Category Archives: Science of Reading

Crisis, Education, education reform, Educational Research, Media, politics, reading, Science of Reading

Lost in Translation: Science of Reading Edition

When Anders Ericsson, an internationally renowned cognitive psychologist, died in 2020, a New York Times article included as a subhead: “His research helped inspire ‘Outliers,’ Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling book on the keys to excelling.”

In short, the general public was more aware of Gladwell’s popularized version of Ericsson’s work than Ericsson, and likely, nearly no one in the general public had read Ericsson’s scholarship.

As a result, Ericsson penned a clarification that includes a key point:

Although I accept that the process of writing an engaging popular article requires considerable simplification, I think it is essential that the article does not contain incorrect statements and misinformation. My primary goal with this review is to describe several claims in Jaffe’s article that were simply false or clearly misleading and then discuss how APS might successfully develop successful methods for providing research summaries for non-specialists that are informative and accurately presents the major views of APS members and Fellows. At the very least they should not contain factually incorrect statements and avoid reinforcing existing misconceptions in the popular media.

The Danger of Delegating Education to Journalists: Why the APS Observer Needs Peer Review When Summarizing New Scientific Developments

Ericsson is confronting an essential problem when journalists and mainstream media seek ways to translate scholarship, research, and science into accessible and engaging media for the public. Journalists prioritize narratives, stories, as the primary mode to accomplish that translation.

Several months ago, I thought again about Ericsson’s valid concerns about Gladwell’s very popular but reductive Outliers:

[An article by Jaffe] goes on to state that “Ericsson and his colleagues found in a 1993 study that professional musicians had accumulated about 10,000 hours of deliberate practice over the course of a decade. The results became the basis of Ericsson’s deliberate practice theory of elite performance, also called the 10,000 hour rule” (Jaffe, 2012, p. 13). With these two sentences Jaffe reinforces misconceptions in some popularized books and internet blogs that incorrectly infer a close connection between deliberate practice and the “10,000 hour rule”.  In fact, the 10,000 hour rule was invented by Malcolm Gladwell (2008, p. 40) who stated that “researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.” Gladwell cited our research on expert musicians as a stimulus for his provocative generalization to a magical number. 

The Danger of Delegating Education to Journalists: Why the APS Observer Needs Peer Review When Summarizing New Scientific Developments

Ericsson came to mind as I was having an extended phone conversation with a producer at 60 Minutes about the current “science of reading” (SOR) movement and the significant amount of misinformation being presented in mainstream media and then driving state-level reading legislation (now in about 47 states).

While the producer was thoughtful and receptive to my concerns about media misrepresenting NAEP data, student reading proficiency, and the so-called failure of popular reading programs and balanced literacy, he ultimately concluded after we talked almost two hours, that there is no story in the truth, thus he would not be able to produce a story about that truth.

As Ericsson’s career demonstrates, the public finds misinformation in the form of simplistic stories more compelling than nuanced and messy research; further, most people, including politicians, have read or viewed the journalism, but not the actual research (notably because too much research is behind a pay wall and/or nearly impossible for the average person to comprehend).

The Ericsson/Gladwell/”grit” dynamic is now being replicated with even greater consequence in the SOR movement that has been codified in legislation banning and mandating programs and practices primarily or even exclusively grounded in media misinformation, and not the full reading science.

For example, the recent controversy about a co-authored article in The Reading Teacher perfectly highlights the essential problem.

Let’s do a thought experiment for a moment: Which do you think the general public and political leaders are more familiar with (or familiar with at all), Emily Hanford’s Sold a Story or Nell Duke’s (with colleagues) work on the active view of reading?

And, importantly, which of those two do you think is a better representation of the current state of reading science (or full body of research on reading and teaching reading)?

Now let’s explore some artifacts to answer those questions.

First, Hanford in her journalism has repeated that SOR is “settled science” called the simple view of reading (SVR):

Covering How Students Learn to Read: Tips to Get Started
There Is a Right Way to Teach Reading, and Mississippi Knows It

The “simple and settled” mantra has been a central part of Hanford’s print journalism and her more popular podcast.

