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Peter Greene: The Book Banners Will Never Be Satisfied

By dianeravitch
November 8, 2023 //
7

Peter Greene warns that the people who want to ban books will never be satisfied.

He writes:

At the heart of the raging controversy about reading restrictions, there are books about which reasonable adults can disagree, even books that the most ardent free speecher might not want their younger children to read. This is why one tactic of the reading restriction crowd is to shove the most extreme excerpts and pictures in front of audiences. If you aspire to being a reasonable person in these debates, you probably accept the premise that there are some books that do not belong in the middle school library.

But no matter how reasonable you want to be, you have to remember one thing.

The book banners, reading restrictors, censors, ultra-conservative crowd, whatever you want to call them–the people out in front of this drive– are never going to be satisfied.

Greene reviews the list of books that the censors want to purge in Collier County, Florida. It’s an astonishing list, because it contains books that have been taught for decades without incident. One must wonder how many students are actually reading the books that are considered offensive.

So what books did Collier County find as dangerous as guns and drugs? The list is long, but PEN America is sharing it; here are some highlights.

Some of the usuals are here– Steven King, Ellen Hopkins, Toni Morrison. But Ernest Hemmingway? Three are on the list, including The Sun Also Rises which I taught for years and while, yes, sex is obliquely (really obliquely) an idea in the book, digging out sexual content would be a hopeless quest.

Dune Chronicles? Steve Martin’s novel Shopgirl? One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest? 2001: A Space Odyssey– I mean, seriously, Clarke is one of the most asexual authors in all of SF.

Many Waters??!! The Madeline L’Engle second sequel to Wrinkle in Time is, like the rest of the series, soaked hard in religious ideas, but Many Waters has for sexual content some heavy flirting. Flowers for Algernon, also regularly taught and unsexy. The Once and Future King, T. H. Whites four-book Arthurian doorstop that is the basis for both Disney’s Sword in the Stone and the musical Camelot and, again, not very sexy.

Man in the Iron Mask, the final of Dumas’s three Three Musketeers novels published in the mid-nineteenth century, when no literary characters ever had sex at all. This is one of several items on the list that lead me to suspect that, in the time honored tradition of non-readers, the compilers of the list skipped the book and watched a movie version instead.

And, believe it or not, both Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, the two Ayn Rand cornerstones. Granted, I agree that nobody ever needs to read Atlas Shrugged ever, but if you feel so compelled, go ahead. Both books, other than presenting Rand’s bizarro notions about romance and some very ungraphic depictions of what appears to be angry sex, these are not ban-worthy books. I mean, I deeply dislike them for their blundering prose and teenaged sociopathic egoism promotion, but I wouldn’t ban them.

Do they want students to read anything?

As Greene notes, PEN America made the list of banned books available. It also pointed out that Collier County “responded to growing restrictions from the state by requiring parents to grant permission for their students to access school libraries. District administration also requires parental permission slips to use nicknames for students.”

Categories Censorship, Democracy, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom to Read, Literacy

Paul Thomas: Our Perpetual “Crisis in Education” Is Fueled by Unreliable, Invalid Test Scores

By dianeravitch
November 3, 2023 //
10

Paul Thomas of Furman University is a clear-sighted analyst of education policy. He is fearless when it comes to calling out frauds. This post is a good example.

He writes:

“The administrations in charge,” write Gilles Deleuze in Postscript on the Societies of Control, “never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons” (p. 4).

Deleuze’s generalization about “supposedly necessary reforms” serves as an important entry point into the perpetual education crisis in the US. Since A Nation at Risk, public education has experienced several cycles of crisis that fuel ever-new and ever-different sets of standards and high-stakes testing.

Even more disturbing is that for at least a century, “the administrations in charge” have shouted that US children cannot read—with the current reading crisis also including the gobsmacking additional crisis that teachers of reading do not know how to teach reading.

The gasoline that is routinely tossed on the perpetual fire of education crisis is test scores—state accountability tests, NAEP, SAT, ACT, etc.

