The State of English Education and a Vision for Its Future: A Call to Arms

grappling with the central question assigned to us at the May 2005 Conference on English Education (CEE) Leadership and Policy Summit"What Is English Education?"the twelve members of our working group confronted another: "Does it even matter?" Given the marginalized and arguably irrelevant role that English education as an academic discipline and English educators as professionals have played on the educational and political scene in recent years, it would be easy to answer in the negative. The most important theoretical inquiries, research studies, and pedagogical projects in our field have had little effect on current educational policy initiatives, from the No Child Left Behind legislation to the rapidly multiplying programs that offer "alternative" routes to a teaching credential and the seemingly inexorable push toward continuous, federally imposed, standardized assessments of literacy. The ideas, values, and aesthetics that energize our fieldideas about the social and political nature of literacy; about the wondrous and unsettling power of literacy and the imagination; about the rich and multifaceted texts that embody cultural ways of being; about the sheer confoundedness of language, especially in its written forms; about the transformative role of technologies in defining new literacieshave been mostly ignored by constituencies outside of the limited audiences who read this journal or attend the CEE or other sessions at the NCTE convention. Indeed, decades of illuminating qualitative and quantitative research into literacy learning and teaching, as well as theoretically and