++The risks of sex-based drug dosing recommendations. +
++Zolpidem tartrate is infamous. It walks the street with many names: “A-minus,” “zombie pills,” “no-go pills.” It has been blamed for a range of strange and disastrous incidents in the news over the years, including Roseanne Barr’s racist tweeting in 2018 and Tiger Woods’s terrible car accident in 2021. But you probably know zolpidem tartrate best by its brand moniker: Ambien, which hit the markets in 1992. +
++Ambien, a drug commonly prescribed as a short-term solution for people experiencing insomnia, is famous not only for its association with celebrity fiascos and faux pas, but also for being the first and only drug sold under an FDA-mandated sex-specific dosing regime in the United States. In a landmark 2013 decision, the Food and Drug Administration recommended that women take half the dose of men, citing new data on women’s higher risk for next-day cognitive impairment that posed dangers for activities like driving. +
++This dosing regime put sex differences on the scientific and regulatory radar. In the eyes of many biomedical scientists, Ambien became a “textbook example” of how neglecting sex as a variable leads to disastrous consequences. This coincided with increasing recognition of the medical establishment’s long history of assuming the white male body as default (women and minority groups weren’t legally required to be included in clinical trials until the 1993 NIH Revitalization Act). It also aligned with a growing prioritization of women’s health as its own area deserving of funding and resources. When the FDA came out with its recommendation to halve Ambien dosage for women in 2013, biomedical scientists from many fields took it as an urgent warning. +
++In a 60 Minutes segment, journalist Lesley Stahl sat down with Larry Cahill, neuroscientist and professor at the University of California Irvine, about the importance of the decision. “If science got Ambien so wrong, does that tell you we really need to go back and review —” “Yes,” Cahill interjected. “Everything?” Stahl continued with her eyebrows raised. “Pretty much everything,” Cahill insisted. +
++For many researchers like Cahill, Ambien presented the perfect example to motivate wider changes, specifically the National Institutes of Health’s 2016 Sex as a Biological Variable policy, which mandated the incorporation of male and female sexes into the analyses of all federally funded, model organism preclinical research. +
++But is Ambien really a textbook example of sex differences? As researchers at the Harvard GenderSci Lab, an interdisciplinary lab that studies the methodologies, empirical claims, and sociopolitical context of studies of gender and sex differences in biomedicine (including areas like preclinical science, Covid-19, and sperm count science), we know that this area of science is deeply contested, with a history of bias and overstatement of sex differences tinged with stereotypes. We think about questions such as: How do scientists, the government, and the public(s) determine what constitutes a fact about differences between the sexes? What is the role of law and policy in validating the authority of scientific claims about sex and gender? And, conversely, how do policies and interventions take up such claims? We track how ideas about the nature of gender categories transform as they traverse domains as varied as laboratories, courtrooms, and business pitches. +
++Our collaborative team of scholars analyzed the scientific and public life of Ambien’s sex-based dosing claims, the results of which were recently published in the journal Social Studies of Science. We show that what seems a straightforward fact about pharmacological sex differences is not so simple, and what was widely hailed as a victory for women’s health and equity is not obviously so. Troublingly, this Ambien “fact” might actually be encouraging imprecise science and reinforcing a set of harmful assumptions about binary sex. +
++Unpacking the FDA decision process +
++How did the FDA’s 2013 recommendation come about? The agency’s regulatory approval process for pharmaceuticals is notoriously intense. Regulatory decision-makers incorporate many forms of scientific evidence, and they also make judgment calls about how to weigh efficacy and risk, which metrics to use, and when to exercise extra caution. +
++When Ambien was originally approved in 1992, the recommended dosing was sex-neutral. That changed in 2011 during the approval of a new formulation of Ambien called Intermezzo. As the name suggests, Intermezzo was supposed to be taken in the middle of the night, for patients who woke up and couldn’t fall back asleep. Taking a sleep aid in the dead of night left less time for the drug to be metabolized before patients woke up, leaving them potentially drowsy and dangerous drivers the next morning. Because of this, the FDA was especially worried about both how quickly patients metabolized the drug and the real-time effects of the new formulation. +
++This resulted in a drawn-out approval process for Intermezzo in which the FDA demanded that the drug company perform a study to examine the effects of Intermezzo on drivers at three and four hours post-dose, reflecting their broader concern about the safety of sleep aids. This study did not find that Intermezzo interfered with driving four hours after dosing. But the FDA remained worried about high levels of zolpidem in the bloodstream at this time interval, and pushed the drug company to find a way to lower morning drug levels in the blood for all patients below a cutoff point associated with driving impairment at three hours post-dose. Because other studies showed that female patients metabolized the drug more slowly than male patients, the drug company acquiesced by lowering the dose for female patients to half of that for males. +
++Importantly, the Intermezzo evaluation wasn’t based on direct evidence that slower clearance rates caused driving impairment. Furthermore, when adjusted for weight, sex differences in clearance rates themselves were reduced or even, in one case, reversed. (However, the FDA rejected this adjustment because it found that weight alone did not statistically predict clearance rates.) Ultimately, sex was a convenient way to reanalyze existing data, saving Intermezzo’s manufacturer, Transcept, from another cycle of regulatory scrutiny and from having to perform additional studies. +
