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Teacher Education in (Another) Era of the “Bad Teacher” Myth

[Header Photo by CDC on Unsplash]

Note

I entered the classroom as a high school English teacher somewhat ominously in 1984, an academic year when Orwell’s classic was increasingly assigned but also when in South Carolina, where I taught, the high-stakes accountability era began with a vengeance.

From 1995 until 1998, I completed an EdD in Curriculum and Instruction while teaching full-time and even taking on some adjunct work at local colleges. Unlike most of those in my EdD cohort, I have no plans to leave K-12 teaching once I graduated from the program.

However in 2002, my former high school English teacher, Lynn Harrill (whose position I had taken where I was teaching English), left his position at Furman University, which was within driving distance for me. In a flurry of a few weeks, I was offered the job, and frankly, I had almost no idea what committing to teacher education would entail.

To be blunt, teacher education was incredibly frustrating and disappointing because much of my work was bureaucracy—nearly endless cycles of new standards and documenting that we were addressing those standards. Accreditation and certification rendered the quality of teaching pre-service teacher to teach a mere ghost of what we wanted to do, what we were capable of doing.

I have written before about how and why teacher education struggles both to foster new teachers and to challenge misleading and inaccurate (mostly by politicians, media, and pundits) attacks about the failures of teacher education, teachers, students, and public schools (see more HERE).

The piece below represents my uncomfortable position in teacher education because I believe in teacher education as a field and degree but am at least skeptical if not cynical about accreditation/certification.

It seems my time in teacher education has come to a close (my department is transitioning away from teacher certification toward education studies), and since the piece below failed to find a journal home, I am offering it here (and I also prefer open-access).

This is a complicated topic, but I hope this does a fair job because I do love teachers of all kinds and find the “bad teacher” myth one of the most misguided narratives in the US.

Teacher Education in (Another) Era of the “Bad Teacher” Myth

P.L. Thomas, Furman University

In 2018, a simplistic but compelling story was established: Teachers do not know how to teach children to read because teacher educators have failed to teach the “science of reading” (SOR) in teacher preparation programs (Aukerman, 2022a, 2022b, 2022c). These misleading narratives about teacher education, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data, and reading have gained momentum and now drive reading policy and legislation in practically every state in the US (Aydarova, 2023, 2024; Reinking, Hruby, & Risko, 2023).

There is an ironic truism—“a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”—most often incorrectly attributed to Mark Twain that describes the misguided SOR movement’s central claims wrapped in the initial mantra that SOR is both simple and settled. Here, though, are two more nuanced and evidenced-based counter-points to the SOR story being sold (Thomas, 2024b, 2024c, 2024d):

  • Reading instruction can and should be significantly reformed (in the context of addressing wider systemic inequities), but the SOR version of causes and solutions are false.
  • Teacher education can and should be significantly reformed, but the SOR version of causes and solutions are false.

I have been a strong advocate for education reform, beginning when I entered the field in 1984, and subsequently a strong advocate for teacher education reform, starting with entering higher education and teacher education in 2002. Writing about Maxine Greene over a decade ago, I noted about teacher education: “As teacher educators, we are trapped between the expectations of a traditional and mechanistic field and the contrasting expectations of best practice guided by critical pedagogy” (Thomas, 2010).

Further, critical pedagogy acknowledges that all teaching and learning are political acts (Kincheloe, 2005), which require teachers and teacher educator to reject the norms of teaching being apolitical. The current SOR movement and concurrent re-emergence of the “bad teacher” myth have created a hostile environment for teachers at all levels, and thus, the time is now for re-imagining being teacher educators as well as K-12 teachers who advocate for teacher professionalism and the individual needs of all students.

The Anti-Teacher (and Sexist) Roots of Rejecting Teacher Autonomy

Over the past few years, both traditional and social media have uncritically reanimated the “bad teacher” myth (Bessie, 2010; Thomas, 2023b) with the following stories:

  • Elementary teachers are failing to teach reading effectively to US students.
  • That failure is “because many deans and faculty in colleges of education either don’t know the science or dismiss it,” according to Hanford (2018).
  • Elementary, literature/ELA teachers, and history teachers are brainwashing students with CRT (Pollock & Rogers, 2022).
  • Elementary and literature/ELA teachers are grooming children to be gay or transgender by forcing them to read diverse books and stories.

Except for teachers themselves and some education scholars, these new “bad teacher” myths are both extremely compelling and almost entirely false. Writing more than a decade ago during a peak “bad teacher” movement in the US, Adam Bessie (2010) explains about the bad teacher stories represented then by Michelle Rhee and perpetuated by the Obama administration and Bill Gates:

The myth is now the truth.

The Bad Teacher myth, [Bill] Ayers admits, is appealing, which is why it’s spread so far and become so commonly accepted. Who can, after all, disagree that we “need to get the lazy, incompetent teachers out of the classroom?” Even Ayers agrees that he, like all of us, “nods stupidly” along with this notion. As a professor at a community college and former high school teacher, I nod stupidly as well: I don’t want my students held back, alienated, or abused by these Bad Teachers.

This myth is also seductive in its simplicity. It’s much easier to have a concrete villain to blame for problems school systems face. The fix seems easy, as well: all we need to do is fire the Bad Teachers, as controversial Washington, DC, school chancellor superstar Michelle Rhee has, and hire good ones, and students will learn. In this light, Gates’ effort to “fix” the bug-riddled public school operating system by focusing on teacher development makes perfect sense. The logic feels hard to argue with: who would argue against making teachers better? And if, as a teacher, you do dare to, you must be “anti-student,” a Bad Teacher who is resistant to “reforms,” who is resistant to improvements and, thus, must be out for himself, rather than the students.

Bessie (2010) concludes, “The only problem with the Bad Teacher myth, as anyone involved with education is intimately aware of, is that problems in education are anything but simple,” and ultimately, these myths are not supported by the evidence.

One challenge of doing public work and advocacy addressing education, education reform, and teachers/teaching is framing clear and accessible messages that avoid being simplistic and misleading. Since I have spent years of challenging the overly simplistic and misleading SOR movement (Thomas, 2022), I have attempted to carefully craft some direct and brief messages, including “not simple, not settled,” “teach readers, not reading” (Afflerbach, 2022), and my core commitments to teacher autonomy and the individual needs of all students.

One would think that these core commitments attract support even among those who disagree on other aspects of teaching and education policy. Yet, I face a persistent resistance to supporting teacher autonomy, grounded in a fundamental distrust of all teachers. Teacher autonomy is essential for teaching to be a profession (Kraft & Lyon, 2024), but autonomy is also essential because education is a high-accountability field. One of the historical and current mechanisms to reduce or eliminate teacher autonomy is the norm of teaching as apolitical, discouraging teachers at all levels from advocating for themselves or their students.

The problematic tension in education is that teachers are routinely held accountable for mandates (not their professional decisions and practices) and how well they comply with the mandates, repeated currently in the SOR movement. Since many education mandates are flawed (such as current SOR reading legislation) and for decades have failed, teachers are then blamed for that failure even though they didn’t impose the mandates and were simply the mechanisms for required practices.

Most education crisis rhetoric and education reform have been grounded for decades in anti-teacher sentiments. Currently, the reading crisis movement blames reading teachers for being ill-equipped to teach reading (failing children) and teacher educators for not preparing those teachers, for example (Aukerman, 2022a). One of the strongest elements of rejecting teacher autonomy, in fact, is among SOR advocates who promote structured literacy, often scripted curriculum (Compton-Lily, et al., 2020) that reduces teachers to technicians and perpetuates holding teachers accountable for fidelity to programs instead of supporting teacher expertise to address individual student needs.

Let me be clear that all professions with practitioner autonomy have a range of quality in that profession (yes, there are some weak and flawed teachers just as there are weak and flawed medical doctors). To reject teacher autonomy because a few teachers may not deserve it is a standard not applied in other fields. But the heightened resistance to teacher autonomy is likely grounded in gender bias.

K-12 teaching (especially elementary teaching) is disproportionately a woman’s career since about 8 in 10 public school teachers are women. And while teacher pay is low compared to other professions, the pay inequity is more pronounced in areas where the proportion of women is even higher at the elementary level (Will, 2022). As a frame of reference, a more respected and better rewarded teaching profession is in higher education where professor have professional autonomy, except the gender imbalance exposes a similar sexist pattern. While the gender balance is better in higher education than K-12, the pay and security of being a professor increases where men are a higher proportion of the field (Quinn, 2023).

