Category Archives: education reform

Education, education reform, Educational Research, Lou LaBrant, reading, Science of Reading, Teacher Autonomy

We Teach English in Times of Perpetual Crisis: Selling a Story of Reading (and Literacy) [Webinar Companion Post]

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See the webinar presentation HERE.

Webinar recording:

In 1947, writing in NCTE’s Elementary English (which became Language Arts), Lou LaBrant announced, “This is not the time for the teacher of any language to follow the line of least resistance, to teach without the fullest possible knowledge of the implications of his medium” (p. 94).

The 2020s have made this call even more important for teachers of language K-12 in the US because of the rise of censorship and curriculum gag orders along with legislative mandates including scripted curriculum as part of the “science of reading” (SOR) movement.

Here, I want to focus on the SOR movement as another cycle of the Reading War, one that threatens the professionalism and autonomy of all teachers at every level.

Those Reading War cycles have included:

Teachers must recognize that Reading War cycles tend to be about ideology, market concerns (reading programs), and political agendas, but not grounded in credible evidence or well focused on the needs of students or the professionalism of teachers.

Also when I address the SOR movement, I am not contesting reading science or valid concerns about reading instruction or reading proficiency by students. I am challenging the media story being sold:

Aukerman, M. (2022, November 23). The science of reading and the media: Is reporting biased? Literacy Research Association. https://literacyresearchassociation.org/stories/the-science-of- reading-and-the-media-is-reporting-biased/ 

Further, teachers at all levels must be familiar with the key issues for misleading and even inaccurate claims within the SOR movement (again distinct from reading science and a broad base of research over a century):

Despite many of the claims made in this media story being misleading or false, the story is very compelling for the public, especially parents. For example, a poll, Reading Education Messaging: Findings and Recommendations from an Online Poll of K-5 Parents in America, shows a disturbing pattern:

The media claim about reading proficiency (which is false because of the confusing categories in NAEP testing) actually changes parental opinion from positive to negative.

“Basic,” not “proficient,” in NAEP is at grade level; therefore, instead of about 2/3 of students struggling to read, the closer statistic is about 1/3 (and this has been a flat data point for 30+ years, which suggests a norm of reading proficiency and not some recent crisis):

More broadly, the phonics agenda in the Reading War is driven by the same conservative ideology as book bans.

One example is the advocacy of the Gablers in the 1980s, featured in a article in Texas Monthly:

But the Gablers also feel that even those students who learn to read through intensive phonics, memorize their ‘times tables,’ diagram sentences perfectly, and win spelling bees and math contests must still cope with an educational system that is geared to undermining their morals, their individuality, their pride in America, and their faith in God and the free enterprise system. Much of this corrosive work is accomplished through textbooks in history, social sciences, health, and homemaking.

The Gablers also targeted textbooks in their crusade similar to the book bans and misguided attacks on some reading programs:

Norma and Mel Gabler entered the field of textbook reform twenty years ago, after their son Jim came home from school disturbed at discrepancies between the 1954 American history text his eleventh-grade class was using and what his parents had taught him. The Gablers compared his text to history books printed in 1885 and 1921 and discovered differences. “Where can you go to get the truth?” Jim asked.

Since states have been moving toward reading legislation and programs labeled as SOR since around 2012, the evidence is mounting that these misleading and ideological claims of a reading crisis have not (and cannot) deliver on their promises. [1]

But possibly more troubling than the failure to improve student reading proficiency is that these legislative commitments are wasting taxpayers’ money on another baseless Reading War that serves the interests of the education marketplace: “In the first year of implementation, $100 million was allocated for the reform, with $60 million coming from CO VID-19 relief funds. Most of these resources, however, went toward covering the products and services provided by nonprofit and private-sector organizations” (Aydarova, 2023, p. 570).

The market motives behind SOR, in fact, were openly expressed a decade ago in a post by IDA, Structured Literacy: A New Term to Unify Us and Sell What We Do:

At its July 1st meeting, the IDA Board of Directors made a landmark decision designed to help market our approach to reading instruction.  The board chose a name that would encompass all approaches to reading instruction that conform to IDA’s Knowledge and Practice Standards. That name is ‘Structured Literacy.’…

If we want school districts to adopt our approach, we need a name that brings together our successes. We need one name that refers to the many programs that teach reading in the same way. A name is the first and essential step to building a brand….

The term “Structured Literacy” is not designed to replace Orton Gillingham, Multi-Sensory, or other terms in common use. It is an umbrella term designed to describe all of the programs that teach reading in essentially the same way. In our marketing, this term will help us simplify our message and connect our successes. “Structured Literacy” will help us sell what we do so well.

Structured literacy is more a marketing term than a proven way to address the manufactured reading crisis; further, structured literacy accomplishes two outcomes that are counter-educational—de-professionalizing teachers and whitewashing the reading curriculum. [2]

The SOR movement grounded in structured literacy driven by efforts to curb teacher autonomy is being admitted also by the Evidence Advocacy Center, as reported in New Initiative Is Creating Evidence-Based Guidelines for Educators:

In the EAC’s plan for the transformation of the profession into an evidence-based system, educators will relinquish certain freedoms — notably the leeway to employ ineffective practices — but will gain guidance that empowers them to fulfill their original purpose by profoundly impacting the future of students, families and communities. The alternative is to continue rearranging the deck chairs under the guise of education reform.

