Don't Predict My Politics Based on My Pedagogy

Teaching isn't about making a statement; it's about making sure kids get across the finish line.

Photo by Presidio of Monterey

Playing the Politics Card

I’ve been hyper-aware recently of the attacks against Science of Reading (SOR) advocates based on unfounded assumptions related to the political and ideological motivations of the movement. Some corrective context is provided from Science of Reading Laws: Let’s Begin with the Facts (Albert Shanker Institute):

While conservative organizations are often mentioned in discussions about SoR support, there are clear signs that the movement is bipartisan. Progressive organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Center for American Progress, and the Education Trust have all voiced support for this policy effort. Given its broad and diverse backing, it is misleading to frame it as a politically motivated effort; a more accurate characterization is that of a nonpartisan initiative.

Here is a recent statement in my comments section about SOR: I see ‘Science of Reading,’ in its narrow, judgmental, politicized form, as inseparable from deficit thinking.

Interestingly, right after I read this criticism related to deficit thinking, I listened to Nathaniel Hansford (The Scientific Principles of Teaching) state the following on Principal Center Radio:

When I first started teaching, there was this resistance to this concept called ‘deficit teaching’, which was the idea of teaching to kids’ weaknesses and struggles. And instead, I heard a lot of ‘let's focus on their strengths’. While I was a kid, I was really bad at math. And truthfully, I don't think I'm bad at math anymore though. I'm definitely not a math genius, but I grew to be good at math after a lot of practice. And if my teachers had just been like, ‘Ah, he sucks in math; we don't need to teach him math; we'll teach him art,’ it could have ended up completely changing my life in a negative way. So I think the same especially goes to reading . . . It's not that we should be focusing just on their strengths. I get that that sounds like a rosy, nice image . . . and it has sort of a magical thinking element to it.

I can vividly recall playing tennis for the first time as part of one of my P.E. rotations in high school. My teacher was both a good player and a good instructor, and I was very grateful that he spotted the deficits in my swing so he could address them and turn me into a good enough player to enjoy hours of fun in the years to come. We can’t proclaim that we want our students to develop a love of reading and become lifelong learners and then turn around and deny them the very skills they need to achieve those goals because of a fear of demonstrating deficit thinking.

One of my students—after two years in reading intervention—declared at the end of second grade:

You changed my life. You made me become a reader.

Honestly, one detractor made it seem as though I force my students to walk around flashing a Scarlet D! If in order to address my second grader’s needs, I first had to determine his deficits, then—like Nathaniel Hansford—I do not apologize for deficit thinking. Doing my job means acknowledging assets and addressing deficits. I’m not making a political statement, I’m just giving my students what they need to succeed.

Reading researcher Keith Stanovich wrote in 2000:

Ironically, the primary casualties of the Reading Wars are disadvantaged children who are not immersed in a literate environment and who are not taught the alphabetic code—precisely the children that progressive forces most want to aid. As Adams’s (1990) book makes clear, research has shown that a very efficient way to generate large social class differences in reading achievement is to implement an extreme whole language curriculum that shortchanges the explicit teaching of spelling-sound relationships.

Some Whole-Language and Balanced-Literacy proponents believe they have a monopoly on caring for kids, and they disparage explicit and systematic phonics instruction as drill and kill, unlike Anita Archer’s framing: thrill of skill. This, they contend, is the antithesis of the joyful, meaning-based activities they endorse. In Caring for Your Students, I explored the different dimensions of caring, but in doing so I didn’t touch the third rail: politics.

I’m addressing this lightning rod now because I am offended on behalf of my students that my decision-making has been called into question as being representative of a political disposition rather than purposeful pedagogy. My reading instruction is purported to be dependent on policies advocated by political parties instead of the reality of my own experiences working with children during my teaching day, shaped by the needs of the students in front of me and my ability to address those needs. The only agenda I follow is the one in my lesson plan.

If my job is to equip my students with the tools to navigate a cruel world that is thrust upon them when they exit their educational careers, I need to make choices that reflect this goal and not pretend there is a path they can follow to an alternate reality they will enter that doesn’t require these skills. I would rather be accused of deficit thinking than magical thinking.

The Triple Threat

Here’s the refrain I grew up with: God bless Roosevelt! This was my Greek mother’s mantra because she knew all too well that her adopted country opened up opportunities for her that she did not have access to in her mountain village. Later, when her husband died and left her with three young children to raise alone, she became a direct recipient of the social support system that the Roosevelt administration had created.

