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Accelerated Insights @disruptsel.bsky.social · 13h

Four years ago, CASEL worked with the Fordham Institute and they recommended doing this very thing in order to “sell” social-emotional learning to a broader audience.

bsky.app/profile/disr...

Accelerated Insights @disruptsel.bsky.social · Jun 18

L2, P1

In the fall of 2021, the Fordham Institute partnered NewSchools Venture Fund, CASEL and the Chan Zuckerberg Foundation to explore better ways to market and promote social-emotional learning.

fordhaminstitute.org/sites/defaul...

Accelerated Insights @disruptsel.bsky.social · 21h

@nancyebailey.bsky.social has taken a deep dive into EL in the context of NYC public schools mandating adoption of their curriculum.

It's not the curriculum but the underlying logic of high quality instructional materials (HQIM) that needs to be investigated.

nancyebailey.com/2024/01/09/s...

Science of Reading and EL Education: What is It? - Nancy Bailey's Education Website

School privatization was born of manufactured crisis, and one of the so-called crises today is reading instruction. Not that reading shouldn't be debated and improved when it's called for, especially ...

nancyebailey.com

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Accelerated Insights @disruptsel.bsky.social · 21h

The linked article below from @iancushing.bsky.social provides a linear explanation of the critique through an international lens.

The argument is that the WG is a red herring that distracts from the neoliberal education reforms ushered in during the 1990s.

e-space.mmu.ac.uk/641609/8/Rea...

"Neoliberal school, academisation, scripted curricula, standardized pedagogies, teacher surveillance, and the global industry of deficit thinking."

"The seed of the word gap lies in the mid-90s academic knowledge production, from where it was grown and cultivated..."

"it appealed to policy makers because of how it shifted blame onto marginalized individuals and absolved state responsibility..."

"it offered digestible headlines for journalists invested in moral panic narratives..."

"it seemingly offered school leaders a perennial solution for educational injustices on a plate."

"Many teachers...are doing what they can to reject a pervasive narrative that communities experiencing systemic inequality are simply in need of more words and better words."

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Accelerated Insights @disruptsel.bsky.social · 22h

Currently, the Match nGSE program is closed.

I was referring to admissions requirements for the MAT program that is currently accepting applicants.

It's a fast moving space in the world of alternative teaching certification programs, I guess.

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Accelerated Insights @disruptsel.bsky.social · 22h

Agree and apologize for not expanding on the choice of using the word *scripted*.

This moment of state-mandated ELA curriculum aligned to the Science of Reading (SOR) harkens back to NCLB and direct instruction (DI) lesson plans forced on seasoned teachers.

www.pbs.org/makingschool...

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Accelerated Insights @disruptsel.bsky.social · 22h

Must have been an exciting time to attend as you would have been the third student cohort.

Makes sense that their program was curriculum design heavy as the emphasis at Match would shift in a few years towards launching the high quality instructional materials that would come to be Fishtank.

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Accelerated Insights @disruptsel.bsky.social · 1d

Yes, that is the legacy of the test-based accountability movement of the 2000s (NCLB) and the alignment of curriculum to rigorous standards (CCSS), which creates pressure on first-year teachers to adopt prepackaged, scripted curriculum to teach to the test rather than teach to the student.

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Accelerated Insights @disruptsel.bsky.social · 1d

If I understand the Match Model, applicants had already graduated from a teaching program and had two years of teaching experience.

I'm curious when you attended since the program seems to have closed due to lack of funding.

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Accelerated Insights @disruptsel.bsky.social · 1d

Whether Fishtank, CKLA or EL, the pedagogical model of content-rich curriculum aligned to the CCSS perpetuates the "word gap" myth as described by @plthomasedd.bsky.social below:

radicalscholarship.com/2025/05/07/b...

Big Lies of Education: Word Gap

The story is simple and may sound obvious: Poor children suffer from a significant “word gap” (WG) when compared to middle-class and affluent children. Miller, Sperry, and Sperry explai…

radicalscholarship.com

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Accelerated Insights @disruptsel.bsky.social · 1d

Training teachers to teach to a standards-based curriculum aligned with discrete learning outcomes as measured by standardized tests of achievement does not necessarily help teachers develop the skill of adapting scripted curriculum to the needs of students.

This article references Match schools in its last few graphs and can be accessed in its entirety here:
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/543fe0e3e4b0f38ea7930575/t/565f5aa2e4b0a09598e01690/1449089698239/11.20.15+NYT+article+-+Dynarksi.pdf

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has focused their funding on teacher evaluation systems and other education reform fads that have faded out of memory - like the small schools initiative in the early 2000s and the CCSSI following the great recession in 2008.

New Profit is a venture philanthropy fund seeking to transform the public school system.

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Accelerated Insights @disruptsel.bsky.social · 1d

One thing that makes K-12 teaching so much harder is the degree of oversight and economic precariousness teachers face due to long hours, low pay and teacher evaluation systems designed to make them adopt the latest education reform trends being pushed by district level administrators.

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Accelerated Insights @disruptsel.bsky.social · 1d

It is important to remember the threads that have led to the curriculum reform movement since the 2000s, at least in the US.

First, you have the test-based accountability systems used for teacher evaluations and school takeovers during the NCLB era.

Then, the alignment of curriculum to the CCSS.

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Accelerated Insights @disruptsel.bsky.social · 1d

This @nancyebailey.bsky.social post from 2020 weaves together the premises to the argument.

Basically, the skill of aligning curriculum to developmentally inappropriate learning standards replaces the skill of adjusting curriculum to meet the needs of students.

nancyebailey.com/2020/01/24/p...

