Handbook on Reading Disabilities Research
Edited by Richard Allington and Anne McGill Franzen
Taylor & Francis 2009 November
The Political Contexts of Reading Disabilities
Patrick Shannon and Jacqueline Edmondson – Penn State University
The study of politics is the investigation of power within particular contexts.
Power circulates through discourses among various groups who make use of and are used
by values and language to participate in on-going events (e.g., Foucault, 1980; Gonick,
2003; Peet, 2007). These discourses and uses of discourse set parameters, influence
actions, and position participants within events. Those who wield power in some contexts
are powerless in others as negotiations push and pull participants in ways of their own
making, but not entirely within their control. The discourses surrounding DIBELS can
serve as a short introduction to the political contexts of reading disabilities,
demonstrating how power works.
Each summer our campus supports a reading program for children and youth who
are experiencing difficulty in learning to read at school. The program serves as a
practicum for masters degree students seeking reading specialist certification. Working
from a three-to-one students/teacher ratio, we enroll between 20 and 30 children each
year. Traditionally, the enrollment process begins in late spring after teachers and parents
have conferred about a student’s progress throughout the academic year and their
projections for success in the next grade. In the past, parent phone calls would trickle in
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during late May and early June with discussions about “summer regress” and “ a boost
going into next year.” Over the last three years, however, our program is full with a
waiting list by the end of January. Parents call with panic in their voices, reporting that
their kindergarten and first grade children are “reading disabled” because they have not
“passed the DIBELS tests”.
The Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) are a set of six
fluency tests (letter names, initial sounds, phoneme segmentation, nonsense words, oral
reading, and retelling) designed to enable regular monitoring of “pre-reading and early
reading skills” (www.dibels.org). The purpose, content, and format of DIBELS are built
upon the evidence-based conclusions of the National Reading Panel (2000) and National
Research Council (1998) and are pronounced valid and reliable based on their
correlations with other established tests. In these ways, DIBELS performs the discourse
of experimental science – its language, logic, appearance and values – constructing
reading abilities and disabilities in its wake.
At the same time, DIBELS is a product that competes in a market created when
the need for regular monitoring of these skills became generally accepted within the
reading field. Although the basic materials of DIBELS can be downloaded from a
website, and students’ scores can be processed and packaged into reports for one dollar
per student, the tests are also available commercially in several forms along with test
preparation materials and technical and human support as well. These products and
services are advertised through professional journals and the internet. In these ways,
DIBELS incorporates the discourse of business, working for a market share and to
maximize profits, complicating what it means to determine reading ability and disability.
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The market for the regular measurement of early reading was officially
sanctioned when the Bush Administration implemented its Reading First Initiative of the
No Child Left Behind education law of 2002. In order to insure that all students would
test “proficient in reading” by 2014, the Department of Education connected federal
funding to state and school district compliance with testing systems that could track
schools’ progress toward that goal. With the discourses of science and business firmly
underlying modern policy making, federal officials searched for a valid and reliable
technology to standardize the practices and outcomes of reading education across the
country. According to a Department of Education Inspector General’s Report
(September, 2006), Reading First officials pressured states and school districts to adopt
DIBELS as the appropriate technology in order to comply with federal policy and qualify
for funding. In these ways, DIBELS projects a government discourse, framing the use of
its tests as lawful behavior and a commitment to helping all students become proficient
readers.
Through these three (and other) discourses, DIBELS positions participants within
reading education, replacing local knowledge and practices with the universal values,
language, and rules of science, business and government. For example, adults’ familiarity
with students’ interest in text or children’s questions around meanings are discounted in
favor of students’ speed and accuracy when decoding sound and print. School traditions
and teacher decisions give way to technologies that direct students’ attention to code in
printed texts. Although these discourses are sometimes contradictory, they provide new
possibilities for the participants as well as limit others. DIBELS enables administrators,
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teachers, parents, and students to be “more effective”, “more efficient”, and “ more
accountable” during reading instruction.
However, DIBELS also defines these participants by the same terms. Each
becomes defined as an abled or disabled administrator, teacher, parent or reader
according to the six measures in the DIBELS battery, and their subsequent actions are
disciplined by the meanings assigned and performed through the authority of these
discourses. All other relations with text become irrelevant. To the extent that participants
internalize these discourses, the power of DIBELS becomes invisible and natural, and
local administrators make policies, teachers label students, parents worry about their
children, and readers are made or unmade accordingly. And the reach of these discourses
comes knocking on the door of our campus reading program with early calls from
anxious parents, who have been warned by concerned teachers, who work in schools that
must prove that they have a technology to produce proficient readers within specified
time limits. Our program’s enrollment becomes younger each year – filled with
kindergarten graduates and first grade repeaters. Although the parents’ reactions have
changed, the discourses behind the politics are not new. DIBELS is only the most recent
amplification for these discourses.
