This book offers a call to all who are involved with literacy education. It explores the prescriptions that hinder authentic and effective approaches to literacy instruction. The scripts identified here include the Bureaucratic Script, the Corporate Script, the Student Script, the Parent and Public Script, and the Administrative Script. The authors bring their classroom teaching experiences (over thirty years combined) along with their research base to a discussion of literacy spanning elementary through high school. The discussion offers the reader practical and research-based lenses for identifying and overcoming the barriers to best practice while avoiding the inherent pitfalls found too often in our schools. The implied answer to the subtitle is a definitive "No," but the text goes beyond criticizing the current state of the field and seeks to empower both teachers and students seeking literacy growth beyond the scripts that plague twenty-first century commitments to accountability and testing.

Discusses literacy holistically and within the context of literacy instruction throughout the twentieth century

The Bureaucratic Script.- Standards, Standards Everywhere and Not a Spot to Think.- Rubrics, Scoring Guides, and Testing, Testing, Testing.- The Corporate Script.- Marketing Child Readers: Ranking and Sorting.- English as a Scripted Language.- The Student Script.- "When Are We Going To Do English?".- How School Works: Raise Your Hands When You Want to Learn.- The Parent and Public Script.- "Why Don't You Mark the Errors on My Child's Papers?"-Explaining Yourself Theoretically and Professionally.- "Why Aren't You Teaching C. S. Lewis?"-Challenges and Expectations from Outside School.- The Administrative Script.- But Are They Ready To Do Best Practices?.- Building and Department Politics-Talking English.- Beyond Scripts to Literacy.- Literacy as Action-Empowering Students.- Assessing Our Way into Instruction: What Teachers Know and How They Know It.