This story was produced by the Associated Press and reprinted with permission.
Math is the subject sixth grader Harmoni Knight finds hardest, but that’s changing.
In-class tutors and “data chats” at her middle school in Compton, California, have made a dramatic difference, the 11-year-old said. She proudly pulled up a performance tracker at a tutoring session last week, displaying a column of perfect 100 percent scores on all her weekly quizzes from January.
Since the pandemic first shuttered American classrooms, schools have poured federal and local relief money into interventions like the ones in Harmoni’s classroom, hoping to help students catch up academically following COVID-19 disruptions.
But a new analysis of state and national test scores shows the average student remains half a grade level behind pre-pandemic achievement in both reading and math. In reading, especially, students are even further behind than they were in 2022, the analysis shows.
Compton is an outlier, making some of the biggest two-year gains in both subjects among large districts. And there are other bright spots, along with evidence that interventions like tutoring and summer programs are working.
Students interact in a fourth grade classroom at William Jefferson Clinton Elementary in Compton, Calif., Thursday, Feb. 6, 2025. Credit: Eric Thayer/Associated Press
The Education Recovery Scorecard analysis by researchers at Harvard, Stanford and Dartmouth allows year-to-year comparisons across states and districts, providing the most comprehensive picture yet of how American students are performing since COVID-19 first disrupted learning.
The most recent data is based on tests taken by students in spring 2024. By then, the worst of the pandemic was long past, but schools were dealing still with a mental health crisis and high rates of absenteeism — not to mention students who’d had crucial learning disrupted.
“The losses are not just due to what happened during the 2020 to 2021 school year, but the aftershocks that have hit schools in the years since the pandemic,” said Tom Kane, a Harvard economist who worked on the scorecard.
In some cases, the analysis shows school districts are struggling when their students may have posted decent results on their state tests. That’s because each state adopts its own assessments, and those aren’t comparable to each other. Those differences can make it impossible to tell whether students are performing better because of their progress, or whether those shifts are because the tests themselves are changing, or the state has lowered its standards for proficiency.
The Scorecard accounts for differing state tests and provides one national standard.
Higher-income districts have made significantly more progress than lower-income districts, with the top 10 percent of high-income districts four times more likely to have recovered in both math and reading compared with the poorest 10 percent. And recovery within districts remains divided by race and class, especially in math scores. Test score gaps grew by both race and income.
A student works in a classroom at Benjamin O. Davis Middle School in Compton, Calif., Thursday, Feb. 6, 2025. Credit: Eric Thayer/Associated Press
“The pandemic has not only driven test scores down, but that decline masks a pernicious inequality that has grown during the pandemic,” said Sean Reardon, a Stanford sociologist who worked on the scorecard. “Not only are districts serving more Black and Hispanic students falling further behind, but even within those districts, Black and Hispanic students are falling further behind their white district mates.”
Still, many of the districts that outperformed the country serve predominantly low-income students or students of color, and their interventions offer best practices for other districts.
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In Compton, the district responded to the pandemic by hiring over 250 tutors that specialize in math, reading and students learning English. Certain classes are staffed with multiple tutors to assist teachers. And schools offer tutoring before, during and after school, plus “Saturday School” and summer programs for the district’s 17,000 students, said Superintendent Darin Brawley.
To identify younger students needing targeted support, the district now conducts dyslexia screenings in all elementary schools.
The low-income school district near downtown Los Angeles, with a student body that is 84 percent Latino and 14 percent Black, now has a graduation rate of 93 percent, compared with 58 percent when Brawley took the job in 2012.
Harmoni, the sixth-grader, said that one-on-one tutoring has helped her grasp concepts and given her more confidence in math. She gets separate “data chats” with her math specialist that are part performance review, part pep talk.
“Looking at my data, it kind of disappoints me” when the numbers are low, said Harmoni. “But it makes me realize I can do better in the future, and also now.”
Brawley said he’s proud of the district’s latest test scores, but not content.
“Truth be told, I wasn’t happy,” he said. “Even though we gained, and we celebrate the gains, at the end of the day we all know that we can do better.”
A tutor helps students at Benjamin O. Davis Middle School in Compton, Calif., Thursday, Feb. 6, 2025. Credit: Eric Thayer/Associated Press
As federal pandemic relief money for schools winds down, states and school districts will have limited resources and must prioritize interventions that worked. Districts that spent federal money on increased instructional time, either through tutoring or summer school, saw a return on that investment.
Reading levels have continued to decline, despite a movement in many states to emphasize phonics and the “science of reading.” So Reardon and Kane called for an evaluation of the mixed results for insights into the best ways to teach kids to read.
The researchers emphasized the need to extend state and local money to support pandemic recovery programs that showed strong academic results. Schools also must engage parents and tell them when their kids are behind, the researchers said.
And schools must continue to work with community groups to improve students’ attendance. The scorecard identified a relationship between high absenteeism and learning struggles.
In the District of Columbia, an intensive tutoring program helped with both academics and attendance, said D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Lewis Ferebee. In the scorecard analysis, the District of Columbia ranked first among states for gains in both math and reading between 2022 and 2024, after its math recovery had fallen toward the bottom of the list.
Pandemic-relief money funded the tutoring, along with a system of identifying and targeting support at students in greatest need. The district also hired program managers who helped maximize time for tutoring within the school day, Ferebee said.
Students who received tutoring were more likely to be engaged with school, Ferebee said, both from increased confidence over the subject matter and because they had a relationship with another trusted adult.
Students expressed that “I’m more confident in math because I’m being validated by another adult,” Ferebee said. “That validation goes a long way, not only with attendance, but a student feeling like they are ready to learn and are capable, and as a result, they show up differently.”
Federal pandemic relief money has ended, but Ferebee said many of the investments the district made will have lasting impact, including the money spent on teacher training and curriculum development in literacy.
Students walk through a hallway at Benjamin O. Davis Middle School in Compton, Calif., Thursday, Feb. 6, 2025. Credit: Eric Thayer/Associated Press
Christina Grant, who served as the District of Columbia’s state superintendent of education until 2024, said she’s hopeful to see the evidence emerging on what’s made a difference in student achievement.
“We cannot afford to not have hope. These are our students. They did not cause the pandemic,” Grant said. “The growing concern is ensuring that we can … see ourselves to the other side.”
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Over the past decade, a majority of states have passed new “science of reading” laws or implemented policies that emphasize phonics in classrooms. Yet the 2024 results of an important national test, released last month, showed that the reading scores of elementary and middle schoolers continued their long downward slide, hitting new lows.
The emphasis on phonics in many schools is still relatively new and may need more time to yield results. But a growing chorus of education advocates has been arguing that phonics isn’t enough. They say that being able to decode the letters and read words is critically important, but students also need to make sense of the words.
Some educators are calling for schools to adopt a curriculum that emphasizes content along with phonics. More schools around the country, from Baltimore to Michigan to Colorado, are adopting these content-filled lessons to teach geography, astronomy and even art history. The theory, which has been documented in a small number of laboratory experiments, is that the more students already know about a topic, the better they can understand a passage about it. For example, a passage on farming might make more sense if you know something about how plants grow. The brain gets overwhelmed by too many new concepts and unfamiliar words. We’ve all been there.
A ‘Knowledge Revival’
A 2025 book by 10 education researchers in Europe and Australia, “Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking: The Knowledge Revival,” makes the case that students cannot learn the skills of comprehension and critical thinking unless they know a lot of stuff first. These ideas have revived interest in E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge curriculum, which gained popularity in the late 1980s. Hirsch, a professor emeritus of education and humanities at the University of Virginia, argues that democracy benefits when the citizenry shares a body of knowledge and history, which he calls cultural literacy. Now it’s a cognitive science argument that a core curriculum is also good for our brains and facilitates learning.
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The idea of forcing children to learn a specific set of facts and topics is controversial. It runs counter to newer trends of “culturally relevant pedagogy,” or “culturally responsive teaching,” in which critics contendthat students’ identities should be reflected in what they learn. Others say learning facts is unimportant in the age of Google where we can instantly look anything up, and that the focus should be on teaching skills. Content skeptics also point out that there’s never been a study to show that increasing knowledge of the world boosts reading scores.
It would be nearly impossible for an individual teacher to create the kind of content-packed curriculum that this pro-knowledge branch of education researchers has in mind. Lessons need to be coordinated across grades, from kindergarten onward. It’s not just a random collection of encyclopedia entries or interesting units on, say, Greek myths or the planets in our solar system. The science and social studies topics should be sequenced so that the ideas build upon each other, and paired with vocabulary that will be useful in the future.
