Ideological Literacy Instruction in American Public Schools
Private, Democratic, Family
Talking calmly in the abstract about American public schools is tough in this post-pandemic, highly polarized political context. Paradoxically, the time is ripe for policy makers at the federal, state, commonwealth, county, and district level to take a long hard look at the dueling ideological motives we as a people situated in history harbor for either dismantling or improving public schools. Why not privatize it all? What do we lose besides hope? Fairly weigh the value of public schools and recognize public school as sociomulticultural institutions, not factories—or let corporate America handle it the way it has handled climate change and healthcare.
What is the proper function of a public school? Depends on whether you ask the question in Texas or Connecticut. Because the Constitution does not spell out a right to education the way it spells out, say, the right to bear arms, we the people have a long history of handing off the responsibility to teach our children to state governments, to religious institutions, to family and home schoolers. Now is the time to consider the mission.
Ideology of Public Education Today
In my humble analysis, at least three ideologies of pre-adult schooling are woven into U.S. history as rallying points: 1) a private ideology of special privilege, 2) a democratic ideology of mass labor, and 3) a home-based ideology of family. Each ideology is authorized by state and/or national government to sponsor singletons or networks of schools for children 5-17 years old resourced through public taxes or private dollars. Federal and state governments have worked together since 1867 to fulfill one core ideological obligation in brackets: preschool, [school], adult education, post secondary education. Whether privileged, public, or home-based, we prepare our children for school, they leave school, and they are adults. We demand schools for everybody.
The ideology of privacy fosters spiritual and/or material objectives of its voluntary adult subscribers and shields the inner workings of its schools from the dictates of education codes that spring from the democratic ideology, which has disciplinary frameworks and bureaucratic, legal, and semiprofessional accountability (Darling-Hammond, 1989)1. These long-standing competing ideologies are visible to the population in contrast to the more hidden, more amorphous home-based ideology. But many private school management systems have come to be grounded in the factory metaphor with grade cohorts, letter grades, deportment indices, courses, measurements, certificates, units, credits so that their graduates mesh in the adult world with public graduates—the machinery of symbolic capital (GPA, ACT, SAT) used in academic settings to transform academic capital into economic capital upon graduation with a diploma or degree (Bourdieu, 1994)2.
The educational ideology of home and family is like that of privacy in that its motive sometimes is to shield children from unwanted restraints or requirements or to protect them from languishing on a conveyor belt moving either too quickly or too slowly. Family and privacy ideologies are exempt from the expectation that the curriculum remain neutral regarding the teaching of religion. Home schooling is regulated and linked to public resources by way of technology. A key premise of the private ideology, exclusivity, exempts its schools from the requirement to educate all comers. Privacy means selective admission to the club. Families can’t legally or morally exempt a child from education. A litmus test for alignment with the democratic ideology is the question of public funds: Should childless adults foot the bill for public schools? Only in America could such a question arise.
The matter of teaching children to read and write has been deeply contested within the democratic ideology, most recently in the war between phonics and whole language. The contest has always turned on the question of what to do with what Abraham Lincoln called the mud-sills, the workers, the laboring class, who are not privileged and are raised by mud-sill parents. Private academies for the poor are scarce. How much, how well, and what kind of reading and writing is necessary to keep the mud-sills under control and productive, to maintain law and order, to sustain gainful employment?
In 35 states in 2022 legislation has been passed to restrict for ideological reasons what activities public school teachers can assign for literacy learning in their classes.3 The right claims that a core goal of restricting multicultural literature is to protect White children from feeling guilt because of things that happened in the past. This guilt would result in feelings of inferiority and withdrawal from school.
To protect them the law now renders illegal using literacy to teach an understanding of the systematic physical, material, and social injustices White ancestors visited on indigenous and African-American people despite ongoing impacts on the lives of oppressed people today. And for a similar protectionist motive, political conservatives aim to erase civil rights and legal progress the LGBTQ community has made.
