Reading the Naked Truth: Literacy, Legislation, and Lies

by Gerald Coles

With all the talk and print about "scientifically based" reading research, what educational reformers have concealed is that these "findings" are scandalously flawed! Legislation mandating authoritarian and harmful prepackaged reading instruction does nothing but serve corporate interests and political agendas with little regard paid to actually improving reading skills. As he connotes in the title of this urgent expose, Gerald Coles uncovers what's absent from all the claims with which teachers and the public have been assailed. He offers a scathing indictment of the National Reading Panel's "research" and other attempts to undermine reading education and the educators equipped to do it best. Strong on slogans-"Reading First," "No Child Left Behind"-but falling far short on science, education legislation disguises itself in a cunning apolitical-research-as-final-arbiter stratagem. And this has only been fortified by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development whose own studies, as Coles proved in Misreading Reading , are rife with deficiencies in design and reasoning. Coles analyzes in detail the language of the National Reading Panel Report, provides counterarguments to its claims, and investigates significant questions it has Without Coles' thorough critique of this "scientific" foundation for reading legislation, the media will continue to portray the NRP Report as gospel; the public-particularly teachers, policy-makers, and parents-will have inadequate information for making informed instructional decisions; and federal, state, and local advocates of beginning reading instruction with a skills emphasis will have little opposition in achieving their objectives.

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 13, 2003

Reviews

[Karime · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author details and backs up with evidence thanks to the Transparency Act the missinformation being spread by panels and boards put together (apparently by a lack of teachers and experts in literacy but many PhD's instead, all guided by a physicist) to give us legislation like No Child Left Behind.

This is a good book to read for research on how legislation can be informed by only one kind of scientific research (in this case, only quantitative), it advocates only one kind of reading skill like phonics and one kind of teaching: one where the teacher relies heavily on scripted teaching from books and programs instead of relying on the teacher's own professional praxis.
It offers several studies used for the NRP's Report and the manipulation of each of their results to support their claim.