Resources - Discussion Papers

How to Make Literacy Policy Differently:
Generational Change, Professionalisation, and Literate Futures

Professor Allan Luke, University of Queensland

Opening plenary address delivered at the Joint National AATE/ALEA Conference on July 13, 2001 in Hobart, Tasmania

Professor Allan Luke

Download this address as a Word document - 128k.

Introduction
Fresh challenges on the table
New economies, cultures and pathways
Literate Futures: implications of the Queensland state literacy strategy
The Queensland School Longitudinal Restructuring Study: Productive Pedagogies
Basic skills: necessary but not sufficient
The Queensland proposal: four programmatic approaches
Conclusion

INTRODUCTION

I want to thank the conference organisers for making the arrangements to get me here. Originally, I was supposed to close this conference. I want to talk today about policy. This is why it might have been better for me to close rather than open. Who wants to hear a conference open with a talk about policy? You’ll look at the program and think, "God, the ‘P’ word", and you’ll immediately assume that it’s going to be a sleeper or packed with boring technical information. Everybody loves to hate policy but nobody really wants to do it, and everybody loves to hate you when you’re doing policy.

But policy matters - and what policy enables and what policy 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 much better understanding of what it is that people try to do when they make policy. Policy is about constructing, regulating, critiquing and engaging the flows of resources, flows of human bodies, and flows of discourses from central offices out into schools into staffrooms and classrooms and, indeed, back again. As I said, everybody hates you when you do policy. Teachers know when they hate it and are well practiced at resisting policy. For their part, researchers and policy makers know that teachers are artists at ignoring central office, at ignoring curriculum reforms, and finding out ways to get around policy. As for academics like myself, we too are artists at critiquing and attacking policy and policy makers – and the utter freedom of the academy to critique government, to critique policy, to deconstruct is something so important not just to the sustainability of educational theory but to the task of continually remaking and transforming everyday practice - but when we are actually given the keys to the car and asked to drive, it is utterly predictable: we panic.

For me, that was the experience of two years ago when Terry Moran, then Director–General said something to this effect: "Well, you have been bitching, you have been carping, you and your friends in professional organisations and universities what we’re doing wrong for several years. Well, what would you do?" Today I want to describe what we have tried to do in Queensland and outline three documents you will find at the Education Queensland website. These are: the New Basics technical paper; the work I did with Peter Freebody, Ray Land entitled Literate Futures; and a new report entitled The Queensland School Longitudinal Restructuring Study. I will be referring to these three documents during this talk. They are interesting pieces of work, they are interesting policy texts and discourses, not without flaws and problems, ruptures and contradictions, speculations and risks: but they are an attempt at making and thinking policy differently.

Let me start with a disclaimer. The disclaimer is that the views you are about to hear are not the official opinions of any government, NGO or multinational. OK? They are mine. I would also offer the genre of disclaimer that they put on children’s toys ads: "Don’t try this in your own living room without a registered sociologist!"

I think over the last few years I and many other literacy educators, researchers and teacher educators – John Elkins, Barbara Comber, Peter Freebody, Jim Martin, Fran Christie, Jan Turbill, Pam Gilbert, Brian Cambourne, Judith Rivalland, Michele Anstey, to name but a few of the usual culprits - have had ample opportunities to take Australian Literacy education into international forums. Now that ‘the family’ is assembled here today (ALEA and AATE), it is important to acknowledge that we have a great deal to be very proud of. 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 managed to get through the 1980s and 1990s without ripping ourselves to pieces over reading wars, even though these positions and interests that could do so are here today, both internationally and in this room. I think we have maintained, through changes in state and federal government, a consistent commitment as an organisation and as a profession to social justice even at those times when social justice in governments became a dirty word, a word that some nations and states have taken out of their lexicon. Australian educators and Australian literacy educators have remained staunchly committed to literacy as a powerful force for equity and a powerful force for redistributive social justice. These are things that this professional community should be proud of.

