by David Safier
A few commenters have written about a column by E.D. Hirsch in this morning's NY Times
concerning standardized reading tests. The commenters found themselves agreeing with someone who at least one of them has reservations about. Let me weigh in.
E.D. Hirsch is the big "cultural literacy" guy. He's conservative in the sense that he wants everyone to learn the core facts and ideas of western civilization and bemoans the fact that we've tossed lots of the classics aside. I find his idea both attractive and senseless. Though I would love to see more classical cultural literacy, I don't think it would work today with our universal education system, or at least not at nearly the level he wants to see it.
Back to Hirsch's column. He thinks our current reading tests are inaccurate, but not for the usual reasons. He says the reading samples are random and favor students who are most comfortable with the subject matter, not those who are the best readers. I love this example he gives.
[In a 1988 study], Experimenters separated seventh- and eighth-grade students into two groups — strong and weak readers as measured by standard reading tests. The students in each group were subdivided according to their baseball knowledge. Then they were all given a reading test with passages about baseball. Low-level readers with high baseball knowledge significantly outperformed strong readers with little background knowledge.
That's beautiful. As he says elsewhere, when you give inner city kids a passage about hiking in the Appalachians, they're lost. And my experience tells me, if students are interested in the topic, they can read and comprehend far above their tested reading levels. Culturally biased tests yield culturally biased results.
If I remember my testing history correctly, the original I.Q. tests were created in the early 20th century by working with students at private schools and seeing which answers the "smart" kids got right. In other words, the people creating the test already knew what "smart" was — including that "smart" kids attend fancy private schools — and they made sure "smart" kids got the right answers. Which proved they were smart.
Some of those early test questions talked about eating sirloin, a cut of meat many children in other schools had rarely seen on their plates and barely heard of. Cultural slanting of material creates a host of problems.
I agree with Hirsch up to that point. But while he sees the problem clearly enough, he suffers from the classic problem, "When you have a cultural literacy hammer, everything looks like a nail." His solution to the reading test problem is this:
If the reading passages on each test were culled from each grade’s specific curricular content in literature, science, history, geography and the arts, the tests would exhibit what researchers call “consequential validity” — meaning that the tests would actually help improve education. Test preparation would focus on the content of the tests, rather than continue the fruitless attempt to teach test taking.
His idea only works if everyone in the fourth grade, for example, reads the same books and studies the same topics in science, history, geography and the arts. In other words, he wants to see a standardized national curriculum. And I bet I know who he wants to decide what that curriculum should be.
That's where his idea breaks down for me. Should every class in every school in the country read exactly the same books and cover the same facts in history? This country is too big and too diverse for that to work well. But that's Hirsch's dream, and that's why his column raises all kinds of red flags for me.
