15. Reading Instruction in the US Is a Mess!

Title: Reading Instruction is a MESS in the US

Summary:

In this episode, Trina introduces the theme of the Reading Mess, with stark warnings about the severity of the issue in the United states. She outlines the episodes that will be on the theme, why it is so important to discuss, and makes the case that the illiteracy problem in the United States is eroding our ability to effectively self-govern, and is the biggest civil rights issue facing our nation today.

Episode one includes a candid conversation, Trina and Jess discuss the significant challenges facing reading instruction in the United States. The discussion touches upon the struggles both have encountered in teaching reading, the flawed methodologies like the queuing method and whole language approach, and systemic issues in the educational framework. Jess shares her frustrations with a strict, ineffective curriculum that has led her to leave a previous school. They both emphasize the importance of phonics while acknowledging that a balanced approach is crucial for effective reading instruction.

Trina highlights the poor literacy rates in the U.S., referencing her own struggles in getting data and the alarming findings from sources like the CIA World Factbook and the U.S. Department of Education, which suggests that the country may have a literacy rate as low as 64%. They discuss the impact of socioeconomic factors, the importance of veteran teacher knowledge, and the need for meaningful investments in teacher support rather than over-reliance on pre-packaged curriculums.

Throughout the discussion, they advocate for the creation of highly paid veteran reading teachers who can support new teachers, emphasizing the need for a professional designation recognizing teacher leaders. They conclude with a call to action, inviting listeners to sign a petition advocating for these necessary changes in the education system.

00:00 Introduction and Episode Setup
02:53 Teaching Experiences in Oakland
04:15 Understanding Reading and Language Acquisition
05:17 The History of Written Language
06:44 Challenges of Teaching Reading
24:29 Comparing Literacy Across Cultures
29:29 Addressing Literacy Issues in the U.S.
38:08 The Challenges of Teaching Reading
38:39 The Impact of Hiring New Teachers
40:42 Economic Factors Affecting Education
42:12 The Decline in Literacy Rates
47:39 The Debate Over Reading Instruction Methods
56:11 Proposed Solutions for Improving Reading Education
56:59 The Importance of Veteran Teachers
01:09:45 Conclusion and Call to Action

Visit teachershortagecrisis.com to join the movement of teachers speaking up about the mess in K-12 Education in the United States. 

www.teachershortagecrisis.com
Petition to Save K-12 Schooling and our Precious Democracy!

Transcript

Introduction :
Welcome to the Reading Mess Episodes!

This thematic content was the hardest for me personally to produce, and I have been tweaking this, obsessively changing it up, as I continue to shift my big takeaways about how I believe it needs to be discussed.

Why has this been so hard?  Well, It's a very, very big deal, with its own large buckets of knowledge and content to unpack. There’s the theme of structural racism, which is how I first became aware of this mess.  But it's also about other things too, things which involve every last member of our society, and challenge fundamental notions we all hold about American exceptionalism, and our place in the world.  But as we attempt to do this topic justice, I wanna say right at the start here, that this is all very fixable, and I have full faith in all of us to do just that.  But in order for us to fix this, we have to face it, and have ourselves a collective come to Jesus moment about how bad it really is. Please remember, that even though I get mad, and I call folks out, that I love us more than I am angry.  I simply cannot stop trying–god knows I’ve tried–when everyone else around me was acting like this state of affairs was just the way things are, and that there was no way to even begin to try, I kept fighting–sometimes wishing that I could be like everyone else around me and just accept this mess.  Other times, feeling so deep resentment for them for not trying too. I no longer resent other teachers for this mess though.  We are all neck deep in this oppressive system together, but we’ve got to pull the wool off our eyes right now. Thankfully, I found a group of other teachers willing to help me talk about this.

So, there’s a lot of episodes on this theme, and they do get into the weeds a bit.  We found a badass reading teacher–Janet Nasir–to speak about this, and our hope here is that you will stick with the jargon-y stuff a bit as we unpack this mighty beast of a topic, which has, thankfully, been covered or is being addressed by others in recent years who I wanna call out here.  Sold a Story is an excellent podcast series which delves deeply in the reading wars–which is a limited series which chronicles how K-12 education managed to botch reading instruction at a fundamental level by getting away from what we know about how people learn to read–known as, “The Science of Reading” also referred to as explicit instruction in phonics, by adopting a pedagogical approach which conveniently did not require expert veteran teacher knowledge on the subject, which uses a method of having students guess at the meaning of word on the page.  This strategy is called the “Whole Language” approach more recently referred to as the “Cuing Method”, which gets totally away from teaching students the sounds that each letter and combination of letters make, and relies on kids using pictures, and other text features to guess at a word’s meaning.

Another key contributor to this discussion is Kareem Weaver, a literacy champion who now runs his own organization called Fulcrum. He and his prior collaborator, Dirk Tillotson worked tirelessly to advocate for literacy in my former district, Oakland Unified, in the years after I left. Kareem and Levar Burton also collaborated on a film absolutely everyone needs to see, called “the Right to Read” its is a godsend of a film which is a beautiful courageous project which does this subject a whole lot of justice. You will hear Janet Nasir and the three of us react to this important film too.  

But neither of these vehicles were around when I first began digging into this mess, and while both of these resources are excellent, and essential–they are missing a big piece of the puzzle.  They fail to address the systemic issues baked into K-12 which could allow something this horrific to occur.  This podcast’s central thesis about the convoluted, and piecemeal  nature of K-12 governance, coupled with the lack of current teacher leadership over our own profession are of course the cause.  Once again we see, that our best hope to find a lasting fix to this issue is to finally address the systemic sexism in our profession, and elevate the veteran 1st and 2nd grade reading teachers in our nation to be the final voice over how reading instruction should happen–to allow them to develop a praxis of critical dissenting conversations–to empower thet to call the shots here. Because the current paternalistic stance around K-12 teachers is killing our kids, and our democracy.

Does that sound too hyperbolic? I wish it was. As you are going to hear,  The United States has some of the most embarrassing, lowest literacy rates in the world, and somehow, the larger culture has not really noticed or cared. We’ve been distracted by the trappings of our culture wars, rampant consumerism, the latest social media craze, and a million other big and small things…But it's been creeping up on us, this whole time. This is the number one civil rights issue in our nation right now–so if you give a damn at all about our kids, about the school to prison pipeline, about our very ability to effectively self govern, you should be horrified by this mess. 

Episode:
Hi jess. 

Hi, Trina. I'm excited for the show topic. So you're going to do your reading episode. So you haven't done your reading episode yet. 

I've done like so many versions of this. I'm like so in my head about it, Jess.  Yeah, I have recorded and re recorded this so many times. And in fact, there were a handful of people that got an earlier version of this that I recall  and we just got tired of waiting for me to figure this out.

So Amanda released her amazing episode with her sister.  And I think Jess, part of the reason why I'm like,  I just feel overwhelmed by this topic, I think for two reasons. One, it's so important  and I think there are just so many incredibly important people that deserve to have this said correctly and I'm not one of those people.

And that's part of my second problem is teaching sixth grade is not the same thing as teaching first or second grade. Like those are just very, very different things.  And I just feel like woefully inadequate.  But so I think  this final version, this has to be, Jess, this has to be the final version. I need to be done with this episode and move on with my life. 

