Making literacy policy and practice with a difference.

Luke, Allan

Policy matters

My talk today is about educational policy and, more specifically, literacy in education policy in Queensland and Australia. Typically, in educational taxonomies and cycles of research and development we get to policy last, as the 'application' or the consequence of something we know or have learned interpretively or empirically. For many educators policy is treated as a necessary evil but not something that anybody would ever profess doing. Everybody loves to hate policy and nobody really wants to do it, but everybody loves to hate you when you're doing policy.

But policy matters--and what policy enables and disenables is crucial to our work as teachers and administrators, teacher educators and researchers. The time that I spent working for the Queensland Government in 1999-2000 gave me a better understanding of what it is that people try to do when they make policy. To take a metaphor from the literature on globalisation, policy is about constructing and regulating, critiquing and engaging the flows of fiscal and material resources, flows of human bodies, and flows of discourse from governments and central offices out into schools into staffrooms and classrooms, into communities and peoples' lives and, indeed, back again. All this occurs in some kind of chaotic loop--although we act as if there is intention, dominant ideology, order and plan to what so often involves local uptakes, accidents of discourse, idiosyncratic material and human responses.

Teachers are artists at resisting, undermining and ignoring policy. For their part, many policy makers know that teachers ignore central office, disregard curriculum reforms, and devote substantial work to getting around policy. As for academics, we too earn our keep through the intellectual work of critiquing policy and policy makers. The utter freedom of the academy to critique government, to critique policy, to deconstruct is important not just to the sustainability of educational theory but to the task of continually remaking and transforming everyday practice. (1) But when we are actually given the keys to the car and asked to drive, the result is utterly predictable: fear and panic.

This was my experience three years ago when Terry Moran, then Director--General of Education in Queensland said something to this effect: 'Well, you and your colleagues in professional organisations and universities have been telling us what we've done wrong for several years. What would you do instead?' Today I want to describe what I and many colleagues (teachers, academics and bureaucrats) have tried to do in Queensland over the past four years, and discuss three aspects of that work. These are: the New Basics technical paper (Luke et al., 2000); the work I did with Peter Freebody and Ray Land entitled Literate Futures (Luke, Freebody & Land, 2001); and The Queensland School Longitudinal Restructuring Study (Lingard et al., 2002). These texts are policy texts and discourses not without flaws and problems, ruptures and contradictions, speculations and risks. But they are crucial moments in an ongoing attempt in Australia to make and think policy differently.

Over the last few years I and many other literacy educators, researchers and teacher educators have had ample opportunities to take Australian literacy education into international forums. It is important to acknowledge that we have achieved a great deal. We lead the world in approaches to teaching writing and writing curriculum. We lead in the teaching of critical literacy, in the development of linguistic metalanguages, and in our capacity to talk about language and text. We survived the 1980s and 1990s without ripping ourselves to pieces over reading wars. We have maintained a consistent commitment as a profession to social justice, even at those times when some governments and states have not. Australian literacy educators have remained staunchly committed to literacy as a powerful force for equity and a powerful force for redistributive social justice.

We have reached another interesting historical moment: the juncture of taking leadership again in the development of digital literacies and multiliteracies. These are fields, disciplines and discourses in formation, where classroom teachers and seven- and eight-year-olds know more than many researchers and teacher educators, academics and curriculum developers.

From Dewey to Freire to Garth Boomer, we have advocated negotiating the curriculum. Of course, this was always pretty much a con, because we always knew better than the kids, especially in relation to the technologies of print and spoken language. If Vygotsky's model of learning applies, then we must by definition have mastery (and advanced and specialised epistemic authority) to teach, to profess, to induct youth into specialised cultural technologies and artefacts. But we are at a moment where the kids know more about the technologies than we do--where their mastery of practices and, indeed, mastery of new forms of reason, bypasses ours.

Despite the gains we have made in the last ten years, some substantially new challenges have been laid on the table. But the challenges are not the challenges of falling test scores, they are not the challenges of reading wars, and they are not, nor should they be, challenges of spelling or numeracy benchmarks. It is quite remarkable that, given the powerful issues of cultural and economic change and conflict that have been put on the table for us, the US continues to be mired in an educational debate that focuses on phonics. These are important issues, but they should not be the centre of our debates. Those are the persisting challenges of the 1980s or maybe the challenges of the 1970s or, as the late Jeanne Chall (1996) of Harvard University pointed out in her prototypical description of the great debate, maybe even of the 1950s. But they are not the challenges of New Times.

If we play the game of what in the United States has come to be called 'evidence-based' policy and 'evidence-based' decisions about classroom practice (for critical commentaries, see Cunningham, 2000; Garan, 2001; Coles, 2000; Luke, 2003; Stevens, in press), I want to outline and describe Australian data that governments do not often share (one exception being the Education 2010 documentation, available at the Education Queensland website).

This paints a very different picture from the naive view that our principal problem as literacy educators and our principal challenge as policy-makers is one of eight-year-olds struggling with decoding, the national policy obsession in the US. The challenges are those of new identities, of new economies, of very tenacious poverty taking hold in this country in particular areas, of teachers and teacher educators as an age-bifurcated workforce. They are challenges of curriculum, epistemology and knowledge, as much as they might be about skills and human capital per se (Luke, 2002a). The identity and generational issues are not solely about our students. About half of the teaching workforce are thirty; half are in their fifties. Half of us remember ELIC and genre wars; half of us entered the profession in the last decade.

We are a workforce with an average age in the mid-forties, struggling to keep the car that has been bequeathed to us on the road. We are struggling to run education systems and teaching systems across this country that are composites of curriculum and assessment policies and practices patched together in a sometimes ad hoc fashion over the past 30 years. We are the 'cultural custodians' of a system that has in recent years lacked vision, and whose answers to these new challenges of new identities and new cultures, new technologies and new economies are more tests, outcomes of different kinds and levels madly proliferating (what Viv White of the National Schools Network calls, 'death by a thousand outcomes'), and an increased move towards US-style commodity based instruction. That is, the signs have been there since the first critiques of 'technocratic education' by Apple (1978) and others twenty years ago--educational systems face a range of new social and cultural, material and empirical 'anomalies' and matters. Certainly these include the powerful changes outside schools I have described here, but also in many sites we face very conservative and immobile bureaucracies and administrators, and schools and universities that tend towards inertia. These conditions require theory-busting, theory building and paradigm shift. Yet the response of many educational systems has been to move to forms of governance, management and ideology that have the effect of 'micronising' curriculum and teaching, and of deskilling teacher work.

