What I learned then that is still true:

Binaries kill nuance.

Research is never neutral.

Everything is political and cultural.

No singular reading approach will save us from racial capitalism let alone help us build freedom.

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These principles are fairly obvious to anyone who has a grasp of the political economy of education in a racial capitalist society. I have three stories that I hope are of help in all the noise of “scientific reading” now becoming policy, with teacher education programs scrambling to be in compliance with freshly minted state laws.

Story One: Reading happens in specific places and contexts

One of the best and most challenging professional experiences I ever had was working with a young person, an 8^th grader  whose school file had the word ‘illiterate’ in many documents. When I was first paired with Brandon in the university-run reading clinic, I was, frankly, terrified of failing at the task, further harming a person whom school had already harmed. At the time, I was teaching 7^th grade while also taking classes at a university because I had lots of questions about patterns of oppression and exclusion I witnessed but nowhere in my school day or community to talk about them. Even though I immediately opted out of education as an undergraduate major (feminine yet not at all feminist), I returned to education for my master’s degree and teaching credential. Pursuing my reading specialist certification while teaching at a middle school in Las Vegas, I enrolled in the required practicum class in which I would work with one child, a child who was struggling with reading. I knew my comfort zone as a teacher, so I asked my professor to pretty please not pair me with young children. My professor, quite wisely, paired me a person who matched my preference for teaching middle and high school students but whose school records were littered with terms such as “below grade level,” “struggling reader,” “resistant,” and “illiterate.” I imagine that this young person named Brandon also saw these annotations on the faces of his teachers, all of whom had been white women.

Brandon was a quiet Black kid with a knack for truth-telling that so many 13 year-olds have. He was raised in a working poor family who spoke African American Vernacular English (AAVE) as its home language, which also meant that AAVE was the language that held love, laughter, discord, and joy in his home. As revered literacy scholar Geneva Smitherman has taught many generations, if you talk bad about my language, you are talking about my mother. As I’ve been following the science of reading squawking, I have been amazed and disturbed at the absence of what research tells us about place, race, and culture. Notably, resources that support the science of reading list many disciplines, but not sociology, anthropology, or social geography. By pitting whole language vs. phonics-based reading instruction against each others’ throats, “the research” has left behind children at the population level as well as all the ways that we learn by noticing cultural practices, shared ways of being, doing, and acting. In this racial capitalist society, cultural practices are differentially rewarded and criminalized. To work with Brandon, I had to to draw on what the cultural studies of literacy offer: the primacy of place and culture.

The middle school where I worked as a language arts teacher served a population of what has been termed, ‘urbanized.”  The school largely served Black, Latiné and East Asian students. Poor white students were the numerical minorty at this school. 87% of the students qualified for free or reduced meals, which is the blunt proxy that most education policies use for social class. Relatedly, reading grade levels are used as blunt proxies for literacy skills, dispositions, and desires. I was several years into teaching and had learned to take what other teachers had to say about students’ reading levels with a grain of salt. I also had next to zero ‘behavior’ problems with my students mostly because I was more interested in them as human beings than arbitrary rules about chewing gum or timeliness. The principal of the school would often send pre-service teachers to observe my classroom because they, almost all white women, claimed that the ‘behavior’ problems they experienced with students were due to the fact that they were smaller, literally smaller in size, than their students, most of whom were Black, Latiné, and from South East Asia. Can you sound out ‘race evasiveness?’ – the key term for that pattern? With such piqued race evasiveness, how do we expect teachers to treat their students, when they have been racially socialized to fear their students of color? Debates about phonics vs. whole language approaches conveniently provide an exit from being accountable to the ways that linguicism and racism collude and fester in spaces marked by evasion of race.

When I was told, by a standardized assessment, that a student read at the level of year 7, month two, I knew that I still lacked any kind of context to make meaning of this grade level equivalency. What measures were being used? Did these measures exclusively use English? Academic English? English used in middle class homes? English in white, middle class homes where following directions and being surrounded by texts was the norm? Almost always, the answers to those questions are yes, and therein lies the void of the student’s context and an overrepresenatation of standardized tests borne from white patriarchal supremacy. I was and remain passionate about learning and am fascinated every year/semester, at the ways that young(er) people take up invitations to make meaning, critically read texts, and create texts that lift up life and alight our  imaginations. Grade levels pale in comparison to what people create when they are given not just permission but space and resources to create.

