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How the Billionaires Manufactured an Education “Crisis”

By dianeravitch
September 14, 2026 //
7

Mike Simpson, known on Twitter as “Big Education Ape,” is known for his brilliant memes and editorial cartoons. Typically, they expose the latest fads and lies that defame teachers and public schools. Every once in a while, he publishes a great post, like this one.

He writes:

I’M SHOCKED, SHOCKED — HOW 30 YEARS OF BILLIONAIRE-FUNDED “REFORM” MANUFACTURED THE EDUCATION CRISIS IT PROMISED TO FIX

There’s a famous scene in Casablanca where Captain Renault declares he is “shocked, shocked” to find gambling going on — right before a croupier hands him his winnings. That’s essentially the posture of the billionaire reform industrial complex today, clutching its pearls over a Gallup poll showing public satisfaction with American schools has cratered to 32% — an 11-point nosedive in just two years — while quietly pocketing the profits of the crisis they spent three decades engineering.

Shocked. Absolutely shocked.

The Architecture of a Manufactured Crisis

Let’s be precise about the timeline, because precision matters when someone is picking your pocket.

For roughly 30 years, a well-funded constellation of think tanks, philanthropic foundations, hedge fund managers, and tech oligarchs pumped billions of dollars into a single, relentless narrative: public schools are failing. Not “underfunded.” Not “systematically neglected.” Failing — as in, inherently broken, irredeemably incompetent, populated by bad teachers protected by evil unions, and salvageable only by the heroic intervention of the private market.

The messaging was surgical. The money was real. And — surprise! — it worked.

As the Big Education Ape’s deep dive into school funding makes devastatingly clear, the playbook was never subtle:

Starve public schools of adequate funding. Declare them “failing.” Ride in on a white charter bus to “rescue” the children.

The chronic underfunding wasn’t fiscal negligence. In many states, it was a feature, not a bug. Squeeze hard enough, the theory went, and disruption would force innovation. What it actually forced was deferred maintenance, teacher shortages, and a generation of kids learning to read in buildings where the roof leaks and the textbooks predate the iPhone.

Now the poll numbers confirm the narrative took hold — and the reformers are citing those same poll numbers as proof they were right all along. The audacity is, genuinely, breathtaking.

The Numbers That Tell Two Very Different Stories

Here’s what the data actually shows — and what it doesn’t show:

Metric: The Headline. What It Actually Means Gallup Public Satisfaction 32% — record low 30 years of “failing schools” messaging worked exactly as intended.

Parent Satisfaction with Their Own School Historically ~2x the national figure People trust what they experience; they fear what they’re told

Math & Reading Scores Declining, especially bottom quartile Tracks directly with funding inequity and screen-time explosion

Top-tier U.S. Student Performance Still globally competitive. The “crisis” is concentrated where disinvestment is concentrated

The gap between how Americans rate schools in general versus their own child’s school is the smoking gun. It has always been the smoking gun. People who actually walk into a public school building — who meet the teachers, see the classrooms, watch their kids come home — consistently rate those schools dramatically higher than the national “failing” narrative suggests.

That gap is the manufactured crisis. It lives entirely in the space between lived experience and media-amplified fear.

$1.8 Billion Worth of Snake Oil, Served Fresh

And just when you thought the reform carousel might slow down, along comes the Science of Reading — the latest Next Big Thing™ in a long line of Next Big Things™ that have collectively cost American taxpayers tens of billions of dollars and produced reading scores that went, as the Big Education Ape’s withering analysis puts it, precisely nowhere.

Remember Common Core? $15.8 billion. A decade of standardized testing theater. Reading scores: unmoved.

Now we have the Science of Reading, $1.8 billion deep and climbing, with the same cast of vendors, the same philanthropic networks, and the same conspicuous absence of a money-back guarantee.

To be scrupulously fair: phonics works. Explicit decoding instruction works. The underlying research on structured literacy is legitimate. But here’s the thing about legitimate research — it doesn’t require a $1.8 billion vendor ecosystem, mandatory state legislation in 40+ states, and the systematic deskilling of teachers who are told to stop thinking and start following the script. When real science gets packaged into proprietary curricula, sold to districts under legislative mandate, and deployed without the trained human educators needed to implement it well, you don’t get science. You get very expensive phonics worksheets.

The question nobody in the reform complex wants to answer remains the same one it’s always been: Where is the money-back guarantee?

The Other Hand: How Tech Bros Broke Kids’ Brains While Selling the Cure

Here is the part of the story that deserves its own criminal investigation — or at minimum, a very uncomfortable congressional hearing.

The same Silicon Valley billionaires who spent decades pushing EdTech into classrooms as the revolutionary equalizer — screens for every student! –are the identical billionaires whose social media platforms have:

  • Collapsed long-form reading among adolescents at a rate researchers describe as one of the steepest drops in PISA history
  • Engineered algorithmic doom-scrolling that neurologically rewires 15-year-olds away from the sustained attention that math and reading comprehension require
  • Distracted over a quarter of students internationally during core academic instruction, by their own PISA survey data

They sold the disease and the cure. They pushed the screens that fragmented attention spans, then sold the adaptive software to remediate the fragmented attention spans, then pointed at the test scores and said: See? Public schools are failing.

As Big Education Ape’s piece on reading struggles frames it with characteristic bluntness: if you’re struggling to read this, you have some very rich friends to thank.

The Exit Ramp Is Marked “November 3”

None of this is inevitable. None of this is permanent. The No Kings Coalition — the sprawling, nonpartisan civic movement that flooded the streets in March — is now flooding the polls, with a Vote Early Day of Action on October 17 aimed squarely at the November 3, 2026 midterms.

The math is straightforward, even if the billionaires prefer we can’t do it:

  • Elect candidates who will defend public education funding, not divert it into voucher schemes that enrich private operators at public expense
  • Overturn the Supreme Court rulings — from Citizens United forward — that transformed American democracy into a billionaire auction
  • Restore the principle that public money follows public children into public schools, not into the portfolios of private equity firms with a “reform” logo.

The manufactured crisis has a manufactured solution: more billionaire intervention, more privatization, more EdTech, more testing, more disruption. The actual solution is considerably less glamorous and considerably more effective — fund schools equitably, pay teachers competitively, put phones away, and stop letting people who profit from public school failure write public school policy.

The Bottom Line

The 32% satisfaction number is not evidence that public schools have failed. It is evidence that a 30-year, billion-dollar propaganda campaign succeeded. The same people who manufactured the crisis are now selling the cure — at $1.8 billion a pop, no refunds, no guarantees, no accountability.

Meanwhile, the teachers who showed up every day through a pandemic, through chronic underfunding, through a staffing crisis, through the algorithmic dismantling of their students’ attention spans — those people are still in the classroom at 7 AM, doing the work that no EdTech platform, no voucher program, and no think tank white paper has ever actually replaced.

