The Power of Reading to Reach Young Lives


Jason L. Sperber
Novice Teacher, Social Studies

As the battle over how best to teach our children to read rages on between academics, politicians, and pundits on either side of the ‹whole language vs. phonics divide,Š my colleagues and I in the trenches of Los Angeles‰ urban public schools struggle daily to counterbalance the effects of that policy battle‰s fallout in a world of obstacles erected and maintained by systems of economic inequality, racism, and language discrimination. We know, as do our students, that the ability to master the written word, and the world it describes, is one of the keys to taking control of one‰s life in a system seemingly designed to keep some silent and invisible while giving others the sole right to speak. But in a ‹back-to-basicsŠ world in which Open Court is king and the extreme form of whole-language instruction has been replaced wholesale with the extreme version of phonics-based reading instruction, and in a world in which Scantron bubbles on standardized tests are thought to be the only arbiters of truth and achievement, all of us on the frontlines of this fightÖstudents, parents, teachers and community membersÖneed to take a step back and remember what we‰re fighting for.

In the hands of angry pundits and anxious politicians, reading has come to mean only the mechanics of decoding. In the backlash against what is now seen as whole language‰s touchy-feely failure, subtleties like context, meaning, and real-life connections, engagement, and uses of reading have been sent out the classroom door. My colleagues, especially on the elementary and middle school levels, tell me of well-meaning administrators and teachers who say that now all teachers, regardless of training or subject, must become reading teachers in order to get test scores up. While the sentiment may be admirable, the motivation and methods behind it most often requiring teachers of all subjects to ‹teachŠ a scripted, prescribed, phonics-only curriculum miss the boat entirely.

As a high school social studies teacher in an LA public school attended primarily by students of color, I want my students to be able to read. Correctly and fluently decoding unfamiliar words is barely the beginning of what that means in my classroom. Reading means engaging in a dialogue with a variety of texts, including materials which might not traditionally be considered texts. My students are learning to read their lives and their worlds as well as manipulate the words used to describe them. Reading is not a passive, or apolitical, activity. Out of context, reading can be depoliticized and simplified, portrayed as the mere mechanical manipulations of letters and phonemes and morphemes and syllables into pronouncible, replicable, understandable and standardized units of meaning. But taken out of the confines of the traditional English or language arts curriculum, removed from the restrictions of Open Court-style phonics programs, and placed in the context of subject-area knowledge and disciplinary uses across the curriculum, we can restore the power and meaning to reading. By teaching reading across the curriculum, and by giving students the tools they need to analyze and manipulate meaning in a variety of disciplinary contexts, we avoid the false dichotomies of the current reading debate and give our students their best chance at changingÖat rereading and rewritingÖtheir lives, their futures, and their worlds, for the better.