ABSTRACT
The century-long quest for certainty in school outcomes promises personal and social benefits. If governments could make the outcomes of public education more predictable through the manipulation and control of instructional inputs, individuals would be able to educate themselves continuously in order to meet the changing and increasing skill demands of fluid global economies. A predictably schooled workforce would enable businesses to enter labor into the calculus of their current plans with confidence of increased productivity and profits. Without this predictability, many individuals fail to keep pace with rising skill levels of employees in other countries and national economies struggle. Or so the modern economic narrative is told (Chang, 2010). In order to act on this quest, government officials have turned to scientific findings
and business practices to determine the one best method to teach all subjects. Somewhat ironically, these acts seem to curtail teachers’ and students’ development, positioning teachers as one element within the method and students as consumers of information. After a century of trying, the results have been disappointing at best and apparently detrimental to both business and individuals in general. Yet to date, attempts to move beyond this quest and the social forces that make the quest seem right and appropriate have proven to be elusive (Shannon, 2007). All nations seeking to participate in the global economy embrace this quest to some
degree. Consider the increasing popularity of audit culture within public institutions around the world in which performance indicators and calculation replace human judgment in the evaluations of practices and benefits (Caulkins, 2002; Shore, 2008; Trnavcevic & Logaj, 2008). The contributors to the Review of Research in Education (Kelly, Luke & Green, 2008) summarize recent research developments and compare
them to the narrowing of curriculum and increases in testing across all subjects and borders. In more pointed discussions, the contributors to Neoliberalism and Education Reform (Ross & Gibson, 2007) name the instrumentalism of the quests directly and call for alternatives. In what follows, I limit my remarks to reading education in the United States
because it provides a detailed record of this quest for certainty across nine decades. I describe the development of scientific, business, and government discourses within the reading instruction field and discuss how they became the normal ways of thinking about teaching reading, rendering alternatives as quaint, odd, or injurious. This American example corresponds to current policies and reactions in other English speaking countries as well (e.g., Soler & Openshaw, 2007; Goouch & Lambirth, 2008; Stockard, 2010). Renewed emphasis on decoding, explicit instruction, specified curricula, and testing cut across borders and educational systems. Across the 20th century, American educational scientists, commercial publishers,
and government officials worked in order to develop a system of instruction that would teach all students to read. Using reliable, replicable, and objective methods, scientists sought to identify, measure, and then order the behavioral and cognitive variables of reading and compared instructional methods in order to isolate the one most effective in inducing children to read. Publishers translated those scientific findings into technologies (teachers’ manuals, elaborate anthologies and practices, and tests) for teachers to follow in order to produce predictable outcomes. The state and federal officials enacted policies to ensure that those scientific technologies were available to all and that the teachers use them. According to federally funded reports throughout the century, all three groups performed well, and we now have consensus on what reading is and how to teach it (Horn, 1919; Austin & Morrison, 1963; National Reading Panel [NRP] Report, 2000). Elaborate and detailed technologies are used in over 95% of elementary classrooms (Barton & Wilder, 1964; Smith, 1934/2002; Brownstein & Hicks, 2005), and the federal government now insists that these technologies be employed in order to qualify for federal funding (Manzo, 2005). Yet, reading achievement lags well below expected levels, particularly for targeted populations, and business continues to worry about the literacy levels of current and prospective managers and workers (Gray, 1919; Chall, 1965; Berliner, 2006).