Problems Surrounding Amplify’s Core Knowledge Language Arts to Teach Reading - Nancy Bailey's Education Website

Many teachers and parents raise concerns that instruction is age-inappropriate. Many school districts have signed on to Amplify to teach subjects including language arts and reading. Teachers must tea...

nancyebailey.com

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Accelerated Insights @disruptsel.bsky.social · 2d

Fishtank is the curriculum design branch of Match Charter schools, which has its own 501(c)(3) you can directly fund.

As noted elsewhere, part of the SOR is marketing goods, products and services that deskill the profession, by preventing teachers from learning to develop their own curriculum.

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Accelerated Insights @disruptsel.bsky.social · 4d

Satisfaction tracks with American's general trust in public institutions.

There is a clear correlation with political party in office, however.

The relationship is less about the actual quality of education children receive and more about how education is politicized in the popular media.

Gallup poll of average confidence in major US institutions since 1979.

Accelerated Insights @disruptsel.bsky.social · 7d

Could be said of any education reform trend:

"Overemphasizing *rigorous standards* may be especially damaging for children who have had few experiences with *rigorous standards* prior to school." It's hard to overstate the damage being done by the "rigorous standards" propaganda campaign.

Accelerated Insights @disruptsel.bsky.social · 13d

Step away from the preferred narrative frames (reading crisis/science of reading) and notice that math scores steadily increase for all groups over the past thirty years despite a dip in performance following the pandemic.

Declines for lowest performers begin post-CCSS.

bsky.app/profile/disr...

Accelerated Insights @disruptsel.bsky.social · 29d

An alternative take would be looking at 4th and 8th grade performance in math, which has steady improved since the 90s.

In fact, math scores have begun to rebound after their post-pandemic dip.

However, this story does not fit the schools in crisis narrative.

Accelerated Insights @disruptsel.bsky.social · 17d

What gets lost in the Science of Reading discourse is the devastating role that the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) played.

Balanced Literacy entered NYC schools in 2003.

The CCSS took hold in 2013.

States adopted higher testing standards thereafter.

www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2014...

How Lucy Calkins, literacy guru and Fariña ally, is fighting to define Common Core teaching

Lucy Calkins, an influential Teachers College professor, has criticized some of the authors of the Common Core for influencing how the standards play out in classrooms. Now Calkins' own influence coul...

www.chalkbeat.org

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Accelerated Insights @disruptsel.bsky.social · 20d

It’s also worth looking into how changes in student demographics and test format influence performance, especially for students below the 50th percentile:

bsky.app/profile/disr...

Accelerated Insights @disruptsel.bsky.social · 27d

Worth noting more 12th grade students than ever are classified as English learners, having a disability or economically disadvantaged.

Likely demographic changes contributed to the decline amongst the lowest performing students as this was the first time the NAEP was fully digital for 12th grade.

Accelerated Insights @disruptsel.bsky.social · 20d

Declines on 12th grade NAEP should be interpreted in the context of a changing student demographic and a fully digital test format.

See below:

bsky.app/profile/disr...

Accelerated Insights @disruptsel.bsky.social · 27d

Worth noting more 12th grade students than ever are classified as English learners, having a disability or economically disadvantaged.

Likely demographic changes contributed to the decline amongst the lowest performing students as this was the first time the NAEP was fully digital for 12th grade.

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Accelerated Insights @disruptsel.bsky.social · 23d

Could you operationally define, in 300 characters or less, what “whole language” means to provide context to the question you are asking?

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Accelerated Insights @disruptsel.bsky.social · 23d

Recent NAEP results show that math performance steadily increased for students at all achievement levels from 1992 through 2019.

It may be that a science of math that stresses the pedagogy of "productive struggle" shapes how children perceive themselves as math students.

bsky.app/profile/disr...

Accelerated Insights @disruptsel.bsky.social · 29d

An alternative take would be looking at 4th and 8th grade performance in math, which has steady improved since the 90s.

In fact, math scores have begun to rebound after their post-pandemic dip.

However, this story does not fit the schools in crisis narrative.

Accelerated Insights @disruptsel.bsky.social · 23d

The framing of the original "great debate" that led to the "reading wars" narrative in the 1990s is exactly like how the ILA characterizes the role of social media (TikTok or BlueSky, for that matter) in using the SOR to "spread simplified binaries, promote resources and amplify personal stories."

International Literacy Association (ILA) @ilatoday.bsky.social · 24d

TikTok is shaping literacy debates.📱A new Reading Research Quarterly study shows how Science of Reading (SoR) videos spread simplified binaries, promote resources, and amplify personal stories—often framing SoR as the only “right” approach.

Read more: buff.ly/6jM5Dk5

#ILA #LiteracyResearch #EdTech

Two elementary-aged children sit together reading on the floor of a library

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Accelerated Insights @disruptsel.bsky.social · 23d

The reigniting of the reading wars debate has been fueled by Emily Hanford's "Sold A Story" podcast, which cites proficiency rates on the NAEP and state reading assessments as evidence of a "new" reading crisis that emerged over the past fifteen years or so.

hechingerreport.org/inside-the-p...

Inside the podcast that reignited the reading wars

‘Sold a story’ investigates how a faulty method of literacy instruction took hold, sparking anger, questions and concerns

hechingerreport.org

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Accelerated Insights @disruptsel.bsky.social · 25d

I’m confused.

I referenced neither WL nor SP.

Instead, I suggested that variations in NAEP performance are more related to changes in the test as well as demographics of the test takers.

Invoking the Reading Wars narrative just distracts from the influence of these changes on test performance.

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