I think if I try to just  focus on the stuff that I know well,  and then have you constantly be drilling me and clarifying what I'm saying that I can finally be done with this because the goal Jess, the goal, is that I get the courage up to ask Dr. Kareem Weaver, formerly of the NAACP Reading Project, now the founder of his own Organization called fulcrum.

Who's just a bad ass reading equity warrior  to send this to him and see if it does it enough justice that he'd be willing to come on again or come on with me and speak. So that's the goal. What do you think?  

I think it's great. I think it sounds good.  

Okay. I have always been like, okay. So my, my history is I taught in.

Oakland, and I started off teaching in what we call deep East Oakland, which is a phrase that you would only know if you've like lived and worked in Oakland for a while, which is really when we say deep East, we mean the most disenfranchised parts of Oakland gentrification has highly constant concentrated poverty in Oakland and it's really sad.

And so I had the privilege. Of teaching in a school where I was the only white person on campus every day, and I was just so, so irrelevant in that space. And I saw that a lot of kids were just. I don't think any kids were reading at grade level.  And so there was like a lot of a song and a dance about giving them some kind of reading intervention That wasn't real and just a real lack of a bravery around having conversations about what we were doing  And not doing for these students and so I just kept digging in and digging in a little bit more and so  I've I've been thinking about this for years.

I've sat with gurus about reading instruction. I did have to take the RICO, which is in California, the test to prove you know how to teach reading. And I want to just back the truck up to, to my anthropology lessons. I want to go back to the beginning of what is reading.  So, most teachers  in K 12 learn to read easily.

And we're not entirely sure exactly how many people fall into this category, but as many as 10 percent of us, just from the wiring of our brains, seem to pick it up really easily.  , but what that means is that most of us struggle in some way to pick it up. I was not one of those people, and it's really unfortunate that we don't attract more divergent learners in our profession because they have the ability to be that bridge between the status quo of the way we teach and the needs of our kids.

Right. And so reading is just something we take for granted.  It's just one being able to read easily. It's just one of many different types of intelligences. None are more precious or important than the other. But this inability of us to like  understand the struggles of our kids means that we're kind of blind to the struggle of reading. 

And so I bring it back to the history of the written language in general. Like I teach. the formation of the very first written language, Kineoform, in ancient Mesopotamia.  And I think part of the problem is we conflate our ability to pick up verbal language with our ability to write language as one and the same.

And so since it's so easy for us to learn spoken language, we think that that comes from the same place in our brains as reading and writing language. But that is not true at all. We've evolved, um, the ability to speak language well over hundreds of thousands of years, and it cannot be conflated into the written language.

And there have been a lot, a lot of judgment in societies that never adopted a written language. And I'm actually teaching that right now, like the invention of farming.  Do you know much about the invention of farming? Have you ever taught that before Jess?  

Farming? Like, like, what do you mean by that? Like, 

like when we went from being hunter gatherers To then settling down and farming stuff. 

Yeah, I used to have a Farmville. So, I mean, I had so many thoughts going on, right? Like I was like, it's farming some sort of language acquisition skill. I wasn't aware of what do you mean like growing food and yeah, but yeah, I don't, I don't know a lot about the history of that, but it's interesting. And so some of what you're saying right now is my district recently says that we need to do letters training, which is specifically.

The science of reading training, and they do go over the history of language acquisition, and they specifically talk about our language, English, just being super bizarro, uh, in comparison to other languages, the kind of sounds we use with our mouth and just, and we, we actually, it goes over the, the course is intensive.

It's a two year program, and they go over, like, just the basics. Things you just never like, like, I also picked up reading easily as a child. I didn't really struggle with it by the end of first grade. The teacher was like, you know how to read. And then that was it. I never thought about it again, except for learning new words.

But a lot of what they talk about is like how that is not, that's obviously not normal, like just picking it up easy. So I was thinking about the letters training I've gone through, and so much of it is about like, are you aware of like the different sounds our language has, like our written language has certain sounds, and are you aware of like how you're making the sounds with your mouth?

And I was just, so as you're talking, I was just thinking about how that all came together, right? Like how did, how did we get to this point? And so much of it is just things I've never thought of before. Like when I'm taking this training, because even though I did reading methods one and two in grad school, I didn't learn necessarily how to teach phonics.

And that's the class I am in right now doing so many things right now, like certain sounds, like how do you, where do you put your tongue in your mouth? And do you ever use your certain sounds you use your lips, or do you use the back of your throat and recognize I never thought of this in my entire life.

And so anyway, I know this is straying far from far, but we do talk about like they do talk about the ancient alphabets and how different, like, our current alphabet is from where we started with. Oh, yeah, did start, um, you know, telling these stories. stories in that farming lifestyle, right? And they start communicating in that way.

So they do go over the history of mankind and where language come from. So I know a little bit, but not a lot. So you tell me more, 

you know, a lot. And I think that that's fascinating. And I think we take a lot for granted, especially  As people who are reading and writing our native spoken language, for people who happen to have that wiring in the brain that made this easy, it's just so hard for us to imagine the difficulty that other people have with picking up reading and writing a language in general, or even a second language.

And for me, Jess, like, I play the piano woefully bad. Like I'm so poor at sight reading music. It's just not a skill I was able to pick up quickly. And that's my only basis of comparison and it feels painful. And I often want to put the music down and stop playing. And I can, I can live without playing music, but we're not in a society where we can live without reading anymore.

Yeah. So the tie between farming. And the written language, it's this. Okay, so we lived very happy lives for 190, 000 years of the 200, 000 years we've been on this planet. And I read something recently saying that, oh, they think modern humans have actually been around for 300, 000 years. Okay, whatever. But currently the books we're using say 200, 000 years.

And we just did not write things down. How did we commit things to memory? We told stories.  And you've read, because you're a voracious reader, some of the world's first stories, like the epics of the great, um, like Mesopotamia, Egypt, right? They have a rhyme and a meter almost to them, because they were told and memorized before they were ever written down.

And that served us perfectly well, right? The only reason why we ever conceived of a written language is the same reason why we ever started farming. We had to.  There's a lot of judgment in the modern world, well specifically in the 19th century, around like European colonists and encountering fascism.

societies that never had a written language and then judging them to be inferior and using that as an excuse to dehumanize them and exploit them like the West African kingdoms and the Native American people are like the two examples in the American context that come to mind right but the deal is if you don't ever farm You don't ever have a written language.

You just don't because you don't need one. And farming creates this surplus of food,  which creates specialization of labor. So people now have different jobs and are doing different things. Whereas before farming, everybody had the same job. Everybody's hunting and gathering together. And you're living in very small groups of like 50 to 60, uh, band size people.

But once you have food surpluses and farming, You're living in city states that are thousands of people, you know, and so you need to start figuring out, Oh, okay, so some people deserve more money because they have a different job. And we have like a few people making the food for all everyone and everybody gets their share.

So it's about keeping records. That's why writing ever gets started to keep records because of greed. And the complications of a stratified social hierarchy and the food surpluses and how to distribute it. That's, that's why it, that's why writing ever gets started.  And the, in the example of the West African kingdoms, they actually did develop a complicated civilization and never needed to write it down, write anything down and develop a written language.

because they had a different way of conveying information that I'm digressing. For the most part, if you never farmed, you never had a written language. If you did farm, You did. And as soon as humans, cause we're so intensely creative. And as soon as we had a written way to communicate, we immediately started using it in creative and artistic ways, started writing down our stories. 

