Philosophy of Education

from Chapter 6 - Language ...Reading 7. The idea that schools should be held accountable for students' progress in reading is absurd. Schools are responsible to do the best job they can: nothing more and nothing less; they are responsible for their actions, not the actions of others. 8. Reading does not equate with knowledge. 9. Reading does not equate with intelligence. 10. Reading does not equate with wisdom. When people speak of reading 'skills', they are generally confusing at least two distinct issues; the first is decoding skills, that is, essentially, sound-symbol association; for instance, when I see 'basic', I say 'basic'. Many students learn these skills readily and/or with good teaching. Some have a great deal of difficulty, with a variety of contributing factors. Decoding difficulties may be due to intellectual aptitude, which happens to be (currently) a politically incorrect factor; they may be due to poor teaching; they may be due to what is considered a 'learning disability', which happens to be (currently) a politically correct factor; a ‘learning disability’ implies that the student is intelligent but has a processing disorder that renders decoding difficult. Decoding difficulties may be due to other emotional/social factors, for instance the ability to sustain attention on task. Students who have difficulty with decoding may be - and in fact ought to be - encouraged to demonstrate their knowledge and intelligence according to different measures. However, the current system does not allow different measures: we give a child a score in reading - and one is left to assume that this is somehow a measure of the child's overall skill and knowledge. What's worse is that now schools and teachers are assessed by how well ALL students do in reading. Therefore, the teacher who attempts to assist a particular student who has decoding difficulties to learn compensatory skills, for instance by approaches in other learning domains such as audio-visual, may very well be penalized for not 'teaching reading'. This is a travesty and a national disgrace. Reading comprehension skills are generally considered the ability to recall the factual information in a given passage, and the ability to make inferences regarding this passage, such as the author's point of view, the main idea, or the drawing of conclusions. The difficulty with this description is that what we often call 'factual recall' or ‘inferential skills' are not skills per se, but rather information brought to the passage by the reader. (46) Reading comprehension is a combination of what the reader brings to the passage and what the passage brings to the reader. For instance, if a student reads that 'Europe was very interested in what was happening in America in 1787', his ability to make 'inferences' from this sentence depends on what he knows about European and American history. The more knowledge the student has, the more the student brings to the passage; the more the student brings to the passage, the more easily the student can learn, because he has more knowledge to which the information in the passage can connect (47). To improve reading skills, educators should spend more time emphasizing the importance of factual information, on improving students' background knowledge in a variety of subjects, and on teaching conceptual and metacognitive skills. (There are comprehension skills that can be addressed solely within given a passage, for instance, 'Although it was a rainy day, Joey still wanted to...’ where the student is asked to complete the sentence.) The New York State English Language Arts 8th grade exam administered in April 2010 (48) contained an oral passage about Robert Fulton's invention of the steamboat. The passage was titled ‘Folly or Fortune?’ One of the questions addressed the irony of calling Fulton's invention a 'folly'. Students who were familiar with story of 'Fulton's Folly' had a distinct advantage over students who did not know who Robert Fulton was. For those who knew about Robert Fulton, the title alone, ‘Folly or Fortune’ conveys significant meaning. Students of history know that Fulton had the last laugh, at the expense of those who made fun of his untried invention. They know that his steamboat was critically called ‘Fulton’s Folly’ and that the invention proved to be a success. For students who knew nothing of Robert Fulton, not only did they have to acquire the related information for the first time, but they also had to have knowledge of irony and its usage in Fulton's 'folly', a word with which many students were unfamiliar. The question begs, are we assessing ‘comprehension skills’, or are we assessing historical knowledge of Robert Fulton and ‘Fulton’s Folly’?