Reading Comprehension Research and Testing in the U.S.

Undercurrents of Race, Class, and Power in the Struggle for Meaning

Arlette Ingram Willis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135610340
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book challenges traditional, sanctioned, and official histories of reading comprehension by examining how ideological and cultural hegemony work to reproduce dominant ideologies through education in general and reading comprehension research and testing specifically. Willis analyzes the ideological and cultural foundations that underpin concepts, theories, research, tests, and interpretations, and connects these to the broader social and political contexts within U.S. history in which reading comprehension research and testing have evolved. The reconstruction of a history of reading comprehension research and testing in this way demystifies past and current assumptions about the interconnections among researchers, reading comprehension research, and standardized reading comprehension tests. A promising vision of the future of reading comprehension research and testing emerges–one that is more complex, multidimensional, inclusive, and socially just. Reading Comprehension Research and Testing in the U.S. aims to revolutionize how reading comprehension is conceived, theorized, tested, and interpreted for all children. This is a critically relevant volume for educational researchers, teacher educators, school administrators, teachers, policy makers, and all those concerned with school literacy and educational equity.

1

Western European Philosophical Foundations of Reading Comprehension Research and Testing

Reading researchers seldom acknowledge the multiple Western European philosophical assumptions that inform reading comprehension research and testing, including positivism, Social Darwinism, and biological determinism. In the United States these philosophies were present at the onset of educational research in general and reading comprehension research, in particular. Reading comprehension research continues to draw on these philosophical assumptions popularized in the past with some modifications. For example, positivistic theorizing underscores much of the current educational debate on reading and federal funding. It is not my purpose to examine each philosophy in detail, because their influence on research in education is covered extensively by Karier (1986), Lagemann (1997), and Popkewitz (1984), among others.

Herein the connections among these select Western European philosophical assumptions and U.S. education and reading comprehension are disentangled. Along with a brief discussion of the key points of each philosophy and biographical sketches of philosophers (and great thinkers), I illustrate that philosophical assumptions, beliefs, values, and worldviews are human inventions and social enterprises that influence, and are influenced by, the political, social, and economic contexts of the society in which they are conceived. In addition, because these philosophies underpin reading comprehension research and testing, I also review how each philosophy has addressed issues of race, class, and power primarily through the writings of the founders or leaders of each philosophical school of thought. In this way, the undercurrents of race, class, and power, key ideologies are revealed.

This chapter includes a basic review of the philosophical assumptions that underpin historic and current forms of reading comprehension research and testing. It also is important to place philosophical opinions that have informed past investigations within their historical and social settings so as to account for the pervasiveness of the opinions beyond academia. At any one time in history, there are multiple philosophies available. In this context, definitions of reading comprehension used today are the sum total of the history of reading comprehension research and testing, the “collective” effort of countless researchers.

Comte, Spencer, and Darwin are the founders and advocates of positivism, Social Darwinism, and biological determinism, respectively. These men lived with passion and were affected by their beliefs, values, and practices while simultaneously affecting and reflecting the worlds in which they lived. International, national, and local events, along with marriages, affairs, divorces, births, and deaths of children and spouses, affected the lives and work of each man, just as these life events affect the lives for people today. These philosophers were not exceptional men, although they were all members of small intellectual groups within their respective locales that believed they could help ameliorate society’s woes. The lives and work of these men reflected the intellectual and cultural ethos of their era as well as their individual beliefs, values, and worldviews. Their thinking about society, for example, is made clear in their discussions of race and, to a lesser extent, gender.

There are countless biographies describing the lives of Comte, Spencer, and Darwin that reflect shifts in approaches to science and the scientific study of education. While I find the biographies of each man a fascinating study within itself, for this work what is important are the linkages between and among their work and reading comprehension research and testing. The academic documents from which my comments are drawn reflect only shadows of these men and their lives. Their philosophical assumptions, with some modifications, continue to influence and delimit how reading comprehension is researched and tested.

