Regretfully, Kids Count shows more about how good intentions are not enough and that our public and political focus on education remains grounded in deficit ideology and misinformation linked to NAEP testing.
And then, note the deficit perspective for ranking states based on NAEP proficiency:
Imagine if this report focused first on NAEP “basic” and above? And then identified students at or above basic?
Kids Count is yet another part of the manufactured crisis in education that serves negative portrayals of students, teachers, and public schools—and ultimately the education reform industry.
Yet, this report and its negative as well as misleading use of data must make us ask: If kids count, why do we persist in ranking and vilifying those children and the people spending their lives serving them in our schools?
The CLP will feature the following Furman experts:
David Fleming, Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at Furman University (moderator) Paul Thomas, Professor of Education at Furman University (education policy) Ken Peterson, Professor of Economics at Furman University (economic and immigration policy) Karen Allen, Professor of Sustainability and Anthropology (environmental policy) Julie Linton, MD, FAAP, Professor of Pediatrics, Prisma Health Children’s Hospital Upstate, USC School of Medicine Greenville, Professor in Furman’s Community Engaged Medicine (healthcare policy)
The “science of reading” movement has promoted a misleading story about reading through the media—reading proficiency is in crisis because teachers do not know how to teach reading and were not properly prepared by teacher education. This opening talk with argue that attacks on BL are grounded in efforts to deprofessionalize teachers.
Thomas will examine an authentic definition of BL as a reading philosophy that centers serving the individual needs of all students. He will examine also the caricatures of guessing and three cueing (MSV), providing attendees scholarly evidence for accurate characterizations of BL as well as deeper understanding of reading proficiency.
Literacy in the Disciplines 6-12
Webinar
December 10, 2024 – 6-7 pm
We Teach English in Times of Perpetual Crisis: Selling a Story of Reading (and Literacy)
English-speaking countries around the world are once again fighting another Reading War. In the US, the movement is called the “science of reading” (SOR) and the result has been intense media scrutiny of reading programs, teachers, and teacher education as well as highly prescriptive state-level legislation and mandates. Those of us who do not teach beginning readers are not exempt from the negative consequences of another Reading War. This webinar will briefly introduce the history of Reading Wars and identify the key elements of the SOR movement and why the public stories and legislation are poised to erase teacher autonomy and serving the individual needs of students.
“Science of” Movements as Trojan Horse Education Reform [Access PP PDF Here]
In June 2024, the newly formed Evidence Advocacy Center announced plans to “[transform] the [teaching] profession into an evidence-based system.” However, the EAC admitted “educators will relinquish certain freedoms.” This session will examine the “science of” movements as a subset of a 40-year cycle of accountability-based education reform (Trojan Horse Education Reform) that de-professionalizes teachers and fails to serve the needs of students or public education.
Session Two — 2:00 – 3:30 p.m.
Big Lies of Education: “Science of” Era Edition [Access PP PDF Here]
Education practices and policy are often directly and indirectly driven by the stories told in the media, among the public, and by political leaders. This session will explore the Big Lies in the compelling but misleading narratives, including A Nation at Risk/education “crisis,” reading proficiency/NAEP, National Reading Panel, poverty as an excuse, and international test rankings and economic competitiveness.
The Manufactured Crisis: Exposing the False Narrative of Public Education’s “Failure”
Date & Time
Apr 16, 2025 08:30 PM EST
Description
Join us for a timely and vital conversation on April 16 at 6:30 p.m. ET with Dr. P.L. Thomas, Professor of Education at Furman University. For decades, media and policymakers have pushed a narrative that America’s public schools are “failing.” But who benefits from this story, and who is harmed by it? Dr. Thomas will expose how the education reform industry has fueled a false crisis, undermining trust in public schools while advancing corporate-driven reforms. Drawing on his experience as a teacher, scholar, and national award-winning writer, Dr. Thomas will offer critical insights into how we can challenge disinformation and reclaim a narrative rooted in equity, democracy, and community empowerment.
