Six Ideas in Search of a Champion: What Policymakers Should Know about the Teaching and Learning of Literacy in Our Schools

Being invited to participate in this policy forum is at once an honor, an opportunity, and a responsibility. The honor arises from the invitation itself and the thought, however fleeting, that I might have something to say on behalf of the academic contingent of the literacy education community. The opportunity emerges from the context in which the forum is constructed: By extending participation in this conversation to both researchers and policymakers, the editors of JLR have all but insured a serious response from other members of the policy community. The responsibility comes from the possibility that in contrast to most of the limited-audience writing we all do for one another someone who affects decisions about educational policy and practice might actually take these ideas seriously. I hope that this is but the first in a long tradition of such conversations. I was asked to share a handful of ideas crucial ideas that I would want policymakers to understand about the literacy needs of the nation, and the role that scholarship might play in informing our understanding of those needs as well as our capacity to meet them. I offer several interrelated observations for consideration. If there is a theme uniting them, it is that we should celebrate the good work that teachers are doing, then in the same breath acknowledge the vexing issues that still confront us, and finally, prepare ourselves to generate the material resources and intellectual muscle needed to address those issues. 1. Although we do have serious literacy needs, much of the current literacy crisis is manufactured. Both in public and professional arenas, it is commonplace to complain about America's literacy crisis. Usually the crisis is cited as the basis for fixing the blame on some educational policy, practice, or movement and championing an alternative policy, practice, or movement as the solution to our educational ills. I myself have cited literacy needs and poor student performance as a basis for seeking support for my own research and my institution's teacher education programs. Recently, however, I have run across some compelling arguments, accompanied by even more compelling data, to suggest that the literacy crisis, like most other educational crises (Berliner & Biddle, 1995), is manufactured to benefit particular interests often to support those with an ax to grind, a product to sell, or a partisan view to champion. It is simply not the case that this generation of students reads, writes, punctuates, or performs any other literacy task less well than previous generations. In the aggregate, exactly the opposite is