NYC Mayor Eric Adams is proving to be an unreliable source on just about anything he mentions. Adams seems more interested in crying false “crisis” for political gain than doing the hard work of political leadership.
First, crime:
On @fox5ny, @NYCMayor Adams says "I have never in my professional career, have never witnessed crime at this level," which is a very strange thing to say for someone who came up in the NYPD in the '80s and '90s.
Mayor Eric Adams announced Thursday the details of a plan to turn around a literacy crisis in New York City and, in particular, to serve thousands of children in public schools who may have dyslexia, an issue deeply personal to the mayor, who has said his own undiagnosed dyslexia hurt his academic career.
Unfortunately, neither Adams nor the NYT will receive the sort of public correcting for the nonsense in this article, but Lola Fadulu’s coverage of Adams’s dyslexia program is just as much political fearmongering as Adams’s misrepresentation of crime.
In fact, media, parents, and political leaders have been following a similar and misleading playbook for several years now—one that Fadulu and Adams demonstrate so perfectly it could read as parody:
Currently, there is a well-organized and active contingent of concerned parents and educators (and others) who argue that dyslexia is a frequent cause of reading difficulties, affecting approximately 20% of the population, and that there is a widely accepted treatment for such difficulties: an instructional approach relying almost exclusively on intensive phonics instruction. Proponents argue that it is based on “settled science,” which they refer to as “the science of reading” (SOR). The approach is based on a narrow view of science and a restricted range of research focused on word learning and, more recently, neurobiology, but pays little attention to aspects of literacy like comprehension and writing or dimensions of classroom learning and teacher preparation.
“School officials plan to screen nearly all students for dyslexia.” Universal screening for dyslexia is a crisis response to a false crisis. Johnston and Scanlon explain: “Good first instruction and early intervention for children with a slow start in the word reading aspect of literacy reduces the likelihood they will encounter serious difficulty. Thus, early screening with assessments that can inform instruction is important. Screening for dyslexia, particularly with instructionally irrelevant assessments, offers no additional advantage [emphasis added].”
“School leaders are requiring school principals to pivot to a phonics-based literacy curriculum, which literacy experts say is the most effective way to teach reading to most children.” Systematic phonics for all students, and specifically for students identified with dyslexia, is an old and false solution for students struggling with reading, per Johnston and Scanlon: “Evidence does not justify the use of a heavy and near-exclusive focus on phonics instruction, either in regular classrooms or for children experiencing difficulty learning to read (including those classified as dyslexic [emphasis in original].”
“New York is facing a literacy crisis: Fewer than half of all third to eighth graders and just 36 percent of Black and Latino students were proficient on the state reading exams administered in 2019, the most recent year for which there is data.” The NYT helped fuel the newest round of “reading crisis” in the U.S. with an over-reaction to 2019 NAEP reading scores, but the cold hard truth is that marginalized students have never been equitably served in NYC schools or anywhere in the U.S. as any point in history. (See how the reading crisis around NAEP is misrepresented HERE.)
“It is difficult to say how many children have dyslexia in the city because the department hasn’t been able to systematically identify them, said Carolyne Quintana, the deputy chancellor for teaching and learning. But she noted that national figures estimate that one in five children have dyslexia.” Dyslexia advocacy and political responses to dyslexia are misrepresenting dyslexia by overstating how common dyslexia is (some credible experts suggest dyslexia isn’t even a credible label for reading, in fact), and are ignoring that no common definition for dyslexia exists. “Definitions of dyslexia vary widely, and none offer a clear foundation—biological, cognitive, behavioral, or academic—for determining whether an individual experiencing difficulty with developing word reading skill should be classified as dyslexic,” Johnston and Scanlon conclude.
“Naomi Peña said she has four children with dyslexia, and is one of several parents who helped launch the Literacy Academy Collective, an advocacy group.” Parental advocacy groups addressing dyslexia have had direct impact on reading and dyslexia policy across the U.S.; however, that impact has overwhelmingly prompted misguided legislation and policy. Writing about similar political responses to dyslexia in Tennessee, Allington raises a key concern: “What I find most disturbing about the recent Tennessee dyslexia law is the absence of any input from the Literacy Association of Tennessee (LAT) as well as the absence of members of the Dyslexia Advisory Council drawn from the membership of LAT.”
“The additional support includes more intensive instruction steeped in the Orton-Gillingham approach [1], which teaches reading with more hands-on methods that break down words into smaller, more digestible parts.” While the larger push for systematic phonics instruction for all students is misguided, advocates for dyslexia often focus on Orton-Gillingham specifically. Yet, as the International Literacy Association (ILA) shows: “As yet, there is no certifiably best method for teaching children who experience reading difficulty (Mathes et al., 2005). For instance, research does not support the common belief that Orton-Gillingham–based approaches are necessary for students classified as dyslexic (Ritchey & Goeke, 2007; Turner, 2008; Vaughn & Linan-Thompson, 2003).”
“Under the new plan, school officials will require principals, who can choose their curriculums, shift toward a reading program that is based in reading science. Many currently use one developed by Lucy Calkins, an academic at Teachers College, Columbia University, that has repeatedly come under fire.” The dyslexia movement is part of a larger “science of reading” movement that overemphasizes the role of systematic phonics but also attacks popular reading programs across the U.S. See How to Navigate Social Media Debates about the “Science of Reading” [UPDATED] for a thorough examination of the flaws with misusing the term “science.” See also A Response to EdReports’ Assessment of Units of Study for Teaching Reading, Writing and Phonics.
Media and political leaders as well as parent advocates are trapped in a false belief about reading and dyslexia—paralleling the public misunderstanding about crime rates.
Do students struggling to read, especially marginalized students, deserve to be better served in our schools? Absolutely, whether they are diagnosed with dyslexia or not.
But NYC’s plan is political fearmongering, not good policy or practice.
Political leaders would be well served to heed Johnston and Scanlon’s guidelines, including these:
Although there are likely heritable dimensions to reading and language difficulties, there is no way to translate them into implications for instructional practice….
Legislation (and district policies) aligned with the SOR perspectives on dyslexia will necessarily require tradeoffs in the allocation of resources for teacher development and among children having literacy learning difficulties. These tradeoffs have the potential to privilege students experiencing some types of literacy learning difficulties while limiting instructional resources for and attention available to students whose literacy difficulties are not due (exclusively) to word reading difficulties.
[1] Current research does not support O-G as more effective than other, and less expensive, methods; see here and these recent studies/overviews:
Johnston, P., & Scanlon, D. (2021). An examination of dyslexia research and instruction with policy implications. Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice, 70(1), 107. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1177/23813377211024625
Hall, C., et al. (2022, September 13). Forty years of reading intervention research for elementary students with or at risk for dyslexia: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Reading Research Quarterly. Retrieved October 17, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.477
Stevens, E. A., Austin, C., Moore, C., Scammacca, N., Boucher, A. N., & Vaughn, S. (2021). Current state of the evidence: Examining the effects of Orton-Gillingham reading interventions for students with or at risk for word-level reading disabilities. Exceptional Children, 87(4), 397–417. https://doi.org/10.1177/0014402921993406
“In total, lawmakers in at least 15 states have introduced bills that seek to restrict how teachers can discuss racism, sexism, and other social issues,” reports Sarah Schwartz for Education Week.
The key problem with this copycat legislation is CRT isn’t implemented in K-12 education and the 1619 Project is not adopted curriculum.
CRT is rare in higher education, reserved for some graduate programs (specifically among legal scholars), but CRT provides a way to examine systemic racism, not simply the actions of individual racists.
Ultimately, legislation aimed at CRT or the 1619 Project is misleading, a threat to academic freedom and the education of students in SC. As Eesha Pendharker reports in Education Week: “[E]xperts say the laws ultimately will unravel years of administrators’ fitful efforts to improve educational opportunities and academic outcomes for America’s children of color, who today make up the majority of the nation’s student body.”
What, then, is occurring in SC K-12 education in terms of race and racism?
Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training that covers implicit bias, systemic racism and racial privilege, and microaggressions. This training is now common for educators and students, but worth monitoring because DEI training is often not effective and can serve as superficial distractions allowing schools to avoid harder diversity work.
Diversifying faculty and the curriculum. Public school teachers are about 80% white, less diverse than society and the population of students in public schooling (increasingly Black and brown). Also, for many years, a greater representation of Black and brown voices and history have been included in what students are taught (typically in English/ELA and history/social studies). Diversifying the curriculum has prompted controversial legislation by Republicans, however.
Implementing culturally relevant teaching. The work of Gloria Ladson-Billings has gained momentum in K-12 education. Culturally relevant teaching, as she defines it, is “a threefold approach to ensuring that all children are successful. That approach requires a focus on students’ learning, an attempt to develop their cultural competence, and to increase their sociopolitical or critical consciousness.” This focus seeks to honor all children while acknowledging that differences remain among students by race, gender, culture, etc.
Adopting responsive discipline. Decades of research have revealed racially inequitable discipline in schools, popularly known as the school-to-prison pipeline. Many schools have begun to reconsider inequitable practices such as zero-tolerance policies and expulsion/suspension, for example.
Expanding educational access and improving educational quality for children of color. Black and brown students are under-represented in advanced programs (such as Advanced Placement and gifted programs), and often are taught by teachers with the least experience, who are under-/un-certified, and sit in classrooms with the highest student/teacher ratios. Public schools are not the “great equalizers” politicians claim, and often reflect and perpetuate inequity.
State legislation and the Superintendent of Education targeting CRT and the 1619 Project is political theater, a solution in search of a problem. Race and racism remain a significant part of life as well as education in SC. Republicans are poised to ruin the very good and needed, but incomplete, work identified above.
It is critical that teachers and students are free to examine the truth of our past and our present so that we can create the future we believe is possible.
Criticizing U.S. public education through international comparisons is a long-standing tradition in the U.S. media, reaching back at least into the mid-twentieth century.
This is one of many crisis approaches to covering education—Chicken Little journalism—that makes false and misleading claims about the quality of U.S. education (always framed as a failure) and that because of the low status of the U.S. in international comparisons of education, the country is doomed, economically and politically.
Oddly enough, as international rankings of education have fluctuated over 70-plus years, some countries have risen and fallen in economic and political status (even inversely proportional to their education ranking) while the U.S. has remained in most ways the or one of the most dominant countries—even as we perpetually wallow in educational mediocrity.
Yet, this isn’t even remotely surprising as Gerald Bracey (and many others) detailed repeatedly that international comparisons of educational quality are essentially hokum—the research is often flawed (apples to oranges comparisons) and the conclusions drawn are based on false assumptions (that education quality directly causes economic quality).
Media coverage, however, will not (cannot?) reach for a different playbook; U.S. public education is always in crisis and the sky is falling because schools (and teachers) are failing.
Next up? I am betting on the “science of science.”
Fewer than 1 in 4 high school seniors and a little more than a third of 4th and 8th graders performed proficiently in science in 2019, according to national test results out this week.
The results are the latest from the National Assessment of Educational Progress in science. Since the assessment, known as “the nation’s report card,” was last given in science in 2015, 4th graders’ performance has declined overall, while average scores have been flat for students in grades 8 and 12.
“The 4th grade scores were concerning,” said Peggy Carr, the associate commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers NAEP. “Whether we’re looking at the average scores or the performance by percentiles, it is clear that many students were struggling with science.”
But it is even worse than we thought: “These widening gaps between the highest- and lowest-performing students, particularly in grade 4, mirror similar trends seen in national and global reading, math, and social studies assessments.”
Yep, U.S. students suck across all the core disciplines compared to the rest of the world!
Organizing instruction around phenomena is a key feature of many reforms aimed at meeting the Next Generation Science Standards, an ambitious set of standards adopted or adapted by 44 states in 2013. Phenomena are also an organizing feature of instructional reforms in countries outside the United States, likehigh-performing Finland. But what is phenomenon-based learning, and what evidence is there that it works?…
Our study found that students exposed to the phenomenon-based curriculum learned more based on a test aligned with the Next Generation standards than did students using the textbook. Importantly, the results were similar across students of different racial and ethnic backgrounds.
Up next, of course, is the media trying to understand why science scores are so abysmal (like reading and math), assigning blame (schools, teachers, teacher education), and proposing Education Reform. What should we expect?
Well, since fourth-grade scores are in the dumpster, we need high-stakes science testing of all third-grade students and to impose grade retention on all those students who do not show proficiency in that pivotal third-grade year.
We also should start universal screening of 4K students for basic science knowledge (or maybe use “science” to screen fetuses in utero).
Simultaneously, states must adopt legislation mandating that all science curricula are based on research, the “science of science.”
Of course, teachers need to be retrained in the “science of science” because, you know, all teacher education programs have failed to teach the “science of science” [insert NCTQ report not yet released].
And while we are at it, are we sure Next Generation Science Standards are cutting it? Maybe we need Post-Next Generation Science Standards just to be safe?
Finally, we must give all this a ride, wait 6-7 or even 10 years, and then start the whole process over again.
The magical thing about Chicken Little journalism is that since the sky never falls, we can always point to the heavens and shout, “The sky is falling!”
After emailing me about new reading legislation being proposed in North Carolina—next door to my home state of South Carolina that also has jumped on the “science of reading” bandwagon—Ann Doss Helms of WFAE (NPR, Charlotte, NC) interviewed me by phone.
I have given dozens of interviews about education over the last 15 to 20 years, and they all have a similar pattern; the journalist tosses out predictable questions and then becomes somewhat disoriented by my answers. Typically, the journalist at some point notes they didn’t know or had never heard the information I offered, the context and complications I raised about the topic.
My conversation with Helms was no different as we gradually peeled back the layers of the onion that is the “science of reading” as well as the very harmful reading policies that are being proposed and adopted in its wake.
Over the past couple years, I have blogged almost nonstop and written a book on the “science of reading” media narrative and how it is oversimplified and misleading but very compelling and harmful since state after state is adopting deeply flawed reading legislation (often, as Helms noted, to mimic Mississippi).
As I explained, the “science of reading” movement is grounded in the media and parent advocacy (specifically focusing on dyslexia)—advocates who have no expertise or background in literacy—but is essentially a thinly veiled resurrection of the tired intensive phonics versus holistic approaches to teaching reading.
Part of our conversation also confronted the contradiction in the “science of reading” movement that forefronts the debunked claim of “settled science” around how to teach reading and then supports actions and policies that have no scientific support—notably grade retention and using Mississippi as a justification for polices absent any research behind the claimed NAEP improvements by that state.
Further, the “science of reading” movement and those using the “science of reading” to promote state-level reading policy also rely on discredited (read “bad science”) sources such as NCTQ or misrepresent contested sources such as the National Reading Panel (see here).
The “science of reading” movement is deja vu all over again since the movement looks essentially like many other education reform patterns that have all failed (as many of us said they would) because they misunderstand the problem and grasp for silver-bullet solutions—all wrapped in a media and political frenzy that is almost impossible to stop. The trash heap of failure includes Teach for America, charter schools, accountability driven by standards and high-stakes testing, the NRP and Reading First, value-added methods of teacher evaluation and merit pay, and many others.
States adopting truly awful reading policy driven by the “science of reading” slogan will not change reading in the U.S., and in time, very soon, in fact, the media and political leaders will be, once again, lamenting a reading crisis.
While it may be too little, too late since states are racing to pass essentially the same reading legislation across the U.S., many scholars are carefully dismantling the “science of reading” movement in ways that support my claims over the past two years.
