While my work is best known for improving the academic achievement of vulnerable students, about 15 years ago, I added a second focus: how to help individuals develop virtuous, or prosocial, habits. Through the KINDR Foundation, that focus has expanded into resources designed to help people practice kindness and to support kinder communities and workplaces.

This essay does not attempt to solve the difficult question of how instructional time should be divided between academic learning and prosocial habit-building. It also does not address how that balance should shift by grade level, background, or the student’s degree of academic and emotional vulnerability. Those are important questions, but they fall outside what I address here.

Roadmap: how the argument unfolds

This paper makes three connected claims.

First, virtues must be distinguished from the behaviors that express them, because habits form through observable action rather than through intention alone.

Second, virtues become virtuous/prosocial habits when instruction is explicit, systematic, and grounded in practice—so learners can rehearse, receive feedback, and apply skills in real situations.

Third, when enough individuals in a community practice the same prosocial habits, everyday unkindness is interrupted and repaired, and community climate can shift over time.

After developing these ideas, the paper explains how KINDR translates them into practice, summarizes available evidence and reach, describes engagement levels, and concludes with the central thesis.

From virtue to habit at the individual level: the missing bridge

To move from virtue to habit at the individual level, the reasoning has two parts. The first part clarifies what a virtue is and what a prosocial habit looks like in practice. The second part offers design principles for systematic, explicit instruction—so a teacher, parent, or mentor can support habit formation rather than only encouraging good intentions.

Virtues and the behaviors that express them

Virtues are character traits with reliable tendencies to act well—such as kindness, compassion, gratitude, humility, responsibility, and patience. These tendencies show up in how people treat others and how they meet obligations. A disposition to be helpful, appreciative, respectful, or friendly becomes a virtue when it consistently reflects genuine care and commitment over time.

Prosocial or virtuous habits, by contrast, are the observable actions through which virtues are expressed. In practice, virtues describe who we hope to become; prosocial behaviors describe what that hope looks like during everyday choices.

This distinction matters because people do not reliably practice virtues simply because they are told those qualities matter. Virtues are not only ideas to agree with; they are capacities that can develop into habits through use. As Martin E. P. Seligman observed, strengths are built by using them. That is why the key practical question is not whether kindness or responsibility matter, but how those virtues are translated into repeated behaviors that show up under real pressures.

Instructional design: turning virtues into dependable habits

A family, school, church, or workplace should not assume that virtue will automatically grow from messages alone. People need structured learning that helps them (a) understand what a skill looks like, (b) practice it successfully, and (c) apply it across time and contexts.

Kindness deserves particular attention because close, caring relationships are among the strongest foundations for a fulfilling and healthy personal life. Kindness also creates the relational and emotional conditions in which other virtues can grow: openness rather than defensiveness, listening rather than shutdown, constructive cooperation rather than escalation, and more effective repair after conflict. When kindness is understood in this way, it is not merely sentimental. It is disciplined prosocial practice that builds the relational foundation on which deeper virtues depend.

Below are design principles for explicit, systematic teaching of prosocial/virtuous habits—particularly kindness habits—that I derived from the Theory of Instruction and implemented in my book How Love Wins:

• Identify and pre-teach the components of the key idea

• Explain the idea clearly, using examples and nonexamples that sharpen understanding

• Begin simply, then build toward more complex ideas and real application

• Provide guided practice with feedback and corrections

• Review earlier learning so skills are retained rather than forgotten

• Demonstrate and practice real-world applications

• Support generalization until the behavior becomes habitual across varied settings

Appendix A illustrates these design principles at work by using the table of contents of Lasting Happiness: A Guide for Youth and Young Adults as an additional concrete example (in addition to How Love Wins) of how virtue and mindfulness can be taught through systematic, explicit instruction, repeated practice, and real-life application.

Social and character virtue habits

To translate virtue into habit, it helps to name the types of habits being taught. Lasting Happiness teaches two complementary categories of virtuous habits.

Social habits include kindness (and reducing everyday unkindness), compassion, friendliness, gratitude, and helpfulness. These habits help individuals respond to others—and to themselves—with care, understanding, and support during daily interactions.

Character habits include humility, responsibility, and patience. These habits help individuals act reliably and respectfully even when it is difficult—through ownership, considerate restraint, and giving others time and space.

Individually, social and character habits can become stable strengths. Collectively, those habits can contribute to community change once enough people exhibit them at the same time. That shift—from individual reliability to community climate—is the next part of the argument.

From individual habits to community change: why communities change their climate

Creating kinder communities requires more than isolated examples of goodness. Virtuous habits can emerge at the community level when enough individuals practice social and character habits that form constructive civic and community connections within shared public life.

Just as a person does not become kind simply by being told to be kind, a student does not become grateful simply by hearing that gratitude matters, and a community does not become more virtuous simply by posting reminders about virtues.

When environments train people—intentionally or unintentionally—toward humiliation, exclusion, contempt, or chronic blame, kindness becomes harder to sustain. A child who is regularly shamed is less likely to feel kind. A student who is excluded is less likely to feel a sense of belonging. A worker treated with contempt is less likely to feel loyalty. In communities marked by constant blame, mutual responsibility struggles to take root.

Kindness thrives where people can recognize gifts, benefits, sacrifices, and obligations without feeling demeaned or unsafe. And that environment is built largely through sustained community practices of kindness. When kindness is practiced consistently, it tends to motivate broader prosocial action—helpfulness, fairness, responsibility, and stewardship; restraint, repair, and forgiveness; service and concern for future generations. This is the pathway from kindness to kind communities: not a slogan, but a sequence of skills that can be taught and practiced.

Interrupting everyday unkindness and repairing harm

Community mental well-being suffers not only from too little kindness, but also from repeated patterns of everyday unkindness. These include exclusion, discrimination, contempt, ridicule, gossip, sarcasm, and blame; harsh and reactive communication; dismissive body language and chronic criticism; and public shaming.

Each incident may feel small in the moment. Over time, however, repeated unkindness shapes the emotional climate of homes, schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods. Most communities are not mainly harmed by rare, dramatic conflicts. They are worn down by small, frequent interactions that widen emotional distance day after day until unkindness becomes expected.

For that reason, the KINDR approach emphasizes an interrupt-and-repair pathway: interrupt unkindness early, before it escalates; repair harm so relationships can be restored; and reinforce better patterns so virtuous growth can continue. This approach does not assume people will never act unkindly. It provides practical ways to notice harm, stop it, repair it, and choose a better response going forward—so community climate can improve over time.

Mindfulness as restraint: reducing unkindness with the Three-Breath Method

Many unkind reactions happen quickly, when someone feels irritated, embarrassed, threatened, overwhelmed, or ashamed. In those moments, emotions narrow attention and reduce access to better options. The result is often impulsive action: words said too sharply, withdrawal used as punishment, or escalation that feels justified in the moment.

To create a pause between feeling and response, Lasting Happiness: A Guide for Youth and Young Adults teaches a simple tool: the Three-Breath Method. The person pauses, takes three slow breaths in succession, and then chooses the next response intentionally. This is not magic. It is training. Three deliberate breaths can interrupt a reactive habit before it causes lasting harm. The purpose is not only emotional regulation; it is restraint in service of kinder communities. Mindfulness, understood this way, gives people space to act on their better intentions rather than their reactive impulses.

The KINDR Foundation: turning principles into practice

In this paper, KINDR refers to the KINDR Foundation and its initiatives for systematic instruction in prosocial habits, most recently the KINDR Spreading Kindness Campaign(s).

KINDR’s earlier campaign began with a volunteer effort to help make Eugene and Springfield cities of kindness. That initial effort ended due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The current campaign, which began in early 2026, developed instructional resources that teach kindness and gratitude; interruption and repair of everyday unkindness; mindfulness to restrain reactive responses; and habits that strengthen civic and community connections.

The goal is to foster prosocial/virtuous habits in enough people—especially those who are often underserved—so they can practice them repeatedly, retain those skills, and generalize them across real-world settings. Those settings include schools, workplaces, government offices, nonprofits, faith communities, and neighborhoods. In this framework, community well-being depends on two simultaneous conditions: enough people practice prosocial/virtuous habits, and everyday unkind behaviors are constrained through interruption and repair.

KINDR funds two complementary initiatives that support this goal. First, the Evidence Advocacy Center works to transform education into an evidence-based profession by guiding educators' preparation and support in ways that benefit students and their families and communities. Second, the current Spreading Kindness Campaign, described in the video Fostering Well-Being Through Kindness, develops and shares instructional resources for prosocial/virtuous skills, including kindness, compassion, friendliness, gratitude, helpfulness, humility, responsibility, and patience. These resources are designed to build civic and community connections that include vulnerable populations.

The Campaign’s ambition is both practical and audacious: build kind communities by offering resources relevant to multiple sectors and age levels, based on the premise that prosocial skills can be taught, practiced, retained, applied, and generalized across populations—especially vulnerable groups—and across settings such as schools, workplaces, government, nonprofits, unhoused settings, elder care, faith communities, health care, and youth programs.

Evidence of impact: what can be said responsibly

Many KINDR instructional books and programs for vulnerable populations have been evaluated. Reported outcomes include increased kindness across multiple measures, reduced unkind behavior, and a greater frequency of encouraging others to be more kind.

For example, incarcerated participants who took part in the Campaign reported reaching out with kindness significantly more often than the control group. Findings like these matter because they suggest kindness is not only an inherited personality trait. It can be strengthened through systematic, explicit instruction and repeated practice—especially in contexts where interpersonal resilience and self-control are essential.

To date, the Spreading Kindness Campaign(s) have reached more than 7,000 incarcerated individuals, approximately 800,000 students in high-poverty, high racial/ethnic-enrollment schools, and more than 7,500 vulnerable youth in out-of-school programs. These reach figures support the view that the approach is scalable and adaptable across settings.

Engagement levels: a standardized pathway from exposure to habit

How people engage with resources strongly affects outcomes. The KINDR model organizes engagement by time and effort, progressing from least time consuming to most time consuming.

Level 1: Messaging tools

The simplest resources—yard signs, window clings, buttons, and stickers—serve as reminders that kindness matters and prompt people to act.

Level 2: Kindness Ambassador Guides

The free digital ambassador guides support individuals and organizations in reaching out to others and sharing the benefits of increasing kindness for individual and community well-being.

Level 3: Journals for deeper engagement

Journals require more time and effort. They aim to strengthen the habits and virtues described earlier by deepening reflection and practice.

Level 4: Digital books (youth and adults)

The most in-depth learning comes from the free digital books tailored for youth and adults. These books guide readers toward lasting kindness practices and also address breaking unkind habits.

This four-level structure supports a key principle emphasized throughout the paper: lasting change requires more than awareness. It requires repeated practice, guidance, and opportunities to apply prosocial skills in real life.

Conclusion: learnable virtue as a community inheritance

KINDR’s Spreading Kindness Campaign offers a practical, evidence-aligned pathway for strengthening communities from the inside out. It turns kindness, gratitude, mindfulness, and the reduction of everyday unkindness into shared, repeatable habits. These habits are taught through systematic, explicit instruction and scaled through resources distributed across families, schools, workplaces, faith communities, and neighborhoods. Common messaging, Ambassador Guides, journals, and digital books provide a shared language for responding well to others.

