Losing Our Language:How Multic: How Multiculturalism Undermines Our Children's Ability to Read, Write and Reason [Paperback]

Sandra Stotsky (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 15, 2002

Why do American students' reading and writing test scores continue to decline? Why does the achievement gap continue to grow between minority and other students? Poor teacher training, large class size, small budgets and other such answers have been proposed for these vexing questions. But Sandra Stotsky argues that it is the incorporation of a multicultural agenda into basal readers, the primary tool for teaching reading in elementary schools, that has stunted our children's ability to read. In "Losing Our Language," Stotsky shows how basal readers have been systematically "dumbed down" in an effort to raise minority students' "self esteem." While elementary readers of the past featured excerpts from classic stories such as "Arabian Nights" and "Robinson Crusoe," with a complex vocabulary and sentence structure able to challenge the imagination and build reading skills, today's basal readers present students with politically and ethnically correct stories whose language is virtually foreign and unable to engage students. Drawing words from Swahili, Spanglish and other trendy dialects to teach students with a shrinking English vocabularly is a symptom of this intellectual and cultural disorder. Sandra Stotsky reminds us that how successfully we teach reading is no mere academic matter. Literacy--cultural and verbal--gives all students, but particularly those from poor or minority backgrounds, personal independence and achievement and the ability to participate fully in our civic life.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

If Johnny can't read, blame the books. According to Stotsky, a research associate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, increasingly dumbed-down elementary school textbooks have been lowering the standards of literacy in the name of multiculturalism. Culling excerpts from the nation's bestselling fourth- and sixth-grade basal readers, she argues that students in the 1990s are being fed a diet of simplistic texts studded with nonstandard dialects selected not for their intellectual rigor or their ability to "delight the imagination" but for their appeal to children's putative "feelings" about being "victimized" by white Western males. As a result, she claims, students, especially minorities, are not being prepared for the analytic thinking required in secondary school. Perhaps worse, Stotsky argues, they are being inculcated with potentially dangerous cultural misinformation. The excerpts Stotsky quotes are indeed "preachy, boring" texts with a "relative paucity of literate words." Her criticism of how the accompanying teacher guides pander to students' self-esteem by soliciting uninformed feelings about social issues is bold and persuasive as well. But while her arguments about pedagogy are convincing, her indictment of the current practice of "using literature for nonliterary purposes" is muddied by her own repeated call for textbooks that "encourage positive civic sensibilities"; this argument opens a can of worms about what exactly "positive civic sensibilities" are.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews

Stotsky, a Harvard Graduate School of Education research associate, shares familiar worries about the alleged sins of the multiculturalists illiberal'' and anti-intellectual practicestheir ``watering down'' of the curriculum and ``dumbing down'' of pedagogy. Multiculturalists, as the author observes, claim to introduce non-Western, ethnic, and gender-sensitive literature in order to promote ``authentic'' experience. Originally, this was intended to correct longstanding sociopolitical exclusions (and academic deficiencies) and to motivate minority children. As a result, the whole-language movement (a context- and culture-based reading program) became multiculturalisms most prized theory. Phonics-based reading (instruction based on recognizing sound-letter relationships) was pushed aside, and ``advanced vocabularies were replaced with dialects (Black English, Spanglish). Much (to some, excessive) emphasis was given to the literature of minority groups, with relatively scant attention paid to the majority European ethnic tradition. Stotsky complains that traditional basal readers have lost their literary standards and no longer reflect the rigor of textbooks containing the ``best literature'' available. The outcome, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, has been a steady downward trend in the basic skills, knowledge, and analytical powers of students and a widening gap between white and minority children. Some of the authors views contrast starkly with those of researchers who maintain that linguistically and culturally enriched backgrounds are effective in enhancing academic and social skills. The new crop of realistic multiculturalists, such as Jabari Mahiri (author of the recent Shooting for Excellence: African American and Youth Culture in New Century Schools), maintain that to filter cultural and linguistic backgrounds out of the curriculum would be tantamount to denying children's identity and reality. Anti-multiculturalists like E.D. Hirsch and the late Allan Bloom created a debate that has lasted since 1987. Stotsky will perhaps ride its waveand produce a splash of her own. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 302 pages
• Publisher: Encounter Books (June 15, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1893554481
• ISBN-13: 978-1893554481
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #167,153 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Author identifies a genuine problem, but limits her focus., April 30, 1999

By 

Paul G. Zolbrod [e-mail] (Albuquerque, New Mexico) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Losing Our Language: How Multicultural Classroom Instruction Is Undermining Our Children's Ability to Read, Write, and Reason (Hardcover)

Sandra Stotsky performs a great service by demonstrating how our schools now fail to teach children how to read and write. We need to be reminded of the gravity of that failure, of course, and efforts to understand not only its consequences but its causes are long overdue. In where she fixes blame, however, Ms. Stotsky limits her focus badly. She points the accusing finger almost exclusively at the multicultural movement. In their effort to pursue "social and political goals" to the neglect of academic ones, she argues, multiculturalists in the education establishment have brought about literacy's decline.

By insisting on that cause alone, though, she brings too narrow a view to a problem that is as broad as it is complex. As a college English teacher with 40 years of experience, I agree that such a decline has occurred and is serious indeed. I even share her distrust--at least in part--of many proponents of multiculturalism. They, too, bring a limited focus to language arts, and their own ideological zeal can sometimes lapse into anti-intellectual folly. But the causes of "language loss" are many and deep--some blatantly obvious, some less so, and some remaining to be determined by careful, dispassionate investigation. They range widely-- from the spread of affluence in the U.S. following World War II and the outburst of electronic technology, to rapidly changing demographics, Cold War hysteria, and an all-too-simplistic polarization between left and right on the educational front. Quite possibly, they also include the consolidation of smaller school districts into monolithic bureaucracies, the indifference of university English departments to the pre-college education scene, and even a market mentality that treats children as consumers rather than students, especially in tv commercials.

