Evidence shows that reading informational text more frequently is correlated with lower reading scores

I have another little story about non-evidence-based BS.  I'm getting kind of tired of this topic, but I'm going to write it up anyway, just for the record, while my students are writing an in-class essay on Song of Solomon.

Is there evidence that reading more informational text is important?
Because it's being pushed by the Common Core, "informational text" is all the rage these days.  Lesson plans for high school English classes are looking more and more like SAT prep--read a brief passage and answer some factual questions about it--except that the passages and questions I've seen in lesson plans have been less interesting than the ones I used to see on the SAT, back when I used to work as a tutor. One of the people promoting the Common Core these days is literacy titan Tim Shanahan. Some of Shanahan's work on CCSS matters is pretty good--he has a decent take on how to handle close reading in the classroom that is much better than a lot of the dreck I have seen--but like DAvid Coleman he has, I think, too little to say about reading volume, and he has jumped on the informational text bandwagon too wholeheartedly.  In his most recent blog post, Shanahan writes, "CCSS is emphasizing the reading of literary and informational text to ensure that students are proficient with a wide variety of text."

I am skeptical of this claim, since my working hypothesis is that what's really important is overall reading ability, which is increased by reading a lot of whatever kind of text interests you. So I wrote a comment on Shanahan's blog post asking if he knew of any evidence for his assertion.  I wrote, "I have not seen any evidence that trying to make students read more informational text will lead to greater proficiency with informational text.

Shanahan quickly replied to my comment, saying that there was lots of evidence: "Actually there is quite a bit of research showing that if you want students to be able to read expository text, you have to have them read (or write) expository text"

I wrote back asking for specifics, which he didn't give (I understand--he's a busy guy), and then I spent a bit of time poking around.  What I found shouldn't have surprised me.  Here's the upshot: not only does there seem to be no hard evidence that reading informational text makes you a better reader of informational text, there is actually, oddly, some hard evidence that the very opposite is true: that the more regularly students read informational text, the worse they do on reading tests.

A leading scholar makes the case for informational reading, but has no evidence
Nell Duke is a Michigan professor who has spent much of her career pushing to get more informational text in U.S. classrooms; she also edits the "Research-Informed Classroom" book series. Duke has tried to make the case for more informational text in many articles over many years, and her efforts may be paying off: both of my children have been exposed to more informational text in the course of their schooling than I was. This is not necessarily bad, but it's not necessarily good, either.

For what Nell Duke has not done is provide empirical evidence that reading more informational text will make you better at reading informational text.  She is upfront about this: "While there is a great deal of agreement about the necessity of substantial or ongoing  experience with a genre (e.g.,  New London Group, 1996), there is currently no empirical research available to speak to the question of how  much experience  with a given form of written text is necessary for a particular level of acquisition" (Duke, "3.6 Minutes a Day," RRQ, 2000, p.207)  In other words, there is "agreement" among some researchers, but they don't have any hard evidence.

Do U.S. children "need" to read informational text?
In 2010 Nell Duke published an article in The Phi Beta Kappan called "The Real World Writing U.S. Children Need."  The article begins by citing an international test that shows US children doing slightly better on standardized test questions about literary text than those on informational text. The article goes on to make Duke's usual argument that students need to read more informational text.

Because I am skeptical of this claim, I looked up the international test Duke mentions, the PIRLS. As Duke reported, U.S. children, like those in many other countries, did a bit better on questions about literary text than informational text--but the scores were not very far apart.  What Duke did not report, however, was that the 2006 PIRLS study had actually done a bit of empirical research on the very question of whether more exposure to informational text is associated with higher scores on informational text.

The PIRLS study asked students how frequently they read literary texts, and how frequently they read informational texts.  It turns out, counterintuitively perhaps, that students who reported reading informational texts more frequently actually did worse on the reading test than students who reported reading informational texts less frequently.  Here's the relevant section of the US Government report on the 2006 PIRLS:

"The average score on the combined reading literacy scale for U.S. students who read stories or novels every day or almost every day (558) was higher than the average score for students who read stories or novels once or twice a week (541), once or twice a month (539), and never or almost never (509). In contrast, the average score for students who read for information every day or almost every day (519) was lower than the average score for students who read for information once or twice a week (538), once or twice a month (553), and never or almost never (546).

"The higher performance of U.S. students who read for information less frequently relative to U.S. students who read for information more frequently was also observed internationally." (http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2008/2008017.pdf, page 16-17))

So, to clarify, the very study that was cited as evidence of U.S. students not reading enough informational text turns out to show that frequent reading of informational text is associated with lower reading scores.

What to conclude?
First, while those PIRLS data are weird and counterintuitive, and almost certainly don't mean that reading informational text actually harms one's reading level, one thing is clear: this is not a study that offers any support for the idea that U.S. students "need" to read more informational text.  The evidence for this assertion, like the evidence for explicit vocabulary instruction, for charter schools, for VAM teacher evaluation, for larger class size, for explicitly teaching reading "strategies" rather than focusing on meaningful, content-based reading and discussion--the evidence is simply very weak, if not outright negative.

Second, we are again confronted with the spectacle of very eminent scholars (Shanahan is a real bigwig, and Duke is a professor at a very good university who is quite well-established) making strong assertions in the practical and policy realms that don't seem backed up by evidence in the scholarship realm.  There is a striking contrast between the careful language ("may," "currently no empirical research available," etc.) used in scholarly papers and the bold, authoritative tone of articles aimed at teachers and the public about what children "need" to be doing, and what practices will "ensure" a particular result.

The takeaway for me, once again, is that we simply cannot trust any assertion that we have not ourselves looked into carefully--even, or perhaps especially, if it is accompanied by the label "research-based", or as Nell Duke's book series has it, "Research-Informed." Instead, we must rely mostly on our own common sense and our sense of humanity.  At the heart of our work should be: meaningful reading, meaningful writing, and meaningful discussion.

