School privatization was born of manufactured crisis, and one of the so-called crises today is reading instruction. Not that reading shouldn’t be debated and improved when it’s called for, especially for children experiencing learning disabilities.
Still, the frenzy surrounding reading in this country has become fever-pitched. It has divided teachers who want to do what’s best for students.
Like various governors nationwide, New York’s Kathy Hochul plans to replace reading instruction with the Science of Reading in her Back to Basics movement.
It’s still unclear what basic programs she’ll hitch that state’s star to. It might be programs mandated in New York City, and their $100 million NYC Reads also focuses on the Science of Reading.
HMH Into Reading and Great Minds Wit and Wisdom are two of the chosen NYC curricular reading programs, and there are questions about why they’re Science of Reading. I want to focus on the third program, EL Education because it’s more than reading instruction.
EL Education used to be called Expeditionary Learning. It’s a school reform model from Harvard and Outward Bound, the outdoor character and leadership-building program for youth and adults. They partner with school districts nationwide, often as charters or, sometimes, community schools, and teachers teach their curriculum, emphasizing high achievement, character growth, and teamwork.
According to Wiki, EL became one of 11 proposals for the New American Schools Development Corporation NASDC, a private nonprofit corporation created in 1991 under the H.W. Bush administration and part of the America 2000 initiative to develop schools to increase student performance.
The reform movement that launched these programs, was based on the manufactured crisis of A Nation at Risk.
According to Influence Watch, EL Education has big investors, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, John Templeton Foundation, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, Klingenstein Foundation, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Bezos Family Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, and MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos donated an unspecified amount. Robin Hood, a nonprofit that fights poverty, also donated an unspecified amount to EL Education for pandemic relief.
Teachers
Teachers in public schools whose school districts choose EL Education likely have teacher certification, but EL Education has an independent credentialing program, and a big question is whether this will be the wave of the future.
The Sierra Expeditionary Learning Schools states:
To ensure quality programming across the network, EL Education began a “credentialing” program in 2013-14. To qualify for the program, schools must meet a benchmark score on EL Education’s Implementation Review. Once met, schools are then required to outline their overall program, highlight successes, and show competency in three primary categories: Student Mastery of Knowledge and Skills; Student Character; and High Quality Student Work.
Here are programs and prices. Will it replace university teacher preparation?
The Science of Reading
How is EL Education the Science of Reading? One review comes from other nonprofits which support school privatization. Teachers are the most influential in teaching reading, so what do they think of EL Education?
A Chalkbeat teacher interview says that EL Education’s uniqueness is texts that provide the students the opportunity to learn about real-world issues. But Teachers have used texts to teach reading since the dinosaurs.
The Chalkbeat also reports:
The weakness [EL Education] is the difficulty of navigating all of the materials. Even after using EL for four years, it can still be tricky to find the end-of-unit assessments and to make sure you have all of the materials necessary for each lesson. There is a teacher’s guide, supplemental materials book, and student notebooks. The assessments are sometimes in any of these books. At my school we find it necessary to supplement the writing by giving weekly writing assignments, where the students use familiar texts to answer text-dependent questions.
Reddit provides these comments:
EL Education ELA curriculum obliterated my joy in teaching – it’s boring, repetitive, too high for EL students to reach and too low for advanced students. The pacing expectations are completely ridiculous and I cannot wait to be done with this. Kids deserve better and this year – mitigating learning losses for the last two years, was NOT the time to start something new that doesn’t meet students where they are.
Expeditionary learning? A plague! Teach “around” it if you can.
Ours is a “Pilot” of EL, so the district C & I is in our classrooms and prep periods regularly to “Gather data.” AKA policing compliance
Another Reddit page includes more comments.
Kindergarten teachers also note concerns facing students with EL Education. This includes the lack of understanding how dull scripted programming can be, and that one size does not fit all.
Common Core
EL Education swoons over the controversial Common Core, and they focus on language arts and math, using the NWEA MAP assessment, another controversial private nonprofit.
But Common Core has been around since 2010, embedded in many curricular programs and followed by most teachers in classrooms nationwide. If anything, Americans unhappy about reading scores, should ask what’s wrong with these standards.
Character
The EL Education website states:
What started as a concept has grown into a movement. Our mission, now as then, is to create classrooms where teachers can fulfill their highest aspirations and students achieve more than they think possible, becoming active contributors to building a better world.
EL Education’s emphasis on character education raises questions outside of their reading program, especially that they subscribe to Common Core State Standards with fidelity and rely on billionaire donors.
Community
Is there community awareness about programs like EL Education when school districts sign on? Parents in North Carolina believed EL Education involved Critical Race Theory and didn’t seem to understand the program.
A community and its teachers and students should be involved in the selection process of a reading program and understand it. Many programs are foisted into schools, seemingly with little feedback, especially from teachers who become responsible for teaching the program.
School boards should enlist the expertise of teachers, parents and those who will be involved in teaching reading to students, to determine whether these programs are what they claim. University education schools should also step up to evaluate such programs with authentic, independent peer review studies not connected to the program or the push to privatize public schools.
