Category Archives: education

deficit thinking, education, Grit, growth mindset

Big Lies of Education: Growth Mindset and Grit

May 5, 2025 plthomasedd

Currently, US education is under one of the most intense eras of criticism—although there has never been a moment over the past century and a half absent cries of education “crisis.”

Notably during the accountability era begun in the early 1980s, permanent (and manufactured) education crisis has been further eroded by the education marketplace and fads promising to end that crisis.

One enduring tension in the field of education as well is between calls for high-quality and narrowly “scientific” evidence for educational practices [1] and the pervasive embracing of education fads that promise more than research supports.

Two of the current examples of this “gap” [2] between research and practice are growth mindset and grit theories and interventions.

I am now revising a chapter on the current research on growth mindset and grit, and offer here an overview of what educators should know before embracing or continuing to embrace advocacy for both theories and interventions that promise to address student achievement.

In short, the research does not support claims by advocates for growth mindset and grit. Here is a list of what we currently do know about both:

Advocates for growth mindset and grit significantly overstate the casual relationship between these theories/interventions and student achievement.
Research published and cited by advocates is often plagued by flawed research design and/or population concerns, expectancy bias, and reporting errors (including financial conflicts) (Macnamara & Burgoyne, 2023).
Advocates tend to acknowledge that implementation of both growth mindset and grit is often suffers from oversimplification, misunderstanding, and reducing the theories and interventions to slogans and isolated lessons.
Meta-analyses and high-quality independent studies tend to have mixed results with weak effectiveness measures that may not be significant. Increasingly, research on both is negative, in fact (see chart below).
Despite the lack of evidence to support either growth mindset or grit, both continue to be implemented in many schools; some scholars raise concerns that this support is driven by ideology (deficit ideology, bootstrapping/ rugged individualism/ meritocracy) and racism/classism.
Scholars also warn that overemphasizing growth mindset and grit allows educators and policy to ignore the more significant impact of out-of-school factors [3], and as a result, often messaging and interventions manifest as “blaming the victims.”

Below, I include a chart of recent public commentary and a research overview of growth mindset and grit. I also provide the references after the chart with a few key quotes in some of the more powerful studies.

	Growth Mindset	Grit
Popular sources	Negative Study finds, 2018 Tait, 2020 Young, 2021	Negative Barshay, 2019 Denby, 2016 Selingo, 2016 Tampio, 2016
research validity and robustness	Positive Dweck, et al. Dweck & Yeager, 2019 Hecht et al., 2021 Mixed Haimovitz & Dweck, 2017 Miller, 2019 Sisk et al., 2018 Tipton et al., 2023 Yeager et al., 2022 Yeager & Dweck, 2020 Negative Brez et al., 2020 (Burnette et al., 2018; Dixson et al., 2017; Sisk et al., 2018; Schmidt et al., 2017) Burgoyne et al., 2020 Ganimian, 2020 Li & Bates, 2019 Macnamara & Burgoyne, 2023	Positive Duckworth Mixed Allen, Kannangara, & Carson, 2021 Palisoc et al., 2017 Ris, 2015 Negative Bazelais, Lemay, & Doleck, 2016 Barcza-Renner, Shipherd, & Basevitch, 2024 (burnout) Crede, 2018 Credé, Tynan, & Harms, 2017 Goodman, 2018 Gorski, 2016 Kohn, 2014 Locks, Mendoza, & Carter, 2024 Stahl, 2024
evidence-based or ideologically based	Deficit ideology Dudley-Marling, 2007 Gorski, 2000 Tewell, 2020 Thomas, 2023 Wormeli, n.d., Grit and growth mindset Bootstrapping/ rugged individualism/ meritocracy Petrik, Vega, & Vindas-Meléndez, 2022 Tewell, 2020	Deficit ideology Cushing, 2021 Dudley-Marling, 2007 Gorski, 2000, 2016 Locks, Mendoza, & Carter, 2024 Stahl, 2024 Tewell, 2020 Thomas, 2023 Wormeli, n.d., Grit and growth mindset Bootstrapping/ rugged individualism/ meritocracy Kohn, 2014 Kindu, 2014 Locks, Mendoza, & Carter, 2024 Tewell, 2020
racism and classism	Racism Thomas, 2023 Young, 2012b Classism/ poverty Coles, 2019 Mullainathan & Shafir, 2014 Thomas, 2023 Thomas, et al., 2014	Racism Thomas, 2023 [Popular] Love, 2019 Perry, 2016 Locks, Mendoza, & Carter, 2024 Classism/ poverty Coles, 2019 Mullainathan & Shafir, 2014 Stahl, 2024 Thomas, 2023 Thomas, et al., 2014

Growth Mindset and Grit/ Deficit

Cushing, I. (2021), Language, discipline and ‘teaching like a champion.’ British Educational Research Journal, 47(1), 23-41. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3696

Dudley-Marling, C. (2007). Return of the deficit. Journal of Educational Controversy, 2(1), 1–13.

Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of freedom: ethics, democracy, and civic courage. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Mizerny, C. (2019, November 23). Misconceptions about mindset, rigor, and grit. MiddleWeb. https://www.middleweb.com/21699/our-misconceptions-about-mindset-rigor-and-grit

Thomas, P.L. (2023). The “Science of Reading,” education faddism, and the failure to honor the intellectual lives of all children: On deficit lenses and ignoring class and race stereotyping. Voices in the Middle, 30(3), 17-21. https://publicationsncte.org/content/journals/10.58680/vm202332439

Wormeli, R. (n.d.). Grit and growth mindset: Deficit thinking? AMLE. https://www.amle.org/grit-and-growth-mindset-deficit-thinking/

Growth Mindset and Grit/ Poverty

Coles, G. (2019, Summer). Cryonics phonics: Inequality’s little helper. New Politics, 18(3). https://newpol.org/issue_post/cryonics-phonics-inequalitys-little-helper/.

