Please note: This transcript was automatically generated. We have reviewed it to ensure it reflects the original conversation, but we may not have caught every transcription error.

Chris Saldaña: Hi everyone. I'm Chris Saldaña, and this is the National Education Policy Center's Talks Education Podcast. On this month's podcast, we're interviewing Elena Aydarova, who's an assistant professor in the Educational Policy studies department at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Her scholarship focuses on the interactions between educational policy, advocacy, and social inequality across international context.

In this month's podcast, Dr. Aydarova helps us understand and learn about the issue of the science of reading and the reading wars.

For listeners who aren't familiar with how reading is taught in the United States what are some of the key approaches that are currently being used?

Elena Aydarova: Thank you for that question, Chris.

Before I answer this question, I want to remind our listeners that the United States has a decentralized system, and it is not uniform across the board. And specifically, what's important to remember is that public education is de facto segregated along the lines of socioeconomic, racial, and linguistic differences.

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

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

The crux of the wide range of problems schools and society at large are facing is the upward redistribution of wealth that allows those at the top to accumulate and hoard resources, leaving the rest behind. So this is an important context for this conversation. So if they're talking about reading, we need to remember there's a broader socioeconomic system that we are a part of.

Now moving to the reading instruction, there's a narrative that has been sold to the American public and policymakers. There's a literacy crisis because teachers do not teach the science of reading because they were not taught the science of reading in colleges of education. I have tried to identify the evidence that was used to construct this claim, and I actually have not found this evidence yet.

To my knowledge, there are no large scale studies that have empirical evidence that show us what is happening with reading instruction across the board in this highly inequitable and diverse system of US schools. Now because it's a decentralized system, and schools depend on property taxes that fund them, children whose parents can afford to live in the properties that are used to fund affluent schools receive one type of instruction, and children who don't receive a different kind of instruction.

In 2016, 2017, I conducted an ethnographic study of one urban district in the southwestern states. And one of the things that I learned through my time in elementary schools that even within the same district schools that were serving different students, were doing dramatically different things in their English language arts classrooms.

Children in the affluent schools were reading chapter books, developing investigations based on the story in the book, constructing Comp Complex arguments about their investigations, and then in the underfunded schools serving primarily Bipoc students, kids were mostly doing worksheets. So anytime when I would walk in to conduct my observations, I would experience visits to completely different worlds.

So this is important as this context of there is no uniform approach to teaching reading. We do have some large scale studies. Reading First was implemented in early two thousands and there was a study that the Institute of Educational Statistics conducted evaluating the impact of Reading First, and that was the first federal level initiative that pushed for science-based reading instruction, i.e., more phonics in the classrooms.

And the IES evaluation showed that. The instruction of phonics and decoding increased, but students' overall achievement and reading comprehension did not improve. We also have studies that show that there are multiple different reforms that teachers have to navigate, so there's never really just one thing happening in the classroom.

As Cynthia Coburn and Sarah Woulfin have helped us see, teachers are constantly navigating competing demands on their time and their attention. And I would add to that they also have to meet the needs of their students amidst these competing demands. One final thing that I will answer, that I will add to this, when I was conducting observations in Tennessee and they were considering the science of reading bills, one of the components, there was a landscape analysis of reading instruction.

And so one of the legislators asked, why was that a component of the bill and the response that they were given was that we don't know what's happening in the classroom. And the reasonable question that they asked in response was if we don't know what's happening, shouldn't we do the landscape analysis first and then figure out if we should be mandating the science of reading?

Which they were told no. The time to act is now. The urgency to reform is now, and I'm sharing this episode to say we actually don't know what's happening on the large scale. We don't even often know what's happening at the state level, but we're continue pushing for reforms that lack a clear picture based on empirical evidence.

Chris Saldaña: That's so fascinating when folks use this term, the science of reading, you mentioned that you haven't been able to track down the origins of it, but how is that term used to date? What does it mean? And when you think about that term and its operationalization in our political discourse, how has that contributed to what's now called the reading wars?

Elena Aydarova: So the interesting thing that is happening now in scholarship, and I think it's really important to remember, is that there is no one thing that is the science of eating. So some scholars underscore the difference between lowercase science of reading and ppercase Science of Reading. So lowercase science of reading is scientific studies of reading.

Those are conducted by cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists. They're focusing on neurological and cognitive processes involved in reading, and often those are studies conducted in labs. Very important to know. There is a Society for the scientific study of reading. They have conferences. They have a journal titled Science Studies of Reading, and some folks might be familiar with the books written by Mark Seidenberg, Marian Wolf, great works that help us understand how reading processes occur in the brain.