But this happened like super recently  and we just, our brains have not caught up. We're not evolved to do this. And it is very foreign thing we're asking our brains to do very, very foreign thing that we're asking our brains to do.  So I'll pause and let you comment on the farming and the connection to reading.

What do you think? 

Yeah, I've often thought about it like I'm kind of a I really like learning about the industrial revolution. So, and that really. I know it really spread a lot of different like types of manuals and stuff like that, like technical writing was spreading and it was, it was just something that had never been done before.

Right. And so I hadn't really thought about before that, like before the industrial revolution, that's when people were, I mean, that's, that kind of got people off of the farms and into this work environment that wasn't the greatest. Right. And so it's interesting thinking about that beforehand. And also just, you know, again, I'm kind of like going back to, uh, the letters training a little bit.

One of the first activities they have you do during it is they give you like an alphabet that they make up and then they tell you all the sounds, you know, that what it means and what certain words are, and you're trying to do it like you've never seen this alphabet before. There are letters and squiggly lines and shapes and You have no idea.

And then they teach you kind of like the way we teach kids reading. They try to teach you, okay, these letters sound like this. So now let's read a sentence. And you're just like, you are so lost and confused. And it, and they do talk about that in the training, how this is pretty new to humans, not like learning to read and write is not like an, like an ancient skill, right?

That's what I was thinking of when you were talking. I was thinking one that's interesting is I'm always thinking about the farm to industrial revolution movement, um, and how it changed society. It changed everything. It changed how we view life.  

Okay, so I'm going to come back to the farming thing because Yes.

Um, we have this idea, and I gotta, I gotta be honest with you, a lot of sixth grade ancient civilization teachers who don't have a degree in anthropology don't know this, and they don't teach this correct. They, they sort of spin it as, oh, because these textbooks are written this way, too. Jess, they're horribly biased.

They spend one lousy chapter on the first 190, 000 years of human life, and and all of human evolution and gloss over it, right? And stick to the civilizations. That's the history that's worth knowing. And so we set our kids up to having this bias, but we didn't have a better life. When we started farming, we had a, we, our life expectancy plummeted and we only started farming because of a little ice age that occurred.

Um, called the Younger Dry Ass, and it just dried up everybody's natural resources. And so a bunch of societies that had reached a critical tipping point of population that were hunter gatherers all started experimenting with farming at the same time. But yeah, farming leads to writing, but farming is not a better life.

It's not. You start having epidemics and disease and income inequality, and it's not And yeah, I love my modern conveniences and I would not want to go back to, um, what I tell the kids hunting gathering is it's just camping out with no supplies for your whole life. I  admit it, but you know, clearly we were doing well, we live longer, healthier, better lives, and we didn't read.

And so we have to get away from this idea that people who struggled to read are somehow not as smart as the people who don't struggle. So there's that.  And then like, I was talking to my son, my 18 year old son about it,  and he was like, yeah, mom, you know what? Um, I was actually, cause I was telling him about the griots.

of the West African kingdoms who were able to tell their stories through a rhyme and meter rhythm and they would go from village to village just basically communicating information this way and that's how they recorded information was through their griots and Desi was like Mom, I was just reading about the Navajo people and how they helped out the allied forces during World War II with, yeah, with their native language because it never got written down.

The Germans couldn't decode it, and it was super complex and complicated, and they gave of their time and energy and just poured themselves into this project to help allied forces communicate information. And I was just like, I knew that. But when he told me about it and I was thinking about it, I was like, God, and we treated them like utter garbage.

Like, I don't know that the allied forces would have even won without Native American help. I mean, ah,  because we so devalue people who don't write things down. Okay. So that was my digression. So, now we have writing. It's this thing we're asking our brains to do that is very foreign to us. The deal here is that not all written languages are created equal, in regards to being able to read and write them. 

And, again, with the conflation that we do in our brains, of the languages that are easier to learn to speak, we think are the languages that are easier to learn to write. And I use this word, easier, and it's It's super subjective and I'm sure some linguists are going to be like, no,  everything you're saying is incorrect.

So, you know, email me, tell me I'm wrong, but English just happens to be one of those languages that is super hard to learn to read and write. It just is. And what is so deceptive and I'm going to even say insidious about English is that it's super easy to learn to speak. And it's because of our verb conjugations.

Are you familiar with what I mean by this, Jess? Yes. 

Yes.  

Say more.  

I was actually just Googling something because I was in my letters training. I know I keep bringing up letters training, but this is what the schools are using right now to teach phonics to teachers. This is how the schools are used, like everywhere is using this letters training right now in elementary school, several states, the entire states have to learn phonics training.

I was looking up how many, I know like one reason English is somewhat hard to learn is is because we have a lot of different sounds. Um, and our combination of letters don't make any sense. 

That's the problem. 

And I saw that was in the back of my mind when you're talking about like conjugation of words and verbs.

Um, it's just, it doesn't make any sense the way that we change things around compared to like the romance languages. And it's one reason it's just so hard to learn. Like spelling is such a nightmare. It's a nightmare. 

It's a total nightmare. And so, yeah, 

it's 

ridiculous. The language is not that hard to speak because of our very simple verb conjugations.

We have this peculiar thing that other languages have. Um, but we have this highly esoteric vocabulary that is. really unknowable unless you go all the way through college and are immersed in academia and that is unique, not unique, but it's, there are some languages like this where you can't even engage in scholarly discussions if you haven't, you don't have the vocabulary.

So that is one reason why English is kind of insidious, but it is easy to speak. And you know, we've called English speakers have colonized the world, giving everyone our language, and then they never get the opportunity to be fluent enough in it. To speak truth to power to these to this establishment that has oppressed them, you know, and so we have and all of us who speak English know this rules we have phonics rules, and we teach our kids to read highly purely phonetic words first. 

And we even give them nonsense words to make sure they actually can decode the individual sounds in a word perfectly. And once they get all this down, right, they start learning the blends. What these different blends mean together. Consonant blends. And then they learn, um, E controlled vowel words. All this.

The rules that  we teach in the rules, and then in the first couple of, A Like I think maybe the first year or so, and then we spend the rest of their elementary education showing them all the ways these rules are broken  over and over and over. And we know that it is not, it is not anomalous really to have people who are dealing with dyslexia, which is not even a learning disability, it's just a different way of your brain is wired that gives you incredible strengths but it does make reading and writing trickier. 

And we don't screen them. I have no 504s or IEPs for dyslexia most years, which is ludicrous because we know about 25 percent of our population has dyslexia. I see it. Just, I see, I can instantly spot it in a kid's handwriting. Oh, this kid has dyslexia. Um, but what I noticed is the extent to which they're able to truck on through it has to do with their learning advantages and opportunities.

You know, because they have to come up with creative workarounds. They have to persevere, even though they  everything about their learning experience would have them just fall into a hole and cover up and cry and rock themselves because we are so oppressive to different learners, especially in the reading years.

