George W. Bush built his path to the presidency on education reform, the discredited Texas “miracle,” and manufacturing his persona as a kinder and gentler conservative. One of his most effective rhetorical flourishes was evoking the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”
During the Bush era of education reform in the 1990s and 2000s, charter schools increasingly received bipartisan support, notably under the Barack Obama administration.
The darling of that charter school movement was KIPP charter schools that popularized “no excuses” education.
More recently, declaring poverty an excuse in education was established in the “science of reading” manufactured reading crisis: “One of the excuses educators have long offered to explain America’s poor reading performance is poverty” (Emily Hanford, Hard Words).
While Hanford’s misleading and false story caught fire, fueling another reading crisis and state-by-state dismantling of reading instruction, Gerald Coles‘s careful and evidence-based discrediting of Hanford’s claims went mostly unacknowledged:
Can poverty and inequality be taken “out of the equation” in creating literacy and academic success? From Rudolf Flesch onward, the deplorable, unsubstantiated, simple-minded answer is supposed to be “yes, if a phonics-and-reading-skills-heavy early-reading program is employed.” However, as the current rendition reveals, just as over the past 60 years, the answer once again is “no, that’s not why Johnny can’t read.”
Decades of research, notably including the evidence created by the value-added methods of teacher education under Obama, confirm Coles, not Hanford or Bush or KIPP.
For example, consider the overwhelming evidence that poverty and out-of-school factors are causally linked to at least 60% of measurable student achievement:
Maroun, Jamil, and Christopher H. Tienken. 2024. “The Pernicious Predictability of State-Mandated Tests of Academic Achievement in the United States” Education Sciences 14, no. 2: 129. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci14020129
For any education reform to work, out-of-school factors must be addressed along with confronting the impact of inequity in schools.
Poverty is not an excuse, but a reality that education reformers refuse to acknowledge to the detriment of students, teachers, and public education.
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
[Note: This has been submitted to state and local newspapers. So far no responses. Mainstream media resists any narrative other than blaming teachers and schools, regretfully.]
Like dozens of stories in mainstream media, Marion Blank declared in Scientific American, “Biennial testing through NAEP [National Assessment of Educational Progress] consistently shows that two thirds of U.S. children are unable to read with proficiency.”
Reading proficiency crisis has been at the forefront of media coverage and state-level policy for over a decade now. However, the basic claim—2/3 of children not at grade-level proficiency—is misleading at best and false at worst.
The misunderstanding lies in NAEP achievement levels. NAEP warns, “It should be noted that the NAEP Proficient achievement level does not represent grade level proficiency as determined by other assessment standards.”
Tom Loveless calls this the “NAEP proficiency myth,” adding Basic represents grade-level proficiency, and thus, 2/3 of students in the US are reading at grade level or above.
Further, Blank begins the article touting achievement in Mississippi, focusing on impressive gains in NAEP reading. The media embracing of the Mississippi “miracle” further compounds the misinformation about both a reading crisis and one state’s ability to beat the odds.
To understand the US is not experiencing a reading crisis and MS is not a “miracle” template for reading reform, we must consider the recent call for Vermont to mimic MS.
On the 2022 NAEP reading test, VT has 62% of students at or above grade level proficiency (grade 4), compared to MS with 63%. Yes, this is an impressive similarity for MS with a state experiencing a significantly higher rate of poverty and minority students.
But that is not the whole story.
States such as MS and especially FL have very impressive grade 4 NAEP scores that plummet by grade 8: Compare VT (73% grade-level proficient and above) with MS (63%) and FL (69%), notably resulting in VT in the top 6 states in the US, MS in the bottom four, and FL ranking in the middle. Researchers have noted that FL students experience some the greatest drops in achievement from grade 4 to 8, in fact.
Another ignored fact is that MS, like FL, likely achieves the test score bump from extreme levels of grade retention—impacting from about 9,000 – 12,000 students per year across grades K through 3. The MS “miracle” is a test data “mirage.”
But the most important ignored truth about reading in the US can be found in the publicly funded schools run by the Department of Defense (DoDEA)—DoDEA schools NAEP outcomes include in 2022 (grade 4) 80% and (grade 8) 90% at or above grade-level proficient.
