Losing Our Language: How Multicultural Classroom Instruction Is Undermining Our Children's Ability to Read, Write, and Reason - Hardcover

Stotsky, Sandra

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684849615 ISBN 13: 9780684849614

Publisher: Free Press, 1999

Synopsis

American students' reading and writing scores are steadily declining, and the increasing achievement gap between minority and other students is particularly alarming. The latest studies show that 43% of our children test below grade level. Educators, politicians, and parents all blame class size, crumbling schools, and inconsistent standards for this unfortunate trend. Although these are legitimate concerns, the real problem, argues leading educator Sandra Stotsky, is much more basic -- and disturbing -- than we might expect. Traditionally, basal readers, the primary tool for teaching reading in elementary schools, have been the single most important key to academic performance. Yet today, the incorporation of a multicultural agenda into the content of these readers has had tragic consequence for our children's ability to read. Classics of literature have been replaced with simplistic tales that fail to develop our children's ability to read, write, or think. Losing Our Language reveals what the once benign, now politically correct ideology of multiculturalism has come to mean for elementary school reading curriculums in the 1990s. In this insightful book, Dr. Stotsky details the changes that have been made over the past decade in cultural content and teaching strategies used for reading instruction in elementary schools. She asserts that under the guise of an overzealous, culturally diverse agenda, intellectual and literary goals are rapidly being displaced by social and political goals and by the demands of a profoundly moralizing pedagogy. Losing Our Language discusses how, in an effort to incorporate more ethnically varied readings into children's textbooks and to raise minority students' "self-esteem," basal readers have systematically been "dumbed down"; what's more, as the readers have become grammatically more simple and simpleminded, there has been a downward trend in children's analytical powers, general knowledge, and overall literacy. Whereas elementary readers of the 19th century featured excerpts of classic novels such as Black Beauty and Robinson Crusoe, replete with complex vocabulary and sentence structure, today's basal readers present students with ethnic stories studded with aforeign (and, for the purposes of an English vocabulary-building curriculum, impractical) vocabulary. Dr. Stotsky offers overwhelming evidence that today's version of multiculturalism is needlessly limiting the academic achievement of the very children for whom most of these changes were initiated. She recommends that education's aim should be to teach children to read from the best literature available -- and not from the most ethnically diverse sections we can find. This cutting-edge book features interviews with a variety of teachers, in-depth analysis of reading textbooks of the past thirty years (including eye-opening examples from the readers themselves), and a hard-hitting examination of the pressures placed on educational publishers. Today's version of cultural diversity and the development of the basic reading skills children need for academic success are unfortunately and undeniably incompatible. However, in Losing Our Language, Sandra Stotsky offers real hope to parents and educators seeking to regain literacy for our country's children. She gives us a much-needed reminder that ultimately, reading teaches us how to think -- regardless of whether we are rich or poor, black or white.

About this title

About the Author:

Sandra Stotsky, Ed.D., is Research Associate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and director of two Harvard summer institutes on civic education. She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter One: THE CULTIVATION OF MULTICULTURAL ILLITERACY

Captain had been broken in and trained for an army horse; his first owner was an officer of cavalry going out to the Crimean War. He said he quite enjoyed the training with all the other horses, trotting together, turning together to the right hand or the left, halting at the word of command, or dashing forward at full speed at the sound of the trumpet or signal of the officer.

He was, when young, a dark, dappled, iron gray, and considered very handsome. His master, a young, high-spirited gentleman, was very fond of him, and treated him from the first with the greatest care and kindness.

He told me he thought the life of an army horse was very pleasant; but when it came to being sent abroad over the sea in a great ship he almost changed his mind.

"That part of it," said he, "was dreadful! Of course we could not walk off the land into the ship; so they were obliged to put strong straps under our bodies, and then we were lifted off our legs, in spite of our struggles, and were swung through the air over the water to the deck of the great vessel.

-- From Black Beauty by Anna Sewell, in Classic American Readers, Selections from Famous Writers, in third- and fourth-grade readers 100 years ago

I decided, after my first voyage, to spend the rest of my days at Bagdad. But it was not long before I tired of a lazy life, and I put to sea a second time, in the company of other merchants. We boarded a good ship and set sail. We traded from island to island, exchanging goods. One day we landed on an island covered with several kinds of fruit trees, but we could see neither man nor animal. We walked in the meadows, along the streams that watered them. While some of our party amused themselves with gathering flowers and fruits, I took my provisions and sat down near a stream between two high trees which made a thick shade. I ate a good meal and afterwards fell asleep. I cannot tell how long I slept, but when I awoke the ship was gone!