So let's look at a picture of responses of New Times. I will use Queensland as an example because it is the context I know best. The picture is that of a very different set of crises than those that the media and many state departments have promulgated. It is a very different crisis than George W. Bush and state colleagues promulgated in the United States through their 2000 federal educational policies. But this is one of the dilemmas of policy making: it's difficult to 'broadcast' and explain complexity to a public that believes in league tables, to systems, to an increasingly heterogeneous body politic, and it's even harder to have a dialogue about complexity and an uncertain future.

New economies and new times

David Barton, Ros Ivanic and Mary Hamilton (2001, p. i) argue that 'all literacy and literacies and literacy education are situated. All uses of written language can be seen as located in particular times and places,' and can be linked to 'broader social structuring'. This has implications for teachers and administrators. First and most obviously, it means that our teaching, our curriculum and assessment, is optimally constructed and implemented in relation to our understanding of the New Times and places where learners use and acquire literacy. Second, it means that these interventions are enabled and disenabled by the national, regional and local politics and economics of our school systems. How could you make a state or national literacy policy just on the basis of a debate over test scores and methods, without an understanding of the changing places and contexts where people are using literacy for their and their communities' own cultural interests and capital gains, where people are being ripped off with and through literacy, where people are constructing, hybridising and using traditional and emergent texts, where people are engaging with new technologies with mixes of print and non-print and so forth? How could you drive a whole state policy simply on the basis of some belief in a particular method or spreadsheets of benchmark test scores? To do so is utterly naive.

Many of our international colleagues work in state, regional, and district jurisdictions where high stakes testing and a search for a single universal methodology become the principal policy approach. This has had real impacts on teachers' working conditions, career pathways and, most importantly, on their capacity to flexibly serve the needs and interests of diverse students and communities. In some states, such an orientation has yielded short-term test score gains and assisted schools to focus and reorganise their pedagogy. In others it has led to widespread 'teaching to the test and a reduction in focus of other valued curricular, social and cognitive outcomes' (International Reading Association Board of Directors', 1999, statement on large scale standardised testing, in the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy). I will return to both the IRA and the substantive points in this piece later. For now note that the data in Queensland shows that the principle problem is not our delivery of basic skills, but the 'dumbing down' of the primary and middle schooling curriculum (Lingard et al., 2002), and evidence of a classic 'Year 5 slump' in overall achievement. Further, the evidence in places like California is that the testing / basic skills orientation has in fact exacerbated achievement slumps among minority and 'at risk' students in upper primary and secondary school (Calfee, 2003).

The Queensland experience provides an important and, of course, situated story. The baseline findings of Literate Futures are straightforward; literacy education in Queensland in primary and secondary schools is far from a shining exemplar with many parallel problems, similar to situations in American, Canadian, New Zealand and UK schools. In fact, one of our key findings was that literacy education had been neglected in curriculum and systemic policy, which has focused on issues of school-based management and accountability. This is ironic, given a decade of increasing pressure on accountability for student outcomes without a systematic focus on pedagogy and issues of teaching and learning. Our findings indicated that despite improving outcomes on standardised achievement measures, Queensland schools also need a renewed programmatic focus and guidance on the teaching of reading, especially for children from indigenous, non-English speaking backgrounds, minority and low socio-economic communities.

We need a shared professional and pedagogic language for talking about and teaching reading--note I said 'shared language', not single method and definitely not single package or instructional procedure. In spite of the visible strengths that we have in Queensland on genre-based teaching of writing, widespread work with aspects of critical literacy, our findings indicate that schools and systems need to systematically refocus and reinvest in teacher professional development, in coordinating and articulating powerful and effective school planning and in developing organisational capacity and infrastructure to support literacy education, in preparing teachers to better address emergent student needs with reading and spoken language, to develop expertise in multiliteracies, and, at the same time, to critically deal with the pitches of pre-packaged curricular commodities.

Given the seriousness of these challenges, our intent is to show that there might be other ways of approaching the development of students' and communities' literacy; the improvement of classroom literacy teaching and learning and the enhancement of literacy teachers' work on a state-wide scale. While not overestimating our preparedness for dealing with these issues as a field and as a profession, nor underestimating school-level resistance to policy, what we want to propose is an alternative to the 'test and compliance', 'discipline and punish' model of state policy. These are becoming the norms internationally as neoliberal policy, focusing on markets, on reductionist analyses of institutional performance, and on 'steering from a distance' spread from postindustrial countries to emergent economies (through, among other things, the 'structural adjustment policies' required for IMF and Asia Development Bank funding and state bailouts) (Stiglitz, 2002). In doing so, what I want to propose today is a focus on community analysis, on whole school renewal and whole school planning, and on teacher professionalism and an intergenerational change between the 35-year-olds and the 55-year-olds (Luke, 2002b).

We wanted to put together a literacy strategy that began with an analysis of our student bodies and workforces, of our institutional capacity--in this analysis state test scores played a part, but not the major part, in what amounted to a wholescale 'environmental scan' of our system. We began with a view of the new population of Queensland and the new economy of Queensland. I think you will find parallels in the other states.

We found first of all that at any given moment roughly 20% of our kids were living below our own government benchmarked poverty line. This means that 20% of Queensland families are living and trying to raise kids on less than $23,000 a year. Persistent poverty remains a real problem and a real issue. Yet this poverty is highly spatialised, unlike poverty of the past; that is, it isn't evenly cut or distributed. It is located in rural areas and traditional Aboriginal communities, but also in suburban-edged cities with emergent Anglo-Australian and migrant under-classes that had struggled to adopt to the flows and 'scapes' of globalised economies (Luke & Carrington, 2002). Many of these areas have shifted their partisan political allegiances away from the traditional parties and towards One Nation and other alternatives.