Common Core baloney from the New York Times

I missed this NYT editorial from a few days ago on the Common Core, which the editorial calls "clearly the most important education reform in the country’s history."  That may be debatable, but what comes next is mostly just outright falsehood.

"The Common Core standards were the product of a heavily researched, bipartisan effort pioneered by the National Governors Association in collaboration with the Council of Chief State School Officers. The effort arose from a broad recognition that the United States was losing ground to many of its competitors abroad because the learning standards as applied in most states were pathetically weak."

The parts I've bolded are, I believe, simply false. The Common Core is, as far as I can tell by reading its own literature, very thinly researched.  Also, the US is not losing ground to its competitors, and it is far from clear that student achievement has anything to do with "learning standards."

Against lockdowns

I've never liked lockdown drills, especially in schools.  They strike me as unnecessarily scary, making millions of children consider the possibility of a "shooter" (the term that was used in Leafstrewn when lockdowns were introduced a few years ago) roaming their school with intent to slaughter them, and I'm skeptical about their effectiveness.  And now it looks like the city-wide lockdown yesterday wasn't really necessary or effective.

From what the Boston Globe reported this morning, after the suspect eluded the police, he never left the neighborhood, but despite a complete lockdown of the area and a somewhat looser city-wide lockdown (my kids and I managed to slip out to a neighboring town to go to a park), the police weren't able to find him.  Only after the lockdown was lifted, and ordinary people were able to leave their houses, did a local guy go out to his yard, notice blood on his boat and a hole in his tarp, and find the fugitive.

It is of course possible that lockdowns are sometimes useful, but I remain very doubtful that they're worth the effort and the fear.  They mainly, I think, serve to heighten our general climate of paranoia and terror.  Incidents of terrorism are generally trending down in the US over the past many decades, but because our culture is much more terrified, the effectiveness of each incident is much increased, and lockdowns are a part of that trend.  We should think about stopping them.

And I thought economics research was slightly more trustworthy than Ed. research?

I have often been amazed at how sloppy and thin education research is. An item in today's news reminds me that all human endeavor is subject to the same human error.

For years now, the public debate over governmental spending and governmental debt, which has led to the truly bizarre situation of a Democratic U.S. President proposing to cut Social Security and Medicare, has been heavily influenced by a 2010 study by two eminent economists, Reinhart and Rogoff.  The R/R study claimed to show, by rigorous analysis of the historical record, that countries with high government debt levels (above 90% of GDP, I think was the number) had very low economic growth--actually, economic growth of -0.1%, so not growth at all, but contraction.  This paper was used to argue that the correct response to the economic crisis of recent years was not stimulus spending, as per Keynes and much of standard textbook economics, because stimulus spending that increased debt levels too high would not be stimulative, but contractionary. Instead of doing stimulus spending, governments were supposed to respond to the deep recession by...  well, at any rate by doing something else (all too often education reform was dragged into the debate).

Now, with the publication of a paper by UMass researchers, it turns out that the Reinhart/Rogoff study was flawed, partly due to massaging the data in unconventional ways (picking and choosing, and weighting it weirdly), and partly--get this--due to a typo in the excel spreadsheet they used to work with their data. The typo (44 instead of 49) led to the exclusion several key countries.  Mike Konczal covers it here, but the key result is that if you handle the data normally and don't have the typo, countries with 90% debt/GDP ratios actually had average economic growth of 2.2%, not -0.1%.  2.2% is not great, but it's not negative, and it destroys the argument that most mainstream economists and pundits have been using to argue for cuts in government spending.

This is really remarkable news for anyone who's been following the public economics discourse recently.  The Reinhart/Rogoff study has been cited more than anything else in the debates these past few years over government spending (for example, just last week Paul Ryan's response to Obama's budget was entirely based on the R/R study) by people who needed an apparent scientific basis for cuts in government spending like those that have brought England back into recession and Europe to the first stages of dissolution, and yet the study seems to have been simply shoddy and wrong.

What to take away from this?  One, we can usually trust Dean Baker and Paul Krugman.  Two, it behooves us to be modest, compassionate and natural, and to beware of dodgy dossiers.

Teachers, per-pupil spending and student achievement

[Update: Many thanks to Louis F. Caruso for pointing out in a comment on this post that student achievement, whether flat or not, is all about shifting demographics.  I should have known that student achievement was largely about students, not schools!  Caruso mentions increasing ELL and SE students; after a quick look into the matter, it seems like other demographic shifts may be significant as well. In any case, the supposedly "flat" student achievement is, while understandable for the reasons I discuss below, also not as flat as it may seem on the surface.]

American schools have spent more per pupil since the 1970s without seeing a proportionate improvement in student achievement.  Many proponents of "education reform" cite this fact as evidence that (A) our schools are failing, and that (B) we need to destroy teachers' unions. This doesn't make sense; here's why:

Yes, we have been spending more per student and seeing few achievement gains:

Below is a graph used by Bill Gates a couple of years ago. This graph is pretty similar to other graphs used by other Ed Reform types (see graph #3 here); it shows per pupil expenditure doubling since the 1970s, and NAEP scores not changing much.



This is a somewhat dubious graph, since it looks like there might be SOME improvement in the test scores, and the Y-axis scales are not necessarily comparable.  But let's grant that okay, we have spent more money without getting much improvement.  Now why would this be?  The answer Gates has generally given, and that Ed Reformers give, is that bad teachers and obstructive teachers' unions are getting in the way of improvement.  This strikes me as wrong for three reasons:

1. Teachers and kids are not getting better from century to century and decade to decade (there is no Moore's Law for teachers and children)

2. Even though teachers should be making more money, to share in the national wealth, in fact they are not--salaries have been flat since the seventies!

