Gene Tavernetti: Welcome to Better Teaching, Only Stuff That Works, a podcast for teachers, instructional coaches, administrators, and anyone else who supports teachers in the classroom.
This show is a proud member of the BE Podcast Network shows that help you go beyond education.
Find all our shows@bepodcastnetwork.com.
I Am Gene Tavernetti the host for this podcast.
And my goal for this episode, like all episodes, is that you laugh at least once and that you leave with an actionable idea for better teaching.
A quick reminder, no cliches, no buzzwords.
Only stuff that
works.
Today's guest is Karen Bates, an education entrepreneur and national advocate for high quality curriculum literacy and math instruction.
She is the founder of the Curriculum Insight Project and the writer Behind School Yourself on Sub Stack, where she explores research aligned teaching and big questions facing K 12 education.
Karen and I spend a lot of time.
Exploring the Southern surge and the improvements in literacy scores in the South.
I think you're gonna like this one.
Gene Tavernetti: Good morning, Karen.
Welcome to Better Teaching Only stuff that works.
Thank you for having me.
Oh, I've been wanting to talk to you for quite a while and so many things that I wanna talk to you about, but I have to ask you about.
Something that you've been writing about for a while now, and that is the Southern surge.
Can you describe the Southern surge And then I got lots of questions for you.
Karen Vaites: Thank you for asking.
The Southern Surge is my favorite thing to talk about.
In no small part because we don't talk enough about the positive stories in K 12 education, and this is a big one.
For years people have been talking about the Mississippi Miracle, and hopefully that is.
Reasonably familiar to your listeners.
This idea that Mississippi is in well into its second decade of investments in better teaching and teacher training and so forth in order to nurture better early reading foundations and Mississippi has emerged as a darling on our national report card.
The Nape for many years of successive increases on the nape in reading performance.
What really solidified itself with the 2024 Nape cycle is that Louisiana is clearly emerging as this number two state in terms of its gains on the nape in the last five years.
In fact Louisiana was the second most the, it was the most.
Showed the most nape growth in the fourth grade nappe in 2022, and then it again showed the most growth in 2024.
So for two straight Nappe cycles, Louisiana keeps rising.
And what's the most exciting detail of all is that this isn't just a two state story, it's actually a four state story, because both.
Mississippi and Louisiana have states that have almost not identically, but pretty closely mirrored the work in the first gaining state in just the last six years.
So in the last six years.
Tennessee took a number of actions that closely mirrored Louisiana's approach.
Alabama did nearly carbon copy the Mississippi early approach, and in both cases, those successor states also have growth stories that have emerged from the na.
So now we have four states.
Working from a common playbook.
There are two models within that playbook because the Mississippi approach, and Louis the Louisiana approach are a bit different.
And I'd love to drill into that with you.
But we have four states that have shown that with the right smart investments, we can in fact raise reading outcomes for our nation's kids.
And these are four states that are not expected states.
They're states with high rates of childhood poverty.
They are states without high levels of per pupil spending.
So the idea here is that if it can happen in these four states, reading, growth can happen anywhere.
And we all need to be looking to see what are they doing and how can we imitate it.
Gene Tavernetti: So you talked about the fact that they do four things in common.
Karen Vaites: Yes.
Gene Tavernetti: What are the, what are those four things that, that happened in those states or continue to happen?
Karen Vaites: The four pillars in the Southern Surge Playbook are teacher training, assessment specifically screening in grades K through three.
So at the curriculum improvements and also third grade retention.
And this is a package and we have to think of it as a package that all works together nicely.
I can point you to states across the country that are doing one or two of those things or doing parts of what these four states are doing, but all evidence at this point suggests that these four states are seeing gains because they're taking on all four layers of that layer cake, and you get this mutually reinforcing effect from the multiple investments.
Gene Tavernetti: So the, so we have these four things happening these four pillars and Mississippi has been at this longer.
Mm-hmm.
What did the data lag for a while in the growth in Mississippi that just recently we've seen these bigger increases.
What kind of, what happened there?
Karen Vaites: You know, Mississippi, if you start looking at the Mississippi story, you do start to see small stepwise gains on the nape.
In the initial years after those, there was a 2013 package of reading legislation that really kicked off their reforms and made them statewide efforts.
I talk about the efforts as being two decades old because prior to 2013.
Mississippi has a local really respected organization called the Barksdale Institute, where Jim Barksdale gave a sizable gift to the Barksdale Institute to kick off literacy reform work back around 2003, I believe.
And so the Barksdale Institute, along with state leaders had been piloting different models and trying to pioneer what this work might look like before the 2013 legislation as of 2013.
They put in place a number of pillars that took the pilot work more statewide.
