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.
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.”
This analysis is another powerful cautionary tale about education reform, notably the “science of reading” (SOR) movement sweeping across the US, mostly unchecked.
As I do a close reading of Riordan’s study, you should also note that the foundational failure of the SOR movement driving new and reformed reading legislation in states is that the main claims of the movement are dramatically oversimplified or misleading. I strongly recommend reviewing how these SOR claims are contradicted by a full examination of the research and science currently available on reading acquisition and teaching: Recommended: Fact-checking the Science of Reading, Rob Tierney and P David Pearson.
This close reading is intended to inform directly how and why SOR-based reading legislation is not only misguided but likely causing harm, notably as Riordan addresses, to the most vulnerable populations of students that education reform is often targeting.
First, here is an overview of Riordan’s study:
Similar to public, political, and educator beliefs in the US, “QFT [quality first teaching] is a commonly held belief amongst school staff” in the UK, Riordan found. In other words, despite evidence that student achievement is overwhelmingly linked to out-of-school factors, teacher quality and instructional practices are often the primary if not exclusive levers of education reform designed to closed so-called achievement gaps due to economic inequities.
Riordan identifies bureaucracy and simplistic messaging as the sources of implementation failure:
Nonetheless, “[t]his explicit demand [belief in QFT] is an example of the growing pressure on education practitioners to ensure their practices are supported by evidence (of many kinds),” Riordan explains, adding, “School staff believe that high-quality teaching reduces SED attainment gaps and that their belief is backed by research evidence.”
The research/science-to-instruction dynamic is often characterized by narrow citations or cherry-picking evidence: “Because school leaders cited the same references to research evidence to justify very different policies and practices, I conducted a review of the literature that led to these citations.”
One key problem is that while the evidence base may be narrow and “[a]lthough there is agreement that high-quality teaching is important to tackle SED, principles of QFT are nevertheless being implemented in a myriad of ways across secondary schools in England.”
In the US, many scholars have noted that the SOR movement uses “science” rhetoric but depends on anecdotes for evidence; and, in the UK:
Although many school staff (and particularly school leaders) are aware of the EEF resources and believe that there is evidence supporting principles of QFT, no interviewee described this evidence in any further detail. When asked why QFT works, staff reasoned intuitively. The line of reasoning that can be reconstructed from their replies is independent of the research evidence.
…This intuitive argument, reasoned by school staff, is limited but I do not challenge its validity. The main point here is that this line of reasoning does not reflect the research evidence (which is described in detail below ‘The weakness of the evidence for QFT’). It is not the strength of the evidence base that has convinced school leaders to implement QFT practices. This highlights the importance of the psychological aspects of bringing research evidence to bear on practice. It also raises the possibility that a message was disseminated that was already widely believed. I turn to this bureaucratic concern next.
That intuitive urge, again, however, is linked to limited evidence: “Just five studies are being relied upon to disseminate the message that high-quality teaching is the most effective way to reduce SED attainment gaps.”
What may also be driving a misguided reform paradigm is convenience, or a lack of political imagination:
Evidence- or science-based reform, then, tends to be reduced to a “sham” (consider the misleading “miracle” rhetoric around Mississippi, also addressed in Tierney and Pearson):
The unintended consequence is a “misdirection of energy and time of school staff” driven by “pressure to conform to the policies promoted.”
Key to recognize is Riordan identifies that QFT reforms not only fail to close gaps but also cause harm: Some “attempts to improve the quality of teaching are contributing to a large attainment gap,” including: “It is by turning to a more refined measure of SED that we find evidence that the school’s innovations in teaching and learning over the last five years have benefitted its most affluent students most of all.”
Riordan’s conclusion is important and damning:
It has reviewed the wider picture in which school leaders are choosing to implement (or at least justifying the implementation of) particular practices based on a generic message instead of the specific research supporting those practices. The problem here is that the mechanisms operating to connect research with practice are too crude to acknowledge the richness and messiness of social science research. The message, ‘high-quality teaching is the most effective way to support students facing SED’, is too simple to be meaningful.
For the US, education reform broadly and the SOR movement can also be described as grounded in messages that are “too simple to be meaningful” and thus too simple to be effective and even likely to be harmful.
Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Teachers and Teaching Research, UCL
2 April 2024
Evidence is obviously a good thing. We take it for granted that evidence from research can help solve the post-lockdown crises in education – from how to keep teachers in the profession to how to improve behaviour in schools, get children back into school and protect the mental health of a generation.
But my research and that of others shows that incorporating strategies that have evidence backing them into teaching doesn’t always yield the results we want.
The Department for Education encourages school leadership teams to cite evidence from research studies when deciding how to spend school funding. Teachers are more frequently required to conduct their own research as part of their professional training than they were a decade ago. Independent consultancies have sprung up to support schools to bring evidence-based methods into their teaching.
This push for evidence to back up teaching methods has become particularly strong in the past ten years. The movement has been driven by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), a charity set up in 2011 with funding from the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government to provide schools with information about which teaching methods and other approaches to education actually work.
The EEF funds randomised controlled trials – large-scale studies in which students are randomly assigned to an educational initiative or not and then comparisons are then made to see which students perform better. For instance, several of these studies have been carried out in which some children received one-on-one reading sessions with a trained classroom assistant, and their reading progress was compared to children who had not. The cost of one of these trials was around £500,000 over the course of a year.
Trials such as this in education were lobbied for by Ben Goldacre, a doctor and data scientist who wrote a report in 2013 on behalf of the Department for Education. Goldacre suggested that education should follow the lead of medicine in the use of evidence.
Using evidence
In 2023, however, researchers at the University of Warwick pointed out something that should have been obvious for some time but has been very much overlooked – that following the evidence is not resulting in the progress we might expect.
Reading is the most heavily supported area of the EEF’s research, accounting for more than 40% of projects. Most schools have implemented reading programmes with significant amounts of evidence behind them. But, despite this, reading abilities have not changed much in the UK for decades.
This flatlining of test scores is a global phenomenon. If reading programmes worked as the evidence says they do, reading abilities should be better.
And the evidence is coming back with unexpected results. A series of randomised controlled trials, including one looking at how to improve literacy through evidence, have suggested that schools that use methods based on research are not performing better than schools that do not.
In fact, research by a team at Sheffield Hallam University have demonstrated that on average, these kinds of education initiatives have very little to no impact.
My work has shown that when the findings of different research studies are brought together and synthesised, teachers may end up implementing these findings in contradictory ways. Research messages are frequently too vague to be effective because the skills and expertise of teaching are difficult to transfer.
It is also becoming apparent that the gains in education are usually very small, perhaps because learning is the sum total of trillions of interactions. It is possible that the research trials we really need in education would be so vast that they are currently too impractical to do.
It seems that evidence is much harder to tame and to apply sensibly in education than elsewhere. In my view, it was inevitable and necessary that educators had to follow medicine in our search for answers. But we now need to think harder about the peculiarities of how evidence works in education.
Right now, we don’t have enough evidence to be confident that evidence should always be our first port of call.
Sally Riordan, Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Teachers and Teaching Research, UCL
“Human development is an important component of determining a nation’s productivity and is measured in employee skills identified by employers as critical for success in the modern global economy,” claims Thomas A. Hemphill, adding:
The United States is obviously not getting a sufficient return on investment in elementary and secondary education, as it has mediocre scores in mathematics literacy and declining scores for science literacy for 15-year-old students surveyed in 2022. The only significant improvement for 15-year-olds is in reading, where the United States finally entered the top 10 in 2022.
If these educational trends continue, the United States will not have an adequate indigenous workforce of scientists, engineers and technologists equipped to maintain scientific and technological leadership and instead will become perpetually reliant on scientifically and technologically skilled immigrants. We must demand that elementary and secondary education systems reorient efforts to significantly improve mathematical and scientific teaching expectations in the classroom.
However, for decades, evidence has shown that there is no causal link between international rankings of student test scores and national economic competitiveness.
This Big Lie is purely rhetorical and relies on throwing statistical comparisons at the public while drawing hasty and unsupported causal claims from those numbers.
Bracey offers this from researchers on the relationship between international education rankings and economic competitiveness:
Such countries [highest achieving] “do not experience substantially greater economic growth than countries that are merely average in terms of achievement.”
