Scaling up High Quality Literacy Instruction in High Poverty Schools

In 1966 Jerome Brunner, a seminal scholar in the cognitive science “revolution,” wrote: “We begin with the hypothesis that any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development.” In essence, his argument asserted that cognitively demanding instruction and student performances rooted in rigorous, authentic, disciplinary knowledge were appropriate and possible for most, if not all children. This vision for education would have required a dramatic change from traditional professional practice in classrooms and schools.

But since that time, education reform attempts have had little success in fostering this kind of change on a large scale, at least in part because influencing the core of schooling—instruction—has proven to be very difficult (Berman and McLaughlin 1978; Stake and Easley 1978; Ball 1990; Peterson 1990; Wiemers, 1990; Tyack and Cuban 1995). While some school organizational reforms have been widely adopted, and a few instructional interventions have been implemented deeply, innovations aiming at more complex, widespread instructional change have often been implemented quite superficially (Elmore & McLaughlin 1981; Knapp, 1997; Spillane 2004; Spillane & Zeuli 1999; Barnes 2002; Cohen & Ball 1991).

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