The casino is rigged. Captain Renault is shocked. And the November ballot is the one lever the house can’t control.

Vote like a public school depends on it. Because one does.

🔗 Related Reading from Big Education Ape:

Sources & Links

🔵 Public Satisfaction & Gallup Data

🔵 PISA Performance & International Benchmarks

🔵 School Funding, Privatization & the Manufactured Crisis

🔵 Science of Reading & EdTech Accountability

🔵 Democracy, Elections & the No Kings Coalition

All links verified active as of September 9, 2026. Primary polling data sourced from Gallup/Walton Family Foundation. PISA data sourced from NCES/OECD 2025 release.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Closing schools, Corporate Reformers, Corruption, Cruelty, Curriculum, Democracy, Education Industry, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Fraud, Funding, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Hoax, Injustice, Lies, Literacy, Privatization, School Choice, Standardized Testing, State Takeover, Teacher Evaluations, Technology, Vouchers, Walton Foundation

Nancy Bailey: How Common Core and the “Science of Reading” Undermine Writing

By dianeravitch
September 11, 2026 //
3

Nancy Bailey is a retired teacher who has a deep understanding of teaching. Hers is the voice of experience.

She writes here about recent innovations that have complicated the teaching of writing.

Bailey writes:

Critics slam teachers and public schools for low reading scores. Much of that criticism is wrong and misses the real problem. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and the Science of Reading (SoR) both seriously hamper children’s writing (their voices) and, in turn, their ability to learn to read.

Writing and reading are siblings. They complement each other, and for most children, if one isn’t working, the other isn’t either. That’s why, as children learn to read, they should be learning to write. Good reading and writing instruction involves interactions and feedback from teachers, students, and parents.

Below is a reminder of what makes a good writing program, but first I want to address the problem.

The National Reading Panel, which led to the SoR, failed to adequately research reading (See Yatvin, 2003). They ignored writing!

In 2023, Stephen Sawchuck of Education Week wrote about this omission: How Does Writing Fit Into the ‘Science of Reading’? His points are valid, but his focus on breaking writing into explicit skills, much like the SoR breaks up reading, misses the mark.

The Science of Reading isn’t settled, since believers finally want to address writing. They sound like writing instruction never existed, calling for a Science of Writing. Adding “science” makes it sound legit and lends itself to for-profit programs.

While reading Sawchuck’s report, it’s easy to picture newly minted, skill-oriented, expensive online writing programs for states to add to their already crowded list of online decoding programs.

In fact, another Ed. Week report (Schwartz, 2026) indicates that New Hampshire is getting $8M for evidence-based writing that will include online programming.

Arizona is getting $11.5M for the Arizona Education Foundation to partner with the Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD). This includes Science of Writing online courses for purchase to teach teachers to teach students to master self-regulation to work on their own.

I would argue that none of that is necessary for children to learn to write (and read better). What’s needed is paper and pencil and adults who care about student writing, will read and value it, and help children improve upon it.

Teachers used to address writing well. They focused on it more and better. What happened?

Remember Common Core and David Coleman’s toxic words about student voice?

David Coleman, a businessman and codeveloper of the CCSS, who now makes millions as the head of the College Board, denounced student voice.

Around 2015, Coleman, discussing student narrative writing, stating to a group of teachers:

You grow up in this world, and you realize people don’t really give a shit about what you feel and what you think. 

Along with this, SoR enthusiasts largely ignored the critical connections between writing and learning to read. The heavy focus on decoding and direct instruction still permeate early learning classrooms, and writing has been an afterthought.

Coleman was wrong, of course. The most critical part of writing is student voice. The SoR folks are wrong too. Skills are secondary to writing well. With both writing and reading, children must first understand what’s in it for them.

Please open the link and read Bailey’s explanation of the best approaches to teaching students to write and to find their own voice.

Categories Common Core, Curriculum, Education Industry, Education Reform, Literacy

John Thompson: What Happened When Oklahoma Adopted the “Mississippi Miracle”

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2026 //
2

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, explains what happened when state officials in Oklahoma decided to adopt the “Mississippi Miracke.”

He writes:

In so many places, there is a push to implement the reward-and-punish “Mississippi Miracle.” And, unfortunately too many journalists believe their simplistic claims about increasing literacy. Oklahoma is just one example of a state implementing the so-called “Miracle,” so, our story should be a warning to others. 

The Oklahoma State Chamber of Commerce featured Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves in an event this June. Given the misinformation that the Chamber has been spreading about the so-called “Mississippi Miracle,” I assumed that Gov. Reeves would spin the same message. But, his false and misleading statements were far worse.

The leaders of the state Chamber have long repeated the falsehood that NAEP Proficiency is “grade level” when, in fact, grade level is closer to the much lower “Basic” category. This claim was invented in the 1980s in order to attack our public schools as irreparably broken. 

Getting back to Gov. Reeves, Mississippi spins its State “Proficiency” rates as if they were connected with the reliable NAEP rates.  But, from 2019 to 2024, the Mississippi State 8th grade Reading Proficiency rates increased by 6 points, while its NAEP Proficiency scores dropped by 2 points, increasing its State/NAEP Proficiency Gap to 19 points. The 4th grade gap reached 25 points.

So, I looked at Reeves’ record as governor and found an even more disturbing history. And I wondered whether the Chamber looked into his past before they hosted him.

But, I must start with Gov. Reeves plan for expanding test prep and retention policies to 8th graders.

Reeves and the Oklahoma Chamber seem unaware that a major reason why test-driven accountability did so much damage was that No Child Left Behind (NCLB) set impossible targets that pressured schools to treat kids like numbers in order to try to minimize the inevitable harm the law would inflict. 

However, he acknowledged that Mississippi hasn’t increased 8th grade scores. Over the last 28 years, Mississippi’s 8th grade NAEP reading scores improved by one point, indicating that they did not improve reading for comprehension, or help students “learn to read, so that they can read to learn.”

In 2023, their average 8th grade NAEP reading score was 253. But, in 1998, the average score was 255. 

Worse, NAEP – which (at least previously) couldn’t be taught to – has a long history of being the most reliable metric. But, Mississippi’s new 2025-26 standards:

Are based on multiple measures including statewide assessment results in English language arts, math and science, English learner progress, advanced course and career and technical education performance, and graduation rates.

Since Mississippi’s new tests are designed to be taught to, there is little reason to believe they reflect growth in learning.  

Reeves then bragged about recently increasing Mississippi’s new targets. Under state law accountability, standards must increase “when 75 percent of students are proficient or when 65 percent of schools or districts earn a grade of B or higher.”  But, their State and NAEP proficient scores were dramatically different. In 2024, only 23% of Mississippi 8th graders scored Proficient or above in NAEP reading.