FRESH CHALLENGES ON THE TABLE

We’re at the juncture of leading the world again in the development of two areas: digital literacies and new multiliteracies. I believe that the data from Queensland and other states show we’re at an interesting historical moment: we all know that we need to do something with digital literacies and multi-literacies, even though we lack definitive definitions and strategies. These are fields, disciplines and discourses in formation. We work in an emergent field where classroom teachers and seven and eight year olds know more than many of us researchers, academics and curriculum developers. From Dewey to Freire, we have advocated negotiating the curriculum. Of course, this was always pretty much a con because we all always knew better than the kids, especially in relation to the technologies of print and spoken language – and, if Vygotsky’s model of learning is apt, then we must, by definition, have mastery (and advanced and specialised ‘epistemic authority’) to teach. But we are actually at an historical juncture which is unprecedented in the last century, where the kids know more about the technologies than we do - where we have to negotiate with them at the very moment where their mastery of practices and, indeed, mastery of new forms of reason with some of these new technologies bypasses ours.

In many ways we are at an historically critical juncture where, despite all of the gains that we have made in the last ten years, some substantially new challenges have been laid on the table. But the challenges - and this is my key message today - are not the challenges of falling test scores; they are not the challenges of reading wars; and they are not nor should they be over spelling or numeracy benchmarks. These are important issues, but they should not be the centre of our current debates. Those are the persisting challenges of the 1980s or maybe the challenges of the 1970s or, as the late Jeanne Chall of Harvard University pointed out in her description of the great debate, maybe of the 1950s. But they aren’t 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, today I want to outline and describe Australian data that governments don’t often share – an exception being the Education 2010 documentation available at the Education Queensland website. This shows a very different picture from what I believe is a 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 new 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. The identity and generational issues aren’t solely about our students. About half of us are thirty and half are fifty-five. 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-40s struggling to keep the car that has been bequeathed to us on the road; struggling to run education systems and teaching systems across this country that are composites of curriculum and assessment policies and practices latched 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 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 of schools I’ve described here, but also in many sites we face very conservative and immobile bureaucracies and administrators, and schools and universities that tend towards inertia). In what Thomas Kuhn used to describe as "natural sciences" these conditions would 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’ll use Queensland as an example because it is the context that I know well (and also, I think, because the historical tendency of national organisations to use the two largest states as exemplary prototypes of reform is at present misleading). The picture is that of a very different set of crises than those that the Federal Minister, 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. It is a context of changing economies and cultures that is in many ways is anticipated by Barry Jones’ ‘Knowledge Nation’ document, its diagrams and vocabulary aside. But then this is one of the dilemmas of policy making: its really hard to ‘broadcast’ and explain complexity to the public, to systems, to an increasingly heterogeneous body politic, and it’s even harder to have a dialogue about complexity and an uncertain future. But let’s give it a try, as we have in Queensland.

In the introduction to their 2001 book Situated Literacies David Barton, Ros Ivanic and Mary Hamilton of the University of Lancaster 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 several 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 of 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 would be naive.

Here I want to describe one current Australian state policy on curriculum, instruction, school improvement and teacher development. Notice that – it is not a policy on literacy - but a policy on curriculum, instruction, school improvement and teacher development – and language and literacy education.

Many of our international colleagues work in state, regional, and district jurisdictions where high stakes testing and a search for a single universal methodology for teaching reading has become the principle policy approach. This has had real impacts both positive and negative on teachers’ working conditions, career pathways and, most importantly, on their capacity to flexibly serve the needs and interests of their very diverse students and communities. In instances and in some states, such an orientation has brought 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," to cite the International Reading Association Board of Directors’ 1999 statement on large scale standardised testing published 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 that the principal challenge is not our delivery of basic skills, but the ‘dumbing down’ of the primary and middle schooling curriculum.

