Jonathan Lovell is a professor at San Jose State University in San Jose, California, where he supervises students who plan to teach high school English. In this post, he explains the evolution of educational thinking about the teaching of reading over the centuries and does it with wit and style. He also examines the likely impact of the Common Core standards. He notes that the same groups that helped write the standards are now writing the tests. Instead of making millions, they will make billions. Will standards, testing, and a standardized curriculum close gaps between different groups of students? Read on.
The post is brilliantly illustrated. I predict you will enjoy it.
The article appears in Engaging Cultures and Voices: The Journal of Learning Through Media, edited by Roy Fox and Lynn Chang, University of Missouri.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thanks for re-posting this illustrated essay, Diane. The journal that picked it up is called Engaging Cultures and Voices: The Journal of Learning Through Media, edited by Roy Fox and Lynn Chang out of the University of Missouri.
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Great read Jonathon!
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Thanks so much Duane. We all plug on, do we not, despite what can sometimes appear to be insurmountable obstacles.
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“The Reformations”
Martin Luther nailed
His theses to the wall
Arne Duncan mailed
His test D’s to us all
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Martinez Luther nailed to the cathedral wall
His ninety-nine theses,
Unlike Arne, who’s incapable
Of spouting anything but male bovine feces.
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Quite so, SomeDAM Poet. Thanks for responding.
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Oh my, Michael.
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Reading this visual essay was like a trip down memory lane as someone involved in education, first as a student, next as a teacher, for most of her life. It reminded me of all our attempts to rank, sort and pidgenhole students. It recalled own experience of being a “bluebird” reader and going to a selective public school. It reminded me of my experience with homogeneous classes and my frustration, when I first started teaching. It also reminded me of attending Calkins’ writers workshop training at TC as well as all the standardized tests that were heaped on my students.
No matter what artificial constraints we try to impose on students through testing or ranking, it is important that we provide all young people with a well-rounded, comprehensive education. The next “big idea” is not just reserved for the 1%. It may come from a late bloomer or someone that learns differently. That is why we must fight for strong, comprehensive, democratic public education and libraries. Just because oligarchs have a vision for the rest of us does not mean we should acquiesce to their demands. We are all more than the sum of our scores and defy measurement. http://currclickblog.com/standardized-test-cant-measure/
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Thanks very much, Retired Teacher. I taught at Teachers College just prior to Lucy Calkins’ work there, and was part of her selection committee when she started at TC back in 1981.
The reading and writing workshop approach to language growth, conveyed so effectively through the TC Reading and Writing Project and which we also promote through the 200-odd sites of the National Writing Project, seems to me to be one of the best antidotes to the separation of readers into “saved” and “damned” that I discuss in my essay.
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Lovell’s illustrated essay makes one of the most convincing arguments against the past 30-40 years of ed reform I have read anywhere. Brilliantly analyzed and illuminated. Thank you for sharing it with us, Diane.
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Dear Sallyo57,
Thanks so much for your response. I’m humbled.
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Visuals, merged with your text and account of your teaching are really wonderful.
I just wonder how many next generation teachers and students will have a rudimentary appreciation of how appropriate those “fine art” images are as illustrations of the text.
Recall how the CCSS classified studies in the arts? As a “technical subject.” A technical subject was defined as ”A course devoted to a practical study, such as engineering, technology, design, business, or other workforce-related subjects; a technical aspect of a wider field of study, such as art or music (CCSS ELA Standards, Appendix A, p. 43).
So, that could mean that the essay reflects an improper use of those Renaissance paintings dealing with heaven, hell, redemption (and more). A proper use might include them in a technical/career prep course, to teach the craft of fresco painting. Students would have to engage in rigorous and repeated practice within a “learning progression” of exercises leading to mastery of the skills need to do fresco painting on high ceilings and large walls (while meeting new standards for safe selections and uses of materials, scaffolds, etc.). There is no need to address matters of style, imagery, symbolism, meaning, context, patronage, basis for the fame of the artist and so on.
The CCSS need to be folded, spindled, burned, thrown in the heap, including all of the Publishers Criteria, the verbatim rule, and the step-by-step procedures for judging the degree of perfection in the alignment of curriculum materials with each and every standard.
This pathological obsession with control and “calibrations” of all aspects of teaching and learning and testing must end.
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Dear Laura,
As is the case with pretty much everything you post, I agree with you 100%. Thanks so much for your kind words, despite the fact that my visual argument might fall on a few sight-challenged eyes!
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I just learned a few moments ago that this essay will be re-posted on Valerie Strauss’s The Answer Sheet, the education blog for The Washington Post. I’m sure Diane’s influence contributed to this selection. It feels a bit like learning that one has just been nominated for education’s equivalent of a Tony Award. Or a least a Tonette. Quite exciting. I’ve no idea if the illustrations will be part of the re-posting.
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Valerie Strauss reads the blog, and I read The Answer Sheet.
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Thanks again for re-posting my essay, Diane. The version that Valerie Strauss will be re-posting on The Answer Sheet will of course be without the illustrations, but it’s still quite stunning to me that my essay will so suddenly be reaching so much wider an audience.
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I hope the Answer Sheet links to the illustrated version. I don’t think the full impact of the piece will translate. Pausing to “read” the illustrations adds another dimension to the words and gives us time to reflect on what is said as we read.
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Dear 2old2teach,
Valerie Strauss will be providing a link to the illustrated version.
I’ve been told by other journal editors that it’s simply too expensive and time consuming to track down all the credits one would need to pursue in order to include as many illustrations as I tend to use in my illustrated essays. In fact the ECV online journal was the first one to publish one of my illustrated essays, for which I’m extremely grateful.
So apart from glowing exceptions like NYT Interactive (see http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/#/?part=tunnel-creek for an especially stunning example), most major news outlets are likely to continue sticking to print, with an occasional image.