Gorski, P. C. (2000). Good intentions are not enough: A decolonizing intercultural education. Intercultural Education, 19(6), pp. 515-525.

Mullainathan, S. & Shafir, E. (2014). Scarcity: The new science of having less and how it defines our lives. Macmillan.

Thomas, P. L., Porfilio, B.J., Gorlewski, J., & Carr, P.R. (eds.). (2014). Social context reform: A pedagogy of equity and opportunity. Routledge.

Growth mindset

Popular Sources

Study finds popular ‘growth mindset’ educational interventions aren’t very effective. (2018, May 22). Science Daily. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180522114523.htm.

Tait, V. (2020, October 17). Is there still a case for teaching fixed vs. growth mindset? Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/pulling-through/202010/is-there-still-case-teaching-fixed-vs-growth-mindset

Young, G. (2021). Why growth mindset theory fails children. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/shrink-mindset/202106/why-growth-mindset-theory-fails-children

Research

Brez, C., Hampton, E. M., Behrendt, L., Brown, L., & Powers, J. (2020). Failure to replicate: Testing a growth mindset intervention for college student success. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 42(6), 460–468. https://doi.org/10.1080/01973533.2020.1806845

“The pattern of findings is clear that the intervention had little impact on students’ academic success even among sub-samples of students who are traditionally assumed to benefit from this type of intervention (e.g., minority, low income, and first-generation students)” (p. 464)

Burgoyne, A. P., Hambrick, D.Z., & Macnamara, B.N. (2020). How firm are the foundations of mind-set theory? The claims appear stronger than the evidence. Psychological Science, 31(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797619897588.

Burnette, J. L., Russell, M. V., Hoyt, C. L., Orvidas, K., & Widman, L. (2018). An online growth mindset intervention in a sample of rural adolescent girls. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 88(3), 428–445. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjep.12192

Dixson, D. D., Roberson, C. C. B., & Worrell, F. C. (2017). Psychosocial keys to African American achievement? Examining the relationship between achievement and psychosocial variables in high achieving African Americans. Journal of Advanced Academics, 28(2), 120–140. https://doi.org/10.1177/1932202X17701734

Ganimian, A. J. (2020). Growth-mindset interventions at scale: Experimental evidence from Argentina. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 42(3), 417–438. https://doi.org/10.3102/0162373720938041

Haimovitz K., & Dweck, C.S. (2017). The origins of children’s growth and fixed mindsets: New research and a new proposal. Child Development, 88(6), 1849–1859. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12955

Hecht, C. A., Yeager, D. S., Dweck, C. S., & Murphy, M. C. (2021). Beliefs, affordances, and adolescent development: Lessons from a decade of growth mindset interventions. In J. J. Lockman (Ed.), Advances in child development and behavior (Vol. 61, pp. 169–197). JAI. https://doi.org/10.1016/bs.acdb.2021.04.004

Li, Y., & Bates, T. C. (2019). You can’t change your basic ability, but you work at things, and that’s how we get hard things done: Testing the role of growth mindset on response to setbacks, educational attainment, and cognitive ability. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 148(9), 1640–1655. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000669

Macnamara, B. N., & Burgoyne, A. P. (2023). Do growth mindset interventions impact students’ academic achievement? A systematic review and meta-analysis with recommendations for best practices. Psychological Bulletin, 149(3–4), 133–173. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000352

“Taken together, our findings indicate that studies adhering to best practices are unlikely to demonstrate that growth mindset interventions bene t students’ academic achievement. Instead, significant meta-analytic results only occurred when quality control was lacking, and these results were no longer significant after adjusting for publication bias. This pattern suggests that apparent effects of growth mindset interventions on academic achievement are likely spurious and due to inadequate study design, awed reporting, and bias” (p. 163)

Miller, D. I. (2019). When do growth mindset interventions work? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 23(11), 910–912. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2019.08.005

Petrik, R. L., Vega, J., & Vindas-Meléndez, A. R. (2022). A reflection on growth mindset and meritocracy. Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, 12(1), 408–421. DOI: 10.5642/jhummath.202201.3

Schmidt, J.A., Shumow, L., & Kackar-Cam, H.Z. (2017). Does mindset intervention predict students’ daily experience in classrooms? A comparison of seventh and ninth graders’ trajectories. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 46(3), 582–602. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-016-0489-z

Sisk, V. F., Burgoyne, A. P., Sun, J., Butler, J. L., & Macnamara, B. N. (2018). To what extent and under which circumstances are growth mind-sets important to academic achievement? Two meta-analyses. Psychological Science, 29(4), 549-571. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797617739704

Tipton, E., Bryan C., Murray J., McDaniel M., Schneider B., & Yeager D.S. (2023, March/April). Why meta-analyses of growth mindset and other interventions should follow best practices for examining heterogeneity: Commentary on Macnamara and Burgoyne (2023) and Burnette et al. (2023). Psychological Bulletin, 149(3-4), 229-241. doi: 10.1037/bul0000384

Yeager, D. S., Carroll, J. M., Buontempo, J., Cimpian, A., Woody, S., Crosnoe, R., Muller, C., Murray, J., Mhatre, P., Kersting, N., Hulleman, C., Kudym, M., Murphy, M., Duckworth, A. L., Walton, G. M., & Dweck, C. S. (2022). Teacher mindsets help explain where a growth-mindset intervention does and doesn’t work. Psychological Science, 33(1), 18-32. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976211028984

Yeager D. S., & Dweck C. S. (2020). What can be learned from growth mindset controversies? American Psychologist, 75(9), 1269–1284. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000794

Grit

Popular Sources

Barshay, J. (2019, March 11). Research scholars to air problems with using ‘grit’ at school. The Hechinger Report. https://hechingerreport.org/research-scholars-to-air-problems-with-using-grit-at-school/

Bayraktar, B. (2020). Tip: Grit & growth mindset. Tips for Teaching Professors. https://higheredpraxis.substack.com/p/tip-grit-and-growth-mindset

Denby, D. (2016, June 21). The limits of ‘grit.’ The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-limits-of-grit.

