This “Southern surge” narrative tends to center Mississippi but also includes Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana (the most recent “miracle” state based on an incomplete or misleading use of NAEP scores).
Like many media manufactured narratives, the “Southern surge” in reading falls apart when the data are carefully examined.
While I give the Chalkbeat article some credit for admitting that the so-called “surge” is not fully understood, Barnum—as Hanford did when christening Mississippi a “miracle” in 2019 (“What’s up in Mississippi? There’s no way to know for sure what causes increases in test scores”)—gives the “surge” narrative nearly complete credibility even with the headline hedge and a couple points made then glossed over (“Eighth grade results have been less impressive for these Southern exemplars, though”).
Here are the (likely fatal) flaws in the “surge” narrative:
Although Barnum cites an important and comprehensive analysis of reading reform, he fails to acknowledge its most important findings: States adopting reading reform (often popularly associated with Mississippi’s model even when states explicitly do not mimic those reform policies, such as California) has seen short-term test score gains in reading (note that score gains are not necessarily higher reading proficiency); however, while Barnum lists several reading policy components (“third grade retention, phonics-based curriculum, and statewide teacher training”), this study directly states that only retention is associated with higher scores (with the researchers noting their study did not identify why).
Barnum notes the drop by Southern states’ grade 8 reading scores, but fails to acknowledge that this data point may suggest that retention is inflating scores, not increasing reading proficiency. Notably states such as Florida and Mississippi have had these reform for over one to two decades without the “surge” appearing in grade 8 data.
The retention component also is troubling since these states continue to retain students as high rates. If the other policies were working, we should expect retention numbers to decrease significantly, but they have not.
Possibly the most damning ignored data from NAEP, however: Across all states, but including the so-called “surge” states, the race and poverty gaps remain persistent, typically the same as in 1998.
There are statistical realities also being ignored in the “surge” narrative.
Test scores for the lowest performing students are easier to improve that top-scoring students, for example.
But likely more significant is that early literacy test scores are strongly correlated with student biological age (England has almost twenty years of data on phonics checks that show this); therefore, when grade retention removes the lowest scoring students from the testing population (grade 3 retention laws impact grade 4 NAEP testing) and reintroduces them when they are biologically older, the possibility is that scores are being artificially inflated.
Reading “crisis/miracle” narratives and the phonics gambit should be dead horses; these unfounded claims have existed in the US well back into the 1940s, recurring decade after decade.
At best, “we don’t fully understand it yet,” and at worst, too many people profit off this zombie narrative, and children, teachers, and schools will continue to be sacrificed instead of putting these stories in the ground where they belong.
Every two years reading scores make headlines. And this year, as has been the case since COVID, the news is not good. Scores are down (again), and the causes being pointed to for the drop are also wrong (again).
National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is the national program mandated with tracking student achievement. The 2024 results reveal that reading scores have hit their lowest point in 32 years. This decline is notable because in recent years many states have passed aggressive reading legislation, often labeled as the “science of reading” (SOR).
The SOR movement makes a few key claims: the US has a reading crisis, teachers fail to use “scientific” evidence for instruction, and educators and policymakers are making excuses by acknowledging poverty when addressing low reading proficiency.
However, the Mississippi “miracle” story was an incomplete misreading of reading proficiency and policy.
With the average 2024 NAEP reading scores in further decline, the SOR era in reading reform appears to be failing. This is especially true for vulnerable students whose scores have dropped the most. Interpreting these scores correctly is key to forging a better path forward.
Thus, we must seek a more credible story about 2024 NAEP reading scores.
Let’s consider three sets of data from the Department of Defense schools (DoDEA), Florida, and Mississippi. These student populations include significant racial and socioeconomic diversity as well as multilingual learners and other vulnerable populations of students.
Florida and Mississippi have long been applauded for aggressive education and reading reform, and in 2024, their grade 4 reading scores remained in the top 25% of states, seemingly defying the odds. But Florida and Mississippi scored again well below top-scoring DoDEA schools.
Although many rush to ascribe this success to SOR policies, we should really be looking at a different (ultimately harmful) policy: third-grade retention based on state testing.
As education analysts John Westall and Amy Cummings concluded in a report on reading policy: “[S]tates whose policies mandate third-grade retention see significant and persistent increases in high-stakes reading scores in all cohorts…. [T]here is no consistent evidence that high-stakes reading scores increase in states without a retention component.”
Inflated scores are not learning; by eighth grade NAEP reading scores for Florida and Mississippi drop into the bottom 25% of states. The widely applauded “gains” in grade 4 are, in fact, a mirage.
Here is a different story: DoDEA schools are the top-scoring schools on NAEP tests and tell a story we’ve resisted admitting in the US. Maroun and Tieken found in 2024, replicating decades of similar research, that 60+% of student test scores are not linked to teacher quality, instruction, or programs but to out-of-school factors like socioeconomic background, home environment, and parental involvement to name a few.
While DoDEA schools have significant populations from poor and working-class backgrounds and serve diverse as well as vulnerable populations of children, these students have healthcare, food security, stable housing, and parents with stable work—and consistently high reading scores.
