Critical issues: Reading and the new literacy studies: Reframing the National Academy of Sciences report on reading

Journal of Literacy Research, Sep 1999 by Gee, James Paul

On the other hand, an approach like that of the New Literacy Studies, which sees literacy as integrally part and parcel of sociocultural practices (caught up with mind, body, and soul, as much as language), will see social programs that ameliorate injustice and support healthy cultural variation as very much part of the field of"literacy" The issue here is not support for any specific social program (though we do know several that work; for example, improved nutrition; cognitively challenging "early start" interventions; smaller class sizes; more competent teachers; respect for, and building on, diverse cultural skills and knowledge; allowing "non-mainstream" families to accrue and pass down "cultural capital" for three generations or more by programs like affirmative action - see, for example, Darling-Hammond,1997; Grissmer et al.,1998; Ladson-Billings, 1994; Meier,1995; Miller,1995). Rather, the issue is that, if one accepts the New Literacy Studies approach, one cannot coherently debate ways of improving reading and leave out social, cultural, institutional, and political issues and interventions as if they were "separate" from literacy (mere"background noise;' as it were). The formerly closing, and now static, Black-White gap shows they most certainly are no such thing. Some of these issues are touched on in the report, but they are, by no means, central to it.

There is also the issue of power and racism, a matter not touched at all in the report. Some people believe that bringing up such issues is merely "political" or, at the very least, not directly relevant to reading. But this is simply not true. The fact that children will not identify with, or even will disidentify with, teachers and schools that they perceive as hostile, alien, or oppressive to their home-based identities and cultures is as much a cognitive as a political point (Holland & Quinn,1987). Claude Steele's (Steele, 1992; Steele & Aronson,1995,1998) groundbreaking work clearly demonstrates that in contexts where issues of race, racism, and stereotypes are triggered the performance of even quite adept learners seriously deteriorates (see Ferguson,1998, for an important extension of Steele's work). To ignore these wider issues, while stressing such things as phonemic awareness built on controlled texts, is to ignore, not merely what we know about politics, but what we know about learning and literacy as well. To take just one example from many possible examples, the large literature on "sharing time" in the early years of school (Cazden, 1988; Champion, 1997 Gee,1985; Michaels,1981,1985; Michaels & Collins,1984; Michaels & Foster,1985), which in many schools is early oral training for literate language, amply demonstrates that culture and identity are integral to success or failure at learning school-based forms of literate language.

The Academy report is also aware that the category of poor children at risk for reading failure works very differently at an individual level than it does at a group level: "A low-SES child in a generally moderate or higher-- SES school or community is far less at risk than an entire school or come munity of low-sES children" (p. 30). Although the report certainly does not stress the matter, it does nothing to hide the fact that ceasing to pool poor children in poor schools (and placing them, not in merely desegregated schools, but in good schools with highly qualified teachers) might do as much or more for reading scores than any instructional intervention the report does discuss (see, for example, pp. 30-31, 98,119,126-127). Indeed, the report admits (though draws no interesting inferences from this fact) that high levels of poverty in a school are a better predictor of children who will have reading problems than is a lack of early phonemic awareness, an issue to which the report devotes a great deal of space (p. 119). Perhaps paradoxically, however, all this is, even within the reading field, old news. These facts simply follow from the more general fact that family, community, and school factors beyond instructional methods contribute more to school failure or success than do specific methods (however efficacious some of them may otherwise be), a fact that has been known for nearly three decades (see Pearson,1997, and the accompanying articles in the recent reprinting of the famous "first-grade studies" from 25 years ago). And, yet, the report sees the debate over instructional methods as the heart of the matter.