Now here is the most ignored truth about reading achievement. DoDEA schools are not distinct from traditional public schools because of reading instruction or reading programs, but as Mervosh reports:
How does the military do it? In large part by operating a school system that is insulated from many of the problems plaguing American education….
For starters, families have access to housing and health care through the military, and at least one parent has a job….
[T]eachers are also well paid, supported by a Pentagon budget that allocates $3 billion to its schools each year, far more than comparably sized school districts.
The most important and ignored truth about reading proficiency in the US is that reading is a marker for socioeconomic inequity in both our society and our schools. There is no crisis and there are no miracles. But as DoDEA schools demonstrate, if we have the political will, we can and should better serve all our children as developing readers and citizens.
As a teacher for forty years and a teacher educator for more than half of that career, I have always struggled with the tendency to oversell teacher quality and instructional practice.
Does teacher quality matter? Of course.
Does instructional practice matter? Again, of course.
But both teacher quality and instruction (pedagogy) are dwarfed by teaching and learning conditions within schools and more significantly by the conditions of any child’s life.
As I have noted recently, the peak era of focusing on teacher quality, the value-added movement (VAM) occurring mostly under the Obama administration, instead of identifying high-quality teachers as a driver for improving student achievement found out something much different than intended:
VAMs should be viewed within the context of quality improvement, which distinguishes aspects of quality that can be attributed to the system from those that can be attributed to individual teachers, teacher preparation programs, or schools. Most VAM studies find that teachers account for about 1% to 14% of the variability in test scores, and that the majority of opportunities for quality improvement are found in the system-level conditions. Ranking teachers by their VAM scores can have unintended consequences that reduce quality.
Teacher quality necessarily includes two types of knowledge by a teacher—content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge.
Yet the VAM experiment revealed something we have known for decades—standardized tests of student learning mostly reflect the student’s relative privilege or inequity outside of school.
Despite the refrain of Secretary Duncan under Obama, schools have never in fact been “game changers.”
While neoliberal/conservative education reforms leveraged the “soft bigotry of low expectations” and unsubstantiated claims that the Left uses poverty as an excuse, people all along the ideological spectrum are over-focused on instructional practices. And that overemphasis is used to keep everyone looking at teachers, students, and instruction instead of those more impactful out-of-school (OOS) influences on student learning.
A companion to the cult of pedagogy in education reform is the “miracle” school claim, but “miracle” schools rarely (almost never) exist once the claim is interrogated, and even if a “miracle” school exists, it is by definition an outlier and essentially offers no guidance for scaling outward or upward.
The paradox of the cult of pedagogy in education reform is that until will directly address OOS factor we will never have the context for better teasing out the importance of teacher quality and instructional practices.
The current education reform trapped in the cult of pedagogy is the “science of reading” (SOR) movement which oversells the blame for student reading achievement as well as oversells the solutions in the form of different reading programs, reading instructional practice, and teacher preparation and professional development.
The “miracle” of the day in the SOR propaganda is Mississippi, which is very likely a mirage based on manipulating the age of students being tested at grade level and not on teacher quality and instructional practices.
Not a single education reform promise since the 1980s has succeeded, and the US remains in a constant cycle of crisis and reform promises.
Yet, the evidence is overwhelming that many OOS factors impact negatively student learning and that social reform would pay huge dividends in educational outcomes if we simply would move beyond the cult of pedagogy in education reform.
Okano, K., Kaczmarzyk, J.R., Dave, N. et al. Sleep quality, duration, and consistency are associated with better academic performance in college students. npj Sci. Learn.4, 16 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-019-0055-z
My entire career has existed within the neoliberal accountability era of education reform that oversells education as a “game changer” and oversells teacher quality and instructional practices.
Like time-share frauds, we are being duped, and teachers and students need us to move beyond the cult of pedagogy in education reform and focus on the much larger influences on students being able to learn and teachers being able to show that their quality and instruction can matter.
Mullainathan and Shafir use the term “scarcity” for the conditions associated with living in poverty and “slack” for what most people would call “privilege.”
This book is an overview of the scientific research base around the consequence of being poor. This point has always struck me as incredibly important:
And to focus on the kernel point related to bandwidth: “Being poor…reduces a person’s cognitive capacity more than going one full night without sleep.”
Imagine, if you will, that this is likely magnified for children—and when they are younger, even more so.
