Tag Archives: teaching

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

The Zombie Politics of Misinformation about Students Reading at Grade Level

April 29, 2025 plthomasedd

[Header Photo by Daniel Lloyd Blunk-Fernández on Unsplash]

Yesterday, we had our last class session in my upper-level writing and research course that is grounded in students analyzing and evaluating how media covers a chosen education topic.

In that last class, we debriefed about what students concluded about media coverage of education. While some found the coverage valid and informative, much of the discussion focused on why media perpetuates misinformation more often than not—notably about student reading proficiency in the US.

Right on cue, then, I saw this posted on social media, Teaching reading is rocket science, with these two recurring claims that are, in fact, misleading at best and false at worst (see “Recommended” links below):

Eli’s story, and the stories of all my students, are not the exception. They represent the shared reality for two-thirds of our children, here in California and across the country since the 1990s. My students are not at risk because they cannot yet read — they are at risk because not knowing how to read limits their access to opportunities, both academically and beyond.

Research shows when we teach students to read by directly guiding them to break the code of how sounds in letters work, about 95% of them can become strong readers — including multilingual learners and those with dyslexia. So why have only one-third of our fourth graders been reading at grade level for the past three decades? This gap persists because students haven’t had access to evidence-based literacy instruction drawn from decades of vast interdisciplinary research in areas such as cognitive psychology, linguistics, communication sciences and education.

The “2/3 of students are not reading a grade level” claim is one of the most powerful recurring claims in the media. Note these high-profile examples:

Emily Hanford in APM Reports:

The stakes were high. Research shows that children who don’t learn to read by the end of third grade are likely to remain poor readers for the rest of their lives, and they’re likely to fall behind in other academic areas, too. People who struggle with reading are more likely to drop out of high school, to end up in the criminal justice system, and to live in poverty. But as a nation, we’ve come to accept a high percentage of kids not reading well. More than 60 percent of American fourth-graders are not proficient readers, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and it’s been that way since testing began in the 1990s.

Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times:

One of the most bearish statistics for the future of the United States is this: Two-thirds of fourth graders in the United States are not proficient in reading.

And even a college-based literacy professor in The Conversation:

Five years after the pandemic forced children into remote instruction, two-thirds of U.S. fourth graders still cannot read at grade level. Reading scores lag 2 percentage points below 2022 levels and 4 percentage points below 2019 levels.

Despite ample evidence to the contrary and repeated clarifications from many educators and scholars (See “Big Lie” link in “Recommended” below), media characterizations of student reading proficiency continues to be misrepresented, primarily by misunderstanding NAEP achievement levels, because the public has always believed that “kids today can’t read”—despite there being little evidence of a reading “crisis” over the recurring claims of “crisis” reaching back into at least the 1940s.

Two points are important to clarify:

NAEP achievement levels are confusing because “basic” is approximately what most states consider “proficient” and by implication “grade level.” NAEP “proficient” is well above grade level, set at an “aspirational” [1] level that is misleading and creates a perpetual appearance of failure for students, teachers, and schools.
Most states—notably Mississippi and Louisiana—set their “proficient” level just above the mid-point of NAEP “basic” (MS) or just below (LA):

Mapping State Proficiency Standards Onto NAEP Scales, 2007–22

In short, if we consider NAEP and state assessments of reading valid, about 1/3 of students have over the last couple of decades performed below “basic” (NAEP) and thus seem to be below grade level in grade 4.

While the NAEP misinformation and misunderstanding is grounded in the “aspirational” use of “proficient,” the “95% of students can be on grade level” claim is just wildly overstated, and ironically, not based on scientific evidence (despite this being a refrain by the “science of” movement).

I recommend reading Can 95% of Children Learn to Read? to see some of how this claim gained its zombie status.

Historically and currently, many in the US have been and are concerned about student reading acquisition; this, of course, is a valid concern, notably that marginalized and vulnerable populations of students are disproportionately struggling to meet whatever standard we set for “proficient” or “grade level” (see HERE that explores how MS has not closed the race or socioeconomic achievement gaps, for example).

There is an insidious zombie politics to claims about 2/3 of students not reading at grade level, but that if we just did the right thing, 95% of students would read at grade level.

Since neither claim is empirically true, we must confront that basing education claims and reform on misunderstanding and misinformation have not yet worked and are unlikely to work moving forward.

Note

[1] Rosenberg, B. (2004, May). What’s proficient? The No Child Left Behind Act and the many meanings of proficiency. Washington, DC: American Federation of Teachers. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED497886.pdf

Education: How the Market and Fads Poison a Robust Field

April 3, 2025 plthomasedd

[Header Photo by Thomas Kolnowski on Unsplash]

My high school English teacher and eventual mentor, Lynn Harrill, told me in my junior year that I should be a teacher.

I laughed, and certainly as teens are apt to do, hurt his feelings.