I also wish the Oklahoma Chamber would fact check Reeves’ unsubstantiated claim that raising the bar leads to increased student learning. They could start with former Oklahoma Secretary of Education Daniel Hamlin’s research which found that states which set high performance test standards “have not found a way to translate these new benchmarks into higher levels of student test performance.” 

Next, I would like to ask the Oklahoma State Chamber’s leaders if they looked into Reeves’ history. As the Mississippi Free Press explained, Reeves’ ties to the Sons of Confederate Veterans were longstanding. In 2013, He:

Spoke to the SCV’s national gathering in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in front of a massive Confederate battle flag and in a room decorated with smaller Confederate flags and cotton plants. After then-Lt. Gov. Reeves congratulated the organization for “keeping history for our youth,” speakers defended the Confederate “cause” and compared “Yankees” to German “Nazis” in World War II.

Moreover, Reeves’ subsequent proclamation did not mention the role of slavery and white supremacy.

And this April, Reeves, once again, signed the proclamation for the “Confederate Heritage Month.”

I have asked but received no answer as to what the Oklahoma State Chamber of Commerce knew about Reeves when it invited him to Oklahoma City.

In terms of improving schools, I would urge them to pay more attention to peer reviewed education research. And, it seems to me, that state leaders also should pay more attention to the Oklahoma City Chamber’s approach to school improvements, as opposed to the State Chamber.

It’s “Civic Lab is working to advance civic collaboration. Their practice is to look at what makes community collaboration flow best, document what they find and share those practices at a broad level.” Rhonda Baker, Director of Education for the Chamber, explained that they seek to report to the state legislature about better ways to connect the community and improve educational outcomes. And, “they’re talking to the nonprofit community to seek recommendations on policy and alignment changes to ultimately make programs mesh better.”

That, not praise for Jim Crow, sounds more like the Oklahoma Standard to me.

Categories Accountability, Literacy, Mississippi, Oklahoma

Paul Thomas: The Proficiency Mirage: Florida Version

By dianeravitch
July 16, 2026 //
6

Paul Thomas taught in public high schools for many years, before becoming a professor at Furman College in South Carolina. He is a persistent critic of the “Mississippi Miracle.” He uses data to check on state claims. In this post, he fact-checks Florida.

He wrote:

Reading proficiency is a powerful data point despite it being a moving target.

When anyone refers to “reading proficiency,” that usually means a percentage of students who have met or exceeded an established score on a standardized test of reading.

However, “proficiency” is not a standard term. States tend to use “proficient” as grade level expectations while NAEP uses “proficient” as an aspirational achievement level (and “basic” more closely correlates with state grade-level proficiency).

To further complicate “reading proficiency,” not only does the measurement vary from state to state, but also the expectations for what percentage of students should be proficient at any grade is more a debate than an established fact.

How many students should be proficient in reading? Sometimes it is 90%; sometimes it is 95%—and then there are state goals, for example, in Florida, as reported by Aldeman:

A 10-part video series produced by the Children’s Literacy Project tells what happened. It makes a compelling case that these results are attributable to a distinctive public-private partnership between the district and a nonprofit called The Learning Alliance. The story starts with two moms, Liz Woody-Remington and Barbara Hammond, whose children were struggling to read. In 2010, they asked themselves: What would it take to get 90% of the district’s children reading on grade level by the end of third grade?

I find these statistics troubling, similar to concerns raised by Hansford:

Over the years, I have on numerous occasions seen the claim that 95% of students can learn how to read proficiently, so long as they are provided adequate tier 1/2 instruction. Truthfully, it has always stuck out to me as a strange figure, for three reasons. First, most academic research does not typically use percentages in this sort of manner. Second, I often see this figure unaccompanied by a citation. And third, it seems low; I find it hard to believe that 5% of students just cannot learn how to read. …For this figure to have scientific validity, it would need experimental research demonstrating it to be true. Ideally, I would want to see multiple large scale studies, due to the universality of the claim. Intrigued by the discussion, I put out a public call on twitter asking if anyone had a citation for the figure.

Hansford walks us through the research (thin at best) and reaches an interesting conclusion:

This all said, it does seem there is some level of support for 96% being a benchmark goal, for reading proficiency rates. While some might argue, this is too high, I worry it’s too low, as it is clearly possible to achieve better than 96%. For example, in the Torgesen 2003 paper, 98.4% of students were able to read at grade level. When I asked for research on this topic, I was given an anecdote about a school using EBLI that went from 87% proficiency rates to 100%, within a matter of years. Well this is just an anecdote. I do think 100% proficiency is—in many cases—possible and should always be the goal.

I think the points here that must not be missed are the role of “anecdote” in claims about reading proficiency as well as claims about surprising gains and outlier “miracle” evidence, such as, again, Aldeman highlights:

Even more impressively, low-income third graders at Indian River schools scored better than the statewide average for all students. And, perhaps not surprisingly, when we went looking for high-poverty schools that were nevertheless getting good outcomes in reading, we identified three of the district’s schools — Rosewood Magnet, Fellsmere Elementary and Pelican Island Elementary — for our “Bright Spots” list. Fellsmere in particular stood out: Based on its 99% poverty rate, our calculations predicted that it would have a third grade reading rate of just 29%. But its actual rate was much higher, at 53%.

Indian River County was never exactly a failing district, but a decade ago it was performing a bit worse than the state as a whole. It has since begun to pull away, especially in third grade. Coming out of the pandemic, 60% of district third graders scored proficient in reading in 2023. That figure rose to 63% in 2024 and then jumped again, to 69%, in 2025.

This reporting fits into a “beating the odds”approach that frames outlier evidence as the normfor an entire population.

The evidence [1] is overwhelming in education that outlier “miracle” evidence is usually misleading or false, and even more problematic, outlier success, when valid, is rarely scalable.

In short, “beating the odds” stories make for compelling journalism and politics but not for effective or reasonable education reform.

These stories from Florida also raise some red flags.

The organization promoting this reform, Children’s Literacy Project, is faith-based.

Like other Republican states such as Oklahoma and Texas, Florida is seeking ways to erode the separation of church and state, specifically in public schools.

Schools partnering with organizations to promote and support reform is not necessarily a problem, but the outside help does create tensions about ideology as well as erodes the likelihood reforms are scalable.

Another few aspects of Florida are not highlighted in the reporting but deserve attention.

Returning to measurements of reading proficiency, Florida is in the bottom quartile of states in terms of the standard for “proficient”:

Florida, like Mississippi, is also a state where relative success in grade 4 reading quickly evaporates by grade 8:

Again like Mississippi, Florida is in the top of states for grade 4 reading on NAEP, but drops to the bottom quartile in grade 8:

https://radicalscholarship.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/image-6.png

Finally, the media and political story most often focuses on reforms in reading programs, teacher training, school leadership, and school expectations; however, outlier and surprising gains in grade 4 reading are likely driven by grade retention (a harmful punishment) and not the celebrated reforms.

