The Simple Reason Boys Don’t Read

IT is a fact that boys don’t read as much as girls, though in school our success at getting kids to read for pleasure fails for both sexes, particularly as students move from elementary to middle school and then high school.  For the boys the drop off occurs early – sometimes as early as elementary school, but with a near universal occurrence by the end of middle school.  We should not sugarcoat the truth: by high school 95% of our boy students do not read for pleasure, which means that they really don’t read at all unless it’s required for class, a test, or a grade.  Our success with girls is better, and many leave high school maintaining the healthy reading attitudes they built in middle school and earlier, but it’s still a damagingly low number.  Too many kids simply don’t read on their own and they suffer academically because of it.

Here in Colombia we have an interesting wrinkle to the usual kids and reading dilemma.  Getting kids to read has no easy solution wherever you teach.  Our school in Colombia is entirely bilingual; kids have both an English and a Spanish literature course.  We struggle, as most bilingual schools do, with getting students to speak in English rather than Spanish.  Our task is to create truly bilingual students, but since their native social language is Spanish they are far more at ease interacting in Spanish than English.  Here’s the interesting part: they much much prefer to read in English.  The reasons for this are related to the reasons we have a hard time getting kids to read in any school: academic reading versus pleasurable reading.  In elementary and middle school, the emphasis in English is interest and choice, in keeping with Columbia University’s Reader’s Initiative (which most International American schools have adopted).  Colombian schooling, on the other hand, is far more traditional, and the texts the students read are selected for their academic and cultural purpose.  Students read The Hunger Games in English, The Iliad in Spanish.  Moreover, our selection of English texts is varied, modern, individualized, and entertaining.  Our Spanish language library is 1/10th the size of our English library, which also contains a regularly updated selection of ebooks that students can check out.  Students prefer reading English books because the English books are entertaining and because they are free to choose.  

School Teaches Students How To Be Bad Workers

“If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”

A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, 1983

“During my time in school, I have developed many skills that teachers did not intentionally want me to learn, but in a way forced me to because of the way they teach and implement the school rules. These are basically ways to cheat the system discretely. Things such as writing a whole essay not knowing what I am really talking about and not paying attention in class but acting like I am.”

High School Junior, 2016

Here’s a few things I did in school.

• Plowed through weeks and months of class by daydreaming, doodling, playing games, reading unrelated stuff, messaging, and otherwise generally dinking around.
• Talked my way out of deadlines, extending them, sometimes indefinitely.
• Copied homework, answers, and projects, receiving credit for work I didn’t do.
• Ignored everything until the night before the exam and pulled all nighters to finish essays.
• Made judicious use of sources to pad and lengthen my sloppy writing and reasoning.
• Lied to teachers about my mental state, or home state, or some kind of state, in order to avoid consequences and work.
• Learned to nod when applicable, look ahead for the answer to the question that was coming my way, write down responses after they had been given out by others, and generally DO as little actual work as absolutely necessary to still pass the class.  

By the end of high school I was really, really good at a lot of this.  I could read a teacher’s sympathy or mood or general demeanor like a politician.  I had a solid, workable bank of excuses and avoidance techniques.  I could lie so convincingly I believed my own lies.  I eagerly joined group projects because I knew another student, one more interested in higher grades than I, would do most of the work for which I would receive credit.  I mostly mastered the art of determining the minimum work needed to escape scrutiny and still get a passing grade.  (On occasion I misjudged.)  I even developed a solid folder of techniques for making it appear that I’d done far more work than I actually performed.  I developed as well a genuine, heartfelt disdain for work itself, for anything that smacked of repetitive deliberate effort, self-improvement, or vague purpose.

School Actively Creates Unhappiness

A wealth of current research into happiness has yielded a consistent and surprisingly small set of factors.  Three, in fact, beyond the needs of food and shelter: Relationships, Freedom, and Meaningful Work.  Strong, positive relationships create a sense of belonging, a feeling of value and importance in the world. We are social creatures, dependent upon the company of others for survival. At the same time, we are autonomous, and need independence. We don’t wish to be forced into all decisions and crave, both for ourselves and those closest, the freedom to choose.  And finally, research shows that people are most happy when they are good at the things they spend most of their time doing.  Mastery and Meaning go hand in hand.  People who are good at what they do tend to find meaning in it, and people who find meaning in what they do tend to develop the skills that create mastery.

But these are ADULT conditions.  We apply them to the workforce, the family unit, the social contract.  We do not apply these concepts to school and children.  If anything, much of what we do in school is the opposite of belonging, autonomy, and mastery.  It’s almost as if school is not merely unconcerned with the happiness of students, school is designed to eliminate their happiness altogether.