++Shortly after this decision, the FDA used the zolpidem blood level cutoff from the Intermezzo approval process to reanalyze data for other formulations of Ambien. On the basis of the Intermezzo review, together with additional reanalysis evidence that high levels of zolpidem correlated with next-day cognitive impairment, the FDA extended this sex-based dosing scheme to all formulations, including those meant to be taken before bed. +
++A sticky and compelling sex difference “fact” +
++References to the FDA’s sex-based dosing recommendation rapidly populated teaching materials for scientists, academic papers, and popular media like the New York Times, TED Radio Hour, and ABC News. Many scientists underscored Ambien as a canary warning of the wider problem of preclinical and clinical science’s neglect of sex: Who knows how many other biological sex differences in drugs we remain ignorant of, because female biology is ignored in research? In the words of Janine Clayton, director for the NIH Office for Women’s Health, Ambien was “just the tip of the iceberg.” +
++In academic papers, Ambien served as a touchstone for researchers advocating for application of the NIH’s Sex as a Biological Variable policy across fields as diverse as neuropsychopharmacology, surgery, and preclinical studies of alcoholism and neurodegenerative diseases. These researchers used Ambien to argue that scientists need to incorporate sex as a variable in their statistical analyses, disaggregate by male/female groups, and look for differences in sex-based biology. Non-scientific bodies took notice, too. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation made Ambien a case study in its “Gender Equality Toolbox” designed to inform grant funding bodies, and McKinsey cited the drug as a harbinger of sex-based health care and treatment, and their ripe investment opportunities. +
++In these literatures, the sex difference fact was conveyed as the following: Female patients experience higher rates of adverse reactions to zolpidem due to their slower metabolism of the drug, and the FDA recommendation, long overdue, corrects for this by halving the dose. This Ambien story, now common parlance in biomedical literature, oversimplifies both the FDA evidence and state of the research. +
++A fact detached from the scientific debate +
++Sex-based dosing for Ambien reflects neither scientific nor international regulatory consensus. In fact, since Ambien’s approval in the 1990s, researchers have studied the effects of sex, age, and race/ethnicity on zolpidem tartrate. Although they found that women generally had slower clearance (metabolism) rates of zolpidem than men, there was much individual variability, and adjusting for body weight in the analysis reduced much of the observed sex difference, often rendering it statistically insignificant. In one study, older men actually had the slowest clearance rates (and the FDA has suggested that older people of all genders are at higher risk of cognitive impairment). +
++Although the FDA was partially motivated to regulate on the basis of its internal reanalysis data, there has been no clear scientific consensus that slower clearance rates are primarily responsible for sex differences in impaired driving or auto accidents. Moreover, if adverse effects from high zolpidem blood levels are a concern for women, we should also worry about the men who have higher zolpidem levels in the morning. +
++In other words, if the goal of the FDA recommendation was to reduce cognitive impairment and driving accidents for everyone, it’s not clear that halving the dose for women achieved that. Factors like taking multiple concurrent drugs and interactions with age and body weight might also be salient. As we describe in greater detail in the journal Social Studies of Science, like all regulatory policies, the FDA decision reflected a confluence of scientific and political judgment in the face of uncertainty, including a choice to minimize bloodstream levels and rely on sex categories to manage the general risk of automobile accidents. +
++Pharmacology and sleep medicine researchers have since challenged the reasoning behind the FDA’s 2013 recommendation, suggesting that it was missing “concrete evidence” and might have caused undermedication for many women with sleep disorders, which poses its own public health risk. Significantly, aside from Canada and the United States, no other national drug agency has implemented sex-specific dosing for zolpidem. +
++In spite of this, Ambien has become a touchstone example for the public and those advocating for sex-specific medicine in the name of women’s health. As elaborated in our paper, our team found that academic and public-facing references to zolpidem sex differences often misrepresent the evidence. For instance, researchers have mistakenly suggested that emergency room visits and car accidents were primarily responsible for the FDA’s decision (rather than reanalyses of existing data and driving studies), or that zolpidem was removed from the market (only the label’s dosing language was changed). Authors almost never mention the possible relevance of body weight and the FDA’s concurrent suggestion that men also start off with half doses. Some authors cite publications without original data or which do not support their claim, and other authors don’t provide a citation at all, treating zolpidem’s sex difference as an established, canonical fact, one with regulators’ and policymakers’ seal of approval. While it is not uncommon for scientists to disagree about regulatory decisions, the Ambien claim has miraculously transcended both ongoing disagreement and the complexities of its original context. +
++Faulty facts and their fallout +
++It matters when a faulty sex-difference “fact” persists and circulates unquestioned. Once such a “fact” is out in the world, it can be very difficult to unseat or revise. This phenomenon has been documented in the case of misconceptions about spinach’s high iron content, as well as more loaded claims like testosterone’s association with violence. Scholars have termed these “academic urban legends” and “zombie facts” (which cannot be killed no matter how many times they are refuted). +