Since over 75% of public school teachers are women (Report on the Condition of Education 2024), all educators, regardless of content area or grade level, must recognize the threat of “relinquish certain freedoms,” eeriely similar to arguments posed to Handmaid’s in Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale:

There is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Lydia. Freedom to and freedom from. in the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it….

We were a society dying, said Aunt Lydia, of too much choice. (pp. 24, 25)

While these efforts are about power and control, the SOR movement includes a harmful pattern of journalists taking on the role of “watchdogs,” as Hanford claims for the Education Writers Association.

Finally, then, the SOR movement is not just another Reading War, and the SOR movement is far more than an immediate concern for beginning reading teachers and teacher educators.

This movement is another threat to teaching as a profession, an organized agenda that seeks ways to de-professionalize teachers while serving market and political goals at the expense of teaching and learning.

Recommended

Betts, E. A., Dolch, E. W., Gates, A. I., Gray, W. S., Horn, E., LaBrant, L., Roberts, H., Smith, D. V., Smith, N. B., & Witty, P. (1942). What shall we do about reading today? A symposium. The Elementary English Review, 19(7), 225–­ 256. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41382636

Thomas, P.L. (2024, March). We teach English in times of perpetual crisis: The long (and tedious) history of reading crisis. English Journal, 113(4), 21-26. https://publicationsncte.org/content/journals/10.58680/ej2024113421

Thomas, P.L. (2024, May). Teaching English in the “science of reading” era: We teach English in times of perpetual crisis: Selling a story of reading. English Journal, 113(5), 16-22. https://publicationsncte.org/content/journals/10.58680/ej2024113516 [Access HERE until open access at EJ]

Thomas, P.L. (2024, September). We teach English in times of perpetual crisis: The media continue to misread teaching reading and literacy. English Journal, 114(1), 14-19. https://publicationsncte.org/content/journals/10.58680/ej2024114114 [Access HERE until open access at EJ]

Thomas, P.L. (2024, November). We teach English in times of perpetual crisis: For all ELA teachers, “the time is always now.” English Journal, 114(2), 21-26. TBD

Thomas, P.L. (2022). The Science of Reading movement: The never-ending debate and the need for a different approach to reading instruction. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/science-of-reading

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.

Lou LaBrant: An Annotated Bibliography

Tomorrow’s Illiterates: The State of Reading Instruction Today, by Walcutt, Charles Child

Notes

[1] See for example:

  • Aydarova, E. (2023). ‘Whatever you want to call it”: Science of reading mythologies in the education reform movement. Harvard Educational Review, 93(4), 556–581, https://doi.org10.17763/1943-5045-93.4.556
  • Chaffin, M., Riesco, H.S., Hacket-Hill, K., Collet, V., Grizzle, M.Y., Y Warren, J. (2023). “Phonics monkeys” and “real life reading”: Heteroglossic views of a state reading initiative. Literacy Research and Instruction, 1–22. https://doi.org10.1080/19388071.2023.2271085
  • Reinking, D., Hruby, G.G., & Risko, V.J. (2023). Legislating phonics: Settle science of political polemic? Teachers College Record. https://doi.org/10.1177/01614681231155688
  • Thomas, P.L. (2022). The Science of Reading movement: The never-ending debate and the need for a different approach to reading instruction. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/science-of-reading 

[2] See for example:

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

Reading Crisis 1961: “[N]o Further ‘Research’ into Methods of Reading Is Necessary”

“After half a century of [progressive reform and expanding public education],” wrote Jacques Barzun in Tomorrow’s Illiterates: The State of Reading Instruction Today, “we who run businesses, carry on professions, work for the government, or engage in teaching itself are forced to admit that illiteracy is still with us” (xii-xiii).

This was published in 1961, and the cause of illiteracy Barzun confronts may sound familiar to those of us in the 2020s: “the loss of the proper pedagogy in the lower schools…, the goal of seeing whole words instead of letters” (p. xiii).

Barzun pleads, “the citizen who is interested (and who has managed to learn to read) [may have their] hair [stand] on end at hearing what folly has been condoned as educational theory during the past thirty years” (p. xiv).

Along with Barzuns dismay about how reading was taught and what passed for “reading theory,” he mused at the end of his Introduction: “Shall we need another book like the present one, fifty years hence, about the misdeeds of the new simplifiers?” (p. xvi).

Considering Barzun lived to be 102, dying in 2012, he may have had what little hair remained stand on end to watch the reading crisis return in the 1990s (the national meltdown over whole language) and 2000s (the National Reading Panel era). And if he could have just held on a bit longer, the current “science of reading” (SOR) onslaught that takes its playbook from the very volume that includes Barzun’s hand wringing now some 60-plus years ago.

Despite the authors’ lamentations in this volume (along with others in the 1950s and 1960s that held forth again progressive education and whole word reading instruction), neither the US nor the world collapsed due to misguided reading instruction or theory.

Shouting “reading crisis!” has proven to be more hobby that credible pronouncement, and ironically, if folks would find the time to read a bit (I recommend this book, b the way), it doesn’t take long to see the arguments as mostly nonsense and wild overreactions grounded in ideologies.

Let me show you a few examples beyond Barzun’s smug and sensationalistic Introduction.

Chapter I: The Reading Problem in America, Charles Child Walcutt [click for a selection of screen shots]

Walcutt, editor of the volume and also author of Chapter VII, offers and opening chapter that takes a full swing at announcing a reading crisis as well as casting plenty of blame. Much of the chapter should sound eerie similar to those familiar with Emily Hanford’s journalism and podcast, patterns that pervade the entire volume.