Now let’s place that science on scarcity into a recent student on sleep and students:
Although numerous survey studies have reported connections between sleep and cognitive function, there remains a lack of quantitative data using objective measures to directly assess the association between sleep and academic performance. In this study, wearable activity trackers were distributed to 100 students in an introductory college chemistry class (88 of whom completed the study), allowing for multiple sleep measures to be correlated with in-class performance on quizzes and midterm examinations. Overall, better quality, longer duration, and greater consistency of sleep correlated with better grades. However, there was no relation between sleep measures on the single night before a test and test performance; instead, sleep duration and quality for the month and the week before a test correlated with better grades. Sleep measures accounted for nearly 25% of the variance in academic performance. These findings provide quantitative, objective evidence that better quality, longer duration, and greater consistency of sleep are strongly associated with better academic performance in college. Gender differences are discussed.
[abstract] Okano, K., Kaczmarzyk, J.R., Dave, N. et al. Sleep quality, duration, and consistency are associated with better academic performance in college students. npj Sci. Learn.4, 16 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-019-0055-z
Also focus on this: “Sleep measures accounted for nearly 25% of the variance in academic performance.”
Next imagine that children living in poverty are likely to be under the weight of poverty (similar to sleep deprivation) and to experience actual sleep deprivation.
Poor children don’t need to be “fixed” (just give them growth mindset and grit) and their teachers don’t need to have higher expectations, or higher quality, or the “science of reading”; poor children need their living conditions changed so that the negative consequences of scarcity (such as indirect and direct sleep deprivation) allow them the opportunities to learn and excel.
Almost all traditional education reform remains laser focused on blaming children, teachers, and schools in order to justify yet another round of in-school education reform.
We must not ignore the full and complicated science of learning just because it is inconvenient and fails to support the false stories we have almost always embraced.
The US is in its fifth decade of high-stakes accountability education reform.
A cycle of education crisis has repeated itself within those decades, exposing a very clear message: We are never satisfied with the quality of our public schools regardless of the standards, tests, or policies in place.
The sixteen years of the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations were a peak era of education reform, culminating with a shift from holding students (grade-level testing and exit exams) and schools (school report cards) accountable to holding teachers accountable (value-added methods [VAM] of evaluation).
The Obama years increased education reform based on choice and so-called innovation (charter schools) and doubled-down on Michelle Rhee’s attack on “bad” teachers and Bill Gates’s jumbled reform-of-the-moment approaches (in part driven by stack ranking to eliminate the “bad” teachers and make room for paying great teachers extra to teach higher class sizes). [1]
Like Rhee and Gates, crony appointee Secretary of Education Arne “Game Changer” Duncan built a sort of celebrity status (including playing in the NBA All-Star celebrity games) on the backs of the myth of the bad teacher, charter schools, and arguing that education reform would transform society.
None the less, by the 2010s, the US was right back in the cycle of shouting education crisis, pointing fingers at bad teachers, and calling for science-based reform, specifically the “science of reading” movement.
Reading legislation reform began around 2013 and then the media stoked the reading crisis fire starting in 2018. However, this new education crisis is now paralleled by the recent culture war fought in schools with curriculum gag orders and book bans stretching from K-12 into higher education.
Education crisis, teacher bashing, public school criticism, and school-based culture wars have a very long and tired history, but this version is certainly one of the most intense, likely because of the power of social media.
The SOR movement, however, exposes once again that narratives and myths have far more influence in the US than data and evidence.
Let’s look at a lesson we have failed to learn for nearly a century.
Secretary Duncan was noted (often with more than a dose of satire) for using “game changer” repeatedly in his talks and comments, but Duncan also perpetuated a myth that the teacher is the most important element in a child’s learning.
As a teacher for almost 40 years, I have to confirm that this sounds compelling and I certainly believe that teachers are incredibly important.
Yet decades of research reveal a counter-intuitive fact that is also complicated:
But in the big picture, roughly 60 percent of achievement outcomes is explained by student and family background characteristics (most are unobserved, but likely pertain to income/poverty). Observable and unobservable schooling factors explain roughly 20 percent, most of this (10-15 percent) being teacher effects. The rest of the variation (about 20 percent) is unexplained (error). In other words, though precise estimates vary, the preponderance of evidence shows that achievement differences between students are overwhelmingly attributable to factors outside of schools and classrooms (see Hanushek et al. 1998; Rockoff 2003; Goldhaber et al. 1999; Rowan et al. 2002; Nye et al. 2004).
