Bessie, Critical Race Theory, Education, Science of Reading, Teacher Evaluation, teacher preparation, Teaching

The Myth of the Bad Teacher: 2023

February 16, 2023 plthomasedd

If you are paying attention to traditional or social media, you are aware of the following stories being told about US public school teachers in 2023:

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.
Elementary, literature/ELA teachers, and history teachers are brainwashing students with CRT.
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 in 2010 during a peak bad teacher movement in the US, Adam Bessie explains about the bad teacher stories represented 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.
The Myth of the Bad Teacher

Bessie 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, in 2023, these myths are not supported by the evidence.

For example, as the authors of a report out of UCLA assert about anti-CRT attacks on teachers:

We put “CRT” in quotation marks throughout this report because so often the conflict campaign’s definition of “CRT” (like its description of actual K–12 practice) is a caricatured distortion by loud opponents as self-appointed “experts.” The conflict campaign thrives on caricature — on often distorting altogether both scholarship and K–12 educators’ efforts at accurate and inclusive education, deeming it (and particularly K–12 efforts to discuss the full scope of racism in our nation) wholly inappropriate for school.
The Conflict Campaign

The bad teacher myth in 2023 “thrives on caricature” and anecdotes that, as noted above, as very compelling but ultimately not only lack credible evidence [1] and logic, but also cause far more harm than good in terms of reforming education, serving student needs, or recruiting and retaining high quality teachers.

The bad teacher myth in 2023 is targeting educators who are 70-90% women, and those teachers under the most intense attacks tend to be elementary teachers who are even more disproportionately women and the lowest paid educators [2]:

Further, there is little evidence that students today are uniquely underperforming in reading achievement, yet the bad reading teacher myth is perpetuated by misrepresenting reading achievement through misleading messages around NAEP reading data (see Hanford’s chart that ironically suggests gradual improvement, not a crisis).

Two problems with the bad reading teacher myth is that NAEP reading proficiency is not grade level reading, as Loveless examines:

NAEP does not report the percentage of students performing at grade level. NAEP reports the percentage of students reaching a “proficient” level of performance. Here’s the problem. That’s not grade level.

In this post, I hope to convince readers of two things:

1. Proficient on NAEP does not mean grade level performance. It’s significantly above that.
2. Using NAEP’s proficient level as a basis for education policy is a bad idea.
The NAEP proficiency myth

And the low levels of reading proficiency are historical, not a recent set of data that constitutes a reading crisis:

If we want to rely on NAEP reading scores, however flawed that metric, the historical patterns suggest a relatively flat state of reading achievement with some trends of improvement in the 1970s (which was followed by the manufactured myth of schools failing with A Nation at Risk [1983]) and steadily from about 1990 until 2012 (an era demonized as a failure due to reliance on balanced literacy).

Notably, the “science of reading” movement tends to be connected to legislation starting around 2013 and Hanford’s journalism beginning in 2018, and that NAEP data has remained relatively flat except for the Covid drop.

Again, as Bessie acknowledged over a decade ago, the real problems with education, teaching, and learning are very complex and far larger than pointing fingers at teachers as “villains.”

For most of the history of US education, student reading achievement has been described as “failing,” and vulnerable student populations (minoritized races, impoverished students, students with special needs such as dyslexia, and MLLs) have always been underserved.

The dirty little secret about teacher quality related to student reading proficiency is that those vulnerable students are disproportionately sitting in class with early-career and uncertified teachers who are struggling with high student/teacher ratios.

Are students being underserved? Yes, but this is a historical fact of US public education not a current crisis.

Are low student achievement and reading proficiency the result of bad teachers? No, but these outcomes are definitely correlated with bad teaching/learning conditions and bad living conditions for far too many students.

In 2023, just as in 2010, the myth of the bad teacher is a lie, a political and marketing lie that will never serve the needs of students, teachers, or society.

Way back in 1984 when I entered the classroom, I was excited to begin my career but quickly discovered that despite my respect and even love for my English professors and teacher educators in my undergraduate degree, I simply was not prepared well enough to do my job, notably as a teacher of writing.

I set out to learn by teaching, and do better. During the late 1980s, I was fortunate to learn further through the Spartanburg Writing Project (Nation Writing Project), where I discovered that much of my on-the-job training was misguided (thanks, Brenda Davenport).

Anyone who teaches knows that becoming an effective teacher is a journey and that those first 3, 5, or even 10 years are challenging and include a great deal of growth that cannot be accomplished in teacher certification programs.

None the less, everything surrounding teaching, and especially the teaching of reading, can and should be better.

That was true in 1940 and every decade since then.

Teacher and school bashing, shouting “crisis”—these have been our responses over and over; these are not how we create a powerful teacher workforce, and these will never serve the needs of our students who need great teachers and public education the most.

The myth of the bad teacher is a Great American Tradition that need to end.

[1] Valcarcel, C., Holmes, J., Berliner, D. C., & Koerner, M. (2021). The value of student feedback in open forums: A natural analysis of descriptions of poorly rated teachers. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 29(January – July), 79. https://doi.org/10.14507/epaa.29.6289

[2] See Our study found new teachers perform just as well in the classroom as their more experienced colleagues

Charter schools, Crisis, Education, education reform, Florida Miracle, miracle schools, Science of Reading, Teach for America, VAM

The “Manufactured Crisis” and the Repeated Failure of Education Journalism [UPDATED]

February 14, 2023 plthomasedd

[Header Photo by Nik on Unsplash]

For people not in the field of education, A Nation at Risk is either a hazy (or nonexistent) footnote of history or a pedestrian (and obvious) claim that didn’t need a government committee to announce—US public education is a failure.