++How can we make sense of the uptake and proliferation of claims about sex differences in Ambien? Why is it so sticky, while other textbook facts are being knocked down? For one, the FDA’s decision carried the weight and credibility of a federal regulatory authority. Even though the decision involved a contextual assessment to exercise caution and use sex-based dosage to lower morning blood levels, that nuance was lost as it was communicated to diverse audiences and used in different rhetorical settings. And once it was regarded as a “textbook” fact, the claim no longer received as much scrutiny. +
++In addition, the story of Ambien sex differences strongly aligned with the platforms of existing advocacy groups. Over the past 25 years, women’s health advocates have elevated the problem of androcentrism and bias in medical research, emphasizing sex differences. Ambien seems like a clean, “perfect example” of women’s intrinsic biological difference from men, validating something that people often already feel to be true and what women’s health advocates have often argued: that sex differences are ubiquitous and clinically relevant. As Stahl commented on CBS after the 60 Minutes special: “Now we are learning that [men and women] are pervasively different at every level. Our lungs are different, our skin is different, our cells are different.” +
++This way of looking at gender and sex — as two distinct types carving up the human population and producing distinctions at every biological level that explain health disparities — is what scholars call binary biological sex essentialism, and it has serious limitations. +
++Numerous scientific studies show that a sex binary of male and female just doesn’t work to explain the range of variability in humans, animals, and cellular mechanisms. It also privileges intrinsic biological differences as an explanation over social and structural factors or interactions between the environment and biology. Ultimately, this makes science and medicine worse for everyone, including people who don’t fall neatly onto one side of the supposed binary — trans and gender-expansive individuals, people with intersex conditions, and anyone who departs from the average body weight or testosterone/estrogen level for their sex. +
++Certainly, sex-related variables like hormones, gonadal physiology, and chromosomes are important to account for in scientific research such as drug reactions. But if the aim is rigorous science, we need to discard the simplistic notion of sex as merely male or female, stop using sex as a coarse proxy for other mechanistically relevant features like body weight or hormones, and examine interactions between age, other drugs taken, lifetime stress levels, and other social variables to develop medicines that work for everyone, not just the imagined average “male” or “female” patient. +
++Sex-difference claims can also reify culturally embedded notions of two discrete, intrinsically different sexes. Although science that applies a binary sex framework has been championed as a win for women’s health, bad-faith actors have used a similar framework to support trans-exclusionary agendas. Sex-essentialist science has been exploited by those seeking to invalidate trans identities by appealing to the alleged naturalness of the sex binary, whether an XX/XY binary in chromosomes or a penis-vulva binary in genital anatomy. Many anti-trans platforms draw specifically on language from research advancing binary sex differences (e.g., in sports, federal laws about public bathroom access, and federal level health services), thereby claiming that scientific legitimacy and biological reality are on their side. +
++The consequences are grave and imminent: At the time of writing, 563 anti-trans bills have been proposed in 49 states, with 80 having already passed, in a historic legislative assault on the existence of trans people, particularly via restrictions on gender-affirming health care for trans youth. While many researchers share a laudable vision of sex and gender equity, sex essentialist approaches may concretize an oversimplified understanding of sex that runs counter to this goal, particularly in this political context. +
++Ambien isn’t the cautionary tale we think +
++Cahill was right in a sense: Ambien provides a cautionary tale. Rather than offering a paragon example of biological differences between men and women, it instead illustrates how a distorted fact about pharmaceutical sex differences became common knowledge, as well as how hype, advocacy platforms, and assumed authority enabled its proliferation and misrepresentation. Sex difference facts are notoriously sticky, and they powerfully shape the concepts and frameworks in experiments, funding agendas, and policy justifications — so we need to make sure we get them right. +
++To do that, we need a science that embraces the complexity of sex-related variables and their interaction with other biological and social factors in producing human variation in drug response. Comparing men and women is not enough, and we need caution and awareness about the potential bias and overstatement of such claims. +
++Before appealing to a textbook sex difference claim, it might be best to sleep on it. +
++
++
++A huge shift in how kids are taught to read is underway. But the reading wars probably aren’t gone for good. +
++For over a century, a pendulum has swung back and forth on the best way to teach kids to read. On one side are advocates of phonics, an instructional approach focused on the relationships between sounds and letters; on the other, various methods, championed by educators, that emphasize word recognition and context clues. +
++This fight has occasionally grown so vicious it’s been dubbed the Reading Wars. +
++But in the last five years, one camp has scored a victory that, if not permanent, is at least decisive. +
++Since 2019, 45 states and Washington, DC, have passed at least one bill related to reforming reading instruction. The new rules apply to areas like school curriculum, professional development for teachers, screenings for dyslexic students, and requirements for testing. New York City — the largest public school system in the nation — has also ordered change for its 700 elementary schools. +