Love, B.L. (2019). ‘Grit is in our DNA’: Why teaching grit is inherently anti-Black. Education Week. https://www.edweek.org/leadership/opinion-grit-is-in-our-dna-why-teaching-grit-is-inherently-anti-black/2019/02

Perry, A. (2016). Black and Brown boys don’t need to learn ‘grit,’ they need schools to stop being racist. The Hechinger Report. https://hechingerreport.org/black-brown-boys-dont-need-learn-grit-need-schools-stop-racist/

Selingo, J.J. (2016, May 25). Is ‘grit’ overrated in explaining student success? Harvard researchers have a new theory. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/05/25/is-grit-overrated-in-explaining-student-success-harvard-researchers-have-a-new-theory-and-its-not-comforting-at-all/.

Tampio, N. (2016, June 2). Teaching ‘grit’ is bad for children, and bad for democracy. Aeon. https://aeon.co/ideas/teaching-grit-is-bad-for-children-and-bad-for-democracy.

Research

Allen, R.E., Kannangara, C., & Carson, J. (2021). True grit: How important is the concept of grit for education? A narrative literature review. International Journal of Educational Psychology, 10(1), 73-87. https://doi.org/10.17583/ijep.2021.4578

Barcza-Renner, K., Shipherd, A. M., & Basevitch, I. (2024). An examination of the relationship between burnout and grit in college athletes. Asian Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, 4(3), 138–143. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajsep.2024.10.007

“This study was one of the first to examine the relationship between burnout and grit in student-athletes. The results indicated that student-athletes who were high in grit, also self-reported symptoms of burnout and that this relationship was strongest during the first two years of college. It is plausible athletes who are grittier are also more likely to persevere through stress and challenges, including burnout symptoms. Athletes higher in grit may also be investing more effort into their sport, which could be increasing symptoms of burnout, as well.” (p. 142)

Credé, M. (2018). What shall we do about grit? A critical review of what we know and what we don’t know. Educational Researcher, 47(9), 606-611. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X18801322

“For all its intuitive appeal, the grit literature is currently characterized by a number of serious theoretical and empirical challenges ranging from a lack of construct validity, discriminant validity, and predictive validity. At present there is no empirical support for the idea that grit is the combination of perseverance and passion or for the claim that grit adds to our understanding of success and performance. Indeed, the best available evidence strongly suggests that grit is largely a repackaging of conscientiousness—a widely studied personality trait” (p. 610)

Credé, M., Tynan, M.C., & Harms, P.D. (2017). Much ado about grit: A meta-analytic synthesis of the grit literature. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113(3), 492–511. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000102

Cushing, I. (2021), Language, discipline and ‘teaching like a champion.’ British Educational Research Journal, 47(1), 23-41. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3696

Goodman, S. (2018). It’s not about grit: Trauma, inequity, and the power of transformative teaching. Teachers College Press.

Gorski, P.C. (2016). Poverty and the ideological imperative: A call to unhook from deficit and grit ideology and to strive for structural ideology in teacher education. Journal of Education for Teaching, 42(4), 378-386. DOI: 10.1080/02607476.2016.1215546

Kohn, A. (2014). Grit? A skeptical look at the latest educational fad. Educational Leadership, 74, 104–108.

“Make no mistake: Duckworth is selling grit, not dispassionately investigating its effects” (para. 6).

Kundu, A. (2014). Backtalk: Grit, overemphasized; agency, overlooked. Phi Delta Kappan, 96(1), 80.

Locks, A.M., Mendoza, R., & Carter, D.F. (2024). Debunking the grit narrative in higher education. Routledge.

Ris, E.W. (2015). Grit: A short history of a useful concept. Journal of Educational Controversy, 10(1). https://cedar.wwu.edu/jec/vol10/iss1/3/.

Stahl, G. (2024). “Pedagogies of the poor” to “pedagogies on the poor”: Compliance, grit, and the corporeal. In P.P. Trifonas & S. Jagger (eds) Handbook of curriculum theory, research, and practice. Springer International Handbooks of Education. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21155-3_39

Tewell, E. (2020). The problem with grit: dismantling deficit thinking in library instruction. Libraries and the Academy 20(1), 137-159. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/pla.2020.0007.

“The ideal of meritocracy, much like grit and growth mind-set, assumes that the best and brightest rise to the top based on their hard work and determination, without regard for the historical and present-day subordination of many groups….Deficit models view students as perpetual lacking and at fault. This belief is neither healthy nor accurate. Instead, we need to remain open to broader ways of engaging students and of thinking about their lives, consider what power they really have to effect change, and where we share some responsibility. It is essential to examine how issues of access and equity shape our students’ experiences and to question how success is defined and attained” (p. 150)

Notes

[1] Wormeli, R. (n.d). The problem with, “show me the research” thinking. AMLE. https://www.amle.org/the-problem-with-show-me-the-research-thinking/

[2] LaBrant, L. (1947, January). Research in language. Elementary English, 24(1), 86-94. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41383425

[3] Maroun, J., & Tienken, C.H. (2024). The pernicious predictability of state-mandated tests of academic achievement in the United States. Education Sciences, 14(2), 129-142. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci14020129

Big Lies of Education: Series

education

Academics and Academia Can No Longer Afford the Politics of Silence

May 2, 2025 plthomasedd

[Header Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash]

On April 28, 1967, Muhammad Ali publicly defied being drafted into the Vietnam War, costing him his heavy-weight title and derailing his career for three years during his prime.

