How long have “the reading wars” been a part of the national education discourse? What are the recurring themes? What can 4K-12 practitioners do to engage in a dialogue that leads to a better understanding of effective literacy instruction?
In this episode, Paul Thomas shares his findings about the science of reading movement and how educators can navigate this conversation.
Paul, a professor at Furman University, is the author of the policy brief The Science of Reading Movement: The never-ending debate and the need for a different approach to reading instruction (NEPC, 2022). He also wrote How to End the Reading War and Serve the Literacy Needs of All Students: A Primer for Parents, Policy Makers, and People Who Care (IAP, 2020). Paul is a frequent writer at his blog, Radical Scholarship and on Twitter at @plthomasEdD.
Special thanks to Mary Howard, Joy La Vay Taylor, Debra Crouch, and Mary Beth Nicklaus for engaging in and elevating this conversation.
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Full Transcript
Matt Renwick (00:03):
Welcome to Read by Example, where teachers are leaders and leaders know literacy. We are joined today by Dr. Paul Thomas. Paul is a professor of education at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, and taught high school English in rural South Carolina before moving to teacher education. He is a former column editor for English Journal, National Council Teachers of English, current series editor for Critical Literacy Teaching Series: Challenging Authors and Genres and author of Teaching Writing as a Journey, Not a Destination: Essays Exploring What Teaching Writing Means, and the book, which I believe is in its second edition now, How to End the Reading Wars and Serve the Needs of All Students: A Primer for Parents, Policymakers, and People Who Care. NCTE named Paul the 2013 George Orwell Award winner. He co-edited the award-winning volume, Critical Media Literacy and Fake News in Post-Truth America. You can follow Paul's work at on Twitter at @plthomasedd and at Radical Scholarship at radicalscholarship.wordpress.com. Welcome, Paul.
(01:26):
Thank you very much. Nice to be here.
(01:29):
And we have a few who could join, if they could share too. Who you are, briefly just what you do. We'll start with Mary.
Mary Howard (01:39):
I am a literacy consultant and now doing Zoom, because I'm in Honolulu and I'd rather not get on a plane. This is year 51.
Matt Renwick (01:57):
Joy.
Joy La Vay Taylor (01:59):
Hi, I'm Joy La Vay Taylor, and I work for James Madison University with student teachers. Before that, I was literacy coach, reading recovery teacher and reading specialist.
Matt Renwick (02:15):
Deborah.
Debra Crouch (02:17):
Hi, I'm Deborah Crouch. I'm a literacy consultant as well and a co-author of Made For Learning with Brian Cambourne.
Mary Beth Nicklaus (02:30):
Hi, I'm Mary Beth Nicklaus, and I am with Eastern Harbor County Schools in Minnesota. And I'm a secondary level reading specialist. This is my 34th year.
Matt Renwick (02:48):
Welcome everyone. And I have a few questions for Paul, but we'll definitely save time for any questions that you might have. The first one for Paul is, you are consistently on point in your policy brief, which we will link in the newsletter, the Science of Reading Movement, which is a condensed version of your book on the topic. It’s a nice summary, as well as what you post online on Twitter and on your blog. What motivates you to keep coming back to this topic of the science of reading movement?
Paul Thomas (03:27):
Oh, that's a really good question because most of my career, I'm really a composition writing person. And when I discovered Emily Hanford's Hard Words, early 2018, it really struck a chord, but I had no idea that it would get the momentum that it did. So I've always been a holistic literacy person, and I've always been skeptical of over focusing on things like grammar and phonics. And although I taught high school English at Furman, I have taught master's literacy program. So I've been working with early literacy teachers who are getting graduate degrees. And a former colleague of mine, Nita Schmidt, who moved from Furman to Iowa and now she's retired, she's brilliant, she was an early literacy people, and she, she brought me in at N C T E.
(04:33):
And so I had had this kind of transition to being, what I would say, a literacy generalist where I understand kind of K-16 literacy, or birth to grave literacy. My focus I feel like is public work. Like, how do I talk to the public? How do I help people understand education? And this movement just kind of intersected with that public work. And throughout 2018, 2019, I found myself blogging maybe too much, but <laugh> I had quite a number of blogs on this, and I said, "I've got enough for a book. I did see how it was developing in a direction that regretfully has come true. That early kind of messaging has now become policy. So in the last, I guess that's what, five years now, I have shifted very much into being a policy person, which I think was the rightful place for me to go.
