Why Can't They Read or do Math?

Hi! This is Scholastic Alchemy, a twice-weekly blog where I write about education and related topics. Wednesday posts are typically a deep dive into an education topic of my choosing and Fridays usually see me posting a selection of education links and some commentary about each. If Scholastic Alchemy had a thesis, I suppose it would go a little like this: We keep trying to induce educational gold from lead and it keeps not working but we keep on trying. My goal here is to talk about curriculum, instruction, policy, public opinion, and other topics in order to explain why I think we keep failing to produce this magical educational gold. If you find that at all interesting, please consider a paid subscription here, or at the parallel publishing spot on Beehiiv. (Some folks hate the ‘stack, I get it.) That said, all posts are going to remain free for the foreseeable future. Thanks for reading!

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Sorry to publish this one late. I only had about three hours this morning to write and had to hit pause on writing until after the kids were in bed. It’s also a pretty long one so it took a bit more time than usual. Please read all the way to the end, though. I have a lovely juicy bit about how the authors of the standards literally say they don’t want parents helping kids with math homework.

Standardization means standardization

If you’re a regular reader of Scholastic Alchemy, you’ve probably noticed I write a lot about standardization, often negatively. Today is going to be another of those days because it seems like I cannot escape the endless recycling of willfully incorrect takes about what’s wrong with schools these days. Let’s start out by stating it plainly, though, so that everyone gets what I’m laying down. When you complain that kids aren’t reading whole novels, struggle with reading comprehension, don’t know “math facts,” and can’t reason through fairly simple algebra, you need to remember that these are the outcomes of policies that standardized education. While critics of public schooling and zealous neo-reformers mistakenly claim that accountability policies and standardized testing have ended, what has really happened is nothing of the sort. States still hold teachers, schools, and districts accountable for test scores but the bigger shift has been a move to standardize curriculum and instruction.

Accountability may still mean test scores but the way we’ve operationalized accountability is through mandating everything is taught in one way and following up with observations and feedback to ensure teachers are teaching in exactly the way district leaders and curriculum developers demand. We see this in the transformation of departmental planning efforts (e.g. the math teachers get together) into “sprints” and segmented skills workshops and the relentless pressure to use screens as the only instructional medium. We see it in the ways teachers are expected to deliver all instruction according to scripts, literal scripts that tell them what to say and how to deliver their lines. Instructional materials, on screens of course, come as part of massive databases of problem sets and reading passage banks that each teach and test a single discrete skill. As such, they isolate those skills from any prior knowledge and from any other skills students may deploy.

Teachers today are not free to assign whole books or complex problems requiring multiple overlapping skills. How could they? It’s all controlled by the learning management systems. There’s no physics project for kids to design and build a bridge in the dataset. They get a digital model of a bridge on the LMS about which they answer four specific skill-based questions. There are no Shakespeare plays, just excerpts of the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliette or Hamlet’s monologue at Yorick’s grave. There’s no room in the curriculum for deep historical analysis of Women’s Suffrage, just a single passage and comprehension skills questions about that single passage. Pacing! Keep pace. Move kids along because we have to cover all the standards before April. Go faster. The assistant principal for instruction is here and he doesn’t like that your class is fifteen minutes behind the pacing guide. If this continues, you may be on a performance improvement plan, the pathway to being fired.

You may think this is an exaggeration. Maybe in a few exceptional circumstances, this is how teaching looks but, surely, schools today look much like they did 25 or even 50 years ago? After all, these reformers and critics tell us again and again that schools never innovate, are stuck in a factory model, and that poor teaching is endemic. Schools must be full of teachers just doing random things based on vibes and a misplaced sense of social justice. How else could this have all happened? These teachers, they just stopped teaching reading and math. We are told they stopped giving bad grades and that they gave up on holding high expectations. The problem that needs to be solved, it would seem, is all the variability caused by teachers teaching. What if they didn’t teach? What if they weren’t teachers at all? What if they were instead something more like factory workers, performing the identical actions over and over in order to produce the desired output? Yes, we lament the factory model of education, but today’s neo-reformers seem hell-bent on creating exactly that.