++These new policies — met with a mix of excitement and skepticism — are typically accompanied by bold promises. “These changes to our education system will actually educate our kids better in the future than we did before the pandemic,” Tennessee’s Republican Gov. Bill Lee declared. “This is the beginning of a massive turnaround,” said the New York City Schools chancellor. +
++A life with poor literacy skills is a hard life. Not being able to read means countless social, economic, and physical challenges, making the stakes of these new reading reforms tremendously high. Coming out of the pandemic, as students still struggle with learning loss, policymakers are especially aware of the need to get these new literacy interventions right. Though some critics have claimed we have no national reading crisis at all, for the millions of kids and adults who struggle to read in America, there is no question that each day brings about new isolating, draining, and avoidable challenges. +
++Momentum for these reading laws traces its roots to four main factors. +
++The first came five years ago, when a journalist named Emily Hanford released an influential radio series that looked critically at reading instruction, and specifically how popular strategies employed by American teachers conflicted with decades-old research in neuroscience and cognitive psychology about how kids best learn to read. Hanford’s reporting helped launch a movement dedicated to advancing the “science of reading” — a shorthand for applying these brain-focused studies to instruction. +
++The second factor came a year later, when Mississippi, a high-poverty state that overhauled its own reading policies back in 2013, soared in national test score rankings. Mississippi fourth graders went from being 49th in the nation for reading on a major exam known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), to 29th, and one of the reforms Mississippi had embraced in 2013 was a focus on the “science of reading.” +
++The third factor was the emergence in the 2010s of national grassroots networks of parents of children with dyslexia, who have more recently brought their organizing prowess to bear for new state policies they felt could better serve their children’s needs. +
++And lastly, but no less important, was the pandemic, which fueled a major drop in student achievement and sparked an infusion of new federal funds for schools. +
++This is not the first or even second time our country has quickly moved to revamp literacy instruction, and some worry that history is about to repeat itself with failed or misguided policy changes. +
++“I’ve been doing this for more than 50 years and I’ve been through three of these,” said Tim Shanahan, who once served as president of the International Literacy Association and on a federal study into the scientific evidence behind reading instruction. +
++Reading Wars veterans like Shanahan say this wave of reform has some new elements. Still, some problems that have undermined past waves threaten these new laws too, like a lack of funding and the challenge of maintaining political support if (and likely when) some standardized test scores go down. +
++Indeed, not all teachers and school administrators are on board. Many have resented the pendulum that has swung back and forth over decades, with competing rules and ideas and sometimes teacher-bashing to boot. Some educators reject the idea that they’ve been teaching reading incorrectly and note that the new materials they’re being told to use now lack a strong track record, either. +
++One of the most prominent cognitive scientists studying how kids learn to read has emerged as a vocal critic of many of the curriculum guides now being marketed as adhering to the “science of reading.” +
++Even the more enthusiastic champions of the new reading reforms recognize that passing laws is only the first step, and there’s a long road ahead to making these changes lasting and successful, as schools deal with other intense challenges including chronic absenteeism, a student mental health crisis, and unusually high staff turnover. +
++The science behind the science of reading +
++The definition of “science of reading” — a term first used in reading instruction in the 1830s — has evolved over the decades. Today, it primarily refers to cognitive research that pertains to what happens in the brains of strong and poor readers, and is frequently a shorthand for deploying more classroom time on phonics, with its emphasis on learning to sound out words. Past research has found that most kids need systematic phonics instruction when they’re young to ultimately read well. +
++Sometimes this phonics research gets overstated by proponents. The best studies have shown that teaching phonics is moderately better than other approaches — translating to about a few months of extra school instruction. Experts caution against forgetting that at its core, phonics is a means to an end: “Programs that focus too much on the teaching of letter-sounds relations and not enough on putting them to use are unlikely to be very effective,” stated the National Reading Panel report in 2000, a seminal federally funded investigation into science-based reading instruction. +
++And not everyone needs explicit phonics instruction at school to read well; indeed tens of millions of children have acquired strong literacy skills without it for generations, either learning through osmosis at home or through other classroom approaches that have waxed and waned in popularity like “whole language” and “balanced literacy.” +
++But what reading experts generally agree on is that most students — roughly 60 percent of children — will benefit from more systematic phonics instruction, especially in kindergarten, first grade, and second grade. A school’s average reading performance will likely go up, and it could be especially helpful for students from disadvantaged backgrounds or those struggling with dyslexia. +
++Sometimes “the science of reading” is invoked as a way to signal what’s not considered scientific. The most prominent example of that today is a popular reading instruction strategy known as “three-cueing” or MSV, an acronym for meaning, syntax, and visual information. Popularized in the 1960s and ’70s, these methods encourage students to look at context clues to guess the meaning of unknown words; for example, a picture of a house in a story about the country might help a struggling reader guess the word “cottage.” +
