Political Activism and Education: The Failure of Good Intentions

As a lifelong South Carolinian and educator in his 43rd year of teaching in the state, the image and post above causes me a great deal of angst.

Another billboard in that post asks, “23 Years of one-party rule left you feeling powerless?

And I am compelled to not just agree but scream, “Yes!” You see, over the course of 45 years as a SC voter, I have often stood in the voting booth with most of the elections having only one candidate, a Republican.

However, it is the billboard above that causes me distress because I have also witnessed over those years voting and teaching a perpetual story told by both Republicans and Democrats—SC (and US) public education is failing.

And that story results in an endless cycle of bi-partisan education reform that, frankly, is captured by Oscar Wilde: “But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.”

Yet again, these billboards demonstrate that good intentions are not enough.

Below, then, is an older post about SC’s education problem and one of my first scholarly articles from 1999.

South Carolina's Education Problem: Crisis, Faddism, and Boondoggles

One of my first scholarly publications, “A new honesty in education—Positivist measures in a postmodern world,” included the 1998 governor’s race in South Carolina between David Beasley (incumbent Republican) and Jim Hodges (Democratic) in a solidly Republican state.

While the governorship that election shifted to Hodges, mostly because of the wedge issue of gambling in SC, I noted that both candidates and political parties ran on a dishonest but effective platform—SC education was at the bottom in the U.S. In fact, both candidates had billboards lambasting the state’s education ranking that were virtually indistinguishable except for the candidate information.

In 2022 (and 2026), it is important to highlight that SC was popularly and politically identified in crisis and need of reform after two decades of crisis (A Nation at Risk under Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s) and a series of standards and high-stakes testing reform.

I entered education in 1984, right after then-Governor Richard Riley had pushed SC as one of the first adopters into the accountability movement.

As a high school teacher throughout the 1980s and 1990s, I watched and listened as SC political leaders called for modeling SC education policy, standards, and testing on Florida and Virginia (more recently, the model state is Mississippi); despite its bombastic libertarian proclamations (First to secede from the Union!), SC is copy-cat state when it comes to education policy.

And therein lies the problem.

SC remains trapped in a cycle of education crisis, education faddism, and education boondoggles.

After those two decades following A Nation at Risk, SC once again doubled down on reform and accountability during the No Child Behind Era (NCLB) under George W. Bush, and then, stumbled into the Obama era reforms—value-added methods for teacher evaluation, charter schools, and (yes) Common Core.

That Obama/Common Core era is a perfect example of educational dysfunction in SC.

SC rushed to adopt Common Core and the related testing (faddism), purchased teaching and learning materials labeled as Common Core aligned (boondoggle), and then while teachers were being trained and the entire educational system was transitioning to the new standards, SC dropped Common Core (because conservatives falsely labeled the movement as Obama’s although the standards came form the National Governor’s Association and were strongly bipartisan).

This wasteful nonsense was almost entirely partisan politics and had little to do with teaching and learning.

So as we stand in 2026, SC remains trapped in the crisis > faddism > boondoggle cycle that has been demonstrated to fail education since the early 1980s.

The accountability movement phase 1 (mostly a state-level movement) after A Nation at Risk was declared a failure and lead to the accountability movement phase 2 that pivoted on NCLB (and included federal policy mandating “scientifically based” teaching and materials).

About another 25 years after phase 2, we are once again screaming crisis, including a(nother) reading crisis and the really ugly anti-CRT/book banning movements (see how all of these are related historically).

SC has been quick to pass copy-cat reading legislation (see HERE and HERE) for about a decade, and the state budgets have included millions and millions of dollars for “science of reading” policy, training, and materials (sound familiar to those who watched the Common Core disaster?).

As one specific example, SC like many other states is simultaneously (again) calling for limiting everything in education to “scientific” while investing huge amounts of tax dollars to non-scientific boondoggles (see here about LETRS).

Education is an incredibly profitable market in the U.S., and the only people who have benefited from 40+ years of constant crisis > reform are those who repeatedly rebrand educational materials to match the fad-du-jour.

The current reading crisis and curriculum crisis in SC and across the U.S. are marketing and political scams—all faddism and boondoggles.

SC does not have a reading crisis, and never had a CRT crisis.

The real educational problems in SC (and throughout the U.S.) are once again being ignored—poverty, racism, and inequity in both the lives of children and citizens as well as in our schools.

Affluent children continue to have the best access to learning while marginalized and vulnerable children are neglected, ignored, or pushed into the most limited and limiting educational contexts (such as test-prep).

SC is not experiencing a new or unique educational crisis, but we are suffering from a historical and current reality that is reflected in our educational system—a lack of political will.

Crisis, faddism, and boondoggles are the playground of political leaders and education marketers who reap the rewards of misinformation, misdirection, and finding ourselves in a hole while continuing to dig.

Reference

Gorski, P. C. (2008). Good intentions are not enough: A decolonizing intercultural education. Intercultural Education,19(6), 515 - 525.

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Navigating Ungrading and Workshop in a Graded World [click link to access podcast]

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Grounded in the misleading A Nation at Risk report under Ronald Reagan, education reform has been the norm of US public education now for five decades—a perpetual state of the education crisis > education miracle > education reform cycle repeated ad nauseam.

US education reform has been a really bad version of the film Groundhog Day, except nothing ever changes in this real-world nightmare—no happy ending, no reform that works, nothing except perpetual crisis.

Education reform is eerily dystopian. “The administrations in charge,” writes Gilles Deleuze in Postscript on the Societies of Control, “never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons” (p. 4).

As a result, education reform is an industry, the goal being continual reform for political and economic profit.

A better film, in my opinion, would be Monty Python’s And Now For Something Completely Different.

Here’s why.

Along with doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result, US education reform has also been mind-numbingly bi-partisan.

Weekly, I see major Democrats heralding the exact same false claims about education crisis and endorsing the exact same reforms (the same as the previous reforms) as Republicans.

And most of that reform rhetoric, advocacy, and policy are currently trapped in the “science of” movement that began with the “science of reading.”

Reading and math, you see, are in crisis (again, or perpetually?) because teacher educators and scholars have been duping all teachers for decades with constructivism, inquiry, and tons of progressive nonsense.

The solution?

Back-to-basics! teacher-centered instruction! Explicit and direct instruction!

O, and it all must be supported by “science” (except when it profits the “science of” advocates and market, and then it is peachy keen).

We are way past needing to do something completely different and here are just two pieces of evidence of how to make that switch instead of finding ourselves in a hole and continuing to dig.

First, here is what we know after an intensive and rigorous effort to find what works in education using scientific standards [1]:

Educational researchers aren’t known for being funny at parties, but if you ever go to one of the wonky educational policy conferences and start talking shop with a researcher (we don’t recommend it), you might hear them make the joke that the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) should actually be called the Nothing Works Clearinghouse. This is because the WWC website, which prominently says “Find What Works,” is actually short on programs that apparently do work. Most programs reviewed by the WWC fail to meet even minimal evidence standards, with the vast majority rated as having “uncertain effects.” So, apparently, nothing works. Get it?

Narrowly scientific education research is not just difficult to do, but also produces outcomes that seem nearly impossible to implement, especially when almost nothing seems to “work.”

In this case, the “something different” must be an acknowledgement that “evidence” for what works and what doesn’t must be more expansive that only experimental/quasi-experimental research.

Why?

Teachers in real classrooms are not teaching general populations, and narrow “scientific” proof tends to erase the outliers are both ends of the so-called curve; something that “works” in general may not work at one end of the outliers and even cause harm at the other end of the outliers (this is true in pharmaceutical research, for example).

And the key second example of “something different” is research from 2024 [2] that replicates research for many decades:

Almost 63% of the variance in test performance was explained by social capital family income variables that influence the development of background knowledge. Background knowledge is a known predictor of standardized test results. Family income variables are immutable by schools. Only public policies, outside the control of school personnel, can influence family income….

Policy makers and education leaders should rethink the current reliance on standardized test results as the deciding factor to make decisions about student achievement, teacher quality, school effectiveness, and school leader quality. In effect, policies that use standardized test results to evaluate, reward, and sanction students and school personnel are doing nothing more than rewarding schools that serve advantaged students and punishing schools that serve disadvantaged students.

“Something different” in education reform, however, likely isn’t very sexy and probably doesn’t have the market and political capital as what we have done over and over for decades.

