[AAACE-NLA] Reading Today article

[Catherine B. King]

Colleagues:

It's amazing to me what people will put to print.  At the very least, this 
article shows how deep, pervasive, and divisive our problems are.  Efforts 
to understand our history of thought, and to move forward creatively, are to 
be encouraged more, not less, in such an environment.

Also, Sticht may rightly call it a "testing debacle"  -- Testing, but not 
necessarily Educational?

Again, I predict that the testing situation will continue to be a debacle as 
long as we unrealistically cling to our Doctrine of Expecting Positivist 
Results. (I base that on a study of the philosophical history of thought and 
its effects on education).

But I think if we are in an "educational debacle," we can depend on our many 
committed and professional practitioners to hold things together while we 
get our research house in order--they are already doing that--each day.

The irony in that article, however, is that the kind of narrow research that 
Sticht is fostering, and his distortion of what it means to be critical or 
even scientific, is rooted in the same epochal foundational problems that 
must share in the responsibility for the adult educational problems we face 
today and that he focuses on.  Further, we cannot make such claims without 
also considering the context of culture, its dynamism, and its interactive 
relationship to educational institutions in the democratic environment we 
live in (small d).  (See my other note regarding the UK research site.)

At any rate, as an epochal analysis, the writers and editorial boards of 
both the Times and the publications of the International Reading Association 
(Reading Today), are all inheritors of the same epochal problems--problems 
that must be considered and worked out in each environment--hopefully in a 
creative way.  I repeat from an earlier note:

"....this is not only Tom's problem.  His remarks and references are only 
one set of examples depicting why the
different fields have remained divided over so many years.  It's no 
surprise, then, that we should find the problem raising its head here in 
education--the premier synthetic field of applications."

Catherine King
Adjunct Instructor
Department of Education
National University
San Diego, CA
cb.king at verizon.net





----- Original Message ----- 
From: <tsticht at znet.com>
To: <aaace-nla at lists.literacytent.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2008 9:17 AM
Subject: [AAACE-NLA] Reading Today article