Consider Relationships.  The classroom structure is actually primarily designed to break students’ most meaningful social connections.  We sit them in desks facing one direction.  We often (and necessarily) assign seating away from the distraction of friends.  We take away their phones, of course, and attempt to limit in all sorts of often futile ways the social access of their computers.  Many schools and teachers even go to great lengths to discourage the only human relationship left, that with the teacher.

Autonomy, of course, is completely absent in school.  Kids can’t even go to the bathroom without asking permission.  They can’t choose what to wear, when to eat, what to study or when to study it.  Where to go, when to go there.  Who to be with or what to do with them.  How to walk or how to talk.  What to care about and what to ignore. The lack of freedom students have is so thorough, actually, that I suspect we simply avoid thinking about it altogether. Whatever shades one might attempt to paint the picture of school and autonomy, there’s little arguing that nearly every detail concerns the reduction of it.

The three components of happiness are somewhat exclusive of each other, even oppositional.  Relationships decrease autonomy, for example.  Strong, meaningful social commitments, as any married person or parent can tell you, come with expectations of behavior, limits on one’s personal desires and actions. Both Belonging and Autonomy can limit the acquisition of skill, especially if those skills are necessary but not chosen.  Again, as any married person can tell you, having a spouse or child in the room can seriously disrupt work.  There’s a balance that needs to be maintained, and sometimes a choice to be made.  School, obviously, is about Mastery and work.

But while meaningful work is the primary focus of school, it’s actually here where we stumble most profoundly.  Yes, education is almost exclusively dedicated to the acquisition – and mastery – of skills.  It is for this reason that we work so hard to break kids from their social circle and force them into behavior they wouldn’t otherwise choose. But since we aren’t really concerned with a student’s happiness (if we were, we wouldn’t be so aggressive in eliminating 2 of the 3 essentials), we ignore both Meaning and Mastery when instructing.

Meaning is significantly powered by choice, by Autonomy, so there is an immediate reduction of the individual aspect of meaningful work when students cannot choose what to study, when to study it, or how to study it.  But the lack of Meaning in the work of school extends much further than choice.  Often, it’s simply not considered at all.  The acquisition of skills is complicated, uncertain, and expensive if one is forced to answer the fundamental question: why?  The vague answers students so often get – almost all of them variations of ‘You’ll need this later’ – rarely address the actual question that most adults ask and answer satisfactorily about their jobs: Why?  What is the value or purpose?  Because most of the time, for that student in that place at that time, there is no answer.  They are studying the subject more or less ‘Because.’  Because that’s what the curriculum mandates.  Because that’s what’s on the test.  Because that’s what the Standard is.  Because that’s what the system says they must learn.  Because that’s what the structure of their schedule demands.  Because this is the hour in which they study that thing.  There is no ‘Meaning’ or ‘Purpose’ to the subject; there is only system and structure and process.  There is not even the reward of money, merely grades.

Sometimes there’s a kind of peripheral motivation to schoolwork that leans towards meaning – working on ‘this’ builds a parallel skill which will help later in the mastery of meaningful work on some undefined ‘that’. ‘This’ math problem helps build math fluency, which will be useful when one is an engineer or building a business.  Writing ‘this’ essay builds writing skill, which will prove necessary when one actually has worthy ideas.  But such motivations have absolutely nothing to do with meaning, and everything to do with a skill divorced from any kind of purpose; students are told simply to trust and mindlessly do.  Yet meaningful work is anything but mindless.

We might like to think, perhaps, that if ‘Meaning’ isn’t clear to their work, at least students are focused on Mastery.  But again, no.  School is not structured for Mastery.  School is structured for Adequate.

The basic motivational aspect of grades guarantees that schools are not interested in mastery.  Consider:  what is the first thing one thinks if they hear everyone in a class got A’s?  Amazing teacher and totally invested kids?  Of course not.  The class was too easy.  Most schools, in fact, attempt to maintain average grades that hover around the ‘Adequate’.  Mastery is for the few, not the many.  And while there is a great deal of teeth gnashing and lamentation about grade inflation, nobody ever makes similar points about grades being inaccurately low.  If ALL – or even most – students are achieving some form of mastery over the material, the cry goes out to make it harder.

Standardized testing has little to do with Mastery or Meaning, of course, unless it means one masters a meaningful exam, but this is just one element of the problem of assessment.  The traditional classroom measurement device – the test – is specifically designed to separate the few who have mastered the material from the many who have merely acquired the basics.  And rarely does any kind of exam really address the fundamental aspect of Meaning.  Many tests only matter in the moment, to the material of the moment.

None of the three components of happiness stand alone to the creation of a satisfying life.  By themselves, Community, Independence, and Meaningful Work do not create happiness.  If anything, too much of one and not enough of the others is often the root of an unhappy life. Conversely, none of these happiness factors is mutually exclusive and they often feed each other.  Community creates a sense of purpose and belonging, gives value and meaning to one’s work.  Mastery feeds one’s Autonomy.  Choice makes Meaning meaningful.  But in deliberately removing these components from student’s lives, we do not make learning any easier or powerful.

