Category / literacy

by nflanagan

Is There Really a Decline in Pleasure Reading?

The mainstream media has been full of the bad news: new study shows that reading for pleasure has declined! Fewer people are reading for fun: From 2003 to 2023, the share of Americans who read for pleasure fell 40 percent, a sharp decline that is part of a continuing downward trend.

It’s easy to feel depressed about declining—what? literacy? —in the American citizenry. Just one more piece of evidence that schools are failing, blah, blah—nobody reads anymore!

But Anne Helen Peterson, in her substack, Culture Study, has a great piece dissecting the study that these scary headlines are based on. Maybe we’re not reading less; in fact, we may be taking in much more information and storytelling via means other than books.

Peterson posits six interesting theories about the way the study’s questions were framed and interpreted, and why we may need to re-evaluate what it means to be fully literate. She’s also a big-time book-reading enthusiast—not someone who sees the death of book-reading as inevitable in a digital world. Reading for pleasure is worth preserving, for all citizens. It broadens perspectives, makes us more interesting.

I immediately felt better after reading the piece. People aren’t reading less, necessarily; they’re reading differently. But I keep thinking about this story, told to me by a veteran teacher:

She started her career teaching in an elementary school, with reading blocks every day. She went back, as teachers sometimes do, to get a master’s degree in media and library science, then moved to a position in a middle school. A big part of her job there was managing young teenagers’ quests for information about whatever, using the internet as well as print resources.

After several years of staffing her school district’s seven libraries, the money ran out, libraries closed, and she was transferred back to a fourth grade. She said the most shocking thing about returning to a self-contained classroom was how much the kids hated reading.

It had been nearly two decades since she taught reading in an elementary classroom, and there was a palpable difference. Not just in the official reading program and instructional practice, but in the way students–both solid readers and those who struggled–responded to reading, in general. She was directed to follow daily scripts and a pacing chart, whether the students were ready to move on, or not.

She told me that—having already been involuntarily transferred away from a literacy-based job she loved and did well—she was no longer fearful of reprimands, and taught reading in ways that made sense to her fourth graders, including lengthy daily read-alouds that connected them to interesting stories. Their scores (and there are scores, in every story about reading) improved.

Headline today, from the right-leaning Detroit News: Michigan’s Reading Scores Continue to Slide for Youngest Students:

‘The results of the 2025 Michigan Student Test of Educational Progress, known as M-STEP, showed only 38.9% of third-graders and 42.4% of fourth-graders statewide scored proficient on the state’s English language arts (ELA) test, down from last year’s scores of 39.6% and 43.3%, respectively.

Eighth graders performed best in reading, with 65.3% proficient compared with 64.5% last year. Students in eighth grade take the PSAT, a precursor to the SAT, for math and English. Their social studies and science results come from the M-STEP.’

Read the data again. What do you notice? For starters—in every damned story about the so-called ‘reading crisis’—the undefined word ‘proficient’ appears. What does it mean? Everyone thinks they know. But ‘proficient’ (according to the Nation’s Report Card) does not mean ‘on grade level.’  It’s an indicator of advanced skills.

So there’s that. But did you notice that the worrisome ‘slide’ is .7% for third graders and .9% for fourth graders? Less than one percent? And that—miracle of miracles—Michigan 8th graders’ scores are a whopping 26.4% more proficient than Michigan 3rd graders?

There’s a lot to unpack here, but the Detroit News merrily goes on, blaming the fact that Michigan is coming late to legally mandated ‘Science of Reading,’ which kind of makes you wonder about what was wrong with the reading programs that produced success in two-thirds of the state’s 8th graders.

MI 8th graders took the PSAT, a national test, and the rest of Michigan’s kids took the statewide assessment, the M-STEP. Which is the most trustworthy? And why are scores so wildly different? These are questions the Detroit News does not address.

Nor does their reporting on reading scores factor in where the COVID pandemic impacted student instruction. In fact, I have seen op-ed commentary (NOT going to link) exclaim that because the pandemic is ‘over,’  reading scores should have ‘bounced back’—which reveals nothing more than a profound misunderstanding of education and public health data, mixed with contempt for public education.

Last year’s third and fourth graders were in pre-K and kindergarten during the worst years of the pandemic. The things they were coping with—fear and loss– as very young children, have left traces of damage, from school absenteeism to the very thing my friend mentioned: her fourth graders hated to read.

Why? Because learning to read had been a disrupted and difficult process, focused on improving scores, rather than developing an appreciation for an essential skill that would provide an enriched life, in multiple aspects? Including enjoyment—reading for pleasure?

Alfie Kohn:

‘The fact is that students’ days will be spent quite differently depending on whether the primary objective is to make them memorize what someone decided children of their age should know, on the one hand, or to help them “make fuller, deeper, and more accurate sense of their experiences,”on the other.’

I would call reading for pleasure a fuller, deeper and more accurate sense of our experiences—what it means to be a fully literate human being.

by nflanagan

Men Who Like Books Start Out as Boys Who Read

Maureen Dowd, in a NYT article entitled Attention, Men: Books are Sexy!:

Men are reading less. Women make up 80 percent of fiction sales. “Young men have regressed educationally, emotionally and culturally,” David J. Morris wrote in a Times essay titled “The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone.”