At its core, the Campaign rests on two connected truths. First, healthier communities are built when enough people become intentional about how they respond to one another—choosing kindness over friction, gratitude over entitlement, mindfulness over reaction, repair and reconciliation over resentment, and responsibility over indifference. Second, community climate is shaped less by rare dramatic conflicts than by small, frequent interactions that either widen or close emotional distance over time.

Ultimately, teaching people how to live together well takes more than admiration for virtue. It takes daily practice, systematic explicit instruction, and environments where kindness and gratitude can take root. When these habits are taught systematically and shared widely, character becomes more than an individual achievement. It becomes a community inheritance—one generation’s gift to the next. This work invites communities to build something enduring: character strong enough to strengthen relationships, resilience strong enough to interrupt unkindness before it becomes culture, and gratitude strong enough to carry forward what is best today for those who come next.

Appendix A: Systematic, Explicit Instruction for Teaching Prosocial Behaviors

Appendix A illustrates these design principles at work by using the table of contents of Lasting Happiness: A Guide for Youth and Young Adults as a concrete example of how virtue and mindfulness can be taught through explicit instruction, repeated practice, and real-life application.

Part 1: Prepare for Lasting Happiness (create a foundation). Chapter 1 introduces the relevance of mindfulness and kindness to teenagers and young adults, with kindness framed as central to the close, caring relationships that support a happy, healthy life. Chapter 2 presents the skills of action and character that serve as building blocks for changing one’s life.

Part 2: Build Kind Habits (construct the walls). Chapter 3 offers examples and exercises that expand thinking about the many ways to be kind. Chapter 4 guides readers in building kind habits directly.

Part 3: Train Your Mind (put up a roof of mindfulness to keep out unkindness and keep in kindness). Chapter 5 lays out practical ways to meditate and practice mindfulness daily. Chapter 6 explains mindfulness and offers exercises using the senses of sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste. Chapter 7 shows how mindful practice can be woven into daily activities such as brushing one’s teeth, doing laundry, eating, or taking a coffee break.

Part 4: Deal with Unkind Habits (install circuits that block negative energy to enable kindness). Chapter 8 helps readers recognize the unkind habits that hurt themselves and others and stand in the way of close, caring relationships. Chapter 9 offers ways to break the unkind habits most damaging to well-being. Chapter 10 focuses on ways to cope with the unkind habits of others.

Part 5: Take the Final Steps to Lasting Happiness (add finishing touches that show all are welcome). Chapter 11 prepares readers to be resilient when hard times come. Chapter 12 explains how to make one’s “house” welcoming to people seen as different because of race, language, economic status, or political or religious belief. Chapter 13 explains the importance of caring for oneself and serving others in the present moment, rather than worrying about the future or dwelling on the past. Chapter 14 describes how to encourage others to act with mindful kindness. Chapter 15 offers two paths for making kindful living a permanent part of life. An afterword briefly describes the joy, contentment, and energy that come from living kindfully

Doug Carnine, Ph.D. Founder, Evidence Advocacy Center

Preface

G. Reid Lyon and Doug Carnine bring complementary expertise and decades of experience in evidence-based fields. Lyon specialized in neuroscience, investigating how neural systems support reading development and where reading difficulties originate. Carnine was trained as an experimental psychologist—through a University of Illinois NSF undergraduate fellowship—and dedicated his career to designing and testing instructional methods for children at risk of academic failure.

Lyon trained neuropsychologists, medical students and residents in neuroanatomy and neurophysiology within the constraints of a mature profession that had built rigorous requirements for training, certification, ethics, licensure, and hierarchies of evidence. In contrast, Carnine, who trained educators during his tenure at the University of Oregon, was shocked to discover that education lacked rigorous requirements for training, certification, ethics, licensure, and hierarchies of evidence.

Their shared conclusion, which comes from two different sets of experiences, is unambiguous: education has too often treated evidence as optional. It has failed to construct the professional infrastructure that makes evidence-based practice the expected—and accountable—norm.

Executive Summary

The United States does not suffer from a shortage of scientific knowledge about reading development, reading difficulties, or effective instruction. More than six decades of interdisciplinary research have produced a robust and increasingly convergent understanding of how reading proficiency develops and how it can be improved. Yet reading outcomes remain alarmingly low.

This paradox points to a clear conclusion: the primary obstacle is no longer a gap in scientific discovery. It is the failure to institutionalize that knowledge within the systems responsible for preparing and supporting educators and educational leaders.

Central Argument

The reading crisis is not only an instructional, curriculum, or policy problem. It is fundamentally a professionalization problem. Until education establishes a universally shared knowledge base, a common professional language, consistent preparation standards, and enforceable accountability mechanisms, significant variability in professional knowledge, instructional practice, and student outcomes will persist.

Unlike mature professions—such as medicine, engineering, nursing, aviation, and speech-language pathology—education has not built the guardrails that ensure scientific knowledge is translated into practice at scale. Professionalization is the missing link.

The Paradox of Reading Science: We Know Enough, Yet Proficiency Remains Low

Few areas of education have benefited from a more extensive scientific knowledge base than reading. Beginning in the 1960s and accelerating across subsequent decades, researchers identified the linguistic, cognitive, developmental, and neurobiological foundations of reading acquisition. This work culminated in landmark interdisciplinary efforts—including the NICHD Reading Research Program—that integrated findings across disciplines providing the basis for developing instructional programs and assessment systems as well as the means of implementing them.

Alongside the science of reading, advances in the science of learning, the science of instruction, and implementation science have further enriched this knowledge base. Together, four interlocking bodies of evidence define what the field now knows:

The Science of Reading

Decades of research have established core principles about how reading proficiency develops:

• Reading is not acquired naturally, as spoken language is; it must be explicitly taught.

• Reading is a language-based developmental achievement.

• Reading proficiency depends on multiple interacting components.

• Reading difficulties can be identified early—often before formal schooling begins.

• Most struggling readers can achieve proficiency with explicit, systematic, evidence-based instruction.

• Effective instruction can shift developmental trajectories and strengthen the neural systems that support reading.

The core instructional components are based on these principles.

The Science of Learning

The relevant evidence base extends beyond “what works.” The science of learning examines how people acquire knowledge, retain it over time, generalize it to new contexts, and recover when learning breaks down. This science informs the conditions under which instruction is most likely to succeed.

The Science of Instruction

The science of instruction addresses both the design of content and its delivery. Preparing teachers to engage students is only as effective as the quality of the content they engage with. Instructional materials must be carefully structured, sequenced, practiced, and monitored to produce reliable learning outcomes.

Implementation Science

Implementation science is the scientific study of methods and strategies that facilitate the uptake of evidence-based practice and research into regular use by practitioners and policymakers.

The science of reading identifies the knowledge students must acquire. The science of learning explains how that knowledge is acquired, retained, and transferred. The science of instruction translates these findings into instructional practices comprised of well-designed instruction—what to teach—and effective instructional delivery—how to teach—that reliably produce learning. Professional preparation and support should therefore include mastery of all three sciences. Implementation science focuses on closing the gap between what we know and what we do (the know-do gap) by identifying and removing barriers that impede the use of proven interventions and evidence-based practices.

The Central Question

The question is no longer whether scientific knowledge exists. The question is why it has not become common professional practice. The answer lies in the professional structure of reading education—not in gaps in the evidence.

Education Has Not Yet Fully Professionalized

A profession is not defined merely by the dedication of its members. Mature professions develop the capacity to transmit, maintain, and apply scientific knowledge consistently across practitioners and institutions. They build infrastructure that makes correct practice the norm—and makes incorrect practice harder to sustain.

Across mature professions—medicine, engineering, aviation, nursing, finance, and maritime operations—a consistent pattern emerges: evidence-based knowledge is institutionalized through shared standards, coherent training, competence-based licensure, and accountability systems that protect the public. These professions do not rely on persuasion alone. They rely on systems.

Education lacks comparable professional guardrails. As a result, children experience dramatically different learning opportunities depending on their location, the quality of their teachers’ preparation, local instructional traditions, and—most critically—whether leaders and systems align with scientific evidence. This degree of variability would be unacceptable in any trusted profession. It should be unacceptable in reading education.

What Trusted Professions Provide That Reading Education Still Lacks

Mature professions typically institutionalize five pillars that collectively ensure coherence, competence, and adherence to evidence-based practice. These pillars also support enforcement mechanisms that reduce the persistence of ineffective practice.

Pillar 1: A Shared Knowledge Base

Trusted professions agree on foundational knowledge—even when they debate implementation details or interpret emerging findings differently. In reading education, professionals often enter practice with substantially different understandings of critical fundamentals, including:

• How reading develops across childhood

• Why reading difficulties occur

• The role of oral language—vocabulary, grammar, listening comprehension—in reading acquisition

• The role of encoding in word reading and automaticity

• The nature and identification of dyslexia and reading-related disorders

• How assessment should guide instructional decision-making

• What characteristics define effective reading instruction

When foundational constructs are not shared, professional disagreement becomes predictable and implementation unreliable. No profession can scale competence if its members do not share a core model of the phenomenon they are meant to address.

A Common Professional Language Is Central to the Shared Knowledge Base

Even among well-intentioned and well-educated professionals, shared language matters—because it determines what people actually mean when they invoke evidence and instruction. In reading education, key terms are routinely defined differently across universities, publishers, advocacy organizations, state agencies, and professional development providers. Terms such as “science of reading,” “structured literacy,” “explicit instruction,” “balanced literacy,” “dyslexia,” and “evidence-based” carry inconsistent meanings in the field.

This creates avoidable and costly problems:

• The same term can describe entirely different constructs.

• Different terms can describe the same construct.

• Collaboration slows as professionals talk past each other.

• Implementation fidelity erodes when apparent agreement masks real disagreement.

A common professional language, which is part of the shared knowledge base, is not a stylistic preference. It is the infrastructure that makes knowledge transferable—and enforceable.

Pillar 2: Research-Aligned Preparation

Trusted professions align preparation to a shared knowledge base and require trainees to understand not only discipline-specific findings, but also the broader sciences of learning, instruction design, and delivery. Preparation in reading education must similarly include the content in pillar 1.

In medicine, trainees learn evidence-based practice through structured, competence-centered programs. In reading education, preparation remains highly variable. Not all preparation programs ensure mastery of essential reading knowledge and instructional competencies, including the ability to design adaptations of reading instructional programs and deliver that instruction with fidelity. This variability helps explain why evidence-based instruction in classrooms often depends more on local training and support ecosystems than on a consistent professional standard.

Pillar 3: Licensure and Professional Development Rooted in Competence

In trusted professions, licensure signals demonstrated competence and protects the public. Professional development is not optional enrichment—it is structured, ongoing learning that sustains competence and aligns practice with advancing evidence, especially the operational decisions required to translate research into consistent instruction and effective error correction.

Education has not consistently built licensure and professional development systems around competence in evidence-based reading instruction. Licensure too often reflects completion of coursework rather than demonstrated mastery of relevant knowledge and skills.

Pillar 4: Accreditation with Teeth

Today, a large percent of teacher-prep programs that fail to prepare candidates effectively still receive accreditation. Noother serious profession tolerates such laxity.

Pillar 5: Accountability for Professional Knowledge and Practice Quality

Trusted professions protect the public through accountability systems that address both competence defined as adherence to evidence-based standards. Accountability does not merely track outcomes—it monitors whether core professional practices are delivered competently and consistently, including fidelity to evidence-based instructional routines and delivery requirements grounded in the sciences of learning and instruction.

