Billionaires Driving 'Science of Reading'

By Thomas Ultican 1/21/2025 / Originally Posted at Tultican

On January 2^nd, billionaire created education news source, The 74, declared there is a reading crisis in Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD).

This was based on an LA School Report article stating that on the 2023-24 California assessments “43.1% of all LAUSD students met state proficiency targets in reading, compared with 44.1% in the 2018-19 school year, the last before the pandemic.” In math, 32.8% met standards, compared to 33.5% in 2018-19.

It seems ludicrous to believe that a 1% drop in testing results, that are known to wiggle up and down, is a crisis. Furthermore, in 2021-22 those proficiency numbers were 41.7% ELA and 28.5% math and in 2022-23 were 41.2% ELA and 30.5% math which suggests that school district testing results are on an upswing.

The 74 was founded in 2015 by former CNN news anchor, Campbell Brown, along with Michael Bloomberg’s education advisor, Romy Drucker. Its original funding came from billionaires via the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, the Doris and Donald Fisher Fund and Bloomberg Philanthropies. Since then, it has been the vehicle for spreading their message of school privatization. In 2016, The 74 took over the LA School Report.

Creating an Expert

The title of The 74’s crisis article is “Reading Crisis in LAUSD: ‘This is… a Problem With a Responsibility That Falls on All of Us’.” And it has the subtitle, “Literacy Activist Olga de la Cruz says the science of reading is the will solve (sic) literacy losses suffered mostly by poor kids of color in the pandemic.” Literary activist Olga has a BA from UCLA and a Masters of Public Administration from USC. What makes her a literary expert is mystifying. She is also senior campaign director at Families In Schools.

“Reading Crisis in LAUSD …” is an edited version of The LA School Reports interview with Olga. She states, “We need to be more intentional about listening to families, collaborating with community leaders, designing programs that directly support the needs of our students.” The LA School Report asked, “Why is the science of reading important as part of that effort?” Olga answered:

“Science of reading is not a method nor a curriculum nor an approach. It is a body of evidence based on decades of research that explains how the brain learns to read and the foundational skills that students need to become proficient readers.

“It’s about how the brain works and how children learn to read. So this requires explicit, systematic instruction, what are called the foundational skills, which are phonics, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, comprehension, fluency and oral language.”

Olga’s employers, Families In Schools, just published a report which reads more like propaganda for the Science of Reading (SoR) than a scientific review of reading education methodologies. They claim:

“Unfortunately, in many classrooms, students are still receiving reading instruction that is not based on evidence about what works …. For example, the ‘whole language’ approach is based on the idea that students learn to read naturally through exposure to literacy-rich environments, the use of context clues, and word memorization. “Balanced literacy” is a variation thereof that embraces elements of multiple approaches, including small doses of phonics instruction while retaining ineffective elements from the whole language approach.”

Last year, two highly regarded literary professors, P David Pearson of UC Berkeley and Robert J. Tierney of University of British Columbia, published “Fact-Checking the Science of Reading.” Unlike Olga de la Cruz, these are two actual literary experts.

In looking at the charges against balanced literacy, they detect bad testing science and assert, “As current policy pundits and reporters have done, we ask more of these assessments than they were designed to accomplish, as they spread unwarranted—and potentially harmful—claims about both the positive (phonics first will solve our woes) and negative (Balanced Literacy is the culprit) effects of curricular change.” (Page 78)

Person and Tierney also addressed Olga’s claim about “research that explains how the brain learns to read”. The professors noted, “Many fail to understand that the contribution of neuroscience to the practical task of assessment and intervention in reading disability is still rudimentary, and scientific understandings continue to be undermined by methodological difficulties and the selective use of evidence.” (Page 97)

Maren Aukerman is currently a Werklund Research Professor at the University of Calgary who focuses on literacy education and formerly served on the faculties at Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania. She warns of journalists using logical fallacies to promote science of reading (SoR). For example, not reporting research showing students taught to read without systematic phonics “read more fluently.”

The Orwellian labeled SoR is not based on sound science. In 1997, congress passed legislation, calling for a reading study. Establishment of the National Reading Panel (NRP) was a doomed effort. They were given limited time for the study (18 months), which was a massive undertaking, conducted by twenty-one unpaid volunteers. NRP fundamentally did a meta-analysis in five reading domains, ignoring 10 other important domains. They did not review everything and there was no new research. Their search for reading studies and averaged results is the basis for “science of reading.”

SoR’s real motivation is to sell products, not helping children struggling to read. Scholars like Pearson and Tierney are ignored while pseudo-experts with limited credentials are trumpeted.

In 2021, EdReports, which rates curricula for their alignment to Common Core or similar standards, gave both Lucy Calkins’s Units of Study and Fountas and Pinnell’s curriculum its lowest ratings. In January 2020, Student Achievement Partners (SAP) issued a report finding that Calkins’ approach to phonics was “in direct opposition to an enormous body of settled research.” Both EdReports and SAP are billionaire founded and financed companies.

Billionaire Financed Companies Selling SOR

The Families In Schools report was funded by the following philanthropies.

The Ballmer Group is financed by the former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

Sobrato is a Silicon Valley real estate developer’s philanthropy.

Heising-Simons is also a bay area foundation which last year co-created the Early Educator Investment Collaborative, a group of early-childhood funders that also includes the Ballmer Group, the Bezos Family Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Buffett Early Childhood Fund, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Foundation for Child Development and the Stranahan Foundation.

EdVoice was established in 2003 by Eli Broad, John Walton, John Doerr, Don Fisher, Reed Hasting, Laurene Jobs Powell, Buzz Woolley and others to advance their billionaire public school privatization agenda. (See 2003 form 990 TIN 94-3284817)

GPSN is led by former charter school executives and Eli Broad employees.

Billionaires are the main support driving SoR. One of the reasons for that is having a tightly defined curriculum makes it much easier to develop a software-driven-kids-at-screens program and profit while reducing costs; think iReady or Amplify.

Conclusion

SoR advocates are trying to force everyone to use a reading education approach that is not proven and failed miserably in England. Authoritarians want to take over public education and turn it into a profit center, claiming it’s based on decades of research. That is not true and it is more likely to harm children than help. Forty states have already adopted laws that comply with billionaire wishes and in California legislation has been written and submitted. It was tabled this year but it is sure to come up again.

This is a billionaire sponsored tragedy requiring as many people as possible to become aware and oppose it.