Measurable student achievement is by far more a reflection of out-of-school factors (OOS) such as poverty, parental education, etc., than of teacher quality, school quality, or even authentic achievement by students. Historically, for example, SAT data confirm this evidence:
Test-score disparities have grown significantly in the past 25 years. Together, family income, education, and race now account for over 40% of the variance in SAT/ACT scores among UC applicants, up from 25% in 1994. (By comparison, family background accounted for less than 10% of the variance in high school grades during this entire time) The growing effect of family background on SAT/ACT scores makes it difficult to rationalize treating scores purely as a measure of individual merit or ability, without regard to differences in socioeconomic circumstance.
Let’s come back to this, but I want to frame this body of scientific research (what SOR advocates demand) with the SOR movement claims [2] that teachers do not teach the SOR (because teacher educators failed to teach that) and student reading achievement is directly linked to poor teacher knowledge and instruction (specifically the reliance on reading programs grounded in balanced literacy).
This media and politically driven SOR narrative is often grounded in a misrepresentation of test-based data, NAEP:
First, the SOR claims do not match grade 4 data on NAEP in terms of claiming we have a reading crisis (NAEP scores immediately preceding the 2013 shift in reading legislation were improving), that SOR reading policies and practices are essential (NAEP data have been flat since 2013 with a Covid drop in recent scores), and that 65% of students aren’t proficient at reading.
On that last point, the misinformation and misunderstanding of NAEP are important to emphasize:
1. Proficient on NAEP does not mean grade level performance. It’s significantly above that. 2. Using NAEP’s proficient level as a basis for education policy is a bad idea.
Now if we connect the SOR narrative with NAEP data and the research noted above about what standardized test scores are causally linked to, we are faced with very jumbled and false story.
Teacher prep, instructional practices, and reading programs would all fit into that very small impact of teachers (10-15%), and there simply is no scientific research that shows a causal relationship between balanced literacy and low student reading proficiency. Added to the problem is that balanced literacy and the “simple view” of reading (SVR) have been central to how reading is taught for the exact same era (yet SOR only blames balanced literacy and aggressively embraces SVR as “settled science,” which it isn’t).
One of the worst aspects of the SOR movement has been policy shifts in states that allocate massive amount of public funds to retraining teachers, usually linked to one professional development model, LETRS (which isn’t a scientifically proven model [3]).
Once again, we are mired in a myth of the bad teacher movement that perpetuates the compelling counter myth that the teacher is the most important element in a child’s education.
However, the VAM era flamed out, leaving in its ashes a lesson that we are determined to ignore:
VAMs should be viewed within the context of quality improvement, which distinguishes aspects of quality that can be attributed to the system from those that can be attributed to individual teachers, teacher preparation programs, or schools. Most VAM studies find that teachers account for about 1% to 14% of the variability in test scores, and that the majority of opportunities for quality improvement are found in the system-level conditions. Ranking teachers by their VAM scores can have unintended consequences that reduce quality.
Let me emphasize: “the majority of opportunities for quality improvement are found in the system-level conditions,” and not through blaming and retraining teachers.
The counterintuitive part in all this is that teachers are incredibly important at the practical level, but isolating teaching impact at the single-teacher or single-moment level through standardized testing proves nearly impossible.
The VAM movement failed to transform teacher quality and student achievement because, as the evidence form that era proves, in-school only education reform is failing to address the much larger forces at the systemic level that impact measurable student achievement.
Spurred by the misguided rhetoric and policies under Obama, I began advocating for social context reform as an alternative to accountability reform.
The failure of accountability, the evidence proves, is that in-school only reform never achieves the promises of the reformers or the reforms.
Social context reform calls for proportionally appropriate and equity-based reforms that partner systemic reform (healthcare, well paying work, access to quality and abundant food, housing, etc.) with a new approach to in-school reform that is driven by equity metrics (teacher assignment, elimination of tracking, eliminating punitive policies such as grade retention, fully funded meals for all students, class size reduction, etc.).
The SOR movement is repeating the same narrative and myth-based approach to blaming teachers and schools, demanding more (and earlier) from students, and once again neglecting to learn the lessons right in front of us because the data do not conform to our beliefs.
