This weekend features the major festival of the year in my town, and as my wife and I walked back from yesterday's round of festivating, we noticed a sign posted many times along the street. It was a no parking sign, boldly lettered "Temporary Police Order," and we made a quick joke about why temporary police would be allowed to issue orders about parking.
But it got me to thinking.
The preferred method for teaching and testing reading in the [Insert Name Here] Core Standards is to treat reading as a discrete set of skills, completely unrelated to any prior knowledge. David Coleman famously admonishes us to stay within the four corners of the text.
A really great reader, Coleman and his acolytes suggest, can read anything in his native tongue, even without prior background knowledge or contextual knowledge from outside those four corners.
And yet here is a simple text, a text so short and sweet that it fits on a tiny sign. And without prior knowledge, without information from outside the four corners, we can't understand it. We can't "read" it.
Does it announce a order issued by police who are only hired for a short period of time? Is it an order issued by the regular police that will be in effect only for a short period of time? In truth, the former seems more likely if I stay within the four corners-- wouldn't the latter be better expressed by "Police Temporary Order," as awkward and ungainly as that sounds?
Of course, the perceived awkwardness is a function of my prior knowledge of how those three words are best arranged. So using that prior knowledge is cheating.
In fact, I'm already cheating by being aware of the context of the text, which is a sign stapled to a piece of wood driven into the ground beside parking places. If I did not have the "no parking" portion of the sign in front of me, I would have no way of knowing if "order" meant a command or directive as opposed to the absence of chaos or a particular arranged sequence of police. So "temporary police order" could be a reference to the sequence in which some part-time police officers might be standing in line, or it could mean that police have quelled ongoing chaos, but that chaos can be expected to erupt again at any moment. Without the context of the sign, I might imagine that the text originally appeared on a pizza shop takeout form, and now a whole new set of possibilities open up.
The clarification can further depend on my knowledge of local history. Is the use of temporary police pretty standard fare here, or does this town depend on a standing police force? Have I encountered rent-a-cops in municipalities often enough for me to think of them as common, or am I unacquainted with that police hiring technique? My own understanding will influence my ideas about which reading of the text seems more probable.
My understanding of the text rests firmly on my prior knowledge and the context in which it appears. In fact, without employing prior knowledge and context, I cannot reach a definitive reading of the text.
My point? Folks like Coleman whose conception of reading is that it is a simple decoding exercise (like dialing in the combination of a safe) or a set of skills that can be simply exercised cut off from any prior knowledge or understanding outside the four corners-- those folks have a poor understanding of just how complex the act of reading actually is and just how difficult it is to measure. You will find it nearly impossible to create a reliable measure of reading that would cut out prior knowledge, restrict readers to the four corners, and still somehow meaningfully measure reading skills. I'm not sure you could do it at all-- not even with a temporary police order.
Showing posts with label Reading. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reading. Show all posts
Sunday, October 4, 2015
Friday, March 6, 2015
Is Early Reading a Problem?
Robert Pondiscio appeared on US News this week to stick up for the Common Core's demand that kindergartners learn to read.
He's responding to the recent report from Defending the Early Years and the Alliance for Childhood. The report (which I covered here) makes a case that the Core ignores developmental experts.
Pondiscio engages in a subtle but significant misrepresentation of the criticism of CCSS's early reading requirement when he says "What critics seem to be saying is that Common Core is simply too hard for kindergarten."
Well, no. Not exactly.
I can't think of a single person I've encountered on any side who has said, "For the love of God, whatever you do, don't let kindergartners learn to read!! Don't even let them get ready to read!" Nor do I know of anyone in education who doesn't recognize the value of learning to read. I do look askance at statements about early reading success being predictive of "a child's academic trajectory" because it smells a great deal like one more person confusing correlation with causation. But even if I don't buy the usefulness of that observation, it doesn't make me value reading any less.
However, there is a world of difference between saying, "It's a good idea for children to proceed as quickly as they can toward reading skills" and "All students must demonstrate the ability to read emergent reader texts with purpose and understanding by the last day of kindergarten."
The development of reading skills, like the development of speech, height, weight, hair and potty training, is a developmental landmark that each child will reach on his or her own schedule.
We would like all children to grow up to be tall and strong. It does not automatically follow that we should therefor set a height standard that all children must meet by their fifth birthday-- especially if we are going to label all those who come up short as failures or slow or developmentally disabled, and then use those labels in turn to label their schools and their teachers failures as well. These standards demand that students develop at a time we've set for them. Trying to force, pressure and coerce them to mature or grow or develop sooner so that they don't "fail"-- how can that be a benefit to the child.
And these are five year olds in kindergarten. On top of the developmental differences that naturally occur among baby humans, we've also got the arbitrary age requirements of the kindergarten system itself, meaning that there can be as much as a six-month age difference (10% of their lives so far) between the students. [Edit: As correctly pointed out by some readers, depending on how your local district handles kindergarten registration, that age spread can be as large as a full year.]
Saying that we want all students to grow up exposed to rich environments that promote reading-- that's a great idea. Setting an arbitrary cut-off standard and then labeling everyone who doesn't meet it a failure is a terrible idea. The Common Core does not present its reading standards (developed without input from any early childhood learning experts) as suggestions; it presents them as a list of Things Students Must Know By the End of the Grade. That's what Pondiscio tiptoes around in his piece-- that we are going to tell five year olds who aren't at the standard that they are failures (and probably on a path to be failures for life).
And I'm not even starting on how the Core encourages the use of standardized testing to show how students have met the standard. What earthly good does it do to subject a five year old to a standardized test?
Giving each child the earliest best possible shot at learning to read is an admirable and worthwhile goal, but demanding that each and every child meet a One Size Fits All standard is not, particularly when that standard has not taken into account the realities and varieties of early child development.
He's responding to the recent report from Defending the Early Years and the Alliance for Childhood. The report (which I covered here) makes a case that the Core ignores developmental experts.
Pondiscio engages in a subtle but significant misrepresentation of the criticism of CCSS's early reading requirement when he says "What critics seem to be saying is that Common Core is simply too hard for kindergarten."
Well, no. Not exactly.
I can't think of a single person I've encountered on any side who has said, "For the love of God, whatever you do, don't let kindergartners learn to read!! Don't even let them get ready to read!" Nor do I know of anyone in education who doesn't recognize the value of learning to read. I do look askance at statements about early reading success being predictive of "a child's academic trajectory" because it smells a great deal like one more person confusing correlation with causation. But even if I don't buy the usefulness of that observation, it doesn't make me value reading any less.