Walcutt starts by showing evidence of claims of a reading crisis (somehow avoiding credible evidence of a reading crisis). This is particularly interesting because of the strong connections made about low literacy, special needs, and what children are suited for higher education and what children should move from high school into the workforce. Of note, Walcutt mentions Samuel Orton (of Orton-Gillingham), but provides no citation, when discussing disability (p. 8)

If nothing else, the certainty exhibited by Walcutt framed against how much of that certainty comes off as deeply misguided, and by today’s standards, offensive and dehumanizing should give all of us pause about our own certainty and blanket claims.

However, note that immediately follow Walcutt’s arguments about low literacy, he immediately shares a single example of a school that excels at teaching reading! Yes, even in the 1960s, there were claims of miracle schools: “In a school of 700 pupils, there are only 20 with reading problems….We cannot stress too positively that fact that in this school every child learns to read independently in the first grade, unless he is mentally retarded [sic] or disabled”—a percentage oddly close to SOR claims that 90, 95, or 96% of students can be proficient readers (pp. 10-11). [Nowhere is terminology such as “independently” defined or linked to how these claims are verified beyond the claims of the school. We also have no demographics on students or how those students compare to a generalized populations of students.]

We should note that these extraordinary claims have no proof, no scientific research—just claims and anecdotes.

Walcutt does launch into a few pages of “facts,” including data mostly grounded in IQ testing. One example is a reference to the 1940s reading crisis based on the draft for WWII; note that this reading crisis was strongly discredited by literacy scholars as a false attack on progressive education.

Walcutt’s facts also criticize popular commercial reading programs (Macmillan) and associate low literacy with delinquency and low IQ.

Then comes the direct blame, which, again, will sound familiar: “One way to describe the reading problem is to say that it is a teacher problem and —even more—that it is a problem of the teaching of teachers” (p. 18).

And of course: “The assertion that the reading experts do not understand the theory of their system can be demonstrated if we point out the false assumptions, the faulty extrapolations from scientific research, and the absolute contradictions that appear in its central propositions and procedures” (pp. 19-20).

Walcutt then discredits the look-and-say method that he claims dominates reading instruction—although we are left simply to trust that the characterization is both fair and as universally applied as he claims.

Walcutt also traces look-and-say back to Horace Mann, although, again, we must trust this analysis is credible.

Embedded here is a big picture characterization-as-criticism:

This says that reading for meaning has supplanted reading for pronunciation, or even word-recognition, and that some teachers teach only reading for meaning (presumably by whole sentences), ignoring phonics completely on the theory that the child who can read for meaning will pick up his phonics incidentally and without special instruction or effort, but he will read for meaning before he can sound out a word” (p. 31).

In the 1990s, this is the same argument leveled against whole language; today, this is the same argument leveled at balanced literacy.

After Walcutt spends a great deal of time metaphorically discrediting the look-and-say method (an extended bird analogy), he ends melodramatically (but not scientifically): “With this rickety equipment the look-and-say bird has flown for more than thirty years, casting a huge shadow over the lives of our children” (p. 43).

Chapter II: The Nature of Reading Skill, John C. Daniels and Hunter Diack [click for a selection of screen shots]

Daniels and Diack start with exploring different definitions for reading, using another analogy (driving a car). Much of the discussion focuses on concerns about reading through whole word methods, leading to the authors noting their own research on reading errors.

Again, they criticisms seem mostly grounded in disagreements with Dewey and Gestalt psychology. This leads to a discussion of new reading primers, which they criticize as lacking and boring because of efforts to identify and use a necessarily limited number of sight words.

As an artifact of the recurring patterns of the Reading War, this chapter highlights the problems with reading programs and primers grounded in narrow theories and philosophies of reading, but it also demonstrates the complexity of the debates in their final paragraph: “But having said this, we must add that, though the unit of accomplished reading is the word, the phrase, or even the sentence, the unit of learning to read is the letter. These are not two contradictory, conflicting aspects of reading; the one agrees with the other. However, present anxieties about the teaching of reading stem from failures to distinguish between, and indeed actually confusing, these two aspects of the reading process” (p. 67).

Ch. III: Reading Readiness in Theory and Practice, Glenn McCracken [click for a selection of screen shots]

McCracken explains that the New Castle Reading Experiment was published in the book, The Right to Learn, and thus, “Its most important contribution to reading is its proof that the ‘reading readiness’ program is both meaningless and harmful” (p. 71).

This chapter includes a claim that seems common across decades: “Today reading specialists have a long list of reasons why about one third of the public school children can’t read” (p. 80). [Note that despite claims by SOR advocates, NAEP reading scores have been fairly flat with about 30% of students below basic, which is below grade level approximately.]

McCracken represents as well the “poverty is an excuse” faction in the Reading War, arguing: “It is folly to blame poor reading on distracting home influences….Children will learn to read if they are taught to read….If they don’t learn to read it is the fault of the teaching, not the taught” (p. 82).

If fact, McCracken continues, “The reading readiness fad as we have described it here was invented to excuse poor reading instruction by shifting the entire blame to the child….Almost every five-year-old child is ready to learn to read the day he enters school if the reading program is ready for him” (pp. 82, 83).

But, alas, “Reading instructional method in this country is abysmally poor, and blaming the matter on the child is never going to provide any improvement” (p. 84).