The researchers then lay out an interpretation of their findings that differs from the causal interpretation one usually hears:
“We venture, here, the interpretation that much of the achievement ‘effect’ is not really causal in character. It may be, rather, that nation-states with strong prodevelopment policies, and with regimes powerful enough to enforce these, produce both more economic growth and more disciplined student-achievement levels in fields (e.g., science and mathematics) perceived to be especially development related. This idea would explain the status of the Asian Tigers whose regimes have been much focused on producing both economic growth and achievement-oriented students in math and science.”
“From our study, the main conclusion is that the relationship between achievement in science and mathematics in schoolchildren and national economic growth is both time and case sensitive. Moreover, the relationship largely reflects the gap between the bottom third of the nations and the rest; the middle of the pack does not much differ from the rest. . . . Much of the obsession with the achievement ‘horse race’ proceeds as if beating the Asian Tigers in mathematics and science education is necessary for the economic well-being of other developed countries. Our analysis offers little support for this obsession. . . .
“Achievement indicators do not capture the extent to which schooling promotes initiative, creativity, entrepreneurship, and other strengths not sufficiently curricularized to warrant cross-national data collection and analysis. Unfortunately, the policy discourse that often follows from international achievement races involves exaggerated causal claims frequently stress- ing educational ‘silver bullets’ for economic woes. Our analyses do not offer defini- tive answers, but they raise important ques- tions about the validity of these claims. In an era that celebrates evidence-based policy formation, it behooves us to carefully weigh the evidence, rather than use it simply as a rhetorical weapon.”
A key point to note here is Bracey is writing in 2007, and the OpEd above is March 2024. The Big Lie about international education rankings and economic competitiveness is both a lie and a lie that will not die.
I strongly recommend Tom Loveless exposing a similar problem with misrepresenting and overstating the consequences of NAEP data: Literacy and NAEP Proficient.
Bracey offers a brief but better way to understand test data and economic competitiveness: “education is critical, but among the developed nations differences in test scores are trivial.”
Instead of another Big Lie, the US would be better served if we tried new and evidence-based (not ideological) ways to reform our schools and our social/economic structures.
Regardless of your level of optimism, there simply is no other conclusion to draw from over forty years of educational crisis and reform: Education reform has almost nothing to do with improving education for students, but education reform has become an industry.
And one of the most powerful engines driving the crisis/reform industry in education is education journalism.
Interesting is that both are provable false narratives.
Yet, these stories endure because “[v]iewing education as being in more or less permanent crisis” (Edling, 2015) creates market and political profit for media, private education corporations, and politicians.
As a simple fact of logic, consider that for at least the last century, on every standardized test in every content area, students in poverty as a group have scored significantly lower than more affluent students.
Over that century, the teachers, instructional practices, programs, and curriculums/standards have changed dozens of times and have never been coherent at any one point across the US.
The only constant, of course, has been the economic inequity of the populations of students being taught and tested.
Yet, what have the media and political leaders focused on almost exclusively in the forty-plus-years of intense accountability reform (over what can be called at least half a dozen cycles in those decades)?
Instruction, curriculum/standards, and programs.
Why?
Teacher training churn, standardized test churn, and program churn are industries, and there is profit in constant churn.
Never has it been more clear that education reform is industry: “The administrations in charge,” writes Gilles Deleuze in Postscript on the Societies of Control, “never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons” (p. 4).
And never has it been more clear that education journalism is deeply invested in that churn, in manufacturing perpetual crisis:
Just within the past twenty years, Gates+ money has incubated several new education-only media outlets, such as Chalkbeat, EdReports, EdSurge, Education Next, Ed Post, FutureEd, and The 74. Gates+ money has also substantially boosted the efforts of preexisting education-only media organizations, such as EdSource, Education Week, the Education Writers Association, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, and the Hechinger Report. All told, this accounts for almost all large-audience, US, K–12-education-only print media outlets, other than those tied to the traditional public education establishment.
I suspect no one embodies education reform as industry as well as Bill Gates, education reform hobbyist.
And, for example, nothing better exemplify what the true commitment in education journalism is better than the Education Writers Association and the current darling of education misinformation, Emily Hanford:
Manufacture a crisis with a melodramatic story, and then steel the troops for the inevitable outcome so that everyone can circle back to yet another crisis and more reform.
There is the sound of profit in the background as journalists as “watchdogs” announce more and more failure and crisis among school, teachers, and students.
