This Is What Standardized Testing Hath Wrought

[Sean Mooney 1,937]

This is an interesting article from The Atlantic- it's long so fair warning. But it does highlight a couple issues where government oversight of education (at both state and federal levels) have failed kids.

1.) In classroom instruction is encouraged to be differentiated to meet kids at their needs but then they are asked to take a standardized test that does not adapt to their educational needs. So it's a little like training someone to be a roofer by showing them how to fix a car engine.

2.) All the standardized tests are short pieces and nothing in long form novel. So because funding is tied to test results- schools are forced to adapt their instruction to the test meaning lots more short fiction and excerpts as opposed to asking a kid to actually read a novel. 

3.) The government oversight of tests has not adapted to 21st century skills so you have an antiquated test being tied to funding which affects school curricular goals. It becomes a self-fulfilling cycle.

These are the issues that people should be railing about in schools and trying to get fixed.

Quote

 

Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.

This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.

in 1979, Martha Maxwell, an influential literacy scholar, wrote, “Every generation, at some point, discovers that students cannot read as well as they would like or as well as professors expect.” Dames, who studies the history of the novel, acknowledged the longevity of the complaint. “Part of me is always tempted to be very skeptical about the idea that this is something new,” he said.

Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.

And yet, “I think there is a phenomenon that we’re noticing that I’m also hesitant to ignore.” Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.

No comprehensive data exist on this trend, but the majority of the 33 professors I spoke with relayed similar experiences. Many had discussed the change at faculty meetings and in conversations with fellow instructors. Anthony Grafton, a Princeton historian, said his students arrive on campus with a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have. There are always students who “read insightfully and easily and write beautifully,” he said, “but they are now more exceptions.” Jack Chen, a Chinese-literature professor at the University of Virginia, finds his students “shutting down” when confronted with ideas they don’t understand; they’re less able to persist through a challenging text than they used to be. Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.

Failing to complete a 14-line poem without succumbing to distraction suggests one familiar explanation for the decline in reading aptitude: smartphones. Teenagers are constantly tempted by their devices, which inhibits their preparation for the rigors of college coursework—then they get to college, and the distractions keep flowing. “It’s changed expectations about what’s worthy of attention,” Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at UVA, told me. “Being bored has become unnatural.” Reading books, even for pleasure, can’t compete with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.

But middle- and high-school kids appear to be encountering fewer and fewer books in the classroom as well. For more than two decades, new educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core emphasized informational texts and standardized tests. Teachers at many schools shifted from books to short informational passages, followed by questions about the author’s main idea—mimicking the format of standardized reading-comprehension tests. Antero Garcia, a Stanford education professor, is completing his term as vice president of the National Council of Teachers of English and previously taught at a public school in Los Angeles. He told me that the new guidelines were intended to help students make clear arguments and synthesize texts. But “in doing so, we’ve sacrificed young people’s ability to grapple with long-form texts in general.”

Mike Szkolka, a teacher and an administrator who has spent almost two decades in Boston and New York schools, told me that excerpts have replaced books across grade levels. “There’s no testing skill that can be related to … Can you sit down and read Tolstoy? ” he said. And if a skill is not easily measured, instructors and district leaders have little incentive to teach it. Carol Jago, a literacy expert who crisscrosses the country helping teachers design curricula, says that educators tell her they’ve stopped teaching the novels they’ve long revered, such as My Ántonia and Great Expectations. The pandemic, which scrambled syllabi and moved coursework online, accelerated the shift away from teaching complete works.

In a recent EdWeek Research Center surveyof about 300 third-to-eighth-grade educators, only 17 percent said they primarily teach whole texts. An additional 49 percent combine whole texts with anthologies and excerpts. But nearly a quarter of respondents said that books are no longer the center of their curricula. One public-high-school teacher in Illinois told me that she used to structure her classes around books but now focuses on skills, such as how to make good decisions. In a unit about leadership, students read parts of Homer’s Odyssey and supplement it with music, articles, and TED Talks. (She assured me that her students read at least two full texts each semester.) An Advanced Placement English Literature teacher in Atlanta told me that the class used to read 14 books each year. Now they’re down to six or seven.

“It’s not like I can say, ‘Okay, over the next three weeks, I expect you to read The Iliad,’ because they’re not going to do it.”