But that same mantra is central to the claims made by The Reading League, likely the leading organization promoting SOR:

Science of Reading: Defining Guide

Now let’s note how these misleading and oversimplified claims about reading science have manifested themselves in political rhetoric and then state legislation:

WATCH:  Youngkin says education will drive midterm elections amid poor student performance
‘The evidence is clear’: DeWine pushes for ‘Science of Reading’ as only approach in Ohio classrooms

While this is only one example [1] of the caution Ericsson raised, the misrepresentation of reading science as “simple and settled” has become holy text and then spurred misguided reading legislation and policy.

The more nuanced and on-going body of reading science is much better represented by the research from literacy scholars:

Duke, N.K., & Cartwright, K.B. (2021). The science of reading progresses: Communicating advances beyond the simple view of reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(S1), S25–S44. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.411

From Arkansas to New York City, political leaders have misrepresented dyslexia, reading proficiency, reading instruction, and reading programs in ways that parallel the stories found in mainstream media.

Like Gladwell, Hanford and dozens of mainstream journalists are reaping the rewards of compelling stories that misinform while also feeding commercial and political interests that are mis-serving students, teachers, and public education.

Once again, we find ourselves not only in the tired and false rhetoric of reading crisis but also lost in translation because a sensationalistic podcast tells a melodramatic story that runs roughshod over anything resembling a fair representation of student reading proficiency, teacher expertise, or our obsession with finding the next reading program.

Note

[1] For a more detailed examination of the misinformation in media, see the following:

Recommended

The Danger of Delegating Education to Journalists: Why the APS Observer Needs Peer Review When Summarizing New Scientific Developments, K. Anders Ericsson 

Reading Educational Research: How to Avoid Getting Statistically Snookered, Gerald Bracey

Setting the Record Straight: Responses to Misconceptions About Public Education in the U.S., Gerald Bracey

Education, education reform, Educational Research, reading, Science of Reading

Reading Programs Always Fail Students and Teachers

[Header Photo by Nappy on Unsplash]

Despite growing up in a working-class family with two parents who never finished college, I entered formal schooling with a turboboost provided primarily by my mom.

I was a reader, and by traditional school norms, I was a reader way above grade level.

Both my mother and my teachers taught me to read through whole-word methods that were popular in the 1960s. I am of the Dick and Jane reader generation.

I always tested in the 99th-percentile and made As and Bs, but I found school only mildly tolerable, at best; I did, however, love my teachers.

It was a jumbled journey that led to me being a high school English teacher. I recognize now that the foundation of that path included my high level of literacy that eventually drew me to literature, a love of reading, and being a writer.

When I entered the classroom in the fall of 1984, I soon realized that I was not prepared to teach. Almost all of the literature I had studied in college was not or could not be taught in public high school; I also was almost completely ill-equipped to teach adolescents to write.

My first years included what I now perceive as the fatal flaw of teaching—seeking The Way to teach students to read and write.

My saving grace came in the late 1980s and early 1990s, significantly because I entered the regional National Writing Project summer workshop (Spartanburg Writing Project) and was introduced to the workshop model.

Two books and two people were foundational for my journey into workshop teaching—Nancie Atwell’s reading workshop and Lucy Calkins’s writing workshop.

Atwell and Calkins offered a great deal of practices and structures in their seminal works, but, honestly, I paid little attention to the details—fortunately.

I did take away a philosophical structure that included a frame for teaching—time, ownership, and response—and a nearly compulsive commitment to be a student-centered teacher.

Over my 40 years as a teacher, I have witnessed wonderful concepts, theories, and philosophies in education gradually be reduced to programs, structures, and scripts that necessarily fail students and teachers.

Throughout my career, I have resisted and challenged all programs and templates for teaching and learning.

By the 1990s, I had more opportunities to publish and present as a practitioner-scholar, and then after I completed my doctorate in 1998, that credential further reinforced my ability to advocate against programs and, worst of all, educational faddism.