Nuance in almost anything doesn’t work well in the US, but especially in education where the rhetoric is often driven by moral panics; as Christian Bokhove notes:

Yes, “something different” in education reform must be in part rejecting overly narrow types of evidence, moving beyond in-school-only education reform, lessening or eliminating the use of standardized testing, and, importantly, not getting sucked into the vapid BinaryLand of social media and reform advocacy.

BinaryLand suffers from false caricatures and straw man arguments that serve a debate but never students, teachers, or public education.

As entertainment, Groundhog Day and everything by Monty Python is wonderful, deserves, ironically, rewatching on the regular.

However, education reform needs to set aside our futile Groundhog Day approach to reform and commit instead to “something completely different.”

Notes

[1] Lortie-Forgues, H., & Inglis, M. (2019). Rigorous Large-Scale Educational RCTs Are Often Uninformative: Should We Be Concerned? Educational Researcher, 48(3), 158-166. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X19832850

[2] Maroun, J., & Tienken, C. H. (2024). The Pernicious Predictability of State-Mandated Tests of Academic Achievement in the United States. Education Sciences, 14(2), 129. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci14020129

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In my two courses this fall, I am teaching first-year writing and educational philosophy. Students in the ed philosophy course have a major project analyzing public discourse about education (looking at newspaper and magazine articles as well as other forms of public discourse).

The first-year students are working on their second essay, which is a public piece using hyperlinks for citation; they are prompted to choose an interesting topic (hobby, pop culture, etc.) and to be sure to write to a clear public audience.

One activity I have them do is choose an online article on that topic to analyze, focusing on the key aspects of writing we have been covering in class. During the discussion after the analysis, one student who plans to write about Seinfeld noted that the article he found had a factual opening that wasn’t very engaging.

When I asked what would work better, he said using an episode of Seinfeld would engage the reader in the way we have been exploring.

In just a couple months, my first-year students mostly get it—how they have written in scripted and anemic ways as well as applying many strategies for writing in authentic, compelling, and credible ways needed in academic and public situations.

With these two groups of students in mind, I wasn’t surprised but remain disappointed about two high-profile articles on education.

The first is by a college professor about writing and thinking—I’m a College Professor. Writing Isn’t as Important as We Think.—and after seeing dozens of comments on social media, I decided to read it.

The essay is jarring and squanders credibility in the first line (something I warn my students to avoid): “Most college professors I know believe that students learn to think — critically, creatively, reflectively, tenaciously — only by writing.”

The straw man implication is worsened by the over-stated claim, using “only.”

In fact, the first sentence reminds me of an essay from The Onion I use in the first week of first-year writing: “For as far back as historians can go, summer vacations have been celebrated by people everywhere as a time for rest and relaxation.”

I have taught writing for over 40 years and have never heard anyone claim writing is the only way to teach thinking.

Setting that aside, the arguments here seem not grounded in understanding what “teaching writing” means. While students are required to write essays across most disciplines in higher education, many professors assign writing but do not teach writing.

The teaching of writing entails asking students to think deeply and critically, to consider organizing their ideas and claims, to choose and reference high-quality and credible sources, and to interrogate their own and other assumptions about their topics.

Those of us teaching writing have no delusions most or even many of our students will become writers, but by having them write in thoughtful ways and through a rigorous drafting process involving feedback and revision, we see students think better.

We also are under no delusion this is the only way to foster critical thinking.

To be blunt, the essay itself isn’t well written, the claims are often overstated or garbled, and the arguments seem lost in that shuffle.

I likely will now use this as a model essay of how not to write with my students.

The second piece is the usual nonsense about reading and math: Math needs a phonics-style reckoning.

Like a great deal of education journalism, this piece makes claims about reading and math that are widely believed, but have almost no basis in evidence, scientific or otherwise.

The reading/math crisis rhetoric followed by the back-to-basics mantra is at least a century old in the US.

The short version is, there have never been crises, and the blame is mostly cultural and ideological nonsense with little to do with how to teach or how students learn.

The irony here is that a great deal of journalism about education paints a very negative picture of today’s students, yet in my two classes, I meet three times a week with students who write better, think better, and consider the world better than either of these articles.

So it goes.

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Let’s start an examination of the claim that “kids today can’t read” by considering if that claim is true or if, as Chris Ferguson suggests, it is merely “a perennial gripe”:

So here is the problem.

First, is there evidence that over the past century US public schools have never taught students how to read well enough, and thus, the public and political rhetoric has always been “kids today can’t read” because that has always been in fact true?

This premise raises another problem because if “kids today” have never been able to read well enough, there simply has never been any catastrophic social consequence for that fact.

Certainly there have always been individuals who have not learned to read well enough and have suffered significant negative consequences.

But over the last century, the US has remained the dominant country in the world in nearly every category you can identify.

This calls into question the causal relationship between education and any country’s power.

Second, has there been an identifiable period in US history when US public education has taught reading well and “kids today” did in fact read well enough?

As a scholar of literacy and the history of education, I have never had anyone identify that period, and I have never discovered evidence of that period, and thus, I currently think the answer to that second question is “No.” [1]

So I want to return to Ferguson’s conjecture for a moment.

It seems reasonable to admit that over the past century, the vast majority of students have learned to read reasonably well, and that, regretfully because of human nature, some students fall through the cracks for hundreds of reasons and have not attained the literacy they need and deserve.

That said, at any moment in history including now, we as a society are ethically called to address that better than we have thus far.

We damned well know who is falling through our educational and social cracks, and frankly, we culturally and politically don’t give a damn about those children and teens—and we never have.

However, there is a caveat here: The way to address reading and all learning by students is primarily through addressing poverty and social inequity directly, not changing standards, tests, programs, or teacher training.

Note how Lou LaBrant responded to the reading crisis of the 1940s:

An easy way to evade the question of improved living and better schools for our underprivileged is to say the whole trouble is lack of drill. Lack of drill! Let’s be honest. Lack of good food; lack of well-lighted homes with books and papers; lack of attractive, well equipped schools, where reading is interesting and meaningful; lack of economic security permitting the use of free schools—lack of a good chance, the kind of chance these unlettered boys are now fighting to give to others.

We as a society also do not like that fact because of our cultural and political beliefs, beliefs not supported by decades of research.

And thus, the best explanation for the “perennial gripe” that “kids today can’t read” is that the claim itself has almost nothing to do with “kids today” but with the persistent way that “adults today” always misread “kids today” through some sort of misguided nostalgia for their own childhood and education as well as an entrenched urge to criticize younger generations.

Also as a response to the 1940’s reading crisis Emmett A. Betts asserted: “In a democracy, the people get the kind of schools they want.”

To be a bit more cynical, in the US we have gotten the exact kind of schools and society we want—and yet seem justified in always complaining in baseless ways about the very things we created.

Note

[1] Consider the following:

• What Shall We Do About Reading Today?: Looking Back to See Now More Clearly (1942)

• Reading Crisis 1961: “[N]o Further ‘Research’ into Methods of Reading Is Necessary”

• Back to the Future of Reading Instruction: 1990s Edition

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“The cause for my wrath is not new or single,” wrote progressive literacy educator and scholar Lou LaBrant (1931). “It is of slow growth and has many characteristics.”

LaBrant was writing about the bastardization of the project method that William Heard Kilpatrick popularized from the work of John Dewey.

This moment in education history reflects a disturbing but persistent reality in education: Even when we start with a valid premise, that “thing” often is significantly distorted once it is implemented, especially when the “thing” becomes a fad or a program.

Regretfully, that pattern also includes the education “war” cycles (notably reading and math) that produce the pendulum swings from something like progressive to traditional and then from traditional to progressive.

Here is one paradox, as Alfie Kohn notes, despite the pendulum swings, K-12 schooling has remained mostly traditional at its core over the past century.

Yet, the story of progressive failure is extremely compelling.

And thus, we have been in a high mark of essentialism with a “science of” reform movement centered, again, on reading and math, calling for more teacher-centered instruction and the relentless “back-to-basics” rhetoric.

Like LaBrant, then, “The cause for my wrath is not new or single.”

Last week I was kindly invited to speak to a graduate class about the false Mississippi “miracle” story that is driving much of the reading crisis discourse as well as new legislation.

During the discussion, a very positive reference was made to the podcast Sold a Story; I was immediately in a difficult situation, but had to note that Hanford’s journalism is at the core of the misinformation about reading. [1]

Despite my public and scholarly work debunking claims made within the “science of reading” movement, I receive emails and messages regularly that effusively recommend Sold a Story.

Sigh.

And thus: “The cause for my wrath is not new or single.”

Frankly, that situation was more deflating than wrath-inducing.

