Literacy and Race: Access, Equity, and Freedom

The coupling of literacy and race emphasizes their historic and contemporaneous intersection in literacy research. In this article, I draw on my scholarship and use three counternarratives to articulate how literacy and race significantly influence access, equity, and freedom. First, I examine access within the sociohistoric context of African Americans attending Calhoun Colored School. Second, I explore equity in a review of the sociohistoric context of Brown v Board and the Civil Rights Act as well as two federal studies of reading research, National Assessment of Educational Progress reading data, and the No Child Left Behind Act. Finally, I investigate freedom by demystifying linkages among the privatization and corporatization of education and reading achievement under Race to the Top's expansion of charter schools, Common Core State Standards, National Council on Teacher Quality, and their funding sources. I conclude with a call to action to courageously pursue a more educationally and socially just literacy research agenda.