Here, then, are three I recommend for anyone needing further proof that the “science of reading” is yet another bandwagon we should avoid:
Currently, there is a well-organized and active contingent of concerned parents and educators (and others) who argue that dyslexia is a frequent cause of reading difficulties, affecting approximately 20 percent of the population, and that there is a widely-accepted treatment for such difficulties: an instructional approach relying almost exclusively on intensive phonics instruction. Proponents argue that it is based on “settled science” which they refer to as “the science of reading” (SOR). The approach is based on a narrow view of science, and a restricted range of research, focused on word learning and, more recently, neurobiology, but paying little attention to aspects of literacy like comprehension and writing, or dimensions of classroom learning and teacher preparation. Because the dyslexia and instructional arguments are inextricably linked, in this report, we explore both while adopting a more comprehensive perspective on relevant theory and research.
Johnston, P., & Scanlon, D. (2021). An Examination of Dyslexia Research and Instruction With Policy Implications. Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice, 70(1), 107–128. https://doi.org/10.1177/23813377211024625
Johnston and Scanlon answer 12 questions and then offer these important policy implications (quoted below):
There is no consistent and widely accepted basis – biological, cognitive, behavioral, or academic – for determining whether an individual experiencing difficulty with developing word reading skill should be classified as dyslexic. (Questions 1 and 10).
Although there are likely heritable and biological dimensions to reading and language difficulties, there is no way to translate them into implications for instructional practice. (Questions 2 and 11).
Good first instruction and early intervention for children with a slow start in the word reading aspect of literacy, reduces the likelihood they will encounter serious difficulty. Thus, early screening with assessments that can inform instruction, is important. Screening for dyslexia, particularly with instructionally irrelevant assessments offers no additional advantage. (Questions 5 and 6).
Research supports instruction that purposely develops children’s ability to analyze speech sounds (phonological/phonemic awareness), and to relate those sounds to patterns of print (phonics and orthographics), in combination with instruction to develop comprehension, vocabulary, fluency, and a strong positive and agentive relationship with literacy. (Questions 7 and 12).
Evidence does not justify the use of a heavy and near-exclusive focus on phonics instruction, either in regular classrooms, or for children experiencing difficulty learning to read (including those classified as dyslexic). (Questions 7, 8 and 12).
Legislation (and district policies) aligned with the SOR perspectives on dyslexia will necessarily require tradeoffs in the allocation of resources for teacher development and among children having literacy learning difficulties. These tradeoffs have the potential to privilege students experiencing some types of literacy learning difficulties while limiting instructional resources for and attention available to students whose literacy difficulties are not due (exclusively) to word reading difficulties. (Question 12).
In this article, we critique the science of reading when it is positioned within the reading wars as settling disagreements about reading and how it should be taught. We frame our argument in terms of troublesome binaries, specifically between nature and nurture. We interpret that binary in relation to Overton’s distinction between split and relational metatheories, with the latter suggesting a more integrative view of nature and nurture. Focusing on the nature side of the binary, which predominates when the science of reading is promoted in the reading wars, we argue that its singular focus limits the range of scientific inquiry, interpretation, and application to practice. Specifically, we address limitations of the science of reading as characterized by a narrow theoretical lens, an abstracted empiricism, and uncritical inductive generalizations derived from brain‐imaging and eye movement data sources. Finally, we call for a relational metatheoretical stance and offer emulative examples of that stance in the field.
Yaden, D.B., Reinking, D., & Smagorinsky, P. (2021). The Trouble With Binaries: A Perspective on the Science of Reading. Read Res Q, 56(S1), S119– S129. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.402
Note the strong conclusion to this piece:
Unfortunately, we believe that in many cases, the cloak of science has been employed to elevate the stature of SOR work and to promote the certainty and force of its advocates’ preferred explanations for what reading is and how it should be taught (e.g., Gentry & Ouellette, 2019; Schwartz & Sparks, 2019). What we suggested in this article is that the SOR, when so used in the reading wars, is not science at all in its fullest sense. It neglects an entire domain that influences and shapes human experience. It does so with an unmitigated confidence that evidence from one side of a binary can establish a final truth and that such a truth creates a single prescription for all instruction. Taking that stance, however, is outside the pale of science and dismisses work that has both merit on its own terms and a critical role in advancing the aims motivating reading research and instruction.
In this historical analysis, we examine the context of debates over the role of phonics in literacy and current debates about the science of reading, with a focus on the work and impact of the late literacy scholar Jeanne Chall. We open by briefly tracing the roots of the enduring debates from the 19th and 20th centuries, focusing on beginning reading, decoding, and phonics. Next, we explore insights drawn from the whole language movement as understood by Kenneth Goodman and Yetta Goodman, as well as a synthesis of key ideas from Chall’s critique of the whole language approach. We then analyze the shifts across the three editions of Chall’s Learning to Read: The Great Debate and summarize major ideas from her body of work, such as the stage model of reading development. We suggest that reading instruction should be informed by a broader historical lens in looking at the “science of reading” debates and should draw on a developmental stage model to teaching reading, such as the six‐stage model provided by Chall. We describe implications for educators, textbook publishers, researchers, and policymakers that address the current reading debates and provide considerations of what Chall might say about learning to read in a digital era given the pressures on teacher educators and teachers to align their practice with what is deemed to be the science of reading.
Semingson, P., & Kerns, W. (2021). Where Is the Evidence? Looking Back to Jeanne Chall and Enduring Debates About the Science of Reading. Read Res Q, 56(S1), S157– S169. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.405
UPDATE 1
From the very beginning of the “science of reading” movement, media coverage, parental advocacy, and political policy have been misleading and grounded in misunderstanding. As the examples above show, there continues to be a steady dismantling of all that even as policy has been adopted and is being considered, policy that is fundamentally not “scientific” and will prove to be ineffective and even harmful.
Below are some additional examples of the dismantling that I highly recommend:
When it comes to reading instruction, an “all or nothing” approach is actually unscientific.
Every January, my social media feeds fill with ads, free trials, and coupons from the diet and wellness industry, promising to help me with my (presumed) resolutions to be better, faster, leaner, and healthier. Every diet program claims some type of relationship to science.
The same is true with reading instruction. Most programs or approaches claim to be based on “science.” But consider the many possible meanings of this claim. Some approaches to reading instruction are developed as part of rigorous, peer-reviewed research and are continuously evaluated and refined. Others are designed by practitioners who draw on experience, and whose insights are validated by inquiry after development. Many are based on well-known principles from research or assumptions about learning in general, but haven’t themselves been tested. Some “research-based” instructional tools and practices have been shared, explained, interpreted, misinterpreted, and re-shared so many times that they bear little resemblance to the research on which they were based (Gabriel, 2020). Others rack up positive evidence no matter how many times they’re studied. Then there are practices that have no evidence behind them but are thought to be scientific—because they’ve always been assumed to be true.
The simple view of reading is commonly presented to educators in professional development about the science of reading. The simple view is a useful tool for conveying the undeniable importance—in fact, the necessity—of both decoding and linguistic comprehension for reading. Research in the 35 years since the theory was proposed has revealed additional understandings about reading. In this article, we synthesize research documenting three of these advances: (1) Reading difficulties have a number of causes, not all of which fall under decoding and/or listening comprehension as posited in the simple view; (2) rather than influencing reading solely independently, as conceived in the simple view, decoding and listening comprehension (or in terms more commonly used in reference to the simple view today, word recognition and language comprehension) overlap in important ways; and (3) there are many contributors to reading not named in the simple view, such as active, self-regulatory processes, that play a substantial role in reading. We point to research showing that instruction aligned with these advances can improve students’ reading. We present a theory, which we call the active view of reading, that is an expansion of the simple view and can be used to convey these important advances to current and future educators. We discuss the need to lift up updated theories and models to guide practitioners’ work in supporting students’ reading development in classrooms and interventions.
Duke, N.K., & Cartwright, K.B. (2021). The Science of Reading Progresses: Communicating Advances Beyond the Simple View of Reading. Read Res Q, 56(S1), S25– S44. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.411
NOTE: The short version of the Duke and Cartwright essay should be: The “science of reading” is not so simple and not so settled.
