The National Reading Panel: A study in the politics of reading
On Thursday April 13, 2000 the National Reading Panel released its
report in a high profile media event in Washington DC. The panel was
mandated and funded by Congress. It was planned as an important step in
a series of carefully orchestrated steps to establish a national reading
program which would effectively control every aspect of the teaching of
reading throughout the country including teacher education,
testing,certification, hiring and retention of teachers and
administrators, adoption of instructional materials, funding of
research. Passage of the Reading Excellence Act by Congress and
countless state reading laws as well as state board of education policy
decisions have been designed to increasingly restrict how reading can
and cannot be taught. The National Research Council's panel headed by
Catherine Snow was designed to give this essentially political agenda a
cloak of scholarly respectability. The language of the various federal
and state laws repeatedly cited terms such as "reliable replicable
research" to justify the narrow mandates.
The National Reading Panel was created and charged with distilling from
the huge and varied body of research on reading that which would support
the definitions of "reliable replicable research" already in the laws.
The report which the Panel has released has done just that. It is thus
not a research report or educational report. It is not the consensus of
the reading research communities. It is a commissioned political report
which a hand picked panel, which includes researchers and others, has
produced to fulfil its political assignment. The panel worked under the
close supervision of a government agency, NICHD, which has played a key
role in drafting the legislation, funding, promoting, and publicizing
narrowly focussed research and co-ordinating each step of the campaign
to control reading instruction. Two other steps in this agenda have been
going ahead parallel to the work of the National Reading Panel. One is
the screening of state proposals for funding under the Reading
Excellence Act. The planners had originally ordered the panel to produce
a report in six months so it could be used in this screening process.
The intention has been, all along that the "findings" of the panel would
be directly used to screen practice in state and local school
authorities. Another aspect of the agenda is the establishment of an
evaluation team to do the insight inspection and enforcement that will
assure conformity at every level. A competition is currently underway to
award a five year contract for such a paradigm police force.
The panel assured conformity to their charge by adopting rules of what
research would be included and excluded right from the beginning. They
did this by adopting a narrow group of topics to examine and by
restricting what they consider research to experimental studies that
followed a single research design. Ironically the areas the panel refers
to in its report as needing research are precisely the areas in which
abundant non experimental research abounds- for example the issue of the
effectiveness of provision of time for silent reading in the reading
curriculum. Even so it took two years for this panel to produce a report
acceptable to the sponsors.
Let there be no doubt. This was not the report of a representative group
of scholars given free reign to survey the reading research literature
and come up with a consensus, letting the chips fall where they may. The
nature and content of the report was predetermined from the outset. One
must ask why would a group of eminent scholars willingly accept such an
assignment, why would they defend their accepting such a political role?
One of them did not. Dr. Joan Latvian, a school principal, took the
courageous step of insisting on including a minority report in which she
delineates what is missing, in her view, from the report and her
objections to its narrow political agenda. The sponsors proclaimed at
the presentation of the report that there is unanimity in the research
community that their narrow political reading agenda is justified by the
research. Dr. Latvian's heroic voice shows that that is a lie. As for
the others, they like scientists of all time, must ultimately bear the
responsibility for what is done in their names. Some time in the future
what happens to the teachers and pupils in America's schools as a result
of this political report will be judged. They chose to participate in
this political exercise. They must take responsibility for the use of
their work.
Ken Goodman
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