[Header Photo by Andrew George on Unsplash]

In an analysis of how media represents teachers and education, Silvia Edling argues, “Newspapers do not just write about education, they also represent to their readers what education is ‘about.’”

Edling notes that teachers and education are often characterized by stereotypes, focusing on “four inter-related propensities”:

• 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.

At the core of effective journalism is the importance of compelling stories. However, one truism offers a problem with relying on narratives without ensuring that the broader evidence supports the anecdote: “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”

For media coverage of education, the softer version may be that an exciting story can attain a status of fact before educational research can confirm or refute the narrative as an outlier or misinformation.

One challenge is, of course, that journalism works much more quickly than scientific research, and this is compounded by the inherent complexity of conducting education research and then applying that evidence to the real world.

For about a decade now, education reform has mostly invested in an expanding “science of” movement that began with the “science of reading” and now includes an international focus on the “science of learning” as well as a parallel “science of math” movement.

The origin stories of the “science of reading” movement is grounded, in fact, in the journalism of Emily Hanford, notably Hard Words, the ironically named Sold a Story podcast, and There Is a Right Way to Teach Reading, and Mississippi Knows It.

As I have detailed, the Mississippi “miracle” and reading crisis narratives generated and perpetuated by the media are missing one key ingredient—scientific evidence for the hyperbolic claims and narratives.

In fact, the current “science of” movements fail all four of Edling’s concerns by presenting a crisis absent research to support the claims; creating non-education reading “experts” among journalists and advocates for commercial programs; cherry-picking teacher voices while also misrepresenting teacher expertise through stereotypes and caricatures; and framing both the crisis and solutions in simplistic either/or rhetoric along ideological lines (progressive v. traditional framed as vibe-based v. scientific).

While the most recent wave, for example, of reading reform reaches back to 2012, the tipping point was Mississippi’s 2019 grade 4 reading scores. Since Mississippi has a long history of unfairly being cast as “last in the nation in education,” that these grade 4 scores suddenly rocketed into the top 25% of state scores certainly qualifies as a compelling story.

It also doesn’t hurt that the appearance that Mississippi had proven that “poverty is an excuse” adds fuel to the hyperbole fire.

Quickly, a “science of” narrative erupted, resulting in copy-cat legislation and the same unverified story about a reading crisis and the Mississippi miracle across local, regional, and national media.

The “science of” story has, in fact, traveled around the world several times at this point, but the key element remains missing—the science.

For example, The Reading League and the 95 Percent Group have become powerful advocacy organizations that make narrow and absolute claims about the need for science-only reading instruction linked to the promise that 95% of student will become proficient readers.

Again, ironically, neither of these positions (or the advocacy of the organizations) is grounded in the science.

First, The Reading League simultaneously demands only scientific evidence (first image) while advocating for practices and programs (for example, decodable texts and O-G phonics) that literature reviews on the current state of reading science refute (second image):

And, even more problematic, the 95% claim is not a scientific fact, but a very weakly supported and likely aspirational argument with only a few research studies behind the over-sized claim. As I have noted, the only evidence I have found is a a blog post cited by NCTQ, who twisted the stat to 90% and issued a report on teacher education that failed to match claims with the science.

Recently, the science is now catching up with the Mississippi story—although education journalism has remained silent on the current body of research that contradicts the story.

First, if we stick to the science and not the story, poverty is not an excuse when considering reading proficiency; in fact, over 60% of measurable student achievement is causally linked to “social capital family income variables that influence the development of background knowledge. Background knowledge is a known predictor of standardized test results. Family income variables are immutable by schools. Only public policies, outside the control of school personnel, can influence family income.”

In fact, these researchers reject continuing to base education reform on testing data such as NAEP:

Policy makers and education leaders should rethink the current reliance on standardized test results as the deciding factor to make decisions about student achievement, teacher quality, school effectiveness, and school leader quality. In effect, policies that use standardized test results to evaluate, reward, and sanction students and school personnel are doing nothing more than rewarding schools that serve advantaged students and punishing schools that serve disadvantaged students.

Next, two analyses of reading reform—one targeting the larger early reading reform movement and another specifically addressing Mississippi reading reform—find that the early grade reading score increases are not linked to changes in teacher training, reading instruction, and reading programs, but are grounded in grade retention policies.

In the broader study, Westall and Cummings found that only states with grade retention in their reading reform achieved increased reading proficiency scores, and those increases faded from elementary to middle school (paralleling the drop from top 25% to bottom 25% of states in NAEP from grade 4 to grade 8 by Mississippi and Florida).

They, however, drew no conclusions about why retention appears to result in higher scores.

Now, however, Howard Wainer, Irina Grabovsky and Daniel H. Robinson offer a conclusive connection between retention and reading scores:

But it was the second component of the Mississippi Miracle, a new retention policy, perhaps inspired by New Orleans’ Katrina disaster a decade earlier, that is likely to be the key to their success….

Prior to 2013, a higher percentage of third-graders moved on to the fourth grade and took the NAEP fourth-grade reading test. After 2013, only those students who did well enough in reading moved on to the fourth grade and took the test.

It is a fact of arithmetic that the mean score of any data set always increases if you delete some of the lowest scores (what is technically called “left truncation of the score distribution”)….

It is disappointing, but not surprising, that the lion’s share of the effects of the “Mississippi miracle” are yet another case of gaming the system. There is no miracle to behold. There is nothing special in Mississippi’s literacy reform model that should be replicated globally. It just emphasises the obvious advice that, if you want your students to get high scores, don’t allow those students who are likely to get low scores to take the test. This message is not a secret….

The science now suggests that reading proficiency score gains do not equate with improved reading proficiency due to classroom teaching learning reform. Mississippi reform is a statistical veneer for a harmful policy.

Notably, the current science on grade retention also confirms a body of evidence that retention does more harm than any possible good:

[T]hird-grade retention significantly reduces annual earnings at age 26 by $3,477 (19%). While temporarily improving test scores, retention increases absenteeism, violent behavior, and juvenile crime, and reduces the likelihood of high school graduation. Moreover, retained students exhibit higher community college enrollment but lower public university attendance, though neither estimate is statistically significant.

We are left with a significant problem and a question that must be answered: Since, as Edling shows, media controls what most people know and believe about education, teachers, and students, why are journalists committed to a story not grounded in evidence while also ignoring the science that seems essential for creating an authentic “science of” education reform movement?

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