The fiction gap makes me sad. A man staring into a phone is not sexy. But a man with a book has become so rare, such an object of fantasy, that there’s a popular Instagram account called “Hot Dudes Reading.”

It’s enough to make me re-up my abandoned Instagram account.

I also sincerely hope that Maureen and I are not a dying breed, older women (we are the exact same age) who find Men Who Read attractive. I once experienced a tiny swoon when I read that Stephen King carries a paperback with him, wherever he goes. You know, in case he has to wait 10 minutes in line at the post office.

This is more than just my elderly romantic fantasy, however. I think Men Who Read are—or should be—a national education goal. Not men who can decode, nor men who can type fast with their thumbs or pass tests about content. Men who actually enjoy reading.

Reading to use their imagination, rather than seeing prepackaged ideas on video. Reading and—important–evaluating information. Using the language they absorb, via reading, in their daily interactions with others. Reading for pleasure.

Personal story: When I met my husband, he told me about working third shift at the Stroh’s factory in Detroit, while he was in law school. His job involved dealing with a machine that flattened cardboard beer cases and needed tending only at certain times. The rest of the time he filled with reading, hours every night. He would take two books to work, in case he finished the first one. He read hundreds of library books, mostly popular fiction.

He is still that person, 46 years later. Swoon-worthy.

When I read (endlessly) and think about how we’re teaching reading these days, it strikes me that the discussion is almost entirely technical: Do we really have a “reading crisis?”  Why? Is it the fault of a program that was once popular and taught millions of kids to read, but is now being replaced, sometimes via legislation crafted by people who haven’t met first graders or stepped foot into their classrooms?

I recently had a conversation with a middle school teacher in Massachusetts who is a fan of phonics-intensive science of reading curricula, largely because she gets a high percentage of non-readers into her Language Arts classes, kids who have big brains but no reading skills. She’s had some success in getting them to read, using sound-it-out instructional materials they should have experienced in early grades.

Good for her. And good for all teachers who are searching (sometimes in secret) for the right strategies to get their particular kids to read. But I’d like to point out that if the technical skills of reading aren’t matched by reasons for reading, it’s like any other thing we learn to do, then abandon. I’m guessing my friend’s students want to learn to read, because they like her, and they find what she’s teaching them interesting.

From an Atlantic piece: ‘The science of reading started as a neutral description of a set of principles, but it has now become a brand name, another off-the-shelf solution to America’s educational problems. The answer to those problems might not be to swap out one commercial curriculum package for another—but that’s what the system is set up to enable.

A teacher must command a class that includes students with dyslexia as well as those who find reading a breeze, and kids whose parents read to them every night alongside children who don’t speak English at home.

There you have it. We’re looking, once again, for a one-size-fits-all solution to a technical, easily measured “problem”—reading scores—when what we really need is honest reasons for people to pick up a book. Or a newspaper. To enjoy a story, or a deep dive into current issues.

My dad, who didn’t graduate from HS and had a physical job all his life, came home from work every afternoon and read the newspaper. He was more literate than many college grads I know.

He had reasons for reading. He was not carrying a smartphone and had only three TV channels, undistinguished by political points of view. He read TIME and LIFE magazines. I disagreed with my father on almost every issue, back in the day, but he could marshal a political argument. Because he was a reader.

So why are reading scores dropping? Curriculum and poor teaching are lazy, one-note answers. If we want a truly literate population, we need to make reading and writing essential, something that kids can’t wait to do. Because it’s a passageway to becoming an adult, to succeeding in life, no matter what their goals are, or how they evolve.

We currently have a president who doesn’t read his daily briefings, and bases his critical viewpoints on hunger in Gaza on what he sees on TV. But we used to have a president who published an annual list of his ten favorite books.

Which one of them is a (sexy) role model?

by nflanagan

A “Moment of Reckoning” or Just More Empty Hysteria?

I’ve been more or less off the grid for the past two weeks, vacationing in Alaska and determined not to let the repellent Epstein Saga or other assorted travesties spoil the snow-capped mountain vistas. Which means that a whole lot of education-related stories have been waiting in my mailbox.

Lurking bad news, for the most part (even Trump “returning” five-point-something billion to schools is tainted by the knowledge that we’ll see those cuts again—and more). Most of the bad news is cuts, in fact—or scams, like this voucher doozy in Arizona.

Can I just say that education journalists could do the citizenry a solid by continuously reporting all the resources—human and material—that have already been lost? Or by informing parents and communities about residual effects of a global pandemic or unwarranted attacks on public education?

Instead, we get idiotic headlines like this one: A Moment of Reckoning for Michigan Schools. (Cue disaster music.)

The headline is followed up with a series of articles with titles like Michigan spent big to fix schools. The result: Worse scores and plenty of blame. And Mississippi turned around its schools. Its secret? Tools Michigan abandoned.

The “effective tool” that Michigan abandoned? Our late-but-not-lamented Third Grade Flunk law, valid critiques of which centered on the damage done to kids by being forced to repeat a grade, the financial burden on schools as they are compelled to provide an additional year of instruction to large segments of their elementary population, and the complete lack of proof that these laws work.