For many years, I had to caution teachers and administrators about the missionary zeal around Four Blocks® and 6+1 Traits of Writing.

In traditional schooling, we lack the political will to provide students and teachers with the learning/teaching conditions that could support best practice and thriving students. Instead, we remain committed to in-school only reductive practices such as adopting new standards, implementing new standardized tests, and shuffling through an ever-revolving series of reading programs.

Here’s the problem: All reading programs fail students and teachers because when we center reading programs, we de-center the individual needs of students and the professional autonomy of teachers.

Let me be very clear: All reading programs fail students and teachers.

During my teaching career across five decades, I have watched as advocates scapegoat X and promise the success of Y—whether the scapegoat is whole language or balanced literacy (the two favorites over those years).

The “science of reading” movement fits into the manufactured reading crisis cycles that have occurred in the US for a century; almost nothing new is being claimed or promised, but the outsized attack on specific reading programs (Fountas and Pinnell, Calkins’s Units of Study) does represent a disturbing lack of logic (across the US dozens of different reading programs have been implemented over decades with reading proficiency remaining stable) and another fatal mistake of centering reading programs.

To be blunt, reading programs labeled as whole language, balanced reading, or structured literacy carry no guarantee that those programs or the implementation of the program does in fact reflect the theory/philosophy of the label.

One marketed, theory/philosophy is corrupted or erased.

But more importantly, all centering of reading programs is a distraction because teachers are held accountable for teaching with fidelity to the program and students are reduced to mere metrics of that fidelity.

I have remained outside the ideology and program game for 40 years (that’s what critical pedagogy is), but all those trapped inside that game cannot hear my persistent message: Don’t depend on reading programs and reading theories to teach children to read.

I do not support or adhere to whole language, balanced literacy, or structured literacy; I do not endorse (and certainly would never create) any reading program.

As a critical scholar and educator, i recognize that the moment we reduce philosophical structures to scripts or programs, both the ideologies and the humans impacted (students and teachers) are erased.

Most literacy instruction I do these days is with college students and adults, who are still learning to read and learning to write.

I remain guided by time, ownership, and response as my philosophical structures, but I always start with and center who each student is and where is student is.

I have a teaching tool kit that is incredibly full and diverse from my many years as a practitioner, yet I continue to seek new and different ways to teach because each student is a new challenge and a new possibility.

The current media, market, and political story that Reading Program X has failed children but Reading Program Y will save those children is a lazy argument that lacks logic or evidence.

If anyone can step off the reading program merry-go round, they could see that if there was a problem with Units of Study it was that teachers were held accountable for fidelity to that program and not provided the teaching conditions to serve the needs of individual students.

If anyone can step off the reading program merry-go round, they could see that banning some scapegoated reading programs and mandating new structured literacy programs that are scripted (thus erasing teacher autonomy and individual needs of students) is jumping out of the reading program frying pan into the fire.

The rhetoric of missionary zeal exposes the failure of centering when we argue about “teaching phonics” or “teaching comprehension” or “teaching fluency,” for example, because our goal should never be a so-called reading skill, but teaching children how to be eager and critical readers.

In formal schooling we have for decades and currently are failing disproportionately marginalized and minoritized students who are over-represented in those students identified as below proficiency in reading.

As long as we center reading ideologies and reading programs, we are de-centering those students’ individual needs and de-centering the autonomy of their teachers to serve those neglected children.

Reading programs are the folly of petty adult allegiances that are manipulated for political and market purposes.

Reading and writing like teaching reading and writing are complex and unpredictable journeys that are ultimately human behaviors that should be the center of all we do—not beliefs, practices, or, especially, yet another false promise packaged as a silver-bullet reading program.

Education, ILA, reading, Science of Reading

Open Clarification on Recent Publication for The Reading Teacher (ILA)

This is an open clarification to set the record straight about a recent co-authored article in The Reading Teacher (ILA): Stories Grounded in Decades of Research: What We Truly Know about the Teaching of Reading.