But yes, indeed Mississippi did see some of those early gains, but Mississippi's work at first really focused on the bottom 20% of schools.
So when they passed the 2013 reading legislation, one thing that was mandated by that legislation was screening in.
K three.
All schools had to do screening three times a year using a state approved screener.
So that's an example of something that happens statewide.
But their biggest investments were reserved for the bottom 20% of schools.
With teacher training.
They mandated letters, training and subsidized letters, training for all teachers in the bottom 20% of districts by performance.
And they sent state coaches.
Into the bottom 20% of districts by performance.
So a really well-trained state coach would come two to three days a week to support the literacy work happening locally.
As you'd expect that investment in the bottom 20% of schools was not going to produce statewide gains, you know, for some time.
But the they saw a really interesting effect around the training when the bottom 20% of schools suddenly started having stronger performance based on these investments.
Suddenly the districts down the road were calling up the state and saying, Hey, how can we get that training for our teachers?
And the teacher training part started to go viral because other districts started seeing what had historically been the weaker performing districts come up in their state rankings.
So you had an effect in Mississippi that was building on itself over the years.
And you know, by this point you know, Mississippi has breadth and depth of training of its teachers, Mississippi layered on as of 2019 some really intentional curriculum reforms to try to encourage knowledge building curriculum.
So certainly the additional investments would have been expected to keep accelerating that growth.
But it's really only been the last few years that it's, so, the last few nap cycles.
That Mississippi is so abundantly clearly growing faster than the average state that it really compels our attention.
And if you're me, I personally believe that we should be, you know, Quinn Tup compelled by the fact that we have these other states.
And this is no longer a one state outlier story.
This is a story of a replicable model that should be coming to your state, wherever you are.
Gene Tavernetti: So, so if we talk about, this incremental growth that happened in Mississippi based on based on all the things you just discussed state coaches and coming into the lowest performing districts, how was that similar or different to the other states?
Were they doing anything at that time as well, or did it come later?
Karen Vaites: So I'm gonna talk for a second about the Louisiana, Tennessee model because it's worth doing that contrast.
I think to most directly answer your question because when you're saying other states, I think you mean all 50 other states, right?
Gene Tavernetti: No I'm talking about our southern surge.
Karen Vaites: Alright, so let's just keep going with the Southern surge.
Okay.
So Alabama did pretty closely carbon copy what Mississippi did, and they're only in their first six years.
So Alabama has gone ahead with the retention, the screening.
The training.
And Alabama also has a, you know, recommended curricula for foundational skills that really is their effort to raise the curriculum bar.
But even in Alabama, they haven't yet gotten to knowledge building curriculum.
So.
It does take time in these reforms to, you know, unfold in layers, but Louisiana took a rather different approach, and it's worth talking about that as a distinct model, even if it did touch on the same four pillars.
Louisiana story starts back in 2013 with the common core effectively.
So as 2012, as the Common core is adopted in Louisiana leaders recognized that this was a unique opportunity to influence instructional improvements.
And Louisiana was also at the very bottom of the nation on performance.
So they had good good motivators to say, alright, we need some change here.
And the leadership in Louisiana was also influenced by, you know, not just the common core shifts, but also the work of Ed Hirsch and others who've helped to raise awareness of the importance of background knowledge to a student's ability to comprehend what they read.
So Louisiana said, we are gonna make knowledge building English language arts curriculum our statewide norm that is going to be.
Our focus in this work.
So in the beginning, they created a state curriculum evaluation effort that predated ed reports.
This was before Ed reports even existed.
Louisiana was getting its educators together to evaluate curricula and to make it abundantly clear what the best programs were in the state.
And to incentivize their use.
So they had multiple incentives to encourage this work.
Not least of all, they were making it, it made it much easier to see if a district was using a curriculum that the state continued con, huh, considered subpar.
But they also created state contracts to say, you can skip procurement and just sign on to our negotiated state contract if you use one of these programs.
They got teacher teams together and under the leadership of Whitney Wien, they built their own curriculum called the Louisiana Guidebooks, which was an incredibly affordable and very teacher friendly knowledge building ELA curriculum, which is still one of the top three used in Louisiana.
And they streamlined a lot of state procurement systems in a way that further incentivized the use of these materials.
They also created a mentor program where districts were districts had their strongest teachers apply in to be mentors for this work with knowledge building curricula and the state hosted state trainings for those mentors.
And then those mentors went back into districts and served as local coaches.
On the curriculum implementation work.
So you had this whole body of efforts done you know, between 10 and 12 years ago to really, as Louisiana put it, make the good choice the easy choice.
