Jeffrey Austin

@jaustinedu

Literacy Consultant | Growing Researchers of Environment Equity Network (G.R.E.E.N.) Co-Founder | Former ELA Department Chair, Writing Center Director, Instructional Coach + Humanities Teacher | Views are my own | Pronouns: He/Him

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Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu· 4d

“Local control” brought to you by the Michigan Department of Education and their vendor friends.

Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu· 21d

This is its own form of harm.

At Success Academy’s 59 charter schools, all students are expected to take 18 to 20 Advanced Placement exams before they graduate — including 100% taking AP Calculus, AP Biology, AP Macroeconomics, AP Literature, AP US History and AP Art History.

Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu· 24d

While I'm not in higher ed, NCTE's decision to shutter CCCC is another example of institutional and organization failure at a time when unwavering strength is necessary. It's also a bad omen for the future of our professional organization and another reason for K-20 solidarity moving forward.

Email from NCTE Executive Committee acknowledging messages received and the following:

For many years, the Conference on College Composition & Communication (CCCC) played a critical role in serving the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) & its mission. In recent years, however, CCCC has struggled with its fiscal sustainability, declining participation, & governance challenges. As a result, earlier today the Executive Committee of NCTE made the difficult decision to de-charter its special topics conference CCCC. To clarify, today’s decision to de-charter does not mean that NCTE has altered its commitment to supporting teachers at the college and university level. This is exemplified by the fact that the NCTE College Section is thriving. The process in making this decision spanned several years, with attempts to work collaboratively with CCCC’s executive committees across multiple iterations. While the organization appreciates the years of collaboration with CCCC, after deep evaluation and thoughtful consideration, the Executive Committee concluded this step was necessary to more effectively serve the college English and writing and composition community and NCTE membership as a whole.

Although this has been a very difficult decision, we are excited about the future. This change will allow us to provide better support to the college English and writing and composition community. In the coming days and weeks, we will be working hard to make this transition as smooth as possible. We thank CCCC, its leaders, and its members for its many years of contributions and look forward to continuing to involve the composition, rhetoric, and writing communities as we move forward. NCTE remains devoted to improving the teaching and learning of English and the language arts at all levels of education. As future planning takes place, NCTE will communicate updates.

A transition team focused on supporting composition, rhetoric, & writing studies will be named imminently.

Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu· Jul 13

Notice that the "direct instruction knowledge curriculum, savior teachers" can't stand any philosophy/pedagogy that suggests children can learn without the teacher in front of them.

Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu· Jul 12

Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu· Jul 11

The fundamental argument of the CogSci crowd is that students lack durable knowledge, so embodied processes won't work. Learning can only occur when students are explicitly given dots in a systemic, replicable way. The important knowledge students have from other contexts doesn't count.

The science of learning does not reduce education to rote recall. It highlights the indispensable role of long-term memory in learning, because, as Dan Willingham puts it, “thinking well requires knowing facts.” You cannot reason about what you don’t remember. You cannot connect the dots if you don’t have any dots.

Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu· Jul 10

Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu· Jul 10

Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu· Jul 10

Corporate needs you to tell the difference between these pictures meme

Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu· Jul 10

A meme with two men arguing about great books referencing the Doug Lemov argument in the original post.

Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu· Jul 10

I posted this on LinkedIn about a week ago about a recent LA Review of Books article on canon formation and my recent (and ongoing) conversations with Lemov, Kirschner, Hendrick, Wexler and others in the "knowledge building" camp (conversations in which I was called a "pathetic little man" 😂).

This recent piece on the Los Angeles Review of Books on canon formation could double as a critique for contemporary "knowledge building" movements in education.

The author discusses inventions like The Guardian's "100 Best Novels" list, which the paper claims is made up by "authors, critics, and academics worldwide," giving the list an authoritative aura. Despite the Guardian's "big tent" of reviewers, the list is still a function of what is familiar, legible, and safe. Essentially, these lists become about what is always-already processed through the "machinery of consecration." These lists, then, are a monument to what was recognized at a point in time.

In my recent dustups with the "knowledge builders" over curriculum, they will often, like The Guardian, point to the idea that the agreed upon knowledge in their resources was the work of a diverse group of people, holding many different positions, across education and beyond, making the curated knowledge in the resource the very best we currently have to offer. The selected knowledge offers something "essential" for college and career readiness, but also for interactions involving "social capital" where getting the reference matters.

