Parents and reformers who lament the declining quality of American public education have long been aware of serious problems in early reading instruction. Indeed, concern about the spread of multiculturalism has focused largely on higher education and public secondary school curricula rather than on the content of the elementary school basal reader. Now, Sandra Stotsky, a research associate at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, has conducted a careful study of the history and content of these basal reader textbooks. Stotsky documents the implementation of this theory with measurements such as the number of challenging words in glossaries over succeeding editions. Startlingly, difficult vocabulary words are now introduced at a declining rate as a student advances through the grade levels.
Basal readers are less challenging in their sentence structure and grammar as well.
There is a depressing quantity of slang and dialect, such as Spanglish and Ebonics. Peppered with difficult non-English words that children will likely never use again, the new readers rob students of precious time that could be spent more productively. In addition, a strong theme running through the new reading instruction is an emphasis on emotive responses over analytical thought. Stotsky describes how multiculturalist advocates have established a pedagogical scheme that we now know diminishes the intellectual capacity of very young children. For too many students the damage has already been done and irreplaceable time has been lost.