Helpful scholarship, interesting work. I love reading those books. However, the important part is that's not the only thing that we see happening. The second part is the science of reading where it's all capitalized. And some people just now say SOR, right? They don't even bother spelling it out.

They're just like SOR, and that's the science quote unquote, that pertains to businesses, corporations, and EdTech companies that are leading this movement. But they're doing primarily, they're doing this to primarily bolster their profits. So one participant that I interviewed described this moment by saying, when people hear the science of reading, they imagine a little trademark symbol brought to you by the science of reading.

And it is this science of reading with this imagined trademark symbol. What I actually see the most in policy context and these two different definitions, these two different camps operate on different premises and they also pursue different ends. And so even though there might be some overlap, in some cases it is not the same thing.

When I conduct observations in policy context, I see people mention brain studies briefly, but then end up directing a lot of their energy and focus towards promoting particular products or particular services or particular businesses that brand or rebrand themselves as SOR aligned.

Chris Saldaña: You've already mentioned an example from Tennessee about policy language and policy discourse and you've already made this really powerful distinction between folks who are doing academic research, science-based research, and folks who are utilizing scientific claims to promote products and practices that can then be sold to schools. So when you think about this kind of science of reading world, this SOR world, what impact has it had on debates about educational policy? What have we implemented and when we think about what have we implemented, also, how has that shaped how resources have been allocated?

Elena Aydarova: So I think this is an important starting point, is to think about the impact of the word science, right?

'cause if we set some things aside, generally folks think of science as something that we should trust and we should follow and we should believe. And so this brand science of reading has really created two camps that are fighting with each other, right? So it's, are you for science or are you against science?

And the problem is that in this battle about science, and this is, this was where I think it is about science of reading less. Lower case letters, right? We lose the sight of how SOR as a business, as a corporate endeavor is really reshaping what's happening in education policy. And so this is what I have discovered through five years of work on this project.

And that is this SOR brand has paved the way for growing privatization, standardization, and centralization. So let me break this down a little bit. When it comes to privatization, most folks tend to think about the ways in which, in which charter schools or vouchers are reshaping what's happening in the education space.

However, Patricia Birch reminds us that there is also privatization of the instructional core where the delivery of teaching or the processes of learning end up being sourced out to private sector actors. And that's what we see happening after SOR bills are introduced in the states. Increasingly more private sector actors are involved in most of the things that are happening in the classroom.

So as an example, diagnostic and screening assessments are now being mandated and they have to be administered as early as kindergarten, and they have to be administered at least three times per year. And states often don't leave district's choice about what assessments they can be using. Interventions for struggling readers are mandated through these bills, but they're provided through proprietary platforms like Lexia or…

Based on the bills have to spend at least 30 minutes per day on their devices doing phonics exercises. One literacy coach described this to me and I quote, the district pays for Alexia. They pay for Amira, which is a part of hardcore. Then the school pays for several other programs depending on the school, how much money the school has.

And then they keep telling us, we don't need to be putting kids on devices all the time and online, but then they keep giving us mandates. They need to spend this much time on Lexia, this much time on.. And we're like okay, what's, what is that going? What is that gonna do? You're telling us one thing, expecting us to do another, it's not going to work.

We want kids in real books and they have no time for real books because they're spending most of that reading time on these devices getting instruction through platforms and education policy. Scholars are beginning to talk about the impact of platformization of education, where we're increasingly hooking kids up to computers instead of allowing them to interact with content, with teachers and with each other.

One more mandate that is high dosage tutoring. It appears in the bills and now there are private companies bringing a, offering tutoring services to schools that have to demonstrate through literacy plans that they have to submit to their departments of education, that they're complying with the bills, and that they are actually relying on external services to offer services to struggling readers.

Now the next part is standardization, and we see growing influence of highly scripted curricula mandated across the states. So signs of reading bills often have prescriptions that districts have to use high quality instructional materials. I'm using air quotes to talk about this, and there's often criteria that are predetermined and whatever process states end following, we see a fairly short list of curricula appear across different states. Most frequently we see core knowledge language arts developed by the Core Knowledge Foundation distributed by Amplify. We see written wisdom developed and distributed by Great Minds, open Up resources by AL Education and a handful of others.

These are highly scripted curriculum packages and teachers are often expected to follow those scripts to a T, and in some cases, they're observed and evaluated based on their fidelity of implementation of this highly scripted curricula. If they're expected to be on page 51, they better be on that page 51 for their teacher evaluations.

What's important about this curricula is that they were largely developed prior to, in the case of core knowledge, language arts, or for the implementation of common core state standards, when the controversies around the common core as primarily a business mentor erupted, these companies managed to rebrand their curricula.

