Big Brother and the National Reading Curriculum

Reading researcher Richard Allington tracks and questions the thirty-year campaign that has focused on testing, accountability, and federalization of education. He and other educators, including Jim Cunningham, Michael Pressley, Elaine Garan, and Patrick Shannon, have contributed articles that provide an overview of past and recent federal education policies, including the National Reading Panel Report and associated legislation and policy making, with analyses of the premises of the new national reading plan. By showing how these premises are manufactured -- that is, not reliably supported by the research -- they explain why this plan is an unwarranted federal encroachment into local educational decision making. Allington's closing argument calls for a shift away from federal education policies that the record shows are proven failures. He warns that the ideological push we are experiencing today for a national reading curriculum is just the tip of the iceberg. This, he contends, is the sort of top-down management that is undermining the very strengths of our public education system.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.