Take a Word like Yacht
Sometimes things got heated when people started debating reading comprehension with him. Mr. Bubbles got drawn into squabbles with content-area teachers every time he ventured forth into actual classrooms. Content-area teachers could be really intense.
His contract required him to log 75 hours yearly monitoring and reporting on content-area reading instruction and to keep the Superintendent updated. Almost all of his time went to early reading, consistent with the simple view.
History teachers got riled up almost as much as English teachers. Nobody expected reading instruction in Mathematics, but he was intrigued by the divide between math teachers when it came to writing.
Fortunately, that wasn’t in his wheelhouse. He was the Chief Comprehension Officer. It didn’t end well when he crossed swords with the Chief Composition Officer. Who in their right mind would want to have to implement holistic writing assessment?
*
Just last week he had discussed the question of primary sources in the classroom with Mr. Freedman, eighth grade history teacher. Most of the history teachers in the departments across the district frowned on primary sources unless they related directly to the Constitution Test, a state requirement. Bubbles carefully avoided the issue.
Reading the textbook with its snippets of primary sources all packaged in glitz with review questions, happy meals in nutritious units, filled the bill, according to the history council of department chairs. Look at the evidence. Those children who actually wanted to learn passed the district formative and summative assessments just fine, Mr. Bukowski, Freedman’s department chair, pointed out. “Why would any of the other creatures want to look at a letter or a diary written by a dead person?” Plus they learned how to read textbooks.
“Mr. Bubbles, got a second?” Mr. Freedman, one of a handful of black teachers at the school, stepped into the hallway. Bubbles usually enjoyed his conversations, but he wasn’t thrilled about this upcoming installment.
*
“Primary sources?” Bubbles asked.
“Yes, indeed, primary sources.”
Mr. Freedman had been doing a lot of reading in journals about the teaching of history and had found a study focused on the following research questions1.
“Here’s my problem,” Mr. Freedman said. “Permission to speak frankly, Captain Bubbles?”
“Nothing has changed,” Bubbles said. “What you say in this room stays in this room—unless I’m formally observing—with advance notice.”
As Chief Comprehension Officer Bubbles was obligated to comply with recent state legislation designed to pull Critical Race Theory out of public schools by the roots. Bubbles admired Mr. Freedman’s commitment to teaching students how to read and learn history. This was not a teacher who would release his grip on the classroom easily.
“My question has to do with prior knowledge and reading comprehension, you know what I’m saying? If history teachers keep building up prior knowledge that US history is a story of moral white people saving tormented black people from immoral white people, which is what the textbooks do, how does that influence reading comprehension generally in the search for the economic and moral truth of history? Can we ever ask a comprehension question like ‘What were the causes of the Civil War’ in the real world? That ain’t comprehension, Captain.”
Such questions used to be so simple. Bubbles always took the easy way out when he wrote test items for passages about causes of wars: list three reasons stated in the passage and then the back door option: “All of the above.”
*
Bubbles was tired at the end of the day. He’d logged six hours of field time and was sitting down with a cup of coffee to document his observations. He couldn’t bring himself to comment on the record on Mr. Freedman’s primary source dilemma.
The Board had been getting screamed at by angry parents with their angry self-righteousness about reading, about dirty books, and sanctimonious teachers. One Board member in particular had been screaming at the Superintendent. Bubbles would almost rather have to facilitate a direct writing assessment than face what he knew he would have to do if he brought up Mr. Freedman in an official note.
Before he left the office, he got an email from a colleague in his professional learning network who like himself had also been struggling with massive disequilibrium. He’d believed all of his professional life he knew precisely what reading comprehension is and how to measure it. He assimilated and accommodated new research with relish and craved the feeling that what he was doing mattered in the real world. That was hard to come by these days.
The email brought another online address2 leading to another article about the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and its failed battle to bring reading comprehension into the 21st century. He read the piece through and then read it again, seeking glorious comprehension. The crux of the debate, the turning point where the reading scientists and the reading politicians took different roads, was made crystal clear when the chair of the Visioning committee, the head of the expert panel, was quoted as follows:
In many ways, the kind of reading we want to draw inferences about, it occurred to Bubbles, is one of a handful of questions at the core of the mission of public schooling. How many kinds of reading are there? he wondered.
The kind Mr. Freedman was championing where comprehension must be seen as a moral issue because it builds stores of knowledge that shape future comprehension? The kind that Mr. Bukowski wanted perhaps because it is easier, perhaps because it indoctrinates and assures correct comprehension in the future?
He knew these musings were half baked, but he had them like a recurring dream, and he had never before had them quite so stirringly. Another quote pulled him back into the article. Early drafts from the Visioning panel resonated with him in their full throated support for prereading activities on the test itself to activate prior knowledge and prepare readers to enter the text, an established staple of content area reading lesson design:
Alas, the ideological opposition stopped this prereading nonsense in its tracks. Bubbles recalled reading a Chester Finn quote where Finn insisted that comprehension test takers should get no help from the test—they shouldn’t be able to look up words even. Desert island reading. Robinson Crusoe. If he was remembering correctly, some modest inroad was made, but an alone in the real world, swimming in the ocean without a shark cage, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, fortune was made for the fortunate, workday reading comprehension—that’s the kind of reading Finn wants to draw inferences about.
There was no opposition from the desert island readers to the “use and apply” innovation the scientists wanted. It wasn’t right to help readers by building their prior knowledge before reading, but it was just fine to test them to see that they can apply their comprehension after they read. Mr. Bubbles thought it made more sense in the real world of reading to contextualize a passage before asking comprehension questions:
Bubbles wondered how Steiner proposed to score the student-written blog for reading comprehension without treading on the territory held by writing. The Age of Literacy may be dawning, but the academic and institutional maps of reading and writing are ancient. Bubble’s found it somewhat contradictory that David Steiner was not sanguine about the prereading idea. Activating and organizing prior knowledge before reading may be a great idea, but not in the real world. Here’s Steiner:
A broad public vocabulary? Mr. Bubbles was puzzled. As Chief Comprehension Officer and a designated member of a professional learning network, Bubbles found the idea that any state assessment anywhere is written exclusively using the words used by children who “have not grown up in a world of yachts” seriously out of touch with reality. Steiner’ s catalog of works students might be expected to read struck Bubbles as offensive: news, magazines, and novels. Really?
Mr. Bubbles didn’t like thinking ill of people but he was imperfect. How could an individual with such a naive and feckless understanding of literacy have access to the federal power to design measures of reading comprehension? Would such a phenomenon happen in the CDC, the military?
When Bubbles learned that NAEP is examining the role of the scientists in framing test designs in future, he felt better. It seemed clear to him from the grapevine that unrest was beginning. Professional Learning Networks may be in their infancy, but they are past the sensorimotor stage and speeding toward an early formal operational stage. The important work of consequential academic assessment designs should be insulated from non-expert ideologues…
Ogden, Nancy, et al. “Not a Peculiar Institution: Challenging Students’ Assumptions about Slavery in U.S. History.” The History Teacher, vol. 41, no. 4, 2008, pp. 469–88. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40543886. Accessed 2 Nov. 2022.
https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/nations-report-card-has-a-new-reading-framework-after-a-drawn-out-battle-over-equity/2021/08