Ali’s willingness to put publicly his name and his words on his beliefs reminds me of James Baldwin’s response to William Faulkner’s call for patience when confronting racism and inequity in the US: “There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment, the time is always now.”

I am also compelled by a central motif in the life and work of historian and activist Howard Zinn, who argued that we cannot be neutral on a moving train. In this era of the second Trump administration, our democracy and academic freedom train is heading off a cliff; we are all on board.

At the end of the first Trump administration, I implored academics to do more, to speak more, to use our academic and intellectual capital to advocate for the marginalized and the vulnerable as well as the core principle of what academics and education must preserve—academic freedom.

Yet, most academics and colleges/universities remained committed to the “politics of silence” approach to the threats around us.

We have chosen a sort of self-preserving silence, in fact, despite the danger that poses, one confronted by poet Adrienne Rich:

The study of silence has long engrossed me. The matrix of a poet’s work consists not only of what is there to be absorbed and worked on, but also of what is missing, desaparecido, rendered unspeakable, thus unthinkable.

The current political dismantling of K-12 and higher education is an assault on democracy; real people are suffering in inexcusable ways. The values we claim to hold sacred are being destroyed each moment we hesitate, each moment we remain silent, each moment we fail to act.

We academics may believe that the Ivory Tower allows us to protect our community as our only priority, and thus that we must protect that Ivory Tower. But I have witnessed at the highest level of my 41-year career very real and justified fear among college students, staff, and faculty.

A first-year student writing about their journey as a gay child navigating their family expectations concluded an essay with the following chilling recognition: “No one knows what the future holds for the United States now. Unfortunately, what we face is not simply a political matter, but rather, a threat on individual liberty, and I am scared for what will happen in the next four years.”

And for faculty—especially those most vulnerable due to personal status or rank—who have served the academic community as scholars and teachers, the same fear of the uncertain and hostile world beyond the Ivory Tower is directly impacting how and if we teach as we know we should. Many of us have targets on our backs simply for remaining committed to the academic freedom we hold sacred and fulfilling our moral obligation to address diversity, equity, and inclusion.

That Ivory Tower was never protecting anyone; it isn’t protecting us now in that increasingly hostile world.

Therefore, now is not the time to keep our heads down, now is not the time to retreat into the politics of silence.

As a former high school English teacher, I hear constantly in my mind Willy Lohman imploring “the woods are burning,” and I fear if we persist in a “politics of silence” approach, if we bow to cultural expectations that education and educators must appear to be politically neutral, that fire will consume us all.

We could be better than that, we should be better than that.

As the poet Maggie Smith wrote when Trump was first elected:

The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.

…This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

Ultimately, we must make a decision, one reflected in William Butler Yeats’s enduring poem:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

The time is now to reject the politics of silence that brought us here, to speak and act in the name of academic freedom, in the name of our students walking our campuses now but who must enter the very real world burning around them.

The Zombie Politics of Misinformation about Students Reading at Grade Level

April 29, 2025 plthomasedd

[Header Photo by Daniel Lloyd Blunk-Fernández on Unsplash]

Yesterday, we had our last class session in my upper-level writing and research course that is grounded in students analyzing and evaluating how media covers a chosen education topic.

In that last class, we debriefed about what students concluded about media coverage of education. While some found the coverage valid and informative, much of the discussion focused on why media perpetuates misinformation more often than not—notably about student reading proficiency in the US.

Right on cue, then, I saw this posted on social media, Teaching reading is rocket science, with these two recurring claims that are, in fact, misleading at best and false at worst (see “Recommended” links below):

Eli’s story, and the stories of all my students, are not the exception. They represent the shared reality for two-thirds of our children, here in California and across the country since the 1990s. My students are not at risk because they cannot yet read — they are at risk because not knowing how to read limits their access to opportunities, both academically and beyond.

Research shows when we teach students to read by directly guiding them to break the code of how sounds in letters work, about 95% of them can become strong readers — including multilingual learners and those with dyslexia. So why have only one-third of our fourth graders been reading at grade level for the past three decades? This gap persists because students haven’t had access to evidence-based literacy instruction drawn from decades of vast interdisciplinary research in areas such as cognitive psychology, linguistics, communication sciences and education.

The “2/3 of students are not reading a grade level” claim is one of the most powerful recurring claims in the media. Note these high-profile examples:

Emily Hanford in APM Reports:

The stakes were high. Research shows that children who don’t learn to read by the end of third grade are likely to remain poor readers for the rest of their lives, and they’re likely to fall behind in other academic areas, too. People who struggle with reading are more likely to drop out of high school, to end up in the criminal justice system, and to live in poverty. But as a nation, we’ve come to accept a high percentage of kids not reading well. More than 60 percent of American fourth-graders are not proficient readers, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and it’s been that way since testing began in the 1990s.

Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times:

One of the most bearish statistics for the future of the United States is this: Two-thirds of fourth graders in the United States are not proficient in reading.

And even a college-based literacy professor in The Conversation:

Five years after the pandemic forced children into remote instruction, two-thirds of U.S. fourth graders still cannot read at grade level. Reading scores lag 2 percentage points below 2022 levels and 4 percentage points below 2019 levels.

Despite ample evidence to the contrary and repeated clarifications from many educators and scholars (See “Big Lie” link in “Recommended” below), media characterizations of student reading proficiency continues to be misrepresented, primarily by misunderstanding NAEP achievement levels, because the public has always believed that “kids today can’t read”—despite there being little evidence of a reading “crisis” over the recurring claims of “crisis” reaching back into at least the 1940s.