Beyond all this, EL Education demonstrates how the Science of Reading lacks clarity and mostly opens the door for commercialized programs that could privatize public education.
“Beyond all this, EL Education demonstrates how the Science of Reading lacks clarity and mostly opens the door for commercialized programs…”
In my public school district, that door is already wide open.
My district relies on a pair of “balanced literacy” products from Heineman, which is controlled by a private equity fund with deep and well-documented ties to the military-industrial complex.
Criticizing Heineman while ignoring other programs hyped as the Science of Reading is narrowminded. Heineman publishes so much, so I’m not sure specifically what you’re referring to. And this post is also more about dissolving public education so please don’t let that fly over your head.
Also, Brian, could you state more about the last part of your statement.Thanks.
Be consistent, please.
You don’t like commercialized reading programs, fair enough.
Then why not oppose all commercialized reading programs?
Balanced literacy programs Units and Study and Fountas & Pinnell are products of Heinemann.
Heinemann is owned by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is owned by Veritas Capital.
Veritas Capital has a track record and history that is well-known and well-documented.
https://theintercept.com/2015/06/24/opm-contractor-veritas/
Now, one could point out that both Units of Study, which is a balanced literacy product, and Into Reading, which is favored by some in the Science of Reading camp, are, ultimately, products of the same group of companies.
That’s fair. If you’re opposed to ties to big corporations that’s consistent.
But one cannot say that science of reading curricula are unique in their ties to large, multinational corporations… especially since flagship programs from both camps are not only controlled by big businesses but, effectively, the same big businesses.
Thus, advocating for Science of Reading curricula is not advocating, in and of itself, for packaged curricula with ties to big money businesses, becuase that door is already open.
Flagship balanced literacy programs already have such ties.
My local public school’s reading curricula – Fountas & Pinnell and Units of Study – are already products of big business.
I never said I didn’t like commercial programs and I also never said they don’t make money. But the SoR advocates promote a lot online programs, while claiming teachers and their universities are failing, that have little independent research to show they work. And what do you think about the one I just wrote about?
So some programs are bad because they’re commercial, but not all commercial programs are bad?
You’re promoting a false dilemma: that SoR programs are bad because some SoR programs are online.
So we get to choose either online learning or balanced literacy.
I reject that because it’s a false choice.
Let’s break that false choice apart.
Are online learning programs bad, all bad, actually?
I’ll cheerfully concede the radical position on this: yes they are all bad because they are online.
Are online programs that claim to be grounded in the Science of Reading bad because they’re grounded in the science of reading?
No, they are inherently bad because they are online.
In other words, just because one favors the Science of Reading does not mean one favors online learning.
They are separate issues: choosing to reject online learning and choosing to embrace Science of Learning is a logically consistent and understandable position.
One can advocate for both in-person learning and the science of reading.
There is no dilemma here.
And, in fact, in my experience, as a public school parent I saw online programs being used to do work that was not done in the classroom, with Units of Study, that should be done in the classroom.
So, in fact, Unit of Study led to more dependence on online learning.
I never said all SoR programs are bad. In fact, with this post I was trying to figure what is science about the program. I don’t think it’s clear what it is, but as a teacher I’ve used phonics programs with children who have difficulty reading.
But yes online programs are a real concern. And a lot of them are being promoted without much research, if one can trust the research these days. And many are promoting the SoR.
SoR folks are so hung up on certain programs but they fail to look at others. The bottom line is that teachers need to understand how to teach reading and child development and be able to evaluate the programs they think will address their students’ needs.
Most teachers need a reading program to ground their instruction, but some programs work better with some children and not with others. It’s a big deal. Please read the post if you haven’t. Thanks.
Your mention of Bush I reminds me that the Bush family and the McGraw family have been business partners beginning with the founding of the resort town of Jupiter, Florida. Remember Neil’s 1999 Ignite! in the wake of the savings and loan debacle? Wikipedia says 14,000 schools had purchased Ignite! using NCLB funds. Then there’s Jeb’s! various edubusinesses, like A+, which got going, coincidentally, in 1999.
NCLB was a bonanza for testing and curriculum publishers, like the Bush family friends..
Wow! Thanks, Christine. Some of this I did not know.
Kind of ironic how boarding school legacies are making a living grifting the public schools, huh?
Yes. Something they know little about, too.
All of this makes my head hurt. I had encounters with EL in the middle of the last decade. I liked their approach to writing that focused on blind non-judgmental critique as a way to provide students with samples to correct and improve. Many of my teachers used those strategies and saw results. It’s amazing how trends like SoR force programs to bend over backward to fit into a prescribed model while it gets away from their original approach. Any scripted teaching becomes problematic because ownership of the instruction is often compromised..
Thanks, Paul, I wonder how that writing works today and if it qualifies as the SoR.
I don’t know. I heard the curator Ron Berger speak at an admin conference around 2014. He shared a presentation called “Austin’s Butterfly” where a student learned to improve his rendering of the butterfly over a period of time through a positive critique process. That spoke to me because of my experience as an artist and art teacher. The video is worth the time. It surprises me that EL has jumped into the SoR fray, although it probably shouldn’t since it is probably seen as a way for EL to remain relevant. I keep hoping we can get past the “one size fits all” approach to improving instruction and I’m afraid that the push to privatization has made product the priority over results.