Teachers are quitting their jobs in droves.4
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Ideology of Public Education During the 19th Century
What is happening legislatively today in the most backward, poor states in the country to block the formal study of U.S. History and Human Love pales in comparison to the primitive, violent use of legislation to deprive American-born children of reading and writing during actual lived history. Before the Civil War, teaching literacy to slaves was illegal in most of the South, a prohibition more strongly enforced after Nat Turner rebellion in 1831, a deadly event motivated by the outrage a highly educated American Negroe felt about slavery. The laws were enforced. At the start of the Civil War, 95% of the 4,000,000 slaves in America were unschooled and illiterate (Du Bois, 1935). Of course, if you were a child in Oklahoma or Florida today, reading this paragraph would be illegal.
The issue was White fear that literacy would inflame among the slaves an already intense drive for emancipation, a clear and present danger to relationships of power. White supremacist paranoia feared that reading means getting ‘woke,’ finding ambition, demanding justice. For some reason the slave power assumed the alphabet holds a secret potion that would stir the aspirations of slaves. As we will see in the example of Sweden upcoming, this notion is clearly wrong. The country struggled to sustain its democratic form of government in the face of an entrenched, feudalistic White slave power and a flaming sense of manifest destiny. Soon enough after Nat Turner was hanged for sedition, the country dissolved into a sea of blood let loose by truly seditious slave owners.
Today’s cultural fire is exacerbated by a private fear that a democratic public ideology of literacy instruction will create opportunities for all children to develop an informed, moral understanding of the potentials and inclinations of all Americans that will expand and humanize cultural models of capitalism (profits), taxation (government), marriage (man and woman), family, and love. Today’s fear of literacy is very like the fear harbored by the slave power. If children use literacy to examine experiences of gay marriage, they may not stop at acceptance but graduate to living in a more inclusive world.
Democratic Ideology of Schooling During Reconstruction
Harvey Graff, a historian who has researched and published widely in the area of North American 19th century literacy, discussed the emergence of state and federal governmental agencies in the U.S. during the Civil War era charged with the “controlled transmission of literacy” in both the North and South.
Schooling had been a concern of colonies and states during the Revolution era. As the population increased in number, however, as economic life grew more complex, the range and nature of criminal behaviors increased, and it became difficult to teach basic morality and decency face-to-face to the masses. The technology of the alphabet and printing press was employed to indoctrinate young people with textual messages of moral meaning sans pop-up windows. Schooling for the masses became necessary to assure law and order among the mud-sills.
The following excerpt expresses Graff’s view verbatim on the growing 19th century movement to develop widely available, regulated public schooling during this nightmarish century; published in 1977, this particular paper discussed the relationship between literacy instruction and reduced criminality5:
By 1867, with the federal government militarily occupying the states that took part in the secession, the Executive Branch inaugurated the Department of Education which played an important role in Reconstruction. Public education for freed slaves was a pressing issue. Du Bois (1935) thoroughly, painstakingly documented a renaissance of learning and a deep commitment to public schooling among this newly enfranchised group. The last section of his masterpiece Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880 was titled “Founding the Public School” and begins with the words “how the freedman yearned to learn and know, and with the guiding hand of the Freedman’s Bureau and the Northern schoolmarm, helped establish the Public School in the South and taught his own teachers in the New England college transplanted to the black south” (p. 62).
The Union military occupation of the South helped keep White supremacists from absolutely, violently decimating the hopes of the freed slaves to own enough property to sustain a family, to attend school and learn to be productive, and to participate in their own governance. According to Du Bois, “If the Negro public school system had been sustained, guided and supported, the American Negro today would equal Denmark in literacy [written in 1935]” (p.637). Tragically, the military occupation ended in 1877 when Rutherford Hayes ascended to the White House during a contested election as a result of a Trumpian quid pro quo. The South would agree to Hayes if the North would remove the troops. This political failure may represent among the most egregious in all of our failures to free ourselves from this racism eating away the country. Note that it would be illegal in Texas to teach this fact.