NAEP reading scores, again, are not a story about teacher and reading program failure or even student reading proficiency. These scores tell a complex story about a long history in the US of negligence, the lack of political will to address not only the education of all our children, but also their lives outside of school.
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”).
Before the close reading below, let me offer several examples for context concerning how media have weaponized “science” resulting in misguided and even harmful reading legislation.
First, here is an example of a journalist posting an article by a journalist praising a journalist. What is missing? Actual research, evidence, or science.
Gottlieb’s article, oddly, repeats three times at the end that he is a journalist, but in the piece, he seems most concerned about advocating for Hanford:
As brilliantly illuminated by education journalist Emily Hanford’s articles over the past several years, and her 2023 “Sold a Story” podcast, the education establishment in this country — which includes textbook and curriculum publishers, schools of education and school districts — has been guilty of educational malpractice for decades, using now-discredited Whole Language methods for teaching reading.
Gottlieb refers to a report and data, but offers no links to any science or research to support any of his claims, again primarily supported by Hanford’s “brilliant” podcast.
Note that the subhead, written by editors, not the journalist (“The state’s reliance on cognitive science explains why”) is directly contradicted by Hanford, although the article itself implies the opposite of what she acknowledges:
What’s up in Mississippi? There’s no way to know for sure what causes increases in test scores, but Mississippi has been doing something notable: making sure all of its teachers understand the science of reading.
When Hanford makes huge claims about teachers being unprepared to teach reading (“But a lot of teachers don’t know this science“), the link provided circles back to her own journalism, not research, not science.
The consequences of this media cycle of using “science” to give stories credibility while omitting the actual science is reading policy grounded in misinformation, but also given the veneer of “science”:
Legislation that would require Michigan schools to use a reading curriculum and interventions for students with dyslexia that are backed by science has taken a different shape to satisfy school administrators who questioned the timeline in the bills.
I focus in this essay on the way that policymakers in education may promote policy through the use of words and terms used by academics and by the public about education topics – words and terms such as “evidence”, “what works”, “evidence-based policy” and “gold standard”. In particular, I examine ways in which vernacular and specialist meanings of “evidence” and “evidence-based” may become hybridised; ways in which technical terms may be appropriated by politicians and their advisers for public consumption, and, in the process, become degraded and corrupted in the service of their own policy agendas.
One issue with the use of “evidence” (and synonyms) is that policymakers are apt to resort to “’cherry-picking, obfuscation or manipulation.’”
Terms such as “evidence” (and “science”) are designed to create “the ‘almost magical power’ that certain words acquire to ‘… make people see and believe.'”
Thomas’s analysis found:
In not one of the 100 uses was “evidence” used prefatory to an actual itemisation of data in support of a proposition, and in all cases in the non-specific category, “evidence” was used with verbs – e.g. “there is evidence”, “England possesses evidence” – which simultaneously conferred authority via the supposed status of “evidence” at the same time as acting as a proxy for detailed enumeration of specific data. The authority of the non-specific “evidence” was amplified with many qualifications of the word, which, without detail of the data for which “evidence” was a proxy, appeared merely to add rhetorical weight rather than empirical support. These qualifiers included words/terms such as incriminating, overwhelming, strong, weak, little, hard, fresh, preliminary, sufficient, inadmissible, no, verifiable, hearsay, prima facie, disturbing, concrete.
As Thomas walks the reader through a few examples, he highlights: “’Evidence’ is here prefaced with ‘scientific’, seemingly to elevate its status in the absence of specificity – a strategy frequently employed in general discourse, as the analysis of the corpora revealed.”
“Evidence” (like “science” and “research”) is commonly used in place of citing actual evidence throughout media and political discourse. [As my examples above show, US media often link to other media when terms such as “science” and “research” are used.]
“Evidence” is weaponized, then, as Thomas explains:
All the examples given here reveal the fashioning of semiotics, the creation of meaning, and the dissemination of messages to non-specialist audiences in an outlet that, while widely read, offers no obvious route for scholarly interrogation or critique – at least, within a timeframe that might allow meaningful challenge. The putative “evidenced reality” proves on examination not to exist and the attempt is – in the world of retail politics – to craft an illusion of “evidence” in support of particular political agendas, employing devices such as the “negative other-representation” to attempt to augment the writer’s position.
And thus:
“Evidence”, in the pieces examined here, is used often with only a superficial allusion to any kind of research, and the research “evidence”, where any is cited, is often highly selectively sampled, with unconcealed deprecation of alternative interpretations.
Thomas then addresses the need for scholars to correct the misleading stories of media and political leaders instead of jumping on the bandwagon of reform for financial gain or prestige:
Academics must take a share of responsibility in the way that this process proceeds unimpeded. Such is the pressure inside universities for staff to be winning research grants and earning research income that there is inevitably willing involvement in con- tract research involving the kind of steering groups I have just mentioned.