Positivism, Social Darwinism, and Biological Determinism

To begin, it is important to point out similarities among these philosophers. As Europeans of wealth and privilege, they had access to education and leisure to study and pursue their life’s work. Comte’s early academic training, for example, differed markedly from Spencer’s, yet both are recognized as founders of sociology. Typically, their lives changed once they challenged their fathers’ ideas and moved forward with ideas of their own. Each man sought to please his parents, particularly his father, usually around notions of religious devotion. Although each man’s religious views ranged from devotion to denominationalism to agnosticism to atheism, during each man’s lifetime, the most profound and lasting shift came with his adoption or replacement of religion with scientism. That is, the belief in the ability of science to lead to greater knowledge, and for some, Truth, is what drove each man’s passion, but not without cost. Each man suffered physically and emotionally from his beliefs and constant study, often resulting in a nervous breakdown. Finally, Comte, Spencer, and Darwin were completely devoted to their beliefs and life’s work. Comte died poverty-stricken, Spencer became famous, and Darwin became both famous and infamous.

The adoption of these Western European philosophies by thinkers in the United States and the publicized support fueled conflicts simmering between those with traditional religious beliefs and those with belief in a new religion: science. These philosophies threatened traditional religious beliefs, namely, the triune Godhead. Traditional beliefs in a supernatural God, religion, and theology were pushed aside as self-proclaimed agnostic researchers embraced Western European philosophies. One of the great appeals of these philosophies was their focus on the future, as opposed to theology that tended to revere the past and promise a future in the hereafter. Scientism suggested that the present was controllable and the future predictable through scientific knowledge.

Positivism

Auguste Comte believed that science and scientific knowledge were all that was needed to perfect society. Living in a time of social and political reconstruction in France, Comte (1848/1971) argued, “The primary object, then, of Positivism is twofold: to generalize our scientific conceptions and to systematize the art of social life” (p. 3). In his thinking, all knowledge existed in the universe in an external order and could be uncovered through the positive, or scientific, method. His ideas grew in popularity in a country reorganizing itself from aristocratic and military elites to economic and political elites. His philosophic views were supported among many of his contemporaries, such as George Eliot and J. S. Mills, in England, and Albion Small and Lester Ward in the United States, among others. Collectively, these thinkers and writers were drawn to Comte’s notion of science directing social policies.

Comte promoted his idea of the Law of Order, where he sought to demonstrate that all sciences could benefit from the use of the scientific method—observe, hypothesize, test the hypothesis (predict and experiment), conclude (and evaluate), form a new hypothesis, and repeat the process. He claimed that the scientific method was a logical process and reasoned that it existed outside of the emotions of the scientist. Furthermore, in his notion of sociology, he sought to apply the scientific method used in the physical sciences to discover the natural social laws that he believed governed society. According to his theory, advances in science would lead to laws and truths that, in turn, would lead to greater intellectual development and eventually to the perfection of mankind and society.

With increased human intelligence, Comte reasoned, mankind could control society and the environment. He thought that the discovery of general laws or principles allowed the formation of theories based on verification of the “facts.” Comte maintained that the result of positive inquiry could be used to predict human behavior because the methods were objective and should be tested through observation, experimentation, comparison, and verification. Ideas central to Comte’s version of positivism remain (in altered form). For example, he claimed (and some researchers continue to claim) that science is: (a) a way to Truth; (b) deterministic; (c) mechanistic; (d) objective, unbiased, and unemotional; (e) able to uncover laws and theories; and (f) able to predict human behavior and society. Positivism captured the thinking of nonscientists, that is, social thinkers and educators, but had very little impact on practicing scientists. Few “hard” scientists supported his ideas.

Comte also proposed an educational system based on his hierarchy of the sciences and using scientific methods, where observations are made, data collected, and predictions made by educators. In concert with his thinking, he envisioned education’s role as a means to increase society’s role over nature and thereby control society. Comte (1855/1979) predicted a positive scientific society in which “a universal system of positive education would teach men to know and do their duty in such a way as to diminish, if not eliminate, conflict between individuals” (p. 473). He believed that once men were taught to accept their place in the social order and to accept their role in society, the social order would lead to social perfection without conflict. The education of children he divided into two broad time periods, pre- and postpuberty. In addition, his deep respect for the intellect of White men and his belief in the superiority of White men’s thinking, over the thinking of other groups, continues to be a vital part of the academy.