Right. So if you are a listener right now and you are like, ah, English is not that hard. Yeah, fine. We break some rules and you have to learn all these exceptions. Okay, let me give you some context. How many languages in the world have national spelling bees?  Right? Yes? 

Do  other countries do 

that? I don't think so, girl.

I  

wonder. 

I know. Very 

interesting. I'm gonna look it up. 

Well, I don't think so. Yes, words can be super long in German or in the native tongues of India, but they're not constantly breaking their own rules and borrowing from so many language families and not rewriting them in the rules of their own phonics.

You know what I mean? So we are a Germanic language. Did anyone know that? You probably did, but most people would never guess that we are a Germanic language,  but we have. So many Latin words, Greek words, French words. I mean, and we don't change the spellings and it just makes our language so hard to read that we have to funnel in an inordinate amount of time in the learning day in K through five to just teach, to have spelling word lists every week.

And that would be time we could spend on math and science, but no, we have already taught kids how to read, but now we have to spend. five years teaching them all the exceptions to our spelling. You know, it's impossible. It's impossible. It takes forever.  And so, yeah, would we agree that reading and writing English is tricky?

Yes.  Yeah. Okay. But the fact of the matter is it's more complicated than that because there are a lot of other English speaking countries, Canada,  Australia,  the United Kingdom, Ireland. Am I missing any?  Scotland's part of the UK,  um, that are all dealing with the same problem that we have, which is that we have a very difficult language to learn to read and write. 

And they all have near 100 percent literacy rates in their countries.  So say, because you've just traveled, what was your experience with literacy abroad? 

Yeah, I've, I've traveled to like English speaking countries. I've gone to England, New Zealand, Scotland, and it's just, it's shocking the, so what I've noticed, one, literacy in every corner, like bookstores on every corner, newspaper stands on every corner, and everyone reading, like, it is a part of the culture that it.

Everyone reads and that's definitely something that I've taken away from visiting those countries is just how rich like every say 7 Eleven bodega gas station. I mean, it's just they're covered with magazines, books, newspapers, periodicals, so many different types of reading materials and everyone everywhere is reading like you go on the subway.

There's not a lot of people flipping on their cell phones. Most people have a book or a newspaper and they're reading. It's the culture and I don't know how it starts or where it starts, but it's definitely fascinated me. And going in as a teacher, observing these lessons, because I go and visit schools in those countries.

I've been to school. You have?  Yeah, I've been to schools in Scotland, England and New Zealand and I mean, it's just like going into schools. It's kind of shakes you to your core because.  We are years behind their reading levels. So like things, the things that they're producing, like writing, like I went to this, I went to this school in England and won all the first graders, no cursive.

They all write beautiful  handwriting. Yeah. Beautiful cursive. I mean, writing out really, uh, complex words in first grade, but I remember I went to like this fifth grade classroom and the kids were reading Shakespeare and they were writing essays, evaluating and comparing and contrasting these themes in two different Shakespeare plays.

Oh my God. I mean, if you know anything about American schooling or, you know, When you learn that, I mean, even I was in like AP classes in high school and I got like a tiny taste of Shakespeare in ninth and 10th grade. These are fifth graders in England, in London. It was a neighborhood school. This was not a fancy private school.

This was not a charter school. This is not a private school. This is a public school in England.  Very diverse. One of the most, you know, London is one of the most diverse cities in the world. So there were people of all different backgrounds in this school and they are reading Shakespeare in fifth grade and writing and they had all the All the writing samples on the wall, and I'm going through reading these essays, and they sounded like kids in high school.

And these are 10 year olds,  10 year olds, like, and it's just like, it kind of makes you think like, one, like, how are they doing it? Right. And the one thing I noticed is that They just have a huge emphasis. Well, I'll tell you one thing I noticed, especially in England and Scotland and maybe even New Zealand, New Zealand is they have national standards and you see the same lessons and posters in every single room.

And everything is like, it's like kind of like a, like, I mean, they have like a national standard and they hold people to the standard  

and 

it's, it's weird. I got to tell you, it's really weird walking through a classroom and Seeing these first graders write two, three paragraph essays in this beautiful handwriting.

But I also think it's a bit of the culture just valuing reading and writing and seeing these as the most important things in their culture. So I, I just, I cannot believe. And I also just think that, you know, I mean, I know we've probably talked about this before, but just setting that The, the standard of what we use for like entertainment.

I mean, I think a lot of people there are using reading and writing as forms of entertainment and you don't really see a bunch of kids running around with smartphones, running around with iPads. And I mean, I know that's our culture in America, but like over there. There is a like a kind of a respectfulness about reading and writing and it's just it's weird.

It's hard to put your finger on it. I don't really know. I've tried to study it. I've tried to look up journal articles. Like why were these kids three or four years ahead of what it means? 

I'm so glad because this has always been my question is what in the heck are we doing that is so different in the United States and what are the bigger more important question what is it that they are doing that we are not right and it's not so much I think just about I mean obviously it's something that we're not doing or we're doing wrong but it's also that we have  more of a social safety net problem.

Our Children are showing up the first day of school with deficits. There's these things called the foundations of reading, like concepts of print,  and we know for sure that kids who were not read to or talked to like the ideal scenario is you're at home with your kid  and you put your kid on your lap.

And you put a book in front of both of you, and you read it together, and you point to the page, and you read, and you talk about the pictures, and your kid shows up the first day of kindergarten knowing that a book opens from left to right, or right to left, sorry, and that you read from left to right across the page, and has had a lot of a dense vocabulary, been exposed to a dense vocabulary.

So because of our  socioeconomic racial oppression problems in the United States,  We, our kids are not getting those experiences as they should. So that's part of the problem. But I love what you brought up a second ago, Jess, which is that  We, our society in the United States is not the only English speaking nation dealing with historically marginalized populations, socioeconomic and racial based oppression,  immigrants who are speaking language, speaking English as a second language, so children who are not hearing English in the home.

Like, we point to all these problems as our, like, excuses, but like you said, London has all of us. Those same problems. Yes, they're a first world nation as we are. Yes, they are European, but they have a major problem with class and income inequality there too. They're not as evolved with income inequality as other European nations are.

And they would agree with that. They would agree with that. Like the Enlightened people of London would say, yep, you're right, we have that problem too. So there again, that still does not answer the question of why are we screwing up so badly,  right? And why are these other places doing such a better job?

And I think your curiosity about it, Jess, is everything because you're looking around trying to get the information to synthesize a complete statement about a complete understanding about what is going on here. That is where I have been. For years now, trying to figure out why is this so bad, and all I can figure out is just tiny slivers of it, which is why I want to ask Dr.

Karim Weaver to come on to whirl around the information out. But this is what I found when I was trying to research it. Okay, so what are our actual literacy rates in the United States? Because there's this thing called the CIA world fact book, right? We, it's our, it's our central intelligence agency. And years ago when I first found it, it was really compiled as a, as a table, like a X and Y axis table that was really easy to read.

And it had all of the quality of life indicators for all of the nations in the world. And so running across the top were the quality of life indicators running. Down on the, um, Y axis was the nations and it had things like infant mortality rate, life expectancy rate. People living in poverty in all these indicators, and one of them is literacy.