In order to consider the political contexts of reading disabilities, we will examine
the construction, maintenance and uses of the discourses of science, business and the
government that have and continue to swirl around reading education in the United
States. Although reading disabilities appears to be a psychological state of being, we
understand the term to be ripe with politics at many levels. Our intention is to provide
histories, locating the origins and consequences of these discourses within the emergence
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of disabilities in the reading field during the 20th century and into the 21st. Within those
histories, we shall search for values and interests that moved or move the term in various
ways with consequences that ripple through clinics, schools, states, and national contexts.
Science discourses
In An Elusive Science: The Troubling History of Educational Research,
Lagemann (2000) argues that scholars’ efforts to apply the principles of the
Enlightenment to education resulted in the creation of psychology as an academic field.
In order to be recognized as a field, “scientists of the mind” had to distinguish their work
from previous philosophic and religious considerations on mental activity (Shore, 2001).
Toward that end, would-be psychologists secularized the Christian virtues of faith and
hope in terms of science and progress and operationalized the metaphysical questions
about the mind—What can I know? What ought I to do? For what can I hope?—to: How
does the brain work? Accordingly a science of the mind, psychology, would provide the
positive knowledge that would lead human beings out of the problems of theological
fictions and metaphysical egotism toward the natural laws of learning, increasing human
capacity to make life easier and securing individual and social freedom. (Ward, 2002)
Although efforts to separate science from philosophy and religion began during
the French Enlightenment and accelerated with August Comte’s 1830 call for a social
science to make human nature comprehensible, experimental psychology began in
William Wundt’s laboratory in Leipzig, Germany during 1879 (Danziger, 2001). James
McKeen Cattell (Wundt’s first assistant) and G. Stanley Hall are often credited for
extending Wundt’s experimental work and bringing it to the United States, where it met
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the burgeoning applications of science to industry, medicine, and the military. William
James’s (1890) Principles of Psychology is considered the first American book on
psychology. Twelve years in the writing, James’s two volumes included chapters on the
functioning of the brain and brain activity.
Yet, James’s work can also serve as a metaphor for the struggle among discourses
of science, philosophy, and religion within the scholarly discussions of the mind.
(Tolman, 2001) For example in 1902, James published The Varieties of Religious
Experience: A Study of Human Nature in which he rationalized a belief in God, not on
ontological or teleological grounds, but as therapeutic. He cautioned psychologists,
“Science must be constantly reminded that her purposes are not the only purposes, and
that the order of uniform causation which she has use for, and is therefore right in
postulating, may be enveloped in a wider order, on which she has no claims at all. (PP,
1179). In 1904, he published his interpretation of the central crisis in American
psychology, “Does Consciousness Exist?”
Behind this ambiguity, American researchers interested in psychology worked to
separate themselves from philosophy (Koch, 1992). In 1883, Hall established a
psychology laboratory at Johns Hopkins and began to publish his results in the American
Journal of Psychology in 1887. During the late 1880s, psychology departments opened at
many established universities and became the founding discipline for the new Clark
University (which hired Hall as its first president). There were ten laboratories by 1890
and twenty by 1893. The American Psychological Association (APA) was formed in
1892 and held its first meeting that year. In 1895, Cattell became the editor of the
Psychological Review with the first recognized editorial review board. Because
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philosophers found it difficult to present their papers at the APA conferences and then
publish them in the psychology journals, they split from APA to form the Western
Philosophical Association in 1901 and the American Philosophical Association in 1902.
Appeals to science and the use of science methods were the primary reasons for
tension between these groups (Toulmin and Leaery, 1992). In 1896, Karl Pearson
explained,
The scientific method consists in the careful often laborious classification of facts, the
comparison of their relationships and sequences, and finally in the discovery by aid of the
disciplined imagination of a brief statement or formula, which in a few words resumes a
wide range of facts. Such a formula is called a scientific law. (p. 22)
E. L. Thorndike (1906) explained the social advantages of this disciplined
imagination and named psychologists as agents of this work.
The judgments of science are distinguished from other judgments by being more
impartial, more objective, more precise, and more subject to verification by any
competent observer and being made by those who by their very nature and
training should be better judges. Science knows or should know no favorites and
cares for nothing in its conclusions but the truth. (p. 265)
Starting with Wundt and Cattell, psychologists looked for scientific laws that
would explain reading. (Venezky, 1984) Although Wundt was most interested in
physiology, Cattell pursued his interests in understanding individual differences by
focusing on observable behaviors he thought relatable to reading, including letter and
word recognition, legibility, and attention span. His interest in differences led him to
extend Galton’s work through the development of mental tests (a term he coined in
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1890), which could be used to establish a normal range of intelligence by sampling
individual behaviors. In the same study, Cattell predicted “experimental psychology is
likely to take a place in the educational plan of our schools and universities” (p.390).