In the wake of Katrina in 2005, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal (R) leveraged the natural disaster to begin the eventual shift of schools in New Orleans from traditional public schools (TPS) significantly staffed by a Black professional class of teachers to a charter school Recovery School District (RSD) run by Paul Vallas and often staffed by young, white, and affluent Teach for America (TFA) recruits.
This moment was acknowledged by some as disaster capitalism that had far more to do with politics than improving student achievement. The endgame was to entrench school choice schemes and create a cheaper although fluctuating teacher workforce (TFA).
Yet, as many of us warned, an all-charter school system in New Orleans never outperformed the TPS it replaced.
In fact, all across the US, charter schooling, RSD, TFA, and almost every major education reform schemes have never delivered on the academic outcomes promised.
Here, it is important to acknowledge that most education reform in the US over the past 40 years has been grounded in conservative ideology (even though the political support has been bi-partisan) and most of that reform is Trojan Horse reform—using a false veneer of reform to accomplish ideological and political agendas.
School choice schemes are not about student achievement but about publicly funding private education and “white flight” as public schools have become majority-minority populations of students.
TFA and organizations such as National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) are not designed to improve teacher quality or teacher preparation but about creating a cheap workforce and eradicating teacher professionalism to make way for teachers as mere monitors for scripted programs and computer-based instruction.
Although just two examples, the key point is running through Trojan Horse education reform is not just political and conservative ideology but also a commitment to market forces.
Education reform in the US primarily creates churn—new standards, new programs, new materials, new teacher training, etc.—that serves the needs of the market, not parents or their children. That churn is promoted by education reform influencers who only gain if schools, teachers, and students are perpetually viewed as failing—permanent crisis.
Lurking underneath education reforms during George W. Bush’s tenure as governor of Texas and president of the US was the lure of scripted curriculum that shifted authority away from the teacher and to the state and primarily commercial products.
Although Bush’s reform agendas flourished with bi-partisan support, scripted curriculum and de-professionalizing teachers (see also the value-added methods schemes and the “bad teacher” attacks under Michelle Rhee) mostly lost favor and lay dormant post-Obama (even as the Obama administration double-down on most of the conservative elements established by Bush’s administration).
That is, lay dormant until the “bad teacher” myth was resurrected by Emily Hanford and the “science of reading” (SOR) movement.
As Aukerman explains, the story being sold included several elements of failure and incompetence that pits classroom teachers against teacher educators (both of which are primarily women professionals):
Now that SOR has mostly uncritically swept across the US in the form of state-level reading legislation and policy, the evidence suggests that at the core of the so-called success of SOR policies (see Mississippi and Florida) is one of the most conservative and harmful policies possible—grade retention, as Westall and Cummings explain:
Similar to the results for states with comprehensive early literacy policies, states whose policies mandate third-grade retention see significant and persistent increases in high-stakes reading scores in all cohorts. The magnitude of these estimates is similar to that of the “any early literacy policy” estimates described in Section 4.1.1 above, suggesting that states with retention components essentially explain all the average effects of early literacy policies on high-stakes reading scores. By contrast, there is no consistent evidence that high-stakes reading scores increase in states without a retention component.
Grade retention disproportionately impacts poor students, Black students, Multi-lingual learners, and other marginalized population of students. Retention is popular because it represents a type of accountability and punishment for “other people’s children” who need to be “fixed” by those in power.
Concurrent with the SOR movement, a new flurry of “science of” movements have propagated: “science of learning,” “science of writing,” “science of math.”
The mostly uncritical support for SOR by the media, the education market, parents, and politicians have provided fertile ground for a larger “science of” movement to drive our newest round of the same education reform structures we have been implementing without improving student achievement for forty-plus years.
Let’s emphasize here, Trojan Horse education reform doesn’t work to improve teaching and learning, but it does work for media, market, and political interests.