However, there is a world of difference between saying, "It's a good idea for children to proceed as quickly as they can toward reading skills" and "All students must demonstrate the ability to read emergent reader texts with purpose and understanding by the last day of kindergarten."
The development of reading skills, like the development of speech, height, weight, hair and potty training, is a developmental landmark that each child will reach on his or her own schedule.
We would like all children to grow up to be tall and strong. It does not automatically follow that we should therefor set a height standard that all children must meet by their fifth birthday-- especially if we are going to label all those who come up short as failures or slow or developmentally disabled, and then use those labels in turn to label their schools and their teachers failures as well. These standards demand that students develop at a time we've set for them. Trying to force, pressure and coerce them to mature or grow or develop sooner so that they don't "fail"-- how can that be a benefit to the child.
And these are five year olds in kindergarten. On top of the developmental differences that naturally occur among baby humans, we've also got the arbitrary age requirements of the kindergarten system itself, meaning that there can be as much as a six-month age difference (10% of their lives so far) between the students. [Edit: As correctly pointed out by some readers, depending on how your local district handles kindergarten registration, that age spread can be as large as a full year.]
Saying that we want all students to grow up exposed to rich environments that promote reading-- that's a great idea. Setting an arbitrary cut-off standard and then labeling everyone who doesn't meet it a failure is a terrible idea. The Common Core does not present its reading standards (developed without input from any early childhood learning experts) as suggestions; it presents them as a list of Things Students Must Know By the End of the Grade. That's what Pondiscio tiptoes around in his piece-- that we are going to tell five year olds who aren't at the standard that they are failures (and probably on a path to be failures for life).
And I'm not even starting on how the Core encourages the use of standardized testing to show how students have met the standard. What earthly good does it do to subject a five year old to a standardized test?
Giving each child the earliest best possible shot at learning to read is an admirable and worthwhile goal, but demanding that each and every child meet a One Size Fits All standard is not, particularly when that standard has not taken into account the realities and varieties of early child development.
Friday, February 6, 2015
Reading As Relationship
Russ Walsh is an expert in reading instruction, a blogger, and (as near as I can tell) a gentleman. A recent post of his is, for my money, one of his most important ones because it collects some research and clear thinking to remind us of one of the great truths of both reading instruction in particular and education itself in general.
The post sets out to take a more nuanced look at text complexity, leaning particularly on the work of Lauren Anderson and Jamy Stillman, (Over)Simplifying Complexity: Interrogating the Press for a more Complex Text.
Both Russ's post and the original article are well worth reading in their entirety; I'm going to oversimplify them here because that's how I roll.
First, Anderson and Stillman re-support what teachers and other humans with common sense already know-- that giving a student a text above her frustration level does not actually help anything, at all. But there's more than that. Writes Walsh
They were increasingly aware that they needed to revise their definition of text complexity to include the context of the reading situation, the background knowledge and skills of the students and the reading instruction goals.
In other words, the level of challenge in any text is not something that exists as a discrete quality, separate from all others. Text difficulty (or complexity or level or whatever other name tag you want to put on these various measures) is not an objective immutable quality. How challenging a text is depends on context, on whose hands are holding it, on what purpose has been attached to it.
Instruction-- the directions and pedagogy that a teacher attaches to the text-- can change the level of challenge. If I hand first graders a copy of War and Peace and tell them to tell me how many pages or how many chapters are in the book, there is only a little bit of challenge there. If I hand seniors a copy of Green Eggs and Ham, and assign a paper using the book as basis for an analysis of social pressures on the individual as experienced in a post-agrarian society resisting the imperialism of other oppressive cultures, it is now a highly challenging text.
I have been a voracious reader for most of my life (miraculous, considering my parents failed to give me the benefit of high quality pre-pre-K when I was three). Early on, I fell in love with dinosaurs and devoured everything by Roy Chapman Andrews. When I had run out of kid books about dinosaurs, I moved on to grown-up books that were, technically, way above my reading level. But at that point I knew an awful lot about dinosaurs, so between the background knowledge I already had and my high degree of interest and motivation, I managed. On the other hand, the first book I was ever unable to finish was the classic Black Beauty, a stirring tale of some horse who does something or other and then zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Horses-- I neither knew nor cared about anything horsey. I returned to that book as late as 8th or 9th grade but still found that I was easily distracted from it by, well, watching grass grow would do it. It was like Black Beauty was surrounded by a special impenetrable anti-reading forcefield that would push my eyes off in any direction. Still one of the biggest textual challenges I have ever faced, and I've read Moby Dick.
We can play this anecdotal game all day. Whenever I teach seniors, I always teach them Macbeth, no matter what level students they are. But how I teach, what I teach about it, what I expect them to get out of it, what I assess them for-- that varies widely depending on the students.
Bottom line-- I cannot assess the challenge level of any reading material as a specific, objective quality in and of itself. I can do broad strokes (I feel comfortable saying that Macbeth is more challenging than Green Eggs and Ham), but the real classroom challenge of a work comes down to the relationship between the specific work, the specific students, and the pedagogical approach and techniques of the teacher.
The notion of reading difficulty as some static objective isolated quality is a common mental mistake of the reformsters, and it completely misses the importance of relationships. Current education policy is so off track that it qualifies as both necessary and radical to say that relationships matter.
Yet policy is built on ignoring relationships. Teachers are evaluated in a manner that suggests that a teacher's quality and effectiveness are somehow static, absolute, objective, isolated qualities that exist outside of any context, background or purpose. It's like insisting that if a man is a Good Husband, he will be a Good Husband for any woman selected at random from any place, age or location in the world.
Context matters. Background matters. Purpose matters. And relationships matter most of all. Relationships between students and text, students and teachers, students and each other. The fact that we don't have a handy lexile score or quality index or piece of inanely-generated "data" to measure relationships does not mean they aren't important. That's true for reading and for everything else in education as well.
The post sets out to take a more nuanced look at text complexity, leaning particularly on the work of Lauren Anderson and Jamy Stillman, (Over)Simplifying Complexity: Interrogating the Press for a more Complex Text.
Both Russ's post and the original article are well worth reading in their entirety; I'm going to oversimplify them here because that's how I roll.
First, Anderson and Stillman re-support what teachers and other humans with common sense already know-- that giving a student a text above her frustration level does not actually help anything, at all. But there's more than that. Writes Walsh
They were increasingly aware that they needed to revise their definition of text complexity to include the context of the reading situation, the background knowledge and skills of the students and the reading instruction goals.