For those teachers, educational administrators, school members, systems bureaucrats, legislators, media pundits, politicians and anybody we might have left out, we think 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 a neglected zone of curriculum and systemic policy, which principally has been preoccupied with issues of school-based management and accountability; and this is ironic, a decade of increasing pressure on accountability for student outcomes without a systematic focus on pedagogy and issues of teaching and learning). Our findings indicate that despite improving outcomes on standardized 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 that have been adversely affected by the new economies. We need a shared language for talking about and teaching reading – note I said ‘shared language’, not single method. 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 which are being sold as universal cure-alls to literacy problems.

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 the school-level resistance to policy, resistance to ‘reform’ however couched, to engagement with the need to remobilise our work around teaching - what we want to propose is an alternative to the ‘test and compliance’, ‘discipline and punish’ model of state policy. These forms of what French philosopher Michel Foucault called "governmentality" 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). 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 thirty five year olds and the fifty five year olds.

NEW ECONOMIES, CULTURES AND PATHWAYS

Now, I want to talk just briefly about the new Queensland. This isn’t the Queensland of the Bjelke-Petersen era, but it’s a different Queensland. It’s not necessarily the Queensland of the ‘Smart State’, as of yet, anyway. I know you get sick of hearing about ‘clever countries’, ‘smart states’, ‘intelligent isles’ and ‘knowledge nations’. It seems that in order to describe yourself as a new information economy you’ve got to be able to do alliteration based on phonemes rather than graphemes, since knowledge and nations start with ‘k’ and ‘n’.

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. And here’s what we found:

We found first of all that at any given moment roughly twenty percent of our kids were living below the Henderson poverty line. This means that twenty percent of Queensland families are living and trying to raise kids on less than twenty thousand dollars 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 underclasses that had struggled to adopt to the flows and ‘scapes’ of globalised economies. 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%) to be first and second generation non-English speaking background and over ten thousand indigenous kids, many of whose English as a second dialect, English as a foreign language needs that weren’t being recognised by the Commonwealth or our system.

We found that twenty six percent of the economy in Queensland was based on manufacturing, we remain an engine room of primary industry for the Australian economy. But for the first time, over half of Queenslanders worked in what I call a ‘semiotic and information based’ economy. That is, they worked in an economy in which 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 Dixon and others using the Monash economic forecasting model, by all ABS and labor-force planning prognoses, which Barry Jones and others used in the Knowledge Nation documentation, 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 that is verbally, through drama, through rhetoric and forensics, through art works and aesthetic 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’s 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 male white underclass of long-term unemployed. And I have to mention this in relationship to the discussions that will occur at this conference over boys and literacy during this conference, because I think that is probably the economic root cause of much of the problem: not just the intersections of poverty and gender noted by Jane Kenway and others in their major 2000 DETYA study, but as well 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, like in many of your states, that market share was declining. My God! Did I ever say, "market share"? Yes, the state system had seventy three percent of students and, this was dropping off as DETYA 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. And we found as well, looking across Australian states, that 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. These were not good signs. If I were a researcher or a chartered accountant or a diplomat and had walked into the building and somebody had described this data to me I would have thrown up my hands in despair. Clearly, this was a problem of great complexity, depth and breadth. And it isn’t a problem of declining test scores. I think we’re 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 but the visible surface of the iceberg. Now let me describe to you 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 can’t tell you how complex the data is. What we found is that there has been (and I will give you a technical term for it), a delinearisation of life pathways from school into work for kids’ (I’ve described this in more detail in an article with Carmen Luke in the first edition of the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy 1(1); an abridged version is reprinted in the most 2001 edition of English in Australia).

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 trained others as if they wanted to do medicine or science at University of Queensland or University of 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 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 know more about personality assessment than a changing economy are hamstrung in their efforts to help.