Ch. IV: The Whole-Word and Word-Guessing Fallacy, Helen R Lowe [click for a selection of screen shots]

Lowe shares an anecdote about a 28-year-old who holds a high school diploma designated with “Honors”; yet, Arthur cannot read.

Of course, such stories have been highlighted throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries; they are tragic but are none the less anecdotes, proving nothing that can be generalized about how children are taught to read.

Lowe, like the other authors in this volume, has an agenda so as is common in all the eras of the Reading War, their are bait-and-switch tactics, never grounded in valid evidence or claims.

Notable, Lowe recognizes that standardized testing of reading can and was gamed to meet the ways students were taught to read; she accuses reading tests focusing on predicting means that “the best predicters are rated the best readers” (p. 103)

The agenda is to attack, you may be surprised, teaching children to guess at words by using pictures: “How can he learn to read words when he is taught to look and think about pictures?” she ponders (p. 104).

Lowe also mentions Orton (in this volume paired with Gallagher, not Gillingham), again without citation.

Ch. V: Reading: A Therapeutic Tool, Hildred Rawson [click for a selection of screen shots]

Rawson’s chapter demonstrates a few key patterns found in today’s Reading War. First is the tension between teaching reading and how to identify students with special needs such as dyslexia.

Rawson argues that “children with reading disorders are not usually referred to us for examination and treatment until they reach the third grade” because of the look-and-say curriculum.

However, “Children…who have been taught for the first grade…to sound out words—that is, by the phonetic method—approach reading differently. They do not need picture clues” (p. 132).

She calls for phonics-first instruction, and no guessing using pictures, to prevent dyslexia, in fact.

[Ch. VI deals with the claimed link between reading “retardation [sic]” and delinquency.]

Ch. VII: Phonics Systems—Proved and Available, Charles Child Walcutt [click for a selection of screen shots]

Walcutt returns and offers the anchor chapter with the stunning opening line: “We have said that no further ‘research’ into methods of reading instruction is necessary” (p. 141).

The chapter is dedicated to an overview of phonics-based reading programs that, he claims, show that reading research is settled—in 1961.

So here you have essentially the exact same arguments made in 1961 that are being used in the SOR movement.

This is basically a silly book, filled with anecdotes and overstatements. But the SOR movement is no less silly, no less bombastic, and no less futile.

We persist with the same arguments getting us nowhere.

Maybe the problem is the arguments, the silly adult bickering.

Actually, there is no “maybe.”

Tomorrow’s Illiterates: The State of Reading Instruction Today, by Walcutt, Charles Child [click title for access through Internet Archive]

You can access screenshots HERE.

NCTE 2025 Individual Presentation: Recovering Our Reading Dream from a Long Crisis Nightmare

11/21/2025 – 2:45 – 3:15, Mile High Ballroom 1A/1B

Access a PDF of presentation HERE

In 1961, Jacques Barzun in Tomorrow’s Illiterates declared “illiteracy is still with us.” Charles Child Walcutt added: “[N]o further ‘research’ into methods of reading instruction is necessary.” This session examines reading crisis/reform cycles to reconsider the stories told about reading and offer a new approach for reform that serves the needs of students and supports teacher professionalism.

Education, education reform, literacy, Science of Reading

Recommended: Dr. Elana Aydarova. Science of Reading Mythologies

Dr. Elana Aydarova. Science of Reading Mythologies

Episode notes

Dr. Elena Aydarova is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a fellow with the National Education Policy Center. Dr. Aydarova’s research examines the interaction between educational policies, education reforms, and policy advocacy. She is an award-winning author of over 40 publications. Dr. Aydarova received postdoctoral fellowships from the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation and the American Association of University Women.

See Also

What You See Is Not What You Get: Science of Reading Reforms As a Guise for Standardization, Centralization, and Privatization | American Journal of Education, Elena Aydarova

Elena Aydarova; “Whatever You Want to Call It”: Science of Reading Mythologies in the Education Reform Movement. Harvard Educational Review 1 December 2023; 93 (4): 556–581. https://doi.org/10.17763/1943-5045-93.4.556

FreshEd #348 – Science of Reading Unpacked (Elena Aydarova) FreshEd


Education, education reform, Educational Research, Science of Reading

ILEC Webinar: “Science of ” Movements as Trojan Horse Education Reform

See Also

What You See Is Not What You Get: Science of Reading Reforms As a Guise for Standardization, Centralization, and Privatization | American Journal of Education, Elena Aydarova

Politics of Phonics: How Power, Profit and Politics Guide Reading Policies

A Bilingual Educator’s Critique of the Science of Reading Movement, Jill Kerper Mora

Response to ‘English learners and the science of reading’ – Kappan Online

“Science of” Movements as Trojan Horse Education Reform

SOR Movement Maintains Conservative Assault on Teachers and Public Schools [Updated]

Thomas, P.L. (2024, March). We teach English in times of perpetual crisis: The long (and tedious) history of reading crisis. English Journal, 113(4), 21-26. https://publicationsncte.org/content/journals/10.58680/ej2024113421

Thomas, P.L. (2024, May). Teaching English in the “science of reading” era: We teach English in times of perpetual crisis: Selling a story of reading. English Journal, 113(5), 16-22. https://publicationsncte.org/content/journals/10.58680/ej2024113516 [Access HERE until open access at EJ]

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

Why Has Education Reform Always Failed?: “Straightforward Solutions to Complicated Questions”

[Header Photo by Evan Dennis on Unsplash]

Writing about the fundamental flaw in Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, Andrew Solomon opens with a claim that helps explain why five-decades of intensive education reform has always failed: “There is nothing more alluring in polarized times than straightforward solutions to complicated questions.”