As SOR aligned, that's when they started seeing major surges in their profits. Ironically, some of them don't even have any foundational skills components in them. So for example, WIT Wisdom does not teach phonics. It does not have any basic reading instruction. So if districts adopt that, they have to purchase additional curriculum to actually teach kids basic reading skills.

The last point, and this is very important for readers to understand, is that under the SOR banner, we see increased centralization of decision making because as problematic as local control is, what we see debated the most is that local control allows districts to do whatever they want to do, and these SOR bills remove the district's ability to make their own decisions.

So decisions about curriculum assessment, professional development, communication with parents, all of that gets moved up to the state level and makes districts follow what's being dictated to them. From the club, and that means whether they have resources or not, whether they're on board or not, they have to implement these mandates.

And teachers and principals feel increasingly surveilled. They feel increasingly under pressure to follow the mandates. What we see happening in Wisconsin, for example, is we have districts that are already in the red. Because they're underfunded, but they have to purchase curriculum that is mandate that, that is aligned with SOR.

They don't have the money to purchase that curriculum. They're already in the red. They already don't know how to make the ends meet. But the pressure to follow the mandate just keeps pushing them towards really financial disaster, for we have to understand that the products that are being pushed on districts as well are also some of the most expensive. Amplify is one of the most expensive packages out there. And yet districts have to do this again, Wisconsin, the legislature promised that they would at least partially reimburse districts for the purchase of these new curriculum, and that did not happen.

So districts that are strapped for cash, they have to go into referenda to raise taxes, to make sure that they can meet the basic needs of their learners, and their teachers are purchasing new curricula and are not getting their money back. And this is really problematic because it further reread retrenches the inequity and injustices in the system.

Chris Saldaña: I want to take you back to where you started, which was to help listeners understand that. We really have a system of public education in the United States that is decentralized and that results in drastically different experiences for students and for teachers, principals, even central office folks.

When you think about what you've learned in, in, during your time working with educators in, in a multitude of spaces and contexts, how has the impact been felt differently in different places?

Elena Aydarova: The funny part about SOR bills is who they target in their mandates, because they tend to focus only on public schools.

On charter schools, not always. For example, Ohio does not seem to include charter schools in its SOR mandates, and those bills completely do not include private schools. Now, the reason why we want to make sure we pay attention to that is because of the organizations that have been pushing for SOR bills and organizations that have been writing those bills and providing those bills are the legislators, and so the key player in the policy space, or one of the key players in the policy space, rather, is the Foundation for Excellence in Education. Started by Jeb Bush. They have had model bills. That are focused on early literacy for over a decade. They write those bills. They work with legislators that are trying to introduce those bills.

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

And as they celebrate that, SOR is now mandated in 39 states. They are also celebrating that it is now close to 15 states that have universal school choice. And this conversation is relatively recent, so we need to see that these, so our builds are a part of a broader privatization at Glen. And again, why ExcelinEd is important is because they're also partners with ALEC, American Legislative Exchange Council.

And ALEC has had SOR versions of the bill as a part of their omnibus bills that included vouchers and included charters and included alternative routes to teaching. And they've been working with legislators since 2011 pushing for this reform and, particularly in the case of Tennessee, the people who sponsored, co-sponsored or shared these bills on were members of ALEC Education Task Force when those bills were originally considered there.

And so as we think about ALEC involvement, we need to pay attention to the fact that this is the organization that pursues the interest of the private sector. They are involved in both boosting the profits for the corporate sector and in advancing a very conservative agenda. And SOR is on their agenda for policy meetings and they have a new Science of Reading Act that now targets colleges of education and the licensure process for literacy instructors.

That's who is involved in this. And these are not the people who are interested in science or scientific evidence. These are people who are interested in completely different agendas. And so back to the question that you asked though, the impact across different communities. The schools that have been better off and have had the resources to jump on the bandwagon earlier some of them have implemented core knowledge, language arts, and did not see the improvement in test scores that they thought they were gonna get. Some schools that are better resourced continue with the curricula that they had in the past because that's the curricula that allow them to do well. But it is the under-resourced schools that are really struggling with this now, and this is the next part.

It is the schools. That are working with diverse students that are really struggling with these new curricula because apart from being really standardized, meaning it's one size fits all, the analysis of these curricula also show that they are white supremacists. They exclude the voices of BIPOC communities.

They promote really problematic stereotypes of historically underserved communities. And so teachers who were invited to look at these curricula provided really scathing critiques of the messages that these curricula were sending about various forms of diversity in our country. It's an ongoing process and we don't see the full story yet, and there's probably a lot more that we will discover as this continues moving forward.