In education, accountability is too often inconsistent, symbolic, or diffuse. Systems frequently emphasize reporting student results without ensuring the implementation capacity, fidelity, or professional competence required to achieve those results.

The Pendulum Problem

Education is notoriously susceptible to pendulum swings. When evidence is treated as optional, instruction regresses. Carnine’s Substack about “stopping the pendulum” reflects a broader pattern: reading education has repeatedly moved away from evidence-supported practices only to rediscover them after costly cycles of discrediting and re-adopting.

Phonics has been adopted, abandoned, rediscovered, and marginalized again. Whole-language instruction displaced phonics; phonics later regained prominence; then it was pushed aside once more. These cycles are not evidence of a learning field. They reveal that professional systems have failed to institutionalize evidence-based practice as the default.

Understanding the Pendulum

The pendulum is best understood as a symptom of incomplete professionalization. Trusted professions do not cycle between evidence-based and discredited practices, because professional guardrails restrict individual discretion and enforce standards of practice. Education often lacks those guardrails—so local preference, ideology, and “reform churn” can override evidence repeatedly.

What Education Can Learn from Trusted Professions

Evidence alone does not protect the public. Trusted professions become trusted because they build systems that ensure evidence becomes practice—even amid disagreement among practitioners. Five lessons emerge from their example.

Lesson 1: Trusted Professions Reduce Preventable Harm

Trusted professions protect the public by institutionalizing evidence through guardrails and external accountability. They do not wait for voluntary compliance. History shows that during periods when evidence existed but was not uniformly applied, preventable harm occurred. The “period of preventable harm” can be defined as the gap between when evidence is established and when it becomes uniformly applied in practice.

Reading education appears to remain in such a period. Evidence-aligned practice is not universally required, consistently supported, or effectively monitored.

Lesson 2: Members Adhere to a Shared Knowledge Base

In trusted professions, members are not free to disregard core standards of care. Local discretion exists, but it operates within shared, enforceable boundaries. In education, the scientific knowledge base is not consistently treated as a governing standard. Practice therefore depends too heavily on local interpretation, leadership preferences, and curriculum adoption cycles.

Lesson 3: Noncompliance Is Made Harder

Trusted professions do not eliminate imperfect practice—but they reduce its invisibility and its tolerance. Education often allows ineffective practice to persist precisely because professional systems do not impose meaningful consequences for departures from evidence-based standards.

Lesson 4: Local Control Does Not Override the Knowledge Base

Local control and evidence-aligned professionalism can coexist. The problem is not local decision-making per se; it is local decisions made without enforceable, knowledge-based constraints. Trusted professions permit variation in context, style, and application while maintaining non-negotiable core standards. Education too often treats scientific evidence as negotiable—especially when school boards, district leaders, curriculum vendors, or preparation programs prefer alternatives.

Lesson 5: Accountability Is the Key Mechanism

Accountability in trusted professions defines who is responsible for ensuring evidence-based practice—and establishes consequences when it does not occur. In reading education, accountability must be multi-level and enforceable. It should require:

• Classroom-level competence in evidence-based instructional routines and delivery

• Leadership responsibility for coaching, monitoring, and implementation quality

• District responsibility for fidelity to evidence-based practice across schools

• State monitoring that is both supportive and corrective when achievement levels are low and evidence-aligned practice is absent

A Policy Agenda for Professionalizing Reading Education

Improving reading proficiency requires more than adopting new curricula or passing legislation. It requires building professional infrastructure that reliably translates scientific knowledge into daily practice. Five policy priorities are essential.

Priority 1: Establish a Common Knowledge Foundation

States should define the essential professional knowledge that all educators and educational leaders must possess regarding reading development, reading difficulties, assessment, and evidence-based instruction—grounded in the science of reading, the science of learning, and the science of instruction.

Priority 2: Establish a Common Professional Language

Preparation programs, licensure systems, professional organizations, and state agencies should adopt shared terminology and operational definitions grounded in cumulative scientific evidence. Ambiguous or inconsistently defined terms undermine implementation and accountability.

Priority 3: Strengthen Evidence Standards

States should clearly distinguish between claims that are merely plausible and claims that are genuinely evidence-based. They should require stronger evidence standards for curriculum adoption, intervention selection, and professional development investments—and should make those standards transparent and publicly accountable.

Priority 4: Align Preparation and Licensure

Teacher and leadership preparation programs should be evaluated based on demonstrated mastery of scientifically validated reading knowledge and instructional competencies, including the ability to design and deliver instruction consistent with the science of learning and the science of instruction. Licensure must reflect verified competence, not mere exposure to coursework.

Priority 5: Build Accountability for Professional Knowledge and Implementation

Accountability systems should measure both student outcomes and the quality of professional preparation, professional learning, and implementation capacity across the system. This must include monitoring fidelity to evidence-based instructional practice and requiring corrective action when competence or implementation quality is absent.

Conclusion

The future of reading proficiency depends less on discovering new scientific principles than on institutionalizing existing knowledge within the professional systems that prepare and govern educators.

The unfinished work of professionalizing reading education is the construction of guardrails that ensure evidence is consistently taught, consistently understood, communicated through shared language, and consistently applied in practice.

This task is not primarily scientific. It is professional. The evidence is available; the professional infrastructure remains incomplete. If education is to produce stable, sustained progress rather than perpetual pendulum swings, it must develop the shared knowledge base, professional language, competence-based preparation and licensure, and enforceable accountability systems that characterize every trusted profession.

The reading crisis is, at its core, a professionalization crisis. Addressing it requires treating professional infrastructure—not only pedagogy or policy—as the urgent priority it is.

Why We Can Trust the Science of Reading

G. Reid Lyon, Ph.D.

The science of reading is principled, responsible, and reliable—not because of any single study, researcher, theory, instructional approach, or advocacy movement, but because it represents a cumulative, self-correcting body of scientific knowledge built over more than six decades of interdisciplinary research. Its credibility rests on the convergence, replication, refinement, and extension of evidence across cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, speech language pathology, genetics, education, and related disciplines. Across these fields, thousands of studies have examined how reading develops, why reading difficulties occur, and which instructional approaches are most effective.

Why Scientific History Matters

The science of reading is not a static collection of findings. It is an evolving scientific knowledge base that grows stronger as evidence accumulates, methods improve, and findings are tested repeatedly across diverse populations and instructional settings. What is remarkable about this body of work is not the novelty of its conclusions, but its consistency. Collectively, the evidence demonstrates that reading is a complex, language-based, multi-componential developmental process that must be directly taught. It does not develop naturally on its own. It is not a single skill. Reading is a symphony of interacting cognitive, linguistic, and neurobiological processes. Learning to read involves the integration of phonological processing, the alphabetic principle, decoding, morphology, orthographic learning, word recognition, reading fluency, vocabulary, syntax, background knowledge, and comprehension. The evidence further demonstrates that reading proficiency can be significantly improved when instruction is explicit, direct, systematic, cumulative, responsive to learner needs, and informed by ongoing assessment. Effective reading instruction is not teaching a single skill. It’s like conducting an orchestra, ensuring that each component develops appropriately and contributes to a coherent, integrated performance.

Scientific progress depends on understanding discoveries that have survived rigorous testing over time. Ignoring the history of durable scientific findings risks reinventing established knowledge and mistaking rediscovery for innovation. Consider one example. Recent discussions have highlighted the importance of oral language in reading development, sometimes implying that this relationship is a new discovery. It is not. The primacy of oral language in reading acquisition was documented decades ago and has since been replicated, refined, and extended across multiple disciplines and populations. Its importance lies not in its novelty, but in its durability. The relationship between language and reading has survived decades of empirical scrutiny and remains one of the most robust findings in the field.

This illustrates a fundamental principle of science. Confidence in a finding does not come from its recency. It comes from the weight of evidence supporting it. Replication, refinement, and extension increase trustworthiness because they demonstrate that findings are not isolated observations but enduring features of reality.

The Risks of Forgetting What We Already Know

In every mature scientific discipline, understanding discoveries that have survived repeated testing is not merely an academic exercise. It is essential for evaluating new claims, distinguishing genuine innovation from rediscovery, and preventing the field from repeatedly revisiting questions that have already been answered.

When a field loses contact with its scientific history, predictable consequences follow. Researchers and practitioners unfamiliar with prior scholarship may unknowingly rediscover concepts demonstrated decades earlier. This creates the illusion of innovation when the field is actually revisiting established knowledge. Such cycles of forgetting and reinvention consume resources, fragment understanding, and weaken confidence in the scientific record. In science, progress occurs when new knowledge is integrated with established knowledge.

If the past is prologue, the science of reading is particularly vulnerable to misunderstanding and bandwagon adoption. The urgency to reduce persistently high rates of reading failure fuels the search for instructional panaceas. In such an environment, the science of reading can become a political slogan, a marketing label, or an ideological banner rather than a scientific framework. If inaccurately described, burdened with unrealistic promises, or appropriated to market products and programs, it risks being dismissed as just another educational fad. Precision in how the science of reading is defined, communicated, and implemented is therefore essential.

What the Science of Reading Is—And Is Not

The science of reading is not a philosophy, ideology, curriculum, instructional program, commercial product, or political movement. It cannot provide us with absolute certainty. It is a cumulative, reliable, and self-correcting body of interdisciplinary scientific knowledge derived from decades of converging evidence across multiple scientific disciplines, diverse student populations, and varied instructional settings. The 10 Maxims: What We’ve Learned So Far About How Children Learn to Readwere developed to distill decades of interdisciplinary reading research into a set of clear, evidence-informed principles that can guide educators, leaders, and policymakers in improving literacy outcomes for all students. This knowledge base provides our most accurate and reliable understanding of how reading develops, why reading difficulties occur, and how instruction can be designed to improve reading outcomes. Consequently, the science of reading provides a scientifically defensible foundation for the development, implementation, and evaluation of assessment systems, instructional practices, curricula, educator and leadership preparation programs, professional learning systems, literacy frameworks, and the common professional language necessary to support coherent literacy improvement efforts at scale.

The science of reading is complex in its methodologies and in its applications. So what. Reading is complex. Humans are complex. Schools are complex systems. Most people reading this paper are smart enough to handle the complexity. The question is, do we put in the effort to become a genuine professional accountable for our professional knowledge and its use?

The science of reading is not an endpoint. It is the foundation upon which educational innovation should be built, tested, evaluated, and continuously refined. But the practical value of the science of reading in steering the development of effective innovations and practices, can only be realized when they are executed precisely in real world settings, exactly as designed.

Scientific Knowledge Is Necessary—But Not Sufficient

The science of reading provides a necessary, but not sufficient, foundation for improving reading proficiency. Scientific knowledge alone does not teach children to read. People do. Systems do.

The impact of the science of reading on the lives of children, teachers, families, and communities throughout the literacy ecosystem. Scientific evidence must be transformed into evidence-based instructional practices, valid and reliable assessment systems, high-quality professional learning, coherent leadership practices, accountability structures, and supportive policies. Even the strongest scientific evidence cannot improve outcomes if it is misunderstood, diluted, inconsistently applied, or implemented with poor fidelity. The challenge is not simply knowing what works. The challenge is ensuring that what works is implemented as intended within the complex realities of schools, districts, teacher preparation programs, and policy environments. In short, scientific evidence provides the foundation for effective reading instruction, but implementation determines its impact. Reading proficiency improves when educators, leaders, preparation programs, and policymakers possess the knowledge, skills, and organizational capacity to translate scientific evidence into effective and sustainable practice.