Kids who come to class and act social, who push against the lack of autonomy in various childish ways, or who don’t care for the work are usually punished.  We treat their actions punitively, as if they have been bad.  Yet the truth is, all they are trying to do is be happy. That’s not exactly a crime; in fact, isn’t happiness kind of the whole point of education in the first place?

Why Are Teachers So Often Liberal When School Is Anything But?

Consider the military.  Ignoring for a moment the Officer Class (who enjoy perks and benefits to  a ridiculous degree of comfort, safety, and economy), the majority of soldiers survive in a profoundly egalitarian system.  Labor is distributed evenly, as is salary.  Food and housing are provided by the system.  Achievement and reward is merit-based on individual talent, skill, and ability.  Individuality is thoroughly discouraged.  Identity and personality take second (actually, third, fourth, fifth, or more) place to cohesion and function of the whole.  You remember how everyone in China wore the same clothes back in the day?  That wasn’t because they didn’t have clothes or colorful fabric.  I could go on building this case, but there are bigger points to make.

One being this:  If you were looking for a conveniently collected source of Republican-leaning individuals, you’d go find a military barracks and start there.  If you wanted freedom-loving, pro-individual, capitalist thinking, greed encouraging, free market, John Wayne, anti-government purists, you’d find the most stalwart, hard-core, uncompromising idealists in the most communist place in the country.

Now consider School.  Schools are the most Darwinistic, survival-of-the-fittest, merit-based, unequal, capitalist jungles in our society.  On the macro-level they are dependent upon the value and worth of their location for any kind of success at all.  Do you live in an economic desert, someplace sparsely fed with that essential, water-like nourisher of schools: Money?  School life is going to be hard and mean.  Enjoy the metaphorical benefits of water and good soil?  A diverse, thriving school economy, with ample opportunity for growth and success.

In school, everything depends upon your own individual, non-cooperative effort.  Equality in schools is a barely maintained illusion.  For one, you are constantly measured against your peers.  Success or failure always arrives as a comparison against your classmates.  Yes, nominally success in school is supposed to be independent of any variable but one’s own individual talents, but we all know this is nowhere near the truth.  Every class is a competition.  The foundational economy of grades guarantees it.  And as in pure Capitalism (and pure Darwinism) success is a product of inherited traits, not individual success.  Wealth, in schools, is the greatest predictor of future achievement.

School is, despite some modern efforts (and a lot of editorial grousing), intensely, fundamentally competitive.  Conditions change dramatically from environment to environment (from school to school, to grade to grade, to class to class), so success is not merely a product of skill, but adaptability.  As in nature, change occurs over time and distance.  Survival depends on the ability to adapt either as the environment changes in time (as in year to year) or as one moves from one environment to another in place (as in class to class).  School is a daily re-enactment – sped up to impossible levels – of that natural struggle.  Students move from environment to environment, and their success is dependent upon their ability to shift gears, change processes, maximize and minimize specific traits to the landscape.  One class may demand gregarious extroversion while another asks for introverted silence.  One may use logic, the other creativity.

Inherited strength is fundamental in schools, as it is in Capitalism.  Inherited capital has more power than developed.  Success is far more likely if you enter school at a competitive advantage, whether that means you already know how to read, have an aptitude for math, or are the stock of parents who can afford tutors and encourage breakfast.  If your parents are successful, you are likely to be so.

(One might be forgiven assuming that schools are more Fascist than Capitalist.  After all, each classroom is ruled by a dictator with absolute authority.  But a teacher receives so little physical reward from a student’s labor that they can hardly be said to be ‘exploitative’.)

I could go on building this case as well, but there is another point to make, namely:  If you wanted to find the most liberal, socialist-leaning, anti-capitalist, anti-corporate, pro-big government, pro-union, competition-fearing, anti-bullying, marginalized-population-loving, suspicious-of-power  group of people in the nation, you’d find the nearest public school and gather together the teachers.  

Failure Does Not Instruct, Success Does

We’re on a bit of a ‘let’s embrace failure’ trend these days.  Lots of articles across the internets about the benefits of failure, the learning potential, the need for coddled students to experience the wonderfully instructive power of being told they are wrong.  As so often the case, the central thesis comes at us in fairly easy to catch, sensible sounding nuggets of wisdom, which we’ll address in a moment.  More interesting, as usual, is the subtext, and also the actual, usually unstated, intent.  In this case: School is too easy.  People are given too much without needing to work for it.  Pain is not merely instructive, it’s essential to wisdom and moral order.  

So, a few Bromides out of the way first.