When we looked at the Queensland data showing where our thirty thousand plus year 12 students went, we found a very complex picture. We found first of all that forty percent 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 ten might complete a Batchelor’s degree a few years later, after re-entering through TAFE, taking any one of a number of more vocationally or professionally oriented Batchelor’s degrees. We found also that thirteen percent 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 state Ministry in any OECD country placed this complex, difficult and partial data on the table in public, it would probably get them shaken out of office. I believe that the data is symptomatic of a deeper problem: that we have a secondary school system which is training people for an economy that doesn’t exist any more. 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 Hills hoist in every backyard, a Holden in every garage, towards the Brady Bunch life world when, in fact, life pathways have begun to shift and morph in profound ways that we don’t fully understand yet. And the imperatives for that clichéd 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 (Richard Smith of Central Queensland University has suggested that we need to make a shift towards reconceptualizing 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 may have to re-train or re-enter TAFE or re-enter 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, we as educators, as researchers are struggling to come to new understandings required to build new scenarios about which kinds of education, of curriculum, of literacy might optimally prepare people for these kinds of literate futures.

Now finally, if this hasn’t 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 fifty percent turnover of teachers, a seventy percent turnover of principals and of senior bureaucrats and a fifty to seventy percent turnover of teacher educators and academics. In fact, 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 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 won’t do – holding actions are, of course, the safest but, in the medium and long term, risky routes.

Now I’d 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’s 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 debate that we haven’t had, because we have been mired in a debate over private/public school funding 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 curriculum, look at our pedagogies, stop writing off Nintendo kids as deficit and start examining the skills, competences and knowledges that they 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 don’t have definitive answers, nor even definitive data - but we need to have this debate, even as our systems sit in holding patterns around 1980s and 1990s landscapes of vocation, identity, learning. We could say that there is a cynical unwillingness with three to four year political cycles to face up to medium to long term educational planning. But having worked with two ministers and two Directors-General in Queensland, many senior bureaucrats, and, most importantly, many Queensland teachers and principals, I’d report that there are courageous people who have been willing to look at these things and talk about them.

LITERATE FUTURES: IMPLICATIONS OF THE QUEENSLAND STATE LITERACY STRATEGY

Let me talk about the Queensland state literacy strategy: Literate Futures. Peter Freebody from Griffith University, Ray Land and I were commissioned for a four-month program to develop the strategy for Queensland. The debate around the US and UK policies aside, these things are part science, part public policy hocus-pocus, part community consensus building, part public intellectual work and so forth. We received two thousand briefs and if you are interested, we did undertake a discourse analysis of the submissions! We visited schools and we had fourteen public meetings in which people were allowed to show up, get angry, throw darts, advocate, do whatever they had to do. And here’s what we found in terms of the state-of-the-art of literacy teaching in Queensland. Some of it will ring true to you.

First of all we ran into absolutely no objections and no data which indicated any serious problems with the teaching of writing - the quality of the teaching of the 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. This was all good news, and there was broad expertise in the field that could be built upon. But let’s get to the reading data.

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 eighty percent 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. Since the initiation of these assessment systems, South Australia has

had among the best benchmark figures. But recall that Queensland kids are six months chronologically younger on average than kids in other states. Now Freebody and I discussed with John Elkins and Christa VanKraayenoord what an age adjustment might look like, because we know that six months of development means so much between chronological 3 and 8. This phenomenon of metalinguistics awareness in early reading happens overnight with some kids. So we could argue something like the following: "Yeah, Queensland kids are younger, but if we age adjusted it we would probably approach the strongest state norms", but that would be hypothetical and theoretically speculative – the adjustment can’t be done with any accuracy, particularly given the high range of measurement error in most state testing systems.

But the single biggest indicator of who fell below that benchmark was postal code, those students who live in 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 (agreed: another hypothetical ‘cut point’ in data). Yes, 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. 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 (not surprisingly ‘eugenics’, then the science of racial purity, has had a powerful impact on educational debates over intergenerational inherited literacy and language deficit for over 120 years: and it hasn’t been a pretty or distinguished history). But I 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 with its impact on kids who are socio-economically at risk. It’s not a methods problem, it’s not a phonics problem, it’s not any of these things per se. It’s 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 demographics, and built at the whole school level that begin to turn around the most at risk kids. And there is going to 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.

