Misreading the Reading Wars Again (and Again)

Here is some incredibly bad edujournalism: Hard Words: Why aren’t kids being taught to read?

And the summary blurb beneath the title takes that to truly awful:

Scientific research has shown how children learn to read and how they should be taught. But many educators don’t know the science and, in some cases, actively resist it. As a result, millions of kids are being set up to fail.

Now, let me offer a brief rebuttal.

First, the claim that we are not teaching reading as we should is well into its twelfth decade of crisis rhetoric. But the classic example rests at mid-twentieth century: Why Johnny Can’t Read.

That blather was a lie then and it remains a lie today.

I invite you to peruse the work of a literacy educator who taught from the 1920s into the 1970s and left behind decades of scholarship: Lou LaBrant. But the short version is the reading war claim that we are failing reading instruction is a long history of false claims grounded in selling reading programs.

Now let’s be more direct about the bad journalism.

This article cites thoroughly debunked sources—the National Reading Panel (NRP) and a report from NCTQ.

The NRP was a political sham, but it also was not an endorsement of heavy phonics. Please read this unmasking by an actual literacy expert and member of the NRP, Joanne Yatvin: I Told You So! The Misinterpretation and Misuse of The National Reading Panel Report.

NCTQ is a partisan think tank exclusively committed to discrediting teacher education. Their reports, when reviewed, are deeply flawed in methodology and typically misread or misrepresent research in order to reach the only conclusion they ever reach—teacher education is a failure! (Like reading instruction, apparently, has always been.)

I offer here one example of why no NCTQ report should be cited as credible: Review of Learning about Learning: What Every New Teacher Needs to Know. (See also GUEST POST by Peter Smagorinsky: Response to the new NCTQ Teacher Prep Review.)

NCTQ lacks credibility, but the organization has learned how to manipulate the current state of press-release journalism that simply publishes whatever aggressive organizations are willing to feed journalists desperate for click bait.

As well, the article plays the usual game of misrepresenting whole language and balanced literacy. A more accurate explanation of whole language and balanced literacy exposes a really ugly reason some are so eager to trash both and endorse phonics: the former are not tied to (lucrative) reading programs, but phonics is a veritable cash cow for textbook companies and the testing industry. (Note the NRP and NCLB directly led to a textbook scandal under the Bush administration.)

Although I tire making this point, no one in literacy recommends skipping direct phonics instruction. WL and BL both stress the need for the right amount and right time for direct phonics instruction (depending on student needs) and recognize that most students eventually need rich and authentic whole reading experiences to grow as readers (not phonics rules, not phonics worksheets, not phonics tests).

Finally, however, is the real paradox.

Formal schooling has likely never taught reading well. Little of that has to do with teacher education or teacher buy in. Again, see LaBrant’s work from the 1920s into the 1960s and 1970s; she laments the gap between good research and practice over and over.

Of course, the key point is why are we failing our students and everything we know about teaching reading?

One powerful reason is the accountability movement grounded in standards and high-stakes tests. Reading instruction (like writing instruction) has been corrupted by the all-mighty tests.

Test reading is reductive (and lends itself to direct phonics instruction, hint-hint), but it is a pale measure of deep and authentic reading, much less any student’s eagerness to read.

Because of the accountability movement, then, and because of high-pressure textbook reading programs, we have for decades ignored a simple fact of research: the strongest indicator of reading growth in students is access to books in the home (not phonics programs).

I want to end by addressing the real scapegoat in all this—teacher education.

Full disclosure: I have been working in teacher education for 17 years, after 18 years teaching high school English in public school.

But, I am the first to admit teacher education is quite bad, technocratic, bureaucratic, and mostly mind-numbing.

Teacher education, however, is not the problem because whether or not we are teaching reading research and practices correctly is irrelevant; teacher candidates overwhelmingly report that once they are in the classroom, they are told what to do and how—what they know from teacher education is tossed out the window.

The article is not a powerful call, then, for teaching students to read. It is a standard example of really bad edujournalism.

Ironically, a bit of Googling and reading could have alleviated much of that, but I guess we are asking for too much and may want to blame teacher education and teachers for those journalists’ inability to read.

Corporations Are Behind The Common Core State Standards — And That’s Why They’ll Never Work

What’s Wrong with Education as a Discipline?: Unpacking the Reading Wars (Again)

In one of the last class sessions of my education foundations course, a student I had taught in a first-year writing seminar the semester before posed a question while being nearly exasperated: To paraphrase, she wondered allowed why education had such a problem with how classroom practices often contradict what the research base shows is (for lack of a better term) best practice.