The real literacy crisis is that too many people cannot read the writing on the wall. Or more likely, too many people are blinded by the profit of education reform as industry to even see the writing on the wall.
Thought Experiment 1
If you wonder if or how money matters, consider that the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas is funded by Walton money. The Walton’s are significant school choice and charter school proponents. The “research” coming out of the DER is overwhelming positive about school choice and charter schools.
Coincidence?
Thought Experiment 2
England passed reading reform mandating systematic phonics for all students in 2006 (although their media and political leaders persist in crying “reading crisis”).
Along with Decoding Dyslexia, The Reading League is likely the largest advocacy group for the “science of reading” (SOR). As I have detailed, however, there is a serious problem with the “science” in their advocacy.
Let me remind you of the standards for “science” that The Reading League has proposed:
Now, consider the following:
The problem lies in promoting decodable texts under the guise of SOR when here is the evidence on decodable texts [1]:
Here are the sponsors that promoted The Reading League’s recent conference. Some simply sell decoding books. If aware of peer-reviewed studies that I may have overlooked for any of these programs or assessments, please share.
For those of us of a certain age, well before the era of trending on social media, a simple ad for Wendy’s prompted the catch phrase “Where’s the beef?”
The ad made Clara Peller a star in her 80s, and it certainly helped create a national distinction among fast-food hamburger restaurants in the US.
As early as 2020, literacy scholars identified the bait-and-switch approach being used in the “science of reading” (SOR) movement—demanding science while relying on anecdotes:
Hoffman, J.V., Hikida, M., & Sailors, M. (2020). Contesting science that silences: Amplifying equity, agency, and design research in literacy teacher preparation. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S255–S266. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.353
Here are two recent posts on Twitter/X that provide an entry point into that bait-and-switch coming true:
Listen, I have yet to see any evidence that Balanced Literacy as theory or actual practice is the reason for reading struggles in kids. Maybe if there was research that proved it I would be more receptive. Unlike folks who use LETRS I do like research to justify my decisions. 😘
There is no point in this article where I discuss reading proficiency for children in Kindergarten. Yet, my work is cited in this way. Please check your claims. SMH…
— Tiffany A. Flowers (Author & Literacy Advocate) (@Prof_Flowers) March 18, 2024
Gilson asks a key and foundational question about the basis of the SOR movement—the unsupported claims of a reading crisis caused by balanced literacy and a few identified reading programs (primarily by Lucy Calkins and Fountas and Pinnell).
To be blunt, there is no scientific research showing a causal relationship between any reading theory or specific programs and a reading crisis. Notably, there simply isn’t any evidence that reading achievement is coherent enough or that reading programs are consistently used across the entire nation in ways that even make that claim possibly true.
And then, more insidious perhaps, SOR advocates not only bait-and-switch with science/anecdotes, the claims of “science” or “research” are often linked to journalism, not cited at all, cherry-picked evidence, or as Flowers calls out, misrepresentations of evidence.
The resulting legislation, then, is forcing successful schools to change programs and practices by sheer fiat, such as in Connecticut, or imposing bans and mandates that are wildly arbitrary.
Note the practices from a literature review of the science of reading below; please note that “not scientific” can mean either that scientific research has shown the practice to be ineffective or that no scientific research yet exists:
Not only must we ask “Where’s the science?” we must also ask why is three-cueing being banned in the same states mandating O-G phonics (multi sensory approaches), decodable texts, and LETRS training although all of there are technically not scientific?
The answer, of course, is that the SOR movement is mostly rhetorical ideological, and commercial.
Bans and mandates are about serving a narrow set of reading ideologies and lining the pockets of certain education markets.
Teachers, parents, and even students are starting to acknowledge that the SOR tsunami is causing great harm to teaching and learning reading.
This is late, but we simply all must start demanding that SOR advocates practice what they preach. When they make their condescending claims about teachers of reading, teacher educators, student reading achievement, and reading programs, we absolutely must ask, Where’s the science?
Many years ago, I was unusually excited to hear the keynote speaker at the annual SCCTE conference on Kiawah Island, SC—Harvey Smokey Daniels.
For many years in my methods courses for secondary ELA certifiers and practicing teachers, I used Best Practice by Steven Zemelman, Daniels, and Arthur Hyde.
