Literacy Lass 💗📚

#FridayFeeling #satchat #NAESP18

@sapinker on 🔥 here calling out the decades-long bizarre reluctance of Education Faculties to foster explicit teaching, in favour of romantic ideals that lack evidence to support them.

Academicitis - when you demand RCT studies for every last thing.

"Absurd" From the woman who developed a viral, virtually-free phonics program, and actually bothered to do research to demonstrate its effectiveness.

A Michigan superintendent learned that reading in K-5 had "almost vanished." Then, devices were banned "almost overnight" in @MesickSchools. @lilyalta reports. @JonHaidt gets mentions.

Boston University is recruiting participants for a study of different tutoring modalities. From @MeganGierka: “The study is open to first and second grade students in the U.S. who speak English. Participation is remote (with optional in-person implementation in partner settings). The intervention involves 1 to 1.5 hours per week for 10 weeks. The goal of this study is to understand how different types of reading support help children learn. We are comparing AI-supported tutoring with Amira, one-on-one human tutoring, and non-literacy activities or business-as-usual instruction to evaluate what works best for different students.” @MissyPurcell @Veggievangelist @brett_tingley @SFParents @KJWinEducation @Parents4RJ @NationalParents @DDyslexiaCT @DDCalifornia

New article from E. D. Hirsch and me on (1) the evidence for the importance of knowledge in reading; (2) why it’s taken so long for people to acknowledge the evidence; (3) what we predict if the role of knowledge is taken seriously. educationnext.org/rediscovering-…

Everyone needs to read this.

"Our lack of a systematic, sequential, & shared curriculum induces low literacy & low wisdom. That poses a deep danger to civic competence and thus to democracy itself." Tour de force by Willingham & Hirsch. educationnext.org/rediscovering-…

@oliviajune82 “Can you prove books in curriculum are better than passages?” Me:

🎉NOW RECRUITING! The goal of this study is to understand how different types of reading support help children learn. We are comparing AI-supported tutoring with Amira, one-on-one human tutoring, and non-literacy activities or business-as-usual instruction to evaluate what works best for different students. The study is open to first and second grade students in the U.S. who speak English. Participation is remote (with optional in-person implementation in partner settings). The intervention involves 1 to 1.5 hours per week for 10 weeks.

This is a good thread on the debates about how we translate assessment results to “grade levels”. It’s specific to the assessment of adults behind @mattyglesias’s observation about adult reading levels. But there are debates (and misunderstandings) about how to translate the NAEP and other assessments, too.

Whoa! Are programs still using empty themes?? This ‘faux cohesion’ in goes back decades, from when Isabel Beck and I were analyzing programs. Come on, do better.

This is my favorite section of @CharlesBarone's piece on how the Democrats lost their way on education. Yet it illustrates the limitations of using politics/policy as a barometer for anything. Barone is right: there are reformers on this list. Dem reformers! And there is a lot of forward progress, too. BUT... the devil in the details matters, and many of these wannabe reformers have execution issues holding back their progress. For example: - Colorado has mediocre curriculum in many districts thanks to a flawed state list. On the NAEP, Colorado's 4th grade reading proficiency is down relative to 2019, and dropped again 2022 to 2024. - Oregon has a Dept of Ed that likes to dole out $$ and is practically allergic to accountability. Oregon district leaders say this about its Science of Reading reforms. On the NAEP, Oregon's reading outcomes have tanked since the 2010's, and it's down relative to peers and the national average. There are bright spots in Oregon. Portland instituted district-level reforms that look like... wait for it... Louisiana's and Tennessee's! Two years into work with new book-rich, knowledge-building curriculum, the district is seeing small gains on the state assessment. You never see this detail in national media (nor Baltimore's somewhat-comparable story). - In NYC, the reading initiative is well-intentioned and broadly well-structured, but the district let one crummy curriculum onto its allowable list and most schools picked it. Parents and teachers both dislike it, and if Samuels did one thing, he should consider replacing it, so all choices are of higher quality. Policy isn't progress, folks. "Reformer mindset" does not translate to reading gains. For clarity, I don't fault Barone for not including this detail. Very little in the media-and-edreform ecosystem is surfacing these granular, execution-level details... so the conversation stays at the "pundit level". Witness allll the people shouting that Mississippi "just did phonics" and magic happened. We need to find a way to get more clarity on the finer details that distinguish MS/LA/TN/AL's execution (not just their policies), or the follow-the-Southern-Surge era will disappoint. And politicians will continue to get participation trophies for their eloquence, when what we really need is execution.

C. S. Lewis’s advice to a young schoolgirl on how to become a better writer:

One of the challenges with knowledge-building, in my experience, is that people only know what a good knowledge-building curriculum looks like if they have seen one or more. If they have only seen other programs, they tend to buy into the idea that knowledge building curriculum is simply “anything with nonfiction in it.” This is why posts like @oliviajune82's (and @laurapatranella's earlier this year) are so important. They make the details tangible. I love seeing @natwexler diving into the details—and critically, noting the curriculum review landscape issues that enable these misconceptions. Do read until the end for concerns that I very much share.

This is good news. The antidote for brain rot is books.

It isn't always easy to tell if a curriculum truly builds knowledge--especially if it's been misleadingly labeled. Please join me on a dive into one of those curricula: Benchmark Advance. @KnowledgeMatrs @karenvaites The difference is important. nataliewexler.substack.com/p/how-can-you-…

This is a very good example of "knowledge-rich gone wrong." Building knowledge is a cumulative enterprise not additive. @natwexler @oliviajune82 open.substack.com/pub/nataliewex…

This is a smart post from @mattyglesias, especially the part about the Ed Tech backlash being a symptom, not necessarily THE malady. I say that as someone with an anti-Ed Tech bent, because most of the first-generation Ed Tech was well-marketed garbage. I’d classify this moment as a backlash against Stuff That Didn’t Work (including but not exclusive to Ed Tech), witnessing the revolt against Balanced Literacy curricula... which is now being followed by a backlash against overly-conceptual-and-discourse-oriented math curricula, overly-complex phonics curricula, oral-only phonemic awareness programs, and I-could-go-on. Mind you, iReady is not a good tool for instruction! We just published a piece on the issues over at the Curriculum Insight Project: curriculuminsightproject.substack.com/p/were-ready-t… As important as it is to root out things that don’t work (whether it’s Ed Tech or a flawed curriculum), the equally-important question is: What are schools supposed to replace it with? Which brings me to my concern about the accountability-can-fix-it thesis. The accountability theory of change assumes that schools know what to do to raise outcomes, and if we just put the right carrots or sticks in place, they will do it. I don’t actually believe that’s the case, writ large. The embrace of crummy programs is a symptom of an education ecosystem where educators receive (and often believe) loads of misguided signals about what works to improve outcomes. Put another way: if we implemented new accountability schema today, paranoid schools would be just as (or more) likely to embrace the next faddish tech-enabled solution (“just like iReady, untested for efficacy, but now AI-enabled so it’ll work this time!”) as they would to embrace the curricula in Louisiana and Tennessee. Ask me how I know. So, I think we need to go upstream with accountability, and look at Accountability at the Input Level, or at least better research/insight, so we give better signals to schools (and school boards and parents) about the quality inputs/programs. There can be a role for policy here. I like the idea of a national curriculum database, so we can do research into what schools are using and correlations with performance: karenvaites.org/p/a-call-for-a… More to say on how we can kick accountability upstream, but that’s probably its own post.