This clarification is being made in my name only and reflects only my perspective.

After the piece was posted online for early access, Nell Duke requested that her name be removed from a table in the article:

Since the term “science of reading” has a variety of contexts and meanings as I have documented in my own work, I appreciate any concern raised about misunderstandings or misrepresentations.

First, then, let me clarify that the intent of the “challenges” is grounded in the SOR movement making claims through journalists, such as Emily Hanford, and high-profile organizations, such as The Reading League, that the simple view of reading is “settled science”; see for example, the following:

To understand what the science says, a good place to start is with something called the “simple view of reading.” It’s a model that was first proposed by researchers in 1986 to clarify the role of decoding in reading comprehension. Everyone agrees the goal of reading is to comprehend text, but back in the 1980s there was a big fight going on over whether children should be taught how to decode words — in other words, phonics.

The simple view says that reading comprehension is the product of two things. One is your ability to decode words: Can you identify the word a string of letters represents? For example, you see the letter string “l-a-s-s” and you are able to sound it out and say the word….

The simple view is an equation that looks like this:

decoding ability x language comprehension = reading comprehension…

The simple view model was proposed more than 30 years ago and has been confirmed over and over again by research.

There Is a Right Way to Teach Reading, and Mississippi Knows It
Science of Reading: Defining Guide

To be brief, current research, including work by Duke on the active view of reading, challenges the claim that SVR is settled science:

The simple view of reading is commonly presented to educators in professional development about the science of reading. The simple view is a useful tool for conveying the undeniable importance—in fact, the necessity—of both decoding and linguistic comprehension for reading. Research in the 35 years since the theory was proposed has revealed additional understandings about reading. In this article, we synthesize research documenting three of these advances: (1) Reading difficulties have a number of causes, not all of which fall under decoding and/or listening comprehension as posited in the simple view; (2) rather than influencing reading solely independently, as conceived in the simple view, decoding and listening comprehension (or in terms more commonly used in reference to the simple view today, word recognition and language comprehension) overlap in important ways; and (3) there are many contributors to reading not named in the simple view, such as active, self-regulatory processes, that play a substantial role in reading. We point to research showing that instruction aligned with these advances can improve students’ reading. We present a theory, which we call the active view of reading, that is an expansion of the simple view and can be used to convey these important advances to current and future educators. We discuss the need to lift up updated theories and models to guide practitioners’ work in supporting students’ reading development in classrooms and interventions.

Duke, N.K., & Cartwright, K.B. (2021). The science of reading progresses: Communicating advances beyond the simple view of reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 56(S1), S25–S44. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.411

Other scholars have also challenged SVR as settled or adequate:

Theoretical models, such as the simple view of reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986), the direct and inferential mediation (DIME) model (Cromley et al., 2010; Cromley & Azevedo, 2007), and the cognitive model (McKenna & Stahl, 2009) inform the constructs and skills that contribute to reading comprehension. The simple view of reading (Gough & Tunmer, 1986) describes reading comprehension as the product of decoding and language comprehension. The simple view of reading is often used to underscore the critical importance of decoding on reading comprehension; however, evidence suggests that the relative importance of decoding and language comprehension changes based on students’ level of reading development and text complexity (Lonigan et al., 2018). Cross-sectional and longitudinal studies demonstrate that decoding has the largest influence on reading comprehension for novice readers, whereas language comprehension becomes increasingly important as students’ decoding skills develop and text becomes more complex (e.g., Catts et al., 2005; Gough et al., 1996; Hoover & Gough, 1990; Proctor et al., 2005; Tilstra et al., 2009). However, the simple view of reading does not comprehensively explain all skills that influence reading comprehension, nor does it inform what comprehension instruction requires. 

Filderman, M. J., Austin, C. R., Boucher, A. N., O’Donnell, K., & Swanson, E. A. (2022). A meta-analysis of the effects of reading comprehension interventions on the reading comprehension outcomes of struggling readers in third through 12th grades. Exceptional Children, 88(2), 163–184. https://doi.org/10.1177/00144029211050860

In that context, I think including those scholars neither misrepresents their work nor misrepresents reading science.

