Will this be on the test? Texas may base tests on state reading list

"The Crucible" uses the Salem witch trials as an allegory for the "red scares" of the McCarthy era.

Will this be on the test? In other words: Does this matter? Do I have to pay attention?

Texas may be about to answer "yes," to that question by linking state reading tests to a state-required reading list, writes Natalie Wexler. If the state board of education approves the idea, students won't just be asked to show isolated comprehension skills on state tests. They'll be assessed on vocabulary and content taught in class. You "did" The Crucible and Lincoln's Lyceum Address this year? It'll be on the test.

That means teachers will focus much more on content than skills, writes Wexler. That improves comprehension and helps disadvantaged students build the knowledge and vocabulary needed to understand complex texts.

Louisiana experimented with a reading test based on texts in its state-created literacy curriculum, Wexler wrote previously. It incentivized district to adopt the curriculum, and most did. But few students took the experimental test and only for a few years before the state phased it out.

The Texas proposal centers on whole books, she writes. "That runs counter to a nationwide trend toward relying on brief texts and excerpts" to teach skills that will be measured by standardized tests.

"Relying on brief passages fails to build reading stamina and cultivate the patience needed to make it through a whole book," writes Wexler. It's also less engaging, and "may be contributing to the recent steep decline in reading for pleasure."

In grades six through twelve, a whole book will serve as an “anchor” for related stories, speeches, poetry and nonfiction, Wexler writes. "That’s a great way to build students’ knowledge and to make a literary work more meaningful by providing context."

For example, "Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl is paired with a nonfiction book about Jewish resistance to the Holocaust, the poem Blessed is the Match by Jewish resistance fighter Hannah Szenes, and (somewhat less logically) George Washington’s letter to the Hebrew congregation at Newport, Rhode Island."

On the down side, there's a lot of pushback from local control advocates and from people who think the proposed reading list is too Christian (it includes Bible stories), too white, too conservative and/or just too long.

The state's optional elementary literacy curriculum, Bluebonnet Learning, "sometimes crosses the line into indoctrination," writes Wexler. This reading list raises similar issues.

State officials say Bible stories are included to build cultural knowledge, not to proselytize. Students won't be lost if they encounter allusions to Job or the Prodigal Son in other reading. It will depend on how teachers teach the texts, writes Wexler.

She also sees subtle political messages. "I can see why Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is paired with Pericles’ Funeral Oration, but the inclusion of Margaret Thatcher’s eulogy for President Reagan might raise some eyebrows," she writes.

Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, about the Salem witch trials, is supplemented with Federalist Papers No. 78, Lincoln’s Lyceum Address, excerpts from de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story Young Goodman Brown to build knowledge of judicial independence and Puritanism, she notes. But the context in which the play was written -- it's an allegory for the anti-communist paranoia of the McCarthy era -- is ignored.

Fewer than 200 of Texas’s 1200 school districts -- most of them in rural areas -- have adopted the Bluebonnet curriculum, and some have cut the Bible stories, Wexler writes.

The board of education delayed a vote on the reading list after hearing concerns at a January meeting about the lack of racial, ethnic and gender diversity, the inclusion of Bible stories and the list's length.

Wexler thinks Texas may have to back down from mandating an entire literacy curriculum. If there were one or two books required per year, ideally with state tests linked to the content, that would be more likely to achieve wide support.

Robert Pondiscio makes the case for teaching "allusions, idioms, metaphors and background knowledge." Of course, Bluebonnet -- and this new curriculum is "Bible-infused," he writes. "So is English." If students aren't familiar with Noah's Ark and Greek and Roman myths and Shakespeare, they'll have trouble understanding what they read.

This is not a debate about religion or ideology, Pondiscio writes. "It is about whether schools are willing to acknowledge an uncomfortable truth: literacy requires shared knowledge, and shared knowledge requires choices. Those choices will never satisfy everyone."

Texas’s list may not be perfect, he concludes. But "the alternative — a curriculum that names no texts, assumes no common ground, and leaves cultural literacy to chance — has already failed too many students to recommend itself again."