However, for all its fanfare and eager media coverage, the real significance of the politically driven report is that it set in motion a pattern still vibrant in 2023; mainstream media is constantly fanning the flames of “manufactured crisis.”

A Nation at Risk was a media, public, and political hit, but scholars were quick to note that the claims in the report were overstated, oversimplified, and lacking any credible evidence [1].

In short, manufactured.

From the early 1980s and into the 2020s, mainstream education journalism has hopped feverishly from crisis to crisis and endorsed boondoggle after boondoggle—never once stopping to say “My bad!” or to pause, step back, and reconsider their template.

David Labaree concludes:

When the state takes the quantified depiction of schooling that educational researchers provide and uses it to devise a plan for school reform, the best we can hope for is that the reform effort will fail. As the history of school reform makes clear, this is indeed most often the outcome. One reform after another has bounced off the classroom door without having much effect in shaping what goes on inside, simply because the understanding of schooling that is embodied in the reform is so inaccurate that the reform effort cannot survive in the classroom ecology. At worst, however, the reform actually succeeds in imposing change on the process of teaching and learning in classrooms. Scott provides a series of horror stories about the results of such an imposition in noneducational contexts, from the devastating impact of the collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet Union to the parallel effect of imposing monoculture on German forests. The problem in all these cases is that the effort to impose an abstract technical ideal ends up destroying a complex distinctive ecology that depends on local practical knowledge. The current efforts by states across the globe to impose abstract technical standards on the educational village bear the signs of another ecological disaster.
The Lure of Statistics for Educational Researchers

As a result, a stunningly harmful pattern has emerged:

Amanda Ripley was wrong about Michelle Rhee.
Jay Matthews and Paul Tough were wrong about “no excuses” charter schools and Teach For America.
David Brooks was wrong about “miracle” charter schools (and everything else).
[Insert journalist] was wrong about Common Core and VAM.

And now, rest assured it will come to pass, Emily Hanford and Natalie Wexler are wrong about the “science of reading.”

Remember Waiting for Superman?

Sold a Story and The Truth about Reading are the same melodramatic misinformation campaign depending on an uninformed public to sell yet another educational crisis.

There will be no reckoning; there never is.

But some day (soon?) the “science of reading” histrionics will be a faint memory while everyone scrambles to the next education manufactured crisis.

The only things not to be addressed, of course, are the actual needs of students, teachers, and universal public education.

[1] See Gerald Bracey, Gerald Holton , and David Berliner and Bruce Biddle (who coined “manufactured myth”).

Education, education reform, reading, Science of Reading

Which Is Valid, SOR Story or Scholarly Criticism?: Checking for the “Science” in the “Science of Reading”

February 12, 2023 plthomasedd

From late November of 2022 through late February 2023, I have (or will have) presented at 6 major literacy conferences, both national and state level.

Two dominant literary issues have been curriculum/book bans and the “science of reading” (SOR) movement. A few important patterns occurred with the latter.

Many teachers are overwhelmed and discouraged about the heavily negative messaging around SOR, but I also interacted with teachers not fully aware of the magnitude of this movement and remain puzzled about the controversy.

Further, the media, public, and political story around reading and teaching reading is the primary message reaching both educators and the public. The robust scholarly criticism of SOR [1] is often welcomed by teachers and administrators, but unless they are attending conferences, these critique goes unnoticed.

Scholars and educators have been backed into a corner since the SOR story is grounded in a great deal of blame, hyperbole, misinformation, and melodrama.

The media SOR story is simple to the point of being false, but simple in a way that is very compelling for people outside the field of literacy.

Here, I want to put some pieces together, and offer a place to hold the SOR movement/story to the same standards demanded by advocates of SOR (specifically The Reading League).

First, let’s start with the core of the scholarly critiques of mainstream media’s story:

Hoffman, J.V., Hikida, M., & Sailors, M. (2020). Contesting science that silences: Amplifying equity, agency, and design research in literacy teacher preparation. *Reading Research Quarterly, 55*(S1), S255–S266. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.353

While scholarly critiques (see note 1) are far more nuanced and substantive that this central point, this is a manageable way to interrogate whether or not the SOR story is valid based on the standards the movement itself established.

The debate, then, is well represented by conflicting evaluations of SOR and SOR criticism on social media: a literacy scholar and co-author of an SOR reading program called the scholarly criticism “stupid,” and a policy scholar not in literacy noted that the media story is “facile.”

To determine which is valid—the SOR story or the scholarly criticism—that story must be checked against the standards for science established by the movement itself, here from The Reading League:

Finally, the components of the SOR story must be identified in order to check the science behind the claims and the anecdotes; consider Aukerman’s overview:

And my overview in my policy brief:

Below, I outline the SOR story and identify current scientific research, or lack thereof, limiting the evidence to TRL’s guidelines (experimental/ quasi-experimental, published in peer-reviewed journals).

