Peter Greene, retired teacher, is a regular contributor to Forbes, where this article appeared. It’s heartening to know that a business publication is exposing its readers to a veteran teacher who knows what he is talking about.
In this article, he cautions champions of “the science of reading not to repeat the same mistakes as Common Core, our last overhyped educational panacea.
He writes:
Bills mandating the “Science of Reading” have been passing left and right across the nation.
While some, like the Pennsylvania bill that passed 201-0, provide gentle nudging and support, others, like Indiana’s law, provide strict mandates on what teaching techniques are required and which are forbidden. And that’s a bad idea.
America has seen this movie before.
A bipartisan collection of political leaders, concerned about improving America’s education system, came together to mandate certain education practices, based on the recommendations from advocates located far from actual classrooms. The result was a contentious and controversial mess that did not seem to actually make things a bit better.
That was Common Core. “Science of Reading” fans would do well to learn a few lessons.
Brand identity
Despite widespread discussion, Common Core meant many different things to many different people. The group that wrote the standards disbanded and did not stick around to answer questions (of which there were many). Common Core the brand was open to anyone’s interpretation. This left businesses free to claim their materials were “Common Core aligned” without fear of contradiction.
Likewise, there is no widespread agreement on what “Science of Reading” actually entails. Publishers can slap “Now with more Science of Reading” on materials and hit the marketplace.
Top down
Tom Loveless pointed out in his excellent Common Core post mortem, pushing programs from the top down leads to implementation issues. Legislators can mandate traffic patterns from 100 miles up, but on the ground, folks have to navigate potholes, hills, valleys, other traffic, and everyday surprises. What look like stripes from far above may turn out to be a staircase…
Response time
Research can course correct quickly. Legislators cannot. Under No Child Left Behind, legislators tried to influence instruction by attaching high stakes to a big standardized test, with the goal that 100% of US students would score above average on that test by 2014. Legislators assured alarmed educators that the law would be rewritten before that unachievable goal came due. The law was rewritten in December of 2015.
Legislators deleted the original goal of 2014 as the date by which all students would magically score above average, but they left in place a harsh series of demands that were disruptive and demoralizing.
Open the link to read Peter’s analysis of ways to avoid making the same mistakes as Commin Core while pushing the goal of reaching new heights of literacy.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Hi Diane–one of the biggest issues teachers I know have with the ELA portion of CCSS is its emphasis on generic reading comprehension skills over content knowledge. I see this in the changes made to the AP curricula and exams–in history, they heavily emphasize students reading passages–often from some pretty obscure sources–and then answer questions based on their understanding of the passage. Gone are the straightforward questions that measured content knowledge.
I blame David Coleman, the CEO of the College Board, who is trying to align the SAT and AP exams to Common Core (which he helped develop).
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Exactly right, David. The Common Core State Standards, which were common only in the sense of being vulgar, did not incorporate core knowledge, were not developed by the states but foisted upon them, and certainly did not establish anything one might call “standards,” were and are almost entirely content free. And yes, Coleman made the SAT vastly worse by Coring it. He should have called his version the SCAT, or Scholastic Cored Assessment Test, aka, a POS.
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The truly horrific thing is that while people write essays about the demise of CCSS, it still reigns. A lot of states are still using it, and those that aren’t are using their own “standards” largely based on the CCSS crap. In other words, we are still very much living with this horror, which led to a dramatic devolution of curricula, in print and online, in ELA, and Coleman is still pulling down his breathtaking salary for having inflicted this crap on the country, and Gates, who paid for it all so that he could have one set of standards, nationally, to key monopolistic enterprise to, is still out there playing the boy genius in his PR productions for having led us into this swamp.
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One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that K-12 Education moves REALLY SLOWLY to make change. So, despite the UTTER FAILURE of the Common Core and its associated testing to make ANY STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT IMPROVEMENT by the Education Deformers’ own preferred measure, the scores on those tests, it persists like a metastasized cancer on the body of US education. Same thing happened with Behaviorism in the 20th century. Behaviorist ideas started taking over US schools as early as the 1940s and had established an iron grip on psychology in the US and Great Britain even earlier. Then, in the fifties, because of work by Karl Lashley and Noam Chomsky, the great Cognitive Revolution in psychology occurred, but the Behaviorism in U.S. K-12 education persisted for decades after this. Oddly, education leader tend to be quite slow learners.
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I I believe the reason for the slow change in education is that each wave of reform has a built-in aspect that conserves its momentum. In the case of the Common bore, it was the testing. Since the testing that was setup is still intact, it will drive the content (or lack thereof).
