Leveled Readers in Aligned Schools

A theory that works is altogether a miracle: it idealizes our varying observations of the world in a form so stripped down as to be kept easily in mind, permitting us to see the grubby particulars as exemplars of a general case.

Jerome Bruner, 1996, The Culture of Education, pp. 88–89

Do your students like reading? Stripped down, the theory that works like a miracle for teachers, that is kept easily in mind, is the nagging idea that teaching students to like reading may be more important than teaching phonics or even comprehension.

Reading has always been the center of our stripped down cultural model of the public school curriculum, its beginning and its end, a discipline unto itself in grade school, supplanted a bit by writing in the curriculum as the grade levels increase, blossoming finally into the English Language Arts.

How important is it that your students like reading? If your theory of reading instruction values liking, even loving reading, do you have lessons with “teaching students to like reading” as the objective?

What student is going to miss the signals advertising that reading accurately, fluently, is the grand prize? Reading means climbing from one level to the next. Reading means putting in the time, knowing what is coming, passing tests. What about liking it?

Do you have a theory of how you teach a student to like reading that lets you see the grubby particulars as exemplars of a general case? Is liking enough?

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Curriculum as a concept is on shaky ground these days I see as I scan recent philosophical and conceptual pieces from hours of sampling current volumes of journals with the word “curriculum” in the title. Innovations lately appear to be limited to higher education as spin-offs of the Bologna process in Europe, constructive alignment among the most recent debates. More on this topic in a future post.

Something changed in theorizing about curriculum between 2002 and 2022. Whether the consequences of ideological warfare rattling previously settled structures like accreditation, government intrusion into Advanced Placement courses and tests, new definitions of civil rights, minor issues like SoR, or COVID, traditional component parts of a curriculum are less firmly moored in the normal. Terms like ‘post truth curriculum,’ ‘curriculum without borders,’ ‘curriculum in a post human world’ are laced in the top level structures of published arguments.

Anderson (2002¹) wrote a chapter looking backwards at curriculum research in the k12 system from 1950 forward, a work of cultural archeology uncovering the hidden part of the iceberg. “During the past half-century there has been a growing body of evidence supporting a fundamental educational truism: that what and how much students are taught is associated with, and likely influences, what and how much they learn,” he wrote (p. 255). What and how students are taught, according to Anderson, constitute two of the three sides of an equilateral triangle called “the curriculum.” The third side, the piece needed to align the curriculum, Anderson called tests and assessments.

What, how, and how well. But do they like to read?

What gets taught in a curriculum document on this traditional view is termed “curriculum standards” or “content standards.” In practice, phrases like “content coverage” or “opportunity to learn” have been used to breathe life into the abstract term “standard.” The “how” part of the triangle is termed “instructional materials and activities.”

In past practice, curriculum materials include intellectual and physical resources developed and published as textbook series. Tests are included within instructional materials developed by private companies. “…[C]ontent validity, content coverage, and opportunity to learn are all included within the more general concept of ‘curriculum alignment,’” Anderson wrote (p. 257).

The depth of penetration as well as the durability of this triangle notion of curriculum alignment is evidenced by the goals of various reform movements. The current SoR movement has targeted the entire triangle by insisting on phonics first and only opportunities to learn (content standards), scripted instructional activities and prescribed materials, and frequent, targeted, summative tests.

Do they like reading? Is that in the curriculum?

The Common Core State Standards movement made the conscious decision to put all of their eggs in the content coverage basket. Although its leaders later regretted it, the Core architects deliberately left instructional materials and activities out of their reform calculus. To streamline their work, they also deliberately ignored tests and assessments, opening the door for entrepreneurs to create new assessment businesses.

The Core architects had historical precedent alerting them to the danger of reform extinction by venturing into the treacherous land of assessment—and they steered clear. Early memos written by employees of the new assessment businesses scrutinized the failure of the CLAS reading test in 1994 California to glean public relations insights helping the neophyte assessment companies avoid flare-ups and meltdowns.

There was also the failed New Standards Project in 1996, an effort to build a national portfolio assessment system for English Language Arts and Mathematics. Two leaders² of the New Standards Project made clear the motive of the project:

“[Assessment] is…the key to curriculum reform. …[W]e have strong evidence that assessment drives instruction; …poor assessment practices are… responsible for the stultifying curricula we have in our schools today. [Therefore]…, assessment practices can serve as the catalyst in developing more challenging curricula we so desperately need.” (Myers & Pearson, 1996)

The New Standards Project reached toward liking. The object was to transform a “stultifying curriculum,” an alignment of coverage, materials, and tests that nobody could like very much. Nonetheless, the learning outcome “students like to read” was implied, not centered.

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Studies done in the 1970s and replicated in the 1990s provided empirical evidence in support of the efficacy of curriculum alignment, that is to say, when alignment was high quality and pacing was brisk, students learned more according to tests. Whether they liked to read was not assessed.

When teachers moved students through instructional materials and activities aligned with curriculum standards, students did well on standardized tests. “Good, Grouws, and Beckerman’s (1978) study of the relationship [between] the number of textbook pages covered [and] mathematics achievement test scores, and Anderson, Evertson, and Brophy’s (1979) study of the number of basal readers completed by first grade reading groups in relation to reading achievement test scores” were confirmed by similar research in the 1990s (cf. Anderson, 2002).

In alignment practice as examined in the studies Anderson cited, teachers deliberately aligned their lesson plans with activities and tests as published in content-aligned textbooks. Teachers carried out activities as prescribed in the teacher’s manual with fidelity. Summative tests provided evidence of alignment.

When standardized tests designed externally to be curriculum-free under the auspices of measurement specialists revealed statistically compelling alignment among all three sides of the curriculum triangle, a school was said to be fairly assessed and could be reported to the public for praise or shame. The school could be held accountable.

Nobody asked if the students liked reading.

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The science of learning has made important progress over the past few decades that calls into question basic assumptions of traditional alignment theory. For one thing, learning is more powerful, more enduring, and more likely in a setting designed to teach students to like what they are doing, to feel joy in learning.

Curriculum standards must reflect disciplinary discourses and epistemologies, but scientific learning outcomes must be broadened to include learning goals like development of motivation, self-efficacy, self-regulation, and self- and peer assessment capacity. Instructional activities and materials used with fidelity can no longer work scientifically in the new learning paradigm. Teachers must have the prerogative to self-regulate their professional practices.

The centrality of self-regulation in teaching and learning suggests profound change is needed in out dated notions of curriculum alignment. Teachers and learners of the future need space to interact and communicate in ways that focus on learner participation in the moment rather than displays of learning after the fact for outside eyes.

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An educational system with reading at its center from the earliest days until graduation isn’t working well when its graduates have no coherent framework grounded in experience for self-regulating reading behavior across a range of discourses and purposes as a lifelong learner. A system that produces graduates who view reading as an unpleasant chore undertaken to prove something to someone else may be aligned. Readers may be leveled. But they will not have learned to like reading because liking is irrelevant.

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