A Response to Professor Kotsko’s “The loss of things I took for granted”

Lots of common ground, although I believe he underestimates the stupidity of the problem

A Response to Professor Kotsko’s “The loss of things I took for granted”: PLEASE read his article. Here is my response: 

Recent years have seen successive waves of book bans in Republican-controlled states, aimed at pulling any text with “woke” themes from classrooms and library shelves. Though the results sometimes seem farcical, as with the banning of Art Spiegelman’s Maus due to its inclusion of “cuss words” and explicit rodent nudity, the book-banning agenda is no laughing matter. Motivated by bigotry, it has already done demonstrable harm and promises to do more. 

I found mostly common ground in your article, and I think it is incredibly important for educators to read, primarily because education is such a naturally siloed profession. When we see a pattern - something that is going wrong - there’s no real way of intuiting whether this is a problem in our classroom only, or in our department, or in our school, or in our state, or in the country, or in the world. The only way we can test the pattern is to get the ideas in front of as many educators as possible, as well as the public, and try to gauge the responses. You have gotten it in front of us, I am responding, hopefully we can gauge the validity and universality of the problems.

There was so much common ground here that I don’t want you, Professor Kotsko, to feel as though I’m quibbling. I am a deeply closeted right-of-center educator in a very progressive, relatively large urban public high school; you are a very progressive professor at a small liberal arts college who submits op-eds to Slate. It is inevitable that we are going to have some “different ways of knowing.” At the same time, it was shocking just how close that Venn Diagram got to being a legitimate circle.

Let’s get the outer rims of the Venn out of the way first - it’s almost entirely found in the opening paragraphs of the Slate article, anyway: 

There are no such things as book bans in the United States.

There are, as of this writing, three copies of Maus available at the E.G. Fisher library in Athens, Tennessee, which is a 1 mile walk from the school where it was “banned”. 

There are also copies of Maus at the Naperville Public Library near where I understand that you teach. 

It’s also available, as of this writing, for $15.82 on Amazon.

If our definition of “banned” is “not in a school library”, then most books are “banned”. If our definition of banned is “not included in the curriculum”, then my own department has “banned” Romeo and Juliet and replaced it with The Poet X.

Which, as an aside, is where we really harm students. As I’m sure you know, there is an opportunity cost to curriculum planning. Like you, I don’t believe I’m a snob, but when you have time for, perhaps, only four books in 9th grade, replacing Romeo and Juliet with The Poet X should result in somebody getting fired. I don’t mind students reading The Poet X (I think it’s a garbage book about a self-entitled, narcissistic brat, and I think the “poetry” is vacuous and uninspired, but not everything is for everyone). However, I challenge anyone to read Romeo and Juliet side-by-side with The Poet X and make the claim that X has more value than R&J. It’s not even close, and teenagers aren’t going to run off and read Shakespeare on their own. We are missing a valuable opportunity and replacing it with trash.  

If we are using the word “banned” in this way, then it’s not just the “right banning Maus for cursing” that is the problem; it’s also “the left banning Romeo and Juliet because Juliet isn’t a differently-abled POC.”

Wasn’t the joke that the only book the left and right could agree to ban was Harry Potter (for trans comments & devil worship, respectively)? And yet, JK Rowling is still doing quite well.  

For most of my career, I assigned around 30 pages of reading per class meeting as a baseline expectation—sometimes scaling up for purely expository readings or pulling back for more difficult texts. Now students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding. 

I understand that our populations are different (students at a small liberal arts college vs. high school students at an urban district). Nevertheless, I have seen the same exact thing, but worse. Students audibly groan with as little as a single page of reading, before even knowing what the reading is about. I have a significant number of kids in English as a New Language classes, who know English better than their home language, who have been in this country 7+ years (keep in mind they are only 14 years old), some were even born here, a few of them don’t even speak their native language, who can’t test out of ENL because they lack the literacy skills to pass the state test to remove them from the classes. In short, they struggle to read, write, listen, or speak with enough proficiency to be considered someone who knows the English language.

