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Massachusetts: Angry Parents Sue Lucy Calkins and Others for Promoting Whole Language Instead of Phonics

By dianeravitch
December 5, 2024 //
67

This is a first, to my knowledge. Parents in Massachusetts filed a class action lawsuit seeking damages from Lucy Calkins and others who installed the “Whole Language” reading curriculum in their public schools. The parents claim that Calkins and others purposely sold a defective product that ignored “the science of reading” and caused their children to need tutors and other assistance in learning to read.

For the record, I don’t approve of this lawsuit. As far as I’m concerned, it’s far too early to reach a definitive judgment about the efficacy of either Whole Language or the “science of reading.” The phonics-based approach was tried more than two decades ago in a federal program called Reading First. RF was created by No Child Left Behind and cost $6 billion. The program was tainted with scandal, and the evaluations were unimpressive.

I was never a fan of Whole Language but I do not believe that its adherents intended to deceive. I knew many of its advocates, and they sincerely believed that Whole Language was the best way to learn to read.

Furthermore, I do not think that this issue should be resolved in a court of law. Nor do I think that the issue of access to medical care by a pregnant woman or the parents of transgender youth should be decided by courts. But my opinion doesn’t count. We will see if this lawsuit goes anywhere.

The Boston Globe reported:

In what appears to be a first-of-its-kind consumer protection lawsuit, two Massachusetts families are suing famed literacy specialists Lucy Calkins, Irene Fountas, and Gay Su Pinnell, their companies, and their publishers, alleging the former teachers used “deceptive and fraudulent” marketing practices to sell curriculums that ignored the scientific consensus about the importance of phonics to early reading.

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in Suffolk Superior Court, alleges three minors, identified in the complaint by their initials, suffered developmental and emotional injuries, while their parents, identified as Karrie Conley of Boxborough and Michele Hudak of Ashland, suffered financial losses, having paid for tutoring and private school tuition to compensate for the flawed reading curriculums used by their children’s public schools.

“I trusted that when I was sending my children off to school, they were getting instruction that had been tested and proven effective,” Conley said during a virtual press conference Wednesday morning. “… This isn’t some luxury we’re asking for. This is reading.”

The lawsuit, shared with the Globe in advance, alleges the defendants ignored a plethora of research demonstrating the importance of phonics, or the relationship between letters and sounds, in creating, marketing, and selling their early literacy products and services. The omission of phonics from their curriculums was intentional, despite widely known evidence of its importance, the complaint alleges.

“Defendants denigrated phonics at worst and paid mere lip service to phonics at best,” the lawsuit reads.

A 2023 Globe investigation found more than one-third of all Massachusetts districts, including Amherst, Brookline, and Cambridge, were using the defendants’ curriculums in their elementary schools. 

A lawsuit represents only one side of a complaint. Representatives for the defendants did not return an immediate request for comment, though Calkins, Fountas, and Pinnell have in the past denied any wrongdoing.

The Massachusetts lawsuit represents a new step in the early literacy advocacy movement and could spur new complaints like it nationwide. It follows several years of heightened debate surrounding the “science of reading,” a broad body of research demonstrating how the brain learns to read and which shows a firm grasp on phonics to be key to early reading success.

At issue in the complaint is whether the literacy authors knowingly ignored scientific research and purposely sold “defective and deficient” curriculums to school districts across Massachusetts. The lawsuit argues the authors and their publishers did and in doing so broke a state consumer protection law.

“Defendants knew or should have known they were committing unfair and deceptive acts,” the complaint reads.

Rather than emphasizing phonics, or the sounding out of words, Fountas and Pinnell, longtime publishing partners, and Calkins have come under increasing scrutiny for their curriculums’ cueing directions, which instruct children to, for example, look at a picture for context in helping determine an unknown word. In Calkins’s curriculum, Units of Study, this skill has been called “picture power.”

The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, which considers the defendants’ curriculums to be low quality, has doled out millions of dollars in grant money to help local school districts purchase new materials grounded in reading science. A 2023 Globe investigation found nearly half of all school districts in the state were using a low-quality curriculum in their elementary schools, and, of those, nearly 3 in 4 were using either Calkins’s or Fountas and Pinnell’s materials.

In addition to the authors, the lawsuit, which seeks class action status, names as defendants Calkins‘s company, The Reading & Writing Project at Mossflower; the board of trustees of Teachers College at Columbia University, which used to house Calkins‘s curriculum work; Fountas and Pinnell LLC; New Hampshire-based Heinemann Publishing; and HMH Education Co., a Boston-based publisher.

Categories Accountability, Fraud, Literacy, Massachusetts

Florida: School Board Bans Book about Banning Books!

By dianeravitch
June 27, 2024 //
9

At what point does Florida go from the absurd to the ridiculous? Or has that point already been passed? A school board in Florida voted to ban a book called Ban This Book.

I wish someone would explain to school board members, to Moms Restricting Liberty, and to Governor Ron DeSantis that whenever a book is banned, that book gets national notoriety and a big sales bump. Authors are thinking, “Please ban my book,” it needs publicity, and yahoos oblige.

Scott Maxwell, columnist for the Orlando Sentinel, writes:

The headline that made its way around the world last week looked like a joke:

“Florida school board bans book about book bans”

The story couldn’t have been more meta. Or more Florida. I half-hoped it was satire, but having covered Florida’s increasingly ridiculous education priorities in recent years, knew it wasn’t.