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Hmmmm. A lot of this just seems like ignorant lack of reflection on what one is doing. People get up in the morning and do the same damn thing they did yesterday without stopping to consider whether it makes sense. It was truly shocking that U.S. educators were still forcing people to write “behavioral objectives” 30 years after Behaviorism had fallen into deep disrepute among psychologists.
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I cannot be that generous in my assessment, Roy. Here’s why:
There are more “standards” than there are multiple-choice questions on the state tests. So, each “standard” is testing by 1 or 2 questions. The “standards” are incredibly broad (The student will be able to draw inferences from texts; the student will demonstrate command of proper punctuation), and it is LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE therefore to test them with one or two questions. THAT THIS WAS NOT OBVIOUS–THAT IT WAS NOT OBVIOUS TO EVERY EDUCATOR–THAT THE TESTS DID NOT AND COULD NOT VALIDLY TEST FOR PROFICIENCY ON SUCH “STANDARDS,” GIVEN THEIR DESIGN, MEANS THAT EDUCATORS DID NOT FREAKING BOTHER TO THINK AT ALL ABOUT WHETHER THE TESTING MADE SENSE.
This is utterly appalling. It’s inexcusable. It’s sickening. It’s a national scandal.
We need to do away with the invalid state testing and then establish a Truth and Reconciliation Committee to claw back from the test makers the billions they have sucked out of our educational system with their pseudoscientific, scam testing.
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correction: so each “standard” is represented by 0, 1, 0r at most 2 questions (yes, that happens; sometimes a test will have two questions on one standard despite the fact that many standards are not tested at all).
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The whole “science of reading” craze resulting in legislation points to the fact that legislators should stay out of issues of pedagogy. They clearly have no clue what they are doing. It also highlights the fact that legislators are doing the bidding of special interests that are paying for them to impose pedagogy about which they know nothing. It is a very much the same type of special interest meddling that brought CBE to public schools because such an approach benefited Bill Gates and Big Tech. Through no fault of their own, our public schools have become a political battleground of special interests as corporations position themselves latch on to public money.
This article by a Dr. Thomas, which appeared on Peter Greene’s weekend roundup of articles a couple of weeks ago, examines the SOR legislation that started in the south and has spread to the north. There is zero evidence that supports the validity of the SOR, but foolish legislators are jumping on the bandwagon. With more than three and a half decades in public education, I have never seen states mandate a particular pedagogy w reading instruction. It is intrusive, ill-advised and foolish. https://radicalscholarship.com/2024/03/15/science-of-movement-repeating-mistakes-of-education-reform-cycles/
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RT,
I certainly agree with your skepticism about legislatures mandating “Science of Reading” or any other instructional method. I wrote a post about it. There has been a campaign to promote SOR as the best and only way to teach reading. As you note, there really is no evidence for that claim. But the echo chamber has joined in—Education Week, NPR, major media. Legislatures assume that there is a consensus among experts. There is not. We may have to wait another 20 years until a new wave of experts discovers a “reading crisis” and demands a different approach.
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Amplify is going to make a LOT of money.
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Nancy Bailey points out that the latest profiteering plan is called “building knowledge.” While we can agree that knowledge is important, the corporate solution is, of course, to plop youngsters down in front of screens.
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I don’t know how CCSS will be viewed 100 years from now. Maybe there will be “core” ideas that prove useful. Behaviorism, I think, is mellowing that way. For instance, now we talk about incentives for performance. Behaviorism did investigate and promulgate a philosophy of when and why people did what they did. Behaviorism did ignore any consideration of internal motivation, about which we could only speculate, and focused on only observable behavior. You want to maximize the chances that someone will “learn” some behavior? Then use a variable interval schedule of instruction/reinforcement. Still true today as far as I know. I am really simplifying as well thinking these ideas out as I go. If we get away from focusing on pure Skinner and look at what it might have revealed about behavior, I think some of the extreme behaviors we are seeing are easier to understand. Trump has tapped into how to reinforce this behavior.
Let me reiterate, I am basically pontificating on matters about which I am only an amateur observer.
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Like almost everything else connected to Behaviorism, incentives for performance actually make things WORSE.
RSA ANIMATE: Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us (youtube.com)
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Over simplification. Raising my salary doesn’t make my performance worse. Promising me a cookie for picking up my toys doesn’t make me worse at the chore. It’s the assumption that if I pick up my toys, I will always get a cookie that sabotages that bargain. As long as an employer shows an appreciation for an employee’s performance, and the employee knows they are valued, how and when that appreciation is shown should be varied. Giving a toddler some reward, whether it be a cookie, a hug, or a story for some desired behavior is not going to sabotage the desired behavior.