The big question is whether the theory that more knowledge improves reading comprehension applies to real schools where children are reading below grade level. Does a content-packed curriculum translate into higher reading achievement years later?
Putting knowledge to the test
Researchers have been testing content-packed lessons in schools to see how much they boost reading comprehension. A 2023 study of the Core Knowledge curriculum, which was not peer reviewed, received a lot of buzz. The students who attended nine schools that adopted the curriculum were stronger readers. But it was impossible to tell whether the Core Knowledge curriculum itself made the difference or if the boost to reading scores could be attributed to the fact that all nine schools were highly regarded charter schools and were doing something else that made a difference. Perhaps they had hired great teachers and trained them well, for example. Also, the students at these charter schools were largely from middle and upper middle class families. What we really want to know is whether knowledge building at school helps the poorest children, who are less likely to be exposed to the world through travel, live performances, and other experiences that money can buy.
Another content-heavy curriculum developed by Harvard education professor James Kim produced a modest boost to reading scores in a randomized controlled trial, according to a paper published in 2024. Reading instruction was untouched, but the students received special science and social studies lessons that were intended to boost young children’s knowledge and vocabulary. Unfortunately, the pandemic hit in the middle of the experiment and many of the lessons had to be scrapped.
Still, for the 1,000 students who had received some of the special lessons in first and second grades, their reading and math scores on the North Carolina state tests were higher not only in third grade, but also in fourth grade, more than a year after the knowledge-building experiment ended. Most of the students were Black and Hispanic. Forty percent were from poor families.
The latest study
The Core Knowledge curriculum was put to the test in another study by a team of eight researchers in two unidentified cities in the mid-Atlantic and the South, where the majority of children were Black and from low income families. More than 20 schools had been randomly assigned to give kindergarteners some lessons from the Core Knowledge curriculum. The schools continued with their usual phonics instruction, but “read aloud” time, when a teacher ordinarily reads a picture book to students, had been replaced with units on plants, farming and Native Americans, for example. More than 500 kindergarteners looked at pictures on a large screen, while a teacher discussed the topics and taught new vocabulary. Additional activities reinforced the lessons.
According to a paper published in the February 2025 issue of the Journal of Education Psychology, the 565 children who received the Core Knowledge lessons did better on tests of the topics and words that were taught, compared with 626 children who had learned reading as usual and weren’t exposed to these topics. But they did no better in tests of general language, vocabulary development or listening comprehension. Reading itself was not evaluated. Unfortunately, the pandemic also interfered in the middle of this experiment and cut short the analysis of the students through first and second grades.
Lead researcher Sonia Cabell, an associate professor at Florida State University, says she is looking at longer term achievement data from these students, who are now in middle school. But she said she isn’t seeing a clear “signal” that the students who had this Core Knowledge instruction for a few months in kindergarten are doing any better.
Glimmers of hope
Cabell did see glimmers of hope. Students in the control group schools, who didn’t receive Core Knowledge instruction, also learned about plants. But the Core Knowledge students had much more to say when researchers asked them the question: “Tell me everything you know about plants.” The results of a test of general science knowledge came just shy of statistical significance, which would have demonstrated that the Core Knowledge students were able to transfer the specific knowledge they had learned in the lessons to a broader understanding of science.
“There are pieces of this that are promising and encouraging,” said Cabell, who says that it’s complicated to study the combination of conventional reading instruction, such as phonics and vocabulary, with content knowledge. “We need to better understand what the active ingredient is. Is it the knowledge?”
All the latest Core Knowledge study proves is that students are more likely to do well on a test of something they have been taught. Some observers errantly interpreted that as evidence that a knowledge rich curriculum is beneficial.
“If your great new curriculum reads articles about penguins to the kids and your old stupid curriculum reads articles about walruses to them, one of these is going to look more successful when the kids are evaluated with a penguin test,” explained Tim Shanahan, a literacy expert and a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago who was not involved in this research.
Widening achievement gaps
And distressingly, students who arrived at kindergarten with stronger language skillsabsorbed a lot more from these content-rich lessons than lower achieving students. Instead of helping low achieving kids catch up, achievement gaps widened.
People with more knowledge tend to be better readers. That’s not proof that increasing knowledge improves reading. It could be that higher achieving kids like learning about the world and enjoy reading. And if you stuff a child with more knowledge, it’s possible that his reading skills may not improve.
The long view
Shanahan speculates that if knowledge building does improve reading comprehension, it would take many, many years for it to manifest.
“If these efforts aren’t allowed to elbow sound reading instruction aside, they cannot hurt and, in the long run, they might even help,” he wrote in a 2021 blog post.
Researchers are still in the early stages of designing and testing the content students need to boost literacy skills. We are all waiting for answers.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
This blog has been kindly written for HEPI by Professor Sir Chris Husbands, who was Vice-Chancellor of Sheffield Hallam University between 2016 and 2023, and is now a Director of Higher Futures, working with university leaders to lead sustainable solutions to institutional challenges.
The scale of the funding challenge in higher education is widely known, though almost every week brings news of fresh challenges and responses. Real term funding for undergraduate teaching in 2025 is close to 1997 levels – levels which led the Blair government to introduce £1,000 top-up fees. Some commentators have argued that the scale of the challenge now is as great as the 1981 cuts in government funding for universities, which reduced spending on universities by 15%, and saw Salford University lose 44% of its income.
As contemporary funding challenges have intensified, growth options have become more difficult:
international student numbers have either stalled or declined;
undergraduate growth, although evident, has not tracked demographic trends;
the Office for Students has identified persistent optimism bias in the sector’s funding projections; and
competitive pressures are multiplying.
In many countries, flexible for-profit providers are growing fast, especially in professional and post-graduate education. Many of these are backed by funds with deep investment pockets; some UK for-profit providers are growing very quickly and the expansion of private provision in Germany, France and Canada has been remarkable. In summary, the funding challenge is not only real but increasingly profound.
Institutional responses to these challenges have been extensive. Almost all universities are now undertaking significant change programmes. There have been major strides in revising operating models, especially for professional and support services, and the impact has been significant. On the other hand, although portfolio reviews are widespread, there have been fewer developments in reshaping business models for teaching and research, though some do exist. Core delivery arrangements largely remain based on a two-semester or three-term model. Staff-student ratios which, as the King’s College Vice-Chancellor Shitij Kapur has repeatedly emphasised are low by international standards, have not been significantly shifted. Undergraduate study remains relatively inflexible. Module sharing and simplified credit transfer arrangements remain small scale. Estate use has not been significantly intensified. All this suggests that individual institutions are finding it difficult to look at the challenge strategically with an eye to the longer term shape, size, structure and nature of the university. There is a lot happening in individual change plans, but probably not enough. Without a secure and sustainable core academic model, institutions will be forced into repeated restructurings, which will not be comfortable for them or for the sector more generally.
This is the background to the important Jisc-KPMG report Collaboration for a sustainable future, which was the subject of a this week’s HEPI / Jisc webinar. For all the evidence of individual institutional change, the report argues that a collaborative approach is needed to secure sustainability and reshape the sector. Institutions need to find ways to work together, in back-office functions, in professional services and perhaps in academic delivery. The report acknowledges that there are technical difficulties to overcome, including the requirement to pay VAT on shared services and the need to navigate competition law, though these need to be genuinely tested in practice, but it also argues that the deeper barriers to effective collaboration are cultural.
The ingrained habit of individual autonomy, even and perhaps especially in non-competitive services (as Nick Hillman reinforced, no one chooses their undergraduate degree based on the university’s finance system) is a major barrier to significant change. Moreover, the report acknowledges that collaboration and shared service arrangements are unlikely to deliver cost savings in the short-term – and just now a good deal of thinking in the sector seems to be shaped by Keynes’ dictum that ‘in the long-run we are all dead’. Institutions are caught between the economic realities of the funding challenge and the cultural challenges of collaboration.
In Four Futures, my HEPI paper published in June last year,I argued that the financial and funding circumstances which produced the sector we have no longer exist. Government is unwilling or unable to pay for the sector most university leaders would like. I argued that there were some policy choices for higher education, and that the sector will almost certainly be different in the future. There are public policy questions here, but there are also questions and challenges for institutions. That means strategic choices for leaders, with universities being much clearer about the things they can do well, and do well sustainably, and building different relationships with other institutions. Leadership matters. As the Jisc / KPMG report observes:
Given the current trajectory, there is a window of opportunity for institutions to act now and help drive this forward before they are compelled into action by necessity.