Almost fifty years later, and I have been a career educator since 1984.

I realized I wanted to be a teacher and a writer during my junior college years—the former because I had a job as a tutor and the latter because my speech teacher, Steven Brannon, introduced my to e.e. cummings.

I declared my secondary English education major when I transferred the fall of my junior year. And then, almost immediately, I learned a harsh lesson about becoming an education major: It was a “lesser” degree.

I took as many English courses as I could as an undergrad, and in ever class, I had to out myself as an education major, not an English major (almost most of my close friends were English majors).

Over the next five decades, I have had to navigate that “lesser” status when I tried to enter an MFA program while teaching high school full-time (nope), tried to apply for a PhD in English while teaching high school full time (nope), and then completed an EdD (yet another “lesser” degree to go with with my BA in English Education and MEd).

And since 2002, I have had to correct people who assume I am in the English department; nope, I am in Education.

In the good ol’ U.S. of A., as well, the standard beliefs are that education is failing, teachers are people who can’t do (and were mostly weak students themselves), and the discipline of education is a joke.

Just as a recent example, see this on social media:

Why does Hattie's plagiarism & misconduct matter?

Because it exposes the lie at the heart of what is called the 'science of learning', 'evidence-based' or 'education reform' movement.

This movement is not about 'science', but about 'management science', and it's destructive ⬇️ https://t.co/ODuGOTdAX5
— Stephen Vainker (@StephenVainker) April 1, 2025

Visible Learning, promoted by Tom Bennett, Nick Gibb, Carl Hendrick, & Daisy Christodoulou in the most glowing terms, is a far deeper & more pernicious myth than any of these.

Hattie appeared at Greg Ashman's ResearchED event as recently as last month.https://t.co/lYd8XLId5S https://t.co/zbJfJmh6qI
— Stephen Vainker (@StephenVainker) April 1, 2025

I have recently submitted a book chapter, in fact, on two “pernicious” fads in education—grit and growth mindset.

However, I believe the standard attacks on education, teachers, and then the discipline of education are gross oversimplifications that miss almost entirely the real problems (what Vainker is addressing above and what I am confronting in my chapter on grit and growth mindset).

There are layers to the problem.

First, education as a discipline is robust and valid. My own recognition of that, however, did not fully develop until my EdD program where I was engaged with the scholarship, philosophy, and theory of the field of education—and not distracted by issues of certification and bureaucracy.

Now, that means when people are attacking “education” and the “pernicious fads” they are in fact not criticizing the discipline.

Here are the layers of problems that dilute a valid field:

Certification and accreditation bureaucracy. Regretfully, education is a profession that feels compelled to mimic more respected fields like medicine and law, where credentials are required. However, that layer has more often than not been reductive for the discipline because of the inherent flaws with credentialing and bureaucracy.
The education market place. The current “science of reading” (SOR) movement is repeating what happened during the Common Core era—the education market place using branding (SOR, CC) to spur purchasing cycles in education. To be blunt, the single most powerful and corrupting aspect of education as a field is the market. Any credible or valid education research is necessarily reduced when it is packaged and sold; this is exactly what happened with multiple intelligences, learning styles, grit, growth mindset, etc., creating the perception that the research isn’t credible instead of acknowledging that the marketing is the problem (although in some cases, the market is perpetuating flawed research as well). In short, education reform is an industry, not a process for improving teaching and learning in the US.
Education celebrities. A parallel problem with education market forces is the education celebrity who corrupts the field of education by selling programs, fads, or themselves as “experts” (and sometimes, all of these at once). This is a problematic concern since many of us who work in education, of course, are paid as professionals. Simply being paid as a professional is not something to criticize in a capitalistic society, of course, but money can and does corrupt. One of the best (worst?) examples of how an education celebrity can distort significantly credible and valid research is Ruby Payne, who cashed in (literally) on NCLB mandates and funding. Payne peddled stereotypes about poverty and teaching children in poverty—even though a robust body of research on poverty refuted nearly everything she packaged, promoted, and sold. Part of the problem here is that education celebrities and the market can easily prey on education and educators because the US has been politically negligent in providing schools, teachers, and students the sort of conditions in which all children can learn.
Sexism. Here is a fact at the core of many problems in education: More than 7 out of 10 K-12 teachers and most teacher educators/scholars are women. I leave this as the last point for emphasis because I believe sexism is the foundation of why education remains disrespected as a field and why there is so little political and public support for teachers as professionals (note the current rush to support scripted curriculum as one example). The current focus on “science,” as well, is another sexist movement (repeating the same sort of claims during NCLB) since the quantitative/qualitative divide in what research matters is highly gendered (men do “hard” science, but women do “soft” science).

Bashing student achievement, school and teacher quality, and teaching as a profession as well as education as a field are all a sort of lazy and unexamined national past time in the US.