So we found that eighty percent of the kids were doing ok. We found also among teachers that they reported to us that there was a lack of shared vocabulary on reading, that the Year One teachers for example did not know how to tell the difference between a NESB problem, an ADD problem, a speech pathology problem, a hearing problem, home/school socialisation transition issues, and so forth. Teachers didn’t have the diagnostic capacities to actually know what they were looking at in many cases as these kids entered year one and year two, in spite of their approach to the diagnostic net. This isn’t surprising: there had been no systematic professional development on reading since the early 1990s for many teachers across our system.

As a result, and facing anomalous and, for some, economically ‘brutal’ new conditions in communities - teachers in schools were being sucked down the chute of commodity purchase: buying into the assumption that if they just 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 (apologies for the terminology – finding the right vocabulary is problematic no matter which way we turn, "disadvantaged" is no better).

Second, 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 (though we have taken a different approach), and not all of our schools have systematic school programs in literacy. The picture looked something like this: Freebody, Ray Land and I ran into programs that were extremely unbalanced in their orientation. And I will give you an example. We went into one program that declared itself with full parental support a "basics" school and was 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 and get ambushed in the secondary 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 or through subscribing to single method approaches.

A third issue: at the same time what we found was a tremendous number of ‘pull-out’ programs that had proliferated through various state and Commonwealth initiatives over the years. That is, schools didn’t 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 kid might actually be diagnosed as NESB and Special Education, but there might be minimal communication between the two teachers. In fact a lot of this had come about because the programs had been developed by different groups over the years with different buckets of money. In a lot of schools, there was no coherent coordination between these various "pull-out programs" and we had very little state-wide data about which combination of pull-out programs would have been appropriate for this community.

The effect was that many schools had just 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 Ed 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: literacy across the curriculum is a failed project in this country. It’s gone away. In fourteen public meetings, we had only one secondary teacher who was not an English teacher show up. We received one submission from over two thousand 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 says that mandate literacy across the curriculum. In other words, it gets mentioned. In fact, what appears to have happened is that the studies of society and environment teachers, science and maths teachers and others teachers have withdrawn from seeing literacy as any part of their core business. Now are we going to blame them? I don’t think so. 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 where any systematic approaches were used at all.

Next point: we found some year five and six teachers who folded their arms and said, "If the primary teachers would just get on teach reading properly I could get on and do my job." We also found that everybody talked about multiliteracies but no one knew how to do it; that in fact 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 isn’t a complete enough picture, we also encountered a generational blame game at work in our schools. Many of the forty-five and fifty year-old teachers explained to us that the younger teachers didn’t know how to teach reading. I wondered how many of us knew how to teach reading well when we commenced our professional careers. I did my primary teacher training in 1975 at Simon Fraser University in Canada. I received a list of a 150 reading skills. I knew how to use my DISTAR and Reading 360 teachers’ guidebooks, and I learned how to augment this with the use of language experience activities. I also probably neglected some of my reading classes as an undergraduate and didn’t fully understand how central it would be in my professional life and daily survival (they were pretty boring). I don’t 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.

So there is indeed a generation split of fifty percent of us being thirty and fifty percent of us being fifty five is that as we baby boomers start thinking about the superannuation, hanging out with the grandchildren, doing whatever we are doing here, 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 as some kind of intergenerational exchange and dialogue around literacy, rather than an oppositional pose that sets up both new students and new teachers as deficit.

Now you are the minister. I want you to image this. You are the Minister and some academic lays out this picture to you, what on earth are you going to say? It looks very complex. And sure enough when we made our report there were sighs of relief: "Thank God, we don’t have a crisis, so we aren’t going to be pilloried in the press by the politicians." But the easiest and typical thing for any government to do is to take a complex problem and try to offer an over-simplified answer, and the simplest thing for us to do is to go for short term results that we know might make us look as if we’re 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. We looked at the mandatory use of basal reading series in many US jurisdictions. The more Freebody, Land and I looked, the more we agreed that the solutions seemed to be solutions to a different problem than the one we had identified. The US and UK solutions seemed to be solutions to significantly deteriorating school infrastructure, to a lot of other historical issues that didn’t 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, but more about that later.