And so Louisiana set the table with its curriculum reform in the last five or so years since 2021, Louisiana has added legislation in the Science of Reading era that added screening, added third grade retention and also added a teacher training effort.
But, and I have no doubt that those investments in the last five years have helped to accelerate the pace of growth, but really.
For Louisiana to have shown up in 2022.
With growth on the nap cycle and significant growth, we were really looking at the, you know, the payoff of the first chapter of curriculum led reforms and, you know, good for Louisiana for continuing that steamrolling with some of those additional reforms.
Tennessee's work, by the way, looks really similar to Louisiana's, but in a more compressed period.
In Tennessee it was there 2020 or so.
2019 and 2020 that they were doing a lot of that curriculum centered reform work.
Mandating use of curriculum off of strong state list.
Getting district leaders together in state convenings to be comparing notes on high quality programs, amplifying the stories of early adopters of really strong programs, and so on.
So Tennessee, again led with curriculum reform.
And in the handful of years that followed, they added on that screening a really great homegrown reading 360 teacher training where they trained more than 90% of Tennessee elementary teachers in the space of two summers.
In a very well designed training.
And then also that third grade retention, which came as a lagging reform.
So you've got these two models.
You have more coaching and teacher training and third grade retention led.
And then you have the Louisiana and Tennessee model.
More curriculum led with other reforms that follow.
Gene Tavernetti: So in both of these, in both of these instances, we have the curriculum, you have the knowledge building curriculum, but you also, in addition to that, the foundational skills curricula as well, that needed Indeed to be, that, needed to be, that needed to be selected.
So, so indeed it's not just, and
Karen Vaites: I think it's, I think it's fair to say Mississippi definitely leaned on the foundational skills aspect of this.
It was only as of 2019 that, mississippi began encouraging this use of knowledge building curricula, and it took some years for the knowledge building curricula to start to make some inroads within Mississippi.
I actually think that's a great thing, right?
It's good.
Mississippi still has a number of districts that are not yet using what I would call to be knowledge building curricula.
It's still a patchwork there in Mississippi, so Mississippi still has some low hanging fruit to go pick in order to keep.
Continuous improvement going in its work.
Versus Louisiana and Tennessee where they started with the knowledge building piece.
And only in the later chapters were they putting a heavier focus on the reading foundations because that early screening, that's K three screening for foundational skills, the training heavily focused on foundational skills.
So you wanna see both happening in all states, but different order of operations for those two different models.
Gene Tavernetti: So, so we have these states that are, that did very well.
Mm-hmm.
And we had some alliteration with the Southern surge.
Karen Vaites: Gotta have alliteration
Gene Tavernetti: But nobody, but not everybody is embracing this and embracing the evidence.
I mean, the last few weeks that I've been reading you on Twitter on x, it's, you are.
Kind of explaining some of the problems with the data that you saw.
And so, so why don't you think that this is accepted?
What happened?
Karen Vaites: You know, this isn't, the resistance to the Mississippi story isn't new.
It's worth mentioning that within K 12 education circles, when the Mississippi story.
You know, we can look back like five, six years ago as Mississippi starts to emerge as a Nape darling.
And there were many folks that were resistant to believing it.
And I don't wanna speak for others about the why of their resistance, but it seemed five or six years ago, like a lot more of it was just really Mississippi.
Can we really buy that?
And a lot of people, I, I mean, I find that to be a disrespectful position, but I that seems to be where they.
The gut reaction some folks were having.
And it's fair to say that there have been times before where someone in a district or a state claimed that, Hey, we're seeing really big gains here.
And those gains were later unmasked to actually be something else happening in the data that better explained the picture that was being presented, whether it was badly presented data period or or otherwise.
I talk a lot about the San Francisco USD math story where the San Francisco Math Department literally made an error, a math error in the way they put forward their detracking experiment in a way that made the country believe they had seen major equity gains from Detracking when they hadn't at all.
And we're still recovering from that, right?
So sometimes we hear these stories and people are right to kind of put up there.
Their, you know, BS radar and ask hard questions.
Skepticism isn't always bad, but I guess I have a little bit of impatience at this point for the Mississippi skepticism because we did have the skepticism five, six years ago.
We've gone through successive rounds of different people looking harder at the data studies of the data analysis done that debunk the debunkers.
And at this point.
Anything that I've seen in 2025 that goes ahead and says Mississippi, it can't be, is doing one of three things or usually three of three things.
It's not actually looking at the details of the data, where Mississippi at this point has gains in.
Every single assessment cohort.
So they have gains in their low performing students.
They have gains at their students at the 75th percentile.
They have gains for students at the 50th percentile on the nap.
So some of the things that the debunker say, like, ah they're taking kids out of their testing cohort with third grade retention.