What is happening in this new stage of the reading wars is there for all to see in North Carolina’s and others’ use of the phrase. Instead of spelling out what they mean, “science of reading” advocates wrap themselves in the protective mantel of science, as if invoking science is all that anyone needs to be credible and persuade others to join them. Anyone disagreeing is anti-science, i.e., ignorant.
This is not a great persuasion strategy. Not surprisingly, those from a different vantage point argue that no one has a right to define science in a way that conveniently fits their perspective.
The “Read to Succeed” Act ultimately did not pass during Kentucky’s 2021 legislative session. However, given that state legislators have introduced early literacy bills multiple times in recent years, it is likely that the state may see similar proposals in coming years. Further, given the rapid spread of these policies across states in recent decades, the considerations discussed here will be relevant to policymakers in other states interested in third-grade literacy legislation. Though many states have already enacted early literacy legislation, policymakers need not adhere to a one-size-fits-all approach to improving third-grade literacy achievement. State policymakers can learn from the research, described above, that has been conducted to this point about these policies. I offer three specific recommendations for policymakers to consider as they strive to ensure the efficacy of third-grade literacy policies moving forward:
• Instead of limiting the legislation to the “Big Five” components of reading, include a set of instructional best practices in literacy.
• Ensure initial, ongoing, and targeted professional development in literacy for K-3 teachers.
• Show educators that their expertise is valued by involving them in the development of the policy. This can be done by soliciting feedback through an open online comment period, conducting focus groups with a representative group of K-3 educators, and/or involving educators in the creation of various components of the policy.
Cummings, A.. (2021). Making early literacy policy work in Kentucky: Three considerations for policymakers on the “Read to Succeed” act. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/literacy
In many U.S. states, legislation seeks to define effective instruction for beginning readers, creating an urgent need to turn to scholars who are knowledgeable about ongoing reading research. This mixed-methods study considers the extent to which recognized literacy experts agreed with recommendations about instruction that were included on a state’s reading initiative website. Our purpose was to guide implementation and inform policy-makers. In alignment with the initiative, experts agreed reading aloud, comprehension, vocabulary, fluency, phonological awareness, and phonics all deserve a place in early literacy instruction. Additionally, they agreed some components not included on the website warranted attention, such as motivation, oral language, reading volume, writing, and needs-based instruction. Further, experts cautioned against extremes in describing aspects of early reading instruction. Findings suggest that experts’ knowledge of the vast body of ongoing research about reading can be a helpful guide to policy formation and implementation.
Collet, Vicki S.; Penaflorida, Jennifer; French, Seth; Allred, Jonathan; Greiner, Angelia; and Chen, Jingshu (2021) “Red Flags, Red Herrings, and Common Ground: An Expert Study in Response to State Reading Policy,” Educational Considerations: Vol. 47: No. 1. https://doi.org/10.4148/0146-9282.2241
Marissa J. Filderman, Christy R. Austin, Alexis N. Boucher, Katherine O’Donnell, Elizabeth A. Swanson
Abstract
Informed by theories of reading comprehension and prior reviews of reading comprehension intervention, this meta-analysis uniquely contributes to the literature because it describes the relative effects of various approaches to comprehension intervention for struggling readers in Grades 3 through 12. Findings from 64 studies demonstrate significant positive effects of reading comprehension intervention on comprehension outcomes (g = .59, p < .001, 95% confidence interval [CI] [0.47, 0.74], τ2 = .31). A metaregression model indicated significantly higher effects associated with researcher-developed measures, background knowledge instruction, and strategy instruction, and significantly lower effects associated with instructional enhancements. Grade level, metacognitive approaches, and study quality did not moderate effects. Findings support the use of background knowledge instruction and strategy instruction to support comprehension of struggling readers in upper elementary and beyond.
Theoretical models, such as the simple view of reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986), the direct and inferential mediation (DIME) model (Cromley et al., 2010; Cromley & Azevedo, 2007), and the cognitive model (McKenna & Stahl, 2009) inform the constructs and skills that contribute to reading comprehension. The simple view of reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986) describes reading comprehension as the product of decoding and language comprehension. The simple view of reading is often used to underscore the critical importance of decoding on reading comprehension; however, evidence suggests that the relative importance of decoding and language comprehension changes based on students’ level of reading development and text complexity (Lonigan et al., 2018). Cross-sectional and longitudinal studies demonstrate that decoding has the largest influence on reading comprehension for novice readers, whereas language comprehension becomes increasingly important as students’ decoding skills develop and text becomes more complex (e.g., Catts et al., 2005; Gough et al., 1996; Hoover & Gough, 1990; Proctor et al., 2005; Tilstra et al., 2009). However, the simple view of reading does not comprehensively explain all skills that influence reading comprehension, nor does it inform what comprehension instruction requires.
The DIME model of reading (Cromley et al., 2011; Cromley & Azevedo, 2007) and cognitive model (McKenna & Stahl, 2009) build upon the simple view of reading as component-based models. The relationship between five variables—background knowledge, inference, strategies, vocabulary, and word reading—are hypothesized to result in reading comprehension according to the DIME model. Word reading, vocabulary, and background knowledge each have direct effects on reading comprehension. However, the effect of word reading, vocabulary, and background knowledge on reading comprehension is also mediated by other variables. Indirectly, background knowledge and vocabulary are needed to use comprehension strategies or to draw inferences (Ahmed et al., 2016). The cognitive model (McKenna & Stahl, 2009) also breaks reading comprehension into its component parts. According to the cognitive model, reading comprehension is made possible by automatic word recognition, language comprehension, and strategic knowledge. The model further delineates specific skills contributing to each of these components of reading comprehension. For successful language comprehension to occur, vocabulary, background knowledge, and knowledge of text structures are needed. General purposes for reading, specific purposes for reading, and knowledge of strategies contribute to strategic knowledge. In summary, both the DIME model and the cognitive model provide greater insight into specific constructs and skills required for reading comprehension that can be targeted instructionally in comprehension intervention.
Filderman, M. J., Austin, C. R., Boucher, A. N., O’Donnell, K., & Swanson, E. A. (2022). A Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Reading Comprehension Interventions on the Reading Comprehension Outcomes of Struggling Readers in Third Through 12th Grades. Exceptional Children, 88(2), 163–184. https://doi.org/10.1177/00144029211050860
Teaching children to read is one of the most fundamental goals of early years and primary education worldwide, and as such has attracted a large amount of research from a range of academic disciplines. The aims of this paper are: (a) to provide a new critical examination of research evidence relevant to effective teaching of phonics and reading in the con-text of national curricula internationally; (b) to report new empirical findings relating to phonics teaching in England; and (c) examine some implications for policy and practice. The paper reports new empirical findings from two sources: (1) a systematic qualitative meta-synthesis of 55 experimental trials that included longitudinal designs; (2) a survey of 2205 teachers. The paper concludes that phonics and reading teach-ing in primary schools in England has changed significantly for the first time in modern history, and that compared to other English dominant regions England represents an outlier. The most robust research evidence, from randomised control trials with longitudinal designs, shows that the approach to phonics and reading teaching in England is not sufficiently under-pinned by research evidence. It is recommended that national curriculum policy is changed and that the locus of political control over curriculum, pedagogy and assessment should be re-evaluated.
Wyse, D., & Bradbury, A. (2022). Reading wars or reading reconciliation? A critical examination of robust research evidence, curriculum policy and teachers’ practices for teaching phonics and reading. Review of Education, 10, e3314. https://doi.org/10.1002/rev3.3314
Key points:
The key question that we address in this paper is whether robust research evidence sup-ports this historically significant change in reading pedagogy. Our findings from analysis of tertiary reviews, systematic reviews and from the SQMS do not support a synthetic phonics orientation to the teaching of reading: they suggest that a balanced instruction approach is most likely to be successful. They also suggest the need for a new more careful consideration of the strengths and weaknesses of whole language as an orientation to teaching reading. The reading wars have often resulted in some very dismissive attitudes to whole language, a position that is not underpinned by the research. Although there remains no doubt that phonics teaching in general is one important component in the teaching of reading, the research certainly does not suggest the complete exclusion of whole language teaching….