Competition over the past decade has undoubtedly delivered benefits, and we should not understate those, especially in estate investment, student experience, teaching quality and research performance. But competition has also delivered homogeneity, duplication and overlap, and that needs to change. And for that, as the Jisc / KPMG report identifies, the leadership culture needs to change. Hyper-competitiveness has driven institutionally focused leadership behaviours and associated performance indicators, targets and rewards. But there have been different leadership assumptions in higher education in the past, and other sectors have grappled with the challenge of changing leadership culture. The most successful school improvement initiative of the past generation was London Challenge, in which the performance of schools across the capital was significantly raised. One of the most important shifts was a cultural one, persuading headteachers to think not about ‘my school’ but about ‘[all] our children’: success across the system was a leadership challenge for all.
The Jisc / KPMG Report is strong on the potential for collaboration to shape the future of the system, though it also makes painful reading on the challenges which have bedevilled this in the past. In the current context, government is unlikely to provide additional funding. The private sector could no doubt provide standardised sector-wide services, but the risks of a single supplier for key services are enormous. If government is not the solution, if the private sector is not the solution, if the status quo is not sustainable, the answer must be imaginative and engaged leadership which is not simply about ‘my institution’ but also about ‘our future’.
This week’s HEPI / Jisc webinar on ‘Competition or collaboration? Opportunities for the future of the higher education sector’ can be watched back here.
The results of a major national test released Wednesday showed that in 2024, reading and math skills of fourth and eighth grade students were still significantly below those of students in 2019, the last administration of the test before the pandemic. In reading, students slid below the devastatingly low achievement levels of 2022, which many educators had hoped would be a nadir.
The test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), is often called the nation’s report card. Administered by the federal government, it tracks student performance in fourth and eighth grades and serves as a national yardstick of achievement. Scores for the nation’s lowest-performing students were worse in both reading and math than those of students two years ago. The only bright spot was progress by higher-achieving children in math.
The NAEP report offers no explanation for why students are faltering, and the results were especially disappointing after the federal government gave schools $190 billion to aid in pandemic recovery.
“These 2024 results clearly show that students are not where they need to be or where we want them to be,” said Peggy Carr, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, in a briefing with journalists.
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More than 450,000 fourth and eighth graders, selected to be representative of the U.S. population, took the biennial reading and math tests between January and March of 2024.
Depressed student achievement was pervasive across the country, regardless of state policies or instructional mandates. Student performance in every state remained below what it was in 2019 on at least one of the four reading or math tests. In addition to state and national results, the NAEP report also lists the academic performance for 26 large cities that volunteer for extra testing.
An ever-widening gap
The results also highlighted the sharp divergence between higher- and lower- achieving students. The modest progress in fourth grade math was entirely driven by high-achieving students. And the deterioration in both fourth and eighth grade reading was driven by declines among low-achieving students.
“Certainly the most striking thing in the results is the increase in inequality,” said Martin West, a professor of education at Harvard University and vice chair of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the NAEP test. “That’s a big deal. It’s something that we hadn’t paid a lot of attention to traditionally.”
The starkest example of growing inequality is in eighth grade math, where the achievement gap grew to the largest in the history of the test.
Source: NAEP 2024
The chart above shows that the math scores of all eighth graders fell between 2019 and 2022. Afterward, high-achieving students in the top 10 percent and 25 percent of the nation (labeled as the 90th and 75th percentiles above) began to improve, recovering about a quarter of the setbacks for high achievers during the pandemic. That’s still far behind high-performing eighth graders in 2019, but at least it’s a positive trend.
The more disturbing result is the continuing deterioration of scores by low-performing students in the bottom 10 percent and 25 percent. The huge pandemic learning losses for students in the bottom 10 percent grew 70 percent larger between 2022 and 2024. Learning losses for students in the bottom 25 percent grew 25 percent larger.
“The rich get richer and the poor are getting shafted,” said Scott Marion, who serves on the NAEP’s governing board and is the executive director of the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment, a nonprofit consultancy. “It’s almost criminal.”
More than two-thirds of students in the bottom 25 percent are economically disadvantaged. A quarter of these low performers are white and another quarter are Black. More than 40 percent are Hispanic. A third of these students have a disability and a quarter are classified as English learners.
By contrast, fewer than a quarter of the students in the top 25 percent are economically disadvantaged. They are disproportionately white (61 percent) and Asian American (14 percent). Only 5 percent are Black and 15 percent are Hispanic. Three percent or fewer of students at the top have a disability or are classified as English learners.
Although average math scores among all eighth grade students were unchanged between 2022 and 2024, that average masks the improvements at the top and the deterioration at the bottom. They offset each other.
The NAEP test does not track individual students. The eighth graders who took the exam in 2024 were a different group of students than the eighth graders who took the exam in 2022 and who are now older. Individual students have certainly learned new skills since 2019. When NAEP scores drop, it’s not that students have regressed and cannot do things they used to be able to do. It means that they’re learning less each year. Kids today aren’t able to read or solve math problems as well as kids their same age in the past.
Students who were in eighth grade in early 2024, when this exam was administered, were in fourth grade when the pandemic first shuttered schools in March 2020. Their fifth grade year, when students should have learned how to add fractions and round decimals, was profoundly disrupted. School days began returning to normal during their sixth and seventh grade years.
Harvard’s West explained that it was incorrect to assume that children could bounce back academically. That would require students to learn more in a year than they historically have, even during the best of times.
“There’s nothing in the science of learning and development that would lead us to expect students to learn at a faster rate after they’ve experienced disruption and setbacks,” West said. “Absent a massive effort society-wide to address the challenge, and I just haven’t seen an effort on the scale that I think would be needed, we shouldn’t expect more positive results.”
Learning loss is like a retirement savings shortfall
Learning isn’t like physical exercise, West said. When our conditioning deteriorates after an injury, the first workouts might be a grind but we can get back to our pre-injury fitness level relatively quickly.
“The better metaphor is saving for retirement,” said West. “If you miss a deposit into your account because of a short-term emergency, you have to find a way to make up that shortfall, and you have to make it up with interest.”
What we may be seeing now are the enduring consequences of gaps in basic skills. As the gaps accumulate, it becomes harder and harder for students to keep up with grade-level content.
Another factor weighing down student achievement is rampant absenteeism. In survey questions that accompany the test, students reported attending school slightly more often than they had in 2022, but still far below their 2019 attendance rates. Eleven percent of eighth graders said that they had missed five or more school days in the past month, down from 16 percent in 2022, but still far more than the 7 percent of students who missed that much school in 2019.
“We also see that lower-performing readers aren’t coming to school,” said NCES Commissioner Carr. “There’s a strong relationship between absenteeism and performance in these data that we’re looking at today.”
Eighth graders by the number of days they said they were absent from school in the previous month
Source: NAEP 2024
Fourth grade math results were more hopeful. Top-performing children fully recovered back to 2019 achievement levels and can do math about as well as their previous peers. However, lower-performing children in the bottom 10 percent and 25 percent did not rebound at all. Their scores were unchanged between 2022 and 2024. These students were in kindergarten when the pandemic first hit in 2020 and missed basic instruction in counting and arithmetic.
Reading scores showed a similar divergence between high- and low- achievers.
Source: NAEP 2024
This chart above shows that the highest-performing eighth graders failed to catch up to what high-achieving eighth graders used to be able to do on reading comprehension tests. But it’s not a giant difference. What’s startling is the steep decline in reading scores for low-achieving students. The pandemic drops have now doubled in size. Reading comprehension is much, much worse for many middle schoolers.
It’s difficult to say how much of this deterioration is pandemic related. Reading comprehension scores for middle schoolers had been declining for a decade since 2013. Separate surveys show that students are reading less for pleasure, and many educators speculate that cellphone use has replaced reading time.
One possibility, said Harvard’s West, is that it’s “premature” to see the benefits of improved instruction, which could take years. Another possibility, according to assessment expert Marion, is that being able to read words is important, but it’s not enough to do well on the NAEP, which is a test of comprehension. More elementary school students may be better at decoding words, but they have to make sense of those words to do well on the NAEP.
Carr cited the example of Louisiana as proof that it is possible to turn things around. The state exceeded its 2019 achievement levels in fourth grade reading. “They did focus heavily on the science of reading but they didn’t start yesterday,” said Carr. “I wouldn’t say that hope is lost.”