But I think that there's a lot to be really concerned about.

Chris Saldaña: It has been so fascinating to just listen to you connect the dots and in, in a field with education policy where there are so many trees and so many intersecting organizations and people and context and circumstances. I want to ask you to kinda maybe move in a different direction. Still around the questions of reading, but I wanna ask you about reading bans and book bans. What, if any, connection is there between SOR reading debates and book bans?

Elena Aydarova: Yeah. I think that's the part where remembering who the key players are is really helpful because ALEC as an organization has, as its members, some of the most powerful conservative think tanks in the nation. So Manhattan Institute, American Enterprise Institute, Fordham Institute, they're all involved in their activities and these are the organizations that are actively engaged in promoting SOR and specifically emphasizing that there has to be standard curriculum and evaluation has to be tied around that standard curriculum.

Professional development has to be tied around to that curriculum. These are the same organizations that are saying that any controversial, and again, air quote, air quotes materials have to be removed from school libraries, and children should not be exposed to any diverse literature or books.

Similarly in terms of the parental organizations involved in the movement, Moms for Liberty have been very active in the book banning movement, but they have also been active supporters of SOR. They are not universally right, because they do have some chapters that have raised questions even about the super conservative curriculum that is being implemented.

But nevertheless, they do support this movement. And I think what this helps us see is that this SOR with the capital letters is entangled with the conservative education reform movement that is not just about profits for the private sector, which we see happening, but is also about an ideological transformation of what happens in school.

So the organizations that support SOR also are fighting, for example action civics. They don't want activists raised in our social studies classrooms. They want very conservative birthrights curriculum that was developed with the funding from Koch Foundation. So you can see how SOR fits into this bigger, broader agenda because through the curricula, through the testing, through the transformations and how teaching and learning will now be happening, it is a move to much more traditional values. Right? Why are Moms for Liberty supporting this in their social media? They talk about how the classroom should be, where the teacher stands in the front, and students are sitting in rows and repeating what the teacher says.

So it is actually an onslaught on progressive pedagogy. It is actually an attack on civil rights and social justice 'cause the people who support this movement, or who are writing materials for this movement question the agenda of justice, equity, and diversity. Hirsch, Ed Hirsch, who developed core knowledge language arts, blames multicultural education for the achievement gaps.

Because he says it's this multicultural education that teaches kids that they're victims of the system. What we need to give them is core knowledge that will teach them to be patriots who will pledge allegiance to the state. That is a dramatic traumatic and really problematic reorientation of what the civil rights struggle has been about, what the social justice struggle has been about.

And really any kind of efforts to bring equity are being undermined.

Chris Saldaña: There are so many individuals who are impacted by what we're talking about today, parents, families, kids, teachers, principals, you name it. I am wondering if there are any recommendations that you have for folks as they engage with the discourse in what is a very complex landscape.

Elena Aydarova: Absolutely. So here's a couple of things that I think are really important to keep in mind, and the first thing that we need to pay attention to is to the ways in which stories are being strategically deployed to co-opt us into agendas that we don't always see clearly.

ALEC is not open about their influences, any of this. ExcelinEd has done most of their work. Often behind scenes. It's only recently where it has become much more apparent how extensive their involvement in the early literacy reforms are. But the important thing is that all of this is propelled by stories, podcasts, the movement where some stories get elevated and it is always very selective about whose stories get elevated and whose stories get excluded from the conversation about what's happening in the science of reading space. When stories are being deployed, it is really important to ask what the evidence is behind those stories and whether those stories actually represent something of a broader pattern, or they're being used to influence perceptions that are rather an exception than a broader pattern.

And with that, an important element is emotions. Because science of reading has create, created a really charged emotional space. Emily Hanford's PO podcasts are recorded in ways that really create emotional responses, and it is normal to feel emotions, but I think we really need to be careful about how our emotions being used for someone else's agenda.

If you are engaging with materials and the author tells you that they would rather that you listen and not read, remember that this is an invitation to being manipulated because they're concerned that their text will not have the same hold on your attention as the podcast with the music, the violins, and the tears, and the sobs.

And again, that goes back to everything that we've talked about. We have to have empirical understanding of what's happening. And these stories and emotions distort our perception of reality. And we really need to know when to step back and take a much cooler, rational look at what's happening and what's being proposed.

And that brings me to the question of evidence. Whether the evidence that is being deployed is evidence that is based on studies. Studies that have been replicated and repeated the quality criteria or if it's something that has been done in isolation, paid for by some philanthropy or conservative boom tank.

