Literacy Lass 💗📚

#FridayFeeling #satchat #NAESP18

If you come across someone asserting there is "no scientific evidence" that social media is causing harm, please send them this link. We lay out seven lines of evidence, including RCTs, natural experiments, and testimony from victims & perpetrators of harm worldhappiness.report/ed/2026/social…

@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…