While all that test data itself may or may not be valuable information for both how well students are learning and how to better serve those students through reform, ultimately all that testing has almost nothing to do with either of those goals; in fact, test data in the US are primarily fuel for that perpetual state of crisis.

Here is the most recent example—2023 ACT scores:

I have noted that reactions and overreactions to NAEP in recent years follow a similar set of problems found in reactions/overreactions to the SAT for many decades; the lessons from those reactions include:

  • Lesson: Populations being tested impact data drawn from tests.
  • Lesson: Ranking by test data must account for population differences among students tested.
  • Lesson: Conclusions drawn from test data must acknowledge purpose of test being used (see Gerald Bracey).

The social media and traditional media responses to 2023 ACT data expose a few more concerns about media, public, and political misunderstanding of test data as well as how “the administrations in charge” depend on manipulating test data to insure the perpetual education crisis.

Many people have confronted the distorting ways in which the ACT data are being displayed; certainly the mainstream graph from Axios above suggests “crisis”; however, by simply modifying the X/Y axes, that same data appear at least less dramatic and possibly not even significant if the issues I list above are carefully considered….

This crisis-of-the-day about the ACT parallels the central problem with NAEP, a test that seems designed to mislead and not inform since NAEP’s “Proficient” feeds a false narrative that a majority of students are not on grade level as readers.

The ACT crisis graph being pushed by mainstream media is less a marker of declining educational quality in the US and more further proof that “the administrations in charge” want and need testing data to justify “supposedly necessary reforms,” testing as gas for the perpetual education crisis fire.

Please open the link to read this excellent analysis in full.

Categories Accountability, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Hoax, Lies, Literacy, NAEP, Standardized Testing

Phonics Is Important. But There Is No “Science of Reading”

By dianeravitch
November 1, 2023 //
48

One of my grandsons sent me an article about the national rush to mandate “the science of reading,” and it caused me to explain briefly (without boring him) the background of the latest panacea.

I didn’t tell him the history of the “reading wars,” which I researched and wrote about in Left Back (2000). I didn’t tell him that reading instruction has swung back and forth between the phonetic method and the “whole word” method since the introduction of public schooling in the first quarter of the 19th century. Horace Mann opposed phonics. But the popular McGuffey readers of that century were phonetic. In 1930, the Dick-and-Jane readers were introduced, and they swept the country. Unlike the McGuffey readers, they featured pictures of children (white and suburban), they used simple words that could be easily recognized, and they were bright and colorful. By the 1950s, Dick and Jane style readers were used in about 80% of American schools. They relied on the whole word method, also know as look-say.

In 1955, this national consensus was disrupted by the publication of Rudolf Flesch’s wildly popular book, Why Johnny Can’t Read, which castigated the look-say method and urged a revival of phonics. The fervor for phonics then is similar to the fervor now.

But the debate about which method was best quickly became politicized. “Bring back phonics” was the battle cry of very conservative groups, who lambasted the whole-word method as the conspiratorial work of liberal elites. Phonics thus was unfairly tarnished as a rightwing cause.

The definitive book about the teaching of reading was written in 1967 by Harvard literacy expert Jeanne Chall: Learning to Read: The Great Debate. Chall wrote about the importance of phonics as part of beginning reading instruction, followed up by wonderful children’s literature. She warned against going to extremes, a warning that has been ignored with every pendulum swing.

The 1980s began the dominance of whole language, which brought back whole-word sight reading and de-emphasized phonics. Textbook companies boasted that their programs were whole language. Literacy conferences were focused on whole language. Phonics was out. Many reading teachers held on their phonics books, even though phonics was out of style.

There is always a crisis in reading, so in the late 1990s, the pendulum began to move again. As it happened, a very influential supporter of phonics held a key position at the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Reid Lyon was director of the NIH’s National Institute of Child Health and Development. His field of expertise was learning disabilities.