Well, if that was true, you couldn't see this cross cohort gain, right.
They also tend to completely ignore the existence of Louisiana, Tennessee, Alabama.
So if you just talk about Mississippi and you know, drag us off into a place where we're all gonna debate Mississippi's data and pour over it, you ignore the fact that here's Louisiana with lots of gains and none of the things that people consider to be possible confounding factors in Mississippi story.
So overall, I think.
I the why of why people don't like this story.
I think it's probably varies, but in some cases, this story doesn't suit some people's politics.
It's definitely true that folks on the left have been more likely to, express doubt in the Mississippi story or the Southern Surge story because it doesn't necessarily suit people's political priors if these deep blue states without a lot of education funding are seeing gains.
So for some, they may resist the story for that reason, and in other cases it may just be a reflexive.
I refuse to believe that, you know, great ed reform gains are possible without big infusions of money, et cetera, et cetera.
Your mileage may vary depending on depending on these things.
And I may be the worst person to ask because clearly with the look that I've taken, I'm persuaded that there's a reel there and another state should follow.
Gene Tavernetti: You know, one of the things that I think you had talked about quite a bit was the criticism of the third grade retention.
Karen Vaites: Yeah.
Gene Tavernetti: So what does, and this may be unfair to ask you, but do you know what the data is, the growth.
Of those kids who are retained in third grade.
Karen Vaites: I don't know that I've seen an analysis that specifically isolates the retained students and talks about their specific outcomes.
So I can't answer that one as directly as as I'd like.
But I'll say this about retention.
I didn't like the retention aspect of Mississippi's story myself, and I struggled with it when they first arrived on the national stage as a model to follow.
I had a big squirm factor, and in part it's because I'd listened to the conventional wisdom where I think we still have a conventional wisdom in K 12 that suggests that when students are retained, that they tend to have very adverse.
Emotional impacts and that there may be more downsides to retention than upsides, and at least one study has, you know, purported that's the case.
So I really thought, you know, that these other things you're doing, training, teachers, screening, you know, better curriculum, those things all day long, those are positive steps forward.
But do we really need to have retention?
What has brought me around on the retention story is two things.
First of all.
When you really sit with what happens and the when students are moved on and they're not able to read struggling readers older than fourth grade show dramatically higher levels of self-doubt and depression than students that are typically developing and successful readers.
It's not, I mean, it's even safe in our country to say like, I'm not a math person.
That's not my thing.
Or, I'm not good at that.
But if you can't read and you're in the fourth grade and most children around you are successful readers, that is going to affect your self-esteem.
And I don't wanna, I don't want anyone to pretend that we don't create emotional baggage for children when we fail to retain them and instead pass them on.
So I've started looking at this as.
No one likes the idea of retaining students, but no one likes the idea of struggling upper grade readers either.
And you have to think about this as, okay, what's the lesser of these evils?
Secondly when you really look at these states and how many students are retained, it's actually not a particularly high number.
You know, we see retention levels that are not that inconsistent with other states.
And also, you know, Mississippi has had higher retention at some points in his, in its phases, but its retention has actually ticked down a healthy amount over the last five years.
So we're not retaining undue numbers of students.
And I do believe what everyone says about these policies, which is no one wants to tell a child that he or she's going to be retained.
No one wants to tell parents, Hey, we've gotta hold your son or daughter back.
So.
Adults in the system, the coaches, the teachers, the principals, everyone pulls out all the stops to make sure they get every possible child across that successful reading threshold by third grade, and that's exactly what you would want.
If you could design a system, you'd want to design it for success.
And not just the quote unquote accountability of third grade retention, but the fail safes along the way.
If you have mandatory screening of every child between kindergarten and third grade, any child's going to have gone through a state approved screener 12 times before he or she is retained and well-coached.
Teachers that have gone through reading training are going to be provided to support that student, and then Mississippi has regulations to say.
That when a student is retained, he or she has to be placed after the retention year or during that, you know, second repeat of third grade with a high performing teacher.
That's a really smart overall system to produce the outcome of maximizing literacy for kids as they enter fourth grade and beyond.
Gene Tavernetti: I am one of those folks who are not, is not a big fan of the retention.
And I agree with everything you said about the issues when the kids can't read.
Yeah.
You know, but we've created, you know, the, you know, when you listen to, know, the successful districts, like, I can't remember the name of the district, the, in the second season of sold the Story, when they talked about, you know, what they did and the idea of homogeneous groupings.
You know, that regardless of grade level.
That we have created this artificial barrier at third grade.
And I guess I would have some questions like, is this is the only area in which they're not performing at grade level?
