The latest “criticize teachers for not teaching the ‘science’ of reading” can be found in “Schools Should Follow the ‘Science of Reading,’ say National Education Groups” in the Gates funded Education Week.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funds most of the organizations in this report that criticize public schools and teachers for low NAEP scores. Yet they are behind the Common Core State Standards, which appear to be an abysmal failure.
Most individuals and groups never teach children themselves, but they create policies that affect how and what teachers are forced to teach. They have always been about privatizing public education.
Reading instruction is the conduit for corporate school reformers to reach their privatization goals. Reading has always been one of the most important functions of a public school.
Here are the organizations blaming schools.
This group put Common Core State Standards in place in 2010, ten years ago.
How can they blame teachers and public schools for reading failure? Most teachers have worked fearfully towards these standards.
If children aren’t reading well, Achieve should revisit the English Language Arts Standards for Kindergarten which describes Phonological Awareness and Phonics Word Recognition and goals like the following:
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RF.K.2.d Isolate and pronounce the initial, medial vowel, and final sounds (phonemes) in three-phoneme (consonant-vowel-consonant, or CVC) words.1 (This does not include CVCs ending with /l/, /r/, or /x/.)
Alliance for Excellent Education
This group highlights Future Ready Schools, putting children in front of screens. A class of 60 children in front of computers? See “Inside the primary school class in the UK with 63 pupils.
There is no evidence that technology alone will make better readers.
Collaborative for Student Success
This group criticizes public schools for a decline in NAEP reading scores, with an “urgent call to action,” but they’ve pushed high-stakes standards on the backs of children for years! If they want to blame anyone for less than ideal reading scores, they should point to themselves!
They work with Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change. Bush has foisted many harmful school reforms on the State of Florida and the country, including third grade retention. Chiefs for Change and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute are shills for privatization. It has been this way for years, so why aren’t they reexamining their reform effects on schools?
Scroll to the bottom to see who’s running this show. The 2010 Teacher of the Year is creating programs for the Learning Channel, which parents will need to rely on once their public schools are gone.
They partner with Amplify. It’s online reading instruction.
National Association of Elementary School Principals
Why are school principals on this list? Where the hell have they been all these years? What are they doing to assist teachers in the teaching of reading? Most of the parents I know blame principals for the reading problems in their schools.
Here’s a quote from their website.
Now more than ever, educators must understand the need to support a seamless continuum of learning for every child across prekindergarten through the third grade, typically age three to age 8. As investments in aligned systems has gained momentum, a critical component has been missing: professional learning opportunities to build the capacity of early childhood leaders to effectively support the learning and development of the children they serve.
National Council on Teacher Quality.
This is an astroturf group of school reformers. NCTQ is quick to criticize teachers and their education schools. They’ve set themselves up as experts, which they are not.
It’s difficult to find a connection with the NUA and the criticism of what teachers are doing in the classroom. I don’t understand why they’re on this list.
They have a report called Powering the Digital Revolution. Scroll down to the donors for 2018.
Military Child Education Coalition,
They are connected to Achieve and Common Core. Here are their donors.
We are a professional coalition with a diverse community consisting of public school districts, private schools, colleges and universities, small businesses and corporations, organizations, military commands and installations, military families, and caring individuals from local communities across our Nation … all for the sake of the child.
They constantly shill for school privatization while pretending they support schools and teachers.
_________
The science of reading, as it stands, is currently biased and incomplete. It is being used to destroy public schools and the teaching profession.
This reading debate should be between those closest to the child, teachers and parents, giving them the power to make changes when called for in their public schools. They should be able to do this through their local school boards.
This conversation should take place, because something is wrong when parents are unhappy with their child’s schooling. It isn’t a debate that will be won by yelling at each other on social media, but by working together at the school level.
It should include a state department of education in each state that investigates problems and isn’t about getting rid of public education. The U.S. Department of Education should also be working to better address the controversy surrounding reading and what’s behind denying students with reading disabilities their IDEA rights.
Universities should review how they teach reading, but they also shouldn’t be forced by these groups to destroy reading practices that have worked for years.
It is, however, difficult to do this at this time. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and the previous education secretaries, never taught, never studied reading in a university setting or worked to remediate student difficulties, and have themselves been about the business of destroying schools and de-professionalizing the teaching profession.
If you think the NAEP scores are poor, look at the groups mentioned here. It has been a rigged game for years!
There is an agenda to destroy the teaching profession so we can indoctrinate our children with a computer for each child and a personalized program to change the value system of those children who do not conform to the agenda. Nothing will come between this future of one computer, one child and no teacher in between to disrupt the goal. I do not trust any data produced by any school district or the federal government and that includes the NAEP. This data can and I believe is manipulated to create a false crisis in order so the progressive global ed reform fascists working with our government can drive in the final nail of federal/global control of education. It is the perfect Hegelian dialectic and Americans will fall for it the same as they have fallen for the false Choice movement which is also part of the agenda for profit and control, eventually and finally shutting down the voice of the public and vouchers which will suck all false education choices into the same system and the data pipeline. This is a false choice program that will leave parents with NO choice and NO voice. The final choice will be choice of location only and all elected school boards shut down to silence parents. By the time citizens wake up it will be too late and “they” are counting on that.