Two points are important to clarify:

NAEP achievement levels are confusing because “basic” is approximately what most states consider “proficient” and by implication “grade level.” NAEP “proficient” is well above grade level, set at an “aspirational” [1] level that is misleading and creates a perpetual appearance of failure for students, teachers, and schools.
Most states—notably Mississippi and Louisiana—set their “proficient” level just above the mid-point of NAEP “basic” (MS) or just below (LA):

Mapping State Proficiency Standards Onto NAEP Scales, 2007–22

In short, if we consider NAEP and state assessments of reading valid, about 1/3 of students have over the last couple of decades performed below “basic” (NAEP) and thus seem to be below grade level in grade 4.

While the NAEP misinformation and misunderstanding is grounded in the “aspirational” use of “proficient,” the “95% of students can be on grade level” claim is just wildly overstated, and ironically, not based on scientific evidence (despite this being a refrain by the “science of” movement).

I recommend reading Can 95% of Children Learn to Read? to see some of how this claim gained its zombie status.

Historically and currently, many in the US have been and are concerned about student reading acquisition; this, of course, is a valid concern, notably that marginalized and vulnerable populations of students are disproportionately struggling to meet whatever standard we set for “proficient” or “grade level” (see HERE that explores how MS has not closed the race or socioeconomic achievement gaps, for example).

There is an insidious zombie politics to claims about 2/3 of students not reading at grade level, but that if we just did the right thing, 95% of students would read at grade level.

Since neither claim is empirically true, we must confront that basing education claims and reform on misunderstanding and misinformation have not yet worked and are unlikely to work moving forward.

Note

[1] Rosenberg, B. (2004, May). What’s proficient? The No Child Left Behind Act and the many meanings of proficiency. Washington, DC: American Federation of Teachers. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED497886.pdf

Wherefore Art Thou, Jesus?

April 22, 2025 plthomasedd

[Header Photo by Stephanie Klepacki on Unsplash]

With Easter just behind us, mainstream Christians in the US have experienced a high period of religious holidays and celebrations starting around Thanksgiving and then intensely punctuated with Christmas and Easter.

As an atheist/agnostic who seeks to live a good life as a humanist, I witness during these celebrations that much of what passes as religious is mostly pagan rituals and free market capitalism.

The irony, of course, is that these contradiction do, in fact, represent well what mainstream Christianity is in practice and reality for most people in the US.

To further that irony, the claim by the most fervent Christians in the country that the US is a Christian nation is perfectly reflected in the Bacchanalian orgy of branding and spending in the name of Jesus born, crucified, and risen as the stories go.

I was born, raised, and have always lived in the Bible Belt, specifically in the Upstate of South Carolina where many people are Southern Baptist or some other type of fundamentalist Christian.

Something in my DNA, I think, made me not just immune but resistant to authoritarian environments—in my home and family, in schooling, and most significantly in church and religion.

I don’t care much for commandments and blind faith.

My relationship with religion evolved into the sort of embarrassing sardonic nonchalance of adolescence that spilled over into being downright mean during my first two years of college.

In high school, it was a joke. I was elected president of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes as a ploy by some of my friends to have me on student council (they knew I would speak up because I was already viewed as anti-authority).

I think I was the lone person in my peer group openly admitting non-belief, and I had also exposed myself among those friends as a heavy beer drinker—something I had honed growing up on a golf course and playing golf.

That experience working at the golf course is one the most formative moments of my life. The golfers, you see, were adults I knew from my hometown, all very Christian men and most holding jobs that were well regarded with a few much wealthier than I could imagine anyone being (my own family was solidly working class, aspiring to middle class).

The golf course, however, served as an alternate universe of sorts, a perverse sanctuary where these Christian men used profanity, drank heavily, smoked marijuana, and hurled racist and sexist language at a nearly compulsive rate.

And several of these men as well used the golf course for their adultery sanctuary; a few had me monitoring their phone calls as I was tasked to distinguish between calls from their wives and their girlfriends.

The message was clear: Being a Christian was almost entirely rhetorical so that everyone could pretend to embrace the norms of what people were supposed to believe and do (even as almost no one practiced what anyone preached).

I also had to sit quietly and patiently occasionally while good Christians witnessed to me, quoting from the Bible in order to justify their racism and sexism.

Black people descended from Cain mating with apes, I was assured, for example. Something they had learned in church.

By college, I was a nasty atheist to my peers, attending a Methodist college where many were naive, even sweet, true believers.

In those first two years of college, I immersed myself in Sartre, Camus , and Kierkegaard, but that intellectualism lacked the very things I found infuriating in the Christians I was determined to discredit—kindness, human dignity, and love.

Fortunately for me, I found literature and gradually settled into a relatively harmless state of agnosticism anchored to Kurt Vonnegut’s missives on humanism:

So I sit here post-Easter 2025 when the US has fully realized the very worst warnings I have anticipated about being a Christian nation since I was a teen in the 1970s.

Almost 70% of registered voters did not vote for a second Trump term as president, but his base is mostly driven by Christians, specifically fundamentalist Christians.

And his hellscape of policy since January has been punctuated with Christian intent.

This Christianity reminds me of a larger-scale version of the golf course experiences I had—lots of hypocrisy, almost entirely rhetorical without a single ounce of Christian love or respect for human decency.

This Christianity is authoritarian and fueled by hate, fear, and judgment bereft of any logic, morals, or ethics.

US Christianity has proven that distinguishing between a cult and a religion is a distinction without a difference.

There has been an insidious long game reaching back to the Reagan era, the rise of the so-called Moral Majority, that has gradually eroded both Christianity and democracy in the US (watch Shiny Happy People to understand this).

Regardless of the historical accuracy of the stories about Jesus—and the validity of the mystical aspects of miracles and such—there simply is nothing in the cult of Trump that is remotely Jesus-like, just as his behavior as president lacks any hint of democracy.

But there is ample evidence that any optimism anyone has had for the human race is at least naive if not delusional.