THE QUEENSLAND SCHOOL LONGITUDINAL RESTRUCTURING STUDY: PRODUCTIVE PEDAGOGIES

But, wait. There’s more! And this is where the picture is going to get a little more complex. At the same time, we were well underway in a study commissioned by a previous Minister and Director General five years ago called The Queensland School Longitudinal Restructuring Study, an empirical study that looked at the effects of school-based management and reform on pedagogy and student outcomes in one thousand classrooms. We had been undertaking this study since 1998 - Bob Lingard (Queensland), Jim Ladwig (Newcastle), Deborah Hayes (UTS), Jennifer Gore (Newcastle), Martin Mills, Mark Barr, Pam Christie, David Chant and myself (all Queensland), and a cast of thousands. This is the largest scale study of what goes in Australian classrooms in the history of the country. We visited a thousand classrooms at Years 6, 9 and 11 in Social Education, English, Maths and Science. It was a purposive, not random sample: they were the classrooms of teachers who had nominated themselves or been nominated as good and innovative teachers by their principals or schools. It’s not directly about literacy, but I think you are going to see the relevance of the picture as I describe it to you. This also is on the Education Queensland website, and I cannot over-praise the Queensland Government, the State Department, the Queensland Teachers Union and the teachers of Queensland, for having had the courage to look at data like this and be willing to front up to some of these issues. Not all stories about policy are cynical ones.

We observed a thousand classrooms for these twenty items (see Table 1) 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.

TABLE 1: Productive Pedagogy Categories

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

We added problematic knowledge and critical literacy as a category – 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 a problem-based learning in the classroom.

In the area of social support: we coded for whether students had any control over the lesson pacing or plan or organisation of learning; we coded for overall social support; time on task; using Bernstein, whether the criteria for student performance were actually being made explicit to kids; following Glasser, whether students were engaged in self-regulation over their behaviour or whether the teacher was in command and control mode.

To look at inclusivity: We coded for whether non-mainstream cultural knowledges were being used, whether Aboriginal knowledge, women’s ways of knowing, other kinds of knowledge were being used. We coded for whether there was equal participation – which was difficult and, often, in the eyes of the beholder. Martin Mills, Deb Hayes and I went into one classroom to code for classroom inclusivity. The result was one confused research exercise: I was watching for whether the Asian kids were being included, Martin was looking for the girls and boys breakdown and none of us saw the deaf kids in the front row! So our capacity to code for inclusivity is in the eyes of the beholder. Following the work of Kieran Egan, we coded for whether or not narrative was being used or whether the instruction was principally expository in mode. We coded for whether there was citizenship and group activity. A thousand classrooms, and one major quantitative data matrix later, here’s what we found:

We found that Queensland classrooms were very strongly socially supportive – they’re great places to be. I think that issues of violence, behaviour management are hyped, they’re overstated in the press. These are not the Queensland classrooms that I knew when I was in Townsville in 1984. 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. What we didn’t find, however, was enough kids doing anything that was connected to the world. How do we create motivation and behaviour management problems? There it is. How do we create motivation and behaviour management among disenfranchised white boys in these low employment areas? Here’s the answer: 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.

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.

But finally and this is the one that hurts – we encountered low levels of intellectual engagement and intellectual demand. On our overall likert scale, the intellectual demand ratings were around the low 2s, with a standard deviation of almost one. This means that about half the lessons we visited had something of intellectual substance occurring; but about half the lessons were very superficial. I can’t put it any other way: there is a ‘dumbing down’ going on in our classrooms – worse at some grade levels and KLAs, but visible across the board in 1000 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 forty-minute lesson and it was a wonderfully orchestrated lesson. The Year 3 and 4 kids watched a video on Flipper, and they did some enlarged print materials with Flipper. All of these things in a wonderfully socially supportive environment. If I were a principal or teacher supervisor who walked past the lesson I would have said, "Five out of five! A beautifully run lesson, no behaviour management problems, great teacher." At the end of lesson, at the end of forty 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. Now that’s what I mean by ‘dumbing down’ of the curriculum. Jim Martin was once called it ‘infantilisation’ and I think there is more of this than we would like to admit occurring in our classrooms. Content-free teaching, or teaching that is about having a good time but in which no substantive engagement with a field, with a discipline, with multiple discourses is occurring. No depth of engagement and the activities are disconnected from the world. In this light, the very fact that the social support levels are high is absolutely necessary – because the actual boredom quotient would be a problem.