Karen, I think you have good reason to be concerned. While I sometimes disagree with you, I think your post is very good. I share your concerns. Thank you for your comment.
Hmm, since you believe in no data, you’ve put yourself in a position of never allowing yourself to be persuaded by evidence. Sort of like 9/11 and Area 51 conspiracy theorists. Must be lonely in your own bubble.
I can’t speak for Karen, and she and I can disagree, but schools are inundated with unnecessary data. Sometimes data is collected without parental permission. Many parents and teachers are sick of data.
Data can be manipulated. The data surrounding the science of reading is also flawed, but who’s listening?
Thanks for this, Nancy, but I think you missed an important point: The more we focus on standardized test scores, the more reading is seen as a series of small skills rather than a complex meaning-making process. Most administrative rules for identifying students labeled learning disabled and most states’ RTI frameworks also reinforce this notion, requiring that instruction be broken into the smallest bits and then taught and tested until students achieve mastery. In my many years of working with students labeled reading disabled, a common pattern was that many of these students suffered not from a disability but from poor instructional programs that led them to understand reading as sounding out and perhaps reading quickly, but not understanding.
I appreciate your comment, Cathy. I am no fan of RTI as previous posts have shown. Nor am I happy about high-stakes tests as mentioned in this post. I am concerned about the idea that systematic, explicit phonics is the only way students with disabilities will learn to read. But having also taught students with reading disabilities, I was always careful not to lay the blame of those disabilities on teachers or parents. I have studied LD and do believe reading disabilities exist.
Attack professional educators. Right out of donald’s playbook. Read frank Bruni in today’s New York Times. I like your blog! https://kaplanforkids.wordpress.com/
Thanks, Jeanne. I read it. Fascinating point about how the real professionals are gone and those like DeVos stay on.
Sandy Dixon Forrest Recipe for sucking in public tax money and making obscene profits on the backs of public school teachers and students: FINANCE inappropriate “standards” to be implemented by all teachers, REQUIRE the use of products which financially benefit the creator of the “goals,” SMILE as hired “cheerleaders” tout the benefits of the mandated program, BEAM proudly as profits roll into the companies producing the “magic” solution, CRINGE privately at dismal results, REWRITE the “cheerleader” script, AND THEN…drum roll, please.. BLAME the teachers for disappointing results of the non-educators’ (but obscenely wealthy) magic elixir to cure the problems of all public school students. RESULTS?! The sponsors of this hoax made buckets of money! Wave goodbye to the career teachers; TFA folks are cheaper and more (desperate) cooperative anyway. Don’t worry about the kiddos; just give them a double dose of grit. It’s all good…right?
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Thank you, Sandra!
Terrific blog, Nancy. I had the same reaction to reading the piece in EdWeek: ‘Why are school principals on this list? Where the hell have they been all these years?’ I don’t know much about NAESP (unlike most of the other orgs on the list), but can say that a whole lot of organizations that *sound* like they would be fully professional and research-focused to help their members are no such thing.
Once an organization starts taking grant money to stay alive and expand their ‘work,’ the core principles of their stated mission and vision often go wonky, and the staffers and CEOs decide to follow the easy money. Lots of national organizations with large, influential memberships, fell under the CCSSO spell, for example, providing PD to support the standards. There’s money behind that list of organizations.
Thanks for taking the time to comment, Nancy. Excellent point! I could sadly name some special education organizations that fell into that trap. You’re also right about the money. It’s all about that isn’t it.
I am not familiar with all of the organizations you cite in this article but I am afraid you missed the mark with Literacy How. While they do have some sort of partnership with Amplify, the sole mission of this organization is to help teachers learn about reading instruction for struggling readers (which actually benefits all readers) based on the science of reading.
I know that reading is a very controversial topic and not everyone agrees with the best method for teaching it but please don’t write Literacy How off as some online reading system that blames educators for NAEP scores. That is an unfair and inaccurate.
Hi Jill, Thank you for your comment. You’re right that reading is controversial.
Literacy How was listed in the Education Week article I cited above. They are part of what’s called a “collective” who, I quote, “In the wake of falling reading scores on the test known as the Nation’s Report Card, 12 major education groups are calling on schools to adopt evidence-based reading instruction.”
They aligned themselves with those who are supporters of Common Core and who are critical of teachers, implying they don’t understand the evidence or “science” of reading. This is insulting to professionals. They also believe in the results of the National Reading Panel which is flawed.
