The Testing Barrier for Whole Books

There's been a growing amount of noise over the absence of complete books from high school education. That's a good thing, though like many educational issues, it's a cause that can be used in the service of not-particularly-swell goals. But let me tell you what we should be looking at.

The barrier to whole works in the classroom is not student laziness or social media or screens or our transformation into a post-literate society, though all of those factors deserve discussion.

The problem is testing. Not just the effects of the Big Standardized Tests, but the fact that really meaningful assessment a student's work with a whole book is nearly impervious to any sort of standardized test at all. And yet the past several decades has been marked by a push to reduce all assessment to simple standardized data points.

I have ranted about the effects of the BS Test on reading at length. The best way to prepare for a test is to run students through lessons that closely mimic the test. This is the flip side of the principle that you should design an assessment to closely fit what and how you have taught, which is why you design your test after you have designed your instructional unit-- but of course the BS Tests were meant to drive and control instruction, so they came first.

Anyway, the best way to prepare students for a test that is based on superficial multiple-choice questions in response to a context-free short excerpt is to subject them to batteries of multiple-choice questions attached to short context-free excerpts. Education "experts" have tried to argue that an excerpt is fine, that in many instances it's all that's necessary and we don't need to bother with complete works. These experts are full of it.

But the reliance on the BS Test is just a symptom of the trouble with reading whole books.

There's no easy, standardizable way to assess student's work with a whole book. How do we work our way into a whole book? Slowly, carefully. Plenty of support. Lots of discussion. Lots of mulling and reflecting. Maybe some reading of other opinions about the work. 

Studying a whole book is the epitome of work that cries out for slow schooling. The time to dig deep, to turn the pieces over and over. And the best results are not particularly easy to assess.

The cheap and ugly method is superficial and pointless (I still have bitter memories of a test question about Oliver Twist asking about the appearance of Bill Syke's dog). But it's easy to check, easy to score, produces a clear digital score. I was fond of assigning papers, with topics often growing organically out of classroom discussion. It gets even better when you start talking and writing about the connections between different works (Huck Finn and Heart of Darkness make an intriguing pair). And if you have thoroughly wormed your way into the piece, projects that allow students to build and repackage their understanding (and make jokes-- I have always maintained that the more education you have, the more jokes you get) in ways that are both illuminating. I still have fond memory of one group's sketch in which Hamlet went on The Dating Game and tried to choose between Ophelia, Edna Pontellier, and Lady Brett Ashley. My colleague regularly put Lady MacBeth on trial (redeemable or not) in her AP class and my 12th grade vocational students served as the jury. 

Point being, you can dig deep into the meanings and ideas of whole books, many of which defy any attempt to declare that there is Just One True Way to read them. They become rich sources of experience existing at the intersection of the work and the students and the teacher's own expert guidance, but you aren't going to measure that in a quick-to-take, easy-to-score assessment.

The SAT is supposed to measure college level reading, yet a new study shows that the test is getting, well, dumber. The passages are shorter, and mostly expository (aka the kind of thing that is more likely to have One True Reading).  Says Thomas Aquinas College Vice President John Goyette, “The makers of the SAT seem to believe that the ability to tackle long and complex literary works isn’t an important skill for college students anymore.”

The Classic Learning Test wants to pitch itself as a better, less woke, more classically awesome alternative to the SAT, but it has failed to make much of a mark, though Florida likes using it for a graduation test because more students pass it. 

But no standardized test of the SAT or ACT or CLT sort is ever going to provide a useful assessment of really reading whole books. The AP test's version of "pick a work from this list and write this essay" came closer to an ideal, but the AP folks have totally lost their way and are now looking for a director of AP English Language and Composition who will be "leveraging generative AI to author and/or review assessment content, improving and/or making more efficient assessment processes and outputs."

The challenge remains-- teaching whole books requires time and care and does not lend itself to the kind of speed and "efficiency" favored so much in education these days, nor can it be assessed in nice, neat simple numbers. That doesn't mean it can't be assessed at all, but that assessment is best if it's loose and flexible and takes into account the subjectivity involved in grappling with whole works. Teaching whole books takes time, and it requires a level of comfort with squishy imprecise assessments that involve a certain amount of flexibility and grace. If you can't get comfortable with those features, you will have a hard time putting whole books back in your classroom.