In our first session of the practicum reading clinic, I sat down with Brandon, the 8^th grader who was a ‘struggling reader.’ We agreed that neither of us were experts about each other’s worlds and we would try as hard as we could for Brandon to reach his goals and my goals for him. Our goals were a venn diagram, and the strongest overlap was for Brandon to be literate enough to have more agency in his life at school and taken out of his class less frequently to be tested by a developmental psychologist or a social worker. Brandon wrote in his goals, “I don’t want to be embarrassed anymore. I want to be able to help my mom with the papers she has to fill out cuz sometimes she feels bad too.” You might be able to hear, in Brandon’s words, the echo of Peter Freebody and Allan Luke’s now-classic model of capable readers who simultaneously draw on four resources: decoding, meaning making, creating text, and critical reading of texts. One of the first times I heard Allan Luke speak, he said, “you can do the phonics instruction, surround kids with books, and you might succeed in simply making them literate enough to be duped.”

In our weekly sessions, Brandon and I sometimes tussled over choice texts and mandatory texts. I remember the taste of the Jolly Rancher I had just finished chomping on during our snack time, telling then 13-year-old Brandon, “We need to work on your decoding skills with this book so you can read the books and magazines you want to read.” Brandon pushed back, Jolly Rancher still intact in his mouth because he had that kind of patience: “I don’t want to read baby books. I told you that those books embarrass me. You said you would help to stop that.”

I paused. I had abandoned our agreements for a tepid reason: the clinic didn’t have books that both interested Brandon and could strengthen his decoding and meaning making skills. To this day, I am grateful he knew himself so well and trusted me just enough to yank me back to our shared agreements. We solved the problem of relevant text absence fairly easily, but it had the potential of breaking a tenuous trust that Brandon had in me.

The fact is I knew almost nothing first-hand of the embarrassment that Brandon explained to me and that is well documented in sociological studies of k-12 schooling. School was pretty easy for me despite, having been raised by my immigrant mother who did not attend school past the primary years. That was the patriarchal norm in the village where she grew up. “The research” would tell you that my primary caregiver’s low level of prowess in print-based English and not being read to or being surrounded by books put me at risk of falling behind some mythic normal kid who was white and monolingual, created from logics of eugenics. From that genealogy, what “the research” often entirely overlooks is what was missing in Brandon’s school records and mine: context. In school, I followed the directions and did just well enough so that my report cards were full of “Satisfactory” or later in schooling, “A’s.” I was a good enough student who preferred test days because I’d finish quickly and then I could read what I wanted to read. Teachers assumed that I was good at math because of my South Asian surname. Quickly disappointed by their assumptions, they mostly left me alone because I didn’t cause much (visible) trouble. But was I a good learner? Probably not. Schooling tends to reward children and young people who know how to perform being a good student. It has weaker muscles for recognizing genuine learning. In fact, as Carla Shalaby details, when children and young people are curious and want to stay with the thing that has piqued their curiosity, they are often labeled troublemakers because they are reluctant to do a different thing a teacher is telling them to do at that exact moment.

Story Two: the politics of reading curricula and state policies

I completed my Ph.D. in 2001, after a decade of being a full-time language arts teacher.  I wrapped up my dissertation about the ways that discourses about adolescence socialize adults to create material limitations and containment for youth, and decided to turn from the academy to policy.

I took a policy job after completing my Ph.D. program, a decision that most of my professors warned me was “career suicide.” But, since I had never intended to become a professor and simply kept taking classes and because I wanted to learn about how policy was made, I ignored their well-intentioned advice and headed to my state level policy position. I did in fact learn a great deal about the politics of policymaking, along with immersive, everyday lessons in political economy and the fact that everything is political. I was hired by the state of Hawai’i, a potential rube from the ‘mainland’ who was young-looking and undeniably a few decades younger than most other people who had secured leadership roles in the state department of education after working in schools for decades. It was quickly apparent to me that there were players with institutional power who thought I was going to stay in my lane, be thankful for a well-paying job in ‘paradise,’ and toe the company line.