From Wikipedia:

From 1992 to 2005, Lyon served as a research neuropsychologist and the chief of the Child Development and Behavior Branch of the NICHD at the National Institutes of Health; in this role he developed and oversaw research programs in cognitive neuroscience, learning and reading development and disorders, behavioral pediatrics, cognitive and affective development, School Readiness, and the Spanish to English Reading Research program. He designed, developed and directed the 44-site NICHD Reading Research Network.

Lyon selected the members of the National Reading Panel. Like him, most were experimental researchers in higher education. Only one—Joanne Yatvin— was experienced as an elementary school teacher and principal. She wrote a “minority view” dissenting from the report, and she worried that the report would be misused.

President George W. Bush signed No Child Left Behind into law on January 8, 2002. This law was the single largest intrusion of the federal government into education in American history. Before NCLB, education was a state responsibility. Since passage of NCLB, the federal government established mandates that schools had to obey.

One of the components of this law was the Reading First program. RF was based on the report of the National Reading Panel, which emphasized the importance of phonemic awareness, phonics, decoding, and fluency.

The Reading First program allocated $6 billion over six years to encourage districts to adopt the “science of reading,” as established by the National Reading panel.

There were two reasons that the program ended.

First, there were financial scandals. Google “Reading First Program Scandals”). The New York Times reported here about conflicts of interest and steering of contracts to favored textbook publishers. “In a searing report that concludes the first in a series of investigations into complaints of political favoritism in the reading initiative, known as Reading First, the report said officials improperly selected the members of review panels that awarded large grants to states, often failing to detect conflicts of interest. The money was used to buy reading textbooks and curriculum for public schools nationwide.”

Second, the final evaluation of the program found that it taught what it aimed to teach but there was no improvement in students’ comprehension.

Here is the summary of the final evaluation:

The findings presented in this report are generally consistent with findings presented in the study’s Interim Report, which found statistically significant impacts on instructional time spent on the five essential components of reading instruction promoted by the program (phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension) in grades one and two, and which found no statistically significant impact on reading comprehension as measured by the SAT 10. In addition to data on the instructional and student achievement outcomes reported in the Interim Report, the final report also presents findings based upon information obtained during the study’s third year of data collection: data from a measure of first grade students’ decoding skill, and data from self-reported surveys of educational personnel in study schools.

Analyses of the impact of Reading First on aspects of program implementation, as reported by teachers and reading coaches, revealed that the program had statistically significant impacts on several domains. The information obtained from the Test of Silent Word Reading Fluency indicates that Reading First had a positive and statistically significant impact on first grade students’ decoding skill.

The final report also explored a number of hypotheses to explain the pattern of observed impacts. Analyses that explored the association between the length of implementation of Reading First in the study schools and reading comprehension scores, as well as between the number of years students had been exposed to Reading First instruction and reading comprehension scores were inconclusive. No statistically significant variation across sites in the pattern of impacts was found. Correlational analyses suggest that there is a positive association between time spent on the five essential components of reading instruction promoted by the program and reading comprehension measured by the SAT 10, but these findings appear to be sensitive to model specification and the sample used to estimate the relationship.

The study finds, on average, that after several years of funding the Reading First program, it has a consistent positive effect on reading instruction yet no statistically significant impact on student reading comprehension. Findings based on exploratory analyses do not provide consistent or systematic insight into the pattern of observed impacts.

After the disgrace of the Reading First program, support for phonics dissipated. But in the past few years, journalists (led by Emily Hanford) have trumpeted the idea that the report of the National Reading Panel established the “science of reading.” New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote about the “Mississippi Miracle,“ claiming that the “science of reading” had lifted fourth grade reading scores, and no new spending was needed in a very poorly resourced state. Kristof did not explain why the SOR did not cause a rise in eighth grade scores in Mississippi, nor did he understand that retaining low-scoring third graders raises the percentage of fourth graders who get high test scores. State after state is now mandating the “science of reading.”

And so the cycle begins again.

Categories Education Reform, History, Literacy, NCLB (No Child Left Behind)

Did Justice Sotomayer Accept a “Bribe” to Speak in Mississippi?