1

First, for the rest of the SOR story to hold up to scientific scrutiny, we must establish whether or not there is a unique reading crisis in the last 10-20 years in which students are failing to learn to read at acceptable rates; this must be true for the blame aspects of the SOR movement to be true.

What is the status of scientific research supporting this claim? There is no current scientific research to support this claim; most scholars have identified that NAEP [2] (and other measures of reading achievement) have remained flat and achievement gaps have remained steady as well for many decades predating the key elements blamed for reading failures.

Note that the age 9 longitudinal data including actual scores appears mostly flat with some fluctuation. (Source)

NAEP age 9 reading appears mostly flat after A Nation at Risk, mostly flat with some trending upward during the 1990s BL era, increasing after the federal pressure of NCLB in 2001, and then flat since the rise of SOR legislation around 2013.

Notably the long-term NAEP data during the recent SOR era for 9 and 13 year olds is relatively flat or unchanged except for lowest performing students:

2

Next, the SOR story claims teachers are not well prepared to teach reading and teacher educators either fail to teach evidence-based methods or willfully ignore the science.

What is the status of scientific research supporting this claim? There is no current scientific research to support this claim [3] although scholars have demonstrated that credible research is available on teacher knowledge of reading and teacher education:

Hoffman, J.V., Hikida, M., & Sailors, M. (2020). Contesting science that silences: Amplifying equity, agency, and design research in literacy teacher preparation. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S255–S266. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.353

3

The media story claims the current settled reading science is the “simple view” of reading.

What is the status of scientific research supporting this claim? Scientific research refutes this claim:

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

[UPDATE]

Burns, M. K., Duke, N. K., & Cartwright, K. B. (2023). Evaluating components of the active view of reading as intervention targets: Implications for social justice. School Psychology, 38(1), 30–41. https://doi.org/10.1037/spq0000519

4

The SOR story centers a claim that systematic phonics instruction is superior to all other approaches to teaching beginning readers and thus necessary for all students.

What is the status of scientific research supporting this claim? Current scientific research refutes this claims, showing that systematic phonics is no more effective than other approaches (balanced literacy, whole language) and confirming that systematic phonics can increase early pronunciation advantages but without any gains in comprehension and with that advantage disappearing over time:

Bowers, J.S. (2020). Reconsidering the evidence that systematic phonics is more effective than alternative methods of reading instruction. Educational Psychology Review, 32(2020), 681-705. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10648-019-09515-y

Wyse, D., & Bradbury, A. (2022). Reading wars or reading reconciliation? A critical examination of robust research evidence, curriculum policy and teachers’ practices for teaching phonics and reading. Review of Education, 10(1), e3314. https://doi.org/10.1002/rev3.3314

Testing the impact of a systematic and rigorous phonics programme on early readers and also those that have fallen behind at the end of Key Stage 2. (2022, October). Education Endowment Foundation. https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/projects-and-evaluation/projects/read-write-inc-and-fresh-start

Bowers, J.S. Yes Children Need to Learn Their GPCs but There Really Is Little or No Evidence that Systematic or Explicit Phonics Is Effective: a response to Fletcher, Savage, and Sharon (2020). Educ Psychol Rev 33, 1965–1979 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-021-09602-z

Legislating Phonics: Settled Science or Political Polemics? David Reinking, George G. Hruby, and Victoria J. Risko

5

Mississippi has been heralded in the SOR story as a key example of the success of SOR reading policy, based on MS 2019 grade 4 reading scores.

What is the status of scientific research supporting this claim? There is no current scientific research to support this claim, and the SOR story omits that MS has had steady grade 4 reading improvement since the early 1990s (well before SOR) and that MS grade 8 have remained low, suggesting the grade 4 gains are inflated (see also other states with the grade 4 to 8 drop).

6

The source of low reading proficiency, the SOR story claims, is the dominance of balanced literacy and a core of popular reading programs.

What is the status of scientific research supporting this claim? There is no current scientific research to support this claim. In fact, some of the most criticized programs are only adopted in about 1 in 4 schools suggesting that the variety of programs and practices make these claims overly simplistic at best. Journalists also often misidentify reading programs as balanced literacy that explicitly do not claim that label.

7

Often the SOR story includes a focus on dyslexia, claiming that multi-sensory approaches (such as Orton Gillingham) are necessary for all students identified as dyslexic (and often that all students would benefit from that approach).

What is the status of scientific research supporting this claim? Current scientific research refutes this claims:

Johnston, P., & Scanlon, D. (2021). An examination of dyslexia research and instruction with policy implications. Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice, 70(1), 107. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1177/23813377211024625

International Literacy Association. (2016). Research advisory: Dyslexia. https://www.literacyworldwide.org/docs/default-source/where-we-stand/ila-dyslexia-research-advisory.pdf

Socioeconomic dissociations in the neural and cognitive bases of reading disorders, Rachel R. Romeo, Tyler K. Perrachione, Halie A. Olson, Kelly K. Halverson, John D. E. Gabrieli, and Joanna A. Christodoulou

Stevens, E. A., Austin, C., Moore, C., Scammacca, N., Boucher, A. N., & Vaughn, S. (2021). Current state of the evidence: Examining the effects of Orton-Gillingham reading interventions for students with or at risk for word-level reading disabilities. Exceptional Children, 87(4), 397–417. https://doi.org/10.1177/0014402921993406

Hall, C., et al. (2022, September 13). Forty years of reading intervention research for elementary students with or at risk for dyslexia: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Reading Research Quarterly. Retrieved October 17, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.477

As of this post, the claims made in the SOR story are not supported by scientific research, and the criticisms offered by scholars appear valid.