In addition to the importance of contextualised reading teaching as an evidence-based orientation to the teaching of reading we hypothesise the following pedagogical features that are likely to be effective. Phonics teaching is most likely to be effective for children aged five to six. Phonics teaching with children younger than this is not likely to be effective. A focus on whole texts and reading for meaning, to contextualise the teaching of other skills and knowledge, should drive pedagogy. Classroom teachers using their professional judgement to ensure coherence of the approach to teaching phonics and reading with other relevant teaching in their classroom is most likely to be effective. Insistence on particular schemes/basals, scripted lessons, and other inflexible approaches is unlikely to be optimal. Well-trained classroom assistants, working in collaboration with their class teachers, could be a very important contribution to children’s reading development. Although the most relevant studies in the SQMS showed approaches that were effective usually from between 9.1 h and 60 h of teaching time, we hypothesise that effective teaching of the alphabetic code could be delivered in 30 h or less of instruction time. If so, this would mean that greater emphasis on aspects such as reading comprehension could begin much earlier in England’s national curriculum programmes of study than in the current national curriculum of 2014.
One of the defining moments of my first-year writing seminar is my reading aloud the first few paragraphs from A Report from Occupied Territory by James Baldwin.
This essay in The Nation from July 11, 1966, offers students dozens of powerful examples of compelling and purposeful writing, Baldwin at his best. But the circumstances of the essay are what first strike my students.
“There was a great commotion in the streets, which, especially since it was a spring day, involved many people, including running, frightened, little boys,” Baldwin writes. “They were running from the police.”
We note that Baldwin uses “police[men]” five times in the first paragraph, which focuses on people in the Harlem “in terror of the police” because “two of the policemen were beating up a kid.”
Students immediately noted that Baldwin was addressing exactly the same racism grounded in policing that has been the source of social unrest in the U.S. throughout 2020.
In other words, racism in policing in the U.S. is not a recent crisis, but a historically systemic fact of policing.
The more things change, we noted, the more they stay the same.
The history of education in the U.S. is often fascinating and surprising, but it also is like being Phil (Bill Murray) in Groundhog Day—especially when it comes to bandwagons and political and public cries of “crisis.”
Fews aspects of education represent this pattern more than reading, suffering the “science of reading” (SoR) movement since early 2018.
The SoR movement is nothing new, a movement anchored in the past.
But as David Reinking, Victoria J. Risko and George G. Hruby note at The Answer Sheet (The Washington Post), “More worrisome, a majority of states have enacted, or are considering, new laws mandating how reading must be taught and setting narrow criteria for labeling students as reading disabled.”
As my students came to recognize about racism and policing in the U.S., anyone who examines the history and current bandwagon of reading will see that schools, teachers, and students have, like Phil, lived the same day over and over—reading is in crisis and here is the silver-bullet for all students to read.
One must wonder why we never pause to confront that this formula has never resulted in anything other than the same crisis.
And one must acknowledge that something cannot be a movement if it is anchored in doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.
Both the website and the League represent the very worst of missionary zeal and good intentions; and they both fail the fact check necessary for claims about a reading crisis and the bandwagon of SoR.
First, The Reading League grounds their concerns in a misguided and false red flag about whole language, as reported on Syracuse.com: “Murray is referring to the large base of research and knowledge that proves scientifically-grounded methodology in teaching reading is more effective than the ‘whole language’ approach most curriculum takes.”
This argument has two significant flaws. First, whole language has been replaced by balanced literacy for decades. And second, the 1990s revealed a discredited assault on whole language and an ignored analysis of by Darling-Hammond that showed a positive correlation between higher NAEP scores and students being in whole language classrooms.
The website, The Science of Reading: A Defining Movement, is complicated to fact check because there seems to be a purposeful effort to appear to be different than the SoR bandwagon by rejecting the term as a “buzzword” and demanding “We must preserve the integrity of reading science.”
Further, in the Preamble to their The Science of Reading: A Defining Guide, one sentence stands out: “We know that our children can be taught to read properly the first time.”
“The first time”?
Literacy and reading are lifelong learning experiences, and this claim raises a genuine red flag about this movement.
But the biggest reveal about the so-called SoR movement is in the definition, where there is a narrow parameter set for “scientifically-based”: experimental/quasi-experimental study design, replication or refinement of findings, and peer-reviewed journal publication.
The SoR movement is a bandwagon with its wheels mired in the same muddle arguments that have never been true and silver-bullet solutions that have never worked.
Like Phil, we find ourselves waking up to the same day in reading.
This is no crisis, but it certainly is a tired, old story that needs to be left behind through some other vehicle than a bandwagon.
I am contacting you with an urgent caution about Bill 3613 and the historical failures of addressing reading in South Carolina through micromanaging legislation that has not resulted in improving home, community, individual equity or learning outcomes for students living in poverty, Black students, Emergent Bilinguals, or students with special needs.
Currently, I am in year 37 of being an educator in SC, serving as a high school English teacher at Woodruff High for 18 years before moving to teacher education at Furman University for the past 19 years. I entered education in SC in 1984, the first days of the accountability movement in our state.
Despite changing standards and high-stakes testing multiple times over the past four decades, political and public perception remains convinced our schools are failing, and that our students are, specifically, failing in reading achievement.
Read To Succeed was a serious mistake at its inception since it misreads both how students learn to read and how best to teach reading. Reading growth is not simple, and test scores are a stronger measure of poverty and social inequities than the state of student learning or the quality of teaching.
Bill 3613 is making the same mistake political leaders have been making since the 1980s, tinkering with prescriptive legislation aimed at our students and teachers while ignoring the overwhelming negative impact of inequity in our students’ homes and communities as well as the harmful negative learning and teaching conditions that persist in our schools.
I am attaching a full statement and a resource list that includes powerful and valuable recommendations from important national organizations (NCTE, ILA, NEPC) who have addressed how best to reform our schools in order to serve all students and to foster literacy in effective and compelling ways.
Please read and consider the resources I have provided, notably the nearly exhaustive collection of research on grade retention and NCTE’s Position Statement strongly rejecting grade retention as reading policy; below I highlight the should not/should recommended with research support from NEPC (see the resource list below):
Should not fund or endorse unproven private-vendor comprehensive reading programs or materials.[i]
Should not adopt “ends justify the means” policies aimed at raising reading test scores in the short term that have longer-term harms (for example, third-grade retention policies).[ii]
Should not prescribe a narrow definition of “scientific” or “evidence-based” that elevates one part of the research base while ignoring contradictory high-quality research.[iii]
Should not prescribe a “one-size-fits-all” approach to teaching reading, addressing struggling readers or English language learners (Emergent Bilinguals), or identifying and serving special needs students.
Should not prescribe such a “one-size-fits-all” approach to preparing teachers for reading instruction, since teachers need a full set of tools to help their students.
Should not ignore the limited impact on measurable student outcomes (e.g., test scores) of in-school opportunities to learn, as compared to the opportunity gaps that arise outside of school tied to racism, poverty, and concentrated poverty.[iv]
Should not prioritize test scores measuring reading, particularly lower-level reading tasks, over a wide range of types of evidence (e.g., literacy portfolios and teacher assessments[v]), or over other equity-based targets (e.g., access to courses and access to certified, experienced teachers), always prioritizing the goal of ensuring that all students have access to high-quality reading instruction.
Should not teacher-proof reading instruction or de-professionalize teachers of reading or teacher educators through narrow prescriptions of how to teach reading and serve struggling readers, Emergent Bilinguals, or students with special needs.
Should not prioritize advocacy by a small group of non-educators over the expertise and experiences of K-12 educators and scholars of reading and literacy.
Should not conflate general reading instruction policy with the unique needs of struggling readers, Emergent Bilinguals, and special needs students.