When we observe the failure of practices and policies supported by the science of reading, we must ask whether the evidence we are applying is current. Equally important we must ask were the conditions that are necessary for successful implementation present. Were educators adequately prepared and supported? Were instructional frameworks, curricula, assessments, and professional learning systems aligned with the evidence? Was implementation coherent, intensive, and sustained?

Improving reading outcomes at scale therefore requires more than a strong scientific foundation. It requires systems capable of translating evidence into practice. This includes strengthening educator and leadership preparation, establishing rigorous standards for evidence claims, aligning policy and instructional infrastructures, and creating sustained professional learning systems. Without these conditions, even the strongest scientific evidence is unlikely to achieve its full potential in classrooms.

The Challenge Is Translation

Over the past half century, foundational findings concerning oral language, phonological processing, the alphabetic principle, morphology, word recognition, orthographic learning, reading fluency, comprehension, and effective instruction have been replicated, refined, extended, and integrated into an increasingly precise scientific understanding of reading development and instruction.

The field’s greatest opportunity lies not in just continually searching for the next breakthrough, but in ensuring that what is already known is understood, communicated accurately, and applied consistently.

The central challenge facing the science of reading is not the absence of knowledge. It is the persistent failure to communicate, translate, institutionalize, and sustain the application of knowledge that has already demonstrated its validity and durability.

For more information about the Evidence Advocacy Center (EAC)’s efforts to move education toward an evidence-based profession:

EAC Research-Based Resource Repository to make resources and reliable organizations readily available

EAC Alliance of Evidence-Aligned Professional Education Organizations to provide technical assistance

EAC Consortium of States as proof of concept

EAC Multi-Sector Collaborative to mobilize stakeholders to exert external pressure requiring the implementation the five pillars.

Learn from history: Education repeatedly forgets what it has already learned. Even when we know how to teach a content area effectively—history, social studies, science, literature—that knowledge is rarely preserved in a shared professional memory. As a result, the field continually rediscovers old insights and debates questions that were partly answered decades ago. Failing to learn from history is but one of the topics I discuss in my recent Substack, What Education Can Learn from Trusted Professions.

Teach history: This essay revisits a 30‑year‑old integrated research program on teaching U.S. history—work that could have informed today’s debates had it not been forgotten.

Introduction

Every time I read current arguments about history and social studies instruction, I have the same reaction: we have been here before.

In literacy and mathematics, efforts are underway to build cumulative knowledge bases—such as the Evidence Advocacy Center’s Canons of Literacy and Math. But in content areas like history, social studies, science, and literature, useful evidence remains scattered, unorganized, and largely absent from the profession’s collective memory.

A case in point is a research program my colleagues and I conducted shortly after the first NAEP history assessment in 1994. In 2022, only 13 percent of eighth graders scored at or above Proficient in U.S. history—virtually unchanged since 1994.

We wrote a two‑volume textbook, Understanding U.S. History, and used it to study a practical question:

How do you teach history so that students don’t just memorize information but learn to think with it?

That question remains urgent. And the answers we found remain relevant. The fact that they feel newly relevant is not a sign of progress—it is evidence that education has forgotten what it once knew.

The Debate Has Not Changed Much

Two contemporary critiques echo debates that have spanned several decades. ^[1]

1. The Content Problem (Wexler)

Natalie Wexler argues that instruction often prioritizes generic comprehension skills over domain‑specific knowledge. Without sufficient background knowledge, students cannot:

• understand what they read

• engage deeply with content

• think meaningfully about it

Within the context of history instruction, students cannot:

• interpret primary sources

• compare political systems

• explain causation

• write meaningful essays

unless they know enough to think with precision. But facts alone are insufficient. Traditional instruction often presented history as a disconnected list of details. Students remembered isolated information but lacked the conceptual structure needed to use it. The goal is not memorization for its own sake. The goal is to remember organized knowledge that becomes usable.

This is also an equity issue: students with less prior knowledge are harmed most when schools fail to build it.

2. The Primary‑Source Problem (Bassett & Shiffman)

Bassett and Shiffman argue that schools often assume that giving students more primary sources will naturally deepen historical thinking. But novices lack the background knowledge and interpretive routines that historians bring to such documents. The result is predictable:

• cognitive overload

• shallow analysis

• misinterpretation

Primary sources fail when they are used as substitutes for preparation rather than opportunities for application. Historians can read primary sources effectively because they already possess:

• rich background knowledge

• established interpretive routines

Students do not.

Our research found that primary sources succeed when:

• the narrative is established

• concepts and vocabulary are taught

• students have time to read and interpret

Primary sources work after preparation, not instead of it.

What We Studied

Our experimental U.S. history textbook was built around six design principles derived from Theory of Instruction.

1. Primed Background Knowledge
   Students need prerequisite knowledge before encountering new ideas or documents.

2. Big Ideas
   Concepts that organize facts into coherent structures.

3. Conspicuous Strategies
   Explicit procedures for thinking, reading, and responding.

4. Strategic Integration
   Deliberate connections among facts, concepts, and skills.

5. Mediated Scaffolding
   Temporary supports that fade as competence grows.

6. Judicious Review
   Sufficient, cumulative, distributed review to secure retention.

These principles anticipated today’s debates by emphasizing both memory and preparation for analysis. The hypothesis was simple: If content is well organized, background knowledge is deliberately built, review is cumulative, and supports are embedded, then students will remember more—and think better. This hypothesis directly addressed the concerns now resurfacing in today’s debates.

A More Effective Sequence for History Instruction

Our research identified a three‑phase instructional sequence:

Phase 1: Acquisition

Primed Background Knowledge

Phase 2: Organization

Connect background knowledge to big ideas through conspicuous strategies, mediated scaffolding, and strategic integration accompanied by judicious review.

Phase 3: Application

Write, solve problems, and analyze primary sources based on proficiency with respect to acquisition and organization.

Skipping phases leads to predictable failure. Stopping at acquisition prevents students from using what they know. Skimping on organization makes application too difficult.

What the Five Studies Found

Across the five studies (see Appendix A for descriptions) synthesized in Designing Effective U.S. History Curricula for All Students, students using the experimental text:

• included more historical facts, more principles, and concepts with fewer misconceptions in essays on primary sources

• scored higher on knowledge tests

• were more engaged and accurate during instruction

• learned new vocabulary at a faster rate

• retained more relevant content over time

· Another study using the experimental text with learning disabled students not only replicated our findings concerning factual recall and vocabulary but also found significant positive effects on sample items from the NAEP history assessment.

Among special education and at‑risk students, difficult content became accessible and frustration decreased. Knowledge‑rich, teacher‑directed instruction benefits all students—especially vulnerable learners.

What This Means for Primary Sources

Primary sources should be:

• fewer

• carefully selected

• contextualized

• used after conceptual learning

A Benjamin Franklin passage about colonial life, for example, became meaningful only because students had already studied the relationship between geography, climate, resources, and economic development.

The source worked because it came after preparation.

What This Means for Memorization

Memorization is not the goal—but it is indispensable.

Students need:

• facts

• vocabulary

• dates

• major actors

• conceptual categories

securely in memory so they can think with them. Recall is the platform for explanation, interpretation, and judgment.

Conclusion: The Instructional Lesson

Students can:

• remember important content

• write with substance

• understand concepts

• interpret sources

• engage in real historical thinking

—but only when instruction is designed to support these outcomes.

The essential question was never facts or sources.
The essential question is: How do we build organized knowledge that makes analysis possible?

Conclusion: The Professional Lesson

The deeper lesson is about the profession itself.

The fact that this 30‑year‑old research feels newly relevant is evidence of a systemic failure: education does not preserve its own learning. Without a cumulative knowledge base for content areas such as history, science, and literature, the field will continue to:

• rediscover what it already knew

• repeat old debates

• reinvent the wheel

A recent example of the value of building a professional knowledge base comes from Robert Pondiscio’s recent AEI post, which states: “..the [RAND] report can’t tell us if the average number of books assigned has declined…” If the findings about the number of books assigned were stored in a professional knowledge base, it would be possible to repeat the assessment in five years and make statements about increases or decreases in the number of books assigned. But if this finding is forgotten, an assessment five years later might state that “the report can’t tell us if the average number of books assigned has declined.”

Until education learns to remember, it will remain condemned to forget.

For more information about the Evidence Advocacy Center (EAC)’s efforts to move education toward an evidence-based profession:

EAC Research-Based Resource Repository to make resources and reliable organizations readily available

EAC Alliance of Evidence-Aligned Professional Education Organizations to provide technical assistance

EAC Consortium of States as proof of concept

EAC Multi-Sector Collaborative to mobilize stakeholders to exert external pressure requiring the implementation the five pillars.

Appendix A: A description of the five studies

^[1] 19th and early 20th centuries: Debates about cultural literacy and essential knowledge gained prominence. Proponents argued that shared knowledge—dates, events, figures, vocabularies—enables meaningful reading of historical texts and informed citizenship. Critics warned that privileging a fixed canon could marginalize historically excluded voices and perspectives.

Mid–late 20th century: Progressive and inquiry-oriented approaches emphasized skills—analytical reading, interpretation, questioning, and evidence-based argumentation—often with less emphasis on broad, centralized background knowledge. The goal was to cultivate disciplinary habits of mind through primary-source work and inquiry.

Over a quarter century ago, I wrote Why Education Experts Resist Effective Practices (And What It Would Take to Make Education More Like Medicine). Since then, the research base has grown in many areas, especially literacy, mathematics, learning science, instructional design, and implementation. Growing at almost the same rate are the number of reform proposals and critiques of the education system as I noted in Stop Admiring the Problem: Escaping Education’s Groundhog Day. It is time for me to move beyond the idea that education should be evidence-based to describing what that profession could look like.

At present, education does not function as an evidence-aligned profession. That does not mean it lacks research, talented educators, or worthy intentions. It means the field has not yet built the accountability “guardrails” needed to make reliable knowledge normal, expected, and enforceable in daily practice.

To see what education is missing, it helps to look at evidence-aligned professions such as medicine, finance, and the maritime industry. They have built enough coherence and accountability so that their core knowledge bases guide practice rather than merely competing with preference. That is the lesson education needs to learn.

What Evidence-Aligned Professions Have That Education Still Lacks

In Stopping the Pendulum, I describe five pillars shared by all evidence-aligned professions: 1) A shared knowledge base that members are expected to know and use. 2) Preparation systems that teach that knowledge coherently. 3) Licensure and professional development that signal competence. 4) Accreditation that is meant to protect quality. 5) Accountability to guarantee that the shared knowledge base is accurate, up to date, and adhered to in the daily work of the professionals and applied to the other pillars. While education lacks these accountability guardrails, they allow evidence-aligned professions to become non-governmental self-governing professions that regulate themselves, often with recognition or delegated authority from the state. These professions set standards, certify competence, and discipline members to protect the public, while remaining independent from direct government control. Because non-governmental, self-governing professions are recognized or have delegated authority from the state, I refer to them as trusted professions.

When education implements the five pillars, it can become a trusted profession. My purpose is to extract lessons from the history and operation of trusted professions that can assist education in its transformation into an evidence-aligned and therefore trusted profession.