Okay. And so I think from everything I was seeing that they're basing this number on what they think that the national level of who's reading at a sixth grade level in those nations are. Okay. So, the rest of the first world. You know, the wealthy nations are above 95. Most of them are above 98%.  And the United States, at that time, I'm thinking this was like  2015 when I started looking at this table.

There was just an empty box. There was no number there,  Jess. And this is compiled by our intelligence agency. They were just not putting a number there. So what do you think when I'm saying that? Are you surprised? 

I'm not, I'm no, I'm not really. In fact, I started Googling it as you were talking about it.

And I was like, what is going to come up? Right. And they're just, there are so many different. Yeah. Yeah. 

Yeah. Don't don't read because we're getting to it, but  nobody called them out on that.  So are we just not looking at national literacy? I know. Because when I was in Oakland, I would reliably have. Even when I got out of deep East Oakland and I was up in the hills, I was teaching a privileged Hills community.

But in Oakland, we bus kids, it's an open enrollment thing. So, uh, if you're willing to get up real early and have sleep deprivation, you can be bused all the way up to the Hills and some kids did. And so there was just this wild divide between the haves and the have nots with their reading levels. And those privileged white kids up in the Hills were, really sophisticated, like Oakland liberals are really sophisticated.

They expose their kids to a lot of, you know, incredibly cool learning opportunities. They're progressive. And then you have these kids who are surviving DPS Oakland, who are being bussed up every day, and their reading levels were for the most part, a wild divide.  And so it was just reading opportunities.

And so I was saying to my bosses, I'm like, I have about five, mostly black boys, occasionally a black girl every year, reliably across three cohorts of about, you know, 30 kids, each five. I just can't read at all, because I knew that if you're testing below the third grade level, you have not mastered the basic foundations of reading, and you have foundational holes in your knowledge and you know English is so hard to learn to read that if you've missed that information you've missed it, it's gone and so I was asking people like, hey, what is the district literacy rates. 

Somebody new.  I mean, my boss at my my bosses at my site level middle school had never taught reading and didn't have a multiple subject credential and so did not understand what it meant when you've got six seventh and eighth graders who are reading below the third grade level. So I would say, you know, they're functionally illiterate.

We have no reading intervention class here.  What are we going to do for them? And you know what they would say to me?  You're racist for calling them illiterate. That's a racist word. They are struggling readers. They're going to be fine.  So I'm going to let you respond to that because that's what I was told. 

Wow. I mean, and it just feels like more of the, you know, we don't have funding for this. So we're just going to change the labels so people can't get the help they need. Right. Which is that's actually the racist act right there is like, there's people that need help and we're not helping them because we don't want to spend money on them because really.

Somebody somewhere is feeling like they're not worth it. They're not worth the investment. They're not worth the funding. That's what it feels like when you're telling this story.  

Well, if you control the narrative, then you can twist things to be whatever you want them to be. And so since we didn't want to acknowledge that we had a huge literacy problem amongst our African American students, we just covered it up.

And called it something else. And K 12 is so good at doing that. About reframing things and using language to confuse and befuddle people. And the people in this system who have the knowledge about what illiteracy is, what literacy is, how to teach it, they're all first and second grade teachers who have the least amount of agency in this system.

They don't get promoted. They don't, no one asks them what they think. And so I started just digging and digging. I eventually came up with my own pilot program to create something from scratch. But while I was doing it, um, I learned that you can't sit down kids who don't have basic reading foundations of reading in front of any computer program.

There's no computer program that is going to remediate those skills. It has to be a person less strong, better in knowledge, and you can't learn it in your program. Like you said, you didn't learn it in yours. I didn't learn it in mine. I did not learn it in mine either. I had two classes of pedagogy for ELA and I did not learn how to teach reading.

It wasn't until I went to study for the RICA test. That I found this badass guru, um, from California State University  decided to produce these YouTube videos showing all of the stages of reading and you have to know them to pass the RICA. It's always, everybody knows that's the hardest test and they're trying to get rid of it because it's so hard.

It's eliminating too many potential candidates. That's not the answer. You have to just teach them. It's not an unknowable thing. You have to teach them. But the main thing here is that even with this knowledge about how people learn to read, actually executing it and teaching reading takes time. You can't you have to learn it on the job and you have to have a plus classroom management.

You have to navigate and negotiate a number of homogeneous groupings in the room. And no child should ever have to suffer through a single year in those foundations of reading years with a brand new teacher. It is an insult to their reading and instruction education that they will not recover from. 

And you know, Jess, that the, uh, the kids who are exposed to a higher degree of these brand new teachers, that's not equally distributed amongst the masses, right? 

Well,  well, one thing I was thinking in the back of my head is that I've actually heard admins say this. I'm not saying my admin, but I've heard admins say that they love hiring brand new teachers to save a little bit of money because it's free.

You know, you don't, you don't hire like people with experience and extra degrees. They tend to be higher on the pay scale. Right. And we've talked about that before. And it's just like, they're saving money at what cost? I mean, everybody needs, you know, everybody, everyone who wants to teach should get that chance.

But like you said, uh, kind of like where maybe a more veteran teacher would be needed in certain cases. Like, what are the reasoning for not taking them on? And another thing is that I think we mentioned this earlier when we were just chatting alone, I think that the newer teachers are able, like, they have a little less fight in them because they're eager.

They're hungry to learn. They want, they want to learn the profession. So I don't want to call them easy to brainwash.  

No, I know, but they 

know what I mean, but like, they're not, they're, they're more accepting of some of the BS. Yes, 

of course. I think 

that they, they see that. And so those were some of the thoughts that were running through my mind as you were talking about that.

Well, they're preyed upon. And in an earlier episode with Dr. Bruno, we were talking about how he did a separate study with another colleague and they definitely found that brand new teachers are put in the hardest position. Positions because in those positions, if you put a qualified, um, highly veteran person, they're going to tell you what's wrong with everything we're doing.

And they don't want those complications. They don't, they want someone who's just going to not have an opinion and do exactly what they're told because in our country, unlike even in the United Kingdom, I'm in the rest of the English speaking world. We don't have a social safety net, right. And our pay has not capped up with.

The rising cost of just basic living, healthcare, housing, and education, which are, you know, sure, London has expensive housing, but they're not paying for education and healthcare. And so their profession does not need to keep up wage wise. With this ever growing cost of living situation. So the United States, we have this flight from the profession because it's not keeping up with the cost of living.

And, and I forgot to mention this in the episode with Paul, Dr. Bruno, but for the very first year. In over 20 years, the United States saw for the very first time in over 20 years, an increase in the gender pay gap,  and the number one reason why this happened is because of the teaching wages stagnating  teaching they reference teaching first and then healthcare jobs second.

So our profession, we are professional wages are stagnating so badly. They are contributing to the overall nationwide gender pay gap. And so we just have people fleeing the profession. And so when you can't privilege or center teacher, veteran, veteran teachers in this thing,  because there aren't enough of us.

So you start adopting a cultural belief that you don't need them.  And that's where we got to where I'm headed. Next is the bad Miss the bad choices that brought us to an even worsening literacy rate. So getting back to the the CIA World Factbook, once Trump took office, and I'm not trying to be political guys, but this is just what happened.

The CIA World Factbook began being organized qualitatively differently. Instead of the table that you can look, we'll link it to this episode. Instead of an easy to read X and Y axis table, now there it's pages you have to leaf through on the internet. And it's much harder to notice that the United States isn't even revealing its literacy rates. 