I will return to this issue of spatialised poverty when I discuss our literacy test results. We found a growing proportion of our kids (15-20%) to be first and second generation non-English speaking background and over 20,000 Indigenous kids, many of whose English is a second dialect, or a foreign language. These are needs that were not being recognised by the Commonwealth or our system (Luke, Land, Christie & Kolatsis, 2002).

We found that 26% of the economy in Queensland was based on manufacturing; we remain an engine room of primary industry for the Australian economy. But in the last decade, over half of Queenslanders worked in what we could term semiotic economies. That is, their capacity to deal with signs and symbols either as service workers or information or finance sector workers was more important than their capacity to work with raw materials. And the shift documented by all ABS and labour-force planning prognoses is simply this: that employment in Australia shows a gradual but steady decline in jobs that require physical and manual dexterity and a persistent increase in jobs that require our capacity to sign, to code, to language, to text, to discourse.

Hence, in the New Basics model, we focused on multiliteracies. Our capacity to represent ourselves, whether verbally, through drama, through the lost arts of rhetoric and forensics, through graphic and plastic design, on-line or through traditional print, becomes the coin of the realm in an economy that is based on semiosis and information, inexorably supplanting an economy that is based on digging stuff out of the ground, moving it around and turning it into goods. So we found a Queensland economy that was changing, in which women were being positioned as low level service workers, where Indigenous and many migrant people were working at the margins, where there was an emergence of a white male underclass of long-term unemployed. I mention this in relationship to the discussions of boys and literacy, because I think that is probably the root cause of much of the problem: not just the intersections of poverty and gender, but also the degree to which the emergent economy may be leading to a 'regendering' of different kinds and levels of work.

We found at the same time, as in many other states, that the overall proportion of students retained in the state system was declining. The state system had 73% of students, and this was dropping off as the Commonwealth retipped the playing field of funding towards private and independent schools. Gradually the upper middle class and the middle class had begun to move their kids out of the state system. Looking across Australian states, retention rates which had peaked out in some states in the low seventies and sixties of Year 12 completion had begun to drop off, so that we were twelfth among OECD countries in terms of the percentage of kids who were completing Year 12 or equivalent (Luke, in press/a). These were not good signs.

Clearly, state education faced problems of great complexity, depth and breadth. But it is not a matter of declining test scores. We are looking at a composite of new educational anomalies that have emerged with new economies, with new cultures, with the making of the new Queensland, and new Australia. And our educational systems are 'coping' by offering up with state of the art 1980s answers and interventions.

But this is merely the visible surface of the iceberg. There are two further, more intriguing findings from our experience in Queensland. By now all states will have undertaken 'pathway' studies of trying to track kids from Year 10 out in the workforce. And I cannot tell you how complex the data is. What we found is that there has been 'a delinearisation of life pathways from school into work for kids' (Luke & Luke, 2001).

In another economy in another time we asked kids at Year 9 whether they were going to go into academics or vocational programs. We tracked a cohort as if they were going to go to become plumbers, get unionised jobs and work for the council for thirty years. We tracked others as if they wanted to do medicine or science at University of Queensland or University of Melbourne or Tasmania. As parents and teachers, we know that kids in Years 9 or 10, when asked what they wanted to do with their lives, always utter a kind of a half truth for the sake of the relatives and domestic peace. So few 14- and 15-year-olds can know what they want to do with the rest of their lives--and counselling professionals who often know more about personality assessment and learning style than a changing service and semiotic economy are hamstrung in their efforts to help.

When we looked at the Queensland data showing where our 30,000 plus Year 12 students went, we found a very complex picture. We found first of all that 40% plus of the university entries in Queensland were non-school leavers. We found that kids were constructing new routes into and out of work, education, unemployment: some who were dropping out of school at Year 10 might complete a Bachelor's degree a few years later, after re-entering through TAFE, taking any one of a number of more vocationally or professionally oriented Bachelor's degrees. We found also that 13% of University graduates returned to TAFE for specialised training. We found also that there were over 10,000 subject combinations, that our vocational education enrolments were increasing, but our actual certificated attainment levels lagged far behind. And perhaps most worrying, we had no systematic way of tracking these new 'choice biographies', 'life trajectories' or whatever we may wish to call the non-linear, risky pathways into and out of work, leisure, consumption, education that students were fashioning.

Now, if any department of education in any OECD country placed this complex, difficult and partial data on the table, it would probably get them shaken out of office. I believe that the data is symptomatic of a deeper problem: we have a secondary school system which is training people for an economy that no longer exists. We have actually got a Year 10, 11, 12 tracking system with huge money and personal investments in curriculum, in HSCs, in tests, in vocational education, in competency statements, that is training people for a dual pathway economy that existed in 1985 and 1992, but is being increasingly variegated and destabilised in the current de-unionised, out-sourced, sub-contracted, casualised economy.

So, we are tracking people towards a post-war economic world when, in fact, life pathways have begun to shift and morph in profound ways that we do not yet fully understand. And the imperatives for that cliched term of 'life-long education' have become even more urgent as executives have to be re-trained at forty; where the trades work by the council has been sub-contracted and out-sourced. In our Queensland policy deliberations, Richard Smith of Central Queensland University has suggested that we need to make a shift towards reconceptualising the senior school as something less akin to a stockyard with two gates, and more aptly as the London Underground, with multiple entries, exits, recursive paths, alternative ways of getting to the same place, multiple entry tickets, and so forth. People today may have to re-train, or re-enter TAFE or university at several junctures during their life.

So there has been a delinearisation of adolescence, a material economic reframing of the imperatives for lifelong learning, and a remaking of the parameters of home/school/work transition. And we, as governments, as educators, as researchers are struggling to come to new understandings required to build new narrative scenarios about which kinds of education, of curriculum, of literacy might optimally prepare people for these kinds of literate futures. We must do this through policy that is developed and tested on the basis of 'evidence'--but that evidence clearly must exceed basic skills test scores and tell us about new conditions of work, of poverty and these new life pathways. It must be rich, multidisciplinary, theoretically and empirically rigorous, critical and interpretive in the most thorough ways. You cannot have 'smart states' based on anachronistic and reductionist approaches to social analysis and policy development.