++But studies have shown that these sorts of predictive approaches are ineffective in helping students actually learn to read specific words. Strong readers, rather than guessing a word’s meaning based on adjacent clues, will work to decode letters in the unfamiliar word itself. Have students who rely on cueing generally understood the meaning of a passage? Yes. But they haven’t read the passage well. +
++These debates around phonics instruction can grow contentious, especially over the last few years. Many academics argue there should be a broader, more inclusive definition of “science of reading” that encompasses research fields beyond just the brain. +
++“There isn’t shared language with thinking and talking about this with any precision,” said Rachael Gabriel, a professor of literacy education at the University of Connecticut. “A lot of the language is dog whistle-y, and everyone gets really deep in the weeds and then confuses each other.” +
++For example, though some reading experts defend context-based strategies like cueing, pointing to experimental studies showing they could be complementary to phonics, others believe it’s a mistake to encourage teaching the strategies of poor readers at all. +
++“Being a reader isn’t like being pregnant where you either are or you aren’t,” said Shanahan, who supports the move away from cueing. “We care how good a reader are you, and we know that strong readers don’t try and guess the meaning.” +
++In 2019, a nationally representative EdWeek Research Center survey found 75 percent of K–2 teachers said they teach students to read using the three-cueing method, and 65 percent of postsecondary instructors who teach courses on reading instruction said they did too. As the “science of reading” movement has picked up steam, popular school curriculum providers who endorse these strategies have come under intense scrutiny, blasted for teaching young children strategies that could delay or derail their reading. +
++The tide is seemingly turning. Three states — Indiana, Arkansas, and Louisiana have recently gone so far as to ban “three-cueing” in legislation, and ExcelInEd, a national advocacy group founded by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, holds eliminating three-cueing as essential for any model reading policy. Last year Lucy Calkins, a longtime proponent of the “balanced literacy” approach to reading instruction, revamped her popular school curriculum program to include class-wide daily phonics lessons. “All of us are imperfect,” Calkins told the New York Times. “The last two or three years, what I’ve learned from the science of reading work has been transformational.” +
++The problem is we don’t know how to teach the “science of reading” well yet, either +
++Though states have moved to replace poorly rated curricula or ban weak instructional approaches, figuring out exactly what schools should do instead is harder. Politicians have falsely declared that experts know what science-backed alternatives teachers should use, and education companies have rushed to meet the demand for new materials, selling school districts their own questionable curricula and teacher trainings. +
++“We think we have some sort of tentative answers, that various kinds of instructional approaches work better than others, but that evidence is definitely far from ironclad,” said Morgan Polikoff, an education professor at the University of Southern California and an expert in K–12 curriculum standards. “Generally speaking there is not a lot of good research on the effectiveness of core curriculum materials, and that’s true both in reading and for other subjects.” +
++For example, LETRS, an acronym for Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling, has become one of the most popular training courses claiming to adhere to the “science of reading.” Mississippi embraced it beginning in 2014 as part of its statewide reading reforms, and following Mississippi’s impressive gains on the 2019 NAEP exam, other states rushed to follow. (It’s a pricey professional development course that can take teachers up to 160 hours over two years to complete.) +
++Despite its close associations with the “science of reading” — LETRS has its own middling track record of effectiveness. One experimental study found teachers who were trained by LETRS did improve in their knowledge of reading science, but their students did not have statistically higher differences in achievement than teachers in the control group. (A spokesperson for LETRS told Vox, “we know it has been proven to drive positive student outcomes when coupled with other educational interventions.”) +
++Likewise, studies of reading interventions known as Orton-Gillingham, which have been promoted by many literacy reform advocates, have yielded mixed results so far. One 2021 meta-analysis found the approach did not generate statistically significant improvements in foundational skill areas like phonics. Even for students with some forms of reading disability, Orton-Gillingham wasn’t found to significantly boost comprehension or vocabulary. +
++Generally reading experts say the policies included in the new state reading laws are a “real mixed bag.” Some laws incorporate more research-backed ideas like coaching, while other endorsed approaches are more suspect. There is no clear amount of time that research shows should be spent daily on phonics, no established curriculum for the “science of reading” and studies on so-called decodable books — strongly endorsed by some phonics advocates to help young students practice letter-sound combinations — have their own mixed research track record. +
++“Often phonics advocates promote the use of research since research supports phonics instruction … but when it comes to specific prescriptions about how phonics should be taught, they make all kinds of claims that come down to: do it my way, I know best, don’t worry about what the science has to say,” said Shanahan. “There are features of effective phonics instruction suggested by the research and there are aspects on which there is either no research or the research rejects the advocate’s prescription.” +
++Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive neuroscientist and author of Language at the Speed of Sight, has emerged as a critic of some of the new materials being promoted under the banner of the “science of reading.” He’s blasted “influencers” leading the movement whose own background in cognitive science is limited. (Seidenberg’s book on reading research heavily shaped Hanford’s reporting.) +
++In an interview with Vox, Seidenberg expounded on his criticism: “It’s a difficult situation because people want to adopt better practices, they understand the idea that what was done before was not really based on solid ideas … but now you have a huge demand for science-based practices pursued by advocacy groups and people who don’t have a great understanding of the science.” +
++Seidenberg believes that moving away from strategies like three-cueing is important. But he warned that a simplistic reliance on some of the foundational reading science research can lead to some misinformed instructional conclusions, like the idea that children should learn units of sound (or “phonemes” ) before letters, and letters before syllables and words. +
++“That’s a basic misunderstanding,” said Seidenberg. “Phonemes are abstract units that are results of being exposed to an alphabet, they’re not a precursor.” He also lamented that some leaders have incorrectly cited his research to suggest there’s no downside to teaching kids phonics in the early grades for too long. “There are big opportunity costs and the clock to fourth grade is ticking,” he said. “You only want to do a lot of instruction on these components enough to get off the ground.” +
++The UK offers a cautionary tale. Last year reading researchers published a major study that concluded England’s present emphasis on phonics instruction came at the expense of other needed literacy skills. They attributed the country’s heavy prioritization in part to a national phonics screening test introduced by the government in 2012, which incentivized in some cases up to three years of daily hour-long phonics lessons. +
++“There’s no question that phonics instruction is important,” Dominic Wyse, the study’s lead author and an education professor at the University of College London, told Vox. “But let’s be clear, there are risks to overdoing it. You’re wasting their time and damaging their time to develop reading comprehension.” +
++Getting implementation right +
++The success of the new reading instruction laws will depend primarily on how well they’re implemented on the ground in schools and individual classrooms. +
++This past spring researchers from Michigan State presented a study assessing the impact of the new reading reform laws on test scores. The research, which has not been peer-reviewed, found students in states with more “comprehensive” supports — like coaching for teachers, adequate funding, and summer tutoring — had larger gains on test scores and on the NAEP than students in states with less comprehensive reading laws. +
++One concern for advocates is the great variability in how states might hold schools accountable to the new laws. Some worry that without more proactive transparency and enforcement provisions, the reforms could wither on the vine. Others worry about unfunded mandates in a year or two once Covid-19 aid dries up. +
++Still, others point to the fact that many colleges of education are still teaching methods to prospective teachers like three-cueing, and the New York Times quoted Lucy Calkins at a conference in March telling educators they can join other school leaders in rejecting these new approaches. “You can say no,” Calkins had said. “And people all over the country are doing so.” +
++To encourage more successful implementation, Gabriel of the University of Connecticut and Sarah Woulfin, a professor of education policy at UT Austin, have been encouraging more focus on school systems, structures, and leadership, rather than a narrow focus on what individual teachers know about reading. “It is not enough to deliver new materials that may sit in boxes in a closet without strong leadership for their integration,” they write. “It is not enough to press teachers to use new tools, without providing high-quality opportunities.” +
++In some states, such as North Carolina, lawmakers have rolled out new policies but provided little support for educators to incorporate the new mandates into their existing workflow, fueling backlash. +
++Ginny Sharpless and Amanda Harrison, co-founders of Literacy Moms NC, a group for parents of students with reading disabilities, told Vox they’ve been deeply disappointed by the lack of investment lawmakers have made in building teacher buy-in for the new policies. +
++“If you’re already working crazy hours, already not getting paid enough, and then someone says, ‘Oh, we want you to do 200 hours of extra training on your own time,’ well, you’re going to be pissing off people who are already burnt out,” said Harrison. +
++“State lawmakers did absolutely nothing to try to change [educators’] views, you can’t just show people the data and expect them to be converted,” added Sharpless. “Leaders should have gone out there and had meeting after meeting to talk to teachers to bring them on board.” +
++Polikoff, of the University of Southern California, said the history of US education policy reform suggests that building teacher buy-in and avoiding overly punitive mandates will be important to helping the new “science of reading” laws actually stick. He also warned against hinging hopes to specific state test score gains. When scores trended down following the introduction of the federal Common Core standards, opponents used those declining results to then water down the policies. +
++“There’s the risk of setting yourself with unrealistic expectations, and states that go up in test scores also go down,” he said. “One of the states that could go down is Mississippi, which has a lot of conditions that make it likely to have educational difficulty.” +