The Tallahassee Democrat explained that the Indian River County School Board voted 3-to-2 to ban a book called “Ban This Book.”

The book is a lighthearted yet poignant tale about a 9-year-old girl named Amy Anne Ollinger who, upon learning that her school is trying to censor books, decides to fight back by cultivating her own secret library in her school locker. It’s part comedy and part thought-provoker. Some of the book focuses on how Amy Anne doesn’t always go about things the right way.

A promotional blurb for the book says: “Ban This Book is a love letter to the written word and its power to give kids a voice.” Publishers Weekly said it celebrates “kids’ power to effect change.”

To that end, I have a new proposal for Florida’s book-banners: Before pushing to censor any book, you have to first actually read it and then prove you understood it. In this case, “Ban This Book” was written for 8-to-12-year-olds. So you might need to put on your thinking cap.

The story in Indian River got even more ridiculous when it revealed that virtually all the censorship stemmed from one person — a Moms for (so-called) Liberty member who objected to books by everyone from Toni Morrison to Kurt Vonnegut.

“She also got ‘Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation’ pulled from a high school,” the story said. “And, in response to her objection to a children’s book that showed the bare behind of a goblin, the school district drew clothes over it.”

OK, let’s stop here. If you’re a grown adult whose crowning accomplishments are to censor a book about the Holocaust, ban a book on book-banning and draw cartoon underpants on a cartoon goblin, then to paraphrase Jeff Foxworthy: You might be an idiot.

So this is my plea today to my fellow Floridians during an election year: Stop electing idiots. Specifically, stop electing them to school boards.

Categories Censorship, Democracy, Extremism, Florida, Freedom to Read, Literacy, Stupid

Louisiana: Attacks on Librarians Intensify and Inspire Fear and Courage

By dianeravitch
June 23, 2024 //
4

Governor Ron DeSantis unleashed a rightwing barrage against school libraries and public libraries, and even he has backed off (a bit) as a small number of angry censors, led by groups like Moms for Liberty, have barraged librarians with demands for censorship. These “Moms” don’t want “Liberty”; they want to impose their views on others.

Sarah Ravits of the Gambit in Louisiana describes the intense attacks on libraries and librarians, by groups whose purpose is to restrict access to books they don’t like.

She writes:

Amanda Jones never thought of herself as a controversial person.

A beloved librarian in a small, tight-knit South Louisiana community, she’d earned numerous awards for her commitment to education over the years, including the coveted National School Librarian of the Year honor in 2021.

“I had a rock-solid relationship with my community, and I was in good standing,” she says. “I grew up here, and I devote so much time to my school, community and children.”

But her life took a sudden, bizarre turn in 2022 when she spoke at a public library board meeting.

During a heated discussion about whether a local library should restrict access to certain books for teenagers, Jones echoed what many educators have been saying for years.

Challenges to books are often “done with the best of intentions,” but frequently target the Black and LGBTQ communities, she said. Removing or relocating those books could be “extremely harmful to our most vulnerable — our children. Just because you don’t want to read it or see it does not give you the right to deny [it to] others.”

Jones certainly wasn’t the lone, dissenting voice that evening — she says at least 30 other people in attendance expressed similar sentiments.

But the next day she found herself being viciously targeted in a smear campaign by the ultra-conservative nonprofit Citizens for a New Louisiana, and the Facebook account Bayou State of Mind.

“They made memes about me and posted my picture and where I work,” Jones told Gambit. “They said that I advocate for teaching anal sex and that I want to give 6-year-olds pornography and erotica.”

As false and ridiculous as the claims were, they took off like wildfire across the internet and spilled over into everyday life as Jones, her family and her colleagues were bombarded with threatening messages and phone calls, including from people who said they were going to kill her.

Jones, terrified and suffering from severe mental distress, eventually took a medical leave of absence…

Right-wing activists have led efforts nationwide to attack books while targeting libraries and their workers. That, in turn, has led Republicans enthralled to these radical interests to push legislation forwarding their agenda in states across the country.

The war against libraries has been felt especially hard in Louisiana, where multiple parishes have become engulfed in legal and political battles centered around book censorship…

While some of the most egregious bills failed to even make it out of legislative committees, these efforts have nonetheless had a chilling effect on library workers.

One librarian in the New Orleans area, who spoke to Gambit under condition of anonymity, says they are “disillusioned and annoyed,” by the implication that librarians distribute obscene materials.

“I’m not a criminal,” the librarian says. “My job is to provide people with good information….”

Adding to librarians’ frustrations is the fact that book challengers often take passages wildly out of context, and it takes already-strained library board members and workers months to fully audit books after they’ve been challenged.

In St. Tammany Parish, for example, more than 150 books were challenged last year, according to the Louisiana Illuminator.

Going after so many books at once was a clear tactic to overwhelm librarians, who are required to produce reports on each book called into question. For every complaint, the library’s policy was to pull the book from circulation and refer it to a committee for review. Eventually, the number of challenged books was so high the library created a policy that it will not pull books from shelves while they are under review.

Many of the complaints came from just a handful of activists who don’t even have library cards or kids who use the library. In fact, in many states these complaints aren’t even coming from people who live in the state, let alone the local community…

Some of those involved passing legislation to bring criminal charges to librarians, which passed in fellow red states like Arkansas, West Virginia and Missouri.

