Today, we’re looking back to an important little piece on literacy and assessment by E.D. Hirsch and Robert Pondisco. With the current controversy over common standards and assessments, it’s worth a read. From the article:
“Schools and teachers may indeed be making a Herculean effort to raise reading scores, but these efforts do little to improve reading achievement and to prepare children for college, a career, and a lifetime of productive, engaged citizenship. This wasted effort is not because our teachers are lazy or of low quality. Rather, too many of our schools labor under fundamental misconceptions about reading comprehension — how it works, how to improve it, and how to test it. …
“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.”
It is refreshing to see that someone (Hirsch and Pandesco) recognizes that “…our schools labor under fundamental misconceptions about reading comprehension — how it works, how to improve it, and how to test it.” That also goes for the misconceptions educators have about literacy and thinking. They refuse–seem almost ashamed to admit–that acquired knowledge is the bedrock that supports comprehension and valuation. Without background knowledge, what Hirsch famously coined as cultural literacy, our students cannot compete in the international academic arena.
[...] The impact of poverty is inarguable. And test scores are far from perfect tools of evaluation. But here’s another possibility: Maybe schools are failing to teach important content, and, more importantly, maybe they’re failing to gift students with a thirst for it. And no amount of test prep can make up for this lack. [...]