My argument back to the "knowledge builders" mirrors the author's claims in the linked piece: these curated sets of knowledge, like those in many commercially available "knowledge building" curricular resources, are billed as unquestionable, unimpeachable, and unassailable, rather than being recognized as "provisional."

This sense of certainty also forecloses meaningful discussions on the how certain knowledges are labeled as "essential" or how the selection process reifies certain systems, structures, and ways of knowing that may benefit those doing the selecting or that those doing the selecting have already benefitted from.

Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu· Jul 8

Doug Lemov's post about his new book-based curriculum.

Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu· Jul 7

What happens when kids don't want to read excerpts from the big box curriculum or write another five-paragraph CER or find the learning culturally or linguistically irrelevant? This ignores that task, text, context, and identity all play a role in how we participate in reading and writing.

A slide from the Michigan Department of Education stating that students need to be assessed for dyslexia if they exhibit escape or avoidance behaviors when asked to engage in reading or writing activities.

Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu· Jul 5

The teaching profession carries a powerful story about its best people: they are the ones who stay, who fight from within, who keep showing up for children even when the system makes it nearly impossible. That story serves the institution. It asks teachers to martyr themselves to a system that hurts them and uses their labor to harm children, and to call that martyrdom a form of service. The values that brought you into teaching were values about children’s dignity and humanity. Those values do not require you to remain inside an institution your own conscience has already indicted. Gatto stayed for decades. When he finally left, he left loudly, in public, on behalf of every child he had been required to fail. His example is a challenge to examine the story you have been told about what a good teacher does, and to ask whether that story is in service of children, or in service of the system.

Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu· Jul 4

Hendrick on Substack: "Over the past few years an uncomfortable truth has emerged across every major reading survey: children are simply not reading books any more." Alpha: "TeachTales Is an AI-powered story-building platform that turns your kid into the author of their own custom adventures."

A tweet from Alpha about the TeachTales platform

Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu· Jul 4

"Get in, kids. It's vocabulary and Latin day here at Kingswood."

Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu· Jul 4

A screenshot of a tweet:

"What do you do?"
"I take ignorant empty young bags of meat and fill them with important life saving and affirming knowledge that allows them to become fully fledged humans."
"So you're a teacher that enjoys direct instruction?"
"umm, yes."

Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu· Jul 4

The school was founded by people "discouraged" with public schools. "HQIM" for thee, but not for Maggie and Tom Brown's school, where you can memorize disjoined and disconnected facts.

Maggie and Tom Brown were living in Naperville with their 6 children and were very discouraged with the public school system. Homeschooling at the time was not an option, but they wanted something similar where they could expose their children to classical literature and their Catholic faith in the right way. They wanted a place where their values and ideals were supported by the school and the curriculum, and where their Catholic faith would be shared in accordance with the Magisterium of the Catholic Church and in the spirit of Opus Dei. After meeting Lilliam Civantos and Tracey Skokna, they agreed they wanted the same thing for their children. With the help of God, their wonderful husbands, and lots of prayers, they forged ahead. The founders held meetings to promote the school at a time when they didn’t even have a building. They are grateful for the first families who believed in their dreams. Now 30 years later, Maggie and Tom have 10 children, live in Downers Grove, and have 14 grandchildren.

Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu· Jul 4

This is a sample of the "real curriculum" for 8th graders at Kingswood, which is just disconnected readings, time periods, and terms. This tracks given that "memorization" is one of their pedagogical selling points. It seems they're more interested in posturing than teaching anything substantive.

The 8th grade curriculum at Kingswood Academy

Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu· Jun 27

A screenshot of Twitter post debating progressives' perceived lack of education policy.

Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu· Jun 25

Whether or not we think JWT's project is cynical (I think it is!), I also think the LARB provides a useful framing for why and how a list like that gets constructed and the audience it's intending to reach. Related to Morrison's quote, the idea of "monuments" is a compelling one.

What distinguishes The Guardian’s list within this long and somewhat dismal tradition is not that it judges—all canons judge—but the specific character of its public-facing authority. Academic canons carry, at least formally, the caution of scholarly qualification. They present themselves as provisional disciplinary instruments. The Guardian list borrows the aura of institutional expertise—“authors, critics and academics worldwide” voted, the editors announce—while simultaneously billing itself as a broad, democratic, cultural event, open to all. It does not offer provisional aesthetic judgments. It offers monuments.

Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu· Jun 25

From a recent piece in the LA Review of Books...

Canons are criticism without the burden of demonstration. They assert hierarchies without performing the readings on which hierarchies must rest. And the deepest clichés in canon-making are not, as one might expect, the repetition of the same titles. They are the repetition of the same conditions of recognition: the same institutional ecology—the syllabus, the review culture, the prize archive, the translation prestige, the teachable masterpiece—through which certain works circulate into visibility while others remain, not unknown to specialists, but unprocessed by the machinery of consecration.

Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu· Jun 17

I don't believe state governments should exert this level of control over pedagogical and curricular decisions.

Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu· Jun 15

"Interest convergence" is also a powerful force. By claiming that SoR's sociopolitical aims are really about "literacy as a civil right," folks spearheading the movement can evade questions about culture, race, and class while ensuring the systems meets their needs/interests.

While SoR has recently been promoted as a remedy for racial
disparities in reading outcomes, its initial momentum largely
emerged from political advocacy by predominantly White,
middle- class parents of children with dyslexia who believed the
education system failed to provide effective reading instruction
for their children (Gabriel and Woulfin 2017; Hanford 2017).
Their advocacy helped catalyze a national movement, particu-
larly as it aligned with broad, growing concerns about reading
achievement. The political traction of SoR as an equity solu-
tion illustrates what Bell (1980) termed “interest convergence”,
which explains how reforms gain power when they serve the
interests of dominant groups while only appearing to benefit
marginalized communities.

Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu· Jun 15

Another line that they've been using lately is "I'm very liberal" and "I support DEI," which I think is trying to head off proven and valid criticism about the cultural destructiveness of big box curriculum.

"I will publicly say that I am 'pro-DEI' (when effective) and very liberal and would choose CKLA.

What's behind 'their vision is kids knowing stuff.

Go to the GK 2nd grade "history and geography" section. The first four units are on India, China, Japan, and Greece."

Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu· Jun 15

These are responses to criticism of Hirsch's Core Knowledge and related Amplify curriculum on Twitter. What do you notice, and what do you wonder?

CKLA is great foundational knowledge to build on. An acquaintance with a Black Nationalist micro school uses it. He calls it foundational knowledge for standardized tests. His students sit for all public school tests and are always outliers.

I'm guesting you must REALLY be against Martin Luther King's version of cultural literacy.

Our entire district uses it. We implemented the Science of Reading prior to the state law b/c of the strong advocacy of the local NAACP branch to do so.

Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu· Jun 14

Correct. Here's an excerpt from a bill currently in front of Congress.

“(4) SCIENCE OF READING.—The term ‘science of reading’ means an interdisciplinary body of evidence-based research about reading and issues related to reading and writing that—

“(A) identifies instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension, and writing as essential components to skilled reading;

“(B) demonstrates the importance of background knowledge, oral language, the connection between reading and writing, and strong writing instruction;

“(C) explains why some students have difficulty with reading and writing; and

“(D) does not use a three-cueing model.

“(5) THREE-CUEING MODEL.—The term ‘three-cueing model’ means an instructional approach or model that—

“(A) uses meaning drawn from context, pictures, or syntax as the primary basis for teaching word recognition (commonly referred to as ‘meaning, structure and syntax, and visual cues’ or ‘MSV’); or

“(B) teaches visual memory as the primary basis for word recognition.”.

Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu· May 31

I just learned that the principal edu influencer who walks around with the cart and uses thinly veiled regressive discipline rhetoric leads a charter school that uses aggressive and discriminatory tactics to weed kids out, and now his whole shtick makes much more sense.

Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu· May 8

Michigan Democrats had a trifecta for the first time in over 40 years and used it to pass a corporate-friendly back-to-basics literacy package, meanwhile only two school districts in the county where I work employ librarians and only a few more have actual functioning school libraries.

Declining rates of school media specialists in Michigan

Jeffrey Austin@jaustinedu· May 2

What happens when your school leader doesn't read research or makes decisions based on trends, ideology, vendor sales pitches, or social media? Not staying aware of research or writing in the field reduces teachers' power and influence to participate in decision making and, if needed, push back.