Notably, high-grade retention states like Florida and Mississippi are also the states with significant decreases from grade 4 to grade 8.

Florida has a long history of aligning itself with “miracle” education reform that proves to be a mirage.

Beware the current numbers game about reading proficiency—a measurement that changes with the political wind.

[1] Thomas, P.L. (2016). Miracle schools or political scam? In W.J. Mathis & T.M. Trujillo, Learning from the Federal Market-Based Reforms: Lessons for ESSA. Charlotte, NC: IAP.

Categories Accountability, Data, Florida, Gender, Literacy, NAEP

Popular Lies About Test Scores Corrupt Debates About the Progress of Our Students and Their Schools

By dianeravitch
June 22, 2026 //
4

Atlanta Journal-Constitution

https://share.google/NXK2OD6xIFegOuWoe

By David Reinking and Peter Smagorinsky

Every day we read about people asking, “At what grade level does my child read?” “Is it true that 54% of adults in the U.S. read below a sixth-grade level?” “Have reading scores dropped an entire grade level since the pandemic?”

The assumption behind these questions is test scores are precise indicators of reading ability, like scientific laboratory measurements. But like blood pressure levels — in which there is agreement about what’s being measured — they are variable and open to interpretation. 

Despite the subjectivity and lack of agreement in defining reading, grade level and ability, grade-level reading ability is often mistakenly viewed as determined by a precise, stable test score, one that does not take into account factors such as students’ health and hunger in their testing performance. Not everyone agrees on what is salient at a particular grade level, leading to subjectivity in weighting phonics knowledge, vocabulary, comprehension, the ability to synthesize a theme and recognize an author’s point of view in a given passage, or some combination of such things. 

Standardized tests are typically the basis for establishing grade level. But test scores themselves don’t indicate grade level, which is a creation of an interpreter. That’s why different tests don’t always produce the same grade level. A student who tests at fourth grade in one state may test at the third or fifth grade when moving to another state using a different test. In short, different tests or standards can produce different grade levels.

David Reinking is a retired professor at Clemson and the University of Georgia. He is an inductee in the Reading Hall of Fame, and a former co-editor of Reading Research Quarterly and Journal of Literacy Research. (Courtesy)

David Reinking is a retired professor at Clemson and the University of Georgia. He is an inductee in the Reading Hall of Fame, and a former co-editor of Reading Research Quarterly and Journal of Literacy Research. (Courtesy)

The National Assessment of Educational Progress calls itself “the nation’s report card” even to the point of using the phrase on its website and then having it repeated as if it is an established fact. It is often invoked in commentaries on grade levels. But it wasn’t designed for that purpose. NAEP itself states that “NAEP Proficient achievement level does not represent grade level proficiency as determined by other assessment standards (e.g., state or district assessments). NAEP achievement levels are to be used on a trial basis and should be interpreted and used with caution.”

But that hasn’t stopped many policy makers and journalists from trying to connect a NAEP test score to a grade level. Giving in to political pressure and rejecting recommendations from authorities in developing tests, in 1990 NAEP officials did introduce four tiers of reading achievement: Below Basic, Basic, Proficient and Advanced. These levels were established solely using subjective judgment about what’s expected of children tested at a specific grade level.

Peter Smagorinsky is a retired professor at UGA, an inductee in the Reading Hall of Fame, and a former co-editor of Research in the Teaching of English. (Courtesy)

Peter Smagorinsky is a retired professor at UGA, an inductee in the Reading Hall of Fame, and a former co-editor of Research in the Teaching of English. (Courtesy)

Then, they set equally subjective cut scores to establish boundaries between these four levels. States often use a parallel model for their own tests. In Virginia, student performance is measured on a 0–600 scale, with proficiency set at 400-499 and advanced at 500 or above. It’s hard to imagine that a meaningful difference exists between a student scoring 499 (proficient) and 500 (advanced).

Much confusion is also centered in interpreting whether “basic” is acceptably normal or if it is reasonable to expect all students to be “proficient.” Many commentators, some of whom have a vested interest in arguing that there is a reading crisis, argue the latter. Some have promoted the false idea that “proficient” is grade-level reading, which it absolutely is not. Then, they wrongly argue that two-thirds of American students are reading below grade level by counting “basic” scores as below grade level.

Another way to illustrate the problem is to simply rename NAEP’s subjective categories as “below average,” “average,” “above average” and “far above average.” Then, approximately 60% of students are reading at or above an average score, and only 40% (instead of the usually expected 50%) of students are below average. Presto, much of the reading crisis disappears. As further evidence against a crisis, there has been relatively little variation in NAEP reading scores since 1992, even if an upward trend began retreating around 2015 with many plausible but unconfirmed explanations.

A number of educators have debunked the conclusions of NAEP misinterpreters. Yet, the dogged belief persists that everything can be reduced to subjective interpretations of test scores divided into hierarchical categories that can be falsely, if conveniently, converted to grade levels. 

We are concerned whenever we encounter all-too-common misinformation about grade-level reading ability. When misinformation becomes disinformation offered by those who use grade-level reading ability to advance political, polemical or ideological agendas, we become concerned about how faith in test scores lends them to manipulation and deception to help create the crisis that critics have historically claimed is engulfing schools, only to be saved by their favorite solutions. 

David Reinking is a retired professor at Clemson and the University of Georgia, an inductee in the Reading Hall of Fame, and a former co-editor of Reading Research Quarterly and Journal of Literacy Research. Peter Smagorinsky is a retired professor at UGA, an inductee in the Reading Hall of Fame, and a former co-editor of Research in the Teaching of English.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Ethics, Fraud, Lies, Literacy, NAEP, Standardized Testing

John Merrow: AI Didn’t Kill Writing. The Testing Regime is the Culprit!

By dianeravitch
May 12, 2026 //
6

John Merrow was the education correspondent for the PBS Newshour for many years. Some people never forgave him for his many episodes lionizing Michelle Rhee. I forgave him when he filmed a final episode thoroughly exposing her cruel methods and her indifference to allegations of cheating.

John’s latest post seeks to correct the record, with reference to Dana Goldstein’s article in The New York Times blaming AI (artificial intelligence) for killing the teaching of writing.

No, says John, AI didn’t do it. Our hyper-focus on standardized testing and standardized writing and standardized thinking did it.

He writes:

This week the New York Times turned over a significant portion of its front page to a long piece headlined “How A.I. Killed Student Writing (And Revived It).”