Makes you wonder where this unsubstantiated condemnation comes from—that’s the disappointing part. These articles (and more just like them, hacking away at our public schools) are from Bridge Magazine, a fairly centrist, nonpartisan publication that focuses on issues in the Mitten State.

I interviewed its founder, eminent journalist Phil Power, shortly after Bridge launched, in 2011, and invited him to speak to the Michigan Teacher Forum, where he proclaimed his undying support for public education and especially for the hard-working teachers in Michigan public schools. Bridge seems to have moved on from those ideas, however, adopting a common politicized perspective: Oh no! Our state is falling behind other states!

There’s a lot to debunk in the series of Bridge articles (wherein I found precisely one veteran teacher quoted, mildly suggesting that the silver-bullet “Science of Reading” prescription was only one of the ways that students learned to read), but I am too jet-lagged to tackle these, point-by-point, at the moment.

State Senator Dayna Polehanki, a former teacher, did some debunking, however. From her Facebook post:

“While I won’t denigrate Mississippi’s efforts to improve its academics, the picture being painted by at least one Michigan publication that Mississippi is outperforming Michigan on the NAEP reading test (“The Nation’s Report Card”) is MISLEADING.

While Mississippi has *scored higher than Michigan ONE TIME over the past decade on the Grade 4 NAEP reading test . . .

Michigan has *scored higher than Mississippi EVERY TIME over the past decade on the Grade 8 NAEP reading test.

The assertion in the Michigan publication that Michigan “abandoned” our 3rd grade read-or-flunk law to our detriment is not supported by test score data.

It’s not surprising that states that flunk their “worst” 3rd grade readers achieve elevated results ahead of the Grade 4 NAEP reading test, but these elevated test scores tend to flatten over time (by Grade 8 NAEP reading), like they do with Mississippi.

This is borne out in NAEP data from other states as well, like Florida, which also flunks its worst performing 3rd grade readers.”

In fact, there are plenty of pieces debunking the “Mississippi Miracle,” from its deceptive gaming of the system, to right-wing blah-blah claiming that raising 4th grade reading scores isn’t enough—that Mississippi needs vouchers, immediately, to solve its poverty-related education problems.

What all these pieces have in common might be called uninformed–or “lazy,” take your pick–journalism. Education data is not easy to interpret, nor is it truth. One example: A NAEP score of “Proficient” doesn’t mean “on grade level” as most people (including some education journalists) seem to think it does.

Worse, relying solely on test scores doesn’t tell us how successful schools actually are. For that, we need to look at a wide range of factors. It’s interesting that, two weeks before Bridge launched its so-called Moment of Reckoning, they published a piece noting that only 9% of the state’s public schools currently have a full-time librarian.

Think that has anything to do with our faltering reading scores?    

In the end, schools are comprised of people and programming. The more instruction is tailored to the students in that school, the more dedicated and skilled the personnel are, the better the results. Score competitions with other states are pointless.

There are hundreds of ways to improve student learning: Universal free preschool attached to high-quality childcare. Smaller classes, especially for our youngest learners. Recruiting, training and paying a long-term teaching force. Stable housing and health care for all children. A hot breakfast and lunch, plus plenty of recess time. Government supports for public education. I could go on.

None of these are free, or likely to come down the pike in Michigan or anywhere else in the near future.

Are we reckoning with that?

by nflanagan

Book-banning, Book-burning, Book reading—and Truth

Cue (the 1970s): Nervous young candidate for a job teaching music steps out of her dad’s car—she doesn’t own a car, yet–in a small Michigan town on the rural outer ring surrounding Detroit, where little villages are interspersed with working farmland. The town is charming, full of old houses and 19th century buildings. The principal she’s meeting proposes they take a walk around the town while interviewing.

He gives her a thumbnail history of the Hartland Music Hall, the cemetery and the “1921 Building”—the first high school in the county. They end their walk at the Cromaine Library, the crown jewel of this little village. It’s exquisite—built in 1927, before the Wall Street Crash that sent the country spiraling into Depression—with beautiful Georgian windows, and a working fireplace. Every child in the Hartland Schools comes to the Cromaine Library and gets a library card, the principal tells her—it’s part of the school district.

Of course, I got that job (and bought a car)—and raised my family in that little town, taking my personal children to that library hundreds of times. My husband served on the library board, for a time. It was (beautifully) expanded in 1980 and has remained, for nearly 100 years, the heart of the community, a hub for both kids and adults—and for learning.

I was sickened to read that the Cromaine Library Board (like, unfortunately, the Hartland School Board) has now been co-opted by right-wing morality scolds. Serving on library boards—like school boards and other civic oversight jobs for volunteers—is a thankless job, but also a power-grabbing opportunity for those who’d really prefer to live in an anti-DEI town. In an anti-DEI world, in fact.

“For the Hartland Cromaine District Library in Livingston County, the conversation on labeling books started in 2022. Over time and with the election of new library Board of Trustees members, the conversation became much more pointed.

Much of that had to do with the election of Bill Bolin, the pastor of the FloodGate Church in Brighton, and his elevation to the president of the Cromaine District Library board in January. Bolin and his church have been written about by various publications, including Tim Alberta detailing Bolin’s mixture of right-wing conspiratorial politics and Christianity. Bolin also features throughout Alberta’s 2023 book, “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism.”