Although Cattell’s efforts to capture human difference through mental testing proved
futile, his students (E L. Thorndike, Walter Dearborn, and Arthur Gates) and others
would bring the concept of mental testing to their experiments on learning in general and
on reading in particular. In fact, Venezky (1984) labeled this era “The Golden Years” of
reading research, leading to the publication of Edmond Burke Huey’s The Psychology
and Pedagogy of Reading in 1908 and Thorndike’s establishment of the Journal of
Educational Psychology in 1911. Kolers would note in 1968 “remarkably little empirical
information has been added to what Huey knew (about the reading process), although
some of the phenomena have now been measured more precisely” (Huey, 1908/1968, p.
xiv.).
In these golden years, the language about reading and reading education changed
from contemplation of how reading fitted into moral development, stimulated thought, or
captured beauty to analyses of perception, speed, and precision. The language of reading
instruction changed from historical and descriptive accounts or personal evaluations of
classroom practices and texts to statistical comparisons of basic perception among able
and less able subjects and of experimental interventions against traditional methods. For
example, Ruskin’s philosophical words were often quoted: “To use books rightly is to go
to them for help; to be led by them into wider sight, purer conceptions than our own, and
to receive from them the united sentences of the judges and councils of all time against
our solitary and unstable opinions” (e.g., Brown, 1905). Such sentiments gave way in the
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early 20th-century to a different discourse substituting scientific rationality and
technological advances for the experiential basis of tradition treatments of reading and
reading instruction. Consider the following statements.
After all we have thus far been content with trial and error, too often allowing
publishers to be our jury, and a real rationalization of the process of inducing a
child with the practice of reading has not been made. (Huey, 1908/1968, p. 9)
When the mechanics of reading, if we may use that phrase, are mastered, the
whole attention may now be concentrated on the significance of the passage.
(Judd, 1914, p. 366)
Any progress toward measuring how well a child can read with something of the
objectivity, precision, co-measurability, and conveniences which characterize our
measurements of how tall he is, how much he can lift with his back, squeeze with
his hand, or how acute his vision, would be a great help in grading, promoting,
and testing the value of methods of teaching. (Thorndike, 1914, p. 1)
Standard reading tests supply information concerning all phases of instruction
from broader issues involved in the course of study to the detailed difficulties
encountered by individual pupils. (Gray, 1915, p. 59)
The Standard Test Lessons in Reading are offered to the teachers in our school
[Lincoln School at Teachers College Columbia University] with confidence that
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their use will give to pupils a rate of speed and power to comprehend exceeding
that yielded by ordinary methods of teaching silent reading…Every lesson is a test
and every test is a lesson…Not only is every test a lesson, but every test is a
standard test; that is, it shows how well the normal or typical pupil would read
these same lessons. (McCall and Crabbs, 1925, p. xi)
One of the most potent factors in spreading the results of research is through a
well-prepared set of readers and manuals, yet we find teachers still instructing
children as they themselves were taught, absolutely ignorant and oblivious that
science had discovered for us truths and that little children are entitled to he
benefits of these discoveries. (Donovan, 1928, p. 106-07)
In these remarks, the discourse of science positions teachers and publishers as
impeding the translation of the laws of reading into classroom practice. The process of
reading is divided and sequenced. Technology is declared to be the solution to individual
variation, leading from accurate measurement to classroom instruction to individual
remediation. The discourse established a normal range in the process of reading, the ways
in which it is learned, and the speeds with which it is acquired. Students within this range
become able readers, and those outside this normal range are disabled. Presuming all
student capacities being equal, only teacher error kept these disabled readers from the
normal able process, approach and speed. At the same time, the discourse of science
positioned psychologists as experts within this field of reading and reading education,
applying scientific methods to new issues of concern. Philosophers, theologians,
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historians, literary scholars, or even other social scientists became less important, less
powerful in the discussions and actions surrounding reading ability and disability.