In the piece, the usually reliable Dana Goldstein puts forth sweeping generalizations based on what about 400 teachers volunteered. This, in a nation with nearly 4 million public school teachers and another 1.5 million college faculty! Granted, most of these 5.5 million teachers probably aren’t teaching writing, but relying on self-selected sources seems dubious, especially for the front page. What we learn is that a few creative and dedicated teachers, frustrated by their students’ reliance on A.I., are having the kids write in class, on paper, with pens or pencils. That’s not really news, although Goldstein, a very good writer, brings their stories to life…and may make you wish you could be in their classes.

More than a year earlier Ben Cohen reported about the dramatic rise in the sale of ‘blue books’ on college campuses: Sales of blue books this school year were up more than 30% at Texas A&M University and nearly 50% at the University of Florida. The improbable growth was even more impressive at the University of California, Berkeley. Over the past two academic years, blue-book sales at the Cal Student Store were up 80%.

Both of these news reports hang on the same premise: Student writing is dead, and A.I. is the killer. I think that’s flat out false. Our obsession with test scores and our prioritizing quantity over quality are the culprits. Most education systems stopped trying to teach writing back when Artificial Intelligence was the stuff of science fiction, unfortunately. Playing up to politicians, the education bureaucrats (who generally don’t trust teachers) decided to ‘raise standards,’ which to them meant having students write more papers and read more books and plays. Any suggestion that writing one outstanding paper would be better than six or a dozen so-so papers fell on deaf ears.

And because writing skills can’t be tested by a machine, why bother? Since we don’t trust teachers, it would be foolish to rely on their evaluation of their students’ writing skills.

Happily, I know in my bones that lots of teachers have not given up. A quick Google search turns up a treasure trove of ideas for improving student writing, starting in the elementary years. Writing thank you notes, keeping a journal, and so on. Here’s one I think you will enjoy (and might want to share with teachers in your world).

It’s not semantics to assert that the goal is to develop writers, not “teach writing.” That’s an important distinction.

So what can teachers who want to develop writers in their classes do in 2026? First of all, take a deep breath because we’ve been through this before–back when the internet emerged. Soon some students discovered that they could download papers and submit them as their own. Next came profit-making companies offering papers written to order. While small-minded bureaucrats thought they could win that struggle by spending millions on technology that supposedly could scan papers and detect plagiarism, thoughtful teachers won that struggle by 1) reducing the number of papers assigned, and 2 )working with individual students as they developed their ideas and wrote drafts. It’s harder to cheat when the teacher is overseeing the process and when kids are writing about something they genuinely care about.

What’s called for now is emulating what my high school English teacher, William Sullivan, did nearly 70 years ago. Two or three times every week he would tell us to clear our desks of everything except for a single sheet of paper and a pencil. What followed was what he called a “2-8-2,” meaning that we had two minutes to think–no writing allowed–followed by eight minutes to write, and then two more minutes to read what we had written and correct any errors. He would put our writing assignment on the blackboard. Sometimes we would have to include a certain sentence, such as “I wish I had missed that train.” Or “I still wish I hadn’t missed that flight.”

Even today I still remember one particular assignment: “Turn out the light; I don’t want to go home in the dark,” which Mr. Sullivan told us were the dying words of William Sydney Porter and challenged us to explain the contradiction. After we turned in our papers, Mr. Sullivan told us that we knew William Sydney Porter as the writer O. Henry.

(Fun fact: Some forty or fifty years later I discovered that Porter actually did not contradict himself. His dying words were “Turn up the lights. I don’t want to go home in the dark.” Apparently Mr. Sullivan changed his words to create a challenging paradox for us to try to explain.)

Although I went to a private school with small classes and privileged students, Mr. Sullivan’s approach can work at all levels. I know this to be true because I taught working-class kids in a public high school, first generation African American college students in an HBCU, and young men serving sentences in a federal prison.

I used Mr. Sullivan’s “2-8-2” all the time. I got to know my students’ writing, and I’m convinced that their writing skills improved. They became writers, confident in their voices.

Frequent in-class writing worked then, and it should work in the age of Artificial Intelligence and with all the other ‘advances’ in our future.

However, policymakers and administrators have to behave sensibly and understand that ‘less is more.’ That means smaller classes, fewer students per teacher, and heightened trust in teachers. Those shouldn’t be a bridge too far, if we really want our young people to be thoughtful and capable citizens.

You can stop here if you wish. What follows is the story of my own dabbling in A.I., printed in my blog in April 2023, more than three years ago.

If you’re at all like me, you’re curious about Artificial Intelligence and new applications like ChatGPT and Bard. The brilliant Thomas Friedman of the New York Times says the world will never be the same again, but my interest is narrower: If students can simply ask Bard or ChatGPT to write their papers for them, how can teachers prevent this?

So, naturally, I turned to Bard, which told me (within seconds) that, while it can help students generate ideas, do research, improve their writing, and learn about different writing genres, it’s not supposed to be a substitute for original research and writing. Then it warned me to “Monitor students’ use of Bard to make sure that they are not plagiarizing or engaging in other forms of academic misconduct.”

Yeah, right. If I’m teaching English in a public high school, I probably have between 100 and 125 students! There aren’t enough hours in the day….

Second question: Can Bard help identify cheaters and plagiarists? Within seconds, I received an answer:

“There are a few things you can look for to tell the difference between original writing and prose provided by Bard.

  • Original writing is typically more creative and original than prose provided by Bard. Bard is trained on a massive dataset of text, so it can be very good at generating text that is grammatically correct and factually accurate. However, it is not always able to generate text that is creative or original.
  • Original writing is typically more personal and engaging than prose provided by Bard. Bard is a machine learning model, so it does not have the same level of understanding of human emotions and experiences as a human writer. As a result, its writing can be dry and impersonal.
  • Original writing is typically more nuanced and complex than prose provided by Bard. Bard is a large language model, but it is still under development. As a result, it can sometimes struggle to understand the nuances of human language. This can lead to writing that is simplistic or even nonsensical.

……

  • Ask yourself if the writing sounds like it was written by a human. Bard-generated text can sometimes sound robotic or unnatural. Original writing should sound like it was written by a human.

To put this the test, I gave Bard the following task:

I am one of six children, the second oldest and the first-born son. We grew up on a small farm with chickens, a few cows, a few pigs, and one goat. I’m now 81. Please write a short memoir of no more than 200 words about my childhood.

Within seconds, Bard spit out this:

“I was born in 1942, the second oldest of six children. We grew up on a small farm in the Midwest. My father worked hard to provide for our family, and my mother took care of the house and the children. We didn’t have much money, but we were happy.

I loved growing up on the farm. I spent my days playing with my siblings, helping my father with the chores, and exploring the woods behind our house. We had chickens, a few cows, a few pigs, and one goat. I loved taking care of the animals, and I learned a lot about hard work and responsibility.

I also learned a lot about nature on the farm. I spent hours watching the birds and the animals, and I learned to identify all the different plants. I loved being surrounded by nature, and it helped me to appreciate the beauty of the world.