The Arkansas law, for example, states school and public librarians can be sentenced up to six years in prison for distributing “obscene” or “harmful” material to students under 18.

That law, however, is currently blocked by a federal judge…

Then there are the ongoing attempts by the Legislature to discredit the American Library Association, considered to be the top professional library association, by blasting it as being too “woke” and “Marxist.”

One particularly shocking bill, authored by Livingston Parish Republican Rep. Kellee Dickerson, sought to imprison public librarians with hard labor and slap them with huge fines if they dared to get reimbursed for attending ALA conferences.

“If you’re going to put librarians in jail for even trying to associate with (their) profession’s national organization, that kinda gives away the game,” says one of the librarians Gambit spoke with…

Some of the more problematic bills, like throwing librarians in jail for attending the ALA conferences with public funds, died immediately in committee….

Then there are everyday citizens who have joined the fight to stand up for librarians and books.

Lisa Rustemeyer, a semi-retired mother of grown children in St. Tammany Parish, has become an activist in recent months.

Rustemeyer previously never thought she’d see public libraries being targeted, and said she felt a “gut instinct” to stand up when she saw they were under fire.

Lately she has found herself writing letters, making phone calls, attending public meetings and urging legislators to reconsider their bills.

Rustemeyer says she has always turned to libraries during “tough times,” while looking for answers, or simply for entertainment. “It’s where you meet other people and see your neighbors,” she says. “Libraries represent democracy and free speech.”

The way she sees it, dismantling and undermining public trust in libraries is a step toward dismantling and undermining trust in democracy itself.

“This doesn’t really come from a logical place,” she says. “(Lawmakers) are not scared of guns, but they’re scared of books? There’s no logic in it, which makes it infuriating. There’s no evidence that any kid has ever been harmed by a book. And here we are at the bottom of literacy, we’re at the bottom in (education) for as long as I can remember. We should not take award-winning books out of the hands of children. That is insane….”

Amanda Jones, meanwhile, has decided to double down on her advocacy work.

While the groups who targeted her expected Jones to be a shrinking violet, she says her commitment to literacy and free speech has only grown stronger.

“I was a hot mess for about a year, and then I decided to make lemonade out of lemons,” she says. “Screw them … No one wants to be famous for being defamed and called a groomer.”

Because she was already well-known in the library world, she says she has decided to share her story far and wide.

“I decided I wanted to tell my story, speak out and try to help other people know, they can also speak out,” she says.

What helps motivate her, she says, is that moment most librarians can probably relate to: when a book resonates with a new reader.

Jones calls it a “home run” moment.

“When you put a book in a kid’s hand, and it becomes their ‘home run’ book — it’s when you hook them into reading,” she explains. “And you know that because they read that book, they’re going to read one or two more, and then become a lifelong reader.”

She has seen it happen over and over throughout her career.

She says, “Every student deserves to see themselves reflected in the characters on our shelves.”

Categories Censorship, Extremism, Freedom to Read, Librarians, Libraries, Literacy

Thomas Ultican: New Book by Reading Experts Debunks “Science of Reading”

By dianeravitch
May 31, 2024 //
38

Thomas Ultican, retired teacher of advanced mathematics and physics, reports on a new book by literacy scholars, The book, he concludes, demolishes the hype associated with “the science of reading.” Ultican believes that states should not mandate how to teach reading. I agree. Legislators are not teaching professionals or literacy experts. They should not require teachers to follow their orders.

Ultican writes:

Two eminent professors of instruction and literacy teamed up to write “Fact-Checking the Science of Reading.” P. David Pearson of UC Berkeley and Robert J. Tierney of University of British Columbia are Emeritus Professors with high reputation in their respective countries.

In the introduction, they inform us that Emily Hanford’s 2022 “Sold a Story” podcasts motivated them to write. In particular, they noted:

  1. “A consistent misinterpretation of the relevant research findings; and
  2. “A mean-spirited tone in her rhetoric, which bordered on personal attacks directed against the folks Hanford considered to be key players in what she called the Balanced Literacy approach to teaching early reading.” (Page XIV)…

After reviewing their findings, Ultican concludes:

SoR advocates say when teaching reading, the “settled science” of phonics “first and fast”, should be applied. They are working to make it against the law to disagree, claiming other forms of instruction cause child harm. SoR reading theory may have some holes but their political power is unquestioned and global. Laws mandating SoR have been enacted in 40 US states, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other English-speaking countries. These rules limit teacher autonomy and attempt to make reading a scripted subject. (Page XII)

The Orwellian labeled science of reading (SoR) is not based on sound science. It more accurately should be called “How to Use Anecdotes to Sell Reading Products.” In 1997, congress passed legislation, calling for a reading study. From Jump Street, establishment of the National Reading Panel (NRP) was a doomed effort. The panel was given limited time for the study (18 months) which was a massive undertaking, conducted by twenty-one unpaid volunteers. NRP fundamentally did a meta-analysis in five reading domains, ignoring 10 other important reading domains. In other words, they did not review everything and there was no new research. They simply searched for reading studies and averaged the results to give us “the science of reading.”

SoR’s real motivation is to sell products, not helping children struggling to read. Scholars like Pearson and Tierney are ignored and swept away by a podcaster with no credentials. 

For the sake of the future, we must stop legally mandating SoR as a solution to a fraudulent“reading crisis” and put our trust in education professionals.

