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He rejected the class size amendment and worked to get it repealed.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.
___________
All of the individuals and groups above consistently ignore the critical concerns surrounding public schools that would go a long way to improving them, which face teachers and could affect how children learn to read.
Teaching reading involves evaluating students by qualified teachers prepared to teach reading through vital university programs that consider various reading approaches. That includes phonics. Phonics should be an integral part of any reading program, especially for students with reading difficulties.
But teachers should understand child development, how children learn to read, the disabilities that some children might face, and the many reading programs and what they offer. There’s little proof online programs will provide all that a child needs to become a good reader.
We need a new National Reading Panel that includes parents, real teachers, reading specialists, and unbiased peer-reviewed research to analyze and better understand how to assist students in reading, including those with disabilities.
But there is no mention of such collaboration because the above individuals and groups have a lock on replacing teachers with profitable online programs in the name of the Science of Reading.
As teachers continue to leave the classroom, driven out by years of corporate tampering involving public schools, and parents become convinced that technology will solve their child’s reading difficulties, schools will rely more on novice facilitators, tutors, and online instruction. Many students will miss out on the multifaceted literary environment that they deserve.
It’s easy to predict a future where few read well for meaning or care much about it.
This is excellent!!! Thanks for connecting the dots. Qualified teachers who are actually allowed to teach students verses data points are the best way to prepare readers!!
Thanks, Stefanie. Absolutely!
exactly said, Stefanie
The Reading Wars predate the Math Wars a bit further back into the ’80s. Both these “wars” have less to do with education, kids, learning, and factual research and more to do with money and political leverage. Many of the same educationally-conservative voices at the forefront of the Reading Wars made regular appearances in the Math Wars (including people who had little background in math, or little background in reading instruction, or little background in elementary education (the latter shortcoming was often promoted as an asset!)
Everything from the rhetoric to the think tanks, foundations, private funders, etc., that was prominent in the Reading Wars was likely to appear in the Math Wars. These conflicts really weren’t separate at all.
Yet after thirty to forty years of public and academic warfare, it’s clear from the recent “Science of Reading” vs. “Everything and Everyone Else” battles that we’ve made no meaningful progress in how math or reading “should” or “may” be taught in American public schools. And the prospects of improvement in the foreseeable future are slim and none (and Slim’s left town).
Much as a national reading panel with broad representation sounds promising, I’m afraid that it won’t help because if there’s even one “Science of Reading”/”Bunch o’ Facts Math” advocate with a voice involved in the process, the process is doomed to go around in circles trying to be “fair to all sides.” My experiences fighting in the Math Wars made crystal clear to me that the educationally conservative side doesn’t compromise, doesn’t yield an inch, and NEVER quits. If they can’t sink a program they dislike this week, they’ll ruthlessly decimate it in short order by going to parents, media, politicians, and so on with any and every lie and distortion they can muster to undermine approaches that stray from their own.
I’d love to be proven wrong on all of this. But it’s not going to happen because I really know the rules of engagement and the people we’re up against.
Thanks, Michael. I appreciate your showing the similarities with the Math Wars I know less about. And while I would still like to see a new National Reading Panel, quite a few individuals have echoed your concerns. Sadly, I can also see that scenario.
The obsessive focus on digital “personalized education” is just an extension of the scripted lessons that were heralded when NCLB hit the scene in early 2000. Fidelity to the curriculum meant you could not deviate from the lessons in order to give students what they needed. I taught ELL and was mandated to teach lessons designed for English speaking students. You couldn’t even substitute words in the script. I rebelled and got transferred to another school.
Now teachers are almost completely left out of the picture with online platforms. Why would a district need to hire teachers with graduate degrees, let alone, Bachelor’s degrees when they just need someone to monitor the student using the program? With budget cuts, the cost of a program is much cheaper than hiring a highly qualified teacher.
That’s right. Anyone can read a scripted manual to students, and it lends itself well to being converted to online instruction.
There’s also an emphasis on tutors. I’ve read too about high school students teaching elementary students how to read—wink wink. That sounds like a part of a plan.
I hate those words “with fidelity” which were just code for” teach it my way or the highway” I got those words thrown at me more times than I want to remember. When you made do and crafted a hybrid program that met the needs of the students and their IEPs, who do you think got dinged for data that didn’t meet the expectations of the program?.
My school system uses a web-based reading program called Benchmark. It is absolutely god-awful and the teachers hate it. It is this kind of program that makes me determined to homeschool my granddaughter.
I’m sorry. It sounds like the teachers, parents, and grandparents have little ability to push back on this stuff. I know you’re not alone, Dorothy.
These programs and the tech attack on teachers and real teaching is the gross failure of our unions to do their job. Their job is to protect the teachers and the teaching profession. They have not only not done that they have even taken money from these foundations and tech companies.
Why aren’t teachers calling out their unions for their failures?
Great question. Thanks for asking it, Ellie.
SIgh. Yes, thank you for connecting the dots. Does it seem that currently most SoR curriculua is delivered by teachers following a scripted curriculum? Or by computer programs? Something else? Thanks!
That’s a great question. Scripted reading or direct instruction has been around for a long time, but it converts nicely to online, so I guess it depends on schools and teachers. Thanks, Carrie.
I got out of the classroom 11 years ago due to the poor practices forced upon us by the groups you have written about in your blog. They have been ruining literacy practice for over 11 years.
AND I call bull on anyone who says kids haven’t been getting sor for the last 11 years. In fact I’d argue that that is the problem!
I agree, Stefanie. Thank you.
These digital reading programs are privatization of public education from the inside out. The fact that they cannot adequately replace teachers is ignored because special interests groups are out to destroy democratic public education and turn it into a for-profit commodity, even though most parents want quality public schools for their children. Sadly, our so-called representatives do not represent us. They represent the wealthy people that pay for their political campaigns.
Thank you, Karen. Well said.
Some countries such as Australia used to have radio schools for those in areas inaccessable to physical schools. The radio schools had licensed teachers that took letters and phone calls from the students and real time radio broadcast of the days lessons. Then these radio schools were replaced them with online computer “schools” guess what happened? The quality of education went way down. I concerns me more of special education students, preschool and elementary students to get poor quality education from these so called online schools. A high school student that is not disabled who works may benefit from an online school but not younger children who can barley read.
Great points, although I’d say all children need face-to-face instruction. Thank you, Will.
If the State Education Technology Directors Association (SETDA) has the influence that its site suggests, it’s critical to know its funding source- Gates. The taxpayers pay the Directors’ salaries. Is the Association doing what the public wants, crafting private-public partnerships, lobbying?
The Journal, a digital-promoting website posted, 3-16-2020, “Science of Reading (finally) Becoming Mainstream in Teacher Prep Programs.” The site listed 15 colleges to corroborate the headline. More than half of them are in former slave-owning states.
(1) The Gates’ Frontier Set, a program aimed at control of curriculum and delivery, was notable for its preponderance of financially strapped HBCU’s. (2) The charter school campaign heavily targeted inner city schools. (3) Harvard’s Roland Fryer, funded by Gates, talked about a two-tier system of testing (Mercedes Schneider’s blog provides details).
Interesting. Thank you, Linda. I think other universities are now signing on too.
Here’s the post from Mercedes that I think you’re referring to. https://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2015/09/17/massachusetts-roland-fryer-and-a-two-tiered-system-of-standardized-testing/
I e-mailed the University of Akron Dept. of Ed. to express my opposition to a state university carrying freight for Gates, a man who lives in the state with the most regressive tax system in the country.
I think we need a gazillion more emails, unfortunately. Thanks, Linda.