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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

Aukerman, M. (2022a). The Science of Reading and the media: Is reporting biased? Literacy Research Association Critical Conversations. CC BY 4.0 license. https://literacyresearchassociation.org/stories/the-science-of-reading-and-the-media-is-reporting-biased/

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/

Aukerman, M. (2022c). The Science of Reading and the media: How do current reporting patterns cause damage? Literacy Research Association Critical Conversations. CC BY 4.0 license. https://literacyresearchassociation.org/stories/the-science-of-reading-and-the-media-how-do-current-reporting-patterns-cause-damage/

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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

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Kristof, N. (2023, February 11). Two-thirds of kids struggle to read, and we know how to fix it. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/11/opinion/reading-kids-phonics.html

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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, education reform, Educational Research, Science of Reading

Misunderstanding Mississippi’s Reading Reform: The Need to Resist Copycat Education Reform

[Header Photo by BABAMURAT USMANOV on Unsplash]

Another flurry of over-the-top commentary has resurfaced on social media concerning reading reform in Mississippi; for example:

Since 2019, the discourse around reading reform in MS has been consistently hyperbolic and misleading because, frankly, there is little solid evidence supporting the rush to copy the state’s reform.

Even a historically top-scoring state, Massachusetts, is poised to join the “science of reading” reform fad.

Along with the new round of Mississippi mania, however, comes a bit of sobering news: The grades are in: Mississippi schools backslide on academic progress.

The relentless cycles of ever-new education reform since the 1980s and the fatal mistake of copycat reform movements are being replicated by the rush to “be like Mississippi.”

The belief that MS has performed a miracle in reading instruction and achievement is likely at least misleading if not a mirage (increased test scores due to manipulating the population of students being tested but not due to greater reading proficiency). Regardless, states must resist copycat education reform.

Questions Remain Unanswered about Popular Reading Reform: The Mississippi Model

Because of the state’s exceptional National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) grade 4 reading scores in 2019, Mississippi was anointed as an education “miracle” in The New York Times.

However, one admission in that NYT’s christening has yet to be fully addressed: “What’s up in Mississippi? There’s no way to know for sure what causes increases in test scores, but Mississippi has been doing something notable: making sure all of its teachers understand the science of reading.”

At best, Mississippi’s grade 4 reading scores challenge the overwhelming evidence that standardized test scores mostly correlate with race and social class. However, in 2019, the outlier NAEP scores were merely correlated with Mississippi’s comprehensive reading reform that has now been implemented for well over a decade.

Since the early 1980s and the release of the highly politicized A Nation at Risk, education reform has remained in a permanent series of crisis/reform cycles, driven by copy-cat legislation.

Much of that reform, unfortunately, has been the result of media, politicians, and reformers failing to understand test data—such as misunderstanding and misrepresenting NAEP achievement levels—and thus passing reform that fails to match the needs of students, teachers, and schools.

Despite the lack of robust research on why Mississippi has achieved and maintained outlier scores in grade 4 reading, many states have rushed to implement the Mississippi model of reading reform, often identified as the “science of reading.”

That reform has some common features: mandates about what reading programs meet the standard of “scientific,” teacher retraining in the “science of reading,” bans on some reading instructional practices, and third-grade retention based on state assessments of reading.

Research by Westall and Cummings offers insight into the current state of reading reform, acknowledging that those reforms have resulted in some short-term test score gains similar to Mississippi’s.

However, that study has an important caveat: Only states implementing third-grade retention are seeing those score increases. The researchers note that this study does not conclude why retention correlates with short-term score gains, however.

While Reading Wars are often contentious and driven by hyperbole and confrontational rhetoric, most people would agree that the US can and should do a better job of teaching children to read, and our most vulnerable populations of students are those being carelessly left behind despite a permanent state of education reform in the US for over five decades.

Before we commit to more reform, there are at least three questions needing to be answered about the Mississippi model for reading.

The first question may be the most important: What is the role of grade retention in reading reform?

Research on grade retention continues to raise red flags about the practice, often resulting in negative consequences for students and disproportionately impacting minoritized and impoverished students.

Mississippi has been retaining about 9,000+ K-3 students since 2014, and those retention numbers seem to be relatively consistent. If the reading reform is working, MS should have seen a significant drop in students being retained.

It seems possible that grade retention impacts the population of students being tested, and thus, distorts the test data. In short, grade retention may be raising test scores without improving student reading proficiency.

A second question must seek why Mississippi’s exceptional grade 4 scores do not erase the race or poverty gaps. As NAEP reports in 2024: “In 2024, Black students had an average score that was 25 points lower than that for White students. This performance gap was not significantly different from that in 1998 (26 points). … [And] students who were identified as economically disadvantaged had an average score that was 26 points lower than that for students who were identified as not economically disadvantaged. This performance gap was not significantly different from that in 1998 (26 points).”

The opportunity and achievement gaps in education in the US are by far the most pressing needs in our schools, and yet, these reforms seem to be inadequate for closing them.

One reason may be that we are pursuing the wrong reform agendas, as Maroun and Tienken argue:

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

A final question concerns the evidence about short-term score increases among states implementing reading reform. Similar to another high-retention state, Florida, Mississippi has remained in the bottom 25% of states in grade 8 reading NAEP scores.

This data evidence also suggests that retention may be distorting test scores and not supporting robust or valid reading achievement by students.

Regretfully, the “science of” era of education reform is repeating a problem found in reform cycles since the Reagan era: Focusing on trends and failing to do the hard work of identifying what our problems are and then seeking reform to improve teaching and learning for all students.

