The title to the article is Raising a generation of illiterates
BY Alexander Nazaryan
Published: Thursday, March 29, 2012, 3:25 PM

Call me a conservative crank, but I find this frightening: American high school students are reading at a fifth grade level, according to a new report that analyzes the complexity of the works they complete both in the classroom and outside it.

Why so low? Well, the report finds that the most popular book read in high school during the 2010-2011 school year was Suzanne Collins’ “The Hunger Games.” The top 20 includes three Collins selections (“Catching Fire” and “Mockingjay” are #6 and #7, respectively) and two each from Stephenie Meyer (“Twilight” is #9; “Breaking Dawn” is #11) and schlockmeister Nicholas Sparks (“The Last Song” at #5 and “Dear John” at #14). Meanwhile, “The Great Gatsby” clocks in at a pathetic #17. Chaucer, the Bronte sisters, Toni Morrison – these are all nowhere to be found.

We are becoming a nation of illiterates. That is all I can conclude.

Yes, I know that many adults enjoy “The Hunger Games” and “Harry Potter” in their leisure time. So do kids, of course. But the report, “What Kids Are Reading,” is at least partly based on classroom assignments, even though Renaissance Learning, which commissioned the report, did not break down inside/outside classroom reading. Still, it recorded the 2,290,522 books read by 388,963 9-12th graders during the 2010-2011 school year. In purely statistical terms, “The Hunger Games” could not be the most popular high school book in the nation unless a significant number of teachers and school librarians either assigned it or actively, repeatedly encouraged students to read it.

Another surmise: They aren’t reading “The Hunger Games” in China. Or in Finland. Or in any of the other countries that consistently beat us in standardized tests. Fair bet is that they’re reading Shakespeare, Chaucer, Austen and Hurston (or their high-culture equivalents), all of which are on the Common Core standards for high school and yet, by and large, remain ignored in the American classroom, where the intellectual rigors of the fifth grade linger right up until college.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/pageviews/captain-underpants-raising-generation-illiterates-blog-entry-1.1637984

Eduhonesty: It’s hard to disagree with Alexander Nazaryan. On the other hand, I welcome Alexander to try to teach my classes. So many students simply aren’t reading. We are still passing them on, and I freely confess to being part of this problem. If I failed as many as I ought to, based on their knowledge acquisition, I doubt I could keep my job.

Maybe we shouldn’t pass these students who have not mastered the academic language and literacy expectations for their grade. Maybe we should use exit tests to determine who passes. If students can’t read and interpret age appropriate texts, we could retain them until they can pass. That scary experiment might work. The Illinois law that requires students to pass Constitution tests to be promoted to the next grade results in students who will work ferociously to master the Constitution.

I honestly don’t know the answer to this one. I favor giving students genre fiction at their reading level since my experience suggests students will not read books that require a great deal of deciphering. Too much time spent looking up words breaks the flow of the story until they put the book down unfinished, if they ever picked that book up in the first place. Even at my age and with excellent reading skills, I put books down when I get bored.

I had a doctor appointment so I passed my class to another teacher. They had a test to take. I thought the hour promised to be an easy one for him.

“What will I do when I am done?” asked “Maribel” quietly.

“I thought you could read,” I said. My colleague has a large library.

Maribel’s expression could only be described as dismayed. I had to run but I kept thinking about that expression as I drove. Maribel is a good student, one of my best. Would she read? If she didn’t, a number of others would opt out of reading as well. I did not want my colleague to suffer so I called from my cell phone to tell him where he could find a packet of work to give the class after the test. I was pretty sure most of them would do the one-page reading in that packet and answer the questions following.

Eduhonesty: It’s really sad when a pedestrian work packet about interest payments has a better chance of success than a freely chosen book or magazine.

We are quite expert at teaching students how to read. The research on this topic may be almost as abundant as the common house fly. What we don’t teach is why to read. Oh, we give toss-offs about how they will need to be able to read for college. Reading teachers tell students about the many wonderful books that can be found in the local library. But the issue of why to read remains underaddressed and underconsidered.

Teachers tend to be readers. Too often, I think we teachers gloss over the intellectual and spiritual benefits of reading, as well as reading’s innate entertainment value, because we believe these aspects of reading are obvious. I suspect these aspects of reading may only be obvious to readers — a portion of the population that regrettably has been shrinking.

Eduhonesty: I confidently predict that our push towards common curricula and common standards will be a hindrance rather than a help if our goal is to cultivate readers. If we wish to create readers, administrators and bureaucrats need to leave teachers alone. Each class is different. If I have 18 boys and 10 girls, my reading choices should be different than if I have 18 girls and 10 boys. Those boys likely have little interest in domestic life on the prairie.