In other words, the level of challenge in any text is not something that exists as a discrete quality, separate from all others. Text difficulty (or complexity or level or whatever other name tag you want to put on these various measures) is not an objective immutable quality. How challenging a text is depends on context, on whose hands are holding it, on what purpose has been attached to it.
Instruction-- the directions and pedagogy that a teacher attaches to the text-- can change the level of challenge. If I hand first graders a copy of War and Peace and tell them to tell me how many pages or how many chapters are in the book, there is only a little bit of challenge there. If I hand seniors a copy of Green Eggs and Ham, and assign a paper using the book as basis for an analysis of social pressures on the individual as experienced in a post-agrarian society resisting the imperialism of other oppressive cultures, it is now a highly challenging text.
I have been a voracious reader for most of my life (miraculous, considering my parents failed to give me the benefit of high quality pre-pre-K when I was three). Early on, I fell in love with dinosaurs and devoured everything by Roy Chapman Andrews. When I had run out of kid books about dinosaurs, I moved on to grown-up books that were, technically, way above my reading level. But at that point I knew an awful lot about dinosaurs, so between the background knowledge I already had and my high degree of interest and motivation, I managed. On the other hand, the first book I was ever unable to finish was the classic Black Beauty, a stirring tale of some horse who does something or other and then zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Horses-- I neither knew nor cared about anything horsey. I returned to that book as late as 8th or 9th grade but still found that I was easily distracted from it by, well, watching grass grow would do it. It was like Black Beauty was surrounded by a special impenetrable anti-reading forcefield that would push my eyes off in any direction. Still one of the biggest textual challenges I have ever faced, and I've read Moby Dick.
We can play this anecdotal game all day. Whenever I teach seniors, I always teach them Macbeth, no matter what level students they are. But how I teach, what I teach about it, what I expect them to get out of it, what I assess them for-- that varies widely depending on the students.
Bottom line-- I cannot assess the challenge level of any reading material as a specific, objective quality in and of itself. I can do broad strokes (I feel comfortable saying that Macbeth is more challenging than Green Eggs and Ham), but the real classroom challenge of a work comes down to the relationship between the specific work, the specific students, and the pedagogical approach and techniques of the teacher.
The notion of reading difficulty as some static objective isolated quality is a common mental mistake of the reformsters, and it completely misses the importance of relationships. Current education policy is so off track that it qualifies as both necessary and radical to say that relationships matter.
Yet policy is built on ignoring relationships. Teachers are evaluated in a manner that suggests that a teacher's quality and effectiveness are somehow static, absolute, objective, isolated qualities that exist outside of any context, background or purpose. It's like insisting that if a man is a Good Husband, he will be a Good Husband for any woman selected at random from any place, age or location in the world.
Context matters. Background matters. Purpose matters. And relationships matter most of all. Relationships between students and text, students and teachers, students and each other. The fact that we don't have a handy lexile score or quality index or piece of inanely-generated "data" to measure relationships does not mean they aren't important. That's true for reading and for everything else in education as well.
Saturday, January 24, 2015
K Reading Instruction: Ignoring the Experts
Defending the Early Years and the Alliance for Childhood have released a report about the use of Kindergarten reading instruction. Authored by Nancy Carlsson-Paige, Geralyn Bywater McLaughlin, and Joan Wolfsheimer Almon, the report gives up its conclusion in its title: "Reading Instruction in Kindergarten: Little To Gain, and Much To Lose."
If you prefer your information in video form, here's a handy short clip they've created to tout the report's conclusions:
Both the video and the report are fully accessible to people who have not been soaking in education policy debates for the past several years, so they are perfect educational tools to share with your civilian friends.
The report is not a long or arduous read, but it's still a full twelve pages, so I'm going to give you the bullet points version.
* Many children are not developmentally ready to read in kindergarten, but the Common Core Standards require schools to do exactly that. Researchers have demonstrated that the developmental milestones of early childhood have not moved significantly since at least the 1920's. Researchers also offer a wide range of time frames for those milestones to be hit, an observation confirmed by anybody who ever spent time around more than one tiny human. Citing superhuman education research machine Mercedes Schneider, the authors note that the Common Core's creation involved not one single grown human with professional expertise, training or experience working with the tiny humans that they were setting standards for.
* No research supports the idea that learning to read in Kindergarten results in long-term gains. It's true that no research can hope to show just how much grown human social status and adult self-esteem is derived by parents who can casually observe at cocktail parties that their five-year-old is currently polishing off the complete Harry Potter series, but so far no researcher has been able to show that a kindergarten reading head start leads to early admission to Yale, cuter prom dates, and more frequent raises. Anecdotally, I am sure by the time students have arrived in my classroom to argue about how much they don't enjoy reading Heart of Darkness, any super advantage they may have had from an early reading start has pretty much disappeared. I don't think I'm unusual in this respect, and so far nobody has conducted research that would prove I'm wrong.
* Research does show that play-based programs are far more effective than any sort of Tiny Human Academics. Also, children learn through playful, hands-on experiences with materials, the natural world, and engaging, caring adults.In other words, letting five year olds act like five year olds instead of trying to make them behave like college freshmen is a good choice. It works, and the research shows it.
* Active, play-based experiences in language-rich environments help children develop their ideas about symbols, oral language and the printed word — all vital components of reading. Yes, we know a lot about how to do this stuff effectively.
* We are setting unrealistic reading goals and frequently using inappropriate methods to accomplish them. Which sort of follows. If your goal is to make pigs fly, is there anything you might attempt that wouldn't be inappropriate. This is why it matters that CCSS goals are bad goals set by people who don't know better-- if you start from bad goals, you will use bad methods to pursue them.
* In play-based preschools and kindergartens, teachers intentionally design language and literacy experiences which help prepare children to become fluent readers. In other words, back off. We're professionals and we know what we're doing. What may look like "just messing around" to people who don't know any better is actually laying the groundwork for literacy. And no, you can't get the same effect from a pre-packaged computer program. Tiny humans need to learn from other humans.
* The adoption of the Common Core State Standards falsely implies that having children achieve these standards will overcome the impact of poverty on development and learning, and will create equal educational opportunity for all children. No well-promoted set of government standards will make the effects of poverty disappear. Nor do the standards trump actual developmental stages. You don't get children to grow taller faster simply by insisting that they must, or else.