Things got off to a rocky start.

During a visit to O’ahu to look for a place to live, my soon to be boss asked me to visit an elementary school on the North shore. I sat in a first grade classroom, watching and listening to the Native Hawai’ian children, and children of Filipino, Japanese and Chinese ancestries word call or say out loud in unison ‘nonsense’ words, words that do not exist in the English language, while being timed how quickly they could perform this exercise. The logic of this activity was one based in the fact that in order to be print literate, it helps tremendously if you can decode quickly and with automaticity. Being able to sound out words is undoubtedly necessary for print literacy but it is also insufficient. Somewhere, somehow, that undeniable fact took a turn for the worst kind of impulse when it comes to research. When we find a thing we can measure, in this case,  how quickly a child can decode words,  we make it THE measure of being literate.  It is a classic, arrogant mistake that was on full display in that first grade classroom. The teacher, a Filipina  whose family had lived alongside Native Hawai’ians for generations, had been mandated to teach children how to read  by holding a scripted reading book open to the page of the day and a stopwatch in her other hand, voided of the power of teaching relationally and noticing what her students brought into the classroom as literacies. I left disheartened and passionately ready to find traction and company. I found not only company but also cover, which I needed because I also found myself in fights, testifying to the state’s legislature and in front of principals and teachers daily who had genuine questions about how to best serve their communities. On days when I wasn’t in front of principals and politicians, I was able to work in quieter ways, redirecting resources to the people from whom they had been extracted.

Some time after that school visit, I was in a meeting with my boss and the then superintendent of the Hawai’i public school system, in which there was, in policy terms, one LEA, one learning education agency, in everyday terms one state-wide school district, across an archipelago in which each island had its own personality and several kinds of ecosystems. One definition of reading for a ‘paradise,’ that has historically refused wave after wave of colonization. In that context, reading, per state statute, was defined as being able to read 130 words per minute. You make it make sense. Back to the meeting.

My boss and I were going head to head. She said, “but the research says that phonics-based approach is what works, and our children need what works. We can’t waste their time with kumbayah stories and read aloud time.” I argued back: “Which specific research? I can counter with plenty of research that says an approach that prioritizes phonics at the expense of meaning making is imbalanced and you’re cultivating children who would do well on a Pavlovian test of behavior ticks but tank if they were asked to sign a contract that eliminated their right to unionize, let alone their birthright and duty to steward the land.” The superintendent deftly interceded, told us in essence to return our respective corners of the boxing ring and calm down. He told my boss, “we hired her because she is an expert. Let her apply her expertise and let’s see what we can all learn.” He told me, “you’ve been hired in good faith and you have a budget for programming. Get to the work.” Later, this person, a champion of literacy and the power of teacher-led writing projects, would be on the state public channel in hearings that unhoused him from not his expertise but his job and role. He was and is a powerful leader who had respected the mysteries of learning, but this very strengths made him vulnerable in a politicized context where there already existed a political and economic investment in three scripted reading programs for reading instruction.  

A few months after being told to get to the work, I had been able to hire 12 teachers to provide professional development to every single teacher in the state. Our goal was large yet simple: we needed every teacher to realize that everything they assessed was through language, specifically standardized American English. Teachers needed to be able to inform and defend their literacy instruction, and they needed each other as professional learning communities. This team of master teachers left schools and coveted classrooms to work alongside me, out of our shared ethos that if you are not able to professionally address the literacy abilities and needs of learners in specific contexts, someone or some company will come into your classroom, take away your professional vantage point, and mandate a contextually vacuous, teacher-proof curriculum.

