Literacy Crises and Reading Policies

Children Still Can't Read!

Janet Soler, Roger Openshaw

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134305230
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildung Allgemein

This widely researched comparative study addresses the critical issue of literacy crises around the world and questionstheir wider sociological and educational impact. The recurring literacy crises in England and English speaking countries such as the US and New Zealand are linked to wider issues of educational standards, concepts of teacher professionalism, debates over curriculum content and the whole purpose of schooling, in order for us to obtain a deeper understanding of specific national contexts and the political pressures involved.

The authors' comparative approach enables them to uniquely demonstrate how literacy crises in one country can actually stimulate and shape literacy crises in another, as well as illustrating that these crises frequently share common features across time and geographical boundaries.

Rather than championing any 'one best' method of teaching reading, central questions are addressed and discussed, which will make this ground-breaking book essential reading for policy makers, teachers and students in literacy and education studies.

Part 1

Are our standards slipping?

Exploring post-Second World War reading debates from a historical perspective

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Chapter 1

Introduction

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The teaching of reading is currently the subject of intense national and international interest. In this book we attempt to address broader questions about the origins and contexts of national literacy policy rather than engaging in debates about the efficacy of particular programmes. In particular we aim to investigate specific episodes where a ‘Great Debate’ has occurred over approaches to reading.¹ A powerful motivation for our study of the debates over reading standards and methods has arisen from our previous work in this area which has had a particular focus upon the role of the media in shaping educational policy. This has alerted us to the need to understand how public debates have shaped the specific contexts in which professionals currently engage in the teaching of literacy.

The central question we seek to address in this study is what role did public debates over reading play in the shaping of the National Literacy Strategy (NLS)? This is a crucial question not only for literacy educators but also for anyone interested in the processes which have driven educational policy in a specific direction over the past four decades. In England, the sixtyyear period from 1945 to 2005 has seen a remarkable transition from an environment where the pedagogy and programmes related to the teaching of reading was essentially a matter for schools, teachers and local authorities, to one in which successive governments and their agencies progressively implemented a policy of extensive national assessment at all levels. This has led in the 1990s to the creation of the NLS, and the instigation of a Literacy Hour in which both content and pedagogy are prescribed in detail. In this book we argue that an understanding of the history of the increasingly intense public debates over reading standards reveals that these debates were a driving force in creating a sense of national crisis in the 1990s that was to ultimately lead to both measures. What this history particularly demonstrates is the central role that fears concerning declining English reading standards played in creating a climate where government intervention and national testing were viewed as both necessary and natural. Also highlighted is the key role that reading standards debates have played in the increasing politicisation of the literacy curriculum and education in general.

Aims, purposes and scope

A further reason for undertaking this study is our conviction that historical research has an important part to play in enabling educational professionals at all levels to make sense of contemporary professional contexts. In looking back we endorse the recent call for educational historians to link the past to the present thereby illuminating the taken for granted structures within which we teach.² Because literacy has been at the heart of mass education since its inception in the nineteenth century, our investigation of the debates over reading standards serves to further reveal the processes that underpin the contemporary contexts of schooling. In our own work with teachers and educators we have come to see the power that such understandings can give practitioners to critically debate, negotiate, make decisions and modify their own professional environment.

From a critical literacy perspective it can be argued that the ‘problem’ of how to teach reading needs to be re-conceptualised as part of a deeper social phenomenon. Reading controversies cannot be resolved by apparently neutral evidence from universally comparable skills competencies or abilities.³ Critical literacy theorists have alerted us to the fact that we must examine the way in which different historical and socio-political contexts can give rise to specific ideological beliefs, the development of different reading programmes, national literacy policies and new ways of addressing the ‘problem’ of how to teach reading. Their work shows that reading practices and the teaching of reading arise from social activity, which is in turn shaped by historical, social and political contexts.⁴

In utilising a historical methodology which is informed by a critical literacy approach, we will draw upon but not necessarily replicate an emerging body of literature that goes beyond a relatively narrow focus upon the mechanics of teaching reading. Whilst valuable in itself, much of this work is highly theoretical, drawing upon limited specific examples. To date very few studies provide an in-depth examination of specific national contexts. Fewer still attempt to illuminate the particular political processes that provide an important key to understanding literacy debates.

Additionally, we have chosen to interweave parliamentary exchanges, newspaper reports and professional commentary in order to illustrate not simply the ebb and flow of literacy debates at particular junctures, but also to demonstrate the interactions between various influential individuals, reading researchers and professional lobbies, various interest groups, media commentators and political parties that contribute to the intensification of the debate in the public forum. As curriculum historians, working on debates over reading standards we came to view the dynamic processes that shaped these debates as best fitting Herbert Kliebard's conclusion that different interest groups, each representing a force for a different selection of knowledge and values from the surrounding culture, compete for dominance over the curriculum.⁵ Through viewing the debates over reading standards and the micro-politics surrounding their visibility in the public arena, we found ourselves questioning the Left-versus-Right dualism implicit in educational policy accounts. Instead, our attention became increasingly drawn to the multi-faceted nature of the dynamics that drive curriculum policy, programmes and approaches. For us this raised critical questions about the complex processes that surround educational decision-making at the intersection of politics, schooling, standards and literacy.