His observations of French society led him to assert that all knowledge progresses in a deterministic pattern, which he tried to tie to his hierarchy of the “hard” sciences. Drawing on Lamarckian theories of evolution in human institutions and social progress, he proposed,

Every sociological analysis supposes three classes of considerations, each more complex than the preceding: viz., the conditions of social existence of the individual, the family, and the society; the last comprehending, in a scientific sense, the whole of the human species, and chiefly, the whole of the WHITE RACE. (Comte, 1842, p. 268, emphasis added)

Comte did not view all humankind as equal, although he was not a proponent of slavery (he explained his views on slavery as part of human history). He believed that some racial groups were worthy of being part of the human race and others should be eliminated. He so revered the intelligence of (White) men that he created a calendar of male intellectual geniuses (from Prometheus to Gall). Not surprisingly, according to Comte, French men were the most intelligent (Comte, 1854). Furthermore, he believed that women, working classes, and people of color were inferior to White men of intelligence (i.e., educated White men).

Comte maintained that each stage of human intellectual development represented a stage of knowledge that paralleled the evolution of the individual mind (Law of Three Stages). His stages included a theological stage (belief in gods and spirits for the occurrence of natural events and governed by priests and military rulers); a metaphysical stage (other unobservable causes that explain natural events and governed by clergymen); and a scientific or positive stage (quantifiable descriptions and explanations for natural events or descriptions, predictions, and control are governed by industrial leaders and the rules of science). He maintained that science should be conducted without religion or theocracy. Ironically, his denial of the role of religion in the life of humankind led him to mysticism and, finally, to the point where he embraced positivism as a religion. In the United States, his ideas about science, the importance of the scientific method, and the use of science as a means to perfect society were more widely accepted than was his theology.

Twenty years after Comte’s death, Ribot (1877) wrote a series of articles that expounded the philosophical advances in France and discussed a distinction among Comte’s followers. He argued that Comte’s work consisted of three main divisions: a philosophy, a polity, and a religion. The followers of Comte were in one of two camps: those who followed the entirety of his work or those who adopted his philosophy but disregarded his polity and religion.

Habermas, a more contemporary critic, wrote “Positivism stands and falls on the principle of scientism” (1971, p. 67). In fact, he argued that positivism “contradicts the intention of an unprejudiced critique of knowledge” (p. 67) because it assumes a priori the answer to the inquiry. In this view of science, what is most important is a strict adherence to methods or procedures. What is most troubling, however, about this approach to science and the study of education is that it is detached from the specific contexts in which learning occurs. Habermas (1973), in a scathing review of the import of positivism, wrote:

Interest and inclination are banished from the court of knowledge as subjective factors. The spontaneity of hope, the act of taking a position, the experience of relevance or indifference, and above all, the response to suffering and oppression, the desire for adult autonomy, the will to emancipation, and the happiness of discovering one’s identity—all these are dismissed for all time from the obligating interest of reason. (pp. 262–263)

In reading comprehension research, the appeal to science (i.e., the use of scientific methods) is an appeal to positivism, an appeal that recently has been resurrected to support and fund reading comprehension test research.

Social Darwinism

Herbert Spencer (1820–1893), who is often paired with Comte as a cofounder of sociology, developed the idea of social Darwinism, which helps to fill in a social gap in positivistic thought. In 1848, he became a subeditor for the London Economist, and three years later, published his first book, Social Statics, or the Conditions Essential to Human Happiness. The text, informed by Comte’s notion of social dynamics, or human progress, outlines Spencer’s views on evolution. In addition, it describes his theory of social evolution as a process of “individuation.” He believed that individualism (the belief that society exists for the benefit of the individual, who must not be constrained by government interventions or made to subordinate to collective interests) is a means to greater human progress.