I had a wonderful childhood on the farm. It was a time of innocence and discovery, and I will always cherish those memories.

Now that I am 81 years old, I still look back on my childhood with fondness. I am grateful for the opportunities I had, and I am proud of the person I have become. I know that my experiences on the farm helped to shape me into the man I am today.

Boring, and also wrong, and so I responded:

This is inaccurate. I was born in 1941, and our farm was in Connecticut. Worse, however, it does not capture either the small pleasures of collecting the eggs every morning or learning to milk cows, and it also does not capture the deep pain of watching a pig or steer that I raised being slaughtered. Please rewrite.

In just a few seconds, Bard responded by adding a few paragraphs, highlighted below to make it easier for you to read: “Sure, here is a more accurate and detailed memoir:

I was born in 1941, the second oldest of six children. We grew up on a small farm in Connecticut. My father worked hard to provide for our family, and my mother took care of the house and the children. We didn’t have much money, but we were happy.

I loved growing up on the farm. I spent my days playing with my siblings, helping my father with the chores, and exploring the woods behind our house. We had chickens, a few cows, a few pigs, and one goat. I loved taking care of the animals, and I learned a lot about hard work and responsibility.

I also learned a lot about nature on the farm. I spent hours watching the birds and the animals, and I learned to identify all the different plants. I loved being surrounded by nature, and it helped me to appreciate the beauty of the world.

One of my favorite things to do was collect the eggs every morning. I would wake up early and go to the chicken coop, where I would find a dozen or so eggs waiting for me. I would carefully collect the eggs and put them in a basket, then bring them back to the house. My mother would use the eggs to make breakfast, and I would always get to eat one of the freshest eggs in the world.

Another thing I loved to do was milk the cows. I would go to the barn in the evening and bring the cows into the milking parlor. I would sit on a stool and milk each cow in turn, collecting the milk in a bucket. The milk would then be used to make butter, cheese, and ice cream.

Of course, there were also some challenges growing up on a farm. One of the hardest things was watching the animals being slaughtered. I knew that it was necessary to eat meat, but I still felt bad for the animals. I would often cry when I saw them being killed.

Overall, though, I had a wonderful childhood on the farm. It was a time of innocence and discovery, and I will always cherish those memories. I am grateful for the opportunities I had, and I am proud of the person I have become. I know that my experiences on the farm helped to shape me into the man I am today.

OK, but even with this information, the writing remains pedestrian and without emotion. Human writers would know not to begin with their birthday, for one thing. They might lead with a sentence designed to keep the reader’s interest. Something like, “70 years later, at age 81, I can still hear the terrified squealing of the hog as it was strung up by its hind feet to be slaughtered….”

John Merrow

former Education Correspondent, PBS NewsHour

My blog: themerrowreport.com

“I don’t want to BE old when I am old.”  Jack LaLanne

Categories Literacy, Teachers and Teaching, Technology

Nancy Bailey: Robert Sweet and the Making of the “Science of Reading”

By dianeravitch
May 11, 2026 //
11

Retired teacher Nancy Bailey wrote on her blog about significant figures in the evolution of the history of reading. In this post, she focuses on the role of Robert Sweet, an important figure in the Department of Edication during the Reagan-Bush era.

Bailey writes:

Today’s Science of Reading (SOR) was born of a right-wing conservative phonics focus. A Nation at Risk helped advance that messaging, and one of the messengers was Robert Sweet, Jr.

As the country mandates the Science of Reading (SOR) and invests heavily in unproven programs, marketing disputes flourish over which best align with so-called evidence. These programs control teachers’ instruction through one-size-fits-all directives, delivered with manuals or online. It’s easy to see where this is going. States could spend millions more on reading programs that don’t appear to improve learning as teachers are driven out with tech.

During the Reagan administration, A Nation at Risk raised unfounded negativity towards public schools and teachers (See Biddle and Berliner, The Manufactured Crisis). Reading, already controversial, became a vehicle for attacking teachers, their teacher colleges, and public schools, furthering a school privatization agenda that continues to this day. Schools weren’t doing badly, but those who wanted to privatize them worked to make them fail.

The obituary of Robert Sweet, Jr. is glowing. I don’t doubt that, like many SOR enthusiasts, he believed he was doing the right thing. He became instrumental in the phonics movement, working later with the Science of Reading and Reading First promoter Reid Lyon to create No Child Left Behind and Reading First. Yet he’s rarely mentioned today.

Sweet wasn’t a qualified reading teacher. He taught physics, coached, and sold textbooks. He arrived in DC as a member of the US House of Representatives staff during the Reagan administration. He supported Reagan initiatives such as tuition tax credits, low-income voucher programs, student self-help reforms, education savings accounts, and other conservative school initiatives.

He met Dr. Onalee McGraw, a PhD political scientist and a Heritage Foundation representative. McGraw, unrelated to the publishing company, was a Reagan appointee to the National Council on Educational Research (See Robert Sweet interview 4.17 below).

The Heritage Foundation is behind today’s Project 2025. Lindsey Burke, who wrote the education part, works with Education Secretary Linda McMahon. Neither are educators.

McGraw wrote “Family Choice in Education: The New Imperative,” arguing that public schools were in decline, academics had been replaced by social engineering, and humanistic curricula and subjective values had taken over. She believed education was inherently religious, not value-free. She promoted vouchers, minimum competency requirements, and moral education classes.

Sweet initially didn’t see reading as a problem. He and his children learned to read. But McGraw introduced him to Michael Brunner, who convinced Sweet otherwise.

Brunner wasn’t a reading teacher either. He had a degree in library science becoming the director of Title I in Idaho. He connected with the Reading Reform Foundation, created after Rudolph Flesch’s Why Johnny Can’t Read. Brunner wrote Vowelectomy. He believed in the work of well-known reading expert Jeanne Chall, but didn’t think vowel and mixed digraph instruction took place early enough, waiting until the end of first grade.

Both Sweet and Brunner repeatedly claim that students aren’t learning to read and teachers and especially their colleges are failing to teach phonics.

But Berliner and Biddle in The Manufactured Crisis pointed to media claims as being distorted and hostile, describing reporters failing to address cited study details, indicating that research really showed that poverty was the leading cause of reading difficulties (see p. 10-11).

Sweet became the director of the National Institute of Education and later the US Department of Education, bringing Brunner to DC to work on reading. They commissioned a report, Becoming a Nation of Readers. It’s informative, covering phonics importance, but also comprehension, meaning, and environmental influences. Sweet complained it was unfocused (8.45 video below).

He commissioned another report by Marilyn Jaeger Adams Beginning to Read: Thinking and learning about Print. The book, still popular today, stresses the importance of phonics and whole language. I could not find what Sweet thought about Jaeger’s book.