And now, the mask is coming off with the announcement of the Evidence Advocacy Center:
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.
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)
Under the Brave New World of “science of” education mandates, teachers will have freedom from professional autonomy and freedom to implement scripted programs!
And who benefits?:
Many of these groups are fundamentally conservative, but even a modicum of interrogating the Who and Why behind this agenda reveals some chilling concerns.
NCTQ was founded by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank dedicated to school choice/charter schools and market forces. Note that there is a distinct contradiction between advocating for “science” in education practices and citing NCTQ, which has never produced any scientifically valid “reports.”
The leadership of EAC includes several connections to the University of Oregon, home of DIBELS®, a phonics-centric program that was revitalized by the SOR movement.
Other leaders include Louisa Moats, creator of LETRS, which is being mandated across the US to retrain teachers in SOR even though, again, the program is not supported by science.
The 95 Percent Group is also based on an aspirational claim not grounded in settled science, as one analysis concludes about the 95% claim: “This all said, it does seem there is some level of support for 96% being a benchmark goal [emphasis added], for reading proficiency rates.”
And two key comments lurking in the background of these “science of” movements must not be ignored.
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.
Connect the dots and connect the rhetoric: “Relinquish certain freedoms,” “sell what we do so well,” “watchdogs.”
The “science of” movements are yet another cycle of Trojan Horse education reform. We have already opened the gates and waved this in with blinders on, so now we must do our best to reclaim teaching and learning that serves the needs of our students and not the media, the market, and political/ideological agendas at the expense of those students.
My partner and I were discussing this YouTube video by Nick Lewis, who explains in the beginning how social media influencers make profits (watch the first few minutes, by the way, for his explanation):
The key point here is that social media influencers need consumers to always be interested and buying the next thing, the new thing.
Influencers are not incentivized to find for their audiences The Thing, something that lasts, something that solves a problem, because the value is in churn—consumer buying the thing and then almost immediately positioned to want to replace that thing with the new thing.
That dynamic is exactly what is working in the perpetual reading war where influencers (journalists, education reformers, politicians) are incentivized to keep the public in a constant state of crisis/reform.
Those crisis influencers must first create market space (“Reading programs X and Y have failed!”) and then promote the New Reading Program—and then in just a few years, that reading program will be declared a failure so if we will only adopt this Next New Reading Program …
Reading reform influencers are like social media influencers as well in that they lack expertise in the issue; their only expertise is the influencing and the creation of constant churn.
The “science of” movements in education are just that—influencers creating market churn—and not in most ways about addressing real educational problems and certainly not about solving them.
If education and reading were satisfactorily improved, what would they do?
We need to deinfluence reading (and education) reform if we are genuinely concerned about improving student achievement.
As a writer and a teacher of writing, I am well aware of the need to avoid cliches, but cliches often do, in fact, capture well something that is worth considering.
In this education reform “science of” era, reading reformers are suffering the negative consequences of missing the forest by hyper-focusing on a few trees.
The cautionary tales being ignored [1] are also expanding, and possibly the most powerful evidence that the SOR movement is misguided is in the UK, where a similar reading reform movement was implemented in 2006.
Not surprising, but phonics-intensive reading reform in the UK has not achieved what was promised—and media as well as political leaders are still shouting “reading crisis.” [2]
At the core of education reform broadly and reading reform narrowly are several fatal flaws that mainstream reformers refuse to avoid: (1) manufactured crises, (2) one-size-fits-all solutions, and (3) policies and mandates that are hostile to teacher autonomy and individual student needs.
Digging deeper into the monolithic reading reform cycles over the past 40 years (and reaching back into 80 years of reading crisis rhetoric and fruitless reading wars), some of the most ignored evidence in reading crisis rhetoric and reading reform/policy concerns the failure to address how demanding teacher fidelity to policy and programs reinforces deficit ideology about language and marginalized students.