More students fall below the lowest “basic” level
The results show that many more children lack even the most basic skills. In math, 24 percent of fourth graders and 39 percent of eighth graders cannot reach the lowest of three achievement levels, called “basic.” (The others are “proficient” and “advanced.”) These are fourth graders who cannot locate whole numbers on a number line or eighth graders who cannot understand scientific notation.
The share of students reading below basic was the highest it’s ever been for eighth graders, and the highest in 20 years for fourth graders. Forty percentof fourth graders cannot put events from a story into sequential order, and one third of eighth graders cannot determine the meaning of a word in the context of a reading passage.
“To me, this is the most pressing challenge facing American education,” said West.
This story about the 2024 NAEP test was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger newsletters.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
These are the remarks by Alison Payne, Research Director at Reform Scotland, at the HEPI / CDBU event on funding higher education, held at Birkbeck, University of London, on Thursday of this week.
We are also making available Johnny Rich’s slides on ‘Making graduate employer contributions work’ from the same event, which are available to download here.
Thanks to the CDBU and to HEPI for the invitation to attend and take part in today’s discussion.
My speech today has been titled ‘A graduate contribution model’. Of course, for UK graduates not from Scotland, I’m sure they would make the point that they very much do contribute through their fees, but the situation is very different in Scotland and I’m really grateful that I have the opportunity to feed the Scottish situation into today’s discussion.
I thought it may be helpful if I gave a quick overview of the Scottish situation, as it differs somewhat to the overview Nick gave this morning covering the rest of the UK.
Although tuition fees were introduced throughout the UK in 1998, the advent of devolution in 1999 and the passing of responsibility for higher education to Holyrood began the period of diverging funding policies.
The then Labour / Lib Dem Scottish Executive, as it was then known, scrapped tuition fees and replaced them with a graduate endowment from 2001-02, with the first students becoming liable to pay the fee from April 2005. The scheme called for students to pay back £2,000 once they started earning over £10,000.
The graduate endowment was then scrapped by the SNP in February 2008. A quirk of EU law meant that students from EU countries could not be charged tuition fees if Scottish students were not paying them but students from England, Wales and Northern Ireland could be charged. This meant that from 2008 to 2021/22 EU students did not need to pay fees to attend Scottish universities, though students from the rest of the UK did.
We’re used to politics in Scotland being highly polarised and often toxic with few areas of commonality, but for the most part the policy of ‘free’ higher education has been supported by all of the political parties. Indeed at the last Scottish election in 2021 all parties committed to maintaining the policy in their manifestos. It is only recently that the Scottish Tories have suggested a move away from this following the election of their new leader, Russell Finlay.
But behind this unusual political consensus, the ‘free’ policy is becoming increasingly unsustainable and unaffordable. Politicians will privately admit this, but politics, and a rock with an ill-advised slogan, have made it harder to have the much needed debate.
The Cap
While we don’t have tuition fees, we do have a cap on student numbers. And while more Scots are going to university, places are unable to keep up with demand. Since 2006 there has been a 56% increase in applicants, but an 84% increase in the number refused entry.
It is increasingly the case that students from the rest of the UK or overseas are accepted on to courses in Scotland while their Scottish counterparts are denied. For example, when clearing options are posted, often those places at Scotland’s top universities are only available to students from the rest of the UK and not to Scottish students, even if the latter have better grades. As a result, Scots can feel that they are denied access to education on their doorstep that those from elsewhere can obtain. Indeed, there are growing anecdotes about those who can afford it buying or renting property elsewhere in the UK so that they can attend a Scottish university, pay the higher fee and get around the cap.
Some commentators in Scotland have blamed the lack of places on widening access programmes, but I would challenge this. It is undoubtedly a good thing that more people from non-traditional backgrounds are getting into university, it is the cap that is limiting Scottish places, not access programmes. This is a point that has been backed by individuals such as the Principal of St Andrews, Professor Dame Sally Mapstone [who also serves as HEPI’s Chair].
Financial Woes
The higher education sector in Scotland, as with elsewhere in the UK, is not in great financial health. Audit Scotland warned back in 2019 that half of our institutions were facing growing deficits. Pressures including pensions contributions, Brexit and estate maintenance have all played a role and in the face of this decline, but nothing has changed and we’re now seeing crisis like those at Dundee emerge. Against this backdrop, income from those students who pay higher fees is an important revenue stream.
There is obviously a huge variation in what the fees are to attend a Scottish university, considerably more so than in the rest of the UK.
For example, to study Accounting and Business as an undergraduate at Edinburgh University, the cost for a full-time new student for 2024/25 is £1,820 per year for a Scottish-domiciled student (met by the Scottish Government), £9,250 per year for someone from the rest of the UK and £26,500 for an international student.
It is clear why international students and UK students from outside Scotland are therefore so much more attractive than Scottish students.
However, there is by no means an equal distribution of higher fee paying students among our institutions.
For example, at St Andrews about one-third of undergraduate full-time students were Scots, with one-third from the rest of the UK and one-third international. The numbers for Edinburgh are similar.
At the other end of the scale, at the University of the Highlands and Islands and Glasgow Caledonian, around 90% of students are Scottish, with only around only 1% being international.
So it is clear that institutions’ ability to raise money from fee-paying students varies very dramatically, increasing the financial pressures on those with low fee income.
However, when looking at the issue, it is important to recognise that it is not just our universities who are struggling, Scotland’s colleges are facing huge financial pressures as well.
The current proposed Scottish budget would leave colleges struggling with a persistent, real-terms funding cut of 17 per cent since 2021/22. Our college sector is hugely important in terms of the delivery of skills, working with local economies and as a route to university for so many, but for too long colleges have been treated like the Cinderella service in Scotland. The prioritising of ‘free’ university tuition over the college sector is adding to this problem.
Regardless of who wins the Holyrood election next year, money is, and will remain, tight for some time. It would be lovely to be able to have lots of taxpayer funded ‘free’ services, but that is simply unsustainable and difficult choices need to be made.
This is why we believe that the current situation is unfair, unsustainable, unaffordable and needs to change.
Reform Scotland would offer another alternative solution. We believe that there needs to be a better balance between the individual graduate and Scottish taxpayers in the contribution towards higher education.
One way this could be achieved is through a fee after graduation, to be repaid once they earn more than the Scottish average salary. This would not be a fee incurred on starting university and deferred until after graduation, rather the fee would be incurred on graduation.
In terms of what that fee could be, the Cubie report over 25 years ago suggested a graduate fee of £3,000, which would be about £5,500 today. This could perhaps be the starting point for consideration.
Any figure should take account of different variations in terms of the true cost of the course and potential skill shortages.
However, introducing a graduate fee would not necessarily mean an end to ‘free’ tuition.
Rather it provides an opportunity to look at the skills gaps that exist in Scotland and the possibility of developing schemes which cut off or scrap repayments for graduates who work in specific geographic areas or sectors of Scotland for set periods of time.
Such schemes could also look to incorporate students from elsewhere for Scotland is facing a demographic crisis. Our population is set to become older and smaller, and we are the only part of the UK projected to have a smaller population by 2045.
We desperately need to retain and attract more working-age people. Perhaps such graduate repayment waiver schemes could also be offered to students from the rest of the UK who choose to study in Scotland – stay here and work after graduation and we will pay a proportion of your fee. A wide range of different schemes could be considered and linked into the wider policy issues facing Scotland.
According to the Higher Education Statistics Authority (HESA) there were 3,370 graduates from the rest of the UK who attended a Scottish institution in 2020/21. Of those, only 990 chose to remain in Scotland for work after graduation. Could we encourage more people to stay after studying?
Conclusion
A graduate fee is only one possible solution, but I would argue that it is also one with a short shelf life. As graduates would not incur the fee until they graduated, there would be a four-year delay between the change in policy and revenue beginning to be received. Our institutions are facing very real fiscal problems and there is a danger of a university going to the wall.
If we get to the 2026 election and political parties refuse to shift the dial and at least recognise that the current system is unsustainable, then there is a danger that nothing will change for another Parliamentary term. I don’t think we can afford to wait until 2031.
There is another interesting dynamic now as well. Labour in Scotland currently, publicly at least, oppose tuition fees. However, there are now 37 Scottish Labour MPs at Westminster who are backing the increase of fees on students from outside Scotland, or Scottish students studying down south. Given the unpopularity of the Labour government as well as the tight contest between the SNP and Labour for Holyrood, it seems unlikely that position can be maintained.
All across the UK there are increasing signs of the stark financial situation we are facing. Against that backdrop, along with the restrictions placed on the number being able to attend, free university tuition is unsustainable and unaffordable. People outside Scottish politics seem to be able to see this reality, privately so do many of our politicians. We need to shift this debate in to the public domain in Scotland and develop a workable solution.