Autonomy, pay, and respect track positively for men and negatively for women in teaching, and the resistance to autonomy for K-12 teachers strongly correlates with the field being primarily women. A key but ignored element of education reform must include better pay for all K-12 teachers and supporting teacher autonomy so that individual student needs can be met. The historical and current resistance to teacher autonomy exposes the lingering sexism in how we view, treat, and reward educators.

Therefore, at its core, the “bad teacher” myth and requiring teachers to remain apolitical, objective, or neutral serve indirectly to further de-professionalize teachers at both the K-12 level and in teacher education. This leads to the role of science in de-professionalizing teachers when examined as part of the SOR movement.

“Science of Reading” Playing Numbers Games Not Supported by Science

One of the most effective elements of the SOR movement that helps reinforce the “bad teacher” myth is the rhetorical power of “science” in the claims. It appears that the use of “science” has reinvigorated the push to impose scripted curriculum on schools, a central effort of George W. Bush while governor of Texas. While that wave of scripted curriculum failed, in the 2020s, many advocates and legislators have completely caved on teacher autonomy as state after state is mandating scripted reading programs based on stories in the media that misrepresent teacher expertise about reading, teacher educators, and a reading crisis.

At the core of the SOR movement, then, is the pernicious use of numbers games within the rhetoric of “science.” A foundational example is the misrepresentation of NAEP reading scores to declare that 60% or 2/3 of students are not proficient readers and/or not reading at grade level (Hanford, 2018; Kristof, 2023). This numbers shell game is based in the misleading use of “proficient” by NAEP as well as the combination of ignorance about those achievement levels and willful ignorance about those achievement levels (Loveless, 2016, 2023; Thomas, 2025). The NAEP numbers game is frustrating because the claim shuffles “not proficient” and “not on grade level” while literally inverting the valid claim based on NAEP. In fact, for 30 years, NAEP grade 4 reading data show that about 60%+ of students are reading at grade level and above since NAEP “basic” (not “proficient”) is equivalent to grade level reading (See NAEP National Achievement-Level Results, n.d.).

Further, and even more frustrating, is that this numbers game distracts us from the real issues: (1) The US has no standard for “grade level” reading, (2) we have never fully interrogated the need for a standard “age level” instead of “grade level” metric, and most importantly, (3) the real challenge (even failure) is the disproportionate number of marginalized and minoritized students in the below grade level data pool.

Along with the misleading NAEP story, as well, is a numbers game that hasn’t been fully unpacked—the claim that 90-95% students can be proficient if we simply implement SOR. As a side note, those SOR advocates making this shifting claim (sometimes it is 90%, sometimes it is 95% or 96%) have not, along with most of mainstream media, clarified how this claim is based in scientific research while also avoiding a compelling example of the possibility that the 90-95% proficiency is achievable: Department of Defense (DoDEA) schools have close to that rate of achievement (see below).

Now as the SOR movement has grown over the past 6 years, the 90-95% claim has been repeated more and more although that numbers game still has less traction than the 2/3 not proficient claim. However, when I began my review of a recent National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) report (Thomas, 2023a), I took the time to interrogate the 90% claim by the anti-teacher education think tank: “With effective reading instruction, we could take that [student reading proficiency] to more than 90%” (Teacher Prep Review, 2023, p. 4)

That claim by NCTQ has a footnote to a few studies, but the most interesting evidence is the final citation to a blog post by Nathaniel Hansford (2023) who admits at the beginning, “it has always stuck out to me as a strange figure” because:

First, most academic research does not typically use percentages in this sort of manner. Second, I often see this figure unaccompanied by a citation. And third, it seems low; I find it hard to believe that 5% of students just cannot learn how to read.

When Hansford (2023) asked for scientific evidence for the claim, this is what he discovered:

Some of the citations I was sent were policy papers, by authors and institutions that used this claim. However, these papers were not experimental and usually cited popular Science of Reading books, not experimental research. There was also, interestingly, one research paper sent to me from the 1980s, that made the claim, but did not cite any evidence to support it. So it appears that this claim has been in circulation for a long time. The most common source listed for this claim seemed to be Louisa Moats, who has written about this rule on numerous occasions. However, she does not claim that 95% of students can reach grade level, based on just core instruction, but rather in totality. Louisa Moats cites 4 sources in support for this rule. In Kilpatrick’s book Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties; a 2009  paper by Lim, et al. on students with Down Syndrome; a 2005 paper by Mathes, et al, examining the rate of risk reduction for struggling reading, with intensive intervention instruction, and a literature review of risk reduction, by Joseph Torgersen. In my opinion, the last two citations provide some experimental evidence to support this claim.

I have found no better conclusion about the 90-95% claim than the one offered by Hansford (2023); there is scarce and dated scientific evidence to support, at best, that the 90-95% claim is a valid aspirational goal of reading proficiency: “This all said, it does seem there is some level of support for 96% being a benchmark goal [emphasis added], for reading proficiency rates.”

Key here is that like the NAEP misrepresentation, the 90-95% claim is in no way a scientific claim being used by a movement that has used “scientific” as a rhetorical lever to promote their ideological (not scientific) agenda targeting K-12 teachers and teacher educators. The SOR numbers games are essentially distractions. Regretfully, we certainly need to address reading proficiency in students, especially for marginalized and minoritized students.

But the real problems and achievable solutions are likely not to make the education marketers money but will require a different way to view education, one that acknowledges the key number that education reformers and SOR advocates ignore. That number is 60+%.

A recent study confirms a statistic that has been repeated by scientific research for decades—about 60+% of measurable student achievement is causally linked to out-of-school (OOS) factors (not reading programs, not instructional practices, not teacher quality, not teacher education): “Almost 63% of the variance in test performance was explained by social capital family income variables that influence the development of background knowledge” (Maroun & Tienken, 2024).

That fact of measurable student achievement discredits claims that reading proficiency, for example, is mostly a problem of reading programs and reading instructional practices. Reading reform for decades has simply shuffled programs and reading theory, which amounts to rearranging chairs on the deck of the Titanic. Yet as I noted above, there is credible evidence that something approaching 90% reading proficiency is achievable; this evidence does not rely on the “bad teacher” myth but does require addressing those OOS factors. Notable, yet mostly ignored, the reading achievement of DoDEA students on NAEP in 2022 are impressive—79% at or above grade level in grade 4 and 91% at or above grade level in grade 8 (See State achievement-level results, n.d.).

The DoDEA story isn’t one of reading programs, reading theory, or teacher/teacher educator bashing; in fact, there is a compelling story here that demonstrates the importance of addressing living as well as teacher and learning conditions so that students and teachers can be successful:

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. (Mervosh, 2023)

The SOR movement is playing a harmful and duplicitous numbers game that fits into decades of ineffective and harmful education reform. But the SOR movement is also following the corrosive playbook of using “science” as a rhetorical veneer for ideological agendas. Like scientific racism, the SOR movement is disturbingly absent science for many of their foundational claims, and the collateral damage is not just students but teaching as a profession.

Numbers games have consequences, and ironically, the research emerging from SOR policies is beginning to show that SOR legislation is whitewashing the curriculum (Rigell, et al., 2022) and de-professionalizing teachers (Blaushild, 2023). While there are several shifting numbers in the SOR movement, no science supports the foundational claims. And the numbers that are being ignored are the huge taxpayers’ costs for shuffling reading programs to line the pockets of many of the people promoting those numbers games. Unless teacher educators and K-12 teachers use their political voices to reject and resist the false stories and numbers games, the teaching profession will continue to be eroded.

If Teacher Education Is Failing Reading, Where Is the Blame?

The current SOR climate surrounding public education in the U.S. has its roots, ironically, in misreading (or at least reading uncritically) A Nation at Risk, a report during the Ronald Reagan administration that was widely reported by mainstream media. The politically driven and deeply flawed report also prompted the accountability movement in the U.S.—state standards and high-stakes testing—that eventually enveloped the entire country by the 1990s.

The report established a false but compelling cultural truism that is too rarely interrogated: Public schools in the U.S. are failing. Since the early 1980s, political leadership has decided that the failure is due to a lack of accountability, but accountability of whom or what has shifted over the past 40 years.

The first blame narrative focused on students and schools, ushering in high-stakes testing at 3rd grade, 8th grade, and high school (exit exams) as well as school and district report cards. Eventually high-stakes accountability of students and schools seemed not to change the measurable outcomes that advocates had promised; there were also unintended consequences such as exit exams increasing the number of students not completing high school.