Private schools, which produce a disproportionate share of elite college students, seem to have been slower to shift away from reading complete volumes—leading to what Dames describes as a disconcerting reading-skills gap among incoming freshmen. But private schools are not immune to the trend. At the prep school that I graduated from five years ago, I took a Jane Austen course my senior year. I read only a single Austen novel.

the issue that Dames and other professors have observed is distinct from the problem at community colleges and nonselective universities, where some students arrive with literacy and comprehension deficits that can leave them unable to complete collegiate courses. High-achieving students at exclusive schools like Columbia can decode words and sentences. But they struggle to muster the attention or ambition required to immerse themselves in a substantial text.

Faced with this predicament, many college professors feel they have no choice but to assign less reading and lower their expectations. Victoria Kahn, who has taught literature at UC Berkeley since 1997, used to assign 200 pages each week. Now she assigns less than half of that. “I don’t do the whole Iliad. I assign books of The Iliad. I hope that some of them will read the whole thing,” Kahn told me. “It’s not like I can say, ‘Okay, over the next three weeks, I expect you to read The Iliad,’ because they’re not going to do it.”

Andrew Delbanco, a longtime American-studies professor at Columbia, now teaches a seminar on short works of American prose instead of a survey course on literature. The Melville segment used to include Moby-; now his students make do with Billy Budd, Benito Cereno, and “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” There are some benefits—short works allow more time to focus on “the intricacies and subtleties of language,” Delbanco told me—and he has made peace with the change. “One has to adjust to the times,” he said.

The Columbia instructors who determine the Lit Hum curriculum decided to trim the reading list for the current school year. (It had been growing in recent years, even while students struggled with the reading, as new books by nonwhite authors were added.) Like Delbanco, some see advantages to teaching fewer books. Even the best-prepared students have probably been skimming some of their Lit Hum assignments for years. Joseph Howley, the program’s chair, said he’d rather students miss out on some of the classics—Crime and Punishment is now off the list—but read the remaining texts in greater depth. And, crucially, the change will give professors more time to teach students how they expect them to read.

But it’s not clear that instructors can foster a love of reading by thinning out the syllabus. Some experts I spoke with attributed the decline of book reading to a shift in values rather than in skill sets. Students can still read books, they argue—they’re just choosing not to. Students today are far more concerned about their job prospects than they were in the past. Every year, they tell Howley that, despite enjoying what they learned in Lit Hum, they plan to instead get a degree in something more useful for their career.

The same factors that have contributed to declining enrollment in the humanities might lead students to spend less time reading in the courses they do take. A 2023 survey of Harvard seniors found that they spend almost as much time on jobs and extracurriculars as they do on academics. And thanks to years of grade inflation (in a recent report, 79 percent of Harvard grades were in the A range), college kids can get by without doing all of their assigned work.

Whether through atrophy or apathy, a generation of students is reading fewer books. They might read more as they age—older adults are the most voracious readers—but the data are not encouraging. The American Time Use Survey shows that the overall pool of people who read books for pleasure has shrunk over the past two decades. A couple of professors told me that their students see reading books as akin to listening to vinyl records—something that a small subculture may still enjoy, but that’s mostly a relic of an earlier time.

The economic survival of the publishing industry requires an audience willing and able to spend time with an extended piece of writing. But as readers of a literary magazine will surely appreciate, more than a venerable industry is at stake. Books can cultivate a sophisticated form of empathy, transporting a reader into the mind of someone who lived hundreds of years ago, or a person who lives in a radically different context from the reader’s own. “A lot of contemporary ideas of empathy are built on identification, identity politics,” Kahn, the Berkeley professor, said. “Reading is more complicated than that, so it enlarges your sympathies.”

Yet such benefits require staying with a character through their journey; they cannot be approximated by reading a five- or even 30-page excerpt. According to the neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, so-called deep reading—sustained immersion in a text—stimulates a number of valuable mental habits, including critical thinking and self-reflection, in ways that skimming or reading in short bursts does not.

Over and over, the professors I spoke with painted a grim picture of young people’s reading habits. (The historian Adrian Johns was one dissenter, but allowed, “My experience is a bit unusual because the University of Chicago is, like, the last bastion of people who do read things.”) For years, Dames has asked his first-years about their favorite book. In the past, they cited books such as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Now, he says, almost half of them cite young-adult books. Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series seems to be a particular favorite.