But then, a major publication announced that Louisa Moats is winning the reading wars. [2]

This is the cause of my wrath.

And a key example of the paradox of education journalism quality.

For almost a decade now, education journalists have perpetuated a series of false claims: students today cannot read because teachers have failed to teach systematic phonics because those teachers were not taught the “science of reading.”

This has proven to be both a very compelling and false story.

Key actors in this false story have been Emily Hanford, whose journalism made the claims, and Louisa Moats, who conveniently has “science of reading” teacher training to sell you, LETRS.

First, the claims made by advocates of the “science of reading” are not supported by science.

Next, although Moats’s LETRS has been sold for decades, there is no science or evidence that the training raises student reading proficiency; in other words, the person selling teacher training, the person who is supposedly winning the reading wars, has scammed millions of dollars from states across the US with a product that doesn’t do what it claims. [3]

What is true is that Hanford and Moats have won the story wars—although these stories are almost entirely fiction.

The paradox is that education journalism and education entrepreneurs point their fingers accusingly at teachers and teacher educators for failing at their jobs while the quality of education journalism is itself the problem (if you want another source of my wrath, try this).

There simply is no scientific evidence that student reading proficiency is in crisis due to the absence of phonics instruction [4], and there is scientific evidence that teacher quality is dramatically overstated in terms of impacting student test scores:

Research on VAMs has been fairly consistent that aspects of educational effectiveness that are measurable and within teacher control represent a small part of the total variation in student test scores or growth; most estimates in the literature attribute between 1% and 14% of the total variability to teachers. This is not saying that teachers have little effect on students, but that variation among teachers accounts for a small part of the variation in scores. The majority of the variation in test scores is attributable to factors outside of the teacher’s control such as student and family background, poverty, curriculum, and unmeasured influences.

This is counter-intuitive, but how teachers are teaching reading is unlikely to be a major factor in reading scores by students on standardized tests such as NAEP or state-accountability testing. [5]

The reading crisis story, the Mississippi “miracle” story, and the “bad teacher” story—they are all marketing, and they are all misinformation at best, and a lie at worst.

And the only “winning” that is occurring is the cashing in—at the expense of students and teachers.

Notes

[1] See this series:

Thomas, P.L. (2024, November). We teach English in times of perpetual crisis: For all ELA teachers, “the time is always now.” English Journal, 114(2), 21-26. https://publicationsncte.org/content/journals/10.58680/ej2024114221

Thomas, P.L. (2024, September). We teach English in times of perpetual crisis: The media continue to misread teaching reading and literacy. English Journal, 114(1), 14-19. https://publicationsncte.org/content/journals/10.58680/ej2024114114

Thomas, P.L. (2024, May). Teaching English in the “science of reading” era: We teach English in times of perpetual crisis: Selling a story of reading. English Journal, 113(5), 16-22. https://publicationsncte.org/content/journals/10.58680/ej2024113516

Thomas, P.L. (2024, March). We teach English in times of perpetual crisis: The long (and tedious) history of reading crisis. English Journal, 113(4), 21-26. https://publicationsncte.org/content/journals/10.58680/ej2024113421

[2] Please read Rachael Gabriel’s response: A CEO won the Reading Wars.

[3] Gearin, B., Chattergoon, R., Kim, Y.S.G., Piasta, S.B., & Brooke, E.C. (2025). Evaluating a professional development program and third-grade reading achievement outcomes in the context of Colorado’s Read Act. The Elementary School Journal, 126(2), 280-306. https://doi.org/10.1086/737951

Rowe, M. W., & Thrailkill, L. D. (2025). A view from within: A critique of North Carolina science of reading policy for teacher professional development. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 33(82). https://doi.org/10.14507/epaa.33.8621

[4] Reinking, D., Hruby, G.G., & Risko, V.J. (2023). Legislating phonics: Settle science of political polemic? Teachers College Record. https://doi.org/10.1177/01614681231155688

[5] If you want to argue, “But Mississippi!” you need to see the evidence. MS has raised only grade 4 reading scores; but grade 8 MS is back in the bottom 25% of states. Also evidence shows that MS grade 4 scores are primarily the result of grade retention and test prep, not instructional changes or teacher training. I recommend the following:

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The “science of reading” (SOR) reform movement is following a predictable cycle—doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result.

The crisis-miracle-reform cycle is all too familiar over the past five decades of education reform in the US spurred under the Reagan administration with the misleading A Nation at Risk report.

The seed of SOR reform is the Florida model under Jeb Bush, who attempted to replicate his older brother’s political success, George W. Bush’s debunked Texas “miracle” that built enough media and political momentum to lift him to the White House and, ultimately, produce No Child Left Behind at the federal level.

Jeb’s gambit fizzled, however, even as the Florida model planted a key seed, grade retention, that resulted in the pivotal moment in the crisis-miracle-reform cycle, the Mississippi “miracle.”

This false education “miracle” story has stuck, spurring copy-cat reading legislation is almost every state across the country.

The penultimate moment in this reform cycle arrived with a jumbled reading report from U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy, M.D. (R-LA), whose key role in education is his wife’s charter school that focuses on students with dyslexia.

Let’s not miss that the media has a vested interest in the Mississippi “miracle” story (it sells views and podcasts), that politicians have po0litical interests, and that many people have financial interests in selling a story.

And thus the final act, federal reading legislation—despite there being no research or scientific evidence supporting any of the claims about a reading crisis, the Mississippi “miracle,” or state or federal mandates.

Education Reform as Industry

Regardless of your level of optimism, there simply is no other conclusion to draw from over forty years of educational crisis and reform: Education reform has almost nothing to do with improving education for students or formal education for society or democracy because US education reform has become an industry.

And some of the most powerful engines driving the crisis/reform industry in education is education journalism, politicians, and the education market (boosted by education entrepreneurs).

Education journalists only write two kinds of stories about education: Education as failure (Crisis!), and education miracles.

Interesting is that both crisis and miracle are provably false narratives.

Yet, these stories endure because “[v]iewing education as being in more or less permanent crisis” (Edling, 2015) creates market and political profit for media, private education corporations, and politicians.

As a simple fact of logic, consider that for at least the last century, on every standardized test in every content area, students in poverty as a group have scored significantly lower than more affluent students.

Over that century, the teachers, instructional practices, programs, and curriculums/standards have changed dozens of times yet have never been coherent at any one point across the US.

The only constant, of course, has been the economic inequity of the populations of students being taught and tested.

Yet, what have the media and political leaders focused on almost exclusively in the forty-plus-years of intense accountability reform (over what can be called at least half a dozen cycles in those decades)?

Instruction, curriculum/standards, and programs as a distraction from addressing poverty directly.

Why?

Teacher training churn, standardized test churn, and program churn are industries, and there is profit in constant churn.

Never has it been more clear that education reform is industry: “The administrations in charge,” writes Gilles Deleuze in Postscript on the Societies of Control, “never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons” (p. 4).

And never has it been more clear that education journalism is deeply invested in that churn, in manufacturing perpetual crisis:

Just within the past twenty years, Gates+ money has incubated several new education-only media outlets, such as Chalkbeat, EdReports, EdSurge, Education Next, Ed Post, FutureEd, and The 74. Gates+ money has also substantially boosted the efforts of preexisting education-only media organizations, such as EdSource, Education Week, the Education Writers Association, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, and the Hechinger Report. All told, this accounts for almost all large-audience, US, K–12-education-only print media outlets, other than those tied to the traditional public education establishment.

I suspect no one embodied education reform as industry as well as Bill Gates, education reform hobbyist, who wrecked havoc before moving on to other billionaire hobbies (paralleled by moving on from his marriage under the specter of Epstein connections).

And, for example, nothing better exemplifies what the true commitment in education journalism is better than the Education Writers Association along with the current darling of education misinformation, Emily Hanford:

Manufacture a crisis with a melodramatic story, and then steel the troops for the inevitable outcome so that everyone can circle back to yet another crisis and more reform.

There is the sound of profit in the background as journalists as “watchdogs” announce more and more failure and crisis among school, teachers, and students.

The real literacy crisis is that too many people cannot read the writing on the wall. Or more likely, too many people are shielded by the profit of education reform as industry to even see the writing on the wall.

Federal SOR legislation is likely inevitable.

That will not solve the so-called reading crisis, but it will set the stage for the next crisis-miracle-reform cycle to be ushered in by a new array of actors—journalists, politicians, and education profiteers.