Gradually after No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the blame narrative moved to teachers, in part driven by George W. Bush’s popularizing the slogan “soft bigotry of low expectations,” the rise of charter schools embracing “no excuses,” and the same messages and buy-in for Bush era education policy by Barack Obama’s administration and Department of Education. For about a decade the blame narrative focused on teachers, and political leaders rushed to intensify teacher evaluation, notably the use of value-added methods (VAM). Once again, the outcomes promised by advocates did not come to fruition. Eventually, in fact, the tide turned against the use of VAM and other types of punitive teacher evaluations (ASA, 2014).

The vacuum left in the blame narrative did not remain long. Concurrent with the SOR movement that claims public school teachers are not teaching reading guided by the SOR is the next round of blame—teacher education. The blame narrative makes for strange bedfellows. While mainstream media have begun to blame teacher education consistently, a leading literacy professional organization, the International Literacy Association (ILA), reinforced the story as well. Education Week has led this charge; for example, Madeline Will (2020):

Decades of research have shown that teaching explicit, systematic phonics is the most reliable way to make sure that young students learn how to read words. Yet an Education Week analysis of nationally representative survey results found that professors who teach early-reading courses are introducing the work of researchers and authors whose findings and theories often conflict with one another, including some that may not be aligned with the greater body of scientific research.

EdWeek‘s survey data were confirmed, it seemed, by ILA’s survey data: 60% of respondents claim their teacher education programs did not prepare them well to teach reading (Top takes, 2020).

First, we should pause at media and professional organizations citing survey data while also embracing a very rigid and narrow demand for SOR. Survey data have many problems, and in this case, we may want to know if disgruntled teachers (and disgruntled for many valid reasons unrelated to teacher preparation or literacy) were disproportionately motivated to reply. None the less, it is quite a different thing to say “60% of respondents claimed X” than “60% of teachers claimed X.” Are these survey data representative of all teachers of reading?

Let’s assume this is true, that more than half of teachers charged with reading instruction believe they are not properly prepared to teach reading. But let’s also unpack how that came to be, and ultimately answer in a fair way, where the blame rests.

For the past 30-40 years, teachers and teacher educators have had less and less professional autonomy; or stated a different way, the professional autonomy of teachers and teacher educators has been reduced to how well they can address mandated standards and produce measurable outcomes that prove those standards were addressed and effective. In the high-stakes accountability era, then, if we are going to accept that 60% of teachers were not well prepared in their teacher education programs, we must be willing to acknowledge that those programs were governed most often by the accreditation process. Organizations such as NCATE and CAEP have been holding teacher education accountable along with the coordination of professional organizations (often generating tensions between accountability and teacher autonomy).

How teacher education approached literacy broadly and reading specifically was grounded in standards designed by ILA (elementary) and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) (secondary), and those programs were periodically monitored by ILA and NCTE for if or how well the programs met those standards. If we currently believe that the teaching of reading in our public schools is failing our students, we must also acknowledge that teachers are implementing state standards of reading and preparing students for state tests of reading; those teachers were also taught how to teach in teacher education programs implementing national standards determined by ILA and NCTE under duress to produce measurable student outcomes linked to state-mandated standards and high-stakes testing.

Accepting the survey data as valid, then, the blame for these failures rests at least in part in the accountability and accreditation process, of which teachers and teacher educators are mere agents. After being a classroom teacher of ELA for 18 years and then a teacher educator for the last 24 years, I believe I have a strong and well-informed view of what is happening. This is a better explanation, but not a simple one that the media would prefer or a politically expedient one that politicians would prefer.

Education has never been the type of failure proclaimed by A Nation at Risk, and a lack of accountability was never the cause of what the true failures in education were then and are today. Formal education reflects and a perpetuates inequity in the U.S. Public schools are not game changers. Therefore, it is true that far too many students are not being taught to read well enough, and that on balance, public education is failing far too many students.

Counter to the story being sold, however, those failures are about inequity—inequity of opportunities both outside and inside schools that disproportionately impacts poor students, Black and brown students, multi-lingual learners, and special needs students (populations the SOR movement has correctly identified as being under-served). And as jumbled as the journey has been, the logic experiment I offer above reaches a credible conclusion: the accountability era has failed and once again disproportionately impacting vulnerable populations of students.

But accreditation has failed just as much. Accountability grounded in standards and high-stakes assessment is not conducive to teaching, learning, or scholarship. As a former K-12 classroom teacher, I can attest to that fact; as a teacher educator, I can confirm that the bureaucracy surrounding compliance with accreditation and certification mandates often dilute my courses and overburden my professional work to the exclusion of scholarship and research as well as teaching. Accountability structures are disproportionately bureaucracy within a political system, and thus can be a distraction from effective teaching, learning, or professional behavior.

While I am frustrated with mainstream media misrepresenting reading and reading instruction, I am concerned with the necessity for professional organizations such as ILA and NCTE to work within and through the political bureaucracy of accountability, accreditation, and certification because of the necessary tensions related to accountability and teacher autonomy. Those professional organizations are put into no-win situations similar to the experiences of K-12 teachers and teacher educators. The result is well intentioned and hard-working professionals often work against our bests interests.

Here, then, is a larger lesson of this entire four-decades mess: Let’s stop looking for people to scapegoat in the blame narrative, and recognize instead that systems are failing us, especially when we are complying to them. Professional autonomy for K-12 teachers and teacher educators is a process we have not tried, but one far more likely to give our schools and our students a better chance if we also acknowledge that social and educational equity need the same financial and administrative focus we have given accountability since the early 1980s.

Teacher Educators and the Politics of Resisting Systemic Failure

Media and political stories have for decades perpetuated a story of student, teacher, and school failure. The current SOR movement has expanded the false story of the “bad teacher” by blaming “bad” teacher educators for producing reading teachers ill equipped to serve the most vulnerable students in our schools. The effectiveness of these myths depends on maintaining the blame gaze on individuals to mask systemic failures and the politics of calling for no politics.

What often appears to be student or teacher failure, however, is the negative consequences of failed systems. Both the larger inequity of society and schooling combined with the inherently flawed accountability paradigm constitutes the cause agents for the outcomes (almost always high-stakes testing data) used to determine student achievement. If we want something to change, then, teacher educators must assume a political stance against systemic failures, and part of that stance must include preparing future (and current) teachers also to assume a political stance.

At mid-twentieth century, Lou LaBrant (1952), who would soon after serve as president of NCTE, wrote on English Journal: “When I finished college my teachers thought I was ‘prepared to teach English’” (p. 345). Yet, what she recognized, and advocated for in this article, was a need for change: “It is time to examine the patched and worn bottles into which we have put this magnificent, live wine of language” (p. 347). I suspect, if LaBrant were still with us today, she would make the same call for how we prepare our teachers in the 2020s, acknowledging that to have different outcomes, we need to change the systems that overwhelmingly cause those outcomes.

Teacher educators, to be change agents, must embrace a new politics of resisting systemic failures, which have been unfairly portrayed as “bad teachers.” We are in the same place of crisis and reform after forty years of accountability linked to standards and testing, all of which has driven repeated cycles of new standards for certification and accreditation. Those systems have not only failed but have distracted from the sort of systemic reform needed to address the inequity of living and schooling that guarantees failure. For all teachers, our only option is a new politics of teacher education and teaching.