Categories Education Industry, Fake News, For-Profit, Literacy, Science

Mississippi: Fourth-Grade Reading “Miracle” Disappears in 8th Grade

By dianeravitch
May 30, 2024 //
21

Much has been written about “the Mississippi Miracle,” the dramatic increase in fourth grade reading scores. New York Times’ columnist Nicholas Kristoff brought national attention to the phenomenon and remarked that these amazing results were due to the “science of reading” (phonics), not any new funding for the state’s woefully underfunded schools, nor any reduction in poverty or segregation..

At the time, I criticized Kristoff’s naïveté, because he failed to notice that the state’s fourth grade NAEP scores rose, but its eighth grade scores had not. What kind of miracle fades away over time? Of what value is evanescent progress? Kristoff attributed the stunning improvement in fourth grade scores to the “science of reading,” and minimized the significance of the state’s policy of holding back third graders who didn’t pass the reading test. Winnowing out the weakest readers lifts the average scores of those who are promoted to fourth grade. A manufactured miracle.

Julia James, a reporter for Mississippi Today, wrote recently about the disparity between the fourth grade scores, which rose impressively, and the eighth grade scores, which didn’t. The headline says that the state “fell short” of an eighth-grade reading “miracle.” In fact, Mississippi’s eighth-grade reading scores were completely unchanged over the period from 2011-2021; actually, the scores were slightly lower in 2021.

The balance of the article concerns ways to raise eighth grade reading scores.

But there is no thought given to whether there really was a “miracle” in fourth grade or just old-fashioned gaming of the system.

Incidentally, the Mississippi State Superintendent who oversaw the fourth grade reading “miracle” is now the state superintendent in Maryland, where she hopes to produce the same results. Let’s hope that those gains are sustained into eighth grade.

Categories Literacy, Propaganda

Iowa Mandates “Science of Reading”

By dianeravitch
May 11, 2024 //
31

The “Science of Reading” is the panacea of the moment. Iowa’s Governor Kim Reynolds signed a bill requiring the use of SofR in the state’s classrooms.

ADEL, Iowa (Gray Television Iowa Capitol Bureau) – Governor Kim Reynolds signed a new law Tuesday meant to boost literacy rates for Iowa children. It requires schools teach a specific reading method, called the Science of Reading, and develop individual plans for students not at grade level.

Last year, more than 30% of Iowa’s third and 11th graders weren’t reading at their grade level. Travis Wilkins with the Adel DeSoto Minburn Community School District said, “As an educator and in this profession, I think it’s important we recognize and name the fact that we are not meeting our mission.”

But ADM Schools found success. Three years ago it had one in four students not meeting reading standards. Then, it implemented a literacy strategy called the science of reading. “Our third grade through 11th grade scores now show 90% of our students are proficient in reading and writing,” Wilkins said.

Now, the Science of Reading is the law in Iowa. Tuesday Governor Kim Reynolds signed a bill mandating schools implement the strategy and must provide personalized instruction for students who fall behind. “And for those who continue to struggle, the bill also ensures parents are informed of their right to request that their child be retained to repeat a grade level if that’s necessary,” Reynolds said.

Categories Education Industry, Freedom to Read, Iowa, Literacy

Nick Covington: What the “Science of Reading” Overlooks

By dianeravitch
May 9, 2024 //
32

Nick Covington taught social studies for a decade. He recently decided to delve into the mystique of “the science of reading.” He concluded that we have been “sold a story.”

He begins:

Literacy doesn’t come in a box, we’ll never find our kids at the bottom of a curriculum package, and there can be no broad support for systemic change that excludes input from and support for teachers implementing these programs in classrooms with students. 

(Two hands pull apart a book)

Exactly one year after the final episode of the podcast series that launched a thousand hot takes and opened the latest front of the post-pandemic Reading Wars, I finally dug into Emily Hanford’s Sold A Story from American Public Media. Six episodes later, I’m left with the ironic feeling that the podcast, and the narrative it tells, missed the point. My goal with this piece is to capture the questions and criticisms that I have not just about the narrative of Sold A Story but of the broader movement toward “The Science of Reading,” and bring in other evidence and perspectives that inform my own. I hope to make the case that “The Science of Reading” is not a useful label to describe the multiple goals of literacy; that investment in teacher professionalization is inoculation against being Sold A Story; and that the unproductive and divisive Reading Wars actually make it more difficult for us to think about how to cultivate literate kids. The podcast, and the Reading Wars it launched, disseminate an incomplete and oversimplified picture of a complex process that plasters over the gaps with feverish insistence.

Sold a Story is a podcast that investigates the ongoing Reading Wars between phonics, whole language, balanced literacy, and “The Science of Reading.” Throughout the series, listeners hear from teachers who felt betrayed by what school leaders, education celebrities, and publishers told them was the right way to teach, only to later learn they had been teaching in ways deemed ineffective. The story, as I heard it, was that teachers did their jobs to the best of their personal ability in exactly the ways incentivized by the system itself.  In a disempowered profession, the approaches criticized in the series offered teachers a sense of aspirational community, opportunities for training and professional development, and the prestige of working with Ivy League researchers. Further, they came with material assets – massive classroom libraries and flexible seating options for students, for example – that did transform classroom spaces. 

