Parents Defending the Right to Read

In Miami Lakes, Florida, a single parent complaint has resulted in the removal of Amanda Gorman’s poem, “The Hill We Climb”¹ (read by the poet at President Biden’s inauguration), from the elementary school curriculum (filed later in the Middle School section). The parent’s filing does not point to objectionable material, confuses Gorman with Oprah Winfrey, and asserts that the poem is “not educational” and sends hate messages designed to indoctrinate children.² 

The “hill” Gorman hopes we will collectively climb does the opposite. She writes: “We are striving to forge a union with purpose, to compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man. And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us.”³  Sounds educational to me.

But this one parent has support. Florida’s governor, Rick DeSantis, approved the Curriculum Transparency Act (2022), requiring school districts to catalog their library collections and establish a process by which titles can be reviewed and subject to complaints. The Act was strengthened by House Bill 1069 (2023), which “adds sweeping new provisions prohibiting the use of pronouns consistent with one’s gender identity, expands book banning procedures, and censors health curriculum and instruction.”⁴ According to the Tallahassee Democrat, banned “Books with characters of color and themes or race and racism made up 30%. So did titles with LGTBQ characters or themes.”⁵ 

The notion of “Parental Rights” has been appropriated by dangerous far right extremists
to cancel curriculum that finds fault with a narrative as old as America’s original sin. 

The same parent who challenged Ms. Gorman’s poem rallied with the white supremacist group, the “Proud Boys.”  She simmers with white exceptionalism. Ms. Gorman implores us “to put our future first,” to “put our differences aside,” and to “lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms.” When asked if she had studied reviews of the poem or its meaning, the parent replied, “I don’t care.”  Gorman urges us to learn how to “leave behind a country better than the one we were left.”  The parent divides. Gorman strives.

And yet, in a successful lawsuit filed in California, parent plaintiffs expressed their
own, collective “parental rights” within a larger, constitutional context: the right to read.

Their claim: California had failed in its duty to “address the literacy development” of its children. These parents cited case law and held the State accountable for its own statements about a “sense of urgency in implementing a state literacy plan” to serve all its citizens. What is more, they did their homework, having articulated in detail the extent to which California had not served its diverse populations: “English learners, students with disabilities, socioeconomically disadvantaged students, and African American and Hispanic students.”⁶  

Theirs was a class-action suit supported by research. California Governor Gavin Newsom has approved “early Literacy Support Block grants (ELSB) for 75 of the state’s lowest-performing schools;”⁷ and millions more for learning recovery, high-need training, literacy coaches, professional development, early literacy resources, reading specialists, dyslexia research, literacy certification, and Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library (“offering a free book mailed every month to every child under 5 to ensure book-rich households.”

The California  lawsuit was not only a victory for educational justice, but a watershed moment in the application of research-driven pedagogy to effective practice. In California, Science of Reading and Structured Literacy programs are showing dramatic progress. In Mississippi, “Black and Hispanic students, including those from low-income families, made huge strides.”⁹ 

It’s catching on worldwide. DEVI Sansthan (India)¹⁰ has developed Accelerating Learning for All (ALfA), a highly portable, inexpensive, culturally-adaptable, multilingual program in structured literacy for the world’s poorest.¹¹  During a recent press conference at India’s Press Club, 5-7 year olds read newspapers in Hindi and English.¹² In Kenya, children at risk for reading failure “received daily structured instruction in letter knowledge, phonological awareness, decoding, word reading, and reading comprehension in Kiswahili and English.” The result: significantly higher growth in letter-sound knowledge.¹³

We have a long way to go. A World Bank’s press release (June 23, 2022) made this stark claim:  “70% of 10-Year-Olds now in Learning Poverty, Unable to Read and Understand a Simple Text.”¹⁴ It was, without doubt, devastating. School closures, infrastructure challenges, and little to no training for teachers or parents have undermined, if not gutted, any gains in global development goals.  Nevertheless, faulty or outdated literacy policies have been decimating education long before the pandemic.  