Rejuvenated Public Ideology During the Civil Rights Era
In 1962, President Kennedy appointed Francis Keppel to head the Office of Education, then part of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Keppel wondered what the duties of the Commissioner of Education were, so he looked up the 1867 law. He found that the Office was to report annually on the progress of students in the United States. The Office had never done so.6
In March of 1963, Keppel asked Ralph Tyler…for his suggestions for measuring school quality. …[T]he germ of the idea that was to grow into the National Assessment of Educational Progress was sown. …As the project grew, it came under the administrative leadership of the Education Commission of the States (ECS).
The historical formation including Brown v Board of Education (1954) that broke the stranglehold of separate but equal in public schooling, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 legislating broad protections for all of us, and the Coleman Report of 1966 showing ugly disparities in access to public education between rich and poor, paved the way for the first national test of reading and writing achievement (NAEP).
Objections to any national testing program at the time arose from public ideologists who feared the federal government was treading on states’ rights. A national assessment would narrow curricula and lead to state by state comparisons, they argued. Wealthy capitalists have always understood that teaching literacy always involves an ideology and that testing the ineffectiveness of under-resourced, crowded, segregated schools would raise the ire of the mass of voters.
As Trump argued about Covid testing, if you don’t test, you don’t find the virus. The more you test, the worse it looks.
The Ideology of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth
In Orwell’s novel 1984, Big Brother uses literacy workers to rewrite history as history happens. Truth in history is whatever the Ministry of Truth says it is at any given moment. Truth can change if authors change their texts. Recent assessment information suggests there may be no need to go to the trouble. American high school age students know little U.S. History in the first place.
In 2018 NAEP assessed U.S. History, Civics, and Geography. Deborah Carr, the Director of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), gave a valuable and powerful presentation available on YouTube.7 The assessment itself looked at three content areas and three cognitive areas, a fascinating assessment design in its own right which could dovetail with AACU’s VALUE rubrics for Critical Thinking and Writing. The following screen shot presents a sample question in the History content area:
Carr makes clear that this test item measures knowledge, but it taps into the interconnectedness of facts about politics, geography, and civics. Additionally, the assessment is built from a range of item genres, including constructed response, enhanced multiple choice, text markings, etc. In short, the test itself is difficult and challenging, admittedly requiring a high level of literacy development and experience in the form of profitable social engagement with complex primary and secondary sources. Carr minces no words. The results are a “signal,” a “red flag.” Something is seriously wrong.
As the individual charged with making sense of these numbers for the Office of Education, Carr talked about having been on the job the past few decades, having watched these social studies scores appear every few years. In the Q&A a viewer asked her for her reaction when she first saw the 15% proficient statistic. She was shocked—she believed this could be the lowest proportion of proficient students ever on any NAEP measure—but not surprised. With a paltry 15% of learners in public high schools proficient or above in knowledge and understanding of history using a robust test, almost nine in ten young people are basic or below. Who needs a Ministry of Truth to hoodwink such a population?
Given the importance of historical understanding in this polarized epoch, I’m surprised we haven’t seen flashing lights and heard alarm bells rivaling A Nation at Risk. Why are states bothering to pass laws banning CRT? The vast majority of students aren’t learning history anyway.
A Modest Proposal
Instead of eating our children, it would seem to be a perfect time in 2022 to integrate literacy instruction with the discipline of History. Instead of English, a moniker for a discipline that is not at all parallel with a similar discipline like French or Spanish, say, we could rename the field and call it Language and Literacy in History.
Such a pairing would improve the teaching of language, literacy, and of history—plus diminish the hegemony of English as a privileged language. Opportunities to read and write abound, assignments to narrate historical events, to write speeches appropriate for historical occasions, to read period documents and characterize them for peers in presentations, to write plausible diary entries, to make maps and diagrams and charts, to read and write poems, to dramatize, to draft political briefs on locally important or global current events, to take a stand in an editorial or debate or speech, to write library research papers—history is the stuff we are made from and a significant fund of knowledge for analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Using literacy to learn important content to apply in structured experiences is worth a look.