Bolin:
“I desire to protect children from the harm that can befall them over coercive behavior. The approach I am suggesting, along with certain colleagues, is a commonsense approach to changing the sexual tone and nature of some library policies and practices.”

Bolin said the Board [under his leadership] would discuss controversial items on the agenda, including the removal of June LGBTQ+ Pride displays, labeling certain books that may be deemed controversial, moving books to an age restricted area, providing supervision in the teen area to monitor “behavior” and returning the Pledge of Allegiance to monthly meetings.

Bolin then recited a potential warning label he had created warning adults of the dangers of providing such material to children. But Bolin wasn’t talking about dirty magazines in a seedy retail store: he was talking about books within the community’s public library. Bolin added that a list of books that could be recommended for labeling was being compiled with at least 80 titles, minimum.

The article goes on to say that the Board was advised by the ACLU and their own law firm that they’re setting themselves up for legal pushback. A meeting gets heated and the Sheriff is called to escort those endorsing leaving the books on the shelves out of the room. It’s shocking—and nauseating. I loved this library.

Several attendees note that Bolin hopes this case will be the showcase legal action in front of the Supreme Court. Bolin muses on his belief that: “legal discourse was changing in America, indicating that courts in the era of Trump might be turning the tide to support measures much like the one being discussed by the Cromaine District Library board.”

And maybe that’s the saving grace—this is not just happening here, in small towns in the Midwest. When Georgia high schools can no longer present classic theatre like “The Crucible”—which is how I learned about the McCarthy hearings, as a HS student—then we all need to rise up. Show up at board meetings. And speak.  

Free choice of reading. It’s right there in the Bill of Rights. Remember?

In a previous column, I wrote about the moving experience of standing in the Square where—on May 10, 1933—students (students!) supporting the emergent Nazi party burned books. Thousands and thousands of books that the party said were too Jewish (including classic works of literature and philosophy) or not German enough: In 1933, Nazi German authorities aimed to synchronize professional and cultural organizations with Nazi ideology and policy (Gleichschaltung).

That’s precisely what’s happening in what I used to think of as my little town: synchronizing professional and cultural organizations with Trumpian ideology and policy.

Only engaged citizens can stop this.

by nflanagan

Are Women the Cause of Reluctance to Read?

I remember learning–perhaps in a grad class or professional development session, years ago–that boys didn’t like to read about girl things. You know—relationships, communication, emotions, the finer points of making a home or enriching family life. Boys wanted to read stories about adventures, we were told. Starring, naturally, other boys.

Ergo, if we wanted to turn boys into enthusiastic readers, we needed books where boys did boy stuff—creeks, animals, cars, fights, danger, you name it. Write it and they will come.

I thought about this when re-reading A Separate Peace this month. My book club is doing a “Books You’ve Already Read—or should have read” month, and I thought it was time to re-read a book that I put on my Top Ten list for decades.

(Seriously—I kept continuously updated top ten lists of books, movies and LPs until I had both children and a full-time job. There are still some gems on those lists—but also some really embarrassing stuff.)

I wouldn’t, however, call Separate Peace an embarrassing pick. I read it in high school, although not as a class novel. In the late 60s, my public high school adopted a choice-based language arts curriculum. Instead of English 9/10/etc, there was an array of semester-long courses. I took journalism, speed reading and Great Books, a totally wonderful class where students did nothing but read books, then journal their impressions.

There was a list of great books (SP was on it), but you could also deviate, with the teacher’s permission. It was that teacher—Mrs. Palmer—who introduced me to Daphne du Maurier, Virginia Woolf, and Madeleine L’Engel.

It’s hard for me to put my finger now on why I loved Separate Peace so much. Partly, it was the boarding school setting—what it would be like to live in dorms, with other students whose parents weren’t scraping to pay the mortgage, for whom college was a certainty, not a stretch.

Mostly, though, I think it was because—spoiler—there’s a death in the book, under unusual circumstances, leading the reader (this teenaged reader, anyway) to muse on Big Meaningful Issues. In case you’re wondering whether I noticed the homoerotic flavor of the relationship between the narrator and his best friend, the answer (1969) is no and (2025) yes.

But here’s what really jumped out at me, some 50+ years later: there are no women in this book. Aside from a couple of sentences mentioning a screechy school nurse, and a sentence describing a classmate’s mother as kindly, there is zero female presence in this book. There’s plenty of adventure, danger, scrapes and disobedience. Even a student-led tribunal, and a World War. But not a single woman, or girl.

From a recent article in The Guardian, about a newly formed publishing house that intends to publish only books by men: 

Cook said the publishing landscape has changed “dramatically” over the past 15 years as a reaction to the “prevailing toxic male-dominated literary scene of the 80s, 90s and noughties”. Now, “excitement and energy around new and adventurous fiction is around female authors – and this is only right as a timely corrective”.

“This new breed of young female authors, spearheaded by Sally Rooney et al, ushered in a renaissance for literary fiction by women, giving rise to a situation where stories by new male authors are often overlooked, with a perception that the male voice is problematic,” he said.

Hunh. I wasn’t really paying attention to any toxic literary scene in the 1980s and 90s, due to the aforementioned family and job. But I was still reading a lot—and was deeply involved in whether and what my students were reading. Or not reading.