The other thing is that there's so much you know, there's a lot of developmental things between eight and nine.
Between eight and 10 that we see kids catch up.
So, to, to me without having a lot of questions answered, a blunt instrument to do it when it may be a sliver of problems in their reading.
And the other thing that it just kind of, you know, that they will be placed with a highly qualified teacher.
You know, if I was a parent, and that's what I was told, I said whoa.
What happened in the last four years?
You know why now?
So, so I am not the heart's in the right place, but I just have some detail questions about that.
And yeah,
Karen Vaites: and I think it will be interesting, you know, the retention part of these policies is the one that I think the most people fur their brow about.
And I am anticipating that we're going to start to see some states.
Go to imitate the Southern surge or follow the leaders without implementing the retention policy in particular.
Right now, Massachusetts is a state to watch because there's a bill in Massachusetts that has passed the house unanimously and is likely to be voted on somewhere in the next four to six weeks.
If I get my story right from locals that would really push for curriculum improvement in schools and give the state new powers.
To mandate that districts use a curriculum that's of high quality and would also advance teacher training efforts.
But I see nothing on the ground in Massachusetts to be pushing third grade retention.
So we may start to have states that are taking an alternate path and doing all the layers of the layer cake besides retention, and we'll have an opportunity to compare across systems.
/ Gene Tavernetti: I mean, there's absolutely no doubt there has to be some intervention at that point.
But that, yeah, that, that will be interesting.
And I think one, yeah, there's a
Karen Vaites: detail that I really like out of Alabama, by the way.
Alabama has summer reading camps.
They've developed and for students that are screened as being at the bottom of their class or the, you know, underperforming in those early grades, and I'm not gonna remember off the top of my head, but my piece on the Southern surge has links in more details.
So it's more specific about exactly which grades and exactly which students.
But basically students that aren't yet thriving as readers in those early grades are flagged and offered summer reading camps that have really remarkable efficacy.
Efficacy.
So I'm all for trying to find other ways.
Of pulling out all the stops, if you will, to make sure that we have kids reading by third grade.
Many of these states have added on tutoring.
I love seeing smart tutoring investments happening in parallel with the other reforms.
As far as I'm concerned though, this idea of do all the things you can possibly do to get kids reading by the time they move on to fourth grade, where across content areas, the curriculum's, assuming you've got proficient readers.
That feels like something we all can rally around, even if Yes.
Reasonable people can disagree about some of the specifics.
Gene Tavernetti: Right?
Absolutely.
And you know, the other, there's a couple issues.
When I think of, you described all the things that you talked about, the four pillars, et cetera.
And that is the idea of replicating this across areas.
And it reminds me of when I was, gosh, this was, oh God, in the nineties.
In the nineties in California.
We were going to take the lead from Tennessee on class size reduction.
I can't remember the gentleman's name, but he was a state.
He was the governor at the time.
And then he came to be the head of the department of education, Lamar Alexander.
Ah, okay.
Lamar.
Lamar Alexander, and he was the champion of this.
And so California, they looked at Tennessee and says, we're going to do class size reduction also.
So, in California, they said, okay, we are going to have 20 kids.
Maybe, possibly up to 25.
And then you took a look at what Tennessee had done.
15. They had done 15 kids.
So this idea, you know, it's, well, we would like to do that, but we can't for any reason.
And so, you didn't say it this way, but they get sloppy in act, in actually doing the replicating.
And so it'll be interesting.
You talked about Massachusetts, you know, any other states where.
They're looking at this.
Well,
Karen Vaites: sloppy replicating is not a bad segue to talking about the other 46 states.
And I guess I should say 45 states because I'm a big admirer of the work that has happened in Massachusetts so far, although Massachusetts is not turned up with a lot of strong performance on the Nape, and Massachusetts has struggled in recent years with reading performance on it.
State.
Assessments as well.
So we have plenty of evidence to, to actually show us why Massachusetts should be pushing this next bill and this next layer of reforms to you know, get itself back.
Back on track, but I do admire the efforts that the state leaders have made to date.
For example, on curriculum reform, Massachusetts had a super creative incentive that they ran a couple years in a row where they basically said, we've got a big grant program.
You'll be eligible for grants to replace your curriculum and to invest in curriculum aligned professional development, which is always recommended when you adopt a new.
More rigorous high quality curriculum that you're getting in there with not just the, you know, spray and pray PD at the beginning of the year to show you where the table of contents are, but that there's really ongoing coaching and nurturing and PLC time to help school teams be successful with more rigorous materials.
So, Massachusetts throws out a grant that says you can apply for our funding and we're going to give priority to districts.
