Fast Lane Literacy by SEDSO

Tommy Schultz:

America’s K-12 crisis in a nutshell: The average 18 year old student scores at the same level as a top 10% 9 year old in Reading

Via NWEA. Backup link.

In March, Berkeley’s Hung-Hsi Wu asked the European Mathematical Society a question that sounds too simple to need an hour: what is the mathematics we teach in school? His answer is that what American textbooks have carried for seventy years does not deserve the name — it defines almost nothing, explains almost nothing, and rarely says why any of it matters. Three reforms tried to replace it and fell short, he argues, because nobody had written down the alternative in enough detail for a teacher to use. So he spent twenty years writing it: six volumes, 2,402 pages, K through 12. The five principles he says any replacement must satisfy fit on a single page.

Our overview, with a link to the full talk: [link]

Sarah Sparks:

“The largest evaluation of an instructional coaching program to date…found no benefits to either teacher retention or student test scores from an intensive, expensive coaching model used in hundreds of schools”

Transcript, slides & audio:

On October 26 at the UW–Madison Law School, Kirstin Birkhaug of Hope College made a case for reading Mercy Otis Warren. The men we call the founders wrote almost nothing systematic about civic virtue; the people who did were mostly women, excluded from office and writing instead. Warren’s argument was that liberty is only ever learned by not having it — so a republic survives exactly as long as it keeps remembering what being unfree felt like. She doubted the Constitution could do that work, pressed for what became the Bill of Rights, and when that was settled, wrote a two-volume history of the Revolution as an act of public memory.

Joseph Jye-Cherng Lyu on Taiwan, Wisconsin, and what each owes the other:

A Taiwanese banker turned trade envoy came to Madison to sign an agreement and, in the course of explaining why it mattered, told a short history of how Taiwan learned to make semiconductors. American aid rebuilt the island after the war. An American company licensed it the technology in 1976. Engineers trained at IBM, AT&T and Texas Instruments went home and built an industry. His argument is that what looks to some like a supply chain problem is better read as a debt coming due, and that Taiwan intends to repay it by helping rebuild the manufacturing base that America let thin.

Ananth Seshadri:

An economist looks at two losing football seasons and argues they are a symptom, not the disease. The same pattern, he says, shows up in the business school, in computer science and in how the university sets prices, moves money and borrows: markets that move quickly, and an institution built to move slowly. The talk draws on his work on the economics of UW–Madison, and ends with what he thinks should change.

Rajiv Batra:

A founder came back to the department he graduated from in 1983 and talked, for the most part, about the unglamorous half of a startup. Not the idea and not the funding, but the organization you have to build around them: who to hire, how to pay them, what culture costs if you leave it until year three, and how to tell a company that is merely slow from one that is already dead.

Mark Seidenberg:

The Simple View is, at one level, the observation that at the onset of reading instruction, a child knows spoken language (at the level of a 5 or 6 year old) and needs to learn how to use the spellings of words to access knowledge of them gained from using oral language. Reading thus involves print, language, and the connections between them. This aspect of the Simple View accurately describes conditions at the onset of reading. The beginning reader’s initial challenge is indeed to learn how print represents words that are known from spoken language. This observation is consistent with countless studies because it describes the basic problem of beginning to read. It could be falsified only if we discovered a culture in which children learn to read before they learn to talk, or we found that children ignore what they already know about language in learning about print, or equally fanciful events obtained. I will call this the Simple Point of the Simple View. Every account of reading must include both print and language in some manner given that the minimal definition of reading is “comprehending language in written form.” This point is useful for a teacher or other educator coping with colleagues who maintain that instruction about the associations between print and sound–phonics–is unimportant, an impediment to skilled reading, or only relevant for struggling readers.[2]

Discussions of the Simple View frequently note that it is supported by a hundred or more studies as a way to establish its validity and also convey the depth of reading research. To take two examples, according to the Reading League’s guide to the science of reading, “The Simple View of Reading has been empirically validated by over 150 scientific studies.” According to a Reading Rockets blog, “The Simple View is supported by hundreds of studies which have shown decoding and language comprehension are critical to skilled reading.” What these studies support is the Simple Point.

Florence Bason and Christopher Redding:

This study examines the extent to which state adoption of Science of Reading (SoR)-aligned policies was associated with changes in fourth-grade reading achievement. Using longitudinal state-level panel data from 2003-2024 and quasi-experimental difference-in-differences (DiD) methods, the study estimates relationships between SoR policy adoption and NAEP Grade 4 reading outcomes. Findings suggest that SoR-aligned reforms are associated with modest but gradually emerging improvements in reading achievement, with stronger effects observed at longer post-adoption periods. Effects are not uniformly distributed across student groups, with more consistent positive associations observed for White students and students not eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. Results further suggest that coordinated policy environments may matter more than individually adopted literacy policies.

Eno Sarris:

But the thing that has perhaps separated the Brewers and Rays from other organizations that have also bought all the technology and tried to be on the forefront of the data revolution is that they’ve always had good process. The insights they gain from the data sourced from the tech they’ve bought are put into action up and down their organization. It takes great communicators to turn all that data into insights that the best coaches can use to improve their players.

Perhaps that’s why both teams have frequently hired analysts in the blogosphere for their baseball operations departments. There are Baseball Prospectus and FanGraphs alumni aplenty in their front offices.

“We should work on our process, not the outcome of our processes” – W. Edwards Deming.