3. Therefore, the increase in per pupil spending has been in other areas--but what?

No wonder students and teachers haven't improved much: people are not like microchips 

Teaching, like parenting or art, takes just as much time as it always took, and is not necessarily better now than a generation ago.  It takes many fewer people-hours to make a computer than it did in 1975, and the computers we make are of dramatically better quality, but the art that we make, or the children that we raise, are not so dramatically better.  Maybe they're a little better, but they're not dramatically better.

Some things have gotten better:

Standard 1970s computer

Standard computer today

But some things have not gotten better:
                                       

Bobby Orr

Brad Marchant

People are not computers. To ask Brad Marchant to be a better hockey player than Bobby Orr, or a better sportsman, is absurd; to ask today's poets to be better than Larkin or Ashbery is absurd; and to ask today's teachers to be better than, say, my mom, is equally absurd.

Our national income has gone up, so teachers' incomes should have gone up, too... 

Over the thirty-plus years that Gates's graph covers, America has gotten much, much richer. One way to measure how rich we are is GDP; in order to adjust for an increase in population and for ups and downs in how many hours people work, we can use GDP per hour worked.  By this measure, America nearly twice as rich now as in 1975.





If the national income has gone up a lot, then you might imagine that teachers, like hockey players, might get paid a bit more, even if we aren't much better than our 1975 counterparts.

...but, amazingly enough, teachers' salaries have NOT gone up!

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, a high school teacher in 1973 made, in 2007 dollars, $51,961  In 2007, the average high school teacher made $52,367.  Teacher salaries have been flat for over 30 years, despite the remarkable GDP growth we've seen.

Teachers are not alone. Wages in America, except for the top 10% or so, have been flat for decades.  The country has gotten much richer, but the overwhelming majority of workers have not shared in this prosperity.  Here's a graph showing growth in GDP/hour worked ("productivity") and in hourly compensation for non-supervisory workers; you can see the divergence between GDP and wages, starting in the early 70s:




So even though teachers SHOULD be making more money, we're not.  This certainly begs the question of what that extra money has been spent on.  I'm not a school finance expert, but you'd think people like Bill Gates might be able to figure it out.  If he hasn't, this is another pretty good argument for his not being in good faith.  He sends his kids to their fancy private school, which no doubt has the same exact dynamic going on (rising per-pupil costs, flat student achievement numbers and flat teacher salaries), but it never occurs to him that maybe his attacks on teachers are fundamentally wrong?  (It's nice to see him, in his 4/3 WaPo piece, trying to be more diplomatic, but he has no credibility.)

Update: On second thought, I shouldn't have said that the WaPo piece was nice.  Anthony Cody is right; that Gates is pompously criticizing an over-reliance on test scores is outrageously hypocritical, given that Gates has arguably the largest individual responsibility for our current testing mania.  But then, this is a guy who without a glimmer of irony has a Gatsby quote about failing to reach your dreams engraved in the library of his Gatsby-esque mansion.

The Common Core is not "research-based" and its "efficacy" is unproven

In poking around looking at PARCC (the new testing associated with the Common Core) I stumbled onto an interesting document: the "publishers' criteria" set out by the two lead authors (Coleman and Pimentel) of the ELA Common Core "State" Standards. These criteria are intended to guide publishers in their development of curricular materials for teaching under the Common Core regime. (Although I don't actually know any teachers who use a publisher's curriculum materials, many must do so, since producing these materials seems to be a huge industry.)
 
Here's the conclusion--again, this is Coleman and Pimentel telling publishers how to create materials for teaching to the Common Core standards:

CONCLUSION: EFFICACY OF ALIGNED MATERIALS
Curriculum materials must have a clear and documented research base. The most important evidence is that the curriculum accelerates student progress toward career and college readiness. It can be surprising which questions, tasks, and instructions provoke the most productive engagement with text, accelerate student growth, and deepen instructor facility with the materials. A great deal of the material designed for the standards will by necessity be new, but as much as possible the work should be based on research and developed and refined through actual testing in classrooms. Publishers should provide a clear research plan for how the efficacy of their materials will be assessed and improved over time. Revisions should be based on evidence of actual use and results with a wide range of students, including English language learners.

This paragraph may seem fairly reasonable on its face; nevertheless, I have two thoughts about it.

I. The Common Core does not, itself, "have a clear and documented research base"

My first thought is that what Coleman and Pimentel say about publishers' Common Core-aligned materials seems quite relevant for the Common Core itself.  It is as if Coleman and Pimentel had realized all the things that should have been done, but that they didn't do, in writing up educational standards for the entire country.

The Common Core is hardly "research-based"; the research base on which it rests is incredibly flimsy.  The authors of the Common Core make their case, such as it is, in an appendix purporting to offer, among other things, "research supporting key elements of the standards."  The relevant section of this appendix is only three pages long and offers "research" worthy of an undergraduate paper or a blog post, not of a major national endeavor.  Its three pages make roughly the following case:

1) College performance correlates with the ability to read and understand difficult texts, and especially expository texts. (This is probably true.)

2) Complexity of texts assigned in high school has declined over the last 50 years, and high school students read relatively little expository text. (This may be true.) 

3) Therefore, students need to be assigned more difficult texts, and more of those texts should be expository. (This third part neither follows logically nor is supported by empirical data.)

As I noted, the first part of this argument seems very likely, and the second is plausible, but the third part is very problematic, neither seeming logical nor being supported by the historical record or empirical research. The gap in logic is obvious: just because kids who are better at reading complex expository texts do better in college does not mean that most of the reading kids do in high school should be of complex expository texts, and just because the complexity of texts assigned in high school has declined somewhat over the past several decades does not mean that assigning more complex texts is the right remedy.  For these conclusions to be valid, there would have to be empirical support either of the historical or experimental variety.  There is neither.