Without the critical toolkit and systemic support to evaluate claims of effectiveness, and lacking collective power to challenge the dictates of million dollar curriculum packages, teachers taught how they were instructed to teach using the resources they were required to use. And given the scarcity of educational resources at the disposal of most individual teachers, it’s easy to see why they embraced such a visible investment in reading instruction. Instead of seeing teachers in their relation to systemic forces – in their diminished roles as curriculum custodians – Hanford instead frames teachers who participated in these methods as having willingly bought into a cult of personality, singing songs and marching under the banners of Calkins and Clay; however, Hanford also comes up short in offering ways this story could have gone differently or will go differently in the future.

‍A key objective of Sold A Story is to communicate to listeners that “The Science of Reading” is the only valid, evidence-based way to teach kids to read and borders on calling other approaches a form of educational malpractice, inducing a unique pedagogical injury. In the wake of Sold A Story, “The Science of Reading” itself has been co-opted as a marketing and branding label. States and cities have passed laws requiring “The Science of Reading,” sending school leaders scrambling to purchase new programs and train teachers to comply with the new prescription. 

In May 2023, the mayor of New York City announced “a tectonic shift” in reading instruction for NYC schools. The change required school leaders to choose from one of three pre-approved curriculum packages provided by three different publishing companies. First-year training for the new curriculum was estimated to cost $35 million, but “city officials declined to provide an estimate of the effort’s overall price tag, including the cost of purchasing materials.” NYC Schools also disbanded their in-house literacy coaching program over the summer to contract instead with outside companies to provide coaching. It’s hard not to conclude that the same publishing ecosystem that sold school leaders and policy-makers on the previous evidence-based reading curriculum – and that Hanford condemns in the podcast – is happy to meet their current needs in the marketplace. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. 

Now, months into the new school year and just weeks before Winter Break, how is the hurried rollout of the new reading curriculum going for NYC schools and teachers? One Brooklyn teacher told Chalkbeat they still hadn’t received the necessary training to use the new materials, “The general sentiment at my school is we’re being asked to start something without really knowing what it should look like, I feel like I’m improvising — and not based on the science of reading.” A third-grade teacher said phonics had not been the norm for her class, and that she hasn’t “received much training on how to deliver the highly regimented lessons.”  Other teachers echo the sentiment of feeling rushed, hurried, and unprepared. One 30+ year veteran classroom teacher mentioned that she has “turned to Facebook groups when she has questions.” The chaotic back-and-forth was also recognized by many veteran teachers responding to the Chalkbeat piece on social media. One education and literacy coach commented, “I sometimes wonder how many curriculum variations I’ve seen in the last 3 decades – ’Here teachers [drops off boxed curriculum],  now teach this way’ –  hasn’t changed student outcomes across systems.” 

Open the post to read Covington’s review of the research on phonics-based programs. No miracle. No impressive rise in test scores.

Most of my professional career has been devoted to debunking “miracles“ in education. Whole language was not a miracle cure. Neither is phonics.

Why not take the sensible route? Make sure that teachers know a variety of methods when they enter the profession. Let them do what they think is best for their students. Not following the fad of the day, but using their professional knowledge.

Categories Education Industry, Education Reform, Literacy, Research

Jan Resseger: How Book Bans and Censorship Are Hurting Children

By dianeravitch
May 6, 2024 //
7

Jan Resseger explains how young people are injured when adults censor what they read and teach them inaccurate history.

She writes:

Public schools, which serve more than 50 million of our nation’s children and adolescents are perhaps our society’s most important public institution. Unlike private schools, public schools guarantee acceptance for all children everywhere in the United States, and they protect the rights of all children by law. And unlike their private school counterparts, public schools are also required to provide services to meet each child’s educational needs, even children who are disabled or who are learning the English language.

Today’s culture war attacks on public education drive fear of “the other” and attempt to frighten parents about exposing their children to others who may come from other countries, from other cultures, from a different race or ethnicity, from a different religion, or from a gay or lesbian family.

The idea of insulating children is, however, counter to the whole philosophical tradition that is the foundation for our system of public schooling.

More than a century ago, education philosopher John Dewey declared: “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children… Only by being true to the full growth of all the individuals who make it up, can society by any chance be true to itself,” (The School and Society, p. 5)

For Dewey, however, educating all children together without insulating them was important as more than an abstract principle. Dewey believed that the experience of school was itself a way of learning to live in a broader community: “I believe that the school is primarily a social institution. Education being a social process, the school is simply that form of community life… I believe that much of present education fails because it neglects… the school as a form of community life… I believe that… the best and deepest moral training is precisely that which one gets through having to enter into proper relations with others in a unity of work and thought.” (My Pedagogic Creed, January 1897)

A hundred years later, in 1998, the political philosopher Benjamin Barber defended the idea of public schools as a microcosm of the community: “America is not a private club defined by one group’s historical hegemony. Consequently, multicultural education is not discretionary; it defines demographic and pedagogical necessity.  If we want youngsters from Los Angeles whose families speak more than 160 languages to be ‘Americans,’ we must first acknowledge their diversity and honor their distinctiveness.”( “Education for Democracy,” in A Passion for Democracy: American Essays, p.231).

And in the same year, another philosopher of education, Walter Feinberg explained that in public school classrooms students should learn to tell their own stories, to listen and respect the stories of others, and through that process prepare for democratic citizenship: “That there is an ‘American story’ means not that there is one official understanding of the American experience but, rather, that those who are telling their versions of the story are doing so in order to contribute to better decision making on the part of the American nation and that they understand that they are part of those decisions. The concept is really ‘Americans’ stories.’” (Common Schools: Uncommon Identities, p. 232) (emphasis in the original)

Today, of course, the culture wars attacks on public education seek to reshape the curriculum, silence controversial discussion, and ban books.

