Reading a Text Titled “Weather Forecast”

Sep 28, 2024

Teaching its citizens to read deeply and critically may be the single most important capacity a democracy in the 21st century ought to care about. What good is an election if voters are undereducated? If polls are even tolerably accurate, votes for Donald Trump are concentrated in undereducated White men with reading problems. Trump himself is a perfect model of a man with a reading problem.

If “undereducated” has any meaning, it suggests that these are neither deep nor critical readers. What is the likelihood they’ve read a document the length of Moby Dick called Project 2025? Call me Ishmael. There is a shared meaning element: Each text speaks about a monster white whale smashing ships of state like toothpick sailboats.

Consider this fact: Project 2025 pledges to dismantle the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) if MAGA is returned to the Presidency. With a nose for power, Trump has identified all the levers and is set on using them to increase profits for corporations. NOAA is a significant lever as is the FDA, which faces a similar existential crisis.

People who don’t read deeply and critically can’t possibly realize the full extent of NOAA's responsibilities. It’s ironic that MAGA are the very people living in areas benefiting from NOAA’s work in fishery management, for example, fisher-people who have no interest whatsoever in the topic of this post. Why write about it quixotically in a blog focused on literacy education? Why preach to the choir?

My point reaches a layer of American culture at the bedrock of the country, even more important than the weather. That we have sufficient numbers of White male high school graduates who go along with their own destruction tells me we have a reading problem. White males are setting themselves up for the perfect storm, and that is stronger evidence of a national reading problem than any data NAEP might have to offer.

We don’t need reading tests to tell us something is wrong when our high schools graduate college and career ready people who don’t understand their world beyond their villages and small towns. We have n educational crisis on our hands.

*****

To give them the benefit of the doubt, MAGA males may have tried to read the document but couldn’t decode the fifty dollar words. Even so, they may lack knowledge of the semantic and syntactic cueing systems and are therefore unable to comprehend. Accustomed to not understanding, they may have a mindset acclimated to confusion, setting their mental compasses toward backyard common sense, toward their favorite President as the newest evangelical to come to their rescue.

“Science” may not be very deep in their vocabulary; so sounding it out means nothing. Some might not associate NOAA with functions like weather forecasting or climate research beyond a surface connection. Those that do may immediately see the words “climate change” and blow a gasket.

In deep Red states where schools are implementing phonics laws as a panacea, voters may not grasp how oceanic and atmospheric sciences interrelate in their day to day life. Sounding out words like “climate change” and linking these words to other perhaps more difficult words like “tsunami” or “atmospheric river” takes a modicum of comprehension based on constructed knowledge.

This whole issue demonstrates the significance of the three-cueing system that trains children to read for meaning. MAGA opposes three cueing pedagogy perhaps more strenuously than it opposes NOAA. If everyone read for meaning first instead of for sounds, no one would trade safety and security during a hurricane for higher corporate profits.

Project 2025 states explicitly that the work of NOAA should be outsourced to for-profit companies. Weather forecasts can be handled handily by corporate conglomerates with black Sharpie ©️ pens to redraw forecasts of hurricanes more to their liking as Trump did when he was in office. From the 2025 document:

“The National Oceanographic [sic] and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories.”1

Project 2025 describes NOAA as "one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry" and says it "should be broken up and downsized.”2 This phrase “climate change alarm industry” is used in the 2025 plan document, but it’s also used repeatedly elsewhere in MAGA discourse. From a US Senate document:3

That MAGA males see weather forecasters as alarmists is an incredible example of a semantic miscue. “The alarmist on channel 5 predicted rain,” says Ma Kettle. “Shucks,” says Pa Kettle. “What do they know.” On a standardized vocabulary test, how would they respond?

Select the meaning of the term “weather forecaster” from the options below: a) my cousin down the road with a bum knee; b) would be comedians and entertainers; c) alarmists out to sell the climate change hoax; d) highly trained scientists working in NOAA to prepare the population for weather events.”

For the National Weather Service specifically, Project 2025 calls for it to "fully commercialize its forecasting operations."4 It proposes disbanding NOAA's Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, which conducts climate research (see footnote 1). The document labels NOAA a "colossal operation" that is "harmful to future US prosperity.” To be fair, Project 2025 doesn't call for completely eliminating all of NOAA or the National Weather Service; it would simply restrict their work and capabilities.

