Why I'm Not Giving Thanks for Twitter

The site has benefits, but even in "nice" Twitter neighborhoods, things can get vicious.

Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash

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Over the past several years, Twitter has provided me with an intellectual community, a way of discovering new ideas and people, and a means of keeping track of what’s happening in the world of education. But on occasion it’s been so toxic that I’m not sure I ever want to go back.

I’m writing this post partly in hopes that it will help me stop ruminating on some painful recent events. But I’m publishing it at the risk of sounding whiny because I also believe these events are part of a more general problem with Twitter.

This isn’t about Elon Musk’s reign of confusion. Twitter has its own little neighborhoods; mine is sometimes called Edutwitter. You don’t see racist or homophobic rants there. As Twitter neighborhoods go, it’s a relatively polite and friendly place. But once in a while, things get kind of vicious.

Twice now I have been the target of what I would call a Twitter mob, most recently over the past few weeks, and it’s not a pleasant experience. In each instance it’s started with a few people who may have misinterpreted what I’ve said—or possibly not read the post I’ve tried to summarize in a tweet. Then others pile on.

Once the ball gets rolling, negative tweets seem to get the most “likes” and retweets, so they keep popping up in my notifications, over and over. Maybe my perception is distorted; for me, as for most of us, negative feedback looms larger than praise. But I do think it’s also the way Twitter tends to work.

Even if there isn’t an algorithm feeding users stuff that’s likely to get them riled up, being riled up is often a stronger impetus to action than feeling supportive (not to mention that if people are beating up on someone, you risk getting beat up on too if you express support). And Twitter, like other social media, provides a dangerous combination of immediacy and distance: you can put out a tweet in a few seconds, without taking much time to reflect, but you’re not actually face-to-face with the person you may be targeting.

That can lead people to tweet things they wouldn’t say in “real life,” although they might think them. These aren’t the kinds of comments likely to be removed by Twitter content moderators, if any are still around. They’re not threats of bodily harm or racial slurs. But they can still be hurtful and damaging.

If you don’t follow Edutwitter, you may be wondering what two specific incidents I’m talking about. I’m not going to go into the first one. I don’t want to revisit it, and I don’t think it had any lasting effects. I worry that the recent one may be different.

First, some background. You may have noticed there’s been something of an explosion in media coverage of reading instruction. The New York Times has run at least three stories on the issue, for example, and Time magazine ran a cover story. These stories and others have rarely suggested there are any problems with reading instruction other than the widespread failure to teach phonics effectively.

I’m all in favor of bringing attention to that serious problem. But I and others, including a group of scientists, worry these reports give the impression that schools just need to fix their approach to phonics, and that the “Science of Reading” only encompasses phonics and other foundational reading skills. In fact, problems with other aspects of literacy instruction—particularly reading comprehension and writing—are even more widespread and better hidden. If we don’t address those problems while we’re also addressing those relating to phonics, many students won’t become fully literate. And we could lose whatever progress we’re making with phonics. People will notice that kids can decode words but can’t understand them, and they may conclude—as they have before—that phonics “doesn’t work.”

There’s one journalist who deserves much of the credit for coverage of the phonics issue: Emily Hanford, who has produced a series of riveting and enormously popular podcasts on reading over the past four years. By the same token, though, her reporting is a big part of the reason other news outlets have focused almost exclusively on the failure to teach phonics. Others have followed her lead.

I’ve known Emily slightly for years. I like her personally and admire her work. I know she’s aware of longstanding criticism of the standard approach to teaching reading comprehension—i.e., that it’s overly focused on teaching disconnected “skills” like “finding the main idea” and fails to build the kind of knowledge and vocabulary that actually fuels comprehension. I don’t know why she’s never mentioned that criticism in the approximately eight hours of audio coverage of reading she’s produced—including an hour-long podcast in 2020, “What the Words Say,” that was ostensibly about comprehension.

Emily gave me advance access to that podcast so I could write about it, and I remember being dismayed and puzzled after listening. In it, Emily does make it clear that comprehension is both crucial and a separate factor from decoding, and also that children from low-income families are likely to enter school knowing fewer words. But she doesn’t describe the standard approach to teaching comprehension or suggest it might be flawed. And she concludes that the best way to ensure kids can comprehend text is just to teach them to decode. (If you want to see for yourself, the transcript is available here.)

Before I published a post on the podcast, I told Emily about my concerns. I won’t quote from our email correspondence because it wasn’t intended to be public, but she did tell me that a written web version of the podcast included some of what I thought was missing. That version does briefly mention that schools have cut back on social studies and science to spend more time on reading, making it harder for kids from low-income families to acquire knowledge. But Emily didn’t explain why even those few sentences weren’t included in the podcast, which reached far more people.

