Making Reasonable Reading Policy Comprehensible to Future Allies

• In Event: How Reading Researchers Can Collaborate Beyond the Academy to Promote the Common Good: The Case of the Curious Dyslexia Debate

Abstract

As a director of a university-based statewide literacy professional development center, I have worked closely with state legislators advising on literacy related legislation, including efforts to forestall or defang dyslexia legislation. I have also worked with our department of education and school district leadership to advance more effective approaches to literacy instruction in the schools and beyond. I had no previous expertise or interest in literacy education policy prior to this position as my research concerned educational neuroscience on reading and the theoretical framing informing turf wars, but by trial and happy happenstance I learned how to effectively maintain and increase our center’s governmental support within a landscape of ever-shrinking state education budgets.

In the course of this experience, I became increasingly frustrated by my institutional colleagues near obtuse disregard for the direction state-level policy was taking and their seeming unwillingness to communicate with stakeholders outside the academy. But I found colleagues at national and international literacy education conferences with similar concerns as my own attempting to make a difference by sharing their research and expertise with a broader and more general audience on behalf of improved reading development for students.

To communicate to a broader general audience, including, say, heartland conservative legislators, wary parents, officious administrators, under-informed journalists, ideologically driven business people, and concerned citizens from all ranks, it is necessary to drop the exclusionary conventions typically employed within academic discourse, and instead learn a few new literacy tricks for effective communication. In my presentation I will briefly note a few pointers with illustrative examples including:

• Stick to your presumed expertise. Center your message around improving children’s reading achievement (but do not refrain from bringing up financial feasibility of policies; legislators are sensitive to that and it can often be an accessory to cool their ardor for new silver bullet solutions)

• Provide a positive, graspable causal narrative about how reading works, and what is going on when it doesn’t. (And keep it simple, smarty-pants.)

• Do not waste time refuting incorrect claims by your antagonists in detail; you’ll repeat and thereby reinforce them. Instead, offer quick praise for what they get right, but then pivot to the indispensable value of what they omit or ignore

• Scale your message agentively so that legislators, parents, and other concerned parties benefit from substantive take-aways on which to act; give them something useful to do or strive for

• Make your message compassionately reasonable, acknowledging the fallibility of human effort and institutions; yet remind all that lack of perfection should never be the enemy of the good, and to avoid all or nothing reasoning.

Author

• George G. Hruby, University of Kentucky