As such, ILA’s statement seems to be a dangerous precedent for policing scholars and for eroding scholarship in the context of media, political, and market forces.

I remain convinced the work scholars are doing on the active view of reading is not only important for understanding reading science but for understanding that science is often a conversation and an on-going evolution, not something settled and not something to be wielded like a hammer.

Ironically, I have been advocating for the voices and work of those scholars in the removed table be given greater weight and time than journalists, politicians, and commercial interests. So I regret that they are no longer being highlighted.

Finally, I recognize that it takes more nuance and care than is often afforded on social media to acknowledge that the robust and on-going body of reading science, in fact, contradicts the stories being told under the label SOR in the media and by political and market interests.

But if you genuinely engage with the science, that is all the article is seeking to address.

Dyslexia, Education, education reform, Educational Research, reading, Science of Reading

Revisiting the SOR Multiverse

Although I have made the distinction many times, the “science of reading” (SOR) as a term denotes three distinct meanings simultaneously:

  1. SOR as a movement, grounded in a pervasive yet misleading media narrative primarily associated with the journalism of Emily Hanford and then the manifestation of the narrative in political rhetoric and legislation/policy.
  2. SOR as marketing and branding, a concurrent flood of reading programs and materials (very similar to the branding of materials during the Common Core era).
  3. SOR as a blanket term for the broad and deep research base on reading than spans at least a century.

I have been contesting the most problematic aspects of SOR—the movement and the marketing/branding—because the misinformation has gained a status as “holy text”; more troubling is that nearly every state has now passed legislation and implemented SOR policy and practice.

In no uncertain terms, there is no longer a debate about the credibility of SOR because that credibility is its own odd multiverse—the movement claims are simultaneously false or misleading while existing in the real world as fact and narrow mandates (for example, structured literacy as the newest reading theory is often packaged as scripted curriculum).

The SOR movement has been driven primarily by people with no expertise or historical context for the narrative established in “Hard Words” and then amplified by “Sold a Story.”

Journalists, politicians, parents, and think tanks/advocacy groups have created a nearly unstoppable force because of a series of beliefs that have been perpetuated in the US for decades: public schools are failing, teachers are failing, and students are failing.

The SOR movement is little different than any other education movement in the US since the template is well established in crisis/miracle rhetoric that appeals to cultural and public beliefs.

Also the SOR movement has weaponized a reductive use of the term “science,” which shields the movement from criticism.

Anyone who dares to criticize—even with evidence—the SOR narrative is discounted as being against “science,” particularly effective in the wake of Covid era fraught with public and political debates about masking and vaccinations.

The missionary zeal of the SOR movement combined with market interests has erased all nuance and complexity from discussions of or implementing the broad and deep body of research on reading that is still evolving and better characterized by debate than being “simple and settled” (the earliest mantra driving the SOR movement in the media).

Over the past decades, SOR advocacy has made any criticism or debate come with great costs to the critics because of the zeal and even anger among SOR advocates on social media, a network of stake holders associated with dyslexia, phonics, and mainstream education reform (such as Jeb Bush’s ExcelinEd).

As I just recently posted, a survey of parents demonstrates the effectiveness of the SOR movement to turn false narratives into holy text.

The survey shows both that parents held relatively positive views of their children’s reading achievement and their teachers. But once those parents were exposed to the false narrative of SOR, their opinions were more negative. The misrepresentation of NAEP data and cueing/guessing was presented to parents as facts, and the change in opinions confirmed that the SOR false information is incredibly effective and mostly embraced uncritically:

Reading Education Messaging: Findings and Recommendations from an Online Poll of K-5 Parents in America

The most shocking aspect of the developing SOR multiverse is that journalists, the public, and political leaders believe that 2/3 of students are not proficient readers and that same NAEP data show that 2/3 of students are reading at grade level or above—inverse “facts” simultaneously “true.”

