Raising Reading Scores and NAEP: We Can Only Go Up

I've been thinking about my students a lot lately; more so than usual, after looking at the latest NAEP scores which I wrote briefly about here.

To recap, Louisiana is once again at the bottom, or near bottom, of the list.  In reading, only 25% of our students are "proficient." We are tied at 48 with Mississippi; New Mexico is ranked 50 at 24%.

This really bothers me.

So, what does that score mean?  What, exactly, is "proficient?"

Proficient is defined this way:

When it comes to reading, eighth-grade “students performing at the Proficient level should be able to provide relevant information and summarize main ideas and themes,” says NCES. “They should be able to make and support inferences about a text, connect parts of a text, and analyze text features. Students performing at this level should also be able to fully substantiate judgments about content and presentation of content.”

About the same time I started fretting about the NAEP results, I came across this article on the Cult of Pedagogy blog urging teachers to "stop killing reading."

And in that article, the author referenced a book called Readicide by Kelly Gallagher, which I immediately ordered and have now read.

Gallagher's book was so on point I kept highlighting passages and sharing them with colleagues.

In my twenty-three year career I've seen more than a few kids who don't like to read, have never voluntarily read a book, and have no idea where the school library is.  I may not ever turn those kids into bookworms who read three books a week, but at least I have always been able to get them to admire the artistry and message of To Kill a Mockingbird or to relate themes in The Great Gatsby to the real world around them.

Sometimes that admiration is grudging, but it always comes.  It has been one of the highlights of my teaching career to see that light bulb go off over a kid's head when he grasps the symbolism of Mrs. Dubose's camellias or Atticus's shooting of Tim Johnson, the rabid dog.  If you've never seen that happen, that light bulb thing, it's amazing and it warms you all over to know that something great has just rattled the brain cells in that kid and a new understanding of the world around him has occurred.

Maybe I'm overstating it, but I don't think so.

I think Kelly Gallagher advocates for student readers and for teaching the classics quite admirably in his book when he writes:

"When every student in the country reads Romeo and Juliet, it means we all acquire a shared cultural literacy, a sharing that is foundational if we, as a culture are going to be able to communicate with one another."

And earlier in the book, he points out that "Reading Animal Farm is not simply an unusual trip to an English farm; Orwell's classic presents our students with the opportunity to discuss what happens when a citizenry fails to pay attention to its leadership."  It makes students think about the world around them.

The ironies with Fahrenheit 451 are obvious, right?  (But how will kids today know that?  They only read parts of this novel, if at all).

Gallagher's point is that the classic novels we teach in school provide opportunities for students to "rehearse" real world situations and ideas, an opportunity to become wiser under the leadership of a teacher.

It's a valid point.  But beyond the classics, he argues, we also need to provide opportunities for students to read for fun.  Many, many students do not read for the pure enjoyment of getting lost in a book and this is especially true with our underprivileged kids or children that come from impoverished homes.  They come to us with what Gallagher refers to as "word poverty" and spend their entire educational experience trying to catch up.

Why wouldn't we give them every opportunity to do so?

Because we are teaching the test. That's why.

There.  I said it.

Go back to those NAEP results.  We spend all of our time now putting articles and passages in front of students like those that they will see on a test.  We inundate them with multiple choice questions.  We highlight and close read and analyze and use sticky notes and we fill out graphic organizers, we analyze some more, we pick and pick and prod and well, it's no wonder that kids begin to hate to read.

We don't give them "books" any longer, we give them "chunks of text."

We don't give them the freedom to read as long as they wish ("If they want to read the entire novel they can do that on their own, outside of school!").  Instead, we give them chopped up passages to endlessly analyze. Where's the fun?  Where's the engagement?  Where's the love in that?

Gallagher talks about this practice a great deal in his book and its worth your time to read it if you're concerned at all about what Common Core and endless test prep is doing to kids.

The bottom line is that we really should be more interested in creating lifelong readers in our students.  They will carry a love of books and reading forever, long after that test score is gone.

Do we really want a generation of kids who have read nothing but passages and articles?

Imagine a world where cultural references such as "Beware the Ides of March!" are meaningless!  Or "Stay gold, Ponyboy...stay gold."  It breaks my heart to turn my sophomores out into the world never having encountered Mayella Ewell or Atticus Finch.  To Kill a Mockingbird is now "summer reading" in our district for freshmen and The Grapes of Wrath is "summer reading" for sophomores.  Imagine the loss at tackling either of those on your own as a young teenager!

Some districts know that they will likely never return to reading full novels in class again.