And therefore:
Should guarantee that all students are served based on their identifiable needs in the highest quality teaching and learning conditions possible across all schools:
Full funding to support all students’ reading needs;
Professionally prepared teachers with expertise in supporting all students with the most beneficial reading instruction, balancing systematic skills instruction with authentic texts and activities;
Full and supported instructional materials for learning to read, chosen by teachers to fit the needs of their unique group of students;
Intensive, research-based early interventions for struggling readers; and
Guaranteed and extensive time to read and learn to read daily.
Should support the professionalism of K-12 teachers and teacher educators, and should acknowledge the teacher as the reading expert in the care of unique populations of students.
Should adopt a complex and robust definition of “scientific” and “evidence-based.”
Should embrace a philosophy of “first, do no harm,” avoiding detrimental policies like grade retention and tracking.[vii]
Should acknowledge that reading needs across the general population, struggling readers, Emergent Bilinguals, and special needs students are varied and complex.
Should adopt a wide range of types of evidence of student learning.
Should prioritize, when using standardized test scores, longitudinal data on reading achievement as guiding evidence among a diversity of evidence for supporting instruction and the conditions of teaching and learning.
Should establish equity (input) standards as a balance to accountability (output) standards, including the need to provide funding and oversight to guarantee all students access to high-quality, certified teachers; to address inequitable access to experienced teachers; and to ensure supported, challenging and engaging reading and literacy experiences regardless of student background or geographical setting.
Should recognize that there is no settled science of reading and that the research base and evidence base on reading and teaching reading is diverse and always in a state of change.
Should acknowledge and support that the greatest avenue to reading for all students is access to books and reading in their homes, their schools, and their access to libraries (school and community).[viii]
I urge political leaders in SC to think differently about our students, our teachers, and our schools; notably, I strongly recommend that we seek ways to create homes, communities, and schools that allow our students to grow and excel in the literacy development.
Continuing to tinker with prescriptive and punitive reading legislation is a dereliction of political and ethical duty; we can and must do better, by doing differently.
[i] This is true even when the program is generally understood to be of high quality. See Gonzalez, N. (2018, November 26). When evidence-based literacy programs fail. Phi Delta Kappan, 100(4), 54-58. Retrieved March 15, 2020, from LINK
See also International Reading Association (2002). What is evidence-based reading instruction? Retrieved March 15, 2020, from LINK
Office of the Inspector General. (2006). The Reading First program’s grant application process. Final inspection report. Washington, DC: US Department of Education. Retrieved March 15, 2020, from LINK
[ii] See the sources linked at Thomas, P.L. (2014). Grade Retention Research. Radical Eyes for Equity. Retrieved March 15, 2020, from LINK
[iii] See resources linked at Thomas, P. L. (2020). Understanding the “Science of Reading”: A Reader. Radical Eyes for Equity. Retrieved March 15, 2020, from LINK
[iv] Carter, P.L. & Welner, K.G. (Eds) (2013). Closing the opportunity gap: What America must do to give all children an even chance. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Reardon, S.F., Weathers, E.S., Fahle, E.M., Jang, H., & Kalogrides, D. (2019). Is separate still unequal? New evidence on school segregation and racial academic achievement gaps (No. 19-06). CEPA Working Paper. Retrieved March 15, 2020, from LINK
[v] Valencia, S.W. (1998). Literacy Portfolios in Action. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace. Retrieved March 15, 2020, from LINK
Strunk, K.O., Weinsten, T.L., & Makkonen, R. (2014). Sorting out the signal: Do multiple measures of teachers’ effectiveness provide consistent information to teachers and principals?. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 22(100). Retrieved March 15, 2020, from LINK
Lavigne, D.A.L., & Good, D.T.L. (2020). Addressing teacher evaluation appropriately. APA Division 15 Policy Brief Series, 1(2). Retrieved March 15, 2020, from LINK
[vi] Schanzenbach, D.W. (2014). Does class size matter? Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved March 15, 2020, from LINK
[vii] Atteberry, A., LaCour, S.E., Burris, C., Welner, K.G., & Murphy, J. (2019). Opening the gates: Detracking and the International Baccalaureate. Teachers College Record, 121(9), 1-63.
See also the sources linked at Thomas, P.L. (2014). Grade retention research. Radical Eyes for Equity. Retrieved March 15, 2020, from LINK
[viii] Fryer, R., & Levitt, S. (2004). Understanding the black-white test score gap in the first two years of school. The Review of Economics and Statistics, 86(2), 447-464.
Lance, K.C., & Kachel, D.E. (2018). Why school librarians matter: What years of research tell us. Phi Delta Kappan, 99(7), 15-20. Retrieved March 15, 2020, from LINK
Krashen, S. (2013). Access to books and time to read versus the common core state standards and tests. English Journal, 21-29. Retrieved March 15, 2020, from LINK
Several years ago I was on a panel for a public forum held on my university’s campus. At the Q&A ending the panel talk, a colleague from another discipline asked a detailed question grounded in their discipline.
I watched their face and eyes as I navigated not only the arcane and somewhat navel-gazing elements of the question (we academics love to hold forth with questions that are thinly veiled opportunities to hear ourselves talk) but also that this conversation between the two of us was almost entirely alienating for 75% of the audience, which included several of my students.
Referencing key scholars from my colleague’s field, I did a bit better than hold my own—although I just have an EdD from a state university.
Because of the lingering Jill Biden controversy—using “Dr.” with people holding doctorates and working as professors—the public has been exposed to the ugliness surrounding and within the academy that includes classism (one detractor of Jill Biden clearly also disrespects community college students), sexism (the original swipe at Jill Biden that isn’t even thinly veiled misogyny), and degree stigmas (even in this excellent rebuttal of all the nonsense tossed at Jill Biden, the EdD is framed as a lesser degree).
My journey to academia and an advanced, terminal degree (EdD in Curriculum and Instruction) began in junior college after I left high school an avid math/science student set on majoring in physics (one of the most prestigious disciplines in academia).
However, while in junior college where I spent an inordinate amount of time playing pick-up basketball and drinking, I was approached by a Dean who taught my British lit intro course. Dean Carter asked me to tutor English in the college’s academic assistance office.
A bit disoriented, I asked why, and he said I was the best student in the class. At that point, a first-year student who had made almost all his As in high school in math and science (although my favorite teacher was Mr. Harrill, my English teacher), I never considered myself a literary person—and certainly had never entertained any proclivity for teaching (I laughed in high school, in fact, when Mr. Harrill one day suggested I consider teaching).
That moment with Dean Carter changed my life.
I soon fell in love with tutoring, and by the spring of my first year of college, I had fallen in love with poetry (thanks to my speech class taught by Mr. Steve Brannon) and discovered that I am a writer (having written my first “real” poems that spring after immersing myself in the poetry of e.e. cummings).
From 1983 until 1998, I completed three (shitty, in seems) degrees in education—a BA in secondary English education, an MEd in secondary English education, and an EdD in Curriculum and Instruction—all from (shitty, it seems) the state system where I live.
I am well aware that K-12 teaching isn’t very highly regarded, that many people see teachers as academically weak themselves (the Urban Legend about education majors having the lowest SATs, GPAs, etc.). I am also well aware that my education degrees are viewed as pre-professional and not academically rigorous.
As I noted above, even an impassioned and detailed defense of Jill Biden using “Dr.” included a swipe at the EdD degree:
Jill Biden does not have a PhD. She has an Ed.D. in Educational Leadership. It’s an applied doctorate, designed to certify rising administrators in the field of education….
At the outset I mentioned that Biden has “an Ed.D. in Educational Leadership” and not a PhD. The Department’s website provides a handy summary of the difference at Delaware.
That “handy summary,” however, is not a definition of EdDs, but of that particular degree and program, but even as there is an emphasis on being a practitioner, the summary ends with this: “The Doctor of Education represents the highest level of scholarly attainment in the professional field of education.”
Now honestly, there is a lot of coded language here that links “scholarly” with “professional field” and speaks into a cultural and disciplinary marginalizing of education as a pre-professional and not academic field.