I can imagine worse preparations for the trials, and thrills, of Lit Hum. Riordan’s series, although full of frothy action and sometimes sophomoric humor, also cleverly engages in a literary exercise as old as the Western canon: spinning new adventures for the petulant gods and compromised heroes of Greek mythology. But of course there is a reason that, despite millennia of reinterpretations, we’ve never forgotten the originals. To understand the human condition, and to appreciate humankind’s greatest achievements, you still need to read The Iliad—all of it.

 

 

[Alias Detective 1,389]

Tldr

 

reating writing and math.  Done.

[weepaws 3,153]

4 minutes ago, Alias Detective said:

Tldr

 

reating writing and math.  Done.

Spelling. 

[Alias Detective 1,389]

22 minutes ago, weepaws said:

Spelling. 

[jerryskids 6,558]

1 hour ago, Sean Mooney said:

This is an interesting article from The Atlantic- it's long so fair warning. But it does highlight a couple issues where government oversight of education (at both state and federal levels) have failed kids.

1.) In classroom instruction is encouraged to be differentiated to meet kids at their needs but then they are asked to take a standardized test that does not adapt to their educational needs. So it's a little like training someone to be a roofer by showing them how to fix a car engine.

2.) All the standardized tests are short pieces and nothing in long form novel. So because funding is tied to test results- schools are forced to adapt their instruction to the test meaning lots more short fiction and excerpts as opposed to asking a kid to actually read a novel. 

3.) The government oversight of tests has not adapted to 21st century skills so you have an antiquated test being tied to funding which affects school curricular goals. It becomes a self-fulfilling cycle.

These are the issues that people should be railing about in schools and trying to get fixed.

 

Interesting, and thanks for the summary.  I would agree that those summary items are issues to be discussed.  I'll try to read the full thing later when I have more time.   

[Sean Mooney 1,937]

31 minutes ago, jerryskids said:

Interesting, and thanks for the summary.  I would agree that those summary items are issues to be discussed.  I'll try to read the full thing later when I have more time.   

I was building off the article some with my gripes but #2 is basically mentioned in the piece- at least the first part. The other pieces are me building my complaints on top of things in the article and trying to explain why there is some decline in the want, and ability, to read.

The general idea of the article is that there is a decline in reading of full texts and there are a lot of factors involved in it. For me, I think a huge factor is that we were wrong in the early 2000's to try to swing everyone to college. We have course corrected now but we are course correcting back too far the other way. Reading is a fundamental skill to have in life regardless of if you are going to college or going to be a day laborer. You need to be able to read and comprehend things.

But by shrinking what the kids are asked to read (again because that is what is asked of us) we are shrinking their capacity to read and stay attuned to things. For example, if you want to run a 5K you don't train to just be able to run 3.1 miles. You train to run 3.5 or 4 miles because of some natural dropoff. If you just train for 3.1 you will peter out somewhere around like 2.7 and have to slog through the rest. With reading it's the same. Instead of training kids to read on Jane Eyre, we are training them to read on a critical essay about Jane Eyre.

[seafoam1 2,799]

Yeah. Liberals are stupid and lazy. Go figure the babysitter is just figuring this out now. 

Keep voting for big government dumbasses. 

[peenie 1,896]

This finding is 30 years late. I rarely read a full book in public school. I graduated high school in 1984. We were given large text books that contained excerpts from books. That's not true....we had 1 or two books a year to actually read (in fact, I know we had to read books because we tried to find Cliff Notes, lol). It wasn't until I went to private school that I was required to read entire large books (300 pages) and that was required reading over the summer. 

[Sean Mooney 1,937]

3 minutes ago, peenie said:

This finding is 30 years late. I rarely read a full book in public school. I graduated high school in 1984. We were given large text books that contained excerpts from books. That's not true....we had 1 or two books a year to actually read (in fact, I know we had to read books because we tried to find Cliff Notes, lol). It wasn't until I went to private school that I was required to read entire large books (300 pages) and that was required reading over the summer. 

 

That must be very specific to an area. In high school we read multiple full length novels. 

[peenie 1,896]

3 minutes ago, Sean Mooney said:

 

That must be very specific to an area. In high school we read multiple full length novels. Yeah, the ghetto, we've been trying to tell you for years they don't teach us anything!

Name them

[Sean Mooney 1,937]

2 minutes ago, peenie said:

Name them

The novels or the ghettos?