*****

One of the most impressive features of argumentation in the Common Core standards is its highlighting of counter arguments. Based on the web search I conducted, several key arguments against dismantling the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) as proposed by Project 2025 are circulating—for those who are strategically capable of making meaning during complex textual negotiations, which undereducated MAGA White males likely haven’t developed in school.

The National Weather Service, part of NOAA, issues critical warnings for hurricanes, heat waves, atmospheric rivers, and other extreme weather events that save lives. NOAA's weather forecasts and satellite observations are crucial for farmers, coastal communities, and many other sectors of the economy (see footnote 2). The agency sets policies for commercial fisheries and protects federal waters.

NOAA plays a crucial role in climate science and monitoring, hence the “alarmist” moniker. The agency tracks changes in the climate system, providing data on ocean temperatures, sea levels, currents, and species distributions. This research is essential for understanding climate change impacts and informing policy decisions—for those with sufficient reading comprehension to follow a train of thought.

Because MAGA White men may not have built a robust schema for the concept “science,” they likely wouldn’t grasp the profound nature of this counter argument: Breaking up NOAA would be bad for scientific progress. Its research capabilities and focus on national and international climate problems cannot be easily replicated by non-integrated state or local entities. NOAA would become as impotent as the federal Department of Education and, now, healthcare professionals who care for pregnant women.

The epistemological fragmentation that would result from dismantling NOAA is terrifying not only because we could no longer trust the weather forecasts, but because epistemological collaboration is the sine qua non of human progress. The role of epistemological comprehension infused with critical thinking isn’t going to get addressed by phonics laws currently on the books. We desperately need the three cueing system with its goal of reading to make sense of texts.

Experts argue that deep sixxing NOAA would be "simply crazy" and could have far-reaching negative impacts on public safety, scientific research, and economic prosperity (footnote 1). Some view it as an attempt to squash the availability of climate change information. NOAA has studied this threat since it was signed into law by, wait for it, Richard Nixon in 1970.

The dismantling of NOAA would have significant negative impacts on international climate agreements and efforts to slow increases in global temperatures ranging from getting gas guzzlers off the road to building out alternative energy sources. Part of the reading problem may be lack of conceptual development in the domain of Social Studies where living together in harmony across the world is an unstated goal of schooling.

The notion of an “international agreement” may be nebulous for MAGA men. The word has five syllables, not too phonologically challenging for say a fifth grader, but it is a candidate for morphological analysis, which may be underrehearsed for them. Part of their comprehension difficulties may derive from impoverished understanding of distinctions like “weather” vs “climate. Men who believe Uncle Charlie’s bum knee foretells bad weather are unlikely to appreciate global data collection and analysis.5

NOAA's data and research contribute mightily to global understanding of climate change impacts. Weakening NOAA and sending its work to corporations would weaken the United States' ability to contribute high-quality climate data and research to prevent the Earth from overheating. The agency's climate research helps the U.S. set science-based emissions reduction targets for agreements like the Paris Agreement (see footnote 5).

Turning its back on working to mitigate the effects of global warming, the United States would set the example for other countries to reduce their own climate research and monitoring efforts (see footnote 2). Given that many other countries have even bigger problems with reading instruction than we do, the groundswell for drilling more oil and burning more coal could become insurmountable.

*****

There is good evidence that even the authors of the Project 2025 could use some reading instruction in an I-Search task field to learn the importance of corroborating facts and details. In addition to their undoubted impressive reading fluency, they seem not to understand that misrepresenting an opponent’s stance is implicitly if not intentionally dishonest.

For example, one of the six divisions in NOAA is dedicated to weather forecasting. The 2025 authors decided that weather forecasting should be completely privatized. For evidence they pointed to the roaring success of AccuWeather, a profitable private weather forecasting firm. Indeed, AccuWeather produces more accurate forecasts than the National Weather Service, according to the 2025 document. Oh?

“But as AccuWeather’s chief executive Steven R. Smith told the Los Angeles Times in July, the private, for-profit company relies in part on NOAA data for its own forecasting and does not share Project 2025’s vision for commercializing NWS operations.” (See footnote 4)

Saving the world begins with our children. Teaching them to read and write is a sacred trust. The political will to ameliorate a threat to all human kind like global warming depends on comprehension, composition, and communication of scientific knowledge. The evidence emerging from this Project 2025 document is stunning in terms of its willingness to distort reality and reject science. Even more stunning? The fact that almost half of the country supports it.

Thanks for reading Learning to Read, Reading to Learn! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Learning to Read, Reading to Learn

Reading a Text Titled “Weather Forecast”

Discussion about this post