Yet, Thomas ends by acknowledging that the weaponizing of “evidence” (and “science” along with other synonyms) immediately frames anyone challenging the stories negatively [1]:
In realising this, astute politicians can kill two birds with one stone. The knack is to enlist conspicuously with “science”, ostensibly adhering firmly to principles of reason and empiricism, while simultaneously projecting silliness, unreason and disengagement from research findings onto one’s interlocutor – as did Gibb in the phrase cited in illustrative case study 2: “The evidence is clear – however much it may shock the pre-conceived expectations of some education experts”, or as did Cummings in declaring that the “education world” handles scientific developments “badly”. Utter the phrase “the evidence is clear” and one straightaway affiliates oneself with reason, wisdom and unequivocal allegiance to empirical inquiry. One’s interlocutors, by contrast, are immediately forced onto the back foot, compelled to defend themselves against charges of not engaging with evidence – of subjectivity, sloppiness, credulity and narrow-mindedness borne of ideology.
Therefore, as Thomas concludes about “evidence,” here in the US we too must accept about “science” in media rhetoric and political policy”
On the basis of the analysis here, “evidence-based” is next to meaningless, given that the evidence in question is habitually unspecified and given that any evidence that is actually specified is carefully selected and/or offered as if it were superior to other evidence which suggests conclusions at variance to those being proffered. Protean and manoeuvrable, terms such as “evidence-based” are powerful rhetorically. They drop easily into conversation, speeches and documents to add weight to an assertion. Filling any gap, taking any shape, as instruments of retail politics they serve politicians’ purpose perfectly, but in any discourse with pretensions to scholarly independence and disinterestedness, their mutability ought to be troubling. Our responsibility as an academy is surely consistently to question these terms, to call for specification of evidence, to be ready to provide alternative evidence, to engage energetically with a broad range of media and social media (i.e. not just peer review and academic publications) and to question the validity of concepts such as “impact”.
[1] Compare this framing with how the Education Writers Association and Hanford frame the role of journalists and the expectation that implementing the “science of reading” may fail:
“The 2022 NAEP results show that the average reading score for fourth graders is lower than it has been in over 20 years. For eighth and twelfth graders, average scores are at about a 30-year low,” states Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) in his new literacy report, adding, “The 2022 NAEP LongTerm Trend assessment for nine-year-old students showed average reading scores not seen since 1999.”
Cassidy’s alert about a reading crisis fits into dozens and dozens of media articles announcing crises and failures among students, teachers, and public schools all across the US. Typical of that journalism was Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times about a year ago:
One of the most bearish statistics for the future of the United States is this: Two-thirds of fourth graders in the United States are not proficient in reading.
Reading may be the most important skill we can give children. It’s the pilot light of that fire.
Yet we fail to ignite that pilot light, so today some one in five adults in the United States struggles with basic literacy, and after more than 25 years of campaigns and fads, American children are still struggling to read. Eighth graders today are actually a hair worse at reading than their counterparts were in 1998.
One explanation gaining ground is that, with the best of intentions, we grown-ups have bungled the task of teaching kids to read. There is growing evidence from neuroscience and careful experiments that the United States has adopted reading strategies that just don’t work very well and that we haven’t relied enough on a simple starting point — helping kids learn to sound out words with phonics.
As I have noted, education and reading crises have simply been a fact of US narratives since A Nation at Risk. But as I have also been detailing, these claims are misleading and manufactured.
Based on NAEP data—similar to Cassidy’s report—Shakeel and Peterson offer a much different view of student achievement in the US, notably about reading achievement:
This analysis demonstrates that the current reading crisis is manufactured, exclusively rhetorical and ideological, generating profit for media, politicians, and commercial publishers.
In short, the manufactured crises are distractions from the other contrarian truth about education as highlighted in the analysis from NPE:
This educational grading from NPE is unique because it doesn’t grade students, teachers, or public school, but holds political leadership accountable for supporting universal public education and democracy. The standards for these grades include the following:
Privatization Laws: the guardrails and limits on charter and voucher programs to ensure that taxpayers and students are protected from discrimination, corruption, and fraud.
Homeschooling Laws: laws to ensure that instruction is provided safely and responsibly.
Financial Support for Public Schools: sufficient and equitable funding of public schools.
Freedom to Teach and Learn: whether state laws allow all students to feel safe and thrive at school and receive honest instruction free of political intrusion.
These two examples come from contrasting ideologies, yet they offer contrarian truths about public schools and student achievement that would better serve how we talk about schools and student achievement as well as how we seek ways in which to reform those schools in order to better serve those students and our democracy.
Thomas, P.L. (2022). The Science of Reading movement: The never-ending debate and the need for a different approach to reading instruction. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/science-of-reading
Accordingly, when policymakers explore new guidelines, they would be wise to do the following:
• Be wary of overstatements and oversimplifications within media and public advocacy, acknowledging concerns raised but remaining skeptical of simplistic claims about causes and solutions.
• Attend to known influences on measurable student reading achievement, including the socioeconomics of communities, schools, and homes; teacher expertise and autonomy; and teaching and learning conditions.