Since I have repeatedly addressed in my public and scholarly work Lou LaBrant’s masterful charge about the historical (and current) “considerable gap” between practice and research, I chose to help walk students through unpacking her question by asking them first who controlled the fields of medicine and law.

We tended to agree that doctors and lawyers mostly (although certainly not exclusively) had the greatest authority and autonomy in their fields.

By contrast, education in the U.S. is primarily public institutions at the K-12 and higher education levels, and thus, education as a discipline is significantly barricaded from education as a practice by legislation, bureaucracy, and a public discourse dominated by disciplines other than education—economics, psychology, and political science.

Embedded in that bureaucracy, we must also note, is the authority of administrators, a subset of eduction as a field that is in many ways disconnected from pedagogy, if not antagonistic to teacher autonomy.

Education as a discipline, then, suffers under the weight of being routinely declared a failure as well as an inadequate field while simultaneously being denied authority and autonomy in its practice, the very thing being used as evidence of its failure.

So, in 2018, we have yet another example of the on-going problem in the so-called publication of record on the field of education, Education Week: When It Comes to Public Education, the Nation Is Still at Risk.

Thomas Toch grounds his commentary is a praising and uncritical embracing of A Nation as Risk—although that report has been thoroughly discredited as a partisan hatchet job masquerading as research (see Gerald Holton here and here as well as Gerald Bracey).

Few things better represent all that is wrong with education as a discipline and profession than how A Nation at Risk (as a partisan political sham) came to drive policy by claiming “research” and “scientific” while being any but.

But the relentless bashing of education and then teacher education certainly did not stop with the rise of standards and high-stakes testing in the form of the accountability movement after Reagan; it was reinvigorated under W. Bush, and then Obama doubled down even further.

No Child Left Behind took its cue from A Nation at Risk, in fact.

This brings me to a recent Twitter discussion representing the reading wars debate that will just not die.

Let’s join that sort of in media res with Daniel Willingham refuting some claims made by Carol Black quoting from my blog post:

I’m still waiting for @cblack__ or @plthomasEdD to explain where I’ve said or implied that “the field can’t handle the science of their profession.” I’ve written exactly the opposite. https://t.co/kwTJX51EgW

— Daniel Willingham (@DTWillingham) April 20, 2018

This Twitter exchange holds almost all of the elements I am confronting in this post: the disciplinary arrogance of economics, psychology, and political science (disciplines that routinely impose themselves in education as if the field dose not exist); the veneer provided by claiming “research” and “scientific” among hard-core phonics advocates; and the irony of the “research” crowd embracing partisan reports that fail as credible research.

First, let me clarify that I have taken a very clear stand against how the media embrace scholars from outside the fields of education and literacy when they arrogantly impose on those fields—for example, Willingham and Mark Seidenberg.

Next, it is illustrative that Willingham’s rebuttal of my criticism, in fact, provides proof of my point: His NYT’s op-ed is both a sweeping discrediting of teachers (since teacher educators are teachers) and, as Toch does, Willingham offers an uncritical embracing of the National Reading Panel (NRP), a partisan hack job powerfully refuted by Joanne Yatvin.

The NRP report serves a different purpose than it intended since it represents how partisan politics combined with unchallenged claims of “research” and “scientific” provide cover for everything that is wrong with the discipline of education being blocked from having authority and autonomy in the practice of education, specifically how reading is taught in US public schools.

If you skim through the discussion after I responded to Willingham, you also witness the problems with the cult of phonics, how advocates for phonics simultaneously beat the drum for “research” and “scientific” while refusing to engage with the field of literacy and reading in an honest way.

For example, whole language and balanced literacy are misrepresented and then those misrepresentations are attacked. Both whole language and balanced literacy are evidence-based approaches to teaching reading that include phonics instruction (just as writing pedagogy includes grammar instruction); however, phonics advocates typically frame them as hostile to phonics as well as not supported by “research” (something dishonestly posed by the NRP).

In other words, this Twitter debate exposes that far too often educational research and practice are highjacked for partisan political and ideological concerns as well as bureaucratic and market ones (phonics advocacy is significantly driven by the textbook and testing industries, for example).

If we return to my student’s question that is echoes in this Twitter debate grounded in Willingham’s sweeping dismissal of teacher education, we are faced with a real dilemma.

LaBrant’s charge that a “considerable gap” exists between evidence and practice exists today, but not in the way or for the reasons stated and implied by Willingham.

Literacy as a sub-discipline of education is not bereft of research, and it is not populated by incompetent professionals who do not know or teach that research base.

Education and literacy scholars are often women, and at its core, the fields suffer from some of the lingering sexism that hovers just beneath why economists, psychologists, and political scientists feel compelled to speak over education as a discipline.