Massachusetts political science professor Maurice Cunningham explains that well-funded advocates for reshaping school curricula—including the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Council for National Policy and a number of dark money groups—are spending millions of dollars to fan the fears of parents by supporting local advocates in organizations like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education. The goal is to agitate against overly “woke” public school curricula and to frighten parents by telling them that teachers are frightening children by including the nation’s sins as well as our society’s virtues as part of the American history curriculum, and by encouraging children to listen to the voices of people who have traditionally been marginalized.  There is, however, no evidence that our children have been personally or collectively frightened when they learn about slavery as the cause of the Civil War or when they learn about gender identity as part of a high school human sexuality curriculum. Accurate and inclusive curricula and open class discussion where all voices are heard and considered are essential for truly public education.

Robert Samuels’ When Your Own Book Gets Caught Up in the Culture Wars profoundly explains the damage wrought by book banning, Samuels, a Washington Post reporter and his colleague Toluse Olorunnipa, had just won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction last fall when they were invited to a Memphis high school to discuss their new book, His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice.  Samuels describes why he wanted to share his book with the Memphis high school students: “I had once been told that the answer to anything could be found in a book… One day, during my senior year, I was browsing an airport bookstore when I saw Stokely Carmichael’s autobiography, “Ready for Revolution.” A whole chapter was devoted to Bronx (High School of) Science, which he had also attended. I was riveted. It started with an officer hassling him on the street, only to be stunned when Carmichael shows him a book with the school’s logo. Although our time there was separated by four decades, we both had the same confusion upon discovering that white classmates had grown up reading an entirely different set of material….  We were both surprised by how little dancing there was at white classmates’ parties. ‘It was at first a mild culture shock, but I adapted,’ he wrote. I, too, had to learn to adapt, to not be so self-conscious about getting stereotyped because of my speech, my clothes, my interests. It was the first time I had ever truly felt seen in a book that was not made for children.”

Samuels and Olorunnipa received a call just before their Memphis visit warning them they could not read from the book and that the school could not distribute copies to students. And during their visit, it became evident that students’ questions had even been carefully edited by their teachers.  Then, in the weeks after the visit, the Memphis-Shelby County school staff and event sponsoring organization stepped all over themselves trying to apologize to Samuels and Olorunnipa.  It became evident that school staff had been frightened and intimidated by school district regulations; the penalties were severe while the rules themselves remained unclear.

Samuels describes what happened: “(T)he spokesperson for the school district e-mailed… to apologize for the miscommunication and misinformation ‘surrounding your recent visit’… (She) defended prohibiting the book itself, on the ground that it was not appropriate for people under the age of eighteen… (She) then admitted that no one involved in the decision had actually read it. The district’s academic department didn’t have time… A staff person in the office searched for it in a library database, noting that the American Library Association had classified it as adult literature.” There was one positive result of the whole fiasco:  with a donation from Viking Books, the publisher, a Memphis community development group, promised any student from Whitehaven High School a free copy of His Name is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice.

Philosophers of education, academic researchers, educational psychologists, and the students in America’s classrooms all tell us that young people are hurt when the school is forced to remove the books that tell students’ own stories.

Young people are made invisible when state laws suppress accurate teaching about all the strands of the American story including slavery, and what happened during the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Civil Rights Movement. Children who are gay or lesbian learn that they should withdraw and hide when the words that describe them are banned. Experts also tell us that the other children in the classroom are not frightened when, for example, a classmate shares the challenges his or her family faced as immigrants trying to find a place to feel welcome.

Please open the link and finish reading this important article.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Education Reform, Libraries, Literacy, Literature, Racism

Should Librarians Be Jailed for Handing Out a Banned Book?

By dianeravitch
May 5, 2024 //
15

This article in The Washington Post by Hanna Natanson and Anymita Kaye provides a national review of states that are trying to stop book censorship and protect librarians and states that not only ban books for sexual and racial content but threaten jail time for librarians who dispense such books. The state-by-state descriptions on the legal status of librarians is valuable. Open the link if you can to see where your state ranks and what actions it is taking to protect or threaten librarians.

Sam Lee, a leader of the Connecticut Library Association, heads to work these days torn between hope and fear.

She’s encouraged because legislators in her state proposed a bill this year making it harder for school boards to ban library books. But she’s fearful because Connecticut, like America, is seeing a sustained surge in book challenges — and she wonders if objectors will see the legislation as a reason to file more complaints.
“I would like to be optimistic,” Lee said. “But having been in my position for the last few years … I don’t know, it really feels like it’s been forever. And I am worried the book banners are just going to be emboldened.”

The bill in Connecticut, pending before an education committee, is one of a raft of measures advancing nationwide that seek to do things like prohibit book bans or forbid the harassment of school and public librarians — the first such wave in the country, said John Chrastka, director of library advocacy group EveryLibrary.

Legislators in 22 mostly blue states have proposed 57 such bills so far this year, and two have become law, according to a Washington Post analysis of state legislative databases and an EveryLibrary legislative tracker.

