Sue Atkinson
Baxter
Iowa public school educators are struggling to improve reading proficiencies up to even the low standard of 41st National Percentile Ranking (while the looming deadline of May 2017 hangs over the head of third-graders not proficient at grade level 65th NPR), and the challenge is properly assessing the process rather than scapegoating students.
It helped to have the Iowa Department of Education finally make a decision last May that all five of the reading concepts (known as the “science of reading”) be included rather than substituting memorization for what teachers are not trained to do (because the teacher training programs in Iowa have not included all five reading concepts for decades). Another problem is the quality of the training for each of the concepts.
Memorization is a shallow, low-level, activity that fails to develop the in-depth skills needed to use reading for higher levels of learning. The new assessment tests, Smarter Balance, are designed to test students for their depth of concept understanding and application — unlike the shallow Iowa Assessments based on memorization. The Smarter Balance tests will show which students were in systems of shallow memorization and which ones actually learned the concepts in-depth to effectively apply them.
When whole words are memorized, students lack the skills to effectively break down the sounds and the parts through phonemic awareness. This is how they discover the mechanics of reading for more in-depth applications. Repeated lessons involving these skill applications speed up the more in-depth reading process that presently bogs down for many students educated only through memorization.
Iowa educators were educated in memorization themselves because of the removal of concepts in favor of Whole Language around 1973. Teacher training has focused on the necessity of memorizing sight words to “speed up” reading — completely missing the important in-depth concept of phonemics and how to effectively teach it.
Memorization leaves out visual learners because of its focus on whole words in place of learning the individual components and how they fit together. For decades, visual learners have been labeled Special Ed. as if the fault lay with them rather than the poor process. Unfortunately, schools are continuing to view visual learners as individually defective while the practice of memorization of sight words continues, holding back the skill of effective reading for many. Clearly the state board needs to eliminate “educator reading,” just as it eliminated “educator math” and “educator science.”