Now finally, if this has not indicated to you that the enormity of the picture and the task on the table, between 2005-2010 many of our systems will have a 50% turnover of teachers, a seventy percent turnover of principals and of senior bureaucrats and a 50-70% turnover of teacher educators and academics. We are preparing right now for the largest generational shift and change in the workforce in the history of Australian education. That is, we baby boomers who have tenure, who have control over these systems, who hold positions of power in staffrooms, bureaucracies, professional organisations, unions and governments are offering our farewells between 2005--2015. The resultant questions are these: How do you mobilise an aging workforce for one further pedagogical hurrah; how do you generate an inter-generational exchange; and what kinds of systems, plans, strategies and precedents do we want to hand over between 2005-2015? Nostalgia will not do--holding actions, are, of course, the safest but, in the medium and long term, risky routes.

Now given this view--I would ask you to pause, take a breath and turn back to the agendas that have been put on the table: benchmark testing, curriculum commodities and packages, endorsement of single methods, performance indicators and accountability systems, what is wrong with this picture? Here is a complex, new world that is upon us, a demand that we actually have the vision to engage in the national and trans-national debate that we have not had, because we have been mired in a debate over private/public school funding, basic skills and standardised testing.

We need to have a debate about 2010, about 2015. We need to have a debate about new life skills and new life pathways. We need to look at our approaches to curriculum, look at our pedagogies, stop writing off Nintendo kids as deficit and start examining the skills, competences and knowledges they do have. We need to be asking which blends of skills, new and old, might be necessary for new and blended cultures, for at risk communities, for navigating new economies. We need to have this debate, even as our systems sit in holding patterns around 1980s and 1990s landscapes of vocation, identity, learning.

Literate futures

Peter Freebody, Ray Land and I were commissioned for a four-month program to develop a Queensland state literacy strategy: Literate Futures. The debate around the US and UK policies aside, these things are part science, part public policy analysis, part community consensus building, part public intellectual work and educational advocacy. We received two thousand briefs. We visited schools and we had fourteen public meetings in which people were allowed to show up, get angry, throw darts, advocate, barrack for a particular method, do whatever they had to do. And here is what we found in terms of the state-of-the-art of literacy teaching in Queensland.

First of all we ran into few indications of any serious problems with the teaching of writing--the quality of the teaching of writing seemed to be more or less satisfactory. While we were not satisfied with the degree of expertise at using functional grammar, it was our view that the overall focus on genre, on a 'text in context' model that had been put in place in 1993, had been effective and was flexible enough to deal with the emergence of new genres and new discourses. The engagement with issues around critical literacy was still emergent and quite strong.

We looked at our reading benchmark testing and you know how that all works: a number of kids reach what in both measurement and domain validity terms is an arbitrarily constructed cut-off point and are adjudged proficient. Our data indicated to us that about 80% of our kids were leaving Year 3 with basic functional coding and word attack skills. You could say, 'Oh, my God that's great!', or, 'That's not great', and we can see the headlines splashed across the local press. But recall that Queensland kids are six months chronologically younger on average than kids in other states. Now Freebody and I discussed what an age adjustment might look like, because we know that six months of development means so much between the chronological ages of 3 and 8. This phenomenon of metalinguistic awareness in early reading happens overnight with some kids. So we could argue something like the following: 'Yes, Queensland kids are younger, but if we age adjusted it we would probably approach the strongest state norms'. That would be hypothetical and theoretically speculative--the adjustment cannot be done with any accuracy, particularly given that the high range of measurement error in most state testing systems mitigates against the direct league table comparisons that have become popular with the press.

But the single biggest indicator of who fell below that benchmark was location, what the social geographers now describe as 'spatialised poverty'. Recall my earlier comments: almost a fifth of Queensland families are living below the poverty line (yes, this is another hypothetical 'cut point' in data). Aboriginality factored in, non-English speaking background, and gender all factored in. But the single biggest determining influential factor appeared to be poverty.

Now we can talk about the complex links between poverty, lower socio-economic status and early literacy failure. This has been a theme in the last hundred years of literacy education, from 19th century biological determinist and charity school arguments to the persistence of linguistic and cultural deficit models. I don't want to get drawn into debates over Einstein videotapes and the benefits of reading to your kids, or the latest tabloid claims on A Current Affair that prenatal reading will improve early literacy. Nor brain research and the new discourses of genetics and biological determinism (Luke & Luke, 2001).

I do want to argue here that the reading problem in this country is, inter alia, the problem of teachers and schools struggling to contend with the effects of poverty and its impact on kids who are socio-economically at risk. It is not a methods problem, it is not a phonics problem; it is not any of these things per se. It is a matter of us coming up with a common vocabulary and a set of shared strategies and approaches that are appropriate and effective for communities, targeted at particular linguistic and cultural demographics, and built at the whole school level that begin to turn around the most at risk kids. And there will be no one single method that will do this--rather a repertoire of approaches that range across and might include early intervention programs, Reading Recovery, ESL and EFL instruction, bilingual transitions, learning support and special education interventions, home/school community partnerships, and so forth. More on the requisites for 'turning around' the medium to long term academic achievement of the most at risk students momentarily, but for now, let's stick with the Queensland situation.

We found that 80-90% of the kids quite likely had reached some modicum of functional decoding by the end of Year 3. Teachers also reported to us that there was a lack of shared vocabulary on reading, that the Year One teachers were struggling to tell the difference between an NESB problem, an ADD problem, a speech pathology problem, a hearing problem, home/school socialisation transition issues, and so forth. Teachers did not have the diagnostic capacities to actually know what they were looking at in many cases, as these kids entered Year 1 and Year 2, in spite of their approach to the Queensland Diagnostic Net. This is not surprising: there had been no systematic professional development on reading since the early 1990s for many teachers across our system, and over this period, not coincidentally, the mainstreaming of kids with special needs and the increase of the NESB student population has complicated teachers' classroom work.