In the post, I said that “as always, Hanford’s reporting makes for great listening,” and favorably described much of the podcast’s content. But I also said that many teachers think they’re already teaching comprehension, by focusing on comprehension skills, and nothing in the podcast would lead them to question that. I expressed my hope that “at some point Hanford will bring her formidable talents to the rest of the story of why so many kids can’t understand what they read.” I don’t recall that anyone, including Emily, raised objections to the post on Twitter or elsewhere.

Emily’s next podcast, which just came out, is a six-part series called “Sold a Story.” In it, Emily argues that four individuals are largely responsible for perpetuating mistaken ideas about how children learn to decode words. Three of those individuals—Lucy Calkins, Irene Fountas, and Gay Su Pinnell—have also been instrumental in propagating mistaken ideas about how kids learn to comprehend text and to write. The entire series makes no mention of that.

After Hanford gave me advance access to the first two episodes, I published a post about them. Most of it was devoted to describing the episodes as “fascinating” and a “valuable addition to Hanford’s body of work.” Towards the end of the post, though, I noted that something was missing. You could listen to all of Hanford’s podcasts, I wrote, “and come away with the idea that if we can just fix the problems with decoding instruction, our literacy crisis will be solved.”

I had no idea those words would be incendiary. The first inkling of trouble was a tweet from someone I consider an advocate of knowledge-building, who said she was dismayed that I was siding with opponents of the “Science of Reading” who say advocates like Emily have reduced reading to phonics alone. But I wasn’t saying that, I told this person. I was talking about the fact that Emily had never said there were problems with instruction in areas of literacy other than decoding. The tweeter essentially said that didn’t matter; I shouldn’t talk about it. I responded that if we can’t talk about the problem, we can’t fix it.

Pretty soon, the barrage began in earnest. Much of it came from Emily’s fans, who are numerous and passionate. Some said they had been fans of mine, but after this … forget it. I was accused of just trying to get publicity for myself and my book, of unnecessarily sowing division within the Science of Reading community, of being unreasonable in expecting a journalist who writes about decoding to also mention comprehension.

I don’t think that’s unreasonable. Although I write mostly about comprehension and writing, I always mention there are also big problems with decoding instruction unless I’m really pressed for space. And if I had produced a long piece that was supposedly about decoding but never mentioned the standard instructional approach or its flaws—and concluded that the way to enable kids to decode was to build their knowledge—I would expect someone to point out that I’d omitted something important.

If I tried to explain myself in the face of what seemed to me to be misunderstandings and false accusations, I was told I was perpetuating this feud for my own petty reasons, sometimes in all caps (“PLEASE STOP!”). This is a pattern I noticed on Twitter last time around: if you try to explain yourself, you just trigger another avalanche of negative tweets.

Eventually, Emily herself put out a Twitter thread in which she called me “irresponsible,”—along with others, some of whom had said she’d reduced reading to phonics—for saying her work gave the impression that all we need to fix is decoding instruction. But she hasn’t offered any evidence that she’s mentioned any problems beyond that. After an earlier brief tweet in which she said I’d described her work inaccurately, I tweeted back that I didn’t believe she’d ever described the standard approach to teaching comprehension or suggested it was flawed, and I asked her to correct me if I was wrong. She didn’t respond.

I don’t like singling out any individual for criticism—especially one I personally like and admire—even if it’s mixed with praise. But I decided that I had to, because Emily is so influential. My hope has always been that she would bring her prodigious gifts to covering comprehension and writing in depth, and that other journalists would follow, as they’ve followed her in covering decoding. But now I worry that—maybe thanks to Twitter—the atmosphere has become so poisoned that she won’t touch those subjects with a ten-foot pole. I hope I’m wrong.

On the brighter side, there are some signs that other education journalists are going beyond a focus on decoding—like this terrific story in the Louisville Courier Journal titled “Why Kentucky’s reading crisis can’t be solved by phonics alone.” I’m hoping there will be more such stories.

If there are, I may not find out about them on Twitter. It’s hard to walk away from a platform that enables me to reach so many people with a perspective I don’t think they’ll find in much other education coverage—I now have almost 15,000 followers. But right now I’m feeling that the bad stuff there outweighs the good.

So I’m not feeling thankful for Twitter this Thanksgiving. But I am feeling thankful for Substack, and for the fact that I now have over 4,000 subscribers. Maybe this can become an alternative community—and I don’t mean one that’s just an echo chamber. I welcome debate and what diplomats call a healthy exchange of views. I just want people to listen to one another and be as kind as possible.

And in that spirit, I’d like to wish everyone—including those who have driven me off Twitter, at least temporarily—a happy and peaceful Thanksgiving.

Update, 11.24.22: Emily Hanford has apologized, privately via an email and publicly on Twitter, for any role she had in the attacks against me and another advocate of knowledge-building curriculum, Karen Vaites. On Twitter she wrote, “They are both working hard to do the right thing for kids.” I appreciate her apology.