Daniels surprised the attendees by noting that he was moving away from the term “best practice” because it had become ubiquitous and thus meaningless. He warned that many, if not most, books being published with “best practice” in the title were anything except best practice.
The term had moved from careful scholarship (the book Daniels co-authored is a wonderful and cautious attempt to translate a wide body of research into classroom practice among the major disciplines) to branding.
And thus, as Daniels lamented, “best practice” was lost in the abyss that is educational marketing.
Much more quickly and recently, Common Core experienced a meteoric rise and sudden crash and burn. In the mean time, classrooms materials were quickly labeled “Common Core” even as the movement was hastily erased before some states even implemented the standards or the national tests (my home state of SC did exactly that as a knee-jerk Republican maneuver to reject Obama, they believed).
Spurred in early 2018 with the rise of the “science of reading,” the “science of” movement appears to be in full swing with the addition of the “science of learning,” the “science of writing,” and the “science of math”—mostly following frantic claims of crisis based on test scores (usually NAEP data).
While both media assessments lack credibility, the rhetoric itself harkens yet another education reform movement destined for the garbage bin. We seem unable to learn that the crisis/miracle reform cycle never works because the problems are always misrepresented and then the solutions are always mandates that will fail.
Let me note here that what made the original best practice approach a wonderful methods text is that the instructional practices were recommended as “increase” or “decrease”—not mandate or ban:
This helps show how the “science of reading” movement—grounded in media false stories and political mandates—is repeating the mistakes of dozens of reform movements before this “science of” nonsense.
The essential mistakes are framing “science of” as a mandate/ban or science/not science dichotomy.
Legislation across most states is now banning specific reading practices and programs while mandating other practices and programs.
While legislation should never ban or mandate specific practices in education, “science of reading” (SOR) legislation also fails by cherry-picking what counts as science/not science.
To be blunt, SOR legislation is driven by ideology and marketing, not science; the mandate/ban line is subject to cherry picking.
For example, many states are simultaneously banning three cueing as not scientific but mandating or funding decodable texts and multi-sensory approaches such as O-G phonics.
Unlike the careful work done on best practice by Daniels and others, the “science of” movement suffers from ham-fisted mandates and essential failures to understand what “science” means for classroom practice.
The Reading League, for example, limits what counts as “scientific” to experimental/quasi-experimental research that is published in peer-reviewed journals. While this is a ridiculously narrow use of evidence and research, it also poses several problems.
First, as the literature review above notes, the science/not science dichotomy can include both practices/programs that have scientific research supporting or not the practice/program or practice/programs that do not yet have any or enough scientific evidence (such as the programs LETRS).
Next, and more importantly, many people fundamentally misunderstand what the science/not science distinction means for classroom practice.
If we use medicine as an analogy, once a medication is found to be effective, that means that medicine X under Y conditions will produce Z outcomes for most people (a generalization).
What is often ignored is that there are at least two outlier groups in that claim; one group will not experience the positive outcome, and one group can experience negative outcomes.
As a teen, I fell into that latter group with both Tylenol (a reaction that can be life threatening) and penicillin.
If we insist on using the science/not science distinction, then, for classroom practices we must not translate that into mandate/ban.
The “science of” movement could be effective if we did two things: (a) expand the use of research to include more than narrowly “scientific” evidence, and (b) replace mandate/ban with implement with confidence/implement with caution.
Let me end by briefly considering what implement with confidence/implement with caution should accomplish.
If we use research/evidence/science to drive implement with confidence, that means those practices and programs can be used to plan broadly (year-long and unit plans prepared before teaching and before having evidence from students to guide instruction).
Those practices and programs, like medication, can be trusted to work for most students under defined conditions—recognizing that there will be outliers and conditions can change, thus changing outcomes.
Practices and programs that can be implemented with caution augment those initial plans and can serve the outliers as well as when conditions change.
Here is the key that the “science of” movement is failing most significantly: This process must honor the autonomy of the teacher to serve the individual needs of students.
As the swing in rhetoric about Alabama reveals (see also the realities about Florida and Mississippi), the “science of” movement is doomed to fail, doomed by repeating the mistakes of reform cycles we have blindly followed for over four decades.
educator, public scholar, poet&writer – academic freedom isn't free
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 