The crisis/reform approach has not worked and likely is not working now.

However, the truth is that we simply do not know what is needed or what works because we are not committed to doing the complicated work needed and we remain too often trapped in market forces as well as political and ideological agendas that fail to serve the needs of the children who need reading the most.

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

The Reading Proficiency Bait-and-Switch: Manufacturing Crisis for Profit [SC Update]

[Header Photo by Ines Kopu on Unsplash]

First, the bait.

As I have detailed, the mainstream media, education reformers and pundits, and politicians repeat a misleading claim that US students are not “proficient” readers, and thus, we are experiencing a reading crisis.

The bait in this misinformation is almost always misrepresenting NAEP scores. Again, the confusion and misinformation is grounded in NAEP’s achievement levels that use “proficient” as an aspirational goal for students that is well above grade-level reading as measured on state assessments of reading, as I recently explained:

The disconnect lies with the second benchmark, “proficient.” According to the NAEP, students performing “at or above the NAEP Proficient level … demonstrate solid academic performance and competency over challenging subject matter.” But this statement includes a significant clarification: “The NAEP Proficient achievement level does not represent grade level proficiency as determined by other assessment standards (e.g., state or district assessments).”

NAEP provides a correlation that shows almost all states set “proficient” at the NAEP basic level:

The bait, however, manufactures the perception of a crisis by making claims about NAEP proficient—2/3 of students are not proficient—that at least exaggerates the state of reading achievement among students:

Next, the switch.

Since about 2012, most states have revised or introduced new reading legislation grounded in the “science of reading” (SOR); in other words, states have made significant political and financial investments in both that there is a reading crisis and that the reforms will improve student reading achievement.

Mississippi, for example, has been christened a “miracle” and many states are rushing to copy their reforms despite a lack of research or evidence about the impressive grade 4 reading scores (which disappear by grade 8). [See three questions that need to be answered about MS.]

Many states are also beginning to adjust their proficiency cut scores [1], complicating any claims of reform being effective versus a misleading change in how students are labeled:

Wisconsin isn’t the only state that recently instituted changes that effectively boost proficiency rates. Oklahoma and Alaska recently made similar adjustments. New York lowered passing or “cut” scores in reading and math last year, while Illinois and Colorado are considering such revisions.

Now, here is the switch.

SOR advocates use the proficient level of NAEP to manufacture a crisis, but then celebrate state-level proficiency (that correlates with NAEP basic) to make claims that the SOR reforms are working:

Here are some fun facts, however, about Indiana and other states: These state proficiency gains are equal to NAEP basic, which, again, SOR advocates refuse to acknowledge when discussing the state of reading the US today; note the correlations below of states with NAEP proficient (appears to be nothing to celebrate, right, if we accept the original bait that NAEP proficient is the correct standard?):

While I do maintain that crisis rhetoric isn’t an effective approach to education reform—especially when that crisis is built on misinformation and misunderstanding test data—I will concede there is a reading reform crisis driven by market, political, and ideological agendas among the adults who seem more interested in scoring gotcha points and profiting off reform than improving student reading.

First, the most current evidence available suggests that reading reform that appears to raise test scores in the short term only is primarily driven by grade retention, not changing reading programs, teacher training, or instruction.

Next, recent research again reveals “63% of the variance in test performance was explained by social capital family income variables that influence the development of background knowledge,” leading the researchers to argue:

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

One of the political purposes of NAEP is to hold states accountable for state assessments. If you look carefully at the correlation above, students moving from one state to another would result in that student being labeled differently in terms of reading achievement [2].

Despite the negative responses to my argument, I maintain that the US needs a common standard for age-level reading that includes clear achievement levels that can support valid reading reform and develop a data base that better reflects if reform produces higher student achievement.

We cannot and should not be shouting “crisis” because we do not have the data to draw any valid conclusions about the overall state of reading in the US.

What we do have is permanent reform for the market and political benefit of those perpetuating crisis rhetoric and selling solutions.

The current state of NAEP and state testing allows rampant market and political manipulation of claims about reading and reading reform.

To maintain permanent crisis and reform, many are willing to sacrifice students, teachers, and public schools.

I am not.

[1] For some background on changes to how tests measure student achievement, I recommend exploring the controversial and often misunderstood re-centering of the SAT.

[2] State achievement levels vary widely:

Update

The reading proficiency bait-and-switch has come to South Carolina (another grade retention state that has much lower grade 8 reading scores than grade 4; see below):

This is more partisan political grandstanding, but the grandstanding in on incredibly thin ice.

SC, like IN above, sets state reading proficiency in the NAEP basic range; however, note that SC is toward the lower end of basic (see the correlations above).

SC sits just above the national average in grade 4 reading (2024), but like MS and FL, the impact of grade retention seems to be in play because by grade 8, SC falls down toward the bottom, again similar to MS and FL:

Crisis, education, education reform, Educational Research, opportunity gap, reading, Science of Reading

Why I Reject Crisis Rhetoric about Reading and Education: My Agenda

[Header Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash]

When I had my OpEd on the manufactured reading crisis and NAEP misinformation published in The Washington Post, I anticipated that SOR advocates would continue their misinformation campaign, including targeted attacks on me that repeat false claims and innuendoes (“hidden agenda”).