By contrast, I went into one of our outstanding primary schools in Queensland (in a lower socio-economic area), and 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, "Cripes, 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 precision.

The ‘Productive Pedagogy’ model is probably a trade marked Education Queensland product. You will probably sooner or later see productive pedagogy wind-up toys and tapes and video material roll in at the next conference! The matrix which we are using in Queensland is giving people a way to talk about pedagogy – it’s opening a space for teachers to talk about their craft. It doesn’t tell you the right way to teach, but describes a repertoire of practices or constellation of practices that you could draw upon depending who you were teaching. Samoan boys might need a different combination of this, depending upon what you are trying to teach.

BASIC SKILLS: NECESSARY BUT NOT SUFFICIENT

But the point that I want to make is that what we found and what Fred Newmann and colleagues 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 over the four resources model again – and again, and again, and again: basic skills are necessary but not sufficient to turn around the performance of your most at-risk kids. Basic skills are necessary but not sufficient. 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 both kids’ 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.

Now back our policy scenario: you’re the minister and they just laid more stuff – data, pie charts, matrices - on the table. This makes things both a little more complex but also a little more simple and straightforward. What this told us and a principal lesson I learned during my brief time as a bureaucrat is that a simple test driven basic skills regime will not solve that problem. 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 (diagnostic net catchment, Reading Recovery results, attendance levels, overall academic achievement derived from teacher judgement, levels of behaviour problems, community response and survey data, teacher absenteeism and test scores) 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 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, I think that 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 scenario I’ll 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’re left with a question of "What next?" The problem – basic skills instruction without overall curriculum reform, intellectual engagement and improved has plateau effects. You’re able to achieve the necessary but not the sufficient; you’ve 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 James Gee recently called the fourth grade slump phenomenon. And by Gee’s reading, 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 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 that they hit year six or seven, your most at risk kids are right back where they started. Reading Recovery teachers and researchers often make this point as well. 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 point that I would make from the QSRLS study is that students return to Flipper, the patterns of disinterest, lowered overall academic achievement, 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.

THE QUEENSLAND PROPOSAL: FOUR PROGRAMMATIC APPROACHES

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. 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 nationally. We can’t have school programs that are just shopping lists, where you must do language experience, phonics instruction this, genre writing for everybody. If you are dealing with ninety nine percent Asian kids in Parramatta, you are going to need to look at some kind of approach to literacy that says to you, "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. 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, Tammy Raphael, Katherine Au, Richard Anderson, Peter Mosenthal and others have proposed other approaches to staging a balanced program, so there are lots of ways to do this.

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 Canadian school reform literature tells us: 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 needn’t 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 of communities and backgrounds; but they will not simply be targets against standardised achievement test scores but targets also against other kinds of social indicators like attendance, behaviour management and so forth.

Our third strategy: 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 1996 work of the New London Group. They also feature in the New Basics. The Singaporeans and Toronto are the only people that have built 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: 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.

CONCLUSION

Some concluding remarks to this long winded and incessantly ‘big picture’ talk. 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 from the work of Bill Green, John Hodgens, Peter Freebody and others, that literacy and literacy crises act as social shock absorbers; that when we hit times of fundamental economic and cultural upheaval where 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 and that is there is something fundamentally misplaced about the test and single package approach.