1. Yes, it’s true, Failure is a way we learn.  Success has rewards, but ‘learning’ isn’t entirely one of them.  Most learning occurs before success, in the trial and error process, where one is neither winning nor losing, just working.
2. Yes, it’s true, Failure is not unnatural.  Much of our life is spent fundamentally failing in one way or another.  Only those born with exceptional gifts are denied the experience of struggle that is intimately married to failure.  
3. Yes, it’s true, Failure creates strength.  Though it’s not exactly a muscular strength.  The strength of failure is in callous, tendon, cartilage.  The strength one gets from failure is the thickened skin of scar.  

But let’s not kid ourselves.  Failure is not so very often the product of natural disaster, or chance, or unanticipated event.  It’s not so often a blind spot, or an absence of essential.  And when it is, one doesn’t really ‘learn’ anything but to move on, around, through.  The failure that we experience confronting the external world is mostly a kind of failure that we go to great lengths to ensure we never have to experience again, or at all.  If the building falls because of an earthquake, we don’t chalk the disaster up to a learning experience.  The building was not designed as some kind of learning experience; it was designed to avoid the failure of falling down.  Perhaps more importantly, the more we know, the more we anticipate failure, the more we do to make sure it doesn’t occur.  The ‘knowledge’ we gain from the failure of disaster is less about skill or fact or detail as it is about resilience, about moving on after the tragedy.

If failure was so very instructive, so very powerful, most of the world would be a hell of a lot more successful.

But the other failure, the failure of school, most often, lies in Character.  We fail because we lose courage.  We fail because we can’t force ourselves through the present moment’s discomfort, or uncertainty, or struggle, or pain – and not because the pain itself is good.  The pain of work is painful.  It’s boredom. It’s tedious repetition.  It’s sacrifice – of time, attention, pleasure.  It’s embrace of struggle.  But none of it is really related to failure.  We embrace all of it because of success.  We embrace struggle to achieve success, and the fact that we fail really has little instructive value.

We know, most of the time, exactly why we have failed.  We failed because we were lazy. We failed because we are stupid.  We failed because we didn’t work hard enough.  Or we failed because we didn’t really care.  We failed because the task was pointless, or stupid, or meaningless.  Often times, our failure is neither a flaw in our character or an instructive step towards future success.  Often times our failure is a product of injustice – of other people’s moral or character failings – and there’s little lesson there except anger or submission.  We fail because the other side cheats.  We failed, quite simply, because the task was impossible, or unfair, or out of our control.

There’s no ‘lesson’ in that.  There’s no strengthening of our skill, just a hardening of our heart.

Kids don’t really learn through failure.  Kids learn through success.  Failure, a good deal of the time, isn’t instructive at all.  Students don’t make mistakes on a math problem and then ‘learn’ the correct answer from the error.  They don’t write a shitty essay and then fix their mistakes.  Any teacher can tell you that kids glance at the grade, ignore the comments, and move on.  If failure were so very instructive, the most effective education would be guided failure, which it most assuredly is not.  Education is guided success.  We reward the students who succeed.  We only punish the students who fail.  We don’t reward them at all for it.  And rarely, rarely is that failure much responsible for how they improve.

I know, from years of experience, not to mention my own intimate friendship with failing, that nearly all students fail because they simply don’t really do the work.  For some, the absence of effort is extreme, and the failure equally severe.  Most teachers will tell you that it takes a lot of work to fail a class.  It takes consistent and persistent absence, because the system is designed to get them working, to keep them succeeding, in however small a capacity.  The threat of failure, and the actual presence of it, is fundamentally, almost universally, an attempt to get students to do the work through fear or suffering.  The threat of failure is not about learning, it’s about motivation.  But does it motivate?  And more importantly, does failure create learning?

Failure does not instruct.  Failure may drive, it may motivate, but even this subtext is wrong.  Because teaching is about instruction.  Students learn through investment, through care, through diligence and concentration.  The goal is to learn and grow.  And failure, however you frame it, is rarely growth.  The threat of failure will motivate a student to invest more time in studying, or writing and revision, or practice, but it really doesn’t motivate a student to actually learn.  Students learn through the success that stands opposite failure.  Our job as teachers is not to instruct students through failure, but to encourage students through success.

The subtext of all these little editorials we keep reading about the spoiling absence of failure aren’t really about learning at all.  They are about character, and if we want our education system to be ‘teaching’ character, we probably ought to start saying so.

Standardized Reading Tests Really Are Boring, and that’s a problem

(This is a much-needed and fairly thorough edit of an earlier post…just in case it seems vaguely familiar to the few of you who muddled through the original.)

“It’s soo booooring!”

