Dr. Sandra Stotsky is the Assistant Commissioner for the Massachusetts Department of Education and a Research Associate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and director of two Harvard summer institutes on civic education. She is the author of Losing Our Language: How Mulitcultural Classroom Instruction Is Undermining Our Children's Ability to Read, Write, and Reason.
Losing Our Language reveals what the once benign, now politically correct ideology of multiculturalism has come to mean for elementary school reading curriculums in the 1990s. In this insightful book, Dr. Stotsky details the changes that have been made over the past decade in cultural content and teaching strategies used for reading instruction in 
elementary schools. She asserts that, in an effort to incorporate more ethnically varied readings into children's textbooks and to raise minority students' "self-esteem," basal readers have systematically been "dumbed down."
As basal readers, the primary tool for teaching reading in elementary schools, have become grammatically more simple and simpleminded, there has been a downward trend in childrens' analytical powers, general knowledge, and overall literacy.