At their more insidious, such causative forces overlap in ways too easily overlooked and should be explored more open-mindedly than Ms. Stotsky explores multiculturalism as a singular agent of pedagogical change. So while she deserves to be heard for how she identifies the literacy problem, she leaves too much unobserved about why it exists. I wish she would have cast a wider net with her considerable research and reasoning skills so as to be more realistic about why we find ourselves in the literacy mess she so aptly identifies.

26 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars See Spot Run Multiculturally, March 25, 1999

By 

Andrew Hazlett (B-more) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Losing Our Language: How Multicultural Classroom Instruction Is Undermining Our Children's Ability to Read, Write, and Reason (Hardcover)

This is my review of Professor Stotsky's book as it ran in the Wall Street Journal of Monday, February 22, 1999

By now, we are familiar with the ways in which multiculturalism has infiltrated America's college reading lists and high school textbooks at the expense of the traditional curriculum. Less well known is what is going on in elementary schools. There, abysmal scores in reading and writing are often blamed on faulty methods, e.g., using "whole language" to teach reading instead of tried-and-true "phonics." No doubt there is a lot of truth to such claims, but it turns out that multiculturalism deserves part of the discredit, too.

As young students learn to read, they use what are called "basal readers." These collections of stories and excerpts from literature--among the most widely read textbooks in existenc--are crucial to the mastery of grammar and vocabulary. The 19th century's version was, of course, the demanding "McGuffey's Readers."

Today's versions are quite different, as we learn in Sandra Stotsky's "Losing Our Language" (Free Press, 316 pages, $26). Ms. Stotsky shows how reading instruction has fallen prey to multicultural fashion at a staggering cost to children. Because "language development is the engine that drives intellectual growth," a child's reasoning ability is the ultimate victim of the new social imperatives.

The multiculturalists seem to be aware of the importance of basal readers, if not the reasons for their importance. Over the past thirty years, they have pushed for revisions motivated by a belief that underperforming students need to feel self-esteem before they can succeed academically. (This premise has never been validated in decades of empirical research.) How will self-esteem be cultivated? Not by insisting that all students achieve at a high level (and thus earn their self-respect) but by lowering standards.

Ms. Stotsky uses some clever measurements, such as the number of challenging words in glossaries over succeeding editions. Difficult vocabulary words are now introduced at a declining rate as a student advances through the grades. Basal readers are less challenging in just about every other way too. Sentence structure and grammar have been dumbed down.

The content of the readers is distressing as well. Essential aspects of American civic culture and history are gone, making way for stories, poems, articles, and inspirational tales by and about members of various U.S. identity groups--or non-European foreign groups. In the 1993 edition of the Macmillan/McGraw-Hill fourth-grade reader, _all_ the foreign content was non-European. (Didn't this make kids wonder who's been doing all the oppressing?)

The teacher guides that accompany the texts pound the point home. The guide to a widely used reading series advises: "To help students begin to develop cultural awareness and understanding, they first need to learn who they are-their ethnicity, gender, and social class-and how they are viewed by society.... Both students and teachers have participated in relationships of domination, submission, oppression, and privilege which have helped to shape who they are and how they see the world."

Given such assumptions, it is not surprising that the new readers are peppered with difficult non-English words that children will likely never use again, such as an Indian tribe's word for "eagle" which is pronounced "WANG buhl" but spelled "Wanbli"" There is also a depressing quantity of slang and dialect, such as this patronizing specimen culled from the Houghton-Mifflin sixth-grade reader (not some 1920s minstrel show): "Shore, shore, Fannie's fetchin' more. We gotta dance.... Member, 'fore mornin' we goin' to be."

Many selections are what Stotsky calls "pseudo-literature": manipulative, didactic stories illustrating "progressive" platitudes. There are stilted narratives about Native Americans, the deaf, people with Down's Syndrome, white people's unfair advantages and so on.

Such selections are springboards for emotional explorations of prejudice and the darker periods in American history. About the World War II-era internment (in "concentration camps") of Japanese immigrants, Houghton-Mifflin wants teachers to ask sixth-graders: "How do you feel about the fact that the United States required Japanese-American people to leave their homes and live together in camps?"

A strong theme of the new reading instruction is the value of emotive responses over analytical reasoning. It's not hard to picture angry 11-year-old boys working out their "feelings" about volatile subjects--like black-white conflict--with their fists at recess.

In sum, as Ms. Stotsky writes, "the moral impulses guiding the choice of these selections in the readers seem to entail high academic costs at the level of language learning itself, especially, and ironically, for black and immigrant children."

Reading "Losing Our Language" should send parents rushing to their school board with pointed questions. At the least, as Ms. Stotsky advises, parents should take a long, hard look at what their children are being asked to read.

Mr. Hazlett is director of the Manhattan Institute's book program.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Take a close look at your child's lit book, August 8, 2004

By 

Kevin Killion (Illinois, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Losing Our Language:How Multic: How Multiculturalism Undermines Our Children's Ability to Read, Write and Reason (Paperback)

Is your child's school using a series of "literature" books, with each year's text containing a wide variety of stories? Well, take a close look. Take a very close look. Are those stories uplifting? Challenging? Do they introduce valuable new vocabulary and increasingly more complex writing? Or do they have startling high proportions of stories you've never heard from, from third world sources? Stotsky's book is a searing indictment of these "basal readers", and just how badly they have slipped in the last twenty years. They are softer, fluffier, and have less inspirational content than ever before. This is a very scary book, and I heartily recommended it.