• Recognize student-centered as an important research-supported guiding principle but also acknowledge the reality that translating such research-based principles into classroom practice is always challenging.
• Shift new reading policies away from prescription and mandates (“one-size-fits-all” approaches) and toward support for individual student needs and ongoing teacher-informed reform.
In rethinking past efforts and undertaking new reforms, policymakers should additionally move beyond the ineffective cycles demonstrated during earlier debates and reforms, avoid ing specific mandates and instead providing teachers the flexibility and support necessary to adapt their teaching strategies to specific students’ needs. Therefore, state policymakers should do the following:
• End narrowly prescriptive non-research-based policies and programs such as:
o Grade retention based on reading performance. o High-stakes reading testing at Grade 3. o Mandates and bans that require or prohibit specific instructional practices, such as systematic phonics and the three-cueing approach. o A “one-size-fits-all” approach to dyslexia and struggling readers.
• Form state reading panels, consisting of classroom teachers, researchers, and other literacy experts. Panels would support teachers by serving in an advisory role for teacher education, teacher professional development, and classroom practice. They would develop and maintain resources in best practice and up-to-date reading and literacy research.
On a more local level, school- and district-level policymakers should do the following:
• Develop teacher-informed reading programs based on the population of students served and the expertise of faculty serving those students, avoiding lockstep implementation of commercial reading programs and ensuring that instructional materials support—rather than dictate—teacher practice.
• Provide students struggling to read and other at-risk students with certified, experienced teachers and low student-teacher ratios to support individualized and differentiated instruction.
Entering the sixth year of detailing how the “science of reading” (SOR) movement uses “science” as a cover for claims that are primarily rhetorical and ideological, I once again must highlight that this misinformation campaign continues to be “holy text” in mainstream media.
What remains stunning about the relentless misleading and factually wrong series of articles in mainstream media is the sheer absence of understanding about the topic of reading by those promoting SOR with missionary zeal.
SOR advocates lack scientific evidence for their claims and seem mostly driven by market/commercial or political/ideological agendas.
Durig’s misinformation is not only the exact same series of false claims you can find weekly since about 2018, but also a disturbingly careless recycling of Emily Hanford’s copycat misinformation articles initiated by “Hard Words” and then recycled into the melodramatic and misleading Sold a Story podcast.
If you follow that link, you find a reference to MO’s NAEP grade 4 reading scores:
Using the exact same misinformation tactic as Hanford in 2018 and Nicholas Kristof in the NYT, Durig either doesn’t understand NAEP achievement levels or is being purposefully misleading; in either case, readers would be better served by not reading further since her argument is built on a lie.
NAEP “basic” is approximately grade level reading, and thus, 60% of MO students are reading at grade level or above, not 30%. [1]
One must ask, if you have to lie to make your case, do you have a case?
The follow-up claims—”The numbers are even more alarming for Black and Hispanic students in the state. They drop to 17% and 7%, respectively”—do not seem corroborated by the NAEP link, showing 31% of Black students at grade level or above and 56% of Hispanic students at grade level or above:
In the US, achievement inequity along racial lines is a historical failure of all achievement, not just reading. But again, if this is a serious issue, misinformation isn’t needed.
But it gets worse, if that is possible, because, Durig claims, “We are in the midst of a reading revolution. The way kids are taught to read in Missouri — and across the country — needs to be overhauled. And any rebuild should be based on the science of reading, including phonics.”
What is most disturbing is the lack of “science” in what follows, notably these well-worn but false series of claims and the links to anything except “science”:
Unfortunately, a lot of early reading teachers in the United States still practice what’s known as balanced literacy. That approach relies heavily on teacher choice and professional judgment. Teachers are taught to have many tools in their toolbox, and to use the methods that they think are most appropriate for their students.
One common practice in balanced literacy is guided reading, in which teachers coach students in a variety of comprehension strategies as they read a book matched to their level. Teachers encourage students who struggle over individual words to use pictures and context, in addition to looking at the letters, to guess at what the word could be.
But should kids be guessing at words when learning to read? There’s a ton of research that says no.
Note that these claims include two hyperlinks—the first to NCTQ (which links to a blog post to prove the 90% claim), and the second to Education Week, more misinformation journalism, not science.
As many have demonstrated by conducting external peer-review, NCTQ is an ideologically conservative think tank founded by The Thomas B. Fordham Institute. NCTQ releases non-scientific reports that are not peer-reviewed. In other words, no NCTQ report meets even the minimum standards of “science,” and in fact, the reports have been shown to use shoddy methods to draw predetermined conclusions about teacher education. [2]
Durig also depends on the Balanced Literacy Big Lie, reducing BL to a caricature of guessing using pictures instead of decoding. Notably as well, Durig offers no links for the “ton of research” claim (because there is none).
The accurate claim about BL is that we have no scientific research to support claims of a reading crisis, no scientific research proving BL has failed, and no data proving any universal application of BL or reading programs. The media and political attacks on BL and reading programs are entirely rhetorical and ideological.
