not guaranteed that all students have the opportunities found in elite private schools (the choice of wealthy and mostly white parents). If public schools simply served all students well and fully, then the support for school choice found among marginalized groups would disappear.
Rarely do any advocates for school choice acknowledge that the qualities commonly found among expensive private schools—what the wealthy choose—are aspects of school reform that could be implemented in all public schools if there was the political will to do so. However, low student-teacher ratios, challenging course work (such as Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate), and expansive fine arts programs somehow are not on the education reform agenda for all students.
The school choice debate ultimately fails because it doesn’t pull back far enough and acknowledge that public schools should be of a universally high quality that makes choice unnecessary. As a culture, we do not allow the market to determine which bridges we drive across are safe or not; all of us driving expect a minimum high quality of bridges on all public roads and highways. As I have concluded before:

People in poverty deserve essential Commons—such as a police force and judicial system, a military, a highway system, a healthcare system, and universal public education—that make choice unnecessary. In short, among the essentials of a free people, choice shouldn’t be needed by anyone.

No child should have to wait for good schools while the market sorts some out, no human should have to wait for quality medical care while the market sorts some out, no African American teen gunned down in the street should have to wait for the market to sort out justice—the Commons must be the promise of the essential equity and justice that both make freedom possible and free people embrace.

School choice advocates fail to consider the indirect and haphazard mechanisms of market forces. School choice not only re-segregates schools, but also creates a huge amount of wasteful churn—students moving among schools along with teachers and even the shifting of school building. The great charter overthrow experienced in New Orleans post-Katrina, for example, has replaced all the public schools with charter schools—with essentially the exact same educational problems remaining for the students, parents, and community.
School choice research has been negatively impacted by common problems with educational research (comparing similar populations, confronting problems of scaling up, etc.) as well as the corrupting influence of advocacy. Too much of what is presented in the media as “research” is actually advocacy masquerading as scholarship. Pro-school choice think tanks have been very aggressive and depended on a non-critical media and public, both of which are highly susceptible to press-release and both-sides journalism.

Ultimately, the school choice debate is a distraction from a sobering fact: the U.S. has failed public education by never completely committing to high-quality education for every child in the country regardless of their ZIP code.

There is no mystery to what constitutes a great school, high academic quality, or challenging education, but there is solid proof that almost no one in the U.S. has the political will to choose to guarantee that for every child so that no one has to hope an Invisible Hand might offer a few crumbs here and there.

Crisis, Education, education reform, Education Week, Educational Research, NPR, reading, Standards

Reading Programs Put Reading Last

January 19, 2020 plthomasedd 2 Comments

girl reading book — Photo by Jerry Wang on Unsplash

While rewatching Zombieland recently, I noticed that this version of the zombie genre was not only a blend of horror and comedy but also a slightly different take on the zombie mythology; a central character, Columbus (played by Jesse Eisenberg), embodies a motif focusing not on the zombies but on the survivors, and their survival techniques often grounded in anxiety and other compulsions that are often a burden in the so-called normal world.

Zombie narratives are enduring in popular culture throughout history because reanimation of life and the near impossibility of killing the reanimated are truly horrifying elements. But zombie narratives are also highly adaptable to many cultural perspectives.

Currently the Reading War has been reanimated around the branding of the “science of reading,” and this version seems even harder to kill than previous iterations; the effectiveness of the double tap perfected by Columbus in the film would be deeply appreciated in this circumstance.

As we wander into 2020, the “science of reading” movement has developed a few new approaches grounded in the foundational arguments that have made “science of reading” as compelling as a zombie story: discrediting popular reading programs as not scientific and reanimating Reading First (the program built on the National Reading Panel).

Central to these developments in the “science of reading” onslaught on reading are two key names: Timothy Shanahan and Lucy Calkins.

In many ways, Shanahan (a member of NRP) has emerged as a key voice in rewriting the history of both the NRP and Reading First. Calkins, as the name on a widely adopted reading program, now represents the so-called failed balanced literacy movement.

Here we have names and people superimposed onto the false war between phonics (Shanahan) and balanced literacy/whole language (Calkins).

Calkins has posted a defense of her programs, and Shanahan has recently posted a somewhat garbled defense of Reading First.

However, there is no value in mainstream media pointing fingers at Calkins, charging her with a self-serving agenda, while supporting Shanahan, who is conducting his own PR campaign for his role in the NRP. Let them without agendas cast the first stone. (Hint: There are plenty of agendas to go around on this.)

Yet, it is a negative review of Calkins’s program that has found a home in the mainstream media:

A new player has moved into the curriculum review market: Nonprofit consulting group Student Achievement Partners announced this week that it is going to start evaluating literacy curricula against reading research.

The group released its first report on Thursday: an evaluation of the Units of Study for Teaching Reading in grades K-5, a workshop style program designed by Lucy Calkins and published through the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project.

The seven literacy researchers who reviewed the program gave it a negative evaluation, writing that it was “unlikely to lead to literacy success for all of America’s public schoolchildren.”