References

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ASA statement on using value-added models for educational assessment. (2014, April 8). American Statistical Association. https://www.amstat.org/asa/files/pdfs/POL-ASAVAM-Statement.pdf

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Aukerman, M. (2022b). The Science of Reading and the media: Does the media draw on high-quality reading research? Literacy Research Association Critical Conversations. CC BY 4.0 license. https://literacyresearchassociation.org/stories/the-science-of-reading-and-the-media-does-the-media-draw-on-high-quality-reading-research/

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Loveless, T. (2023, June 11). Literacy and NAEP proficient (blog post). Tom Loveless. https://tomloveless.com/posts/literacy-and-naep-proficient/

Loveless, T. (2016, June 13). The NAEP proficiency myth. Brookings. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2016/06/13/the-naep-proficiency-myth/

Maroun, J., & Tienken, C.H. (2024). The pernicious predictability of state-mandated tests of academic achievement in the United States. Education Sciences, 14(2), 129-142. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci14020129

Mervosh, S. (2023, December 10). Who runs the best U.S. schools? It may be the Defense Department. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/us/schools-pandemic-defense-department.html

National achievement-level results. (n.d.). NAEP Report Card: Reading. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/nation/achievement/?grade=4

Newkirk, T. (2024). The broken logic of “Sold a Story”: A personal response to “The Science of Reading.” Resources section of https://literacyresearchcommons.org/resources/

Pollock, M., & Rogers, J. (2022, January). The conflict campaign: Exploring local experiences of the campaign to ban ‘critical race theory’ in public k–12 education in the u.s., 2020–2021. IDEA. https://idea.gseis.ucla.edu/publications/the-conflict-campaign/

Quinn, R. (2023, September 14). Faculty gender pay disparities persist, even at Vassar. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/diversity-equity/2023/09/14/faculty-gender-pay-disparities-persist-even-vassar

Reinking, D., Hruby, G.G., & Risko, V.J. (2023). Legislating phonics: Settle science of political polemic? Teachers College Record. https://doi.org/10.1177/01614681231155688

Rigell, A., Banack, A., Maples, A., Laughter, J., Broemmel, A., Vines, N., & Jordan, J. (2022, November). Overwhelming whiteness: A critical analysis of race in a scripted reading curriculum. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 54(6), 852–870, https://doi.org10.1080/00220272.2022.2030803

State achievement-level results. (n.d.). NAEP Report Card: Reading. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reading/states/achievement/?grade=4

Teacher prep review: Strengthening elementary reading instruction. (2023, June). The National Council on Teacher Quality. https://www.nctq.org/dmsView/Teacher_Prep_Review_Strengthening_Elementary_Reading_Instruction

Thomas, P. L. (2010) “Of rocks and hard places—The challenge of Maxine Greene’s mystification in teacher education.” Journal of Educational Controversy 5(1). https://cedar.wwu.edu/jec/vol5/iss1/10

Thomas, P.L. (2024a, 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. (2024b, 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

Thomas, P.L. (2025, July 28). There is no literacy crisis in the U.S. Here’s what’s really happening. The Washington Post. https://wapo.st/474j758

Thomas, P.L. (2024c, 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. (2024d, 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. (2023a, September). NEPC review: Teacher prep review: Strengthening elementary reading instruction. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. https://nepc.colorado.edu/review/teacher-prep

Thomas, P.L. (2023b). The Science of Reading era: Seeking the “science” in yet another anti-teacher movement. Journal of Reading Recovery, 22(5), 5-17. https://readingrecovery.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/JRR_22-2_spring_2023_thomas.pdf

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

Tierney, R.J., & Pearson, P.D. (2024). Fact-checking the Science of Reading: Opening up the conversation. Literacy Research Commons. https://literacyresearchcommons.org

Top takeaways from the 2020: What’s hot in literacy report. (2020). International Literacy Association. https://www.literacyworldwide.org/docs/default-source/resource-documents/whatshottoptakeaways_2020_final.pdf

Will, M. (2022, August 22). The gap between teacher pay and other professions hits a new high. how bad is it? Education Week. https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/the-gap-between-teacher-pay-and-other-professions-hits-a-new-high-how-bad-is-it/2022/08

Will, M. (2020). Preservice teachers are getting mixed messages on how to teach reading. Education Week. https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/preservice-teachers-are-getting-mixed-messages-on-how-to-teach-reading/2020/01

[1] Sections of this essay are adapted from blog posts by the author.

Education, Teacher Autonomy, Teaching

Recommended: Teacher Education: Time to listen to the experts again (UK)

In the US, teacher education as well as teachers have suffered a long history of low respect and support.

A significant aspect of that dynamic, I think, is that the profession in over 70% women.

During the accountability reform movement since the early 1980s, teacher education and teachers have been held accountable without having the autonomy to set the conditions for teaching and learning needed for success.

Here I recommend a new report from the UK: Teacher Education: Time to listen to the experts again.

During the recent rise in “science of” education reform, teacher autonomy and teacher education have been even more significantly eroded, notably with increased education legislation and the shift to scripted curriculum and programs (specifically in reading).

Here are further pieces to consider along with the new report above:

Dyslexia, Education, education reform, Educational Research, grade retention, literacy, reading, Science of Reading, teacher preparation, Teaching

“Science” as Bad Faith Bullying

[Header Photo by jesse orrico on Unsplash]

The more things change, the more things stay the same.

Especially in America.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, set in the 1920s, centers the story on a few rich characters—Tom and Daisy Buchanan, who have “old” money, as well as Jay Gatsby, representing the nouveau riche.

At the cusp of 2024 and 2025, a century later, one page from the novel seems disturbingly relevant:

In this scene, Fitzgerald uses Buchanan to portray the rise of scientific racism in the US. The scientific racism era in the early 20th century is but one of many examples of how “science” can be used by bad faith actors to promote an ideological agenda.

It isn’t his fault, Buchanan seems to suggest, that he is among the superior white Western civilization: “‘It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.'”

In recent years in the US, navigating science, proof, and science skepticism has reach a level of complexity that defies postmodern thought. Simultaneously, we may be living in the most advanced era of scientific knowledge along side a rising and powerful science-skepticism era.

Vaccination deniers, flat Earthers, and Covid conspiracy theorists have increasingly prominent voices and policy influence due to social media, and the Trump era certainly has eroded how most people understand and what counts as “proven” science.

“Science” as Bad Faith Bullying: Education Edition

Concurrent to the larger political and cultural problems with “science” and science-denial, the education reform movement grounded in the early 1980s accountability movement has adopted “science” as a bad faith bullying approach to reform.

The “science of reading” (SOR) movement [1], essentially driven by conservative ideology, exploded around 2018 under the first Trump administration, and now, SOR has spawned a series of “science of” companion movements—the “science of math,” “the science of learning,” etc.

We may have reached peak “science” as bad faith bullying, however, with a law suit against Heinemann and a few reading programs [2] disproportionately attacked and scapegoated by Emily Hanford and much of mainstream media: “The suit alleges ‘deceptive and fraudulent marketing and sale of products and services which are undermining a fundamental social good: literacy.'”

If this weren’t yet another personal attack on a few literacy leaders and potentially significant waste of time and money to navigate the nonsense of this legal move, it would be funny since the SOR movement itself is practicing exactly what the suit accuses Heinemann of doing, “fraudulent marketing and sale of products.”

Let’s start with the foundational argument among SOR advocates that teaching practices must be grounded only in practices supported by experimental/quasi-experimental research published in peer review publications, as argued by The Reading League:

While I think these standards are too narrow for real-world practice, this is in fact the basis upon which SOR advocates (and the substance of the law suit) rest sweeping and misleading claims about a range of discounted practices labeled as either whole language or balanced literacy (SOR advocates both interchange and mischaracterize these terms repeatedly along with misrepresenting other terminology such as “three cueing”).

Further, the SOR movement has adopted an old and inaccurate assertion about “science,” echoing Tom’s “‘it’s been proved.'”

Similar to the reading crisis rhetoric from 1961—when Walcutt announces: “We have said that no further ‘research’ into methods of reading instruction is necessary” (p. 141)—Hanford and Moates proclaimed SOR “settled science” in 2018 (and we must note Moates has a huge market interest in these claims as author of LETRS, see below):

However, the “science” in reading research is not settled, and the SOR movement, as I stated above, is committed to a “deceptive and fraudulent marketing and sale of products and services”; as I have shown repeatedly, the SOR movement is itself grounded in a plan from 2014 to brand “structure literacy” to “help us sell what we do so well.”

That plan has included exaggerated attacks on some reading programs, some literacy leaders, and some literacy practices while simultaneously endorsing different programs and some practices that are also not supported by SOR’s mandate for a narrow type of “science.”

For example, in a literature review of the current status of SOR from 2022, note that practices either ineffective or lacking scientific support include those rejected by SOR and those embraced by SOR; while this lit review identified “three cueing” as not supported by science as SOR advocates claims, it also lists decodable texts and multisensory approaches (such as Orton-Gillingham), practices and programs aggressively supported by SOR advocates and legislation:

That pattern is standard practice in the SOR movement, including the false attack on teacher education and teacher knowledge being used as “science” as bad faith bullying to sell LETRS.

LETRS falls into the “ineffective and currently unsupported” category as well since only a few studies exist, showing no improvement in student reading.

The SOR movement has also adopted slogans not supported by science (95% of students can be proficient readers) and practices that inflate test scores, target and harm marginalized groups of students, but are not supported by research (grade retention, which seems to be the sole SOR policy impacting test scores).