With a team in place, empowered to work on strengthening literacy assessment and practices with the relationships they had with the other teachers and families where lives, I attended to things that state-level policy makers often must do, including showing up when a state senator requests and attending federal programming about literacy. I attended a national gathering of state reading specialists. The meeting, termed a summit, took place in three large ballrooms of a hotel. The summit started with a slide that had the U.S. flag with the caption, “When our children cannot read….” Put simply, the (in)ability to read was putting the entire nation at risk. Thank goodness I could hear the words of the legendary Native Hawai’ian leader Haunani-Kay Trask in my head that day. I heard her words from a famous speech, proclaiming into a microphone, “We are not American! We are not American! We are not American! We are not American! Say it in your heart and when you sleep. We will die as Hawai’ians!.” I was also reminded, in that ballroom, of my high school where I walked under banners that read “A Nation At Risk,” because then President Ronald Reagan was using what he learned as the governor of California: policies that taxed and ranked schools and campuses offered an in-road for surveillance, both creating and containing criminality. The timeline of federal involvement in reading bears weight in contextualizing that gathering of state-level policymakers. Only a few years earlier, the Clinton administration had introduced “America Reads,” inviting literally anyone who so desired to volunteer to read aloud to children in schools. It sounded benign, but it allowed for federal government intervention in local districts, a largely unprecedented presence. From that policy in which no expertise or training was needed, to the gathering of policymakers being told what counted as reading competency and provided three choices of scripted reading programs, reading had been firmly claimed as an area of federal oversight and ripe for corporate takeover.

At that meeting in the U.S. capitol, the image with the U.S. flags, the words in that meeting…it was all a little too familiar. Nationalistic, baseless fears, and tightly scripted presentations that provide little opportunity for the group of education leaders to make sense of information together and share from our regions. Instead, we were told the definition of literacy, were told about “the scientific research of the National Reading Panel’s report” but were not told details of the research methodologies. In the one and only time during the summit when people were asked to share at the tables, the task was to name which one of the three qualified scripted reading programs we intended to use in our state. No nuance, little context, but unmistakable political economy.

I also know a few things about what makes speech public and what makes it private, even when it is in a ballroom in a hotel, so I took copious notes. I used verbatim quotations in a critical policy analysis of this reading policy that I wrote and submitted to one of the top peer-reviewed literacy journals. I received, to this day, three of the most detailed and glowing peer reviews I’ve ever received. I had left Hawai’I and was working at the University of Queensland when I received an email from the journal’s editors informing me that the journal and its professional association were being threatened with a lawsuit by representatives from the U.S. department of education. I asked how the yet-to-be-published article had been shared with that government department. I asked who exactly was threatening a libel lawsuit. I told the editors that I was ‘courtroom confident’ about my notes. ‘Let the lawsuit be filed,’ I signed off. The emails quieted, and when the article was published, someone or someones put ‘Viewpoints” at the top of the article. Although I understood the strategy that attempted to lower the piece from research to one person’s viewpoint, I also knew that all research is perspectival. Again, lessons about political economy were all around me. So were lessons in intimidation and capitulating to seated power.

Some months after that big hotel ballroom meeting, I publicly debated a person who was born and raised in Hawai’I who also had deep financial ties to one of three reading scripted programs that all the state reading directors/specialists were told they needed to choose. The debate went well according to the fiction that there are two sides to every story. We differed on key points of what was best for children, especially Native Hawai’ian children in the face of multiple forms of extraction. We agreed about almost nothing. And the people who attended the debate got to hear the details where we differed on colonization (is it in the past or not), what makes for a literate child (the ability to read 130 words per minute or something a bit bigger, more critical, and imaginative), do we learn to read and then read to learn (a worn out sequencing that that has also surged these past months) and many more binaries. We differed on every single point, in essence embodying a binary. And there was nuance in our disagreement. This person claimed his self-described bankrupt education in Hawai’I’s public school as a condition that he sought to correct. It is a common tactic usually used by corporations, including universities, to prop up a singular case of success as motivation and as a symbol of achievement that pays it forward. More implicitly,  it is a distraction from the mechanisms that stratify societies along lines of race, class, gender, sexual identity, and ability. A political education teaches us that exceptions to the rule, in this case of colonized education, actually make the rule stronger because of their narrative appeal. I shared literacy aspects in which I was raised, and I asked what portion of the sales he was earning from the scripted reading program that bore his and other names. The debate ended rather abruptly at the point. My point at the time of the debate was to follow the money. I still maintain that point, but life experience and lessons from others have also taught me that how we narrate holds tremendous power.. As alexis pauline gumbs puts it so elegantly in undrowned, “the impact of what is said outlives what is learned by saying it.”  I learned precious little by playing the part of one half of a binary, but I continue to learn about the impacts of binaries.