This last point quoted from the review is incredibly important to unpack, as is the urgency with which the mainstream media reports this review mostly uncritically.

First, there is a serious contradiction and hypocrisy when the mainstream media commit to a term such as the “science of reading,” demanding that reading instruction is always grounded in a narrow concept of “scientific” (the so-called gold standard of cognitive psychology, specifically), but participate in press release journalism.

We must ask about the review endorsed by EdWeek: Is it scientific? Has it been blind peer-reviewed? Do the authors have any agendas that would skew the findings?

And then we must argue: If mainstream journalists are now demanding that educators implement only practices supported by high-quality scientific studies, those journalists should not report on any reviews or studies that themselves are not also high-quality scientific studies.

This contradiction in which the media have lower standards for their reporting than for the agenda they are promoting is a window, however, into what is really going on, bringing us back to the conclusion about Calkins’s reading program.

All reading programs can and should be viewed through that conclusion: “unlikely to lead to literacy success for all of America’s public schoolchildren.”

In fact, like the Orwellian named Reading First, reading programs always put reading last because reading programs are inevitably linked over the past 40 years to the accountability movement; teachers and students have been disproportionately held accountable for implementing and following the programs and not for authentic reading.

Reading First did in fact fail, despite arguments to the contrary, because the bureaucracy allowed the natural corruption inherent in the market; funding for reading became inappropriately tied to specific reading programs and textbook companies using the label of “scientifically based” (a central element of No Child Left Behind and the NRP almost twenty years ago).

Reading was last in the Reading First scandal because the focus became adopting and implementing Open Court.

The real irony here is that the market/accountability dynamic is at the heart of why it makes perfect sense to conclude that Calkins’s program is “unlikely to lead to literacy success for all of America’s public schoolchildren.”

And the bigger irony is that whole language and balanced literacy were attempts to pull back from scripted and prescriptive program approaches to teaching reading and to provide philosophical and theoretical frameworks within which teachers could use their professional autonomy to shape reading instruction to the needs of “all of America’s public schoolchildren.”

This is a much ignored truism found in John Dewey: In education, we must resist reducing philosophical and theoretical truths to fixed templates that then become not guiding principles but simplistic mandates to be fulfilled.

Children reading eagerly and critically—this is the real goal of teaching reading in our public schools; that is putting reading first, not any commercial program whether it be systematic intensive phonics or one promoted as balanced literacy.

Reanimating NRP and Reading First is, I concede, on its second round so I can hold out hope that a vigilant double tap may put these zombies back in the ground permanently.

None the less, I will remain anxious like Columbus, skeptical that we are safe.

Pearson Reading First

Democracy, Education, education reform, Invisible Hand

The Market Fails Education

January 9, 2020 plthomasedd 1 Comment

One of the intended consequences of the federal legislation known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was to force public schools in the U.S. to disclose and then address differences among demographics of students. Two of the key demographics targeted were race and socioeconomic status.

While the outcome of this part of NCLB was not a surprise—exposing significant and persistent “gaps” correlated strongly with poverty and so-called racial minorities—there were unintended consequences, including the creation of the achievement gap market.

NCLB mandated that districts and schools not only report disaggregated data on race, gender, and socioeconomic categories, but also document how those gaps and demographics of students were being addressed in order to close the gap.

Within just a few years, then, Ruby Payne boosted her own career by monetizing how to address the poverty gap in education, as detailed by Ng and Rury in 2009:

Measures of Payne’s influence are remarkable to consider. Her aforementioned [self-published] book[, A Framework for Understanding Poverty,] has sold over one million copies and been translated into other languages such as Spanish since its publication in 2005. Payne has also launched a speaking career by conducting professional development workshops in 38 American states and internationally. She trains approximately 40,000 educators a year and reports having worked with 70 to 80 percent of the nation’s districts over the last decade with the assistance of her staff and consultants (Shapira, 2007).

However, while Payne provided a product that met the demands of the market created by NCLB, scholars of poverty, race, and education eventually exposed significant problems with Payne’s book and workshops:

While Payne’s popularity cannot be disputed, her work has generated great controversy and criticism. For example, questions have been raised about the methodological validity of her work and subsequent self-proclaimed “expertise” (Baker, Ng & Rury, 2006). Others have criticized the deficiency-oriented nature of her views on poor people that results not only in blaming the victim for being poor in the first place, but also blaming the victim for not exercising the power to alleviate his/her poor condition (Bohn, 2006; OseiKofi, 2005; Gorski, 2006a & 2006b). Reviews of Payne’s published materials also indicate her inaccurate characterization of existing social science research and reliance upon stereotypes that poor people are disproportionately more immoral, lazy, and promiscuous than middle-class or wealthy individuals (Ng & Rury, 2006). And lastly, a careful analysis of the 607 “truth claims” she makes in her text reveals that the majority of her assertions actually contradict the findings of empirical work in fields such as education, anthropology, and sociology (Bomer, Dorin, May & Semingson, 2008). (Ng & Rury, 2009)

While scholarship continued to grow debunking Payne as an authority on poverty and education, Adrienne van der Valk reported on the Payne debate, and enduring career funded by K-12 education, in 2016:

Writer and educator Ruby Payne has been offering strategies for teaching students in poverty for almost 20 years. Since 1996, when she founded her business, aha! Process, to train educators on “the critical role schools can play in helping children and teens exit poverty,” Payne and her affiliates have, according to her website, “trained hundreds of thousands of professionals.” Her self-published book, A Framework for Understanding Poverty, has sold more than 1.5 million copies. Chances are, if you’re a K-12 educator who has received professional development on working with students in poverty, the training was associated with Ruby Payne.