The “science of” era of education reform is not about improving instruction or student learning. The movement uses “science” as a Trojan horse for de-professionalizing teaching and teachers (selling scripted curriculum) while clearing market space for a new round of “fraudulent marketing and sale of products.”

The law suit is another example showing this “science of” education reform movement is more bad faith bullying than a credible avenue to better supporting teachers and better serving students as readers and learners.

Once again, don’t buy it.

[1] See We Teach English in Times of Perpetual Crisis: Selling a Story of Reading (and Literacy) [Webinar Companion Post]: “Also when I address the SOR movement, I am not contesting reading science or valid concerns about reading instruction or reading proficiency by students. I am challenging the media story being sold.”

[2] I reject adopting any reading programs and maintain that the reading-program-merry-go-round is the problem, not the solution to reading achievement.

Recommended

How Media Misinformation Became “Holy Text”: The Anatomy of the SOR Movement

English Journal Series: We Teach English in Times of Perpetual Crisis

Recommended: Elena Aydarova on Science of Reading Reform

Recommended: Dr. Elana Aydarova. Science of Reading Mythologies

Teaching, Writing

How to Write Like a Scholar (and Not Like a Student)

[Header Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash]

Having taught now an on-going 41 years—about half that time as a high school English teacher and now a college professor—if there is one thing I know very well, it is the student.

While I love teaching and my students, there is also one thing I have worked diligently to discourage, young people in classrooms performing like students.

Most student behavior is artificial (hand raising to speak, sitting in neat rows, walking in single-file lines) and often dehumanizing (asking permission to go to the bathroom). And since the core of my work as a teacher has focused on teaching writing, few aspects of being a student are worse than writing like a student.

Much of my writing instruction focuses on moving students away from writing like students and toward writing like scholars (or, ideally, like writers).

While I cringe a bit focusing with the negative, let’s consider what writing like a student looks like (and what young writers should avoid):

Starting essays with and punctuating the discussion throughout with Big Claims that are often inaccurate or mostly empty and then nearly never proven or cited.

One of the best examples of this rhetorical patterns is from The Onion: “For as far back as historians can go, summer vacations have been celebrated by people everywhere as a time for rest and relaxation.”

Many students are drawn to the “throughout history” claims or framing a topic as “people have always debated,” “many people today debate,” or this topic is “controversial.” Scholars and writers avoid the Big Claims and especially the “throughout history,” “debate,” or “controversy” framing of a topic.

Student writing is often too big and overstated while scholars tend to work in very small and nuanced spaces around a topic; students seek to draw definitive and black-and-white conclusions while scholars deal in questions to be considered and reach tentative conclusions that are qualified.

Writing about doing the writing or research assignment.

Student papers are often filled with references to being a student writing an essay: “The sources I analyzed show,” “In the essay, I am going to,” “The research that I found explains,” “Most of the sources used,” “Many articles and papers done on these topics,” etc.

While there may be some charm to this accidental postmodernist approach to writing (alas, most students are not Kurt Vonnegut intruding on his own fiction narrative), for students, these meta-writing rhetorical moves do not accomplish anything substantive for the purpose of the essay or the content; these phrases simply add to the word count as empty calories.

For example consider the following and the revision (by removing the meta-writing, the word counts drops, and the writing is more direct and clear):

Student writing: Extensive scientific research has been conducted to determine if ADHD is the result of genetics or environmental factors. While this research has shown some correlation between certain genes or environmental factors and the onset of ADHD, the results remain inconclusive (Thapar et al., 2012).

Revised: While some correlation exists between certain genes or environmental factors and the onset of ADHD, the results remain inconclusive (Thapar et al., 2012).

[Note that students can and should use “I” in writing when first person is appropriate and drives the content and purpose of the essay. Typically, students are apt to use “I” in empty and performative ways instead of powerfully and appropriately.]

In cited writing assignments, producing a very narrow form of the “research paper.”

I now include on essay assignments “Do not write a research paper on …” as part of the assignment. The artificial “research paper” that many students have acquired from K-12 schooling is a mechanical and prompted essay form that results in students writing about their sources instead of writing a purposeful essay with a clear audience: “One article I read pushed for dialogue in their congregational community surrounding the mental health of black parishioners.”

Also, as another example: “John Dewey (1953) wrote a book about progressive education. In his book, Dewey (1953) states, ‘The educator is responsible for a knowledge of individuals and for a knowledge of subject-matter that will enable activity ties to be selected which lend themselves to social organization, an organization in which all individuals have an opportunity to contribute something, and in which the activities in which all participate are the chief carrier of control’ (pp. 23-24).”

Many students simply walk the reader through their “sources” one-by-one, essentially writing about their sources and not their topic. This includes text that increases word count and nothing else, empty calories: “Various studies and scholarly research conducted surrounding the pipeline expose the oppressive and discriminatory systems and beliefs involving law enforcement and unforgiving disciplinary policies within schools that are continually pushing students, especially students of color, out of schools.”

Consider a more direct and powerful version: “Oppressive and discriminatory systems and beliefs involving law enforcement and unforgiving disciplinary policies within schools are continually pushing students, especially students of color, out of schools.”

Excessive or inappropriate quoting.

You may be noticing a trend here since a great deal of what makes something “student writing” increases word count without contributing to the content of the writing.

Excessive and inappropriate quoting is a hallmark of student writing grounded in learning to cite and provide evidence in their writing primarily in their high school English classes where they are using MLA and often doing textual analysis (literary analysis).

Students have learned in the context of literary analysis for English courses that the (only) way to prove a point is by quoting. This is essentially true when writing textual analysis, but students turn that into a universal technique whereby they quote excessively from sources in all types of writing.

And thus, students (as noted above) simply write about their sources, quoting excessively from each and providing little of their own thoughts and almost no synthesis of information. One of the most ineffective but common examples is the floating quote in which the student as writer never exists: “’A democratic and inclusive sexuality education balances risk and resiliency and recognizes that they are on a continuum and are influenced by social and cultural factors in the environment’ (Elia & Eliason, p. 25).”

Scholars, when writing in forms and purposes other than textual analysis, tend to quote rarely or not at all; when quoting in scholarly writing that isn’t textual analysis, the guideline is something like quote when the “how” of the passage is as powerful as the “what.”

We may be justified in quoting James Baldwin while not so much when using information from a peer-reviewed journal articles on social mobility or racism in policing.

Mechanical essay form and thesis sentences (declarative and conclusive statements).

If you have been wondering, the 5-paragraph essay is alive and well. Students overwhelmingly believe an introduction is one paragraph that ends with a declarative thesis statement, that essay bodies have three paragraphs or sections to correlate with the three points in that thesis, and that the conclusion is one paragraph that, yes, restates the thesis.

At no point of a student’s development is a 5-paragraph essay justifiable; it is the paint-by-numbers of composition. It is not just bad writing, it is also bad thinking.

Scholars write all sorts of essay forms and construct them around much broader concepts of openings, bodies, and closing with the thesis focus often in the form of questions to be considered and not definitive assertions made at the beginning and then proven.

As with many of the examples so far, the 5-paragraph essay template is a distraction for the student-as-writer, focusing their writing on filling in the template and not addressing and developing their writing purpose for a clear audience. [As a note, I still have students occasionally label their thesis sentence in their essays.]

Essay purpose/form and audience directed at either at no audience or the teacher/professor.

Related to the 5-paragraph essay template is that students are trapped in the context of writing an essay is a form of assessment that is being assigned and graded by the teacher. As a consequence, the purpose is just doing the assignment, and the audience is either no one in particular or simply for the teacher/professor.

While the essay form for scholarly and academic writing is narrower than the entire array of what we call essays, students must be introduced to the broader essay form that involves them as writers making decisions about how to organize, to engage the readers, and to develop the purpose of the essay.

Some of the elements I introduce is the multiple-paragraph opening and closing, subheadings, the thesis as question(s), and abandoning the closing as a restating of the introduction.

Paragraphing that is very long or lacking purpose.

One thing students as writers simply cannot do is paragraphing. They have lived in a world of prescribed number-of-sentences mandates for paragraphing, and those prescriptions have been, to say the least, really bad guidelines.

Students have learned that longer is better.

While academic and scholarly writing suffer from the long-paragraph syndrome, here I do push students toward how non-academic writers use paragraphing.

Broadly speaking, readers prefer shorter paragraphs (or at least balk at long ones). And fields such as journalism use very short paragraphing.