* Recommendations. The authors wrap up with a list of Things They Want To Have Happen. Erase Kindergarten standards from CCSS. Do some more actual research on what works, particularly with students in poverty. Convene a task force (yeah, I'm not really excited about that idea). No high stakes testing for pre-third grade students. Make teachers better and put experienced ones in high-poverty areas.
Okay, so I don't think all of their recommendations are winners. But they've done a good job of laying out the problems with the kindergarten reading standards (and really, with the standards beyond just those). The standards were set by people who did not know what they were doing, and so the standards don't fit the children. To try to make the children fit the standards requires a sort of educational malpractice.
And yet we already know plenty about what works when teaching children to read. And plenty of teachers were already doing it. Early childhood reading instruction is an area where the amateurs running the Common Core show clearly pushed aside and ignored the experts in the field and demanded that solid techniques and approaches be replaced with unfounded approaches. CCSS demands flying pigs. It's time for the amateurs to just back up and let the people who know how to teach the tiny humans do their job.
If you prefer your information in video form, here's a handy short clip they've created to tout the report's conclusions:
Both the video and the report are fully accessible to people who have not been soaking in education policy debates for the past several years, so they are perfect educational tools to share with your civilian friends.
The report is not a long or arduous read, but it's still a full twelve pages, so I'm going to give you the bullet points version.
* Many children are not developmentally ready to read in kindergarten, but the Common Core Standards require schools to do exactly that. Researchers have demonstrated that the developmental milestones of early childhood have not moved significantly since at least the 1920's. Researchers also offer a wide range of time frames for those milestones to be hit, an observation confirmed by anybody who ever spent time around more than one tiny human. Citing superhuman education research machine Mercedes Schneider, the authors note that the Common Core's creation involved not one single grown human with professional expertise, training or experience working with the tiny humans that they were setting standards for.
* No research supports the idea that learning to read in Kindergarten results in long-term gains. It's true that no research can hope to show just how much grown human social status and adult self-esteem is derived by parents who can casually observe at cocktail parties that their five-year-old is currently polishing off the complete Harry Potter series, but so far no researcher has been able to show that a kindergarten reading head start leads to early admission to Yale, cuter prom dates, and more frequent raises. Anecdotally, I am sure by the time students have arrived in my classroom to argue about how much they don't enjoy reading Heart of Darkness, any super advantage they may have had from an early reading start has pretty much disappeared. I don't think I'm unusual in this respect, and so far nobody has conducted research that would prove I'm wrong.
* Research does show that play-based programs are far more effective than any sort of Tiny Human Academics. Also, children learn through playful, hands-on experiences with materials, the natural world, and engaging, caring adults.In other words, letting five year olds act like five year olds instead of trying to make them behave like college freshmen is a good choice. It works, and the research shows it.
* Active, play-based experiences in language-rich environments help children develop their ideas about symbols, oral language and the printed word — all vital components of reading. Yes, we know a lot about how to do this stuff effectively.
* We are setting unrealistic reading goals and frequently using inappropriate methods to accomplish them. Which sort of follows. If your goal is to make pigs fly, is there anything you might attempt that wouldn't be inappropriate. This is why it matters that CCSS goals are bad goals set by people who don't know better-- if you start from bad goals, you will use bad methods to pursue them.
* In play-based preschools and kindergartens, teachers intentionally design language and literacy experiences which help prepare children to become fluent readers. In other words, back off. We're professionals and we know what we're doing. What may look like "just messing around" to people who don't know any better is actually laying the groundwork for literacy. And no, you can't get the same effect from a pre-packaged computer program. Tiny humans need to learn from other humans.
* The adoption of the Common Core State Standards falsely implies that having children achieve these standards will overcome the impact of poverty on development and learning, and will create equal educational opportunity for all children. No well-promoted set of government standards will make the effects of poverty disappear. Nor do the standards trump actual developmental stages. You don't get children to grow taller faster simply by insisting that they must, or else.
* Recommendations. The authors wrap up with a list of Things They Want To Have Happen. Erase Kindergarten standards from CCSS. Do some more actual research on what works, particularly with students in poverty. Convene a task force (yeah, I'm not really excited about that idea). No high stakes testing for pre-third grade students. Make teachers better and put experienced ones in high-poverty areas.
Okay, so I don't think all of their recommendations are winners. But they've done a good job of laying out the problems with the kindergarten reading standards (and really, with the standards beyond just those). The standards were set by people who did not know what they were doing, and so the standards don't fit the children. To try to make the children fit the standards requires a sort of educational malpractice.
And yet we already know plenty about what works when teaching children to read. And plenty of teachers were already doing it. Early childhood reading instruction is an area where the amateurs running the Common Core show clearly pushed aside and ignored the experts in the field and demanded that solid techniques and approaches be replaced with unfounded approaches. CCSS demands flying pigs. It's time for the amateurs to just back up and let the people who know how to teach the tiny humans do their job.
Friday, November 28, 2014
PA Axes Reading Specialist Programs
Turns out there is more than one way to reduce the job requirements for teaching.
Pennsylvania's Department of Education has apparently announced its intention to cut Reading Specialists off at the knees. In an email dated November 5, the department apparently indicated that they would add the Reading Specialist Certificate to the Added By Test list. In other words, it will no longer be necessary to go out and do a Master's Degree's worth of college coursework to become a reading specialist. Instead, aspiring reading specialists would just take a test.
The Keystone State Reading Association is not delighted. Neither are the colleges and universities that make money by training reading specialists. And neither should the rest of us be.
I find the whole concept a little bizarre. I've been an English teacher for 35-ish years and while I know a thing or two about reading, I wouldn't call myself a specialist.
If I wanted to be a specialist, I would take some classes because reading is a highly technical and complicated field, and I would benefit from taking courses with other practitioners as well as having structured opportunities to work on my technique with actual live human beings. I don't think my quest to be a highly competent reading specialist would be improved by the alternative of grabbing a Praxis-style cram book and then hoping to correctly answer a brace of questions on an adult-aimed standardized test.
Why allow for such an approach to the readings specialist certificate? Certainly not to make life easier for teachers-- here in PA teachers have to do a Master's Degree's worth of work to keep our teaching credentials (plus more hours every several years), so why not pick something directed and useful? Is it for students and their families? Are parents calling Harrisburg to complain that their child's reading specialist knows too much as is too well-trained for the job? I'm going to bet the answer is "none of the above."