These sorts of attacks and criticisms are shrugged off as common knowledge and even jokes; again, I believe, primarily because we still see teaching as just something women do with children.

While there is some validity to criticizing educational research that is packaged and sold, this is not something unique to education as a field.

Consider as just one example the perversion of the 10,000 rule in psychology, and the power of Malcolm Gladwell as “celebrity” to do just that.

Psychology and economics, in fact, have experienced crises of replication that should tarnish those fields at least as much as how we marginalize education.

Yet, psychology and economics are seen as men’s professions, and thus, professions, and receive a huge pass when they simply do not deserve that.

We should stop bashing education as a field, but we should also be far more vigilant about protecting educational research and practice from the corrosive impact of bureaucracy, the market, celebrities, and sexism.

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

Recommended: Why We Cannot Go Back to Basics (Rethinking Schools)

April 3, 2025 plthomasedd

[Header Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash]

Note

The article below appears in Rethinking Schools and brings together several problems with and connections between the “science of reading” and book banning/censorship movements that I have been address since 2018.

Why We Cannot Go Back to Basics: Reclaiming The Right to Teach Literacy, Daniel Ferguson, Laurie Rabinowitz, and Amy Tondreau

Although the “culture war” and “reading war” have been described as separate causes promoted by disparate organizations, their stories are more connected than they appear. Both book banning and SoR dogmatism limit what teachers can teach and what students can read, narrowing the ability of public schools to address children’s diverse needs. We see this most explicitly in conservative parent groups, including Moms for Liberty, who have made it clear they endorse both. This should be a wake-up call to critically examine the potential impact of phonics-based policies on public school students and teachers.

Beware Scripted Curriculum: More Trojan Horse Education Reform

April 1, 2025 plthomasedd

[Header Photo by José León on Unsplash, cropped]

It took a few years, but there was always a long game.

And there was a few decades of preparation along the way.

George W. Bush built the foundation for Trojan Horse education reform in the 1990s, including a false “miracle” narrative and efforts to establish scripted curriculum (a colleague and I examined that here).

Education reform, however, was never about improving learning or teaching, but about ideological agendas, conservative agendas.

The crisis/miracle cycles started with that Texas “miracle,” but included the Chicago “miracle” (to bolster Arne Duncan), the DC “miracle” (to promote Michelle Rhee’s grift), and the Harlem “miracle” (that solidly merged education reform as bi-partisan under Obama with the help of grifter Duncan).

What may prove to be the most successful (and harmful) “miracle,” however, is the media manufactured Mississippi “miracle,” grounded in 2019 NAEP scores.

Six years later, the real end game of these manufactured and false “miracles” are merging with an initial effort by W. Bush—de-professionalizing teachers with scripted curriculum. Note the connection in a recent misleading but recurring endorsement by Patrinos (from the Department of Education Reform, funded by Walton money in Arkansas) of that Mississippi “miracle”:

Teaching at the right level and a scripted lessons plan are among the most effective strategies to address the global learning crisis. After the World Bank reviewed over 150 education programs in 2020, nearly half showed no learning benefit.

And then, this disturbing piece by Korbey: Why US schools have fallen in love with scripted lessons.

After taking a swipe at NCTE, Korbey makes the same but false connection as Patrinos above:

Nearly all the states that have seen reading scores improve recently – including Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee and Alabama – have changed state law to encourage districts to choose from approved lists of HQIM.

Conveniently omitted in public advocacy and endorsements of scripted curriculum, is that this is a correlation; however, research has shown that curriculum, instruction, and teacher training are not the keys to increased test scores. Grade retention is:

[S]tates whose policies mandate third-grade retention see significant and persistent increases in high-stakes reading scores in all cohorts…. [T]here is no consistent evidence that high-stakes reading scores increase in states without a retention component.

And another omission is that research has shown scripted reading programs de-professionalize teachers, fail to serve the individual needs of students, and have “whitewashed” the curriculum, alienating the most under-served students in our schools [see Recommended below].

And thus, the end game:

Musk: If you have a classroom of 25 or 30 kids, it is literally impossible to spend time with every kid individually or you can spend to little time.. But what you can do is set them up with ai.. pic.twitter.com/tAcySW2zTE
— Acyn (@Acyn) March 31, 2025

Education reform is dedicated to perpetual education crisis for market and political goal.

Scripted curriculum, then, is not designed to improve reading proficiency, but to create one more step toward AI replacing teachers the same way self-checkout replaced cashiers in our grocery stores.

Buyer Beware: Marketing Education Often an Incomplete Story

March 25, 2025 plthomasedd

[Header Photo by Merakist on Unsplash]

Mainstream media loves a compelling story. And, regretfully, media tends to care very little how accurate or complete that story is.

Media coverage of education is almost entirely a series of misleading stories grounded in either crisis or miracle rhetoric.

