Common Core: How are books judged?
Some time ago I wrote about a highly popular supplemental reading program used in thousands of schools called “Accelerated Reader” by Renaissance Learning Inc., which encouraged students to read books that were evaluated through a “readability” formula. Under this scheme, Ernest Hemingway’s classic, “The Sun Also Rises,” gets 10 points and is recommended for kids less than halfway through fourth grade. ”Breaking Dawn,” the fourth book in Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” series, earns 28 points and is recommended for fourth graders, too. Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “Beloved,” which depicts a mother choosing to kill her daughter rather than see her enslaved, gets 15 points and a book level of 6.0, appropriate for sixth grade. Kids get rewards for amassing book points.
The readability formula used in assigning points to books in Accelerated Reader (which you can find here at AR Book Finder), is called ATOS, one in a number of such systems that purport to reveal how difficult a book is to read. ATOS (like other such readability formulas) doesn’t really measure the quality or complexity of a book’s content, but
The earnest parent and the counselor: A conversation
Steve Peifer, associate director of college counseling at Oxbridge Academy of the Palm Beaches in West Palm Beach, Fla., reported on a counselors’ listserv this (non-) conversation that he had with a parent at an open house, and he has given me permission to publish it. Yes, this stuff really happens. Earnest Parent: My daughter […]
The ‘early language gap’ is about more than words
We hear a lot about how children from low-income families often enter school with a “word gap,” meaning they have heard and know fewer words than their more affluent peers, a reality that puts them at a disadvantage from the very beginning of their education. In this post, Esther Quintero, a research associate at the […]
10-31-13 The Answer Sheet
The Answer Sheet: Mom: My autistic son ‘is lost in a sea of standards’ at schoolEarlier this year I wrote about a boy in Florida who was forced to take a standardized test even though he was born with a brain stem but not a complete brain and doesn’t have the cognitive ability to understand the difference between an apple and an orange. While many disabled children can indeed meet […] 7 by Vale