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has explored education policies and academic outcomes. Ongoing country-by-country analyses include the degree of commitment to research and innovation in education; teacher professional development; education governance, evaluation and quality assurance; access and participation; learning environments; and educational leadership. At every level, research has revealed a striking intersection of outdated literacy policy and disenfranchisement.¹⁵ That’s where parental rights come in:

• To connect literacy rights with human rights

• To expose the sunk-cost fallacy of infusing more money into existing, ineffective literacy programs in the hope that they will improve.

• To hold leadership accountable to outcomes and research-driven measurement

• To mobilize the non-formal sector or semi-literate adolescent and adult populations to support foundational literacy

• To ensure the equitable distribution of materials, training, or support

Literacy rights are human rights. Extremists masquerading under “parental rights” may seek to limit the power of a thinking populace. They, like despots who consider a literate public a threat, remove books and uncomfortable ideas, rather than remove barriers to accessing them—standing in the way of thinking and discovery. True parents’ rights promulgate the idea that a poem about including everyone in the experiment of democracy needs to be understood and plans made to ensure that anyone, anywhere, can read: letter by letter, phoneme by phone, word by word, sentence by sentence, idea by idea.

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LET FREEDOM READ: https://bannedbooksweek.org/let-freedom-read-during-banned-books-week-2023/

FLORIDA FREEDOM TO READ PROJECT: https://www.fftrp.org/ 

Endnotes

1.  Barjas, J. (January 20, 2021). PBS NewsHour. “WATCH:  Amanda Gorman reads inauguration poem, ‘The Hill We Climb.’”  Retrieved from:  https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/watch-amanda-gorman-reads-inauguration-poem-the-hill-we-climb

2.  Chappell, B. (May 24, 2023). “1 complaint led a Florida school to restrict access to Amanda Gorman’s famous poem. NPR

3.  Gorman, A. (2021). “The Hill We Climb: An Inaugural Poem.” Random House, UK.  

4.  National Education Association (2023). What you need to know about Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” and “Don’t Say They” laws, book bans, and other curricula restrictions. Retrieved from: https://bit.ly/dontsaygay-info 

5.  Soule, D. (September 25, 2023). Florida is the nation's book banning leader, according to national free speech group. Tallahasee Democrat.  Retrieved from https://bit.ly/DeSantis-bookbanner 

6.  D’Souza, K (September 29, 2022). The Right To Read: It took a lawsuit against California. Retrieved from: https://edsource.org/2022/the-right-to-read-it-took-a-lawsuit-against-california/678069 

7.  Office of Governor Gavin Newsom (March 2, 2023). “Governor Newsom on Read Across America Day: ‘While other states ban books, we’re helping students to read.” Retrieved from: https://www.gov.ca.gov/2023/03/02/read-across-america-day/

8.  Mahnken, K. (June 20, 2022). After steering Mississippi’s unlikely learning miracle, Carey Wright steps down. The 74.  Retrieved from: https://www.the74million.org/article/after-steering-mississippis-unlikely-learning-miracle-carey-wright-steps-down/

9. Literacy Podcasts Worth Listening To (July 25, 2021): https://bit.ly/lani-reading and Plain Talk about Literacy and Learning. Amplify. Retrieved from: ​​https://bit.ly/plain-tallk_literacy 

10.  DEVI Sansthan.  Dignity Learning.  https://dignityeducation.org/ 

11.  Gandhi, S., Delaney, T., Hakim, J., and Bhat, M. (2022). Disruptive literacy:  A roadmap for urgent global action. Bloomsbur:y India.  Retrieved from: https://bit.ly/disruptive-lit.

12.  Ani Pr. (March 28, 2022). The Print. Educationist and innovator Dr Sunita Gandhi develops new pedagogy: ‘Global Dream. Retrieved from: https://bit.ly/Gandhi-AlFA.

13. Wawire, B.A., Barnes-Story, A.E., Liang, X. et al. Supporting multilingual children at-risk of reading failure: impacts of a multilingual structured pedagogy literacy intervention in Kenya. Read Writ (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-023-10453-z

14.  World Bank (June 23, 2022). 70% of 10-year-olds now in learning poverty, unable to read and understand a simple text.” Retrieved from: https://bit.ly/cannotread.

15.  Productivity, Human Capita, and educational policies (2022). Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).l Retrieved from: https://www.oecd.org/economy/human-capital/