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.