Tag Archives: reading

Billionaire Thinking has Harmed Public Schools

10 Apr

By Thomas Ultican 4/10/2026

Trump’s billionaire education leader, Linda McMahon, claimed on Fox News, “We’re doing terribly, I mean, our education system’s failed our kids.” Like a typical oligarch, she bolstered her point by mischaracterizing NAEP assessment levels stating, “only about 30% of high school and eighth graders can read proficiently or do math proficiently.” Maybe that sounds bad, but the reality is those numbers indicate that 30% of students are achieving at a high B or low A grade-level which sounds pretty good to me.

McMahon was promoting her nonpartisan “History Rocks!” tour. The sponsors of the tour are certainly not nonpartisan. They include America 250 Civics Education Coalition, led by pro-Trump America First Policy Institute which is composed of right-wing organizations such as Turning Point USA, Moms for Liberty and the Heritage Foundation.

However, even though standardized testing is a terrible method for evaluating schools and students, it is notable that the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) results have been falling since 2013.

The NAEP data plotted above is for all tested US students in 8th grade and 4th grade reading. Around 2013, results started dropping. Data for math also shows this same trend. Because education has so many variables, establishing a solid cause and effect relationship for this decline is impossible.

Based on my personal experience in the classroom and my years of observing education outcomes, I have developed a theory that at least partially explains the decline.

Education Technology

In the 1990s, I worked in Silicon Valley researching friction problems associated with computer equipment. Part of my assignment was to develop software that ran testing devices, gathered massive data sets and loaded them into a Microsoft data base which created reports that I shared with customers. Once the testing was setup and started, everything from then on was automated. I loved pushing technology and making it do things no one else had.

In 1999, I got tired of Silicon Valley. That is when I returned to San Diego and sought a teaching credential. At the time, I imagined being able to use my technology expertise in future classrooms. I had become genuinely excited about education technology (edtech).

I wish I could say my expectations were met but I cannot.

I discovered that instead of edtech driving exploration, it was aimed at controlling and replacing teachers.

As part of the master of education program at UCSD, we were sent to local schools to work with students. I went to a local high school to work with struggling math students in a recovery class. Students were assigned to work on computer presented math problems which were then graded by the computer.

As the education technology critique Audre Watters has observed:

“Just because it’s a worksheet on an iPad doesn’t mean it’s transformational or exciting. It’s still a worksheet.”

In retrospect, this experience was an early effort to replace teachers with computer screens. Instead of working on making edtech an exciting addition to education, the effort was pointed toward putting kids at screens instead learning from teachers. The technology industry was promising to reduce the need for costly teachers.

Physics Lab Class

This picture shows an example of using technology to engage students in authentic learning. Two photogates affixed to the ramp were accurate to + or – 0.001 seconds. Here the students were adjusting the ramp to achieve constant velocity when a marble rolled down the ramp. The photogates provided data including the time for test object to roll through the gate and the time between gates. Since students new the diameter of the test ball and the distance between the gates, they were able to calculate three velocities. Once the three velocities were all equal, they changed to a test ball with identical geometry but significantly less mass. They were then able to observe that the mass of the ball did not change the velocity which accorded with Galileo Galilei’s 1589 experiment testing mass and gravity.

Unfortunately, only small companies were working to develop engaging technology for learning. Larger companies were developing school management systems that gathered large data sets on all students and teachers. Or they were creating schemes where teachers created lessons on their platforms which then claimed ownership of the lessons.

The school district I was in bought every student an I-pad and then three years later replaced those I-pads with laptop computers. Because these devices were such a classroom distraction, teachers often required students to put them in their backpacks and store them under their desks.

It was worse than a waste of money. It was undermining learning.

 In my AP physics classes, students were not working through the assigned problems. They discovered that almost all physics problems had a worked-out example on line. I was getting the most beautiful work I had ever seen but the students were clueless when tested.

It seems fair to identify edtech as a possible cause for declining test scores. Artificial intelligence will likely make — not working or thinking — an even bigger problem.

Science of Reading

The Orwellian labeled science of reading (SoR) is not based on sound science. In 1997, congress passed legislation calling for a reading study. Establishment of the National Reading Panel (NRP) was a doomed effort from the beginning. It was a massive undertaking, conducted by twenty-one unpaid volunteers over 18-months. NRP fundamentally did a meta-analysis in five reading domains, ignoring 10 other important domains. They did not review everything and there was no new research. Their report is the basis for SoR.

In Fact-Checking the Science of Reading, professors Robert J. Tierney and P David Pearson share that science is a natural commitment to modesty “is always provisional; ever-ready to be tweaked, revised, or replaced by the next theoretical insight or empirical findings.” As Reinking, Hruby and Risko (2023) stated “settled science is an oxymoron.” In the case of SoR, not only is it not settled science, many literacy researchers believe it is a substandard approach to teaching reading.

SoR is a dressed-up version of George W. Bush’s Reading First Initiative from 2001. In 2008, The Center for Public Integrity reported, “An April 2008 study revealed the general ineffectiveness of Reading First and found that students in schools receiving funds for the program had no better reading skills than children in schools that did not.”

Unfortunately, the spending on SoR by people like Laurene Powell Jobs is causing benighted legislators to mandate it. Forty states have already adopted reading education laws complying with billionaire wishes.

The real reason for promoting SoR is resting control of education away from universities and ending democratically run schools. The agenda is for all teacher education and training to be privatized. Organizations like TNTP and Relay Graduate School are substandard oligarch  financed entities with political clout. They are designed to replace public institutions.  

SoR advocates are trying to force everyone to use a reading education approach that is not proven and failed miserably in England.

Nancy Bailey opened her recent post:

“Today’s Science of Reading (SOR) was born of a right-wing conservative phonics focus. A Nation at Risk helped advance that messaging….”

“As the country mandates the Science of Reading (SOR) and invests heavily in unproven programs, marketing disputes flourish over which best align with so-called evidence. These programs control teachers’ instruction through one-size-fits-all directives, delivered with manuals or online. It’s easy to see where this is going. States could spend millions more on reading programs that don’t appear to improve learning as teachers are driven out with tech.”

Since around 2011 or 2012, the reading industry has been spending to change how reading is taught. Sarah Schwartz wrote in EducationWeek:

“The shifts in reading teaching that many states are asking schools to make go beyond simply adding a few new practices to teachers’ toolboxes. Instead, the “science of reading” asks teachers and leaders to adopt a new framework of how skilled reading develops—and what educators need to do to support that process.”

As more and more private companies produce reading materials that are mandated for use in many states, NAEP reading scores have continuously slid down. This is not a clearly known cause and effect occurrence but it does seem to be a reasonable conjecture that SoR is harming student learning.

Conclusion

The more teachers are scripted, the more they have their autonomy diminished, the more private companies are selling education reading products into schools, the more kids are put at screens to learn, the worse the outcomes. This is why I believe NAEP scores have been falling since 2013.

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Billionaires Support Corrupted Science of Reading

1 Jul

By Thomas Ultican 7/1/2025

Science of Reading (SoR) was always a fraud; it is not based on sound science. In 1997, the National Reading Panel was established by congress and 21 volunteers were given 18 months to study reading education. They searched through academic papers, averaged results and made a report that billionaires now label the “science of reading.” June 25th, the oligarch established propagation rag, The 74, published yet another article employing obfuscation to sell SoR.

The article, “How Districts in Georgia, Maryland and D.C. Are Raising Reading Proficiency,” was written by Andrew Cuomo’s former education advisor, David Wakelyn PhD. While working for the National Governors Association, Wakelyn was part of the team that developed the Common Core State Standards. He also served as Deputy Secretary of Education in New York. Today, this former California school teacher has founded Upswing Labs where they conduct research supporting the SoR approach to literacy.

Selling SoR

The first article in a series of posts promoting the “Mississippi Miracle” was written by Wakelyn and Michael Hartney for the New York Post. Its headline read, “NYC should look to the Mississippi Miracle to learn how to teach reading.” Upswing Labs produced two papers in June called “Mississippi or Manhattan” and “Dynamic Districts & States: Where and How Literacy Is Improving.” The last article is Wakelyn’s The 74 article on June 25.

“Mississippi or Manhattan” presents the following graphic to show how superior Mississippi’s reading teaching is to New York City’s.

For unknown reasons, Wakelyn has converted the NAEP average scale scores to an undocumented grade equivalent. He claims one grade level is approximately 10 scale score points, but that makes no sense since the average scores are all above 200. However we do see that Mississippi had made impressive gains. A graph of the average scores shown below has the same shape as the Upswing Labs graph above.

The graph on the left is of the average NAEP scale score for 4th grade reading in Mississippi (red), national public schools average (blue) and New York City (green) years 2003 to 2024. (Note: only the symbols on the graphs represent real data; the lines do not.) The graph on the right is configured the same way for 8th grade testing data. The NAEP data reveals that by 8th grade all of Mississippi’s impressive 4th grade gains have vanished.

These results are likely the result of Mississippi’s mandatory retention policy for third graders whose testing does not achieve the requirements for advancement. By holding back almost 10% of their 3rd graders, Mississippi has by far the highest 3rd grade retention rate in the country. Average 3rd grade retention for all states is 3% and many states have less than a 2% rate. Obviously, Mississippi’s weakest students spend an extra year in 3rd grade so it makes sense that their 4th grade NAEP reading scores have improved but by 8th grade the gains are gone.

This is the basis of the “Mississippi Miracle” and like much of the billionaire financed education agenda, it is a fraud. David Wakelyn earned a doctorate of education from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is certainly aware that the Mississippi data is problematic yet he promotes the distortion.

Maybe it is time for Universities like Wisconsin to consider rescinding doctoral degrees that are being used for lying to the public.   

The 74 Article

David Wakelyn’s article in The 74 is focused on selling the wonderful results from three exemplary districts, “Marietta City in the Atlanta suburbs; Allegany County, at the edge of the Appalachian Mountains in Maryland; and DC Prep, a K-8 public charter school network.” The three districts are small. The total numbers of 4th graders available for testing are DC Prep – 223, Marietta City – 681 and Allegany County – 553.

Wakelyn lauds the science of reading products these three districts have purchased. Why he chose them is a little mysterious. They are so small that they are statistically almost meaningless. He states:

“The districts launched deep, extended professional learning for all elementary teachers over two to three years.  Marietta City trained teachers with Top Ten Tools, a set of mini-courses on core elements of literacy and how to teach them, then added a year of training with Writing Revolution, a set of courses on teaching expository writing. In 2020, Allegany County began a two-year engagement with LETRS, to help teachers master the basics of reading and writing instruction — phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.”  

Top Ten Tools is a product of the 95 percent group inc. founded by Susan L. Hall. It has 220 employees and took in $7.4 million last year. They are one of the many companies working to profit off SoR. Hall is also a Sopris West certified trainer for DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills) and LETRS (Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling). She is the author of “I’ve DIBEL’d, Now What?,” and a co-author with Louisa C. Moats of two books.

In 2023, Rachel Cohen wrote an informative article about SoR, noting about LETRS:

“Despite its close associations with the “science of reading” — LETRS has its own middling track record of effectiveness. One experimental study found teachers who were trained by LETRS did improve in their knowledge of reading science, but their students did not have statistically higher differences in achievement than teachers in the control group.”

The Writing Revolution (TRW) comes out of work by Dr. Judith Hochman of New York. A 2012 award-winning feature article, “The Writing Revolution,” was published in The Atlantic about The Hochman Method giving her national exposure. In 2014, TRW became a 501 C3 tax-exempt non-profit. TRW is not an SoR focused company but they are profiting off public education and like many of today’s non-profit organizations have multiple 6-figure earners (TIN: 46-4970867).

Wakelyn also stated in The 74:

Both Marietta and Allegany improved the quality of their K-5 language arts curricula.  Marietta dropped giving students books they could already read — a popular practice that hasn’t been found to facilitate learning — and switched to Wit and Wisdom and a skills-based foundational class. Allegany stopped using Treasures and switched to Core Knowledge Language Arts. Both are highly rated by independent reviewers and are designed to build a deep and wide knowledge base using grade-level texts in science, history, literature and the arts.  

The “hasn’t been found to facilitate learning” comment is based on a blog by Timothy Shanahan. An early commenter to Shanahan’s post did not like that the article focused on learning level with no mention of content. The writer states, “I’m a retired elementary teacher and school principal, and it has been my experience that students are often thrilled to read materials whose content they find interesting or unique.”   

“Wit and Wisdom” is a scripted curriculum that has enemies on both the right and left.

Since “Treasures” is no longer in print, I would expect that schools are replacing it.

Core Knowledge Language Arts is controlled by Amplify and billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs. It is only lauded by other billionaire-controlled entities.

Conclusion

SoR is a dressed up version of George W. Bush’s Reading First Initiative from 2001. In 2008, The Center for Public Integrity reported, “An April 2008 study revealed the general ineffectiveness of Reading First and found that students in schools receiving funds for the program had no better reading skills than children in schools that did not.” Unfortunately, billionaire dollars kept the SoR malarkey alive.

The real reason for promoting SoR is the billionaire plan for resting control of education away from universities and ending democratic control of schools. The agenda is for all teacher education and training to be privatized. Organizations like TNTP and Relay Graduate School are sub-standard billionaire financed entities with political clout pushing aside public institutions.  

For billionaires, SoR has never been about better reading education. It is just one more element in their drive to eliminate democracy.

The “greedy bastards” lust for power and wealth is perverting everything.

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Strange Science of Reading Law Suit

20 Feb

By Thomas Ultican 2/20/2025

December 4, 2024, two law firms from New York and Chicago respectively filed a class action law suit against reading curriculum developers not steeped in science of reading (SoR).  One of the attorneys behind this Massachusetts suit, Benjamin Elga, said he listened to the Sold a Story podcast and immediately saw “an injustice that cried out for redress.” Their main claim is that “the National Reading Panel commissioned by Congress in 1997 confirmed, all credible education and literacy research shows that daily phonics instruction is necessary for literacy success” and that these curriculum developers were deliberately deceiving schools and parents when they did not focus on systematic phonics instruction.

The suit was brought against: Lucy Calkins and her Units of Study, Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell and their Reading Resources, The Reading and Writing Project at Mossflower, Teachers College Columbia University, Greenwood Publishing Group, Heinemann Publishing and HMH Education Co.

First of Its Kind Law Suit

Never before have curriculum providers been targets of this type of suit.

In paragraph-22 of the filing, the plaintiffs claim, “For decades, scientists and educators have understood that the first step in teaching literacy is robust, daily, and extensive instruction in phonics.” Unfortunately, this statement is not true.

The ideology supporting phonics comes from the National Reading Panel (NRP) that was supervised by the National Institute of Child Health and Development (NICHD). NRP was founded in 1997 and presented its findings in 2000. The report was supposed to end the reading wars but it came under immediate attack including in the minority report by Joanne Yatvin, who wrote: “At its first meeting in the spring of 1998, the Panel quickly decided to examine research in three areas: alphabetics, comprehension, and fluency, thereby excluding any inquiry into the fields of language and literature.”

Yatvin was the superintendent of a school district in Oregon, held a PhD in education and was the only panel member with classroom experience teaching reading.

Yatvin published “Babes in the Woods: The Wanderings of the National Reading Panel” for Kappan (January 1, 2002) in which she directly addressed the phonics piece:

“The situation worsened when the phonics report was not finished by the January 31 deadline. NICHD officials, who wanted it badly, gave that subcommittee more time without informing the other subcommittees of this special dispensation. The phonics report in its completed form was not seen, even by the whole subcommittee, of which I was a member, until February 25, four days before the full report was to go to press. By that time, not even all the small technical errors could be corrected, much less the logical contradictions and imprecise language. Although a few changes were made before time ran out, most of the report was submitted ‘as is.’ Thus the phonics report became part of the full report of the NRP uncorrected, undeliberated, and unapproved. For me, that was the last straw, and I informed my fellow panel members that I wanted my minority report to be included.”

The blow-back to the original report was strong. Elaine Garan is an award-winning researcher, author of “Resisting Reading Mandates” and educator with 24 years of experience as a reading teacher.  In March 2001, she wrote, “Beyond the Smoke and Mirrors: A Critique of the National Reading Panel Report on Phonics” published by Kappan. When two NRP panel members, Linnea Ehri and Steven Stahl, attacked her in their Kappan article, she responded:

“I used the data and words of the National Reading Panel (NRP) to establish that its report was fatally flawed in terms of the fundamental research protocols, including validity, reliability and generalizability.  I established that, rather than living up to the highly publicized claims of ‘scientific’ accuracy, the report was riddled with errors.”

Garan was right. There are no “strong correlative and causal relationships between systematic phonics instruction and reading success.”

Despite the suits claim that “all credible education and literacy research shows that daily phonics instruction is necessary for literacy success”, there are in truth many highly credentialed scholars who disagree.  Posted on Ferman University Professor Paul Thomas’s blog are many articles with links to hundreds of scholars opposing SoR. In a recent post, he noted,

“The hand wringing over the 2024 NAEP reading results, however, seems to focus on learning loss and post-Covid consequences—not that reading achievement on NAEP was flat during the balanced literacy era and now has dropped steadily during the SOR era:”

Peter Johnston and Deborah Scanlon of the University at Albany debunked the Science of Reading (SoR) in this report.

Maren Aukerman is currently a Werklund Research Professor at the University of Calgary who focuses on literacy education and formerly served on the faculties at Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania. She warns of journalists using logical fallacies to promote science of reading (SoR). For example, not reporting research showing students taught to read without systematic phonics “read more fluently.”

In 2023, a major study of teaching reading in the United Kingdom was released. The UK embraced a phonic first reading paradigm similar SoR in 2012. The researchers conclude an over-emphasis on phonics instruction caused reading test scores to go down. This matches what we have seen with this year’s National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) testing.

2024 NAEP Reading Results

Both nationally and internationally, many education researchers are openly opposed to SoR. Its support comes almost exclusively from billionaire sponsored researchers and publications.

Lawyers versus Educators

Two scholars, Robert J. Tierney, Dean Emeritus of the Faculty of Education at University of British Columbia, and Paul David Pearson, Evelyn Lois Corey Emeritus Professor of Instructional Science in the Berkeley School of Education at the University of California Berkeley, published the free to download “Fact-Checking the Science of Reading.”  

Lawyer Benjamin Elga said he listened to the Sold a Story podcast and it motivated his law suit. The education professionals wrote:

“Undoubtedly, for both of us, the precipitating event was Emily Hanford’s (2022) release of the six-part podcast, Sold a Story, broadcast by American Public Media beginning in late 2022. Hanford’s series motivated us to accelerate our response for many reasons—two of which were most pressing to us:

  1. A consistent misinterpretation of the relevant research findings; and
  2. A mean-spirited tone in her rhetoric, which bordered on personal attacks directed against the folks Hanford considered to be key players in what she called the Balanced Literacy approach to teaching early reading.” (Pages xiii and xiv)

Paragraph 39 of the law suit states, “Cueing methods have been roundly criticized for teaching children to guess rather than read.”

This above is a diagram of what they mean by cueing. Orthography uses phonics type approaches to sound out unknown words. Does it look right? With the second cue, syntactic, a student tries to understand what is written. Does it sound right? What would make it conform to grammar rules? Semantics is the last of the three cues. Does it make sense?

Cueing methods like all widely used reading curriculums embrace phonics as a tool but not as part of a daily structure.

Tierney and Pearson observed,

“It seems overly limiting to discredit the use of cueing systems based on what some might consider a restrictive assumption—that reading is entirely the accurate naming of words, rather than an act of meaning making that involves hypothesizing. To dismiss the use of context as an over-reliance on ‘guessing’ or ‘predicting’ ignores important evidence.” (Page 65)

Who Are These People?

With five lawyers listed on the class action law-suit, Kaplan & Grady is a firm in Chicago specializing in commercial and civil rights cases. Justice Catalyst Law (JCL) is a non-profit law firm from New York with two lawyers listed on the case. Both firms are fairly new, Kaplan & Grady was founded in 2022 and JCL was formed in 2018 per their tax filings (TIN 83-0932015).

Not much is known about the private company but in 2022, the non-profit took in $2,185,000 in contributions and Partner Benjamin Elga has connections to big Silicon Valley money. He is a Senior Fellow at American Economic Liberties Project to which The Irish Times reports that eBay founder Pierre Omidyar is a large contributor.

New court filings are due in March and the lawyers are demanding a jury trial.

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