With this careless and misleading article, we find ourselves trapped in the sixth year of the Hanford SOR lie, and it seems too few people are willing to tell the real story of reading, the one that students deserve instead of using “science” to promote the same baseless reading war we have been waging since at least the 1940s.
Fuller, E. J. (2014). Shaky methods, shaky motives: A critique of the National Council of Teacher Quality’s review of teacher preparation programs. Journal of Teacher Education, 65(1), 63-77. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0022487113503872
Cochran-Smith, M., Stern, R., Sánchez, J.G., Miller, A., Keefe, E.S., Fernández, M.B., Chang, W., Carney, M.C., Burton, S., & Baker, M. (2016). Holding teacher preparation accountable: A review of claims and evidence. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/teacher-prep
For many years I have been raising concerns about the use of “crisis” rhetoric around education [1], specifically challenging the default use of “crisis” and “miracle” in mainstream media.
The central role of “crisis” rhetoric in the accountability era of education reform has been characterized as a “manufactured” [2] crisis.
The current subset of education reform, the “science of reading” (SOR) movement, fits into the same patterns of the broader accountability era of education reform, I have argued.
Here, I am using Edling excellent work on the relationship between mainstream media and education to reinforce the claims that SOR as a reform movement is both mainstream accountability reform and essentially conservative.
I want this overview to be accessible, but I also highly recommend reading the piece in it entirety (click title above for access).
Edling’s first sentence establishes: “What is of particular interest in this paper is how professional teachers repeatedly, although not always, seem to be pictured in a de-contextualized and non-relational manner by actors outside education, and especially how the media often fails to take educational complexity and practice into account.”
Media representations of education, then, are often overly simplistic. Note that a key aspect of the SOR movement [3] is the claim that reading science is simple (the simple view of reading) and settled, effectively erasing the complexity of reading science and of reading instruction.
Edling’s explanation about the relationship between media and education also describes well the story of reading found in the SOR movement:
Newspapers do not just write about education, they also represent to their readers what education is ‘about’ (p. 392, see also McLure, 2003; Thomas, 2004). Similarly, Fairclough (1995) stresses that the media has the power: ‘to shape governments and parties … influence knowledge, beliefs, values, social relations, social identities’ (p. 2). From this way of reasoning, the media can be seen as an important power source for the construction of certain ideologies that can either exclude or include (Fairclough, 1995, p. 14), depending on how they are positioned and what sets the agenda for what is to be framed as true or false in society (cf. Johnson-Cartee, 2005).
There is no doubt that critical analyses of education in general are necessary in order to improve quality. Education is here understood as a broad concept that includes institutions such as (pre)schools, teacher education and the ideas behind them (cf. Sa ̈fstro ̈m & Ekerwald, 2012). However, what is highlighted here is not criticism of the media itself, but how the media’s recurring simplifications and often negative images of education and teachers are understood and how they might affect people who are seen or define themselves as teachers. Moreover, teachers in teacher education and teachers at (pre)schools are dialectically interconnected, in that teacher education aims to educate teachers, who are capable of acting as professionals in various educational positions—not the least in (pre) schools. For that reason, the term teacher includes teachers at (pre) schools and teacher education (cf. Hallse ́n, 2013).
In the paper, four interrelated propensities are problematized concerning the media’s portrayals of teachers and education:
Viewing education as being in more or less permanent crisis
Taking the role as a spokesperson for teachers and on behalf of the field of education
Excluding the knowledge and experiences of teacher(s), educators and/or educational researchers in the public press
Simplifying the notion of being a good teacher through stereotypes and dualistic frameworks that overlook task and relational complexity.
The SOR movement is yet another reading crisis in a long line of similar reading crises reaching back to the 1940s. Also the SOR movement is being driven by journalists who are identified as literacy experts, and those journalists have repeatedly characterized teachers as ill-equipped to teach reading because the entire field of teacher education has failed those teachers.
As the fourth bullet point above notes, as well, the SOR movement depends on simplistic characterizations of balanced literacy and reading programs as well as cartoonish caricatures of “three cueing” and “guessing” as pervasive failures of reading instruction across the entire US.
Edling details next “educational crisis discourse”:
Although crisis in the media is generally pictured as having specific causes that can be limited to a certain time in history (Wiklund, 2006), research indicates that the notion of educational crisis has been used as a more or less constant image ever since the 1950s and 1960s, and can be associated with the progressive school vs. conservative school problematic…. [C]risis is something that originates in the clash between different world views. As it is reasonable to assume that different world views will exist as long as there are humans, it is equally reasonable to assume that crises—including educational crises—will too.
The repetition of the word crisis is closely related to ideas that teachers and teacher education are incapable of dealing with education in a proper way. Crisis is used as a blanket to cover the field of education and, as in a situation of social crisis, groups outside education feel the need to step in and take control. The phenomenon can be described as an outside-in vs. an inside-out professionalism (cf. Stanley & Stonach, 2013). It is argued that the way in which people from the outside have assumed the right to define what is good and bad education has created a systematic disbelief in teachers in ways that have reduced their professional autonomy (Ball, 2011; Beach & Bagley, 2012; Krantz, 2009; Lauder, Brown, & Halsey, 2009).