Concurrent with that uncomfortable fact, however, is a damning dynamic captured in Applebee and Langer’s analysis of writing instruction in formal schooling; they concluded something that also explains virtually every problem found in why so many are compelled to declare education a failure: Applebee and Langer discovered that although teachers today know more than ever about best practice in teaching writing (and despite the field of composition being more robust than ever), teachers overwhelmingly disclosed that they are not able to implement that knowledge because of the mandates anchored in standards and high-stakes testing.

As I argued in the Twitter debate, whether or not teacher educators of literacy are teaching as Willingham wants, it doesn’t matter because when teachers enter the field they are being mandated to teach to the tests that measure standards. Teachers in the US have very little to no professional autonomy.

So I want to circle back to the more narrow issue of balanced literacy, a concept rejected by phonics advocates.

At its core, balanced literacy is about having highly expert teachers of literacy who then have the professional autonomy to individualize instruction for all students so that every student excels in literacy.

Intensive phonics programs and textbooks as well as isolated phonics testing (such as DIBELS) are the antithesis of that expertise and professional autonomy—just as the standards and high-stakes testing machine is.

I am not at all dissuaded from my not-so-modest proposal that all disciplines deserve their own autonomy and professionalism, that education has been denied that autonomy and professionalism because of sexism and the corrosive influence of bureaucracy and partisan politics.

This recent Twitter debate captures all that in a way that is relatively concise with many players inadvertently proving my points.

But, alas, I am not hopeful of having made any progress because, you know, I am but a lowly education scholar and practitioner, one mired even lower in the field of literacy.

Sigh.

For Further Consideration

Please note that, like economics, psychology has much to do to keep its own house in order; maybe slamming other disciplines serves as distraction:

And finally one would think psychology has enough to do to keep its own house in order https://t.co/9gE3IrZkpj + https://t.co/UmbGfnTWTZ instead of driving out of your lane and discrediting a field led by women 6/x

— Paul Thomas (@plthomasEdD) April 20, 2018

Attack on “Balanced Literacy” Is Attack on Professional Teachers, Research

Progressivism and Whole Language: A Reader

My Next Book Project: The Psychology of Fixing the Economy through Better Public Policy

The Lingering, and Powerful, Legacy of “Scientific Racism” in America

Writing about the class of 2017’s performance on the newly redesigned SAT, Catherine Gewertz notes, “The number of students taking the SAT has hit an all-time high,” and adds cautiously:

What appear to be big scoring increases should be understood not as sudden jumps in achievement, but as reflections of the differences in the test and the score scale, psychometricians said.

More test takers and higher scores, albeit misleading ones, are the opening discussion about one of the most enduring fixtures of U.S. education—standardized testing as gatekeeping for college entrance, scholarships, and scholastic eligibility.

However, buried about in the middle of Gewertz’s article, we discover another enduring reality:

The 2017 SAT scores show inequities similar to those of earlier years. Asian (1181), white (1118), and multiracial (1103) students score far above the average composite score of 1060, while Hispanic (990) and African-American (941) students score significantly below it.

Throughout its long history, the SAT, like all standardized testing, has reflected tremendous gaps along race, social class, and gender lines; notable, for example, is the powerful correlation between SAT scores and takers’ parental income and level of education as well as the fact that males have had higher average scores than females for the math and verbal sections every year of SAT testing (the only glitch in that being the years the SAT included a writing section).

The SAT is but one example of the lingering and powerful legacy of “scientific racism” in the U.S. Tom Buchanan, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, punctuates his racist outbursts with “‘It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.'”

Buchanan represents the ugly and rarely confronted relationship between “scientific” and “objective” with race, social class, and gender bigotry. In short, science has often been and continues to be tainted by bias that serves the dominant white and wealthy patriarchy.

Experimental and quasi-experimental research along with so-called standardized testing tends to avoid being implicated in not only identifying racism, classism, and sexism, but also perpetuating social inequity.

As I noted recently, since Carol Dweck and Angela Duckworth have produced mainstream scientific studies and published in reputable peer-reviewed journals, their inherently biased work has been nearly universally embraced—among the exact elites who tend to ignore or outright reject the realities of inequity and injustice.

As just one example, Duckworth grounded her work in and continues to cite a Eugenicist, Francis Galton, with little or no consequences.

Racism, classism, and sexism are themselves built on identifying deficits within identifiable populations. Science allows these corrupt ideologies to appear factual, instead of simple bigotry.

“Scientific” and “objective” are convenient Teflon for bias and bigotry; they provide cover for elites who want evidence they have earned their success, despite incredible evidence that success and failure are more strongly correlated with the coincidences of birth—race, social class, gender.