It has now been several years more than a decade since a number of scholars warned that Payne has no credible expertise in poverty, and more disturbingly, that Payne’s central claims perpetuate stereotypes, deficit thinking, and victim-blaming, as van der Valk details:

In our conversations with scholars, educators and other stakeholders, five main criticisms of Payne’s K-12 materials emerged:

They focus on individual interventions and ignore the systems that cause, worsen and perpetuate poverty.

They overgeneralize about people living in poverty and rely upon stereotypes.

They focus on perceived weaknesses (or deficits) of children and families living in poverty.

They are theoretically ungrounded and offer little evidence that they work.

aha! Process workshops—and their price tags—capitalize on the needs of children in poverty.

The ability of Payne to grow her business absent credible expertise or even valid products can also be seen in her newest branding, an Emotional Poverty Workshop offered in February 2020.

Using the belief systems in Payne’s work as well as the belief systems of the education administration and faculty who choose Payne and continue to support her work, it would be easy to blame those school personnel and Payne herself for the Payne phenomenon. But that would be as misguided as Payne’s books and workshops themselves.

The problem here is systemic—reducing a foundational public institution to the whims of the free market. If the system within which Payne is thriving were a different system, we could imagine school personnel and even Payne herself behaving differently.

The systemic problem is distinctly American since it involves the false either/or beliefs in the U.S. concerning socialism (as a reductive and misused term for “publicly funded”) and capitalism. While many in the U.S. claim the country is more devoted to democracy than its economic system, a strong case can be made that the U.S. is capitalism first if not working toward capitalism exclusively.

Public discourse and policy tend to represent anything publicly funded as inefficient, corrupt, and/or failing. Think the narratives around public schools throughout at least the last 170 years.

To understand better how the market necessarily fails education, please consider the road and highway system in the U.S. Roads and highways are primarily publicly funded, and even when roads are funded directly by the users (toll roads), many motorists dislike that version of transportation, and toll roads often fail, then converted into public roads.

Fully publicly funded and well maintained roads and highways are an excellent example of the systemic problem driving the Payne phenomenon. Publicly funded and the market are not antagonistic systems that any public must choose between, but potentially symbiotic forces that allow each system to function better together than in isolation.

Publicly funded roads and highways are essential to the market economy in the U.S., facilitating worker mobility and the near ubiquity of goods and services across the country. As the market thrives, as well, tax dollars are generated at higher and stronger rates, providing even more and better roads and highways.

Symbiotic.

Many in the U.S., notably political leadership, fail to recognize or acknowledge that symbiotic relationship, speaking instead idealistically about the market and demonizing about publicly funded. Public education, then, in some ways like the medical field, is forced into a hybrid system that feeds and depends on the market.

The problem, however, is a bit more complicated than simply blaming the market. In education, the failure of the hybrid nature of education funding (mostly public) and education spending (participating in the market, some of which is created or fueled by public policy) is in part bureaucracy, a failure found in both public institutions and private business.

Payne’s poverty prosperity was made possible by policy in NCLB but also because funds were earmarked and set to a deadline (spend it or lose it) within an accountability system that demanded that districts and schools document that the achievement gap was being addressed. This process occurred far too often (and occurs far too often still) in a purely administrative way.

NCLB also created administrative positions and duties; some people were charged (among dozens of other responsibilities) with complying with NCLB. Those education personnel likely did not have the expertise to evaluate the “who” and “how” of complying with NCLB achievement gap mandates, but was charged with making whatever could fulfill the mandate happen.

While NCLB has been replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act, the legacy of NCLB remains, a hyper-focus on the achievement gap that sustains the race and poverty market in education consulting and materials.

Public education would better serve students and democracy as well as the economy if it were removed from the market (similar to arguments being made about the health care system now) so that bureaucracy is replaced by professionalism and expertise (education decisions made based on research and experience, not policy mandates driven by accountability) and all education materials and professional development are completely funded by public dollars but also created exclusively within the public education system (not purchased from private vendors).

The Payne phenomenon and mistake would never have occurred and would not be lingering if race and poverty experts were employed throughout education and if all necessary materials and professional development were provided by those experts within the education system. The quality of this process would be much higher and the outcomes would likely be far more substantial.

Education, educators, and students are being mis-served by Payne and others who continue to monetize poverty, racism, and inequity, but this problem is likely a symptom of a much larger disease, the hybrid nature of public education funding and depending on a free market that is too often free of credibility or scholarly oversight.