This expression—her expression of gratitude for escaping a hard life of working the fields in her tiny village for what she considered to be suburban paradise—didn’t just shape my sentiments toward my underprivileged students, it resurfaced and was reinforced whenever I looked into the eyes of an immigrant parent and saw my own mother’s eyes staring back at me. Her declaration that she owed the support and opportunities she and her children received to the strong social policies of a Democratic president has had a profound presence throughout my life, especially during my teaching career: a vivid memory of my mother’s determination not to take anything for granted.

However, my translation to the classroom of my experiences growing up has been entirely practical with no political bent or agenda. I rely on these two words—support and opportunity—to guide me because every teacher move I make is for the purpose of offering systematic support to my students and augmenting the opportunities available to all of them by giving them the best education I can, which was my own ticket to success.

Wisdom and money can get you almost anything, but only wisdom can save your life. Ecclesiastes 7:12, New Living Translation

We don’t need to resort to centuries-old hyperbole to simply state with confidence that a solid education is especially important for those children who are marginalized and without economic resources, which is the vast majority of the students I teach. While I naturally endorse social policies that promote their welfare within the society at large, my students cannot afford the luxury of waiting for specific policies to be adopted before I address what I have immediate control over: how teaching and learning happen in my classroom.

In The Science of Reading: A Call to Action or a Cash Cow I noted that a criticism of the Science of Reading movement often comes with these declarations:

Reading proficiency won’t improve until:

• we eliminate poverty

• we overcome racism

• we conquer capitalism

• we make all learning environments equal

• we lower class size

• we increase teacher pay

As someone who grew up with the triple threat—low income, single parent, immigrant household—I am eternally grateful that my elementary school teachers didn’t abdicate their responsibility to identify deficits and address them by teaching me and the rest of my class what we needed to learn. They fulfilled their duty and didn’t wait until the educational environment met their utopian standards for society. Because I grew up facing many of the challenges my students face, I get my kids. This is the relationship that matters most to me, not one aligned with a political cause, and it’s this relationship that drives my decision-making.

Opportunity Is Not a Lengthy Visitor

This summer, like every summer, my family attended the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and we experienced the best production we’ve seen of an old favorite: Steven Sondheim’s Into the Woods. Though I’ve heard the line many times before, and it has certainly stuck with me over the years, Opportunity is not a lengthy visitor profoundly struck me this time like it has never done before. For many of my students, opportunity doesn’t even pay them a courtesy call—let alone reside in their lives for any length of time. Too often, I AM their opportunity! This is why Natalie Wexler refers to the knowledge gap instead of the achievement gap and why others refer to the opportunity gap.

What we call achievement gaps are largely opportunity gaps — differences in access to quality teachers, curriculum, and resources that shape learning.
Linda Darling-Hammond, The Flat World and Education

I know that I need to take advantage of every opportunity I have to help my students gain reading proficiency because with each passing year the opportunity to achieve this goal increasingly fades until the obstinate reality of insufficient literacy outpaces the fleeting opportunity to achieve it. The only weapon I have to fight the unforgiving minute is by filling it with sound reading instruction during the short time my students are with me. I really wish my critics would attack the substance of my reading approach instead of a manufactured stance that they believe my instruction represents.

That's why I bristle when I’m accused of having heartless right-wing positions, a conclusion based solely on these basic facts:

(1) I explicitly and systematically teach phonics decontextualized from literature.

(2) I determine the educational gaps my students have and strive to fill them.

(3) I am concerned when students aren’t proficient decoders before they reach the third grade.

(4) I prioritize literacy rather than other social markers as an issue of equity.

(5) I question the methods and motives of my teachers’ union.

I have been called a phonicator, a union basher, and a deficit thinker—attributes, my detractors contend, that are representative of reprehensible right-wing thinking. However, the fact that a political party that endorses my teaching methods is reprehensible or praiseworthy has nothing to do with insisting that my students are taught with methods supported by a preponderance of the evidence from scientific research, both empirical and qualitative.

SOL Meets CRT

Several years ago my district offered professional development to each school’s Instructional Leadership Team (ILT) focused on Zaretta Hammond’s Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain, and each ILT was in turn expected to offer PD at their sites. I was fortunate to be part of an excellent team that was able to take the principles in the book related to the science of learning—like the importance of scaffolds in general and understanding cognitive load theory in particular—and present practical methods that teachers could apply in the classroom to help improve instruction.