As 2024 draws to a close, Josh Freeman, Policy Manager, and the HEPI team look back on a remarkable year in higher education policy.
We have a fantastic programme of events to look forward to in 2025, which you can read all about here.
One of the best things about working at HEPI is that we can take a bird’s eye view of the sector. Today, we gaze over quite a different policy landscape from the one I wrote about this time last year. We have a new Government which, unlike the last one, is not afraid to raise tuition fees. The Graduate Route visa survived in its current form, largely because of the international fee income it helps bring to struggling institutions. Universities UK published its Blueprint, proving it is possible to get 140 vice-chancellors (or thereabouts) to agree on something. Despite all this, nothing seems to stop the interminable slide into financial precarity with up to three-quarters of institutions at risk of running deficits in 2025.
It has been a privilege to capture many of these moments and more on the HEPI blog, which had another exceptionally busy year. As we approach the end of 2024, the HEPI team reflects on the pieces which set the tone for the year, struck a chord in institutions, led policy change or were just a great read.
Winter
In January, we heard from Laura Coryton MBE about period poverty in higher education, the stigma attached to it and the strategies institutions can take to address it. HEPI intern Famke Veenstra-Ashmore also discussed this issue, among many others, in her report on the gender awarding gap at Oxbridge in November.
Richard Courtney of the University of East London won the prize for best analogy of the year with his comparison of a Chinese meal to higher education qualification types in February.
This spring was a season of reflection, with Susan Mueller, Director at Stand Alone, bidding farewell and marking the closure of a charity which supported estranged students since 2015.
And Naimat Zafary, PhD researcher at the University of Sussex, marked 1,000 days since girls’ education was banned in Afghanistan with an extraordinarily powerful piece reminding us not to take education for granted:
Last week, I visited the British Library, one of my favourite places in London. I was attracted by the Magna Carta which declared: ‘No free man shall be seized, imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed, exiled or ruined in any way, nor in any way proceeded against, except by the lawful judgment’.
But where is lawful judgment for those denied? What fault in Afghan girls? My little nieces don’t understand their crime. Is love of education a criminal act if you happen to be female?
Summer
As we absorbed the previous day’s General Election results, attention turned to its consequences for higher education. While some of us were struggling to function on two hours’ sleep, HEPI Director Nick Hillman was already analysing how far students’ had swayed the results, building on his own analysis of the 2019 General Election and my analysis ahead of the 2024 vote.
University of Southampton Chief of Staff Giles Carden made his pitch for 10 policies the new Government could implement to fill the policy vacuum, including ‘fundamental reform’ to the Office for Students and setting out a new strategy for digital education.
And our political commentary came to a head when Rose Stephenson, Director of Policy and Advocacy, and I described what we had seen and heard at the Labour Party Conference.
Autumn
The introduction of the Renters’ Rights Bill to Parliament in September 2024 generated much discussion, including several pieces by former Unipol CEO Martin Blakey. His essential primer from October is a must-read for those trying to get their heads around the draft legislation. Martin also wrote for us in June and November on the same topic.
HEPI Director Nick Hillman asked whether restricting access to the Russell Group would improve social mobility (he was sceptical).
Also in October, outgoing Open University Vice-Chancellor Tim Blackman asked, responding to Office for Students (OfS) analysis of degree classifications, whether and how we should measure ‘grade inflation’. In the words of our Director of Partnerships, Lucy Haire, the blog:
poses challenges to the OfS’s methods and use of data, but even more than that, it gets to the heart of what learning is all about and how it is achieved. It tackles prejudice about disadvantage and weak prior learning and, above all, recognises the strides that students take, the role of good teaching and the importance of skilled teachers.
Our piece with a star-studded lineup, including former Welsh Director of Skills, Higher Education and Lifelong Learning Professor Huw Morris and Professor of Public Policy at Manchester Andy Westwood, set out a vision for a new tertiary system.
And particular credit goes to one of our highest-performing pieces of the year from Meti Basiri, CEO of ApplyBoard. He asks which international student populations institutions should be recruiting from. He also wins the (coveted) prize for best graphics.
That’s it from us
Thank you to everyone who has written for us, supported our research, kept up with our daily 6:30am blogs and engaged with us in any way over the past year.
The HEPI blog will continue in a limited form over the break, so do keep an eye out between mince pies. We will be back in full force in January.
Until then, have a wonderful festive break and we will see you for more in 2025!
CORRIGAN: Is there anything else you’d like to share about reading, teaching, or Reading Wide Awake that I haven’t asked you?
SHANNON: I’ll start here. Reading Wide Awake examines reading as flexible practices of personal and social agency necessary for the continuous remaking of ourselves and democracy in and across changing times and contexts. By telling stories of my reading social objects (including printed texts) in everyday life, I invite readers to awaken to the ways these ‘texts’ work for and against their interests and the promises of democracy. By analyzing my reading experiences critically, I demonstrate how to take up these practices and why they are vital to acting in and on the world. I hope I wrote with some intelligence and humor.
This short book is organized according to paraphrased questions that people asked me across the first forty of my now fifty years as an educator: Why read? What is text? How do texts work? Where is meaning? Isn’t reading out of date? Can reading like this get me in trouble? Do regular people read like this? Fifteen years prior to this book, I offered a different structure in text, lies & videotape, a book about whose stories get told in and out of school. That text began with a reading of my junior high principal enforcing “school integrity” with a ping pong ball down my pant leg and a wooden paddle on my backside. My (our) reading practices are always in-the-making, and I’m only five years away from the next installment!
CORRIGAN: In Reading Wide Awake, you seem to use the words “read” and “reading” loosely and expansively—to mean not just looking at written texts but more broadly seeing, recognizing, understanding, or thinking about the world. I’m wondering, how do you define “reading” and why use the word “reading” instead of something broader like “thinking”?
SHANNON: Originally, my choice of the term reading was purely tactical. If seeing, recognizing, understanding, thinking, assessing, and acting in and about the world through the production of social things can be separated from the term reading, then they can be excluded from school curricula. If they are inseparable moments of reading, then they remain basic skills (See Herb Kohl’s pre-TikTok Basic Skills – 1982). My route to this realization maps my development as a critically pragmatic reader with a sociological imagination. That is, the choice stemmed from reading personal experiences (my problem?) and eventually recognizing that they are actually social issues produced and maintained through the texts of powerful discourses in and out of schools (K-20).
By the early 1970s when I was a history graduate student, Americans had been lied to about the Bay of Pigs, Tet Offensive, and bombing of Cambodia; two Kennedys, Malcolm X, Salvador Allende, Fred Hampton and Martin Luther King assassinations; the “collapse” of Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Panthers; and the Angela Davis and the Chicago 7 trials. Official and mainstream representations of these events across time and media led to Richard Nixon being elected and re-elected with an agenda to win the cold war militarily and to bring law and order back to American streets. I lost faith in the path I had chosen at the end of college to become a historian of societal outsiders, which I believed would help more people to develop their “sociological imaginations” (C. Wright Mills), overcoming the “repressive tolerance of a one-dimensional society” (Herbert Marcuse), and thus, freeing their minds to rationally pursue the truth (J. S. Mill). Although certainly necessary, more historically accurate information (reconstructed history books) about the neglected in society no longer seemed adequate. Rather I thought what would be vital, but lacking, was the habitual practice of accessing, interpreting, assessing, and acting upon daily information, artifacts, and events to secure the original promises of liberal democracy. To me, that practice was the act of reading which could be extended and spread through public schooling. I joined the Teacher Corp and set my sights on the first R.
Despite the economic, racial, cultural, and religious diversity among the families of my first class of kindergarten students, the school district supplied me with the DISTAR Language and Reading program and required me to “teach reading” by following the scripts in its teacher’s manual for a specified amount of time daily. The authors of DISTAR assumed that my students had little or no prior experience with reading, phonological or syntactic command of English, or interest in learning to read or in the world around them. They argued their approach was scientifically based. Lessons consisted of small groups articulating phonemes in unison with me. When those articulations were “mastered”, I was to point to manipulated letter symbols arranged randomly on a page in the teacher’s manual and groups were to produce the corresponding sounds (pretending that English has one-to-one letter to sound correspondence). When mastered, I was to point to a symbol to elicit the assigned sound from all, and then, run my finger to another symbol to “make a syllable or blend” as students slurred the first with second phoneme. Eventually, we all graduated to words, phrases, short sentences, and sentence strings (called stories).