-- From "Sinbad's Second Voyage," adapted from Stories from the Arabian Nights, edited by Samuel Eliot, in the 1953, 1957, and 1962 Houghton Mifflin grade 6 reader

Half a mile beyond Hilltop Baptist church, Queenie turned off the main road onto a wagon trail. It had originally been a sawmill road, but that was a long time ago. Now it was a rutted path. It led through the swampy low ground that Queenie called "the deep woods" and onto the open land of Elgin Corry's farm.

Elgin's family was one of the few in the county to dwell in a brick home. It wasn't big, but it was brick all the same, and snug and clean and cozy-looking. Elgin had built it himself. Besides farming, he hired himself out to local builders when his crops were laid by -- whenever jobs were available. A few years back, before times turned so bad, he had bought bricks after a bumper farm crop and had encased his wooden-frame home. The house always reminded Queenie of the story of the three little pigs. It looked to her like one out of a picture book, the way it fitted onto a small rise with shade trees in front and the barnyard in back and cropland off to each side and a pasture in the distance. The whole place had a steadfast look, but most especially the brickhouse, and Queenie imagined that a wolf could huff and puff forever and not blow it down.

-- From Queenie Peavy by Robert Burch, in the 1979 Harcourt Brace Jovanovich grade 6 reader

Tahcawin had packed the parfleche cases with clothing and food and strapped them to a travois made of two trailing poles with a skin net stretched between them. Another travois lay on the ground ready for the new tipi.

Chano was very happy when Tasinagi suggested the three of them ride up to their favorite hills for the last time.

As the three of them rode along, Tasinagi called Chano's attention to the two large birds circling overhead. They were Warjbli, the eagle. Chano knew they were sacred to his people and that they must never be killed.

He looked at the eagle feather in his father's hair, a sign of bravery, and wondered why it was that the Lakotas as well as many other Indians held Warjbli, the eagle, in such great respect. Someday he would ask his father about this.

-- From "Tonweya and the Eagles" by Rosebud Yellow Robe, in the 1996 Houghton Mifflin grade 6 reader

Many Americans whose memories of public school date back to the 1950s or 1960s indulge in an unfounded nostalgia. They seem to be under the impression that these were halcyon years in public education. To them, the low academic expectations for what children are asked to read today is a recent phenomenon -- a couple of decades old at most. Instead, they need to take a close look at what children were expected to read in the primary grades one hundred years ago and compare that with what they themselves were expected to read and with what children are expected to read today. If they did, they would discover that the language base needed for understanding mature academic and literary texts began to erode before midcentury. The decline in the difficulty level of the selections used to teach children how to read has not been a steady one over the course of this century. But there is no mistaking the direction of the movement. What is unclear is how much lower academic expectations can fall without significant breakdowns in thinking and communication at higher levels of education, in the workforce, and in public life.

The passages in the epigraphs help us see some of these changes in academic expectations. In the passage from Black Beauty, used in third- and fourth-grade readers one hundred years ago, we find a vocabulary level, complexity of sentence structure, and level of paragraph development that are challenging yet appropriate for nine and ten year olds who have received adequate preparation for school and sufficient primary-grade reading instruction.

The second passage, from an adapted version of "Sinbad's Second Voyage," is in a midcentury reader in one of the best-selling K-6 reading series in the country. As an adaptation, it has an easier vocabulary and less complex sentence structure than the original version. Its vocabulary level and complexity of sentence structure are considerably lower in difficulty than Black Beauty, even though the selection appears in a grade 6 reader. To show even more clearly the decline in the reading demands of the instructional readers by midcentury, here is the same passage in an unadapted version from The Arabian Nights:

"After my first voyage, of which I told you yesterday," Sinbad began, "I planned to spend the rest of my days in Bagdad. But I soon grew weary of doing nothing. So I bought goods for a voyage, and gathered together a company of merchants upon whom I could depend.

"From island to island we sailed, trading with great profit. One day we landed on an island fair to see, but apparently uninhabited by man or beast. We wandered about, each at his own pleasure, some here and some there. I ate my noon meal, and lay down in the shade to sleep. But when I awoke, alas, the ship was gone! I ran down to the shore. Her sail was just disappearing over the horizon.

"I was ready to die of grief. I tore my beard, threw dust upon my head, and lay down upon the ground in despair. Why had I not been content to stay at home, with the riches already acquired? Now it was too late."

The differences in language between the adapted and unadapted versions of this tale, as well as between the adapted version and the excerpt from Black Beauty, suggest what had happened to the level of elementary reading instruction in over four decades of decline in reading difficulty, from the 1920s to the mid-1960s.

The third passage is from a grade 6 literary reader in one

About this edition

• Publisher: Free Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0684849615
• ISBN 13: 9780684849614
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336