The rise of the scientific discourse in reading education has been neither straight
nor smooth, but to the extent that evidence-based or scientifically based policy and
practice are currently considered the norm, it has been successful. Across the 20thcentury, its increasing influence can be mapped in professional organizations (e.g.,
National Society for the Study of Education, American Educational Research
Association, National Council of Teachers of English, International Reading Association,
National Reading Conference, and Society for the Scientific Study of Reading), their
journals and meetings, and state-of-the-field reports (NSSE Yearbooks Horn, 1919; Gray,
1925; Gray, 1937: Gates,1949; Austin & Morrison, 1963; Barton and Wilder 1964;
Durkin, 1978; Anderson et al. 1985; Adams, 1990; Snow, 1998; National Reading Panel,
2000). Throughout, there has been a tone of certainty – now coming full circle back to
physiology.
Reading reflects language, and reading disability reflects a deficit within the
language system….Using functional brain imaging, scientists around the world
have discovered not only the brain basis of reading but also a glitch in the neural
circuitry for reading in children and adults who struggle to read (Shaywitz and
Shaywitz, 2004, p. 7 & 8)
Discourses of Business
The rhetoric of A Nation at Risk (1983), and that of the reports of crisis that
followed, described reading ability and disability in economic terms (Shannon, 1998).
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Such crisis-based analyses suggest that those who are able to meet the literacy demands
of a global economy are those who will prosper and help the United States prosper. Those
who are unable to meet those demands are those who will face difficult times, becoming
social and economic liabilities. The ability to read in socially acceptable ways, then,
becomes capital – something that can be accounted for and spent personally and socially.
In this way, the financial well-being of the individual and society are embedded within
the framing, infrastructure, and practices that surround reading ability and disability.
Literacy skills required within particular economies set the parameters of who is
considered able or disabled. As demands or perceived demands shift, the numbers in each
group change accordingly. The technology and organization required to ensure ability
and prevent disability move as well, creating markets and new areas of expertise in their
wake. Teachers’ and students’ daily classroom practices are altered by these expectations,
organizations, and technologies – even their relationships with one another and society
transform.
Of course, the economic rationale for reading instruction is not new. Northern
colonies in the New World were taught reading in order to save individual souls, but used
the metaphor of home economies to describe the responsibilities and practices of early
public reading instruction (Smith, 2002). Thomas Jefferson and Horace Mann, nearly
fifty years apart, argued that public schooling would create active citizens and able
workers in order to develop democracy and build an economy one citizen at a time. In the
1800s, even the content of the school readers encouraged Americans to be industrious,
entrepreneurial, and efficient (See Mosier, 1965). In this way, students became
consumers of values as well as literacy skills through reading instruction. As the
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economy turned more and more from agriculture to industry, the organizational schemes
of business and industry were considered to be the primary solutions to consequent social
challenges – industrialization, urbanization and immigration.
The first sustained effort to bring business and industrial principles to public
education is found in the work of the Committee on the Economy of Time in Education.
Members of that committee sought to rationalize school curricula and instruction
according to Frederick Winslow Taylor’s scientific management (Taylor, 1912),
replacing personal judgment and rule of thumb with scientifically developed technology
and standard practices. Their logic was that importing these business principles would
increase both efficiency and the quality of the teachers’ work and product, running more
smoothly, cheaply, and productively. Toward that end, the practices of the most
productive teachers were analyzed in terms of tested results, useless movements
discarded, and divided into elemental parts that could be described completely on
instructional cards. These cards would enable any literate person to follow the one best
system of teaching reading. Within these moves, students became more than
metaphorical products of teachers’ labor. Their learning was subject to quality control of
tests, and teachers’ efforts were standardized in order to increase their continuous fidelity
to that system.
The four reports of the Committee demonstrate the incomplete application of this
business model to schooling in general and reading in particular. The first report
presented a national survey in order to establish standards of expectations for teachers in
each grade. Issues such as subjects within the curriculum, time devoted to reading
instruction, rates of reading, vocabulary loads in textbooks, and the tests available to
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determine student progress were listed to establish norms of expectations (Wilson, 1915).
In the second and third reports, William S. Gray delved deeper into daily practices of
reading instruction, advocating that silent reading instruction was preferable to oral
because of its utility and efficiency in everyday tasks and provied a first glimpse of his
tests – Standardized Oral Reading Paragraphs and Silent Reading (Wilson, 1917). The
fourth report was to be the equivalent of the instructional card for scientific management.
The effort throughout has been to put its recommendations in simple, direct
language, that its report may constitute a handbook and guide for the use of
teachers and supervisors who are interested in planning classroom procedures
with due regard for both economy and efficiency in teaching and learning.