++As teachers embark on the 2023–24 academic year, eager to educate students using the best reading materials available, they’ll have to wade through this morass of information, hoping to do the best job possible but waiting for more clarity on exactly how. And in the meantime, there are real disagreements over what instructional strategies to use in schools, what emphasis each should get, what counts as evidence, and who gets to decide. +
++“Policymakers don’t necessarily want to hear that the science is more complex and less certain than we thought,” said Amanda Goodwin, the co-editor of Reading Research Quarterly and a professor of literacy at Vanderbilt University. “It’s much easier to get public support for a handful of ‘proven’ practices.” +
++A quick guide to Trump’s 4 indictments and why they matter. +
++Donald Trump’s legal web has grown more tangled than ever. The former president is facing 91 criminal charges across four jurisdictions — Georgia, Florida, New York, and the District of Columbia. He has two trial dates set for 2024 so far. And all this is unfolding as he runs for the presidency again. +
++The cases — involving allegations of attempted election theft, mishandling classified documents, and hush money payments — have grown so sprawling that it’s tough for anyone but the most die-hard political obsessive to follow them in detail. +
++But in some, the stakes — for our democracy and for Trump personally — are higher than others. +
++The two prosecutions about Trump’s efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 victory (in DC and Georgia) both come with the possibility of serious criminal penalties. They also have enormous implications for the future of American elections, and for whether Trump or someone like him will respect the results next time around. +
++The classified documents prosecution, in Florida, is also significant in that it involves sensitive intelligence material. However, prosecutors have presented no evidence that this sensitive material leaked out from Trump’s possession. The prosecution is mainly about his efforts to defy the government’s demands that he return the documents. +
++Then, in the New York case, Trump is charged with falsifying business records related to hush money payments he’d made. The core violation here is, basically, that the Trump Organization logged these payments improperly as “legal expenses.” This is not the highest-stakes issue in the world. +
++It’s all a lot to keep track of, so in this guide, we’ll walk through the charges and potential sentences in each prosecution in more detail, and we’ve ranked the indictments in order of importance based on the stakes and potential implications of each case. +
++1) Federal 2020 election case (District of Columbia) +
++How important is this indictment? Very important. As Vox’s Nicole Narea previously explained, this case “will legally define what a politician is able to do to reverse a defeat.” The outcome of this case could have major implications for the 2024 election and every race that follows: If Trump isn’t held accountable for the actions he took on January 6 and leading up to it, he and others could try to pull the same schemes in the future. +
++Ultimately, this case has a significant bearing on the future of US democracy. +
++Number of charges: Four felony counts. They include: +
+-
+
- +Charge of conspiracy to defraud the United States, which includes plotting to overturn the results of the 2020 election + +
- +Conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, including plotting to prevent the 2020 election certification + +
- +Obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, which includes actually blocking the certification of the 2020 election results + +
- +Conspiracy against rights, which includes a plan to deprive someone of a constitutional right (in this case, that is the ability to vote) + +
+Potential jail time per count (these are maximum sentences that are unlikely to be imposed): +
+-
+
- +Conspiracy to defraud the United States: 5 years + +
- +Conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding: 20 years + +
- +Obstructing an official proceeding: 20 years + +
- +Conspiracy against the right to vote: 10 years + +
+
+- Georgia election indictment
+
++How important is this indictment? Very important. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis accused Trump and several of his associates of a sprawling racketeering conspiracy related to their efforts to overturn Biden’s win in the state. In contrast to the federal election indictment, where Trump is the only one charged so far, here 18 others were also charged for participating in this alleged conspiracy. These include famous names like Rudy Giuliani and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, notorious Trump lawyers like John Eastman and Sidney Powell, and lower-level Georgia players. +
++Significantly, if Trump wins the presidency again in 2024, he would not be able to thwart this prosecution, since it is being carried out under state law. +
++Number of charges: 13 felony counts. They are: +
+-
+
- +1 count of violating the Georgia RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act, which is basically a catchall charge for the larger conspiracy to overturn the outcome + +
- +3 counts of solicitation of violation of oath by a public officer, which are about Trump’s attempts to convince Georgia officials to overturn the results + +
- +1 count of conspiracy to commit impersonating a public officer + +
- +2 counts of conspiracy to commit forgery + +
- +2 counts of conspiracy to commit false statements and writings + +
- +1 count of conspiracy to commit filing false documents + +
- +1 count of filing false documents + +
- +2 counts of making false statements and writings + +
+Most of those counts relate to the Trump campaign’s effort to put together a slate of “alternate” electors from Georgia who would purport to cast electoral votes for Trump rather than the actual winner, Biden. +
+ ++3) Federal documents case (Florida) +
++How important is this indictment? Important. This case centers on a president’s ability to endanger the country’s national security by taking and mishandling classified documents after leaving office. Documents that Trump kept addressed everything from US nuclear programs to the country’s defense and weapons capabilities to how America could respond in the face of a possible attack. Additionally, the case looks at how Trump obstructed FBI efforts to take back the documents. +