(05:44):
I do think trying to work on public narratives, how we talk about critical discourse analysis is a big thing for me. It's a central part of my upper level reading and writing course. At Furman, that's a requirement at Furman, they have to have an upper level writing and research course. So I think it was just kind of a perfect storm for me because I do feel like it's really important for scholarly work to have a real world place. And this felt way more engaging. It felt way more productive than my composition work. Although my book before this was on writing. I'm still, I teach first year writing. I care very much about writing. But reading is very central to sort of how we think about education in the United States. So it seemed like kind of a natural development for me.
Matt Renwick (06:47):
Yeah, your policy brief is very practical, very useful. It was easy to read, but you covered the, the essential topics of it and really gave, for me anyway, it gave me some nice talking points. Right now in Wisconsin, we're dealing with it, right this very week, up for discussion, so to speak. How might educators and parents best use this resource to effectively advocate for more reasonable policies? What can we do with this to, to make some kind of a difference, or at least try to influence policymakers?
Paul Thomas (07:29):
So first I would like to say I really am very proud of the policy brief. And I think a huge part of that was the N E P C staff itself. They did not make this easy <laugh>. I had to a 6,000 word policy brief. I probably wrote 15 to 20,000 words and three or four drafts, and I was kind of taken to task three or four or five times before it even went to peer review. And I think they should be commended for that. The editorial group at N E P C weren't literacy people, so they were constantly going, "What do you mean by this? Uh, is this real?" And the the fun part was being challenged on using the simple view of reading.
(08:22):
One person said to me, "Paul, nobody uses that. That's silly. That's a silly term." And I had to say, "No, it's a technical term. It's a real term." So I do appreciate that opportunity, and I will say any PC believes in practical. So it had to build to what do people do. I do feel really good about the policy implications at the end. I've been working indirectly with Diane Stephens, who is Professor Emeritus from the University of South Carolina. She taught several other places. Diane has really perfected taking actual legislation and copy editing it, <laugh>. It's amazing, "Here is where you're off base, but here is how to reform that." So I think what we have to do is, it kind of parallels the book banning and the anti C R T movement.
(09:23):
It seems almost silly to have to argue for access to books. It seems silly to have to say you shouldn't ban books. So I think it seems kind of pointless for a lot of reasonable people to argue for teacher autonomy and serving the needs of all students. And very simply put, that's kind of what the policy brief boiled down to. We really targeted, "there's no such thing as one size fits all instructional practices." So there should not be any one size fits all mandates in policy and legislation. We really kind of honed in on, "it's not the place of legislators to ban or mandate anything that goes against what is a reasonable approach to day-to-day classroom practices." So I think what can people do is I think is, kind of target these simple messages.
(10:37):
I've been trying to work better about clarifying that I'm advocating for teacher autonomy. I'm advocating for meeting the needs of every individual child. I am not an advocate for reading recovery. I'm not an advocate for balanced literacy. I'm not an advocate for National Council Teachers of English. I'm not an advocate for International Literacy Association. I'm not being trivial here. I don't advocate for labels and organizations, even though I love N C T E, for example. It's been my home for a long time, and I respect N C T E, but I think what we have to advocate for are key principles. And I've called this challenge out many times, you know, on social media. If someone says they don't agree with me or that I'm wrong, I say, so you're saying that there should not be teacher autonomy, so you're saying we shouldn't serve the individual needs of every student, and I really think we have to call people on the carpet about that.
(11:47):
I also think it's really important, and it might be too much for most people, I just don't believe in misinformation. I get called out that I'm advocating for X when I simply say Y isn't true <laugh>. This is a really good example to me, is the attack on Lucy Calkins, I think is just unfair. It's not accurate. Lucy Calkins Units of Study and Fountas and Pinnell work are in one in four schools in the country. It's 25% of the reading programs, I just tweeted out today. You know, their programs are not the dominant programs in New Mexico. And New Mexico has the lowest NAEP fourth grade reading scores and the highest percentage of children below basic. So creating a bad guy <laugh> is a trick of storytelling.