Haidt is an academic and scholar who is having success with public work. His status as scholar should elicit trust in his work—notably more so than public work by journalists (such as Malcolm Gladwell) or pundits (such as a tiresome list of Op-Ed writers at the New York Times).

Yet, as Solomon explains, Haidt’s popular book is, in fact,

a compendium of important and profound insights about contemporary childhood embedded in such wishful lucidity. His twinned basic propositions – that children should have less supervision and more free play, and that they should have less access to social media and some other parts of the internet – have a strong basis. It is likely that his sweeping simplifications will help to move forward much-needed social change; it is unfortunate that the impetus for that change is often grandiose and misleading statements, an endless succession of graphs and footnotes notwithstanding. The word sometimes seems not to be in his vocabulary; the key associated with the question mark seems not to work on his computer. He never lapses into the rhetoric of uncertainty that would serve truth. Nowhere does he refer to the incomprehensibility of social decay. Never does he express uncertainty that it is possible to know the causes of something as complex as the fluctuations in youth mental health, so his remarks allow for almost no contemplation of the exceptions to his propositions.

Since I entered higher education, I have been dedicating most of my work to public scholarship and public commentary (such as this blog); when I publish traditional scholarship, I advocate for those pieces to be open-access.

I have always felt that too much of academic scholarship and research is siloed behind paywalls and almost exclusively discussed at exclusionary professional organization’s conferences.

What good is knowledge when it sits behind a wall between academics/scholars/scientists and the general public?

My introduction to public scholars included reading Joseph Campbell and Howard Zinn when I was quite young and only beginning as an educator, writer, and scholar.

I was drawn to their work well before I discovered that academia mostly frowns on public scholars. Even in 2024, much of my work is casually waved off as “just a blog,” and there really is no mechanism in my university for receiving the sort of proportional credit my public work deserves.

Most of my traditional scholarship is read (maybe) by 10s of people. In 2023, my blog had 139, 000 visitors and 220,000 views. Some of my public work has directly impacted grade retention reform.

However, as Solomon details about Haidt’s thesis, too often what is popular is mostly “straightforward solutions to complicated questions.”

And that leads to what most of my public work necessarily confronts: A century of media, public, and political misrepresentations and misunderstandings about teaching and learning resulting in a fruitless series of education reform cycles.

As Solomon admits, Haidt’s book is grounded in a valid concern about contemporary childhood. But from there, Haidt over-relies on extreme claims not grounded in the evidence (the same sort of mistake found among journalists).

The essential problem here is one that Howard Gardner has examined. Leaders, such as politicians, are most effective when they use black-and-white rhetoric.

In other words, the paradox of public messaging is that what works to compel the public is counter to what works for addressing complex problems.

For several years now, the US has experienced that exact same dynamic in terms of media and political claims about reading instruction that has resulted in reading legislation destined to do more harm than good (except sow the seeds for yet another reading crisis in a few years, which is occurring in England after major reading reform in 2006).

Although grounded in the journalism and podcast of Emily Hanford, the mainstream media remains trapped in “sweeping simplifications” and “grandiose and misleading statements” about reading instruction, reading achievement, and national tests data (NAEP) as represented by Julian Roberts-Grmela’s “Many kids can’t read, even in high school. Is the solution teaching reading in every class?”:

Poor reading skills are a nationwide issue. On the 2022 National Assessment of Education Progress, known as the Nation’s Report Card, nearly 70 percent of eighth graders scored below “proficient” and, of those, 30 percent scored “below basic.”

“In a typical classroom that’s about 25 kids, that means about 17 are still struggling to comprehend text at the most foundational level,” said [Natalie] Wexler.

This article again misrepresents NAEP data and allows another journalist make a false overstatement not grounded in fact.

Even if we accept NAEP data as 100% valid, “proficient” is well above grade level, and “basic” represents what Wexler calls “foundational,” grade level reading.

That means in a class of 25, we might have 7-8 students, not 17, struggling to read at grade level.

In other words, the paradox of public messaging is that what works to compel the public is counter to what works for addressing complex problems.

The truth here, however, doesn’t fulfill the crisis rhetoric journalists have committed to despite the evidence otherwise. The truth doesn’t help fuel the reform cycles that feed the education marketplace (such as the US tossing out millions of dollars of reading programs to buy new and different reading programs without any valid evidence that the reading problem is grounded in those reading programs).

So if we return to Solomon’s excellent and nuanced look at Haidt’s work we can better understand that most of education reform is also prompted by valid concerns about student learning (especially reading and math as so-called foundational learning); however, we must also then acknowledge that the claims about the problems and the solutions being offered are yet more “sweeping simplifications” and “grandiose and misleading statements.”

In our free market, regretfully, there is often little money or popularity in nuance, either in detailing problems or providing solutions.

Roberts-Grmela and Wexler are certainly perpetuating extreme over-simplifications about reading that—as Sold a Story has proven—are very compelling for the public.

Like Haidt’s book, however, most of the claims and most of the solutions are fundamentally grounded in misinformation and misunderstanding.

Journalists today, ironically, seem incapable of reading with comprehension themselves, or are simply blinded by the popularity of their misinformation.

