This is both a favorite lede in mainstream media and a perfect example of the enduring story we tell about education in the U.S.:

Fewer than half of New York City public school students showed proficiency on reading exams this year, a decline from the previous year that may reflect how hard it is to change teaching approaches as the district embarks on a major reading overhaul. (Troy Closson, New York Times)

If time travel were possible, we could visit virtually any moment in the U.S. over the past 100 years and the story would be the same: Kids today cannot read!

But over the past five decades, the state of schools, teaching, and student achievement has been the focus of perpetual accountability-based education reform grounded in high-stakes testing and standards.

That reform has existed in a repeated cycle of crisis/reform, including periodic elevated concern for student reading achievement. Reading reform almost always sits in what has become know as the Reading War.

The Reading War and reading crisis have a long history, reaching at least back into the 1940s.

Therefore, the lede quoted above is mostly not unlike the public perception of student reading for about a century, although the current Reading War is couched in the high-stake environment of education reform and a media story that is both compelling and misleading as well as often entirely false.

Thus, the reading proficiency decline in NYC sits within a high-profile movement, the “science of reading” (SOR) story driven by mainstream media and resulting in new or revised reading policy across most states.

While the media focus on NYC is outsized and thus misleading, the dynamics at play in NYC do serve as a cautionary tale about policy and legislation reform grounding in a Reading War.

One of those cautions is embedded in the article:

Education officials in New York sought to frame the reading drop as part of the natural pains that come with reform….

“Significant change does not happen overnight,” the New York City schools chancellor, David C. Banks, said in a statement. He called the “slight decline” in reading scores reflective of “a transitional period as our school system adjusts to a new method of instruction.”

Education reform is fraught with identifying problems, posing reforms, and then measuring learning outcomes in valid ways.

Yes, education reform is often followed by measurable learning declines; therefore, the NYC officials are not skirting responsibility.

However, there is a significant problem: Reading in the U.S. (and NYC) is not in crisis, and reading programs themselves have not failed students.

NYC scrapping and banning some reading programs, mandating a few new programs, and then, implementing “a new method of instruction” is the problem with this Reading War and reading reform based on the crisis rhetoric and misinformation about student reading achievement.

Reading Wars, in fact, fuel educational churn, specifically churn in the education market place, but the crisis/reform cycles have never resulted in raising student achievement.

Regardless of Reading Wars or reform cycles, the story remains the same: Students can’t read, teachers do not know how to teach reading, and schools are failing.

The perpetual war that results in constant reform, then, includes collateral damage.

Broadly, that collateral damage reflects a paradox: Education reform simultaneously claims to be in service of teachers and student while also making false and negative claims about those teachers and students.

More narrowly and specifically in the context of the SOR Reading War, one of the key elements of collateral damage is instructional—the erasure of workshop approaches to literacy instruction because of the disproportionate and false attacks on Lucy Calkins’s Units of Study and reading programs by Fountas and Pinnell.

I entered the K-12 classroom as a teacher in 1984. To be blunt, I was solidly prepared by my education program to teach high school literature, but I was nearly lost in terms of teaching writing.

Fortunately, I was already a practicing writer, but I had to build my knowledge of composition instruction while I was teaching high school students.

The foundation upon which I have built a 40-plus-year career as a teacher of writing included two important people and their work—Nancie Atwell and Calkins.

Atwell and Calkins provided for me the workshop structure—time, ownership, and response—that fore-fronted student-centered instruction as well as honoring students experiencing authentic and holistic literacy experiences to grow as readers and writers.

Reading about using reading/writing workshop was a beginning, but the next step was crucial—attending two summer programs by the National Writing Project/Spartanburg Writing Project where we experienced workshop ourselves to guide implementing workshop as teachers.

The current erasure of workshop because of the false SOR story today is not unique. The teaching of reading and writing over the last century has been scarred often by fads as well as misunderstanding and implementing incorrectly what are otherwise credible and effective practices.

For example, Lou LaBrant confronted misusing the project method in 1931, and Lisa Delpit offered a nuanced challenge to how writing workshop implementation often failed marginalized students.

Workshop approaches to teaching literacy should include meeting the individual needs of every student based on demonstrated strengths and needs; that must be in the form of authentic artifacts of learning, student reading authentic texts by choice and writing original texts by choice.

But if workshop structures do not provide direct instruction, for example, students suffer. That failure is not a flaw of workshop but a failure of implementation (what Delpit confronted, for example [1]).

Reading Wars narrowly and education reform broadly have the same essential flaws—misdiagnosed crisis followed by overly simplistic solutions in the form of policy and legislation mandates.

Yes, there is media, market, and political capital in Reading Wars, but (too) similar to actual wars, these repeated Reading Wars have collateral damage.

Once again, the SOR movement is harming teachers and students, and one of the greatest losses is the erasure of workshop, which honors individual student learning and authentic literacy.

Almost 60 years apart, LaBrant and Delpit—both progressive/critical educators and scholars—confronted and rejected what many would consider to be key progressive instructional practices, project-based learning and writing workshop.

Their concerns were valid because they were acknowledge how the implementation of both too often failed progressive/critical standards for all serving students well in the context of intended learning goals.

Too much historically and recently about literacy instruction has also failed progressive/critical standards for serving all students.

But the SOR movement is not making that case and, in fact, is making conditions for learning and teaching worse because it remains grounded in banning and mandating reading programs—not seeking ways to better support teachers serving the needs of all students.

In the wake of this Reading War, students and teachers are once again collateral damage because the war serves something other than learning and teaching.

[1] Delpit:

I do not advocate a simplistic ‘basic skills’ approach for children outside of the culture of power. It would be (and has been) tragic to operate as if these children were incapable of critical and higher-order thinking and reasoning. Rather, I suggest that schools must provide these children the content that other families from a different cultural orientation provide at home. This does not mean separating children according to family background, but instead, ensuring that each classroom incorporate strategies appropriate for all the children in its confines.