This article reviews Margaret Meek Spencer's body of work in relation to the various policies that she critiqued from the Bullock Report in 1974 to the National Literacy Strategy in 2004. She analysed increasingly conservative moves to promote a dominant, elitist version of school literacy. A Critical Realist perspective aligns with Margaret Meek…

An economics-driven discourse about early literacy (Trudell, 2009) in sub-Saharan African settings often includes a list of reasons for poor levels of literacy that remain mired in deficit thinking or a deficiencies model in which the problem lies within the non-literate people themselves. Meanwhile, the established post-colonial educational…

This report chronicles the record of the Reading First program as a research-based approach to teaching children to read, from early successes as a strict program whose funding would be distributed to states and districts using reading curricula whose effectiveness had been validated by scientific study, to one of eased eligibility that permitted…

A recent report by Dr. Randall Ryder evaluated the use of Direct Instruction (DI) reading programs in 2 school districts in Wisconsin. In the report, Ryder claimed that students in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grade who received Direct Instruction scored significantly lower on several standardized tests of reading than students who received more traditional…