'cause that's another thing that we see happening in this space. Manhattan Institute gets brought in to provide support for third grade retention, even though they are the only organization that has issued studies that say that this is a positive thing, right? The preponderance of opinion across multiple fields shows that retention is harmful, and yet we are debating this despite solid evidence that has been accumulated across medical fields, educational policy fields, and so on.

And the last thing I want the listeners to remember is that in this critical moment, we need to be thinking about how to maintain participatory democracy. And participatory democracy means we are in this together and we have to think beyond I. Yes, there are things that I, as an individual might want, but we need to refocus on our attention on common good, on solidarity with each other. So when we come to schools, we need to remember that battles, conflicts, attacks undermine our ability to sustain democracy in this critical moment. So we need to think about how we can, together as communities, work to improve the chances of our children, and here our children should be everybody.

It doesn't matter if it is my child who looks like me [faced blued], or it's a child who looks differently from me. I need to pursue what we together in this country need for this critical moment. And yes, it's for every voice to be heard, but it is also locked, locked arms to defend democratic decision making, to defend our educators and to defend our public schools.

Chris Saldaña: I want to single out one group in particular and see if there's any additional recommendations that you might have for policymakers.

Elena Aydarova: There's a lot happening. I think one of the important things that I would invite policymakers to consider and pay attention to is that the loudest voice is not the voice of all.

And in fact, again, we live in this moment where certain groups have learned to amplify particular voices. That really distort our perception of what is happening on the broader scale. And unfortunately what happens is the voices that become louder are the voices that have the most resources, and those who don't have those resources often don't get a chance to participate in deliberations and discussion, even though the outcome of those discussions will directly impact them. So when conversations around science of reading are happening, right? Asking who's present in the room and who's not present in the room and why is really important, who is the loudest in promoting this is really important, but also who is being silenced or left outta the conversation is also very important.

So I'm gonna get very specific right now. Because part of what people see in policy spaces is that SOR has been promoted by parents whose children have dyslexia. And to an extent it is true. In fact, there have been groups that have organized very well and pushed for legislation that meets the needs of students with dyslexia.

And I think it is the responsibility of schools to meet the needs of all students. And if students with dyslexia have not had their needs met their needs should be met. However, the assumption that what is good for children with dyslexia is good for everyone else has not received empirical evidence or support.

We can make this leap. But we don't necessarily have the evidence that this indeed may be the case in a highly decentralized and inequitable system that is very different from a lab where experiments are conducted. However, some groups like Decoding Dyslexia brought together parents with a lot of resources.

They can organize meetings with legislators and they can find funding to make sure that they have well organized campaigns, or they have friends in the media. That's a very loud voice, and again, yes, their voice should be heard. But their story should not become the story of all children that our schools serve, because our schools also serve children who are still learning English.

Our schools also serve children who are unhoused. Our schools also serve children who are continually exposed to violence. And our schools need to meet the needs of those children too. And those children's parents are unable to come and testify and ask for the things that their children need because those parents happen to be running away from ICE.

Those parents happen to be living on the streets and happen to be dealing with really serious precarity in their lives. So remembering that their constituents are a lot more diverse than the mothers who show up and say that they spend $60,000 on private tutoring to make sure that their child learns to read is really important when those decisions are being made.

And the final thing that I will say that all of those things about stories, emotions, and evidence that I have shared as important things for parents and communities to keep in mind, apply to legislators as well, 'cause I have observed multiple testimonies where emotions are intentionally deployed to get everybody in the room crying, to get to the place where those bills are passed.

And I will add that I have had a chance to interview folks who have been. active in the dyslexia space and who mobilized their resources to introduce legislation. And one of the things that I've noticed is that they realize that new legislation does not necessarily meet the needs of their children, 'cause the tests that are being mandated are not the tests that they were fighting in the first place. And what I really appreciate about those activists is that they say, science is not static. We don't want the state to mandate one particular product because tomorrow science might show that product does not meet the needs of our children.

And so those products should not be a part of this legislation and yet. At this moment when SOR all caps controls the discourse, those voices are now absent from the conversation. So there's a lot more complexity to this, and we need to pay attention to that complexity. And I really ask the legislators to remember those things, that not only the loudest voices matter, that emotion stories are strategically deployed in this moment, and we need to really look for evidence before we move forward.

And that those voices need to be present as things move forward. I want to add one more thing, and that is teachers and educators because they are being asked to comply with a lot of things in a very difficult, intense political moment in our country. And again, my observations of legislative debates have shown how teachers are actively silenced in this process.

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

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

Chris Saldaña: Thank you, Dr. Aydarova for being on this month's podcast. As always, we hope you're safe and healthy. And remember, for the latest analysis on education policy, you should subscribe to the NEPC newsletter at nepc.colorado.edu.