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Karen Vaites Profile picture
Karen Vaites
@karenvaites
Literacy advocate, curriculum maven, children’s advocate, mom.
6 subscribers
Apr 8 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
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
Apr 7 • 16 tweets • 5 min read
.@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?
Image
Image 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
Apr 6 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
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
Jan 13 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
Remarkably busy week on the state curriculum adoption front. A mixed bag of news, illustrating fragmented landscape.

Here’s a roundup thread.

The good:

MN short lists truly high-quality curriculum options. No weak basal programs on the list.

👍 The bad:

A mostly-grim list of options out of South Carolina.

Core Knowledge Language Arts is the only high-quality option on a list dominated by mediocre basal series.
Aug 18, 2023 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
It’s the seventh school day in Sumner County, Tennessee.

Fourth graders are already writing “well-developed” essays about their interpretation of multiple nonfiction texts.

The kind of teaching that produces this work = what every child deserves.

@scottlangford72 Also, this is a curriculum story. Sumner Cty uses one of the six high-quality curricula designed for this type of work.

@jenni_copeland didn’t invent this lesson, it was part of her curriculum. She is clearly crushing it. 🙌

If this isn’t happening in your school…

Why not?
Jul 16, 2023 • 5 tweets • 4 min read
This article is pay walled, so people are mostly reacting to a tweet about it, I sense.

They might react more strongly if they were reading the contents.

Screenshots in tweets that follow.

bostonglobe.com/2023/07/14/met… Read Superintendent Greer’s quote in all of this context.

Families with the option of leaving are bailing to give their kids access to accelerated math previously offered in Cambridge.

Yet she believes she’s producing greater equity with the watered-down approach.

🤯


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Apr 28, 2023 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
“I hear no remorse whatsoever.”

@ScottJenningsKY captures the really unnerving aspect of this moment.

More than 3 years later… no remorse.

No sign they’d do it differently next time.

And when I say “they,” I mean all of those who had power to alter the outcome.

It’s not right for @rweingarten to be the fall guy for closures when Fauci, @CDCgov, many governors and public health officials in blue and purple regions, and most of the US media failed kids.
Apr 28, 2023 • 7 tweets • 4 min read
Now It Can Be Said:

We had enough information by summer, 2020 to reopen US schools.

Our failure to do so consistently is “a moral catastrophe.”

By @DLeonhardt:

nytimes.com/2023/04/28/bri… .@DLeonhardt has named the mistake before… that US schools often stayed closed too long.

But this is the first time that he is putting a clear, fine point on the real mistake:

We had enough info to make the same reopening choice as Europe and Florida, nationwide.

👇 Image
Apr 25, 2023 • 21 tweets • 8 min read
Now It Can Be Said, Masking Edition:

“From a broad public-health standpoint, at the population level, masks work at the margins — maybe 10 percent.”

– Anthony Fauci

nytimes.com/interactive/20… This is potentially the biggest bombshell from today’s @dwallacewells interview.

When you think about the amount of vitriol that has been spewed over US debates about masking, this is an astounding comment.

Said casually. Almost as an aside. Image
Apr 25, 2023 • 7 tweets • 4 min read
“I still think, honestly to this day, that almost no one appreciates just how wide that age skew really is, given that the risk to someone in their 80s or 90s is perhaps 100s of times as high as it is to someone in their 20s or 30s”
@dwallacewells to Fauci
nytimes.com/interactive/20… Full Q from the interview, which touches on the school closure mistake multiple times:

“Did we do enough to communicate the age skew?” Image
Apr 24, 2023 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
This is the New York Times front page effect.

One week after @smervosh covers Science of Reading, it’s on @CNN.

Panther Valley and @palazzopves, featured by Mervosh, are the heart of the segment: One mom’s reaction:

@alexanderrusso @thegrade_
Apr 22, 2023 • 8 tweets • 5 min read
“At the beginning of last year, 22% of kindergartners in Perquimans were assessed as proficient. At the end of the year, it was 64%. That 42-point gain was higher than the state and national averages.”

@Rupen_Fofaria on Science of Reading shifts in NC:

the74million.org/article/the-tr… My only Q for @Rupen_Fofaria is why the piece feels almost promotional of LETRS.

Actually, the role of curriculum seems at least as strong, noting use of @ReadingHorizons materials in one of the schools in reporting.