I do find it a bit odd that my OpEd claims have ruffled so many feathers because, to be blunt, the OpEd is pretty moderate and factual. For those not interested in reading the piece, here is the TL;DR:

  • Many SOR advocates and education reformers misrepresent or misunderstand NAEP data and achievement levels, reading “proficiency” and “grade level,” reading programs, and reading theories. I call for accurate and honest discourse and claims.
  • The wide range of achievement levels between NAEP and state accountability testing should be standardized, and in my informed opinion, that should be a shift to a standard for age-level reading proficiency.
  • Many states have chosen as reading policy to implement third-grade mandatory retention based on state testing, and current research shows that SOR-based reform is only raising test scores in the short term when states have retention. Grade retention disproportionately impacts Black and brown students, poor students, multilingual learners, and students with special needs; as well, retention is punitive with many negative consequences. I caution states against choosing grade retention since it likely distorts test data and does not contribute to authentic achievement gains.

However, most of the negative responses to this commentary that I have seen focuses on one element—my rejecting crisis rhetoric about reading.

Since I began teaching in 1984, I have worked as an educator entirely in the post-A Nation at Risk era of high-stakes accountability education reform.

I reject crisis rhetoric about reading and education for the following reasons:

  • The test-score gap by race and socioeconomic status is not unique to reading; all standardized testing exposes that gap regardless of content area. There is no unique gap in reading.
  • Reading and education crisis have been declared every moment over the past 100 years (at least), and thus, I maintain that the current status of education in the US is the norm that our society has chosen to accept. That norm, by the way, is something I have worked diligently to change for over 40 years as an educator and scholar.
  • “Crisis” in reading and education is manufactured to feed the reform industry, and not to improve teaching or learning. Two things can be true at once: Education reformers manufacture hyperbolic stories about education and reading crisis to maintain a culture of perpetual reform (for market and political/ideological reasons), and the US public education and social safety net are historically and currently grossly negligent about the serving individual needs of all students (notably those vulnerable populations most negatively impacted by test-based gaps).
  • “Crisis” reform in the US has created a culture of blame for students, teachers, and public education that distracts from the evidence on the primary sources for low test scores and test-based gaps. Over 60% of those test scores and thus that gap is causally driven by out-of-school factors. Current research suggests that test-based evaluations of schools and students have failed and must be replaced for most effective reform.
  • There simply is no settled evidence that the US has a “crisis” in reading or that any specific reading program or reading theory has contributed significantly to low student reading proficiency. As well, there simply is no monolithic settled body of science or research on how to teach reading that supports a one-size-fits-all reading program or theory (such as structured literacy); there is a century of robust and complex research on teaching reading that can and should be better implemented in day-to-day classroom instruction; however, the greater causes for ineffective instruction and inadequate student achievement are, again, out-of-school factors and a failure to provide students and teachers the learning/teaching conditions necessary for better outcomes.

Again, to be clear, the US does not currently have the data to make any sort of valid claim about reading proficiency in the US. The only verifiable claim we can or should make is that there is clearly an opportunity gap grounded in race and socioeconomic status as well as ample evidence that multilingual learners and students with special needs are far too often neglected in our schools.

As I argue in the commentary, we need better data, and we need a more honest and nuanced public discourse about reading and education that is not corrupted by market and political/ideological agendas.

Further, journalists, politicians, and even parents should not be controlling the discourse or the reform in reading and education.

Yes, they are and should be stakeholders with a voice in a democracy, but ultimately, education is a profession that has never had autonomy—and I suspect that is because more that 7 out of 10 educators are women (notably even higher in the early grades when students are first taught to read).

I do not—like many in the SOR and education reform movements—have a “hidden agenda.”

I have never and would never sell a reading or education program. I have never and would never endorse any program or theory or ideology. I provide the vast majority of my work for free, open-access publications and my blog.

Over 40+ years, I have presented many dozens of times with well over 90% of that for free or at my own expense.

I am a critical educator and scholar, and I have never been paid to make any claims or to endorse any organization. My published and spoken work is mine and mine only.

I am fortunate to be a university-based scholar, and thus, I have academic freedom and am beholden to no one except me.

My agenda?

I work to support the professional autonomy of teachers so that the individual needs of students can be fully served in our public education system.

And thus, my agenda includes calling out misinformation, identifying the market and political/ideological agendas driving permanent education reform, and providing for all stakeholders counter-evidence to the crisis story being sold.

Since I am an older white man with university tenure in the US, I am not much impacted by the persistent lies and distortions about me and my “hidden agenda”; however, those lies and distortions are in the service of other people maintaining the education reform gravy train that feeds their bank accounts and political/ideological agendas.

Here is another TL;DR version of my WaPo commentary: If you have to misinform or lie to make your argument, you likely do not have a valid argument.

SOR advocates and education reformers are mostly misinforming and outright fanning the flames of crisis to promote their own agendas.

Suggesting I have a “hidden agenda” is a whole lot of projection.

We can and should do better in our rhetoric and our claims.

We can and should create better systems of assessment and thus better data.

We can and should reform reading and education in ways that address the lives of our students as well as the learning and teaching conditions of our schools.

Punishing thousands of Black, brown, and poor students with grade retention because we are addicted to permanent education reform is inexcusable; test-based grade retention is not reading reform.

The accountability era of education reform begun in the early 1980s has never worked, except to perpetuate constant cycles of crisis/reform.

There is no reading or education crisis.

There is a culture of political negligence in the US that has existed for many decades—that culture is grounded in rugged individualism and bootstrapping myths of the US that are contradicted by (ironically) scientific evidence and research.

Students and teachers (mostly women) are not broken beings that need to be fixed.

Students and teachers reflect the negative systemic forces that somehow we as a society refuse to acknowledge or reform.

I should not be surprised that in the Trump/MAGA era there are many people offended by a call for honest and accurate rhetoric about reading, education, students, teachers, and schools.