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Thank you for a good read (and view). ELA is like math without diagrams.
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As a veteran teacher, I now grasp that most humans are not good readers. Many of my seventh graders have very poor comprehension of most texts, and, extrapolating from what I see at this age, I know that they will still be weak readers when they’re adults, given the slow rate of progress I see. Luther vastly overestimated people’s ability to learn to read with understanding. The Bible is a vast, bloated and incoherent book. It takes a genius Talmudic scholar to even begin to make a coherent interpretation of it. Almost everyone who reads the Bible MISreads it. The Catholics and Orthodox were shrewd to downplay Bible reading and substitute a coherent set of teachings. The vast majority of those who cherish the Bible have little idea of what it actually says. It’s really just a talisman for them. People think that being able to sound out words is the bulk of reading ability. Ha. It’s just the beginning, as Robert Pondiscio and E.D. Hirsch try to explain, over and over, often to deaf ears. One needs a mountain of background knowledge installed in the brain to begin to grasp the most challenging texts. Most of us lack this mountain of background knowledge. Acquiring such a mountain requires a long, slow and systematic transmission. Schools are not undertaking this transmission.. Instead they’ve bought into a short cut sold by charlatans like Lucy Calkins: you can cut out the knowledge and just teach a discrete set of “reading skills”. Alas, research proves these reading skills are minimally effective. Thus our schools remain hobbled by the bad ideas peddled in education schools.
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Dear Ponderosa,
I agree wholeheartedly with Don Hirsch in his compelling assertion that what we call “reading comprehension” is more usefully understood as a measure of cultural literacy. And those students who bring the highest levels of “social capital” (as Robert Putnam has defined it) to our classrooms are also the most likely to be assessed as the highest in “reading skills.”
Where we differ is in determining the best route to addressing the ever-growing disparity between “skilled” and “unskilled” readers. While the best long-term remedy, as I say towards the conclusion of my essay, is to address the ever-widening chasm between our wealthiest and poorest citizens, the best short-term solution (as the TKAM workshop model I describe in my essay suggests) is to increase our students’ appetite for reading in particular and literacy growth in general.
The best materials for doing so at the elementary levels, insofar as I have been able to determine, are the Units of Study in the Teaching of Reading and Writing–products of the altogether admirable Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, directed by Lucy Calkins.
My two cents.
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I was impressed by this historical approach to reading education. It prompted me to think of my own education, so distinctly grounded in the idea that it is a moral duty to learn. My grandfather moved to a little town called Bell Buckle, Tennessee in the 1920s so his children could attent Webb School, one of those private schools that sprang to life in the wake of harsh economic conditions in a war ravaged south. There was no question that the man who started the school still haunted its halls in the late sixties and early seventies when I attended there.
I have been teaching for 29 years at the public school that serves the town where I grew up. Long gone is the idea that every one comes to the plate ready to dine on the cuisine of a good education. Like other teachers, I try everything I can to stimulate interest in the subjects I teach. Sometimes it is an exhausting task.
It strikes me that we cannot discard the idea that education is moral in nature. Notwithstanding the suggestion above that the Bible is difficult to understand, the attempt still has a long history of making better Christians, who like my father, helped begin the long walk to better race relations by believing the Bible taught the same kindness Ghandi used to create a revolution. Pretty good stuff for a Methodist farmer with a reading problem. Maybe that was why I plowed through Runciman’s history of the crusades one hot summer. It was not easy reading about the depredations of the Christian armies making blood run deep in the streets of Jerusalem. It challenged aspects of my belief system, and it was physically uncomfortable on a hot summer day. Belief that it was morally right to do this motivated its completion.
I will continue to try anything to help sell the idea of real education to kids who have not all bought in to the idea yet, but it is more efficient to teach those who have already agreed that it is a moral duty.
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Dear Roy,
You make a strong connection between the “difficult” but morally necessary task of learning in general and learning to read the Bible in particular, and your own Methodist farmer father (with a reading problem!) who began “the long walk to better race relations by believing the Bible taught [him] the same kindness that Ghandi used to create a revolution.” Powerful stuff!
The particular Biblical passage i was referring to in the “those who read but don’t understand were meant to be damned” segment of my essay, as perhaps you know, is lines 9-12 from the gospel according to Mark.
The passage, as you’ll recall, follows Jesus telling the gathering throng the quite puzzling parable of the sower, after which the text reads 9″Then Jesus said, ‘Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.’
10 When he was alone, the Twelve and the others around him asked him about the parables. 11 He told them, “The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables 12 so that they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!”
Frank Kermode uses this passage (along with Robert Frost’s allusion to as the epigraph to his poem “Directive”) as his entry into a fascinating study he calls The Genesis of Secrecy. Put simply, Kermode’s argument is that the experience of reading and interpreting the Bible was just as much an exercise in keeping out those who might “hear but never understand” as it was to let in those who did have “ears to hear.”
When the text recounts the explanation that Jesus gives of this quite unusual four-part parable (especially the interpretation of the thorns as representing the desire for worldly goods that chokes the listeners ability to “hear” the word) I like to think of his disciples as so many sophomore HS boys, looking at each other with skepticism and and perhaps bemusement, saying “How the hell did ‘teach’ get us from that simple parable to THAT meaning? Do you suppose we are ever going to understand?”
For a larger discussion of how that particular passage might have ended up as it did in Mark, with its particular wording, I’d recommend reading The Five Gospels: the “color coded” version of the synoptic gospels that was published a number of years ago by the members of the “Jesus Seminar.”
My very best,
Jonathan
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Love it, and the commentary thread, too.
Thanks Diane!
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Thanks so much, Susan. Hope your presentation at the NPE conference went well. So sorry I could not be there!
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