The single specific complaint I hear from every student who struggles with the reading portions of standardized tests – including the SAT, the ACT and the FCAT in Florida – is that the reading selections are ‘boring.’  The readings don’t hold their interest.  They don’t relate.  The passages are dry and emotionless.  On the surface, this is a lousy complaint.  Boring is a relative term, relative only to the one bored.  Nothing is either inherently boring or interesting, and obviously a student who anticipates all experience to be entertaining or otherwise interesting is in for a difficult future.  Still, the universality of the response begs investigation.

It may be that the term ‘boring’ is simply the only word to come easily to the minds of  sixteen year olds.  We often latch on to the easiest answer when faced with obstacles and complications.  There are lots of reasons to dislike tests, many of them complex and multifaceted, but students have little experience beyond school, and to them the tests are simply parts of their lives they must accept.  They lack both the depth of experience to understand how Standardized exams affect their personal lives and the professional experience to understand how the tests are supposed to exist in the larger world.  Sitting in the middle of that experience, uncertain of its purpose, slaved to readings and questions over which they have no control, eager to escape but not exactly suffering in any tangible way, the only answer to their discomfort and confusion is ‘boring’.

But there is also a more profound reason students lack the vocabulary to explain their struggles with Standardized Exams.  The tests ARE boring, and it has nothing to do with the students themselves.  It’s in the nature of the tests to be boring.  Not because they are uninteresting, or dry, or tasteless and bland.  Not because they lack energy or vitality.  Not because they are repetitive, or simplistic, or opaque.  Though they are all those things.  It’s in the nature of Standardized Reading tests to be boring because they deny the reason any reading is engaging in the first place.  Standardized tests break the contextual energy that makes reading interesting.   

‘Boring’ isn’t a simple matter of missing interest – the causes of the disconnect are varied and significant.  It’s difficult to answer a question, to ‘connect’ to it, if one doesn’t know the point of the question.  It’s difficult to connect to an experience if the conditions are unjust or unfair.  And it’s quite difficult for many young adults to perform well at a process which has no clear purpose or inherent value to them.

Reading Is contextual, tests are not

Reading (like most things) is a contextual experience.  The written word does not exist alone, it acts as a bridge between two things in the real world, between the reader and whatever the writing is about.  An automobile mechanic uses the words in his manual to connect his actions to the actions of the engine.  A surfer reads a surfing magazine to connect his interest in surfing to the wide range of complex details inherent to the sport.  Novels provide a link between the reader and the meaning of experience.  When the reader engages in the text, they do so in an environment in which the written words are merely a part.

But the reading portion of a standardized exam provides few, if any, such links.  More to the point, the reading portion of the exam isn’t about the context, it’s about the words and sentences and paragraphs themselves, independent of any larger purpose the words serve.  Students are to prove they understand what the writing is about without any clear connection between the words and the subject of the writing as it exists in the world.  Most often, in fact, paragraphs are lifted from the middle of essays, textbooks, or novels and then students are asked questions related only to that specific passage.  The disconnect here for poor or reluctant readers can be profound.  Intuitively, students understand the purpose of the written word as a bridge, yet the test itself seems to completely ignore writing’s purpose.  Rather than a test of skills, the exam seems to many some sort of trick designed to…well, they aren’t quite sure.  What they do know, though, is that the passages seem to lack whatever vitality it is that makes things ‘interesting’ instead of ‘boring’.

The tests also are boring because they demand students read in a way that is unnatural to reading.  Students will never elsewhere be asked to read in the manner required by the exam, because, quite simply, it’s not the way (or ‘why’) we read in the first place.  Nobody ever reads a passage in order to answer specific questions about it.  There’s always a context, and for most readers the context is fundamental to the understanding.  If, for example, I am reading a novel and I find myself in a descriptive passage about the weather, I instinctively know that the author is likely setting a mood or tone and that the passage is setting the place of the events.  Well designed questions will focus on this kind of reading, but such a focus is irrelevant to a student who doesn’t read many novels, much less one who is either confused by the purpose of the exam in general or – as is so often the case given the sheer pressure the tests create – suffers from test anxiety.  

The actual assessment aspect of a Standardized exam is also different from that which students usually experience in the classroom.  In the classroom, tests related to readings involve specific lessons and details from the recent past, which are reviewed and then built upon (or discarded) for the next lesson.  They are part of an ongoing experience, with all sorts of visible and invisible purposes.  Vocabulary tests, for example, usually concern words studied or reviewed previously in class.  These are lists of specific words defined and spelled.  Students know that learning the words is part of a wider process and purpose, the amassing of vocabulary, the recognition of roots, prefixes, suffixes, and cognates, deeper understanding of a text through its vocabulary, etc.  (To be sure, the absence of clear purpose within a classroom is also one significant reason students struggle.)  None of that larger purpose or extended history is evident on a Standardized exam.  Vocabulary skills on a Standardized test are mostly about gleaning definition from context clues.  While this is no insignificant skill, the full depth of it is lost if the passage has no larger context.  Again, students are asked to prove they can glean the meaning of a word or passage from the very small fragment they have before them, a passage often sliced from the body of a much larger creature.   