One of the darlings of the media is the charter school, the one aspect of the school choice movement that has garnered bipartisan support.

However, as a type of school choice, charter schools must market themselves and recruit. So when media and school marketing combine, I urge “Buyer Beware”:

Here, The State (Columbia, SC) has platformed the principal of a charter school, who makes a couple important (but misleading) claims: the charter school is exceptional and that is because the school practices separating boys and girls for instruction.

“Exemplary High Performing School” is causally connected by Wooten to the boy/girl instructional segregation; however, rarely can a school conduct the sort of scientific research in-house to determine causation, and more importantly, student achievement (test scores) remain overwhelmingly a reflection of the students’ socioeconomic status (60+%), not the school, instruction, or teacher quality.

Here is the missing parts to this story:

Note that Langston Charter Middle has the third lowest poverty index (PI) in the state (12.9), and for comparison, in the same district, the Washington Center has one of the highest PI (96) in the state. [Note that Greenville has a incredibly wide range of low and high poverty schools because the district is large and covers an area of the state with significant pockets of poverty and affluence; and thus, neighborhood schools tend to reflect that socioeconomic reality.]

Further, if we look at Langston Charter Middle’s state report card, the “exceptional” seems to be missing:

Yes, the academic achievement is “excellent,” but again, this data point reflects mostly the very low PI for the students being served.

Note that when Langston Charter Middle is compared to schools with similar student demographics (Daniel Island School, 8.2PI, and Gold Hill Middle, 11.5 PI), the “exceptional” appears to be typical among similar schools:

Media and marketing do more harm than good for public education. When the media is fixated on incomplete and misleading stories and schools feel compelled to market themselves for customers, we all lose.

The OpEd run by The State is not about an exceptional school or the success of separating girls and boys for instruction (although that does speak into a current political ideology that wants this to be true).

The story, as usual, is incomplete, and the marketing is at best misleading.

Once again, many in the US do not want to hear or see the full story: Our schools and student achievement mostly reflect the socioeconomic status of the students’ parents, homes, and communities.

When it comes to media coverage of our schools, I must emphasize: Don’t buy the story being sold.

Misreading Reading Scores (Again) [Unpublished OpEd Submission]

March 10, 2025 plthomasedd

[This piece has been submitted to national newspapers with no responses.]

[Header Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash]

Every two years reading scores make headlines. And this year, as has been the case since COVID, the news is not good. Scores are down (again), and the causes being pointed to for the drop are also wrong (again).

National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is the national program mandated with tracking student achievement. The 2024 results reveal that reading scores have hit their lowest point in 32 years. This decline is notable because in recent years many states have passed aggressive reading legislation, often labeled as the “science of reading” (SOR).

The SOR movement makes a few key claims: the US has a reading crisis, teachers fail to use “scientific” evidence for instruction, and educators and policymakers are making excuses by acknowledging poverty when addressing low reading proficiency.

When 2019 NAEP reading scores were released, Mississippi was proclaimed a “miracle” state for improving grade 4 reading scores despite being a high-poverty state, implying (without evidence) that those increases were caused by Mississippi implementing SOR policy. In the years that followed, the Mississippi “miracle” became the poster child for other states following the SOR legislative formula; to date 40 states and the District of Columbia have passed SOR legislation.

However, the Mississippi “miracle” story was an incomplete misreading of reading proficiency and policy.

With the average 2024 NAEP reading scores in further decline, the SOR era in reading reform appears to be failing. This is especially true for vulnerable students whose scores have dropped the most. Interpreting these scores correctly is key to forging a better path forward.

Thus, we must seek a more credible story about 2024 NAEP reading scores.

Let’s consider three sets of data from the Department of Defense schools (DoDEA), Florida, and Mississippi. These student populations include significant racial and socioeconomic diversity as well as multilingual learners and other vulnerable populations of students.

Florida and Mississippi have long been applauded for aggressive education and reading reform, and in 2024, their grade 4 reading scores remained in the top 25% of states, seemingly defying the odds. But Florida and Mississippi scored again well below top-scoring DoDEA schools.

Although many rush to ascribe this success to SOR policies, we should really be looking at a different (ultimately harmful) policy: third-grade retention based on state testing.

As education analysts John Westall and Amy Cummings concluded in a report on reading policy: “[S]tates whose policies mandate third-grade retention see significant and persistent increases in high-stakes reading scores in all cohorts…. [T]here is no consistent evidence that high-stakes reading scores increase in states without a retention component.”

In other words, by holding back the lowest performing students in third grade, grade 4 scores appear higher. Florida and Mississippi retain thousands of K-3 students annually.

Inflated scores are not learning; by eighth grade NAEP reading scores for Florida and Mississippi drop into the bottom 25% of states. The widely applauded “gains” in grade 4 are, in fact, a mirage.