The U.S. needs and deserves a robust and autonomous public education system free of bureaucracy and outside the market that invariably fails education and our students.

Education, education reform, Educational Research, literacy, Lou LaBrant, reading

Recommended: Literacy Crises: False Claims and Real Solutions, Jeff McQuillan [Update 2 February 2023]

December 31, 2019 plthomasedd

[UPDATE]

After posting this in 2019 while working on the first edition of How to End the Reading War and Serve the Literacy Needs of All Students: A Primer for Parents, Policy Makers, and People Who Care, I have published the second edition and continued to work on the “science of reading” movement.

Regretfully, McQuillan’s work is even more relevant in 2023 because the media and political response to the SOR movement has gained momentum despite the evidence that it is mostly misinformation and another round of the exact reading war McQuillan debunked in the 1990s.

I highly recommend accessing this (which I will cite/quote below in the update of the original post):

McQuillan, Jeff (1998) “Seven Myths about Literacy in the United States,” Practical Assessment, Research, and Evaluation: Vol. 6 , Article 1.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7275/em9c-0h59
Available at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/pare/vol6/iss1/1 [1]

Recently, I have been (frantically but carefully) drafting a new book for IAP about the current “science of reading” version of the Reading War: How to End the Reading War and Serve the Literacy Needs of All Students: A Primer for Parents, Policy Makers, and People Who Care.

Those familiar with this blog and my scholarly work should be aware that I often ground my examinations of education in a historical context, drawing heavily on the subject of my dissertation, Lou LaBrant. The book I am writing begins in earnest, in fact, with “Chapter 1: A Historical Perspective of the Reading War: 1940s and 1990s Editions.”

As I have posted here, the “science of reading” over-reaction to reading and dyslexia across mainstream media as well as in state-level reading legislation has a number of disturbing parallels with the claims of a reading crisis in the 1980s and 1990s. Few people, I explained, are aware of the 1997 report authored by Linda Darling-Hammond on NAEP, reading achievement in the U.S., and the positive correlations with whole language (WL) practices and test scores.

I imagine even fewer education journalists and political leaders have read a powerful and important work about that literacy crisis in the 1990s, Literacy Crises: False Claims and Real Solutions by Jeff McQuillan.

In his Chapter 1, “What Isn’t Wrong with Reading: Seven Myths about Literacy in the United States,” McQuillan admits, “Serious problems exist with reading achievement in many United States schools,” adding, “Yet in the midst of media coverage of our (latest) ‘literary crisis,’ we should be very clear about what is and is not failing in our schools” (p. 1).

This leads to his list of myths ([1] updated with material from McQuillan’s article noted above), which are again being recycled in the “science of reading” version of the Reading War:

Myth 1: Reading Achievement in the United States Has Declined in the Past Twenty-Five Years.

Myth 2: Forty Percent of United States Children Can’t Read at a Basic Level.

Myth 3: Twenty Percent of Our Children Are Dyslexic.

Myth 4: Children from the Baby Boomer Generation Read Better than Students Today.

Myth 5: Students in the United States Are Among the Worst Readers in the World.

Myth 6: The Number of Good Readers Has Been Declining, While the Number of Poor Readers Has been Increasing.

Myth 7: California’s Test Scores Declined Dramatically Due to Whole Language Instruction.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7275/em9c-0h59

McQuillan carefully dismantles each of these, with evidence, but many today continue to make the same misguided and unsupported claims.

In 2019 (and 2023), McQuillan’s work remains important, and relevant, both for understanding how we should teach better our students to read and how the current version of the Reading War is wandering once again down very worn dead-end roads.

Education, education reform, reading, Teaching, Testing

Mississippi Miracle, Mirage, or Political Lie?: 2019 NAEP Reading Scores Prompt Questions, Not Answers [Update September 2023]

December 6, 2019 plthomasedd 6 Comments

Update September 2023

Grade Retention Harms Children, Corrupts Test Data, But Not a Miracle: Mississippi Edition

UPDATE

CRUMBLING SCHOOLS, DISMAL OUTCOMES: Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education was supposed to change everything for Southern black children, Bracey Harris

UPDATE 15 February 2022

Opinion: Reeves’ Education Mirage

Key points:

To make his case, Reeves — much like the Mississippi Department of Education itself — is chronically selective in his statistics, telling only part of the story and leaving out facts that would show that many of these gains are either illusory or only seem to be impressive because the state started so far behind most of the rest of the nation….

Even the state’s impressive improvement on the National Assessment of Educational Progress may not be quite all that it seems.

From 2013 to 2019, the latest year for which results are available, Mississippi students rose faster in fourth grade reading than anyone on the national test. They improved their ranking from 49th to 29th. The gains in math were even more impressive, jumping from 50th to 23rd during that same time frame.

Reeves attributes the progress to “third grade gate,” the reform pushed through by Republicans in 2013 that requires third graders to demonstrate they are at least minimally proficient in reading before they advance to fourth grade.

The Republican belief is that the threat of having to repeat a grade has prompted students, their families and teachers to work harder to be sure that doesn’t happen.