Let’s look at the winners in the NAEP scores. Those states are incorporating science of reading- Mississippi and Arkansas came in big! Let’s celebrate those successes too. Those teachers are getting credit for raising scores. When everyone does better, everyone does better.
I don’t think Arkansas improved, but the NAEP scores in general were not really that bad. I liked this report by Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post Answer Sheet.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/11/01/common-mistake-betsy-devos-made-about-new-naep-scores-other-problems-with-her-sky-is-falling-narrative/
My concern, Claudine, is the narrative these groups and others are using to cast teachers as failures.
Thank you.
The Mississippi scores were influenced by the new practice of the third grade reading gate. The students who would have performed poorly in fourth grade were held back and thus not tested with their age-mates.
Cathy Toll took the words right our of my mouth. But I’m posting it anyway:
Love the CCSS-ELA cite. Perfect example of what’s wrong with them. Not because it’s “phonics” per se, but because here (as everywhere, right up to 10th-11th grade stds), an organic process is broken into teeny pieces, each elevated to “skill” level. Learning as seen through the eyes of a software developer.
Excellent point! I love this. Thank you, Ginny!
What I see as a supervisor of student teachers makes me fear for future teachers’ ability to successfully address this issue. Here in NYS they are required to complete an edTPA during their student teaching. This means that too often their focus is on only the methods needed to complete the edTPA. Prospective teachers are graduating with fewer tools for assisting students and worse, a belief that the only thing that “counts” is test performance — both for themselves and their students. Thank-you for bringing attention to this issue.
Thank you for sharing, Janice. edTPA is an assessment program by Pearson, and I don’t know any teachers completing their student teaching who like it either. Most believe it is demeaning. It’s another unnecessary hurdle for those working to be career teachers, But it makes money for Pearson. So many agree with you.
I blame no one but myself for the low NAEP scores, particularly for special education students. My daughter couldn’t read and no one could help her — we are military and lived in CA, MD, and VA. I delayed learning about reading and literacy because I wanted to believe, along with my daughter’s teachers, that it was b/c we moved so much and/or developmental — we all “hoped” that the beauty of rich literature would just “take hold.” The opposite happened — my daughter was tracked to the lowest reading group, given guessing skills training, and had limited access to grade aligned knowledge. This was not the fault of her teachers — they wanted to help but couldn’t.
If, at the time, there was a conversation about pre-and-early literacy and preventative measures like reading screening and early intervention in phonological and phonemic processing skills and knowledge building, I, and other parents, could have advocated for my daughter and other children in her low reading groups.
Parents do need to ask questions at school board meetings, at the PTA, in SIT meetings, with their teacher in PT meetings — find out how your school teaches reading. Educate yourself about the simple view of reading, the Reading Rope, the 4 part processor. Understand background knowledge, cursive writing and the things that will help your child connect the sounds in language to the symbols on a page — help your child read words via decoding instead of guessing AND understand the meaning of words. I’ve learned that that’s my job too.
Now that I know better, I try to do better — and connecting the research on how students learn to read to the practice in the classroom is the best gift a parent and teacher could ever receive.
Thank you for sharing your’s and your daughter’s experience. Please don’t blame yourself. If you could go back you’d probably do the same thing. It serves no purpose.
Not sure how old your daughter is, but I like your mention of cursive if your daughter doesn’t get frustrated. I think schools that drop cursive are doing a disservice to children with reading and writing disabilities, unless those difficulties are so severe the child would be better working on a keyboard.
You might want to look into comic books or graphic novels. Children love them reading expert Stephen Krashen has written a lot about how they help. The pictures and short sentences are easy to master.
I’d also recommend magazines where stories are short and easy to read. And children can get caught up with serial books. The Berenstain Bears for young children, Nancy Drew for older children are good examples. Junie B. Jones and Beverly Cleary’s Ramona books are fun. There’s a lot of them. The more she reads the better at it she will become, along with the work on decoding words.
My thanks to Diane Ravitch.
I like that Diane said this about me and this post, “She got steamed and pointed out that none of these individuals or organizations criticizing teachers are known as teachers themselves.”
https://dianeravitch.net/2019/11/13/nancy-bailey-who-is-to-blame-for-poor-naep-reading-scores-here-are-their-names/?fbclid=IwAR1K-ouQx7iS-OdUYOocban64DYp0YdUjyWnHE4_tnFqLWcQzd41uSAMfWQ
The CC standards and their companion tests (SBAC; PARCC; Pearson) placed an undue emphasis on de-contextualized reading and a narrow band of subjective literacy skills. The test-threaten-and-punish policies of the (Coleman inspired) Arne Duncan USDOE weaponized standardized test scores. In response, students at the K to 8 level received a de-facto test prep curriculum, virtually stripped bare of any and all content knowledge that they would normally receive in a well balanced elementary and middle level school experience. Most of the reading problems noted here can be traced back to knowledge and vocabulary deficits which continue to be consequence of the reformer parade of failures.