I stirred some things up in Hawai’i. Most importantly, I was taken in, held, by communities of Native Hawai’ians, multi-generational kama ‘aina who told me that I was there to take care of their keiki while they were in school. This is one of the first and most impactful lessons I learned about how my work only held meaning through relation. I was from the mainland, but not so American to not listen and notice when generational knowledge, when stewards of the lands, water, and skies since time immemorial taught me how to be in relation for however long or short my connection to Hawai’I might be. They didn’t have to use many words. They also taught me simply by inviting me into some stories. I quieted. I listened. I was answerable to them, their ancestors, and the children yet to come. I still am.

Those lessons informed most every decision I made as a policymaker and researcher. I know, not always, and never perfectly, to listen when invited into sacred spaces and stories. I know that sometimes my role is to disturb, debate, and protest. In Hawai’i, it was precisely because I was an outsider in the steep, hierarchical culture of the state bureaucracy that my role was to rebuke publicly and loudly the compromised quality of education that served the profit margins of large publishing houses but did precious little for the children of Hawai’i. As an outsider who was a guest on those lands, my role was rattle and call out that political economy, while building community and relation quietly outside of large meetings. And my role was also to leave and not overstay my specific role in a culture where context and long-standing relations were central.

Story Three: Binaries, timeliness and what gets lost in the fight for the right “research”

Throughout all of these debates about the science of reading and the cacophony of debating within the narrow confines of binaries, it’s easy to lose track of what history and many people who would be considered print illiterate have to teach us about experience, memory, and how knowledge is stewarded.

When I was young, my mother taught me much by how she moved not just in the world, but in the United States where she was judged quickly for her South Asian accented English. As I mentioned earlier, she did not attend formal schooling past elementary years, largely by patriarchal design. I was a good enough student in school to offset a white gaze that saw me as an eternal foreigner, but was I learner? Definitely not compared to my mother. Anytime new neighbors moved into a house nearby, my mother would make pineapple upside down cake and take it to them. Because she had paid attention to this strange, new place and its ways and she had grown up in a culture where food and community were inseparable, she knew to bake something and share it with newcomers. My mother is, to this day, timid and self-conscious when writing something in English. How could she not be, when according to the science of reading, she is expected to sound out the word, “neighbor.” She spells everything phonetically, and it makes perfect sense to me. I often tell her, that is how that word should be spelled. but she would, without a doubt, be labeled by most teachers and reading specialists as a poor reader, maybe even illiterate. She would not be as likely to be called remedial, behind, or at-risk. Those markers predominate in formal schooling and its obsession with timeliness.

Having worked with adolescents and their teachers, timeliness and how it is racialized was a phenomenon I noticed frequently as a teacher and continue to notice. Behind, ahead, at-risk…all of these are based on an ableist timeline whose strength lies in it being repeated over and over again. During my time in Hawai’i, reading 130 words out loud per minute was fundamentally about time and age and a bureaucracy whose employees feared being ranked lower, being behind other states. More recently, the state of Georgia has implemented a multi-tiered system that mandates reading instruction from birth through year five in school, relying heavily on oral reading of print materials. Comprehension is assessed in later grades. This is similar to many states, such as New Mexico, that are using the terminology of “structured literacy,” yet read closely, align with Georgia’s laws that use one measure, the rate of oral decoding, as proxy for being literate. Again, the phrase ‘necessary but insufficient’ is crucial in tracking the codification of a binary-driven debate. As Cheryl Harris details in her exhaustive legal analysis, whiteness as property, whiteness itself is codified in many ways in the law, often in contradictor ways, but always in the interest of maintaining white supremacy. The science of reading is tightly tied to profit, property, and therefore whiteness.

Not all literacy is print. And despite the fact that 3^rd grade literacy levels have long been used to drive the calculated construction of prisons, there is myriad evidence of the ways that oral literacies and their accompanying histories have been systematically eroded over time through colonization, but not at all lost. In 2023, several in-depth articles have dispelled the settler mythology that Native peoples of Turtle Island came to be in relation with horses by way of Spanish colonialism. A more nuanced and accurate history of humans and horses needs lessons that come from Indigenous oral traditions.

