Reading Madness

An article this week in Chalkbeat Tennessee told of Kamryn Sanders, an 8 year-old Memphis 3rd grader who walked out her school’s front door on the day her reading scores were to be revealed. She walked a mile, finally asked for help, and the police returned her to school.

Kamryn was afraid, with some justification, that the scores would reveal a “deficit” and that she would be retained in 3rd grade. Faced with similarly marginal scores a year earlier she had been threatened with retention after 2nd grade unless she attended summer school and submitted to year-long tutoring in 3rd grade.

Kamryn is not alone. All over the country kids are being threatened with retention, subjected to intense tutoring, and losing part of childhood in service of the education bureaucracy’s utterly absurd concern about “learning loss” and low scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

Last week, NY Times column by Nicholas Kristof celebrated this sort of policy:

With an all-out effort over the past decade to get all children to read by the end of third grade and by extensive reliance on research and metrics, Mississippi has shown that it is possible to raise standards even in a state ranked dead last in the country in child poverty and hunger and second highest in teen births.

In the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a series of nationwide tests better known as NAEP, Mississippi has moved from near the bottom to the middle for most of the exams — and near the top when adjusted for demographics. Among just children in poverty, Mississippi fourth graders now are tied for best performers in the nation in NAEP reading tests and rank second in math.

The estimable Diane Ravitch hammered Kristof in a blog post for his dilettante forays into education, a topic he knows just enough about to be dangerous. Among her most fierce criticisms was Kristof’s rather explicit claim that this “conspicuous” success proves that poverty isn’t really a insurmountable problem, if you “make an all-out effort” and employ “extensive reliance on research and metrics.” Mississippi officials and Kristof noted with some confusion that 8th grade scores had not risen similarly.

Kristof, who has written eloquently about child abuse in other places, seems oblivious to the (perhaps more subtle) child abuse implicit in the policies and practices he endorses.

Ravitch’s blog post inspired scores of brilliant comments from dependably knowledgeable readers. At the analytic end, the metrics and data used in Mississippi (and swallowed uncritically by Kristof) showed that the alleged gains could be accounted for almost entirely by holding 3rd kids back, giving them another year of drilling, and then claiming that 4th grade NAEP scores were a sign of nearly miraculous progress. This is similar in style and method to charter schools which boast of amazing graduation rates when they have simply gotten rid of children who weren’t on course to graduate. At the more “philosophical” end were comments pointing out the absolute idiocy of the testing industry and the havoc it has unleashed on children’s lives.

First, the idea that all children can and should read by the end of 3rd grade is a breathtakingly ignorant claim for an educator to make. Many developmental variables make that a silly policy objective, guaranteed to lead to practices that lead poor kids like Kamryn to run away from school. That she had already experienced this after second grade compounds the abuse.

All such policies are neurobiological malpractice and the consequences are long-lasting. Many studies show that the “confusing” results in 8th grade were predictable. The rote processes used in programs like those in Mississippi and Tennessee invariably correlate with 8th grade decline. It is like the landmark studies often cited by Peter Gray that show poorer subsequent performance by children who were in supposedly “academic” early childhood programs.

It is not just that such work is useless, it is that it supplants the more important developmental things kids should be doing, like imaginative play and open-ended discovery. 2nd and 3rd graders should also be playing and discovering, not being assaulted with “the science of reading” and expected to gratify the testing and accountability crowd by performing on their tedious and meaningless tests, NAEP chief among the culprits.

These wizards wonder why children hate school and/or so frightened that they walk away mid-day. Do they think that Kamryn or any other child will love reading or learning at all? Do they know or care about the well-documented shame and emotional harm associated with retention? They talk about children as though they are laboratory animals. Read any of the think tank pieces on educational interventions and you’ll invariably find terms like “high dosage.”

It is exhausting to repeatedly rage against this machine. For decades, one meaningless remedy after another has been foisted on children and teachers. No Child Left Behind did nothing but enrich “reformers” and corporations like Pearson while leaving the same poor, majority Black, kids behind. Race to the Top did much the same. Common Core was useless. Now it’s “high dosage” tutoring and crushing kids’ spirits with retention and summer school.

The problem is tenacious intergenerational poverty and racism. As a nation we refuse to face the reality of our increasingly unjust society. So the children will pay. Over and over again. And influential newspapers perpetuate the idiocy by buying into the false promises.