Before turning to this analysis, I briefly contextualize the advice in new policy frameworks that drove education reform and the family literacy movement during this decade. An important addition to the discursive landscape of literacy advice in the 1990s was the National Centre for Family Literacy in the United States, and the family literacy movement that took root in North America and the United Kingdom during the 1980s and 1990s.

As an educational approach, family literacy programming emphasizes the role of the parent as the child’s first educator, in the early years before school, and as involved parents during the children’s formal schooling. The design and curricula for family literacy programs vary but most commonly involve parents and children ages zero to six in activities aimed at supporting young children’s literacy development and parents’ literacy skills. There is often a parent education component aimed at helping parents to support their children’s literacy development. Family literacy is a legislated service in both the United States and the United Kingdom. In Canada, where literacy funding is usually short-term and administered through individual provinces and territories rather than from a national office, family literacy programming is eclectic, diverse, and community-based, though guided by the notion that parents are their children’s “first and most important” educators, and that low-income, and minority families in particular, require the interventions of professionals to fulfil this role. As Pitt (2002) observed, “[h]elping children to become successful users of literacy in school is one of the motivations behind this new literacy education, because schools are failing to produce children who can reach standardized literacy levels” (Pitt, 2002, p. 116).

According to David (2002), one of the signs of this emphasis on educating parents to educate their children is that the meaning of educational opportunity has shifted emphasis from the state’s role in the redistribution of resources to promote equality of access and results, to an emphasis on the individual’s responsibility for finding and taking advantage of opportunities provided in the emerging educational marketplace. She argued that this shift amounts to a refocus from equality of opportunity, to quality of opportunity, where individual parents are deemed responsible for the quality of education their children receive. As we saw in Chapter Six, the 1970s’ social welfare state conceived of the academic achievement gap in terms of social class and the unequal distribution of social resources. Since the late 1960s, the family as a context for literacy development received growing attention among researchers of reading instruction. In fact the evolution of the concept of family literacy over the past twenty years may be seen to involve an uneasy process of grafting reading instruction research onto the social malaise concerning the fate of the nuclear family expressed by Leach (1978), among others. Indeed, Hannon (2000) suggested that that the popularity of family literacy may be due to “deeper cultural currents — relating to anxieties about national literacy levels and the position of families in society — which make programs labelled “family literacy” particularly attractive to policy makers and funders” (p. 126).