[peenie 1,896]

Just now, Sean Mooney said:

The novels or the ghettos?

Name the novels you read in school. Not the ones you were supposed to read, but the ones you ACTUALLY read. 

[Sean Mooney 1,937]

1 minute ago, peenie said:

Name the novels you read in school. Not the ones you were supposed to read, but the ones you ACTUALLY read. 

I like reading so I read all of them. In no particular order and not a comprehensive list:

Inherit the Wind, Fahrenheit 451, A Tale of Two Cities, The Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, Of Mice and Men, The Things They Carried, Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, 1984, Brave New World, The Crucible, Profiles in Courage, Beowulf, The Odyssey, The Metamorphosis. There are more. 

[Horseman 2,353]

In the spirit of people not being adept to reading novels here is the expert from all that that illustrates your points.

Quote

 

But middle- and high-school kids appear to be encountering fewer and fewer books in the classroom as well. For more than two decades, new educational initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Common Core emphasized informational texts and standardized tests. Teachers at many schools shifted from books to short informational passages, followed by questions about the author’s main idea—mimicking the format of standardized reading-comprehension tests. Antero Garcia, a Stanford education professor, is completing his term as vice president of the National Council of Teachers of English and previously taught at a public school in Los Angeles. He told me that the new guidelines were intended to help students make clear arguments and synthesize texts. But “in doing so, we’ve sacrificed young people’s ability to grapple with long-form texts in general.”

Mike Szkolka, a teacher and an administrator who has spent almost two decades in Boston and New York schools, told me that excerpts have replaced books across grade levels. “There’s no testing skill that can be related to … Can you sit down and read Tolstoy? ” he said. And if a skill is not easily measured, instructors and district leaders have little incentive to teach it. 

 

To your points:

I can sympathize with teachers that feel they are being forced to teach towards the standardized tests, and being frustrated with programs like No Child Left Behind.  However, the position that's not considered that I would put forward is that well read students are still likely to do well on the standardized tests.  The teachers shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater because they have to shorten assignments for some students or at the cost of some student's learning.  Integrate the shortened standardized curricula with full novel reading, adjust the grading curve as needed to fit the school requirements.

Not sure what 21st century skills have to do with novel reading, or the article, other than to call the standardized testing antiquated.  

[peenie 1,896]

4 minutes ago, Sean Mooney said:

I like reading so I read all of them. In no particular order and not a comprehensive list:

Inherit the Wind, Fahrenheit 451, A Tale of Two Cities, The Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, Of Mice and Men, The Things They Carried, Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, 1984, Brave New World, The Crucible, Profiles in Courage, Beowulf, The Odyssey, The Metamorphosis. There are more. 

Did you go to public school and if so where? What was your economic class growing up?

[Sean Mooney 1,937]

11 minutes ago, peenie said:

Did you go to public school and if so where? What was your economic class growing up?

Yes.

PA.

The school had just a basic micro and macro economics class and in them they would do some stuff related to being able to do real world budgeting, but it wasn't like a major component of the class overall. I took AP Economics in senior year as well. 

[Bier Meister 1,657]

32 minutes ago, peenie said:

This finding is 30 years late. I rarely read a full book in public school. I graduated high school in 1984. We were given large text books that contained excerpts from books. That's not true....we had 1 or two books a year to actually read (in fact, I know we had to read books because we tried to find Cliff Notes, lol). It wasn't until I went to private school that I was required to read entire large books (300 pages) and that was required reading over the summer. 

 

15 minutes ago, Sean Mooney said:

I like reading so I read all of them. In no particular order and not a comprehensive list:

Inherit the Wind, Fahrenheit 451, A Tale of Two Cities, The Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, Of Mice and Men, The Things They Carried, Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, 1984, Brave New World, The Crucible, Profiles in Courage, Beowulf, The Odyssey, The Metamorphosis. There are more. 

@peenie

 

I graduated in 87. I went to a public school for freshman year and transferred to a private catholic. I read both novels and short stories at each school (many similar to SM)

[Bier Meister 1,657]

3 minutes ago, Sean Mooney said:

Yes.

PA.

The school had just a basic micro and macro economics class and in them they would do some stuff related to being able to do real world budgeting, but it wasn't like a major component of the class overall. I took AP Economics in senior year as well. 

i believe she meant socio-economic for your family (perhaps). 