But the library-friendly measures are being outpaced by bills in mostly red states that aim to restrict which books libraries can offer and threaten librarians with prison or thousands in fines for handing out “obscene” or “harmful” titles. At least 27 states are considering 100 such bills this year, three of which have become law, The Post found. That adds to nearly a dozen similar measures enacted over the last three years across 10 states.

Lawmakers proposing restrictive bills contend they are necessary because school and public libraries contain graphic sexual material that should not be available to children. Some books’ “sole purpose is sexual gratification,” said West Virginia Del. Brandon Steele (R), who introduced a bill that would allow librarians to be prosecuted for giving obscene titles to minors.
“It is strictly about pornography,” Steele said. “On that limited basis, this isn’t going to have the chilling effect people think it’s going to.”

But other lawmakers say bills like Steele’s are ideologically driven censorship dressed up as concern for children. They note that, as book challenges spiked to historic highs over the past two years, the majority of objections targeted books by and about LGBTQ people and people of color…

The protective library laws being pushed around the country run the gamut: From increasing funding to adding school librarians to campuses to forbidding “discrimination” in choosing which books to stock…

Some restrictive library bills give parents more power over book selection, for example requiring schools obtain parental sign-off before providing children sexually explicit content. Another common move is to require that libraries post lists of their books for parental review.

But the majority of the bills work the same way. They eliminate long-established exemptions from prosecution for librarians — sometimes teachers and museum employees, too — over obscene material. Almost every state adopted such carve-outs decades ago to ensure schools, museums and libraries could offer accurate information about topics such as sex education.

Removing the exemption means librarians, teachers and museum staffers could face years of imprisonment or tens of thousands in fines for giving out books deemed sexually explicit, obscene or “harmful” to minors. For example, an Arkansas measure passed last year says school and public librarians can be imprisoned for up to six years or fined $10,000 if they hand out obscene or harmful titles.

The law protects children and doesn’t harm librarians unless they’re doing something awful, bill sponsor Sen. Dan Sullivan (R) said at the time: “If they don’t knowingly violate [the law], they’re free and clear.”

Seventeen states are weighing some version of this measure, The Post found. That comes after at least eight states enacted such laws between 2021 and last year, although two were later vetoed and one was blocked by the courts.

The Post could not find an instance in which a librarian has been charged under these laws. But Peter Bromberg of the Utah Library Association pointed out several recent cases in which police were called to schools or launched investigations over books — in Missouri, Texas and South Carolina…

Tara White was appointed Elkhart Community Schools’ director of literacy in 2015. For the first several years, she never fielded a book challenge — until 2021, when community members objected to 60 titles, she said. When she defended the books, a conservative website claimed she was fighting for porn in school.

Then last year, Indiana passed a law declaring school employees can face criminal prosecution — leading to a possible $10,000 fine or 2½ years of jail time — for handing out sexual material that is “harmful to minors.”

White resigned.

“I loved being a librarian and … helping every student find themselves in a book,” White said. But while certain she wasn’t actually “breaking the law, nobody wants to go through that process.”

Nobody wants to go to jail, she said, for giving children books.

Categories Censorship, Courage, Cruelty, Disruption, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom to Read, Librarians, Libraries, Literacy

Tom Ultican: The Profit Behind the “Science of Reading” Movement

By dianeravitch
April 20, 2024 //
20

Tom Ultican, retired teacher in California, smells a scam in the making. The science behind “the Science of Reading” movement is not very scientific, he writes. Publishers and vendors are preparing to cash in on legislative mandates that force reading teachers to use only one method to teach reading despite the lack of evidence for its efficacy. Ultican zeroes in on the role of billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs as one of the key players in promoting SofR.

He writes:

Laurene Powell Jobs controls Amplify, a kids-at-screens education enterprise. In 2011, she became one of the wealthiest women in the world when her husband, Steve, died. This former Silicon Valley housewife displays the arrogance of wealth, infecting all billionaires. She is now a “philanthropist”, in pursuit of both her concerns and biases. Her care for the environment and climate change are admiral but her anti-public school thinking is a threat to America. Her company, Amplify, sells the antithesis of good education.

I am on Amplify’s mailing list. April third’s new message said,

“What if I told you there’s a way for 95% of your students to read at or near grade level? Maybe you’ve heard the term Science of Reading before, and have wondered what it is and why it matters.”

Spokesperson, Susan Lambert, goes on to disingenuously explain how the Science of Reading (SoR) “refers to the abundance of research illustrating the best way students learn to read.”

This whopper is followed by a bigger one, stating:

“A shift to a Science of Reading-based curriculum can help give every teacher and student what they need and guarantee literacy success in your school. Tennessee school districts did just that and they are seeing an abundant amount of success from their efforts.”

A shift to SoR-based curriculum is as likely to cause harm as it is to bring literacy success. This was just a used-car salesman style claim. On the other hand, the “abundance of success” in Tennessee is an unadulterated lie. National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) tracks testing over time and is respected for education testing integrity. Tennessee’s NAEP data shows no success “from their efforts.” Their reading scores since 2013 have been down, not a lot but do not demonstrate an “abundance of success”.

NAEP Data Plot 2005 to 2022

Amplify’s Genesis

Larry Berger and Greg Dunn founded Wireless Generation in 2000 to create the software for lessons presented on screens. Ten years later, they sold it to Rupert Murdoch and his News Corporation for $360 million. Berger pocketed $40 million and agreed to stay on as head of curriculum. Wireless Generation was rebranded Amplify and Joel Klein was hired to run it.