First, the historical fallacy.  Robert Hass tells us that all poetry is about loss.  The same is true of the stories Ed reformers tell—we have lost the good old days when teachers taught more rigorously and even poor students could achieve like the rich kids.  The problem with this story is that it is by no means clear that students were more college-ready 50 years ago.  The only historical evidence the Common Core authors cite is what they call a "statistically significant" decline in adult reading proficiency.  What is the actual decline? From 15% in 1992 to 13% in 2007.  This hardly seems precipitous, it covers fifteen years, not fifty, and is belied by (slightly) rising reading scores on the NAEP.  The historical record does not provide a clear argument for making students read more difficult texts or having more of those texts be expository--and Ed reformers, unlike poets, don't have the excuse of poetic license. (For a longer analysis of this historical fallacy in the stories Ed reformers tell, see here.)


Second, there is a shocking lack of experimental data.  As usual in writing about education, the discussion in this Common Core appendix is a mish-mash of much unfounded assertion and some offhand citations of actual empirical research; also as usual, even when there are references, the articles cited often fail to support the assertion.  I'll discuss just one example--the first specific citation I looked at--but they are almost all equally embarrassing.

     References that don't support what they are cited to support

I am skeptical of the idea that students need to read a lot of specifically expository text; my suspicion, based on my own and others' experience, is that the key thing is to simply to read a lot, and that a high volume of reading even of trashy airport thrillers will lead, with only a bit of specific practice, to skillful reading of expository text.  The Common Core document states that "students need sustained exposure to expository text to develop important reading strategies." Now, I doubt this very much, but while I only have anecdotal evidence (me, Malcolm Gladwell, and everyone else of our generation, who learned to read before reading strategy instruction was current) to support my skepticism, the Common Core folks seem to have more: they cite several articles to support their statement.  I looked at the first citation (Afflerbach, Pearson and Paris, 2008), a 2008 overview from "The Reading Teacher" about the difference between strategies and skills (unsurprisingly, the article suggests that skills are unconscious, strategies are conscious, and you need both; I agree, but I'm skeptical that these things can be explicitly taught or usefully assessed)--the article does not support the assertion it is cited to support.  

I have now read the article three times looking for evidence that "students need sustained exposure to expository text to develop important reading strategies," and I have so far failed to find any evidence at all.  Thinking maybe I'd missed it, I searched for "expository," for "exposure" and for "sustained".  None of those words appears in the text.  Neither does "non-fiction."  Looking through again, the closest I could come to anything supporting the claim that you need to read a lot of expository text in order to develop reading strategies is the following very general assertion about practicing strategies, which is completely untethered to any actual data:
  
"The scope and complexity of these strategies are large, and there is ample variety of text difficulty and genre variety to practice so that the skills become automatic. The general rule is, teach children many strategies, teach them early, reteach them often, and connect assessment with reteaching." 

First of all, we should note that this "general rule" is, like most general rules in writing about education, totally unproven and highly dubious. Many people, like me, like Ben Franklin, like Frederick Douglass, received virtually no formal instruction, and absolutely no assessment, in reading strategies, and yet learned to be highly skilled readers and writers.  Second, this brief, unfounded passage bears little relation to the Common Core's assertion that you need to read a lot of expository text in order to get better at it. If this-- "there is ample ... genre variety to practice so that the skills become automatic"--is supposed to mean this--"students need sustained exposure to expository text to develop important reading strategies"-- then either I am a bad reader, David Coleman is a bad reader, or he simply has no idea what a "clear and documented research base" would mean in a field that was, unlike education, actually scientific.

Again, the first citation offered by Coleman and Pimentel to support one of their central claims provides absolutely no support; far from reporting research or empirical data, the article never even mentions the matter at hand.  This is still amazing to me, despite my having found this to be the case with so many other supposedly "research-based" recommendations to teachers.

II. Books and (maybe) a teacher are all students really need

The other thing to notice about the Common Core’s recommendation to publishers is although the authors say that most of the materials "will by necessity be new", this is probably untrue. In fact, developing new materials may be unnecessary, since books alone would seem to fit most of their requirements.  Books support student "readiness for college."  Books have "a clear and documented research base."  Books have a long history of "actual use" with a "wide range of students."

The best ELA program for infants is simply a lot of natural adult talking and reading aloud, and the best college ELA curriculum is simply good books and an engaging professor, but somehow schools have fallen into a muddy puddle of "instruction" and "curriculum materials." Also, one of the major stated purposes of the whole Common Core/PARCC effort is to make sure young people are prepared for college.  I wonder why, then, the best private high schools and the best private colleges aren't using publisher-created curriculum.  Is it possible that Andover and Harvard are delivering a sub-par product.  Perhaps--but far more likely is that either their curriculum is better or that the curriculum really doesn't matter all that much. 

The Common Core anticipates that the questions, tasks and instructions used with readings will be created by publishing companies.  This begs the question of what role, if any, we teachers are supposed to play.  I suppose eventually we will be replaced by computer programs.  That might be okay...

Conclusion

Except that it's not okay. Children need human connection, and the best thing that we do every day is provide that connection.  If scholars and bureaucrats with zero teaching experience can tell us what we can do that will help us connect better, great!  But all too often--that is, almost all the time--their recommendations are shockingly unfounded on any empirical data.

On the one hand, many of the CC's specific recommendations—like the suggestion that students focus on close reading, or the observation that “it can be surprising which questions, tasks, and instructions provoke the most productive engagement with text”—seem reasonable, but the hypocrisy and hubris of the whole enterprise give off a very questionable smell. 

Poverty matters in Wisconsin: No poor school achieves as well as any rich school

Corporate ed reformers like Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee always argue, as in their "manifesto" on "How To Fix Our Schools," that poverty can be overcome by schools and teachers.  That manifesto asks us to start with what they call "the basics" of what they call "failing schools":

     "the single most important factor determining whether students succeed in school is not
     the color of their skin or their ZIP code or even their parents’ income—it is the quality
     of their teacher.”