[Sean Mooney 1,937]

1 minute ago, Bier Meister said:

i believe she meant socio-economic for your family (perhaps). 

Oh yeah, I suppose. I was on school class mode. 

My family was middle class. Lived in a rural area school district that bordered more urban districts so I had friends in those districts and they were reading many of the same novels. 

[TBayXXXVII 2,482]

1 hour ago, peenie said:

This finding is 30 years late. I rarely read a full book in public school. I graduated high school in 1984. We were given large text books that contained excerpts from books. That's not true....we had 1 or two books a year to actually read (in fact, I know we had to read books because we tried to find Cliff Notes, lol). It wasn't until I went to private school that I was required to read entire large books (300 pages) and that was required reading over the summer. 

LOL, another example of your life in a Democrat haven that you complain about... yet, still vote for the people who push those same agendas.  Maybe one day you'll learn.  I'm guessing you won't.

[easilyscan 858]

Proof

From this weeks truth and lies article.

The truth as to why the 1/3 burger experiment failed in the USA (A&W, McDonalds and Fuddruckers among others) is Americans thought they were getting less meat than the 1/4 pounder because 3 is smaller than 4 

 

[RaiderHaters Revenge 4,236]

7 minutes ago, easilyscan said:

Proof

From this weeks truth and lies article.

The truth as to why the 1/3 burger experiment failed in the USA (A&W, McDonalds and Fuddruckers among others) is Americans thought they were getting less meat than the 1/4 pounder because 3 is smaller than 4 

 

And now McDonald’s gives them 1/8 lber cause of it 

[shadrap 220]

8 minutes ago, easilyscan said:

Proof

From this weeks truth and lies article.

The truth as to why the 1/3 burger experiment failed in the USA (A&W, McDonalds and Fuddruckers among others) is Americans thought they were getting less meat than the 1/4 pounder because 3 is smaller than 4 

 

& didn't the school system start dumbing down math because its racist or some hogwash?

[jonnyutah 248]

If the only reason kids in college cant read whole books now is because teachers were gaming the system so they could post higher test scores, why did test scores for reading profiency go down at the 12th grade level over the last 30 years? 

 

 

[easilyscan 858]

27 minutes ago, shadrap said:

& didn't the school system start dumbing down math because its racist or some hogwash?

I can't speak for other states, but they've been doing that exact thing here in Minnesota for years. Tampon Tim approved. 

Of course that has a lot to do with the ridiculously disproportionate # of Somali and Hmong that reside in Minnesota relative to other states.

I figure they like Minnesota because of the mild winters....lmfao

[easilyscan 858]

25 minutes ago, jonnyutah said:

If the only reason kids in college cant read whole books now is because teachers were gaming the system so they could post higher test scores, why did test scores for reading profiency go down at the 12th grade level over the last 30 years? 

Because the collective IQ of America has been going down faster than Britney Spears on Saturday night for 3 decades. 

[Gepetto 1,288]

It doesn't matter what is taught. All the student has to do is move onto the next level, so teachers catering what they teach to promote passing these standardized tests is a good strategy.  

[TBayXXXVII 2,482]

You can't fix the education problem because there are too many obstacles like learning disabilities, learning patterns, and human nature.  Some kids are just slow learners, some are fast.  Some have learning disabilities like dyslexia others may have ADD or be autistic.  Kids are more alert and better able to learn later in the morning that earlier.  All of that leading to kids should be separated based on their learning disabilities, pace of learning, and start school at 9 AM for HS, 9:30 for middle school and 10 for elementary.  School days should have less classes that last longer and the school week should be 6 days, not 5.  They should also go 12 months a year.

Good luck getting that done.  If you're not going to do it the right way, why bother gerrymandering some bull crap way that won't work?

[Fireballer 2,639]

3 hours ago, Sean Mooney said:

I like reading so I read all of them. In no particular order and not a comprehensive list:

Inherit the Wind, Fahrenheit 451, A Tale of Two Cities, The Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, Of Mice and Men, The Things They Carried, Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, 1984, Brave New World, The Crucible, Profiles in Courage, Beowulf, The Odyssey, The Metamorphosis. There are more. 

I can remember being assigned to read at least five  of those also.

[Baker Boy 1,687]

School choice!
 

Everyone knows that the problem with public schools is the teachers union and the federal government.