Blame and hyperbole

Before getting into the effects of standardization, I want to do a bit of media criticism. After looking again and again at the history of No Child Left Behind’s collapse, the emergence of Common Core, the reforms of the Every Student Succeeds Act, and the eventual demolition of all of it under the first Trump administration, I feel like the only reason journalists and pundits insist on blaming Democrats and “the left” for these reforms AND for their failure is because they’re trying to win present-day partisan battles. That is, they’re purposefully misrepresenting the history of politics and policy around education reform in order to push their preferred vision of education reforms. They have to say that Democrats or teachers’ unions or progressives or the left are the cause of bad policy because they are trying to move Democratic politicians’ education policy commitments back toward standardization. What does this look like in practice? Let’s use a super recent example from a publication and an author that I genuinely like quite a bit: Kelsey Piper at The Argument.

Piper and Argument editor and chief, Jerusalem Demsas, recorded a podcast episode recently about the most embarrassing education stories of the year.

The Argument

The most embarrassing education stories in America

America’s literacy problem is a policy choice. As schools shifted away from phonics toward guessing-based instruction, a generation of kids paid the price. But a quiet reversal is underway in an unexpected place. Mississippi rebuilt reading instruction from the ground up, mandated third-grade retention, and saw real gains. If it worked there, why are ot…

Listen now

2 days ago · 23 likes · 17 comments · Jerusalem Demsas and Kelsey Piper

This is stuff I’ve written about a bunch so I’m not here to offer commentary for the entire podcast. Let’s look, instead, at a headline claim made by Piper at roughly the 1-hour mark. She’s talking about the UCSD admissions report which found that UCSD is having to remediate far more students in mathematics despite them coming out of high school with high grades in advanced math. The story has two parts. One is grade inflation. Schools don’t fail students for poor performance. The other part is that UCSD, along with other UC schools, is now “test optional” meaning students are not required to submit SAT or ACT scores and those scores do not form the core of admissions decisions. I agree that it’s bad for kids not to learn math and to require remediation that is often expensive and time consuming and that may increase the likelihood of them dropping out. We should get that out of the way because neo-reformers like Piper often like to paint any critics as being in denial of the problems themselves. My criticism here is not about that. I am here to criticize the way a flawed policy change at the UC system alchemically transmutes into a nationwide problem and a problem for Democrats or liberals or progressives. Here’s the transcript:

So far so good. I think these are important and reasonable questions that a journalist and commentator should ask. But the reporting goes a bit wonky in the next bit where she relies entirely on the word of a friend who is a teacher to explain why, apparently, every school in California (America?) is doing this kind of grade inflation.

What’s hard to understand here is why we’re supposed to 1) take this friend at her word without additional reporting to support her assertion and 2) where the blame gets placed. As to number 1, in Piper’s article, she does speak with additional teachers and they reiterate that the problems are structural — e.g. kids will drop classes that they risk failing, district policies allow for excessively generous re-takes and late work, zeros are literally prohibited and even automated away by the learning management software. And yet, despite the teachers indicating that they’d love to have a system where they could fail kids who aren’t up to snuff, we get this portrayal in the podcast of teachers as simultaneously complacent and as the masterminds behind all our educational woes.

When you put it like this, the fault seems to rest solely with the teachers. It is because teachers refuse to fail kids that later teachers just go with the flow and pass them along. Again, I want to point out that I’m sympathetic and have come to parallel albeit nuanced conclusions myself. The difference between my point of view and Piper’s is that she is keen to place teachers’ actions (and inactions) in the spotlight whereas I am more interested in why potentially thousands and thousands of teachers are seemingly engaged in a conspiracy against the public interest. What I think is going on has little to do with an actual chosen conspiracy and much more to do with the incentive systems and policies that are in place. It’s not like these teachers just woke up and decided to inflate grades. Teachers basically don’t have a choice and Piper should do more to acknowledge it because that’s what her actual reporting says.