Avid reader, poor test taker

Many students who are enthusiastic readers perform poorly on reading exams.  It’s frustrating, particularly since the issue is not skill.  Because the point of a reading exam is so different from the reading they do elsewhere, that student actually ‘reads’ differently.  When we read, we don’t hold all the information the words contain in equal measure.  Without much conscious decision, we evaluate the purpose of the text and group the information accordingly, holding usually only a few common threads and crucial supporting evidence throughout the reading experience. (This is how one can read a 1,000 page novel and not get lost.)  Since a reading exam, however, is testing comprehension removed from context, students don’t know where to start.  As a result, a weak test taker tries to hold every single word of a reading in their minds, to in effect memorize the passage before they get to the questions.  A paragraph into any reading passage and they have lost all track of the beginning.  By the end of the passage, they have to go back and start all over again.

Later, they wonder, ‘What happened?’  The standard answer: ‘It was a boring selection.’  But behind that answer is real damage, for these enthusiastic, avid readers exit the experience being told that they are poor readers.  Many of them lose the passion.  

Moving Forward

There are answers to this nightmare, answers actually discovered by many people some time after they leave school, all those folks who go on to great success despite lackluster academic performance.  Yet presently, the school system relies primarily on testing to mark, monitor, measure, and motivate.  A student might understandably survive their academic years under the impression that the world of successful professional adults operates under the same general guidelines.  To many, the thought of this is enough to steer them towards less professional fields.  The world outside school, however, accommodates everyone to varying degrees, and it does not rely on testing – it relies on individual product.  Like reading itself, the world students graduate into is purpose driven.

Standardized tests do work, of course.  They do measure many student’s reading ability, but in many ways what they actually measure is kind of peripheral to the skill of reading comprehension.  Good students are very often simply more curious than poor students.  Good students are open to ideas, and are willing to gaze past the limitations of a passage to the material within.  Good students also read a lot, and over a wide range of topics; thus, they are more likely familiar with the variety of passages and language that shows up on the test.  Often their ability is not so much their skill as it is their experience.  But it is by no means a democratic or equal measure, and all too many students are not being accurately judged.  The big question, then, is this:  How can an assessment accurately gauge or evaluate the skill of a process that isn’t actually being fully tested?  Is it even an accurate assessment of a student’s true reading skills if the test doesn’t allow the student to demonstrate the skill?

We’ve been evaluating student ability this way for a long time now, but the past does not quite serve as a standard for the present when it comes to standardized exams.  The two big hitters – the SAT and the ACT for college – are relatively new to the scene, and for a long time they were hand-graded essay style tests.  Only recently have the public schools themselves gone full-on with standardized exams.  In other words, these tests are not classics.  Moreover, the model for the standardized exam is drawn from tests that measure advanced academic potential; that is, success in school.  There’s nothing wrong with this approach, so long as it applies to those young adults with an interest in pursuing academic fields.  Those are the ones who do well on exams.  Currently, however, we apply the model to all students, regardless of their interests or abilities, and bemoan the lack of universal success.  The tests are also a product of their time and circumstance.  Until recently, these kinds of exams were the easiest, most efficient, and accurate way to measure large groups of essentially anonymous applicants.  That is not true anymore.  If we so desired, and were willing to undertake the (admittedly strenuous) task of changing direction, we could create an evaluation system that would more accurately gauge ability, not to mention serve – far more accurately – a much wider range of demands.

It may be that the standardized exam is here to stay.  Accountability in an institution as entrenched, bureaucratic, and large as the education system is difficult, to say the least, and consistent, across the board, exams are quite possibly the only reasonable path.  But let’s at least be honest about both what should be measured – not student academic success on a large scale, but possible student strengths and ability on the scale of the individual – and how best to democratically measure those skills.  At the least, we should give the students power over their own destiny.  Let them choose what tests to take.  Give them some choice in the reading.  Let them sense that the exam is merely a tool for direction and proof of achievement.

If we are to use an exam to measure our kids, we should provide as many exams as possible, and allow the scores on those tests to be the badge by which the students earn entry into the work they choose.  We don’t need two exams – English and math – or three – writing – or four – add science.  We should have hundreds, for everything they choose.  And we should not measure them by our choices (which I doubt we even understand), but by the paths they choose.  Our students should not be forced to come to us with a piece of paper that judges them by our standards.  They should come to us with a piece of paper that says, “This is what I care about and what I’m good at.”