I think those people being offended says more about them than me.

Recommended

Big Lies of Education

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

education, education reform, NAEP, reading, reading proficiency, Science of Reading

Three Questions about the Mississippi Reading “Miracle” [Updated December 2025]

[Header Photo by USGS on Unsplash]

Update [December 2025]

Here I want to note that Q1 and Q3 have been answered, and the answer is exactly what I have been suggesting.

First, let me recommend How much of “Mississippi’s education miracle” is an artifact of selection bias?, which examines the analysis answering two of the questions below: On education miracles in general (and those in Mississippi in particular), Howard Wainer, Irina Grabovsky and Daniel H. Robinson.

Here are the highlights, although I recommend reading the entire piece:

In 1748, famed Scot David Hume defined nature. He elaborated such a law as “a regularity of past experience projected by the mind to future cases”. He argued that the evidence for a miracle is rarely sufficient to suspend rational belief because a closer look has always revealed that what was reported as a miracle was more likely false, resulting from misperception, mistransmission, or deception….

A careful examination confirms that enthusiasm to emulate Mississippi should be tempered with scepticism….

This provides a boost of about $111.63 of extra funding annually for each pupil. Comparing this amount to what are annual contemporary per pupil expenditures nationally, we have to agree that if such small expenditures can make a visible difference in student performance it truly is a miracle – a Mississippi version of St. John’s loaves and fishes.

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

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

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

Strangely though, for the eighth-grade literacy test, the state’s rank dropped to a tie for 42nd place!…

(Note that this works especially well for student height, for after retaining the shortest third-graders for an extra year they will likely be taller when they are measured again a year later. It would be nice if the same were true for students struggling in academic subjects.)…

Were we to do this we would find that most of Mississippi’s gains are due to the retention rate.

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

 Find a way to prevent the lowest test scorers from taking the exam and the average score will increase….

Second, besides weak empirical data, educational reformers like Patrinos should have given greater weight to the extant literature on the Mississippi Miracle. The miracle had already been convincingly debunked.10 Fourth-grade gains had vanished by the time the students reached eighth grade.

Question 1: Why is Mississippi retaining about 9000-12,000 K-3 students annually since 2014?

One of the key assertions of the “science of reading” (SOR) movement is that students across the US are mostly not proficient readers because teachers rely on balanced literacy to teach reading.

And then, SOR advocates argue that 95% of students can be proficient readers, and the key to that success is SOR.

That raises an important question about Mississippi, which has implemented both SOR reading policy and grade retention for over a decade.

SOR advocates have called MS’s jump in grade 4 NAEP scores a “miracle”; however, MS has continued to retain about 9000-12,000 students annually in K-3.

Certainly, a decade is enough time to reach the 95% rate of proficiency, and thus, retention numbers should have dropped dramatically or be near 0.

Question 2: How is Mississippi a “miracle” if the achievement gap for race and socioeconomic status is the same as 1998?

As shown in MS’s 2024 NAEP reading scores for grade 4:

Question 3: Why has Mississippi’s grade 8 NAEP scores remained in the bottom 25% of states despite the grade 4 NAEP scores jumping into the top 25%?

For 2024, MS NAEP grade 8 reading scores drop to eleventh from the bottom of state scores:

An analysis of reading reform found that states with comprehensive reform that includes grade retention have experienced short-term increases in test scores.

However, the analysis does not identify why these comprehensive reforms (including grade retention) are correlated with those short-term scores increases.

Research on education “miracles” have found that virtually none exist, and even when a school or program appears to be “high flying” there is little evidence those can be scaled up meaningfully.

Mississippi’s grade 4 NAEP scores in reading, then, raise questions that must be answered; instead, it is now politically cool to adopt copy-cat legislation from the state without proper evidence that there is valid success or a solid understanding of what is happening and why.

Recommended

Big Lies of Education: Grade Retention

education, literacy, NCTE

1959: “yet students enter college badly lacking in these fundamental skills”

[Header Photo by Austin on Unsplash]

It is 1959, and J. Donald Adams in the New York Times is lamenting the lack of basic skills among college students in the US:

If more parents who were themselves the recipients of a decent education could be made aware of the asinine statements about the teaching of the English language which are being spewed forth by today’s educational theorists, there would be an armed uprising among the Parent-Teacher Associations all over the United States.

Yes, 1959.

And where does the blame lie?

That inheritance is being endangered by various forces operant in our society: by the hucksters of Madison Avenue, by the tiresome circumlocutions of the bureaucrats; by the tortured locutions of the sociologists, psychologists and symbol-haunted critics. However erosive these may be, the root responsibility for the decline in standards of English rests, I think, with the teachers of English in our primary and secondary schools, and even more so, with the teachers of education who produced them. These are the people whom you can chiefly thank for the fact that so many college entrants cannot spell, punctuate, or put together a coherent sentence in their own tongue, let alone any other….

[And] THERE is an organization called the National Council of Teachers of English, whose attitudes and activities constitute one of the chief threats to the cultivation of good English in our schools.

65 years ago, it seems, schools were focusing, alas, on the wrong things:

Today, the emphasis is placed, with unutterable stupidity, upon teaching the things that cannot be taught, the things that have to be learned, by trial and error, by oneself, such as social adjustment. High schools undertake to teach safe driving: you can teach someone to drive, but you cannot teach him to drive safely; the temperamental and emotional factors involved are beyond the reach of the instructor. But reading, spelling, punctuation, grammar and arithmetic can be taught: yet students enter college badly lacking in these fundamental skills, and with the most fragmentary notions of geography and history.