So who benefits? Could it be perhaps anybody who wanted to operate a school but wanted to cut back on the costs of things like, say, reading specialists? Is this one more move intended to make charter staffing easier and cheaper? Granted, it's less destructive than the Ohio plan for just doing away with the requirement for specialists entirely, but it still does nothing to elevate the profession, the teaching of reading, or the quality of instruction here in the Keystone State.
The KSRA has a nifty link to letters that you can fill in and send to anybody in Harrisburg who might conceivably help. It's true that this is probably one of the major battle fronts in the struggle to preserve public education, but it is one more thing to chip chip chip away at the level of professionalism and expertise required to work with students. It's one more way to create a world in which anybody can stand in a classroom and be a content delivery specialist, at least for a year or two, as long as they've gotten some clearances and some paperwork done.
Why not demand that reading specialists be trained, and trained well, in their field? Passing some test is not enough. Harrisburg is wrong on this one. Reading specialist should mean more than "passed a special test."
Pennsylvania's Department of Education has apparently announced its intention to cut Reading Specialists off at the knees. In an email dated November 5, the department apparently indicated that they would add the Reading Specialist Certificate to the Added By Test list. In other words, it will no longer be necessary to go out and do a Master's Degree's worth of college coursework to become a reading specialist. Instead, aspiring reading specialists would just take a test.
The Keystone State Reading Association is not delighted. Neither are the colleges and universities that make money by training reading specialists. And neither should the rest of us be.
I find the whole concept a little bizarre. I've been an English teacher for 35-ish years and while I know a thing or two about reading, I wouldn't call myself a specialist.
If I wanted to be a specialist, I would take some classes because reading is a highly technical and complicated field, and I would benefit from taking courses with other practitioners as well as having structured opportunities to work on my technique with actual live human beings. I don't think my quest to be a highly competent reading specialist would be improved by the alternative of grabbing a Praxis-style cram book and then hoping to correctly answer a brace of questions on an adult-aimed standardized test.
Why allow for such an approach to the readings specialist certificate? Certainly not to make life easier for teachers-- here in PA teachers have to do a Master's Degree's worth of work to keep our teaching credentials (plus more hours every several years), so why not pick something directed and useful? Is it for students and their families? Are parents calling Harrisburg to complain that their child's reading specialist knows too much as is too well-trained for the job? I'm going to bet the answer is "none of the above."
So who benefits? Could it be perhaps anybody who wanted to operate a school but wanted to cut back on the costs of things like, say, reading specialists? Is this one more move intended to make charter staffing easier and cheaper? Granted, it's less destructive than the Ohio plan for just doing away with the requirement for specialists entirely, but it still does nothing to elevate the profession, the teaching of reading, or the quality of instruction here in the Keystone State.
The KSRA has a nifty link to letters that you can fill in and send to anybody in Harrisburg who might conceivably help. It's true that this is probably one of the major battle fronts in the struggle to preserve public education, but it is one more thing to chip chip chip away at the level of professionalism and expertise required to work with students. It's one more way to create a world in which anybody can stand in a classroom and be a content delivery specialist, at least for a year or two, as long as they've gotten some clearances and some paperwork done.
Why not demand that reading specialists be trained, and trained well, in their field? Passing some test is not enough. Harrisburg is wrong on this one. Reading specialist should mean more than "passed a special test."
Thursday, August 7, 2014
Dolly Parton. Really.
So you say you'd like a cheerful story for a change. Fine. Let's talk about Dolly Parton. Really.
You may or may not be a fan of Dolly Parton, Country Icon and Oddly Constructed Barbie Doll, but if you're not paying attention, you might miss Dolly Parton, Philanthropist. And not Investment Philanthropist or Disruptive Innovation Philanthropist. Parton is pretty old school.
Parton came from real poverty, growing up with eleven siblings and a father who couldn't read or write in the middle of one of the poorest regions in the country. A tough time for her was not wondering if she dropped out of college, would her parents be willing to support her long enough to get her start-up off the ground.
Parton never forgot where she came from. You may think of Dollywood as a monument to kitsch, a big slice of Tennessee tacky, but it is also a sturdy economic engine and job factory in the middle of an otherwise poverty-stricken region. Parton's thought never seemed to be, "I'll build a big plastic monument to myself," but "I'll create a business that will bring money to my home region."
But Dollywood is only the most visible of Parton's work. Since the 1970s she's been awarding scholarships in Sevier County (her home). She's played at times with giving students a $500 bonus for finishing high school. Some of what she's done I can't tell you about because, apparently, much of her philanthropy is done anonymously.
But I can tell you about the Dollywood Foundation and the Imagination Library.
This program started with the simplest idea in the world-- putting books in the homes of small children. It began, once again, in her home county, and her proposal was simple-- sign your newborn child up, and once a month from birth through Kindergarten, the child will receive a book. On the program's website, Parton writes
When I was growing up in the hills of East Tennessee, I knew my dreams would come true. I know there are children in your community with their own dreams. They dream of becoming a doctor or an inventor or a minister. Who knows, maybe there is a little girl whose dream is to be a writer and singer. The seeds of these dreams are often found in books and the seeds you help plant in your community can grow across the world.
The program launched in 1995 in Sevier County, and it grew quickly. By 2006, when the Washington Post wrote about it, the program had spread to 471 communities in 41 states. In 2011 it launched in Scotland, and it can now be found in the UK, Australia, and Canada. The site says that 706,468 US kids are currently signed up. It's still fairly simple. Some combination of sponsors (some private, some government, depending on the locale) help with the financing (the cost is roughly $27 per child per year) and the Foundation delivers the books, each in its own poly bag with the child's name on it (consider the power of a child, even a small one, receiving a book that is theirs, addressed to them, by name).
Researching this was challenging, because press about the program is sparse. Apparently Parton is unaware that good philanthropists make sure to get plenty of press coverage for their work.
And one other noteworthy feature of this program-- she doesn't pay people to promote it or participate. It has spread across the world because people like the idea and want to do it. Imagine that-- a program that makes so much sense that it sells itself.
It makes me wonder-- what if Bill Gates had decided that rather than rewrite public education, he would spend a gabillion dollars putting books in the hands of every elementary school student in this country. What if a raft of corporate sponsors had worked with Scholastic Books to give every child a good-for-one-book voucher?
Ah, well. Parton may not be setting the education world on fire, but she's also not telling the children of Sevier County that they just need to find some grit to escape or insisting that Sevier County schools need to be more rigorous and testier. And if she has been, please wait a day or so to tell me. Let me have at least a day to enjoy the idea of a person who got rich and used the money to help folks out in a simple and direct way.