It was a time when getting any kind of reading material—from comic books to Captain Underpants— into kids’ hands was the prescription for reluctant readers. There was a rolling bookshelf in my band room, filled with books about music and musicians. Some had some vaguely naughty photos. I purchased all of them, and they were well used.

My take on any reduction in male readers in the 21st century is that omnipresent screens, not problematic masculine voices, are responsible.

Still. What I notice about this (well-meant, I assume) announcement is that it only took a couple of decades for men to perceive that women were “ushering in a renaissance,” then set up their own literary clubhouse, no girls allowed.

There’s also this:
Less than half of parents find it fun to read aloud to their children, new research shows. Only 40% of parents with children aged 0 to 13 agreed that “reading books to my child is fun for me”, according to a survey conducted by Nielsen and publisher HarperCollins. The survey shows a steep decline in the number of parents reading aloud to young children, with 41% of 0- to four-year-olds now being read to frequently, down from 64% in 2012.

A significant gender disparity was identified, with 29% of 0- to two-year-old boys being read to every day or nearly every day compared with 44% of girls of the same age.

Plus this, ominously: Many parents focus on the literacy element of reading, seeing it as a skill, rather than encouraging a love for reading in their children.

So—who’s not reading, and why?

If you talk to the Science of Reading crowd, boys’ reading difficulties and reluctance to read can be laid at the feet of teachers who were never taught the only correct protocols for reading instruction, or—worse—fail to use them with fidelity, a word I have come to loathe when applied to pedagogy.

And since the overwhelming majority of early-grades teachers are women, this can be construed as another way in which women are not paying attention to the needs of boys. But it’s so much more complex than phonemic awareness, yada yada.

The Great Books class at my high school only lasted a few years, then fell when the “cafeteria curriculum” became outmoded, in favor of … what? I forget. Back to Basics? One of our cyclical returns to The Canon—in which white male-authored books have literally always been deemed more worthy of study?

All children deserve to be read to, daily, even when they’re able to read themselves. Stories about both boys and girls. Because that’s how they learn to be curious about the real world.

Version 1.0.0
by nflanagan

The Reason We Still Need Conferences

I am just back from the Network for Public Education conference, held this year in Columbus, Ohio. Columbus is an eight-hour drive from my house, and we arrived at the same time as ongoing flood warnings. But—as usual—it was well worth the time and effort expended.

For most of my career—35 years—I was a classroom teacher. Garden-variety teachers are lucky to get out of Dodge and attend a conference with their peers maybe once a year. Teachers don’t get airfare for conferences in other states and often end up sharing rides and rooms, splitting pizzas for dinner. They go with the intention of getting many new ideas for their practice toolboxes—lesson plans, subject discipline trends and tips, cool new materials—and to connect with people who do what they do. Be inspired, maybe, or just to commiserate with others who totally get it.

In the real world (meaning: not schools), this is called networking. Also in the real world—there’s comp time for days missed at a weekend conference, and an expense form for reimbursements. Conversely, in schools, lucky teachers get a flat grant to partially compensate for registration, mileage, hotel and meals. In many other schools, nobody goes to a conference, because there’s just not enough money, period.

When you hear teachers complaining about meaningless professional development, it’s often because of that very reason—there’s not enough money to custom-tailor professional learning, so everyone ends up in the auditorium watching a PowerPoint and wishing they were back in their classrooms.

Back in 1993, when Richard Riley was Secretary of Education, his special assistant, Terry Dozier, a former National Teacher of the Year, established the first National Teacher Forum. (In case you’re wondering, the Forums lasted just as long as the Clinton administration, and Riley, were in the WH.) Teachers of the Year from all 50 states attended. The purpose of the conference was to engage these recognized teachers in the decision-making that impacted their practice. In other words, policy.

It was probably the most memorable conference I ever attended. I took nothing home to use in my band classroom, but left with an imaginary soapbox and new ideas about how I could speak out on education issues, engage policymakers, and assign value to my experience as a successful teacher. The National Teacher Forum literally changed my life, over the following decades.

But—the idea that teachers would start speaking out, having their ideas get as much traction as novice legislators’ or Gates-funded researchers, was a hard sell. Education thinkers aren’t in the habit of recognizing teacher wisdom, except on a semi-insulting surface level. In the hierarchy of public education workers, teachers are at the lowest level of the pyramid, subject to legislative whims, accrued data and faulty analyses, and malign forces of privatization.

Which is why it was heartening to see so many teachers (most from Ohio) at the conference. The vibe was big-picture: Saving public education. Debunking current myths about things like AI and silver-bullet reading programs. Discussing how churches are now part of the push to destabilize public schools. New organizations and elected leaders popping up to defend democracy, school by school and state by state.  An accurate history of how public education has been re-shaped by politics. The resurgence of unions as defenders of public education.

Saving public education.  A phrase that has taken on new and urgent meaning, in the last three months. Every single one of the keynote speakers was somewhere between on-point and flat-out inspirational.

Here’s the phrase that kept ringing in my head: We’re in this together.

The last two speakers were AFT President Randi Weingarten and MN Governor Tim Walz. I’ve heard Weingarten speak a dozen times or more, and she’s always articulate and fired-up. But it was Walz, speaking to his people, who made us laugh and cry, and believe that there’s hope in these dark times.