One must wonder how we survived …

H/T Ralph Pantozzi

education, education reform, Educational Research, Science of Reading

The “Science of” Movements: Another Education Reform Red Herring

[Header image misocrazy from New York, NY, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons]

“Red herring” perfectly describes the bulk of education reform in the US since the Reagan administration because thosee reforms have been based on false claims to distract from needed social and educational reform in the interests of students, teachers, and public education.

The US (and many English-speaking nations around the world) have remained in a perpetual state of education and reading crises for decades.

The US has never stopped using crisis rhetoric or blaming schools, teachers, and students, but policy has been a revolving door of new standards, new tests, and new “miracle” solutions—none of which ever produce the positive outcomes promised.

The dirty little secret is that perpetual crisis/reform in education (and reading) is its own goal because constant crisis/reform is politically and economically profitable to those fanning the flames of crisis.

In 2018, the “science of reading” (SOR) became a tired and constant refrain of the media, spreading to parent advocacy and then legislation and policy.

By 2025, the “science of” has added “math” and “learning,” including many English-speaking countries where a reading crisis is the norm.

And thus, education reform in the US and other countries has now adopted at the core of education reform “science of” rhetoric, claims, blame, and policy.

Parallel to education reform since the 1980s, the “science of” education reform is not grounded in credible claims about education crisis or problems, and therefore, the blame and solutions are also not credible or effective.

The “science of” approach to education reform has been extremely effective since “science” is being weaponized, and when anyone dare to challenge the movement, those people are accused of being anti-science, often compared to the anti-vaccination movement.

Here’s the problem: Those of us challenging the “science of” movement are not rejecting scientific research in education; we are acknowledging that “science of” advocacy is misrepresenting educational challenges, educational research, and educational practice for ideological, political, and market purposes.

Journalists, educators/scholars, education “celebrities,” the education marketplace, and politicians have made their careers on false “science of” claims and unfounded attacks on anyone calling them out for not being credible.

Ironically, the evidence supports those of us who are critics of “science of” education/reading reform, and consequently, “science of” claims are red herrings, distractions from the valid education challenges and potential reforms that would serve the interests of students, teachers, and public education.

Here, then, is the core evidence that the “science of” movements are, in fact, red herring education reform.

Is there an education or reading crisis? No.

Elena Aydorova; Reinking, Hruby, and Risko; and Larsen, as just a few examples, have explained that the data/evidence simply does not support claims of crisis.

Further, “science of” advocates tend to move quickly from the false claims of “crisis” to offering false blame.

Just as there is no evidence of crisis, there is simply no scientific studies showing, for example, that the US has a reading crisis caused by a few reading programs, the implementation of balanced literacy, or the failure of teacher education to prepare teachers.

Again, there is a paradox in the “science of” movement whereby the advocates of “science of” themselves do not adhere to the narrow use of “science” to support their major claims.

For example, in the US, SOR advocates and SOR-based policy and legislation include support for a number of practices, claims, and programs that lack scientific evidence—decodable texts, LETRS, 95% rule, Orton-Gillingham, systematic phonics first for all students, nonsense word assessments (DIBLES), etc.

Broadly, also, “science of” advocates’ most damning red herring is that they are weaponizing “science” as a veneer to take a non-ideological pose although “science of” advocates are themselves mostly making ideological claims.

Direct instruction and skills-based instruction have long been at the core of conservative ideology.

Once we acknowledge that “science of” claims of crisis and who/what they blame are not evidence-based, we can also acknowledge they are mostly making ideological arguments, and then, we must unpack why.

Noted above, there is a great deal of profit in crying education/reading crisis and maintaining a constant state of reform.

As long as that reform never works.

And it never has, it never will.

The “science of” movements, then, are grounded in misinformation, oversimplification, and ideological bias.

The “science of” movements are another form of red herring education reform.

The distraction is also ideological, grounded in a rejection of the power of systemic forces and a belief in rugged individualism as well as the bootstrapping myth.

The “science of” movement is also a distraction from other ulterior motives, such as de-professionalizing teachers with scripted curriculum and imposing AI/computer program approaches for teaching students.

More irony: Education reform is designed to keep our eyes on individual people—students, teachers—and not the overwhelming evidence:

Almost 63% of the variance in test performance was explained by social capital family income variables that influence the development of background knowledge. Background knowledge is a known predictor of standardized test results. Family income variables are immutable by schools. Only public policies, outside the control of school personnel, can influence family income….

Policy makers and education leaders should rethink the current reliance on standardized test results as the deciding factor to make decisions about student achievement, teacher quality, school effectiveness, and school leader quality. In effect, policies that use standardized test results to evaluate, reward, and sanction students and school personnel are doing nothing more than rewarding schools that serve advantaged students and punishing schools that serve disadvantaged students. (Maroun and Tienken, 2024)

Here is the science that critics of the “science of” movement recognize.

And fun fact, we are not trying to sell you anything or get your vote.

Don’t be distracted.

Recommended

Aukerman, M. (2022a). 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/

Aukerman, M. (2022b). The Science of Reading and the media: How do current reporting patterns cause damage? Literacy Research Association Critical Conversations. CC BY 4.0 license. https://literacyresearchassociation.org/stories/the-science-of-reading-and-the-media-how-do-current-reporting-patterns-cause-damage/

Aukerman, M. (2022c). The Science of Reading and the media: Is reporting biased? Literacy Research Association Critical Conversations. CC BY 4.0 license. https://literacyresearchassociation.org/stories/the-science-of-reading-and-the-media-is-reporting-biased/

Aydarova, E. (2023). “Whatever you want to call it”: Science of reading mythologies in the education reform movement. Harvard Educational Review, 93(4), 556–581, https://doi.org10.17763/1943-5045-93.4.556

Aydarova, E. (2024). What you see is not what you get: Science of reading reforms as a guise for standardization, centralization, and privatization. American Journal of Education. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/730991

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

education

Buyer’s Remorse: Reading Story Sold Manufactured Crisis, Fake Miracles

[Header Photo by Alejandra Rodríguez on Unsplash]

I began my teaching career in 1984, coinciding with the current era of high-stakes accountability driving education reform in the wake of A Nation at Risk.