++Number of charges: 40 felony counts. They include: +
+-
+
- +32 counts of willful retention of national defense information, which includes keeping classified documents related to military activities and nuclear weapons + +
- +1 count of conspiracy to obstruct justice, which includes Trump working with an aide to hold on to classified documents and hide them from a grand jury + +
- +1 count of withholding a document or record from an official proceeding, which included efforts to hide documents from a grand jury + +
- +1 count of corruptly concealing a document or record from an official proceeding, which included hiding boxes with classified documents + +
- +1 count of concealing a document in a federal investigation, which included covering up Trump’s ongoing possession of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago + +
- +1 count of scheming to conceal information the government is seeking, which includes hiding the fact that Trump still possessed classified documents + +
- +1 count of making false statements, which includes directing his attorneys to lie about returning all the classified documents in his possession + +
- +2 counts of altering, destroying, or concealing information the government is seeking, which includes plans to delete security footage + +
+Potential jail time per count (these are maximum sentences that are unlikely to be imposed): +
+-
+
- +Willful retention of defense information: 10 years + +
- +Conspiracy to obstruct justice: 20 years + +
- +Withholding documents from an official proceeding: 20 years + +
- +Concealing documents from an official proceeding: 20 years + +
- +Concealing documents from federal investigators: 20 years + +
- +Scheme to conceal: 5 years + +
- +Making false statement to the US government: 5 years + +
- +Altering, destroying, or hiding something the government is looking for: 20 years + +
+4) New York state case related to hush money to Stormy Daniels +
++How important is this indictment? Less important. This case is significant for the ways it addresses alleged wrongdoing by Trump, but it has fewer sweeping implications than the other indictments. It essentially highlights Trump’s recurring lies and falsehoods, but doesn’t really have the same broader democracy or national security stakes that the other cases have. Primarily, it centers on efforts by Trump to conceal hush money that was paid to porn actress Stormy Daniels so she wouldn’t go public about their affair. +
++Number of charges: 34 felony counts. All counts are centered on falsifying business records, which Trump is accused of doing to cover up the hush money payments to Daniels. +
++Potential jail time per count (these are maximum sentences that are unlikely to be imposed): +
+-
+
- +Falsifying business records: 4 years + +
+All of this leads to two big questions: Will these indictments derail Trump’s presidential bid? And do they mean Trump’s going to jail? +
++What do the four indictments mean for Trump’s chances of becoming president again? +
++Amid all this, Trump is running for president again and facing several challengers in the Republican primary. He retains a massive poll lead. These multiple indictments haven’t hurt him just yet; if anything, they’ve helped, as GOP voters have rallied around him. +
++Currently, Trump’s New York trial is scheduled for March 25, 2024, and his Florida trial is scheduled for May 20, 2024. Unless one of his challengers surges before then, he could have the nomination mostly wrapped up before either trial begins. +
++Then, even if he’s found guilty, or even if he’s jailed, he technically wouldn’t be disqualified from taking office. If he wins the GOP nomination, he’ll still be on the ballot in the general election. So only the voters can stop Trump from becoming president again. +
++Will Trump go to prison? How long could his sentence be? +
++The technical “maximum sentence” Trump could face if convicted of everything he’s been charged with is absurdly high — hundreds of years — but in practice, such high sentences are almost never given. Yet — though we’re a long way off from Trump actually being behind bars — he really is in danger of getting serious time. +
++His eventual sentence, if he is convicted, will depend on several factors in each jurisdiction, none more important than whether the juries will even convict him. The strength of each case and the politics of each area could well influence this — given political polarization, winning a conviction may well be easier in DC and New York than in the mostly conservative area of Florida where he will be tried. (Recall it only takes one holdout juror to block a conviction.) +
++Then, if he is convicted, what sentence will the judge hand down? Judges have broad discretion to hand down a sentence they feel is appropriate. Judge Tanya Chutkan of DC will hear the federal case against Trump for trying to steal the 2020 election, and she has been the toughest sentencer for January 6 rioters, suggesting she may lean more toward the maximum if given the chance. Meanwhile, Judge Aileen Cannon of Florida has the documents case, and she is a Trump appointee who has already arguably stretched the law to try and help him out; a conviction in her courtroom could be on the lighter side. +
++Once he’s sentenced, will higher court judges rescue him on appeal? Some of the cases against him use novel legal reasoning that hasn’t been tested before. So far, the Florida case appears the clearest and best grounded in precedent, while the election cases are more novel (no president has tried to do what Trump did before, after all) and the New York hush money case has been somewhat legally controversial. If Trump is convicted, then, his eventual fate may end up in the Supreme Court. +
++Finally, any Trump sentence could be scuttled if he wins the presidency. If Trump is back in power, he would likely use executive power to end the federal prosecutions against him (the DC and Florida ones), and perhaps even pardon himself. He could not end the state prosecutions — the Georgia and New York ones — but if he wins the presidency, he could likely put off serving prison time until after his term concludes. So, again, it’s the voters who ultimately have the power to maximize, or minimize, Trump’s chances of going to prison. +