As I have noted, I was confronted with evidence about Units of Study (UoS) that has never been the focus of the outsized and misguided attacks on that program and Lucy Calkins. Teachers at a conference just weeks before the Covid shutdown explained to me that their problem with UoS was not the program itself but the excessive policing and accountability by administrators that teachers implement the program with fidelity.
Two problems exist with implementing programs with fidelity. First, that shifts the locus of authority away from the teacher and to the program itself. And thus, second, that shift institutionalizes a deficit ideology about language and students since programs tend to impose standardized versions of literacy as well as evaluate students in terms of how they fail to demonstrate standard literacy.
Fidelity to programs creates obstacles for honoring fidelity to student needs.
Few people challenge how efforts to standardized language is a way to standardize humans (and children). Formal schooling’s approach to language is almost exclusively standardizing—systematic phonics, Standard English grammar, and false concepts such as the “word gap” (see Recommended articles below).
What we in the US should not be ignoring is evidence from the UK of how policy manifests itself in the real-world classroom.
Cushing and Clayton offer excellent data based on evidence drawn from the Critical Language Awareness group (CLAW). Here are some of the highlights of that evidence:
“[T]eachers work in contexts where they undoubtedly negotiate a dense array of top-down policy initiatives which may well not align with their language ideological beliefs.” Key here is that policy imposes beliefs about language, thus, there is no such thing as objective or apolitical policy.
And thus: “We understand language discrimination not simply as about individual attitudes which manifest in individual, malicious acts of prejudice, but as a structural phenomenon underpinned by language ideologies which stratify, rank, and hierarchically organise language varieties and the communities associated with them (Lippi-Green, 2012). Schools are particularly key sites of language ideological production and the co-construction of racial, class, and linguistic stratification.”
Language/reading policy legislates national ideology grounded in deficit ideology:
Attempting to justify these structural deficits, the state produced a stigmatising narrative of strivers and scroungers which framed working-class and racialised minorities as responsible for their own hardships, and thus responsible for their own welfare by modifying their individual behaviours, including language (Tyler, 2018).
Austerity, public cuts, and the 2011 nationwide uprisings that followed created an ideological space in which educational reform was deemed by the state to be urgent and necessary, and where the most marginalised members of society could begin to experience upward social mobility and educational success simply by changing their language (see Nijjar, 2018).
The dynamic in place in the UK is being replicated in the US:
These mechanisms include new national curricula, high-stakes standardised grammar tests for primary school students, high-stakes GCSE assessments for secondary school students, revised professional standards for teachers, and Ofsted, the schools inspectorate. These policy mechanisms place teachers into positions where they are encouraged (and rewarded) to perceive marginalised students’ language as deficient, to engage in hostile language policing, and to reproduce ideologies of linguistic correctness which bolster language discrimination. At the same time, post-2010 curriculum changes stripped away units and assessments concerned with spoken language study, leaving little room for teachers to engage in critical debates about language variation, attitudes, and ideologies. These changes coordinated with a resurgence of deficit discourses in policy, such as those clustered around the so-called word gap and an increased focus on technical grammar and vocabulary—at the expense of critical and social aspects of language.
Language/reading policy tends to erase how language ideologies are “intricately connected to race, class, and privilege.” In short, “language ideologies were a proxy for other forms of stigma,” and that stigma impacts both students and teachers, especially those from marginalized backgrounds and identities.
Reading policy ignores and even resists critical approaches to language that “challenge language discrimination.” Yet, Cushing and Clayton document “how students had ‘loved looking at how and why their language got policed’ and how the unit allowed students to see that ‘attitudes about their language were really just about their social class.'”
Literacy instruction not grounded in deficit ideology faces multiple obstacles, then: “internal obstacles (in the form of management) and external obstacles (in the form of Ofsted, national curricula, assessments, and examination boards).”
“What is important to stress here is that schools are under increasing pressure to demonstrate ideological fidelity to externally produced, state-produced education policy, themselves which are underpinned by academic scholarship subscribing to normative ideologies about language and discourses of deficit (Cushing, 2023c).”