Nearly as stunning is the Urban Legend around cueing and guessing that, again, simultaneously is believed by almost everyone while not existing in reality:

Narratives that speak into cultural beliefs are incredibly powerful, and bandwagons are difficult to slow down or reroute.

As a consequence truth and nuance are lost.

In a recent co-authored scholarly piece, colleagues and I confront the imbalance between the SOR movement/marketing and the full body of research on reading.

The responses to that article on social media and even among literacy scholars reflect the same problematic dynamic exposed in the survey of parents; nuance struggles to keep its head above water during a tidal wave.

I am currently at the annual NCTE convention and will present on a panel tomorrow about SOR; however, even at a professional conference, being critical of SOR is an outlier stance.

The SOR misinformation has won—at least for now.

In 5 or 10 years, the next reading crisis will somehow overwrite this one—simultaneously all of the century’s worth of reading crises existing and never having happened.

Just like now.

Now seems impossible, in fact, since “kids today” (no matter when “today” is) have never been proficient readers.

Yet, here we are, inexplicably harder to believe than Bigfoot.

Crisis, Education, education reform, Education Week, Educational Research, Media, reading, Science of Reading

NAEP, Media Fuel Manufactured Reading Crisis

Consider how people would respond to the two following statements for a survey:

  1. About 2/3 of US students read below “proficient” on national testing.
  2. About 2/3 of US students read at or above “grade level” on national testing.

We don’t need to imagine, however.

Coverage in Education Week of a new survey on parents’ perceptions of reading reveals incredibly damning findings—damning not about reading achievement or teaching but about NAEP and media:

The survey’s findings reflect that damning dynamic:

Yet, despite the misinformation about NAEP, these survey findings reflect decades of surveys showing parents generally have positive views of their children’s schools and teachers but believe public education nationally is failing:

This survey, though, exposes the source of that disconnect—media coverage of NAEP data, which seems to be designed more to manufacture a crisis than to assess student reading achievement.

The opening two hypothetical statements show where the problem lies because the first is an accurate statement about NAEP and the second is an accurate statement about reading at grade level.

As NAEP explains and others have addressed for years (see below), NAEP “proficiency” is well above grade level and “basic” represents something close to grade-level proficiency. However, the larger problem is the US has no standard criteria for “grade-level proficiency” and states set their own levels with NAEP using terminology that is at least confusing if not intentionally misleading.

Another problem, as I have argued, is that “grade level” is likely a worse metric than “age level” since many states now implement grade 3 retention based on reading tests, corrupting populations of students being assessed since data show that student scores on early reading are strongly correlated with birth month.

See the following to better understand NAEP and media misinformation about reading proficiency:

The US has a long and troubling history of media and political leaders being more invested in a manufactured education crisis than actually investing in better public education.

As a result, parents and students are trapped between their own genuine appreciation and need for effective, responsive reading instruction and a media-fueled political campaign to misinform the public because a constant state of reading crisis benefits a contracting media and generates political capital.

The reading crisis in the US is that the public is reading misinformation about reading and teachers, grounded in a national testing program designed to manufacture crisis.

NOTE

The survey also shows how misinformation about three cueing and phonics misleads parents and distorts their perception of reading instruction:

The framing of the survey misrepresents both cueing and guessing; see the following:

Educational Research, NYT, reading, Science of Reading

Guest Post: Letter to NYT, Susan Ohanian

re: Ohio Lawsuit Punches Back in Battle Over How to Teach Reading 

In highlighting the big money spent by the Reading Recovery Council  to influence state reading policy, the New York Times offers a slight variation on the same old meme of reading science vs reading catastrophe. 

As a longtime reading teacher, I await an article on the billions spent by leading publishers to promote something called the science of reading so they can continue selling their textbooks and billions of pages of   peripherals that accompany these texts. I mourn the hours children spend trudging through Big Business workbook pages traveling as “science.”

