How Education Policy Shapes Literacy Instruction: Understanding the Persistent Problems of Policy and Practice

Abstract

Reading instruction is the most legislated area of education and the most frequently referenced metric for measuring educational progress. This book traces the trajectories of policy issues with direct implications for literacy teaching, learning, and research in order to illustrate the dynamic relationships between policy, research, and practice as they relate to perennial issues such as: retention in grade, remediation, intervention, instruction for English learners, early literacy instruction, coaching, and leadership. Using policy documents and peer-reviewed articles published from the 1960s to the present, the editor and authors illustrate how issues were framed, what was at stake, and how policy solutions to persistent questions have been understood over time. In doing so, the book link a generation of scholars with research that illustrates trajectories of development for ideas, strategies, and solutions.