You may or may not be a fan of Dolly Parton, Country Icon and Oddly Constructed Barbie Doll, but if you're not paying attention, you might miss Dolly Parton, Philanthropist. And not Investment Philanthropist or Disruptive Innovation Philanthropist. Parton is pretty old school.
Parton came from real poverty, growing up with eleven siblings and a father who couldn't read or write in the middle of one of the poorest regions in the country. A tough time for her was not wondering if she dropped out of college, would her parents be willing to support her long enough to get her start-up off the ground.
Parton never forgot where she came from. You may think of Dollywood as a monument to kitsch, a big slice of Tennessee tacky, but it is also a sturdy economic engine and job factory in the middle of an otherwise poverty-stricken region. Parton's thought never seemed to be, "I'll build a big plastic monument to myself," but "I'll create a business that will bring money to my home region."
But Dollywood is only the most visible of Parton's work. Since the 1970s she's been awarding scholarships in Sevier County (her home). She's played at times with giving students a $500 bonus for finishing high school. Some of what she's done I can't tell you about because, apparently, much of her philanthropy is done anonymously.
But I can tell you about the Dollywood Foundation and the Imagination Library.
This program started with the simplest idea in the world-- putting books in the homes of small children. It began, once again, in her home county, and her proposal was simple-- sign your newborn child up, and once a month from birth through Kindergarten, the child will receive a book. On the program's website, Parton writes
When I was growing up in the hills of East Tennessee, I knew my dreams would come true. I know there are children in your community with their own dreams. They dream of becoming a doctor or an inventor or a minister. Who knows, maybe there is a little girl whose dream is to be a writer and singer. The seeds of these dreams are often found in books and the seeds you help plant in your community can grow across the world.
The program launched in 1995 in Sevier County, and it grew quickly. By 2006, when the Washington Post wrote about it, the program had spread to 471 communities in 41 states. In 2011 it launched in Scotland, and it can now be found in the UK, Australia, and Canada. The site says that 706,468 US kids are currently signed up. It's still fairly simple. Some combination of sponsors (some private, some government, depending on the locale) help with the financing (the cost is roughly $27 per child per year) and the Foundation delivers the books, each in its own poly bag with the child's name on it (consider the power of a child, even a small one, receiving a book that is theirs, addressed to them, by name).
Researching this was challenging, because press about the program is sparse. Apparently Parton is unaware that good philanthropists make sure to get plenty of press coverage for their work.
And one other noteworthy feature of this program-- she doesn't pay people to promote it or participate. It has spread across the world because people like the idea and want to do it. Imagine that-- a program that makes so much sense that it sells itself.
It makes me wonder-- what if Bill Gates had decided that rather than rewrite public education, he would spend a gabillion dollars putting books in the hands of every elementary school student in this country. What if a raft of corporate sponsors had worked with Scholastic Books to give every child a good-for-one-book voucher?
Ah, well. Parton may not be setting the education world on fire, but she's also not telling the children of Sevier County that they just need to find some grit to escape or insisting that Sevier County schools need to be more rigorous and testier. And if she has been, please wait a day or so to tell me. Let me have at least a day to enjoy the idea of a person who got rich and used the money to help folks out in a simple and direct way.
Wednesday, June 18, 2014
Inauthentic Reading Assessment
Does it seem as if test writers come up with the most obscure, boring, reading-resistant passages possible for standardized test? It's not just you. It's a deliberate choice, and not necessarily an ill-intended one, but the result is a completely unreal inauthentic reading experience that real humans don't have anywhere except on standardized tests.
One goal in test design is to steer the ship of assessment past the shoals of "prior knowledge." After all, if I'm Pittsburgh and my test includes a reading passage about the Steelers with questions about Troy Polamalu's career stats, I won't know if the students answered correctly because they read the passage or because they already know the stats.
So I am looking for a passage that my test-takers are unlikely to have prior knowledge about. In fact, since I'm trying to create a standardized test on the national scale, my third grade testing goal is to find selections for which no eight year old anywhere in America would have prior knowledge.
That's how eight year olds end up taking tests on selections explaining the village politics of ancient Turkey.
But let's look at just how inauthentic that is.
In school, we always present new material by connecting it to old material. We do this because A) we are trained educators and B) we are not idiots. The most fundamental way of absorbing new material is to connect it to what we already know. As teachers, we use that to our advantage, and we model it for our students. They aren't just learning to read-- they're learning how to learn. Part of the whole business of becoming an educated person is acquiring enough background that no matter what New Stuff we encounter, we have the foundation of knowledge to connect the New Stuff to Stuff We Already Know.
We also model attack skills, the skills needed to make sense of things that do not, initially, make sense. Ask somebody. And in the 21st century-- get out your device and look it up.
In real life, we read things we are interested in, which means we already have some prior knowledge about the content before we even start. And our real-world presentation of reading materials always involves some reader prep, from the blurbs on the back cover of a book to the pull-quotes and sub-headlines in non-fiction articles.
I just looked at a wired article about photochrons with a blurb calling them the instagrams of the 1800s, which is not exactly accurate, but it immediately communicates where we're going for everyone who doesn't already know about photochrons (aka "pretty much everyone"). That connecting idea would be a complete no-no in standardized test land, yet in the real world, it's exactly what a good editor does.
Where in real life do we ever pick up something that has no connection to anything we already know, and then read it without the ability to do simple look-it-up research to make sense of the hard parts?
Nowhere. The type of reading we demand students do on reading tests is a type of reading that isn't done anywhere except on reading tests. Well, and of course now, also, in all the classrooms that are trying to get students ready for these inauthentic reading tests. The perversion of close reading that insists on teaching students short excerpts with no scaffolding or preparation has nothing to do with teaching readers and everything to do with test prep.
It has been said many many times, but it's important enough that somebody should be saying it, again, every week. Reading instruction is a casualty of testing, twisted into test prep that does not teach our students how real readers read in the real world. It is not aimed at preparing lifetime readers, but at preparing test takers.
One goal in test design is to steer the ship of assessment past the shoals of "prior knowledge." After all, if I'm Pittsburgh and my test includes a reading passage about the Steelers with questions about Troy Polamalu's career stats, I won't know if the students answered correctly because they read the passage or because they already know the stats.
So I am looking for a passage that my test-takers are unlikely to have prior knowledge about. In fact, since I'm trying to create a standardized test on the national scale, my third grade testing goal is to find selections for which no eight year old anywhere in America would have prior knowledge.