I have repeated this from Martin Luther King Jr. so often I worry that there is no space for most of the US to listen, but simply put: “We are likely to find that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished.”
While it is false or at least hyperbolic messaging to state that 65% of US students are not proficient readers, if we are genuinely concerned about the reading achievement of our students, we must first recognize that reading test scores are by far a greater reflection of societal failures—not school failures, not teacher failures, not teacher education failures.
And while we certainly need some significant reform in all those areas, we will never see the sort of outcomes we claim to want if we continue to ignore the central lesson of the VAM movement; again: “the majority of opportunities for quality improvement are found in the system-level conditions.”
The SOR movement is yet another harmful example of the failures of in-school only education reform that blames teachers and makes unrealistic and hurtful demands of children and students.
The science from the VAM era contradicts, again, the narratives and myths we seem fatally attracted to; if we care about students and reading, we’ll set aside false stories, learn our evidence-based lessons, and do something different.
[1] TAKING TEACHER EVALUATION TO SCALE: THE EFFECT OF STATE REFORMS ON ACHIEVEMENT AND ATTAINMENT
Joshua Bleiberg Eric Brunner Erica Harbatkin Matthew A. Kraft Matthew G. Springer Working Paper 30995 http://www.nber.org/papers/w30995
ABSTRACT
Federal incentives and requirements under the Obama administration spurred states to adopt major reforms to their teacher evaluation systems. We examine the effects of these reforms on student achievement and attainment at a national scale by exploiting the staggered timing of implementation across states. We find precisely estimated null effects, on average, that rule out impacts as small as 0.015 standard deviation for achievement and 1 percentage point for high school graduation and college enrollment. We also find little evidence that the effect of teacher evaluation reforms varied by system design rigor, specific design features or student and district characteristics. We highlight five factors that may have undercut the efficacy of teacher evaluation reforms at scale: political opposition, the decentralized structure of U.S. public education, capacity constraints, limited generalizability, and the lack of increased teacher compensation to offset the non-pecuniary costs of lower job satisfaction and security.
[2] I recommend the following research-based analysis of the SOR movement claims:
Hoffman, J.V., Hikida, M., & Sailors, M. (2020). Contesting science that silences: Amplifying equity, agency, and design research in literacy teacher preparation. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S255–S266. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.353
Part of the problem in debates about schools and education is the relentless use of “teacher quality” as a proxy for understanding “teaching quality”. This focuses on the person rather than the practice.
This discourse sees teachers blamed for student performance on NAPLAN and PISA tests, rather than taking into account the systems and conditions in which they work.
While teaching quality might be the greatest in school factor affecting student outcomes, it’s hardly the greatest factor overall. As Education Minister Jason Clare said last month:
“I don’t want us to be a country where your chances in life depend on who your parents are or where you live or the colour of your skin.”
We know disadvantage plays a significant role in educational outcomes. University education departments are an easy target for both governments and media.
While the governorship that election shifted to Hodges, mostly because of the wedge issue of gambling in SC, I noted that both candidates and political parties ran on a dishonest but effective platform—SC education was at the bottom in the U.S. In fact, both candidates had billboards lambasting the state’s education ranking that were virtually indistinguishable except for the candidate information.
In 2022, it is important to highlight that SC was popularly and politically identified in crisis and need of reform after two decades of crisis (A Nation at Risk under Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s) and a series of standards and high-stakes testing reform.
I entered education in 1984, right after then-Governor Richard Riley had pushed SC as one of the first adopters into the accountability movement.
As a high school teacher throughout the 1980s and 1990s, I watched and listened as SC political leaders called for modeling SC education policy, standards, and testing on Florida and Virginia; despite its bombastic libertarian proclamations, SC is copy-cat state when it comes to education policy.
And therein lies the problem.
SC remains trapped in a cycle of education crisis, education faddism, and education boondoggles.
After those two decades following A Nation at Risk, SC once again doubled down on reform and accountability during the No Child Behind Era (NCLB) under George W. Bush, and then, stumbled into the Obama era reforms—value-added methods for teacher evaluation, charter schools, and (yes) Common Core.
That Obama/Common Core era is a perfect example of educational dysfunction in SC.