Cushing and Clayton build to a typology for anti-language discrimination. Here, I want to emphasize a key component about what counts as evidence: “Teachers grounded their work in a broad research base, including recent developments within critical applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and the sociology of education. They questioned mainstream narratives of ‘the evidence base’ and drew on radical, critical scholarship.”
The article ends by noting that teachers alone cannot change this pattern, and I want to stress that is especially true in the US where teachers are often powerless and have been publicly discredited as not knowing how to teach reading.
However, the evidence is clear that “[l]anguage discrimination is a structural phenomenon” and that reading policy and reading programs are key elements in that structure.
Mandating fidelity to deficit beliefs about language and students is at the core of the SOR movement. Once again, we are missing the evidence by focusing on a few trees and ignoring the forest.
Dominic Wyse and Charlotte Hacking present a ground-breaking account of teaching phonics, reading, and writing. Created from a landmark study, new research, new theory, and cutting-edge teacher professional development, this balanced approach to teaching seeks to improve all children’s learning, and therefore life chances.
The book dismantles polarised debates about the teaching of phonics and analyses the latest scientific evidence of what really works. It shows, in vivid detail, how phonics, reading, and writing should be taught through the creativity of some of the best authors of books for children. By describing lessons inspired by ‘real books’, it showcases why the new approach is more effective than narrow phonics approaches.
The authors call for a paradigm shift in literacy education. The chapters show how and why education policies should be improved on the basis of unique analyses of research evidence from experimental trials and the new theory and model the Double Helix of Reading and Writing. It is a book of hope for the future in the context of powerful elites influencing narrow curricula, narrow pedagogy, and high stakes assessments.
The Balancing Act will be of interest to anyone who is invested in young children’s development. It is essential reading for teachers, trainee teachers, lecturers, researchers, and policy makers world-wide who want to improve the teaching of reading and writing in the English language.
ILEC Vision: To promote literacy learning practices that enable all children and youth to realize their full potential as literate, thinking human beings.
At the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), …I witnessed the spread of serious misinformation about reading research and related reforms. In this post, I aim to address four particularly troubling ideas I encountered. For each, I will not only provide factual corrections but also contextual clarifications, highlighting any bits of truth or valid criticisms that may exist within these misconceptions.
The post, however, misrepresents valid concerns about SOR messaging and the growing reality of negative consequences for SOR-based legislation and mandates[1]. Further, many of the bullet points under “facts” do not refute but support valid criticisms framed as “myths.” The post focuses on idealized possibilities of SOR to the exclusion of the current implementation of SOR-based programs and instruction.
Positive Aspects of the Post:
Under Myth #1, Quintero acknowledges the problems with misrepresenting National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data[2] on reading and minimizing the impact of poverty and inequity on student achievement[3].
Quintero concedes: “Reading science (indeed, any science!) is not settled; science is dynamic and evolving.”
ILEC Concerns:
Myth #1(“The reading crisis is manufactured”) is self-contradictory in that the “fact” bullets repeat the valid concerns raised among SOR critics about misrepresenting NAEP data and ignoring out-of-school factors in education reform. Once again, the SOR reading “crisis” is in fact manufactured[4].
Myths #2 (individualized instruction) and #3 (SOR restricts teacher agency) misrepresent the trend across the US of banning some reading programs and mandating other programs that tend to be structured literacy and too often scripted curriculum. Scripted curriculum does in practice impose on-size-fits-all instruction and de-professionalizes teachers[5].
Myth #4 (“The Science of Reading harms English learners”) fails to acknowledge concerns raised among Multilingual learner (MLL) scholars and teachers about SOR’s one-size-fits-all mandates[6] and “whitewashing”[7] the texts offered students from diverse backgrounds[8].
Quintero poses a false binary between SOR reform or reverting to an inadequate status quo, ignoring credible alternatives to reading reform grounded in equity/diversity and teacher agency.