It takes little effort to imagine a contemporary Tom pointing to the 2017 SAT data and arguing, “‘It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.'”

Such ham-fisted scientism, however, mutes the deeper message that SAT data is a marker for all sorts of inequity in the U.S. And then when that data have the power to determine college entrance and scholarships, the SAT also perpetuates the exact inequities it measures.

The SAT sits in a long tradition including IQ testing that speaks to a jumbled faith in the U.S. for certain kinds of numbers and so-called science; when the data and the science reinforce our basest beliefs, we embrace, but when data and science go against out sacred gods, we refute (think climate change and evolution).

Science that is skeptical and critical, questioning and interrogating, has much to offer humanity. But science continues to be plagued by human frailties such as bias.

Science, like history, is too often written by the winners, the oppressors. As a result, Foucault details, “[I]t is the individual as he[/she] may be described, judged, measured, compared with others, in his[/her] very individuality; and it is also the individual who has to be trained or corrected, classified, normalized, excluded, etc.” [1]

“Scientific racism,” as a subset of science that normalizes bigotry, allows the accusatory white gaze to remain on groups that are proclaimed inherently flawed, deficient, in need of correction. “Scientific racism” distracts us from realizing that the tests and science themselves are the problem.

And thus, we must abandon seeking ever-new tests, such as revising the SAT, and begin the hard work of addressing why the gaps reflected in the tests exist—a “why” that is not nested in any group but our society and its powerful elite.

[1] Foucault, M. (1984). The Foucault reader. Ed. P. Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books, p. 203.

See this thread:

Completing my review of Morris’ “Scholar Denied” and emerging with a deep appreciation for central irony at the heart of race scholarship..

— Professor Fleming (@alwaystheself) September 30, 2017

Accreditation: “‘relatively superficial, extremely time-consuming and doesn’t lead us to a goal of significant improvement'”

For well over three decades, I have been both a full-time educator (high school English teacher for 18 years and currently a college professor, going on 16 years) and a writer. As a high school teacher, I also taught journalism and was the faculty sponsor for the school newspaper and literary magazine over about 10-11 years.

Therefore, I have a great deal of experience in the fields of education and journalism, experience that has revealed to me a rather damning fact: One can be well trained in educational pedagogy or the craft and conventions of journalism, but without nuanced and deep knowledge of the content of that teaching and writing, the outcome can and often is quite awful.

In journalism, for example, the vaunted New York Times publishes and fails to recognize blindly awful articles about poverty. And Education Week regularly features the worst of edujournalism.

And let me emphasize here, these criticisms are about the very best of the field.

The rise of Trumplandia has also birthed a renewed concern about the media and journalism—much gnashing of teeth about fake news and post-truth—so this announcement from Northwestern University may seem ill-suited in the context of those concerns:

In a nontraditional move, officials at Northwestern University‘s prestigious journalism and communications school have decided not to renew the program’s accreditation, letting the designation lapse.

The dean of the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications said Monday that school officials chose not to pursue renewed accreditation, which provides outside approval of academic programs, because the process is “flawed” and not useful.

More pointedly, the dean explains:

“Our goal is always to be the best in the world, and this process doesn’t get us there,” Hamm said in an interview Monday afternoon. “We just don’t find that the review provides us with anything beyond what we already know today. It’s relatively superficial, extremely time-consuming and doesn’t lead us to a goal of significant improvement. It’s sort of a low bar.”

The current hyper-focus on media and journalism has been a parallel reality in the field of education over the last three decades-plus; therefore, there is much to unpack about the parallels in the two fields.

As a lifelong educator, I had to seek certification during my formal college education, I worked as a classroom teacher in public schools under standards and testing, and I now must conform to the mandates of teacher certification and program accreditation as a teacher educator.

In all of those contexts, I am a witness to that accreditation (like certification) is, in fact, “’relatively superficial, extremely time-consuming and doesn’t lead us to a goal of significant improvement. It’s sort of a low bar.’”

All types of bureaucratic accountability—such as the thirty years of standards and high stakes testing in public education reform—are ultimately reductive by shifting the focus toward meeting standards and requirements that are secondary and tertiary approximations of authentic goals (holistic goals that have been cannibalized into discrete elements for the sake of efficiency).

Why, we should be asking, do disciplines such as journalism and education feel the need to add the layer(s) of accreditation (and certification) onto their degrees—when other disciplines trust that the degrees themselves are enough?

Two reasons are practitioners in both disciplines suffer from the low self-esteem of the fields and the twin-tyrannies of the market place and bureaucrats.

Since I focused on journalism above, let me shift here to education.