(Wilson, 1919, pp. 7-8)
Gray deduced forty-eight principles for reading instruction from thirty-five
studies, covering norms for student progress across grade levels, suggestions for oral and
silent reading, and specifications for printed materials. He emphasized that the
experiments demonstrated that no single textbook method of teaching reading was
necessarily superior to all others in terms of test results. Rather he argued that
instructional efficiency and productivity varied according to how well teachers used the
materials available to them. Just as Taylor had found in the steel mills, master teachers of
reading were working in classrooms beside teachers who demonstrated little talent. Even
before the publication of the fourth report, the NSSE formed the Committee on Materials
in Education, combining the Committee on the Measurement of Educational Products and
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the Committee on the Economy of Time in Education. “At this point, the Society
assigned to the present Committee the task of embodying, in concrete materials to be
used in classrooms, the principles arrived at by the earlier committees” (Bagley, 1920, p.
11). In short, the new Committee was to develop a technology that would raise the
methods of struggling teachers to the same productivity of the master teachers. In this
way, teachers became consumers and subjects of tests and materials in order to promote
reading ability and prevent reading disability.
The need for more effective technologies of quality monitoring of student
learning and teacher instruction created new markets within the reading community.
Tests within reading lessons, tests of reading progress over short and long periods, and
diagnostic tests became ubiquitous in classrooms and schools across the next decades.
Experts took pains to explain the benefits and limits of informal sampling of students’
reading that teachers could implement and analyze themselves, and standardized reading
tests which required outside monitoring to be used effectively in order to identify specific
areas of weaknesses among students. As early as 1906, existing textbook companies (e.g.,
World Book, Lippincott, and Public School) and companies created to publish tests (e.g.,
Courtis and Thorndike published their own tests before selling them to companies)
entered this market. As with the textbook market, many of the tests were modest
variations of a few popular products. The authors’ intended purpose of these tests was (as
it is to this day) to sort students into categories of able and disabled readers (typically
with scales within each category) in order to direct teachers’ attention and instruction to
the areas designated as the causes of individual reading disability. The publishers’
purpose, however, was (as it is to this day) to insure that every reader was tested in every
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way necessary in order to maximize the companies’ profits. Increased economic demands
for literate workers fueled, as it continues to fuel, the need for more and better tests,
keeping the test publishing market lucrative. Currently it is a multi - billion of dollars per
year industry (PBS February 18 2008, www.pbs.org/nbr/site/onair/transcripts/080218i).
The prevention and remediation of reading disability also created markets for
publishers. The need for standardized instruction across classrooms led to the production
of teachers’ manuals, which set the path for able development (Shannon, 1989). Although
most teachers used textbooks during reading instruction prior to 1920, those books
printed only brief directions for teachers within the students’ books. During the 1920s,
psychologists’ calls for explicit directions to standardize teaching practices created a
market for textbooks enhanced by lengthy teachers’ guidebooks. Reminiscent of Taylor’s
instructional cards, the tone and content of directions set the scope, sequence, and
expected outcomes of each lesson.
Across the decades to the present, advances in reading psychology led publishers
to identify new markets for “better and better” materials – manuals, anthologies, practice
books and sheets, and informal and standardized tests – in order to monitor students’ flow
through its system. Most reading experts proclaimed the scientific basis of each new set
of materials and accessories, increasing the power of businesses in schools. Many of the
more prominent experts worked for basal (later core) reading program publishers.
Although periodically some experts have criticized the conservative influence of
publishers on classroom practices and conceptions of ability and disability (e.g., Durkin,
1978; Goodman et al., 1988), most continued and continue to support the use of basal or
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core reading programs during reading instruction, citing the quality control over teaching
(e.g. Anderson, Osborn & Tierney, 1984).
Adjusting quickly to changes in the professional rhetoric surrounding reading
education to supply new supplementary products, basal publishers, however, have not
changed the basic structure of these materials since the 1920s. New information is added
and the nomenclature changes in order to gain new customers, but the structures and
formats remain remarkably the same to maintain the old market (Chall & Squires, 1991).
Early in the century, publishers maintained their influence through direct involvement in
NSSE committee work in order to provide recommendations on reading education and
instruction. In the 1950s, publishers contributed to the start-up capital of the International
Reading Association, and continue to fund the professional meetings of that and other
organizations concerned with reading and reading instruction (Jerrolds, 1977; Sears,
2007). For the educational materials publishing industry, all these efforts and expenses
are simply marketing.
A recent successful marketing venture concerns the consequences of testing of
reading ability. As described by Garan (2005), readers who fail to reach the able range
require more and perhaps different attention because standardized technological solutions
have been unsuccessful. Prior to taking the tests, readers designated as “at risk” of failure
can be served by extra preparation. Test publishers, basal publishers, and independent
entrepreneurs have moved rapidly into this market, supplying goods and services to
improve the odds of passing. Those who still fail provide a market for more materials and
services as well. Since public schools are responsible for students becoming able readers,
the tutoring market provides a new conduit for public education funds to flow toward
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private companies and businesses. The continued flow has apparently been lucrative (see
PBS 2008). Although there were scores of basal programs at the beginning of the 20thcentury, there are only five major programs and three publishers that control the reading
materials market today. The news media designated some publishing companies as “Bush
stocks” when the No Child Left Behind legislations passed (Metcalf, 2004).