Other researchers point to how the media refers to teacher education and teachers as lacking the necessary qualities and blames them for the crisis in school without taking the purposes and contexts of education into account (cf. Cochran-Smith & Fries, 2008; MacLure, 2003; Thomas, 2004; Warburton & Saunders, 1996).
The SOR movement has manufactured a reading crisis (mostly from misrepresenting NAEP data) and then placing soft or indirect blame on reading teachers and direct blame on teacher educators.
Edling notes that blame for educational crises do vary across countries (Sweden, for example, portrays teachers as victims of the crisis as well as the authorities who can overcome that crisis, contrary to the SOR story of teacher blaming). However, Edling adds that in most crisis discourse about education “teacher educator(s) and educational researchers were degraded and silenced,” similar to the current SOR movement.
Broadly, Edling emphasizes “a tendency to repeatedly fixate the debate on education in a dualistic and simplified image that omits the task and relational complexity,” resulting in “[s]tructural violence”:
Structural violence is generated through social practice and law, and hence becomes closely entwined in a specific culture and the norms that govern it, which implies that people in general, including members of group who suffers from their consequences, risks upholding the norms in their every-day actions since the norms are taken for granted as true. From this sense, people or groups of people, such as teachers, are not neutral or simply passive victims but partakers in the weaving of social structures. Violence is produced as a recurring beat through endorsed ideals, speech, gestures, choice of focus and solutions to world problems. The violence that becomes materialized as a consequence of these structures does not necessarily have to do with ill-will, as in deliberately wanting to do harm. On the contrary, what characterizes these acts is that they appear to be normal, harmless and sometimes have the ambition to do good, whereas in reality, they make life difficult for certain groups of people (cf. Cudd, 2006, p. 127, Epp & Watkinsson, 1997, p. 6).
Here is a key point: Journalists and teachers do not need to be bad actors for the media stories and resulting consequences to be bad actions. Hanford and other journalists as well as elected officials likely see their work as good work even as their messaging and policy endorsements are oversimplified, misguided, and harmful (to teachers and students).
This helps explain why Hanford and other journalists have teacher support:
She argues that our identity is not just shaped by how we see ourselves, but also through the way others see us, and that seeing is often coloured by stereotypes and norms (Young, 1990, p. 46–47). In accordance with the associative model, teachers can choose to see themselves as part of the professional group of teachers, which research describes as complex and multidimensional. At the same time, the group affinity model helps to illuminate how teachers’ identity as a group is shaped from the outside based on stereotyped and simplified images of teachers and educational researchers. Hence, people can identify themselves as members of the group known as ‘teacher professionals’ that is associated with certain practices. At the same time, they may have to face contrasting images of a teacher created by the media.
Parallel to the role of NAEP in the media-manufactured reading crisis, the role of standardized tests is acknowledged by Edling: “In a sense, one could argue that reports such as TIMMS and PISA have presented evidence of the failure of education in many countries, which might suggest that the negative criticism of teachers and education is justified. The results in the reports have been used to motivate several reforms focusing on measurability, accountability and control.”
Ultimately the stories perpetuated by media are stereotypes: “Once people have become accustomed to stereotypical thinking, they may not be able to see individuals or situations for what they are. Accordingly, a problem with stereotypes is that they are used to judge and pigeonhole people, without really taking into account context and unique individuals.”
The crisis story of reading in SOR is a simplistic story of caricature about teachers, teacher educators, balanced literacy, and reading programs. the complexity of the real world of teaching and learning reading are erased. As Edling notes:
Parallel with the recurring waves of crisis that wash over the field of education and the recurring stereotyped images of teachers, the curriculum complexity of the purposes and practices of education generally goes unnoticed in the media debate on education. What is forgotten is that teachers are not free to do as they want, even though their profession often allows them some kind of freedom to judge. Indeed, as the teaching profession is politically defined, it is obliged to pay attention to a multitude of different policies (Ball et al., 2012) and curriculum purposes (Hopmann, 2007). In a sense, it is possible to assert that teaching in many countries have come to be restricted to a standard and accountability movement; and hence, rendered more mechanical and simplified than before—very much following the logic presented in media (cf. Apple, 2011; Berliner, 2013).
Consequently, Edling explains: “Rather than beginning the discussion with the various demands that are embedded in teachers’ professional assignments, there are tendencies within the media to portray the good teacher as someone who is capable of efficiently transferring knowledge to pupils, where the epistemology of knowledge stems from science rendering it equal with truth and fact about a world (Wiklund, 2006, p. 177).”
The weaponizing of “science” in the SOR movement, in fact, has begun to creep broader into the science of learning, the science of writing, and the science of math.
