ABSTRACT
Public and political pressure for high-stakes assessments linked to rigorous standards in the United States has unfortunately been accompanied in many arenas by a regressive move to conceptualise the construct to be assessed – reading – in a simplistic manner. This conceptualisation is referred to as the ‘Simple View of Reading’, and its re-emergence in educational and research circles in the United States is, in my view, disturbing, perplexing, and – ultimately – dangerous. The ‘Simple View of Reading’ posits that the process of reading involves only two components and that they are additive and linear: (1) decoding and (2) comprehension. This stance is disturbing because it is linked to political moves that appear to be power plays by special interest groups whose special interests do not include marginalised people, but rather those who have long held power and influence. It is perplexing because it represents several giant steps backwards, ignoring research and knowledge that has been accumulated over the past two decades of the ways sociocultural and cognitive factors interact and transact to influence academic success, including reading achievement. It is ultimately dangerous because it is not unlikely that the results of this simplistic view of learning to read, with its current link to high-stakes testing and new standards, will result in the reification – but this time under a ‘scientific’ mantle – of the academic marginalisation of underachievement of those groups of people who since time immemorial have represented the bottom quartile of achievement in our schools. It could very well lock non-mainstream students ever more solidly into categories of achievement that label them as ‘not good enough’, ‘below average’, ‘not proficient’, or whatever the norm-referenced or criterionreferenced term of choice is.