The media story is overstated and oversimplified even though nearly all literacy educators and scholars agree that too many marginalized students (minoritized students, special needs students, impoverished students, MLLs) are being underserved (which is a regrettably historical fact of US education).

The SOR movement has created a predicament for the media story in that the standards being required for teachers and reading policy is an incredibly high and narrow threshold that (as I have shown above) the movement itself has not reached.

Again, scholarly criticism of the SOR story is nuanced and substantive, but at its core, that criticism is best represented by demonstrating that SOR advocates, especially the media, cannot meet the standard they propose for the field of teaching reading.

Simply put, US reading achievement is not uniquely worse now than at nearly any point in the last 80 years, and therefore, blaming balanced literacy as well as popular reading programs proves to be a straw man fallacy.

Reading instruction and achievement, of course, can and should be better. But the current SOR story is mostly anecdote, oversimplified and unsupported claims, and fodder for the education marketplace.

Media is failing students far more so than educators by perpetuating a simplistic blame-game that fuels the education market place.

[1] Media Coverage of SOR [access materials HERE]

MacPhee, D., Handsfield, L.J., & Paugh, P. (2021). Conflict or conversation? Media portrayals of the science of reading. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S145-S155. Retrieved July 26, 2022, from https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.384

Cryonics Phonics: Inequality’s Little Helper – New Politics

[UPDATE]

The Science of Reading and the Media: Is Reporting Biased?, Maren Aukerman, The University of Calgary

The Science of Reading and the Media: Does the Media Draw on High-Quality Reading Research?, Maren Aukerman

The Science of Reading and the Media: How Do Current Reporting Patterns Cause Damage?, Maren Aukerman

[Aukerman three posts as PDF]

Making sense of reading’s forever wars, Leah Durán and Michiko Hikida

[2] Note that NAEP is not grade level, however:

NAEP does not report the percentage of students performing at grade level. NAEP reports the percentage of students reaching a “proficient” level of performance. Here’s the problem. That’s not grade level.

In this post, I hope to convince readers of two things:

1. Proficient on NAEP does not mean grade level performance. It’s significantly above that.
2. Using NAEP’s proficient level as a basis for education policy is a bad idea
The NAEP proficiency myth

[3] Media tend to cite reports from NCTQ that do not meet the standard for “scientific” established by TRL:

NEPC Review: 2020 Teacher Prep Review: Clinical Practice and Classroom Management (National Council on Teacher Quality, October 2020)

NEPC Review: 2018 Teacher Prep Review (National Council on Teacher Quality, April 2018)

NEPC Review: Learning about Learning: What Every New Teacher Needs to Know (National Council on Teacher Quality [NCTQ])

Education, Teacher Autonomy, Teaching

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

February 10, 2023 plthomasedd

[Header Photo by Katherine Hanlon on Unsplash]

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 am in my fifth year of challenging the overly simplistic and misleading “science of reading” (SOR) movement, I have attempted to carefully craft some direct and brief messages, including “not simple, not settled,” “teach readers, not reading,” and my core commitments to teacher autonomy and the individual needs of all students.

One would think that those core commitments attract support even among those who disagree on other aspects of teaching and education policy. However, I face a persistent resistance to supporting teacher autonomy.

At a fundamental level, teacher autonomy is essential for teaching to be a profession, but autonomy is also essential because education is a high-accountability field.

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. Since many education mandates are flawed (such as current reading legislation) and for decades have failed, teachers are then blamed for that failure even though they didn’t make the mandates and were simply the mechanisms for 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.

One of the strongest elements of rejecting teacher autonomy, in fact, is among SOR advocates who promote structured literacy, often scripted curriculum [1] 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 their 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 there may be a gender-based reason for such resistance.

K-12 teaching (especially elementary teaching) is disproportionately a woman’s career:

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:

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.

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.

[1] Compton-Lilly, C.F., Mitra, A., Guay, M., & Spence, L.K. (2020). A confluence of complexity: Intersections among reading theory, neuroscience, and observations of young readers. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(S1), S185-S195. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.348

Education, education reform, Merit Pay, Teacher Evaluation, Teaching

Commentary: There’s no merit in merit pay plans for rewarding, retaining SC teachers (The Post and Courier)

February 10, 2023 plthomasedd

Commentary: There’s no merit in merit pay plans for rewarding, retaining SC teachers

While the Editorial Staff of the Post and Courier rightfully raises cautions about newly elected Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver, who has a history of extremely conservative positions on public education, that caution should also extend to Weaver’s plans for merit pay to address teacher needs in South Carolina.

I am in my fifth decade as an educator in SC, beginning as a high school English teacher in Upstate SC in 1984. Over that career I have witnessed one frustrating pattern: A constant state of education reform that recycles the exact same crisis rhetoric followed by the same education reforms.

Over and over again.

In fact, in very recent history, SC and the nation have experienced a high intensity focus on teacher quality, teacher evaluation, and teacher merit pay models under the Obama administration.