I don’t know if this is something you’ve seen, Professor Kotsko, but aside from academic capacity, post-covid students have been unbelievably immature. They have very little ability to self-regulate, and very little impulse control. It’s odd, upsetting, and does not lend itself to academic excellence. 

If we ask what has caused this change, there are some obvious culprits. The first is the same thing that has taken away almost everyone’s ability to focus—the ubiquitous smartphone. [and then] Even if I rarely attain that high level of focus, though, I am able to “turn it on” when demanded, for instance to plow through a big novel during a holiday break. That’s because I was able to develop and practice those skills of extended concentration and attentive reading before the intervention of the smartphone. For children who were raised with smartphones, by contrast, that foundation is missing. 

It’s 100% the phones. We also issued every student a chromebook so they could virtual school during the pandemic, and we continue to use them in class. It’s no longer a question, they are machines that are built for distraction, and as you say, students are missing out on the ability to build a foundation of capacity for sustained concentration. Schools need to ban cell phones and probably chromebooks, too.

The second go-to explanation is the massive disruption of school closures during COVID-19. There is still some debate about the necessity of those measures, but what is not up for debate any longer is the very real learning loss that students suffered at every level. [and then] Not only did the marked decline in reading resilience start before the pandemic, but the students I am seeing would have already been in high school during the school closures. Hence they would be better equipped to get something out of the online format and, more importantly, their basic reading competence would have already been established.

I don’t see how these things are different. The claim (with which I agree) is that there was already a marked decline in reading resilience before the pandemic, due in large part to portable distraction devices. So then why wouldn’t students locked in their rooms by themselves, alone with their distraction devices, for a year or more, exacerbate said decline in reading resilience? I think that’s exactly what happened, and I also think it explains the unique levels of immaturity we’ve been seeing in grades 7-12. 

Less discussed than these broader cultural trends over which educators have little control are the major changes in reading pedagogy that have occurred in recent decades—some motivated by the ever-increasing demand to “teach to the test” and some by fads coming out of schools of education. In the latter category is the widely discussed decline in phonics education in favor of the “balanced literacy” approach advocated by education expert Lucy Calkins (who has more recently come to accept the need for more phonics instruction). I started to see the results of this ill-advised change several years ago, when students abruptly stopped attempting to sound out unfamiliar words and instead paused until they recognized the whole word as a unit. (In a recent class session, a smart, capable student was caught short by the word circumstances when reading a text out loud.) The result of this vibes-based literacy is that students never attain genuine fluency in reading. Even aside from the impact of smartphones, their experience of reading is constantly interrupted by their intentionally cultivated inability to process unfamiliar words.

This topic always reminds me of the quote: “Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.”

This is absolutely my experience, except, with all due respect Professor, I believe you are dramatically underestimating the stupidity of the situation. Educators love using research while at the same time are notoriously bad at doing and understanding research. You mentioned phonics, for example. As I understand it, the way this controversy started, was some educators observed that really good readers could read words without sounding them out, concluded that this meant beginner readers should be taught to read words without sounding them out (because that’s what practiced readers do), and thus began the reading wars that lasted half a century. This was a debate that never needed to be, and yet it dragged on for literally decades, and continues to drag on.

The Great Reading Wars are the tip of the iceberg. K-12 education as an institution is easily duped by fads because the tools required for critical reading and conducting research is not baked into any of our preparation programs, and the problem is compounded because the administrators who lead the schools and the professor who teach the teacher preparation programs have no idea they are awful at understanding research. Actually, they consider themselves experts at it. The examples are everywhere, but here are a few I’ve run into personally, that translate into policy and practice, that are (what do the kids say?)...problematic:

Multiple intelligences: they don’t exist, because (1) “intelligence” is an actual thing that is reliably measurable, (2) if there are “eight intelligences”, as Howard Gardner suggests, then why can’t there be nine? Or ten? Or a hundred? None of the proposed intelligences have a relationship with each other, they are all different things, so why can’t there be an intelligence for everything one has a mind to do? and (3) what, exactly, is the difference between an “intelligence” and a talent, or an interest, or a personality trait? None of this stopped educators from believing that people can be “Nature Smart” and therefore understand edelweiss in a way people who are “Nature Special Ed” cannot.  