Here is a significant distinction that many do not acknowledge about education as a discipline. Much of education in the academy is grounded in teacher certification (an area in which I work and strongly criticize), but education as a discipline is a social science, a cousin to psychology.
My graduate degrees (MEd and EdD) included many advanced courses in statistics and qualitative/quantitative research, educational philosophy, and educational psychology. I am willing to concede that education as a field is a hybrid of other disciplines, but I can hold my own among researchers regardless of the field, among complex discussions of philosophy and psychology (not just education), and among debates about the challenges of realizing theory/philosophy in day-to-day practice.
But many have also criticized Jill Biden for her dissertation, again the implication being that EdDs are less academically rigorous:
Some critics have honed in on the fact that Biden’s dissertation is not a PhD thesis but an “Executive Position Paper.”…
For that matter, we can argue, as Volokh does, that a PhD thesis “is generally a dissertation that constitutes a substantial original work of scholarship,” but it should be pretty clear that “generally” is doing a lot of work here. This is why writing a crappy thesis doesn’t mean that Gorka can’t call himself “Dr. Gorka.” It means his PhD doesn’t certify him as an expert on terrorism or in political science. Biden isn’t trying to pass herself off as a leading expert on educational reform or whatever….
For that matter, we can argue, as Volokh does, that a PhD thesis “is generally a dissertation that constitutes a substantial original work of scholarship,” but it should be pretty clear that “generally” is doing a lot of work here. This is why writing a crappy thesis doesn’t mean that Gorka can’t call himself “Dr. Gorka.” It means his PhD doesn’t certify him as an expert on terrorism or in political science. Biden isn’t trying to pass herself off as a leading expert on educational reform or whatever.
This defense, you see, of Jill Biden is grounded in the argument that she did in fact meet the requirements of her EdD, which is a doctoral degree, and therefore, assigning “Dr.” to her name while she is a professor is entirely reasonable.
This defense glides right past making any concession that EdD programs may in fact have rigorous dissertation requirements that result in a “a substantial original work of scholarship.”
My own experience with graduate school was not like my colleagues’ programs since I completed my MEd at a satellite campus (degree was based in the main campus, however) and then completed the EdD with very lenient residency requirements (I did not quit my teaching job or live on campus, meeting residency by taking a certain number of main-campus listed courses over several consecutive semesters).
And my dissertation does meet the threshold of being “a substantial original work of scholarship,” but it is an educational biography—a qualitative research paradigm and a sub-genre of history, both of which are stigmatized in academia (once again, shitty and shitty).
Tracing the life and career of Lou LaBrant through much of the twentieth century required my completing a literature review of biography/educational biography grounded in feminism and critical pedagogy (that grounding, you guessed it, shitty and shitty), reading dozens of works by LaBrant and about LaBrant that form the skeleton of my field of literacy and English education, and then writing a book-length biography (which has since been published).
I was well equipped during my years in graduate education to have written a traditional dissertation driven by a quantitative study (I found none of that compelling and chose my program specifically because it included a key figure in education biography, Craig Kridel, and because I could write a biography).
My work on LaBrant, as Kridel declared at my dissertation defense, is a unique contribution to the field of education (as a social science), rich in history as well as robust debates about philosophy, theory, and practice.
My challenge is that I wonder how many economists, political scientists, psychologists, and almost all the other disciplines awash in PhDs could have done the type of work I did, academically advanced writing (not to a dissertation temple) that grounded a prominent figure over almost a century of thought in that field.
I suspect few of the academic snobs pontificating on Jill Biden could have done the work I did, and part of their condescension is a way to avoid that fact.
It’s not, then, that my terminal degree is just an EdD from a state university; it’s all the layers of shitty I have trafficked in along the way—just the field of education, just a biography.
The Jill Biden debate is mostly about sexism and misogyny; it is unwarranted and petty.
I know from first-hand witnessing that there are plenty of charlatans in all the disciplines—small-minded and weak thinkers about even mundane topics. I have to stand in proximity to their PhDs as if I don’t count because of the simple difference in letters.
We call them “Dr.” and don’t bat an eye.
These hierarchies and professional/personal pettiness are embarrassing among people who are supposed to be well educated.
But there is no place for any of that in our public debates either. I know that despite my shitty degree.
I posted a fairly tame Tweet about the Wall Street Journal‘s recent Op-Ed attacking Jill Biden using “Dr.” and editorial doubling-down on negative responses to the Op-Ed (none of which I will link here):
WSJ proves a hard fact: conservative thought cannot avoid being 🔥💩
Conservatives suffer from arrested development, permanently enamored with Ayn Rand basement level pseudo-thinking of 12-year-old boys
The Tweet attracted conservatives with ten’s of followers, most of them misreading the Tweet and many of them attacking me for being an academic/professor (the typical snarky references to Marx, etc.) as well as being in the field of education (my university affiliation and doctorate, an EdD, are part of my Twitter bio and handle—although several Twits thought they were outing me in some way for these public facts).
While I am enormously privileged, I share with Jill Biden the paradox of holding a doctorate in an often marginalized field, education; when I attained my EdD in the mid-1990s, it was still a much lesser degree than a PhD—and remains well down the hierarchy of academic credentials since education is often discounted as a pre-professional field.
Over 37 years as an educators, I spent the first 18 as a public high school English teacher. K-12 teachers are disproportionately women, and being a K-12 teacher is a profession rarely recognized as such—mostly, I contend, because it is perceived as mere women’s work.
Like babysitting.
Now in the middle of my nineteenth year as a professor, having moved through the ranks to full professor and received tenure, I am part of a male-dominated field (especially at the higher ranks) that often warrants far more prestige than K-12 teachers but also receives a fair amount of public shaming and ridicule (notably from conservatives, as my Twitter experience illustrates).
That ridicule is based in large part on cartoonish stereotypes of the Ivory Tower (academic knowledge not being realistic or practical) and a mischaracterization of professors as radical Leftists.
What popular and conservative attacks of higher education often miss is that academia is incredibly traditional, especially in terms of policies and practices that are sexist, racist, classist, and (often) petty.
Higher education, like K-12 education, more often reflects society—the good, the bad, and the ugly—than not.
The Jill Biden debate prompted by the conservative WSJ is an opportunity to confront the gendered inequity of academia that is replicated in the racism, classism, and other inequities that permeate disciplinary hierarchies, the tenure and promotion process (along with faculty evaluation such as student evaluations of teaching [SET]), and numerous unspoken norms.
That higher education fails to be the Ivory Tower of equity is not the only paradox of academia. Many would assume, for example, that academics practice research-based policies and procedures, but one of the greatest inequities of being a professor is the use of SETs for annual evaluations and the tenure/promotion process (see here).
“Having a female instructor is correlated with higher student achievement,” Wu said, but female instructors received systematically lower course evaluations. In looking at prerequisite courses, the two researchers found a negative correlation between students’ evaluations and learning. “If you took the prerequisite class from a professor with high student teaching evaluations,” Harbaugh said, “you were likely, everything else equal, to do worse in the second class.”…
Studies since the 1980s have found gender bias in student evaluations and, since the early 2000s, have found racial bias as well. A 2016 study of data from the United States and France found that students’ teaching evaluations “measure students’ gender biases better than they measure the instructor’s teaching effectiveness,” and that more-effective instructors got lower ratings than others did….
Despite the data, at many colleges, particularly research-based institutions, student evaluations are still the main measure, if not the only one, of teaching effectiveness in promotion-and-tenure decisions.
Just as the WSJ editorial staff doubled down on a grossly incompetent and even laughably weak Op-Ed by a classic mediocre white man, academia repeatedly doubles down on SETs, arguing that colleges must have something to evaluate teaching and casually flaunting the research base.