Yet our year one teachers and two 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. We in Queensland have many schools that are doing outstanding jobs of literacy – by multiple indicators - through whole school programs. While it is actually axiomatic that poverty effects literacy preparedness and achievement - what we know from three decades of school effectiveness and reform work is that the quality of pedagogy can influence twenty or thirty percent of the variance in kids’ performance. 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 twenty or thirty percent better overall achievement than others. But what is it that makes those schools fly? Here’s what we found.

One: strong leadership, a principal who either knows literacy, or is smart enough not to know about literacy and to delegate it to somebody who does.

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

Three: strong professional learning communities - staffrooms in which people are talking about literacy. You don’t 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 ‘unpublic’ 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.

So, strong leadership, balanced programs, professional learning communities, consistent vocabulary and professional metalanguage – and investment. Up to fifteen to twenty percent discretionary funds of many successful schools were put to teacher (and teacher aid, and in instances, parent) professional development. If we don’t invest in professional development we should give up.

As a footnote, we also found that the schools that made a difference did not talk deficit. One principal we’ve worked with for years actually banned deficit talk from her staffroom. The difference in environment that it created is significant because unsubstantiated deficit talk convinces us that kids that were 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’s 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 don’t deliver to them and ‘dumb down the curriculum’, they’re going to engage with these things via the Discovery Channel on cable afterschool.

When I joined the Queensland state system, in spite of what Glasser says about learning to take responsibility for our actions, I found in our educational community a large dysfunctional family. We beat each other up 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 blame the Federal government. In sum, we were caught in a destructive cycle of that was immature and dysfunctional.

In the last year, since I’ve returned to teaching and research - I’ve had the opportunity to meet with teachers and systems bureaucrats in Hong Kong, throughout Asia, in the US and the UK and also in Hawaii and other places in the last year and a half. Many of them would love to be teaching in Australia now. Why? Because our system and school infrastructure has not deteriorated, we have not descended into test-driven systems. 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.

Approaches like that of Education Queensland have won for us as a profession some precious time. We have bought time to reprofessionalise and time to engage in a generational transition. We have bought time actually to focus on school renewal around pedagogies. If we cannot act or fight among ourselves, the results are utterly predictable – whether vouchers or more tests or number driven systems. Our responses could be those of denial. We could act like everything is OK, we could buy a lot of commodities, we could continue to attack the politicians and bureaucrats, we can blame teacher education and the universities – which are struggling with their own funding issues and generational changes. We can split and fight over reading wars, and fight over methods. We can argue that everything that we do in literacy education is so precious, so ineffable that it could never be measured. So that we can argue that we are beyond measurement and we can also retreat into personal growth models, or just assume that by being warm demanders and giving a lot of social support and building self-esteem through hard times everything will be good.

The historian of literacy Harvey Graff once said that literacy is not the problem and it’s not the solution. As literacy educators, this may be a bitter pill for us to swallow. It seems to me that what we need to do now is not fetishise literacy but try to latch our agendas into systematic school renewal and re-professionalisation around the issues of pedagogy. We need to move beyond foci on management and accountability, and refocus on our core business. This teaching and learning and educating.

For me the agenda can have three simple moves: the ‘just in time’ delivery of skills in context. Basic skills are necessary but not sufficient, we need to deliver phonemic awareness, sight vocabulary, alphabetic knowledge, knowledge of print and so forth to learners ‘just in time’ and in meaningful context.

Second, we need a substantive critical engagement with fields, disciplines and discourses around us – whether KLAs, New Basics or whatever - so that we do not dumb down our curriculum any longer. No more Flipper, please.

Third: we need to engage our students in activities that have visible connection to the new worlds of work and life. Literacy education should not be a nostalgic exercise in preparation for another lifeworld and another economy. Just in time delivery of skills, critical engagement with fields, disciplines and discourses, and connectedness to the world. This was John Dewey’s vision nearly a century ago and Paulo Freire’s vision almost forty years ago.

Thank you for your time.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Charles Morgan of the Tasmanian Department of Education for his persistence and assistance in preparing the written version of this address, Ray Land for his ideas and analyses in Literate Futures and, of course, Peter Freebody.