No discipline or profession has suffered more under the weight of political and public marginalizing and de-professionalization than education—in part as a consequence of sexism (teaching long associated with being a woman’s job) and in part due to the burden of K-12 and many college teachers/professors being agents of the state, working in tax-funded public institutions.

Education currently labors under a nearly unmanageable matrix of mandates related to degrees, certification, and accreditation; and these requirements are in constant flux—standards and mandates for proving those standards have been met shifting every 3-5 years.

Over the accountability era, then, many teacher certification programs have dropped educational philosophy courses, foundations courses, and what many people would consider the more academically challenging knowledge base of education degrees (degrees, by the way, that have historically been slandered as “too easy”).

Education programs are in constant flux, changing courses and programs to meet state certification mandates and accreditation mandates—neither of which are being driven by scholars or practitioners but by bureaucrats.

The most perverse of ironies has occurred, then, in education because those who claimed education degrees are flimsy have successfully made them a maze of nothingness through certification and accreditation mandates.

Ultimately, we must face these realities:

Increasing an emphasis on the technical aspects of education and journalism distorts the importance of both and has created practitioners who may perform with proficiency while failing miserably at the larger responsibility to what is being taught and what is being expressed as well as who is being taught and who is being informed.
No generic teaching or journalism skills exist absent the content of what is being taught or written about, and therefore, reducing teaching or journalism to discrete skills necessarily dilutes holistic professions to simplistic bureaucracy.
There is no option for objectivity in education or journalism; both are political acts that require moral and ethical distinctions as well as seeking out the Truth/truth.
Accreditation (and certification) is more about power and political grandstanding than about the integrity of any discipline. In fact, accreditation is necessarily counter to the integrity of any discipline.

Reaching back to Franz Kafka and then recurring throughout pop culture (mainly satire such as Dilbert and Office Space), the folly of bureaucracy has been exposed time and again; yet, it remains entrenched in some of the foundational disciplines in our democracy—education and journalism.

Northwestern University has taken a bold but necessary step that should be a beacon for all of journalism and education; we are well past time to end accreditation (certification) as the process that strangles the vibrancy out of any discipline.

Easter 2017 Reader: Grit, Poetry, Educational Rankings, Poverty

Grit

Forget Grit. Focus on Inequality, Christine Yeh (Education Week)

Grit is an easy concept to fall in love with because it represents hope and perseverance, and conjures up images of working-class individuals living the “American dream.” However, treating grit as an appealing and simple fix detracts attention from the larger structural inequities in schools, while simultaneously romanticizing notions of poverty….

Perhaps this idea of grit resonates with so many people who believe in the popular American adage that if you work hard and pull yourself up by your bootstraps, then you can achieve anything. This belief unfortunately, assumes that individuals have the power, privilege, and access to craft their own futures, regardless of circumstance and systemic barriers.

Statistics on educational access consistently reveal vast differences in resources in affluent versus poor neighborhoods. Predominantly white, middle- and upper-income school districts tend to spend significantly more money per student than the districts with the highest percentages of marginalized students. Our poorest schools also tend to have large class sizes, unsafe school transportation, damaged and outdated facilities, and high staff turnover. All of these conditions directly contribute to low educational outcomes and underscore the link between access to school resources and improvements in students’ success. Schools that focus on grit shouldn’t ignore structural inequities because they assume that regardless of your race, class, or social context you can still triumph.

Telling children ‘hard work gets you to the top’ is simply a lie, Hashi Mohamed (The Guardian)

What I have learned in this short period of time is that the pervasive narrative of “if you work hard you will get on” is a complete myth. It’s not true and we need stop saying it. This is because “working hard, and doing the right thing” barely gets you to the starting line. Furthermore, it means something completely different depending on to which context you’re applying this particular notion. So much more is required.

I have come to understand that the systems that underpin the top professions in Britain are set up to serve only a certain section of society: they’re readily identifiable by privileged backgrounds, particular schools and accents. To some this may seem obvious, so writing it may be superfluous. But it wasn’t obvious to me growing up, and it isn’t obvious to many others. The unwritten rules are rarely shared and “diversity” and “open recruitment” have tried but made little if any difference.

Those inside the system then naturally recruit in their own image. This then entrenches the lack of any potential for upward mobility and means that the vast majority are excluded.

Check out Neoliberalism: A Concept Every Sociologist Should Understand, Peter Kaufman (Everyday Sociology)

The end result of neoliberal ideology, Monbiot continues, is that we are led to believe in the myth of the self-made person:

“The rich persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages – such as education, inheritance and class – that may have helped to secure it. The poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances. Never mind structural unemployment: if you don’t have a job it’s because you are unenterprising. Never mind the impossible costs of housing: if your credit card is maxed out, you’re feckless and improvident. Never mind that your children no longer have a school playing field: if they get fat, it’s your fault. In a world governed by competition, those who fall behind become defined and self-defined as losers.”