Then we get another headline claim about the second half of the UCSD admissions report, the impact of being test optional. Demsas interjects and brings in a question.

And she repeats this point about the SAT being abolished a minute later.

Okay. Team. The SAT was not abolished! Based on Piper’s writing and the fact that Demsas literally says “no longer required” instead of “abolished,” I think Piper knows the SAT has not been abolished. I have other problems here, too. They’re only talking about the University of California system but by saying “We abolished the SAT” it makes is sound as though this is something that continues to happen at universities nationwide and it makes it seem like this supposed abolition was done by some kind of popular referendum. It’s as if voters said ‘no more SAT’. The reality, though, is that the UC system just looks like a laggard in returning to requiring tests.

Lest you think that I’m misrepresenting things, The Argument’s own social media is fronting “We Abolished the SAT,” plastering it on, for example, their TikTok.

@theargumentmag

How did a bunch of students get into UC San Diego without being able to do fractions? Kelsey Piper explains on tomorrow’s episode of The A... See more

Shockingly, the SAT continues to exist and about two million kids take the SAT every year. The ACT, a competing standardized test also widely used for college admissions, has about 1.4 million test takers. Neither test was abolished and many colleges and universities use the SAT and ACT scores as admissions cutoffs. The wave of colleges going test optional crested following the pandemic and is now receding. One of the many reasons, besides the resolution of the pandemic, is that test optional policies led to colleges needing to do more remediation! What’s happened at UCSD is not new. Harvard encountered this problem after going test optional. Big state schools like UT Austin have reinstated testing requirements in part because they felt they were admitting students who needed excessive remediation. So, not only was the SAT not abolished, but the trend nationwide is away from being test optional.

Meanwhile, if you look at the graph included in that link about the number of kids taking the SAT, you’ll see that most SAT takers now take the SAT during the school day at their high school.

This is a big shift from pre-pandemic where kids taking tests were usually doing so at testing sites on the weekends. Why has there been a growth in school-day test takers?

It seems pretty obvious to me that not only are colleges returning to testing-based and test-preferred admissions, but that many high schools are not looking to shirk their “external accountability” because they’re literally bringing the SAT into the school and testing every single kid. The ACT, by the way, is even more embedded in the school-day testing shift with 78% of ACT test takers taking the test at school. None of this is adequately discussed by Piper or by Demsas or others reporting on the UCSD controversy. When Piper claims that “We abolished the SAT” I see in the comments on Substack or on TikTok, in the notes where people share clips from the podcast, and in media reports about the same, an uncritical acceptance of her words at face value. People actually believe that the SAT is all-but-defunct and that universities nationwide are just admitting kids on vibes and wishes and inflated grades. Accuracy matters. The facts matter. Engaging in hyperbole to draw attention to your cause is something people do but we should expect better from journalists at The Argument and elsewhere.

Speaking of elsewhere, writing in The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait invokes a series of tropes that should seem familiar to my readers. He devotes only a single sentence to the dramatic changes Republicans have undergone on education policy.

All too true, though I think there’s more to the current administration’s politics than that. However, Chait is not interested in the conservatives who actually control all branches of federal government and a majority of state governments but in the feckless liberals and center-left Democrats who’ve stopped talking about achievement gaps and, allegedly, given in to a view that education is unable to close gaps.

According to Chait, Democrats ignore urban charter schools and the successes of NCLB because “reforms are challenging and they generate political resistance.” He goes on to indicate that the reason Democrats have given up is because “teachers’ unions loathe accountability in general, and specifically hate merit pay or anything that makes it easier to fire a low-performing teacher.” Given that Chait begins the article lauding Mississippi’s reforms, “including teacher training, testing, retention, and a mostly phonics-based reading instruction” the logic really doesn’t follow. If Mississippi’s improvements came in part from better teacher training and from improved reading curriculum, then the problem was with teacher training and curriculum. If a teacher was poorly trained and given a “bad” “whole-language model that prevailed at the time” then it makes sense that they would perform poorly on accountability measures. If anything, Chait is identifying one of the key problems with the accountability regime of the last two decades: teachers were being held accountable for problems that originated with districts and policymakers. They aren’t ultimately responsible for their training’s program of study and they aren’t ultimately choosing the schools’ curriculum, nor are teachers the ones who implement retention and testing programs. But they need to be held accountable?