By dianeravitch
August 26, 2023 //
22

This article was written by Margaret McMullan, an author and former professor of creative writing. She lives in Pass Christian, Mississippi. It appeared in the Washington Post. She recalls when she invited Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayer to speak at the Mississippi Book Festival, no expenses paid. It was a long shot.

She wrote:

One rainy day in April 2019, my phone buzzed and the caller ID lit up with “Supreme Court.” I stared at the two words for a moment. Was I in trouble?

Then I remembered.

A few months earlier, I’d sent Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor a letter inviting her to speak at the Mississippi Book Festival, which runs every August. Our offer was the same as it had been for other authors: a $250 stipend, a ride to and from the airport and a large, appreciative audience. In addition, we would purchase 1,500 copies of Sotomayor’s books to give to students. Could the justice please travel to Jackson, Miss., to talk to kids for two days? In the hottest time of the year?

Sotomayor’s “Turning Pages,” aimed at children ages 4 to 8, had come out in 2018. In her 2013 memoir suitable for young adults, “My Beloved World,” Sotomayor wrote about reading and the importance of education in her life, as well as her challenges with diabetes. I was sure that both books would resonate with Mississippi students. During our call, Le said the offer was interesting; the justice had never been to Mississippi. I outlined the potential impact Sotomayor would have on students, noting our state’s high poverty rate and its problem with childhood diabetes.

Le said she would get back to me.

And she did, with a few more questions — details about flight connections, book-signing and so on. I said we would be happy to upgrade her flight. Nope, the publisher was handling her flight. I said we’d be happy to upgrade her hotel room. Nope, the justice was fine with a Marriott, plus her security detail was familiar with the layout.
So far, so good.

Subsequent emails and phone conversations were similar. No, Le said, the justice did not need us to provide lunch or dinner. No, she could not accept the $250 stipend.

Did Le urge me to buy more books? No. She did ask whether we wanted any of the copies of “My Beloved World” to be in Spanish. In fact, we did, and I hadn’t thought to order them.

When Sotomayor came to Jackson, we had her speaking in the sanctuary at Galloway Memorial United Methodist Church, the church where Eudora Welty once worshiped. Backstage, Sotomayor smiled when she saw my clipboard of questions. She helped me with my tote bag full of books. She then clapped her hands together and said something like, “Okay. Here’s what we’re going to do.”

In addition to our planned onstage interview, she said, she wanted the freedom to go off-script. “They’re children,” I recall her saying. “I want to be sure I get to their questions.”

“Perfect,” I said.

So the justice took a seat in one of the side pews and watched as Dav Pilkey, the author and illustrator of “Captain Underpants,” entertained a delighted audience of about a thousand students, drawing cartoons as he spoke. Then, it was our turn on the stage. I asked my clipboard questions and Sotomayor answered. Afterward, she got up and spoke from the heart, walking up and down the aisles.

In answer to the students’ questions, she told them about growing up in Puerto Rico, eating mangoes off the tree, going away to college for the first time and working in a male-dominated court system.
She talked to these kids. She asked them their names, what they liked in school, what they wanted to do with their lives. She hugged them and posed for pictures with them. After she finished, she signed their books and took more pictures.

“My success came about because I read,” she told them.

The following morning, we did it all over again for another packed sanctuary, with Sotomayor telling even more personal stories about her life and talking about a civics program she and Justice Neil M. Gorsuch work on. She also gave us homework: Go out and make friends with someone who doesn’t look like you.

My only regret is that we ran out of books. I wish we had ordered more.

There very well might be a culture of poor ethical conduct in the Supreme Court, but there is no moral equivalency between justices accepting rides on private jets to vacation with friends who had cases before the court and Sotomayor talking about her books and her life to a crowd of mesmerized young readers.

The standard royalty rate for authors is less than 10 percent of the sales price. I don’t know anything about Sotomayor’s deal with her publishers, but 10 percent would make her cut of the 1,500 books our foundation purchased approximately $2,250 — for which she had to fly to Mississippi and give two presentations. During the hottest month of the year.

Was that a bribe? You be the judge.