Thought Experiment 1

If you wonder if or how money matters, consider that the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas is funded by Walton money. [1] The Walton’s are significant school choice and charter school proponents. The “research” coming out of the DER is overwhelming positive about school choice and charter schools.

Coincidence?

Thought Experiment 2

England passed reading reform mandating systematic phonics for all students in 2006 (although their media and political leaders persist in crying “reading crisis”).

And thus: Ruth Miskin Literacy makes nearly £10 million profit in four years – taking cash pile for its sole shareholder to approaching £15 million

Note

[1] Bracey, G. W. (2006). Reading educational research: How to avoid getting statistically snookered. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

In education, readers should beware of research emanating from the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Heartland Institute, the Mackinac Center, the Center for Education Reform, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Paul Peterson group at Harvard, and, soon, the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. Arkansas is home to the Walton family, and much Wal-Mart money has already made its way to the University of Arkansas, $300 million in 2002 alone. The new department, to be headed by Jay P. Greene, currently at the Manhattan Institute, will no doubt benefit from the Walton presence. The family’s largesse was estimated to approach $1 billion per year (Hopkins 2004), and before his death in an airplane crash, John Walton was perhaps the nation’s most energetic advocate of school vouchers. (Bracey, 2006, p. xvi)

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The mother sitting across from me at the parent-teacher conference was a single-mother, struggling with the challenges of the rural South and now her daughter who was failing my A.P. Literature course.

The student was bright and had done well in my tenth-grade American Literature course, but as a senior, her life had become more complicated.

Fighting back tears, the mother explained that she had taken my earlier notices seriously so she was really confused. She then carefully noted that she picked up her daughter after school everyday, drove her to the library, and dropped her off to do her school work.

Having been a teacher, coach, father, and grandfather across five decades since the early 1980s, I think I will never forget that moment.

Along with many other people in this small town—my hometown and the high school I had graduated from less than a decade before—I knew more about the student than her mother.

This was the 1980s, and her daughter, white, had a Black boyfriend—another really bright and kind student in my class. Interracial relationships were still taboo and thus mostly closeted and often shunned in the rural South, although they were fairly common in the high school.

Each day the mother dropped her daughter at the library, and then that boyfriend picked up the daughter for their secret afternoon rendezvous.

Recently, and regretfully, this hit too close to home when I was emphatically told, “I know my child,” as a rebuttal to a concern I raised.

And here is a sobering fact about being a parent—each of us as a parent knows only some version of our child, a version that is necessarily incomplete, sometimes to extreme degrees.

One parent trap is that we all as children either began to lie or often failed to share with our parents parts of our ideas, beliefs, and behaviors that we freely shared with our peers and often with an adult who wasn’t our parent. That adult seems to be commonly a teacher or a coach.

Yet when we become parents, we seem to believe our child wouldn’t behave exactly as we did.

When we are young, we seek non-judgmental and safe spaces to be our full selves—something, ironically, we often feel we cannot be in front of our parents or in our homes.

This reality is not a fact of bad parenting or bad children; this is a natural fact of human development.

No parent can or should be everything for their child, and no parent can or should seek ways to determine for the child who that child should be.

Despite many flaws, my parents were unusually good parents, often fun parents. I had a very open relationship with my mother even as I masked a great deal of myself from my father.

My journey to being a teacher, in hindsight, started in tenth grade when I began drifting into Mr. Harrill’s classroom during break. Lynn Harrill was an early-career English teacher who taught me in tenth and eleventh grades, became my mentor (I took his position at the high school when he moved to administration, and then, oddly, I was hired in my current position in higher education when he left to return to K-12 administration), and remains someone I am forever indebted to.

I spoke openly and freely to Lynn, and he was always patient, kind, and receptive—even when I now realize I was being occasionally annoying (he needed to be planning and grading) and often just a typical clueless teen thinking he was saying something smart to an adult.

Lynn knew a version of me no one else knew, even my parents. But Lynn also didn’t know other and important versions of me.

When I became a teacher, a wonderful thing happened—students drifted into my classroom during breaks because they saw my space as a refuge from the tyrannies of high school rules.

They came to trust I would listen and not judge, or at least not rush to judge.

Students would start with “Please don’t tell anyone …” so I would have to interrupt and explain that I couldn’t guarantee that—although I would honor it if possible.

I have always felt compelled to practice what I preach, and I have always been skeptical of authority and rules; therefore, one of the posters I had on my classroom wall was a quote from Henry David Thoreau: “Any fool can make a rule and any fool will mind it.”

Of course teens loved that.

We also studied Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” exploring his arguments about laws—human laws versus what is right or just.

What drew students to my classroom was not lawlessness, not hiding from the rules, but an environment of fairness. Teens especially, but all children, are hyper-focused on fairness—although when humans are young that sense of fairness can be distorted by a strict black-and-white perception of “fair.”

Young people want their human dignity and autonomy honored, and they tend to value adults who do that without slipping into capricious authoritarianism, one of the most harmful parent traps (such as my father’s dictum: “Do as I say, not as I do”).

Few things are as difficult as being a parent—or teacher, or coach.

To be in the care and service of children and young people is a wonderful and terrifying thing—fraught with more opportunities to fail than succeed.

A parent trap than tends to lead to failure is the arrogance that “Only I know my child.”

It is never true, nor should it be.

Good parenting takes patience and a tremendous amount of humility that recognizes the child you know is but one version of many.

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It seems important to note:

“entrepreneur” rhymes with “manure”

entrepreneur - taken from French, originally meaning "manager or promoter of a theatrical production"

manure - Anglo-French, originally meaning "to cultivate (land, a garden) by manual labor"

—P.L. Thomas

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It was an unusually
Cool day in October
For South Carolina

He was drinking
An Oktoberfest pint
Märzen people mispronounce

While reading a novel
That reminded him of her
Choosing this nonsense of him

He had loved every curve of her
For longer than seemed possible
Through far too many angers

And there between sips
Of a beer perfectly amber 
He was thinking about her

The best thing he thought
Was how much he liked her
Like these chilling sunsets of fall

Nobody told them they shouldn’t
Stand outside holding hands
Under a cold full moon

Like children hoping someday to be lovers

—P.L. Thomas

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have a drink
with me

nothing in our hands
sitting still in a september sunset

as if only
this matters

have a drink
with me

your left hand in my right
like children playing red rover

as if only
this matters

have a drink
with me

we could refuse to go inside
once the melon hued sky fades to black

as if only
this matters

have another drink
with me

we’ve been too busy
with other people’s business

have another drink
with me

yes
have another & another

we can toast a near fall moon
us there side by side in silhouette

let’s never
forget

have a drink
with me

we can talk about everything & nothing
haunted by sam cooke & amy winehouse

let’s never
forget

let's never 
let go

have another drink
with me

like this forever

—P.L. Thomas

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Ryan Boyd focuses his response to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me to “speculate briefly on what that says about Coates’s writing mind.”

Boyd agrees with John Warner that Coates is more student than James Baldwin’s preacher. And in his roles as student, writer, public intellectual, Coates presents as well a nuanced (and I think, important) perspective on what literature matters:

Coates is a canonist. Not in the normative way that, say, Harold Bloom or Matthew Arnold are, because they see canon-formation and maintenance as primarily an Anglo project; but rather in terms of a basic belief that some texts really are better than almost all others and thus worth passing along to younger generations first. To be sure, he envisions a democratic canon which is constantly interrogated and supplemented, but he’s still a Great Books man. Canonicity is a principle, not a specific roster of content.

Many teachers, writers, and readers have fought a long and seemingly endless battle against the normative canon, the gated Great Books, which is often a reductive and prescriptive list of dead white men’s books—myself among that cause.

Yet, like Coates, I have always struggled with loving many of the works that fall into that traditional canon, and also felt self-conscious about having standards myself for “good” versus “bad” literature.

This schizophrenia manifests itself for me in my response to young adult (YA) literature: I strongly advocate for YA literature because it encourages young people to read, often a great deal, but I often add that for me most YA literature falls short of what I expect from literature (and I think too many YA works ask too little of teens who are more capable than writers and publishers seem to believe).

I have made that same case about comic books and graphic novels.

This Coates-inspired rethinking about the canon, then, coincided several years ago with my finishing Cormac McCarthy’s The Border Trilogy: All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain.

McCarthy as a white male writer and then his mostly white, male mythology represent the essential tension faced by those of us calling for the expanded canon, including the voices of women and Black/brown authors.