In any case, like all of education reform across the past five decades, the current reading reform movement will fail, again, because it is another round of “straightforward solutions to complicated questions.”

Dyslexia, Education, education reform, Parody, reading, Science of Reading

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BABEL® is a nonsense word assessment system designed by the North West Institute of Phonics based on the Science of Phonics®.

HAL® is the friendly and fast AI teaching assistant fully integrated into Skrip-Z® .

Teachers will be just as likely to find our suite of programs FUN since there is no planning, no instruction, and no grading!

“I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.”

HAL®

Speaking of teachers, MT Education Products® offers teacher training through SPELRZ®, also based in the Science of Phonics®. This program fills the holes left by the failures of teacher education. SPELRZ® was developed by psychologist and program developer, LuLu Rivers.

What People Are Saying

“I have been reading MRIs for 37 years and I can attest that brain scans of students using Fun-X® show the highest level of fun I have ever seen.”

William Iceberg
Cognitive scientist, 37 years reading MRIs

“I have never taught, but my investigative reporting uncovered an educational crisis that the developers of Fun-X® have assured me will replace the crisis with fun!”

Hannah Ford
Podcaster, Education Crisis Today!

“Our school has always been a family, but now our school is a place where we have fun thanks to Fun-X®! 97% of our students and 98% of our teachers say so!”

Simpson Jackson
Principal
Walton Charter Elementary STEAM College
Little Rock AR

“I diagnosed all of my children with dyslexia years ago after several days doing research on the Internet, but now our homeschooling is fun thanks to Fun-X®.

Karen Splaner
Parent, homeschooler
@KSplaner_8675309 (X)

Coming Fall 2025!

Know-N® is being developed because some people have begun to ask questions about knowledge and its role in nonsense word acquisition. This may not sound like fun, but MT Education Products® is committed to continuing to offer NEW education products as often as anyone will buy them. Be on the look out for the Science of Knowledge® revolution!

Contact

MT Education Products®

Subsidiary of

Media and Technology Educational Co-Op, LLC

911 Charter School Way

Battle Creek MI 01010

[1] MT Education Products® guarantees that if fewer than 95% of students identify Fun-X® as fun, then MT Education Products® will send for FREE a link to our NEW and upcoming education product, Know-N® (coming Fall 2025).

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College Board, Education, education reform, Educational Research, SAT

Top 10 Reasons Not to Rank States by Education

[Header Photo by Joshua Golde on Unsplash]

If you have been following on social media the decision in Louisiana to post the Ten Commandments in all school classrooms, you may have seen comments like this:

And this sort of “gotcha” is primarily from more progressive people who strongly support public education and democracy.

Over my forty years in education, ranking states by education has been a persistent practice in the media and by political leaders.

In fact, I published a scholarly piece in 1999 noting that both the Republican and Democratic candidates for governor ran on the platform that SC ranked 50th in the nation in education, both having nearly identical billboards across the state.

One of the ways the media brandished state rankings annually was using the SAT, a test never designed for ranking educational quality. Eventually, the College Board itself warned that ranking states by the SAT was misleading at best and false ultimately:

Useful comparisons of students’ performance are possible only if all students take the same test. Average SAT scores are not appropriate for state comparisons because the percentage of SAT takers varies widely among states. In some states, a very small percentage of college-bound seniors take the SAT. Typically, these students have strong academic backgrounds and are applicants to the nation’s most selective colleges and scholarship programs. Therefore, it is expected that the SAT Evidence-Based Reading and Writing and Math scale score averages reported for these states will be higher than the overall average. In states where a greater proportion of students, with a wide range of academic backgrounds, take the SAT, and where most colleges in the state require the test for admission, the scores are closer to the overall average.

None the less, even after the College Board started issuing state averages alphabetically, the media continues to clamor to rank and shame.

The urge to rank also has been fueled by the less often released NAEP scores; however, those rankings again are deeply misleading because, as in the case of the SAT, state populations being tested are not the same.

States with high poverty levels and multi-lingual learner populations continue to score lower, which is a historical fact of standardized testing that remains far more causally related to out-of-school factors.

As Gerald Bracey warned throughout his career, ranking states (or countries) by education fails statistically but also simply by the fact of ranking.

Ranking as a goal prioritizes metrics that create spread. In other words, seeking to rank disregards data that doesn’t help create the ranking.

For one excellent example, Bracey notes that when states or countries are statistically about the same, most rankings will list them alphabetically, giving the appearance of different levels of quality that simply doesn’t exist. The US has suffered a negative consequence of that combined with the recurring failure to note differences in populations being measured.

LA, like Mississippi and SC, has endured a long history of being education shamed as a proxy for ignoring political negligence about poverty, racism, and related inequity that negatively impacts student achievement and teacher/school impact.

So if you clicked on this post for my ranking, you are going to be disappointed.

I don’t rank.

Don’t rank states by education because doing so is a political distraction grounded in labeling and competition.

If you genuinely support public education and democracy, don’t stoop to misleading rankings to score political points.

Educational outcomes are primarily a reflection of political commitments. All across the South, specifically, states have been run by conservative politics (Democrats for decades and then Republicans since the 1960s).

A lack of political will has failed the most disadvantaged people and children in these states for many years, and the measured outcomes of students is a measure of political negligence and not the quality of children, teachers, or schools.

There is no way to justify ranking states by education unless your goal is shaming and further distraction from the political choices children and public education deserve.