Lesson 1: Professions Become Trusted by Reducing Preventable Harm

Trusted professions do not fully protect the public simply by having a knowledge base of what is effective. These additional steps are required:

· Decision makers (political will) become convinced of the importance of all five pillars

· Legislative and/or legal action takes place around the utilization of the five pillars

· The knowledge base becomes central to the operation of the trusted profession

However, before becoming a trusted profession, they all went through a period of preventable harm. The period of preventable harm can be defined as the interval of time between when evidence was established and when evidence was uniformly applied by the profession.

Medicine offers a stark example. The evidence that hand hygiene could reduce deadly infection was clearly demonstrated by Ignaz Semmelweis in 1847, when he required physicians in the Vienna maternity clinic to wash their hands with chlorinated lime before examining maternity patients. Although Ignaz Semmelweis demonstrated the value of handwashing in 1847, hand hygiene became a broadly institutionalized professional expectation only gradually, especially from the 1890s into the early 1900s, as germ theory, antisepsis, and aseptic practice took hold. During this period of preventable harm, families, courts, and professional societies pressed for better documentation and outcome-based thinking. A reasonable historical estimate is that requiring handwashing in U.S. medical settings beginning in 1847 could have saved at least hundreds of thousands of lives, and possibly more.

The maritime world offers a similar lesson. James Lind’s controlled trial in 1747 showed that citrus fruit could prevent and treat scurvy, and he published the findings in 1753, yet the British Navy did not make citrus juice a standard ration until 1795, nearly half a century later. Only after sustained leadership from reform-minded naval medical officers, persistent public and parliamentary pressure, and the mounting burden of scurvy on sailors did the Royal Navy translate the Lind findings into formal policy.^[1] During that delay, scurvy continued to disable crews, sabotage voyages, and kill large numbers of sailors. Historians commonly note that scurvy killed more sailors than combat, storms, and shipwrecks combined, and broad historical estimates place the death toll in the hundreds of thousands to well over a million across the age of sail.

Finance and accounting tell the same story in a different form. The collapse of Enron in 2001 and the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002 marked a turning point in making stronger controls and accountability far less optional in public company reporting. Pressure to address Enron-style failures and strengthen reporting came from a confluence of actors across corporate, regulatory, and public spheres: whistleblowers like Sherron Watkins and Cynthia Cooper, investigative journalism, and investors—especially pension funds and other large stakeholders—whose losses and eroded retirement security sharpened the call for transparency; public trust in financial disclosures plummeted, spurring congressional inquiries and regulatory scrutiny.^[2] The harm before stronger enforcement was not abstract. Investors lost billions of dollars, employees lost jobs and retirement savings, and public trust in The Enron scandal likely destroyed $60–70 billion in investor value, eliminated about 20,000 Enron jobs, wiped out over $1 billion in employee retirement savings, contributed to the collapse of Arthur Andersen and the loss of tens of thousands more jobs, and caused large secondary harms through lost trust, legal costs, and regulatory disruption.

Takeaway: A trusted profession protects the public, not when it discovers useful evidence, but when external pressure requires implementing the evidence that applies to the five pillars. Education is still in the time of preventable harm.

Lesson 2: In a Trusted Profession, Members Adhere to the Shared Knowledge Base

Trusted professions, such as medicine, finance, and maritime work, can exit the period of preventable harm once their members are expected to apply their knowledge in practice. That does not mean every practitioner performs perfectly. It means the profession has enough structure to make departure from its knowledge base less normal, more visible, and more consequential. The scale of these professions makes this especially striking.

The broader U.S. health care sector employs well over 20 million people, including physicians, nurses, pharmacists, technicians, hospital and clinic staff, and many others connected to care delivery and administration. The finance and insurance sector employs about 7 million workers, and the broader U.S. maritime sector includes hundreds of thousands of mariners, officers, port workers, and other personnel. In all of these sectors, the daily work is carried out by very large numbers of people. Yet despite that scale, the professions still function around a shared body of knowledge that practitioners are expected to follow.

In medicine, physicians are not free to ignore core standards of care because of personal preference. In finance and accounting, firms are not free to disregard accepted reporting and auditing principles simply because a local office prefers a different approach. In the maritime industry, local discretion does not erase navigation rules, safety procedures, or inspection standards. These professions all allow variation in style and context, but they do not allow unlimited variation in whether the profession’s core knowledge matters.

In stark contrast, education is still in the period of preventable harm because the five pillars are not in place. From the beginning of NAEP reading assessments in 1970 through 2024, the United States likely exposed roughly 60 to 70 million fourth graders to unnecessary serious reading failure, if one assumes that the current “Below Basic” rate of about 40% could have been reduced to 5% to 10% through more effective evidence-based instruction. That estimate is rough, but its implications are not. It suggests massive preventable harm in the form of reduced confidence, shame, frustration, and anxiety for children; heavy tutoring, advocacy, and emotional burdens for families; greater remediation costs and disrupted learning environments for schools; and long-term social losses through lower graduation rates, reduced lifetime earnings, weaker workforce readiness, and higher public costs. In human terms, this is not simply an instructional shortcoming. It is a large-scale, preventable injury to the lives of millions of students. The fact that the knowledge base is not mandated means its use is optional for practitioners.

Takeaway: A trusted profession is able to guide the behavior of millions of professionals. Education is unable to provide evidence-aligned guidance.

Lesson 3: No Profession Is Perfect, But Trusted Professions Make Noncompliance Harder

Trusted professions use an agreed-upon evidence base, unlike education, where the evidence remains largely optional. No profession achieves perfect compliance. In medicine, finance, and maritime work, some individuals and organizations fall below standard and some undoubtedly escape accountability for a time. But the important point is that even imperfect accountability can still produce a profession that is far more coherent and protective than one in which evidence remains largely optional. If only 1% to 3% of the more than 20 million professionals in U.S. health care were substantially out of compliance at any given time, that would still mean roughly 200,000 to 600,000 individuals. If the same rough range applied to the 7 million workers in finance and insurance, that would mean about 70,000 to 210,000 individuals. If it applied to a maritime workforce in the hundreds of thousands, it would still mean thousands of individuals. The important point, however, is not that these professions have eliminated noncompliance. The important point is that they have built systems strong enough that the shared knowledge base still governs the field overall. Their members understand that professional practice should align with what is known. Their organizations understand that they are expected to support that alignment. Their accountability systems, though imperfect, make it harder for weak practice to remain invisible or indefinitely tolerated.

This is where education differs. The United States has roughly 7 million educators and school-based professionals in elementary and secondary education, including about 4.2 million teachers, as well as principals, superintendents, counselors, instructional leaders, and other professional staff. Once one also includes educator preparation programs, nonprofits, professional associations, curriculum publishers, assessment companies, ed-tech vendors, consultants, tutoring providers, and other organizations that sell to or shape the work,’ work, the total is close to ten million. If education were a trusted profession, out of ten million, we would expect about 100,000 to 300,000 individuals in the field of education to be substantially out of compliance with evidence. However, in education, individuals might comply with evidence, ideology, tradition, local preference, or “reform churn.” Consequently, we have no idea how many individuals do not comply with evidence-based practices in education.

Takeaway: Trusted professions do not eliminate weak practice, but they make it much harder for it to remain the norm. In education, weak practice is too often the norm.

Lesson 4: Local Control Exists for Trusted Professions, but Doesn’t Override the Knowledge Base

A common claim in education is that local control makes an evidence-aligned, trusted profession impossible. Other professions show otherwise. In medicine, local doctors and hospitals make local decisions. In finance, local firms make local decisions. In the maritime industry, ship operators and ports make local decisions. But local control does not mean they are free to ignore the profession’s core knowledge base. A hospital cannot say, “In our clinic, we do not believe in sterile technique.” An accounting office cannot say, “We prefer not to follow accepted reporting standards.” A ship captain cannot say, “Our local approach does not include standard navigation or safety procedures.” Local discretion exists inside the accountability guardrails of a profession. It does not override it. This is one of the clearest understandings that education must learn. The problem is not local control in itself. The problem is local control without strong professional accountability guardrails.

In education, local preference too often overrides the strongest available evidence. A teacher may know what works, but the district may prohibit it. A principal may support sound instruction, but a board or superintendent may reverse it. A preparation program may improve, but local curriculum decisions may disconnect new teachers from what they learned. That is what it means to say education is subservient to local control.

Takeaway: Local control is not a problem for trusted professions. Education is subservient to local control because it lacks accountability guardrails.

Lesson 5: Accountability Is the Key for Education to Become a Trusted Profession

A profession can have a strong knowledge base, with evidence-aligned preparation, licensure, and professional development, and accreditation, but none of those guarantees that effective practice will consistently occur in education settings ranging from classrooms to State Departments of Education. The central accountability question is simple: Who makes sure that what is supposed to be done is actually happening—and what happens when it is not? And how is that accountability maintained over time? In a trusted education profession, accountability would exist at several levels.

At the classroom level, teachers would be expected to use evidence-aligned materials and instructional routines competently and consistently. This would not mean robotic teaching. It would mean that the profession clearly defines the core elements of effective practice and expects them to be observable. Teachers would ensure they use the correct materials, request coaching and support for effective implementation, and regularly monitor student performance data and adjust instruction accordingly. Accountability would be supported with any necessary assistance but enforced by school leadership.

At the school leadership level, principals and school leaders would be accountable not only for management, but for the quality of instructional practice as demonstrated by student progress within the school year and on to the next school year. They would need to know whether teachers are actually using the adopted evidence-based materials, whether coaching is occurring, whether weak instruction is being identified and addressed, whether students are making expected progress, and what barriers teachers are facing. This accountability would be enforced through annual evaluations, performance contracts, leadership standards, license renewal or continuation decisions, and intervention systems. However, as with teachers, additional support in the form of technical assistance and added resources would also be provided to school leadership by district leadership.

At the district leadership level, superintendents and senior academic staff would be responsible for protecting coherence across schools. They would be accountable for ensuring that schools are implementing evidence-based programs, that implementation quality is monitored across sites, that weaker schools receive support, that drift from evidence-based practice is identified and corrected, and that districts report honestly on implementation and results. Superintendents could be held accountable by local school boards: student progress, annual evaluations tied to instructional quality, and implementation fidelity. If student results remained weak, superintendents would be expected to answer practical questions such as: What is the district’s plan to address the deficiencies? Performance contracts would specify evidence-based goals and expected outcomes. Contract renewal or nonrenewal decisions would be based on whether those goals were met. Superintendents would also be held accountable by the state, with district performance reviews conducted by the state board or a state monitoring process, which could include the governor. Corrective action systems would kick in when persistent weakness is evident, and public reporting requirements would make outcomes transparent.

Takeaway: Effective accountability requires added support, intervention plans, and consequences when the required changes are not implemented. These are key to becoming a trusted profession. Education lacks all five pillars including the fifth pillar of accountability.

Lesson 6: If a profession does not use evidence, the state will force it to

Education’s lack of demonstrated professional capacity has led over 44 states to prescribe a broad, research-informed framework for reading (e.g., the Science of Reading, Structured Literacy, explicit, systematic instruction, universal screening, multi-tiered systems of support, etc.). State legislation, such as requiring the Science of Reading, is rare outside of education. In professions, broad frameworks are imposed through licensing and ethics codes.^[3] In fact, the few impositions that do exist are not broad frameworks and have little effect on the typical daily professional practice of core skills and knowledge. However, a few examples exist of legislation/regulations that have made very specific prescriptions for practitioners in a specific aspect of a trusted profession.^[4]

If education were a trusted profession, State Departments of Education (SDE) would fulfill their mandate and must evolve from mere data collection to a proactive mechanism that ensures evidence-based instruction is the non-negotiable standard in every classroom.