So if you look, though, and you sift through all this awkward information, the way it's been organized now, you'll see that, you know, the lowest literacy rates are something like, you know, 60 percent in the 60 percent range. There are some poor nations that are doing very well, that are still in the 80 to 90 percent range for literacy. 

And so you would think, okay, So the United States is wealthy, but we're screwing up. And so maybe we're not as low as that, but we're not going to be as high as the rest of the English speaking world. Well, trying to get at that number led me into an obsessive pursuit, which I know is something that you're prone to do too, Jess.

Like, what is,  what the hell is this number? So I kept looking because no one could tell me what the historical literacy rates were even in my district. I wanted to know, are we back in Oakland? Are we getting better? Are we getting worse? Are we stagnating? Like what's going on here? No one knew no one knew because no one was even willing to acknowledge there was a problem in 2016 when I brought it up, you know, so I finally got the number and it's, I'm still not sure if it's absolutely 100 percent true, but the U S department of education estimates.

That we were 64 percent literacy rate. That would put us in the bottom quartile of the world. How in the hell is this not headline news?  I, I, I mean, I, I get chills saying it. It's so overwhelmingly (bleeped), Jess.  What do you think when I say that number?  

I mean, I actually wasn't surprised  because  my, my district is one of the biggest districts in the country.

And the beginning of the school year, we released all of our SBAC data from last year. And we only have, as a city, Las Vegas, only 20 percent of kids who Are on reading live.  We have 20%. So I'm thinking to myself, well, if we're one of the biggest, we're one of the biggest school districts in the country and we had 20 percent of kids meet.

their reading level for the year from K 12. Like what is that? Like there has to be other big cities struggling as well. And so I'm kind of like, I was balancing it out in my head. And I, I mean, I had just done a basic Google search and it was giving me like 79%. So I was like, Oh, that seems overinflated for what I'm used to. 

But I mean, compared to like these places that I've been is I've been all over now. Um, 99%, 100%. I mean, it's just like, I was like, how did we get to this? And I, I've been, it's kind of been weighing on me all year, this number that only 20 percent of kids have passed their reading test.  And I'm a librarian and it feels really bad, you know, like, it's just like, oh my gosh, like, what are we living in some sort of dystopian  right now? 

Nobody cares about reading, writing, Or basic skills. And I don't want to say nobody. I mean, I'm saying decision makers, policymakers, adults, people, obviously the kids, it's impacting them greatly. And they're just learning to adapt. And I think that the technology is making it a little easier. And it's just becoming less and less noticeable.

But I mean, at what point, like, I mean, it's, it has to be, it's, it's going, we're going to see a snowball effect of this eventually, because I don't think our literacy rate has always been this low. I feel like it's getting worse. 

I know, and I don't know what it is. That would be great. This data is missing.

Hell, not even the CIA's own World Factbook is documenting our current literacy rates. It feels like an intentional cover up, right? Like we're trying to dupe the American people into thinking everything we're doing is fine. You know, these are not the droids you're looking for. You know, like it's not, this is not real.

Like, this just distract us from the fact that we're not learning to read. But you talk about a dystopian reality, that's why in the intro song I say this is an existential threat. Because if you're wondering how we got to this place right now, where we have people believing baloney, and lacking the ability to think critically about what's actually real in society, if you're like,  clutching yourself with existential dread over the current state of affairs in the United States and the world, This is a big part of why.

It's because our population has not been taught how to read.  We don't know how to read, we don't know how to think critically, and we keep making decisions, the decision makers in our profession, that just exacerbate it and make it worse. So if, if everything you're doing is not centered around the veteran teacher holding the space  and having all the tools at their disposal.

Because we're about to start talking a little bit about the weeds of how reading instruction happens. And you and I know these terms, and I'll try to break them down, but like,  if they don't have all of that. and you know, all the help they need.  That's how, that's how we get into the situation that we're in.

And so you're going to make a decision about, well, we're not going to center the teacher expertise. So let's just buy something. Let's buy a curriculum. Let's believe that it's easier than it is to teach reading. And then here we go with the queuing method. All right. So what is your experience? Experience with the queuing method and whole language approach to reading instruction, a la the whole Soul to Story podcast. 

Oh,  yeah. I'm the one that I mentioned that to our other co hosts, Amanda, the, the Soul to Story. I always had a problem with it. I always like, and I actually quit a school that had, I had really loved working at the school. I was a fifth grade teacher, and they adopted this really rigid, uh, whole language.

It was a little. Lucy Calkins, I'm not gonna lie. Yeah. They, they, they adopted it. Mm-Hmm. . And some of it was just so insane to me, and I got mad and like they were telling me that I couldn't teach Latin and Greek root words anymore.  , I couldn't teach parts of words. Oh  my God. They were telling me that, you know, everything that I had learned. 

That would help kids read better than I was a big fan of they said, Nope, you got to do it this way. And, um, you know, I tried it for a year and it didn't work. It didn't work. I tried the, the workshop method. I tried whole language. I went step by step in these manuals and it drove me bonkers because I just felt like, you know, it's not, it's not just one.

Thing. It's not just one method. I mean, there's so many different things that are involved in creating this reading world, right? And that's what I see my classroom is, is a reading world where, you know, we're kind of like we're being immersed, but we're learning different things. We're learning different components of the reading world.

Of reading, we're learning different reading strategies, and it's not just one way or the highway. And that's what they were telling me at this school. They were like, Nope, you got to do it this way. And then they started piling on the work where we had all of these like rubrics where we're grading, you know, reading skills and writing skills with all of these rubrics.

It made no sense. They were just wasting my time. And I, and I quit, I quit that school at the end of the year. I didn't quit.  But at the end of the year, that was the main reason I was like, I can't, I can't teach. I can't teach reading and writing like this, like in this way, because I had seen at work using more of a combo. 

Before I'm like, I'm not saying I'm not, you know, people are always like, are you phonics? Are you whole language? Which team are you on? It's not a team. It's a, it's a, it's an effort. You know, like it's, it's a, it's a conjoined effort. You need both of them to have it work. And now I'm seeing the pendulum swing, which my reading professors told me it's going to swing from whole language back to phonics.

And then it's going to swing back in 20 years. They said every 20 years, it swings violently.  The violence swing towards phonics and it's upsetting me because the kids are not reading books anymore. They're not, they got rid of novel studies. They're not reading. Oh yeah. Books. They're, they're reading short little excerpts and I'm sorry, that's great in some cases, but if you want someone to fall in love with reading, like one way to fall in love with reading is falling in love with a character in a book.

I'm sorry, but it works and this is what I believe in.  I don't know. It's just, it's a lot. It's too much. It's just, why can't we just meet in the middle? Why can't we be in the 

middle? I don't understand. Well, part of it, in my opinion, first of all, brava, Jess, everything you just said, and you're touching upon my  anger and frustration around what I think is one of the worst places for CAN curriculum, which is secondary ELA.

And they put so much in there that my, what I'm currently hearing, and I'm not going to draw attention to my district or specific people in my district, but what I am currently hearing is I don't have time to teach novels anymore. Oh, I know. So you have to do the secret stealthy thing of I'm going to teach a novel. 