James Gee (1996) approached the topic of ideological literacy from the perspective of a linguist. With full appreciation for phonemic segmentation, syllables, and spelling—all autonomous skills performed pretty much the same way in a schoolroom or a back alley—Gee pointed out the “big problem” in Gilbert Ryles’ sense for literacy and schooling as one of teaching the mechanics of reading and writing while ignoring the ideological import:
“Literacy as ‘the ability to write and read’ situates literacy in the individual person, rather than in society. As such it obscures the multiple ways in which literacy interrelates with the workings of power” (Gee, 1996, p. 22).
A default view of writing as a technical, autonomous skill unrelated to power has dominated American schooling since Alexander Bain published a composition textbook mid-19th century that became the best selling textbook for English Composition for the next 75 years. Bain categorized writing assignments into four structures: Exposition, Description, Narration, and Argumentation—Aunt EDNA I called it when I taught the History of Composition course as a professor in a reading specialist program.
The key idea was this: The writing teacher’s job is to teach students to produce and reproduce text structures. For example, teaching students to write a paragraph means teaching them to write topic sentences, detail sentences, and optional closing sentences. Teach them the structure. What they fill it with, what they want the paragraph to do, who they intend to read the paragraph—these are instructionally irrelevant.
Bain-inspired writing instruction still dominates in many state academic frameworks and shapes grade level objectives. First grade writers produce a sentence, second grade writers produce a few sentences, third grade writers produce a paragraph. Writing takes place on demand under structural but not rhetorical specifications. Welfare in the writing classroom (Donald Graves) suggests that children have nothing to bring to the act of composition, that they need to be given ideas of what to write about, that they need to practice technical production rather than waste time on considering an audience or occasion or purpose for the writing beyond the teacher, that they are incapable of occupying an authentic role as a writer with something important to say. Welfare prevents unwanted ideas from entering heads and thereby serves to control the mud-sills without motivating them to challenge the thinking of authorities.
Ideology of Literacy Instruction and Adults
Interestingly enough, 20th century education policy makers reverse themselves once children graduate the K-12 system and become adults. The learning outcomes assessed for adults ignore questions about fluency, paragraph structure, punctuation, on-demand literacy events for no personally understood nor relevant purpose, and the like.
The question of adult illiteracy didn’t arise out of a concern for improving K-12, the usual rationale for mass testing. Society had changed. In addition to stiffening the demands of reading for aircraft mechanics and bomb makers, who had to read manuals correctly or cause the death of soldiers, World War I created a large increase in the banking sector to accommodate war financing, and with this increase came the very adult need to practice literacy in an informed, purposeful, consequential manner. Dare I say economic literacy was born?
Of course, the banking industry was adamant that its employees would serve any customer regardless of literacy level. All comers were invited to open accounts. According to the Vice President of the Bowling Green Kentucky Trust Company, which had experienced a 200% increase in depositors, a euphoria had set in: “The higher the culture the greater is the number of bank accounts, and one can determine the degree of development of a culture and of law and order by the percentage of the population who have bank accounts” (New York Times, May 9, 1920).
By 1962, UNESCO, a specialized agency of the United Nations charged with promoting world peace through stimulating international cooperation in education, the arts, science, and culture, took to the term “functional literacy” to distinguish between autonomous literacy (purposeless and fragmented, decontextualized reading and writing for an examiner audience) and ideological literacy (“using reading and writing to engage in all those activities in which literacy is required to be active in his [sic] group and community,” UNESCO, 1962).