Hattie’s Effect Sizes: John Hattie sold over 2 million copies of his book Visible Learning, in 29 different languages, purporting to have used statistics to determine what works and what doesn’t work in the classroom. Administrators seem to love his work because there are pictures and large sounding numbers, which is all very impressive to them. However, unfortunately for all of us, (1) effect size is not a known mathematical technique, (2) he calculates probabilities below zero and above one hundred, and somehow nobody called him on it until years later, (3) he doesn’t do the math correctly and he admits that he did the math wrong but never (as far as I know) made a public statement, allowing districts to continue to treat his work as valid (4) he combines unlike things and treats them the same (e.g. for “the impact of health on learning” he combines cancer, diabetes, sickle-cell anemia, and digestive problems, and (5) there are a number of other serious problems with his work that would be tedious to spell out, but if moved, you could click the link. Educators, especially administrators, don’t notice or they don’t care, because “effect size” is an easy concept with a simple graphic and the interventions are actionable, and it all feels really researchy.

Everyone is in honors classes: If you look at student schedules in our school, you might notice an awful lot of “Honors” students. In fact, it’s all of them. I believe our principal read some headline about “mindset” and so now believes if everyone is in an honors class, they’d pass their state tests with greater ease. Also, if we put everyone in the NFL, maybe they’d all be professional athletes.

There are more of these, but I’ll spare you. I know that none of them are riveting. But they all guide policy and practice, and they are rarely given much critical thought. As far as I can tell, this is the norm, and now you have the students you have.

It is hard to see a similar motivation in the growing trend toward assigning students only the kind of short passages that can be included in a standardized test. Due in part to changes driven by the infamous Common Core standards, teachers now have to fight to assign their students longer readings, much less entire books, because those activities won’t feed directly into students getting higher test scores, which leads to schools getting more funding. 

The funding from Common Core was not usually as much as you might think. Often schools would get even more money for failing. Success does keep schools off of “naughty lists”, though, which keeps the state out of their lives (which is always a good thing). 

I mentioned that our school replaced Romeo and Juliet with The Poet X. What actually happened was that our school replaced Romeo and Juliet with excerpts of The Poet X - depending on the teacher, we read somewhere between three and twelve poems out of that awful book. The less generous understanding of why we do this is what you stated (and I agree is the more likely answer): these are the types of passages likely found on standardized tests, so we’re going to train for the tests. The more generous reading is that English teachers aren’t tasked with teaching “content” (e.g. whole books), they are tasked with teaching “skills” (e.g. “how does the author’s use of figurative language develop the central idea of the text”). The rationale is that we don’t need whole books for skill-development, and that more time needs to be spent on “analysis” than wasted on simple things like “understanding the plot of the story.” 

To borrow a phrase from Jonathan Haidt, we are in the “uniquely stupid” position of having the less generous explanation makes more pragmatic sense than the more generous explanation. The problem is, regardless of the explanation, “not reading” is not an effective strategy for maximizing student potential, cultivating a love of reading, or doing what it purports to do, which is maximize test scores; for the 2022-2023 school year our school was in the 5th percentile in the state for our high school state test (the ELA Regents exam). The strategy of “not reading” somehow doesn’t produce effective readers, writers, thinkers, or test-takers.

Large-scale prose writing is the best medium we have for capturing that complexity, and the education system should not be in the business of keeping students from learning how to engage effectively with it.

This is a matter not of snobbery, but of basic justice.

YES! And again, thank you for writing this, and I hope I have added something useful to the conversation.