And I'm, you know, I have, you have to be sneaky and subversive to teach a novel. Oh, that's what I'm doing right now. But anyways, getting back to this, what you were talking about whole language versus. explicit instruction in phonics. So if you're not an English or reading teacher,  here's the deal. Explicit instruction in phonics is a kind of laborious process of laying down the skills.

Like I was alluding to them a little bit at the beginning of this episode of what, how, what these different sounds make and then teaching them different combinations and then what the exceptions are. It's really like sounding out words. And then later teaching things like Greek and Latin roots, prefix and suffix. 

All of this stuff, and a lot of different strategies, right? Whereas whole language is more about making guesses about what the words might mean, based on other information, like the pictures, or the text features, or teaching kids how to make an inference about what the word is, by covering it up and looking at the clues, context clues around the word.

The deal is, is that both of these are good. I use all of them. I, I use all of them, but the deal with the queuing method and whole language, I think this is why I think it got so insidious just is requires less veteran teacher knowledge.  And so it was something that they could sell to the districts of like you don't need a veteran teacher.

This is simple, anyone can learn to do this. So here you go, just do this.  And Lucy Calkins was somebody who was touted big time in my district by the person who's in charge of our curriculum and instruction right now. No humility. No, I'm sorry. No, I maybe I should listen to veteran teachers because she's only taught I think three years, a billion years ago, right?

And never this, never, never children's reading instruction. Now it's now do this, you know, other HMH can content. And there's no, the problem is we're not asking the teachers. Nobody was willing to sit down with you just to say, do you think this is working?  Uh, let's create a space where people are actually having to use this stuff, get to talk critically about it. 

It's not like we've made this mistake.  We've never made this mistake before. We keep making this mistake, and it keeps resulting in this embarrassing literacy rate in our country that we're not willing to look at. And it's not because we're not spending enough money. We are. We got a lot of people making a lot of money in the CAN curriculums that they are selling, and it's not yielding any benefits, and no one's being called to account for it. 

And then, okay, so Kareem Weaver is about the science of reading, and I gave him a call because I heard his former colleague Dirk Tillotson, who has since passed away, speaking on KQED radio one day, finally drawing attention to the illiteracy problem in Oakland, like, Finally, I was in the car screaming.  So I got home and I called him up and he put me in touch with Kareem Weaver.

I don't even think Dr. Weaver remembers this conversation. It was a long time ago, but this is what I told him. Okay. So  there is the problem of, we got to have explicit instruction in phonics game, and we have to marry it with what we know about with whole language. Like we need good pedagogy that relies on veteran teachers.

So there's that. But then there's also the reading opportunity gap that's happening with our nation's BIPOC community, socioeconomic disenfranchised community. And it's because we have a poor distribution of veteran teachers in this country, right? So these kids in these lower socioeconomic neighborhoods, they're often have just year over year of brand new teachers or worse yet, not even a teacher, a sub, a parade of subs. 

The kids I had that were most affected, uh, I'm in that privileged hill school in Oakland. They were all kids who didn't even have a teacher of record or first or second grade or one of those years.  And so if we're not going to acknowledge the fact that, that we've hurt our kids, we've oppressed them because we can't hire people to be in these positions.

We don't center veteran teacher knowledge. Then where do you go from there? So my, my thought process was to create highly paid.  First or second grade reading teachers that their entire job is to push into the classrooms, offer tier one and tier two reading instruction in classrooms where there's new teachers. 

And that way the new teacher can watch and see the way it's supposed to look. Can counsel and be mentored by a veteran teacher who's highly paid because this would be a toast that we need to pay these people. Let's be real women for the most part for their knowledge, and then they can sign them off. So you're ready to teach alone.

Go for it. Go forth. Now that you have the skills and knowledge in the classroom management. And that's what it is. That's what we need to do. And I told Kareem this and he was like, you know what, you're right. That's what we need to do. We need to create a brand new higher paid position in K 12 that centers veteran teacher knowledge and really mitigates the lack of veteran teachers in these spaces.

And so, yeah, these TOSAs would have to go maybe support four or five teachers. And they'd have to be running around. They wouldn't even have their own room, but they would be highly paid. So what do you think about that solution? 

I think that'd be wonderful. And I actually, I worked in this rural school district once and I was there for about four years.

It's the one that I, that I left because I didn't like the reading and writing workshop. It was a wonderful school though. And they had something like that. They had this thing where it was all for intervention. If you, if you needed help with your class, either with behaviors. Reading, writing, or math.

There was like this intervention committee you would go to, and all of the people on the committee were seasoned veteran teachers, and they were paying them a little extra, but I don't think Anything that was probably fair. I'm just guessing, right? I'm just guessing. But these teachers, and I did have a teacher.

She kind of adopted me through this program, and she taught me these interventions that would work. And she would sit down on our prep times, and she was getting paid. For the prep time, right? She was getting paid extra to talk to me and she would work. She would tell me, you know, teach me a strategy and say, okay, I want you to go use this with your class the next week and report back to me next week on how it's working.

So I was, I was getting like really good information from someone who had been a teacher for 25 years and I learned a lot from her and it's just a shame that we don't have.  And this was a very small district. I mean, we're talking there were seven schools in the district. It was very tiny. And so I feel like the smaller districts have more control over their budget and they were actually, you know, you'd be surprised.

It was very conservative place, but they were very pro teacher. They saw the value of teachers because they saw the value that teachers add to the community. And they saw that the people that were in these classrooms were growing up to be the sheriff. The mayor, the business owner, the real estate person, right?

They're seeing, they're seeing the kids stay in the community and they're seeing them grow up and they're seeing what the teacher's done because it's like, you know, these small towns, like they really do value community. And that's why I think it worked there. And it's always been in the back of my mind, how I had that teacher helping me and how cool it would be if that was like set up on a, on a campus.

A bigger scale by just I I'm now I'm in this gigantic machine of a of a school district and it's just like it's it's It's almost like being on a merry go round every day and you get off and you're like, whoa, what happened to me? I mean, it's very, I feel discombobulated. I feel confused. I don't even, like, I'm not saying I don't think.

I think I could get help, but when I do ask for help, I'm kind of like gas lit sometimes. Like I go to team meetings or I go to like leadership meetings and I'll, I'll just throw something random out to see what people say. And like, I'll have other people be like, Oh, well I never have that problem because I X, Y, Z, you know, instead of like offering.

Strategy like that person did, like that, that veteran teacher had offered me a real strategy, taught it to me, and then had me go teach it to others and take data on it. And then she would push into my classroom and help me sometimes. And they would find a replacement. She was also a teacher. They would find someone to go and watch her class while she was helping me one on one.

I'm not saying it was perfect, but I mean, I don't understand Why, how big are school districts get to this point where they don't value the teacher anymore? And so I love your idea. What I'm saying is I feel like I've had a taste of your idea and I love it and I wish it could 

work.  I love that you've had experience with this.

I'm so glad we're recording together right now 'cause I haven't talked to anyone who's ever had this and I didn't know it ever existed anywhere.  So it tells me my instincts were correct. Um, because again, like one of the things sold a story to stop short of is really understanding why this problem ever got so entrenched in the first place.