This is, of course, a straight-out lie.  Unfortunately, lies this convenient are zombies that need to be disproved over and over again. I recently saw, on the blog of a retired math teacher, a graph that (re-)does the job quite neatly.

The graph, gratefully reproduced below, shows very clearly the relationship between poverty and educational achievement.

The state of Wisconsin makes available a lot of data about all of its schools, and the retired math teacher blogger has made a chart comparing the average "student achievement score" for a school (a composite of the math and reading scores on the state tests for all students in a school) with the % of students who are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch.  Each blue dot represents a school; its vertical position represents student achievement, while its left-right position represents the % of "economically disadvantaged students."  (The curved lines are the first and third-degree functions that fit the data best--you can ignore them if you like.)

(From http://gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com/2013/01/21/poverty-isnt-destiny/)

What I like about this graph is its beautiful symmetry. Look at the top left hand corner of the graph, and you will see that there is not a single rich school (i.e. less than 10% of students eligible for free or reduced price lunch) in the entire state of Wisconsin whose "student achievement" the state measures at less than 54.  Similarly, there is not a single poor school (i.e. FRPL>90%) whose student achievement is above 53. In other words, there is ZERO overlap between the rich schools and the poor schools.

This graph, like the compelling ones compiled by UT physicist Michael Marder, shows that in the real world there is no school--not a single one!--that has succeeded in educating its poor kids to the level of even the lowest-achieving rich-kid schools.  It may be theoretically possible, but as far as I can tell it has never been done, and to say, as Klein, Rhee and their ilk do, that "the single most important factor" determining success in school is not parental income but teachers is offensive to teachers, to kids, and to anyone who cares about truth, science, data, or reality.

The Common Core is not "evidence-based"--but maybe that's okay!

My Curriculum Coordinator just got a subscription to the Marshall Memo, which may be bad for my mental health--I'll be reading a lot more Ed. research. This post came from reading an article in EdWeek that Marshall refers to in this week's memo.  I'm sorry the post is so long.  I think it served to clarify my thinking...

The Common Core is Not Evidence-Based
There's an article in a recent EdWeek with the remarkable headline: "New Literacy Research Infuses Common Core."  The article's subtitle reads, "In the 15 years since the National Reading Panel convened, the knowledge base on literacy has grown." As far as I can tell, both the headline and the subhead are essentially false.  The Common Core standards are not really evidence-based, and the knowledge base on literacy has not grown much in the 15 years since the now-discredited National Reading Panel --except perhaps in the Socratic sense of knowing how much it doesn't know.

This is interesting only because it points up the farcical nature of so much of today's educational discourse.  While most of what happens in schools today is worthwhile, the way people talk about it is just ridiculous.  One of my colleagues suggested that our schools would be better off if all the Graduate Schools of Education disappeared from the face of the earth (he used stronger words), and I think he might be right. Education research is like Hollywood: NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING.  Of course, this isn't true, either of schools or of Hollywood, but it's partly true. 

The article itself is somewhat better than its headlines, and if you read it carefully you can see that the Ed. professors are basically just as in the dark as we teachers are--if not more so.  What is most amazing about an article that claims to be about "new literacy research" is that it describes very little actual research.  The article quotes many academics, but often they say things as questionable and non-evidence-based as the following paragraph, which manages to express the same simple idea, an idea that has been a truism for many decades now, over and over:

"In our knowledge-based economy, students are not only going to have to read, but develop knowledge-based capital. We need to help children use literacy to develop critical-thinking skills, problem-solving skills, making distinctions among different types of evidence," said Susan B. Neuman, a professor in educational studies specializing in early-literacy development at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. "The Common Core State Standards is privileging knowledge for the first time. To ensure they are career-and-college ready, we have to see students as lifelong learners and help them develop the knowledge-gathering skills they will use for the rest of their lives. That's the reality."

Privileging knowledge is a new idea?  Helping kids become life-learners is a new idea? Critical thinking in literacy is a new idea?  What?  Not only are these old ideas, there is not a the slightest bit of research or data to be found in that paragraph.

The recent history of "evidence-based" BS
The EdWeek article goes on to discuss the National Reading Panel of 2000, which was a much-ballyhooed effort to establish the most advanced and scientific thinking about how children learn to read and how we can help them.  The Panel's report came down decisively on the side of explicit instruction in skills: phonemic awareness; vocabulary; comprehension strategies; etc.  The panel's recommendations formed the basis of a $1 billion-a-year effort, "Reading First" by the Federal government to improve reading in the early grades.  Eight years later, there was a comprehensive assessment of the program, to find out how much difference this explicit instruction in skills had made.  The answer: zero difference.

The assessment reported three key findings: (1) Reading First did indeed result in students spending more time on reading "instruction" (phonemic awareness, vocab, etc.); (2) Reading First did indeed result in more professional development in "scientifically based reading instruction (SBRI)"; (3) however, "Reading First did not produce a statistically significant impact on student reading comprehension test scores in grades one, two or three" (page v).

Another finding, that the assessment did not consider "key," but that may have had some impact, was that the increased instructional time and the emphasis on skills did not result in any increase in students' actually reading.  As the assessment puts it: "Reading First had no statistically significant impacts on student engagement with print" (page xii).

This is remarkable: in 2000, only twelve years ago, the state of the research (the "knowledge-based capital," in the vapid phrase of the Michigan professor), which the panel of eminent experts claimed to hold to the "highest standards of scientific evidence," was utterly and completely wrong.

After being so wrong, the education experts tried to reposition themselves--but not very clearly.  One of them is quoted in the EdWeek article as saying that after the National Reading Panel, "comprehension became the 'next great frontier of reading research.'"  This is odd, since "comprehension" was one of the central topics of the NRP itself. (1)

Reading Next:
One of the ways the experts tried to reposition themselves was in a report called "Reading Next," which according to the EdWeek article "helped spark the common core's approach. Education professor Catherine A. Snow and then-doctoral student Gina Biancarosa of the Harvard Graduate School of Education found that explicit comprehension instruction, intensive writing, and the use of texts in a wide array of difficulty levels, subjects, and disciplines all helped improve literacy for struggling adolescent readers."