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I don’t think you followed this, Speduktr. What happens is that when people are told that there is an incentive plan, this is deincentivizing because a) it suggests that the thing to be done is so onerous that people have to pay extra for it, and b) it undermines personal autonomy and decision-making. This is why merit pay programs NEVER work.
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Daniel Pink has lots of interesting things to say just as behaviorism does. Human motivation is far more complex than either slant can possibly explain. On only what Pink showed in his graphic presentation, one still has to ask why performance tanked under certain conditions. I suppose it explains why teachers will work for close to nothing. Goes to show that smart people can be really dumb, but we can keep them producing by telling them what saints they are every once in awhile.
Behaviorism ignored the idea of an internal life and internal rewards and focused only on behavior that could be observed. I wonder if behaviorists could replicate Pink’s example in strictly behaviorist terms and explain it. Don’t get me wrong. I believe that what goes on inside our minds is essential to trying to understand our behavior. I just believe that it is a mistake to dismiss insights that can be drawn from behaviorism.
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Behaviorist strategies sometimes work with people WHEN THEY DON’T KNOW THAT THEY ARE BEING APPLIED, as in the famous experiments where students condition profs to stand on one side of the room. But what is going on in the head of the subject MATTERS. People, including very young children, are very sensitive to being manipulated. THEY HATE IT, and THEY REJECT IT.
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Personal autonomy means A LOT to people. That’s why these incentive programs always fail. They piss people off at really fundamental levels.
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The takeaway from the whole DISASTROUS Behaviorist enterprise is this: You can sometimes get results from intermediate positive reinforcement in conditions where human subjects are unaware of the reinforcement program.
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The whole deformer modus operandi is based upon a flawed Behaviorist paradigm: on the notion that you can use test-based reward and punishment to effect positive educational outcomes. THIS DOES NOT HAPPEN. IT HAS UTTERLY FAILED. And someone like Pink can explain precisely WHY it has failed. People don’t work like that.
Are you listening, Bill Gates? PEOPLE DO NOT WORK LIKE THAT.
But no, he is not listening. Never did. Never will.
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Behaviorism in American psychology was just like Lysenkoism in Soviet genetics. It was ideology, not science. It set us back half a century, at least. And its lingering influence, in education “reform,” for example, continues to poison public policy.
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I science also subject to ideological fads? Well, yes. Behaviorism and Lysenkoism are two superb examples of this.
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For well over half a century, in the 20th century, educators in the United States were taught by their Education professors that what was going on in the minds of children DID NOT MATTER and SHOULD BE IGNORED. This is how utterly ridiculously faddish “science” can become. One must be constantly vigilant against such hogwash. And right now, far, far too many Education professors are teaching people that the results from the federally mandated tests constitute “data.” Invalid tests do not provide anything that merits the name “data.”
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BTW, the fundamental human need to be the locus of control in one’s own life, the need for personal autonomy, fundamental in all people except those who are severely damaged in particular ways in childhood, goes a long way to explaining WHY intermittent reinforcement works better than does reinforcement every time. It encourages people to imagine that they are controlling or can control or might be able to control the situation. This happens with gamblers, for example, who invent elaborate fantasies about how they are “fooling” the lottery or the racetrack or the casino or whatever.
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So, ironically, the most useful finding from Behaviorism undermines the fundamental tenet of Behaviorism, that any discussion of what’s going on in the mind is unscientific. ROFL.
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BTW, Skinner taught for a while at Indiana University. I was there studying psychology when–glory to behold–Skinner was burned in effigy in front of the Psychology building.
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by a bunch of Psych grad students. ROFL!!!
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In these benighted times, they would be arrested for terrorism.
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The Behaviorists were a bunch of freaking Nazis. In their insecurity, based, I suspect, on doubts about their cult’s main ideas, they enforced orthodoxy and ruined careers. I had a Methods prof who was one of these Behaviorists, so one day before class, I sneaked into the room and wrote this in enormous letters across the chalkboard:
Abraham Maslow on Behaviorism:
“[I]f the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”
–Maslow, The Psychology of Science, 1966
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Oops. Here’s the quotation:
“[I]t is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”
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.Somehow you have managed to ignore my point. I never advocated an orthodox approach to Behaviorism. However, there are ideas that are useful to understand while there are also obvious shortcomings since it ignores internal mental activity because we can’t “count” it. Now we have computers to fool us into thinking we can understand human thought by counting behavior events.
I have told the story before one of my professors who talked about extinguishing an obsessive behavior in a patient only to have her break out in hives.