SchoolED Podcast: Paul Thomas on Grit, Slack, and the Effects of Poverty on Learning

UPDATED (Again): Grit, Education Narratives Veneer for White, Wealth Privilege

“Grit” Takes another Hit (with Caveats)

Rejecting “Grit” While Embracing Effort, Engagement

Poetry/ National Poetry Month 2017

Perspective | Poet: Why I would never tell a student what a poem means, Sara Holbrook (The Answer Sheet/ Washington Post)

A few months ago I wrote an essay, “I Can’t Answer These Texas Standardized Test Questions About My Own Poems,” in which I questioned those of unknown academic distinction who anonymously compose proficiency test questions. Many teachers wrote to tell me that they too are unable to answer these vaguely written test questions being used to evaluate their students. One teacher reported that her kids had to endure 17 days of testing this year. Considering there are only about 20 days of school in a month and that every test requires preparation on the devices and manner of testing, that’s a lot of lost instructional time.

Parents wrote. I did a few television interviews and radio programs. It was my 15 minutes. Additionally, I took some heat from a (very) few academics who jumped to inform me that authors do not own the meaning of a poem, it is up to literary critics to make this determination. Good grief.

It was not my intent to kick off an argument on of the relative merit of learned literary analysis. I’ll leave that to those with letters after their names. But friends, parents, educators, learned folks, please remember, middle-schoolers are not just short college sophomores. They are not lit majors. These are kids like Paul. Kids who are often grappling with a world of unseen and sometimes unspeakable challenges.

In Defense of Poetry: “Oh My Heart”

“So We must meet apart”: #NationalPoetryMonth 2017 and My Journey with Emily Dickinson

Educational Rankings

Are South Carolina schools really the worst in the nation?, Cindy Landrum (Greenville Journal)

Furman University education professor Paul Thomas said the education ranking is far less about education than socioeconomics.

“This ranking is a direct reflection of political negligence,” he said. “Our schools don’t legislate. It’s not like our schools are without any fault, but how schools function is a reflection of political leadership. South Carolina is failing our children, not our children are failing school.”

U.S. News & World Report used 11 metrics to measure a state’s education ranking, including college and high school graduation rates and standardized test scores. Three of the six pre-kindergarten-12 categories are test scores (ACT and National Assessment of Educational Progress), while the others are high school graduation rates, pre-K quality, and preschool enrollment. South Carolina ranked high in quality of its public pre-kindergarten program, but ranked low in test scores and college readiness.

“Schools in South Carolina and the U.S. reflect the inequities of communities, the failure of our policies, and as a result, they are ineffective as mechanisms of change,” Thomas said.

At least 60 percent of test scores are correlated with out-of-school factors such as parental education levels, poverty, hunger, mobility, lack of health care, safety, and community resources, he said. Only 10 percent to 15 percent of test scores can be traced to teacher quality.

Thomas said it has been known for decades that poverty and inequity are the greatest hurdles for children learning. But instead of addressing the problems, instead grade-by-grade standards are changed and students tested.

“Our states have social and educational pockets of poverty,” Thomas said. “Food and home insecurity directly contribute to low academic output, and once they get into school, we make horrible decisions. High-poverty children are sitting in larger classes with early-career and uncertified teachers. We do the exact opposite of what we should be doing.”

Poverty

America’s Shameful Poverty Stats, Sasha Abramsky (The Nation)

But there’s a deeper significance to the numbers: how they compare with the figures from recent decades. The percentage of people in poverty is roughly the same as in 1983, in the middle of the Reagan presidency, as well as in 1993, at the end of twelve years of Reagan/Bush trickle-down economics. A far higher portion of the population lives in poverty than was the case in the mid-1970s, after a decade of investment stemming from Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty; and far more live in poverty today than did at the end of Bill Clinton’s eight years in office—years in which the earned-income tax credit was expanded, unemployment was kept to near-historic lows, and poverty rates fell significantly.

That our poverty numbers have risen to such a high level exposes the fact that as a society, we are choosing to ignore the needs of tens of millions of Americans—as we have done for much of the period since the War on Poverty went out of fashion and the harsher politics of Reaganism set in. These ignored Americans include kids like the ones I interviewed in Los Angeles, forced to choose between applying to college or dropping out of school and getting dead-end jobs to support parents who had lost not only their jobs but their homes, too. They include the elderly lady I met outside Dallas, who was too poor to retire but too sick to take the bus to her work at Walmart. Her solution? She paid her neighbors gas money to drive her to a job that paid so little she routinely ate either 88-cent TV dinners or went to bed hungry. They include, too, the residents of New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward I met in 2011, who, six years after Hurricane Katrina, were still living in appalling conditions in a largely obliterated community.