LA has grossly mis-served democracy with their Ten Commandments policy, and like many states across the US, LA has inexcusably failed the children and the institution of public education for many decades as an act of political ideology.

The political leaders deserve shaming, not the students, the teachers, or the schools.

See Also

Big Lies of Education: A Nation at Risk and Education “Crisis”

Big Lies of Education: Reading Proficiency and NAEP

Big Lies of Education: National Reading Panel (NRP)

Big Lies of Education: Poverty Is an Excuse

Big Lies of Education: International Test Rankings and Economic Competitiveness

Education, education reform, Educational Research, Science of Reading

What Works?: The Wrong Question for Education Reform

[Header Photo by Vadim Bogulov on Unsplash]

I stumbled my way to becoming a high school teacher of English in the same high school from which I had graduated just five years before.

After graduating from junior college, I was set to transfer to the main campus of the University of South Carolina; that plan included a friend I had attended every year of school with since grade 1.

He had a catastrophic accident that summer, leaving him paralyzed and changing both our plans for continuing college.

I then stumbled, mostly fearful of heading off without the comfort of that friend since we were both small-town boys. So I abruptly shifted to attending the local satellite campus of the South Carolina university system, which meant I also committed to living at home for the rest of my undergraduate years.

My entry in teacher certification was yet another stumble since I did not really choose the degree and career until I was sitting at orientation the fall I transferred to the satellite university.

As a rising junior, I needed to declare my major and had been contemplating pre-law and architecture. But on the spur of the moment, and after several clarifying questions, I became a secondary English education major.

The transfer and relatively late decision to be in teacher certification resulted in my graduating in December, and then, being in a sort of limbo that next spring (although I did enroll in an MEd program as well as worked as a substitute teacher).

But the greatest stumbling of all, I must admit, was those first 5 to 7 years as a high school English teacher.

I often think of the beginning-teacher Me—idealistic and nearly fanatically focused on finding the instructional practices that worked (specifically, how to teach my high school students to write well).

Semester after semester, I revised and rebooted my instruction. Yet, often, student assignments were submitted with about the same degree of struggling, the same (and often predictable) performances that needed to be revised.

In this mania for finding out what works, I even created my own writing textbook, developed directly from my students’ work.

Year after year, a pattern developed: I was highly regarded by my students, my colleagues, my administration, and my students’ parents as an excellent teacher, notably an excellent teacher of writing; yet, I felt constantly as if I was failing.

I had an unhealthy tunnel vision focused on finding what works, and I was not willing or able to simply step back and consider what I now know is true, but is also counter-intuitive. And I just made that claim on social media:

What I have learned as I just completed my year 40 as a teacher is that many instructional practices work, but often predicting what works is fraught practice.

And what I am now certain about is my second point above: What works is profoundly impacted by learning (and living) and teaching conditions.

My mother, who completed only one year of junior college, taught me to read at an advanced level well before I entered public schooling. And she used entirely whole word strategies (note cards taped to objects all over our house) and picture books (from Dr. Seuss to Go, Dog, Go and One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish).

We were working class/poor and my parents were not highly literate, but what worked for me isn’t necessarily supported by scientific research and isn’t a template for what would work for anyone else.

Here, then, is why the pursuit of what works in education reform fails:

  • What works feeds into the silver-bullet fallacy. No instructional practice or program works universally because instructional/program effectiveness is relative to individual differences among students and time.
  • What works feeds into the in-school-only reform paradigm. Ironically, hyper-focusing on what works (instruction/programs) ignores the body of scientific research that shows teachers’ impact on measurable student learning (1-14%) is magnitudes less than out-of-school factors (60+%). Reforming instruction and programs, then, can never have the sort of measurable outcomes that addressing out-of-school factors could produce. This in part explains why all reform appears to fail and we remain in a constant cycle of crisis/reform in education.
  • What works is trapped in a flawed model of human behavior. Humans develop is somewhat predictable in terms of stages; however, the exact when of that development is not nearly as fixed as systematic instruction and programs require. Most what works claims are bound to predictive grade- (or age-) level achievement that is linked to aspirational expectations that 100% of students can or should be at these levels. Again, this paradigm in part explains why we are in constant crisis since the expectations are unrealistic.
  • What works is a subjective designation grounded in the definition of “works.” At the policy level, what works is always political/ideological because some power structure endorses the defining characteristics of “works”; since education policy is at the whim of political structures, what works can and will be manipulated by political shifts creating an instability that is counter-educational. For example, in writing instruction, do rubrics work? Rubrics can be effective for clarifying expectations for students (transparency) and for standardizing grades assigned to writing (fairness); thus, in that context of “works,” the answer is yes. But rubrics do most of the writer’s work for students by detailing the decisions that emerging writers need to develop; therefore, if your goal is teaching students how to make authentic writing decisions, rubrics do not work (similar to how training wheels do not work). Different power structures, then, could define rubrics as what works or as “currently unsupported instructional practices” based on the mandated definition of “works.”

The US needs a reckoning, one similar to my own experiences as an early-career high school English teacher.

What works? Well, not spending any more time trying to identify and then mandate what works.

Many different instructional practices work under different conditions. And even when something doesn’t work, we have time to find out what will work if we would focus more on what really matters—the learning (and living) and teaching conditions of students’ schooling (and lives).

Almost 60 years after my formative years as a beginning reader, I have witnessed my grandson’s journey to reading grounded in his iPad, playing Minecraft and watching YouTube videos about how to play his video games.

