What Are We Measuring?

Does "reading at grade level" mean anything?

Photo by Sebastien LE DEROUT on Unsplash

Even as college professors report an overall decline in the reading capacity of students, state policymakers persist with a testing regime that may be more a part of the problem than any sort of solution.

First, a note about how reading is talked about in the K-12 setting.

The above tweets are just two examples of the ways “reading proficiency” is discussed.

We also often hear or read about “reading at grade level.”

Here’s an example from the Billings Gazette:

Assessment results indicate that just 51 percent of middle school students are proficient at reading

And from Newark, New Jersey:

Standardized test scores presented to the Board of Education last week show that 31.4% of all students in grades 3 through 9 were proficient in English language arts, marking an increase from the 29% of students reading at grade level the prior year.

But, what does all this “proficiency” and “grade level” ability to read mean?

As noted in The Atlantic:

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.”

Which means that all this reading proficiency talk is really talking about the ability to correctly answer questions about a short excerpt of text rather than to read and comprehend entire works.

Professors report that students come to college having never been assigned an entire text to read.

And, students aren’t reading outside of school, either:

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.

Technology certainly plays a role in the lack of attention to longer texts, as a teacher from Billings notes:

“As a teacher, I could be tap dancing the instruction and be as flashy as I want to be, but I’m not going to be able to compete with TikTok,” Felchle said. “So that really has changed the trajectory of learning. I believe that they really do struggle with being able to attend to and engage with information in larger chunks of time and long enough to really make headway in learning content.” 

Why does it matter?

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.

Reading a passage to answer questions specific to that passage is different than reading a text and understanding the full context of the events and actions undertaken by multiple characters.

And, while the constant distraction of devices certainly plays a role in the brevity of attention spans, perhaps reading disconnected texts and taking test after test robbed a generation of students of the joy of connection with characters - and therefore, robbed them of a passion for reading.