He remarked that his HS government teacher—class of 24 students, very rural school—would never have believed that Tim Walz would one day be a congressman, a successful governor and candidate for Vice-President. It was funny—but also another reason to believe that public schools are pumping out leaders every day, even in dark times.

In an age where we can hear a speaker or transmit handouts digitally—we still need real-time conferences. We need motivation and personal connections. Places where true-blue believers in the power of public education can gather, have a conversation over coffee, hear some provocative ideas and exchange business cards. Network.

Then go home–and fight.

by nflanagan

The Folly of Settled Science

It was on Morning Edition, seven years ago—a cheery little piece on how we now know just how to teach students with dyslexia how to read. Interesting, I thought then, expecting to hear about some new breakthrough technique in reading pedagogy. Instead, what I heard was this:

Dyslexia is the most common learning disability, affecting tens of millions of people in the United States. But getting help for children who have it in public school can be a nightmare. “They wouldn’t acknowledge that he had a problem. They wouldn’t say the word ‘dyslexia.’’’

Wow. Not true in my school. We talked about dyslexia and reading instruction endlessly, being very careful not to throw around the label (which impacts 3% to 7% of students, depending on how the condition is defined) indiscriminately. I found it hard to believe that parents who sought help for a genuinely dyslexic child would find the process ‘nightmarish.’

I spent most of my career in one school district, but teachers there expended a great deal of effort and analysis in teaching kids to read and reinforcing ‘reading across the curriculum’ in upper grades. Over three decades, and via my own children’s reading instruction there, I saw several reading programs come and go. I was part of countless conversations about how to incorporate new pedagogical thinking into practice. But–teachers refusing to identify the issues with a student who struggled to read? Never.

Turns out, the Morning Edition piece (in 2018, remember) wasn’t really about a new, proven strategy for helping kids with reading disabilities. The program was fanning new flames of the always-politicized Reading Wars:

Research shows that they learn to read better when they are explicitly taught the ways that sounds and letters correspond. And research shows that even students without dyslexia learn better this way. “I have started to call it not dyslexia but dysteachia. It’s the teachers who are not giving the right kind of instruction!”

Aha! Kids can’t read? It’s the teachers’ fault. Again.

The Reading Wars (which have been going on for over 100 years) tore local school boards apart in the 1990s, in an effort to determine which reading program was “the best.” Many of these bitter arguments were framed as “Phonics” vs. “Whole Language,” but anyone who’s studied the acquisition of literacy knows that’s a simplification so gross as to be useless. Reading instruction is never binary, or limited to right vs. wrong strategies.

The National Reading Panel, convened by a government department with an agenda, put forth a major report, designed to settle the question, once and for all—but the lone practitioner on the panel strongly disagreed with the methodology and policy implications that rolled out, post-report—if not with the actual findings. So, hardly a consensus among teachers.

Then the heavy hand of accountability pushed the discussion—the professional work of reading teachers—out of the classroom, and into whatever place it is that reading programs are measured by their efficacy in raising test scores. And possibly forcing children to repeat the third grade.

I am sincerely happy to know that students correctly identified with dyslexia, a complex, multi-layered diagnosis, seem to be more successful in learning to read, using a phonemic awareness/phonics-intensive program. Still, I am putting my faith, as always, in the discernment and expertise of the teacher.

Students classified as dyslexic have varying strengths and challenges and teaching them is too complex a task for a scripted, one-size-fits-all program. Optimal instruction—meaning the most effective methods for students with disabilities as well as those already reading fluently and making meaning–calls for teachers’ professional expertise and responsiveness, a full tool bag and the freedom to act on the basis of that professionalism.

It’s worth mentioning—again—that formal reading instruction in Finland does not begin until students are seven years of age, long after some children in the United States have been identified as dyslexic or learning disabled, because they’re unable to decode at age six.

Seven years ago, the author of the Morning Edition piece, Emily Hanford, claimed that the superiority of phonics/phonemic awareness instruction for all children—and the failure of whole language programs—was settled science, ‘like climate change.’

I certainly hope there’s never a rigid, unchanging agreement on the One Best Way to teach people of any age to read. All scholarly disciplines should undergo regular re-assessment, as research reshapes knowledge. There are still classrooms in the United States, after all, where evolution is not settled science.

I dug some of this information out from a piece I wrote in March of 2018 for Education Week, because yesterday, for the first time, I had an unpleasant skirmish on Bluesky.

I had posted a comment re: the just-released, drooping NAEP reading scores which are now being dissected in the media. There’s a lot of alarmism and pearl-clutching in the mainstream media, but here’s a pretty good piece from NPR. (The piece also reminds readers that “proficient” doesn’t mean adequate or even OK—it means considerably above average.)

While 4th and 8th grade reading scores overall are still below pre-pandemic levels, it’s worth remembering that this year’s fourth graders were in kindergarten when the pandemic hit, and many spent much of first grade, prime learn-to-read time, learning remotely. Fourth graders in the tested NAEP group did not experience typical reading instruction.