The Racist Imperative: White as Mythological and Universal

In “Cormac McCarthy’s Paradox of Choice: One Writer, Ten Novels, and a Career-Long Obsession,” Scott Esposito recognizes in McCarthy “the allegorical nature of The Border Trilogy”:

McCarthy seems to be at pains to paint these books in black and white because he knows he is writing allegories, and thus they require broad strokes in order to function properly.

The Border Trilogy is certainly not nearly as realist as McCarthy’s first four novels, or even as realist as Blood Meridian. It has been previously commented that John Grady and Billy are far too able as cowboys to be believable. Whether breaking a horse, muzzling a wolf, or shooting game, they never struggle to do anything; they just do it, much like an epic hero might.

I find the trilogy compelling because of McCarthy’s Faulknerian tendency to drop into poetry (frequently, the prose is beautiful above and beyond the obligation a writer has to move along a story) and because the works are mythology charged with confronting readers with enduring questions about justice and coming to grips with the human condition.

And therein lies the problem, but not one we must lay at McCarthy’s feet alone since the white and misogynistic template for mythology is literally Greek and Roman mythology.

The white male hero was not created by McCarthy (see Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces), but John Grady Cole and Billy Parham maintain a tradition among the normative canon of casting whiteness and maleness as Universal Truth, one that has moved away from description and toward prescription.

As well, McCarthy slips uncritically into the template of the female-as-prize for the male-as-savior—notably Magdalena (Cities of the Plain), a mere child cast as epileptic prostitute and, as always, beautiful. (See the same strengths and weaknesses in True Detective, season 1.)

However, if McCarthy’s works are simply endorsed by the normative cannon edict or dismissed by a similar but inverse multi-cultural mandate, I believe that we fail Coates’s canon-as-principle, as Boyd suggests.

The Border Trilogy is allegory, mythology rich in considerations of the nature of justice as well as the elusive nature of any human seeking to bring about justice.

More nuanced, I think, is the Mexico/U.S. duality posed by McCarthy—much as Margaret Atwood does with Canada/U.S. and Roxane Gay does with Haiti/U.S.

Nested within the larger themes of justice, Mexico becomes an allegory of the communal while the U.S. represents a people trapped in the market. Billy Parham’s sense of justice is enhanced by the kindness he experiences while crisscrossing into Mexico. The border crossing is itself a mythological passage in which coins signal the transition from Mexico—where my house/food is your house/food—to the U.S.—where everything is a matter of money.

This Mexico/U.S. contrast does raise themes about race and culture, to McCarthy’s credit, but that remains within the white gaze of the author and the dominant white male central characters.

Yes, there is a veiled racial/racist tradition in McCarthy’s allegory/mythology that frames white and male as universal, but those qualities are part of a larger fabric offered in the work—a fabric that may and should be judged in the complex canon-as-principle that seeks to discover “some texts really are better than almost all others and thus worth passing along to younger generations first,” per Boyd from Coates.

In my early and rare scholarly publications while I was teaching high school English (see below), I wrote several times about how to merge the traditional canon with multicultural works. Then, I was struggling against the normative canon, but I had no lens for addressing the either/or trap of calling for multicultural literature at the expense of so-called classic works.

Now, as I sit with McCarthy’s Border Trilogy—and I think about Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy as both fundamentally like McCarthy’s and in very significant ways unlike McCarthy’s (for example, Lisbeth Salander)—I have begun to reconsider the notion of the canon personified by Coates as not a compromise but a richer mechanism for confronting all texts in order to reimagine what works to celebrate, to teach, and to embrace in our never ending journey as students.

In his Between the World and Me, Coates champions the power of literature and confirms Walter Dean Myers’s recognition about the normative canon: “there was something missing.”

Coates (Malcolm X and Baldwin) and Myers (Baldwin) share the importance of seeing yourself in the fictions that make you who you are; in short, the “universal”—particularly the universal as a thin veil for white/male privilege—is not enough, even when the universal is compelling, as Myers reveals:

I needed more than the characters in the Bible to identify with, or even the characters in Arthur Miller’s plays or my beloved Balzac. As I discovered who I was, a black teenager in a white-dominated world, I saw that these characters, these lives, were not mine. I didn’t want to become the “black” representative, or some shining example of diversity. What I wanted, needed really, was to become an integral and valued part of the mosaic that I saw around me.

See Also

Ta-Nehisi Coates and Cormac McCarthy Walk Into a Bar, T. Elijah Hawkes

Thomas, P.L. (1996). When Wordsworth is too tame: Merging minority literature with the classics in the secondary language arts curriculum. In L. Cooke & H. C. Lodge (Eds.), Voices in English Classrooms: Honoring Diversity and Change, 28 (pp. 177-185). Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Thomas, P.L. (1991, Spring). Exposing the universal through the diverse: The role of minority literature in the language arts curriculum. Western Ohio Journal, 12 (1), 58-61.

Reading Out of Context: “But there was something missing,” Walter Dean Myers

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“With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea,” opens Ursula K. Le Guin ’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.”

The reader soon learns about a people and a land that leave the narrator filled with both a passion for telling a story and tension over the weight of that task:

How can I tell you about the people of Omelas? They were not naive and happy children—though their children were, in fact, happy. They were mature, intelligent, passionate adults whose lives were not wretched. O miracle! but I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you. (p. 278)

The narrator offers an assortment of glimpses into these joyous people and their Festival of Summer, and then adds:

Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing. (p. 280)

The “one more thing” is a child, imprisoned in a closet and its own filth—a fact of the people of Omelas “explained to children when they are between eight and twelve, whenever they seem capable of understanding”:

They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery. (p. 282)

And how do the people of Omelas respond to this fact of their privilege at the expense of the sacrificed child? Most come to live with it: “Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it” (p. 283)

But a few, a few:

They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas. (p. 284)

Le Guin’s sparse and disturbing allegory has everything that science fiction/ speculative fiction/ dystopian fiction can offer in such a short space—a shocking other-world, a promise of Utopia tinted by Dystopia, the stab of brutality and callousness, and ultimately the penetrating mirror turned on all of us, now.

At its core, Le Guin’s story is about the narcotic privilege as well as the reality that privilege always exists at someone else’s expense. The horror of this allegory is that the sacrifice is a child, highlighting for the reader that privilege comes to some at the expense of others through no fault of the closeted lamb.

In the U.S., we cloak the reality of privilege with a meritocracy myth, and unlike the people of Omelas, we embrace both the myth and the cloaking—never even taking that painful step of opening the closet door to face ourselves.

What’s behind our door in the U.S.? One of the largest group of humans in poverty in the US is our children:

While Le Guin’s story ends with some hope that a few have a soul and mind strong enough to walk away from happiness built on the oppression of the innocent, I feel compelled to long for a different ending, one where a few, a few rise up against the monstrosity of oppression and inequity, to speak and act against, not merely acquiesce or walk away.

Recommended

George Saunders’s Allegory of Scarcity and Slack

Le Guin, U. (1975). The wind’s twelve quarters. New York, NY: Harper Perennial.

The stories themselves, literally, are powerful and engaging or George Orwell’s 1984 and Arthur Miller’s The Crucible would not have endured as they have as literature people read again and again—and possibly should read again and again.

However, ultimately, 1984 is not predicting “the future” (especially since we have long since passed the future Orwell may have envisioned), and The Crucible is not about the past (although Miller built his play on the very real and troubling history of Puritan witchcraft mania). These works are about the complicated present of both authors’ worlds as that speaks to the enduring realities of the human condition.

All of that may seem weighty stuff to step into a look at what appears to be a children’s book, but the paragraphs above should be more than a hint that looks can be deceiving—and enlightening.

The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, written by George Saunders and wonderfully illustrated by Lane Smith (whose It’s a Book I cannot recommend highly enough), is a fanciful and satirical tale that proves in the end to be an allegory of scarcity and slack—a perfect companion read to Ursula K. Le Guin’s allegory of privilege, “The One’s Who Walk Away from Omelas.”

Realizing that the Human Heart Is Capable

“Ever had a burr in your sock?” sets Saunders’s story in motion—one sentence centered on the page over a giant question mark. It is an opening worthy of a child and all of us who cling to the wonder of childhood.

While Le Guin is often described as a science fiction writer, in her work I recognize the blurring of genres that joins science fiction, speculative fiction, and fantasy; it is that “other world” about which Le Guin and Margaret Atwood appear to argue, and it is a stark but rich other world Saunders conjures and Lane pictures.

The story of Frip involves three houses for three families, all with children at the center. The houses are distinguished with primary colors—child-like blue, green, and red—but Lane’s artwork adds the ominous to Saunders’ seemingly simple narrative tinged with more than a bite of satire. The illustrations echo the haunting works about and for children found in Tim Burton, for example.