Government Discourses
In North America, government discourse entered reading education in 1642 when
the Massachusetts legislature passed a law requiring towns to make certain that “all youth
under family Government be taught to read perfectly the English Tongue, have
knowledge in capital laws, and be taught some orthodox catechisms, and that they be
brought up to some honest employment, profitable to themselves and to the
Commonwealth.” (quoted in Cubberly, 1934, p. 18). In this statement, the colonial
legislature presaged six values to be found in later US government discourse: 1) the US is
a republic and not a democracy (legislators made the decision), 2) rule of law (all youth –
knowledge of capital laws), 3) equal protection of those considered citizens (under family
Government), 4) building infrastructure to develop the economy (taught to read – some
honest employment), 5) accountability (perfectly), and 6) ideology of party in power
rules (English – orthodox catechisms). In 1789, with the ratification of the US
Constitution and its first ten amendments, education was secured as a state’s right,
continuing what had been the uneven commitment to public education and reading
education across the various colonies. By necessity, each state legislature has had to
address a series of questions:
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What type of education should the state sponsor?
Who should pay for that education?
Who should determine what is taught and how it is taught in a state sponsored
school?
Who should have the opportunity to study? For how long? Toward what end?
Who should decide and how should they decide when students are sufficiently
educated?
Who should decide who is qualified to teach?
Variability in state legislature’s answers to these questions resulted in beautifully
idiosyncratic consequences yet also standardized outcomes (On the one hand, think of the
wonderful classroom libraries that developed in California schools when the state
legislature argued that students should read more in the 1980s, but would not fund school
libraries. On the other hand, consider the effects of large state textbook adoptions on the
production of basal or core reading programs from which smaller states must also
choose). Currently, definitions of reading ability and disability by state vary greatly
because, under No Child Left Behind (P.L. 107-100), states have the right to determine
these categories according to state standards and examinations. Students can change their
classification simply by crossing a state boundary. Arguments for district, municipal, or
other local control to address these questions would only increase such differences.
However, as Coffey (1933) made clear, it is state governments that have the right to
regulate local school districts. Local control is a courtesy, not a right.
The maintenance of public schools is a matter of state, rather than of local
concern. School districts exist because the state finds this is a convenient way to
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carry out its educational program. It may require these districts to do any act,
which it might perform directly. It may place restrictions upon them as it seems
essential. It has full authority, unless its constitution provides otherwise, to
prescribe the subject matter that may or shall be taught in its schools. (Coffey,
1931, p. 386).
Although the states have the authority to enforce their educational decisions through
sovereign power, economic sanctions have been the primary incentive since the end of
the Second World War. When local communities’ tax bases decline, school districts
become more dependent on state funding, and thereby are compelled to comply with state
regulations and demands.
The federal government may lack a constitutional mandate to manage public
education, but its direct involvement began after the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957
when it appeared that the United States was losing the technological advantage that it had
demonstrated during the World War II (Kaestle & Smith, 1983). The National Defense
Education Act (P.L. 85-864) provided substantial funding for research on, and
development of, school curricula deemed vital to the national defense and security –
science, second language and mathematics curriculum – and asserted for the first time
that general curriculum could be improved as well. With this legislation, two new values
were added to the government discourses. First, public schools were recognized as a
national security concern, and therefore, the federal government had a direct interest in
schooling and curriculum. Second, funding would be the primary federal incentive to
gain state compliance with its education initiatives. The federal government would fund
research as well as direct payments to schools to enable programs. Subsequent federal
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legislation (e.g., Elementary and Secondary Education Act P.L. 89-10, and the Education
of All Handicapped Children Act P. L/ 94-142) reinforced these and the original
government values and practices.
The role of ideology within government discourses becomes most apparent in the
shift of the hierarchy of values over the last half century. All administrations
demonstrated governmental values by their choice of rhetoric, legislation, and research
funding, but each positioned those values according to its underlying political ideology
(Shannon, 2007). Contrast the emphasis in the rhetoric surrounding Project Head Start
(Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, P.L. 88-452), a program designed to promote equal
opportunity for disadvantaged children through federal funding, during the Johnson as
compared to the Reagan administrations. Consider the following two quotes from each in
turn.