Scores for advantaged students—the top of the heap, economically—were actually strong; scores for the poorest quadrant were dismal. Nothing new, but that gap was much bigger in this round of testing. That is actually useful information. We should be putting more resources into the public schools that serve disadvantaged students (not vouchers to subsidize wealthy families choosing private or religious schools).

I thought about how the ‘settled science” of learning to read has become the “Science of Reading”—and how, over the past seven years, since I first heard that piece on Morning Edition, kids who were first learning to read then (and are now 8th graders) have not moved up the testing ladder, even though over 40 states now have laws or policies based on the so-called Science of Reading.

If SOR was the one best way, why haven’t scores been creeping up? It was a simple, non-hostile question.

Which drew a very hostile response from a Bluesky account that appears to be an online tutoring service with one of those improbably aspirational—think Rocket Reader!!–names.  He or she refused to give his/her name, and the exchange (wherein I kept asking for research supporting his/her claims) got increasingly antagonistic.

S/he kept returning to how old and out of touch I am, and insulting not only me, but other researchers and opinion writers with far more credibility than I on the topic of learning to read. His/her final comment (before I blocked him/her) was “Go live in the nursing home with Lucy Calkins!”

Here’s the thing, though. Having seen reading instruction up close and personal—as a professional, not a student—over decades, it’s very clear that it will never be settled (or, probably, science).  It’s complex and variable and entirely dependent on what students bring to the table.

by nflanagan

TIASL Best Blogs of 2024

I used to blog for Education Week—for nine years, in fact. And at the end of each year, the teacher bloggers were asked to choose our ten best blogs and post a piece about them. We were given viewership statistics (for our personal blog only), so we’d know which ones got the most eyeballs. And invariably, the most popular ones—the winners–were my least favorite pieces.

I’m writing for myself and like-minded readers these days, so I’m not sharing the most-read 2024 columns from Teacher in a Strange Land. I’m sharing eight blogs that I think best reflect the, well, Strange Land we find ourselves in, educationally speaking.

Before I list them, I’d suggest you read two recent—important– blog posts from Peter Greene. The first informs his regular readers (I’m among them): If you have ever had an urge to send money my way, I ask that you transfer that urge to someone whose work you appreciate and who has, however shyly or boldly, held their hat out. Plunk down some bucks for the work that you value and that you want to see staying in the world.

You’ve probably noticed that the most famous people who write about education are often not educators. The best—most accurate, most creative, most humane—writing about schools and learning comes from people (like Peter) who’ve done the work and have first-hand observations about doing right by children. In 2024 alone, I have subscribed to seven newsletters, paying a modest fee and developing an informed reading habit on screens, rather than newspapers and magazines. Some of those writers have interactive publishing modes and write back.

I have favorite ed writers—and it is those writers who introduce me to other ed writers. Which is Peter Greene’s second point: Share the good stuff. If you’re wondering who to read, click here. There are dozens of suggestions, curated by Greene. But first, subscribe to his blog, because his work is terrific, soaked in reality. And free.

Here are my eight picks:

Do Core Democratic Values Belong in Schools? Some Say No.
When looking at curricular change over the past five years—immediately preceding the onset of the COVID pandemic—it’s easy to see that there were plenty of precursors to the anti-woke, book-banning, teacher-punishing mess we find ourselves in as we slowly recover from that major shock to the public education system.

The scariest thing to me about the abuse teachers are taking, across the country, is its impact on curriculum. Here’s the thing: you really can’t outsource teacher judgment. You can prescribe and script and attempt to control everything that happens in the classroom, but it doesn’t work that way.

My Research is Better Than Your Research:

Simple theoretical questions—like “which method produces greater student understanding of decomposing geometric shapes?”—have limited utility. They’re not sexy, and don’t get funding. Maybe what we need to do is stop ranking the most influential researchers in the country, and teach educators how to run small, valid and reliable studies to address important questions in their own practice, and to think more about the theoretical frameworks underlying their work in the classroom.

Ignoring the Real World in the Classroom:

What happens when teachers can’t take questions about the daily news? It makes us look like idiots, for starters. Uninformed content-dispensers, unable to connect facts to causes or outcomes. What have our students learned from our unwillingness to discuss national crises, like 9/11?

Weaponizing Empathy and other Heritage Foundation Rhetoric for School Reform:

I was dumbstruck on hearing this little clip from a recent school board meeting.

Board member says: “This gets into the weaponization of empathy, where empathy is taught as the highest goal, the highest order. Do we teach empathy to the effect where students disregard parental authority—and accept anything and everything? Do we teach kids that any kind of judgment is bad?”

Wait. What? Who is he accusing? And what is the weaponization of empathy?

Too much empathy leads to kids defying their parents, evidently. The moral ambiguity of school confuses students. That’s their big fear?

DIS-Information in Schools:

There are, indeed, public schools where media literacy is a formal part of the curriculum. There are outstanding digital literacy resources for students, supported by high-quality research. What’s missing is the will and the urgency of the need to educate kids about distinguishing between truth and whatever it is they’re getting on TikTok.

Or, unfortunately, at their kitchen tables or their church or on the bus. Misinformation—can you remember Things You Used to Believe?—has always been a factor in growing up and becoming educated. Disinformation is a darker thing altogether. Especially when it comes from people who should, theoretically, represent integrity. Legislators, for example.

