Literary Approaches: Prison-Education Literacy--Reading is Harder than You Think

In September 2006, Marjorie Gillis, in an Op-ed in The New York Times, widely broadcast a particularly arresting correlation between literacy and prison.  Many of us might have suspected that, as she argued, "The discouraging outlook for low-performing students is reflected in the high incidence of reading difficulties among the prison population."  However, what she claimed next strained the credulity of many education-reform and community-action stalwarts: "Some states even estimate future prison populations based on third-grade reading scores."  In this editorial, widely disseminated in full and in part on the web, Gillis was pushing for the appointment of a "Reading Czar" to oversee reading instruction in Connecticut.  Though long empty, the position had been given new life by a legislature shocked by the rapid fall in literacy rates in its state.

The predictive nature of literacy rates doesn't surprise, but a state's use of literacy figures to budget for prison construction astonishes.  So does Gillis's final thought on prison and literacy, in which she measures bureaucratic cynicism using simple arithmetic.  It costs, she notes, twice as much to imprison an adult as to educate a child:

Thus not only do reading problems affect students, but they also have a host of negative effects on the economy: the average cost to educate a child in Connecticut is close to $11,000 annually while the average cost to house an inmate here is about $28,000.

In an epigram of a kind found in much of American public debate -- from Franklin to Emerson, to Truth and Cady Stanton -- she encapsulates a depth and breadth in educational and social economies in a well-earned and simple figure.  To borrow from another popular version of this form, she's telling us: "if you think education's expensive, take a look at the alternative."

And boy, have we.  Here's just a sampling of the rampant and sometimes willfully naive ways we discuss literacy rates and prison-planning.  The Educational CyberPlayGround cites an Arizona Republic article from September 15, 2004 in order to insert fact-finding into the literacy-prison connection.  In June of 2008, discussants at Oprah's online home took a third-hand account of a conversation with someone who "runs a Federal Prison" in Texas and turned it into a familiar banner: "3rd grade reading scores = Number of Beds for Fed.Prisons!"  In 2010, a more editorially-vetted article at OregonLive! by Bill Graves, quotes officials from California's and Oregon's Departments of Corrections who dismiss the direct correspondence between "reading scores" and "prison beds."  In the same journalistic vein, in 2009, Maria Gold and Rosalind S. Helderman at The Washington Post, out national and Virginian politicians who repeat the "bogus claim" that third-grade reading scores are used to predict prison populations.  

It is Graves, a journalist of social issues and a writer of a book-length examination on education reform, who reminds us that while there is a deep connection between failed literacy education and crime, it isn't the simple and oft-repeated connection between literacy rates and state prison budgets.  His is the voice of, we could say, complexity, in this sometimes one-note conversation.

Now, I don't know exactly how states use literacy rates to project crime or prison populations.  However, as Graves notes, in our public discourse, no one else does, either.  Graves reports that prison officials claim to use "complicated formulas" to make such projections, and in doing so suggests that there's a story here, parts of which are yet to be uncovered. 

Unfortunately, then, lost in the echo-chamber of Gillis's most startling claim is everything else she had to say -- about Connecticut's past high achievements in literacy, budget downturns, renewed interest in schools, and a few key legislative cheerleaders.  Given this cast of characters and the tension that high-stakes educational policy produces, isn't it strange that we don't often ask, "What happened in Connecticut?"  We might also ask a lot of other related questions, if we didn't want to strangely avoid the topic at hand.  We could join a conversation about schools and reading by asking questions like "Do incarcerated adults learn to read?  What if they do?  What if they don't?  What are the best ways to teach them?  How do they describe the transformation they undergo when they become literate?" 

We can answer these questions about Connecticut by reading legislative and news stories in Connecticut's newspapers, or by talking to its parents and children.  We can answer questions about literacy and prison by mining a dozen studies done in prisons by scholars and state institutions.  If we did, we'd have a mess of data, claims, events, stories, and people.  That would be a great thing.  But instead we keep revisiting Gillis's throwaway line -- "Some states even estimate future prison populations based on third-grade reading scores" -- because it allows us to say, "I knew it all along."

What we don't always do is figure out what we didn't know, those inconvenient or complicated stories that stick like fishbones in the narratives we've built about education as it relates to crime or anything else.  Bureaucrat and activist, wonk and community organizer, we'll need to be able to think and act differently.  If we want to move forward, we'll need to see, integrate, and re-frame stories about our schools and communities if we want to make changes, to see not just received truths or even "complicated formulas" of education, but the real people whose stories make up the vast and, I'm afraid, often unseen field of teaching and learning.  This blog begins by considering the reading-prison fallacy because it is a striking example of a truth that few examine with fresh eyes, and because, even when wielded by reformers, it re-installs a host of prejudices about people and educational policy that weigh particularly heavily on the Stratton community.