SC rushed to adopt Common Core and the related testing (fadism), purchased teaching and learning materials labeled as Common Core aligned (boondoggle), and then while teachers were being trained and the entire educational system was transitioning to the new standards, SC dropped Common Core (because conservatives falsely labeled the movement as Obama’s although the standards came form the National Governor’s Association and were strongly bipartisan).
This wasteful nonsense was almost entirely partisan politics and had little to do with teaching and learning.
So as we watch 2022 slip into 2023, SC remains trapped in the crisis > fadism > boondoggle cycle that has been demonstrated to fail education since the early 1980s.
The accountability movement phase 1 (mostly a state-level movement) after A Nation at Risk was declared a failure and lead to the accountability movement phase 2 that pivoted on NCLB (and included federal policy mandating “scientifically based” teaching and materials).
About another 20 years after phase 2, we are once again screaming crisis, including a(nother) reading crisis and the really ugly anti-CRT/book banning movements (see how all of these are related historically).
SC has been quick to pass copy-cat reading legislation (see HERE and HERE) for about a decade, and the current budget includes millions and millions of dollars for “science of reading” policy, training, and materials (sound familiar to those who watched the Common Core disaster?).
As one specific example, SC like many other states is simultaneously (again) calling for limiting everything in education to “scientific” while investing huge amounts of tax dollars to non-scientific boondoggles (see here about LETRS).
Education is an incredibly profitable market in the U.S., and the only people who have benefitted from 40 years of constant crisis > reform are those who repeatedly rebrand educational materials to match the fad-du-jour.
The current reading crisis and curriculum crisis in SC and across the U.S. are marketing and political scams—all faddism and boondoggles.
SC does not have a reading crisis, and does not have a CRT crisis.
The real educational problems in SC (and throughout the U.S.) are once again being ignored—poverty, racism, and inequity in both the lives of children and citizens as well as in our schools.
Affluent children continue to have the best access to learning while marginalized and vulnerable children are neglected, ignored, or pushed into the most limited and limiting educational contexts (such as test-prep).
SC is not experiencing a new or unique educational crisis, but we are suffering from a historical and current reality that is reflected in our educational system—a lack of political will.
Crisis, fadism, and boondoggles are the playground of political leaders and education marketers who reap the rewards of misinformation, misdirection, and finding ourselves in a hole while continuing to dig.
This post is intended for people who have viewed the full series, including the final episode, of Ozark.
Many people have acknowledged that Ozark is a well-acted derivative of Breaking Bad. But an analogy just as important, if not more so, is that Ozark is a 2010s-2020s version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1910s-1920s The Great Gatsby.
Marty and Wendy Byrde are essentially Tom and Daisy Buchanan, although Wendy is often more like Tom, and Marty, more like Daisy. None the less, Marty and Wendy fit well narrator Nick Carraway’s description of the Buchanans:
I couldn’t forgive [Tom] or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made….
The Byrdes leave a staggering trail of carnage, larger but similar to the bodies in the wake of the Buchanans. Both couples survive mostly unscathed—at least still wealthy and alive.
If we include the Breaking Bad comparison, the two series’ creators made some important and different decisions about Marty and Walter White—the main white male center of the “vast carelessness”—and some profoundly important different decisions about the parallel characters of Jesse and Ruth—both sympathetic characters who suffer some of the greatest consequences of the carelessness.
Ozark and Breaking Bad ultimately offer some excellent aspects of contemporary series, and nearly equal elements that are problematic. Notably, the shows center whiteness against Mexicans as murders and drug lords—with the whiteness often seeking viewer empathy.
The back story of Walter White—and the annoying messaging that being reduced to a high school teacher is proof Walter has been cheated by the universe—folds into his cancer diagnosis; this feels much reduced in the scene where Marty is on his knees about to be murdered, only to start the momentum toward nothing ever really touching Marty Byrde, unlike Walter’s fate.
Bryan Cranston and Jason Bateman go a long way to help the writers skirt past the ugliest of truths beneath these men scorching the earth for the good of their family. They are, in fact, the worst sort of “careless people,” selfish and calculating.
Breaking Bad, like Better Call Saul, are far better written and filmed than Ozark, even as these series are carried by incredible acting, possibly even better in Ozark than its obvious inspiration.
On balance, Break Bad is the better series, but in its last episode, Ozark makes a case for itself because of the decisions around Ruth, in contrast to her parallel, Jesse, from Break Bad.