Both he and I became eager readers because of our passion for reading as a means to the things we love.

Not an instructional practice.

Not a program.

What works is less a thing we can identify and mandate and more an ideological shift in verb tense—what worked.

A move from being predictive to descriptive, which takes a great deal of patience, a comfort for the unknown and unknowable, and the wisdom to look carefully at the right things—the students in front of us and not the mandates grounded in what works.

See Also

Follow an example thread here:

Education, education reform, Educational Research, Florida Miracle, grade retention, Grit, growth mindset, reading, Science of Reading

Crisis Rhetoric Fails “Science of” Era of Reading Reform

[Header Photo by Joël de Vriend on Unsplash]

The fall of 2024 will mark year 41 for me as a literacy educator, scholar, and advocate.

About half of that career was spent in K-12 public education in rural Upstate South Carolina, where I was born and live. I have witnessed daily race, social class, and gender inequity at some of the most extreme levels in the US.

At the core of my work as an educator, as well, I have named, challenged, and advocated to correct all forms of inequity. That work has often been in very hostile environments in the South where the power structures deny these inequities exist and persist at calling for traditional values as code for maintaining the status quo.

Also throughout my career as an educator and scholar, I have developed a solid grounding in the history of education and the field of literacy. Having written an educational biography of Lou LaBrant and serving as Council Historian for the National Council of Teachers of English were foundational experiences for that commitment to the history of education.

Further, having begun as an educator in 1984, I have lived and worked my entire career in the high-stakes accountability era of education reform. At every point along the way, I have raised a hand in opposition to this reform paradigm because it is driven by media, the market, and politicians who are more committed to education reform as industry than to serving the needs of our students or honoring the professionalism of America’s teachers, who are more than 70% women.

The “science of reading” movement and the offspring “science of” reform agendas are nothing new, except they are incredibly harmful—notably for the very students some of the advocates use as shields against criticism.

Once again, “science,” “crisis,” and “miracle” are being weaponized to not only label and punish students but also de-professionalize teachers.

One of the most effective and dishonest tactics is the “crisis” claim about reading in the US.

First, this claim lacks a basic understanding of educational testing, and further, the claim is ahistorical.

At least since the 1940s in the US, two facts can be proven: (1) at no point has student reading achievement (“proficiency”) been declared adequate; there has been a perpetual cry of reading “crisis” in every decade by media and political leaders, and (2) throughout the history of US public education, there has been a pervasive so-called “achievement gap” (better referred to as an “opportunity gap”) with marginalized populations of students performing well below average or white and affluent students.

That means that current reading achievement however measured and current “achievement gaps” are not a crisis but a historical and current reality maintained by political negligence.

Since current “science of” advocates have a fetish for misrepresenting and citing NAEP, let’s look at how NAEP in fact proves my point.

Consider Mississippi, the darling of reading reform and media crowning as a “miracle:

At grades 4 and 8 in reading, Black students in MS were BELOW basic (approximately below grade level) at a rate of 51%, about the national rate for Black students.

Note that despite well over a decade of SOR reading reform, the achievement gap for Black students remains about the same as in 1998.

Education and reading reform is not addressing the inequity Black students suffer in MS or anywhere in the US. However, the SOR movement has been doubling down on labeling and punishing Black students through grade retention, which serves to inflate grade 4 scores but not better prepare students.

MS has consistently retained about 9000-12000 students (mostly Black students) since 2014; if SOR policy and instruction were actually working, these retention number should drop or even disappear (since SOR advocates claim to be able to have 95% students reach proficiency).

Weaponizing “science,” “crisis,” and “miracle” are veneers for denying what the actual science and evidence have shown for decades: far more than 60% of measurable student achievement is causally related to out-of-school factors.

And thus, my advocacy for my entire career has been for both social and education reform that focuses on equity and refuses to blame teachers and students for that inequity.

For the past forty-plus years, however, education reform has solely targeted blame on schools, teachers, and students.

Those racially minoritized students and students living in poverty have routinely been characterized by deficit ideology, and reform has sought to “fix” those students by inculcating grit or growth mindset—or simply imposing a systematic phonics regime on those students, treating them all as if they have reading “disorders.”

And if those students don’t perform, retain them (punish them) and label them. Yet, there is never any consequences for the reformers when none of their reform promises are fulfilled (see the charter fiasco in New Orleans).

Hyper-focusing on MS (and Florida) is not just a lie, but a distraction.

Again, let’s look at NAEP:

DODEA (Department of Defense) students are the most successful in reading in the US, but you see almost no media or political coverage of this fact.

Students in military families are often from impoverished backgrounds, yet Black students BELOW basic are at rates of 25% (grade 4) and 18% (grade 8), dramatically less than the national average and MS.

And here is what the media, the market, and politicians refuse to acknowledge: DODEA students have medical care, food security, housing security, and parents with work stability.

Also, DODEA teachers are paid above most public school teachers.

Unlike the false claims about MS, DODEA achievement shows that both in- and out-of-school reform must be addressed for the in-school achievement to rise in authentic ways.

I am tempted to say the real crisis is how media and political leaders mislead the public about education and education reform—as well as demonize students and teachers.

But that is also nothing new.

There is great profit in perpetual crisis so don’t hold your breath that anything will change any time soon.

Recommended

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

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

Reading Reform We Refuse to Choose

When Exceptional Publicly Funded Schools Are Not a Miracle, and Why