Our National Literacy Instructional Nightmare
“You closed schools, and people were upset about that. Schools are open now,” he said. “The Moms for Liberty really have to aim their fire on math and science and reading, versus focusing on critical race theory and drag queen story hours” (John Fredericks, quoted in NYT, December 16, 2023).
The John Fredericks Show in Virginia is syndicated by radio station WHTK in Hampton Roads, WNTW in Richmond, and WBRG in Roanoke, Salem, Lynchburg, Lexington, Charlottesville, Farmville and Danville. Since 2015, Fredericks has regularly landed interviews with Donald Trump and his surrogates, becoming a dependable voice for the MAGA movement with work experience as a newspaper advertising consultant. He worked briefly as an editorial page editor, but he reportedly told another Virginia newspaper he was fired because he “was too conservative.”
Fredericks spilled the beans on the Moms for Liberty by talking to the New York Times. Yes, the Moms got organized in response to school closures as a safety measure during the pandemic. But they moved on to meatier causes like keeping drag queens out of read alouds and banning the history of slavery from the curriculum. A recent sex scandal (too prurient to print in this space) involving a high-profile Liberty Mom leader in Florida and her husband, the head of the Florida Republican Party, however, has put a crimp in their style. Tone it down ladies. Fredericks suggests that they can do better political work by “aiming their fire” at reading and math instruction.
Stick to working as “joyful warriors” in service to the god Phonics, Fredericks asserts. Aim your fire where your bullets are more apt to do some damage to those creeping socialists dripping their bleeding hearts all over the prom dress you couldn’t afford in high school but now can buy on an impulse. Do it behind the cloak of Science. Aim your fire at math and science and reading. What an image those words conjure! Why would the Moms for Liberty take up arms against public schools?
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Let me provide for you with a brief excerpt from an AI session wherein I looked for information to suggest that the vetting of findings from scientific research for implementation purposes is no casual matter. Above all science must be protected to the degree possible from political intrusion. From my perspective scientific questions should be left to scientific experts. Silly me. To try to establish a baseline, I asked the bot to compare the infrastructure the American Medical Association has put in place to assure safety and efficacy of evidence-based medical practice to the infrastructure the Moms of Liberty have established to ensure that their instructional recommendations for reading are evidence-based.
User: Compare the capacity of the American Medical Association to vet scientific research in medicine with the Moms for Liberty capacity to vet research in reading instruction.
Smith4: The American Medical Association (AMA) and Moms for Liberty differ significantly in their capacity to vet scientific research, due to differences in their origins, missions, resources, and expertise.
**American Medical Association (AMA):**
1. **Expertise:** The AMA is a national organization representing physicians and medical students in the United States. It was founded in 1847 and has a long history of contributing to medical research and setting standards for medical practice and education.
2. **Resources:** The organization has considerable resources, including access to current medical research, databases, and a large staff that includes medical professionals and researchers.
3. **Infrastructure:** The AMA publishes "JAMA," the Journal of the American Medical Association, which is a peer-reviewed medical journal that features original medical research, reviews, and editorials. It has an established infrastructure for vetting scientific research which includes peer review, editorial oversight, and a commitment to evidence-based medicine.
4. **Professional Network:** The organization's network includes experts in every medical specialty who contribute to the review and interpretation of medical research.
5. **Influence:** The AMA has a significant influence on health policy and clinical standards due to its comprehensive understanding of medical science and established reputation within the medical community.
**Moms for Liberty:**
1. **Expertise:** Moms for Liberty is a grassroots organization focused on parental rights, and its members are generally not professional experts in education or literacy research.
2. **Resources:** The group likely has fewer resources dedicated to in-depth research compared to an organization focused on medical or scientific research like the AMA.
3. **Infrastructure:** Unlike the AMA, Moms for Liberty does not have an established infrastructure for systematic vetting of scientific research. Their approach to reviewing research may rely on collecting studies and information available from other sources or reaching out to allied experts.
4. **Professional Network:** While Moms for Liberty may have access to educational experts who share their views, their network does not broadly encompass the full range of specialties within the educational research community.
5. **Influence:** The group's influence is largely within the realm of advocacy and civic engagement, rather than scientific research. Their position on reading instruction may be shaped more by educational preferences and values than by systematic review of scientific evidence.
In conclusion, the AMA has an established, robust capability to vet, publish, and guide medical research and practice with a wealth of professional and scientific resources at its disposal. Meanwhile, Moms for Liberty, being an advocacy group with a different focus, does not have the same level of infrastructure or breadth of professional expertise dedicated to evaluating scientific research in reading instruction. While both organizations aim to impact their respective areas, the AMA does so through a direct, evidence-based medical science approach, while Moms for Liberty may act more through advocacy and community engagement rather than scientific research vetting.
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It’s worth taking a look at some of the scientific evidence these Moms for Liberty offer to support their argument for phonics first on their website. Did you know this scientific fact?
This claim has some obvious face validity. Of course, I wonder if the research supporting it considered the socioeconomic status of the population studied. It is logical in my mind that children who get off to a bad start in reading, those who don’t absorb knowledge of print through informal experience, are apt to struggle until they do learn the lessons of first grade involving the alphabetic principle. In fact, evidence stretching back 40 years leads to the conclusion that this fact is supported (cf: Foorman, Francis et al., 1998). The following quote from this study also indicates that a difference in socioeconomic levels among struggling first grader readers is a supportable fact:
“There may always be a small percentage of children who are at risk of reading failure for a variety of cognitive, linguistic, or social-emotional factors. However, in urban settings, there are entire schools in which reading failure is the norm, in part because of lack of home preparation in understanding the alphabetic principle (Adams, 1990) and also because of inadequate instruction in the classroom” (Foorman et al., p.37).
The contrast between a “small percentage of children” at risk of failure with “entire schools” in urban settings that perpetuate a norm of failure suggests a variety of sociocultural factors, not simply phonics instruction, in play. The words “lack of home preparation in understanding the alphabetic principle” is documented in qualitative studies of home life lived by “other people’s children” (Delpit, 1995; Hart and Risley, 1995).
The deeper I probe, the clearer it becomes that phonics instruction is the tip of the iceberg, the surface of the problem, and therefore not the real cause. Lack of understanding the alphabetic principle upon entrance to school is a symptom, not a disease. Yet the Moms for Liberty assert the existence of the Matthew Effect (Stanovich, 1986) as evidence establishing phonics as the cure. How can the fact that a problem exists affirm a solution?
The Foorman et al. (1998) article also clarifies that “systematic, explicit phonics instruction” is one instructional response, but many others have shown efficacy as well. The real problem for them with Reading Recovery, for example, is that it is not a systematic, explicit phonics program, tautological reasoning in the third degree.
“Although programs such as Reading Recovery, SRA Reading Mastery, and Success for All show good efficacy, they have not attempted to isolate the components of effective reading instruction. Current research suggests that a necessary skill to be mastered in learning to read in the early grades is decoding” (p.38).
People have the right in America to freedom of political speech, but they are not immune from the freedom of others to think for themselves and to resist cherry picked scientific evidence.
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Did you know this scientific fact also highlighted on the Moms for Liberty phonics website?
How about this fact? The implication that poor reading skill is associated with unemployment and incarceration has some face validity, but the logic claiming poor reading as a cause for the cycle of poverty and mass incarceration seems fantastic in the root sense of the word.
The United States has experienced mass incarceration dating back to 1980, the dawn of the modern conservative political movement culminating in the MAGA cult of today. In 2014 conventional wisdom was that a) people were committing more crimes or that b) policing was catching more criminals. A National Research Council report called these explanations into question. Instead, the report concluded that the courts had become more efficient and sentences meted out were longer. Witness:
I’m not able to find any scientific research in the scientific literature supporting the assertion that 2/3 of the prison population is locked up as a consequence of their not having developed phonemic awareness or phonological decoding and encoding skills. I consulted a U.S. Department of Justice report from 2022 providing factual evidence raising reasonable doubt about phonics as either the cause or the cure for crime. The data bring alternative explanations to the front of the discussion. Witness:
Are we to assume that because just under half of the prison population arises from the Bureau of Prisons and California, Texas, and Florida, these data mean that these states have poor phonics programs in first grade?
Looked at from a different angle, these numbers reveal that only 3 in 10 incarcerated criminals were from white or Asian ancestry. Can we infer some sort of biological immunity from dyslexia among this group? Did the sparseness of these populations in prison mean that most of the members of this set had access to Reading Recovery or DISTAR? Might there be other explanations? Or does political pressure for a silver bullet, an easy fix, enter the argument?
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It would be great if the Moms for Liberty could have had the courtesy to cite a source for the following fact. I can find zero, nada, zilch, nothing in the scientific research on reading that articulates a dollar amount that the country could recoup by investing in LTRS or DISTAR or any other scripted phonics program.
Would you like to know the cause of crime, unemployment, loss of tax revenue? Would you like to know how to fix it? According to these Moms for Liberty, the tenacity of one stellar reading researcher knows the truth:
Go figure.