Categories Accountability, Ethics, Literacy, Mississippi

Texas: New Law Will Bankrupt Small Bookstores

By dianeravitch
August 5, 2023 //
16

The Texas legislature passed a law in its last session requiring booksellers to rate any books they sell to public schools for its sexual content. And to rate any book they have ever sold in the past to public schools or to teachers.

The law threatens the survival of some 300 independent bookstores across the state. “And by April of next year, every bookseller in the state is tasked with submitting to the Texas Education Agency a list of every book they’ve ever sold to a teacher, librarian or school that qualifies for a sexual rating and is in active use. The stores also are required to issue recalls for any sexually explicit books.”

Small bookstores, like Blue Willow in Houston, may be bankrupted if they are compelled to comply. Blue Willow has two full-time employees and 12 part-time employees. It sells books to 21 school districts. Sales to schools comprises about a fifth of the store’s business.

The law is set to take effect on September 1.

Blue Willow has joined a lawsuit to block the bill. The lawsuit was filed by Austin’s BookPeople, the American Booksellers Association, the Association of American Publishers, the Authors Guild and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. “The lawsuit argues booksellers will suffer financial damage if they lose school-related business. Koehler estimates that a fifth of Blue Willow’s business is with schools.”

The legislature doesn’t care about the financial impact on small bookstores like Blue Willow.

Let’s see if the courts do.

Categories Censorship, Freedom to Read, Houston, Librarians, Libraries, Literacy, Teachers, Texas

Nancy Flanagan: Why Do Moms for Liberty Support the “Science of Reading”?

By dianeravitch
July 10, 2023 //
163

Nancy Flanagan, retired teacher in Michigan, wonders why the extremist Moms for Liberty have jumped into the reading wars on the side of the “Science of Reading.” The politicization of reading is not new. Phonics has long been a rightwing cause, unfairly, in my view. Every reading teacher should know how to teach phonics.

What’s new is the idea that only phonics can be considered “the science of reading.” This conceit was hatched by the National Reading Panel in 2000. The new Bush administration was super pro-phonics and inserted a $6 billion phonics program called Reading First into No Chikd Left Behind. After six years, Reading First was abandoned because it was riddled with conflicts of interest and self-dealing, and an extensive evaluation concluded that it didn’t make a difference.

Flanagan is especially interested in reading instruction in middle school.

She begins:

I am fascinated by the increasing politicization—no other word for it—of reading instruction. How to best teach reading has always been contentious in the United States, from the 1950s look-say method featuring Dick and Jane, accused of letting Ivan slip ahead of us in the space race, right up until last week, when Moms for Liberty jumped into the Faux Science of Reading (FSoR) fray.

It’s unclear why Moms for Liberty has aligned itself with the phonics-forward FSoR movement. I get that white parents, accustomed to being first in line for educational goodies, feel threatened when they’re told that other children may be having their needs met first. I know racism is a thread that has run through the entire history of public education in America. I also know that many ordinary citizens feel bewildered and angered by rapidly changing social beliefs and customs around acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community.

A friend of my says you can measure social progress by observing who can be beat up on Saturday night without consequences—Wives and girlfriends? Ethnic minorities? Gentle souls like Matthew Shepherd and Elijah McLain? I hate living in a country where threats align with archaic ideas about who’s in charge of our customs and institutions, including public schools. I hate it, but I understand why it happens.

What I do NOT understand is why a far-right, power-grabbing, deep-pocket-funded group of purported “concerned moms” are choosing to endorse One Right Way to learn the skill of reading.

Surely some of their children learned to read using cuing systems or word walls or balanced literacy. Surely some of their children picked up reading quickly and easily reading stories on grandma’s lap. Surely some of their children had caring and creative teachers who employed multiple strategies to nurture genuine literacy.

Which makes me think that a lot of the enmity around learning to read stems from free-floating hostility toward public education and schoolteachers in general, greatly exacerbated by recent events: a pandemic, a child-care crisis, growing and dangerous inequities, and terrible political leadership that plays to the worst in human nature.