Archimedes told us many centuries ago: give me a lever long enough and a
fulcrum strong enough and I can move the world. Today, at last, we have a
prospect of a lever long enough and support strong enough to do something about
our children of poverty. The lever is education, and the fulcrum is federal
assistance.” (Commissioner of Education Francis Keppel, 1965)
First the President wanted to reduce substantially federal spending for education.
Second, he wanted to strengthen local and state control of education and to reduce
dramatically the federal responsibility in this area….Fourth, the President wanted
to encourage the establishment of laws and rules that would offer greatly
expanded parental choice and that would increase the competition for students
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among schools in newly created public and private structures patterned after the
free market system that motivates and disciplines U. S. business and industry.
(Secretary of Education Terrell Bell, 1986).
Although both the liberal and conservative official expressed his commitment to
schooling, the difference in values is explicit expressed in their statements. Ideology is
also evident in the rhetoric employed by the neoliberal Clinton Administration
(Edmondson, 2000) and the neoconservative G. W. Bush Administration (Goodman et
al., 2004). Regardless of the ideology, Head Start was never sufficiently funded under
any administration to enroll all eligible children.
Furthermore, consider two federal attempts to protect minorities’ rights in public
schools. In 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (P.L. 89-10, which has
passed through several iterations to its current form No Child Left Behind) was originally
the educational weapon in the War on Poverty, supporting other federal programs for
food, health care, and housing. Gaps in achievement between the poor and the not poor
were attributed to social inequalities that were to be addressed with a comprehensive and
national plan. In schools, this required compensatory supplemental instruction for
demonstrably poor, including racial minority, students. Lack of progress in reading was
defined as a social disadvantage. In 1975, the Education for All Handicapped Children
Act (later renamed Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, P.L. 108-446) sought
services for a non-visible or demographically recognizable minority – children with
physical and cognitive handicaps. This legislation marked the official entry of the
language of disability into federal law (McGill-Franzen, 1987). To qualify for special
educational services, students had to be tested and score outside the normal range, and
22
gaps in scores were attributed to individual traits and not social conditions. Clearly the
testing since the beginning of the standards movement in the 1990s to the testing of
NCLB follow this latter definition of reading disability as a personal deficit with a simple
instructional solution. To overcome those gaps, the federal government began to fund
research on best methods to assure success in reading before and during school.
Such Federal funding of research is a third way in which ideology influences
government discourses on reading education. The influence has not been singular or
linear. Contrast the eclectic approaches of the First Grade Studies)(Bond and Dykstra,
1967) and Project Head Start (1960s), the information processing of The Center for the
Study of Reading (1970s), the disciplined agenda of the National Institute for Child
Health and Development (1970s-90s), and the “contextual” work of the Center for the
Improvement of Early Reading Achievement (1997-2002). Federal and state
administrations spent tens of millions of dollars to discover which methods would teach
all American children to read. In order to translate those results for school personnel, the
federal government funded a series of state-of-the-field reports: Becoming a Nation of
Readers (Anderson, et al., 1985), Beginning to Read (Adams, 1990), Preventing Reading
Difficulties in Young Children (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1997), and the National Reading
Report (1998). In each, the definitions of reading ability and disability are contingent on
who was at the table as the content of the reports were decided.
The areas of focus and the methods of analyses were decided by who was selected
to the panel. The five areas of tthe [National Reading Panel] Report do not
capture all there is to reading. Rather they are the specialties of the panel
members. Tom Trabasso in comprehension, Linnea Ehri in phonics, me for
23
fluency. I fought for my topic as did the others. The outcome could not have been
otherwise. That does not compromise the report. It simply demonstrates its limits.
(Samuels, 2006)
Connections, Contradictions, Constants
As demonstrated by the foregoing review, the political contexts of reading
disabilities are mediated by the discourses of science, business, and government. The
power of these discourses circulate through and among participants near and far in ways
that establish opportunities and limits, impact actions, and position participants within
their immediate circumstances. It is circumstance, not position, that determines
participants’ power (See Fraatz, 1987). In order to understand the political contexts of
reading disabilities, researchers must locate these discourses and map the landscape of
the situation accordingly. Note that the discourses do not always work in conjunction
with one another, because the values of one discourse can trump those in another.
Consider for example, the struggles over the definitions of reading disabilities
since the turn of the 21st century. Researchers, teachers, politicians and pundits with
competing conceptions of reading and literacy presented their positions to professional
and public audiences. Some affirmed traditional definitions and methods, while others
called for higher standards and higher stakes for both. Some researchers and teachers
disputed the assumptions inherent in how the categories of reading abilities and
disabilities could and should be determined, while others denied the categories altogether.