Reading Next focused on an array of fifteen "powerful tools" for improving literacy.  In an improvement on the NRP's exclusive focus on skills instruction, many of Reading Next's recommendations were so vague that no one could object ("Effective Instructional Principles Embedded in Content"), and many sounded fairly old-fashioned (Strategic Tutoring; Motivation and Self-Directed Learning; Extended Time for Literacy).  But when you actually looked more deeply into what the specific recommendations were, it became clear that the report was, like the NRP, trying as hard as possible to avoid mentioning the very simple strategy of having students actually read.

Avoiding all mention of actual reading:
Here is the passage from the Reading Next report that discusses "Extended Time for Literacy," which I had thought from its title might mean more time for students to actually read.  That may be what is meant, but the authors seem to twist themselves into jargony knots so as to avoid discussing actual "reading":

Extended Time for Literacy
None of the above-mentioned elements are likely to effect much change if instruction is limited to thirty or forty-five minutes per day. The panel strongly argued the need for two to four hours of literacy-connected learning daily. This time is to be spent with texts and a focus on reading and writing effectively. Although some of this time should be spent with a language arts teacher, instruction in science, history, and other subject areas qualifies as fulfilling the requirements of this element if the instruction is text centered and informed by instructional principles designed to convey content and also to practice and improve literacy skills.

To leverage time for increased interaction with texts across subject areas, teachers will need to reconceptualize their understanding of what it means to teach in a subject area. In other words, teachers need to realize they are not just teaching content knowledge but also ways of reading and writing specific to a subject area. This reconceptualization, in turn, will require rearticulation of standards and revision of preservice training.

This passage is amazing.  Despite the fact that it seems intended to promote spending more time having students actually reading, the language in this passage and the whole report seems to avoid saying that straight out. Instead we hear about "instruction" (four times), "literacy-connected learning," "interaction with texts," and "instructional principles designed to convey content." The word "reading" appears twice, but never on its own, never with the implication that the students might be actually reading; instead, we read that time should be spent with "a focus on reading" and in "teaching... ways of reading."  

This passage, like the whole report and indeed like so much of the discourse of reading experts, makes me think of Pearson and Gallagher's "Gradual Release of Responsibility Model."  These experts, perhaps because they are so far removed from teaching actual children, are not willing to release responsibility...

Much of the data that does exist is obvious
Much of the "research" that the EdWeek article mentions is super-obvious.  For instance, here is some expert wisdom:

"research showing that there is no bright line for when students start to read to learn"

"Kids have to read across texts, evaluate them, respond to them all at the same time. In office work of any sort, people are doing this sort of thing all the time."

"a student's depth and complexity of vocabulary knowledge predicts his or her academic achievement better than other early-reading indicators, such as phonemic awareness."

Didn't we all know these things already? But here is my personal favorite piece of obvious data:

"students who practiced reading, even when it was difficult, were significantly better 20 weeks later at reading rate, word recognition, and comprehension, in comparison with the control group."

Wow--if you read more, you get better.  Who knew?!

Education is like medicine, circa 1850
I have read that at the end of John Hattie's 2009 Magnum Opus, Visible Learning (I've ordered the book, but it hasn't come yet), Hattie compares the state of research in education to the state of medical research in the nineteenth century. In other words, we teachers might be better off with home remedies or folk wisdom.  And in a sense this makes me feel a bit better about the Common Core.  The Common Core is in no real sense, as far as I can tell, evidence-based (saying that students will one day have to write non-fiction is not scientific evidence for making them read it a lot when they are eight), but given the state of education research, maybe that's okay.  What matters is that students read a lot, think and talk about what they read, and look carefully at their own writing.  We English teachers can facilitate this process, but we shouldn't worry too much about the standards, which are, as Tim Shanahan says, in an expert opinion I can agree with completely, "a little goofy."

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Footnotes:
(1)  In fact, one of my favorite passages from the NRP report is the following piece of meaningless verbiage: "Comprehension is critically important to the development of children’s reading skills and therefore to the ability to obtain an education. Indeed, reading comprehension has come to be the “essence of reading”."  This is as absurd as if one were to say, "Movement is critically important to the development of children's running skills and therefore to the ability to compete in many team sports.  Indeed, movement has come to be the "essence of running"."

Arne Duncan's life of privilege seems to have limited his imagination

From an article in today's NYT, here's Arne Duncan: “When everyone is treated the same, I can’t think of a more demeaning way of treating people."

Hm.  I can think of some more demeaning ways.

More on the non-golden age of the 50s...

This is not directly literacy-related, but it supports and confirms what I was talking about in my last post, so I'll just mention it quickly.  Richard Rothstein, who has for years and years been doing a great job of patiently and repeatedly dismantling the idea that schools and teachers are the best way to overcome poverty, has a wonderful, entertaining and painful article in The American Prospect. I'll give the basic story here, but it's worth reading the whole thing.

I. Joel Klein's non-evidence-based BS
Joel Klein--who represents better perhaps than anyone else (see footnote) the idea that if only we put billionaires in charge of our schools and gave them a free hand to hire, fire and generally wreak havoc, then public education will be able to cure all of our country's social ills (which are now largely the result of incompetent, undisciplined teachers who have read too much Paulo Freire)--Joel Klein is always citing his own life story to show that all you need are good teachers to lift you out of inner-city poverty and public housing.  According to Klein, he himself grew up poor and in public housing, in a family that offered him no support for reading or other cultural activities, but his public school teachers held him to high standards, and he went to Columbia and on to a successful career, so therefore poverty is not an insurmountable impediment, and his story shows that "you'll never fix poverty in America until you fix education."