See Also

the world

Teacher Quality: A Reader in 2017

Let me start with a full disclosure: Lawrence Baines is a colleague and friend with whom I have collaborated on several book projects and presentations. So I want to offer some friendly concerns about his thoughtful When ‘Highly Qualified’ Teachers Aren’t in Education Week.

Baines open with: “Recent research confirms that America’s most vulnerable children are being taught by the least-qualified teachers.”

This is incredibly important, but let’s clarify a few points. Vulnerable students include black and brown students, high-poverty students, English language learners, and special needs students. And Baines is highlighting a truly ugly fact about unwritten policies in education: these vulnerable populations of students are assigned disproportionately new and early-career teachers as well as un-/under-certified teachers.

Dozens of studies for many years have confirmed that administrations commonly “reward” veteran teachers by assigning them “good” students and advanced courses such as AP and IB.

Add to that dynamic that the rise of charter schools linked strongly with TFA has increased the likelihood that vulnerable students will be assured a continual stream of uncertified and new teachers.

Confronting the increased bureaucratization of teacher preparation and alternative certification programs, Baines makes his central case: “The continual dumbing-down of the preparation of teachers is not without consequences.”

I would argue that the “dumbing-down” is about the false attack on “bad” teachers as the primary or even single cause of low student achievement among, specifically, vulnerable students.

And the ugly consequence of that assault has been increasing accountability over teacher certification and teacher evaluation (such as using value-added methods) and thus demonizing teachers without improving teaching or learning.

Another repeated fact of education is that measurable student learning (usually test scores) is most strongly correlated with the socioeconomic status of students’ home; see this about Arkansas, which is typical across the U.S.

So here is the teacher quality dilemma: If we demand that teacher quality is the primary mechanism for improving student achievement, and if that is a false claim (which it is), we are doomed to both destroying the profession and discouraging anyone from entering that profession.

And Baines concludes: “All of the highest-performing countries in the world require teachers to obtain advanced degrees, demonstrate pedagogical and subject-matter expertise, accumulate significant teaching experience, and show an aptitude for working with children before stepping into the classroom as full-time teachers.”

Herein we are confronted with what it means to prepare well people to teach. And how do we disentangle teacher preparation and teacher evaluation from corrosive and ill-informed bureaucracy (certification and accreditation) while also providing the context within which we can create robust and challenging teacher education as well as ongoing professional development for teachers?

My short answer is that standards, certification, and accreditation are all the problems, not the solutions. Teacher education needs to be re-envisioned as the other disciplines, which are often self-regulating and robust because of professionalism and fidelity to the discipline among members of that discipline.

Since I have written on these issues often, I offer here a reader to help confront the issues raised by Baines:

Teacher Quality, Wiggins and Hattie: More Doing the Wrong Things the Right Ways

Addressing Teacher Quality Post-NCLB

What We Tolerate (and for Whom) v. What the Rich Demand: On Teacher Quality

Teacher Quality: On Hyperbole and Anecdotes

The Fatal Flaw of Teacher Education: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

What’s Wrong with Teacher Education?

The Rise of Crony Appointees and the Inexpert Ruling Class

Imagine the U.S. president appointing the Secretary of Education based almost entirely on that appointee being connected, and not because of a wealth of experience and expertise in public education.

No, this is not about Trump and Betsy DeVos—or at least not just about the most current spit in the eye of educators. The opening comment applies to Barack Obama appointing Arne Duncan, his Chicago basketball buddy.

The line from Duncan to DeVos is not some dramatic leap, but very direct and incredibly short.

“In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to barracks, from barracks to the factory),” wrote Gilles Deleuze in Postscript on the Societies of Control, “while in the societies of control one is never finished with anything—the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation.”

Many would discount this as so much French philosophical hokum, but when Deleuze turns to the fiction of Franz Kafka, the more concrete warning of this examination appears. Writing over a century ago, Kafka was keenly aware of the soul-destroying consequences of the bureaucratic existence.

Just as Kafka himself offered dark humor in his existential tales, more recently we have the comic strip Dilbert and two versions, UK and US, of the TV sitcom The Office as well as cult class films such as Office Space to dramatize exactly what Deleuze and Kafka feared: the rise of crony appointees and the inexpert ruling class.

Duncan and DeVos are inners, building careers on being connected and buying connections. And education has been a harbinger for the inevitability of Trump for three decades now since being without expertise and experience has driven who controls public education and what policies are implemented.