(13:00):
And regretfully the science of reading movement, I mean, Sold a Story. I mean, it's about storytelling, and they're manufacturing the crisis. They're manufacturing the bad guy. I really just don't like misinformation. And again, I don't like the way balance literacy is defined. It doesn't mean that I endorse balanced literacy, even though I don't have any actual problem with the concept of balanced literacy. I'm really a critical literacy person. Do I like whole language people and their philosophies? Yes, there are a lot of my friends. Do I find balanced literacy ideas compelling? Yes, of course I do. I am a holistic person. So I think we have to, I have to keep sort of simple messaging on the key concepts that we support.
(13:55):
But we also have to say, actually what you're saying isn't true. Your definition isn't true. Your cause of the problem isn't true. Your solution isn't true. Over and over the national reading panel is just misrepresented. I use Diane Stephen's work. The National Reading Panel found that systematic phonics was no more effective than balanced literacy or whole language. Almost every single credible study says the exact same thing. The major study out of England said systematic phonics no more effective than balanced literacy. We need balance in England, over and over. That's the truth. And then you've got the science of rooting people saying, it's the Emily Hanford mantra, that it's simple and it's settled, and neither one of those are true.
Matt Renwick (14:48):
That leads into my next question, Paul, is this towards, especially phonics instructions, kind of this reason why kids are failing to read because they don't have enough of it, or we need more of it to ensure that they can read. And then picking on some of these targets, whether it's a person or it's a program or approach, are these strawmen for maybe avoiding bigger issues that we do need to address, such as poverty or teaching and learning conditions? Or is there some reasonableness to what some people might be advocating for in the sor movement? Where do you see that falling?
Paul Thomas (15:33):
Really nice job there. I appreciate that. Because that's two other kind of key points that we need to hit on. So, the part of my book and the policy brief that I'm most proud of is the historical perspective. In the 1940s, draftees performed very poorly on literacy tests, and Eleanor Roosevelt and the government shouted reading crisis. And John Dewey in progressivism was blamed. The woman I did my dissertation on, Lula Brandt ,did an analysis and found out that most draftees went to traditional schools and had traditional instruction, like phonics instruction, <laugh> had skills instruction. And there's Elementary English, which became Language Arts, had a special issue on it, very similar to Reading Research Quarterly, having two special issues on it in the 2020s.
(16:33):
There was one article, <laugh>, and they literally say this false attack on progressivism is to avoid the truth. The problem with literacy in the United States is poverty. You know, that was the 1940s. Then it recurs, the Johnny Can't Read in the fifties and sixties, same thing. It's phonics, it's lack of phonics. And people are like, "no, the people who are doing poorly are impoverished." And then it recycles into the sixties, into the 1990s, and then around No Child Left Behind is this same thing. So I think two other messages that we really have to make sure we make clear is, and I refer to Martin Luther King toward the end of his life in 1967, he said, "We would find that instead of reforming education to erase poverty, that if we erase poverty, education would improve."
(17:30):
And there is nothing truer. If children had universal healthcare, if they had no food deserts, if they had steady homes, if their parents had steady well-paying jobs, if there were books in their homes, the NAEP scores would go up. And that's doing nothing in the schools. Now, I'm not saying don't do anything in schools. I actually think this is the other thing that drives me crazy. I've been accused of being a protector of the status quo. And people who know me would laugh, they should talk to some of the people I've worked for. I think I entered education in 1984. I start year 40 in the fall. And when I started education, I was a reformer.
(18:23):
That's why I want, I wanted to do school better than it had been done to me. And then when I was in my doctoral program in the 1990s, I found out there were the reconstructionist. There was a whole movement in the early 20th century to reform schools. And so I want things to be different. I want school to be different. And you said it just a second ago. So we've got to address the lives, the homes, and the communities of children. I mean, we have to do that. And this constantly pointing at teachers and saying they don't know what they're doing and that schools are failing is a distraction. But simultaneous to that teaching and learning conditions, I just cannot say that often enough. There's been research for decades that marginalized students are more likely to have beginning and uncertified teachers.