One of my favorite units as a teacher of American literature to tenth and eleventh graders in the rural South was the Transcendentalism era—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and (the often ignored) Margaret Fuller.

Students did not enjoy reading these authors, I must confess, but the unit itself was often very compelling.

In the late 1980s, I added a consideration of the “Reeboks let U.B.U” campaign featuring Emerson:

I tracked down the advertising agency responsible for the ad, and my students wrote a letter calling out the campaign for being contradictory.

Shockingly, we did receive a letter from the person over the campaign. They confessed that my students’ were on target with their criticism, but added that Reebok believed they were a unique shoes company and felt their campaign highlighted that fact.

As a part of that unit also I had a recording from MTV News covering a Madonna look-alike contest.

Among the dozens of prepubescent girls, one was interviewed and she excitedly stated that the girls were there to express their individuality.

While students were no more eager to read Emerson, teens soon found themselves compelled by Emerson’s “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”

Over the past 40-plus years, I think about this unit and my students often—as well as Emerson’s enduring arguments in “Self-Reliance.”

The world of education reform, I regret to acknowledge, is dominated by “little minds,” drawn to and selling the same false stories of educational crisis and miracles.

I would amend Emerson’s list a bit, adding to “statesmen” education journalists.

The current reading crisis, often identified as the “science of reading” (SOR) movement, is yet another example of selling the manufactured reading crisis and education reform miracles that are actually mirages.

Since the 1980s, no education reform has worked.

New standards after new standards have not worked.

New high-stakes tests after new high-stakes tests have not worked.

Accountability for students, teachers, and schools has not worked.

No a single fear-mongering prediction or promise has been fulfilled.

With each new hot reform, the missionary zeal doesn’t fades; it just switches teams.

I am drawn to a line from Blade Runner as I contemplate the fate of the current SOR movement: “The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long – and you have burned so very, very brightly, Roy” (Tyrell).

The uncritical support for the SOR story has been as fervent as any reform movement, so I must wonder if we are on the cusp of buyer’s remorse.

Are these canaries in the coalmine foreboding an end to yet another era of unfounded claims of a reading crisis?

  • A judge in Massachusetts rejected a frivolous lawsuit grounded in the story being sold that a reading crisis was caused by a few reading programs and the scapegoat of the moment, balanced literacy (and three cueing).
  • Unlike mainstream media, Snopes corrected Trump-appointed Secretary of Education’s claim about student reading proficiency based on the Big Lie about NAEP.
  • Possibly most surprising is this call from Perry Bacon Jr. to set aside the crisis rhetoric around education, including this acknowledgement about NAEP:

The overwhelming majority of American students are reaching “baseline proficiency” in math, reading and science, according to PISA. That’s almost certainly because of our public school systems, where about 87 percent of students in grades K-12 get their education. U.S. politicians for a while were pushing the aspirational idea that most students should score proficient or above on the NAEP tests. That is a very high and probably unrealistic standard. Most of America’s students are reaching the NAEP “basic” level, mirroring the PISA results.

The impending buyer’s remorse for buying the reading story being sold will come with tremendous costs.

As Bacon warns: “But the alarmist portrayals of our schools are wrong and undermine support for public education.”

The SOR movement has wasted huge amounts of public funding and time; students are also paying a high price because of the caustic nature of scripted reading programs and grade retention.

As I read mainstream journalists and political leaders parrot the same false reading story over and over, I cannot help thinking about the preteen girls dressed like Madonna and the Reebok add that even my high school students were able to shake their heads at in disappointment.

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

The Science of Ideology: What Is Really Wrong with Education?

[Header Photo by Ivan Aleksic on Unsplash]

Responding to the symposium question “What Shall We Do about Reading Today?” Emmett A. Betts, professor of Education at Pennsylvania State College, opened the first article in a professional journal for elementary education with a broad claim:

In a democracy, the people get the kind of schools they want. One of the many functions of an educator is to point the way to ever better schools. If the people want many public and private institutions for the preparation of teachers regardless of the quality of the work or the teacher supply and demand, the people get them. If the people want better schools plants and instruction, they make their will known at the polls and they get what they want. In a democracy, the quantity and quality of educational opportunity is the product of what people want, and what they want is to no small degree conditioned by the educational leadership they have elected to follow. (p. 226)

This may read a bit idealistic or naive, but Betts, I think, offers an accurate characterization of the very complex public education system in the US—a system bound necessarily to the political system itself.