As a result, and facing anomalous and, for some, economically 'brutal' new conditions in communities--teachers in schools were enticed by commodity purchase: buying into the assumption that if they adopted this approach or bought this package it would solve these very complex problems, often in the absence of evidence. So surveying the reading data, it was clear to us that there was no 'crisis' in early literacy, in fact that we were quite adequately serving the early literacy development of basic skills for most students--but that we as a system were struggling to address the needs of the most socioeconomically 'at risk' students (finding the right vocabulary is problematic no matter which way we turn, socioeconomically 'at risk' seems marginally better than 'disadvantaged'; the Commonwealth prefers 'target groups', a military metaphor at best).

Also, we found, in Queensland at least, that systematic school programs around literacy were very patchy. Victoria has very much led the way in this regard; like its UK and American counterparts it had mandated a uniform set of materials. Yet the fact was that not all of our schools have systematic school programs in literacy. The picture looked something like this: we encountered programs that were extremely unbalanced in their orientation. We went into one program that declared itself with full parental support a 'basics' school, committed to phonics, word study and quota spelling, and that was their total emphasis for about the first three years of schooling. Their reading comprehension scores at Year 6 were low and there were real problems in the students' writing, but the kids could spell really well. Fed by a rhetoric around 'basic skills', the parents had supported this, and the principal had supported it, though some of the teachers were disgruntled. So, if we just took single benchmark tests on spelling the school could show it was doing very well. On functional decoding they looked pretty good, but on every other indicator and more complex indicators of academic achievement they had problems. This is the kind of program 'skew' that leads on from an over-reliance on test scores (and a lack of understanding of literacies, new and old). I felt that the kids were going to leave primary school with poor content area secondary reading comprehension and with a very limited command of written genres. So that was an example of the kind of unbalanced program that emerged through commodity purchase and single method approaches.

Another issue was that at the same time we found a tremendous number of 'pull-out' programs that had proliferated through various state and Commonwealth initiatives over the years. That is, schools did not really have an approach to literacy, but many had learning support programs, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander programs, perhaps they had an NESB person and a speech pathologist, Reading Recovery and LOTE. In most cases there was no total educational plan, and in many instances there was limited coordination, and often competition between the various players for resources. So a student might actually be diagnosed as NESB and special needs, but there might be minimal communication between the student's two specialist teachers. In fact a lot of this had come about because the programs had been developed by different groups over the years with different tied funding sources. In a lot of schools, there was no coherent coordination between these various 'pullout programs', and we had very little state-wide data about which combination of pull-out programs would have been appropriate for this community. We also found that 'gains' achieved through pull-out programs were difficult for many schools to sustain when there had been little focus on the core of mainstream pedagogy.

The effect was that many schools had simply added on programs over the years. Nobody pulled the money away so they kept doing it. Schools had never been asked to develop literacy programs that said, 'Well here's how Reading Recovery should fit with the NESB orientation', or, 'Here's how the special education learning support teaching work should fit with our basic approach to literacy'. So, although there were some exemplary programs, we found many school programs were all over the map.

Our fourth observation was that literacy across the curriculum is a failed project in this country. In fourteen public meetings, we had only one secondary teacher who was not an English teacher show up. We received one submission (from over 2,000 briefs) from a secondary teacher who taught something other than English. This, in spite of all our efforts in the 1980s, with three level guides, the teaching of reading comprehension across the curriculum, with the introduction of genres into science and history and so forth. In spite of the fact that our huge curriculum documents always have sections that mandate literacy across the curriculum. In other words, it gets mentioned. What appears to have happened is that the content area teachers have withdrawn from seeing literacy as part of their core business. They too are suffering under work intensification, many of them are saying, 'You want us to roll out this new syllabus and, by the way, you want us to do literacy too.' The effect is that the job of teaching reading and writing has again fallen back to the English teacher in the secondary school, as opposed to being a shared responsibility. So we found secondary school after secondary school without a systematic literacy program, without systematic entry-level diagnostics, using ad hoc combinations of old standardised achievement tests--secondary schools where no systematic approaches were used at all.

We also found some Year 5 and 6 teachers who folded their arms and said, 'If the early primary teachers would just get on and teach reading properly I could get on and do my job.' Finally, everybody talked about multiliteracies but no one knew where to begin; the engagement that we have with the new technologies and the dovetailing of new technologies with the cultural analysis undertaken in literacy studies is ad hoc and occasional. In fact, in most schools the IT co-ordinator is still a Maths/ Sciences person and the dominant discourses around IT are about the psychology of teaching and learning technical skills. The literacy work is going on somewhere else, in another industrial and professional 'silo' separate from the traditionally defined areas of language arts, English and literature teaching.

If this is not a complete enough picture, we also encountered a generational blame game in many schools. Many of the forty-five and fifty year-old teachers explained to us that the younger teachers did not know how to teach reading. I trained as a primary teacher in 1976 and I do not think there are many of us who could say that we knew how to teach reading when we left teacher training. The teacher education literature tells us that we probably learned how to teach by bringing our preservice training to bear on our classrooms over the first two to three years of our teaching (Luke, in press/b). Yet there is a tendency to want to write off the younger generation of teachers as somehow deficit or unable to do whatever we were able to do, and a failure to appreciate that they are better with the new technologies than us, that they are generationally closer to what a lot of these kids can do and that we actually need to engage with them. What is needed is an intergenerational exchange and dialogue around literacy, rather then a definition of new students and new teachers as deficit.

In the face of this complex picture--the easiest and typical thing for any government to do is to offer an over-simplified answer, and international prototype is to target short-term results that we know might make us look as if we are making accountable, and 'countable' progress and development. So we spent time looking at the UK literacy hour. We spent time looking at the State of California, where they put in standardised achievement tests and subsequently set about realigning their curriculum to their assessment system (Calfee, 2003). We looked at the mandatory use of basal reading series in many US jurisdictions. The US and UK solutions seemed to be solutions to significantly deteriorating school infrastructure, to other current contexts and historical issues that did not seem to apply to us. It was obvious that the single approach that was being taken internationally was, 'Test everybody, make the test high stakes, mandate a single program, put everybody in the single program'. And there is no doubt that you will get better results on your tests because, by definition, if you take variegation and chaos and you bring some degree of order to it, generate more time on task and instructional focus you are going to get immediate rises in your test scores. I will discuss these issues further below.