Local control would then be a privilege earned through results. However, when a system consistently fails educators and their students, the state must intervene to restore the fundamental right to an evidence-based education. Intervention may start by providing additional resources, such as coaches and technical assistance. Triggers for State Intervention could include persistent underperformance, continued use of methods and materials unsupported by evidence, and failure to show progress despite prior SDE intervention.

Takeaway: SDEs have a responsibility to monitor all professions. For education, SDE monitoring of school districts must become far more supportive, intensive, and even intrusive.

Conclusion

Education still struggles to earn the same kind of trust that states extend to medicine, finance, and maritime work. Why? Effective support for educators and their students is lacking, which disempowers educators and causes widespread student failure. Education has not yet implemented the five pillars. Its knowledge base is neither organized nor recognized as legitimate. Its preparation systems vary widely. Licensure may not reliably reflect instructional competence. Accreditation can remain weakly connected to evidence. Accountability is often inconsistent, symbolic, or diffuse. As a result, evidence in education still competes with ideology, tradition, local preference, and “reform churn.” Consequently, states do not defer to education in the same way as they defer to trusted professions. Deference is not a gift. It is a response to demonstrated professional capacity and reasonable levels of student achievement. Until education implements the five pillars, it will remain weaker than the trusted professions it hopes to resemble, and educators, students and families will continue to bear the cost.

For more information about the Evidence Advocacy Center (EAC)’s efforts to move education toward an evidence-based profession:

EAC Research-Based Resource Repository to make resources and reliable organizations readily available

EAC Alliance of Evidence-Aligned Professional Education Organizations to provide technical assistance

EAC Consortium of States as proof of concept

EAC Multi-Sector Collaborative to mobilize stakeholders to exert external pressure requiring the implementation the five pillars, which is the first take away.

^[1] Implementing citrus as a standard ration required not just scientific proof but the alignment of procurement, supply chains, logistics, and training; it demanded budget approvals, reform of provisioning stores, and new shipboard care standards. The ensuing policy shift—codifying citrus juice as a routine necessity—reduced disease, improved voyage reliability, and created explicit accountability structures within the navy: regular health reporting, inspections, and oversight by Parliament and the Admiralty.

^[2] This convergence culminated in landmark reforms—the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 and the establishment of the PCAOB—mandating stronger internal controls, auditor independence, and clearer financial disclosures (including Section 404). Corporate boards and audit committees faced heightened accountability, while rating agencies and institutional investors demanded verifiable data and governance reforms to restore confidence. The 2008 economic collapse offers a cautionary warning about what happens when professional guardrails are weakened by legislation. The **Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999** weakened the separation between commercial banking, investment banking, and insurance, allowing financial institutions to grow larger, become more complex, and become more exposed to risk across sectors. The **Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000** left many over-the-counter derivatives, including credit default swaps, largely outside strong regulation, which allowed risky financial products tied to mortgages to expand rapidly with limited oversight. Together with weak mortgage lending standards, excessive leverage, rating-agency failures, and poor enforcement, these changes helped create the conditions that made the 2008 collapse possible.

^[3] Across trusted professions, broad frameworks are imposed through licensing and ethics codes (such as medical privacy rules like HIPAA, GDPR for data protection, and professional confidentiality duties), internal governance and risk-control measures (boards, internal audit, segregation of duties, data stewardship), inter-organizational cooperation arrangements (MoUs, joint policies, data-sharing agreements, interoperable standards), emergency and crisis management structures (ICS/NIMS, EOCs, surge capacity planning, triage ethics), and overarching ethical and legal foundations (duty of care, autonomy, informed consent, liability, mandatory reporting, human rights), all of which constrain professional autonomy while promoting accountability, safety, privacy, and coordinated action across sectors.

^[4] Examples: interventions that may be performed in the field (drug administrations, airway management, ventilation devices, defibrillation) by emergency medical services (EMS) and paramedics. Two other examples involve dentistry and sedation and nursing related to methods for high-risk procedures (e.g., sterile technique, intravenous therapy, specific medication administration under standing orders or protocols).

“We must resist the temptation to spend our time admiring the problem.”
— Samantha Power, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations

40% of fourth-grade students perform “Below Basic” in reading.
— 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)

Education has spent decades diagnosing its failures. It is time to spend less energy describing the failures and “cures,” and more energy ending it by transforming education into a research-based profession.

As Robert Pondiscio argues convincingly in Why Is Education So Damn Fad-Prone?, the real “miracle” in education is that any school or district manages to sustain success in a system defined by churn, fragmentation, and where compelling research on effective programs is not the driver of decisions about instruction.

He joins a long chorus. Larry Cuban made this point in “Reforming Again, Again, Again, and Again” published in Educational Researcher in 1990. Tyack and Cuban extended it in “Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform.” Searches of major education databases such as ERIC, Google Scholar, and JSTOR using terms like “school reform,” “critique of American education,” “failure of U.S. schools,” and “education reform” yield thousands of results.

I joined that chorus with my 2000 article Why Education Experts Resist Effective Practices. But I began thinking along these lines in 1976, when I realized that the Project Follow Through findings on the Direct Instruction model had been suppressed, undermined, and ignored.

Ever since, I have felt like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. Every morning, education wakes up to the same spectacle—fads rise, effective schools and districts fall, and the system behaves as if none of this has happened before. Fads abound. Criticism is abundant. Serious solutions are not.

One of the few viable answers is to transform education into a research-based profession. That is the argument to which I return through the work of the Evidence Advocacy Center (EAC).

In medicine, engineering, and other serious professions, knowledge accumulates, standards matter, and institutions protect practice from ideology, fashion, and wishful thinking. Education, by contrast, has never built that kind of protection. As a result, it lurches from one enthusiasm to the next while repeatedly abandoning what works and then rediscovering what should never have been forgotten. Until we confront that reality, we will continue to mistake novelty for progress and churn for improvement. We will keep replaying education’s own version of Groundhog Day.

Why Reform Keeps Collapsing

To understand why education keeps cycling through initiatives, we must distinguish between two levels of failure.

The Operational Failure

At the operational level, Pondiscio’s argument is exactly right; he points out that leadership turnover, weak feedback loops, political pressure, and moral urgency create what he calls “rational churn”. In that environment, starting something new is safer and more visible than making something work.

New programs generate headlines. Steady execution does not. Reinvention becomes a rational response to a system that prizes appearance over results for students. That helps explain why so many reforms are launched with fanfare and then quietly fade away.

The problem is not always a lack of intelligence or good intentions. The problem is that the system rewards disruption more than durability. In education, launching often gets rewarded more than sustaining.

The Structural Failure

But the structural level is more important. Education lacks the guardrails that keep other professions from drifting into fads. It fails to link and integrate research, preparation, licensure, accreditation, and accountability. Without that integration, effective practice remains vulnerable to being overridden by ideology, weakened by poor training, or swept aside by the next leadership change. That is why the churn never ends. The system has no mechanism for promoting and protecting what has already been learned.

Because of both the operational and structural failures, I no longer believe the central challenge is simply discovering what works. We already know far more than the system is willing to honor. The real challenge is building the structural capacity that can advance and defend evidence-based practice in a field that too often treats knowledge as optional.

In Stopping the Pendulum: Making Education a Research-Based Profession, I argue that serious professions do not continually recycle disproven ideas. They build institutions that preserve knowledge, enforce standards, and prevent the field from wandering back into error. If we want to stop the pendulum, we must stop searching for miracles and start building the profession itself.

See Part 2: Start Building the Profession.

Installing the five pillars found in all research-based professions is how to start building a research-based education profession. These five pillars must be implemented concurrently. In Touching Only a Part of the Education System: A Fatal Misunderstanding, I argued that reformers repeatedly make the same mistake: they try to fix one isolated part of the system—such as creating a knowledge base or improving the preparation of new teachers—and then act surprised when the whole system does not improve.

1. A Shared Knowledge Base

We need a curated, authoritative body of research connecting literacy, mathematics, learning science, instructional science, and implementation.

Without a shared knowledge base, the field remains easy prey to selective citation, intellectual fashion, and ideological distortion. Every faction can claim “research support,” and no one is held to a common standard of evidence.

A profession cannot exist without a common foundation of knowledge. Education still behaves as though every debate begins from scratch. That has to end.

2. Aligned Preparation

Future teachers must be prepared in practices that are demonstrably effective. Preparation, induction, and professional development should reinforce the same evidence-based principles, not contradict one another.

Too many teachers still enter classrooms carrying theories that are weakly supported, poorly taught, or directly at odds with what the research says about effective instruction. That is not a minor flaw. It is a betrayal of both teachers and students.

3. Evidence-Based Licensure

Licensure must mean something. It should signify genuine instructional competence grounded in a high-quality preparation program, not mere seat time, procedural compliance, or bureaucratic endurance.

If licensure does not protect the public from ineffective practice, then it is not serving its essential purpose. No serious profession treats licensure as a hollow ritual. Education should stop doing so.

4. Constructive Accreditation

Accreditation should ensure that educator preparation programs are anchored in research-based evidence and taught by faculty who understand that evidence. Too often, accreditation has become a procedural exercise rather than a quality safeguard.

If preparation programs are free to ignore validated practice without consequence, then the profession has no meaningful way to protect its future. Accreditation must strengthen quality, not disguise weakness.

5. Quality Accountability

Accountability systems must protect educators and students from ineffective practices driven by local ideology, habit, or fashion. Their purpose should be to monitor student learning and instructional quality throughout the school year in order to safeguard quality and support improvement—not merely to generate compliance documents or political talking points.

In every mature profession, accountability exists because the public deserves access to what works and protection from bad practice. Students deserve no less.

When effective practice is ignored and ineffective practice is allowed to persist unchecked, students and families pay the cost. A profession is not built on enthusiasm. It is built on institutions that protect what works.

From Argument to Action

These ideas matter only if they move from argument to action. That is why “The Evidence Advocacy Center’s Plan to Transform Education into a Research-Based Profession” lays out a strategy for building the structural capacity that education lacks, starting with a proof-of-concept involving a few states and districts.

The Evidence-Based Education Laboratories Consortium

The EAC is launching Evidence-Based Education Laboratories or EBEL, in a small consortium of states and districts. This is not an academic exercise. It is a proof of concept designed to show that when policy, preparation, and classroom practice are aligned around evidence, student achievement can improve in sustained and visible ways.

The field does not need more rhetoric about coherence. It needs working examples that make incoherence impossible to defend.

The Alliance

The Alliance is a group of evidence-aligned professional education organizations that support the states and districts in the Consortium. It also provides other states and districts with the technical expertise and coaching needed to bridge the gap between policy and classroom reality.

Policy statements do not implement themselves. Change fails when leaders assume that issuing mandates is the same as changing practice. It is not. Serious implementation requires expertise, discipline, and support.

The Collaborative

The Collaborative is made up of representatives of national organizations whose constituents are harmed by the failures of our education system:

• parent and family advocates

• elected officials representing taxpayers

• business leaders

• community colleges

• civil rights groups

Its purpose is to mobilize the stakeholders who have the most to gain from lasting improvement—and the most to lose from continued failure. These groups are too often treated as peripheral when they should be central.