Please open the link and read her account of how impassioned this debate has become and her experience teaching music to students in middle school.

Categories Curriculum, Education Reform, Extremism, Literacy

Nancy Bailey Eviscerates the “Mississippi Miracle”

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2023 //
30

Veteran teacher and blogger Nancy Bailey was stunned by Nicholas Kristof’s column in the New York Times describing Mississippi’s schools as a national model of success. Her reaction: Can children learn to read when they are segregateed and hungry?

Bailey points out that Kristof is praising the work of Jeb Bush, who has pioneered third grade retention and even funded the study that allegedly proves the value of holding back third graders who flunk the reading test. This helps to improve fourth grade scores but multiple other studies assert that it harms those who are held back.

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

Rcharvet: How I Taught My Students to Love Reading

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2023 //
26

Rcharvet, a retired teacher and regular commenter here, explains how the pedagogy of the Commin Core taught his students to dislike reading. They were supposed to read excerpts of books, not a complete book. They were expected to analyze the meaning of words and sentences instead of following the narrative of the story. Mr. Charvet became a subversive. He explains here.

We had to use a program called Study Sync. The kids called it, “Study Stink.” It was a canned computer program that used excerpts from stories. It drove me nuts. A lot of highly-intellectual processing for kids who were “emerging readers.” I had to “study my brains out” to figure out what the “end game” was and then how to explain/teach it to my students. Once “I” got it (not lying took a lot of study time on my part) I could teach it. It was still boring.

We had “Lord of the Flies” but only an excerpt. None of the kids got it. I found several YouTube videos that reviewed and explained the story. Once I did that, one of my students said, “I went home and read the whole book three times! It was one of my favorites.”

When I taught reading, I would read out loud so kids would HEAR the characters voices (yes I did the voices as well). For struggling readers they typically move through a sentence like they are walking on glass. But, we worked together.

One book that we started was “The Pig Man.” It started out slow (geez I was slow) but started liking the book to the point kids were saying, “Can we read The Pig Man and find out what happened?” They felt the words. They connected to the characters. We could ask questions like, “If you were Tommy what would you do in this case? What should the Pig Man do about the broken statue?” Then because I was making a connection to the book and trying to follow the curriculum I was deemed “moving too slow” and the department head said, “Just collect all the books and move on.”

What did I know?

And then the kids had to take Accelerated Reader tests. This told them what type of book they qualified to read by their AR or Lexile number. When they went to the library the librarian would tell them, “Oh, the rocket ship book is not in your Lexile number range, you cannot read about rocket ships.” I grumbled something like, “This is f-ing messed up under my breath.”

Then, I noticed their test scores all went down. I asked them, “I am curious. You were all doing so well and then I noticed that your AR scores dropped (it’s okay) but I am just curious.” They told me the test added a clock-timer that their eyes kept looking at. “We got anxious because we could tell we only had so much time to answer the question.” Some Kids decided to punch any answer just to be done. Wow, that was fun.

And when we went to distant learning, one little girl asked, “Mr. Charvet, can I read this book because it is not my Lexile number.” I told her, “You read any book you want. Just do what I told you: if you don’t understand a word, look it up or put it on your sticky note so you can keep reading. I will help you later. But if you keep stopping, you will lose the flow and that’s no fun.”

The reading was painful to the point, I wanted to skip it. But, I did find some great FREE programs online that the kids loved as long as they didn’t tell anybody — making reading fun, our little secret.

I printed out all the papers because most kids like to have something they can “feel” when they read. The computer reading hurt my eyes; it created headaches for many of my kids.

When I taught art I had a magazine cabinet for collages. I looked up one day and there were a group of middle school boys giggling and having a good time. “Hey you kids! What are you doing back there?” I reminded them there was no reading, just collecting pictures. Then I said, “Nah, what did you find?” “Mr. Charvet, check out this giant spider egg that was buried in the ground. And look at this old boat they found. And look at this…and this… and this. They had so much fun. I said, “You know I come back here to look for pictures, too. Then an hour goes by after I read all these great articles and learned so much. You know, this is the stuff (by knowing) you can win thousands of dollars on a game show!” For crying out loud, they gave away $250K for knowing that Frodo (LOTR) was not a Pokemon. We all laughed, but that kind of reading didn’t count because they could only read books. You know REAL books.