What do parents know about public education:

Adults’ perceptions of what’s happening in public schools mainly come from their own personal experiences (and this includes people with no K-12 children in the home). The percentage of people who read books or articles, watch cable news or videos, or listen to podcasts about education is small. People who get their education news from newspapers? Fifteen percent. Second highest source of ed news? Social media.

That’s a lot of guesswork, memes and faulty memories.

Man with Sixteen College Degrees Can’t Read:  

Things that ARE apparent in this article:

  • Third grade is WAY too early to label ANY child a non-reader (or punish them by retaining them). It’s too early for labels, period.
  • When it comes to effective learning (the kind that sticks, and can be applied), experiences trump worksheets.
  • Continuously reading to your children, even when they are supposedly “reading to learn” at age eight, is absolutely the right thing to do.
  • Visual interpretation of text symbols is not more efficient or of higher value than hearing that text read aloud.
  • Many, many children are “bright but different.”

The Return of the Trad Teacher:

It strikes me that tradwives are just another glitzy, social media-driven facet of a larger wave of backlash against a whole lot of un-trad trends in American society: Full-blown reproductive freedom. The continued shrinkage of mainline religions. Honoring personal sex/gender choices. Women running for office and corner offices–and winning. And so on.

I also see lots of pushback against untraditional teaching, curriculum and school organization models. The whole “Science of Reading” battle rings very familiar to those of us who started teaching in the 1970s, when teachers were pushing back against the “Why Johnny Can’t Read” –because teachers theoretically weren’t teaching phonics–crusade in the late 50s.

Thanks for reading. Remember: Share the good stuff.

by nflanagan

We Need Hygge Classrooms in America

The ubiquitous FB meme:

In Iceland, books are exchanged as Christmas Eve presents, then you spend the rest of the night in bed reading them and eating chocolate. The tradition is part of a season called Jolabokafload, the Christmas Book flood, because Iceland, which publishes more books per capita than any other country, sells most of its books between September and November, due to people preparing for the upcoming holiday.

Nobody ever responds: That sounds awful! My family prefers watching our individual TVs!

Generally, commenters reply wistfully, longing for a country where learning is valued and books are ideal gifts, where the dark and cold are counterbalanced by intellectual curiosity and conversation.

Thanks to the Jolabokaflod, books still matter in Iceland, they get read and talked about. Excitement fills the air. Every reading is crowded, every print-run is sold. Being a writer in Iceland you get rewarded all the time: People really do read our books, and they have opinions, they love them or they hate them. At the average Christmas party, people push politics and the Kardashians aside and discuss literature.

Perhaps because I live in a region that gets 135 inches of snow each winter, these cozy, fireside literary chats are enormously appealing to me. As is the Danish concept of hygge:

The Danish art of contentment, comfort, and connection…a practical way of creating sanctuary in the middle of very real life.”

Hygge (hoo-ga), which has no direct translation into English—surprise!—is many things to many people: Woolen socks. Candles and other gentle light. Board games. Comfortable couches and cozy quilts. Warm drinks.

Although hygge seems to have Scandinavian roots, it’s not exclusively a cold-climate thing, evidently. A rustic cottage on a lake, with its beat-up furniture, mildewed paperbacks from the 1950s and second-hand bathing suits is very hygge, according to Meik Wiking, author of “The Little Book of Hygge” and, not coincidentally, CEO of the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen. The mere fact that there is a Happiness Research Institute, somewhere in the world, makes me—well, happy.

The interesting thing about hygge and Jolabokafload is their inherent intentionality. Citizens in Iceland and Denmark take contentment, comfort and connection seriously, and pursue them with deliberation. Choosing the right book for someone means you know that person, and what they might enjoy reading. Playing games with your family means connecting with them, laughing and teamwork.

So why don’t we pursue this, here in the land of the free, home of the brave? What keeps us, a nation that often proclaims itself the best country in the world, or at least on its way to becoming “great” again, from choosing to embrace contentment and connection?

Perhaps Scandinavians are better able to appreciate the small, hygge things in life because they already have all the big ones nailed down: free university education, social security, universal health care, efficient infrastructure, paid family leave, and at least a month of vacation a year. With those necessities secured, according to Wiking, Danes are free to become “aware of the decoupling between wealth and wellbeing.”

That decoupling between wealth and wellbeing is well-reflected in this headline: Children Need Homes, Not Charter Schools or Standardized Tests, and Definitely Not Tax Cuts for the Wealthy.

That’s where our intentionality lies in the U.S., where we’re spending our hard-earned tax dollars—canned curricula designed to raise test scores and alternative school governance models, endless expensive tests—when over 100,000 New York City schoolchildren were homeless last year. According to former Senator Orin Hatch, we don’t even have money for poor children’s basic health care. As a nation, we have linked simple human well-being to wealth, and sealed it with the tamper-proof cap of low opportunity.

Many teachers try to add hygge touches to the classrooms where their high-poverty students meet and work every day—from beanbag chairs to classroom sets of snowpants for outdoor play, from little free libraries to Cocoa Day. If school can become a place of connectivity, warmth and safety, they reason, students will keep coming back.

Happy Hygge-days, Teacher in a Strange Land readers. Thanks for all you do for your students.