Together, these three efforts address the central weaknesses that have kept education trapped in churn. The Consortium creates proof points. The Alliance provides implementation capacity. The Collaborative builds the external pressure needed to sustain change.

One demonstrates what is possible. One supports what is necessary. One demands what is overdue.

That is how a field moves from repeated critique to durable reform. Proof points matter. Implementation matters. External pressure matters. Durable reform requires all three.

Conclusion: End Education’s Groundhog Day

Pondiscio is right: the miracle is not that some schools succeed, but that any sustain success in a system this incoherent. But we cannot continue to rely on miracles, or on the extraordinary heroism of individual educators struggling against a broken structure. Heroism is admirable. It is not a system. If we want to stop the churn, we must stop chasing isolated reforms and start building the profession itself.

We need pillars that preserve a shared knowledge base, align preparation with evidence, make licensure meaningful, make accreditation serious, and hold systems accountable for instructional quality. Without those structures, education will remain trapped in Groundhog Day—repeating the same mistakes while students and families pay the price.

Call to Action

We have admired the problem long enough. If we want to stop education’s Groundhog Day, we must stop treating churn as normal and start building the guardrails of a real profession. That means supporting the five pillars of a research-based profession and the work of the Evidence Advocacy Center to move research into policy and practice. Act now by sharing this article with your:

· Legislator and governor

· State department of education

· Professional network

· Connections to potential members of the Collaborative

Learn More

To learn more about the Evidence Advocacy Center:

• visit the EAC Website

• sign up for the EAC Newsletter

• explore resources, news, and learning opportunities supporting evidence-based practices and policies

See Part 1: Stop Admiring the Problem

Becky Allen’s thoughtful Substack Engelmann Last

Becky’s Substack

Engelmann Last

Let me start by saying the thing that nearly everyone in education privately thinks: the Engelmann DI community has a bit of a cult problem. Not because the ideas are wrong - many of them are genuinely powerful - but because Theory of Instruction is so painful to read that the only people who finish it are the kind of people who become evangelists for i…

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4 months ago · 38 likes · 12 comments · Becky Allen

post prompted a harder question: in terms of human well-being, is Theory of Instruction worthless? https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Doug-Carnine/publication/303721842_Theory_of_Instruction_Principles_and_Applications/links/574f661a08aef199238ef8b6/Theory-of-Instruction-Principles-and-Applications.pdf

That sounds extreme. After all, Carl Hendrick has referred to it as “education’s closest approximation to a Principia Mathematica.”

The Learning Dispatch

10 Rules for Designing Effective Learning

For a few years now, I have been reading and re-reading Theory of Instruction by Siegfried Engelmann and Douglas Carnine, which stands perhaps as education's closest approximation to a Principia Mathematica. The basic argument is that all learning follows predictable, logical patterns when instruction is properly designed and that violating these logica…

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10 months ago · 354 likes · 36 comments · Carl Hendrick

How could something so admired, so intellectually serious, and so potentially powerful be called worthless?

A theory may be scientifically true, elegant, and even revolutionary, yet still have limited effect on human well-being. A strong theory can clarify what is happening, explain why something works, and sharpen professional thinking. But if its use is not required in practice, its social benefit may remain small. Knowledge by itself does not protect people. Human well-being improves when professions and institutions require valid knowledge to shape what they do. I have written previously about the harm to educators and their students because education is not an evidence-based profession inTouching Only a Part of the Education System.

Douglas Carnine

Touching Only a Part of the Education System

I have dedicated more than 50 years to educational reform. Throughout my career, I served as a faculty member, researcher, and director of numerous large-scale federal projects. Most notably, from 1978 to 1991, I directed the Direct Instruction Follow-Through Model…

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7 months ago · 26 likes · 7 comments · Douglas Carnine

Germ Theory Shows the Pattern

Germ theory is the clearest example.

The theory explained that microorganisms cause disease. That was an extraordinary intellectual advance. But for a long time, the theory did little for ordinary people. People still died from preventable infections because doctors, hospitals, and public health systems were not yet required to act on it.

Germ theory became socially powerful when its use was embedded in practice through handwashing, sterilization, antiseptic surgery, sanitation systems, and infection-control procedures. In other words, germ theory did not change human well-being merely by being discovered. It changed human well-being when medicine and public health required people to behave differently because of it.

Theory explains. Required use protects.

The Same Pattern Appears Elsewhere

This is not unique to medicine. Human history contains many examples of theories that had little practical benefit until their use became expected, standardized, and enforced.

· Blood typing theory made safe transfusion possible, but lives were saved only when hospitals required blood typing, cross-matching, transfusion protocols, and compatibility screening.

· Waterborne disease theory did not improve public health merely because experts understood it. Its value emerged when cities required sewage systems, protected water supplies, filtration, chlorination, and sanitation inspection.

· Nutritional deficiency theory did not help sailors simply because someone understood scurvy. It helped when navies required citrus or equivalent anti-scurvy foods, standardized provisioning, and preventive dietary rules.

· Structural engineering theory did not make buildings safer merely by existing in textbooks. It protected people when governments and professions required building codes, structural calculations, inspections, and licensed oversight.

· Aviation safety theory did not save lives merely because people discussed it. It became powerful when aviation systems required checklists, standard operating procedures, crew coordination protocols, recurrent training, and safety reporting systems.

The pattern is remarkably consistent: a theory may be true, elegant, and widely praised, yet until its use is built into practice, it often remains weak in its effect on human well-being.

That Is Why the Question Matters for Education

This brings us back to Theory of Instruction.

A valid theory of instruction can explain how to make learning more reliable. It can clarify the importance of careful sequencing, precise wording, attention to prerequisites, and using student error as feedback about instructional design.

That matters. But here is the uncomfortable question:

If schools, districts, and teacher preparation programs do not require educators to use such a theory, how much does it actually improve human well-being?

That is the real issue.

A theory of effective instruction may exist. Research may support it. It may be admired, discussed, cited, and praised. But if the profession does not require its use, its benefits remain limited. It does not reliably protect teachers from weak preparation, and it does not reliably protect students from weak instruction.

In that sense, Theory of Instruction stands in the same relation to schooling that germ theory once stood in relation to medicine: scientifically important, but socially weak until embedded in required professional practice.

Why This Matters So Much in Education

Educational failure is not a minor inconvenience. It affects human well-being in serious and lasting ways. When effective instructional theory is not required, students are more likely to experience poor early reading outcomes, unnecessary academic failure, weak preparation for later learning, reduced readiness for college and work, diminished long-term opportunity, widened inequality, and avoidable social and economic harm.

So the sharper question is this:

How much does even a powerful theory help human beings if the profession is not organized to require its use?

That is where the answer becomes uncomfortable.

So Is It Worthless?

Not as explanation, not as intellectual achievement, and not as a source of potential guidance. But in practical terms, if a profession leaves the use of valid theory optional, fragmented, and vulnerable to ideology, even a powerful theory may do far less for human well-being than it should.

That is the tragedy. A theory sitting on the shelf, however brilliant, does not reliably help children learn to read. A theory admired in academic conversation, however elegant, does not reliably prevent instructional failure. A theory cited in essays and conferences, however important, does not by itself protect teachers from miseducation or students from weak instruction.

What Would Make Theory of Instruction Matter More?

Theory of Instruction would become far more beneficial if its use were built into the profession through teacher preparation, curriculum design, coaching, decision tools, professional norms, and accountability systems. More concretely, that would mean teacher preparation grounded in research-based instructional design principles, curriculum standards tied to validated sequencing and clear language, coaching based on observable features of effective instruction, decision tools that help teachers identify missing prerequisites, and accountability systems that protect students from ineffective teaching.

Only then would the theory move from being a respected idea to becoming a protective force in children’s lives.

The Larger Lesson

The larger principle is not limited to one book or one educational approach.

A theory can be true without being socially useful. A theory can be admired without protecting anyone. A theory can be revolutionary and still have little practical effect if its use is not required.

For a theory to matter at the human level, it must be translated into procedures, embedded in standards, taught through training, monitored through accountability, and required in actual practice.

That is why the right question is not simply whether Theory of Instruction is brilliant. The right question is whether any theory, however powerful, can substantially improve human well-being when a profession is not organized to require its use.

Conclusion

Germ theory did not improve human well-being simply because it was true. It improved human well-being when medicine and public health required its use. The same pattern applies to blood compatibility, water sanitation, nutritional deficiency theory, structural engineering, aviation safety, and education.

So is Theory of Instruction worthless? As a theory, no. But if its use remains optional, fragmented, and vulnerable to ideology, its contribution to human well-being will remain far smaller than it should be.

A theory does not become a force for human flourishing simply by being correct. It becomes one when its use is made normal, expected, and required.

And that is the question education still has to answer.

In analyzing the landscape of American education, Robert Pondiscio

The Next 30 Years

What Happened to the Miracle Schools?

Education writer Holly Korbey recently posed a thoughtful and important question: Why doesn’t education study its successes the way other fields study their masters? Why don’t we linger over high-performing schools, dissect what they do, and deliberately build on their example the way “Kobe did with Jordan, or Dylan did with Woodie Guthrie”? she asked. …

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5 months ago · 45 likes · 26 comments · Robert Pondiscio

identifies three primary reasons why we fail to replicate successful schools:

• Rationalization: We dismiss positive outcomes as statistical anomalies.

• Selective Adoption: We endorse practices only if they fit our existing biases.

• Short-term Focus: We prioritize “breakthrough moments” over the grueling work of long-term sustainability.

However, there is a fourth, more sinister reason: We fail to learn from the active destruction of successful schools. I was prompted to write this Substack because of Pondiscio’s observation about what happened to a school serving minority children that produced high achievement but found itself being accused of cheating: “One of them, Houston’s Wesley Elementary School, was swept up in the district’s testing scandals…”

The Miracle: Witnessing Brilliance in Acres Homes

One might think that Wesley Elementary School was the source of the scandal, but in fact the source of the scandal was the Houston school district central office. Their scandal was the effort of the school district to try to destroy a successful school, Wesley Elementary School. But the story of Wesley Elementary is not merely a case study of the attempted destruction of a successful school; for me and many others, visiting Wesley Elementary was a transformative experience. Forty years ago, my visit to Ms. Killion’s fifth-grade classroom revealed what was possible when evidence-based instruction delivered through the Direct Instruction Program materials met high expectations. Despite being 98% economically disadvantaged and 98% African American, these fifth-graders were engaged in sophisticated, nuanced discussions about biological systems.

Their competence was so profound that it left “the hairs standing up on the back of my neck.” These students weren’t just memorizing facts; they were reasoning and making inferences. During a tour of Baylor Medical School, their inquiries were so advanced that a medical resident had to be summoned to assist the tour guide.

My experience at Wesley served as a double-edged sword. While it proves how the competence of teachers leads to the brilliance of their students, it also highlights the tragedy of the “miseducation” occurring in thousands of other classrooms—a realization that first led me in the early 2000s to abandon my 15 year effort

https://evidenceadvocacycenter.org/wp-content/uploads/historical-antecedent-of-eac-120925.pdf

to make evidence central to the decision making of educators. I left the field of education for a dozen years. Then, the public support to improve reading instruction, generated by Emily Hanford’s Sold a Story and the Mississippi Miracle, gave renewed hope to the possibility of transforming education into an evidence-based profession.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-176418027

This hope took form when Reid Lyon, Kelly Butler, Linda Diamond, and I launched the Evidence Advocacy Center.

https://evidenceadvocacycenter.org/research/

The Resistance: Documentation of a War

The attempted destruction of Wesley Elementary was documented by ABC’s Prime Time Live.

