Teaching to the Test.

via Fort Worth Squatch, by Creative Commons.

When critics of standardized testing talk about how such tests are culturally biased, there’s a tendency to dismiss that concern as a bunch of p.c. claptrap. But what tests do is measure how well kids get the mechanics of the task; they’re actually not all that useful as gauges of whether  kids understand what they’re reading.

In an essay over at The Prospect, E.D. Hirsch Jr. and Robert Pondiscio explain the difference.

Think of reading as a two-lock box, requiring two keys to open. The first key is decoding skills. The second key is oral language, vocabulary, and domain — specific or background knowledge sufficient to understand what is being decoded. Even this simple understanding of reading enables us to see that the very idea of an abstract skill called “reading comprehension” is ill-informed. Yet most U.S. schools teach reading as if both decoding and comprehension are transferable skills. Worse, we test our children’s reading ability without regard to whether we have given them the requisite background knowledge they need to be successful.

Researchers have consistently demonstrated that in order to understand what you’re reading, you need to know something about the subject matter. Students who are identified as “poor readers” comprehend with relative ease when asked to read passages on familiar subjects, outperforming even “good readers” who lack relevant background knowledge. One well-known study looked at junior high school students judged to be either good or poor readers in terms of their ability to decode or read aloud fluently. Some knew a lot about baseball, while others knew little. The children read a passage written at an early fifth-grade reading level, describing the action in a game. As they read, they were asked to move models of ballplayers around a replica baseball diamond to illustrate the action in the passage. If reading comprehension were a transferable skill that could be taught, practiced, and mastered, then the students who were “good” readers should have had no trouble outperforming the “poor” readers. Just the opposite happened. Poor readers with high content knowledge outperformed good readers with low content knowledge. Such findings should challenge our very idea of who is or is not good reader: If reading is the means by which we receive ideas and information, then the good reader is the one who best understands the author’s words.

It’s really hard to overstate how important this is to our education policy. One of the tentpoles of the White House’s Race to the Top competition is tethering student performance to teacher pay (though states are given some latitude in how much a factor  it is allowed to be in teacher evaluations). But a fundamental problem in the current push for more teacher accountability, which most people support in the abstract, is that testing will always magnify the skills of the kids who will have the broadest content knowledge — those who come from more educated, more financially stable families. You can see this in public school systems across the country. In specialized, academically selective magnet schools, for which test scores usually factor into entry in the first place, the demographics are often dramatically different from the general districts of the districts in which they operate.

Race to the Top is reaffirming the centrality of testing in American education, which will have serious ramifications for “poor readers.” States, districts and teachers will spend tons of energy and resources in an attempt to get those kids up to standard, when the standard is probably predicated on the wrong thing.

G.D.

G.D.

Gene "G.D." Demby is the founder and editor of PostBourgie. In his day job, he blogs and reports on race and ethnicity for NPR's Code Switch team.
G.D.
  • Momma!

    Texas, where i live now and California, where i was raised, are probably in the bottom as far as testing and academics in United States. I personally know that I was “socially” promoted to graduate from high school and the diploma that i recieved is not worth the paper it was printed on.
    When I lived in CA, it was so bad, i took my children out of public school and sent them to private school. their tuition alone costed more than my house note (i have three children) but it was worth the sacrifice. i have 1 in college and one going to college. the baby who is going to be a soph. in h.s. this fall failed a class. i am not happy but at least i know he is not being pushed along! a lot of Texans say that the schools “teach to the test” all i can say is…at least they are learning something!

    • at the risk of drawing too bright line on the irony of your response….did you read any of the post?

  • Momma!

    not really

  • Momma!

    okay, i just skimmed through it and basically its a bunch of b.s. i think the system is just that, a system and colored folk are blessed if they make it thru. yes there is prejudice, institutionalized racism and a lot of other isms that can hold us down, if we let it. we just have to do our best and keep it moving, some of us need to go back, reach back, elevate and teach, but no amount of reporting and stats are going to chance, or lessen the gap. we just need to get to it. speaking of which, let me get off of this computer!