Chait also blames elite parents for being opposed to testing. Citing Andrew Rice at New York magazine, Chait claims that “Affluent parents dislike the stress that comes with standardized testing” and that “teachers’ unions and dismayed parents worked together to dismantle regular testing, which helped bring about this era’s educational stagnation.” Looking to Rice’s article, we see how he makes this claim: by citing the example of Montclair, New Jersey, where he lives.

Recollections are fine but when making claims like these, it’s good to turn to the data. Here’s a report from Consortium for Policy Research in Education out of the University of Pennsylvania titled The Bubble Bursts: The 2015 opt-out movement in New Jersey. Contra Rice (and by extension Chait) the report states that “based on the NJOE dataset, the rates of opting out were not correlated with district socioeconomic status overall”. This is why journalists typically do not limit themselves to generalizing from personal experience alone and try to gather data and reporting to establish the facts of an event. It turns out that the idea of opt-out being the work of “affluent parents” and wealthy elites in towns like Montclair is simply false. But, the report gives us some important information about what was really going on in New Jersey. What were the parents’ groups who opposed testing doing?

Emphasis added. And what about backlash to the Common Core?

It seems odd today that New Jersey would be lumped together with more conservative leaning states like Indiana, Oklahoma, Missouri, Tennessee, and West Virginia but you have to remember that New Jersey was just coming off the conservative Christie governorship and part of what he hoped would help his White House run was his record as an education reformer. So, sure, progressives and teachers’ unions opposed NCLB and Common Core and to a lesser extent the ESSA, but they needed conservatives on board and found a way to convince them to join in. I think, too, that if you look at the issues highlighted in the parentheticals above, you can see the same complaints being made today. Chait and Rice and Piper complain that kids don’t read whole books and don’t learn math facts but these problems come from the full-court-press for nationwide standards. Rice, at least, acknowledges that the focus on test scores went too far, but that nuance is lost on Chait.

Getting the facts wrong on purpose

I wish I could say this is simply a rare occurrence of journalists or neo-reformers engaging in a bit of hyperbole, but there’s a trend. I pointed out in May that the New York Times ignored its own reporting about the opt-out movement to paint liberals and progressives as the primary opponents of standardization and testing despite opt-out actually centering on conservative districts in New York. It seems like Dana Goldstein and Andrew Rice are drinking from the same tap. Neo-reformers insist that No Child Left Behind’s modest and illusory gains for one demographic subgroup should count as a success. If the gains vanish, how is that a success? And in the same post I make the point that while there were plenty of Democrats and progressive groups against NCLB and accountability, the key movers of policy were actually Republicans. Contemporary sources looking at the turn against the Common Core tell us that the first states to reject the Common Core standards were red states.

At the time principled objections to standardized testing were coming from conservatives, like Jay Greene at the Heritage Foundation and Fredrick Hess at AEI. While Piper is keen to harp on Mississippi’s success (as well as Tennessee and Louisiana), the education policies she wants to see emulated date from their rejection of Common Core and of the Every Student Succeeds Act and run counter to the policies that are promoted in the media. David Brooks says Mississippi’s success is in part because they lack teachers’ unions (as a right to work state, they are illegal). But they lacked unions before scores improved so that can’t be it.