And just like in the so-called real world of business, merit pay models for teachers have failed.

Under Obama and then-Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, federal and state policy helped implement teacher evaluation and pay schemes modeled on Bill Gates’s use of stack ranking. Notably this value-added model of teacher evaluation and pay was famously heralded by the media when Michelle Rhee was chancellor of DC schools.

However, over time, Rhee’s tenure was unmasked as mostly a fraud but also as extremely harmful for teachers and students.

While merit pay remains a popular approach to recruiting and maintaining workers across many fields, research has consistently shown that merit pay does not work, and often has negative consequences, especially in education.

Research by Dan Pink and Alfie Kohn, for example, highlight the disconnect between what merit pay promises and how that plays out in the real world.

Gary Clabaugh challenged Obama’s merit pay polices, offering evidence that remains valid today and suggests not only caution about Weaver’s merit pay plan but also solid reasons not to try the same thing again.

Merit pay fails education, teachers, and students in the following ways:

Merit pay assumes workers need motivation to work harder; teachers are often overworked and their ability to be effective is not a result of how hard they are working, but the conditions under which they work.
Merit pay is often linked to standardized testing in education. As a result, merit pay incentivizes teaching to the tests and corrupts evaluation systems intended to measure learning.
Merit pay creates a culture of competition, instead of cooperation. Research also shows that competition is more harmful than cooperation, especially in the field of education where all educators should be invested in the success of all students.
Measurable student achievement, mostly through standardized testing, is more heavily linked to out-of-school factors (60-80%) than to in-school factors or teacher quality (10-15%). Therefore, merit pay overemphasizes direct and measurable teacher impact and often holds teachers and students accountable for factors beyond their control.

Policy makers in SC are faced with two facts: (1) Teacher pay is important to address and long overdue in the state; however, (2) merit pay is an ineffective and even harmful approach to addressing pay and teacher shortages.

Since SC has tried to use pay incentive to address teacher shortages in struggling districts already, we will better serve the needs of our students if we commit to new and different reforms.

The greatest need in SC is that elected officials directly address poverty across the state—access to healthcare, stable jobs with strong pay, and access to affordable housing.

But we can also do better with in-school reform.

If we want to bolster the teaching profession among our high-poverty districts, we must address teaching and learning conditions, which include the following:

Parent, community, and administrative support for teachers.
School facilities in good repair.
Fully funding teaching and learning technologies and materials.
Guaranteeing students who are struggling have access to experienced and certified teachers.
Recognizing that student success is linked to teacher quality, but that teacher quality is only one element in a complex network of forces that help children learn.

SC remains faced with a very old problem—high-poverty students struggle to achieve well enough or fast enough compared to their more affluent peers.

Those children deserve new solutions, and merit pay is a tired gimmick that has never worked and will fail children and teachers once again.

Teaching Reading and the Goldilocks’ Dilemma: A Case for Purposeful Literacy

February 3, 2023 plthomasedd

Everyone teaching reading is confronted with the Goldilocks’ dilemma.

Using terms offered by Stephen Krashen, I see teaching children to read falling on a spectrum.

Intensive phonics (often called systematic phonics) is serving porridge that is too hot. Zero phonics is serving porridge that is too cold. But basic phonics is serving porridge that is just right.

The current reading war, the “science of reading” (SOR) movement, is little different than any of the proceeding reading wars; once again, the war is being framed as one between intensive/systemic phonics and zero phonics.

And once again, the “just right” option, basic phonics, is being left out of the rhetorical equation.

Let me be very clear. What I am doing is not a call for compromise or for a middle approach. I find the pendulum analogy to be one of the problems with the recurring reading war, in fact.

My proposal is more akin to the conclusions draw in England that showed systematic phonics has not achieved what was promised and that students would be better served with “balance.”

Of course, the word “balance” often triggers the caricature of “balanced literacy” (BL) offered in the SOR movement, a misrepresentation that erases the philosophical and theoretical framing intended in BL (teacher autonomy grounded in serving the individual needs of students).

Where people get lost, I think, and what I am proposing is that the balance isn’t about reading theories (such as balancing phonics and comprehension in instruction), but about how any teacher serves the individual needs of any student.

The balance is about balancing student needs with instructional goals, and then, making sure the teacher and student are provided the appropriate teaching and learning conditions for students to learn to read.

This sort of balance de-centers reading programs and standards, and centers students. As a result most any program or set of standards can be effective or not depending on the teacher’s ability to serve the student’s needs.

Another aspect of this dilemma, I think, is that intensive/systematic phonics will always prove to be too hot because it over-emphasizes the role of the letter-sound system. Nonsense words and decodable texts mislead students about the complexity of decoding and making meaning from text.

Students may be compelled to see phonics as a simple plug-and-play until they encounter “wind” or “dove,” two words that have differing pronunciations in different contexts.

Also consider the maze of problems when exploring the letter “C”:

Cease

Crease

Cause

Cello

Checker

Climb

Slime

Coach

Cat

Space

Cough

Coffee

“C” shares sounds with “S” and “K,” but this series of words presents some satisfying patterns as well as some baffling exceptions that students could better navigate with some background in etymology and with greater experience reading (and thus building their toolbox for making meaning).