The ebb and flow of these debates have played out in several ways. For example,
Dressman (2007) tracked a move from psychological theory to social theory in the
24
majority of articles published in three major research journals in the field of reading
education research. A second example is the split within the membership of the National
Reading Conference when in 1993 disgruntled members formed the Society for the
Scientific Study of Reading in order to reinforce the traditional values of science and
progress in the field of reading. A third example is University of Oregon Professor
Douglas Carnine’s call for the professionalization of the reading field through
“systematic aggressive action” to increase “the use of scientific methods to determine
efficacy” in order to discredit nonexperimental methods (1999, p. 6). As director of the
federally funded National Center to Improve the Tools for Educators, Carnine’s solution
channeled all three of the discourses.
Recent use oDuring second Clinton Administration to the present,f government
discourses marchedwaded into this struggle with atypical consistency. As reviewed
previously, the standards movement set standardized tests as the measurement of
learning. NICHD, by its own acknowledged criteria, has funded only research proposals
that have employed reliable and replicable experimental methods in the study of reading
instruction during Reid Lyon’s tenure. Member selection for national panels on reading
favored experimentalists over social theorists throughout the decade (Cunningham,
2001;Department of Education Inspector General, 2006; Kennedy, 2007. Finally, the
federal government sought to end the struggle over the definition of reading disabilities
with the Education Science Reform Act of 2002 (P.L. 107-249). Although the National
Academy of Sciences was successful in negotiating somewhat inclusive language, many
educational researchers continue to interpret that law as decidedly biased in favor of
experimentalism (See Feuer, Towne & Shavelson, 2002). Taylor and her colleagues
25
expressed their frustration that the discourses of science, business and government
overlap to produce a powerful but irrational force in the reading education field.
Policymakers and educators feel the urgency of finding an easy answer and
producing results. Foorman and her colleagues appear to present just such an easy
answer in the last line of their article by suggesting that widespread reading
failure might be prevented through explicit teaching of the alphabetic principle.
Further, when the authors of this widely publicized study use their results as the
basis for highlighting specific commercial programs such as Open Court and SRA
Reading Mastery, they contribute to the impression that students’ reading
problems will be solved if a school simply buys the right program. (Taylor et al.,
2000, p. 23)
In contrast to the variability and struggles within the discourse of science and
government, business discourses have been consistent across the entire 20th century:
Schools are responsible for and to the economy; they should be organized and run like
businesses; and they provide markets for businesses. Accordingly, higher standards are
needed because business demands on reading have increased. Straightforward practices
based on the measurement of goals will be effective and efficient – business like. Both
these values are implied in Taylor and her colleagues’ statement. Explicit in their
statement, however, is the third value – the capitalization of reading disabilities.
Publishing companies, testing companies and their parent companies as well as new
entrepreneurs are heavily invested in the identification, maintenance, and practices of
reading disabilities. “Discoveries” of new methods to identify and address reading
disabilities are quickly transformed into commodities for sale. When the market is
26
saturated with products, then like other businesses, new types of disabilities are
discovered and new (or repackaged) remedies marketed. This is not a recent phenomenon
(Altwerger, 2005; Larson, 2007). The current billion-dollar test, textbook, and test prep
industries rest upon those million-dollar textbook industries of the past.
The Department of Education Inspector General’s report of September 22, 2006
(ED OIG/I13-F0017) described how discourses of science and government swirl inside
the most powerful business discourse within the Reading First Initiative of the federal No
Child Left Behind education law. Echoing Edmond Burke Huey and members of the
Committee on the Economy of Time in Education, the Reading First Initiative policy
requires “scientifically based research” as the criterion for making instructional decisions.
The phrase appears over 100 times in the policy. Yet the Inspector General’s report found
that science and research were not the criteria used to determine the test, materials, and
practices that would define reading abilities and disabilities on a daily basis in American
schools. Rather, materials favored (and sometimes authored) by external groups
appointed by the Federal government were forced upon school personnel and students
without benefit of rigorous research, and other programs which did have such scientific
support were excluded systematically. The report provides the names of some officials
who were implicated, but does not offer the names or titles of the questionable
commodities or their publishers.
The Washington Post was not so discrete (Grunwald, 2006). They report that “the
vast majority of the 4,800 Reading First schools have now adopted one of five or six top
selling commercial textbooks….most of the schools use the same assessment
program…with little research backing.” That assessment program is DIBELS. The same
27
one that brings the “reading disabled” kindergarten and first grade “failures” to our
Reading Camp. We have practiced the politics of reading disabilities in our own context
by sharing comments with parents from the newspapers concerning the Inspector
General’s report on the conflict of interest in the Reading First Initiative, Then we begin
to work with the reading abilities that the children have brought with them to camp.
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