That's how eight year olds end up taking tests on selections explaining the village politics of ancient Turkey.
But let's look at just how inauthentic that is.
In school, we always present new material by connecting it to old material. We do this because A) we are trained educators and B) we are not idiots. The most fundamental way of absorbing new material is to connect it to what we already know. As teachers, we use that to our advantage, and we model it for our students. They aren't just learning to read-- they're learning how to learn. Part of the whole business of becoming an educated person is acquiring enough background that no matter what New Stuff we encounter, we have the foundation of knowledge to connect the New Stuff to Stuff We Already Know.
We also model attack skills, the skills needed to make sense of things that do not, initially, make sense. Ask somebody. And in the 21st century-- get out your device and look it up.
In real life, we read things we are interested in, which means we already have some prior knowledge about the content before we even start. And our real-world presentation of reading materials always involves some reader prep, from the blurbs on the back cover of a book to the pull-quotes and sub-headlines in non-fiction articles.
I just looked at a wired article about photochrons with a blurb calling them the instagrams of the 1800s, which is not exactly accurate, but it immediately communicates where we're going for everyone who doesn't already know about photochrons (aka "pretty much everyone"). That connecting idea would be a complete no-no in standardized test land, yet in the real world, it's exactly what a good editor does.
Where in real life do we ever pick up something that has no connection to anything we already know, and then read it without the ability to do simple look-it-up research to make sense of the hard parts?
Nowhere. The type of reading we demand students do on reading tests is a type of reading that isn't done anywhere except on reading tests. Well, and of course now, also, in all the classrooms that are trying to get students ready for these inauthentic reading tests. The perversion of close reading that insists on teaching students short excerpts with no scaffolding or preparation has nothing to do with teaching readers and everything to do with test prep.
It has been said many many times, but it's important enough that somebody should be saying it, again, every week. Reading instruction is a casualty of testing, twisted into test prep that does not teach our students how real readers read in the real world. It is not aimed at preparing lifetime readers, but at preparing test takers.
Thursday, January 9, 2014
Close Reading 2.0
Close reading is an example of how misshapen and distorted a teaching technique can become when it enters the gravitational pull of CCSSetc. The specific ways in which it has become misshapen tells us a lot about the shape of CCSS.
Where did close reading come from, anyway?
A search on good old google ngram tells us that the phrase "close reading" has been around since 1800 in some trace amounts, starting to climb post-WWII and steadily growing to a peak around 2000. This is not surprising. Calling a reading technique "close reading" is kind of like announcing your new athletic program, "fast walking."
But close reading as a technique for literary analysis began, according to some sources, in the 1920's under the tutelage of I. A. Richards, a forefather of the New School of criticism. You can google all this and pursue it at greater length. Take away that close reading is old.
It is also...well...vague. Or rather, broadly interpreted by many proponents over the decades. Some critics assert that Richards was taking a Skinnerian view of language, treating it as a behavior. And the path gets tricky because although Richards is sometimes considered important to the New Critics, the New Critics said they rejected much of his work, and then proceeded to pretty much follow it. Add to that the fact that so much of the groundwork was laid in the fertile but often hard-to-translate-into-plain-English soil of academia and high-toned scholarliness, and-- well, for our purposes, let's just note that close reading has been around as a technique for almost 100 years.
How does close reading work?
So what is it? There, too, we find a number of interpretations, and for every one of us who went to college to study Englishy Stuff, it all seems so vaguely familiar. My professors never said, "Okay, we're going to do a close reading of this text. Here's the official list of close reading steps. Follow them." I suspect my experience is not unique.
But on the occasions when I have heard about close reading, I recognized it pretty readily. Look carefully at the writer's language choices-- diction, tone, that good stuff. Know the context of his/her writing. Follow the syntax. In longer works, note the sequencing of words and ideas. Is it narrative or dramatic-- watch for specific choices accordingly.
In short, "close reading" is what many of us think of as "reading."
In thirty-five years, I've never told my students, "Okay, we're going to do a close reading now." But I direct their attention to how it makes a difference whether Frost writes "to stop without A farmhouse near" or "to stop without THE farmhouse near." We examine what Longfellow might intend in "Psalm of Life" and how the recent deaths of loved ones might inform that intention. We watch Twain eviscerate Cooper's inexact word choices. We search for allusions in the word choices of William Bradford. We try to pick apart that confounding twentieth chapter of Light in August.
So why is putting close reading with CCSS a big deal?
So when I first heard that close reading was coming to town, a-riding on the CCSS train, I thought, "No big deal. We've been doing that for years." Well, yes and no.
Close Reading 2.0 is a new animal. As Coleen Bondy learned in her LA close reading training, the new, improved, CCSS-ready version has some significant differences from the old-school version we thought we knew.
It's for hard things. In one of many training videos available on youtube, the teacher starts right in by noting that close reading is for hard things. It's kind of an odd assertion. As a teacher of pop culture, my bread and butter has long been giving close readings of ordinary pieces of writing. Twilight may be a work of light fluff, but a close reading of it unpacks how many truly indefensible and odious subtexts are lurking in its gooey pages. But no-- we are hearing repeatedly that we are supposed to use close reading for hard things.
It's for short stuff only. Short poems. Short excerpts. Little things. It's an aspect that I hardly know how to argue with, like a nutritionist who insists that we should only eat red food. I'm pretty sure there is some valuable literature out there that is more than one page long.
It must be read in a vacuum. Of all the cockamamie bits of malpractice that have been attached to reading under CCSS, this is the most cockamamied of all. The examples are legion. Read the Gettysburg Address without knowing anything about the Civil War. Read "A Modest Proposal" without being told anything about Swift or the poor of the time. Read The Sun Also Rises without knowing anything about The Great War (only, of course, don't, because it's a big long novel).
It's an easy game. Any English teacher can rattle off a dozen works that only fully give up their depth and riches if students understand a bit of context. There isn't a real teacher of literature on the planet who thinks this is a good idea. These three restrictions tie the students' hands and force them to do readings that are, contrary to the buzzwords, an inch deep at best. With just a few quick additions, CCSS whizzes have turned Close Reading into Close Reading 2.0, whch is kind of like turning wine into vinegar.
So then why is Close Reading 2.0 here?
Why Close Reading 2.0? Simple. Reading instruction is hereby turned into test prep.
Standardized test excerpts are always short, usually inpenetrably hard (or the kind of dull that passes for difficulty), and always delivered without any context at all, not even the context of the rest of the work from which they've been untimely ripped.