Another interpretation has been offered, though. It’s that because of third grade gate, Mississippi’s lowest performing students get an extra year of instruction before they take the fourth grade test. With the state failing more than twice as many students in their early years as the national average, that could create a significant advantage, though probably a short-lived one.

The research remains inconclusive on this point. It’s not on the others.
REEVES’ EDUCATION MIRAGE

UPDATE 7 December 2022

Note the trends in Mississippi’s NAEP Reading scores from 1992 through 2022 and the contrast between grade 4 and grade 8:

Note that Mississippi’s grade 4 reading scores on NAEP show:

MS has steadily improved scores over thirty years despite adopting different reading programs, implementing different state standards, and reforming with multiple reading policies.
MS has had two large gains—one from 2005 to 2009, 7 points, and one from 2013 to 2019, 10 points, dropping to 8 with 2022—raising a question about the role of SOR legislation since that first large gain is pre-SOR.
MS remains well below proficient on average, similar to other high-poverty states.

Note that Mississippi’s grade 8 reading scores on NAEP show:

Apparent “gains” made in grade 4 have disappeared by grade 8 (consistent with research on systematic phonics instruction for reading).
MS grade 8 scores on reading have remained relatively flat for 24 years.
MS grade 8 larger increases happened in 2002-2003 and 2017-2019, again one well before and another after SOR legislation.

UPDATE 4 July 2023

Column: How Mississippi gamed its national reading test scores to produce ‘miracle’ gains (see HERE also)

MISSISSIPPI’S MIRACLE: Do we really have a “Mississippi mirage?”

MISSISSIPPI’S MIRACLE: Has the revolution reached the eighth grade?

UPDATE: Mississippi reading isn’t so miraculous after all

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

There is a disturbing contradiction in the predicted jubilant response to Mississippi’s outlier 4th-grade results from the 2019 NAEP reading test. That contradiction can be found in a new article by Emily Hanford, using Mississippi to recycle her brand, a call for the “science of reading.”

This is a great deal to ask of the average reader, but Hanford’s argument is grounded in a claim that most students in the U.S. are being taught reading through methods that are not supported by scientific research (code for narrow types of quantitative research that can identify causal relationships and thus can be generalized to all students).

However, the contradiction lies in Hanford’s own concession about the 2019 NAEP reading data from Mississippi:

The state’s performance in reading was especially notable. Mississippi was the only state in the nation to post significant gains on the fourth-grade reading test. Fourth graders in Mississippi are now on par with the national average, reading as well or better than pupils in California, Texas, Michigan and 18 other states.

What’s up in Mississippi? There’s no way to know for sure what causes increases in test scores [emphasis added], but Mississippi has been doing something notable: making sure all of its teachers understand the science of reading.

To be fair, there is a way to know, and that would be conducting scientific research that teases out the factors that can be identified as causing the test score changes in the state.

In her missionary zeal for the “science of reading,” Hanford contradicts herself by taking most of the article to imply without any scientific evidence, without any research, that Mississippi’s gains are by her fervent implication a result of the state’s embracing the “science of reading”: “In 2013, legislators in Mississippi provided funding to start training the state’s teachers in the science of reading.”

Let me stress here a couple points.

First, scientific research connecting classroom practices to NAEP test scores is rare, but in the 1990s, comparative data were released on 1992 scores in 1997. That research showed a possible link between whole language practices and higher NAEP scores—something that Hanford and her “science of reading” followers may find shocking since they routinely claim that whole language and balanced literacy are not scientifically supported.

Therefore, it is simply far too soon after the release of the 2019 NAEP scores to suggest any relationship between classroom practices (as if they are uniform across an entire state) and NAEP scores. Any implications about Mississippi are premature and irresponsible to make for journalists, politicians, or advocates for education.

Premature and irresponsible.

Second, data from Mississippi are more than 4th-grade 2019 reading—if we genuinely want to know something of value about teaching children to read.

Mississippi’s outlier 4th-grade reading scores are way more complicated once we frame them against longitudinal NAEP scores as well as 8th-grade reading scores. These, then, are more data we should using to ask questions about Mississippi instead of making rash and unscientific claims:

4th grade reading trends

4th grade score gaps

8th grade reading trends

8th grade score gaps

Here are some complicated takeaways from this larger picture:

If the “science of reading” is the cause of recent gains in 4th-grade reading in MS, how do we explain that MS has seen a trend of increased scores since 1998 and pretty significant jumps between 2005 and 2009[1], well before the shift identified by Hanford in 2013?
Why does MS still show about the same gaps between Black and white students as well as between socioeconomic classes of students since 1998 if how we teach reading is the key factor in achievement?
And a really powerful question concerns 8th grade: Are any 4th-grade gains by MS (or any state) merely mirages since many states with 4th-grade gains see a drop by 8th grade and since longitudinal 8th-grade scores are mostly flat since 1998?
UPDATE: Todd Collins has raised another important caveat to the 4th-grade reading gains in Mississippi because the state has the highest 3rd-grade retention percentages in the country:

But Mississippi has taken the concept further than others, with a retention rate higher than any other state. In 2018–19, according to state department of education reports, 8 percent of all Mississippi K–3 students were held back (up from 6.6 percent the prior year). This implies that over the four grades, as many as 32 percent of all Mississippi students are held back; a more reasonable estimate is closer to 20 to 25 percent, allowing for some to be held back twice. (Mississippi’s Department of Education does not report how many students are retained more than once.)