Using crummy materials, and those include if you use Fountas and Pinnell, if you use the units of study from Teachers College reading workshop, like they named names about the programs they were looking to get out of their schools and prioritized funding to districts where they were trying to flush weaker programs out of the system.
That I struck me as an incredibly creative way of signaling to.
Districts in the state, here's what better looks like without actually giving the State Department the control to mandate curriculum change.
I'd love to see other states imitate that model.
But you know, beyond Massachusetts and the Southern Surge states, there's a trend and it's easy to talk about.
Between 2019 and 20 22 45 states passed some form of science of reading legislation.
This has been an unprecedented era of reading legislation.
And additional states have followed with both more legislation and more policy changes since 2022.
So at this point, every single one of the 50 states has made whether legislative or sort of regulatory, if you will, out of their Department of Education.
We're 50 for 50 on science of Reading reforms.
No state is doing nothing, but we only have four southern surge states.
So how do we explain that dichotomy?
I'll honor two things here because I do think we're going to see more states if they stay the course on these reforms, start to see some gains in the years to come.
I wanna honor the fact that the work in Louisiana.
And Tennessee is, you know, 12, 13 years old.
For Louisiana, it's, you know, more than it's coming up on two decades old in.
Mississippi, if we include the Barksdale era before the reading legislation, but it's been 12 years since the big 2013 bill.
So you do need some time for these reforms to start to permeate the system.
And we're all coming out of the pandemic era.
And schools, you know, every state saw some wobbles in its performance around the pandemic.
We're still combating things from chronic absenteeism to, you know, students coming through the system with learning losses.
Kindergartners who had to attend kindergarten and the pandemic hitting third grade assessments, like it's gonna be a little time before we can say that some of those pandemic effects are out of the system.
So I don't rule out that we'll start to see more states come into their own who made investments five years ago under science of reading reforms.
But we've just, it's time for us to start to see.
Those investments come to maturity.
However, the reason I'm not optimistic that we're going to see that in most places is that the average state's reform looks like a very watered down version of a few of the things that they did in Mississippi or Louisiana.
So for example, around training.
You know, Mississippi mandated that training in the bottom 20% of schools and it, and then subsidized training.
And at this point they, they crossed 80% of districts having teachers trained, you know, some years ago.
So they've really focused on making investment broad and deep.
Tennessee again, trained more than 90% of their teachers across two summers.
They made a big push with a very job embedded, well designed training.
A lot of states are just saying, Hey, for training, here's some funding.
And if you wanna get your teachers trained, you can pick off a really long list of training.
But nobody's even tracking how many teachers are trained in my state, New York.
This is uniquely disappointing.
New York found funding for training, but then they gave the funding to the New York local regional.
Associations to execute the training, and no one is putting out good reviews of this homegrown training that has happened out of these New York regional organizations.
So I have no optimism for New York starting to see gains out of its science, of reading reforms just on pure execution.
So if there's one watch word that we have to talk about in the other states, it's really about the depth and the.
Thoughtfulness of the implementation.
The country is a bit littered with implementation failure at this point in time.
Gene Tavernetti: Couple thoughts.
One, again, it's almost analogous to the third grade example, and that is, okay we're gonna have this legislation, teachers are gonna get trained.
Does the legislation include university programs to make changes in the universities?
Because it's, we seem at some point,
Karen Vaites: yeah,
Gene Tavernetti: the training shouldn't be necessary that in that intensive, or at least we should have fewer going through the training every year.
Karen Vaites: Can we say it more plainly, like it's ridiculous that districts have to do this effectively retraining of their teachers.
I doubt that anyone is listening to your excellent podcast that is unaware of the fact that we have a major problem with teacher preparation in America, where at the university level.
Some of the flawed theories about how kids learn to read.
That came primarily out of the whole language camp.
But but without even putting labels on it, there's a lot of teaching that happens in our universities about how kids learn to read and, or a massive gap in teaching about how kids learn to read.
That's and yet poor signals about learning sciences generally.
That issue's just pervasive and I hope folks have been following the NCTQ reports because NCTQ has been putting out reports for a lot of years, looking at the syllabi at our teacher prep institutions, and it's clear that we have a number.
Of organizations that are of universities that are just not getting on side with this science of reading and the info we desperately need to be giving teachers before they start.
So, I have not seen really good reporting and I'm sorry to say that 'cause I, you bring up a topic I'm curious about too.
Haven't seen great reporting about which states have made more inroads with their educator prep programs.
I know it's, there's some variants there and I know it's something that a lot of states have in their sight lines, but unfortunately it's the hardest thing for us to tackle because in universities there's academic freedom and it's not easy for states to use the heavy hand of the state to mandate change.