  • flasher702

    “…when the standard is probably predicting the wrong thing.”? Is the thing being predicted wrong or are they just naming it incorrectly? Does it matter that what we call “reading comprehension” is significantly affected by contextual knowledge? If teachers are held responsible for “reading comprehension” test scores, and they respond by increasing breadth of knowledge as part of their integrated curriculum and ensure that tests are better localized and scores go up has anything bad happened?

    Wouldn’t a greater degree of shared common knowledge instigated by all students being required to perform similarly on the same test be a respectful way to help to form an inclusive national identity that would help us to work together as a group and ease social disparity? Can we seriously claim that Student A’s knowledge of baseball makes them just as well educated as student B’s knowledge of horseback riding, international travel, and biology? Of course not; there’s an education disparity there that’s going to cause problems and also in small cultural disparity that’s going to cause problems. Both can be fixed with slight tweaks to student B’s education and a revamping of student A’s education and both of these things are compatible with standardized testing.

    • quadmoniker

      Firstly, it’s “predicated on” not predicting. Secondly, no one was talking about baseball.

      • flasher702

        Firstly, I don’t know why you responded if you weren’t going to actually respond to any of my content 😛 But that’s ok, I’m sure your much more intelligent and educated than I am. Secondly, they actually did talk about baseball. They didn’t talk about horseback riding though. I made that part up for my counter example 😉 Thirdly, you could replace “predicting” with “predicated on” and it wouldn’t change much of anything about either statement.

        I can count to three. I win.

        Ok, that was a little unfair. I use stupid rhetoric and make smarmy remarks sometimes too. But you flamed first 😛

        But seriously, is the entire complaint that our idea about what reading comprehension IS is wrong? G.D. points out that they say they are testing “reading comprehension” but evidence suggests they are actually testing contextual knowledge. He’s very convincing in his argument. But I missed the part where he argued that standardized testing of contextual knowledge is the wrong thing to do…

        • Oh yeah, sorry, I missed the blockquote. But there is a problem here because of what we’re calling it, and what we do in response. They’re using the baseball example to show that what we classify as “good” reading and “bad” reading isn’t anything like that at all. So when we test kids in school we classify kids as bad readers when, on another test, they would classify as good readers. And those kids are subsequently tracked because of the test, which limits the access they have to new materials, etc.

          The point isn’t that, if teachers wanted to, they could teach information and that would result in everyone getting better test scores because it would give them the context for the tests. The kids are being tested, and everyone assumes those tests correlate with some sort of innate ability.

          • flasher702

            Ok, NOW i think I understand your point. Not so much about minor flaws in our understanding of intelligence/education testing itself but that people will misinterpret the information and respond inappropriately, likely along cultural and class lines, as they’ve done many times before, and create degraded expectations for already disadvantaged groups that they will likely live up to.

            But isn’t that the status quo?

  • Another huge problem with “teacher accountability” is the underlying premise that teachers don’t know what they’re doing, and that politicians and textbook companies need to micromanage teaching. It’s absolutely appalling.

    I took over the language arts stuff in PK’s classroom this year in order to keep the teacher from using prepackaged textbook geared-to-the-test material, largely because that kind of material teaches kids that reading and writing are deadly boring. Forcing kids who make observations like, “in a lot of kids’ books, the parents aren’t around. I guess that’s because if the parents *were* around, the kid wouldn’t have to solve any problems and there’d e no plot” to write essays along the lines of “there are three character traits that make X seem reliable. Those traits are A, B, and C” is a surefire way of draining all enthusiasm for literature and writing out of them early.

  • April

    I’ve read a similar opinion written by E.D. Hirsch in the Yale Alumni Magazine. I think there is a simple way to alleviate this problem, which Hirsch also suggested in the YAM: tie the “reading comprehension” passages to topics kids actually study in that grade. For instance, when I was in fourth grade in Virginia, we studied state history, things like Jamestown, Colonial Williamsburg, etc. So if there were passages on, say, Pocahontas and John Smith, then all the students in that grade should be familiar with the subject matter.