Instead, under Common Core, (which in Louisiana is called Louisiana Believes), students read selected chapters of books, or articles about books.  In tenth grade, for example, you read only the Prologue of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, and then lots of articles about ethics.

You get the idea.

It's my belief, and I believe there is science and data (that ever present golden key - data) - to back me up, that kids who read a lot are better writers and have a much more developed vocabulary.  They are more rounded.  They are better equipped to deal with the unknown.  So, teach a kid to read for fun, and you've created something truly wonderful and given that kid a lifelong gift.

Is that enough to raise NAEP scores?  Probably not.  There are a lot of other factors that go into those scores: poverty, parental involvement, technology access, life-trauma, environment, etc.  Those scores reflect a whole plethora of factors beyond reading comprehension.

But hey, we've got no place to go but up.  Let's bring reading back into the curriculum.  And I mean reading fiction (we currently read about 75% non-fiction in grade 10 ELA), long books, novels, not just "chunks of text" or Xeroxed passages.  We need to give kids time to read IN SCHOOL and not just on their own.  What tenth grader can truly grapple with  The Grapes of Wrath without some help?!

My bottom line:  Kids need time to read, time without having to organize, annotate, highlight, determine this or that - just time to read to get lost in the pages.

Do that, and I guarantee we will have smarter kids; now, whether the test scores reflect that or not is a whole 'nother kettle of fish, as they say.

On Mysterious Flowers and Monuments

A friend of mine has a night -blooming cereus that she named Eudora, in honor of course of the famous Southern author Eudora Welty who had one in her own garden and was known for celebrating its buds with all night parties. When my friend's cereus produced buds last week, rather than throw an all night party she sent a group text with a photo. Her message was filled with as much glee as Miss Eudora must have felt at her own blooms.

Miss Eudora has been much on my mind in past weeks as I picked up a volume of her collected stories recently. I have not read any of them in quite some time - since college, perhaps.  One exception would be "A Worn Path" which I use when I teach a creative writing class; other than that, the treasures of "The Wide Net" and "Clytie" have been long forgotten.  I spent several weeks this summer sitting outside under the shade of my magnolia rediscovering Miss Welty's lovely southern prose and relishing the rich atmosphere she creates with her words.

There's nothing more rewarding to me than picking up a book and rediscovering an old, favorite author.  While I read widely, both fiction and non-fiction, my preferences tend to Southern writers. Give me a Rick Bragg memoir, Flannery O'Connor, or even Faulkner and I am consumed with the words.

In the course of writing my biography of Cammie Henry I discovered the short stories of Ada Jack Carver, a bright light in the 1920s but who never produced anything of note after that.  Carver's stories are rich in atmosphere and many have memorable characters such as old Baptiste in "Redbone" who initially seems to be celebrating the birth of a son by going into town to get drunk but there is more to the story...

What is it that makes Southern writers so unique?  Some critics contend that the Southern literary renaissance that began in the 1920s is still ongoing and I tend to agree with that.  When H. L. Mencken declared the south "The Land of the Bozart" and insisted that southern writers had produced nothing of substance, he fired up the pens and typewriters of every warm-blooded southerner who had a desire to prove him wrong.

The literature of the South is as unique and beautiful as its climate and its people.

How long before it is targeted for criticism and banning as the Confederate monuments are?  Is that too much of a stretch?  Look at it this way: critics of the Confederate monuments say that the South lost the war, that the war was treasonous, that the Confederacy held slaves (as if the Union did not), and that the monuments were erected in the Jim Crow period; apparently their point with that last one is that these monuments are intended as some sort of subliminal white supremacy symbol.

This is all fallacious reasoning it seems to me.  These monuments were commissioned to honor the family that fought to protect their homes and their way of life.  And no, "way of life" is not code for slavery.  The way they lived was agrarian, it was slow and peaceful, it was with a work ethic and independent spirit that did not want help from outsiders.  Of course there were bad people who did bad things, but that has been the case throughout history.  Never has an entire culture been targeted because of that as is the case now.

One of our most beloved Southern writers was Harper Lee whose To Kill a Mockingbird is nothing if not a message on equality, tolerance, and dignity.  In Scout Finch we see the innocence of a child who has never been taught to see color in a person and who has never learned hatred or prejudice.  Those things are learned from adults and Atticus Finch's lesson to his children was "put yourself in their skin and walk around in it."  What are we teaching our kids now?

How many of us are living that way now?  How much of our hatred is learned and passed along to others?  How much of this monument mess is just mob mentality?