Gene Tavernetti: Well, I don't know how easy it is, but I know when I was going through graduate, a graduate program where I was going to university a state I was part of a a cohort that was interviewed.
By the state licensing folks, you know, our wasc college accreditation.
So I know they go through it as well.
So I don't know why heavy hands can't be everywhere, especially in you know, in a area where the state is actually doing licensing.
It seems the natural place to do it.
One thing another thought that I have is.
And it has to do with my experience.
Of course, I have to go back to my experience and I remember I was a new principal at a school, and I asked the vice principal who had been there for a long time, I said, so how many of our kids, you know, can read at the end of third grade?
He says, a hundred percent.
And I said, what?
Whoa.
What do you mean a hundred percent?
Oh, well, he goes let me back up.
They can all decode.
They can all decode, some are better comprehension than others.
Yep.
And I said, what are you doing?
And they were using a direct instruction whatever at that time, you know, the, yeah.
I don't know what it was called.
And so that was the commitment.
They did it.
Kids learned to read and we didn't have the other issues.
Now, I say that as context for my question is that it's great that we're seeing all this growth, but it seems to me that if a kid is entering kindergarten now with a group of teachers who've been trained, that we should have near a hundred percent proficiency at the end of third grade
Karen Vaites: So there is a figure that circulates in science of reading circles that says that we should be able to get 95%, of children reading successfully by the end of third grade.
And I feel like that's a fair norm to put out there because there are children with developmental.
Challenges that I, I wanna make sure that we're putting out realistic expectations for schools, but that 95% threshold is so far from where public school systems are in America with precious few examples.
I love that we have examples like Steubenville to talk about that get awfully close to that threshold in an awful lot of their assessment years.
But yeah, I mean, there's.
There should be no reason if we have well-trained teachers who are given the right supports from good curriculum to a sound screener, sound assessment protocols, and good job embedded training on use of those materials.
There's just no reason that we shouldn't be able to get the overwhelming majority of children to a point of success.
Gene Tavernetti: You know, I agree.
One more, one more thing and was, there's been miracles all over this country, right.
And I live in Fresno, California, and 20 some years ago there was a Sanger Miracle in Sanger, California.
And it became so noteworthy that the superintendent was a national superintendent of the year for all the work that they had done.
And it was a mecca.
I mean, you know, everybody had to go to Sanger.
And so I was talking to a a group of administrators from a school district that had gone to Sanger.
To actually see what was going on.
They were on one of those, one of the pilgrimages.
And when they talked to teachers and when they visited classrooms, what they had been told was happening wasn't as across the board as it seemed, and teachers expressed oh yeah, that's what we're supposed to be doing, but we don't do that.
Do we know how much of that is happening in the southern surge states?
Have you had a chance to actually visit classrooms or,
Karen Vaites: yeah, so I have had a chance to visit classrooms on, you know, visits where I might go to a district for a couple of days.
And so I wanna start by honoring the realistic point you make, which is in American schools.
Teachers do have a lot of empowerment to close the door and do what suits them with the bulk of the instructional time.
And that's why it's all the more important to make sure that we're really looking at the human side of this work and thinking about how we make sure that when we give teachers new, better curriculum, we are giving that professional learning, not just so teachers know.
How to use the materials effectively, but also why the materials have been designed the way they have.
I've spoken to countless teachers who were given knowledge building curricula without any real professional learning on the importance of background knowledge to reading comprehension.
Well, I might be put off if you gave me a curriculum that over-focused its time on science and history, and it felt like.
The books I love for being crowded out of the classroom or some of the attitudes you hear.
I might feel that way too if nobody had ever explained the learning science to me.
When we respect and show and invest in teachers to help teachers understand the research base and the why of these materials, it is, you know, that's this critical step to make sure you bring everybody onto the same page and that we're treating adults like people we need to motivate in all of this work.
That said I really like the short answer to your question's.
Not exactly.
It isn't like there's some set of, you know, eyes and ears into classrooms across Mississippi that lets us know exactly how much people are, you know, on board with or, you know, teaching from their curricula, for example, with.
Regular fidelity, but we do know the following.
There's a stat that came out of Tennessee where two years into Tennessee's curriculum reform they did a large scale survey of Tennessee teachers, and 96% of Tennessee teachers reported that they were teaching primarily from the materials selected by their district.
That is like a unicorn level embrace.
Of materials.
I don't have to, you know, I don't have to tell anybody that there's this popular conception of teachers and curricula that teachers don't like being told what curriculum to use.
They don't like teaching from a script, et cetera, et cetera.
I've come to think that narrative is completely driven by the fact that over the last 20, 25 years, the majority of curricula that were pushed into schools.
Weren't that good.
