Roxanna Elden, author of the article Data-Driven and Off Course, which I recently read in the “School Life” section of Education Next (Winter, 2011), reaffirms the need to reconsider how we teach reading and reconsider how state tests assess a student’s ability to read.  Oh, and we need to reconsider how standards are written, as they are nothing  short of asinine in too many instances.  Agreed!

Here are her main points:

• Benchmarks: when it comes to reading, we won’t know if a student has demonstrated mastery of a particular benchmark if there are only two questions dedicated to it.  Especially if one of the questions is flawed because it’s inherently confusing and the other question is flawed because it contains a vocabulary word the students don’t generally know, such as approximate, effectively making the question a vocabulary question.
• Unintended consequences of high stakes test data: comprehension requires the student to apply multiple skills simultaneously.  When the “data” tells me that a kid scored low in synthesizing information, I should think twice before handing him or her a worksheet with a short passage to synthesize.  Once a kid knows how to decode, he or she can’t learn how to read by learning a bunch of isolated skills. Instead, students need lots of practice reading deeply (my point) to nurture a love of reading (her point).  Worksheets won’t cut it.
• Strict adherence to data-driven instruction can result in drilling of students on isolated skills, effectively taking them away from opportunities to read deeply in subjects like science and social studies.  Worse yet, students associate reading with boring, laborious worksheets, e.g., the dreaded “drill-and-kill”.

There is no counter point to offer.  She is dead on.  Roxana is also author of See Me After Class: Advice for Teachers by Teachers.  She teachers high-school English in Miami, Florida.  I’m inspired to read her book… stay posted – pun intended.  C