Individual literacy levels are huge, too. If my class is reading at a third to seventh grade level, To Kill a Mockingbird is the wrong book. I should be able to assess my classes before reading materials are chosen for the year. I should have the option of differentiating. Maybe one-third of my class should read To Kill a Mockingbird and another third should read The Phantom Tollbooth. I may have a group that needs Yertle the Turtle or my personal Dr. Seuss favorite, Bartholomew and the Oobleck. Reading needs to be fun, at least some of the time.

But I am the one on the scene. I am the one who can gauge my students’ enthusiasm. I need to be able to meet the needs of individual students so that I can sell the idea of reading. Reading is only entertaining if we read books that entertain us. Books assigned by a bureaucrat in a board office not only may not meet that need — they may discourage reading. If To Kill a Mockingbird becomes of source of confusing misery for a child, we may have provided one more reason NOT to read.

Listed in a cnbc.com article, the 12-most-underrated-jobs-of-2012 include diverse not-yet-favorites such as economist, school principal, and veterinarian. Most of these jobs require college and some up to seven or eight years of college, but a number can be had with a couple of years or less of schooling beyond high school. These include legal assistant, plumber, electrician and automobile mechanic.

Eduhonesty: Let’s pull back a little on the push to put all of America’s students in a university. While a nation of plumbers won’t work, some kids are not cut out for a university but may have everything it takes to become an excellent plumber. I’m pretty sure my plumber makes more money than I do, too!

“A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.”

~ Albert Einstein, born on this day in 1879 – died April 18, 1955

I embrace this statement. Nevertheless, I think Albert’s insight needs a few qualifications or caveats.

Eduhonesty: Science requires reliability and validity. A well-designed experiment will be structured to test one variable, or in rare cases, a few variables, controlling outside influences. Does light help the plant grow? Keeping all other conditions equal, we give one group of plants light and put another group of plants in the dark. We might expand the model to include different kinds of light.

When our test fodder is students, not plants, it’s simply irresponsible to make large numbers of changes at the same time. Changing the schedule, the materials, the interventions, the required classroom activities and the administration at the same time hardly ever creates progress — and when it does, it’s extremely difficult to pinpoint what caused that progress.

Thanks to No Child Left Behind, an element of frantic activity has taken hold in lower-scoring districts. Many districts have shown little improvement. I believe part of the problem has been the act of instituting sweeping changes that cannot subsequently be analyzed because we have too many interacting variables in our equation. Any systematic approach to teasing out what works becomes impossible because we did too many things at once.

Another factor that I’m certain plays into this picture: Not only do we do too many things at once, we frequently do them badly. The first year of any new system is likely to have bugs, sometimes lots of bugs. Staff will implement changes differently too. My intervention is not John’s intervention is not Maria’s intervention even if we went to the same training. Maybe I am spending 10 minutes daily on the new math system, John is spending thirty and Maria is spending the whole class period. Joey may have tossed the binder with the new system into his wastebasket. In cases like this, you can only end up with gobbledygook for data. That does not keep administrations from publishing that data, at least internally, and making decisions based on their nonsense numbers.

One of my colleagues made the following discouraging observation this afternoon:

“Between ACCESS, ISATs and MAP tests, I feel like we’ve pretty much lost the whole quarter.”

We’ve had three standardized tests in the space of a couple of months. It’s too much. ISATs are going on right now and that’s four days lost directly, not including all the time devoted to getting ready and to assemblies and pep talks. We end up with a couple of hours free in the afternoon, but they are crispy critters by that time, their brains toasted. As usual during a standardized testing period, the school is edgy and the Dean is inundated with disciplinary demands.

When counting the days lost, it’s vital to understand that a morning of testing is effectively a day lost. Students are used up by the end of two sessions of state testing. Behavioral issues abound.

Eduhonesty: Yes, we need testing. Yes, we need measures of performance. But we also need to consider the opportunity cost of our testing. What are we not teaching while we are testing?

I truly don’t understand why we need more than 6 of our 180 days for testing. We should test once in September to find out what they know and once in late April or May to find out what they learned. Testing for language skills of English language learners should last no more than one day at the end of each year. That would be about 4% of the school year. As it is, some districts are testing over 20 days — which is over 10% of the year and frankly ridiculous.

I have them working on a project. This requires construction paper, pictures to cut out, markers, colored pencils and whole shebang. If the printers in my school could have been used as needed by students, we might have done this as an Excel project instead, but construction paper is available and reliable. Yesterday, I played their music, somewhat loudly, as they worked.

I had students volunteering to help with all sorts of things. I gave them all a piece of candy and received so many thank-yous. They were happy.

Eduhonesty: You can’t always blast the music. Sometimes you have to buckle down to multistep equations. But students also need a chance to operate in their comfort zone. They understand this cutting and pasting thing. They have confidence that they can produce good work, a product worth putting in the window or taking home. We need to make sure that the testing mania does not take away too many opportunities to create that project they can show off to their friends.