So if somebody gave me Wonders, a curriculum that's super bloated and lots of parts of it are pretty unimpressive and it actually contains no whole books in chapter book grades.
If you gave me Wonders and told me to teach it to Fidelity, it.
I'd be pretty resistant to curriculum change too.
But what we see consistently is that when states managed to get better materials into their schools, and both Louisiana and Tennessee achieved consistent use of knowledge building programs and pushed their basils broadly out of the state, pushed balance literacy broadly out of the state.
Suddenly, in a state where the curricula are consistently stronger, teachers are consistently using them like it's a completely unsurprising outcome.
But I think a really important data point in this work.
Gene Tavernetti: You know, it is it's very interesting to me the continuing paradox of Mississippi.
They had local selections.
Then we wanna get the other 45 states on board.
So where's the state, where's the state telling us what to do?
And then where, you know, so it's really hard to pinpoint in the United States in you know, in how independent we are.
I know in, in, in Fresno County, we have, I think it's 35 school districts.
You know, that nobody wants to be told, you know what to do.
They wanna do what's best for kids.
And they work hard, but there's a real tension.
There's a real tension there that as Americans, I don't know how we're going to, how we're going to settle that.
So, gosh.
Karen Vaites: Yeah.
Well, I'll tell you my favorite idea.
All I want for Christmas, and this is a preview of a piece that I'm hoping to get written by Christmas.
All I want for Christmas is a national curriculum database.
I think it's ridiculous that we have about six states that have put out some form of data, usually a sample at a moment in time, like Massachusetts has a dashboard of the curricula used in their schools, but the current version of it applies to one school year, and it's already a bit out of date.
And many states have put out a report saying in this moment in time, you know, for the year 2022, here are the curricula used in our schools.
But then that gets out of date.
I don't see why we couldn't start to mandate that schools publish openly the material selections that they've made.
And if you knew those selections in a moment where a lot of districts are changing and are even under more pressure to change with all the state legislation, you could do a regression analysis to look across our 13,000 plus districts and say, alright, well.
Which curricula are associated with higher performance relative to a district socioeconomic profile, which curriculum changes start to produce increases in student outcomes In a given district, all it would take is the data set.
So I'd like to see a national data set that'll empowers us to actually do some proper analysis on which curricula are raising bars and which ones aren't, because I firmly believe.
That better curricula are the ones raising bars, and I can point to the whole state of Louisiana and Tennessee as my proof point, but I think we can all agree we have a little ways to go in, in better insights in this realm.
Gene Tavernetti: We do.
We do.
And, now that we have your Christmas wish out do you have any, do you have any questions for me, Karen?
Karen Vaites: Oh, well, I'm meeting you at the end of the year and I've I have seen more remarkable podcasts with you Fly through my Twitter feed, so I wanna know from you.
What's the biggest aha moment you had or the biggest surprise or striking learning you had out of your year of 2025?
Podcasting.
And that will give me some good listening to go back to as we go into the holiday season.
Gene Tavernetti: Well, I tell you, it's, I've had recently, I just learned a lot about um, what to do with the kids that didn't make it by fourth grade.
And that was had Faith Howard had a great podcast that where she created what she calls a learning lab in secondary.
And it's a middle school and high school literacy lab, not a learning literacy lab.
And that was, I just had some great information about what all teachers could do to become reading teachers, because that was another cliche that we had years ago.
All teachers are reading teachers.
No training.
No.
You know, so I think that was a good one.
Doug.
Lamo, same thing in the same vein.
Talked about, you know, little things that, that teachers can do in the instruction.
And then I also ki buts.
From Baltimore, if you know Kire I
Karen Vaites: know I have had the pleasure of being in Kiera's classroom.
Oh
Gene Tavernetti: yeah.
so you can vouch for things.
Karen Vaites: I could sing hymns to Kira's teaching.
And I, that is three for three a set of podcasts that I'm gonna queue up in my cube.
Gene Tavernetti: Yeah.
So those are ones that I would that I would suggest.
Karen, I have to tell you, it was a joy.
I appreciate all the work you do and keeping things straight because it is a big job.
It's a big job.
And people ask me, I and I want to save public schools.
We have to save public schools.
But I'm thinking more of instead of saving our school system, that we should save a system of schools, you know, that we're a little bit more targeted.
Each school could be a little bit more targeted and satisfy our clients.
Anything else before we go, Karen?
Karen Vaites: No, I'm just really grateful for the work that you do helping to get out such a really the voices of the Dougs and Faiths and kis.
We should we all have so much to learn and so thank you for everything you're doing to nurture our professional learning.
Gene Tavernetti: Well, thank you, Karen.
I hope we see each other soon.
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