Close Reading 2.0 is proof (piece of evidence #2,098,387) that CCSS was built to feed the testing beast. Close Reading 2.0 is authentic assessment turned on its head. You remember authentic assessment. It was just starting to flourish when NCLB plowed it under over a decade ago. The idea was that if you were trying to teach a particular skill, your assessment should come as close as possible to actually demonstrating that skill.
What we knew back then was that if you wanted to teach reading and interpreting a full, complex work of literature, you couldn't assess that skill with a bubble test. Now, instead, our Educational Overlords say that since the assessment is going to be a machine-scorable standardized test, then that's the skill we must teach. And so instead of actual reading, we are now pushed to teach standardized test reading, and to make it look like legitimate, we'll give it the name of an old and honorable practice.
Close reading? You reformers keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Close Reading 2.0 is crap. Specifically, it is the kind of crap that only people who know nothing about reading or teaching could come up with. It is one more application of the idea that if we are only able to count X, then X must be all that counts. It is teaching redesigned to fit the test. It is educational malpractice. For English teachers, it is one line that we refuse to cross.
Where did close reading come from, anyway?
A search on good old google ngram tells us that the phrase "close reading" has been around since 1800 in some trace amounts, starting to climb post-WWII and steadily growing to a peak around 2000. This is not surprising. Calling a reading technique "close reading" is kind of like announcing your new athletic program, "fast walking."
But close reading as a technique for literary analysis began, according to some sources, in the 1920's under the tutelage of I. A. Richards, a forefather of the New School of criticism. You can google all this and pursue it at greater length. Take away that close reading is old.
It is also...well...vague. Or rather, broadly interpreted by many proponents over the decades. Some critics assert that Richards was taking a Skinnerian view of language, treating it as a behavior. And the path gets tricky because although Richards is sometimes considered important to the New Critics, the New Critics said they rejected much of his work, and then proceeded to pretty much follow it. Add to that the fact that so much of the groundwork was laid in the fertile but often hard-to-translate-into-plain-English soil of academia and high-toned scholarliness, and-- well, for our purposes, let's just note that close reading has been around as a technique for almost 100 years.
How does close reading work?
So what is it? There, too, we find a number of interpretations, and for every one of us who went to college to study Englishy Stuff, it all seems so vaguely familiar. My professors never said, "Okay, we're going to do a close reading of this text. Here's the official list of close reading steps. Follow them." I suspect my experience is not unique.
But on the occasions when I have heard about close reading, I recognized it pretty readily. Look carefully at the writer's language choices-- diction, tone, that good stuff. Know the context of his/her writing. Follow the syntax. In longer works, note the sequencing of words and ideas. Is it narrative or dramatic-- watch for specific choices accordingly.
In short, "close reading" is what many of us think of as "reading."
In thirty-five years, I've never told my students, "Okay, we're going to do a close reading now." But I direct their attention to how it makes a difference whether Frost writes "to stop without A farmhouse near" or "to stop without THE farmhouse near." We examine what Longfellow might intend in "Psalm of Life" and how the recent deaths of loved ones might inform that intention. We watch Twain eviscerate Cooper's inexact word choices. We search for allusions in the word choices of William Bradford. We try to pick apart that confounding twentieth chapter of Light in August.
So why is putting close reading with CCSS a big deal?
So when I first heard that close reading was coming to town, a-riding on the CCSS train, I thought, "No big deal. We've been doing that for years." Well, yes and no.
Close Reading 2.0 is a new animal. As Coleen Bondy learned in her LA close reading training, the new, improved, CCSS-ready version has some significant differences from the old-school version we thought we knew.
It's for hard things. In one of many training videos available on youtube, the teacher starts right in by noting that close reading is for hard things. It's kind of an odd assertion. As a teacher of pop culture, my bread and butter has long been giving close readings of ordinary pieces of writing. Twilight may be a work of light fluff, but a close reading of it unpacks how many truly indefensible and odious subtexts are lurking in its gooey pages. But no-- we are hearing repeatedly that we are supposed to use close reading for hard things.
It's for short stuff only. Short poems. Short excerpts. Little things. It's an aspect that I hardly know how to argue with, like a nutritionist who insists that we should only eat red food. I'm pretty sure there is some valuable literature out there that is more than one page long.
It must be read in a vacuum. Of all the cockamamie bits of malpractice that have been attached to reading under CCSS, this is the most cockamamied of all. The examples are legion. Read the Gettysburg Address without knowing anything about the Civil War. Read "A Modest Proposal" without being told anything about Swift or the poor of the time. Read The Sun Also Rises without knowing anything about The Great War (only, of course, don't, because it's a big long novel).
It's an easy game. Any English teacher can rattle off a dozen works that only fully give up their depth and riches if students understand a bit of context. There isn't a real teacher of literature on the planet who thinks this is a good idea. These three restrictions tie the students' hands and force them to do readings that are, contrary to the buzzwords, an inch deep at best. With just a few quick additions, CCSS whizzes have turned Close Reading into Close Reading 2.0, whch is kind of like turning wine into vinegar.
So then why is Close Reading 2.0 here?
Why Close Reading 2.0? Simple. Reading instruction is hereby turned into test prep.
Standardized test excerpts are always short, usually inpenetrably hard (or the kind of dull that passes for difficulty), and always delivered without any context at all, not even the context of the rest of the work from which they've been untimely ripped.
Close Reading 2.0 is proof (piece of evidence #2,098,387) that CCSS was built to feed the testing beast. Close Reading 2.0 is authentic assessment turned on its head. You remember authentic assessment. It was just starting to flourish when NCLB plowed it under over a decade ago. The idea was that if you were trying to teach a particular skill, your assessment should come as close as possible to actually demonstrating that skill.
What we knew back then was that if you wanted to teach reading and interpreting a full, complex work of literature, you couldn't assess that skill with a bubble test. Now, instead, our Educational Overlords say that since the assessment is going to be a machine-scorable standardized test, then that's the skill we must teach. And so instead of actual reading, we are now pushed to teach standardized test reading, and to make it look like legitimate, we'll give it the name of an old and honorable practice.
Close reading? You reformers keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Close Reading 2.0 is crap. Specifically, it is the kind of crap that only people who know nothing about reading or teaching could come up with. It is one more application of the idea that if we are only able to count X, then X must be all that counts. It is teaching redesigned to fit the test. It is educational malpractice. For English teachers, it is one line that we refuse to cross.
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