Simply put, we are dealing with a trope, not with reality. Too many writers, when they write about education, are interested in suborning the facts to their intended narrative. Writers I respect and admire like Matt Yglesias or the recently everywhere Kelsey Piper need to advance a narrative of reform, one that seeks to re-create the early 2000s consensus that the one thing schools need in order to educate kids well is consequences. They know conservatives are utterly disinterested in helping public schools educate well so they spend their time targeting the perceived enemies they can reach: teachers’ unions, affluent progressive parents, and teachers themselves. In doing so, they create this sense that “everyone” knows about and agrees on the problems facing our schools. They create a narrative in which the solution appears to be commonsense. Just hold teachers accountable so they stop inflating grades. Just retain 3rd graders who fail an ELA exam. Just bring back the SAT. Just get rid of teachers’ unions. Just standardize the curriculum. Just make it so teachers have no autonomy in the classroom. All well-worn ideas that have been part of the reform movement for ages.

Breaking out of the infinite repeat

When I read articles like Piper’s or Chait’s, I am often struck by just how little liberal reformers’ preferred policies have changed in the last twenty years and I’m honestly a little gob smacked. I mean, schools have changed a lot. Phones. Digital everything. Three nationwide efforts at accountability and standards have come and gone. We had that pandemic and months or years long learning disruptions. School shootings are more a thing now than in the early 2000s, as is chronic absenteeism. Kids are reporting higher rates of mental illness and the number of students receiving school services for disabilities is at an all-time high. How is it possible that the answers are the same year after year, decade after decade?

In an effort to break us out of this loop, I want to keep highlighting teachers’ voices and their experiences with teaching and learning under standardized curricular practices and today’s accountability regimes. As I said earlier, what many neo-reformers don’t recognize is just how much our accountability systems have moved from purely outcome-based measures such as merit pay or firing low-scoring teachers to standardization of curriculum and instruction. The accountability is still there but often takes the shape of coercing teachers into teaching and behaving in ways they believe are contrary to deep learning.

I’ve come to discover there’s a vibrant community of educators writing and posting on Substack and I think their perspectives are invaluable. (Someone should organize a conference.) If you want to hear about something besides bad NAEP scores or the Mississippi miracle, these are a great place to start.

Peter Shull wrote this week about Teaching Without a Textbook. He is writing about the standardization of curriculum and says none of it is new.

One change he has noticed is that today’s textbooks (or their digital replacements) are no longer about sampling a literary cannon or providing glimpses of various literary traditions and movements.

The idea of being literate has been reduced, he says, to the atomized skill work that leads us to never reading whole books.

Shull argues teachers should simply teach longer, freely available texts anyway. I worry that he’s due for a shock when the standardized curriculum becomes something he is required to teach with fidelity.

Kate Roberts of out beyond ideas reassures her readers that This will not last.

She sees discontent growing in classrooms.

Luke Morin at the Middle School Literacy Project takes stock of the kind of standardized passages that purport to teach kids skill mastery.

Luke critiques a scholastic passage that “anyone who has spent time in middle-grade classrooms in the last 20 years will recognize these types of activities in a heartbeat. They dominate “lesson starters” and “reteach stations,” while edtech platforms gamify them so students can keep “practicing” at home.” He contrasts it with another informational text from a Caldecott award winning book and turns a phrase that definitely deserves to be repeated.

Emphasis added. Do you want the TikTok of instruction because that is what the standardization of curriculum will bring us. That is what the EdTech will bring us.

Adrian Neibauer embraces the absurdity of teaching under standardization with a combination of imagining Sisyphus happy and acknowledging the Catch-22 nature of it all.

This is what I worried about for Peter Shull. Shull, in a sense, says “close your door and teach” but that strategy doesn’t work when you aren’t in control of the curriculum or the pacing or even the way you talk to your students. I think this is the result of people listening too closely to journalists like Chait. As I noted above, Chait acknowledges that poor performance was a policy choice made far above teachers’ heads, but he also wants to bring back strict test-based accountability for teachers. What this manifests as is what Neibauer is experiencing as a teacher this year. Standardization all the way down to the daily pace of lessons and the kinds of assignments and readings he can use. Everything must be sacrificed for the sake of test scores and then you take the blame anyway because the Chaits and Pipers of the world can’t admit standardization is the problem. In short, it’s absurd.