(19:25):
That's a simple thing to address. We should guarantee that no child who is performing below what we believe they should be, instead of using third grade test scores to retain students, why don't we use third grade test scores to ensure children to have experienced certified teachers and low student-teacher ratios in fourth grade? That's a much better policy. And I would 100% endorse the use of standardized testing for that. But we are not going to do those things. I mean that's what's kind of criminal about this. Special needs children...we're overly concerned about dyslexic students. I am not saying that we should not be, absolutely, we should be concerned with dyslexic students. But special needs students are really highly likely to have beginning and new teachers, special needs students are really highly likely to have uncertified teachers.
(20:31):
Those are things that could be addressed. Now I think that would solve a lot of problems, systemic forces outside of the school. And then, I agree, this is a national education policy center thing. Instead of accountability reform, we need equity reform. So inside schools, I would say no grade retention. We should not be stratifying students. We should not be gatekeeping students into courses. But the biggest thing to me in school is a teacher assignment. The dirty little secret about education, nobody wants to talk about...if you teach long enough when someone retires, you get the good kids. And I think that's one of those little dirty secrets that we don't talk about. Beginning teachers too often... administration sits down, the remaining teachers get to pick their courses for next year, and the leftovers go to the new person. That is a terrible policy. It's a terrible way to treat children. And these are things we could address. We never talk about them, and we don't do them. So I think as you were implying, I think a lot of this is about ways to avoid doing the hard stuff.
Matt Renwick (21:53):
Yeah, for sure. You hit on a lot of topics there with that. There were couple of questions and, and I won't bring it up here just because it could, who knows where it would to go. But the money aspect too. You noted on Twitter, that a lot of these arguments and blaming are actually creating a space, a void, in which then certain individuals, publishers, organizations can sell their programs, trainings to solve the problem that they created in the first place. But that's a whole nother topic almost, I think.
Paul Thomas (22:38):
I could interject there real quick. Sure. I think people don't understand. I just had a conversation with a producer of a major news series yesterday morning. Instead of chasing the right reading program, we should reevaluate that. We use reading programs. It's much simpler than that. At W S R A, I think it was 2019, it was right before covid, teachers taught me a lesson. The problem that they had with units of study was not units of study, it was how it was implemented. And we too often hold teachers accountable for implementing a program instead of serving the needs of students. And I think that's a really important distinction. And it would also, I think it would address the money issue. We do, I think we do spend too much money on educational materials, and then we feel obligated to holding teachers accountable because of that investment.
Matt Renwick (23:41):
Yeah. Too much money and resources is not enough. And the ultimate research, which is teachers and students as well is, how can we structure students to be resources for each other? I'd like to open it up to other people who have questions here, or Paul, if you have anything you'd like to share that to come to mind. I'll open the floor up.
Mary Howard (24:06):
Okay. I was just gonna come back to, and I appreciate this so much because it led me back to what you wrote. One of the best things about this is that it's so specific to suggestions for decision makers and policy makers. And so one of the, and I loved every one of them, but one of the things that I kept coming back to is at the very end, two that really keep, are really in my head. One is be wary of overstatements and oversimplifications within media and public advocacy. Acknowledging concerns raised but remaining skeptical of simplistic claims about causes and solutions. And one of the challenges is that there are so many, the policy makers, the people who are making these decisions, they want oversimplification. They want to know, all I have to do is write a check and there's nothing else I have to do.
(25:11):
And if, because they don't have a background in education, that sounds really, really compelling. And then the other one is just a couple down from that, which is so important. Recognize student-centered as an important, research supported guiding principle, but also acknowledge the reality that translating research-based principles into classroom practices is challenging. So not only do they want those over simplifications, but they want to be able to take the research and say, here's what the research says, which is complicated research. And so we're gonna do this. You know, it brings me back to RtI where the solution was the walk-to-intervention model. So they know the importance of supporting children, but they're going to find the easiest possible, not just the one that they can write a check for, but the one that's going to be the easiest possible to implement.
(26:09):
So, you know, those just loom really large in my mind, and I don't know how we undo. Let me just say one more thing. I remember so many times walking out of a session where someone, usually someone with a really big name, said something really absurdly ridiculous. Like, time for reading, independent reading doesn't matter. And does it in such a compelling way that people I really admire walk out of that session and say, "Oh my God, I never thought about that before." And that's been happening with the science of reading too. "Oh my God, I never knew that." And so it's really smart, lovely, wonderful people. But for some reason, <laugh>, it's coming across not as what is being said. I don't know. It's a really weird thing to me.