You fool yourself, though, if you reject the idea that external reward is a useful tool. Every time we smile at a student, we “risk” rewarding them for seeking our approval. Behaviorism was an attempt to understand human behavior exclusively through what observable behavior could reveal. An obvious over simplification if internal mental processes are ignored.
Daniel Pink could not have written Drive without social scientists designing experiments to study behaviorist ideas, which have taken us far beyond any orthodox attempts to enshrine Behaviorism. Unfortunately, it is easy to monetize the concepts in ways that are not always productive.
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I agree that people studying education should learn about Behaviorism, mostly because such learning provides a superb case study of the idiocy of educational fads. There are very, very limited uses of some Behaviorist protocols. But most of it, almost all of it, is simply garbage.
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There is ENORMOUS research showing that external rewards are DISINCENTIVIZING.
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You are talking to a former special ed teacher. External rewards could be extremely useful but not as an end point as I have mentioned more than once. When it comes down to it, any behavior we repeat has to have some sort of internal reward.
In a sense, my understanding of Behaviorism helped me “extinguish” unwanted behaviors. Like the student who would act out to gain attention. I had one who refused to do any homework or participate in most class activities. I could speculate about his reasons, but initially it was far more productive to find ways around his behavior. A lot of ignoring/punishment was involved initially as well as positive attention when his behavior even approached acceptable. Did he know what I was doing? Of course not! Was it overtly manipulative! Again, no.
I find this discussion much like I view the battle between whole language and phonics proponents. As far as I am concerned, no one ever learned to love reading through phonics, but I did have students who might never have learned to read without extensive instruction in phonics. In the same way, you could frustrate the student who would gain little from a heavy handed phonics approach. Finding the balance for each student was not always easy.
In the same way, I never approached a student with the idea that carrots were the way to go although they proved handy on occasion.
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I’m glad you found methods that worked for you. A nudge here, a nudge there. If you got anywhere, it was probably because the kid decided that he or she liked you.
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The problem with behaviorism is dehumanization, treating people like rats in a cage. That is the problem with behaviorism. Another problem is that, in humans, intrinsic is better than extrinsic motivation.
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People are very much aware when they are being so treated, and they REALLY, REALLY hate it.
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Exactly right, LCT. The whole goal of education should be to build extrinsic motivation in kids.
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Agree. As a special ed teacher, a judicious use of external rewards combined with activities intended to be internally rewarding was often the best way to reach the reluctant learner.
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Once the student was reaping the internal rewards, “bribes” could be eliminated.
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The bribes don’t work. This is why kids’ reactions to educational software follows this trajectory:
Lots and lots of hype about the new educational software program.
District buys it and forces it on teachers.
Lots and lots of delay while people try to figure out how to onboard everyone despite all the glitches.
Up and running. Kids are interested for about 20 minutes because it is something new.
From then on, kids would rather have all the hair pulled off their bodies with tweezers than log onto the POS again. They PARTICULARLY HATE the built-in “rewards,” such as being able to buy accessories for one’s avatar. This kind of thing attracts their greatest ire. Why? Because, as Neil Postman wrote long, long ago, “Kids have excellent crap detectors.” And they don’t like being manipulated. That’s the worst kind of Behaviorist crap of all.
A Warning to Parents about Online Learning Programs | Bob Shepherd | Praxis (wordpress.com)
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Behaviorism works well for overcoming phobias. That is the extent of its usefulness.
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People are willing to work toward ends THAT THEY CARE ABOUT under conditions of PERSONAL AUTONOMY. They care about pursuing the goals that they care about and about having personal autonomy A LOT MORE THAN THEY CARE ABOUT PAY, EVEN!!!!
Telling people, this is so awful that we have to incentivize you is NOT incentivizing. It’s that kind of simple-minded thinking about stimulus and reward that is why Behaviorism was so unutterably stupid. Behaviorists did not understand how and why people work, and their failure in this regard is shared by Education Deformers like Gates. NB: Gates, who has no idea how other people tick, instituted the ultimate in a punishment/reward system at Microsoft: stack ranking.
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cx:
The takeaway from the whole DISASTROUS Behaviorist enterprise is this: You can sometimes get results from intermittent positive reinforcement in conditions where human subjects are unaware of the reinforcement program.
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Especially if you refer to them as subjects.
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I did not suggest overtly referring to them as subjects.
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Despite widespread review of “What Was”, TESTING remains the greatest waste of minds and resources. Despite widespread review of “What Was”, preaching dissent, after practicing obedience (complicity-giving tests) is no more than word slinging. TEACHERS what’d ya leave behind for me???