May 4 has become a special day in pop culture, especially for fans and nerds who love Star Wars. May 4, 2024, proved to be a doubly special day since it fell on Free Comic Book Day.
That morning, I had two of my grandchildren—my granddaughter, 9, and my grandson, 7. With some trepidation that they would be far less excited than I was, I offered to take them to Free Comic Book Day at my local comic book shop, The Tangled Web.
The store was filled with adult faces I knew from visiting the shop at least weekly, but I was pleased to see many children there also as we weaved through the pay line to reach the back room tables stacked with free comic books.
The sign read “Three Books Only,” and the store owner greeted us, adding that the comics for children were on the first table.
My grandson said he saw the book he wanted, Pokemon, as we shuffled forward in line.
When we reached the end, where the owner was sitting, my granddaughter was holding three books when she saw one at the end she wanted so we told her she could swap out one she was holding.
The owner heard us and told her to keep all four.
We looked around a bit—my grandson wanted to see the high-priced Pokemon cards behind the case—and then as we walked to the car, my granddaughter took my hand and said the owner was nice for letting her have an extra book.
Immediately in the car, my grandson began flipping through his Pokemon book, saying some times he just likes to look at the pictures. I told him that over my comic book life sine the 1970s, I almost always do a first “read” of the books just looking at the artwork.
Back at the apartment, my granddaughter took one book in to read, a teaser copy of Monster High (IDW). My partner was setting up for her and the children to play Smash Bros. on the TV while my granddaughter consumed her new comic book.
Soon, she moved over to the couch, sitting down heavily and sighing. The story ended in a cliff hanger, and she was sad there wasn’t more.
My granddaughter was hooked. The magic of free comic book day.
No tests. No assignments. No chastising children not to look at pictures while making meaning.
Just a few encouraging adults, access to books, and the freedom to read for pleasure.
We had to drop the children off with their father just after midday to head to my partner’s book club. I tend to be a passive observer, although I did read their first book.
The book club consists of mostly friends in a gamer group, and the anchor for the monthly gathering is a series of wines for tasting.
The discussions are relatively haphazard, often wandering off into very interesting tangents punctuated with attending to children and dogs or grabbing snacks provided by everyone.
This Saturday the food was supposed to be Star Wars themed because of May 4.
As time passed and some needed to leave, the group chose the next book—this month had been nonfiction and the next category is works in translation (something I was particularly excited about)—by sharing blurbs about several suggested books (including three from my partner).
To say the least, my partner and I are as excited as my grandchildren were in the wake of Free Comic Book Day.
The next day, however, I read Dan Kois writing about the “Decline by 9”:
[A] child’s attitude towards reading enjoyment and importance is a predictor of reading frequency, which is why it also is striking to note the drop between ages eight and nine in the percentage of kids who think reading books for fun is extremely or very important (from 65% to 57%). Similarly, the number of kids who say they love reading drops significantly from 40% among eight-year-olds to 28% among nine-year-olds.
Kois acknowledges some of the standard reasons cited for children not reading—often over many decades blaming technology such as smartphones today—but then makes this point:
But others also pointed to the way reading is being taught to young children in an educational environment that gets more and more test-focused all the time. “I do not blame teachers for this,” said O’Sullivan, but the transformation of the reading curriculum means “there’s not a lot of time for discovery and enjoyment in reading.” She noted a change I, too, had noticed: Reading in the classroom has moved away from encouraging students to dive into a whole book and moved toward students reading excerpts and responding to them. “Even in elementary school, you read, you take a quiz, you get the points. You do a reading log, and you have to read so many minutes a day. It’s really taking a lot of the joy out of reading.”
The specific reference is to the “science of reading” (SOR) movement that has targeted reading programs by banning some and mandating those that are often scripted curriculum and phonics-heavy.
As Kois’s article acknowledges, the SOR movement is sacrificing important aspects of reading, including pleasure, rich texts, and diversity [1].