Murdoch proposed buying a million I-pads to deliver classroom instruction. However, the Apple operating system was not flexible enough to run the software. The android system developed at Google met their needs. They purchased the Taiwanese-made Asus Tablets, well regarded in the market place but not designed for the rigors of school use. Another issue was that Wireless Generation had not developed curriculum but Murdoch wanted to beat Pearson and Houghton Mifflin to the digital education market place … so they forged ahead.

In 2012, the corporate plan was rolling along until the wheels came off. In Guilford County, North Carolina, the school district won a Race to the Top grant of $30 million dollars which it used to experiment with digital learning. The district’s plancalled for nearly 17,000 students in 20 middle schools to receive Amplify tablets. When a charger for one of the tablets overheated, the plan was halted. Only two months into the experiment, they found not only had a charger malfunctioned but another 175 chargers had issues and 1500 screens were kid-damaged.

This was the beginning of the end.

By August of 2015, News Corporation announced it was exiting the education business. The corporation took a $371 million dollar write-off. The next month, they announced selling Amplify to members of its staff. In the deal orchestrated by Joel Klein, who remained a board member, Larry Berger assumed leadership of the company.

Three months later, Reuters reported that the real buyer was Laurene Powell Jobs. She purchased Amplify through her LLC, the Emerson Collective. In typical Powell Jobs style, no information was available for how much of the company she would personally control.

Because Emerson Collective is an LLC, it can purchase private companies and is not required to make money details public. However, the Waverley Street Foundation, also known as the Emerson Collective Foundation, is a 501 C3 (EIN: 81-3242506) that must make money transactions public. Waverly Street received their tax exempt status November 9, 2016.

SoR A Sales Scam

The Amplify email gave me a link to two documents that were supposed to explain SoR: (Navigating the shift to evidence-based literacy instruction 6 takeaways from Amplify’s Science of Reading: The Symposium) and (Change Management Playbook Navigating and sustaining change when implementing a Science of Reading curriculum). Let’s call them Symposium and Navigating.

Navigating tells readers that it helps teachers move away from ineffective legacy practices and start making shifts to evidence-based practices. The claim that “legacy practices” are “ineffective” is not evidence-based. The other assertion that SoR is evidence-based has no peer-reviewed research backing it.

Sally Riordan is a Senior Research Fellow at the University College London. In Britain, they have many of the same issues with reading instruction. In her recent research, she noted:

“In 2023, however, researchers at the University of Warwick pointed out something that should have been obvious for some time but has been very much overlooked – that following the evidence is not resulting in the progress we might expect.

“A series of randomised controlled trials, including one looking at how to improve literacy through evidence, have suggested that schools that use methods based on research are not performing better than schools that do not.”

In Symposium, we see quotes from Kareem Weaver who co-founded Fulcrum in Oakland, California and is its executive director. Weaver also was managing director of the New School Venture Fund, where Powell Jobs served on the board. He works for mostly white billionaires to the detriment of his community. (Page 15)

Both Symposium and Navigating have the same quote, “Our friends at the Reading League say that instruction based on the Science of Reading ‘will elevate and transform every community, every nation, through the power of literacy.”’

Who is the Reading League and where did they come from?

Dr. Maria Murray is the founder and CEO of The Reading League. It seems to have been hatched at the University of Syracuse and State University of New York at Oswego by Murray and Professor Jorene Finn in 2017. That year, they took in $11,044 in contributions (EIN: 81-0820021) and in 2018, another $109,652. Then in 2019, their revenues jumped 20 times to $2,240,707!

Jorene Finn worked for Cambria Learning Group and was a LETRS facilitator at Lexia. That means the group had serious connections to the corporate SoR initiative before they began.

With Amplify’s multiple citations of The Reading League, I speculated that the source of that big money in 2019 might have been Powell Jobs. Her Waverly Street Foundation (AKA Emerson Collective Foundation) only shows one large donation of $95,000,000 in 2019. It went to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation (EIN: 20-5205488), a donor-directed dark money fund.

There is no way of following that $95 million.

The Reading League Brain Scan Proving What?

Professor Paul Thomas of Furman University noted the League’s over-reliance on brain scans and shared:

“Many researchers in neurobiology (e.g., Elliott et al., 2020; Hickok, 2014; Lyon, 2017) have voiced alarming concerns about the validity and preciseness of brain imaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to detect reliable biomarkers in processes such as reading and in the diagnosis of other mental activity….

“And Mark Seidenberg, a key neuroscientist cited by the “science of reading” movement, offers a serious wcaution about the value of brain research: “Our concern is that although reading science is highly relevant to learning in the classroom setting, it does not yet speak to what to teach, when, how, and for whom at a level that is useful for teachers.”

“Beware The Reading League because it is an advocacy movement that is too often little more than cherry-picking, oversimplification, and a thin veneer for commercial interests in the teaching of reading.”

The push to implement SoR is a new way to sell what Amplify originally called “personalized learning.”This corporate movement conned legislators, many are co-conspirators, into passing laws forcing schools and teachers to use the SoR-related programs, equipment and testing.

SoR is about economic gain for its purveyors and not science based.

When politicians and corporations control education, children and America lose.

To read an earlier post by Tom Ultican on this topic, see this.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Failure, For-Profit, Klein, Joel, Literacy, Online Learning, Research, Technology
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