A child standing precariously close to the end of a slanted cliff over an angry ocean catches the eye on page 7 and then the crux of the story pulls you back to the text on page 6:

Frip was three leaning shacks by the sea. Frip was three tiny goat-yards into which eight times a day the children of the shacks would trudge with gapper-brushes and cloth gapper-sacks that tied at the top. After brushing the gappers off the goats, the children would walk to the cliff at the edge of town and empty their gapper-sacks into the sea. (p. 6)

Gappers, orange burr-like creatures with many eyes and the size of a baseball, come to represent throughout the story the power of the systemic inevitable: The presence of the gappers determines the lot of the families (and their goats), but most of the people in the tale remain unable to see beyond their own fixed and mostly misguided worldviews.

When the gappers cling to the goats of all three families, there is an ironic appearance of equality among them. But when the fortune of one family shifts, the gappers fulfill their name by creating the gap:

So that night, instead of splitting into three groups, the gappers moved into one very large and impressive shrieking group directly into Capable’s yard. (p. 12)

Before this shift in how the gappers behave, of course, the three families are not equal because Capable is an only child living with her father and who has lost her mother. Capable works as all the children are expected to work (removing gappers in a daily Sisyphean nightmare of chores) and seeks to serve the needs of her grieving father, who along with his grief is a prisoner of nostalgia:

“I myself was once an exhausted child brushing off gappers. It was lovely! The best years of my life. The way they fell to the sea from our bags! And anyway, what would you do with your time if there were no gappers?” (p. 11)

This nostalgia masking an unnecessarily burdensome childhood, however, is but one ideology weighing on Capable because as soon as the other two families are relieved of gappers on their goats, those families reveal themselves to be very much like the people of Le Guin’s Omelas, a story about who a people are willing to sacrifice for the so-called greater good of some:

“It’s a miracle!” Mrs. Romo shouted next morning, when she came out and discovered that her yard was free of gappers. “This is wonderful! Capable, dear, you poor thing. The miracle didn’t happen to you, did it? I feel so sorry for you. God has been good to us, by taking our gappers away. Why? I can’t say. God knows what God is doing, I guess! I suppose we must somehow deserve it!” (p. 17)

Capable becomes the sacrificed child, and despite her misfortune, the relieved families read the events as their merit (and of course the ugly implication that Capable and her father deserve the burden of the gappers).

What follows from this shift in fate is the central story of Frip with Capable as our main character. The message becomes clear, and Saunders and Lane make the ride one you’ll want to visit again and again. If you are lucky, the book could become one of those read alouds requested by son or daughter, or by a classroom of children.

And while I will leave the rest of the story to you, I think it is necessary to note here that this allegory is both a cautionary tale about how we view children and childhood as well as a brilliant call to reconsider how we view education and education reform.

George Saunders’s Allegory of Scarcity and Slack

The U.S., like the characters (except for Capable) in Saunders’s story, is tragically blinded by a belief in cultural myths that have little basis in evidence: That we live and work in a meritocracy, that competition creates equity, that children need to be “taught a lesson” about the cold cruel world lest they become soft, and such.

As a result of these beliefs, schools (and parents) often reflect and perpetuate rather harsh environments for children—or to be more accurate, schools often reflect and perpetuate rather harsh environments for other people’s children, as Capable personifies.

Here, then, I want to make the case that The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip is a powerful allegory of scarcity and slack as examined by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir in their Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much.

Mullainathan and Shafir detail that the conditions of poverty, scarcity, so overburden people psychologically, mentally, and physically that their behavior is often misread (poor people are lazy, poor people make bad decisions, etc.). In Saunders’s story, scarcity and its burden are portrayed by the gappers, and readers witness how the coincidence of the onslaught of the gappers changes the families involved. Counter to the rugged individualism myth, the behavior of people is determined by the environment, and not by the inherent goodness or deficiencies of any individual.

The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip goes further, however, by showing that one person’s scarcity (Capable) allows other people slack: privilege is built on the back of others, and those conditions are mostly arbitrary. While Mullainathan and Shafir argue that the slack enjoyed by those living in relative privilege provides the sort of cognitive space needed to excel, Saunders speaks to more than the slack enjoyed by the two families relieved of gappers and the compounding scarcity suffered by Capable (her lot in life and the addition of the gappers):

• The families gifted slack remain trapped within the corrosive burden of competition and their inability to recognize the value of compassion and cooperation.

• Capable represents a counter-narrative to claims that impoverished children lack “grit” or a growth mindset. As her name suggests, this child is more than capable, but the world appears determined to defeat her.

• Capable also embodies Lisa Delpit’s confrontation of “other people’s children”—that those with privilege (slack) are willing to allow one set of standards for other people’s children (often living and learning in scarcity), standards they will not tolerate for their own.

As I stated in the opening, allegory seeks to open our eyes by diversion, creating an other world that helps us see both the flaws with our now and the enduring failures of humans to embrace our basic humanity, a failure Capable teeters on the edge of making herself but cannot:

And [Capable] soon found that it was not all that much fun being the sort of person who eats a big dinner in a warm house while others shiver on their roofs in the dark.

That is, it was fun at first, but then got gradually less fun, until it was really no fun at all. (p. 70).

In the end, it is this sort of charity, this sort of recognition of the community of humanity, a call for the kindness found in Kurt Vonnegut’s similar mix of dark humor that Saunders appears to suggest we are all capable.

Companion Reads for The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip

Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir

“The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” Ursula K. Le Guin

“The Soul of Man under Socialism,” Oscar Wilde (1891)

“The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People’s Children,” Lisa Delpit

Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom, Lisa Delpit

Understanding Education: Growth Mindset and Grit

Competition: A Multidisciplinary Analysis, Wade B. Worthen, A. Scott Henderson, Paul R. Rasmussen and T. Lloyd Benson, Eds.

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One of the most contentious issues in the US’s culture war is whether or not bias and privilege exist as well as whether bias (such as sexism, racism, etc.) is a consequence of individual or systemic causes.

Conservatives argue that bias such as sexism and racism no longer exist except in some unique individual cases (what Ta-Nehisi Coates labeled as “oafish racism”) and that the US functions mostly as a meritocracy.

Progressives assert that the US remains a sexist/racist country because bias is built into the system, even as many individual people reject sexism/racism.

This last argument, in fact, is at the core of Critical Race Theory that asserts US systems (such as policing and the judicial system) are examples of systemic racism and that individuals within those systems perpetuate those biases even when they are not themselves racist (consider the shooting of Tamir Rice and age perceptions of Black children).

A popular example of that argument is Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Another powerful example of systemic harm is Police in the Hallways, in which Kathleen Nolan shows how police in schools creates students as criminals instead of making schools safer.

Since many white conservatives believe claims about systemic bias and privilege are attacking and demonizing white people, the issue is likely too emotionally and politically charged to change anyone’s mind even though the overwhelming evidence supports that systemic bias remains in the US, countering the claim that we exist as a meritocracy.

Consider instead the piano and the story of Elizabeth Schumann.

Hamilton explains about Schumann’s experience as a pianist:

It turned out [Schumann’s] impressive reach came from unusual flexibility, years of stretching to fit an instrument that was never designed for her. As a teacher, she began noticing the same pattern in her students. The ones who struggled most with tension and injury were often the ones constantly hyper-extending their fingers, straining to cover intervals the standard keyboard demanded of them. The research backed up what she was seeing: Smaller-handed pianists get injured more often.

“People are blaming themselves and their bodies,” Schumann said, “instead of asking if there’s a design problem.”

The design problem is example of a systemic bias that does not necessarily have to have some biased intent even as it has negative consequences for marginalized groups. Hamilton continues:

The modern piano keyboard was standardized around 1880, when virtuosi like Franz Liszt were becoming international celebrities. As piano design was modified to produce a bigger sound in large concert halls, keys may also have been widened to accommodate the resulting larger instrument. And since the celebrated performers of the era were generally European men, who tend to have larger hands, the wider keys posed little problem for them. At the same time, mass production demanded a standard size to produce thousands of pianos. From this, we inherited a one-size-fits-all, 6.5-inch-octave span.

Here then are the negative consequences:

The scope of the problem is larger than most pianists realize. A 2015 survey of 473 adult pianists found that only about 13% of women have a hand span large enough to play repeated, fast octaves comfortably on the standard keyboard, whereas 76% of men do.

Note that the standardized keyboard design has some bias against men and then a much greater bias against women.

