Policy Hangover

So I did the mayor's literacy summit. It's taken me a few days to figure out what I wanted to say about the whole experience. Overall I think I did okay. Twice I've run into people in the "street" who were there and who wanted to talk about what I said. Actually, both of them wanted to know on what I base my claim that there is no evidence that offers causal links between illiteracy and criminality (!), but more on that in a minute.

Being able to talk to policy-makers is something I've have been struggling with for a long time. I have wondered why policy makers typically do not ask folks like me to give input on their policy plans. Instead, they use “numbers” that use “folk” knowledge about literacy and how to understand it that ignores what research has told us for more that 25 years. My colleagues in policy point out that administrators, politicians, and news people don’t know what to do with qualitative research like mine or with the kinds of texts I typically produce. Cynically, I think they just don't want to believe that their long held ideas about superiority of the white middle class as the norm might need to be rethought, let alone eliminated.

Back to the summit...originally, no one on the committee had thought to ask a literacy researcher let alone me, but one of my colleagues pushed the issue. I was the only literacy researcher represented at all. The other panelists were institute directors or program directors who do not do literacy research, but rather analyze large databases to determine trends. I was shocked to hear two long-discredited arguments put forward without the blink of an eye [my eyes were wide open in astonishment]: 1) that illiteracy is a cause of criminality; and, 2) that African American parents do not talk to their children and they have to be taught how to do so. Not only were these assumptions taken as commonplace, in spite of my explicit naming of the fallacy of these points, but also NCLB and the resulting Reading First mandates were not of concern at all. It felt as though 30 years of research and practice had not happened. There were no teachers in the room either.

I kept my mouth shut for the most part in hopes that I would have a second opportunity to talk to the mayor and his committee about how to understand literacy and how to think about making citywide policy. We'll see. So far, my phone hasn't rung.