Paul Thomas (27:11):
Yeah. One advantage of my career being pretty eclectic is I've taught some graduate level leadership courses, and I used to use Howard Gardner's book Leading Minds. He's known for multiple intelligences, but I don't think that's his best work actually. In Leading Minds, he directly says all the research shows that leadership functions on black and white statements. And there's very little you can do about that. So there's an ethical obligation if you're going to compel the public, you're going to have to be relatively simple. So to me, I think the line is between simple and simplistic. And the challenge we have, and again, the conversation I had yesterday morning, really, really drove this home to me, is we're in a bind because our message is not simple. And the sor people are, it's become a cult of personality because they're doing the simple and settled.
(28:12):
And it is very compelling. I, like you Mary, know some very lovely people who have bought it. I knew some, and I still know, I know some lovely people, bright, who bought Teach for America. I know some lovely and bright people who bought charter schools. And those have now passed, and we know they didn't work. Teach for America has really dramatically fallen off. And some of the best people I know in education went through Teach for America. So it's not the people. The simplistic message, that you just had to demand more of students, it's that soft bigotry of low expectations. And if you just demand more, and if you just work harder, these kids will succeed. And then those poor people who did that, and those children didn't succeed. They were devastated.
(29:07):
So we do have a problem. Our message is not simple. But that's the only message that works. And also I think, another point of yours Mary, is the idea of evidence. I think I said this the other day, but the most important evidence is the child in front of you. The first five or 10 years of my teaching, the best thing that happened to me was humility. I had missionary zeal. I came in thinking I knew what I was doing. I kind of had my butt kicked at the National Writing Project. I'll shout out to Brenda Davenport. She almost literally kicked my butt. She saw something in me. She did respect me, but she took me in a room and she let me have it. And it was an awakening for me.
(30:00):
I softened, I backed up off of my certainty, and I learned to work from the ground up. Research and theory... I love theory. I love philosophy. These things are important, but they're for you back here. I mean, they sit somewhere back here. But it's the actual child in front of you. So I've learned, Furman has really taught me a lesson too. I mean, for the last 21 years, my college first year writing students are a different type of human than what I taught in rural South Carolina in high school. So I try to work from the student and instead of imposing Paul's beliefs about writing, Paul's beliefs about learning. You know, one simple thing is we we're always told that, that you have to give students credit for class participation.
(31:04):
I know a lot of professors still put that on their syllabus, and there's a percentage for it. Well, Furman has taught me that students can participate by being completely quiet in the room. And I had to listen to that, which is kind of ironic. And <laugh>, I don't say that anymore. I don't say, "You have to speak in class, you have to participate this specific way." So I think one of our messages, I think has to be that, evidence is not simplistic. And the most important piece of evidence is the child in front of you.
Matt Renwick (31:41):
Thanks, Paul. Thanks, Mary.
Debra Crouch (31:45):
Can I ask a question, Paul? How do you simplify in a way, I guess, how do you talk to student-centered in a way that keeps it understandable for people who don't come at this from "Look at the child and recognize what children are bringing" and that sort of thing. How do we talk to that? Because I agree with you. I think that piece is huge.
Paul Thomas (32:12):
Yeah. And teacher education, that's one thing I do is I talk about artifacts of learning. I talk about things like, I really think music teachers, art teachers, coaches, that I think the average person understands that. So, there was a piece in Phi Delta Kappan many, many years ago, somewhere in the 1990s. And the guy said, what if we had two football teams line up every Friday night and take a multiple choice test to decide the football game? Parents would revolt, <laugh> my hometown, the entire town would revolt. So, you know, in art class, we have a child actually draw an artifact of learning, and then we work from there. Until the child does a drawing or a clay sculpture, we don't have any way to teach them. We have children play instruments, we have children sing, we have children play the sport.
(33:13):
So I think putting it in terms of behaviors, having students do the thing, and I think that's where my holistic urge is. I was a soccer coach, I coached for quite a few years. And I love scrimmage. I was a big fan of scrimmaging. So you could end the moment, you could teach, of course we did some skills, but to be perfectly honest, that's not that effective. If people practice the same thing over and over incorrectly, they're not actually learning. They're getting worse. They're building the wrong tools. So, the joke of my teaching high school was I graded about 4,000 essays a year for 18 years. Wow. And I graded about 6,000 journals on top of that. So my joke was, it was volume, volume, volume.