All materials were black print on off white newsprint with no illustrations. To ensure that parents participated in these reading instructions, students were to bring home half-sheet “student copies” of the stories to demonstrate their mastery of reading. Standardization through teacher and student fidelity to the program assumptions and scripts were presented as the keys to success in reading, in school, and in life. There were no expected discussions of the meaning of the program’s texts or the practices encouraged in or outside of the classroom. When the students finished the last DISTAR lessons, they and I began the daily lessons supplied in commercially prepared reading materials, (called basals), following more loosely scripted lessons as we worked our way through anthologies, workbooks, worksheets, and criterion reference tests across grades 1 through 6. This defined learning “to read at school.”
Because the remainder of the kindergarten curriculum was not prescribed except by name of subjects, the students and I had time to discuss their lives outside of school, their interests, habits, family traditions, ideas about how the world works, media use (TV and radio)….Later, I came to recognize these discussions as examples of what William James meant by “pluralism:” there will always be different perspectives and interpretations of any idea, event or artifact – all work in some situations and none are superior in all. We used these talks and their surroundings to read their worlds to consider how people use symbols to make meaning and get things done. While emphasizing the “why” of reading, we engaged in the “how”, attending to salient features (color, size, position) in images and things and studying phonics by recognizing and using Sylvia Ashton Warner’s Key Words techniques (Zoo), examples from Septima Clark’s and Beatrice Robinson’s Freedom Schools (“What’s a good a word? Amendment”), local store signs (Red and White), and learning to recognize everyone’s printed name (from Abby to Zimbalist) posted on their cubbies and supply boxes. To varying degrees, all participated in what Allan Luke and Peter Freebody would later call the four-resource model of reading – code cracking, meaning making, determine use and effects of genre, and social analyses – without any of us knowing these labels.
I found willing confederates among the music, art, and gym teachers to help us study how sounds, images, and bodies can be used symbolically to represent our intentions to mean. We called this “reading”, and because I lived in the neighborhood and looped with many of these students through the primary grades (K-3), I had time to demonstrate how this reading blended with their family members’ reading outside of school. By our third year together, we had convinced our building administrator that DISTAR was not appropriate for our community; unfortunately, my fellow teachers chose to replace DISTAR with a single K-6 set of commercial reading materials (with significant amounts of promised free components and staff development promised by their publishers) for reading instruction at our school. That “other stuff” that we employed daily as reading, while not necessarily harmful, was considered “beside the point”. Those practices, you see, were not essentials in an elementary school curriculum…
I finished my four-year commitment to shepherd those students and families through the primary grades and enrolled at the University of Minnesota (then famous for its reading research program) to try to understand how my colleagues’ decision could make sense. The best outcome of that move was that I read my first-day schedule incorrectly, went to the wrong office, and met Kathleen (I’m married to Kathleen). Another outcome was that I began to develop an understanding of reading at school. My first course – History of Research on Reading – assigned titles such as The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading (Huey, 1908), Reading as Reasoning (Thorndike, 1917), Remembering (Barlett 1932), Literature as Exploration (Rosenblatt, 1933)….These texts and my peers’ discussion of them taught me that my interpretation of reading was not wrong or beside the point because reading was information processing, not ever mastered or easily transferred among situations or tasks, colored by cultural attitudes and personal habits, and involved emotions as well as reason.
Buoyed with those insights, I used the intellectual tools I brought with me to class (Marxism/critical theory) and began to develop new ones (pragmatism – old, new, American and French – Richard Bernstein) to understand my experiences with past colleagues (and continued experiences in and around reading education over 40 years). Marxism directed me toward analyses of the social relations embedded in those commercially prepared basals. Critical theory honed my attention to how power was/is used in reading education (in at least the U. S.). The pragmatists pointed toward the language school personnel use to represent and reflect upon their interests and experiences while teaching reading, and then, to follow the consequences of their acting on those reflections. I concluded initially that three hegemonic discourses (science, business, and the state) speak through school personnel’s words and actions (Broken Promises, 1988). I’ve tracked the consequences of those discourses over time (e.g., Reading Against Democracy, 2007; Closer Readings of the Common Core, 2013; and Reading Poverty in America, 2014).*
You can read current consequences of the continued power of those three discourses in the recent struggles over the definitions of reading and reading instruction as it played out in the New York Times this spring – insisting reading is a psychological, not a set of social, cultural, and historical practices; treating reading instruction as a market and reading as human capital, not creative, contextualized, human endeavors; and mandating guidelines for schools and teachers to overcome social and economic inequalities, not social problems in need of collective democratic solutions.
For example, the New YorkTimes reported that the COVID pandemic resulted in a “reading crisis” across the country as systematic reading lessons moved online render the lessons to be parents’ responsibility (Jonathan Wolfe). Reflecting on his struggles with learning to read at school, the new mayor of New York City mandated that city teachers be “trained” to use phonics-based commercial reading programs to teach reading in order to overcome the crisis (Lola Fadulu). Ten days later, a Times reporter described how Columbia University professor Lucy Calkins “retreated” from meaning centered lesson to a more sound oriented position in her commercial materials (which occupies one quarter of the US market for reading education) (Dana Goldstein).
*I address a history of counter-discourses in The Struggle to Continue, 1990; Progressive Reading Instruction in America, 2017.
CORRIGAN: Throughout the middle chapters of the book you discuss reading specific types of social texts (like NPR and Google Maps), and you also present a more general theory of reading (regarding sociological competence, sociological imagination, pluralism, etc.). In other words, these chapters take up the somewhat traditional matters related to reading: texts, ideas, the life of the mind. But all of that appears bookended with two case studies from “real life,” a less traditional concern for reading: one case is about the fate of a canyon wilderness area and the other is about a dying town being revitalized and the questions are about what to do and what is being done in each situation that affects real lives of real people and environments. Through this bookending, the reading life gets anchored in the life of action—even activism—such that reading is not just about thinking and feeling but also about doing. Can you elaborate on that?
SHANNON: Bear with me…I find it not useful to consider ideas separately from actions because we must experiment to adapt to continuously changing physical and social environments. That need to adapt, to experiment, induces our ideas; not the other way around. Wide-awake reading is an array adaptation practices – ways for Americans to enhance our “self-evident” right to participate as peers with all others in the making of democratic social life. Perhaps, that is what could be meant by reading as activism – wide awake readers refuse to cede that right to others and exercise ‘intelligent action.’ I didn’t make this up – see quotes below – listed in chronological order, not the order of my ‘discovery’ of these authors (Marx, Foucault, Dewey, Emerson).
Emerson: Circles 1841
In nature every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is sacred. Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit. No love can be bound by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher love. No truth so sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in the light of new thoughts. People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.
I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle anything as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no Past at my back.
Marx: Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach, 1888
The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.
Dewey: Democracy and Education (1916)
We can definitely foresee results only as we make careful scrutiny of present conditions, and the importance of the outcome supplies the motive for observations. The more adequate our observations, the more varied is the scene of conditions and obstructions that presents itself, and the more numerous are the alternatives between which choice may be made. In turn, the more numerous the recognized possibilities of the situation, or alternatives of action, the more meaning does the chosen activity possess, and the more flexibly controllable it is.
Foucault: “On the Genealogy of Ethics’ (1983)
My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism. I think that the ethico-political choice we have to make every day is to determine which is the main danger.
Human agency begins in the deep and critical reading of the present conditions in our attempts to adapt to continuously changing environments. Marx directs Emerson’s experimenters to collective action within their historical contexts, and toward equality; Dewey engages experimenters in intelligent actions to address social problems to move closer to the realization of the promises of democracy; and Foucault warns experimenters that consequences of all alternatives are dangerous, at least to some group(s), regardless of experimenters’ aims. He rejects cynicism and passivity, setting individual and collective daily agendas to decide and act on the main dangers.
CORRIGAN: In Reading Wide Awake, you connect reading to an embrace of such values as democracy, dissensus, difference, pluralism. The idea is that reading can enable and motivate readers to genuinely dialogue with those who are different and who hold different values, beliefs, opinions. But Reading Wide Awake came out in 2011, a few years before what appeared to me to be a remarkable intensification of conflict, fake news, and bad faith arguments in the United States—the Trump era. Has your hope for the possibilities of collaboration, dissensus, and dialogue changed since?
SHANNON: My short answer is “no.” If anything, the last decade has made me more committed to those values, and I thank you for considering that “reading wide awake” could serve as a tool in the on-going “real utopian project” of the making of democracy for these times. Many share your interpretation (although they vary in readings of the problem): Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Michael D. Shear, Sarah Vowell, Max Fisher.