But even the college classroom remains inequitable for women; Lee and McCabe have found that gender inequity in the college classroom hasn’t improved over the past 40 years, as they observed:
Men students are more likely to take the floor to talk while women students are more likely to wait for their turns. Across all nine courses observed, men students talk 1.6 times as often as women. In addition, men are also more likely to speak out without raising their hands, interrupt other speakers in the classroom, and engage in prolonged conversations with the professor during class….
Despite great gains in women’s access to and achievements in higher education, contemporary college classrooms seem to have remained “chilly.” Our observations suggest that men students continue to occupy advantaged positions while women students are largely hesitant to take up space in classrooms. These differences occur regardless of students’ or professors’ awareness of these inequalities.
A key point here is that women for many years have surpassed men in attending and achieving success in higher education. And the nonsensical WSJ Op-Ed seems to reflect anther disturbing finding about gender and higher education by Levanon, England, and Allison:
Occupations with a greater share of females pay less than those with a lower share, controlling for education and skill. This association is explained by two dominant views: devaluation and queuing. The former views the pay offered in an occupation to affect its female proportion, due to employers’ preference for men—a gendered labor queue. The latter argues that the proportion of females in an occupation affects pay, owing to devaluation of work done by women. Only a few past studies used longitudinal data, which is needed to test the theories. We use fixed-effects models, thus controlling for stable characteristics of occupations, and U.S. Census data from 1950 through 2000. We find substantial evidence for the devaluation view, but only scant evidence for the queuing view.
As women surpass men in doctorates, the prestige of that credential has diminished.
Once again, however, we need only to listen to women themselves, of course, to recognize the lower realities of higher education that have nothing to do with cancel culture, Marxism/socialism, or diversity/equity/inclusion initiatives.
Those lower realities are mostly good old American sexism.
“Contrary to what one might have expected,” Allison Miller explains while unpacking the Jill Biden controversy, “I have found that the further away from higher education I’ve gotten, the more respect for my degree colleagues have shown.”
Miller continues:
Where I have encountered most disrespect for my doctorate is actually from academics. It’s not just that all Ph.D.s are not created equal — some schools still dominate hiring and will continue to do so as the academic-job market shrinks….
[T]he fetishization of hazing hasn’t disappeared from inside academe….
Once you have a Ph.D. … you learn the lessons of academic hierarchy all over again. What’s called “collegiality” is actually deference, a willingness to get along by going along, to put up with corridor microaggressions, to smile through Professor X’s department-meeting BS — but like a whack-a-mole, there’s always another Professor X. The rules of deference are unwritten because most of them would probably be illegal. “Wait until you get tenure” is not in the faculty handbook….
The demands for deference speak to gatekeeping and a general clubbiness that is hard to penetrate without a background that includes close proximity to upper-middle-class white people.
Three key points must be acknowledged here in order to recognize the lower realities of higher education: “hazing,” “gatekeeping,” and “clubbiness” all confront that higher education is a highly insular and sexist system that, like most formal organizations, is more concerned with conserving its structure than changing for the good of all.
Higher education is often a good ol’ boys club with more credentialing and a more arcane vocabulary.
Attaining a doctorate—PhD or EdD (JD or MD)—is a relatively rare achievement, but those credentials do not guarantee that people are better humans after they earn the opportunity to be called “Dr.”
Dr. X and Dr. Y are no less likely to be selfish and arrogant, and we have no guarantee that anyone in any field, academic or medical, wasn’t last in their class—or isn’t a charlatan, a hack.
But when medical doctors gained the label of “Dr.” (after academics) and when academic doctors were mostly men, society rarely balked at the possibility that “Dr.” didn’t make any of those guarantees.
If anyone is ready for a reckoning in the U.S. (and I doubt many are), we would be better served to question the outsized role of mediocre white men, like the recent scribe of a WSJ Op-Ed, both inside and outside the academy.
In the mean time, it’s Dr. Jill Biden who will be the next FLOTUS, and along with Kamal Harris being the vice president, there is much to celebrate about women and simply no room for adolescent Op-Eds in the WSJ that can’t rise above Ayn Rand basement level pseudo-thinking.
17 September 2020 turned out to be a day of disinformation about education in the U.S. The White House launched another assault on education (not a surprise), and the International Literacy Association offered (for a fee) “Making Sense of the Science of Reading.”
The latter is disappointing from a powerful and influential professional organization because the “sense” made appears to be quite different than the intent.
SoR links reading to policies and practices that lack scientific support and cross ethical lines of allowing the ends to justify the means (for example, nonsense literacy and grade retention linked to high-stakes testing).
Here, I want to focus on how SoR crosses ethical lines in order to justify and misrepresent the very “science” those advocates embrace.
Writing about corporal punishment, Rutherford quotes from Gertrude Williams: “[s]ince the dawn of humanity, children have been treated with incredible cruelty and have little recourse to the law which regarded them as things, not persons” (p. 356).
In my scholarship and public work, corporal punishment and grade retention share something, ironically, with SoR advocacy; I contend that the scientific research base (both decade’s long) on corporal punishment and grade retention , while not “settled,” is overwhelmingly compelling against the use of either with children and students.
And thus, I am deeply alarmed at ILA justifying the use of grade retention as a component of the SoR movement. A speaker at the ILA event and a follow-up email from ILA highlighted a disturbing report from the conservative Manhattan Institute: Do Retention Policies Affect Student Success?
In 1974, talking on education at UC Berkley, James Baldwin confronted the same sort of inequity toward children highlighted by Rutherford on corporal punishment: “And education is a billion-dollar industry and the least important part of that industry is the child.”
With that in mind, the report on grade retention from Perrault and Winters must be interrogated for its lack of peer review (How does one reach for the unscientific to support the scientific?) and its distorted view of teaching and learning along with its antagonism toward children (and teachers).
Perrault and Winters make several key mistakes in how they focus this report and what they fail to identify and consider important.
Decades of high-quality research on grade retention as well as more recent examinations of high-stakes retention similar to what Perrault and Winters address have found the following: grade retention’s impact on raising test scores is mixed, but even when test scores increase, those gains dissipate over time (those gains, then, are a mirage); grade retention is strongly correlated with negative consequences for students, including being separated from their peers and increasing the likelihood of dropping out of school; and grade retention tends to disproportionately impact students of color, high-poverty students, English language learners, and special needs students (contributing, then, to perpetuating inequity).
Perrault and Winters choose to ignore the overwhelming negative consequences, preferring to argue for the ends justifying the means, and instead focus again on a simplistic look at whether or not the “threat” of grade retention increases test scores for students not retained (a circular argument for decreasing grade retention).
Those choices lead to a very disturbing and flawed argument that grade retention, according to Perrault and Winters, improved student learning and teaching (a reductive claim based solely on test scores as an adequate proxy for learning and teaching); their concluding rhetoric is very telling:
Our results, however, suggest that earlier studies, which focus entirely on retained students, substantially understate the benefits of test-based promotion policies on student achievement. The test-score improvements that we find within the third grade for students in Arizona and Florida apply to a much larger group of students than those who were eventually retained by the policies. Indeed, our results show that the threat of retention [emphasis added] improves student academic achievement, thus reducing the need for retention.
SoR advocacy and ILA have made a fatal flaw in citing this report in order to argue that the ends justify the means.
Grade retention is overwhelmingly harmful to students, it does not improve learning and teaching, and it disproportionately harms the most vulnerable students in our schools.
Short-term gains produced by test-based retention policies fade over time with students again falling behind but with a larger likelihood of dropping out of school. These unintended consequences are most prevalent among ethnic minority and impoverished students. The author concludes by providing alternatives for ending social promotion that do not include grade retention as well as suggestions for further researching the role such policies play in perpetuating class inequities. [from abstract]
The SoR movement has lost its way, depending on reports and anecdotes in order to promote a simplistic view of reading and teaching reading.
As Baldwin noted in the 1970s, education is an industry, and we must be suspicious why so many are compelled to make claims that seem more likely to serve the interests of those who produce and sell reading (phonics) programs and reading tests than the very children we claim to serve.
educator, public scholar, poet&writer – academic freedom isn't free
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 