This last concern means that significant numbers of students in states with 3rd-grade retention based on reading achievement and test scores are biologically 5th-graders being held to 4th-grade proficiency levels. Grade retention is not only correlated with many negative outcomes (dropping out, for example), but also likely associated with “false positives” on testing; as well, most states seeing bumps in 4th-grade test scores also show that those gains disappear by middle and high school.

UPDATE

(USDOE/Office of Civil Rights) – Data 2017-2018

Sources

Ultimately, if anyone wants to argue that how we teach reading in the U.S. must be grounded only in a narrow view of “scientific” (and that is a terrible argument, by the way), then any claims we make about the effectiveness of those practices must also be supported by scientific research.

Despite efforts to make Mississippi a shining example of how all states should address reading policy, we should be using Mississippi (and the 29 states scoring higher) to examine all the factors contributing to why students achieve at the levels they do on NAEP reading.

Unless of course we have real political courage and are willing to admit that NAEP and any form of standardized testing are the wrong way to make these decisions.

Here’s something to think about in that regard: As long as we use this sort of testing, we will always have some states above the average, several at the average, and some below the average—resulting in the same nonsensical hand wringing we see today that is no different than any decade over the last 100 years.

I recommend instead of all the scientific research needed to make any fair claim, we stop the testing, make teaching and learning conditions better, make the lives of children and their families in the U.S. better, and do the complicated daily work it requires to serve the needs of all students.

NOTE

[1] Hanford contradicts herself again and open the door to another question:

For years, everyone assumed Mississippi was at the bottom in reading because it was the poorest state in the nation. Mississippi is still the poorest state, but fourth graders there now read at the national average. While every other state’s fourth graders made no significant progress in reading on this year’s test, or lost ground, Mississippi’s fourth-grade reading scores are up by 10 points since 2013, when the state began the effort to train its teachers in the science of reading. Correlation isn’t causation* [emphasis added], but Mississippi has made a huge investment in helping teachers learn the science behind reading.

There is an 8-point jump in 4th-grade reading in MS from 2002 to 2009—well before the 2013 shift to the “science of reading”—thus how is that explained? [UPDATED]

* For the record, causation is a key component of “scientific,” which Hanford espouses for reading, yet she stoops to correlation (not scientific) to make her argument.

Education, education reform, Educational Research, reading

Back to the Future of Reading Instruction: 1990s Edition

December 2, 2019 plthomasedd 1 Comment

[Header Photo by Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash]

The year is 1997 and the topic, of course, is improving a failing education system in the U.S. Linda Darling-Hammond explains in the Preface [1]:

This follow-up report, Doing What Matters Most: Investing in Quality Teaching, seeks to gauge the nation’s progress toward the goal of high-quality teaching in every classroom in every community. It draws on data about the conditions of teaching that have become available since the original Commission report was released, and it examines policy changes that have occurred.

This report has five recommendations that may sound familiar:

I. Standards for teachers linked to standards for students….

II. Reinvent teacher preparation and professional development….

III. Overhaul teacher recruitment and put qualified teachers in every classroom….

IV. Encourage and reward knowledge and skill….

V. Create schools that are organized for student and teacher success.

We need better standards for teachers and students, better teacher education, better recruitment of teachers focusing on high quality, better reward systems for teacher expertise and outcomes, and better teaching and learning conditions.

Yet, the report also offers some sobering information:

Over the last decade, reforms have sought to increase the amount of academic coursework and the numbers of tests students take, in hopes of improving achievement. These initiatives have made a great difference in coursetaking: In 1983, only 14% of high school students took the number of academic courses recommended in A Nation at Risk—4 units in English and 3 each in mathematics, science, and social studies. By 1994, more than half (51%) had taken this set of recommended courses.

Despite these changes, achievement scores have improved little, and have actually declined slightly for high school students in reading and writing since 1988 (see figure 3). [emphasis added]

Let’s look at that figure 3:

Notice anything familiar above when we look at 4th and 8th grade reading since the early 1990s?

While this report concedes what research has long shown—the largest influences on measurable student outcomes are out-of-school factors (parent income, level of education, etc.)—the focus remains on teacher practices, offering a rare set of correlations between scores and those practices:

Here is where I want to pause to note that while no one has conducted even a correlational graph such as the one above—and no one has conducted scientific research to identify causal relationships—to draw conclusions about 2017 and 2019 NAEP scores, this chart raises some key questions about the current “science of reading” claims about teacher education and the need for systematic intensive phonics (and not whole language or balanced literacy).

Note above that whole literacy practices and training correlate with higher scores.

