Expert Douses Boston Globe’s “Science of Reading” Advocacy

The Boston Globe did another editorial hyping “science of reading” legislation and I don’t know anything about literacy instruction but neither does the Globe so I thought I’d introduce someone who does. Dr. Elena Aydarova is an assistant professor in the Educational Policy studies department at the University of Wisconsin Madison and an actual expert on the corporate campaign to profit off “Science of Reading.”

Here’s a link to the transcript of a  podcast Dr. Aydarova did with National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado. I’ve embedded a few excerpts, with my underlines added for emphasis:

The Globe depicts SOR as a “civil rights” issue (remember when the Globe’s doomed charter school ballot question was “the civil rights issue of our time”?) and Dr. Aydarova has a go at that:

the United States has a decentralized system, and it is not uniform across the board. And specifically, what’s important to remember is that public education is de facto segregated along the lines of socioeconomic, racial, and linguistic differences.

This means that education that predominantly white children receive in affluent schools is dramatically different from the kind of education that children in under-resourced and underfunded communities receive. If Detroit public schools are unable to retain their teachers because they cannot pay them livable salaries and 70 children end up in a gym.

This is not education, but this is also not something that other children experience, and it’s not the fault of the schools or educators, but rather the inequities and injustices baked into the system that depends on local property taxes to fund the schools and allows major businesses and corporations to avoid paying taxes altogether.

The crux of the wide range of problems schools and society at large are facing is the upward redistribution of wealth that allows those at the top to accumulate and hoard resources, leaving the rest behind.

On Science of Reading as a marketing ploy (as opposed to the actual scientific study of reading):

They’re just like SOR, and that’s the science quote unquote, that pertains to businesses, corporations, and EdTech companies that are leading this movement. But they’re doing primarily, they’re doing this to primarily bolster their profits.

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We lose the sight of how SOR as a business, as a corporate endeavor is really reshaping what’s happening in education policy. And so this is what I have discovered through five years of work on this project.

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And that is this SOR brand has paved the way for growing privatization, standardization, and centralization.

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As SOR aligned, that’s when they started seeing major surges in their profits.

What happens when we take away local control and empower the state?

teachers and principals feel increasingly surveilled. They feel increasingly under pressure to follow the mandates.

And what about those billionaire backed privateering interests the Globe loves to promote, like Jeb Bush’s ExcelinEd?

one of the key players in the policy space, rather, is the Foundation for Excellence in Education. Started by Jeb Bush. They have had model bills. That are focused on early literacy for over a decade. They write those bills. They work with legislators that are trying to introduce those bills.

They make sure that they testify on the committees when those bills are being committed considered. They write op-eds to influence the public perception of those bills. And we want to pay attention to the fact that it’s ExcelinEd that was involved in promoting SOR. Because it’s also the organization that is involved in promoting vouchers, promoting charters, promoting alternative arou (sic) into teaching.

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And again, why ExcelinEd is important is because they’re also partners with ALEC, American Legislative Exchange Council. (Ed: ALEC is a corporate bill mill heavily underwritten by Charles Koch).

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And so as we think about ALEC involvement, we need to pay attention to the fact that this is the organization that pursues the interest of the private sector. They are involved in both boosting the profits for the corporate sector and in advancing a very conservative agenda.

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So the organizations that support SOR also are fighting, for example action civics. They don’t want activists raised in our social studies classrooms. They want very conservative birthrights curriculum that was developed with the funding from Koch Foundation.

Gee, I wonder who the SOR marketers might blame for all the supposed ills of education?

teachers are blamed for the failure, how teachers are told that their districts are failing, and the teachers would know my district is performing really well and they would still be attacked for the failures. And I just want to remind legislators that if we want to have public education in this country, our teachers deserve respect.

Our teachers deserve autonomy, and our teachers long for the opportunity for their voices to be heard in policymaking processes. And unfortunately, what SOR bills are doing is both demonizing teachers and excluding them from any decision making, even at the school level to the extent that we have never seen in this country before.

“Why wait for popular opinion to catch up when you could portray as ‘reform’ what was really slow-motion demolition through privatization?” – Professor Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Plan for America.

[Full disclosure: as a (now retired) educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money, democracy, and oligarchy.