Recommended: Literacy Crises: False Claims and Real Solutions, Jeff McQuillan
Recently, I have been (frantically but carefully) drafting a new book for IAP about the current “science of reading” version of the Reading War: How to End the Reading War and Serve the Literacy Needs of All Students: A Primer for Parents, Policy Makers, and People Who Care.
Those familiar with this blog and my scholarly work should be aware that I often ground my examinations of education in a historical context, drawing heavily on the subject of my dissertation, Lou LaBrant. The book I am writing begins in earnest, in fact, with “Chapter 1: A Historical Perspective of the Reading War: 1940s and 1990s Editions.”
As I have posted here, the “science of reading” over-reaction to reading and dyslexia across mainstream media as well as in state-level reading legislation has a number of disturbing parallels with the claims of a reading crisis in the 1980s and 1990s. Few people, I explained, are aware of the 1997 report authored by Linda Darling-Hammond on NAEP, reading achievement in the U.S., and the positive correlations with whole language (WL) practices and test scores.
I imagine even fewer education journalists and political leaders have read a powerful and important work about that literacy crisis in the 1990s, Literacy Crises: False Claims and Real Solutions by Jeff McQuillan.
In his Chapter 1, “What Isn’t Wrong with Reading: Seven Myths about CONTINUE READING: Recommended: Literacy Crises: False Claims and Real Solutions, Jeff McQuillan | radical eyes for equity