The new literacy crusade

And I mean that with all the negative baggage that carries, yes. And a periodic reminder that the only person I speak for here is me  

xkcd 1167, acknowledging that the world may not need more written on this

I had a friend ask me earlier this month what I knew about what Governor Healey announced in the State of the State as her administration's "Literacy Launch" and more largely about what Massachusetts is doing on literacy and public education.

If you read the linked article, you'll see that Secretary Tutwiler outlines a $30M effort from the state that seems reasonable. They're planning to fund professional development and grants for districts to purchase curriculum that more strongly supports kids learning to read. That seems fine, and it's the role of the state to support districts in this way.

Let me be clear: while teaching kids to read is not my professional background, it's demonstrable that:

• kids need different things in order to learn to read; not every kind of instruction works with every child (kind of like everything else)

As a local side note: this is where Worcester was. It wasn't until we got a new superintendent, and the leadership that resisted getting teachers the curriculum they needed was gone, that we made a change. $7M or so in ESSER funds went to a new elementary reading curriculum; Worcester's elementary schools now have Core Knowledge for Language Arts or CKLA.

Where this becomes something else, as too often in education, is when it becomes a crusade. 

And all, we are there in spades. 

I have been struggling for weeks on how to tackle this issue on here, because it is so big, so heated, and, at ground, so breathtakingly missing the mark. Yesterday, though, I had shared with me the third of Maren Aukerman's of the University of Calgary's three part series on the Literary Research Association site "The Science of Reading and the Media" which hits the mark; you can find the first part here, and the second here.

I particularly found useful how she frames the state of coverage, which will sound familiar to any readers of the Boston Globe:

From how much of the media tells it, a war rages in the field of early literacy instruction. The story is frequently some version of a conflict narrative relying on the following problematic suppositions:

a) science has proved that there is just one way of teaching reading effectively to all kids – using a systematic, highly structured approach to teaching phonics;

b) most teachers rely instead on an approach called balanced literacy, spurred on by shoddy teacher education programs;

c) therefore, teachers incorporate very little phonics and encourage kids to guess at words;

d) balanced literacy and teacher education are thus at fault for large numbers of children not learning to read well.

The upshot? "Unfortunately, these suppositions turn out to be highly misleading."

In the first part, Professor Aukerman starts by asking if reporting is biased, using as an exemplar Dana Goldstein's piece from 2022 on Lucy Calkins. Aukerman walks us through the lack of balance, use of straw man arguments, myopic lens fetishizing phonics instruction, and logical fallacies. One could--and I would argue, we need to!-- do the same here in Massachusetts with the Globe's three part much-touted series on literacy. 

In the second part, Aukerman looks at if media is using high quality research. The lack of deep understanding and use of research across education (and I dare say, in other fields) is an ongoing issue of the current state of media, and we certainly see it here in Massachusetts. Even something so basic as the basis of the argument in their literacy series, which the Globe has based on ELA MCAS scores reveals this sloppiness, as MCAS scores do not tell us much about literacy; ELA MCAS tests much more than literacy and is not, on its own, a test of literacy. 
But more broadly, you can see this in the coverage:

By drawing mostly on vociferous advocates of one approach and bolstering their claims primarily with other journalism, journalists create an echo chamber which itself is disconnected from reading research. 

And would you guess this from reading the popular coverage?

 ...there is insufficient evidence to conclude that any single approach, including the particular systematic phonics approach often elided with “the science of reading,” is most effective.

Nearly all coverage also lacks both historical context:

 The idea that phonics can fix children’s reading ills is at least 70 years old, yet results from other large-scale phonics reforms have also yielded disappointing results, including during the Reading First era in the U.S. and as England’s recent national curriculum mandates have played out

And, I would argue, a disturbing ignorance about how curriculum works in the classroom. The Globe, for example, waved their hand and deemed "outdated" curricula that they found in their survey that districts are using. But that both a) leans on the above poor understanding of what is quality curricula and b) understands "curricula" as if it is taken from a box and inserted into children's heads without going through educators who always use a variety of resources to best meet the needs of children.

The third part of Aukerman's series brings us to where I am concerned we are in Massachusetts: the consequences. The latest Massachusetts iteration of this is the push to pass H579/S263, frighteningly favorably reported out of the Joint Committee on Education on the last available day*. This would not only add another report to the pile of reports that districts have to submit to DESE--let me know when that fixes something, eh?--but would give the Department the authority to select curriculum, with districts selecting from a list generated. As the bill reads:

each local school committee shall use programs and curricula from the lists developed by the department or an approved alternative program

This honestly makes me both so angry and so frightened about the state of education in Massachusetts that words fail me. There are much more articulate words in the actual practitioners of the letter I shared earlier this month, of the position statement of the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents, and the four fallacies of the reading wars.

One cannot, of course, separate this out from context: this is the same "my local elected officials are not doing exactly what I want, so I am taking it to the manager" that brought us mandates over everything from COVID to other nonsense. And someone, somewhere, is going to write a great book about the economic anxiety of the white middle class and its impact on public education and lines of governance.

But in the meantime, here we are. 

So, please go read all of Aukerman's series. Share it. Email it to your legislators.  

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*and if you think the Globe "just happened" to choose the hometown of the Senate chair of that committee for one of their articles, I have a bridge to sell you.