In responding to these complex historical issues, we have chosen to follow chronologically the extended post-war debate over reading standards. In order to further our appreciation of the English experience, however, we have elected to include some comparative examples. This inclusion allows us to better illustrate, not only the shared nature of the ideals that underpin the development of different literacy programmes and national literacy curriculum policies, but also to appreciate the reasons for differences at the national level. A considerable body of literature argues that there has been a shift from a liberal humanist discourse in schooling towards a discourse of management.⁶ Underpinning these arguments is a debate over the purposes of schooling, and questions about learning and teaching in the context of the post-modern, globalised nation state. In England, this debate has had a profound impact, moving schools away from earlier liberal humanist understandings and towards a technicist/rationalist notion of learning and a view of the individual as a subject to govern and/or be governed. This, in turn, has led to an emphasis on the politics of governance and surveillance.⁷

Critiques of the 1988 Education Reform Act have noted the central role that conforming to national standards and surveillance through national testing has played in changing the ‘narratives of the pupil’. They have further argued that examining this process through a Foucauldian notion of ‘moral technologies’ highlights the way in which government policy is bringing about a shift in, and reorganisation of schooling through an emphasis upon testing and grading and the publication of league tables of school performance.⁸

In the decade following the introduction of the National Curriculum, the literacy curriculum and its associated pedagogies has been exposed to a normalising gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish.⁹ Improving literacy standards became a central part of New Labour's educational thinking. It was also a key consideration in the development of the party's electoral platforms in 1997 and 2001 and subsequent educational policy initiatives such as NLS¹⁰ that have proliferated during the New Labour administration.

Moreover, recent reviews of the literacy and numeracy strategies, introduced from the late 1990s onwards, have drawn attention to the implicit notions of governance and surveillance and the adoption of technicist, prescriptive, less flexible pedagogical approaches. There has also been a rejection of progressive, child-centred ideals in the key documents designed to present or implement these policy initiatives.¹¹

Commentators have drawn particular attention to the technicist, assessment-orientated agenda embedded in the NLS that attempts to counter previously held progressive, child-centred professional ideals by reducing the individual child to an invisible ‘normal’ individual who is constructed around quantifiable norms. They also note the conflict with the rhetoric of previous documents such as the Plowden Report¹² with its emphasis upon teaching as an art, and the tendency in the NLS to regulate teacher behaviour whilst simultaneously tightening control over the profession as a whole through a prescriptive curriculum emphasising testing and grading.

Finally in this section of the introductory chapter, we wish to stress that, in highlighting the constructions of literacy that take place in reading debates and the associated development of particular reading programmes and strategies, we are not necessarily viewing reading practices as lacking cognitive and behavioural aspects. Neither are we denying their role in individual agency.¹³ As we have already emphasised, we do not intend to enter the current debate as participants in ‘a binary dispute over method (e.g., phonics vs. word recognition, skills vs. whole language, genre vs. process, liberal vs. conservative)’.¹⁴ Instead, rather than championing any ‘one best’ method of teaching reading, we will directly address the central questions that Welch and Freebody identify as hinging on relativities of power.¹⁵ These key literacy questions are essential for politicians, policy-makers, teachers and parents to consider. They include:

• Whose interests are being pursued under the guise of particular literacy policies and programmes?
• How do particular methods and models of reading come to dominate?
• What part do reading debates play in determining what kinds of literate practices get enshrined in policy, and for whom?
• To what extent do reading debates commit protagonists to a narrow, essentially unproductive ‘either-or’ fixation on the ‘one right method’?
• Are such debates exclusively a symptom of right-wing conservative reaction to progressivism?¹⁶
• How can a better understanding of reading debates across time and international boundaries improve the teaching of reading in the future?

Have reading standards declined? Issues and problems

While the above questions address the political construction of literacy policy, curriculum and pedagogy through the controversies over the teaching of reading, they do not address the underlying issue raised in the debate and implied in the title of this book: ‘Have reading standards declined?’ This is an entirely legitimate question for educators to expect historians studying the debates over reading to consider. It is, however, an extremely difficult question to definitively answer. One persistent difficulty for those conducting scientific studies into reading standards lies in ascertaining just what is meant by terms such as ‘standards’, ‘literacy’ and ‘illiteracy’. Richard Aldrich points out that the terms ‘standard’ and ‘standards’ have had many different meanings that have changed over time.¹⁷ Citing the 1997 White Paper, Excellence in Schools, as an example, he states that confusion occurs even in official documents. Sometimes ‘standards’ seem to imply the setting of an acceptable level against which all should be judged, but at others the term seems to relate more to the unacceptable levels of achievement of those failing to reach the expected standard.¹⁸ Aldrich observes that standards, like examinations, curricula and education itself, have a complex history that has been contested by both contemporaries and by later historians. He goes on to contrast government policies since 1988 to improve the quality of education, that have been based on the concept of an expected standard of achievement for all children of a particular age, with the 1967 Plowden Report's conclusion that it was not possible to describe a standard of attainment that should be reached by all or most children.¹⁹

When we turn to key terms in the reading standards debate such as ‘literacy’ and ‘illiteracy’, these definitional problems are further compounded. Sir Cyril Burt's early research on illiterate adults was one of the first to critique commonly accepted definitions of illiteracy, exemplified by the contemporary Oxford English Dictionary entry as, ‘one ignorant of letters, unable to read’ for giving a wrong impression of the problem.²⁰ According to Burt, tests now showed that nearly all those loosely described as unable to read could read something, even if this was, by itself, of little value. Burt's comments alert us to the fact that it has always been historically difficult to define and quantify illiteracy and hence to talk meaningfully about reading standards. Burt certainly felt that it was essential to arrive at more scientific definitions and to more widely utilise standardised tests.²¹ He thus went on to suggest that:

(i) an illiterate may be defined as meaning one who in everyday life is able to make no practical use whatever of reading or writing, and (ii) a semi-literate as one who is able to make no effective use of these activities, that is, one who is debarred by his disability from using the ordinary machinery of a civilized country: (e.g., he will not be able to read with any understanding a short par...