(34:07):
Until a kid wrote a paper, I did not know what they needed, Until a player lined up as a centerback and played and played a soccer match, I did not know what he needed. So I do think we have to talk in terms of sort of holistic behaviors that we're trying to teach children to do. And then our job to me is mentoring. It is coaching. I love the word coach. I think the right kind of coaching, not the stereotypical United States coach that screams and cusses, but the kind of coach that goes, "Look, you did it this way, now do it this way." Like, here is why. One thing I loved about soccer is it's conceptual. You don't run plays and it's not very structured, the type the clock runs, and it's these concepts. So it's these holistic behaviors at the conceptual level, what should you be doing? But the key element is why are you doing this? I hope that answered your question, I feel like I did.
Matt Renwick (35:12):
Yeah. Thanks Deborah. Thanks, Paul. Joy, did you want to throw that question out of how did we engage in this? I think Paul spoke to that previously. Was there anything else that you wanted to follow up on though, Joy regarding how to engage in conversation around this time?
Joy La Vay Taylor (35:35):
The article that you put out, Paul, was really helpful, Mary and I will follow it a little bit better.
Paul Thomas (35:51):
A lot of this movement is public, so I think a lot of it is on social media. And there is a problem. I do think Twitter is not a good place for discussion. I haven't had good luck with it. I've had a few people try to. I had one person a couple times lately, very kindly say, would you mind, you know, let's have a discussion about this blog post. I don't. There's just not enough room. There is no chance for nuance. I joke and say the best way to deal with social media discussions is don't do it. But a more practical one is, are you dealing with a serious person? So probably six months ago, a woman who is an s o r person engaged with me.
(36:42):
She was patient, she was kind, she was clear. I did two or three tweets with her. I realized she was a serious person. We had a very long Twitter discussion. She didn't change her mind. I did not mute her. I did not block her. Everything was fine. The key was not that we agreed with each other. The key was that she was a serious person. And that's the hard part. I often check the Twitter bios. If there's four followers, probably not serious. If they've got the little hashtag, #amplify, probably not serious. Way too much of the science of reading movement is driven by the exact thing that Hanford is attacking. If it is in fact a problem that Lucy Caulkins has made money, which is an odd thing to accuse somebody of in the United States, then the science of reading, people who are driven by market intentions are just as guilty.
(37:56):
My home state and the most recent budget, 15 million for LETRS training, were a very small state. Can you imagine how much state money, tax money is being earmarked for LETRS training? I don't trust advocates of LETRS anymore than I trust anyone. I mean, we learned that the tobacco industry said cigarettes were okay. They had a market interest. So I do think we have to navigate public discussions with serious people. I do not mute people instantly. I generally give everybody one or two tweets. I give you a chance. Then it's it, and it's just little things, right? Are they selling something? Do they have almost no followers? I've got people out there. I know I muted them, so I didn't block them, but they can still do it. They say, don't listen to Paul Thomas. He works for reading recovery. That's just a blatant lie. There was an organization that blogged and said, don't listen to me because I'm not a teacher. I start year 40 in the fall. I've been a literacy teacher for 40 years, over five decades since the eighties. It's just a blatant lie. So lying means you're not a serious person. If if you're trying to sell something, you're probably not a serious person. So I just think navigating that space, we're looking for serious people and then we can engage.
Matt Renwick (39:34):
I had the pleasure of watching Paul have a panel discussion with other serious people. It was a research panel at the Wisconsin State Reading Association Conference. He was talking with a researcher at UW-Madison, a principal out of California, and they did not all agree. I think we talked about this later, Paul. You did not all agree on the same issues, but you all were respectful the way you talked. "I hear what you're saying. Here's where I'm coming from." It was very, it was just a good conversation. And I learned a lot. And I think, I thought it was a really good model for, for what this could be, but unfortunately, often is not.
Paul Thomas (40:16):
Right. And I really don't think we have to all agree. Like, there are people I love that I don't agree with everything about them. And that's not what we're looking for.