Since a foundational part of teaching writing for me is students learning to be purposeful instead of following templates and rules, I focus on purposeful and varied paragraphing. We read and examine many effective essays that use one-sentence paragraphs and explore how paragraphing impacts the reader/audience of the text.

Word choice and tone contradicting the content and tone of the essay topic and purpose.

Students as writers are, of course, developing and expanding their vocabulary. But the diction problem that most characterizes student writing is a lack of awareness of tone—using words that have a contradictory tone to the level of seriousness of their topic.

Lots of “thing,” “good,” “bad,” and 8-color crayon box of words when they are exploring complicated and serious issues: “Sex education in the United States is all over the place, and for some students, their sex ed is almost exactly like the students in Mean Girls” or “This article was also pretty on par with the tone of the research papers” or “Because each employee’s salaries are not posted on the front desk for everyone to read, many women don’t even realize they are being gipped until someone blabs during their break at the water cooler or they hear the specifics of their associate’s raise.”

So here we are after a pretty extensive list of what student writing tends to entail. This, by the way, is no criticism of students.

Student writing is a reflection of how students have been taught, assigned, and graded. Students often learn what they are taught despite the hand wringing to the contrary.

I have two thoughts now.

First, students deserve better writing instruction and expectations throughout K-16. That instruction needs to come from teachers who are writers, not just “English teachers,” and more educators need better experiences with being writers themselves (that is the foundation of the National Writing Project).

Next, students are capable of making this transition, although the unlearning is often not fun for them or the instructor.

And thus the paradox remains: I love students but work daily to deprogram them from behaving like students.

See Also

Reading Like a Writer (Scholar): Kingsolver’s “Making Peace”

Teaching, Writing

Fostering Authority in Students as Writers

[Header Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash]

Over my 40-year (so far) career as a teacher, I have spent the bulk of that time teaching adolescents and adults to write.

An inordinate amount of that effort focuses on a great deal of unlearning since many writing assignments for students are exclusively student behaviors, not authentic practices or producing authentic artifacts.

This semester I am teaching two first-year writing seminars and an upper-level writing/research course. All of these students are in the midst of submitting cited essays.

This is the time of unlearning the “research paper.”

For the upper-level course, students work through an authentic process of choosing a topic, searching for their primary and secondary sources, submitting an annotated bibliography, and then submitting a cited essay (an analysis of media coverage of an educational topic).

Throughout that process, I note that, for example, the annotated bibliography is for them, a sort of prewriting of the cited essay (not an assignment to submit for a grade). This is an effort to lay the foundation for an authentic process of writing an original analysis grounded in evidence.

Despite my repeated warnings, students in this course still often turn in a first submission that is not a media analysis but a “research paper” on the educational topic. For example, instead of submitting their original analysis of how the media covers dyslexia, they submit a “research paper” on dyslexia.

Concurrent with that assignment, my first-year students are preparing their first formally cited essay (using APA). The essay before this assignment requires them to cite using hyperlinks, again emphasizing an authentic and more common approach to evidence in the world outside of formal schooling.

For both first-year and upper-level students, however, the urge to write a reductive and stilted “research paper” is deeply engrained from their K-12 schooling.

One consequence of that artificial experience and template is extremely cumbersome style that includes students writing about their “sources” instead of using their sources as either the focus of their analysis or evidence for their claims.

For example, these sorts of sentences are common:

  • Extensive scientific research has been conducted to determine if ADHD is the result of genetics or environmental factors. While this research has shown some correlation between certain genes or environmental factors and the onset of ADHD, the results remain inconclusive (Thapar et al., 2012).
  • Various studies and scholarly research conducted surrounding the pipeline expose the oppressive and discriminatory systems and beliefs involving law enforcement and unforgiving disciplinary policies within schools that are continually pushing students, especially students of color out of schools.
  • One article I read pushed for dialogue in their congregational community surrounding the mental health of black parishioners.
  • Journalists for mainstream media sources have argued that standardized testing adds a lot of stress and without many benefits.
  • Published scholarly work has concluded that testing is necessary, and journalists Donnelly (2015) and Silva (2013) back up these views.

This sort of meta-writing—identifying that scholars do research, treating the sources for an assignment as “my sources,” acknowledging that the student has done the research or reading—is a failure of the students to understand both the nature of cited writing and their own obligation as a writer of scholarship.

The upper-level course has a very challenging assignment that requires students to understand different types of sources and to write in different styles within the cited essay.

For these students, they have to gather evidence of media coverage of an education topic (the primary evidence of their analysis) while also having a body of scholarly sources that serve as the foundation of that analysis.

The brief literature reviews forces them to focus on the patterns in those scholarly articles, which provides the lens for analyzing the media coverage.

In the media analysis and evaluation sections, then, students must incorporate textual analysis, which requires a much greater sophistication than the examples above.

Here is the expanded guide I have created for those students to navigate the stylistic shifts and the use of evidence in cited essays:

Media Analysis Guidelines (EDU 250)

For 8-10 pages, a proposed structure:

Opening – about 1 page (2-4 paragraphs); be sure to include essay focus on media

[ ] Open with a specific narrative that focuses reader on your educational topic (and possibly use a media example).

[ ] Prefer shorter paragraphs (throughout essay).

[ ] Thesis must focus on media analysis. Prefer identifying questions you will answer about media portrayal of educational topic. [Do not refer to “the literature” or “research.”]

Literature Review – 2 pages; focus on *patterns* in the sources (write about your topics, not the sources); must be fully cited (prefer synthesis and avoid presenting one source at a time) and address all scholarly sources included in references

[ ] Discuss the patterns found in the scholarly evidence. [Do not refer to “the literature” or “research.”]

[ ] Do not write about your “sources”; write about what the evidence shows concerning your educational topic.

[ ] Primarily focus on a synthesis of your scholarly sources; do not walk through one source at a time.

[ ] All scholarly sources must be included, and you must fully cite using APA.

Media Analysis – 2 pages; focus on *patterns* in the media and include several examples; directly identify media outlets and journalists

[ ] Discuss the patterns found in media coverage of your educational topic.

[ ] Identify journalists and media sources specifically; choose some key quotes to show readers evidence of media coverage patterns.

[ ] Must cite fully in APA.

Media Evaluation (identify if media claims are valid or not) – 2 pages; this is the most important goal of the essay so evaluate the media coverage by implementing your knowledge of the scholarship (do not refer to “research” or “sources”); must be fully cited

[ ] This is the key section where you show whether or not the media coverage is valid (supported by research) or not. You must connect media patterns with the scholarly research.

[ ] Do not refer to “my sources,” the “research,” or the “literature.” Use your scholarly sources to evaluate media coverage.

[ ] Must fully cite throughout in APA.

Closing/Conclusion – about 1 page (2-4 paragraphs); must emphasize essay focus, media analysis

[ ] Return to a concrete or specific example from media.

[ ] Maintain focus on media analysis and give your reader something to do with your analysis/evaluation.

This assignment seeks to offer students an experience with what is common in academic and scholarly writing (graduate-level work and published scholarship). The assignment guidelines are too much of a template for my liking, but I am aware that many real-world scholarly works conform to such template or narrow guidelines (see this work of mine written to a strict template).

For both my first-year and my upper-level students, however, what I am seeking is how to foster in them greater autonomy and authority as writers and scholars.

My students’ cited essays are never called “research papers,” students always have choice about topics for their essays and must generate their own thesis/focus for the assignment, and my feedback supports these students incorporating evidence (sources) as ways to build their authority as writer and scholars.

For example, we work on fairly simple stylistic shifts that create authority and move cited essays beyond the research paper:

From this:

Research has shown that standardized testing interferes with both teaching and learning, increases student frustration, and leads to a classroom mindset focused more on grades than on actual learning of material (Wilson, 2022).

To this:

Standardized testing interferes with both teaching and learning, increases student frustration, and leads to a classroom mindset focused more on grades than on actual learning of material (Wilson, 2022).

Students have far too many experiences at the K-12 level that use inauthentic writing assignments (such as the “research paper”) as a mechanism for assessing if students have acquired skills—finding and analyzing sources, implementing academic citation, etc.

Those approaches have the goals reversed.

Students as developing writers and scholars need to acquire those skills in the service of their writing and expression; the cited essay is the thing we are seeking, and their authority as writers/scholars is the most important aspect of our feedback and (if necessary) assessment.