Here is a different story: DoDEA schools are the top-scoring schools on NAEP tests and tell a story we’ve resisted admitting in the US. Maroun and Tieken found in 2024, replicating decades of similar research, that 60+% of student test scores are not linked to teacher quality, instruction, or programs but to out-of-school factors like socioeconomic background, home environment, and parental involvement to name a few.

While DoDEA schools have significant populations from poor and working-class backgrounds and serve diverse as well as vulnerable populations of children, these students have healthcare, food security, stable housing, and parents with stable work—and consistently high reading scores.

NAEP reading scores, again, are not a story about teacher and reading program failure or even student reading proficiency. These scores tell a complex story about a long history in the US of negligence, the lack of political will to address not only the education of all our children, but also their lives outside of school.

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

Media Manufactures Mississippi “Miracle” (Again) [Updated]

March 5, 2025 plthomasedd

[Header Cropped from Photo by Miracle Seltzer on Unsplash]

I almost feel sorry for Louisiana. (See Update 2 below)

When the 2024 reading scores for NAEP were released, LA seemed poised to be the education “miracle” of the moment for the media and political leaders.

Since mainstream media seems to know only a few stories when covering education—outliers, crises, and miracles—the outlier gains by LA compared to the rest of the nation, reportedly still trapped in the post-Covid “learning loss,” was ripe for yet another round of manufacturing educational “miracles.”

However, the media is not ready to let go of the Mississippi “miracle” lie: There Really Was a ‘Mississippi Miracle’ in Reading. States Should Learn From It.

To maintain the MS “miracle” message, journalists must work incredibly hard to report selectively, and badly.

For example, Aldeman celebrates, again, MS as a outlier for for the achievement of the bottom 10% of students (carelessly disregarding that outlier data is statistically meaningless when making broad general claims):

But one state is bucking this trend: Mississippi. Indeed, there’s been a fair amount of coverage of Mississippi’s reading progress in recent years, but its gains are so impressive that they merit another look.

Next, Aldeman highlights reading gains by Black students in MS, omitting a damning fact about the achievement of Black (and poor) students in MS (which mirrors the entire nation):

That’s right, MS has the same racial and socio-economic achievement gaps since 1998, discrediting anything like a “miracle.”

But the likely most egregious misrepresentation of MS as a reading “miracle” is Aldeman “debunking” claims that MS gains are primarily grounded in grade retention, not the “science of reading.”

Notably, Aldeman seems to think linking to the Fordham Institute constitutes credible evidence; it isn’t.

So let’s look at the full picture about grade retention and MS’s reading scores on NAEP.

First, the research on increased reading achievement has found that only states with retention have seen score increases. Westall and Cummings concluded in a report on reading policy: “[S]tates whose policies mandate third-grade retention see significant and persistent increases in high-stakes reading scores in all cohorts…. [T]here is no consistent evidence that high-stakes reading scores increase in states without a retention component [emphasis added].” [Note that Aldeman selective refers to this study late in the article, but omits this conclusion.]

The positive impact of retention on test scores has not been debunked, but confirmed. What hasn’t been confirmed is that test score gains are actual achievement gains in reading acquisition.

Next, MS (like FL and SC, for example) has risen into the top 25% of states in grade 4 reading on NAEP, but then plummets into the bottom 25% of states by grade 8 (despite their reading reform having been implemented for over a decade), suggesting those grade 4 scores are a mirage and not a miracle:

And finally, MS has consistently retained about nine thousand students each year (mostly Black and poor students) for a decade; if the state was actually implementing something that works, the number of students being retained would decrease and (according the SOR claims that 95% of students can be proficient) disappear.

A final point is that media always omits the most important story, what research has shown for decades about student achievement:

Almost 63% of the variance in test performance was explained by social capital family income variables…. 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.

High-poverty states and states with high percentages of so-called racial minorities are not, in fact, beating the odds—again, note that states have not closed the racial achievement gap or the socio-economic achievement gap.

Yes, too often our schools are failing our most vulnerable students. But the greater failures are the lack of political will to address the inequity in the lives of children and the lazy and misleading journalism of the mainstream media covering education.

Update 1

The Mississippi “miracle” propaganda is part of a conservative Trojan Horse education reform movement.

Note this commentary from the Walton-funded Department of Education Reform (University of Arkansas): Mississippi’s education miracle: A model for global literacy reform. The key reveal is near the end of the commentary:

Teaching at the right level and a scripted lessons plan are among the most effective strategies to address the global learning crisis. After the World Bank reviewed over 150 education programs in 2020, nearly half showed no learning benefit.

The goal is de-professionalizing teachers and teaching, not improving student reading proficiency.

Updated 2

The political, market, and media hype over both MS and LA are harmful because that misrepresentation and exaggeration drive the fruitless crisis/reform cycles in education and distracts reform from the larger and more impactful causes of student achievement.

To understand better education reform, I recommend the recently released Opportunity to Learn Dashboard.