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/zuceyg64k2g2yx2maxmd8/Wesley-Elem-Prime-Time.mp4?rlkey=dt427f3cpw4mnmrewltf7knc2&dl=0

The documentary revealed a school that, by 1988, ranked in the top quarter of all Texas elementary schools, with many students performing two years ahead of grade level. Yet, instead of being celebrated, Principal Thaddeus Lott and his staff were besieged by their own district.

The following excerpts from the documentary illustrates the institutional hostility:

• Hostility toward Success: “The Wesley School would seem to be a classic success story, a model of how much inner-city children can achieve. Which is why what’s happened here the last few years is so puzzling. Because far from being the toast of the Houston School District, Thaddeus Lott and his teachers say they have been undercut at every turn. They’re hostile to Wesley. They’re hostile to the building principal.”

• The War on Autonomy: “Gail Fallon, who runs the Houston Teachers Federation, says school bureaucrats have declared war on Thaddeus Lott because he ignores their guidelines. She says resentment is so deep at district headquarters that for years, officials there have accused the school of cheating to get its strong test scores. We’ve had them come in and say, we think they’re cheating at Wesley. Can you find out how they’re doing it? Just that directly? Just that directly. They’re not subtle about it.”

• Unfounded Allegations: “District officials have investigated Wesley repeatedly in recent years, but no cheating has ever been found. I was in tears because I was upset. I didn’t know what, you know, what was going on. First grade teacher India Williams was involved in the latest incident a few weeks ago when two officials from the Houston School District walked into her classroom and accused her of feeding answers to her students on a national test. They searched her classroom for hours but found nothing. I didn’t know these people. I had never done anything.”

• The Root of Suspicion: “And I was just, you know, singled out. Why the suspicion? I think they suspect them because they are poor black children. And because in the mindset, in the administration, they don’t believe poor black children can outperform suburban white children. And they are doing it, and they are doing it routinely. Ms. Fallon, you’re making a very serious charge. Right. You’re basically accusing the school district, the top administrators, of racism. Yes.”

The Community Response: Gold is Gold

The harassment of Wesley’s principal and teachers eventually galvanized the local community and outside watchdogs.

• Community Anger: “Parents in Acres Homes say they’ve had enough of the harassment and suspicion from district headquarters. It’s not the first time. They have accused this school of cheating before, but when they come out about the teachers that was the last straw. The community even voiced its anger in church. We understand that they would rather the best school be in an affluent area. But the bottom line is, gold is gold. I don’t care where you find it.”

• The Principal’s Stand: “Thaddeus Lott says he too is getting fed up with administrators who don’t believe poor black children can succeed. There are people like this in every big city throughout this country who feel like if you’re doing what we’re doing, even though it works, it doesn’t matter. It’s just against their philosophy. And these people have no place. They should not be making a salary at the expense of these youngsters who will ultimately wind up illiterate. And that’s what’s happening all over this country.”

• Outside Support: “Lott says it’s more than just the allegations of cheating, that the bureaucrats have picked on Wesley for years. Last year, Houston’s Tax Research Association, the government watchdog group, went around the school district straight to Wesley. They needed help. They needed some immediate help. George Scott says his group raised $10,000 for the school to buy paper and workbooks and math. And he says he sent a blunt warning to the school district, about Wesley’s principal. You better stop messing with this man.”

Conclusion: The Cost of Ignoring Excellence

The story of Wesley Elementary is a sobering reminder that in education, success is often met with institutional skepticism rather than celebration. When a school proves that poverty and race are not insurmountable barriers, it threatens the bureaucratic status quo. Fortunately, the support of the business community allowed Thaddeus Lott to continue the Direct Instruction program for another decade.

To prevent the “active destruction” of future successes, we must transform education into an evidence-based profession,

https://www.educationtoday.com.au/news-detail/Touching-Only-a-Part-6690

and thereby be able to move toward:

• Protecting Success: Creating administrative “safe harbors” for schools that produce exceptional results, shielding them from forced conformity.

• Evidence Over Ideology: Prioritizing instructional methods that work—like the Direct Instruction seen at Wesley—over the philosophical preferences of district officials.

• Sustainability over Miracles: Recognizing, as Mississippi does, that progress is a “marathon,” requiring long-term commitment rather than a search for temporary heroes.

To honor the legacy of Dr. Lott and Ms. Killion, we must ensure that no successful school is ever again “swept up” or silenced by the very systems that should be designed to support them. We must commit to a future where evidence, not bias, drives our educational policy.

Changing the System

Educational reform efforts encompass a range of areas, including early literacy, mathematics, school governance, career and technical education, product development, research, and more. While having a particular target for reform is understandable, it overlooks a fundamental truth: the urgent need also to help support a comprehensive transformation of the entire education system. W. Edward Deming, widely considered to be a master of continual quality improvement, wrote: “Eighty-five percent of the reasons for failure are deficiencies in the systems and processes rather than the employee. The role of management is to change the process rather than badgering individuals to do better.^[2]”

Individual targets for reform efforts have failed to change the system, with educators being “badgered” to improve student achievement in an often untenable situation. Simultaneously working on individual targets of reform without regard for the overall education system approach has arguably failed to lead to sustained improvement, not because the specific targets for reform areas aren’t important, but because the education system at its roots itself has impeded long term success.

A Comprehensive Solution

To move beyond essential yet limited isolated targets for reform requires a truly comprehensive solution that integrates all of what I consider to be the following five pillars of a research-based profession:

• A professional knowledge base anchored to reliable research evidence that all educators share, and education publishers follow in producing their products

• Research-aligned educator preparation and ongoing professional learning

• Educator licensure rooted in demonstrated competence

• Accreditation of educator preparation programs based on evidence

• Accountability for the quality of educators’ practice

Only by understanding the need for the concurrent implementation of these five pillars of a research-based profession can the education reform advocates gain a clearer understanding of the bigger picture and make informed decisions that reflect the intricate realities of the education system and how to genuinely transform it. To create significant and enduring improvement in education, it is imperative to go beyond an aggregation of siloed targets for reform; instead, it is essential for states, the federal government, and philanthropic organizations to support cohesive, systemic change grounded in an understanding of the interconnectedness of all educational components.

The Parable of Touching Only a Part of the Education Elephant

The parable of the Blind Men Touching the Elephant captures the consequence of ignoring the need for systemic change. Each group of advocates for a particular target of reform, convinced of its unique insights when addressing only its part of the “Educational Elephant,” unsurprisingly reports findings based solely on its specific area of reform. For example:

• The Early Literacy Advocates proclaimed, “Education is like a strong foundation! Without early reading skills, students struggle to build their knowledge.”

• The Math Advocates countered, “No, education is like a complex puzzle! If students don’t master math, they won’t be able to solve real-world problems.”

• The School Governance Advocates insisted, “You are all mistaken! Education is about effective leadership and policies that ensure schools function properly.”

• The Career Technical Education Advocates concluded, “You are all incorrect! Education must prepare students for careers and equip them with skills and habits for the workforce.”

As the advocates debated passionately, each was convinced that its perspective would lead to substantial and lasting changes. Unfortunately, they appeared unaware that education was operating as a minimally functional system, which had undermined their efforts in the past and would continue to do so in the future. Their well-intentioned and dedicated work, however, was akin to meticulously repairing individual parts of a crumbling building without addressing its fundamental and systemic structural flaws.

The Lesson of the Whole Education System

In deference to the parable of the Blind Men Touching the Elephant, as one of many who have worked for educational reform for decades, I would humbly assert: “My friends, you have focused solely on parts of the education system, but none of you have considered the whole picture. Your conclusions, limited to your focus areas, fail to recognize how the reality of the entire system precludes the enduring success of your individual efforts.”

The Moral: Beyond Siloed Targets for Reform

The parable illuminates a critical truth: advocates fail to recognize that the current education system in its fractured state, inherently undermines their efforts to meet their goals of sustained improvement.

On approach to Reagan National Airport, while finalizing a speech on the importance of evidence-based practicesin education, I had just finished writing, “In a complex system, such as an airplane, if one part fails—like the flaps—the entire plane can go down.” At that moment, the captain’s voice interrupted with an announcement, accompanied by the wail of a siren: “It seems our flaps may not be working, so we’re being diverted to Baltimore International Airport.” This real-life scenario illustrates the need for trustworthy systems in which each componenthas been rigorously tested to ensure that the entire system of components work seamlessly and successfully.

In education, the system components have not been tested to demonstrate that they work seamlessly andsuccessfully, which allows, for example:

· The graduates of effective educator preparation programs to go into a school that not only fails to implement evidence-based approaches, but forbid the use of them because the district favors program such as Reading Recovery and Lucy Calkins’ Units of Study

· Educator preparation programs to refuse to reform because they have been accredited by organizations that do not include reliable evidence in their review and approval process

· Professional learning to be based on educational fads, that deprive educators of the opportunity to develop the skills and knowledge needed for them to adequately prepare their students for later, educational opportunities, and ultimately a viable career and lifestyles.

· Educational products for instruction, assessment, etc. to be based on educator preference rather than being based on the shared knowledge base of the profession

Ironically, it is through this fundamental, systemic transformation in which the components are demonstrated to be effective that the advocates can find enduring success for their targets of reform. It is, therefore, in the students’ best interest to support the development of an education profession grounded in findings from:

· reliable scientific research

· states, districts, and schools that have demonstrated consistently higher-than-expected levels of student achievement.

To address the need for a comprehensive educational reform effort, the Evidence Advocacy Center is making a concerted effort to champion this vital transformation by providing the resources and guidance to support the development of the five pillars:

· A shared knowledge repository consisting of both vetted research-based resource menus linked to evidence-aligned organizations and comprehensive canons that include linking literacy science and math science to learning science and instructional science.

· An easy-to-use policy navigator tool that provides language for the creation of evidence-aligned policies, to be used by state departments of education and policymakers, educator preparation programs, and districts and schools

· Step-by-step implementation guides to facilitate the use of evidence

By elevating education to a research-based profession with systematic implementation, educators will be equipped with the rigorous preparation, continuous professional development, and robust support they need to drive significant increases in student achievement and enhance every students’ prospects for a fulfilling life. Together, by embracing cooperation and committing to systemic change, all organizations can finally create an education system that truly benefits all students, empowers all educators, and strengthens society as a whole. The time for action is now.

^[1] From 1991-2005 Dr Carnine, working in large cities like Los Angeles and Dallas, six states, and at the federal level, was always involved in coalition building, and strategic planning around policy and implementation on the ground. He helped legislative, state board, business, community, union, and publisher groups to understand and support evidence-based educational tools for students with multiple risk factors. Under the guidance of the then Secretary of Education and an assistant to President Bush, he also consulted with five offices within the US Department of Education, as well as with NSF and USAID, on moving research into policy and practice. With his presidential appointment to the National Institute for Literacy, as chair of the program committee, Dr. Carnine oversaw the distribution of the National Reading Panel Report during President Clinton’s administration. Finally, he served on the National Educational Research Policy and Priorities Board for the Office of Education Research and Improvement. For a more complete historical account, see Historical Antecedent of the Evidence Advocacy Center: The National Center to

Improve the Tools of Educators.

^[2] Deming, W. E. (2000). Out of the crisis. MIT Press