Dr. Yvonne Fournier, an education columnist for Scripps Howard, takes up E.D. Hirsch’s common sense call for state reading tests to reflect the content taught in each grade. Responding to a mother who complains that her A-student son’s poor performance on a reading comprehension test is keeping him out of his school of choice, Fournier notes the advantage conferred by the content knowledge accumulated by higher SES kids — “the type of kids who get to learn not just through school but through the vocabulary their educated parents use, the trips they can take, the camps they attend, the extracurricular activities their parents can pay for, weekends at the lake house, Internet access and more.”
Fournier’s advice for the parent? Clip Hirsch’s recent New York Times op-ed on testing and march to the district office:
Take a copy of Hirsch’s article to the person in charge of setting policy as to who gets into the better schools. Notify your school board and, if need be, the NAACP and your newspaper. Insist on your child’s report card to be taken as proof of his intellectual ability. He needs no further testing unless the school board wants to infer that your son’s teachers gave him his grades.
The challenge here is that most teachers and most educators (at least that I regularly interact with) do not believe this. They believe that reading is a skill that you can teach separate of knowledge and content. They believe that good readers are able to read anything no matter what it is based on. How do we change these core beliefs?
Personally, I’d like to give these teachers a reading test using some of the articles I had to read in my graduate biochemistry classes. Anyone else think this would be fun?