Betts then warns:

Very soon strong pressure will be felt by elementary school teachers to intensify instruction in certain areas, such as reading. This pressure will be brought to bear by non-educators who have found a deficiency but who may may offer no other solution than a “stronger prescription.” Years of fruitful research on learning many be cast aside in order to “do something about reading instruction….” To prevent this wastage, educators must be prepared to bring to bear a considerable accumulation of information that permits an adequate resolving of this problem. (p. 226)

Later in that issue, William S. Gray, University of Chicago, expands on Betts’s warning:

[R]ecent editorials…maintain that current deficiencies in reading are the product of “pseudo-scientific bungling and the innovation of so-called progressive methods of teaching. The solution advocated by one editor was the elimination of “impractical non-essentials,” which were not defined, and of “undisciplined dabbling with practical essentials. The implication of these vague criticisms is that recent innovations in teaching reading have been adopted without due consideration of essentials and of methods of achieving desired ends. Such assumptions are as unsound and merit no more consideration than a purely defensive attitude. (p. 235)

In forty-plus pages, eleven literacy scholars confront the same problems with a reading crisis that may sound familiar to people in 2025.

However, this is from 1942

And in a mere two decades, guess what the state of reading the US entailed?

“After half a century of [progressive reform and expanding public education],” wrote Jacques Barzun in Tomorrow’s Illiterates: The State of Reading Instruction Today (1961), “we who run businesses, carry on professions, work for the government, or engage in teaching itself are forced to admit that illiteracy is still with us” (xii-xiii).

Barzun adds, “the citizen who is interested (and who has managed to learn to read) [may have their] hair [stand] on end at hearing what folly has been condoned as educational theory during the past thirty years” (p. xiv).

Editor of this volume and author of chapters 1 and 7, Charles Child Walcutt argues: “One way to describe the reading problem is to say that it is a teacher problem and—even more—that it is a problem of the teaching of teachers” (p. 18).

And of course: “The assertion that the reading experts do not understand the theory of their system can be demonstrated if we point out the false assumptions, the faulty extrapolations from scientific research, and the absolute contradictions that appear in its central propositions and procedures” (pp. 19-20).

Over sixty years ago, a reading crisis was declared (twenty years after on just before it), teachers were blamed, and reading experts were accused of not understanding the science behind their own field.

Déjà vu all over again.

There is a recurring story—one that is profitable and easy to sell—that education in the US is a failure, notably reading and math education.

The problem with this story is that it has existed since the mid-1800s in some fashion; but as I share above, an intense era of education (reading and math) crisis is at least 80 years and running.

And then, the last 40 years has been characterized by perpetual education reform, several cycles of new standards, new tests, and constant high-stakes accountability.

At no point in the US has the public, the media, or political leaders declared education (reading or math) effective.

But since the 1980s, after the hyper-crisis panic of A Nation at Risk, the US has doubled and tripled down on in-school only reform—”pressure will be brought to bear by non-educators,” as Betts noted in 1942.

The story that isn’t compelling and is hard to sell is this: The history of education crisis and reform has been grounded in misdiagnosing educational problems, casting misguided blame, and mandating solutions that are destined to fail—and even cause harm.

However, here is a story told in research that the US will not accept:

Almost 63% of the variance in test performance was explained by social capital family income variables that influence the development of background knowledge. Background knowledge is a known predictor of standardized test results. Family income variables are immutable by schools. Only public policies, outside the control of school personnel, can influence family income….

Policy makers and education leaders should rethink the current reliance on standardized test results as the deciding factor to make decisions about student achievement, teacher quality, school effectiveness, and school leader quality. In effect, policies that use standardized test results to evaluate, reward, and sanction students and school personnel are doing nothing more than rewarding schools that serve advantaged students and punishing schools that serve disadvantaged students. (Maroun and Tienken, 2024)

In other words, the ways we measure school and teacher effectiveness as well as student achievement are in fact mostly measuring out-of-school factors.

So, what is really wrong with education?

Ideology/politics and market forces.

The disconnect between public, political, and media beliefs about education and decades of research reinforced by Maroun and Tienken is entirely ideological/political.

Many people in the US are bound to rugged individualism and the meritocracy myth, both of which feed into another belief that education transforms society.

So we are now at the story the US hates, refuses to acknowledges, and thus, does not sell: Schools reflect our society, but do not (cannot) transform it (reread the opening quote from Betts above).

There is a core libertarian belief in the US rejecting the dominance of systemic forces that drives crisis rhetoric about education as well as the politics and policy mandating how we implement our schools.

US public education has never been a singular process. There has never been one program or learning/teaching theory driving schools.

However, the ideological attacks on schools, teachers, and students have always reduced claims of crisis to simplistic problems and blame (reading the entire journal issue from 1942 or the book from 1961 is eerie and frustrating).

But possibly as powerful and problematic as ideology/politics is the impact of market forces on educational practices.

To be blunt, the education market benefits from perpetual education crisis, not from successful education reform. (See also: The healthcare market benefits from perpetual illness, not curing diseases and healthy people.)

Education crisis and reform, then, have been almost entirely ideological/political and market driven.

Ironically, perpetual crisis/reform benefits both ideology/politics and the market.

Regretfully, perpetual crisis/reform does not benefit schools, teachers, or students.

This also is a story that doesn’t sell: The current “science of” movement (science of reading, science of math, science of learning) is nothing new; in fact, this is simply the science of ideology (again).

Because of the outsized impact of ideology/politics and the market on how we talk about, judge, and implement schooling in the US, we do not have a crisis, but an entrench set of failures we lack the political will to address: perpetual opportunity and achievement gaps between affluent, white students and minoritized/marginalized students (Black and brown students, impoverished students, multilingual learners, and special needs students).

Yet those gaps have been about the same for many decades and across all areas of learning (there is no gap in reading, for example) that isn’t also in math or science, or even civics).

But as Maroun and Tienken show, those measured gaps are more about social inequity than education—even though those measures also show in-school inequity as well that magnifies systemic inequities.

The ideology/politics driving how we view and implement our schools is corrupted by a fatalism about needed social reform.

