USAToday published an opinion column written by Colorado’s commissioner of education in which he bashed schools and teachers for causing an “illiteracy crisis” that puts “the fate of our nation in serious peril.” Citing scaredy-cat luminaries Rudolf Flesch and E. D. Hirsch, Commissioner Moloney predicted that the sky will fall on our once-great nation because “85% of U.S. reading teachers were never properly trained.” This dire claim is based on data from The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NIHCD), a quasi-science propaganda front for the US Dept. of Education.

The federal government regularly exploits mainstream media to relay its message of fear and failure through mindless mouthpieces like the commissioner, in order to promote its reformist agenda. An ignorant public will accept any data as fact, so long as it’s cloaked in official-sounding rhetoric. Joann Yatvin, president-elect of the National Council of Teachers of English, responded with an indictment of her own, and says, in part:

NICHD, well financed by the federal government, supported by the Bush administration, and cheered on by publishers seeking profits, has done its best to persuade the American public and educators at every level that its ideology is based on science, moreover, that it is THE SCIENCE OF READING.

On the subject of educational research, Stephen Downes made a good argument about the limitations of experimental designs in education:

…when these experiments are conducted in a health (or educational, or foreign aid) setting, what happens of necessity is that the experiment is deliberately isolated and abstracted from the environment as a whole….The inference from the experimental setting to the wider practise is not warranted.

Journalists who report government-sponsored research data should learn how to read it. If there is an illiteracy crisis, it is with the media professionals themselves, since they appear unable to critically evaluate their sources. As a consequence, they sell a message of failure that dominates the marketplace of ideas and drives pubic policy down a dead end road to the past.

Michael Pressley’s article, A Few Things Reading Educators Should Know About Instructional Experiments is a good resource for teachers who want more information about the strengths and weaknesses of educational experiments. When we hear claims for the efficacy of evidence-based reading instruction, we should think about the validity criteria for those assertions.

Ironically, Pressley agreed with commissioner Moloney that too-few primary classrooms are engaging and effective. It’s interesting, though, that Pressley didn’t cite a lack of teacher training as the cause. Instead, Pressley concluded that

Educators and policymakers need to spend time looking at scientific evidence to determine how to reform literacy teaching, but neither group has digested this body of work enough to make the best use of it.

Without a determination of cause for weaknesses in reading instruction I suggest that burdensome policies enacted by ignorant politicians might be to blame, as well as textbooks and curricula that push a skills and drill instructional methodology. It’s been my experience that student teachers come from the university with fresh ideas that don’t wash politically in the public system, which suggests that training is not the problem as much as a culture of compliance that is found in practice.

Before we can realize the goal of an informed and effective teaching force, we’ll need to educate ourselves and our leaders about how to evaluate the research. What we are offered is a research-based political agenda that pushes a predetermined vision of schooling. What we need is freedom to pursue our hopeful visions, inspired by the data gained from our own sense-making as we read, watch, and learn from one another.