The question (which still hasn’t been fully answered by research) has never been if students need phonics, but how much, when, and how that is acquired (upfront v. by extensive reading).

Intensive/systematic phonics is too hot and misleading, I think, for the same reason that worksheet approaches to context clues are ultimately harmful. The “rules” for using context clues tend to work only in sentences designed to prove context clues strategies work.

As I have noted before, this is the training wheels versus balance bicycle dilemma.

The SOR reading war is fundamentally no different than any other reading war; see McQuillan’s debunking of the whole language reading war from the 1990s and note the similar patterns found in the current SOR movement.

Currently, the media misinformation and the misguided political response have made yet another claim that reading instruction has failed to provide systematic phonics (porridge too cold), and now state reading policy and reading program adoption are scrambling to implement structured literacy (scripted curriculum, porridge too hot).

In the US, we have never stepped back from the same old reading war rhetoric that centers all the adults and their (often petty) ideological biases.

Too often, everyone is caught up in selling their thing by demonizing other people’s things.

It is a tremendous failure of logic to shout that current popular reading programs have failed students because publishers and program creators are grabbing the cash, and therefore, we need to change to a different set of programs (with publishers and program creators who are also grabbing cash).

Again, we must stop centering adult ideologies and market interests, and start centering the students themselves and also providing teachers the resources and conditions to serve student needs.

What I propose is purposeful literacy, which has the following framing:

The teaching of reading begins with individual student artifacts of reading (strengths, needs, etc.)—not programs, standards, or mandates.
Centering the individual needs of students requires that we address the equity in their lives outside of school as well as in school.
The effective teaching of reading requires teacher autonomy and teaching and learning conditions that allow teachers to serve individual student needs.
Reading materials, programs, and standards must be tools that serve teacher instruction and not goals and frameworks for teacher accountability. The current “problem” with reading programs is not the quality of any program but that programs become the goal of teaching (fidelity, “is the teacher implementing the program” v. “is the student being served”).
Purposeful literacy places reading skills (such as phonics) in both the context of comprehension and critical literacy (moving beyond mere understanding to interrogating text).
The goal of purposeful literacy is students who are eager, independent, and critical readers.

The reading war approach to education reform is not a fairy tale; it is a horror story, and almost no one survives.

We must set aside the quest for THE program and the THE theory of reading.

Instead of centering all the adults and the concurrent pettiness, we must center the individual needs of students, which includes honoring the autonomy of teachers and providing both teachers and students the teaching and learning conditions that make a “just right” approach possible.

Fiction

GOD. GUNS. TEXIDA. [Fiction]

February 2, 2023 plthomasedd

1

“What are you, blind? You fucking GASR,” the screamer’s disorientingly swollen finger pointed aggressively at a sign reading:

No.

Fucking.

GASRS.

Allowed.

The screamer’s beard was huge, scraggly like a briar patch, and bright red, but more orangish than the red ball cap hiding their equally red hair and reading: “GOD. GUNS. TEXIDA.”

The cap’s bill was tattered and the wording on the crown had loose gold threads. A Texida flag patch seemed to have been recently sewn onto the side of the hat:

Terror Mustang simply kept walking after pausing briefly at the screamer pointing at the sign.

Terror came from a long line of Fords who had been living for many decades now in a huge automotive graveyard. The Ford name became such a stigma that a few generations ago, someone changed their name to Mustang, but it wasn’t fooling anyone, Terror knew all too well.

Everybody hated GASRS, people who sat at the bottom of the current food chain in Texida and continued to drive cars with combustible engines.

Terror’s grandfather told them often about the good old days when gas cars were normal, when gas prices were high, and when fear of running out of gas was always at the edge of people’s thinking.

And when there was one United States instead of Texida—where Terror was born, enveloping the Southern most part of the defunct USA—and the Northern and Western most area, New Cali.

Now, however, gas was nearly free for the taking, and Terror lived among hundreds of abandoned automobiles. They had rows and rows of old school busses that had been converted over the years into dozens of libraries and storage units—and of course living quarters.

Gas stations were rare, but the gas was really cheap or sometimes unattended and free. But Terror also had dozens of gas tanks around the automotive graveyard for their using.

Terror used to sit listening to stories of many ages ago when there were gas wars—prices for gas dropped at competing stations—and gas shortages that caused high prices and panicked lines for just a few gallons of gas. But the hardest part of the stories to believe were that people used to fear running out of gas, something that never happened and then gas became almost worthless.

In the school buses, books that had been banned and not burned, and thousands of automobile manuals that almost no one cared about were carefully stored from the elements and meticulously catalogued by several generations of Fords/Mustangs, and now watched over and used by Terror—possibly the last of the Mustangs for all they knew.

Among their stash, Terror had 37 bicycles as well—one of which they had been riding past the store when the screamer launched into their tirade, a store that Terror was, in fact, not going to enter.

But nearly daily mechanical work on the cars and the bicycles left Terror’s hands etched with lines of grease, and they usually smelled of gasoline, although Terror had long ago stopped noticing it.

Fuck. Off. MAGAT, Terror thought, but had learned simply to stay silent, not make eye contact, and go about their business.

Terror was nearly self-sufficient and could make it most of the time staying at the automotive graveyard, home. But trips into Town were necessary for supplies, usually food, and not becoming something of a solitary monster, they thought, often, lying alone in bed at 3 AM unable to fall back asleep.