Unfortunately, as is too often the case in education, the district abandoned this book after just two short years in favor of Gholdy Muhammad’s Cultivating Genius, a far more theoretical and less practical text that became the focus of our districtwide anti-bias/anti-racist (AB/AR) professional development over the next five years. Last year, a mandatory systematic review by an independent evaluator recommended that the district move away from this AB/AR training to directly address the instructional needs of our students—which is where we had started with Zaretta Hammond’s book so many years ago. Hammond reminds us:

We have to hold students to high standards, not just in terms of content but in how they process information, solve problems, and think critically . . . The goal of culturally responsive teaching is to help students become independent learners who can do deep thinking.

This shift in emphasis from classroom concerns to societal ones reached a new low when one of our elementary schools adopted the ideological program Woke Kindergarten, which was implemented over a three year period at great expense but with no impact on academic achievement. I believe this contrast between the two texts we used for professional development captures the disconnect between the reality of the classroom and the reality of society at large, and prioritizing ideology over instruction does a disservice to all students, especially our most vulnerable ones.

In her book, Hammond is careful to distinguish between three terms: social justice, multiculturalism, and culturally-responsive. These distinctions make sense to me: support social justice, celebrate multiculturalism, but make sound instructional choices that are responsive to the students you have in front of you right here, right now. Most important, don’t confuse these choices with what you can accomplish outside the classroom. Do no educational harm and just do your job. From Zaretta Hammond:

Culturally responsive teaching is not about celebrating heroes and holidays or being social justice–oriented; it’s about helping students become independent learners by connecting cultural tools to cognitive skills.

I can create a microculture in my classroom that honors each student by acknowledging their assets and addressing their social, emotional, and academic needs even if the society at large fails to do the same. The fact that political labels are applied to instructional methods I use shows that critics aren’t objectively analyzing those methods—they are merely tallying which segments of society support them and judging their merit on this ideological marker alone.

What should we call these reflexive accusations? How about deflection and dereliction? Isn’t it a deflection when one shifts the conversation and won’t argue against teaching methods based on an informed analysis of those methods? And isn’t it a dereliction of duty to our students to assign political labels to teacher moves instead of addressing the underlying pedagogy related to those moves? This leap of logic that equates an instructional stance with a political motive isn’t just blind to the reality of the classroom and the students who occupy it, it’s beyond the realm of reason because any attempt to talk about the rationale for instructional choices is filtered through this political lens by its detractors, which immediately shuts down the conversation. I can’t talk to you because you’re one of them!

Yes, I examine every single teacher move I make, but not because I strive to be politically correct. I’m not checking boxes in the classroom—I’m checking for understanding. And my next teacher move is contingent upon that student understanding, not a political movement that has no instructional valence. As for the accusations against me? Sticks and stones . . .

Sitting with Discomfort

Carl Hendrick ends his recent piece about cell phones by giving a wish-list for his three daughters, including: I want them to sit with discomfort long enough to learn how to process it, rather than reflexively reaching for a screen to escape whatever they're feeling.

Similarly, I want those whose instructional methods are being challenged (and that includes me!) to sit with discomfort long enough to carefully examine and reflect upon those methods. Too often the response to any challenge is to reflexively assign these methods moral weight aligned to a worldview that some believe can only carry weight if it reflects a political, rather than a pedagogical, stance. This failure to sit with discomfort can lead to academic failure that follows our students long after they exit the classroom.

If we are asking a student to carefully navigate their educational career so they don’t become a ship at sea when it ends, we need to focus on their educational experiences within the classroom context, not through a colored lens (red or blue) that throws the vicissitudes of life outside its doors into stark relief—as important as they may be. Those challenges will be made even worse by the well-intentioned teacher who substitutes a vision of social justice for vigorous lesson planning—politics trumping pedagogy.

How we teach our students matters regardless of which way society’s shifting winds blow. And talking about our teaching, warts and all—telling it the way we see it when it comes to choosing the best methods and calling out individuals and institutions that resist those methods—means we are opting for teaching in the real world our students occupy and not avoiding it until our utopian visions becomes a reality.

Calling out my detractors for failing to separate pedagogy from politics is not a put-down—it’s a nod to putting kids first.

Always striving to make sense—please let me know when I fail.