We have many examples of the magic of literacy and the beauty of nuance. One of my favorite examples comes from the brilliant Haitian writer, Edwidge Danticat, from an interview that focused on her craft as a writer.  The reporter asked Danticat: “what was your favorite book growing up?” A consistent champion of the need for more stories rather than a singular ‘right’ one, Danticat replied “I didn’t own books as a child. Actually we had only one non-school book in the home. Instead, I was told wonderful stories by my aunts and grandmonthers.” Danticat’s grace took a question that is sourced from the large body of research that emphasizes the need to surround children with books and various types of text and reframed the question. It is true that children benefit from being surrounded by books, but Danticat’s delicate reframing draws our attention to story and provides an answer about how she came to love the art of storytelling. Danticat is a writer who can pen stories of deep violence and do it with poetry that somehow always uplifts humanity. She is a master of nuance.

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Those are my three stories. For me, they are incomplete without a love letter in this struggle over and for literacy. I take seriously Robin D. G. Kelley’s words that study, struggle, and love are intertwined necessarily when we are trying to make the world a better place, a place of and for freedom. We should pursue and study literacy, not to have definitive power over it but to steward it as best as we can, with humility and abundant love.

We should ask questions that no single discipline can answer, including the study of literacy and how and why people use forms of literacy in the pursuit of becoming free. Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe details that ways that semi-literate Black sharecroppers, laborers, housewives, youth, and a few radical white people came together to study communism in the sharply racist context of Mississippi in the early 20^th century. The pursuit of freedom is intertwined with literacy and apparent in many social movements, in which internal political education and study are essential to struggle. In many ways, the most organic place for learning is in struggle. By contrast, the perseveration on print literacy and the measure of its timeliness predictably leads to small, loveless questions of compliance and threadbare experiences for children and young people while large publishing corporations’ profits climb.  What actually happens in the political contexts and processes of becoming literate is the stuff of magic. Being literate is nuanced. It defies grade/month timelines, and it will knock our best teachers off their feet because the best teachers are also students who learn richly by the students who trust them to be more interested in learning than being the expert.

Binaries kill nuance. That is the work of binaries. It creates us vs. them, right vs. wrong, and it does so in order to claim absolute knowledge for the purposes of domination and copyright/property rights. Every time I read of legislation that tries to make teachers into cops, that tells children that one cannot be human and trans at the same time, that places control over others’ bodies in the hands of a largely white, male, and old set of politicians, my heart sinks. But then I visit a library, and I am whisked back to my childhood, when my other would take me and sister to the public library every Saturday. Because books written in English are not her favorite things and because she loved us, she would wait patiently while we dithered over which books to leave at the library, respecting the loan limits. When I walk past or into a library, I am reminded not only of what is at stake for the public but how it already exists, how we must protect it and create more public spaces where literacy is simply allowed to be, to exist and be loved, and spread like dandelions.

As a literacy expert who can also ‘read’ the fascism in laws written by a select few to define life itself for others for the purpose of domination, my definition of reading has to match my ethics, Because I demand nothing less than truth-telling and transparency in this racial capitalist society, I have to put my cards on the table, what I’m willing to go broke for when it comes to literacy, what I love about reading and how reading loves us back…

I want children to be fluent readers who can decode and much, much more. I want them to have rich, literate lives that embolden them to write themselves into the world and write over and overrule, every ableist marker of late, behind, at-risk, and precocious that has made school places of surveillance, tracking, and containment. I want children and young people to be critically literate, poetic in their dreams for themselves, and to know that what they learn and practice today is deeply tied to what futures will come to be. I want children and young people to laugh in the face of narrow definitions of literacy because they know that their stories and futures are bigger and that bigness of love overshadows any single measure of decoding. I want our children, which is to say all children, to be literate in the language of seeking freedom for people and beings they’ll never meet but whose fates are intertwined with theirs. No measure of decoding speaks to intertwined fates, but we can refuse such stingy and feckless thuggery dressed tackily as policy. To paraphrase the marching orders my former superintendent gifted me almost twenty years ago: stop the bickering and return to the love of the work.

My deep appreciation for Drs. Renata Love Jones and Carla Shalaby for encouraging me to write generally and to write this essay specifically. I am indebted to Dr. Patrick Proctor for a friendship and intellect that were crucial in penning these words.

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