Some rebellions as he closes:

It really really really is the standards, folks

Kristen Smith, a veteran math teacher who writes at The Confidence Interval, explains what the math crisis looks like from the classroom. In doing so, she hits a home run and breaks down exactly what standardization has done to math education. I wish Piper had spent even a minute talking to someone like Smith. I want to highlight the section she calls “Fluency with Facts Matters”. After fielding a parent’s complaint that their kid lacked an understanding of “math facts,” these are things like the times tables kids used to have to memorize, she writes,

Notice the Science of Learning in there! Smith laments the shift away from committing math facts to memory because this created a cognitive foundation of prior knowledge that would allow more complex work to take place down the line. What Smith doesn’t cover is the history here. Common Core threw out math facts, building automaticity, and operational fluency in favor of number sense and conceptual mathematics.

One thing Smith says really resonated with me.

What she may not recall is that “we” told parents to stop helping their kids with math because Common Core knew better than they did. Parents’ present-day lack of engagement and support is a result of standardization!

Indeed, when parents initially encountered math instruction aligned to Common Core, they took to social media and complained. This prompted curriculum and instruction experts to tell parents to disengage from teaching their kids math.

Less focus on memorizing means less focus on math facts. No times tables or anything like that. So, when kids move up, as Smith discusses, they have the increased cognitive load of having to mentally work out simply addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. This is, by the by, something that still takes a toll on working memory even if they get to use a calculator. Anyway, the article continues,

And we wonder why parents were so easily persuaded that common core was bad? Let’s synthesize with Smith here. Kids aren’t learning math facts because with the advent of Common Core the focus in math education shifted away from “memorization” of math facts and toward (which is also right around when Smith’s teaching career started) more conceptual learning under the heading of “number sense”. This shift was so dramatic that parents struggled to help their kids with homework. The literal authors of the standards didn’t want parents helping kids with math homework, so we fast forward a decade and Smith is here hoping that families will one day help kids with homework and believe that math facts are important.

I don’t know how much clearer I can make it. When the authors of the standards say they don’t want parents helping kids with math homework because the teacher is delivering the curriculum and they should just let their kid sit there take it in, like, it’s the standards people! The whole point is eliminating any human aspects of education. The teachers’ perspectives I’ve share here are sounding an alarm about standardization today, about how it compromises their ethics and about how kids and teachers are suffering so that atomized discrete skills from tests can be taught with fidelity. Kids aren’t developing a deep understanding of math because the standards don’t allow for it, because the curriculum follows the standards and excludes it, and because the tests don’t assess it. Kids aren’t reading whole books because the standards don’t require it, because the curriculum doesn’t include them, and because the tests are only of short passages. Our entire education system is now teaching to the test and if it’s anything else that’s in spite of the system, not because of it.

Far from supporting our teachers in their alarm over the state of affairs, our journalistic and punditry apparatus is beholden to some kind of neo-reformist movement that wants more standardization, not less. They routinely engage in lies of omission whereby the recent past of education reform is stripped of inconvenient information that might contradict the purposes of the authors. The SAT has not been abolished but they say it has. Accountability is not gone but they say it is. Teachers have high expectations of their students but they say teachers do not. But look at what these teachers above are saying! They’re all here, writing week in and week out, about how much they want to expect more from their students. They have very high expectations and are stymied by efforts to standardize curriculum and instruction. These are teachers who want to support deep and meaningful learning that will stay with students for the rest of their lives. We should let them.

Nobody is falling victim to the soft bigotry of low expectations but the standardizers who are pushing teaching and learning to the lowest common denominator. Teaching to the test is a low expectation. Focusing on isolated skills is a low expectation. Telling parents not to help their kids with homework is a low expectation. A pacing guide is a low expectation. The people who purport to have the highest expectations of students are, in fact, pursuing the opposite. That is scholastic alchemy.

Thanks for reading!