[This has been submitted to several newspapers in SC without response so far.]

Ranking member of the US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, Bill Cassidy (R – LA) has issued a report announcing a reading crisis in America: “Two-thirds of America’s fourth and eighth graders are not proficient in reading.”

Here in SC, legislators are once considering new reading legislation, building on over a decade of reforms with Read to Succeed.

However, a report from the progressive NPE and an analysis from the conservative Education Next offer contrarian truths about public education and student achievement, neither of which is grounded in crisis rhetoric or blaming students, teachers, and schools for decades of political negligence.

First, based on NAEP data—similar to Cassidy’s report—Shakeel and Peterson in EdNext offer a much different view of student achievement in the US, notably about reading achievement:

Contrary to what you may have heard, average student achievement has been increasing for half a century. Across 7 million tests taken by U.S. students born between 1954 and 2007, …[r]eading scores have grown by 20 percent of a standard deviation during that time, nearly one year’s worth of learning.

When we examine differences by student race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, longstanding assumptions about educational inequality start to falter. Black, Hispanic, and Asian students are improving far more quickly than their white classmates in elementary, middle, and high school. In elementary school, for example, reading scores for white students have grown by 9 percent of a standard deviation each decade, compared to 28 percent for Asian students, 19 percent for Black students, and 13 percent for Hispanic students. Students from low socioeconomic backgrounds also are progressing more quickly than their more advantaged peers in elementary and middle school. And for the most part, growth rates have remained steady throughout the past five decades.

Shakeel and Peterson’s analysis confirms a concern raised by scholars for decades after A Nation at Risk—the manufactured educational crisis perpetuated by the media, political leaders, and education publishers.

Keeping the US in perpetual crisis has resulted in over four decades of blaming students, teachers, and public schools as failures even though education policy and funding have been exclusively controlled by political leadership at the national and state levels.

That leads us to a state-by-state analysis from NPE that avoids blaming students, teachers, and schools by holding political leadership accountable for the following:

• Privatization Laws: the guardrails and limits on charter and voucher programs to ensure that taxpayers and students are protected from discrimination, corruption, and fraud.
• Homeschooling Laws: laws to ensure that instruction is provided safely and responsibly.
• Financial Support for Public Schools: sufficient and equitable funding of public schools.
• Freedom to Teach and Learn: whether state laws allow all students to feel safe and thrive at school and receive honest instruction free of political intrusion.

The top five states include North Dakota, Connecticut, Vermont, Illinois, and Nebraska with Arkansas, North Carolina, Utah, Arizona, and Florida sitting at the bottom.

SC ranks 39th, receiving a grade of F for failing to fully support public schools or our democracy. That political negligence has resulted in decades of unwarranted negative messages about our schools, teachers, and students.

These reports combined offer SC an opportunity to resist crisis rhetoric as well as rejecting the ineffective reform cycles since the 1980s.

The problems facing our students, teachers, and schools are social inequities such as poverty and racism, but we also have a history of political negligence in our state that has resulted in a national recognition of our Corridor of Shame.

We can and should do better for our students, schools, and state by recognizing that the real failure is not our schools but our political leadership and the lack of political will to fund and support education as a foundational part of our democracy.

In my work as a public educator/scholar, I have had conversations with dozens of people seeking to understand education issues and topics because they are not themselves educators or are not literacy educators.

Yesterday, I had such a conversation for over an hour, discussing the issue of reading in my state in the context of the “science of reading” (SOR) movement.

During that discussion, a key point was made about how debates about reading proficiency of students and teaching reading are often absent nuance—and that the nuance itself is part of the problem with finding effective reform.

Like all states in the US (although at an extreme level), my home state of South Carolina has been an early and eager education reform state, including multiple iterations of reading legislation reform.

Also like most states, SC education and reading reform has been a constant cycle of crisis and new reform. We seem to refuse to acknowledge that reform itself is need of reform because so far the reform never works (or we wouldn’t need the next round of reform).

None the less, since we seem committed to shouting reading crisis every few years in order to justify yet more reading reform, this round of reading crisis serves as a powerful example of how the rhetoric around discussing reading proficiency and teaching reading is fraught with miscommunication and often unnecessary antagonism because of basic misunderstandings or problematic clarifications.

At the broadest level, what we mean by “reading” is an essential part of the conversation.

Particularly in the SOR era, there is a spectrum of what counts as “reading” for beginning readers that has on one extreme the ability to pronounce words absent meaning (such as nonsense words), and then on the other extreme, students being able to create meaning from a text without decoding (walking through a picture book and recreating the story either from memory or using the pictures).

Somewhere in the middle of that spectrum is, I think, what we should be talking about when we talk about reading—a student’s ability to eagerly and critically produce meaning from text grounded in automatic word recognition.

However, what greatly complicates how we talk about “reading” is that discussion often relies on (what should be) technical language.

Media, public, and political rhetoric around reading tends to use for “reading” both “reading proficiency” and “grade level reading.” Rarely, those two terms are used distinctly, but more often than not, they are tossed around as synonymns.

Here is a serious concern as I have noted often.

First, we have no standard metric of “proficient” or “grade level” at the federal or state level, and there is little understanding about how “proficient” is often an aspirational metric that is well above “grade level” (for example, NAEP achievement levels in which “basic” is approximately grade level).

Next, we have no clarification in the US about what percentage of students can or should be at whatever level we agree on and at what grade. [Note that I would add another issue is that we prefer “grade level” to “age level,” the latter being in my opinion a better metric.]

This, then, leads to another significant aspect of the current SOR movement; when we talk about reading, we often talk about what percentage of students are reading appropriately (?) at certain designated grades, often grade 3 or 4.

A claim made by SOR advocates helps show how this is a problem since many of them promise that 90-95% of students can be proficient readers.

Setting aside that this is a speculative claim and not a statistic supported by a valid body of science, the 90-95% argument often isn’t a clear one in terms of when.

Does that mean 90-95% of students can eventually become proficient readers or grade level readers, or that 90-95% of students can be proficient or at grade level in every single grade throughout schooling?

I think those questions are essential clarifications to address.

Among other elements of reading wars and education/reading reform, I think what we talk about when we talk about reading needs to be addressed in ways that clarify the elements noted above.

We need standard definitions for “reading,” “reading proficiency,” and “grade level reading”; we also should strongly consider replacing “grade level” with “age level” (to alleviate that distorting impact of policies such as grade retention on standardized measures of reading).

And we also need a national conversation about what are reasonable and aspirational goals for what percentage of students meet those metrics and when.

We seem to have ignored a key lesson and failure of NCLB—mandating 100% of students achieve proficiency by 2014. In other words, aspirational mandates doom reform to failure and erase any possibility that we do in fact reform reading policy in the best interests of students (and not the adults who profit in the debate and reform).

We all must do better to acknowledge what we talk about when we talk about reading—or we are destined to remain trapped in the crisis/reform cycle that hasn’t served anyone well (except for the profiteering) for over forty years.

Note

The title is a reference to a title that is a reference. Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, which is inspired by Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.