I am confident that stories about crucifixion and resurrection are not literally true; I am also confident that Jesus’s simple messages of love each other, lay down your worldly possessions, and do unto others are the very least each human can do to live the good life for ourselves and for others.

Commandments otherwise are mere authoritarianism, ways for a few to control the many.

But a rabid minority in the US has rejected that Jesus nonsense and fully embraced hatred, fear, judgment, and punishment in the embodiment of one the most vile people existing in the US today.

Fools will choose fools to lead them.

And here we are.

education, education reform, Educational Research, literacy, NAEP, politics, reading, Science of Reading

Webinar: The Manufactured Crisis: Exposing the False Narrative of Public Education’s “Failure” (A4PEP)

April 21, 2025 plthomasedd

The Manufactured Crisis: Exposing the False Narrative of Public Education’s “Failure”

[Click HERE for recording]

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.

6:30 pm, April 16

[Click HERE for presentation]

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

Recommended: Effective practices for literacy teaching

April 16, 2025 plthomasedd

Effective practices for literacy teaching, Colin Harrison, Greg Brooks, P. David Pearson, Sari Sulkunen, Renata Valtin (2025)

In light of the PISA 2022 student results, which showed a decline in performance in basic reading skills across Europe, this report presents a detailed literature review of the most recent European and international research on effective approaches to literacy teaching. It highlights practices that have been properly evaluated and are supported by evidence of impact.

Targeted primarily at policymakers, but also relevant to teachers, parents, and all those contributing to children’s literacy development, the report analyses over 600 studies on effective teaching practices (both pedagogical and content-specific), support programmes, and policies that promote literacy for all children across the EU. It covers different levels of education and takes into account gender perspectives as well as the needs of vulnerable and special needs groups.

Based on the key findings, the authors discuss the teaching of comprehension beyond letters and words (e.g. drawing inferences, judging relevance and trustworthiness), the role of dispositional characteristics such as motivation, metacognition, and world knowledge, and the teaching of digital literacy skills, including critically evaluating online information. Building on these findings, they present 20 research-informed recommendations for policymaking.

education

The Great Gatsby at 100: Failing Students and America

April 11, 2025 plthomasedd

Teaching high school English has a Groundhog Day dynamic that people who have not taught may never consider.

Over my 18-year career as a teacher of high school English, I taught some works of literature more times than I’d like to admit. But let me also note that I often taught some works of literature several times a day and then year after year.

One of those works—that I in some ways loathe—is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, which turned 100 this week in 2025.

My well-worn teaching copy of *The Great Gatsby* used to teach high school English from 1984 until 2002.

Setting aside my own skepticism about the canon and requiring all students to read certain so-called “classics,” among the American literature works I was required to teach year after year after year—The Great Gatsby, The Scarlet Letter, The Crucible, and The Sun Also Rises at the core of those required lists—I must admit that Gatsby was often the most accessible for students (easy to read and the Robert Redford film was a great supplement to the unit).

I prefer Hemingway as a writer to Fitzgerald, but I prefer student choice and more diverse and contemporary works as well.

However, a century on and many students in the US still read and study Gatsby in high school along with a fairly conservative list of works from the slightly expanding canon of American literature.

My point here is not to crucify Gatsby or Fitzgerald or modernist literature (lots there that is worth interrogating), but to confront that how secondary (and college) teachers teach along with how students read and learn from Gatsby in traditional and reductive ways that cheat the novel, cheat students, and ultimately cheat the democratic purposes of public education in a (for now) free country.

“Gatsby Believed in the Green Light”

In a bit of ironic symbolism, if you want to see (literally) my concern about the cultural failure of Gatsby, click here: The Empire State Building is turning into a green light for The Great Gatsby’s centennial (See also It’s Gatsby’s World, We Just Live in It).

This act, of course, is a nod to the color imagery running through Gatsby, culminating in the penultimate paragraph of the novel:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther … And one fine morning—

This reductive and figurative language approach to what this novel shows the reader is about more than the often mechanical way students are required and taught to analyze text (more on that next); while teachers, students, and then the public often “get” that Gatsby is about the American Dream, too often that becomes completely disconnected from the novel itself.

Partly, that happens because that next-to-the-last paragraph can become a sort of idealistic doubling-down on the American Dream that Fitzgerald pretty clearly dismantles over fewer than 200 pages.

When I taught Gatsby, in fact, I required students to read John Gardner’s bi-centennial essay, “Amber (Get) Waves (Your) of (Plastic) Grain (Uncle Sam),” where he makes a distinction that is often missed when studying Gatsby:

That idea—humankind’s inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—coupled with a system for protecting human rights—was and is the quintessential American Dream. The rest is greed and pompous foolishness—at worst, a cruel and sentimental myth, at best, cheap streamers in the rain. (p. 96)

Taking Gardner’s figurative language, then, Gatsby’s American Dream (a sort of singular obsession with wealth and Daisy) is just “cheap streamers in the rain,” what has for the most part replaced the essential American Dream—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Fitzgerald’s own life being sold to the capitalism of Jazz Age America, both in his relentless production of short stories for income and his alcoholism and partying, sits behind the fictional dramatization of what America had become, what America kept becoming, and how America now has nearly fully erased “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for “filthy lucre” (as D.H. Lawrence warned just a year after Gatsby was published).

Two dynamics are at play here, I think.

The first is most students like Gatsby because it is short and easy to read (notably more so than reading Edgar Allan Poe or Nathaniel Hawthorne, for example); students also enjoy the melodramatic plot of the novel centered on partying, violence, and adultery.

The second is my larger concern—how we traditionally teach literature in high school through a narrow and distorted New Criticism lens.

Not to wander to deep into the weeds of literary criticism and classroom pedagogy, but most of us can recognize how often high school English classes become “guess what the English teacher wants you to say about this text”—and that guess often includes some literary technique, what I call the “literary technique hunt.”