Like, how do we get to a place where  presumably, you know, knowledgeable experienced teachers were perpetuating a bogus pedagogy? Kids were not reading and nobody was saying or doing anything about it. It's because we're so institutionalized. The word you taught me to use. We're so, so disempowered. We're so there's such a paternalistic stance towards us that we have no expert veteran knowledge.

We second guess our own observations. Oh, wait, this is working, right? Because they're telling me it's going to work. It, they mess with your head. So if you've ever been a part of this oppressive thing, it's not your fault. Like teachers, it's not your fault. We're constantly, it's, it's like, you know, sexism.

You're constantly going, wait, what? Did that just happen? And you're constantly second guessing yourself. We were researching a very specific CEO of one of the big three textbook companies today. That jerk no degree in education. I'm sorry, Jess, but I won't say his name and I won't say the textbook company, no degree in education, no master's degree, and was on an interview in a magazine talking about how his online curriculum and online tools are going to be the thing that are going to save teachers because it's all about the teachers and trying to make their lives easier and just taking all the decisions about assessment and instruction away.

So that they can focus on building relationships. Oh, thanks!  Who are you to make those decisions for us, you big jerk, what?  

Yeah, and I was just thinking about, like, teachers in my building and how everybody's on Canned Curriculum now, and the Canned Curriculum is so bad. It's so horrible, and I do believe we use this specific company for our reading program as well.

It's a script. The teacher, how can you build a relationship when you're like this and reading off of a piece of paper? And how is anyone building a relationship with anyone when they're and then they have my principal's boss comes in with the daily script because we are, we are ranked one of the worst schools in the district, right?

So we're under a magnifying glass and they come in and they make sure. That if you're on page 55, that you're on this part of the page. I mean, they are checking the script. How, why would kids want to be friends with a robot? Why would kids want to learn from someone who has to go like this all day with a sheet of paper in front of their face?

Sorry, if you're listening to this, you can't see, but I have a piece of paper in front of my face. I mean, they don't. They don't. Kids don't want to learn off of a piece of paper. Like,  I don't understand why, why would you sell like he, like these people, these tech textbook companies are selling the next biggest story, right?

Like we heard C. Calkins sell a story. There's a new story that like, basically, if you read off of a sheet of paper, you're going to be a good teacher and all your kids are just going to love you. Because you're like this all day. And that's what it looks like if you walk in the classrooms. I mean, the kids are doinking off, you know, slapping themselves in the face, playing with their shoes, fighting with each other.

And the teacher's like, okay, I'm on page 55 and they're throwing papers around. I'm just like, Oh my gosh, this is, this is insanity. This is what insanity looks like. I just saw a picture of it and it's this, these classrooms and the teachers that are veteran teachers, they're kind of, they kind of know better, right?

They're sort of like, like, Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, look, the principal is boss here. Page 55. Yeah. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.  They're like, they close the book and they get back to real teaching. You don't learn that. You don't learn that overnight.  

But I feel like I waste a lot of time making sure it looks like I'm doing the curriculum.

It's, it's exhausting because we have to do these assessments and they're such, they're, they're baloney, right? And it just takes like a whole day. If you add up all the days of the things where I'm having to make it look like I'm doing the curriculum to fidelity, because I do the bare minimum. I'm not trying to get in trouble, but I'm not going to just use this and screw over my kids.

Right? I have to do what's right by my kids. That's my first loyalty. But I probably lose a few weeks of instruction just ticking boxes to make it look like I'm using this canned curriculum, which is lousy. You know, it's just crap. And, you know, they, the assessments that come with this curriculum  are kind of bogus, too.

I mean, they are definitely bogus, too. They artificially inflate data and make it look like it's working. And because of the rapid turnover of superintendents and school boards, like, nobody's called to account for, hey, we paid for this and it's not working. That's on you. Because by the time that that data comes up, that person is gone.

And that is why I told the story, as I said, it's not going to go stop short, because it needs to say, hey. Teachers are tenured. Teachers stay put. Teachers need to be in charge. We need to create a whole new professional designation inside of K 12 of teacher leader. And whenever you have shown that you are ready to lead a certain area, you do it.

And you have exactly the same amount of power as a site base or district admin, and you're released for part of your day to do it.  You have to stay teaching to be a teacher. But that's, that's what we're saying is center teachers, cut the paternalistic crap out. We are the experts, stop looking around the room at all the people who are running these textbook companies who don't have a degree and never taught.

What the hell? Where do you get this kind of arrogance to think you know better than me, you jerk? Ding, ding, ding. Ding, ding, ding. Is that the end of this episode?  

That's what,  whenever the, when I'm teaching the kids and they get, they make a big aha in class about something. It's usually about systemic racism or something like that.

I'll be like, Ding, ding, ding. And they love it. They love it.  

Thanks for talking with me about this today. I, I hope it makes people feel better and validates the teachers who are the experts. I'm not. I don't teach in a first and second grade classroom. I do teach reading, but I'm not. That frontline essential badass veteran first or second grade teacher.

I just love you so much. You are  everything.  

Yeah, I really wish we could clone them because I feel like every school should have these reading specialists, regardless of the level of skill. School or like, I mean, I just feel like every classroom, you know, needs to have exactly what you were talking about, like push in reading specialists and help people because like the more I'm learning about the science of reading, and I will be the first to admit, like, I should have, I should have learned this before becoming an elementary school teacher, but they weren't teaching it when I was in school, right?

Like, I've had a K 8 license now for 13 years, and I don't know how to teach people how to read. So. Like, this is my first experience, you know, with the science of reading and learning phonics, and obviously there's some things that I've known, but a lot of that I haven't known. So, I mean, it's just, I think this was a really good kind of overview on, uh, you know, just our perspectives, but I feel like other people are going to see part of themselves in this episode too.

Because I mean, if there's one thing a teacher gets frustrated about, even a math teacher, is like when someone can't read, right? Like, I mean, when it's just, and it's becoming this bigger, like you said, it's like this huge gap in society. It's getting larger and larger. It's like the elephant in the room.

And I mean, like, no one wants to really talk about it because as soon as you say like, yeah, none of these kids can read. Um, People look at you like, well, you're the teacher. Shouldn't you be teaching them how to read? Differentiate, differentiate. Yeah. Like you're getting, you're getting gaslight. You're feeling weird.

So anyway, I mean, I think the point of this episode was just to say like, you know, give a little history on, on it, our points of view, things we've seen, but also kind of like. So you know you're not alone like it is very there is a level of insanity going on right now in K 12 when it comes to reading instruction.

It's there. You're not making it up. It's not in your head. We're recognizing it. We see it too. 

And the petition addresses this. We're trying to create a new professional designation inside of K 12 for teacher leaders that we have equal power as school boards and site and district and city. County and state and federal admin.

We need to be a part of this. I'm not saying we're the only ones, but for the love of God, we got to be in there and it will take an act of Congress and we need a national association of us who have that power.  Sign our petition, sign our petition.  Okay, that's it.  Thanks for listening, everyone. Please let us know if you want to join in this or any conversation on the podcast, because we're We have only begun to delve into each topic and we need your voice to do this justice. 

Don't forget to go to teacher shortage crisis.com to sign the petition and join the movement to save K 12 schooling and our democracy. And remember, we may just be teachers, but we're the only ones who can fix this mess.