An important op-ed by E.D. Hirsch in Sunday's New York Times looks at how we measure reading achievement in our nation's schools. For all the conversation about using "better tests" to measure school performance and student learning, policymakers often overlook one important shortcoming of existing reading assessments: the content on them is totally disconnected from the vocabulary and content children actually learn in school. Hirsch writes:

The problem is that the reading passages used in these tests are random. They are not aligned with explicit grade-by-grade content standards. Children are asked to read and then answer multiple-choice questions about such topics as taking a hike in the Appalachians even though they’ve never left the sidewalks of New York, nor studied the Appalachians in school.

Teachers can’t prepare for the content of the tests and so they substitute practice exams and countless hours of instruction in comprehension strategies like “finding the main idea.” Yet despite this intensive test preparation, reading scores have paradoxically stagnated or declined in the later grades.

This is because the schools have imagined that reading is merely a “skill” that can be transferred from one passage to another, and that reading scores can be raised by having young students endlessly practice strategies on trivial stories. Tragic amounts of time have been wasted that could have been devoted to enhancing knowledge and vocabulary, which would actually raise reading comprehension scores.

 

 

 

Hirsh argues that we could improve the quality of both reading assessment and reading instruction if we replaced the current model with reading assessments in which the passages students are asked to analyze focus on topics that are aligned with the curriculum that children actually study in literature, science, social studies, the arts, and other subject areas in each grade. Doing this would also require states to improve the quality of their state standards in these subject areas so that they provided more useful information to teachers about what students are expected to learn in each grade.

Although children don't typically take reading assessments until 3rd grade, these recommendations are still important for early educators, because ensuring that students learn to read proficiently by the end of 3rd grade is one of the central goals of quality early education programs, and Hirsch's recommendations would have implications for how teachers teach reading even in the preK and early elementary grades.

This also seems like a great occassion for reminding folks of Daniel Willingham's terrific video, "Teaching Content is Teaching Reading"