Basic skills and intellectual demand

But, wait. This is where the picture is going to get a little more complex. At the same time, a team led by Bob Lingard and Jim Ladwig were well under way in a study commissioned five years ago called The Queensland School Longitudinal Restructuring Study (QSRLS), an empirical study that looked at the effects of school-based management and reform on pedagogy and student outcomes in 1,000 classrooms. This is the largest scale study of what goes on in Australian classrooms in the history of the country. In this study, we visited 1,000 classrooms at Years 6, 9 and 11 in Social Education, English, Maths and Science. We observed what went on in these classrooms in terms of twenty items and we coded these on a one-to-five scale. The Productive Pedagogies categories below stand as a matrix for discussing and identifying different strategies, or a 'repertoire of strategies', we put to work in classrooms each day. The Productive Pedagogies categories provide teachers with a vocabulary for talking about teaching.

We coded classrooms, for instance, on higher order thinking--that is conceptional work, synthetic and analytic work. We looked at what Fred Newmann in Wisconsin called 'deep understanding' and 'deep knowledge', which involves substantial engagement with key concepts and understandings of intellectual fields and with social discourses. Simply, we looked for substantial engagement with anything. We coded for what Courtney Cazden (1989) has described as sustained conversation or exchange in the classroom that ventured beyond the quiz show, 'initiate/response/evaluate' (IRE) questioning cycle that tends to dominate instruction as a 'default mode'. So we coded for where classroom exchanges actually went beyond fact recall IRE patterns: 'What is the capital of Tasmania? Yes, good, what is the capital of Brisbane?'

We added problematic knowledge and critical literacy as categories--and asked whether kids were being encouraged to criticise knowledge, to argue with books, ideologies, to contest canonical and definitive interpretations and discourses and so forth. Following the prototypical applications of Hallidayan linguistics to Australian classrooms, we coded for metalanguage: for whether there was a language for talking about, weighing, and manipulating language in classrooms. We also coded for whether the teaching was interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary, whether there was background knowledge and schema-building occurring in the instruction, and, crucially, whether the tasks that the kids were being asked to do had any connection to the world. We coded for whether there was problem-based learning in the classroom. And we had extended sets to assess social support and inclusivity of curriculum and pedagogy.

Our findings were that Queensland classrooms were very strongly socially supportive--they are humane social environments. Queensland and other Australian teachers are very good at creating supportive and humane environments for kids. And I think that we should be proud of this--it is to the credit of our teacher training systems and the major investment in behaviour management and school climate of the last decade. What we did not find, however, was enough kids doing anything that was connected to the world. How do we create motivation and behaviour management problems? Run a curriculum and typical instructional modes (featuring worksheets, copying, answering questions at the end of chapters) that have no visible connection to anybody's lived experience. This is a recipe for trouble, for alienation, resistance and disengagement, particularly in the middle years.

We found that teachers are struggling with recognition of difference. As I said earlier, we have difficulty dealing with cultural and linguistic diversity, with issues of gendered equity of participation in classrooms, with the inclusion of kids with learning difficulties. Often our rhetoric in teacher education, in policy is good, but our actual practical strategies are limited and many teachers are frustrated.

Most importantly, we encountered low levels of intellectual engagement and intellectual demand. About half the lessons we visited had something of intellectual substance occurring; but about half the lessons were very superficial. I cannot put it any other way: there is a 'dumbing down' going on in our classrooms--worse at some grade levels and in some KLAs, but visible across the board in 1,000 lessons.

Let me give you two exemplary lessons that I observed as part of this study. One was a shared book experience on Flipper. It was about a 40-minute lesson and it was wonderfully orchestrated. The Year 3 and 4 kids watched the video Flipper, and they did some enlarged print materials with Flipper. All of these things in a wonderfully socially supportive environment. At the end of 40 minutes, what had the kids gained? Flipper. They knew Paul Hogan had starred in Flipper. They knew that Flipper was a dolphin that could talk and that it had been a movie, but that was about it. That is what I mean by 'dumbing down' of the curriculum. Jim Martin once called it 'infantilisation'; Garth Boomer had, I am told, some even less kind, more colourful, terms for it. I think there is more of this than we would like to admit occurring in our classrooms. Content-free teaching, or teaching that is supportive, but in which no substantive engagement with intellectual fields and discourses is common.

By contrast, I observed a shared book lesson with Paperbag Princess in which the kids and the teacher did a shared book experience and then the teacher said, 'Well kids, what questions would we ask of the text?' And I thought, 'Good critical literacy lesson.' The kids were generating the questions and not answering the questions. She listed them. Then she said, 'Which of these questions go together in the same family?' Then I thought, 'What's going on here?' And then she said, 'Who can write a question that actually can cover the other three questions in the same family?' She was teaching taxonomy and meta-language and doing it with a fair degree of technical precision.

Our findings corroborated what Fred Newmann and colleagues (1996) found in the Wisconsin-based CORS study over a decade ago: that for your most at-risk kids, these two things--connectedness to the world and engagement with knowledge--have to be there to turn around their medium to long term performance. And I will make the point that Freebody and I have made in relation to the four resources model again: basic skills are necessary but not sufficient to turn around the performance of your most at-risk kids (Freebody & Luke, in press). No matter what we do with them in terms of basic reading and writing skills, numeracy and literacy skills, unless the activities are somehow connected to the world and unless there is a critical intellectual engagement with knowledge--unless there is an educative act going on--we might as well pack up and go home. A democratic, supportive and safe classroom environment is important for development and for our work--but in and of itself it is not sufficient to turn around the performance of our most at risk learners.

Scenarios and alternatives

A principal lesson I learned during my brief time as a policy-maker is that a simple test driven basic skills regime will not solve these complex problems. One would no more judge the sum total efforts, needs, successes and failures of a school system by a single high stakes test result than we would purchase a vehicle on the basis of horsepower numbers or choose a food solely on the basis of one of the many pieces of data conveyed on the labels. Systems and schools need to use data and evidence smartly. We need to read across and triangulate intra-school performance data with a sharp analysis of extra-school data on community linguistic and cultural resources, socio-economic context, population movement and student transience. From this picture we can begin to construct a literacy program and we can decide how, when, and in what ways to support school renewal, improved pedagogy, and more effective uses of central and school level resources. This is a 'smarter way' of doing policy and management than the league tables and markets answer.

