Karen Vaites Profile picture
Apr 23, 2022 12 tweets 10 min read Read on X
Now It Can Be Said, @EdWriters Edition:

@matt_barnum of @Chalkbeat, the most well-staffed publication in K–12 Ed, finally… finally… notes that there is weak evidence for masking in schools.

After virtually every US school has gone mask-optional.

chalkbeat.org/2022/4/18/2302…
My favorite part is where he notes that the CDC guidance was unclear back when it was most needed to get schools reopened.

👉 What do you call journalism about a topic that comes out ~15 months after it could have been written but wasn’t?
What’s it mean if an Ed policy reporter who calls himself a “fake stats vigilante” won’t talk about the poor evidence base for an education policy until the policy has more or less faded away?

BC Matt is very smart. You can’t tell me he just spotted these glaring issues.
To his credit, he is refreshingly direct about it.

“Remarkably, two years into the pandemic, there is little definitive research on either the benefits or the downsides of requiring masks in American schools, even though the CDC has released a number of studies.”

#satchat
This represents a pretty noteworthy pivot from how @matt_barnum has used his voice until now.

He has been a rather ardent defender of masks in schools… even calling out @DLeonhardt for how he talked about the weak mask efficacy data.
Most often, @matt_barnum points to the popularity of mask policies.

This has been a constant refrain.
But here’s the thing:

Any smart Ed reporter knows schools generally enjoy high trust from parents, & school policies tend to shape parent opinion.

I’m sure @matt_barnum read @vkoganpolisci’s research on ways school closures influenced parent opinion on the safety of reopening:
I’d bet a million dollars that surveys of parents show they approve of their school’s reading curriculum, too.

AND YET most of them should not: edweek.org/teaching-learn…

👉 The reason we have journalism is to keep schools accountable for the soundness of their policies.
One more bit of gratitude to @davidzweig, who understood the assignment and wrote this in August, 2021: nymag.com/intelligencer/…

With a follow up piece on crummy CDC studies in December: theatlantic.com/science/archiv…

They remind us what was possible in mainstream media.
So, allow me to remind @matt_barnum that the biggest enabling condition of the crummy @CDCgov pandemic performance was his choice, and his @edwriters colleagues’ choices, to stay silent about, and even promote, the blatant crap out of the CDC for the last 2 years.

@elizwgreen
And I look forward to @matt_barnum’s coverage of children’s speech delays in 2023.
At least I can commiserate with the other parents who tweeted the heck out of the critiques of 6-foot distancing, based on issues that Barnum names a year-plus later.

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More from @karenvaites

Apr 26
The @sfchronicle Editorial Board is over it.

This whole editorial is 🔥, and the literacy portion is nuclear.

“Nearly 60% of our 3rd graders didn’t meet state standards” for ELA.

“Meanwhile, poverty-stricken red states such as Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama have surged ahead of California in childhood literacy after adopting mandatory foundational literacy teaching and training.”

@mgpotente @BerrinchudaM @KJWinEducation @careads @SFParentsImage
For context, California advocates have put forward a reasonable literacy bill for the second year in a row – AB1121 – and it’s under fire.

Here’s what @sfchronicle Editorial Board has to say: Image
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@sfchronicle “Yes, you read that correctly — ensuring California kids receive the most effective reading lessons didn’t even merit a discussion among Democrats in the face of union opposition.”

Read the whole thing. Image
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Read 5 tweets
Apr 13
The trouble with having Mississippi as THE standard-bearer for state reading reform is that some people don’t buy it, just because it’s Mississippi.

I sat in a restaurant in Brooklyn last night, telling a table full of new acquaintances – two of whom listened to @ehanford’s Sold a Story – about Mississippi and the Southern Surge.

They were fascinated. They had questions about why this work isn’t happening in NY.

But one guy kept shaking his head. “Mississippi. It’s just hard to believe.”

Friends, that is why we must talk about Louisiana, Tennessee, and Alabama.

Some people simply won’t embrace a one-state “miracle” as their model. However, a four-state pattern is hard to deny.

🧵
@alexanderrussoImage
I posted the viral Urban League chart in another platform, and a Dem friend wrote this in response.

Some people will reflexively reject a “Mississippi Miracle.” Which is why we need to talk in terms of “Southern Surges.”

I don’t make the rules, I’m just reporting the reality. Image
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People spun up myths to explain away the Mississippi Miracle. Those myths have been debunked, but they get floated every time you talk about Mississippi.

Louisiana’s 3rd grade retention law doesn’t go into effect until this year. Its gains are completely unaffected by retention policies.

See how much easier it is to make a case for following the leading states when they are a cohort?
Read 4 tweets
Jan 14
Wowza news in early literacy:

Study shows major gains in K-1 reading outcomes from use of the viral, and virtually free, UFLI foundational skills program.

In fact, I’ve never seen effect sizes this high from a study of a literacy program.

Congrats @HollyLanePhD @burnsmk1 @UFLiteracy!Image
Link to study here:

If there are higher effect sizes from use of a curriculum product, pls send me that study, BC I need to know it.

One more reflection…researchgate.net/publication/38…
One of my favorite things about UFLI: it asks 30 minutes a day from teachers for foundational skills work.

Teachers in this study were spending 30 min/day.

The attention that the UFLI team gave to creating an effective program *within a 30 minute window* is laudable.

We still live in a world where the “Science of Reading” encounters resistance for being over focused on phonics, and for robbing time from other valuable and exciting work like getting kids into rich texts.

If your program is 30 minutes/day, you leave plenty of time for the other essentials of literacy.

AND - if a 30-min program has gone viral within the Science of Reading community, that says a lot about the demand in that community.
Read 5 tweets
Apr 8, 2024
A key reminder in the Science of Learning conversation:

You can always find weak studies to support adult preferences about how kids should learn.

Here’s a good example. This was recently tweeted by a prominent teacher, in defense of choice reading (letting kids pick the books they read).

files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ116…Image
If you read the study, you realize:

The authors are fully bought into the theory, common in education, that enjoyment of a task improves your outcome with the task.

Just because it does. Image
.@C_Hendrick talked about this common misperception in his brilliant keynote at @researchED_US.

This was the segment:
Read 9 tweets
Apr 7, 2024
.@C_Hendrick’s keynote at @researchED_US was astoundingly good.

I caught most of it on video…

Sorry that it’s in Tweetable chunks, but I promise that it’s worth the headache of pressing Play a few times.

What is learning, Carl asks?
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The problem is that learning is highly counterintuitive.

How we think we learn, and how we actually learn, are more often than not very far apart.

@C_Hendrick
@C_Hendrick As he outlines the six paradoxes of learning, @C_Hendrick speaks personally about #2, the difference between working memory and long-term memory.

“I had no idea about this for the first 5 years of my teaching.”
Read 16 tweets
Apr 6, 2024
Are these educational beliefs familiar to you?

They were once familiar to, and believed by, @MrZachG.

“I’m not a contrarian. I believed what I was told” in teacher preparation.

At @researchED_US: Image
His learning journey brought him to more effective practices.

@MrZachG details Project Follow Through, a massive US study of instructional approaches that showed the relative effectiveness of explicit instruction vs more popular approaches. Image
@MrZachG In his podcast, @MrZachG goes into detail on Project Follow Through with some of the original participants, including Linda Carnine:

It’s a fascinating listen! podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/pro…
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Read 4 tweets

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