So why do they get to be unique and called a public school? This always irritates me about charters and private school vouchers. But thanks for sharing your example and thoughts about it, Paul.
The school district where I work adopted EL this year. Luckily we’re expected to teach only 2 of the modules. As another commentator wrote, the teacher materials are badly organized and poorly written. Each lesson requires reading through about 10 pages of text, mostly boilerplate, to find out what we’re supposed to do.
My concern going in was the high level of the main texts. ( Many teachers also wanted to see more diversity. And representation.). The first book, Sharon Creech’s Love That Dog, is written in verse and requires a huge amount of inferring. There are also poems by Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams and others that go along with it. I thought it would be hard for many of my fourth graders. However the lessons go super slowly and there’s lots of re-reading and it went better than I expected. I also like the “I notice/I wonder” papers that helped involve all the kids in discussions.
The writing assignments took way longer than the program expects—one assignment that was scheduled to take 20 minutes took us one week. We are also not doing the entire program which would require hours a day. It has some strange idiosyncrasies. For example, instead of using “main idea” it asks for the “gist”. And instead of a topic sentence it calls for a focus sentence.
We got it because it’s aligned with Common Core. Like most programs it has some strengths and weaknesses and it will take a while to figure out what parts work and what needs changing.
Thank you, Ann, for taking the time to describe how EL is working for you. I’m sure there are good parts to the program, as you have pointed out, but the pervasive nature of a nonprofit taking over public education is the main worry for me. Its allegiance to Common Core is also a concern.
Nancy, Happy 2024. Have you ever interacted with Newsela? I found it so useful in the classroom and relevant. And, free. I used to spend hours finding free materials online that were quality and far better than whatever “canned” programs they made us use. Kids loved it. https://newsela.com
Ditto for 2024! Sorry, Rick, but I’m not keen on it or any online program collecting children’s data and emphasizing alignment to standards. Here are their partners https://newsela.com/about/solutions/integrations-and-interoperability/
I worry that screens will replace teachers and I have never liked using special education to promote personalization of instruction like Newsela promotes here. https://www.businessinsider.com/personalized-education-special-ed-2016-10
It’s also a way to privatize instruction. So I’m sorry to have to disagree here.
Oh, I never used it “online.” I printed out materials to supplement other things I was doing. I liked the stories. It was one part of many things I used. I created most of my own material as well. I was ignorant to all the “online collection” stuff. I just had a drawer filled with reading material. Most of my kids were kinesthetic learners and needed to hold, mark on, and whatnot to help them navigate the world around them. Yeah, I was never liked the mindset, “Well, now we found the the panacea for all our childrens’ needs. In fact, I remember my principal telling me, “You never really do the same thing twice do you?” I said my teaching is organic where I keep the good, build on it, and throw out the bad. Also, use a lot of student input. Oh well, I tried.
It sounds like you were a great teacher, Rick! Very creative ideas!
@Nancy — Now that you got me thinking…I remember when I taught third grade and the standards actually said “Students to use calculators..” well something like that. I refused because they did not have any “number sense.” I told them, “First we learn the fundamentals and later when you are good with those skills, I can show you how to use a calculator to ENHANCE learning,” Then, I remember the computers came and that was the panacea, “See, all the kids just have to turn on a computer and, well, they will LEARN better than before.” Never liked it. It was once again not focusing on “mastery of skills” (by this I mean I spent more time solving tech issues and helping kids simply logon and such so by the time we finally got to doing whatever it was we were supposed to do, momentum was gone) then learning how different adaptations would enhance learning. My students were kinesthetic; they needed paper, pencils, crayons, color coded folders, explanations and me doing voices while I read to them. Oh what joy to think about the Oompa Loompa from what I read to them. Then, came the “online learning courses.” “See, this is all they need and so EZ,, too.” I didn’t like it because my students needed stuff to draw on, write on tear out, and whatnot, so I chose the consumable books in addition to HAVING to use the computer as well. One of the things I found irritating (until I mastered it) was reading on a computer and learning how to scroll. It hurt my eyes (I still can’t do Ebooks). A lot of my kids said they got headaches, but not so much with good ol’ books. And with computer online stuff (mandated) the kids were adept at figuring out how to get onto the Internet to go to social media sites. I was supposed to teach emerging readers and monitor their every computer move. The Newseal and Readworks had great stories and I kept a file because I made an effort to know each student and their interests. “Hey Sarah, I have a story on reptiles. Would you like to read it?” “Mr. Charvet do you have a story on engines?” I do. So I went to my file and got it for them. Tangible, readable, relevant. As an art person, I loved starting in the same place, but seeing how many different solutions there were to the same problem. I may have started with a simple worksheet that, by the end, expanded into an art work with a narrative explaining the “how’s and why’s” of their solution. Really cool stuff and kids were so proud of saying, “I made that.” Thanks for allowing me to share.
Good for you, Rick! You should write a book!
Also, I used Readworks to supplement reading and the kids loved it. So many topics of interest and FREE. https://www.readworks.org