The most obvious problem with this story is that one anecdote does not prove much of anything.  A larger problem is that the nation's schools were not, by any objective measure, any better overall in the 50s or 60s than they are now. But the biggest problem with the story is one you wouldn't know unless you did what Richard Rothstein did and actually looked into it: Klein's account of his own childhood is essentially untrue in every particular.

Klein was not in fact poor: his postal-worker father and bookkeeper mother probably made significantly more than the national median household income.

Klein's family did offer him culture and literacy.  In fact, Klein was inspired to become a lawyer because his father would take him to the federal courthouse in Manhattan to watch cases, and if his family was like many other middle-class Jewish New York families of his era, education was probably valued as much as life itself.

Klein did grow up in public housing, but it was in no way like public housing as we have become accustomed to think of it.  The words "public housing" for most evoke notions of crime-ridden wastelands, subsidized permanently by the government, inhabited by single parents and terrified children who are mostly people of color.  The public housing Klein grew up in, by contrast, was not rent-subsidized, and in fact could be seen as a bastion of white middle-class privilege: the application process excluded single-parents, anyone with a criminal record, anyone with an out-of-wedlock birth, anyone with a history of drug addiction or mental illness, and most people of color (there was essentially a quota system intended to keep the neighborhood balance the same as it was before). In other words, the social problems, as Rothstein puts it, were "weeded out by the Housing Authority."  This is not what most people think of when they hear "public housing."

So Joel Klein's biography does not actually provide any evidence that a poor kid growing up in a dangerous and unhealthy neighborhood with little family support can be saved by a good teacher.  Instead, it reinforces the obvious truth that a middle-class kid growing up in a safe and healthy neighborhood with significant family support will do well in school and will appreciate a good teacher when he gets one--as Klein appreciated his high school physics teacher.

II. Parallel Childhoods
One of the strengths of Richard Rothstein's article exposing Klein's BS is that Rothstein and Klein turn out to have had parallel childhoods.  Like Klein, Rothstein grew up in a middle class neighborhood in New York with a postal worker father and a bookkeeper mother, went to public school and went on to an Ivy League college. The two men even had the same physics teacher. But while Klein complains about not having a Mitt-Romney-like childhood and pretends that schools in the fifties were so great as to make up for his deprivation, Rothstein is aware that it was his family support that made the difference.  Rothstein even tells us that when he wanted to apply to Harvard, his high school refused to process the application (because "boys from here don't go to Harvard") until Rothstein's father took the day off from work to come in and talk to the Principal.  So much, as Rothstein says, for the golden age of the 50s.

For most people, as for Rothstein and probably Klein, education in the 1950s was no better than it is now.  Then, as now, there are lots of kids from middle-class homes and parents without college degrees who are pushed and supported by their families and go on to great academic success.  My father and stepfather are both examples of this: both grew up in stable middle-class homes, with parents who hadn't been to college; both were pushed and supported by their parents.  My father, who went to a small rural high school in the midwest, was one of two kids in his high school class to go to college, but he ended up at MIT.  My stepfather grew up in a Mitchell-Lama building in Washington Heights, with parents who hadn't gone to college, and he went on to be valedictorian at Bronx Science; he also went on to MIT.

Neither my father nor my stepfather would ever say that their 50s and 60s public schools were responsible for their success.  Their schools were OK, but most students in those schools did not achieve such dramatic success. Instead, what allowed my father and stepfather to excel so remarkably was the support and encouragement of their middle-class parents, the fact that they were not surrounded by miserable poverty, and probably the fact that they themselves were pretty gifted.

III. Rothstein's concluding peroration
Again, it's worth reading the whole article, but here are a couple of paragraphs from the end of it:

"It would be obscene for me to claim I overcame severe hardship and was rescued from deprivation by schoolteachers. It is more obscene for Klein to do so, because his claim supports attacks on contemporary teachers and a refusal to acknowledge impediments teachers face because of their students’ social and economic deprivation. It’s a deprivation that he never suffered but that many children from public housing do today.
"A few superhuman teachers may lift a handful of children who come to school from barely literate homes, hungry, in poor health, and otherwise unprepared for academic instruction. But even the best teachers face impossible tasks when confronted with classrooms filled with truly disadvantaged students who are not in tracked special-progress classes and don’t arrive each morning from families as academically supportive as mine. Instead, they may come from segregated communities where concentrated and entrenched poverty, unemployment, and social alienation over many generations have been ravaging."

IV. My own conclusion: the subtext of Klein's and others'  master narrative
(I don't have time to write this in an articulate way, since I have to enter interim progress reports, but I'll take ten minutes and make an attempt.)

Klein's story is obscene, but its obscenity is not unique to Joel Klein; in fact, it is part of a larger cultural phenomenon, the anxious attempts by our ruling classes to assert that they deserve their own extraordinary privileges,  and I think we need to understand the current emphasis, by these ruling classes, on education and education reform as a part of this larger cultural phenomenon.

This need to deny one's own cultural advantages can be seen not only in Klein's absurd story, but in the absurd assertions by successful aristocrats like Mitt Romney that they are self-made men ("I inherited nothing").  Our society is in many ways less a meritocracy than it was 50 years ago, but the ruling classes want to pretend that it is.  (This is, I believe, the thesis of a book I haven't read, The Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy, by the estimable Christopher Hayes.)  The ruling elites know they are smart and have worked hard, and they want, perhaps understandably, to pretend that their success is due to their own efforts.  The elites' emphasis on education has to be seen in the light of this pretense.

Every time a politician pays lip service, as Obama did in his disastrous debate, to the idea that education is the best way to rebuild our economy and create jobs, we should remember that this is a self-serving argument, and one that implicitly blames the poor for their own condition. When we see articles that say that even high-priced colleges are a great investment, we should consider that college, for many students in a country whose top college major is "Business", may be as much a matter of what I think Jane Jacobs calls "credentialing" and what I always think of as analogous to a guild system; that is, a college degree functions as a class marker, and the four years of hard work or debauchery at an expensive campus is less about education than about your parents trying to ensure that you remain in the upper middle class.