The notion of functional literacy spread rapidly. Hunter and Harmon (1979) published a paper for the Ford Foundation which articulated a definition of literacy that would have sent the slave power of the 19th century into fits: “…the ability to obtain information and to use that information for their own and others’ well-being; the ability to read and write adequately to satisfy the requirements they set for themselves as being important for their own lives; the ability to deal with demands made on them by society; and the ability to solve the problems they face in their daily lives.”
Whether a person is functionally literate for Hunter and Harmon is contextual and best answered with reference to each individual’s lived experiences and view of the world—a worldview as a personal ideology embedded in family, community, and society. It is possible for one’s functional capacity to change if, in the morning, one is trying to decide on a purchase of canned goods in a grocery store by reading the label but, in the afternoon, one is reading a biology text on the concept of the food chain, and, in the evening, one is reading about still life paintings of fruit to satisfy an aesthetic curiosity. Logically, if an adult couldn’t function in a certain area, that adult would have the wherewithal to set about learning to function. How do I process biology texts? What sort of conventions are in play in the textual domain of aesthetic philosophy? Needless to say, this definition did not make its way into government funded test design.
The Final Report of the Adult Performance Level Study (1977), a massive government-funded study to look into “the requirements for adult living” carried out over four years by Nowell Northcutt at the University of Texas, took a definitive ideological stance on literacy as follows:
“The concern of the APL study is much more than the stereotypical notion of literacy. Because the term ‘illiteracy’ popularly connotes a low level of functioning (e.g., the ability to read and write one’s name), which may have nothing to do with functional competence, we have chosen to excise the word from the rest of this exposition” (APL Study, 1977, p. 24, available from the U.S. Office of Education in Washington, DC).
Northcutt contracted with the Opinion Research Corporation to administer a 42 item survey in the homes of 1,500 citizens selected at random between October 7-26, 1974. The survey consisted of multiple choice, ‘open’ questions, and performance tasks and took one hour to complete. The following are example test items and questions:
Writing a personal check
Writing a letter to a U.S. Representative
Addressing an envelope correctly
Writing a note for a child’s absence from school
Underlining an appropriate sentence in a paragraph explaining one’s rights when arrested
Filling out a complaint form
Filling out an income tax return
The Final Report ultimately scored and analyzed the survey findings into five domains of competence judged to be most important for survival in the United States: occupational knowledge, consumer economics, government and law, health, and community resources. Boiled down to its maximum impact, this study has been cited over the years as evidence to support the claim that one in five US citizens is functionally illiterate.
As time passed the APL report itself drew criticism for its impoverished ideological framing of the question of competence. The nuanced, humanistic perspective advocated by Hunter and Harmon (1979) is noticeably missing. This contested nature of the APL report underscores Streets (1993) point: Literacy is always already ideological, always already enmeshed in the community or society organizing its instruction. But the ideology is often hidden, the values, the objectives, buried in parcels of technical learning outcomes. Removing literacy acts from history and carrying on as though the big deal is spelling, fluency, getting the main idea, analyzing a metaphor, etc., elides the human from literacy. Sadly, the domains of competence serving to organize the APL report were immediately transformed into educational objectives that shaped adult education for decades.
Who Owns Language and Literacy?
Ideologies seem to define literacy achievement from the perspective of those in power and then structure tests accordingly which shape learning experiences. In K-12 public schools questions of ownership of literacy work and authority to set purposes are irrelevant for learners. They are answered in advance by the school. Children are socialized into looking to their teacher for proof that they did the right thing, spoke the right word, thought the correct thought.
The following screenshot comes from California’s current second grade common core standards for writing8. As you read them ask yourself first off how well they align with the personal motives children might have for writing. Are there other goals for writing second graders might have than writing their opinion about a book? Whose goals are these? Is the underlying pedagogical ideology of surveillance to achieve compliance with goals set by someone who has power a good thing?
Gee (1996) cited Harvey Graff to discuss Sweden’s being the first country to achieve universal literacy, including equality among men and women, before the end of the eighteenth century.