Twenty years after this report from Darling-Hammond have seen at least two significant additional rounds of educational reform, one driven by No Child Left Behind and another sputtering one connected to Common Core.

Just as educational leaders were in the 1990s, we are left with the same data problems, notably flat or dismal reading scores, and can only reach for the same lazy arguments that have never worked before.

The five recommendations from 1997 are echoed today by political leaders and the “science of reading” crowd, all bashing teacher education, teacher expertise, and focusing on standards, tests, and programs.

And little to nothing is done about food and work security, healthcare, or class size—even though these conditions combined would dwarf any measurable impact of teacher quality or program/standards quality.

Ultimately, the “science of reading” and NAEP-crisis rhetoric are doomed because the Christopher Columbus syndrome (thinking you have discovered something that others you ignore or marginalize have known forever) insures that one truism will remain true—those ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it.

Today’s reading crisis is that, back to the future of reading, a 1990s edition recast [2].

[1] Credit and appreciation to Diane Stephens, literacy expert and former professor at the University of South Carolina, who brought this report to my attention.

[2] Don’t forget the 1940s also: “What Shall We Do About Reading Today?”

Education, education reform, reading

Worst NAEP Reading 2019 Hot Take of the Week

November 20, 2019 plthomasedd

This is really a hard feat, but Put “Whole Language” on Trial by the King of Know-Nothing edureform Michael J. Petrilli is easily the worst NAEP Reading 2019 Hot Take of the week.

Dumb doesn’t get any dumber than this:

An equal-opportunity challenge related to shoddy teacher preparation would likely face the same roadblock. Further, there is little, if any, legal precedent for suing schools of education; even medical schools enjoy significant protections from charges of malpractice related to the physicians they train.

All of which is why it would be important to go after states, and in particular states that have already lost finance-adequacy cases. It would also help if the chosen target states do not require elementary-school teachers to pass an in-depth test of the science of reading before entering the classroom, and if the states host several big education schools that earn failing grades when it comes to preparing candidates to teach reading effectively. States that appear to meet those criteria include Kentucky, South Carolina, and Washington.

Petrilli has entered the “science of reading debate” a little late but just as fact-challenged as the other advocates have been.

So here are a few questions:

Where is scientific research that how teacher education programs prepare teachers to teach reading is actually how they teach reading once in the field? (Not any.)
Where is scientific research that there is a causal relationship between how reading is taught (and if those approaches are uniform across an entire state) and NAEP scores? (Not any.)
And where is scientific research to explain—as Petrilli highlights above—these outcomes for Kentucky, South Carolina, and Washington? (Not any.)

NAEP R 2019 4

NAEP R 2019 7

NAEP R 2019 8

Kentucky, South Carolina, and Washington have 2017 and 2019 NAEP reading scores all over the place—above, at, and below the national average; dropping from 4th to 8th; and dropping from 2017 to 2019 (except one increase by SC, which remains below the national average in every test).

Petrilli is yet another know-nothing that is grasping as “scientific” straws with no evidence on his side.

This is all hokem, rhetorical grandstanding that proves to be hollow.

Shouting the “science of reading” proves itself once again to been mere ideology.

Education, education reform, literacy, reading

Research, the Media, and the Market: A Cautionary Tale

November 19, 2019 plthomasedd

Reporting in The New York Times, Gina Kolata offers a compelling lede:

The findings of a large federal study on bypass surgeries and stents call into question the medical care provided to tens of thousands of heart disease patients with blocked coronary arteries, scientists reported at the annual meeting of the American Heart Association on Saturday.

The new study found that patients who received drug therapy alone did not experience more heart attacks or die more often than those who also received bypass surgery or stents, tiny wire cages used to open narrowed arteries.

And Julie Steenhuysen adds an interesting detail to this new major study: “At least two prior studies determined that artery-clearing and stenting or bypass surgery in addition to medical treatment does not significantly lower the risk of heart attacks or death compared with non-invasive medical approaches alone.”

But these details may prove to be the most important ones of all: “Over $8 billion worth of coronary stents will be sold annually by 2025, according to a new research report by Global Market Insights, Inc. The increase over the years will be created by an increase in artery diseases coupled with a growing demand for minimally invasive surgeries,” explains Stephen Mraz.

So now let’s do the math. If heart doctors shift to what the new research shows, “The nation could save more than $775 million a year by not giving stents to the 31,000 patients who get the devices even though they have no chest pain, Dr. Hochman said,” reports Kolata.

Better and less intrusive patient care, lower overall medical costs for a U.S. healthcare system already overburdened—what is there to keep the medical profession from embracing compelling scientific research?

Well, the market of course.

Lower costs come from fewer heart surgeries, meaning heart surgeons lose income—and possibly patients.

Keep in mind that while the medical profession decades ago emphasized best practice in prescribing antibiotics (only when bacterial infections are detected), many doctors found that following best practice led to dissatisfied patients, who flexed their consumer muscles by finding doctors who would usurp best practice and prescribe the requested antibiotics even when they weren’t warranted.