What we are living in is less meritocracy than plutocracy, and saying that our educational system is failing is a way of displacing blame for the increasing inequality whose effects are all around us, if we only have eyes to see. (This is not to say that education doesn't matter, nor to say that individual teachers can make a difference--and in fact I am trying my best, but we teachers can't do it all by ourselves.)



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Footnote: Joel Klein's career

Hired in 1998 by billionaire Mayor Bloomberg, Joel Klein was for years the Chancellor of the largest public school system in the country despite having no prior experience in education (he was counsel for a huge corporation); after resigning in 2010, Klein now works for two other billionaires Rupert Murdoch (Klein is trying to sell media to public schools) and for Eli Broad (Klein is in charge of Broad's massive effort to put "reform"-minded (anti-union, pro-privatization) superintendents in place across the country).

The Writing Counterrevolution

I. "The Writing Revolution"
There's an interesting but insidious article about writing instruction, "The Writing Revolution," in this month's Atlantic.  The article tells the story of a high school on Staten Island that changed the way it taught writing and saw its test scores and graduation rates improve significantly.

The changes in the writing instruction don't seem unreasonable--an increased focus on argument and grammar, along with a heavy use of sentence stubs and frameworks (e.g. "I agree/disgagree that_____, because _____")--and it seems possible that instituting a coherent writing and thinking curriculum as a big part of a schoolwide overhaul could be a big improvement in a bad school. Why, then, does the article so raise my hackles?

I think it's mainly because the article takes this one curricular shift and weaves it, with a lot of dangerously simplistic received ideas, into a standard narrative of recovering a lost golden age--in this case, the golden age of the 1950s. According to the article, the school's shift to "formal lessons in grammar, sentence structure and essay-writing" was a return to the ways that "would not be un­familiar to nuns who taught in Catholic schools circa 1950." This counterrevolution (the article's headline is misleading) was necessary, according to the article's narrative, because misguided educational movements of the 60s, 70s and 80s had led schools away from teaching "the fundamentals" and toward a weak, pointless curriculum of "creative-writing" in a "fun, social context."

This long-term narrative is annoyingly untethered to any hard data.  Were students better writers in the 1950s?  I doubt it very much.  The best data we have on long-term trends comes from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which shows little change from 1971 to 2008, but if anything shows a gradual upward trend.  If the story this Atlantic article is telling has much truth to it--if there was a shift in the 70s and 80s to a more fun and creative writing curriculum that ruined academic achievement across the country--then we should see NAEP scores going down.  But they don't go down, they go (slightly) up! Here are the National NAEP reading scores for 13 year olds:

1971       255
1975       256
1980       258
1984       257
1988       257
1990       257
1992       260
1996       258
1999       259
2004       259
2008       260

The reading scores for 9 year olds, who wouldn't have had as much schooling, and 17-year olds, who had more, tell basically the same story.  Students in 1971 had not had much time to be ruined, as the article implies they were, by teachers teaching Paulo Freire in Ed school, and yet they seem to have been no more literate than students in the nineties, or in 2008.

The particular story the Atlantic article tells, about one high school that changed (among other things) its writing instruction, is an interesting anecdote, one whose facts could be probed further (what else was changed at the school?) and whose meaning can be debated (even if the shift in writing curriculum was responsible for a dramatic improvement in academic achievement, is it possible that any coherent writing curriculum, even one that focused on personal or creative writing, could have had the same effect?).  The interesting anecdote, however, is put in the context of a larger narrative that seems to be clearly and demonstrably wrong.  It is simply not true that because misguided 60s and 70s pinkos, in the name of freedom, stopped teaching anything, student achievement plummeted.  Whatever teachers were doing in the 70s, 80s and 90s, student achievement did not plummet.

II. "How Self-Expression Damaged My Students"
The main Atlantic article is accompanied by a shorter piece by a former "teacher" (the guy seems to have used a brief stint in the New York public schools as a stepping stone from a career in magazine publishing to a career in the Ed Reform industry), entitled "How Self-Expression Damaged My Students." This bizarre article likens the "Reader's and Writer's Workshop" approach (one that this guy used in his classroom) to a "cargo cult."  In other words, the reading and writing his students did was, as he sees it, as totally pointless as the building of runways by primitive peoples who hoped that by imitating the form of an airfield they could bring back the airdrops of supplies and food that had come during the war.  This comparison is so insane on so many levels that I am not going to take the time to analyze it.

Later in his article, apparently realizing that he has gone off the deep end, the author tries to reel himself back, writing, "Let me hasten to add that there should be no war between expressive writing and explicit teaching of grammar and mechanics," but he goes on to argue that "at present, we expend too much effort trying to get children to 'live the writerly life' and 'develop a lifelong love of reading.'" And he concludes by implying that it is ten times more important to teach grammar and mechanics than to try to get kids to love reading and writing by having them actually do it.

These people are all about data, but where is the data that shows that grammar and mechanics "instruction" works better than just reading a lot? It sounds like the author of the Atlantic article had his students spend way too much time on the writing process and not nearly enough time reading, but just because he was bad at it does not mean that getting kids to develop a lifelong love of reading won't help them read and write better.  It almost certainly will.  Grammar and mechanics instruction, on the other hand, should be a small part of the curriculum.


III. What, then, to think? (Besides that the Atlantic is owned by right-wing crazies...)
I'm not sure what my own overarching narrative is (maybe that we're in the middle of a decades-long counterrevolution in which we are making the poor poorer, blaming them for the results of their poverty, and then telling them they ought to act more like they did in the 50s, when people respected their betters?), but I am pretty sure that these people in the Atlantic don't have the right one.