What happened to reading? Part 7

Standardized testing has turned reading instruction into test prep.

Originally published in the Moultrie News.

What happened to reading?

We’re studying the causes of declining reading frequency and proficiency among American students. If you wondered when I would get around to the negative influence of high-stakes standardized testing, today’s the day.

State tests generally assess reading comprehension by giving kids passages to read and asking questions about it. For the most part, I don’t quarrel with this evaluation method.

The problem is that the tail now wags the dog. Realizing their jobs were tied to test results, educational bureaucrats began shaping reading curricula by reverse-engineering the test. Now, reading in the tested grade levels (commonly 3-8) focuses on an extensive slate of isolated skills. Reading instruction is test prep. Understanding and appreciating an entire text is out. Using a text as a means of exercising skills is in.

Here's a typical process:

After reading, students complete exercises that use the passage to “build skills” transferrable to the next text and beyond: “What is the main idea? Underline three supporting sentences.” A favored challenge is making inferences: “Why do you think Pa put on his coat?” Frequently, all this is administered through digital learning apps.

Because “to create” currently tops the learning hierarchy, students inevitably arrive at activities like “Make a bookmark based on the story” or “Create an interactive theater production that celebrates individuality” (an actual exercise in my eighth-grade basal). Though kids won’t have to perform such labors for testing, the idea is that skill-building tasks are secretly embedded within them.

Higher-level students engage in “metacognition” — thinking about thinking. It's insufficient to infer that Pa put on his coat because he was cold. Students must write, draw, or explain to a partner how they reached that inference. Evidence is sketchy, but metacognition supposedly helps regular cognition. Or something.

Metacognition can involve annotating texts with marginal notes that express feelings (“Wow, Romeo is a dirtbag!”), identify story elements (“Cool metaphor!”), or ask questions about the text (“Why in the heck did Pa put on his coat?”)

The stats at the end of the game will show that time spent actively reading the text like a normal human is a fraction of that spent “comprehending” it.

Before the dog-wagging era, students engaged with more texts while employing just a few essential skills. The more kids read, the more they grow and gain from the experience. Utilizing fewer skills allows kids to process texts more fluidly. The last thing you want a kid to do while reading Hatchet is to constantly be thinking about reading Hatchet (or be anxious about journaling in the margins).

Today’s skill-building ideology has pushed kids away from reading by turning texts into specimens. Dissecting a story and dissecting a frog have this commonality: they both kill their subjects. The test prep approach systematically saps books of their enjoyment and vitality.

To be sure, dissecting an occasional frog (or book) can deepen our appreciation for its complex design. But if we do it too often, linger too long on the process, or realize that it’s only about improving the next dissection, it turns into a sterile academic pursuit. Once that happens, frogs become lifeless in more ways than one.

Yes, certain reading skills need direct teaching, but most are better learned naturally, like carpentry skills gained while building a cabinet.

Ironically, getting back to the basics of helping kids understand and appreciate what they read would elevate reading proficiency. Who, after all, better understands measurements: a child building a cabinet or one solving math problems?

Today’s educational leaders firmly believe it’s the latter. Consequently, they’ve changed literature from a cabinet into a word problem. In shop class, the cabinet is the goal, and the skills learned to build it transfer to other pieces. But in math, no one actually expects the child to find the flagpole’s height using its shadow; the goal is learning the math function. Today’s reading instruction discards the enlightenment gained from Pa’s farm experience and savors the ability to deduce why he put on his coat.

The upshot? Well, how many word problems do you unwind with after a long day at work?

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Jody Stallings has been an award-winning teacher in Charleston since 1992 and is director of the Charleston Teacher Alliance. To submit a question, order his books, or follow him on social media, please visit JodyStallings.com.