The great paradox of crisis rhetoric in media coverage of education is it insures failure:
The implication is that whatever they do, they will end up as failures in the sense of being unable to embrace the multitude of requirements at the same time. Hence, drawing on the task and relational complexity of teachers’ work, one might ask whether it is possible to be an impeccable teacher in the relational midst of education if a multitude of educational purposes and relational inconsistencies have to be taken into account. If it is not, perhaps there is a point in adhering to more nuanced judgements of teachers’ quality in accordance with curriculum content, purposes and the ways in which relations are played out in educational spaces.
Edling warns: “[T]he power of the media and the damaging consequences of repeatedly judging groups of people through a grid of stereo- types need nevertheless to be taken seriously,” concluding:
Consequently, when the media systematically define teachers as working in a field of crisis and need exterior help to sort things out, it automatically excludes the professional knowledge and experiences of teachers and educational researchers and their task and relational complexity, which are already present in their day-to-day work, from the debate.
In the light of these tendencies, research on structural violence helps to remind us that: (a) teachers are unwillingly forced into a paradoxical (in)visibility (even in Sweden, where it is pointed out that their voices need to be heard), (b) they are squeezed in-between two pressuring external demands, namely the complexities in their professional assignment that are politically steered and stereotypes of the good and bad teacher produced by, in this case, the media, (c) they risk wasting time and energy on addressing prejudices that have nothing to do with the specific work they are expected to do, and d) the logic of binary stereotypes is a power issue that brands teachers into a position of permanent failure.
While Edling is writing about media coverage of education in general, her examination matches exactly how the SOR movement works as well as how that movement is grounded in misinformation to the detriment of teachers, students, and democracy.
[3] See an overview of the story about reading now commonplace in media, grounded in Emily Hanford’s journalism, specifically her article “Hard Words.”
There is an incredibly powerful and frustrating dynamic about mainstream media in the US: While common knowledge claims mainstream media is liberal media, actual mainstream journalism in the US perpetuates as fact conservative ideology.
And the topic that suffers the most from that contradiction is education.
We are but 8 days into 2024, and the self-proclaimed Queen of US journalism, the New York Times, has offered up what may prove to be one of the classic examples of that liberal/conservative contradiction (see, for example, the NYT covering poverty at the level of The Onion).
Currently, media has renewed interest in college admissions, specifically using standardized tests such as the SAT or ACT for admissions. Progressive/liberal advocates call for not using SAT/ACT for admissions ; conservatives support maintaining standardized tests in admissions.
This college admissions/SAT example parallels the NYT piece on grocery shopping by people in poverty; the claims of the articles are driven by normative conservative ideology (poor people buy junk food and standardized tests measure merit) not empirical evidence.
Mainstream media misrepresenting education and educational research, then, is normal in the US. In fact, far more coverage of education is misleading or outright false than is credible.
One of the best examples of this problem is coverage of reading proficiency and the current reading crisis, specifically the “science of reading” movement.
Along with many others, I have documented that media coverage of reading is both “holy text” and significantly misleading.
Key elements of that misguided coverage include the following:
Misrepresenting “reading proficiency” based on misunderstanding NAEP achievement levels. Media makes the claim 1/3 of students are not proficient readers when, in fact, NAEP shows 2/3 of students read at grade level or above.
Misrepresenting balanced literacy, three cueing, guessing, and popular reading programs. Essentially, no evidence exists showing balanced literacy has created a reading crisis or that any sort of uniform approach to reading exists across the US since many programs and interpretations of reading co-exist now and throughout the history of the US.
Misrepresenting teacher knowledge and practice related to reading as well as broadly discrediting teacher education, primarily based on a think-tank (NCTQ) agenda and not empirical evidence.
Misrepresenting reading science by distorting conclusions from NRP and ignoring or cherry-picking from the two decades of research since NRP.
Claiming reading science is settled and asserting that brain research is also settled. Both reading and brain science are evolving, each ripe with debate and room for greater understanding.
Simultaneously narrowing the reading science to only experimental/quasi-experimental research while using as evidence anecdotes and endorsing practices (grade retention, systematic phonics instruction for all students) and programs (LETRS, Orton-Gillingham) lacking scientific support.
Aligning SOR with social justice agendas although a growing body of research shows SOR contradicts equity goals.
In short, reading proficiency and reading instruction deserve better than mainstream media is providing.
Education journalists need in 2024 to step back from the “holy text” template, re-engage with the full story and body of evidence, and then provide the sort of critical coverage students, teachers, and our democracy deserve.