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The big lie that students could “magically” score at above-average proficiency by 2014, or ever, has allowed the testing machinery and the $$$ that go with it to continue for so long. The warped genius of the test developers is that they were able to convince families that this was a noble, achievable goal. They lied, and continue to lie, about closing gaps, etc. They know that the test design ensures that “proficiency” is a moving target, and norm-referenced testing guarantees that students will always test above and below the cut score. Families don’t understand this, and they are convinced that “proficiency” can be achieved by all, through marketing and selling of tech, software, consultants, etc. It’s an evil, damaging corporate takeover that will continue in perpetuity unless it is finally exposed for what it is. Nothing more than grift, with our students and teachers as collateral damage.
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The state tests were supposed to be criterion-referenced, not norm-referenced, tests. Criterion-referenced set a particular level for proficiency, and theoretically, every child could reach that level.
That was the plan. It was unachievable, but not because these were norm-referenced tests in which everyone was supposed to be above average, which is, of course, impossible.
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The media is also misinformed about proficiency on the NAEP. Proficiency is a subjective determination that on the NAEP is well above the norm, but that does not stop the media from publishing false information about the performance of American students on the test.
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Reading is an incredibly complex phenomenon affected by a lot of variables, so while there is science that affects how to teach kids to read, there is no science of reading.
On the Pseudoscience of Strategies-Based Reading Comprehension Instruction, or What Some Current Comprehension Instruction Has in Common with Astrology | Bob Shepherd | Praxis (wordpress.com)
Oh, and BTW, our education schools need to do a LOT better job of teaching prospective educators about testing and assessment. A LOT of educators do not understand the most basic concepts in this area. It’s really pretty shocking.
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There many ways to teach students to read. Reading teachers and elementary teachers know that they must assess in order to plan for instruction, and the assessment tools need not be standardized. For example, elementary teachers often use an informal tool known as a “running record” to get a sense of sound mastery and fluency. It is both useful and diagnostic. Instruction should be flexible enough to accommodate most learners and often includes flexible grouping based on need. The learning must also be somewhat enjoyable because children that learn to enjoy reading are more likely to become adults that know how to think. One size fits all approaches are not appropriate for all. Instruction should be based on need, not politics.
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amen
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”often includes flexible grouping based on need”
In my daughter’s second grade class, one group students were placed in she called the “Left Behind” group. Kids know what’s going on. Every attempt to manipulate the learning environment will be disrupted by the “rats” learning the game. After all, the brains of all social animals are evolved primarily to detect cooperation and cheating, not Readin’ and Rithmatic
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Well said, Scott!
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Before Common Core was forced on the nation through trickery, bribes and lies, there were other fake fads forced on teachers through school boards or state legislaturres.
There was the self esteem movement where students would succeed at learning by feeling better about themselves if they never earned a grade lower than a C. It didn’t matter if the student did nothing… NOTHING but warm a seat, they had to earn Cs or better. Teachers where I taught were raked over the coals by administration for daring to put an F or D on a report card that a student earned by doing nothing or not showing up to class too many times. I was one of those teachers who was told it wsa my fault students were earn ign Fs or Ds in my class for doing nothing because I wasn’t motivating them to work.
During that fad, I even had parents on parent conference night accuse their students earning Ds or Fs because their student told them I was boring. Or they lied and said they turned the work in but I lost it. I had one parent accuse me of losing her daughters work and didn’t apologize after I asked her student for her English binder and found all of that unfinished work still in her binder. That student started the assignments and never turned them in. The student’s name was there, the right date was there, the title of the assignment was therre and the rest of the page was blank.
Then there was the whole language approach to reading and admin forced English teachers to stop teaching students the rules of grammar and spelling. To make sure we weren’t teaching those subjects, admin recruits students spies to make sure we weren’t. I got caught doing that stealth teaching and was called in and threatened that I’d be fired if I didn’t stop teaching kids how to spell correctly and know what words to capitalize and where commas and periods go. The Whole Language Approach to teaching said students would learn all of taht automatically just be reading more. No need to teach it.
Then there was the test every lesson you teach fad. Every day before the class ends to determine if the students learned what you taught that day.
EVERYDAY we had to have end of class short quizzes based on every daily lesson.
I taught for thirty years, 1975 – 2005. The fads come and go. They always go because they always fail. They’d come in with a roar and over time fade out to silence until they were no more.
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The Self Esteem movement. That was a blip, huh? Like the Flipped Classroom, which was supposed to be “The Next Big Thing.” Even “The Next Big Thing” has been left in the dust. Now, according to Bill Gates, who is never wrong about anything (ROFL), the “reading problem” is going to be solved by large-language-model AI like ChatGPT. The genius-level ideas keep rolling out of this buffoon.
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