Although recognized as a cofounder of sociology, Spencer (1864) explained there were differences between his thinking and Comte’s in the article, “Reasons for Dissenting From the Philosophy of M. Comte”:

What is Comte’s professed aim? To give a coherent account of the progress of human conceptions. What is my aim? To give a coherent account of the progress of the external world. Comte proposed to describe the necessary, and the actual, filiation of ideas. I propose to describe the necessary, and the actual, filiation of things. Comte professes to interpret the genesis of our knowledge of nature. My aim is to interpret … the genesis of the phenomena which constitute nature. The one is subjective. The other is objective. (p. 7)

Despite his lack of scientific training, Spencer strongly upheld the primacy of science and scientific knowledge for the understanding of society and attempted to use natural selection theories to explain societal and racial differences. The most extensive explanation of his thinking is his nine-volume System of Synthetic Philosophy (1862–1896), based on his theories of social evolution. He explains that he sought to “reconcile science and religion and to lay the metaphysical underpinnings of evolution” (Spencer, 1862, p. 570). Specifically, he attempted to integrate themes from biology and sociology with the general culture of his time by replacing theological explanations of life with scientific explanations.

Spencer’s views on evolution are attributed to his understanding of the theories espoused by Lamarck (1744–1829) and Malthus (1776–1834). From the former, Spencer gathered his ideas about inherited acquired characteristics and from the latter, Spencer imagined that human suffering (i.e., war, famine, disease) were a part of nature. He drew most heavily from the work of Lamarck, who opined that species inherited characteristics, some of which were developed as they adapted to their environment and were passed on to the next generation.

His theory of evolution rested on the notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics explained in his 1852 article, “The Developmental Hypothesis.” He believed that the connection between physical and mental characteristics was hereditary and that all humanity was generated from a common stock. In an 1852 essay, “A Theory of Population,” Spencer summarized his ideas about evolution and coined the phrase “survival of the fittest.” He held that the more “fit” acquired unique characteristics that advantaged them over others, and, thus, the “fit” survived (this idea is a misappropriation of Darwin’s work, but it was catchy and remains a familiar maxim). He added that differences were exhibited due to the ability of preceding generations to assimilate, accommodate, and adapt themselves to circumstances.

Spencer also believed that natural laws were deterministic. Thus, as the lower species evolved into a higher, more complex species, those most able to cope with change would change and adjust, to survive. Applying his theory to society, he argued that the upper classes of society were genetically superior to the lower classes and more deserving of continual survival. Furthermore, he maintained that the evolutionary process was inherent within each race and each child of each specific race. In his view, the weak, the poor, and the unfit would die off. Thus, he coined the phrase “the elimination of the unfit, through struggle” as a corresponding phrase to his “the survival of the fittest” maxim. For Spencer, this meant that the best adapted individuals in society, which he identified in terms of race, class, and gender, should survive. He was a vocal opponent of all reform, any benevolent support that would allow the survival of the unfit (poor, needy, and less intelligent), and any support that would permit the unfit to pass on their (alleged) weaknesses. He believed that those who survived were chosen by nature to do so.

A self-described agnostic, Spencer argued that the process of evolution was determined by the unknowable’s selection of which species would survive and the species’ adaptations. He argued, “The poor, the weak, the downtrodden, the stupid, and the lazy must be allowed to die off” (Spencer, 1892, p. 79). He argued that the government should not interfere with nature: If some were poor, Black, or uneducated, and could not help themselves, the government should not intervene. Spencer’s views on race made clear that racial hatred, sans America’s peculiar institution of slavery, was not unique. His ideas of racial superiority and inherited intelligence were part of the “common sense” of Western Europeans. He called for individualism, where one sought his own means of survival and did not look for, or expect, government intervention.

Spencer found a ready body of believers for his social evolutionary theory in both Europe and the United States. In Europe, his theories seemed to fit the existing hierarchy of the social class system. In the United States, where the same social class system did not exist in such exaggerated form, many Euro-Americans accepted his ideas as they struggled to regain the power and prestige that some felt they had lo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Western European Philosophical Foundations of Reading Comprehension Research and Testing
• 2. Ideological and Philosophical Foundations of Reading Comprehension Research and Testing
• 3. Reservoir of Themes and Premises: Social Influences of Early Concepts of Reading Comprehension
• 4. Producing Early Reading Comprehension Research and Testing
• 5. World War I and the Development of Reading Comprehension and Research Testing
• 6. Reproducing and Producing Reading Comprehension Research and Testing
• 7. Reading Comprehension Research and Testing Reinvents Itself
• 8. Federal Involvement in Reading Comprehension Research and Testing
• Postscript
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index