According to the press release from NEPC:

Funded and maintained by the National Center for Youth Law (NCYL) and The Schott Foundation for Public Education, the Opportunity to Learn Dashboard tracks 18 indicators across 16 states. The project seeks to provide information about factors impacting the degree to which children of different ethnicities and races are exposed to environments conducive to learning.

However, indicators directly related to schools explain only a minority of the variation in achievement-related outcomes. Therefore, the dashboard includes out-of-school factors such as access to health insurance and affordable housing, as well as within-school factors such as exposure to challenging curricula and special education spending.

For both MS and LA, we must acknowledge the significant and robust systemic (out-of-school) disadvantages minoritized and impoverished students continue to face in both states:

Explore MS here.
Explore LA here.

Note here my points raised about lingering opportunity/achievement gaps exposed by NAEP scores in both states:

To emphasize again, NAEP scores do not reveal education “miracles” in either MS or LA. In fact, NAEP scores continue to show that education reform as usual is a failure.

Reading Deserves a New Story, Different Reform

February 11, 2025 plthomasedd

[Header Photo by Gaelle Marcel on Unsplash]

You know the story: Students today can’t read.

And those who can, don’t read.

But there is more.

Children who can’t read have been cheated by their teachers, who fail to teach reading skills such as phonics.

And our national reading crisis is a threat to our very nation, especially our international economic competitiveness.

However, there are a few problems with this story.

If you were to find a Time Machine, you could travel to any year over the past century and hear the exact same story.

As well, this crisis rhetoric has been used historically and currently with math—and every other content area tested in the US.

Here is a story about reading you probably are not familiar with: There is no reading crisis, and there is no evidence that reading test scores are driven by reading instruction or programs.

Further, again, there is nothing unique or catastrophic about reading test scores or reading achievement by US students.

Historically and currently, reading test scores and achievement reflect a fact that has been replicated for decades:

Almost 63% of the variance in test performance was explained by social capital family income variables….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.

Now, consider a newer story: Post-Covid students are suffering a historic learning loss:

Reardon’s call for “long-term structural reform” must follow a new story about reading and a different approach to reading reform.

First, since the vast majority of causal factors reflected in reading standardized test scores are out-of-school conditions, the new reading story and different reform must address universal healthcare, food security and eliminating food deserts, home and housing stability, and stable well-paying job for parents.

Another out-of-school reform needed for reading is guaranteeing students have access to books and texts in their homes, communities (public libraries), and then in their schools (school and classroom libraries).

A simple program that gives every child from birth to high school graduation 20 books a year (10 chosen by the child/parents and 10 common texts) would build a library and ensure access to texts, one of the strongest research-based elements of reading acquisition.

Without social reform, reading scores will likely remain flat and inadequate.

The most important different aspects of a new story and reading reform is confronting traditional approaches to in-school reform in the US common since the 1980s. A different approach to reading reform must include the following:

De-couple reading reform and instruction from universal or prescribed reading programs and center teaching children to read (not implementing reading programs with fidelity). Admit there is no one way to teach all students to read, and provide the contexts that allow teachers to serve individual student needs.
Reform the national- and state-level testing of reading. The US needs a standard metric for “proficient” and “age level” (instead of”grade level”) shared on NAEP and state tests in grades 3 and 8; and that achievement level needs to be achievable and not “aspirational” (such as is the case with NAEP currently). National and state testing must be age-based and not grade-based to better provide stable data on achievement.
End grade retention based on standardized testing. Retention is punitive, and it harms children while also distorting test data.
Monitor and guarantee vulnerable populations of students who are below “proficient” to insure they are provided experienced and certified teachers and assigned to classes with low student/teach ratios.
Address teaching and learning conditions of schools, including teacher pay and autonomy.
Honor and serve students with special needs and multi-lingual learners.

While we have no unique or catastrophic reading crisis in the US—and even hand wringing over learning loss seems unfounded—we have allowed a century (or more) of political negligence to ignore the negative impact of children’s lives on their learning.

We have remained trapped in a manufactured story of reading crisis and that poverty is an excuse.

All the available evidence suggests otherwise.

Crisis, miracles, blame, and punishment have been at the center of the story everyone is familiar with. That story has never served the interests of students, teachers, or public education.

In an era of intense political hatred and fearmongering, this is a tenuous call, but if we really care about students learning to read, and if we truly believe literacy is the key to the economic and democratic survival of our country, reading deserves a new story, an accurate story, and a different approach to reform grounded in the evidence and not our cultural mythologies and conservative ideologies.

NAEP Serves Manufactured Education Crisis, Not Teaching and Learning

February 2, 2025 plthomasedd

[Header Photo by Andy Feliciotti on Unsplash]

I teach an upper-level writing and research course for undergraduates as part of their general education requirements. The overarching project asks students to gather media coverage of an education topic in order to analyze the credibility of that coverage.