Recent Research Challenging SOR Policy/Legislation
Elena Aydarova; “Whatever You Want to Call It”: Science of Reading Mythologies in the Education Reform Movement. Harvard Educational Review 1 December 2023; 93 (4): 556–581. https://doi.org/10.17763/1943-5045-93.4.556
Megan Chaffin, Holly Sheppard Riesco, Kathryn Hackett-Hill, Vicki Collet, Megan Yates Grizzle & Jacob Warren (25 Oct 2023): “Phonics Monkeys” and “Real Life Reading”: Heteroglossic Views of a State Reading Initiative, Literacy Research and Instruction. 10.1080/19388071.2023.2271085
Overwhelming whiteness: a critical analysis of race in a scripted reading curriculum, Amanda Rigell, Arianna Banack, Amy Maples, Judson Laughter, Amy Broemmel, Nora Vines & Jennifer Jordan (2022) Overwhelming whiteness: a critical analysis of race in a scripted reading curriculum, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 54:6, 852-870, 10.1080/00220272.2022.2030803
Compton-Lilly, C., Spence, L.K., Thomas, P.L., & Decker, S.L. (2023, November 2). Stories grounded in decades of research: What we truly know about the teaching of reading. The Reading Teacher. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.2258
Thomas, P.L. (2023). The “Science of Reading,” Education Faddism, and the Failure to Honor the Intellectual Lives of All Children: On Deficit Lenses and Ignoring Class and Race Stereotyping. Voices in the Middle, 30(3), 17-21. https://library.ncte.org/journals/vm/issues/v30-3/32439
Thomas, P.L. (2022). The Science of Reading movement: The never-ending debate and the need for a different approach to reading instruction. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/science-of-reading
For more than five years, mainstream media has been obsessed with two false but compelling stories: (1) there is a national reading crisis caused by balanced literacy programs that rely on three cueing, and (2) the solution is the “science of reading” (SOR).
Second, advocates for SOR instruction such as NCTQ promise that SOR policy and practices will result in 90% of students reading at grade level proficiency:
If we maintain the essential foundations established by the SOR movement itself, we must conclude that the working paper itself should garner no media coverage because it fails to meet the standard of “scientific” and that even if we consider the findings of the paper credible, SOR policy has significantly failed in CA:
The benefits can seem small. The majority of children in these schools still cannot read well. Even with these reading improvements, more than 65 percent of the students still scored at the lowest of the four levels on the state’s reading test. (3/4)
Now I want to unpack why the paper should never be covered at this level and with such a positive spin by journalists (including within the paper itself).
The most important issue is that a working paper is not peer-reviewed or published, thus not “scientific” per expectations identified above:
And as noted by Barshay: “The working paper, ‘The Achievement Effects of Scaling Early Literacy Reforms,’ was posted to the website of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University on Dec. 4, 2023. It has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, and may still be revised.”
Next, since there is a great deal of misinformation in the paper about NAEP and literacy, we should be concerned that the authors have backgrounds in social studies and economics, not literacy:
For scholars and journalists, not knowing enough to know what you don’t know can erode the credibility of research and journalism. This paper represents misrepresentations far too common in both research and media—misunderstanding NAEP reading proficiency:
Since “Basic” and not “Proficient” approximates grade level reading proficiency, NAEP data show that about 2 out of 3 students are at or above proficiency—not 1 out of 3.
Whether or not the US has a reading crisis and how scientific research can address reading proficiency in the US is negatively impacted by this simple fact: There is no standard metric for “proficiency” in reading, and NAEP along with each state sets the cut scores for proficiency differently.
Another misrepresentation or oversimplification in the paper is the failure to define clearly what counts as SOR as well as recycling oversimplified characterizations of whole language and balanced literacy:
At the center of misrepresenting reading theory and practices, this paper again significantly skews both what three cueing is and how it has or hasn’t impacted reading proficiency. [1]
The paper acknowledges two important points often misrepresented in the media: the Mississippi “miracle” is more story than science, and the last twenty years include research showing little to no positive impact from SOR policies grounded in NCLB, Reading First, and NRP:
Yet despite the high standard SOR has set for reading proficiency and the minimal gains shown in this paper, the authors slip into advocacy for SOR:
The paper lacks a clear definition of what counts as SOR (except it appears anything not including three cueing counts) [2] or reading proficiency, and skirts over that the policy implemented in CA includes far more than SOR literacy practices (suggesting any gains could be more from extra funding and other practices):
Media’s outsized coverage of this paper also raises questions about outliers and selective coverage.
The paper again notes a history of SOR practices not resulting in promised gains:
The paper’s caveats also deserve far more emphasis than the findings:
Again, decades of research and contemporary examples from MS and FL have shown repeatedly that raising reading scores in the short term and early grades almost never continues into middle school, and thus are mirages, not miracles.
Finally, the paper represents two significant problems with so-called high-quality research in education: (1) using metrics such as “X [time] of learning” and (2) judging policy and practice in terms of “cost effective” (one researcher, again, has an economics background):
Finally, then, if we circle back to the standards and promises within the SOR movement, this working paper should not be covered at all by media (a working paper is more press release than science), but if anything, the results signal a significant failure of SOR practices to meet the 9 of 10 students reaching reading proficiency.
The media coverage of this working paper could be considered much ado about nothing except it will serve to continue the manufactured crisis campaign about reading that is ultimately, and again, mis-serving children, teachers, and the promises of public education.
Compton-Lilly, C.F., Mitra, A., Guay, M., & Spence, L.K. (2020). A confluence of complexity: Intersections among reading theory, neuroscience, and observations of young readers. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S185-S195. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.348 [access HERE]
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 