How ‘Tolerance’ Undermines Writing Skill

It is sometimes surprising how genuinely modern, even Existential, most students are.  When asked to support an opinion, they fall to that most current of defenses: You can’t judge my belief.  What they believe is what they believe, unassailable because it is belief, from the sacred heart, the pure soul, unique and holy.  Of course, this what we want, what we’ve asked for.  Schools have made it their mission to teach acceptance, to counter prejudice, to expose those isolated lives to the vast world of difference.  We have made it a mission to eliminate prejudism, the cornerstone of that belief being more than tolerance, but accommodation.  

And we have succeeded.

Our youth are now Religious Existentialists.  A glut of cultural difference and a deep penetration of relativism – in movies and t.v. and music and, especially, school – has had the desired effect.  Prejudice is low.  Tolerance, of a sort, is high.  Awareness and acceptance of other religion, ritual, and lifestyle is widespread.  But asking people to tolerate difference does not mean students will question their own belief systems, much less other’s.  Nor should they.  After all, the goal is tolerance and acceptance, not questioning.  It is, in fact, hypocritical to ask students to tolerate everyone who is not like them and simultaneously critically question religious or cultural traditions.  (And if there is one sin that teenagers are sensitive to it is hypocrisy.)  Thus the urge to create tolerance and peace has undermined our desire to create reflective and analytical students.  It’s pretty clear which trait we favor more.

Belief itself demands conviction.  It demands at least an approach to an answer of yes or no, right or wrong.  Belief without grip doesn’t really accomplish what we need it for: among other things, a sense of purpose, an answer to the question of death, rules of behavior in an uncertain moral universe.  The conviction of opinion demands a response.  The stronger the opinion, the more immediate the response.  You can see the dilemma.  If no opinion is more correct than any other, then even reacting to an opinion is divisive; is, in fact, morally wrong, since the only real moral demand is to not judge at all.  But what do you do if powerful opinion demands a reaction you aren’t allowed to have?  One easy solution is to not have powerful opinions.   

What we get from our students are essays whose thesis statements are so bland, so hesitant to make a claim, that they are not thesis statements at all.  They are obvious statements of fact attempting to be ‘opinion’.  When writing about literary technique, for example, students will write: “The author of so-and-so uses literary devices to create mood.’  I used to write, all too boldly I fear, ‘DUH!’ next to such statements on essays, but I stopped because it hurt my students’ feelings.  It also seemed to confuse them, and try as I might, teasing from them an opinion that actually had any bite at all seemed more than simply frustrating.  Students react with more than ignorant confusion – they respond with moral resistance.  How, they ask, can I make a strong statement about ART?  It’s my opinion whether the poem works or not; it’s my opinion what the meaning of the story is.  (The only real opinions they willingly sink their teeth into are those that criticize or point out prejudice.)

Belief also demands support – at least if one has to defend it – which leaves students in another curious quandary.  First, their opinions – being opinions – don’t require support. Culture doesn’t require justification, or excuse.  Who we are, what we believe: nobody is obligated to explain themselves, to justify who they are, what they are.  A person should not be required to support their beliefs, since support implies justification.  Second, and perhaps more impactful, support undermines the primary, unassailable authority of opinion, by actually forcing upon the opinion evidence, by grounding the opinion in reality.  As soon as one does this, the opinion is no longer unquestioningly true.  It has effect, a place, connections to actions and other ideas.   Support makes opinion vulnerable.

As an English teacher, one of the more difficult skills I struggle to teach is Support.  What’s so vexing and perplexing to me is how obvious the skill seems.  Any idea, no matter how insignificant, requires some sort of evidence.  A simple statement of mood, ‘I am sad’ for example, must be followed by specific detail.  In fact, if I should tell someone I am sad and they don’t ask why – don’t seek the support – I would be insulted, since clearly they don’t really care.  Every judgment, good or bad, requires proof.  She is lovely, he is mean, that is terrible – all these demand some form of specific detail for meaning.  This is a basic element to communication, to storytelling and human interaction and gossip and business.   Yet nearly  every weak essay I grade lacks support.  It’s as if students are deliberately averse to supporting their statements with evidence or support.  We often call this, simply, ‘laziness’, but I find even the best and brightest and hardest-working students often struggle with the fundamental concept of support.  

The irony is not lost.  It’s English teachers who push the tolerance maxim, through the literature, the class discussions, the reading selections and essay topics.  English class is where students analyze advertising for bias and propaganda.  English class is where students read and discuss stories that humanize the marginalized, spotlight the bullies, give voice to the hiding and hidden.  Tolerance – and an intolerance of intolerance – is learned in English class.  But English class is also where students are supposed to learn and practice the skill of argument, where they are supposed to strengthen their writing skills, skills that are fundamentally constructed on the use of evidence and support. Forced to make a choice between the sanctity of opinion and the authority of supporting evidence, it’s clear which opinion they choose to follow.  