For high school teachers and students, then, Gatsby become likes most texts being studied—a vehicle for identifying techniques.

Students begin what amounts to an Easter egg hunt; there’s lots of green and yellow (gold) throughout the novel (hint: money), and the job students have is to find the color and identify the symbolism. (It’s how we ruin poetry, for example.)

About mid-way through the novel, Daisy encounters Gatsby’s “‘beautiful shirts'” (her own Easter egg hunt), and readers encounter the green light:

“If it wasn’t for the mist we could see your home across the bay,” said Gatsby. “You always have a green light that burns all night at the end of your dock.”…

Now it was again a green light on a dock. His count of enchanted objects had diminished by one.

I want to emphasize here, I am not blaming high school English teachers necessarily because the “literary technique hunt” is a consequence of how formal public education has been reduced to testing (easier to test students finding and identifying literary terms than having them do complex analysis of texts) and teachers and schools are expected to be non-political.

The reductive New Criticism of high school English classes seems objective, then, and offers what appears to be a fixed way to assess students.

It is frustrating, however, that Gatsby is reduced to color imagery and symbolism while most of the racism and bigotry are skirted over or ignored entirely.

“They Were Careless People, Tom and Daisy”

Not that I want to “save” Gatsby on its centennial anniversary, but I am particularly invested in literature and how we teach it (and how we often ruin it for students)—and I am also deeply committed to the role of literature/literacy in our democracy, which is currently in Hospice.

But if we could set aside our reductive New Criticism approaches, and then shift our focus away from Nick and Gatsby and toward Tom and Daisy, we could make Gatsby work for our students and for this country that we seem uninterested in saving.

In the last pages, Nick explicates Tom, and Daisy:

I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they made … .

Fitzgerald showed us 100 years ago that America was a wasteland, a product of “vast carelessness.”

Because of our idealism, “our rigid refusal to look at ourselves,” we have chosen to walk to the precipice of America no more.

We seem eager and even gleeful to have chosen “cheap streamers in the rain.”

This is not who we have become, this is who we always were.

Education: How the Market and Fads Poison a Robust Field

April 3, 2025 plthomasedd

[Header Photo by Thomas Kolnowski on Unsplash]

My high school English teacher and eventual mentor, Lynn Harrill, told me in my junior year that I should be a teacher.

I laughed, and certainly as teens are apt to do, hurt his feelings.

Almost fifty years later, and I have been a career educator since 1984.

I realized I wanted to be a teacher and a writer during my junior college years—the former because I had a job as a tutor and the latter because my speech teacher, Steven Brannon, introduced my to e.e. cummings.

I declared my secondary English education major when I transferred the fall of my junior year. And then, almost immediately, I learned a harsh lesson about becoming an education major: It was a “lesser” degree.

I took as many English courses as I could as an undergrad, and in ever class, I had to out myself as an education major, not an English major (almost most of my close friends were English majors).

Over the next five decades, I have had to navigate that “lesser” status when I tried to enter an MFA program while teaching high school full-time (nope), tried to apply for a PhD in English while teaching high school full time (nope), and then completed an EdD (yet another “lesser” degree to go with with my BA in English Education and MEd).

And since 2002, I have had to correct people who assume I am in the English department; nope, I am in Education.

In the good ol’ U.S. of A., as well, the standard beliefs are that education is failing, teachers are people who can’t do (and were mostly weak students themselves), and the discipline of education is a joke.

Just as a recent example, see this on social media:

Why does Hattie's plagiarism & misconduct matter?

Because it exposes the lie at the heart of what is called the 'science of learning', 'evidence-based' or 'education reform' movement.

This movement is not about 'science', but about 'management science', and it's destructive ⬇️ https://t.co/ODuGOTdAX5
— Stephen Vainker (@StephenVainker) April 1, 2025

Visible Learning, promoted by Tom Bennett, Nick Gibb, Carl Hendrick, & Daisy Christodoulou in the most glowing terms, is a far deeper & more pernicious myth than any of these.

Hattie appeared at Greg Ashman's ResearchED event as recently as last month.https://t.co/lYd8XLId5S https://t.co/zbJfJmh6qI
— Stephen Vainker (@StephenVainker) April 1, 2025

I have recently submitted a book chapter, in fact, on two “pernicious” fads in education—grit and growth mindset.

However, I believe the standard attacks on education, teachers, and then the discipline of education are gross oversimplifications that miss almost entirely the real problems (what Vainker is addressing above and what I am confronting in my chapter on grit and growth mindset).

There are layers to the problem.

First, education as a discipline is robust and valid. My own recognition of that, however, did not fully develop until my EdD program where I was engaged with the scholarship, philosophy, and theory of the field of education—and not distracted by issues of certification and bureaucracy.

Now, that means when people are attacking “education” and the “pernicious fads” they are in fact not criticizing the discipline.

Here are the layers of problems that dilute a valid field:

Certification and accreditation bureaucracy. Regretfully, education is a profession that feels compelled to mimic more respected fields like medicine and law, where credentials are required. However, that layer has more often than not been reductive for the discipline because of the inherent flaws with credentialing and bureaucracy.
The education market place. The current “science of reading” (SOR) movement is repeating what happened during the Common Core era—the education market place using branding (SOR, CC) to spur purchasing cycles in education. To be blunt, the single most powerful and corrupting aspect of education as a field is the market. Any credible or valid education research is necessarily reduced when it is packaged and sold; this is exactly what happened with multiple intelligences, learning styles, grit, growth mindset, etc., creating the perception that the research isn’t credible instead of acknowledging that the marketing is the problem (although in some cases, the market is perpetuating flawed research as well). In short, education reform is an industry, not a process for improving teaching and learning in the US.
Education celebrities. A parallel problem with education market forces is the education celebrity who corrupts the field of education by selling programs, fads, or themselves as “experts” (and sometimes, all of these at once). This is a problematic concern since many of us who work in education, of course, are paid as professionals. Simply being paid as a professional is not something to criticize in a capitalistic society, of course, but money can and does corrupt. One of the best (worst?) examples of how an education celebrity can distort significantly credible and valid research is Ruby Payne, who cashed in (literally) on NCLB mandates and funding. Payne peddled stereotypes about poverty and teaching children in poverty—even though a robust body of research on poverty refuted nearly everything she packaged, promoted, and sold. Part of the problem here is that education celebrities and the market can easily prey on education and educators because the US has been politically negligent in providing schools, teachers, and students the sort of conditions in which all children can learn.
Sexism. Here is a fact at the core of many problems in education: More than 7 out of 10 K-12 teachers and most teacher educators/scholars are women. I leave this as the last point for emphasis because I believe sexism is the foundation of why education remains disrespected as a field and why there is so little political and public support for teachers as professionals (note the current rush to support scripted curriculum as one example). The current focus on “science,” as well, is another sexist movement (repeating the same sort of claims during NCLB) since the quantitative/qualitative divide in what research matters is highly gendered (men do “hard” science, but women do “soft” science).

Bashing student achievement, school and teacher quality, and teaching as a profession as well as education as a field are all a sort of lazy and unexamined national past time in the US.

These sorts of attacks and criticisms are shrugged off as common knowledge and even jokes; again, I believe, primarily because we still see teaching as just something women do with children.

While there is some validity to criticizing educational research that is packaged and sold, this is not something unique to education as a field.

Consider as just one example the perversion of the 10,000 rule in psychology, and the power of Malcolm Gladwell as “celebrity” to do just that.

Psychology and economics, in fact, have experienced crises of replication that should tarnish those fields at least as much as how we marginalize education.

Yet, psychology and economics are seen as men’s professions, and thus, professions, and receive a huge pass when they simply do not deserve that.

We should stop bashing education as a field, but we should also be far more vigilant about protecting educational research and practice from the corrosive impact of bureaucracy, the market, celebrities, and sexism.

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

Recommended: Why We Cannot Go Back to Basics (Rethinking Schools)

April 3, 2025 plthomasedd

[Header Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash]

Note

The article below appears in Rethinking Schools and brings together several problems with and connections between the “science of reading” and book banning/censorship movements that I have been address since 2018.

Why We Cannot Go Back to Basics: Reclaiming The Right to Teach Literacy, Daniel Ferguson, Laurie Rabinowitz, and Amy Tondreau

Although the “culture war” and “reading war” have been described as separate causes promoted by disparate organizations, their stories are more connected than they appear. Both book banning and SoR dogmatism limit what teachers can teach and what students can read, narrowing the ability of public schools to address children’s diverse needs. We see this most explicitly in conservative parent groups, including Moms for Liberty, who have made it clear they endorse both. This should be a wake-up call to critically examine the potential impact of phonics-based policies on public school students and teachers.

Beware Scripted Curriculum: More Trojan Horse Education Reform

April 1, 2025 plthomasedd

[Header Photo by José León on Unsplash, cropped]

It took a few years, but there was always a long game.

And there was a few decades of preparation along the way.

George W. Bush built the foundation for Trojan Horse education reform in the 1990s, including a false “miracle” narrative and efforts to establish scripted curriculum (a colleague and I examined that here).

Education reform, however, was never about improving learning or teaching, but about ideological agendas, conservative agendas.

The crisis/miracle cycles started with that Texas “miracle,” but included the Chicago “miracle” (to bolster Arne Duncan), the DC “miracle” (to promote Michelle Rhee’s grift), and the Harlem “miracle” (that solidly merged education reform as bi-partisan under Obama with the help of grifter Duncan).

What may prove to be the most successful (and harmful) “miracle,” however, is the media manufactured Mississippi “miracle,” grounded in 2019 NAEP scores.

Six years later, the real end game of these manufactured and false “miracles” are merging with an initial effort by W. Bush—de-professionalizing teachers with scripted curriculum. Note the connection in a recent misleading but recurring endorsement by Patrinos (from the Department of Education Reform, funded by Walton money in Arkansas) of that Mississippi “miracle”:

Teaching at the right level and a scripted lessons plan are among the most effective strategies to address the global learning crisis. After the World Bank reviewed over 150 education programs in 2020, nearly half showed no learning benefit.

And then, this disturbing piece by Korbey: Why US schools have fallen in love with scripted lessons.

After taking a swipe at NCTE, Korbey makes the same but false connection as Patrinos above:

Nearly all the states that have seen reading scores improve recently – including Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee and Alabama – have changed state law to encourage districts to choose from approved lists of HQIM.

Conveniently omitted in public advocacy and endorsements of scripted curriculum, is that this is a correlation; however, research has shown that curriculum, instruction, and teacher training are not the keys to increased test scores. Grade retention is:

[S]tates whose policies mandate third-grade retention see significant and persistent increases in high-stakes reading scores in all cohorts…. [T]here is no consistent evidence that high-stakes reading scores increase in states without a retention component.

And another omission is that research has shown scripted reading programs de-professionalize teachers, fail to serve the individual needs of students, and have “whitewashed” the curriculum, alienating the most under-served students in our schools [see Recommended below].

And thus, the end game:

Musk: If you have a classroom of 25 or 30 kids, it is literally impossible to spend time with every kid individually or you can spend to little time.. But what you can do is set them up with ai.. pic.twitter.com/tAcySW2zTE
— Acyn (@Acyn) March 31, 2025

Education reform is dedicated to perpetual education crisis for market and political goal.

Scripted curriculum, then, is not designed to improve reading proficiency, but to create one more step toward AI replacing teachers the same way self-checkout replaced cashiers in our grocery stores.