The achievement ideology of Reading Wonders: a critical content analysis of success and failure in a core reading programme

ABSTRACT

In the early 1960s, researchers began to conduct content analyses of core reading programmes/basal readers. Although these researchers often adopted a critical perspective, and examined the ideological underpinnings of the texts, they failed to make an explicit connection between ideologies and reader access to the text. The study described here is a critical content analysis of texts contained within the core reading programme Reading Wonders. It addresses these research questions: What vision of success and failure is exemplified by selections in the fourth-grade Reading Wonders textbook?—and—To what extent are selections in this programme accessible to readers? Mobilizing MacLeod’s notion of achievement ideology, the study explores the contrast between the programme’s emphasis on individual success and the inaccessibility of the selections included in it. The analysis demonstrates that the achievement ideology is the foundation for most of the selections. It also shows that the complexity and unengaging quality of the basal reader interferes with the reader’s ability to access the included texts. I argue the Reading Wonders textbook serves to convince readers that personal and professional success is the norm in contemporary society, while failing to allow them to construct more than a surface-level meaning of the included selections.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical content analysis
• critical literacy
• curriculum research
• reading engagement
• reading programmes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. These three terms will be used interchangeably throughout this text.

2. Many researchers studied the role of textbooks in the international context during the 1980s but there is a dearth of published research since that period.

3. For purposes of this study, I define dominant groups as those—particularly consisting largely of White, upper-class men—who hold the most power.

4. In 2013, after the publication of Reading Wonders, McGraw-Hill Education was sold to Apollo Global Management, a private equity firm with businesses ranging from Hostess Snacks and timeshares to insurance and television production, allowing the McGraw-Hill companies to focus on its more profitable financial businesses (Henry, 2012). Most Apollo subsidiaries are located in the Caymen Islands and Delaware, both of which are known as tax havens and prime locations for so-called shell companies. Apollo divested itself of CTB/McGraw in 2015 (Cavanaugh, 2015) and also changed McGraw-Hill Educations’ name to S & P Global Inc. in 2016 (S & P Global-Who we-are, 2016).

5. For a more detailed description of the role of textbook publishers in general, and McGraw-Hill in particular, see Jaeger (2012).

6. There were nine poems and two plays included in the texts, but they were excluded from the readability measure because they could not be assessed using the sentence-based formula; plays were included in other measures.

7. McGraw-Hill employs the Lexile formula to assess readability, but it, too, is more challenging to calculate. Comparing the Reading Wonders Lexile scores with my Fry calculations, 35% of the scores were identical, 36% were off by one grade level, 18% by two grade levels, and 13% by three or more levels. On average, the Fry calculations were about a third of a level higher than the Lexile calculations.

8. The target community for this core programme was presumed to be urban. There is a clear link between urban communities and a preponderance of basal texts. The Reading First funding programme, active at the time of this research, promoted the use of core reading programmes (Dewitz, Jones, and Leahy (2009). Reading First grants were more likely to be granted to urban school districts and schools within them (U.S. Department of Education, 2017) that served children who were (a) poor (Fingertip, Fingertip Facts on Education in California, 2017; Response to the Reading First Advisory Committee, 2008), (b) non-White (Reading First State Profile: CA, 2017), and (c) low-achieving (California Assessment of State Performance and Progress, 2017; Reading First Advisory Committee, 2008). All these aspects were true of the district in which this study took place.

9. It is important to distinguish competence (a feeling that one has what it takes to be successful) from success (the achievement of something desired).

10. The remaining 17% of main characters are animals.

11. Failure to delay gratification is associated with very young and/or non-mainstream groups. Among the first 10 empirically-based articles from the past 10 years found in a search for delay gratification on the Summon database, eight were either preschoolers/kindergarteners or people exhibiting eating disorders, problematic Internet use, etc. The remaining two were school-age children.

12. This is also true in the topics addressed in information text.

13. The texts ranged from third grade to college level: third grade = 1%, fourth grade = 8%, fifth through eighth grade = 62%, and high school/college = 11%.

14. Reading Wonders reported average Lexile score was 848 (between fifth grade and sixth grade) and the most challenging piece included was beyond twelfth grade level (Metametrics, 2017).

15. One might expect that the teacher’s guide would support the instructor as s/he attempts to make the text more accessible. This assumption proved untrue in the one selection I examined, ‘Birth of a Democracy.’ In terms of text complexity, seven vocabulary words are introduced and, for those students who speak Spanish as a first language, cognates are offered. The teacher is urged to build prior knowledge by telling the students that, at the time of the American Revolution, Britain was a powerful empire: a fact largely irrelevant to the remaining information presented. Other than asking readers to imagine why it is important to be an active participant in a democracy, comprehension support is limited to literal questions, the answers to which can be found in and quoted from the text. Dutro (2010) provides a more complete analysis of the role Teacher’s Guides play in instruction.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elizabeth L. Jaeger

Elizabeth L. Jaeger is an associate professor of literacy education in the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Sociocultural Studies, University of Arizona, Tucson. Her interests centre on research in literacy development.