Like the Buchanans, the Byrdes are outsiders, and although Jesse is a local like Ruth, Ruth’s parallels in Gatsby are the Wilsons, low- to working-class characters. And like Myrtle and George Wilson, Ruth as redneck young woman, is sacrificed beside her not-yet-finished empty pool with a corpse buried beneath. The imagery of her death is intensified as we hear her telling Wyatt he doesn’t know how to be rich—paralleled by Myrtle’s pathetic efforts to play rich in Gatsby.
Ozark seems to argue that the class barrier trumps race and gender. It certainly dramatizes that class trumps character and intelligence and work ethic.
Ruth splayed on her dirt yard—reminiscent of Myrtle mutilated in the road by Daisy driving Gatsby’s gold Rolls Royce—comes after mid-final-episode the Byrde’s suffering a dramatic car accident, one shown in an earlier episode, one no one could simply walk away from.
For me, the car wreck had no emotional weight, even as Marty and his children crawl free, miraculously unharmed, even as Wendy appears unconscious (dead?) until Marty rouses her. The family soon after arrives at their house in a taxi, Wendy noting they survived only somewhat battered and bruised.
But it is Wendy’s comment to Novarro’s priest that reveals the narrative purpose of the accident—not to tease the audience with one or more Byrde deaths but to show that the entire series is an extended allegory about the Teflon promises of whiteness and wealth.
As Wendy boasts to the priest as she takes him by the shoulders, they will survive, and they do.
The series ends black screen, a gun shot, the Byrde’s winning (a more honest and cynical ending than Breaking Bad), murderously (again) after Marty softly nods to his teen son, Jonah, who fires the shot.
Like Walter White, for Marty, and now Jonah, “what he had done was, to him, entirely justified.”
Many plot lines and characters force viewers to repeatedly interrogate that very concept; Walter and Marty live by the ends justifying the means.
Yet, none confront that central question more vividly than the tensions between Wendy and Ruth about the killing of Wendy’s brother, Ben.
The last episode highlights the emptiness pervading Ozark with Ruth caving to Wendy about culpability for Ben’s murder, prompted by Wendy committing herself in yet another grand manipulation (suggesting viewers should feel empathy for Wendy since, as the scene depicts, she shares with Ruth the consequences of an abusive father).
Ozark and Breaking Bad left me wondering how I am supposed to feel about the characters.
It is there I focus on Ruth and Jesse, the characters with the most lingering sympathetic qualities in spite of their very human flaws, and frailties. I think we can (and should) find more sincerity in the struggles of Jesse and Ruth against the backdrop of the posing and ruthlessness of Walter and Marty.
Like Gatsby, Ozark is a deeply cynical work about the American Dream. This American nightmare is more like what John Gardner lamented:
That idea—humankind’s inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—coupled with a system for protecting human rights—was and is the quintessential American Dream. The rest is greed and pompous foolishness—at worst, a cruel and sentimental myth, at best, cheap streamers in the rain. (p. 96)
“Amber (Get) Waves (Your) of (Plastic) Grain (Uncle Same)” in On Writers and Writing, John Gardner (1994)
The Byrdes shit all over the Ozarks, and we are left with one final wry smile from Marty and, yes, the gun shot.
“[L]et other people clean up the mess they had made”…
One reason, I think, some people shun history is that historical context can be deeply disturbing—but that context also helps illuminate a better understanding of the present.
The following example is both disturbing (nearly impossible to believe) and an apt analogy for the current debate about college loan forgiveness.
Deborah C. England offers these sobering facts about marital rape in the U.S.:
Marital rape was a term that was viewed by the law as an oxymoron until shamefully late in U.S. history. Until the 1970’s, the rape laws in every state in the union included an exception if the rapist and the victim were husband and wife. In 1993, all 50 states had finally eliminated the “marital rape exception.” But the effects of these archaic exceptions persist and interfere with spousal rape prosecutions in some states.
Only over the last three decades have wives been allowed to pursue legal consequences for being raped in their own homes, by their spouse, and thus, far more women have lived under the specter of marital rape than not in U.S. history.
Should those women be so offended by the change in law that they resent the new (and morally justifiable) law? Should they demand that all women continue to suffer as they did?