And where does it end?  People ask that question often, but think about it.  For years overly sensitive lemmings have tried to ban books often citing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Animal Farm, and of course To Kill a Mockingbird among many, many others as offensive in one way or another.

How is that different than monuments?  These books are in public libraries just as monuments are in public places.  What's the difference?

To me, both books and the monuments are works of art and should not be subject to censorship.  I disagreed when the Ten Commandments were removed from courthouses and schools but at least I understood the reasoning behind it ("separation of church and state").  You could point me to a legal position that made that clear.

Perhaps I'm oversimplifying things because of course books don't equate to monuments in literal sense but censorship is censorship wherever it lies.

If our society does not stop with this over sensitive offended culture we are perpetuating there is literally no end to it.  Everything is a target.  If you are traumatized by a monument how could you possibly read Delta Wedding?  When will the book burning start?

Miss Welty abhorred the Civil War: she had one parent from the North and one from the South and she saw what the war did to Mississippi where she grew up (long after the war, of course).  "Ravaged" was the word she used. But she also knew that there are two sides to everything; her parents taught her that.

As we consider the modern debate of monuments, we need to remember that there are two sides to everything and that the men we see carved in these granite and bronze monuments were men - they were not without flaw and they were not perfect but they were human, just like we are, and we can learn from them still and we can admire their dedication to home and family.

The night-blooming cereus blooms only one night of the year. Their blooms are fragile and temporary and draw people to it in admiration and awe, but then it is gone until next year. Welty called them “a naked, luminous, complicated flower,” and maybe that's what our monuments are. Perhaps we all just need to spend more time looking at the beauty of a thing.

Follow the Money

My weekly post at DaTechGuy's blog is up and concerns the nonsense that is Common Core and Lexile levels.

Check it out.

The New Republic had a great article on Lexile levels back in October and I have been wrestling with the issue personally since they ripped To Kill a Mockingbird from my cold, hard fingers.  It's now been relegated to ninth grade.

Of course the whole issue with me centers not so much around Mockingbird (although I'm very bitter about losing it), but about the stripping of the decision making process from the individual teacher, the department head, the principal, the district supervisor, the local superintendent, and the state.  Of course we've always had designated reading lists from which to choose our novels that we teach, but we always had more input into what was on that list and more flexibility.  We've always known To Kill a Mockingbird, for example, was read in lower levels, but in upper levels we have been able to explore deeper themes and symbolism and to bring in related texts to support more rigor with the book.

Common Core strips that away.

Julius Caesar, for example, is gone; Macbeth is the new tenth grade Shakespeare play and it's non-negotiable.

It's the same old drum; I've beat this one before but I am a bitter-clinger and refuse to let it go.

Why doesn't it bother more people that the education system is now driven by the Gates Foundation and other big money trails?

Thug Notes: To Kill a Mockingbird

Wrong on so many levels but I still love it.  Stay with it for the analysis which is actually very good!



There's a whole series of these things.  Check out the one for Hamlet.

Read more about Sparky Sweets, PhD here.
(H/T:  Colene)

Defending the Honor of "To Kill a Mockingbird"

Regular readers here know that To Kill a Mockingbird is one of my favorite books.  I teach it twice a year (once each semester) to my tenth graders.  Additionally, in my right sidebar, I had Mary McDonagh Murphy's new book, Scout, Atticus, and Boo, highlighted for several weeks.  Murphy's book is a collection of responses from celebrities (mostly) about their response to Harper Lee's iconic novel.

Now there's this review from The Weekly Standard of Murphy's book.  I don't wholly disagree with some of these conclusions.  Reviewer Philip Terzian is less than impressed with Murphy's book and came to basically the same conclusion I did:  Who cares what a bunch of celebs think of this novel?

Of course, it is altogether too tempting to recount, ad infinitum, the wisdom of celebrities as they seek to find meaning in life. But it is worth noting that their flattery of To Kill a Mockingbird is sincere, in such peoples’ fashion: This is an important novel because it helped to make them what they are today, and gave them a career boost at some strategic moment on the journey. Not a word about the language of the novel, or its structural qualities, or whether or not it is a work of consequence. Indeed, most reflections seem to come from the movie, not the written version, which tells us something about the witnesses and, of course, about Miss Lee’s bestseller.

But oh!  The painful derision of Miss Lee's book is more than I can bear.

Not only does Terzian call the novel - gasp - "mediocre," but he also criticizes the 1962 film and calls Gregory Peck's performance his "lugubrious worst."  Great Scott!