Mary Howard (40:29):
Yeah. And in a conversation like that, you have the opportunity to have a fluid coming back and forth. That's impossible. But one of the things that I looked for on Twitter, and I've only been recently really trying to dig into it, there are just certain catchphrases that people use over and over. And that to me is a dead giveaway because it's almost like they came out with a s o r attack list of these are the things you want to say. It really is problematic that you can't. There's a big difference to being able to look at someone in the face, for example, and listen to what they're saying and then come back and respond to that than it is. It's almost like the Twitter social media is a ping pong ball, and it's really easy to get caught up in it, you know, especially when emotions are involved.
Paul Thomas (41:32):
That's why I say the, the s o r movement is too similar to the anti CRT movement. They're both too often ideological. So when you're ideological it's very simplistic and narrow. So you do have recurring things to say that are just, they're just imposed onto the situation. They're not drawn from the situation. Someone I blocked, I mean, I muted. I didn't see them, but I saw the response. And apparently somebody on Twitter just in the last couple of days, said that they listened to Emily Hanford. Cause she's an expert. I'm not. And the interesting thing there is not only have I taught literacy for 40 years, I taught journalism for 13 years, and I've published journalism for the last 20. I have a level of expertise in both journalism and education. That's where you can tell somebody's not serious. This is not a serious comment. That is just a blanket imposed statement. And so I think that is the ideological problem. It's not everybody who's in the science of reading movement by any stretch. But there is a faction that is just, it's just an ideologue. And it's the same thing. You know, woke <laugh>, woke by DeSantis, woke by too many Republicans, uh, c r t, these have just been catchphrases. They're not, again, they're not serious people. They're not credible people.
Matt Renwick (43:00):
This conversation's been great as always. Any closing thoughts or takeaways from anyone in the group that you'd wanna share out before we close things out?
Joy La Vay Taylor (43:15):
I'm such a novice, I feel like, at Twitter for sure. I was so focused on being in the classroom, working with teachers that I was so shocked when this whole s o r thing just seemed to slam in. And I hadn't, I didn't have time to be on Twitter. I shouldn't say I have time now, but I thank you so much all for all this information that you put out. And Mary, I love Mary and Matt is great. I don't know you too, but I'm sure you two are great too. <laugh>.
(44:15):
Because I thought that all the information that you gave about politics and the movement of reading was so helpful for me. It just gave me a background. I kind of came in with balanced literacy when it was just kind of called balanced literacy. So all of that was helpful. But is is then, if we think about the purpose of being on Twitter to share information like you do, so is that the best way to think about it as a vehicle for getting truth out there?
Paul Thomas (45:00):
Yeah. I would say, I would say two things. One historically we have told teachers not to be political, which is a political demand, by the way. And we also keep classroom teachers way too busy. If you keep people with their head down, they don't see what's happening to them. So I do not expect teachers to sacrifice themselves. I don't expect K-12 teachers to speak out. Absolutely, that is not an expectation. If you do find the opportunity, I think you said it perfectly. Most of my work that I do on social media is to teach, it's an extension of my teaching. I cite, my blogs are heavily cited. I cite, I link to peer review journal articles on Twitter. So I think you have to perform on social media, not to change people's minds that you're speaking to, but to leave a trail for other people to learn.
(46:03):
I am rarely actually speaking to the individual I'm responding to. I am leaving a trail for other people to learn from. Nobody's asking K-12 teachers to sacrifice themselves. Nobody's asking K-12 teachers to lose their jobs. As a matter of fact, I don't want you to lose your job. I'm relatively safe. I'm even at a private university. If I were in Florida and I was at a public university, I would be toast. But my university is incredibly supportive. I'm a white guy, I'm tenured, I'm old. Let us do it, you know, let us take the brunt of the damage. But if you do engage, it's not to change people's minds, it's to teach.
Matt Renwick (46:54):
Well said Paul. And your policy brief, half the brief is citations. I mean, it's just so well resourced. And I remember Peter Aach speaking about your work too, and just said you were meticulous. I think that's one of the first people he brought up about how to be become more knowledgeable about this topic and stay engaged. So thank you Paul Thomas. Thank you everyone for being here. This has been great. We wish you all a good rest of the year if you're still going. Otherwise, we hope you are enjoying your summer break. Thank you.
Paul Thomas (47:27):
Thank you. A pleasure.
Matt Renwick (47:28):
Thank you.
The Science of Reading Movement and The Never-Ending Debate: A Conversation with Paul Thomas