The new research on stents and heart disease treatment is a cautionary tale involving research, the media, and the market—a cautionary tale that should inform the current call for the “science of reading,” especially as that impacts children with dyslexia.

That several studies now show the use of stents should be reduced or at least delayed, but that doctors have resisted that evidence calls out for us to ask an important question about scientific research: In whose interest is the research being applied?

At the International Literacy Association 2019 conference, P. David Pearson, University of California, Berkeley, lays out in about 11 minutes a compelling unpacking of What Research Really Says About Teaching Reading–and Why That Still Matters.

In this framing talk before a panel discussion, Pearson confronts the role of media in misinforming the public about research, challenges advocates of “scientific research” who fluctuate between endorsing research and following “common sense,” and calls for not ignoring “scientific research” but expanding the types of research relied upon to make teaching and learning decisions (recognizing a broad spectrum of evidence-based research that trumps ideology or assumptions).

One of the most compelling examples offered by Pearson is how the media framed research on reading after the report from controversial National Reading Panel (NRP), at the center of No Child Left Behind’s mandate for scientific research. The headline Pearson highlights is “Systematic, explicit, synthetic phonics improves reading achievement.”

Yet, the specific study being cited actually was far more complicated, and less endorsing of systematic phonics; along with “many other elements…, a small but robust effect for a subset of the population is found on a measure that requires kids to read a lists of pseudowords.”

Pearson adds that even if we accept the larger NRP report as valid (and several scholars do not), the report calls for systematic phonics for K-1 students, not older struggling readers. Yet, as Pearson explains, many calling for the “science of reading” push for systematic phonics programs throughout grades well beyond grade 1.

So there exists several traps in calling for scientific research in education, and more narrowly, in the teaching of reading.

As another example, consider Timothy Shanahan’s response to the effectiveness of dyslexia fonts:

Over the past decade or so, three new fonts have appeared (Open Dyslexia, Dyslexie, and Read Regular), all claiming—without any empirical evidence—to somehow aid dyslexic readers.

Since then there have been 8 studies into the value of these fonts.

Most of the studies found no improvement in reading rate, accuracy, or eye fixations (Duranovic, et al., 2018; Kuster, et al., 2018; Rello & Baeza-Yates, 2013; Wery & Diliberto, 2017). The studies even found that dyslexics—children and adults—preferred reading standard fonts to the special ones (Harley, et al., 2016; Kuster, et al., 2018; Wery & Diliberto, 2017).

Only one study reported a benefit of any kind—the dyslexic students in this study read faster (Marinus, et al., 2016). This benefit apparently came, not from the font design, but from the spacing within and between words. The researchers increased the spacings in the standard fonts and the same effect was seen. Masulli (2018) likewise found that larger spacings improved the reading speed of dyslexics—but that effect was apparent with non-dyslexic readers, as well.

Reading faster is a good thing, of course, as long as reading comprehension is maintained. Unfortunately, these studies didn’t look at that.

The use of dyslexia fonts, then, are driven by the market—consumer demand being met by businesses—but not supported by evidence; neither the claims of the businesses nor the outcomes from implementing the fonts are justified by “scientific evidence.”

Just as Hooked on Phonics flourished in two different iterations (the first felled by court rulings that exposed the lack of research backing market claims), many reading and phonics programs in education are buoyed by ideology and the market but not by research.

But the traps around programs and “scientific” are extremely complex from two different angles.

First, as noted in several examples above, teaching and learning are likely not served well within a market dynamic whereby parents and students are the consumers and teachers and the schools serve the inexpert demands of those consumers.

Yes, parents and students have a right to express their need, but they most often lack the expertise to demand how that need should be met.

Parents of children with reading problems or dyslexia should be demanding that their children be served better and appropriately. But calling for specific policy and practice is outside the purview of those “consumers.” (This is the same dynamic in patients seeking doctors who prescribe antibiotics when they are not needed, creating a health hazard for themselves and others when medical best practice is usurped by market demand.)

The second trap, however, is “scientific” itself. As I have detailed, experimental and quasi-experimental research (what we mean by “scientific,” as Pearson discusses) draws causal relationships that can be generalized. By definition, then, generalizable research doesn’t address outliers or real-world situations where several factors impact the effectiveness of teaching and learning.

The “scientific” trap positions a parent of a child struggling to read, diagnosed with dyslexia, into a problematic corner if that child finds success with dyslexia fonts, a practice not supported by research.

Teaching and teachers must be guided by evidence, both the evidence of a wide range of research and the evidence drawn from the individual students in any classroom.

To teach is to quilt together what a teacher knows about the field, reading for example, and then to match instruction to where any student is and where any student wishes to go.

This, ironically, is the philosophy behind balanced literacy, the approach demonized (usually with false claims and without evidence) by those calling for the “science of reading.”

Each time advocacy for systematic intensive phonics for all students gains momentum, I ask the key question: In whose interest is the research being applied?

Go back to the new research on stents, a true life-and-death matter, and think about that question when you read the media demand the “science of reading.”

For Further Consideration

Flu Outbreak Reduces Class Sizes To Level Appropriate For Learning