This is a perfect example of race and sex bias in the US.

The consequences of gender bias and privilege do not benefit all men and may not negatively impact all women; the consequences of race bias and privilege do not benefit all white people and may not negatively impact all Black people.

Yet, those bias are real and systemic—not simply the result of a few bad individuals. (See this explanation of “patriarchy.”)

Redesigning the piano to lessen or eradicate that bias is not only possible but also ethical—just as systems in the US can and should be redesigned to eliminate bias.

Redesigning the piano is not discrediting or attacking all the great pianists who flourished under the standard size, yet the redesign can and likely will expand the possibilities of who can and will flourish as pianists.

Often there is a white conservative backlash to acknowledging bias, seeking equity, and redesigning our traditional systems; many white conservatives see those redesigns as a loss for those who historically have benefited from what to them was that invisible privilege as opposed to a gain for others who were unfairly denied the same opportunities.

As the piano example demonstrates, however, access and opportunity are not zero sum games.

Redesigning pianos will mean more people excel at the piano, making everyone richer in the process.

Many biases in systems, such as the standardized piano, are the result of a lack of awareness instead of some evil plot. The outcomes of those biases are quite harmful none the less.

The US meritocracy remains an ideal not yet achieved; ignoring systemic bias and privilege, ironically, insures we will never be a meritocracy.

As Schuman’s story shows:

“The larger goal is not simply to build smaller keyboards,” Schumann said. “It is to create the evidence needed to advocate for better design and more equitable access to excellence.”

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PISA 2025 seems to pain a pretty horrific picture of reading in the US (see chart above), especially if you read the headlines:

• U.S. Reading Scores Plummet on Global Exam (NYT)

• PISA 2025: Students’ reading and mathematics performance declined sharply across the OECD (OECD)

• U.S. students score above average in reading. Here’s why that’s not good news. (Chalkbeat)

While, yes, many countries are experiencing trends in declining test scores on PISA, while states also see declining scores in NAEP, there seems to be no case for the histrionics—“sharply,” “plummet,” etc.—as noted by Chris Ferguson [1]:

See also this consideration of the score changes:

Media and political rhetoric around education remains trapped in perpetual crisis, and the data displays are designed to manufacture a crisis even if one doesn’t exist.

Test scores [2] are mere representations of learning, ones that are significantly impacted by factors beyond the classroom—the key issue many in the US refuse to address.

PISA scores range from 0-1000 with most students scoring between 200-800 and most countries having average scores in the 350-550 range; and thus, if we create charts with the same data but use more representative Y axis ranges [3], the data no longer appears to plummet or, you guessed it, reflect a crisis:

To be blunt, large-scale standardized testing is mostly much ado about nothing, but if we insist on remaining trapped in the testing cycle, we should at least stop misrepresenting the data to serve the crisis industry.

England

Notes

[1] The Leaning Tower of PISA

Secrets of Grimoire Manor

The Leaning Tower of PISA

This week the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) released the results from the 2025 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a standardized test of student learning, were released. I’m going to guess that, prior to a few years ago, nobody had ever heard of the PISA outside of wonky education circles. But the PISA referred to the 2025 results as “declining sharply” and in a hyper-anxious environment where bad news about kids is super profitable this predictably set off a major panic…

Read more

a month ago · Christopher J Ferguson, Ph.D.

[2] Consider the Cobra effect:

[3] Earlier versions of these charts had data input errors, which did not change the premise of the data being essentially flat; however, they have been corrected.

Recommended

Zhao, Y. Two decades of havoc: A synthesis of criticism against PISA. J Educ Change 21, 245–266 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10833-019-09367-x

PISA & the Polycrisis

Recommended: Reading educational research: How to avoid getting statistically snookered, Gerald Bracey (2006)

Understanding Education: A Nation at Risk and Education “Crisis”

Understanding Education: Reading Proficiency and NAEP

Understanding Education: Poverty Is an Excuse

Understanding Education: International Test Rankings and Economic Competitiveness

READ!NG CR!S!S: PISA Edition

NAEP Guarantees One Long-Term Trend: Crisis!

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we almost
give up

then spring
arrives just in time

seducing us
like children

a geese-covered lawn
green painting over the brown

we look up into the bright blue sky
expecting balloons like a rainbow

fooled again
we humans hoping

winter fading
then spring

—P.L. Thomas

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I recommend JoLLE@UGA Vol. 22 No. 1 (2026): Resistance Amidst Crisis: Kindling Hope in Language and Literacy Education.

And I want to highlight two articles:

• Lesson Planning as Resistance: Leveraging Culturally and Historically Sustaining Education with Preservice Teachers, Kelsie Corriston Burnett and Kerry H. Alexander

• A Call to Action: Resisting and Repairing Literacy Narratives, Devanshi Unadkat and Wendy Ochoa

If you want to help with the costs of keeping my public work open access and free, please DONATE.

Prelude: Looking for Lou LaBrant

From 1995 until 1998, I was in a wonderful doctoral program at the University of South Carolina (USC); however, I was simultaneously teaching full-time at Woodruff High School—a solid 90-minute drive from the USC campus—as well as adjuncting at Converse College.

My mind was expanding, almost with glee, while I was foolishly overextending myself in ways that would haunt me just a year after graduating.

None the less, this was my entry point into becoming a scholar as it also helped boost my career as a writer that had begun in the spring my first year of college, writing poetry inspired by e. e. cummings.

Attaining a doctorate was pivotal, but the most significant aspects of the program were members of my doctoral committee, notably the chair, Lorin Anderson, and Craig Kridel, who directed the Museum of Education as one of, if not the, leading scholar in educational biography.

My dissertation was an educational biography of Lou LaBrant, who had donated her papers, a small donation, along with writing her memoir for the Museum. That dissertation led to one of my first scholarly books, a revised version of my dissertation on LaBrant, but it also built the foundation of the next phase of my career when I moved to higher education in 2002.

Lou LaBrant lived to be 102 (although much of her life she identified her age 10 years younger than she was); at the end of her life, she wrote her memoir on a typewriter, completing it when she was 100.

I return to LaBrant often. I am still looking for her.

While reading Baumgartner by Paul Auster, I recalled a moment when I was reading LaBrant’s memoir as she lamented losing everyone she loved over her very long life. While reading, I saw a tear drop splash on the page, and it was then that I came to love the person I was trying to reanimate through biiography.

LaBrant catalogued her most difficult loses—her sister Roberta, her brother Wagner, and her love, Paul Witty, over whom she chose her career—admitting: “Being nearly ninety-seven is a lonely age.”

She also quoted a few lines from Rabbi Ben Ezra by Robert Browning:

Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made

And then: “Being old just means being left—a remainder. One merely says: I remember.”

Baumgartner: “His thoughts drift”

[Spoilers below]

Paul Auster opens and closes his novel Baumgartner with accidents, the first one prompting equal parts compassion and humor.

In the novel, Baumgartner is a professor and scholar who ages from about 70 to 72. As a fitting bit of irony, I am a 65-year-old professor and scholar who dropped his prized Kurt Vonnegut coffee mug while writing this (and intermittently doing our apartment Big Clean that I do on Tuesday), breaking the handle and throwing coffee everywhere, including on the novel I am writing about.

“So it goes.”

Much of this short and easy-to-read novel is about the inevitable decline that comes with aging and how that intersects with someone having lived, and living, the life of the mind.

I played the part of the doddering old man, and it wasn’t fun.

The Big Lie of literary fiction is the universality propaganda foisted upon society mostly by white men who see universality in the lives and living of white men.

Auster straddles that sort of literary fiction and his postmodern tendencies, and I deeply connected with much of the novel—although I am not suggesting here they are universal, just that they resonate with my lived experiences.

What I felt was a sort of deep-to-uncomfortable empathy because so much of the life created here matches my own.

The story of Baumgartner in his 70s parallels in ways the real life of LaBrant because he remains in a past that includes those he has lost and loved dearly.

In some ways, this is one of the saddest books I have ever read—although I often laughed out loud as well.

Baumgartner’s love for his deceased wife, Anna, is heartwarming, tender, and sad. He returns to her in many ways throughout the story.

But two aspects I want to highlight here are his remembrances of his father and his musing on being a writer.

On the latter, some of the highlights of the novel are pieces of writing by his wife and Baumgartner himself. Baumgartner’s essay, “The Wolves of Stanislav,” is a really wonderful piece of fictional non-fiction that opens:

Does an even have to be true in order to be accepted as true, or does belief in the truth of an event already make it true, even if the thing that supposedly happened did not happen?