This seems important… Image
Dec 18, 2022 • 7 tweets • 6 min read
Legislation to implement statewide dyslexia screening fails in Michigan, after failing in NY and CA earlier this year.

@careads @WNYEdAlliance @DDCalifornia @dyslexiasomd @DDyslexiaMA @Say_Dyslexia @CAParentPower
detroit.chalkbeat.org/2022/12/13/235… I wish these bills didn't seem so centered in dyslexia; as article notes, all kids benefit from systematic phonics. Screening would catch "instructional casualties" who do not have dyslexia. It's about all kids.

I also wish these bills didn't seem essentially screening-only.+
Dec 18, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Fun fact: I once worked at the FBI.

I was a junior in college, working as an intern, but I had top secret clearance and everything.

This was the job that told me that I should never work anywhere near government bureaucracy. The allergic reaction was real. My replies to the fun thread above.
Dec 16, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
When evening news went away, & we stopped having common media as a touchstone, US discourse worsened.

A fragmented media landscape was bad for national fabric. We stopped sharing the same realities.

If Twitter fails, we will devolve into wholly-fragmented social media… Which feels like a final nail in coffin.

Some seem content to let Twitter fail BC anger at former leadership. I get the anger, but can’t be blasé about risks to national discourse if Twitter devolves into inevitably-tribal, competing platforms.

We’d lose our only public square.
Dec 12, 2022 • 9 tweets • 7 min read
This piece by @mandy_mclaren has everything. 💥

Superintendent @JCPSSuper saying reading instruction will change while district literacy folks say #SoldAStory is “misinformation.” 👀

Phonics-advocate teachers shut down.

A likely phonics patch. 🤦🏼‍♀️

🧵

courier-journal.com/story/news/edu… Here’s @JCPSSuper saying that @mandy_mclaren’s earlier reporting caused “a lot of reflection” about how reading is taught, and phonics instructional time will dramatically increase…

👉 To 20 minutes/day.

(Your daily reminder that all this fuss is about ~30 min/day in K-1!) 🤦🏼‍♀️ ImageImage
Dec 7, 2022 • 17 tweets • 10 min read
A child was raped in a Loudon County school. A grand jury just called it preventable.

Its report does not mince words about the system failure in Loudon schools & law enforcement.

And… Media avoided / distorted the story, BC politics.

@arotherham is 🎯
eduwonk.substack.com/p/loudoun-coun… Finally, @washingtonpost is reporting this story for what it is: a horrifying example of incompetence and leadership failure.

Here’s @hannah_natanson’s coverage today w @jjouvenal.

But you wouldn’t recognize this situation in Natanson’s earlier work.

washingtonpost.com/education/2022…
Dec 6, 2022 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
Massachusetts has updated its curriculum maps, making it easier to find out which curriculum is used in local schools.

HT @MASchoolsK12 @ms_tarca & team!

Recall that MA is one of only 3 states with such an open database.

profiles.doe.mass.edu/statereport/Cu… The other two are Wisconsin: wimaterialsmatter.org

And Rhode Island: ride.ri.gov/InstructionAss…

Why aren’t there 47 others, you ask?

Very good question.

@CCSSO @SecCardona
Aug 1, 2022 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
Frankel’s reporting only shows 1 of 27 parents adopting an anti-vaccine position.

So why is @sheeraf allowed to conflate anti-mandate positions with anti-vaxx positions?

👉They are different.

That’s just the start of the issues w this column.

Cc: @puiwingtam @ellenjpollock1 .@sheeraf’s sources are speaking out to make clear that they are not anti-vaccine.

👇

This raises serious questions about the integrity of this reporting.
Jul 30, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Uvalde shooter ‘was identified as “at risk” academically by 3rd grade & experienced bullying in elementary school. He harbored bad memories of 4th grade in particular… it was in his former fourth-grade classroom where he eventually committed’ the shooting
motherjones.com/crime-justice/… That is such a chilling detail.

Then everything went downhill after school closures. Image
Jun 30, 2022 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
Dear @JeromeAdamsMD,

On behalf of the many parents who read the intl data on school reopening, said we could safely open schools in the face of resistance or silence from our leaders, and were 100% right:

Yes, sometimes the mom has the better read of the data. Image .@KelleyKga is batting 1,000 in her COVID data analysis, and her (unpaid!) work has yielded a number of corrections.

This sort of disdain is not a good look in a country that, *ahem*, made its share of mistakes in how it approached COVID and children.