Can a student organize and focus an examination of a topic or idea in ways that are compelling and grounded in valid claims?

To do that well, academic and scholarly writing demands citation that serves to support the authority of the writer.

Ultimately, the urge in students to write about their sources is a reflection of their not yet understanding their autonomy as humans, writers, or scholars.

Students as writers must be allowed the full experiences of being a writer and thinker, guided of course by teachers of writing. But we as teachers of writing often do far too much for the student and ask far too little of those students.

Few students will move on from formal schooling and be academic or scholarly writers. What we must provide them with, then, is writing experiences that support their coming to embrace their autonomy and authority as thinkers along with the ability to express themselves in ways that are credible and compelling.

Thomas, P.L. (2019). Teaching writing as journey, not destination: Essays exploring what “teaching writing” means. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.

Education, Teaching, Testing, Writing

Teaching Writing: Reconsidering Genre (Again)

[Header Photo by David Pupăză on Unsplash]

My midterm exam for first-year writing invites students to interview a professor in a discipline they are considering as a major. The discussion is designed to explore those professors as researchers and writers.

On exam day, we have small and whole-class discussions designed to discover the wide variety of activities that count as research in various disciplines, and more importantly, what writing as a scholar looks like across disciplines.

The outcomes of this activity are powerful since students learn that research and writing are context-based and far more complicated that they learned in K-12 schooling.

Two points that I often emphasize are, first, that many (if not most) of the professors confess that they do not like to write, and second, I help them see that a profoundly important distinction between their K-12 teachers and professors is that professors practice the fields they teach.

This brings me to two posts on Twitter (X):

First, Luther is confronting a foundational failure of K-12 writing instruction—students being taught the “4 Types/Genres of Writing” (narration, description, exposition, persuasion).

That framing is deeply misleading and overly simplistic, but that framing is grounded in two realities: most K-12 teachers who teach writing are not writers, and the so-called “4 Types/Genres of Writing” are rooted in the rise of state-level accountability testing of writing (not any authentic or research-based approach to teaching composition).

Second, so I don’t appear to be beating up unfairly on K-12 teachers (I was one for 18 years and love K-12 teachers), Dowell is then confronting the often careless and reductive ways in which “academic writing” is both taught and even practiced (academic norms of published writing ask very little of scholars as writers and even impose reductive templates that cause lifeless and garbled writing).

The 1980s and 1990s saw a rise in state accountability testing that asked very little of students. The “4 Types/Genres of Writing” quickly supplanted the gains made with authentic writing instruction grounded in writer’s workshop and the influence of the National Writing Project in the 1970s and 1980s.

Those writing tests prompted students to write narrative or expository essays (for example) that were only a few paragraphs long (likely the 5-paragraph essay). These were scored based on state-developed rubrics that teachers taught to throughout the year.

In other words, as Gerald Bracey warned, writing instruction became almost exclusively teaching to the test. And since K-12 teachers of writers were primarily not writers themselves, this reductive and mechanical way to teach and assess writing was rarely challenged.

Let’s be blunt. K-12 teachers not resisting this dynamic is a logical response to an impossible learning and teaching environment that is dominated by accountability and high-stakes testing.

My criticism is that teachers and students were (and are) put in this situation; I am not criticizing teachers and students, who are the victims of the accountability era of education reform.

Further, while students who move from K-12 to higher ed discover that their K-12 preparation in writing is inadequate and often deeply misleading for how they are expected to write in academia, this new situation is not some idealistic wonderland of authentic writing (as Dowell confronts).

The K-12 to higher ed transition makes students feel unfairly jerked around (many are exasperated when they find out they didn’t need to “memorize” MLA and may never use it again), but navigating academic expectations for writing is equally frustrating (one first-year student this spring noted that my first-year writing seminar is unique, they said, because I teach writing while other professors simply assign and grade writing).

Students deserve better at both the K-12 and higher ed levels so here I want to offer a few thoughts on how to move past the traps I have noted above about teaching writing.

I highly recommend Genre awareness for the novice academic student: An ongoing quest by Ann Johns.

Johns argues for fostering “genre awareness” (addressing in complex and authentic ways Dowell’s concern) and not “genre acquisition” (for example, the reductive “4 Types/Genres of Writing” approach):

The first is GENRE ACQUISITION, a goal that focuses upon the students’ ability to reproduce a text type, often from a template, that is organized, or ‘staged’ in a predictable way. The Five Paragraph Essay pedagogies, so common in North America, present a highly structured version of this genre acquisition approach.

A quite different goal is GENRE AWARENESS, which is realized in a course designed to assist students in developing the rhetorical flexibility necessary for adapting their socio-cognitive genre knowledge to ever-evolving contexts. …After my many years of teaching novice tertiary students who follow familiar text templates, usually the Five Paragraph Essay, and who then fail when they confronted different types of reading and writing challenges in their college and university classrooms, I have concluded that raising genre awareness and encouraging the abilities to research and negotiate texts in academic classrooms should be the principal goals for a novice literacy curriculum (Johns 1997).

Genre awareness for the novice academic student:
An ongoing quest

Here I think is an outstanding graphic (Johns draws from Bhatia) of moving past confusing modes of writing (narration, description, exposition, persuasion) with genres of writing (OpEd, memoir, meta-analysis, literature review, etc.):

At both the K-12 and higher ed levels, then, teaching writing has been reduced to serving something other than students—either the mandates of high-stakes testing or the nebulous and shifting expectations of “academic writing,” which include very dangerous traps such as a maze of citation expectations among disciplines.

My first-year writing students and I are at midterm this spring, and we just held our conferences for Essay 2 with a scholarly cited essay looming once we return from spring break.

In those conferences, we have been discussing the huge learning curve they are facing since I ask them to choose their essay topic and thus develop their own thesis within a genre of writing.

They are making all the decisions writers do in authentic contexts.

Before my class, they have had most of their writing prompted, most of their thesis sentences assigned to them, and most of their genre experiences entirely reduced or erased.

So I explain this to them, assuring them that their struggles are reasonable and not a product of them failing or being inadequate.

These are new and complex expectations of young writers.

But is the only fair thing to offer them, this experience of becoming a writer as an act of them as humans and not as a performance for a test or to fill in a template.

Recommended

Investigating Zombi(e)s to Foster Genre Awareness

Thomas, P.L. (2019). Teaching writing as journey, not destination: Essays exploring what “teaching writing” means. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.

RECOMMENDED: John Warner’s “Why They Can’t Write”

RECOMMENDED: John Warner’s “The Writer’s Practice”

A Nation at Risk, Big Lies of Education, Crisis, Dyslexia, Education, education reform, Educational Research, Florida Miracle, grade retention, Grit, growth mindset, literacy, Media, miracle schools, NCTQ, No Excuses Reform, Poverty, race, racism, reading, School choice, Science of Reading, Social Context Reform, social justice, Teacher Autonomy, Teacher Evaluation, teacher preparation, Teaching, Testing, VAM

Big Lies of Education: Series

Here I will collect a series dedicated to the Big Lies of Education. The initial list of topics include :

  • A Nation at Risk and education “crisis”
  • Poverty is an excuse in educational achievement
  • 2/3 students not proficient/grade level readers; NAEP
  • Elementary teachers don’t know how to teach reading
  • NRP = settled science
  • Teacher education is not preparing teachers based on science/research
  • Education “miracles”
  • Reading program X has failed
  • Whole language/balanced literacy has failed
  • Systematic phonics necessary for all students learning to read
  • Nonsense word assessments measure reading achievement
  • Reading in US is being taught by guessing and 3 cueing
  • Balanced literacy = guessing and 3 cueing
  • K-3 students can’t comprehend
  • 40% of students are dyslexic/ universal screening for dyslexia needed
  • Grade retention
  • Grit/ growth mindset
  • Parental choice
  • Education is the great equalizer
  • Teacher quality is most important factor in student achievement (VAM)

Series:

Big Lies of Education: A Nation at Risk and Education “Crisis”

Big Lies of Education: Reading Proficiency and NAEP

Big Lies of Education: National Reading Panel (NRP)

Big Lies of Education: Poverty Is an Excuse

Big Lies of Education: International Test Rankings and Economic Competitiveness

Big Lies of Education: “Science of” Era Edition [Access PP PDF Here]

Big Lies of Education: Grade Retention

Big Lies of Education: Growth Mindset and Grit

Big Lies of Education: Word Gap

Education, Merit Pay, Teacher Autonomy, Teacher Evaluation, Teaching, VAM

Education Lies that Won’t Die: Teacher Value

The list is mind-numbingly long—education lies that won’t die.