Auster often delves into the meta of writing, and this essay (as well as the unbalanced narration) feels like Auster’s own musing (himself in his 70s) on the nature of how any writer portrays the truth, that tension that exists between fiction being created (some saying carelessly “not true”) and non-fiction often being labeled as “true.”

Immediately after the essay-in-the-narrative, Chapter 5, Baumgartner’s theory of writing is revealed, notably about once a book is finished in its first full draft:

Baumgartner refers to this post-composition period as the collapse, or Mrs. Doolittle in her cups, or, echoing the tagline of the old Coca-Cola ad from his childhood, the pause that refreshes.

There is a great deal of fretting also about having written a book he is proud of but fearing that it will not be accepted by the publishers. Here, I am reminded of my first subject for my dissertation (who I passed on before a friend wrote about him a few years later), William Van Til.

Van Til wrote often about being paralyzed with fear after completing a book and having it published, freed into the public sphere.

This conflicted nature of being a writer is well captured in Baumgartner.

But the part of the novel that buried itself in me was Baumgartner re-considering his father.

Baumgartner and Auster are a bit older than me, and Baumgartner’s father is generationally somewhere between my father and grandfathers.

As I have explored, my father and grandfathers (who bring to mind two words, “laconic” and “stoic”) were of generations where men steeled themselves against the world, emotions and affection absent or indirectly shared.

When Baumgartner is accepted to college, that moment is recalled:

Fetch the bottle from the cupboard, Sy. It’s time for a drink. Baumgartner returned with the bottle as his father lit his umpteenth Lucky of the day., and after the boy had lit one for himself, they each drank down a shot of slivovitz, but nothing more was said since everything had already been said in the letter, so they sat there drinking in silence, first one shot, then a second shot, and at last a third. His father’s praise was in the silence. A man who ran at the mouth at the least provocation, a fulminating word-bag who could drone on for hours at a stretch, rewarded his son by keeping his mouth shut and saying nothing. (p. 132)

That contradictory description of his father makes me smile. My father talked relentlessly to people in public, from friends to acquaintances to total strangers (the latter much to my embarrassment). Then, little said to me other than reprimands and such until he was much older and began to say “I love you” every time we spoke.

Auster’s short novel is quirky, a roller coaster of tone and narrative perspective.

I cried and laughed. It drew me into the past, the people I have lost, and it hit on the raw nerve of awareness that when we are gifted with growing older, we also must accept the inevitable decline.

Like J. Alfred Prufrock’s struggles with aging—“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”—Baumgartner confesses he once was bemused by older faculty who walked around with their fly undone—something that has begun to happen to him, and has become a measure of his own decline: “Now that it has started happening to him—four times in the past two weeks—he wonders how many months or years it will take before he becomes a full-fledged member of the club” (p. 109).

As a developing doddering old man, scholar, and writer, when I read that section, I checked my fly.

And so it goes.

See Also

Paul Auster Walks the Long Valley of Grief in a New Novel

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The subheading for Emma Lee’s Mandated Curriculum Won’t Help New York City Students Learn to Read identifies three key points about the recent reading score decline in NYC schools after significant “science of reading” reform recently:

New York City reading scores have sparked debate about literacy in the city’s public schools, but mandated curriculum, standardized testing, and de-professionalizing teaching is not the answer. We have to fight beyond the classroom for fully-funded schools that meet students’ diverse learning needs.

I re4commend reading the article, even as some of the claims are a bit misleading.

And then, h ere is the current research behind those valid concerns about mandated/scripted curriculum, standardized testing in the context of out-of-school factors, and de-professionalizing teachers by erasing their professional autonomy:

• No scientific studies identify a reading crisis in the US causally linked to balanced literacy, reading programs, lack of phonics instruction, or inadequacy of teacher education. (Aydarova, 2025; Reinking, Hruby, & Risko, 2023).

• The overwhelming causal sources for student reading achievement (test scores) are out-of-school factors (60+%), and teacher quality impact on student achievement is about 1-14%. (ASA, 2014; Maroun & Tienken, 2024)

• Structured literacy (scripted curriculum) is whitewashing the reading curriculum and restricting teacher autonomy and professionalism. (Khan, et al., 2022; Owens, 2025; Parsons, et al., 2025; Rigell, et al., 2022; Naidu, Campbell, & Walker, 2026)

• Orton-Gillingham (multisensory approaches) is no more effective than other instructional approaches. (Hall, et al., 2022; Stevens, et al., 2021)

• Systematic phonics instruction can increase student pronunciation of real and nonsense words in early grades, but it does not increase reading comprehension. Whole language, balanced literacy, and systematic phonics are equally effective for addressing reading comprehension. (Ahn & Sangster, 2026; Bowers, 2020; Hansford, et al., 2025; Stephens, 2008)

• How much direct phonics instruction students need is a topic of debate, not settled science. (Loewus, 2026)

References

Ahn, H., & Sangster, C. (2026). The elephant in the phonics room: rethinking pronunciation norms in early reading instruction. The Australian Journal of Language and Literacy. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44020-026-00106-3

ASA statement on using value-added models for educational assessment. (2014, April 8). American Statistical Association. https://www.amstat.org/asa/files/pdfs/POL-ASAVAM-Statement.pdf

Aydarova, E. (2023). “Whatever you want to call it”: Science of reading mythologies in the education reform movement. Harvard Educational Review, 93(4), 556–581, https://doi.org10.17763/1943-5045-93.4.556

Aydarova, E. (2024). What you see is not what you get: Science of reading reforms as a guise for standardization, centralization, and privatization. American Journal of Education. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/730991

Bowers, J. S. (2020). Reconsidering the evidence that systematic phonics is more effective than alternative methods of reading instruction. Educational Psychology Review, 32(3), 681–­ 705.

Hall, C., Dahl-Leonard, K., Cho, E., Solari, E.J., Capin, P., Conner, C.L., Henry, A.R., Cook, L., Hayes, L., Vargas, I., Richmond, C.L. and Kehoe, K.F. (2023), Forty years of reading intervention research for elementary students with or at risk for dyslexia: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Reading Research Quarterly, 58. 285-312. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.477

Hansford, N., Dueker, S., Garforth, K. et al. (2025). An exploratory quantitative analysis of research on balanced literacy and structured literacy. Discover Education, 4(488). https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-025-00922-8

Khan, F., Peoples, L.Q., & Foster, L. (2022) Lessons in (in)equity: An evaluation of cultural responsiveness in elementary ELA curriculum. The Education Justice Research and Organizing Collaborative, New York University. https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/2022-10/Lessons%20in%20%28In%29Equity%20FINAL%20ACCESSIBLE.10.31.22.pdf

Loewus, L. (2026). “The cost of over-teaching phonics: In teaching reading, don’t miss the forest for the trees.” Education Next, 26(2).

Maroun, J., & Tienken, C.H. (2024). The pernicious predictability of state-mandated tests of academic achievement in the United States. Education Sciences, 14(2), 129-142. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci14020129 [Alternate link]

Naidu, R., S. Campbell, and S. Walker. 2026. “ Balancing the Chalk and the Check: Teacher Autonomy Amid the Rise of Scripted Reading Programs.” The Reading Teacher 80, no. 2: e70074. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.70074.

Owens, D. D. (2025). The Science of Reading Movement: Implications for Teacher Autonomy and the Future of Literacy Education. Journal of Equity & Social Justice in Education, 4. https://doi.org/10.62889/2025/ddo.1006

Parsons, A. W., Smith, K.C., Vaughn, M., Klee, H., Croix, L.L., & Yatzeck, J.C. (2025). Teacher autonomy in text choices for elementary reading instruction. Reading Research Quarterly,60(4). e70071. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.70071.

Reinking, D., Hruby, G.G., & Risko, V.J. (2023). Legislating phonics: Settle science of political polemic? Teachers College Record. https://doi.org/10.1177/01614681231155688

Rigell, A., Banack, A., Maples, A., Laughter, J., Broemmel, A., Vines, N., & Jordan, J. (2022, November). Overwhelming whiteness: A critical analysis of race in a scripted reading curriculum. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 54(6), 852–870, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00220272.2022.2030803

Stevens, E. A., Austin, C., Moore, C., Scammacca, N., Boucher, A. N., & Vaughn, S. (2021). Current state of the evidence: Examining the effects of Orton-Gillingham reading interventions for students with or at risk for word-level reading disabilities. Exceptional Children, 87(4), 397–417. https://doi.org/10.1177/0014402921993406

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