In fact, the latter may well make the situation worse. A 1970s Florida scenario of declaring minimum competency levels, where entire schools and classes retorque their work to the delivery of basic skills, will not solve the intellectual engagement or the connectedness to the world problems that the Queensland data has placed on the table. And, recalling the aforementioned IRA Board of Directors statement on standardised testing of reading in the US, there are three scenarios that begin to emerge in policy environments that have gone down the test driven, basic skills, single-method road.

The first I will call the rise and stall scenario. By focusing instruction and norming instructional approaches around standardised readers and materials, supporting this with professional development investment, you undoubtedly will generate some immediate test score gains. This is in part because you have made order out of chaos, you have improved time on task and overall levels of focused instruction. You get effects of the kinds that bureaucracies and policies want. But many schools and systems then run into a problem of 'stalling' test scores that threshold in particular domains. You are left with a question of 'What next?' The problem--basic skills instruction without overall curriculum reform and intellectual engagement has plateau effects. You are able to achieve the necessary but not the sufficient; you have accomplished a bit of the picture, but, as our second scenario suggests, you may lose the focus and investment very quickly.

The second is what Robert Calfee (2003) has described as the fifth grade slump phenomenon. The consistent message from several decades of American reading research is that we can early intervene substantially, invest all of our money in basic skills programs, remediation and recovery programs in the early years. This is important. But if we return kids from early intervention into an unreconstructed upper primary and middle school--in effect putting them back into intellectually unengaged classrooms, the performance gains achieved by the most at risk children will markedly residualise, such that by the time they hit Year 6 or 7, your most at risk kids are right back where they started. When students return to classrooms with improved phonemic awareness and word attack skills and go back into a classroom where the pedagogy fails to capitalise on these gains, the phenomenon of residualisation of performance occurs. The most recent 2000-2001 DEST (2002) data suggests that even where we have made gains at the Year 3 level, we have a major residualisation of performance by Year 5 and, on the basis of state data, further losses by Year 7. The point that I would make from the QSRLS study is that, if students return to Flipper, the patterns of disinterest, lowered overall academic achievement and low level skill mastery will rapidly re-emerge.

Related is what I will call the let them eat basic skills scenario. By this scenario, played out first in Florida, and then in other American states, is that the focus on basic skills generated by a high stakes test-driven environment actually succeeds--and we get precisely what we aimed for: curriculum and pedagogy focused on the minimum. Here the gap between our best and worst achievers increases and, in the current Federal policy debate over the marketisation of school funding, state schools and systemic Catholic schools become purveyors of basic skills to the new working and underclasses. And elite and selective entry non-government schools (currently not bound by Queensland or Federal legislation to teach mandated curriculum or to administer tests) are free to engage with higher order thinking, intellectual demand and the issues we described in QSRLS. In this scenario, we become a two tiered education system, servicing the new binary class divide that is portrayed as one of the major effects of economic globalisation.

What do we propose in Queensland? We came up with four programmatic approaches. First, a state-wide focus on balanced approaches to the teaching of reading based on the four resources model that Freebody and I worked on in the early 1990s (Freebody & Luke, in press). This requires that teachers make principled decisions based on analyses of their students on the program that is balanced between coding, semantic, pragmatic and critical practices in literacy. Many literacy educators and many states are using this model. We cannot have school programs that are no more than shopping lists, where you must do language experience, phonics instruction, genre writing for everybody. If you are dealing with a high percentage of second language speakers, you are going to need to look at some kind of approach to literacy that says, 'You know, I think explicit instruction in alphabetical knowledge is really important for these kids, because many are learning English and they are moving into an alphabetic system.' Whereas, if I am dealing with middle class kids in St Lucia next to the University of Queensland--children of students, academics and professionals--a phonics-based program is likely to be a waste of instructional time.

So what we need to do is to do what Barbara Comber and others have been talking about for years, and what Luis Moll has prototyped at the University of Arizona (e.g., Comber, Thomson & Wells, 2001). We need to read and analyse our kids, know our school communities, demographically and linguistically, have a realistic analysis of who they are and what they can do when they enter school, sans staffroom gossip about deficit. On that basis, you use the four resources model, or something equivalent, and build a balanced program that provides different developmental blends of the necessary and sufficient, of code, semantic, pragmatic and critical practices. In the US, Taylor, Anderson, Au and Raphael (2000) and others have proposed other approaches to staging a balanced program, so there are lots of ways to do this. Then, and only then, with such an analysis we can proceed to set realistic 'value-added' and 'distance-travelled' targets for improvements in student social and academic outcomes, using assessment data constructively and realistically.

Balanced programs provide coherent consistent vocabularies across classrooms, as importantly they provide the grounds for intraschool accountability where teachers as professionals work together, plan together and share their professional approaches across generations. In fact, the QSRLS and the school reform literature tells us that accountability to our fellow professionals within staffrooms and schools is a stronger indicator of improved schooling and pedagogy than the kinds of accountability to central systems I have described here. My point: though they need not be mutually exclusive, accountability amongst a professional learning community is more important than accountability to central office in setting the grounds for school renewal and better, broader and more effective literacy programs.

Hence, our second strategy is a state-wide focus on the development of whole school plans that includes analyses of local community linguistic and cultural resources, audits of teacher expertise and community involvement. We are going to require that all schools develop whole school programs by the end of 2002. Yes, we know that some will view this as more centrally delivered work intensification, some will finesse them, and some will subvert them, while others will hire consultants to write their whole school programs for them. This will involve setting distance travel performance targets against like schools of similar communities and backgrounds; they will not simply be targets against standardised achievement test scores, but targets also against other kinds of social indicators such as attendance, behaviour management and so forth.

Our third strategy is a state-wide focus on the introduction of multiliteracies. Multiliteracies--the kinds of new practices needed to deal with on-line, media, visual and print texts simultaneously--were developed initially in the work of the New London Group (1996). They also feature in the New Basics. The Singaporeans are also moving to build multiliteracies into their curricula, acknowledging the issues around digital and media culture both in terms of student background knowledge and skill, and in terms of the demands of work and citizenship in new economies. This is new ground, where organisations like ALEA and AATE can lead.