In “Ohio Lawsuit Punches Back in Battle Over How to Teach Reading,”  readers are offered the 23-year-old National Reading Report as evidence of the validity of science of reading.  The claims embedded in this report have been disputed by respected researchers since the day of publication. It’s time to scrap that old rolodex and expand the contact base. For starters, here’s a new report published in The Reading Teacher: “Stories Grounded in Decades of Research: What We Truly Know about the Teaching of Reading.” 

Table 1 offers “Highly Respected Researchers Whose Research Challenges the Science of Reading,”  Here are the names of 7 reading researchers New York Times reporters can contact the next time they decide to write about reading instruction in public schools.

Finally, I offer the evidence of a deaf child who entered public school in 3rd grade. Her residual hearing was helped by special equipment. she and I both wore. After some weeks of sobbing she couldn’t do it, this child triumphed. I attended her high school graduation, where she was on the honor roll. She contacted me 30 years later, telling me that she had graduated from college and enjoyed sharing Amelia Bedelia and knock-knock jokes with her children.

This is called teacher wait time.

Susan Ohanian

Education, education reform, Journal of Reading Recovery, literacy, NCTE, NEPC, reading, Science of Reading, The Reading Teacher, Voices from the Middle

Recent Publications on Reading [Open Access and Updated]

[Header Photo by Jess Bailey on Unsplash]

Thomas, P.L. (2025). Black Widow underestimated and hypersexualized: “I am what I am.” Brill.

Thomas, P.L. (TBD). Haruki Murakami’s 7 stories: “It’s quite easy to become Men Without Women.” In J. Milburn (ed.), Haruki Murakami and philosophical concepts (pp. TBD). Palgrave.

Thomas, P.L. (TBD). Crisis as distraction and erasure: How SOR fails diversity and urban students.  Journal of Literacy and Urban Schools.

Thomas, P.L. (2025). Navigating (another) reading crisis as an administrator: Rethinking the “science of reading” movement. Journal of School Administration, Research and Development, 10(1), 38-48. https://ojed.org/JSARD/article/view/6706

Thomas, P.L. (2024, November). We teach English in times of perpetual crisis: For all ELA teachers, “the time is always now.” English Journal, 114(2), 21-26. https://publicationsncte.org/content/journals/10.58680/ej2024114221

Thomas, P.L. (2024, September). We teach English in times of perpetual crisis: The media continue to misread teaching reading and literacy. English Journal, 114(1), 14-19. https://publicationsncte.org/content/journals/10.58680/ej2024114114

Thomas, P.L. (2024, May). Teaching English in the “science of reading” era: We teach English in times of perpetual crisis: Selling a story of reading. English Journal, 113(5), 16-22. https://publicationsncte.org/content/journals/10.58680/ej2024113516 [Open Access https://publicationsncte.org/content/journals/10.58680/ej202411342]

Thomas, P.L. (2024, March). We teach English in times of perpetual crisis: The long (and tedious) history of reading crisis. English Journal, 113(4), 21-26. https://publicationsncte.org/content/journals/10.58680/ej2024113421

Thomas, P.L. (2023, November). Everything you know is wrong: The “science of reading” era of reading legislation. Perspectives and Provocations, (11), 1-17. https://drive.google.com/file/d/12fAfLV1pCh7ZXV-UFsTftFd7y_MLSK-O/view

Compton-Lilly, C., Spence, L.K., Thomas, P.L. & Decker, S.L. (2023). Stories grounded in decades of research: What we truly know about the teaching of reading. Reading Teacher, 77(3), 392-400. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.2258

Thomas, P.L. (2023). The science of reading era: Seeking the “science” in yet another anti-teacher movement. Journal of Reading Recovery, 22(5), 5-17.

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.

How to End the Reading War and Serve the Literacy Needs of All Students: A Primer for Parents, Policy Makers, and People Who Care (2nd Edition) – IAP – [first edition]

The Science of Reading Movement: The Never-Ending Debate and the Need for a Different Approach to Reading Instruction (policy brief) – NEPC

A Critical Examination of Grade Retention as Reading Policy (white paper). Prepared for the Ohio Education Association in response to Ohio’s “Third Grade Reading Guarantee”, September 15, 2022

The Never-Ending Debate and the Need for a Different Approach to Reading Instruction – NCTE Blog

“Science of Reading” Media Advocacy Continues to Mislead – RRC

A conversation with Paul Thomas. (2021). Talking Points, 32(2), 24-30.