Since the course is undergraduate, I ask them to approach their analysis through critical discourse analysis, but I narrow that lens some for them. The process includes the following:

Identify the pattern of claims about the topics.
Evaluate the validity of the claims in the context of a literature review of the educational topic (limited to peer-reviewed, published recent journal articles).
Consider whose interests these claims serve (the CDA element).

I note that claims about education in the media tend to fall in a range of accurate, misleading, and false; however, for this analysis, identifying whose interest the claims serve is the key aspect of the evaluation.

False and accurate claims are typically easy to manage for students, but the misleading claims can be complicated.

For example, in public discourse about police shooting victims, two accurate data points are often cited: The majority of people shot and killed by police in the US are white and Black people are shot and killed at a higher rate than white people.

Failing to address both data points and clarifying why rates are more important than raw data contributes to media coverage being misleading, and thus, selectively emphasizing true data is often a form of manipulation and serves a particular population or ideology.

With another release of NAEP reading and math scores, we have an opportunity to address how media and political leaders tend to offer false and misleading claims based on NAEP score, but also, that NAEP itself serves to perpetuate the manufactured education crisis, which benefits the media (more clicks), political leaders, and the education market place.

Regardless of what national and state scores on NAEP are, the foundation of media and political claims is always “crisis.”

Ironically, perpetual “crisis” rhetoric and education reform since the early 1980s has had one clear outcomes—maintaining the status quo of educational and socioeconomic inequity in the US.

To consider this, let’s focus on Massachusetts and Tennessee.

Other than top-scoring DoDEA schools, MA sits atop reading scores in the US in both grades 4 and 8:

As a relatively low-poverty state, MA should rank above states with higher poverty students. However, MA certainly serves students in pockets of poverty as well as other vulnerable populations of students who tend to have low standardized test scores.

None the less, MA has joined the standard chorus in the US about reading. The Education Trust released a report in March 2024 providing “5 Things You Need to Know about the literacy crisis in Massachusetts.”

To be fair, MA is similar to most of the US where standardized tests scores have dropped post-Covid and those drops have coincided with MS’s Mass Literacy initiative from 2018:

Perpetual reform and perpetual crisis in education, regretfully, seems only to fuel more reform and more crisis.

Note that MA also has something in common with almost all states regardless of whether states have high or low NAEP results. Achievement gaps by race and socioeconomic status have remained fixed for almost three decades:

While a top-scoring state like MA is shouting “crisis” primarily based on a sort of national psychosis about the “science of reading,” TN is trying to have it both ways with a reading crisis and a celebration of 2024 NAEP scores.

An October 2023 report from the TN Department of Education, “Tennessee’s Commitment to Early Literacy,” forefronts the “Literacy Crisis in Tennessee” based on (you guessed it) historically poor rankings in NAEP reading scores.

One important point here is that the media and political discourse tend to focus on “bad” statistics such as rankings and averages—which is how TN establishes their “crisis.”

Yet, while the 2024 NAEP data has spurred a great deal of misguided doom and gloom, TN is putting a positive spin on their results: Nation’s Report Card Shows Meaningful Academic Gains as a Result of Tennessee’s Commitment to Public Schools.

For political leaders, “we have a crisis” and “I have saved us from the crisis” are not a sequential series of events, however, but a permanent rotation.

So why this positive spin for TN?

While the national average on NAEP reading has dropped, TN has experienced in 2024 a slight uptick. Because most everyone else was dropping, then, TN has seen a rise in their rankings (a key example of why ranking is a “bad” statistic).

Important again is that like MA and most states, TN scores for racial and socio-economic gaps remain fixed: “This performance gap was not significantly different from that in 1998.”

These responses to NAEP by MA and TN reveal a stark lesson that NAEP serves the interests of the media, politicians, and the education market place, but at least since 1998, NAEP hasn’t provided the data needed for any sort of genuine education reform or analysis.

Education is a political and market football, in fact.

Here are a few better takeaways from NAEP:

NAEP’s achievement levels are designed to be confusing and support the manufactured education crisis (see here).
Using NAEP to rank and sort is misleading and doesn’t support needed reform.
NAEP scores do offer some important facts related to achievement gaps and the pervasive influence of affluence and poverty on educational outcomes, but the media and political leaders choose to ignore those lessons.
Decades of NAEP reinforce this conclusion by Maroun and Tienken: “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.”
Media persist in focusing on only two stories about education: Crisis and outliers; both of which serve the interests of anyone expect students and teachers.

Like my students in my upper-level writing and research course, we would all benefit from evaluating the claims being made by media and political leaders in order to determine, first, is the claims are true (they often as misleading or false), and then to confront in whose interests these claims are being made.