Of course not.
That many suffered needlessly is not grounds for maintaining a wrong.
Many in the U.S. live under the burden of student loans because the U.S. has chosen not to fully fund K-16 education and has chosen to ignore predatory lending and abusive interest rates and repayment schedules.
Student debt relief is acknowledgement of a wrong—not a give-away, not a slap in the face of those who were equally wronged.
My parents were working-class Boomers who made college a clear expectation. I am quasi-first-gen since neither parent graduated college but had 1 year, Mom, and 2 years, Dad, but I was aware paying for college was a burden on my parents.
That “burden” in the late 1970s and early 1980s was semesters that cost hundreds of dollars because I attended my local state university branch, living at home over half of that time as an undergraduate. I also tutored on campus and had other jobs, mostly to fund my recreational time.
My parents were very gracious and would have contributed even more if I had asked, but I always felt guilty and tried to lessen that burden. I enrolled in the maximum hours per semester allowed to make their contribution “worth it.”
And I chose to be a high school English teacher because I felt I should complete a “practical” degree and have a career. English, even in the early 1980s, was viewed as a “useless” degree—although my heart always longed to be a “straight” English major, as the rhetoric of my college years went.
My parents never told me what major to pursue, but I felt it was the right thing to do to honor their sacrifices. I graduated as an undergraduate in December and couldn’t find full-time teaching until the next fall.
That was a very hard time with lots of tension because I worried I wasn’t going to be able to follow through with the right thing. I was living at home and struggling to secure part-time work, including being a substitute teacher that spring and starting my MEd immediately.
My teaching career began in the fall of 1984 in the high school where I graduated in 1979. I taught over a decade and continued to cobble together graduate courses on top of my MEd until I entered a doctoral program in 1995. I took out one $6000 loan throughout my grad experience from 1984 – 1998.
And my school district reimbursed tuition for one graduate course a semester along the way.
I taught full time as a high school teacher, was an adjunct at several local colleges, and completed my EdD simultaneously—while married and with a young daughter. These were very tense and overwhelming years of continuing to do the right thing into my late 30s.
I cannot get past that much of these experiences were about “burdens” on my parents, me, and my family. I missed a lot, including my daughter scoring 6 goals one Saturday morning in recreational soccer while I sat in my 6-hour graduate course 90 miles away.
I want to add “unnecessary” to “burdens” because the US is a mostly hateful people, not meeting the label of “Christian Nation,” who think this sort of suffering is a good thing.
It isn’t.
All this to say—there should be no student debt and K-16 education should be fully publicly funded.
Regardless or especially because of those who have survived the horrible system we have created and allowed.
Many in the U.S., especially conservatives and libertarians, love to talk about choice, and that overlaps significantly with those who claim the U.S. is a Christian Nation.
The backlash over forgiving student loans is proof that both are veneers, essentially lies and distractions.
So in the tradition of Kurt Vonnegut, I, a humanist and non-Christian, want to leave you all with a little reading, a meditation of sorts (emphasis mine in bold):
15 At the end of every seven years you must cancel debts.2 This is how it is to be done: Every creditor shall cancel any loan they have made to a fellow Israelite. They shall not require payment from anyone among their own people, because the Lord’s time for canceling debts has been proclaimed. 3 You may require payment from a foreigner, but you must cancel any debt your fellow Israelite owes you. 4 However, there need be no poor people among you, for in the land the Lord your God is giving you to possess as your inheritance, he will richly bless you, 5 if only you fully obey the Lord your God and are careful to follow all these commands I am giving you today. 6 For the Lord your God will bless you as he has promised, and you will lend to many nations but will borrow from none. You will rule over many nations but none will rule over you.
7 If anyone is poor among your fellow Israelites in any of the towns of the land the Lord your God is giving you, do not be hardhearted or tightfisted toward them. 8 Rather, be openhanded and freely lend them whatever they need. 9 Be careful not to harbor this wicked thought: “The seventh year, the year for canceling debts, is near,” so that you do not show ill will toward the needy among your fellow Israelites and give them nothing. They may then appeal to the Lord against you, and you will be found guilty of sin. 10 Give generously to them and do so without a grudging heart; then because of this the Lord your God will bless you in all your work and in everything you put your hand to. 11 There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your fellow Israelites who are poor and needy in your land.
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 