Our fourth strategy is a state-wide focus on the regeneration of professional development, to rebuild teachers' social networks and capital and to facilitate an intergenerational exchange between the baby boomers and the young teachers. We visited staffrooms and would ask staff, 'Who has been 'ELICed'?, and all the baby boomers would put our hands up. Others thought it was an insurance company or government agency. In fact, there has been no systematic professional development nationally in over a decade. And I think many of our local chapters are experiencing the phenomenon in the last few years of participation falling off, or participation being spotty or very generation specific. People are tired, and we actually need to rebuild professional networks quite substantially.

A conclusion and postscript

Some concluding remarks. Do we have the right answers in Queensland--or anywhere? Well, there are no right answers, no magic pedagogical bullet. To mix my metaphors further, if we have learned anything it is that there is no instructional holy grail that is universally effective for all kids. People have been searching for such a method for over a hundred years. But we do know that literacy and literacy crises act as social shock absorbers; that when we hit times of fundamental economic and cultural upheaval schools, teachers and literacy become almost like whipping posts. Literacy becomes the key political 'issue' or 'nodal point' around which the public is mobilised. The picture I have drawn here is more complex than any single answer will give us. And it tells us that there is something fundamentally misplaced about the test and single package approach.

Yet our Year 1 and 2 teachers are struggling to actually identify what it is they are seeing. And as a result, what we are beginning to do in many of our classrooms is talk deficit again. Everybody is deficit: kids are empty vessels, they're watching too much TV, they can't speak English properly, parents don't parent, nobody reads to their kids. The language of deficit is proliferating in staffrooms right across this country as we face the effects of the new poverty, of culturally diverse populations where before we dealt with homogeneous ones. In Queensland we have many schools that are doing outstanding jobs of literacy--by multiple and rich indicators--through whole school programs. While it is actually axiomatic that poverty affects literacy preparedness and achievement, what we know from three decades of school effectiveness and reform work is that the quality of pedagogy can influence more than 20% of the variance in kids' performances (Newmann, 1996; Lingard et al., 2001). We have teachers and principals who are working in low socio-economic and rural areas, in suburban edge-cities hit hard by the new poverty, and indigenous communities--many are running literacy programs that have got 20 or 30% better overall achievement than others. But what is it that makes those schools fly? Here's what we found.

1. Strong leadership, a principal who either knows literacy, or is smart enough to delegate responsibility and power to somebody who does.

2. Balanced programs--not shopping list programs, not single method programs, but programs in which people have thoughtfully exchanged information, audited their staff expertise, enlisted external help and critical friends where needed, and balanced their program in relationship to what they know are the needs of the kids.

3. Strong professional learning communities--staffrooms in which people are talking about literacy, aware of it, exploring different vocabularies for talking about their work. You do not need university people to tell you how to teach literacy--the expertise is in your buildings. It is just that it is often hidden in what industrially and professionally has become for many teachers highly isolated and 'privatised' work. The people who are good at teaching comprehension need to share that with the younger teachers; the teachers who are good at word attack and phonemic awareness need to share that with some of the other teachers. The young teachers with the ICT skills need to begin mentoring the older teachers who need work with multiliteracies.

The expertise is in the building, but we actually need to set up conditions where it gets exchanged. The schools that made a difference actually had consistent vocabularies and meta-languages for talking about literacy. They had shared vocabularies for talking about literacy learning and teaching running across the staff and across classrooms and year levels that actually enabled them and the kids to see some coherence.

As a footnote, we also found that the schools that made a difference did not talk deficit. One principal we have worked with for years actually banned deficit talk from her staffroom. The difference in environment that created is significant because unsubstantiated deficit talk convinces us that kids who are struggling with basic literacy are incapable of dealing with concepts, ideas and intellectual substance. Why teach Flipper when we could have done salinity, seagrass beds, John Lily's speech experiments, dolphin-free tuna, drift-net fishing and fishing rights in the South Pacific? That is what we could have done, and even though some of our students are struggling decoders or struggling writers, they can still deal with those things. If you do not deliver to them and 'dumb down the curriculum', they are going to engage with these things via the Discovery Channel on cable after school.

When I joined the Queensland state system, in spite of what our behaviour management experts say about learning to take responsibility for our actions, I found in our educational community a large dysfunctional family. We did symbolic violence to each other in the waiting room before the therapy could begin. Everybody blamed everybody: the principals blamed the statutory bodies, the statutory bodies blamed the central office, everybody hated central office. Central office blamed the teachers, the teachers blamed the principals, the principals blamed the union, the union blamed the Federal government. In sum, we were caught in a destructive cycle that was immature and dysfunctional.

Since I have returned to teaching and research, I have had the opportunity to meet with teachers and systems bureaucrats throughout Asia, in the US and the UK. Many of them would give anything to be teaching in Australia now. Why? Because our system and school infrastructure has not deteriorated, we have not descended into test-driven systems. Our levels of training and professionalism are very high. We are not all being told to use the same textbooks at the same time every day. The kind of freedom we have to be professionals, to use our professionalism, to expand and develop our craft, is still substantially beyond that of many of our colleagues internationally. We have the space, the incentive and the expertise to solve the problems of New Times.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Charles Morgan, Terry Moran, Kim Bannikoff, Ray Land, Peter Freebody, James Ladwig, and Gabrielle Matters.

References

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Allan Luke

UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND/NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF EDUCATION, SINGAPORE

(1) See Derrida's (2001) 'a university without conditions' on what it means to profess.

Table 1: Productive Pedagogy Categories

 Supportive
Intellectual Classroom Recognition of
Quality Relevance Environment Difference

Higher order
thinking

Deep knowledge

Deep
understanding

Substantive
conversation

Knowledge
problematic

Metalanguage

 Knowledge
 integration

 Background
 knowledge

 Connectedness

 Problem-Based
 curriculum

 Student control

 Social support

 Engagement

 Explicit criteria

 Self-regulation
 Cultural
 knowledges

 Inclusivity

 Narrative

 Group identity

 Citizenship

* Source: Queensland School Longitudinal Restructuring Study (2001).