As if that weren't enough, Terzian links to a Wall Street Journal article from June of this year which, thankfully, I had missed.  There was much fanfare this summer about the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Lee's novel, and I missed this one.  Not so, now. 

In this WSJ piece, Allen Barra (who writes about sports and arts for the Journal) takes the classic novel to task in eviscerating form:

It's time to stop pretending that "To Kill a Mockingbird" is some kind of timeless classic that ranks with the great works of American literature. Its bloodless liberal humanism is sadly dated, as pristinely preserved in its pages as the dinosaur DNA in "Jurassic Park." 

What?  What?!  Are you kidding me? Good grief, Mr. Barra!  Have you no sense of the real beauty of the novel?  Has all the symbolism totally escaped you?  The beauty of the southern language?  Why, Atticus's closing argument at the end of Tom Robinson's trial is one of the most beautifully written passages I've ever read!  Harper Lee brings her novel full circle and thoroughly captures the innocence of childhood in her youthful characters while in the end revealing the painful reality of growing up in a world where people aren't really very nice to each other.

My sophomores love the novel and many totally "get" the themes of not fitting in (Boo, Mayella, even Tom, for that matter) or being unfairly judged.  The symbolism of the snowman is the first time that "lightbulb" goes off over their heads and many begin to understand what symbolism even IS for the first time; when the rabid dog, Tim Johnson, comes along, they get that one without my telling them. 

Harper Lee may not have written War and Peace, but who reads War and Peace anymore?  She won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel and the adoration of so many readers can't be that far off base, even if some are a bunch of airheaded celebrities, as Murphy's book indicates.  When my students close the book after the last page and say to me with satisfaction, "I loved that book!", that's all I need.

No, I don't care what Mr. Barra says.  I will continue to teach and adore To Kill a Mockingbird and it will always have a prized spot on my shelf and in my heart.  If it's meant to be "a children's book" or for adults, I don't care.  Every time I read the novel I discover something new and to me, that's a sign of a great book.

To Kill a Mockingbird: The Fiftieth Anniversary

One of my favorite books of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird, turned 50 this weekend.  Yesterday was the anniversary date of its publication.

I've been teaching for fifteen years and for the past ten, I've taught To Kill a Mockingbird every year (twice a year because when second semester starts in January, I get new classes. So, to six classes per school year (3 and 3) multiplied by ten years, well, I've taught the book to a lot of students.  This makes for a lot of class discussions and lots of different perspectives on Harper Lee's masterpiece.

When I started seeing articles lately about the anniversary and about the celebrations around the country, and especially in Monroeville, I also learned of Mary McDonagh Murphy's new book, Scout, Atticus and Boo.  It's a companion to a documentary she's done in which she interviews a number of people about their reactions to the book.  What fascinates me is that although almost everyone says the book changed their life or made them look at things in a new way, everyone gets something different out of the book.

Murphy says that what surprised her was how many different answers she got when she asked each person their favorite passage in the book.  And what I always tell my students, and what is absolutely true, is that every time I re-read it, I pick up on something I missed before, or something new reveals itself to me.

I've left the book at my mom's (see previous post) or I'd quote something from it for you, but it's really been interesting.  I'm about to read Murphy's interview with Alice Lee, the older sister.

As far as Harper Lee's (and nobody actually calls her that by the way), I don't begrudge her decision for privacy one bit.  The almost universal explanation from those who know her is that she said what she had to say in the book, she was never happy with attempts at another, and she doesn't give interviews because reporters asked dumb questions.  She gave a few after publication, but after a while, enough.  Done.  She doesn't like people making a buck off of her, either.  In Murphy's book we learn that the author used to go to the local bookstore in Monroeville and sign lots of copies of the book for them to sell but then greedy folks would come buy them all and sell them on eBay, so she quit doing that.

I wish I had one of those!  What a treasure! 

We'll read the book in my classes again this fall and I'll share with my students this year some comments from Murphy's book.  Maybe they'll be more motivated to read it when they hear what others have thought and how it impacted them.  Some teenagers, of course, love to read, but it's always sort of a challenge getting some of my slower learners or those who have never read a novel before, ever, to read this one.  Some of the language at the beginning of the novel might be off-putting to them; the history of Maycomb doesn't just grab them at first.  I always show a brief clip of the beginning of the film so they can see what's coming and that usually does it, but not always.  Some never read it, and that's a shame.

So.  Have you read To Kill a Mockingbird?  How many times?  And what was your favorite passage?!  I want to know!

Here's a clip from CBS News on the anniversary, while you're thinking about your answers: