Paul Thomas: Collateral Damage in Yet Another Reading War
Paul Thomas puts the current reading battles in perspective.
This is both a favorite lede in mainstream media and a perfect example of the enduring story we tell about education in the U.S.:
Fewer than half of New York City public school students showed proficiency on reading exams this year, a decline from the previous year that may reflect how hard it is to change teaching approaches as the district embarks on a major reading overhaul. (Troy Closson, New York Times)
If time travel were possible, we could visit virtually any moment in the U.S. over the past 100 years and the story would be the same: Kids today cannot read!
But over the past five decades, the state of schools, teaching, and student achievement has been the focus of perpetual accountability-based education reform grounded in high-stakes testing and standards.
That reform has existed in a repeated cycle of crisis/reform, including periodic elevated concern for student reading achievement. Reading reform almost always sits in what has become know as the Reading War.
The Reading War and reading crisis have a long history, reaching at least back into the 1940s.
Therefore, the lede quoted above is mostly not unlike the public perception of student reading for about a century, although the current Reading War is couched in the high-stake environment of education reform and a media story that is both compelling and misleading as well as often entirely false.
Thus, the reading proficiency decline in NYC sits within a high-profile movement, the “science of reading” (SOR) story driven by mainstream media and resulting in new or revised reading policy across most states.
While the media focus on NYC is outsized and thus misleading, the dynamics at play in NYC do serve as a cautionary tale about policy and legislation reform grounding in a Reading War.