Education and education policy have been a playground for Innovators! who have no historical context or real experience in day-to-day teaching and learning.

The policy equivalent to DeVos being confirmed as SOE is the charter school—a garbled Frankenstein of pet policies manufactured by Innovators!

Charter schools sew together “public” with “choice” and hire inexperienced and uncertified TFA corps members who dutifully (although briefly) implement Innovation! such as project-based learning (PBL).

And as a result of the inexpert ruling class, we continue to hear this sort of nonsense:

In fact, the rise of charter schools mirrors disruptive innovation, a term coined by the Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen. The theory explains how technology allows for the creation of better services, which eventually replace those of well-established competitors. Traditional public schools, for example, are focused on low-risk, sustainable improvements. They lost their dominance in the market to cutting-edge charters that worked to transform labor, capital, materials, and information to better meet consumer needs.

Yes, Technology! and Disruptive Innovation! But there is more:

For more than 2.5 million students in almost 7,000 schools, 43 states, and the District of Columbia, charter schools have ignited innovations in how education is delivered, measured, and structured, by lengthening school days, emphasizing project-based learning, and using new and creative models for classroom management. That traditional public education has adopted many of the same notions first tried in charters is cause for celebration. The more established innovations become, the greater their impact. But charters also run the risk of losing the very conditions that made them able to innovate in the first place.

Wow, Ignited Innovation! As you can tell, this is a hot mess.

The vapid Newspeak of inexpert Innovators! is a veneer covering a complete lack of credibility or substance.

And the result is a reduction of teaching and learning to the exact sort of bureaucratic hell found in Kafka, Dilbert, The Office, and Office Space—know-nothing bosses and managers dutifully keeping the workers on task by constantly changing those tasks.

If we simply unpack the Innovation-of-the-Moment!, PBL, we have a model for exactly how Trump came about, and what to expect in the wake of that rise.

“The cause for my wrath is not new or single. It is of slow growth and has many characteristics,” writes Lou LaBrant. “It is known to many as a variation of the project method; to me, as the soap performance,” explaining:

I am disturbed by the practice, much more common than our publications would indicate, of using the carving of little toy boats and castles, the dressing of quaint dolls, the pasting of advertising pictures, and the manipulation of clay and soap as the teaching of English literature.

LaBrant, then, concludes:

In encouraging much of handwork in connection with the reading of literature, it seems to the writer, wrong emphasis is made. The children may be interested, yes. But it makes considerable difference whether the interest be such as to lead to more reading or more carving….

That the making of concrete models will keep interested many pupils who would otherwise find much of the English course dull may be granted. The remedy would seem to be in changing the reading material rather than in turning the literature course into a class in handcraft.

Let’s note here LaBrant was confronting the failures of obsessive commitments to PBL in 1931.

That’s right.

1931.

The very ugly truth about our crony appointees and inexpert ruling class is that all they have is snake oil and barker’s bullshit.

Innovation! Technology!

Bullshit.

Since one of the first controversies after DeVos was confirmed involved her using a public school for a photo-op, prompting protests and Duncan’s crony-appointee solidarity, I invite anyone who genuinely cares about education to not only visit a public school but also listen to the teachers and students trapped in the Kafkan nightmare that is, for example, a school-wide embracing of PBL.

Teaching and learning—necessarily messy things, essentially personal endeavors—are reduced to a never-ending quest to do PBL as prescribed, teaching and learning be damned (just as LaBrant observed almost 90 years ago).

And as Deleuze recognized, education remains trapped in “always starting again,” “never finished with anything”; education Innovator’s! obsession with Technology! has nothing to do with teaching and learning, but everything to do with making someone money and with discipline and control.

The ceaseless updating of technology requires vigilant retraining (educators are always in a state of retraining), the ceaseless reintroduction of New! standards requires vigilant retraining (educators are always in a state of retraining), and the next program Innovation! requires vigilant retraining (educators are always in a state of retraining).

All the technology and facilities retooling and teacher retraining to implement PBL must necessarily call on Innovators! to create something New! to replace the tired and (once again) ineffective practices.

Once PBL becomes the norm of schooling, Innovators! will pounce on the New! opportunity to Innovate! No, with great speed and determination—Disruptive Innovation!

The know-nothing ruling class and their enablers will scoff at French philosophy and Prussian fiction because that is all about being informed, knowledgable.

We in education have lived under this nonsense for decades now so let me say to the rest of the U.S.: welcome to our nightmare.

Michael Scott has been elected POTUS, and he has given all his friends the cool jobs while he pecks away on Twitter giving the rest of us the middle finger emoji.

Teaching Students, Not Standards or Programs

Teaching Reading and Children: Reading Programs as “Costume Parties”