Sweden earned this distinction despite its people living in grinding poverty and having no formal schools. Imagine achieving universal literacy under such conditions—and not dumbed down reading but reading doing what its authorizing body intended it to do, i. e., impart understanding and wisdom. There was one anomaly: The population was taught to read, but not to write. So give Sweden half credit.
How did this happen? In 1686 Sweden, politically driven by the Reformation and Lutheran Protestantism, passed the Church Law, which mandated that “children, farmhands, and maidservants should ‘learn to read and see with their own eyes what God bids and commands in His Holy Word’” (Gee, 1996, p. 32).
Instruction was carried out in households, supervised by parish clergy with regular, compulsive exams. One wonders what happened to children with auditory processing troubles.
Clearly, personal questions impinging on social motives about why one reads, what one reads, what correct understanding is, what cognitive expectations are in play, how a person might make a text, etc., were left unanswered in Sweden. One acted as an automaton. [See Gee, Chapter 2, 1996, for full discussion.]
Consider some more history that contrasts with Sweden. In 1860 United States, a particular subgroup of the American population excelled in having an exceptionally high levels of literacy.
There were 488,070 members of this subgroup, free American Negroes, according to a Harvard educated historian who published a seminal work on Reconstruction in 1935, W.E.B. du Bois. Only 91, 736 members were unable to read and write—for roughly 80% achievement among the population.
As in Sweden, formal schooling wasn’t in the picture. In 1860 only 32, 629 free Negroes were attending school. In all of the slave states with a combined slave population of 4,000,000, only 3,651 slave children attended a school. A very small minority, 5%, of these millions of slaves were literate.
“The mass of the slaves could have no education. The laws on this point were explicit and severe. There was teaching, here and there, by indulgent masters, or by clandestine Negroe schools, but in the main, the laws were followed. All the slave states had such laws, and after the Nat Turner insurrection in Virginia, these laws were strengthened and more carefully enforced” (Du Bois, 1935, p. 638).
Unjust from the Start
Children from low-socioeconomic homes start school with massive differences in language experience when compared to children from more affluent homes (Bristol Study of Language, 19829; Hart and Risley, 1994; Heath, 1983). Children from homes lacking basic resources hear fewer words, speak fewer words, ask fewer questions, answer fewer questions, and know fewer words than children from stable and adequately resourced homes. Teaching such children to take up a neutral, autonomous literacy with no linkage to their lives is especially unlikely to succeed.
The range of speech acts and performative events available to affluent children fosters learning not just about words and asking and answering questions, not just about the surrounding world. These children build cultural knowledge of language behaviors valued in school, e.g., turn taking, offering information, sustaining joint attention on a unified episode or topic. Experienced children arrive at school enacting valued language behaviors already, and they quickly learn to engage in ever more complex school interactions, using language and, increasingly, literacy. Technical, bland lessons in classrooms become meaningful from prior experience.
As research from the Coleman Report (1965) forward shows, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer with occasional exceptions once the classroom bell rings, signaling the commencement of public schooling in America.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/212956.Language_and_Symbolic_Power
https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Politics/map-anti-critical-race-theory-efforts-reached/story?id=83619715
https://www.chalkbeat.org/22525983/map-critical-race-theory-legislation-teaching-racism?_amp=true
https://www-jstor-org.proxy.lib.csus.edu/stable/pdf/3786842.pdf?refreqid=fastly-default%3A96e7ca53a8c62e3ca13d15834fd0b531&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_phrase_search%2Fcontrol&origin=search-results
https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/about/newnaephistory.aspx
https://prod.nagb.aws.reingoldms.com/naep-results/2018-naep-civics-geography-and-us-history-release.html
http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/W/2/
https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=HV23MTRFMf8C&oi=fnd&pg=PP9&dq=bristol+study+of+language&ots=S757S7F88y&sig=pwiXu9wyP6GO4ZaC2AnvDd03pyA#v=onepage&q=bristol%20study%20of%20language&f=false