> Colleagues: I am pleased to report that the following article appears in 
> the
> Vol. 25, No. 4, February/March 2008 issue of Reading Today, the official
> newspaper of the International Reading Association (IRA). Reading Today is
> read by over a 100,000 people in more than 30 nations. Tom Sticht
>
> The great literacy testing debacle in the United States
>
> By Thomas G. Sticht
>
> Debacle: n. A total, often ludicrous failure. Online dictionary
> at www.answers.com/topic/debacle
>
> The United States seems to be caught up in measurement mania when it comes
> to literacy. The No Child Left Behind law calls for extensive testing of
> children's reading abilities in different grade levels. For adults, the
> U.S. Department of Education (DOE) has developed adult literacy tests,
> while Title 2: The Adult Education and Family Literacy Act of the 
> Workforce
> Investment Act of 1998 calls for accountability measures that the DOE has
> implemented in a national reporting system that makes extensive use of
> adult literacy tests.
>
> The actual measurement instruments and procedures for measuring
> reading/literacy and
> comparing states suffer from major flaws. They all follow different
> procedures in their development, which renders them incomparable, hence
> interpretations of data produced by comparing the various tests are
> essentially meaningless.
>
> Testing children's reading achievement
>
> On page 39 of the June 4, 2007 issue of Time magazine a graph is presented
> showing differences between the percentage of fourth graders in each state
> who are deemed "proficient" in reading based on each state's different
> standardized test. The graph also shows the percentage deemed "proficient"
> on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which is a
> standardized test given in all states. There are some very significant
> differences between the state and national test results. For instance,
> Mississippi reports that nearly 90 percent of fourth graders are 
> proficient
> in reading on the state-developed test, while on the NAEP only about 19
> percent score as proficient. This is a whopping 71 percentage points
> difference.
>
> The Time article reported that when using state test data the average
> percentage of fourth graders considered proficient is 70%. On the national
> NAEP tests only 30% of U.S. fourth graders score as proficient. This is a
> 40-point average gap between state and national estimates of fourth-grade
> reading proficiency. The state and national tests
> use different procedures to determine if children are proficient readers;
> hence they are not commensurate. This raises these questions.  Which tests
> should be considered valid indicators of the reading achievement level of
> the nation's fourth-graders? Should it be, the state or the federal 
> tests -
> or perhaps neither?
>
> Testing adult's literacy levels
>
> Jumping ahead to when fourth graders have grown up, the 2003 National
> Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) presents data for prose and document
> literacy that indicate that in 1992 15% of adults over the age of 16 
> scored
> as proficient on these tests. In 2003, 13% of adults scored as proficient, 
> a
> drop of 2%. Surprisingly, only 30% of adult college graduates scored as
> proficient in literacy.
>
> Although there are clearly differences between the NAEP reading tests for
> fourth graders and adult literacy tests, again rendering them
> incommensurate, they both attempt to portray how many of their target
> groups are "proficient" in literacy. The data indicate that there are 
> fewer
> than half as many adults (13%) who are proficient in literacy as there are
> fourth graders (30%) who are proficient using the federal NAEP, and there
> are only a fifth as many proficient adults as there are proficient fourth
> graders (70%), if the average of the state-made tests are used. This
> suggests a tremendous loss of proficiency as children grow into adulthood!
>
> Measuring literacy for accountability
>
> The problem of assessing literacy also shows up in the accountability 
> system
> of the nation's Adult Education and Literacy System (AELS), which is made 
> up
> of some 3,000 programs funded jointly by federal money from Title 2 of the
> Workforce Investment Act of 1998 and state and local funds.
>
> The National Reporting System (NRS) which prepares reports on how well
> adults are learning to read in the AELS, has acknowledged that different
> states use different standardized tests, with differing amounts of time
> between pre- and posttests to assess growth in literacy learning. But
> despite the acknowledged lack of comparability in the tests and procedures
> used in various states, the NRS computes averages of the percentage of
> adults making learning gains throughout the 50 states. Of course, the lack
> of comparability in measurement tools and their administration renders
> these data totally meaningless and useless to Congress (or anyone else for
> that matter) in deciding whether or not states are using their federal
> funds responsibly and productively.
>
> The debacle of testing literacy ability
>
> Despite the faults of testing for literacy skills, there is apparently no
> hesitancy in using the test results to reward some educators and punish
> others for what they are doing to teach literacy, whether to children or
> adults. Despite extensive use of standardized tests of various sorts by 
> the
> 50 states, 30-year reading trend data with the NAEP show minimal if any
> improvement  for 9-, 13-, or 17-year-old children since the early 1970s.
> Further, the testing of adult literacy in 1992 and again in 2003 shows
> little or no improvement in literacy at the lowest levels and a decline at
> the highest levels.
>
> To date, then, the great literacy testing debacle has cost hundreds of
> millions of dollars, threatened teachers and administrators, subjected
> children to hours of drill and practice in test taking rather than 
> engaging
> in learning important content and skills, and cast aspersions on the
> literacy skills of America's workforce, thus advertising to the world that
> the U. S. workforce is incompetent. This cannot be good for the health and
> welfare of the nation or its international competitiveness in the global
> economy.
>
> Even if we could get literacy testing right - which we have not done up to
> now - there is no way we can test ourselves out of the serious educational
> problems that afflict our K-12 and adult literacy education systems. There
> is a word for the obsessive repetition of utterly foolish, unreasonable,
> and failed practices: insanity.
>
> Thomas G. Sticht is an international consultant in adult education and 
> lives
> in
> El Cajon, California
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> AAACE-NLA mailing list: AAACE-NLA at lists.literacytent.org
> http://lists.literacytent.org/mailman/listinfo/aaace-nla
> LiteracyTent: web hosting, news, community and goodies for literacy
> http://literacytent.org
>