“When Dr. King wrote, “Why We Can’t Wait” in 1964, he took great pains to challenge us to address crushing societal problems with urgency. Sixty years later, New Jersey is facing a real issue – too many of our children can’t read, especially our African American children. Parents want our policymakers and our superintendents to embrace ideas that will bring wide scale results, not promote the status quo or take baby steps.” 

That’s Paula White, Executive Director of JerseyCAN, in an interview about a decidedly odd op-ed written by three New Jersey superintendents who malign the non-profit’s advocacy for effective reading instruction, calling it a “wrecking ball approach championed by those aligned with specific special interest groups.” In particular these educational leaders of West Windsor-Plainsboro, Pascack Valley, and Springfield school districts argue that New Jersey, a state whose education system is “among the top in the nation,” should cease efforts to improve reading proficiency in deference to “the  experience and skill” of NJ teachers. They urge the State Legislature to reject any proposal that would require school districts to provide training and coaching to teachers on student literacy and reading interventions necessary for students. Any such action, they claim, is a result of “magical thinking.”

Question: What has gotten under the skin of superintendents David Aderhold, Sarah Bilotti, and Rachel Goldberg?

Answer: JerseyCAN’s report, “Leveraging Literacy: the Path to Education Recovery in New Jersey,” which shows that NJ students’ reading levels are “plummeting to a level lower than pre-pandemic levels,” that NJ has been derelict in not adopting the National Reading Panel’s recommendations on the best ways to teach reading, that “New Jersey is now in the minority of states that do not provide in-service classroom teachers professional development training aligned to the Science of Reading,” and that the result is an alarming achievement gap in reading skills—47 percentage points— between white/Asian wealthier students and low-income students of color. 

This is a predictable result. While the authors of the op-ed make reference to the “reading wars”—the battle between proponents of a debunked pedagogy called “balanced literacy” and a data-driven approach called the Science of Reading (SOR)—the war is over. We know balanced literacy, also called whole language, doesn’t work for many students. We knew it in 2000 when the National Reading Panel explained that learning to read involves phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension, not just guessing from picture cues. We knew it in 2023 from Emily Hanford’s award-winning podcast “Sold a Story.”  We knew it when Columbia Teachers College dissolved its discredited balanced literacy department. We knew it when AFT, the national teacher union, boasted that 45 states have passed legislation mandating research-based reading instruction. New Jersey is an outlier and the three superintendents would have us maintain that distinction. Their students and others in similarly privileged districts are just fine! 

Yet they must know that is not true. One tell is the particular umbrage they take at JerseyCAN’s analysis of Millburn, where the average house price is $1.2 million and the district is “among the districts with the highest student achievement in the state.” Yet, as JerseyCAN’s report points out, Millburn shows a “severe” and “jarring” underperformance of Black third-graders: “Only 30.8% of this demographic group showed reading proficiency in 3rd grade, more than two times lower than white students in the district.”  Their own districts suffer from the same inequities: In West Windsor-Plainsboro there is a 35 point achievement gap in reading between Black students and white or Asian students; in Springfield there is a 23 point gap between those who qualify for free/reduced lunch and those who don’t. (In Pascack Valley there are no Black students, very few Hispanic students, and only one percent of students qualify for free/reduced lunch.)

White told this writer, “people with privilege and lower stakes tend to be low-risk,” an approach she believes shortchanges the many students whose parents can’t afford to live in gated communities. In addition, the superintendents’ demand for maintaining balanced literacy instruction “works at cross purposes with Science of Reading principles and our children shouldn’t have to serve as collateral damage so that remnants of ineffectual and outdated reading practices can continue.” She continues, “ Here is the deal – the principles of Science of Reading works. That is why almost every other state in the country and our federal government has embraced this approach.”

Yet collateral damage appears acceptable to these superintendents as they gaslight documentation of achievement gaps throughout the state and ignore encouraging results from states that mandate effective reading instruction. They tell us to ignore JerseyCAN’s recommendation that we recognize this moment “as one in which to enact expansive, comprehensive change, the kind that places substantially more children on the path to grade level learning and lifelong success than ever before.”

Those in charge  have a choice: Listen to three non-representative superintendents who want to, as Dr. King said,  “promote the status quo” or “embrace ideas that will bring wide scale results.” Who will they listen to?