I loved reading everything from matchbook covers and especially on the back of cereal boxes — to the comics that would take me on adventures.

Nowadays, “Yes we know Spiderman saved the day. But what was the tone of his thinking? What do you think he meant by using this word? In sentence three, he used plethora. How can that be applied in other ways?” Man, we were just happy Spiderman got rid of the bad guys. Peace out.

Categories Common Core, Creativity, Curriculum, Education Industry, Failure, Joy, Language, Literacy, Literature, Real Education

Tom Ultican: “The Right to Read” is Horse Manure

By dianeravitch
June 24, 2023 //
25

Tom Ultican was a computer scientist before he became a high school teacher of advanced mathematics and science in California. Now that he is retired, he is a scholar of the corporate reform movement, whose goal is to privatize public schools.

In this illuminating post, Ultican analyzes a documentary called “The Right to Read,” which he compares to the propaganda film “Waiting for Superman.” Behind the film, he writes, is the whole apparatus of the corporate reform movement, armed with derogatory claims about public schools and a simplistic cure for literacy.

He begins:

The new 80-minute video “The Right to Read”was created in the spirit of “Waiting for Superman.” It uses false data interpretations to make phony claims about a non-existent reading crisis. Oakland’s NAACP 2nd Vice President Kareem Weaver narrates the film. Weaver is a full throated advocate for the Science of Reading (SoR) and has many connections with oligarch financed education agendas. The video which released February 11, 2023 was made by Jenny Mackenzie and produced by LeVar (Kunta Kinte) Burton.

Since 2007, Jenny Mackenzie has been the executive director of Jenny Mackenzie Films in Salt Lake City. Neither Mackenzie nor Burton has experience or training as educators. However, Burton did star on the PBS series “Reading Rainbow.” He worked on the show as an actor not a teacher.

One of the first media interviews about “The Right to Read” appeared on KTVX channel 4 in Salt Lake City. Ben Heuston from the Waterford Institute answered questions about the new film and the supposed “reading crisis” in American public schools. Heuston who has a PhD in psychology from Brigham Young University claimed that two-thirds of primary grade students in America read below grade level. That is a lie. He is conflating proficiency in reading on the National Assessment of Education Performance (NAEP) with grade level and should know better.

Ultican shows the graphs of NAEP scores over the past thirty years: reading scores have been unchanged for 30 years. The rhetoric about “the crisis in reading” is a hoax.

Misinterpreting the data shown above is the basis for the specious crisis in reading claims. It is known that students develop at different rates and in the lower grades the differences can be dramatic. That explains some of the low scoring. All but a very small percentage of these fourth grader will be reading adequately when they get to high school.

America’s leading authorities on teaching reading are frustrated. Their voices are being drowned out by forces who want to monetize reading education and privatize it.

Ultican names names and identifies corporate sponsors. Somebody expects to make a heap of money from this latest manufactured crisis.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Corporate Reform, Disruption, Education Industry, Fake, For-Profit, Lies, Literacy, Media, Oakland, Privatization

Nancy Bailey: Why Do Corporate Reformers Love “The Science of Reading”?

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2023 //
72

I apologize in advance. I am habitually skeptical of fads and movements. When a hot new idea sweeps through education, it’s a safe bet that it will fall flat in the fullness of time. If there is one consistent theme that runs through everything I have written for the past half century, it is this: beware of the latest thing. Be skeptical.

The latest thing is the “Science of Reading.” I have always been a proponent of phonics, so I won’t tolerate being pilloried by the phonics above all crowd. If you read my 2000 book, you will see that I was a critic of Balanced Literacy, which was then the fad du jour.