Maybe this isn’t surprising given the current and historical political climate in the US, but almost never are the interests of students and teachers being served—especially when the interests of the most vulnerable students are the issue.

education

The “Science of Reading” Ushers in NAEP Reading Decline: Time for a New Story

January 30, 2025 plthomasedd

With the release of the 2024 NAEP reading results, a disturbing new story is developing:

Reading Scores Fall to New Low on NAEP, Fueled by Declines for Struggling Students (Education Week)
Florida reading, math scores fall to lowest mark in more than 20 years on nation’s report card (Orlando Sentinel)

The media has long been obsessed with reading in the US, crying “crisis” every decade over the past century. The most recent media-based reading crisis has prompted aggressive and new reading legislation reaching back over a decade, policy and programs identified as the “science of reading” (SOR).

The hand wringing over the 2024 NAEP reading results, however, seems to focus on learning loss and post-Covid consequences—not that reading achievement on NAEP was flat during the balanced literacy era and now has dropped steadily during the SOR era:

The senior cohort in the 2024 NAEP reading scores represent the SOR era begun in 2012.

Suddenly, media appears to forget that the SOR movement was built on a series of baseless claims: the US has a reading crisis (despite NAEP score being flat for decades) because teachers do not know how to teach reading and rely on failed reading programs and balanced literacy.

The foundational claim of the SOR movement has been firmly discredited: “[T]here is no indisputable evidence of a national crisis in reading, and even if there were a crisis, there is no evidence that the amount of phonics in classrooms is necessarily the cause or the solution.”

But a key element of the SOR story is often overlooked: “One of the excuses educators have long offered to explain America’s poor reading performance is poverty.”

In other words, the SOR story argues that the US has a reading crisis that is entirely the result of in-school policies and practices, that SOR-based reading instruction guarantees 95%+ of students will achieve reading proficiency.

How then is the recent 5-year decline in NAEP scores being blamed on out-of-school factors, Covid learning loss? The story being sold is such blame is merely an excuse.

The problem here is that the entire SOR story is a series of misrepresentations and ideological claims not grounded (ironically) is research or evidence.

As I have noted, NAEP achievement levels are confusing since “proficient” is well above grade level and “basic” tends to correlate with most state metrics for “proficient” (see here for a full explanation and state/NAEP correlations).

However, journalists persists is misrepresenting NAEP scores in order to feed their manufactured “crisis” story: Two-Thirds of Kids Struggle to Read, and We Know How to Fix It.

With the release of 2024 NAEP scores on reading, we have an opportunity to embrace a different story, a credible story, by examining scores from Department of Defense (DoDEA) schools as well as Mississippi and Florida.

First, note that DoDEA schools again are the top scoring schools in grade 4 reading, but MS and FL rank in the top 25% of states despite challenging populations of students being served (both states appear to be outliers defying the odds):

Both MS and FL have been praised for their reading and education reform; however, there are two parts to this “miracle” story that are often left out, that show there is a mirage, not a miracle.

First, MS and FL join many states that have enacted SOR reading reform over the past decade-plus, yet the research on that reading reform highlights something other than reading instruction or programs.

Westall and Cummings concluded in a report on reading policy: “[S]tates whose policies mandate third-grade retention see significant and persistent increases in high-stakes reading scores in all cohorts…. [T]here is no consistent evidence that high-stakes reading scores increase in states without a retention component [emphasis added].”

States implementing K-3 grade retention are gaming the system by pulling out the lowest performing students and then re-inserting them into the testing population when older.

In fact, MS has been retaining about 9000-10,000 K-3 students a year since 2014, and FL retains about 17,000 students annually. [1]

Beyond the impact of grade retention on test scores, we should also ask: If SOR “works,” why do states continue to retain about the same number of students per year?

But NAEP also tells a story about SOR that has been ignored for years. Both MS and FL rank in the top 25% of grade 4 but the bottom 25% by grade 8 while DoDEA remains the top scoring schools in both grades:

Grade retention creates a mirage of achievement in grade 4 that disappears by grade 8, further evidence that SOR is not working at either grade.

Reading achievement as measured on testing has never been about reading instruction, teacher quality, or reading programs.

DoDEA school reading achievement is a testament to what research has shown for decades about student achievement:

Almost 63% of the variance in test performance was explained by social capital family income variables….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.

DoDEA student populations are diverse, often coming from impoverished and working class backgrounds; these schools also serve vulnerable and challenging populations of students.

However, teacher pay is high, and those students have healthcare, food and housing security, and parents with stable work.

DoDEA students almost all have the advantages mostly afforded children living in privilege so that how and what they are taught can matter.

If reading and literacy matter—and they do—and education matters in the US, we are well past blaming teachers, declaring false “miracles,” and jumping on the reading program merry-go-round once again.

Students must have their lives addressed so that their education can serve them well.

NAEP scores tell us little about reading (or math), but confirms again and again that the US is a country determined to ignore the corrosive impact of inequity on the lives and education of children.