Grades Are Currency

Imagine your job looked something like this:  Five days a week you are forced to go to a place and perform a series of tasks.  Sometimes you enjoy the work, often times not.  You have many bosses throughout a day of moving from job to job, place to place.  A great deal of your time is spent sitting and simply listening.  Your basic needs are met.  You have food and water.  There is shelter.  You arrive with clothing.  You have limited decision-making over your assignments.  Opting out, when an option, has serious consequence. You often take your work home with you.  

Both the product and the payment are…interesting.  Neither has much immediate tangible value, though you must collect a minimum amount of ‘reward’ in order to simply escape the cycle.  (For many of your coworkers, the only goal is escape.)  You are told that the payment is mostly internalized, that it’s built into the tasks, that the tasks themselves, the experience gained, is the actual reward. You are told that the built-in reward nature of the tasks will allow you, in some future, to continue doing such things for a currency that allows the purchase of an infinite variety of goods and services, but that is a world you are not yet allowed to enter.  You are reminded, repeatedly and with variety, that the longer you remain in THIS system, completing tasks and accumulating that strange reward, the greater your ability to accumulate a far more powerful currency outside.  You are working, in other words, for a reward that has extremely limited present day value.  If you like the work, that is the reward; if you don’t like the work, the reward is the promise of escape.   

There is a more specific ‘reward’, if one could call it such, and here is where things get even more complicated.  Periodically, you receive a mark for the quality of your work.  Some bosses are generous, others less so.  This mark has little immediate value at all – you cannot trade it for anything.  It cannot be used to purchase tangible goods.  Like the work itself, this payment is supposed to have intrinsic value, though it also bears the oft-repeated promise of future value.  The amount you can earn is capped, and the value is in how close you reach that cap.  

Most often, that product and reward arrive after a long period spent simply trying to get a handle on the material.  Sometimes, that product arrives after a long period of not doing much at all, with a brief spurt of furious activity just prior to the deadline.  You build your earnings slowly, and the formula for growth has an almost infinite variety within each job.  Roughly twice yearly you get a report outlining your savings and their value, though again it is assumed that the tasks themselves are a kind of reward.  This is so painfully NOT true for many of the tasks that it hints at conspiracy.  Enjoyment of the tasks is scattered incomprehensibly throughout your group, but it is expected that you perform to the best of your ability and with maximum enthusiasm to every task.  What happens if you do not, besides reduced payment, is a vague hint of some future painful consequence.  Should you fail to perform the task satisfactorily to the boss of the moment, you risk repeating the entire experience.

Competition varies from job to job, boss to boss, but mostly you are rewarded not for victory over another but for completing the tasks placidly, on time, in abundance, and with skill.   

There are some strange rules and contradictions.  For example, there is a vague promise that if you earn enough from performing the tasks either in abundance or with excellence, you can parlay your earnings into more of the same yet harder!   Your ultimate goal is to escape the job itself, by doing the job so well that you can then go do the job for a different currency, though just as often you are reminded that the job is its reward, and upon exit you should continue to do the job for the sake of the job.  Like string theory, nobody really believes this or understands it completely.  

You are fairly confused about the purpose, nature, and value of the whole affair, but you have no choice or voice so mostly you muddle along as best you can.  The work itself is often vague of purpose, and most of the time seems strangely self-referential.  Final products seem backward thinking, reflections of what was experienced rather than directed towards the future, even though the ultimate goal is leaving the job for someplace else.

And that, friends, is school.

 

As much as it might pain us to imagine schools as an economy, the reality is that they are.  How, in fact, can one even avoid the idea of school as an economy, when so much energy and attention IN school is purposefully designed to acquire skills and experience to function in one upon exit?  Do we imagine students will not internalize the final purpose of all that education?  Do we imagine that if we can divorce the purpose from its form, that somehow it will not intrude?       

Grades are currency.  They are the most powerful currency a school has to offer, and as such, they are treated as a currency by everyone.  Teachers use the currency of grades to get students to do the work..Students work for the payment of grades.  Moreover, taking away the currency of grades does not mean students will suddenly change their ideas about school.  

The other currency of school is the learning itself, but we have no clear way, in the present construct, of turning that currency into value.  Until we do so, we will continue to expect unreasonable engagement and investment from our students.

We would like to deny that grades are a currency, that the world of school does not function like the one we enter after leaving it.  One would like to assume that the structure of school, with its intrinsic motivation and teachers impassioned by the joy of their subject material, should not – cannot – function like a market.  One would like to emphasize that grades are not a currency, not tradeable, and that their value is connected to the skills of students and nothing else.  All true, yet not quite true at all.

It’s easy to anticipate many of the objections,  But I think most objections, like much of what we do in schools, blatantly ignores the fact that students are people no different from ourselves.  If we could not imagine ourselves abiding by such circumstances, then we ought not assume students are something different.