Town had once been University before they all shut down after Texida formed and the Florida Education Act established School for everyone from 6 years old until their seventeenth birthday. After that, all were required to do Service—military, police, work, or the few who were urged to become doctors who needed Training for a few more years—for life.

Everybody gets Basic Skills, goddamit, the Governor said, and then you can just learn by doing it!

The Town was converted red brick buildings that had been the University, mostly Apartments and some Stores now.

Terror was heading to the Store when the MAGAT yelled, the Store where Apricot worked.

Terror and Apricot had been in School together, but they had never talked until Terror entered the Store one day many years after School and thought they saw Apricot with a book.

Not exactly Illegal but unusual.

Terror without thinking spoke, “Hi, I am Terror. Used to be Ford but it is Mustang now.”

“I know,” Apricot said. “Everybody calls me ‘Apricot,’ but my name is Apathy. We’re all Stones.”

Apricot held the book with their arm limp at their side. Terror recognized the artwork: The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip. Terror had three or four copies scattered among the libraries they had organized in several buses, books for reading mixed in with hundreds of automotive manuals.

For a long time, Terror assumed Apricot’s family were MAGATs, although they kept their Store open for anyone with the required Sign on their window: “Fucking. GASRS. Allowed.”

Before seeing Apricot with the book, Terror had noticed the sign had an ivy vine drawn in thin black ink snaking around the angry three words. The ivy was identical to the tattoo Terror noticed one day peaking out of Apricot’s tank top, across their collar bone, and then also, out the bottom of one shorts leg down their thigh.

That was the first day Terror regretted lying alone in the automotive graveyard, even with the books, even with no MAGATs screaming near them.

2

There had been other reasons Terror felt lonely, even abandoned, of course.

DK had been a talker, sometimes seemingly nonstop. Equal parts fascinating and annoying.

DK had died several years ago, But Terror could never keep very good track of time. Seemed really recent and forever ago. The thing that made it seem like maybe it was just yesterday was DK talking about a book they had read.

They never could recall the title and occasionally offered an author name but that seemed to change and DK often said they had no idea about that either.

Rayberry.

Brad-something.

Bradley or Raymond.

“Shit. No idea,” DK said most of the time.

All Terror had was a slightly changing plot that DK would ramble through when high as a kite. DK always added, “I am high as a kite” when rambling more than a couple hours.

Terror learned to grow Wana from DK, converted a few buses with DK’s help to make grow areas.

And Terror spent idle time walking through the dozens of buses that they had converted into libraries (the old kind) scanning every book hoping to find the one DK retold over and over.

Libraries in Texida were where everyone checked out their guns, each one nestled in a hollowed out book. All citizens of Texida had to either own or check out regularly a gun as well as complete target training and retraining.

DK had taught Terror about a glitch in the system, a way to fabricate checking out guns and registering for training and retraining. In fact, DK had shown Terror several Internet hacks, but they really believed the whole thing was a scam. DK could find no evidence that anyone monitored the training and retraining; bypassing the system and fabricating sessions were incredibly easy as well.

It was good enough that everyone believed they were being watched, that everyone was dutiful and maintained a system that ironically only continued because people believed it had to.

“So there is this book, you see, that is really very eerie, if you ask me,” and DK would launch into their retelling. It happened dozens and dozens of times for many years until they died.

Terror found DK dead beside one of the Wana buses, probably high as a kite and certainly dead as a rock.

The funny thing, DK narrated, was not all that funny but just clever as hell kind of funny was that the book had a bunch of firemen that didn’t put out fires but burned books because all books were illegal.

Terror noticed DK almost always started that way, but that huge parts were different and nearly incoherent at times. Maybe depending on how high the kite was that day.

But the other part that never varied was when DK seemed the most moved, sort of emotional and both really calm and deeply upset.

There were these fuckers, you see, DK slowly explained leaning forward and rubbing their gray beard, that dedicated themselves to memorizing whole fucking books to preserve them for the future or whatever. Jesus fucking Christ, man, that is really something. Really gets me, you know. Whole. Fucking. Books.

DK would pat their chest right at their heart. Usually triggering a cough and DK taking a long draw on his Wana.

That’s some kind of devotion, you know, fucking real devotion, DK often seemed about to cry. Son of a bitch.

Terror wanted to cry when they thought about DK retelling the story. But more than anything Terror wanted to find the book.

Read it.

Maybe memorize it. At least know it better than DK’s rambling.

After falling deeply asleep while high, Terror had a recurring dream about finding the book. Usually it burst into flames as Terror opened it.

Then Terror would jerk awake, maybe screaming.

Terror wanted to tell Apricot DK’s version, but also wanted to find the actual book and share that. And Terror wanted to tell Apricot she was now in that dream many nights.

Apricot would find the book, hold it up to ask Terror if they had found it, and then, Apricot would burst into flame.

When Terror jerked awake from those dreams, they were in fact screaming.

[More to come … maybe]

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

“Sell What We Do”: The Manufactured Crisis to Hide the Story Being Sold [Updated]

January 30, 2023 plthomasedd

[Header Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash]

The Origin Story for the “science of reading” movement is popularly associated with a story published by Emily Hanford from 2018. And that movement has gained even more momentum by Hanford’s repackaging that initial (and deeply misleading) story as a podcast, Sold a Story.

The dirty little secret is that this story is not about the ugly underbelly of teaching reading or about creating a new and better way to teach reading. This story is cover for the selling of a different story to feast on the profitable education marketplace.

The single-minded blame-game in Sold a Story that creates reading Super Villains in the form of reading theory (balanced literacy) and reading leaders (Lucy Calkins, Fountas and Pinnell) is a tired and very old media and political strategy.

However the real Monster in the larger story is the marketplace itself, and the conveniently ignored backstory is several years before 2018.

The “science of reading” misleading and oversimplified story [1] about the teaching of reading spoke into a context that was fertile ground for misinformation to not only sprout but thrive—the dyslexia movement, specifically the Decoding Dyslexia structure [2] that was already in place in all 50 states.

Here is an interesting and revealing artifact from 2014:

At its July 1^st meeting, the IDA Board of Directors made a landmark decision designed to help market our approach to reading instruction. The board chose a name that would encompass all approaches to reading instruction that conform to IDA’s Knowledge and Practice Standards. That name is “Structured Literacy.”…

If we want school districts to adopt our approach, we need a name that brings together our successes. We need one name that refers to the many programs that teach reading in the same way. A name is the first and essential step to building a brand….

The term “Structured Literacy” is not designed to replace Orton Gillingham, Multi-Sensory, or other terms in common use. It is an umbrella term designed to describe all of the programs that teach reading in essentially the same way. In our marketing, this term will help us simplify our message and connect our successes. “Structured Literacy” will help us sell what we do so well.
Structured Literacy: A New Term to Unify Us and Sell What We Do

“If we want school districts to adopt our approach,” well, we need to clear space in the reading program marketplace, and that is exactly what the “science of reading” movement is doing with the help of media and complicit parents and political leaders.

Again, the goal announced in 2014: “‘Structured Literacy’ will help us sell what we do so well.”

The many recurring Reading Wars have been driven by people who are sincere and people with ulterior motives—and this “science of reading” movement is no different.

For those with good intentions, that simply is not enough if we are unwilling to confront all the stories being sold as well as the costs of these market wars to effective teaching and the most important outcome of all—students who are eager and critical readers.

Sold a Story [3] is a cover for another story being sold and packaged, literally, and the attacks are designed to clear market space, not support teachers or address individual student needs.

Update

If you want to understand how the education market and education reform machine overlap (or fuel each other), consider the Common Core > Great Minds > Wit & Wisdom (d)evolution as examined in the following:

[1] Media Coverage of SOR [access materials HERE]

Cryonics Phonics: Inequality’s Little Helper – New Politics

The Science of Reading and the Media: Is Reporting Biased?, Maren Aukerman, The University of Calgary

The Science of Reading and the Media: Does the Media Draw on High-Quality Reading Research?, Maren Aukerman

The Science of Reading and the Media: How Do Current Reporting Patterns Cause Damage?, Maren Aukerman

Making sense of reading’s forever wars, Leah Durán and Michiko Hikida

[2] The Hidden Push for Phonics Legislation, Richard L. Allington, University of Tennessee

Poem: this is what we carry (heft)

Image January 30, 2023 plthomasedd

education reform, Educational Research, reading, Science of Reading

The Long and Tired History of Media-Driven Reading Wars

January 28, 2023 plthomasedd

Consider the following excerpts from a scholarly journal of literacy. The articles included are responses from literary scholars to a political and media claim of a reading crisis.

First from Emmett A. Betts:

Next, from William S. Gray:

And then, from Lou LaBrant:

Finally, Paul Witty:

These patterns may seem familiar in 2023 to anyone following the “science of reading” movement:

Public schools are failing to teach adequately children to read.
Reading teachers are ill-equipped to teach reading.
Reading and teaching strategies are not scientific.
Political leaders and the media drive the criticism.
And literacy scholars carefully debunk the entire narrative, to no avail.

These excerpts are from 1942 and collected in The Elementary English Review (The National Council of Teachers of English), which would become Language Arts [1].

The reading crisis was spurred by high illiteracy rates in WWII draftees and Eleanor Roosevelt’s call to action and media coverage of the reading crisis.

The blame game, like now, is misguided and ill informed. Progressive education was the scapegoat, but LaBrant and others noted these soldiers had attended mostly traditional schooling.

Scholar after scholar also note that high illiteracy rates were caused by high poverty levels.

In 2023, as we are trying to stay afloat during the “science of reading” tidal wave of misinformation, we must acknowledge that this current reading war does not differ in any significant way from several since the 1940s.

We must also acknowledge that at no point has the US found reading achievement adequate regardless of teacher training, reading theories, or reading programs and instructional practices.

Reading Wars, then, are reductive, misleading, and ultimately ineffective—over and over.

The “science of reading” movement is another round of misguided blame, misinformation, and yet more hollow calls for “reform” that isn’t anything new or valid.

The “science of reading” is tired and lazy journalism, politics, and ultimately education.

[1] Betts, E., Dolch, E., Gates, A., Gray, W., Horn, E., LaBrant, L., . . . Witty, P. (1942). What shall we do about reading today?: A symposium. The Elementary English Review, 19(7), 225-256. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41382636 [access HERE]