4: How to End the Reading War and Serve the Literacy Needs of All Students: Shifting Our Deficit Gaze, Asking Different Questions About Literacy

One of the main themes that run through this book is the importance of a historical view of everything, but especially both the realities of how students are educated in the United States (including how students are taught to read) and the patterns of how education debates repeat them-selves in the mainstream media and among political leaders. The reading war, I have detailed throughout, has repeated itself in intervals since the earliest decades of the 20th century. In this culminating chapter, I must confess that my work here is also a type of déjà vu since others have made this same effort to expose the “damaging . . . myths about literacy achievement in the United States” as well as provide solutions to the debate and how students are taught to read (McQuillan, 1998, p. 2).