Liberal democracy is not a thing or a template to be applied; rather, it is a method for identifying and solving the common problems of securing the rights of life and pursuit of happiness for all, across time and contexts. According to John Dewey, “The democratic faith in equality is the faith that each individual shall have the chance and opportunity to contribute whatever he is capable of contributing, and that the value of his contribution be decided by its place and function in the organized total of similar contributions: —not on the basis of prior status of any kind whatever.”
For the individual, democracy means having a share in directing the activities of the group – participatory parity; for the group, democracy demands the development and maintenance of social arrangements enabling the liberation of the potentials of each individual member. Those are unmet promises made in the second sentence of The Declaration of Independence. Democratic patriots are keepers of that faith, acting to ensure that this country lives up to those principles within and across its borders. I am a patriot.
Other patriots and I read the texts and contexts to name, resist, dismantle barriers to democratic possibilities and to develop and maintain social arrangements which would enable greater participatory party among all groups and individuals. Even among patriots, however, conflict is likely because we begin our searches for just social arrangements from differing historical positions, and therefore, while we share at least a rhetorical goal, our interests and strategies will differ necessarily. Chantel Mouffe (2018) argues “in a democratic polity, conflict and confrontation, far from being a sign of imperfection, indicate that democracy is alive and inhabited by pluralism.” What we patriots need then are ways to keep that agonism from becoming antagonism. Many imply that it might already be too late for dissensus – a process of identifying differences and locating these differences in relation to each other, leading to collective explanations of how people differ, where their differences come from, and whether they can live and work together with these differences. However, unless individuals and groups have given up entirely on democratic faith, I believe dissensus is possible and necessary to build coalitions among disparate groups to continue the search for and reality of democratic social arrangements.
If we engage in real utopian projects for liberal democracy within pluralistic societies, then patriots must engage in practices of dissensus to support others and ourselves as we sort through our repertoires of social discourses to find points of, at least temporary, agreement. Dissensus affords the possibility(ies) for coalitions to form around specific goals and strategies to act intelligently toward the promises of democracy. As Eric Olin Wright (2010) explained, these projects are utopian because we are thinking about alternatives that embody our deepest aspirations for a just society, and each is real because we continue to experiment with and deliberate within our associated ways of living as we struggle toward the just (and flexible) social arrangements across contexts and time. Reading wide awake can alert us to the ways power works through the “texts” of our lives, enabling us patriots to tame the harm caused by barriers to participatory parity, to erode those barriers through our actions, and to experiment toward just social arrangements. Keep the democratic faith!
CORRIGAN: Since you are on one hand a college professor and on the other hand a scholar who studies K12 education and a teacher who teaches (future) K12 teachers, it seems you have an unique view into both worlds: education in college and education before college. Traditionally and unfortunately, there has been, at least in my experience, little exchange of pedagogy across that line. But I think there are things we could learn from some cross pollination. So in that spirit, I’m curious if you might comment on what commonalities and what differences you see between what we ought to be teaching about reading before college compared to in college.
SHANNON: Most texts I encounter are institutionally produced to teach me who I am, what I should know, value, and do. Unfortunately for me, but certainly by design, they are intended to position me as a consumer, not a producer. Government, business, media news and entertainment, church, science, sports, and other institutions teach me not only to consume goods and services, but also, to swallow expert opinion, idealized representations of the past, and the spectacle of celebrity and success, as if their texts were representations of the way things are and should be. I am to receive from others and not create for myself and contribute with others; I am free to choose among, but not to determine, alternatives. These institutional texts leave little space for me to think outside their intended parameters or to imagine what they left unstated. Their intentions are not my personal problems alone; they are social issues affecting many if not all. These texts, most texts, intend to teach us that civic life is complex and boring, we’re not smart enough to understand or change it, and therefore, we should seek only comfort and security for ourselves and family. These lessons are dangerous for our individual and collective identities and agencies, and I believe, main dangers for the health of our pluralistic democracy.
Except for middle school/junior high, I’ve taught at every level from preschool to doctoral study. (I am afraid of tweens and early adolescents for reasons obvious to anyone who has personal knowledge of this age group.) Reading the texts of my teaching experiences tells me that schools participate in limiting the potential power of reading through decisions surrounding the social arrangements of school curricula and pedagogy. From my first encounter with official reading instruction as a teacher (and a student in the 50s) to the assigned reading list for the History of Reading Research which began my focused study of reading, to my assignment to teach a course on reading and teaching to 300 or more students each semester, schooling has undersold readings’ personal, social, and civic potential. The result, I fear, is that school teaches our students that they are consumers of social life, and not active, equal participants in its continuous making. So my comment to preK-25 teachers about reading is a question (an on-going inquiry really). How can we tame and erode the intentions behind school texts in order to disrupt the production of ‘sleepy’ readers, to develop the social arrangements of our classes, engaging all our students in reading wide awake; and to encourage participatory parity in the making of pluralistic democracies in and out of school?
My recommendation is to trust our students, to see them as interesting and interested, to arrange our courses and readings to enable participatory parity across the differences they bring to class, to seek real reasons for them to engage in dissensus, and to act on their new knowledge and convictions through the discourses we represent.
I’ll share one effort to address this question. During the decade before I retired, I worked with others to reorganize our university’s K-12 reading specialist certification coursework. We sought to add secondary discourses to our students’ repertoires so that they could choose to critique, tame, and erode the typical specialist habitus. Specialists are assigned officially to support students at any grade level who have been labeled as struggling to learn to read and write at school. By law and tradition, these public-school programs are typically organized around assumptions that during their cognitive development of the reading process to date, strugglers have failed to learn one or more code-breaking skills and/or mechanical strategies for extracting meaning from passages – that is their cognitive development of the reading process is incomplete for the demands of their schooling. Specialists are to repair these failures by diagnosing and remediating these problems, bringing students to mastery through scientifically-based reading instruction, and then, to send repaired students back to regular classes able to complete reading assignments. Often, specialists are taught to focus primarily on the how to read and to devote less or little attention to: why read; how texts work; why and how struggling students should assess texts’ intentions; or how struggling students make sense of (all types of) texts outside of school. If these typical reading specialist assumptions, practices, and absences brought the desired consequences, then perhaps, all these explicit and implicit lessons would be warranted. However, beyond the immediate contexts of those lessons, desired outcomes have been scarce – even by their gold standard measure, annual reading test scores. *
Our efforts were complicated by the accreditation processes legally and professionally required for all specialized certification courses. We could not just “do as we pleased.” We proposed our changes as a design experiment with the expected outcome of specialists with competence and imagination. We were approved with “some” concern from the state and some accolades from the profession. Our graduates would be competent (all would pass the state certification licensing exam for reading specialists and be recommended by practicing specialists based on a practicum experience) and imaginative (able to design and act upon social arrangements for learning to read that are not yet, but could be, if specialist focused on the roles for reading in the development of self and democracy). Our assumption for the experiment was that if the specialist could see themselves as reading agents – participants as peers with all others in the decisions of reading programs – they could demonstrate that agency for their students and negotiate/develop social arrangements in their classroom that immersed their students in participatory parity of its social life.
This is getting long and you’re probably now sorry you asked. I’ll be brief. We tripled our teaching workloads to develop three discourses for reading specialists: cognitive, socio-cultural, and political – creating three identity kits of how to speak, think, value and act accordingly across issues of pluralism, policy, scientific warrants, curriculum, and pedagogy. We arranged students in groups of at least three, encouraging the members to deliberate over meanings and likely consequences of their readings of the social things of reading specialists (e.g., cultural differences of experiences, ability grouping, technical reports, time scheduling, state mandates, book chapters, room arrangements, journal articles, pedagogical strategies, tests and assessment procedures, parents/guardians…). Whole class discussions became purposeful exercises of dissensus – always with obligation to move forward toward our state obligation to enter schools to demonstrate reading specialist competence (equipped with multiple discourses with which to read the intentions behind existing school texts), and then, to use our individual and collective imaginations to design, construct, and implement the social arrangements we thought most likely to support our first through eighth grade struggling students as wide-awake readers. From the first course to the tenth, university instructors and school supervisors worked to communicate to each cohort of university students that we expected them to be successful and we were there to support them.