Both Bruner and Sweet favored Spaulding, a reading program spun from Orton-Gillingham (OG). Sweet criticizes Reading Recovery, praising Spaulding at the end of this interview. OG remains popular in the Science of Reading, despite common knowledge that it has lacked high-quality, peer-reviewed studies of its efficacy for 50 years!

Brunner and Sweet traveled the country observing teachers, without being reading experts. They blamed colleges for failing teachers on how to teach phonics. While teacher colleges can always improve, generalizing the same criticism towards all is dangerous. I knew of excellent teacher college programs at that time. Brunner created his own reading program, Phonics Made Plain.

He authored numerous articles on reading, including a Republican policy paper “Illiteracy: An Incurable Disease or Educational Malpractice?” Sweet’s paper was supported by the U.S. Department of Education and the Center for the Study of Reading at the University of Illinois. It called for enlarging the restoration of the instructional practice of intensive, systematic phonics in every primary school in America.

Next, under President George H.W. Bush, Sweet became administrator for the Juvenile Justice Department. Brunner writes Retarding America: The Imprisonment of Potential, highlighting that juvenile crime is due to current reading methods (i.e. little phonics), while ignoring other variables. A good thing is that they establish reading programs in some detention facilities.

Sweet learns of the National Institute of Health and Human Development and met Reid Lyon. He seemed then to form the idea that reading must be based on scientific principal and one assumes he’s talking about phonics (11.58 video below).

In 1993, Sweet became co-founder and president of the now defunct National Right to Read Foundation which focuses again on phonics (12:41 video below). He still implied that teachers didn’t know about phonics.

Brunner criticizes the All Handicapped Children’s Act (PL 94-142) throughout the book listed above implying children simply lack phonics instruction.

But, public schools were working to accommodate children with reading difficulties in schools using phonics in resource classes especially after the 1975 passage of PL94-142. And phonics may have been taught later.

Sweet eventually helps pass the Reading Excellence Act in 1998 under President Clinton, although he doesn’t care for Clinton’s America Reads program where college students read to students (14.18 video below).

Under President G.W. Bush he collaborates with Reid Lyon, an advisor to the president, crafts language for the No Child Left Behind Act. Sweet becomes the primary author of the Reading First initiative which saw “scientifically based research” noted more than 100 times. Reading First turned out controversial.

Lyon immensely disliked educational schools, stating in 2002, a year after 9/11, You know, if there was any piece of legislation that I could pass, it could be to blow up colleges of education. He supports today’s Science of Reading initiative.

Around this time Reid, according to the NYTs, advised his former boss, Dr. Duane Alexander, about candidates for the National Reading Panel (Schemo, 2007). No early childhood teachers who teach reading were included on the panel. It’s controversial findings are still promoted by SOR enthusiasts, including some whom were on the panel. [I mention the lack of early childhood teachers but one teacher/principal was selected for the panel. Joanne Yatvin wrote many reports about her concerns about the panel itself. Minority View]

Robert Sweet and those described here were given much clout over teachers and how they teach. Yet after all these years, focusing heavily on phonics, and adding billions in technology often for SOR online programs, teachers, and their teacher colleges are still blamed as failing.

References

Berliner, D. C., & Biddle, B. J. (1995). The manufactured crisis : myths, fraud, and the attack on America’s public schools. Addison-Wesley.

Gursky, D. (1981, August 1). After The Reign Of Dick And Jane. Education Week, Retrieved from https://www.edweek.org/education/after-the-reign-of-dick-and-jane/1991/08

Schemo, D. J. (2007, March 9). In War Over Teaching Reading, a U.S.-Local Clash. The New York Times, Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/09/education/09reading.html

This post is adapted from my panel presentation at the 2025 Network for Public Education meeting.

Categories Curriculum, Education Industry, Literacy, NCLB (No Child Left Behind)

Denny Taylor: The Science of Reading is Behaviorism in a Digital Wrapper, Funded by For-Profit Corporations

By dianeravitch
May 8, 2026 //
35

Denny Taylor, a distinguished scholar in the teaching of literacy, has done impressive research to identify the origins of the “science of reading.” The roots of this latest fad are deeply entwined in the work of behaviorist Edward Thorndike. She explains how one view of literacy got embedded in the report of the National Reading Panel. Other views, other research was excluded.

It’s a fascinating article.

She writes:

This Substack post documents how George Bush and the Texas Business Council took control of how children are taught to read through their alignment with Reid Lyon and reading researchers on the Thorndike-Skinner-Engelmann-Carnine, stimulus-response, operant conditioning continuum, and delivered American children to technology companies, owned by hedge funds and private equity firms that capitalize on the profits of adaptive AI technology that constantly evaluates a child’s performance to adjust their instruction in real-time.

The post provides the historic foundations of how the integration of real-time adaptive AI into K-3 reading programs marks a shift from education as a social exchange to a closed-loop feedback system between child and machine. In future Substack posts I will focus on how this dynamic reshapes the learning process into a form of “distributed cognition,” where the boundaries between human and artificial thought – the child and the machine begin to blur.

**

Taylor then goes on to document the relationship between Reid Lyon and George W. Bush in the late 1990s. From 1992 to 2005, Lyon served as  the Chief of the Child Development and Behavior Branch within the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at the National Institutes of Health. He met up with Texas Governor George W. Bush and persuaded him that he had the key to reading success. Bush became a true believer in Lyon’s ideas and embedded them in No Child Left Behind after he was elected President in 2000.

In 1997, Lyon created the National Reading Panel, whose research leaned strongly towards one side of the “reading wars.”

Taylor narrates a historical account that should interest anyone interested in the origins of the “science of reading.”

She concludes:

The damage to the American public school system is extreme and for children the Science of Reading laws are catastrophic. The state laws that have been passed mandate beginning reading instruction in public schools that is developmentally inappropriate, and children’s health and wellbeing, as well as their academic development are at risk. The digitization of reading instruction exponentially compounds the risks.

For children in crisis in America the situation is dire, and we must respond. There is substantial evidence that between 60%and 70% of children in U.S. public schools have had Adverse Childhood Experiences and many of these children are coping with ongoing toxic stress which is compounded by 45 state lawswhich mandate state approved “Science of Reading” programs and excessive standardized assessments developed by technology companies owned by hedge funds and private equity firms….

The six year forensic analysis has provided extensive evidence that the experimental research studies that form the four cornerstones of the “Science of Reading” have no scientific validity. Of particular concern are the dog-whistles and lies that have been “sold” to policy makers and the public about the National Reading Panel Report, which has no scientific legitimacy. A compelling case can be made for the removal of the NRP Report from all documents that policy makers have used to require by law the fundamentally flawed “evidence-based reading instruction” in U.S. public schools. Such an action would remove the ban on cueing and the requirement of direct instruction in the “five pillars,” and thus, nullify the 45 state laws that mandate the Science of Reading. It would also mean that universities would be able to base reading courses on the peer-reviewed articles and books of reading researchers whose scholarship has been banned, and curriculum decision-making would be returned to teachers, parents, and local school districts.

