Standards of Learning

A series of articles at the Wall Street Journal [1, 2, 3]recently discussed our current infatuation with "No Child Left Behind", and how so many, unequipped for it, are being pushed into colleges.

Today in our local paper they more or less illustrate the point taken to its local extreme. On our Virginia Standards of Learning test, kids with dyslexia, unable to figure out the words on the page, have the teachers read the passage to them, and then they answer the multiple choice questions.

In a small classroom at Magruder Elementary School in York County, Marquis Mayo hunched over a reading worksheet, pencil in hand. The fourth-grader listened as teacher Alexis Swanson read aloud the story on the worksheet. Swanson then read aloud questions about the main character, testing whether Marquis understood what she heard and could answer questions about the story.

This is how Marquis studies reading. It's also how teachers test her knowledge. She has a disability that makes translating letters and punctuation into words and sentences difficult. It's as though they are a secret code she struggles to unlock.

But the disability does not keep her from taking exams, such as the state-required Standards of Learning tests that all public school students take each year. Marquis' special education learning plan allows teachers to read aloud passages and questions on tests.

But last fall, the U.S. Department of Education tightened the rules for reading aloud to students. Only students with serious vision problems and those like Marquis, who have a disability that keeps them from decoding text, can be read to on state reading tests.

The change means hundreds of special education students in local public schools who have other disabilities must learn new ways to take the SOL tests. Teachers are scrambling to re-evaluate students' learning plans to see if they still qualify for the read-aloud tool.

I'm sorry folks, but that isn't reading. Call it "verbal comprehension" or something if you want, but it's not reading. You are testing whether the child can understand the words coming from the mouth, not the symbols on the page.

Though, with technological innovation, it may be that long-term this won't matter. There are already programs that will take words on a page and read it back. Mostly these are for the blind, but there's no reason a dyslexic person couldn't use these too. But, it's not reading.