Early in our efforts to remake the reading specialist courses, the students and the instructors decided that a museum was most likely to enable us to develop social arrangements that would afford struggling students the opportunity and support to develop wide awake reading. (There are ten museums on campus of various sizes and budgets.) Each university student cohort began its courses with severe doubts that such students were capable to produce exhibits individually and a museum collectively based solely on their readings and actions. Before the final imagination practicum, we worked collectively to develop our students’ language to discuss, if not believe, that a museum was possible. Doubling down on the university instructors’ belief that our (now) Teachers and their Curators could and would indeed engage actively in the inquiries and production, we scheduled a grand opening for the museum on the last day of practicum.
Following John Dewey’s (1938) notion that the realization of any ideal must be based on experience, Teachers organized practicums’ social arrangements to reduce, if not eliminate, barriers to each Curator’s participation as a peer in the design, construction, and presentation of multimodal museum exhibits on a central topic (e.g., habitats, transportation, weather). Prior to the practicum, neither Teachers nor Curators were experts concerning museums or the central topic, although each brought differing amounts of experience with each. They would learn both together. Teachers provided support for Curators as they read to become experts on the topic (“What do you know about . . . ? How do you know that? What would you like to learn about? Would you like help with that?”), and then, write and with the assistance of a resident community artist create multimodal texts to represent their new knowledge for the expected visitors to the museum (“What caught your interest in the museum we visited? How was it interesting? What would you like to write and show about your new knowledge? Would you like help with that?”).
Scores of family members, university personnel, and former participants visited the two-hour museum opening each year. We never had to defend our goals and methods to visitors, parents or Curators because our practice-based events (process and product) trumped the evidence-based practices that Curators (and their parents/guardians) experienced at school. Although the thick school folders that accompany Curators label them as autistic, behind, ELL, learning disabled, dyslexic, or ADHD, every Curator demonstrated her/his/their literate competence by producing and presenting (proudly) an exhibit situated prominently within the museum (two university classrooms and a connecting hallway). And every Teacher showed some signs of reading wide awake. Here’s an excerpt of Teacher Joshua’s final report on Curator Tim.
What does Tim need? It depends:
If you read his folder….
If you watch him during independent reading,…
If you sit next to him and listen to him read a book you picked for him….
But if you work with him on his model train, then….
The first three “ifs” suggest that Tim can’t read well enough to engage in inquiry, and therefore, he needs preliminary skill lessons before you start. The last one shows you that you don’t know Tim or his capabilities unless you let him participate (2014).
* Despite a century of reading research and billions of dollars invested annually in reading education, students from low income families (Carnoy & Rothstein, 2013)— confounded by race (Vigor, 2011), immigrant status (Swartz & Stiefel, 2011) and segregated location (Burdkick-Will et al., 2011)—continue to “struggle” with school literacy. Although some schools have made modest improvements (Rowan, 2011), the overall income achievement gap has increased by 40% since the Reagan Administration (Reardon, 2011).
CORRIGAN: You stress in Reading Wide Awake that you’re still learning how to read. So what have you learned since writing this book?
SHANNON: In 2017, Penn State offered the ARod-deal to all employees of a certain age and length of employment. We had lived in the Happy Valley since 1990. I qualified, took the year’s salary to not come back (the NY Yankees offered this deal to Alex Rodriguez to induce his retirement), and began to write an operetta entitled ‘Bourne in the USA’ (while trying vainly to read ‘flow offense’ during noon basketball games). I’m working on a third draft, learning how to read many genres of musical theater in front of and behind the curtain as well as popular music at the turn of the 19th century and symbols of American social, economic, intellectual, and political history between the depression of ’93 and the end of WWI. It continues to be a thrilling, and humbling experience. When I admit to others what I’m doing “these days”, they often ask: “How are you prepared?” “Who’s Bourne?” “Why now?” “What will Bruce say?”
I have played in a garage band since 1966 (The Root Beer Beaver), appeared in several musicals as a high school student (portraying a sailor in the South Pacific, a Jet, and Conrad Birdie), and maintained a dozen or so pages of decades-old notes on Randolph Bourne. I have formal training in neither music nor theater. When Kathleen and I visit theaters now, we are becoming “wide awake” to ways in which all involved work collectively to produce that play on that “stage” in these times to teach the audience who we are, what we should know and value, and what we should do. In State College, NYC and the Twin Cities, these lessons have changed our theatering experiences, making us attentive differently than my pre-Bourne afternoons and evenings.
I declare that I’m a playwright in the making who is sampling the melodies from popular songs of Bourne’s times, rewriting lyrics to “teach” audiences Bourne’s democracy faith, and drawing images of staging for each scene, both acts, and the whole play. This is shorthand for the new ways I’m reading: new technologies, musical notation, emotional effects of auditory, physical, and visual symbols, historical presentism, lyricism across time, and technical, kinesthetic, physical, and aesthetic practices and objects of musical theater. Keeps me busy.
I picked Bourne as a subject because his life offers remarkable examples of reading wide awake and the challenges of patriotism. Bourne was a social critic and essayist who died in 1918 at the age of 32. I “discovered” Bourne (and began my notes) while reading about John Dewey and the counter-hegemonic discourse of progressive education (unassigned, but necessary texts for that first course in the UMN doctoral program). Bourne was Dewey’s student at Columbia University and wrote two books on education (and another concerning youth culture). I reconnected with Bourne when I read Jeremy McCarter’s 2017 New Yorker piece “The Critic Who Refuted Trump’s World View, in 1916.” McCarter called Bourne, the “Anti-Trump” for Bourne’s essay “Trans-National America” (published in The Atlantic Monthly). Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen devoted three pages to that essay in her 2021 book American Intellectual History: A Very Short Introduction (Thomas Jefferson gets two pages and Dewey none in the 130 pages of prose). Between 1911 and 1918, Bourne wrote over 1400 essays that were published in regional and national magazines (e.g., Columbia Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The Masses, The Dial, Seven Arts).
In its current form, the operetta has two acts. I’ve structured the first around Bourne’s writing of his first national publication “The Handicapped by One of Their Own” (The Atlantic Monthly, 1914). The attending physician misused forceps during Bourne’s birth, changing the shape of his head and altering his breathing, voice, and hearing. At four, Bourne contracted spinal tuberculosis, which over three years curved his spine and limited his gate and height. The Atlantic publisher asked Bourne to write an autobiographical piece to explain his life “struggles.” That essay is often cited as a founding manifesto of the disability rights movement in America. It ends: “Do not take the world too seriously, nor let too many social conventions oppress you. Keep sweet your sense of humor, and above all do not let any morbid feelings of inferiority creep into your soul.”
Floyd Dell’s obituary for Bourne (1919) frames the second act, highlighting Bourne’s participation in the bohemian culture of Greenwich Village, his “Trans-National America” argument for cosmopolitanism over melting pot assimilation to adopted Anglo Saxon cultural expectations, and his vanguard leadership of the anti-war movement (See Twilight of Idols, 1917). In the latter, Bourne explained that Americans couldn’t “make the world safe for democracy” by suppressing it at home or through military force abroad. Bourne’s positions proved unpopular with business and the state, and Bourne died of the Spanish Flu penniless and sleeping on his fiancee’s divan. As Dell (1919) explained:
“There are few avenues of expression for protest, however sane and far-seeing, against the mood of a nation in arms; and one by one, most of these were closed to him as he went on speaking out his thought. It is one of the more subtly tragic aspects of his death, a misfortune not only to a fecund mind that needed free utterance, but to a country which is nearly starved for thought, that he should in these last years have been doomed to silence.”
Oh, and I anticipate Springsteen and E Street will play the opening bars of the overture…
“We need to learn to listen and read and interpret messages more thoughtfully,” Amy Lombardi told me. A doctoral student at the University of California at Davis, Lombardi says such skills are “undervalued and need to be taught more.” In our conversation recorded below, we talk about Lombardi’s recent article “More Is More: Explicit Intertextuality in University Writing Placement Exam Essays.” This study is an admittedly hyper-specific examination—looking at a corpus of exam essays written by incoming college students to see how they cite sources, including the phrasing (how many times do they say “says” vs. “believes” vs. “opposed”?) and punctuation (does all the mention of the sources get crammed into parentheses or are the sources actually named and discussed in the writing?). But in this very specific focus, this is still a study with bearing on a much broader topic: “receptive skills.” The phrases and punctuation that students use (or do not use) to cite sources are “the techniques they’re using to signal to the reader overtly that they’re bringing in information from other sources.” Looking at how students cite is thus a perfect site for examining larger skills such as “reading as a listener” and “listening to the text.” Isn’t writing often referred to as a conversation? Well, Lombardi notes, “these [details of citation] to me are the elements of that conversation.”