Categories Curriculum, Education Industry, Ethics, Literacy

Tom Ultican: Billionaire Fads Are Undermining Schools

By dianeravitch
April 13, 2026 //
3

Tom Ultican, retired teacher of advanced mathematics and physics in California, says that all the bright and shiny fads have actually harmed students and teachers. I have not posted the entirety of his commentary. To finish reading it, open this link.

He writes:

Trump’s billionaire education leader, Linda McMahon, claimed on Fox News, “We’re doing terribly, I mean, our education system’s failed our kids.” Like a typical oligarch, she bolstered her point by mischaracterizing NAEP assessment levels stating, “only about 30% of high school and eighth graders can read proficiently or do math proficiently.” Maybe that sounds bad, but the reality is those numbers indicate that 30% of students are achieving at a high B or low A grade-level which sounds pretty good to me.

McMahon was promoting her nonpartisan “History Rocks!” tour. The sponsors of the tour are certainly not nonpartisan. They include America 250 Civics Education Coalition, led by pro-Trump America First Policy Institute which is composed of right-wing organizations such as Turning Point USA, Moms for Liberty and the Heritage Foundation.

However, even though standardized testing is a terrible method for evaluating schools and students, it is notable that the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) results have been falling since 2013.

The NAEP data plotted above is for all tested US students in 8th grade and 4th grade reading. Around 2013, results started dropping. Data for math also shows this same trend. Because education has so many variables, establishing a solid cause and effect relationship for this decline is impossible.

Based on my personal experience in the classroom and my years of observing education outcomes, I have developed a theory that at least partially explains the decline.

Education Technology

In the 1990s, I worked in Silicon Valley researching friction problems associated with computer equipment. Part of my assignment was to develop software that ran testing devices, gathered massive data sets and loaded them into a Microsoft data base which created reports that I shared with customers. Once the testing was setup and started, everything from then on was automated. I loved pushing technology and making it do things no one else had.

In 1999, I got tired of Silicon Valley. That is when I returned to San Diego and sought a teaching credential. At the time, I imagined being able to use my technology expertise in future classrooms. I had become genuinely excited about education technology (edtech).

I wish I could say my expectations were met but I cannot.

I discovered that instead of edtech driving exploration, it was aimed at controlling and replacing teachers.

As part of the master of education program at UCSD, we were sent to local schools to work with students. I went to a local high school to work with struggling math students in a recovery class. Students were assigned to work on computer presented math problems which were then graded by the computer.

As the education technology critic Audre Watters has observed:

“Just because it’s a worksheet on an iPad doesn’t mean it’s transformational or exciting. It’s still a worksheet.”

In retrospect, this experience was an early effort to replace teachers with computer screens. Instead of working on making edtech an exciting addition to education, the effort was pointed toward putting kids at screens instead learning from teachers. The technology industry was promising to reduce the need for costly teachers.

Physics Lab Class

This picture shows an example of using technology to engage students in authentic learning. Two photogates affixed to the ramp were accurate to + or – 0.001 seconds. Here the students were adjusting the ramp to achieve constant velocity when a marble rolled down the ramp. The photogates provided data including the time for test object to roll through the gate and the time between gates. Since students new the diameter of the test ball and the distance between the gates, they were able to calculate three velocities. Once the three velocities were all equal, they changed to a test ball with identical geometry but significantly less mass. They were then able to observe that the mass of the ball did not change the velocity which accords with Galileo Galilei’s 1589 experiment testing mass and gravity.

Unfortunately, only small companies were working to develop engaging technology for learning. Larger companies were developing school management systems that gathered large data sets on all students and teachers. Or they were creating schemes where teachers created lessons on their platforms which then claimed ownership of the lessons.

The school district I was in bought every student an I-pad and then three years later replaced those I-pads with laptop computers. Because these devices were such a classroom distraction, teachers often required students to put them in their backpacks and store them under their desks.

It was worse than a waste of money. It was undermining learning.

 In my AP physics classes, students were not working through the assigned problems. They discovered that almost all physics problems had a worked-out example on line. I was getting the most beautiful work I had ever seen but the students were clueless when tested.

It seems fair to identify edtech as a possible cause for declining test scores. Artificial intelligence will likely make — not working or thinking — an even bigger problem.

Science of Reading

The Orwellian labeled science of reading (SoR) is not based on sound science. In 1997, congress passed legislation calling for a reading study. Establishment of the National Reading Panel (NRP) was a doomed effort from the beginning. It was a massive undertaking, conducted by twenty-one unpaid volunteers over 18-months. NRP fundamentally did a meta-analysis in five reading domains, ignoring 10 other important domains. They did not review everything and there was no new research. Their report is the basis for SoR.

To finish reading the post, open this link.

Categories Billionaires, Education Industry, Literacy, Technology

Retired Teacher: The Answer to All Complaints About Reading

By dianeravitch
April 3, 2026 //
29

A reader who identifies as “Retired Teacher” explains the best way to teach reading. The best way is to start by understanding that there is no single way to teach reading. The best way is to assess what’s right for the students in front of you. Some need help in phonics; some don’t. Some are already fluent readers and need challenging and engaging stuff to read.

RT writes:

Most competent reading teachers are effective when they diversify instruction based on the needs of the learner. Generally, the first step in effective reading instruction is to assess students. What often results in elementary classrooms is that teachers often end up placing students into a group with other students with similar needs. Some students arrive in kindergarten reading fluently. They have clearly mastered phonics so there is no need to spend time on phonics lessons the student does not need. Both Diane Ravitch and myself grew up in the “See, Say” era of reading instruction. We didn’t learn phonics. We deduced the sound system from reading it. This method will not work for many students, but there are some that would be successful with this approach. 

All learners have strengths and weaknesses. Other students may have other issues like a difficulty with auditory discrimination, and teachers should have the freedom to adjust instruction based on the needs of students. By the way a student with auditory discrimination or memory problems will struggle and flounder in a science of reading environment. This student may have to write the word in order to basically memorize it.

I am a certified reading teacher. I have taught many struggling students, most of whom were English language learners, to read successfully and fluently in English. Part of the reason for positive results was due to the assessing and addressing what the student needed to understand and apply the skill and become a good reader. There is no magic to this process. It is called diversifying instruction, and many competent teachers adjust teaching to meet student needs. Whatever method is used, it needs to meet students’ needs, offer the student a degree of success through application, and be engaging. Professional teachers should have the freedom to adjust instruction without government interference.

Categories Education Reform, Literacy, Literature
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