Education, education reform, Educational Research, Poverty, reading, Science of Reading, Social Context Reform

The Ignored Truth about Reading Proficiency in the US

[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.

Who Runs the Best U.S. Schools? It May Be the Defense Department.

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.

Education, education reform, No Excuses Reform, reading, Science of Reading

When Exceptional Publicly Funded Schools Are Not a Miracle, and Why

Consider the following headlines from the New York Times:

The first two are confidently assertive (lots of knowing), and the third tiptoes into a question and a “may be.”

What is fascinating, and frustrating, is that the first two are almost entirely false coverage—the first badly misrepresenting reading achievement in MS and the second inexcusably misrepresenting NAEP reading data.

The key here is that the first article feeds into the misleading “miracle” narrative popular in media and political rhetoric about schools and the second asserts the “crisis” rhetoric about public education.

Media struggles with the third article topic—the exceptional achievement found in Department of Defense schools—and possibly the most telling quote in the article hits the nail on the head:

“If the Department of Defense schools were a state, we would all be traveling there to figure out what’s going on,” said Martin West, an education professor at Harvard who serves on the national exam’s governing board.

Who Runs the Best U.S. Schools? It May Be the Defense Department.

In a rare moment of almost getting things right about education and testing, the article highlights the outstanding achievement found in DoDEA schools:

Looking at reading achievement levels of NAEP is even more revealing:

While the media has dubbed MS a “miracle,” that same media struggles to understand the DoDEA success.

Why? Well, a few clues are in the article itself:

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.

Defense Department schools are well-funded, socioeconomically and racially integrated, and have a centralized structure that is not subject to the whims of school boards or mayors….

But there are key differences.

For starters, families have access to housing and health care through the military, and at least one parent has a job.

“Having as many of those basic needs met does help set the scene for learning to occur ,” said Jessica Thorne, the principal at E.A. White Elementary, a school of about 350 students.

Her teachers 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. While much of the money goes toward the complicated logistics of operating schools internationally, the Defense Department estimates that it spends about $25,000 per student, on par with the highest-spending states like New York, and far more than states like Arizona, where spending per student is about $10,000 a year .

“I doubled my income,” said Heather Ryan, a White Elementary teacher . Starting her career in Florida, she said she made $31,900; after transferring to the military, she earned $65,000. With more years of experience, she now pulls in $88,000.

Competitive salaries — scaled to education and experience levels — help retain teachers at a time when many are leaving the profession. At White Elementary, teachers typically have 10 to 15 years of experience, Ms. Thorne said.

Who Runs the Best U.S. Schools? It May Be the Defense Department.

Children with access to healthcare and food security, parents with stable incomes and housing, and well-paid faculty—these are all key to educational outcomes, many of us have argued for years, but the mainstream approach in the US for decades has been entirely focusing on in-school reform only—because the education establishment, conservatives argue, have used poverty as an excuse.

The reason DoDEA success is handled with a question and “may be” is that the evidence here is a message that is politically uncomfortable in the US: Education reform needs to be both social reform and school reform.

Credible reading scores (beyond grade 4) are about more than reading instruction or reading programs, but the DoDEA forces us to reconsider the “crisis”/”miracle” rhetoric and move beyond blaming teachers, reading ideologies, and reading programs.

Media and political leaders likely will let this story pass because “Logistical planning, including a predictable budget, ‘isn’t very sexy,’ but it is one key to success, said Thomas M. Brady, the director of Defense Department schools since 2014.”

So here is something we do know, but we are mostly unwilling to admit it: Poverty and inequity are not excuses, but tremendous barriers to the sort of opportunities all children deserve.

The success at DoDEA is certainly no miracle, but that success is the sort of model we should be using instead of the manufactured “miracle”/mirage of the day.