It isn’t that we cannot build a better society; it isn’t that we cannot build better schools.

It is that we simply have chosen that neither matters more than our sacred—and misguided—beliefs and market.

Recommended

Enough with the doom and gloom. American education isn’t failing. Perry Bacon Jr.

The overwhelming majority of American students are reaching “baseline proficiency,” in math, reading and science, according to PISA. That’s almost certainly because of our public school systems, where about 87 percent of students in grades K-12 get their education. U.S. politicians for a while were pushing the aspirational idea that most students should score proficient or above on the NAEP tests. That is a very high and probably unrealistic standard. Most of America’s students are reaching the NAEP “basic” level, mirroring the PISA results.

NCTE

Schedule: Fall/ Winter/ Spring 2025-2026

AI in the Liberal Arts: Promises and Perils

October 16 @ 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm

NCTE Annual Conference 2025 – Denver CO

Panel: Balanced Learning Approaches: From Texts to Literacy Enriched Classrooms

11/20/2025 – 1:00 – 2:15, Mile High Ballroom 2C

Presentation

Dream Texts by Nightmare Authors: To Teach or Not to Teach 

Access PDF of presentation HERE           

Many beloved authors have been exposed as abusive people or advocates for offensive beliefs. From the revelations about Neil Gaiman to the anti-trans stance by JK Rowling, whether to teach their works despite those failures or controversies confronts teachers throughout K-16 literacy classrooms. This session examines if and why teachers should or should not teach dream texts by nightmare authors.

Roundtable: Literacy, a Dream Deferred?: How to (Actually) Serve the Literacy Needs of All Students

11/21/2025 – 9:30 – 10:45, Room 108/110

Roundtable Presentation

Literacy and Literature as Casualties of Reading Wars

Access a PDF of the presentation HERE [Updated 11/21/25]

Reading Wars often have two overlapping components, debates about how reading should be taught and what texts students should (and should not) read. Both of these elements tend to promote ideological agendas at the expense of authentic approaches to literacy and literature.

Individual Presentation: Recovering Our Reading Dream from a Long Crisis Nightmare

11/21/2025 – 2:45 – 3:15, Mile High Ballroom 1A/1B

Access a PDF of presentation HERE

In 1961, Jacques Barzun in Tomorrow’s Illiterates declared “illiteracy is still with us.” Charles Child Walcutt added: “[N]o further ‘research’ into methods of reading instruction is necessary.” This session examines reading crisis/reform cycles to reconsider the stories told about reading and offer a new approach for reform that serves the needs of students and supports teacher professionalism.

Roundtable: How Can Literacy Teachers Reclaim the Right to Teach in Ways that are Responsive to Our Kids, Our Setting, and Our Beliefs?  

11/23/2025 – 9:00 – 10:15, Room 107/109/111

Talk

Fact Checking “The reading wars are ending. Phonics won.” (Washington Post Editorial Board)

Access a PDF of the presentation HERE [Updated]

The Editorial Board at The Washington Post published a bold claim: The reading wars are ending. Phonics won. Here, that claim is fact checked focusing on the false claim that California adopted Mississippi-style “science of reading” legislation. A brief examination of the misleading comparison of CA and MS shows that the WaPo Editorial Board has declared a false end to the reading war as well as mischaracterizing the role of phonics.

Roundtable Presentation

Education Journalism Fails Education (Again)

Access a PDF of the presentation HERE

This roundtable will share with teachers four “red flags” (Chris Ferguson) to critically engage with media coverage of educational issues and research (highlighting the “science of” coverage): RED FLAG 1: Claims that all the evidence is on one side of a controversial issue; RED FLAG 2: Reversed burden of proof. “Can you prove it’s not the smartphones?”; RED FLAG 3: Failing to inform readers that effect sizes from studies are tiny, or near zero, only mentioning they are “statistically significant.”; RED FLAG 4: Comparisons to other well-known causal effects.

WSRA 2026 Annual Conference

February 6, 2025

Conference Program

Session: Fri. Feb 6 from 11:15 to 12:30

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

Education practices and policy are often directly and indirectly driven by the stories told in the media, among the public, and by political leaders. This session will explore the Big Lies in the compelling but misleading narratives, including A Nation at Risk/education “crisis,” reading proficiency/NAEP, National Reading Panel, poverty as an excuse, international test rankings and economic competitiveness, grade retention, growth mindset/grit, and the word gap.

Session: Fri. Feb 6 from 2:15 to 3:30

We Teach English in Times of Perpetual Crisis: Selling a Story of Reading (and Literacy) [Companion Post]

See the presentation HERE.

English-speaking countries around the world are once again fighting another Reading War. In the US, the movement is called the “science of reading” (SOR) and the result has been intense media scrutiny of reading programs, teachers, and teacher education as well as highly prescriptive state-level legislation and mandates. Those of us who do not teach beginning readers are not exempt from the negative consequences of another Reading War. This presentation will briefly introduce the history of Reading Wars and identify the key elements of the SOR movement and why the public stories and legislation are poised to erase teacher autonomy and serving the individual needs of students.

NCTEAR 2026

Pastides Alumni Center, Columbia, SC

Pleanary Session on the Science of Reading

Saturday 3/7/2026, 1:20 – 2:30

Science of Reading or Science of Retention? [follow link for PDF of PP]

P.L. Thomas, Furman University

This talk examines the central role of grade retention policies in raising short-term test scores and shares the current research on grade retention’s impact on test scores and negative outcomes for students.

Alaska Task Force on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP)

April 15, 2026

Understanding NAEP and Educational Funding (follow link for PDF of presentation)