THINKING ABOUT READING PROFICIENCY IN NEW MEXICO (AND BEYOND)

At the 19 August meeting of the local NAACP chapter, guest speaker State Senator Carrie Hamblen responded to my question about the abysmal National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) proficiency scores for 4^th-grade reading in New Mexico not only in 2022, but also in decades past.  Her responses were not surprising; they are the common responses by those protecting teachers from accountability for failing to do the job which they are paid to do.  Defense-of-teachers responses are mainly four.

 

One, teachers cannot teach effectively when students come from backgrounds beset by poverty, unemployment, poor nutrition, poor health, domestic violence, broken families, lack of parental support, and the like social deficiencies.  Indeed, there is a strong correlation between educational attainment and socio-economic conditions.  The implication is that, until these social deficiencies are greatly ameliorated or remedied, little can be done to improve student achievement.  Which shifts the blame for poor academic performance to the world at large and brings education reform to a standstill.

 

Two, teachers cannot teach effectively when students are not motivated to learn.  The implication is that teachers’ first job is to motivate students by one or another approach.  One assumes that motivation is external to teaching, precedes it, and must succeed before teaching can succeed.  Explaining why a subject is important to students, now or someday, and encouraging them are common devices.  Another assumes that motivation is achieved by making learning fun.  Many classroom activities, projects, field trips, and the like have long been designed and deployed for this purpose.  Unhappily, no proof that these approaches or devices have made a positive difference exists.  It hardly matters that students are motivated to learn if their teachers do not know the subject matter which they are supposed to teach.

 

Three, defenders of teachers often use anti-elitist canards to rebut critics of teachers.  So they impute to critics a standard of education which assumes that the only worthy education is a four-year college preparatory education.  I doubt that critics assume or advocate this standard.  I believe that they value a good K-12 education for all students.

 

Four, defenders of teachers often use anti-intellectual stereotypes of teachers to rebut critics of teachers.  They impute to critics a preference for teachers like the stereotype, brainy pedants who lecture, who drone, who bore; the brainier the teachers, the less able to teach effectively.  This stereotype reveals its user’s attitudes toward education.

 

These dogmas and stereotypes attempt to avoid or disarm criticism based on the two most troublesome facts about K-12 education in New Mexico.  One is that 79% of 4^th-grade students cannot read proficiently.  The other is that those who have not learned to read proficiently by the end of 4^th grade will have great trouble reading to learn in grades 5 through 12.  These facts have ominous implications for students’ 5^th-though-12^th-grade education in all subjects, their lives and livelihoods thereafter, and the economy of the state.

 

Characteristically, each of these dogmas or stereotypes focuses on something outside of or peripheral to the educational process and ignores what defines it: the transfer of knowledge or skills from those who possess them to those who does not.  Thus, proper educational focus must be on the subject matter, as defined by the curriculum, hopefully coherent, complete, and properly structured and sequenced; and on teachers, hopefully, competent, confident, and committed to transfer it by instruction.

 

To fix a problem, it helps to know its source.  The NAEP data imply the source: the inability of K-4 teachers to teach reading well enough that their students learn to read proficiently.  So the question is, what explains their inability.  My opinion: ignorance of grammar, admittedly, the bogeyman of English instruction.  Although proficiency in reading involves three components—vocabulary, grammar, and comprehension—, elementary school teachers do not know grammar, as both former Superintendents Stan Rounds and Karen Trujillo admitted to me.  Both knew ignorant teachers’ main line of defense: “grammar does not make good writers.”  Both agreed that the ignorant were not qualified to know.  Yet both tacitly accepted this defense as justifying defiance of state educational requirements.  Teachers’ protestations of good intentions and earnest efforts ring hollow when teachers defend their ignorance of required subject-matter.

 

Grammar has benefits well beyond snobbish correctness or micro-aggressions, both reflected in the cutesy T-shirt warning “I’m silently correcting your grammar.”  Having grammar in one’s head or at one’s fingertips can do much to improve reading comprehension (and make writing more precise and polished).  From a pedagogical perspective, the benefit of grammar instruction for reading is its focus on words and their relationships to one another.  Perhaps for that reason among others, the state’s English curriculum requires that grammar be taught in K-4 grades (and beyond).

 

Given the importance of writing in all academic courses and the possible segregation of a concern for grammar only to English teachers, all prospective teachers in New Mexico should be required to take and pass with high marks a course in grammar as a condition of certification.  For all teachers should be able to help students with writing grammatically and reading comprehendingly.

 

Let me bring together the topic of motivation and the topic of grammar by citing two examples from my experience.  Example one: A 4^th-grade class whose teacher invited me to teach the lesson of the day, adjectives and adverbs.  I had some advantages; I was someone new and different, and the father of a student in the class.  My motivating ploy was simple: all I said was that, if they paid attention, they would learn to know for certain how to identify adjectives and adverbs.  So I taught: general principles, rules for identification, on-blackboard exercises, and, along the way, answers to questions.  The students got it.  When class was over and while I was talking with the teacher, a student came to us, got permission to talk to me, and asked, “why can’t you be our teacher.”

 

Example two: A remedial class in grammar for 1^st-year students at a state university.  My motivational spiel indicated the importance of grammar and, for them, knowledge to replace their uncertainty about grammar because of K-12 guessing games.  After I described my instructional process and standards—introduction to the new topic, home reading, memorization, and exercises, class review, quizzes (with only enough time to instantly write the correct answer)—, three of the seven first-day students dropped out.  The other four stayed the course.  As they racked up high scores in quiz after quiz, exercise after exercise, test after test, their confidence grew.  They had fun finding examples of bad grammar in the local paper.  And they told their friends, who stopped me on campus or in the school cafeteria to inquire whether I would be teaching the grammar course the following term.

 

These examples have two points.  One is not my success, but my students’.  The other is that the best motivation is subject-matter mastery, not fun-and-games.  These students wanted more of my teaching because they wanted the rewards of learning the subject and of acquiring confidence in themselves because of their learning.

 

Unfortunately, state senators and representatives ignore classroom evidence and rely instead on conventional wisdom, educational fads, and a focus on programs and salaries because they know no better or have ulterior political motives.  They tinker with the peripherals; they do not address the essentials.  They could legislate improvements in public education in New Mexico without throwing money around and building empires, and without jeopardizing their political careers.  Here are four suggestions:

 

1.    Require state-funded schools of education to ensure that graduates have subject-matter competence at proposed grade level as determined by an out-of-state, independent educational evaluator.  (Use the results to evaluate the schools of education.)

 

2.    Require all candidates for K-12 teaching positions to be assessed for subject-matter competence at proposed grade level as determined by an out-of-state, independent educational evaluator.

 

3.    Develop a higher-salaried pay scale for all teachers, current and new, who achieve a score of 95% or greater on a subject-matter competency test as determined by an out-of-state, independent educational evaluator.  Permit teachers to take the test only once every 3 years.  Set the higher-salaried scale at about double the current salary scale.

 

4.    Select that out-of-state, independent educational evaluator(s) on the basis of demonstrated testing rigor and standardized distribution of test scores.