But this is a matter of intensity because formal schooling has always been one of the places where pleasure reading goes to die.
I taught high school English for 18 years throughout the 1980s and 1990s, witnessing first-hand that most of my very bright students had become non-readers even though you could visit any K-1 classroom and see a room full of children eager to read.
My high school students all had one thing in common—formal schooling.
This May the Fourth was a truly wonderful day for reading that I was gifted to witness. On a Saturday and nowhere near a school.
I watched children and adults choose to be readers, eager and excited.
And again, no tests. No assignments. No chastising anyone about how to make meaning or what mattered about what they were reading.
This May the Fourth was about The Force, not some Jedi skill set, but reading for pleasure and not reading as a task.
Not much, according to NEPC Fellow Elena Aydarova of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as explained in a recent article published in the peer-refereed Harvard Educational Review. In fact, she warns that legislators are using science-of-reading legislation to distract from more serious approaches to addressing students’ needs.
Using an “anthropology of policy approach,” Aydarova zeroes in on legislative debates surrounding science of reading (SOR) reforms that have swept the nation in the past half decade. As of July 2022, 29 states and the District of Columbia had adopted this approach, Aydarova writes.
Aydarova closely examines Tennessee’s Literacy Success Act (LSA). She analyses videos of legislative meetings and debates, stakeholder interviews, and examinations of bills, policy reports, media coverage, and other documents associated with the LSA, which was passed in 2021.
This SOR bill was first introduced in 2020. As the bill underwent revisions, the phrase “science of reading” was substituted with “foundational literacy skills” to describe the same content: “Across contexts and artifacts produced by various actors, the meanings of ‘science of reading’ shifted and were frequently replaced with new signs, such as ‘foundational literacy skills,’ ‘phonics,’ and others.”
Aydarova finds little evidence that advocates, intermediaries, or legislators grounded their support in anything resembling scientific evidence. Instead, “science of reading” becomes a catch-all phrase representing a grab bag of priorities and beliefs: “[I]n advocates’ testimonies and in legislative deliberations, neuroscience as SOR’s foundational element was reduced to vague references to ‘brain’ and was often accompanied by casual excuses that speakers did not know what ‘it all’ meant.”
Motivations for supporting SOR reforms range from commercial to ideological. For instance, Aydarova notes that after the passage of The Literacy Success Act in 2021, nearly half of Tennessee’s school districts adopted curricula promoted by the Knowledge Matters Campaign. This campaign, supported by curriculum companies such as Amplify and wealthy backers such as the Charles Koch Foundation, added SOR wording to its marketing effort as the curriculum it had originally supported fell out of favor due to its association with Common Core State Standards, which had become politically unpopular in many states.
As the SOR bill reached the legislative floor, “science” was rarely mentioned.
“The link to science disappeared, and instead the sign shifted toward tradition rooted in these politicians’ own past experiences,” Aydarova writes. “During final deliberations, legislators shared that they knew phonics worked because they had learned to read with its help themselves.”
Concerningly, the bill’s supporters also positioned it as “a substitution for investing in communities and creating the safety nets that were necessary for families to climb out of poverty.”
For instance, legislators dismissed as “state over-reach” proposals that would have expanded access to early education or placed more social workers in schools in underserved communities. Yet they “emphasized the importance of proposing legislation to reform reading instruction to solve other social issues,” such as incarceration, impoverishment, and unemployment. Aydarova writes:
Based on artificial causality—poverty and imprisonment rates would decline if phonics was used for reading instruction—these reforms naturalized the widening socioeconomic inequities and depoliticized social conditions of precarity that contribute to growing prison populations. Through these material substitutions, the SOR legislation promised students and their communities freedom, and robbed them of it at the same time.
In the end, Aydarova finds that, “Science has little bearing on what is proposed or discussed, despite various policy actors’ claims to the contrary. Instead, SOR myths link tradition, curriculum products, and divestment from social safety nets.”
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 