Yet it turns my stomach to see Educatuon journalist and mainstream dailies beating the drums for SOR. As you know, I reacted with nausea when New York Times’ columnist Nick Kristof said that the SOR was so powerful that it made new spending unnecessary, made desegregation unnecessary, made class size reduction unnecessary. A dream come true for those in search of a cheap miracle!

Veteran teacher Nancy Bailey, like me, is not persuaded by the hype. She wrote a column demonstrating that the corporate reform world—billionaires and politicians—are swooning for the Science of Reading.

She writes:

Many of the same individuals who favor charter schools, private schools, and online instruction, including corporate reformers, use the so-called Science of Reading (SoR) to make public school teachers look like they’ve failed at teaching reading.

Politicians and corporations have had a past and current influence on reading instruction to privatize public schools with online programs. This has been going on for years, so why aren’t reading scores soaring? The SoR involves primarily online programs, but it’s often unclear whether they work.

The Corporate Connection to the SoR

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation fund numerous nonprofits to end public education. The National Council of Teacher Quality (NCTQ), started by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation backed by Gates and other corporations, an astroturf organization, promotes the SoR.

SoR promoters ignore the failure of Common Core State Standards (CCSS), embedded in most online programs, like iReady and Amplify. CCSS, influenced by the Gates Foundation, has been around for years.

Also, despite its documented failure ($335 million), the Gates Foundation Measures of Effective Teaching, a past reform initiative (See VAMboozled!), irreparably harmed the teaching profession, casting doubt on teachers’ ability.

EdReports, another Gates-funded group, promotes their favored programs, but why trust what they say about reading instruction? They’ve failed at their past education endeavors.

But the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation continues to reinvent itself and funds many nonprofits that promote their agenda, including the SoR.

Former Governor Jeb Bush’s Organizations

Former Governor Bush of Florida (1999 to 2007) promoted SoR, but if children have reading problems, states should review past education policies, including those encouraged by former Governors, including Mr. Bush. His policymaking in public education has been around for a long time.

One should question, for example, Mr. Bush’s third-grade retention policy ignoring the abundance of anti-retention research showing its harmful effects, including its high correlation with students dropping out of school.

He rejected the class size amendment and worked to get it repealed. Yet lowering class size, especially in K-3rd grade, could benefit children learning to read.

As far back as 2011, Mr. Bush promoted online learning. He’s not talking about technology supplementing teachers’ lessons. He wants technology to replace teachers!

Here’s a 2017 post written in ExelInEd, Mr. Bush’s organization, A Vision for the Future of K-3 Reading Policy: Personalized Learning for Mastery. They’re promoting online learning to teach reading as proven, but there’s no consistent evidence this will work.

Here’s the ExcelinEd Comprehensive Early Policy Toolkit for 2021 where teachers often must be aligned to the SoR with Foundations of Reading a Pearson Assessment. If the teacher’s role loses its autonomy, technology can easily replace them. 

Laurene Powell Jobs and Rupert Murdoch’s Amplify

How did Rupert Murdoch’s old program Amplify become the Science of Reading?

Rupert Murdoch invested in Amplify, News Corp.’s $1 Billion Plan to Overhaul Education Is Riddled With Failures. Then Laurene Powell Jobs purchased it. Does a change in ownership miraculously mean program improvement?

Teachers from Oklahoma described how student expectations with Amplify were often developmentally inappropriate, so how is this good reading science?

Many SoR supporters who imply teachers fail to teach reading do podcasts for Amplify. Are they compensated for their work? Where’s the independent research to indicate that Amplify works?

Amplify, and other online reading programs, are marketed ferociously to school districts with in-house research relying on testimonials. When schools adopt these programs, teachers have a reduced role in students’ instruction.

Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) and Their Data Collection

Priscilla Chan pushes Reach Every Reader, including prestigious universities that write SoR reports.

Why must they collect data involving children and their families?

CZI promotes the Age of Learning and ABC Mouse for young children. The reviews of this program appear primarily negative.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Charter Schools, Class size, Corporate Reform, Curriculum, Education Industry, Fake, For-Profit, Funding, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Literacy, Online Education, Research, Teachers and Teaching, Technology
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