I have detailed often the standard manufactured crisis/miracle rhetoric surrounding discussions of education in media, among the public, and by politicians.

And currently, the manufactured reading crisis is grounded in the Big Lie about NAEP and reading proficiency.

Many education lies that won’t die are ideological beliefs masquerading as evidence-based claims; two of the most persistent of those involve assertions about teacher value and merit pay schemes.

Of course, teacher value is incredibly important to student learning; however, this argument is misleading at best, at worst a lie: “Research has shown that the number one factor influencing individual student achievement is the quality of the teacher in the classroom.”

It is an incredibly compelling misrepresentation of the data available, primarily because it appears to support the value of teachers.

Yet, the evidence over many years shows that measurable student achievement is mostly driven by out-of-school factors (OOS) with in-school factors and teacher quality as a subset of that, both significantly overshadowed by those OOS factors:

Teachers Matter, But So Do Words
ASA Statement on Using Value-Added Models for Educational Assessment (2014)
Family Background Accounts for 40% of SAT/ACT Scores Among UC Applicants

The paradox is that teacher value is very difficult to measure through student achievement tests. Further, claims about teacher value that misrepresent that value force teachers and students into nearly impossible conditions to be successful.

Locally, a district is revisiting value-added efforts to attract and retain teachers in high-poverty, majority-minority school, paired with merit pay schemes (that have been tried multiple times in South Carolina unsuccessfully).

Value-added methods of teacher evaluation and merit pay are ideological commitments, and both are strongly refuted by a large body of evidence.

Simultaneously with these failed schemes, education is increasingly hostile to teachers—parent organizations framing teachers as groomers and indoctrinators along with states and districts trending toward curriculum bans and scripted curriculum that de-professionalize those teachers:

“Phonics Monkeys” and “Real Life Reading”: Heteroglossic Views of a State Reading Initiative

If we genuinely value teachers—and having been in this profession 40 years, I suspect that on balance we do not—we would address teaching and learning conditions (class size, teacher autonomy, etc.) within a larger effort to address social inequity in children’s communities and homes.

Ideology is not evidence, and education, teachers, and students deserve much better than political leaders and administrators using our schools as experiments of that ideology—especially when we have ample evidence that ideology is flawed.

Recommended

VAM: Why Is This Zombie Policy Still Around? Peter Greene

UPDATE

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

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to determine the predictiveness of community and family demographic variables related to the development of student academic background knowledge on the percentage of students who pass a state-mandated, commercially prepared, standardized Algebra 1 test in the state of New Jersey, USA. This explanatory, cross-sectional study utilized quantitative methods through hierarchical regression analysis. The results suggest that family demographic variables found in the United States Census data related to the development of student academic background knowledge predicted 75 percent of schools in which students achieved a passing score on a state standardized high school assessment of Algebra 1. We can conclude that construct-irrelevant variance, influenced in part by student background knowledge, can be used to predict standardized test results. The results call into question the use of standardized tests as tools for policy makers and educational leaders to accurately judge student learning or school quality.

literacy, literature, reading, Teaching

Centering Students in Novel and Play Study

Student knowledge and beliefs about literacy and literature are necessarily a reflection of their teachers’ knowledge and beliefs about literacy and literature.

I teach first-year writing at the university level; much of my work is helping students unlearn and reconsider that knowledge and those beliefs they brings from K-12 education.

Teacher posts on social media are often windows into the misconceptions those students bring to college. I recently fretted for a few days after seeing Advanced Placement teachers refer to book-length nonfiction as “novels,” which triggered a recurring situation when I ask students what novels they read in high school.

The answers often include The Crucible and Shakespeare as well as more recently Between the World and Me—prompting me to note that none of those are novels. Students have mis-learned to call any book assigned and studied in school a “novel,” the seeds of having weak or even flawed understanding of genre (see also here), medium, and mode in reading and writing.

Before I could spend any time on that social media post, however, I came across this:

https://twitter.com/triciaebarvia/status/1700497686317633937?s=20

I agree with both challenges here, but think Anger’s post is way more than a “bad take.” Here are a couple reasons why before a fuller discussion of how to center students in novel and play study.

First, I have little experience that assigning a single novel/play for all students to study under the guidance of the teacher is somehow mostly absent from high school literature classes.

Second, whole class study of novels and plays centers the teacher’s authority (the teacher guides the students through the work and then assesses students on that teacher’s framing of the work) and acquisition of knowledge about a singular work (essentially trivia).

Dropping the whole-class study of assigned novels/plays is not only a needed shift in literature study with students, but also a better approach to fostering student autonomy and healthier beliefs and deeper knowledge about literacy and literature.

One instructional and assessment shift is fostering students’ skills at text analysis instead of knowledge acquisition about a specific text. Traditionally, we assign The Scarlet Letter, walk students through the novel page-by-page, and then test students on knowledge they have retained about that novel.

Instead, we should be giving students multiple experiences interrogating texts and then putting them in new text situations to assess their ability to analyze texts. For example, we can do whole-class instruction on a short text by Hawthorne as preparation for having students analyze a text by Hawthorne students haven’t read before.

The key is not knowing facts about Hawthorne’s canonical novel, but fostering their ability to analyze a text better because they are familiar with that author and have context for anticipating those new texts.

The assigned whole-class novel/play is appealing, I think, because it allows greater control of instruction and, again, centers authority in the teacher and the work being studied. None of that, however, is fostering the sort of autonomy, knowledge, and beliefs students need, and deserve.

In the late 1990s when I was teaching high school AP Literature, I made the switch from assigning whole class novels and plays to complete student choice in the major works my students studied in preparation for the AP Literature exam.

I documented that first experience in English Journal because I learned some key lessons the hard way.

First, this shift requires purposeful and direct instruction that supports students’ ability to choose novels and plays. My students taught me that over a decade of being assigned what to read had failed them as skilled or even eager consumers of works.

Teachers disproportionately do way too much for students (see also the problem with rubrics and writing prompts) and inculcate compliance over agency and autonomy.

Finally, let’s consider how making the shift away from whole-class assigned novels and plays can be navigated by teachers despite the valid challenges that poses.

Novel/play knowledge and instructional strategies are often the two most pressing concerns for teachers accustomed to traditional novel/play study.

Yes, I have had students choose novels/plays I had not read (but often read eventually because students chose them) but that in no way hindered my ability to offer instruction or assess their work. In fact, when students are allowed to be the authority on a text, they often are more fully engaged in both reading and understanding the work.

Next, allowing students tethered choice in texts can fit into traditional practices.

The primary structure of novel/play study grounded in student choice and agency is that I designed thematic units within which students chose their works (tethered choice).

For example, one unit was Black writers and the lives of Black Americans. Students had to choose and justify a novel within that theme (we focused on works that helped prepare them for the AP exam, for example, but in any class the purpose must be established for studying the work—understanding American literature or preparation for college, etc.).

Next, for each work the student chooses, they had to build a resource folder on that work by doing searches in the library; these resource folders had literary analysis and author material that supported the student’s study but also gave me access to knowledge if I had not read the work.

Now, I think this is the key for teachers concerned about how to conduct instruction.

We still had whole-class discussions around the thematic element, but each student was invited to share their journey through their chosen text. All students, then, were encouraged to connect and contrast as the discussions unfolded.

For example, one student would note the use of flying motifs drawn from African mythology in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, prompting other students to share the use of flying motifs in other works.

These organic connections were much more engaging than when I orchestrated page-by-page analysis of a shared novel or play.

These class discussions were embedded in reading workshop structures that allowed students time in class to read and research as well as conference with me and other students (especially when students chose the same work).

Using these approaches, students read more, were more deeply engaged, and gained much healthier beliefs and richer knowledge.

As teachers, we must constantly interrogate when our commitments are grounded in retaining power and authority versus fostering the autonomy and agency of our students as well as the integrity of our fields of literacy and literature.

Despite social media protestations, I doubt whole-class novel/play study has disappeared from high school literature classes, but I also certain that making the shift away from that and toward student agency would be one of the best developments for those students.

Education, education reform, Educational Research, miracle schools, No Excuses Reform, Poverty, race, racism, Social Context Reform, Teaching, Testing

Moving Beyond the Cult of Pedagogy in Education Reform

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.

ASA Statement on Using Value-Added Models for Educational Assessment (2014)

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.

For example, see the following:

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.