Media and Parental Advocacy Not Credible Sources for Reading Policy

Peter Greene, former teacher and one of the best public thinkers about education today, found this Tweet “familiar” as a veteran of education reform debates:

Greene and I share long careers in education and the mind-numbing experience of rebuking education reform claims and policies over the last few decades. Education reform, in fact, has followed the exact path Richard Sever warns against in his Tweet.

While some of the larger aspects of the education reform movement that began after A Nation at Risk was released under Ronald Reagan have sputtered — charter schools, Teach For America, standards and high-stakes testing, stack ranking and value-added methods for teacher evaluation — the reform du jour is focused on reading.

Since the mid- to late 2010s — specifically 2018 — the science of reading (SOR) movement has been driven by media and parental advocacy, resulting in new or revised reading legislation in dozens of states across the U.S. [1]

The problem is that political leaders are disproportionately influenced by inexpert advocacy such as Emily Hanford’s journalism and parent organizations for dyslexia (Decoding Dyslexia).

Journalists and parents often share missionary zeal for topics, especially issues related to education, but lack historical, disciplinary, and statistical expertise to see clearly both the very real failures in education and the complex solutions that are needed.

Are too many students being mis-served as emerging readers in our schools, as media claim? Yes!

Is the current education system failing to identify and serve students with reading challenges, including dyslexia, as parents claim? Yes!

None the less, media and parental evidence, claims, and demands for solutions are mostly jumbled, misleading, and not scientific.

[Please continue reading HERE]