Accelerated Reader
Last year about this time, I wrote a blog expressing my frustration with parents who protect their kids from the natural consequences of academic irresponsibility. The thing that set me off was an incident (one of hundreds I've had like it) in which an angry mom called me to complain about the Accelerated Reader program. My frustration was caused by the fact that this angry mom, rather than holding her child accountable for the assignments of the English class, was blaming the AR program (and me for using it) for her child's low grade.
Well, it's a new year, but some things never change. The term ended two days ago, and I have already received a handful of angry e-mails (over the weekend) from parents who are demanding to know why their students' grades are so low. I know without even checking the grading system that lack of AR points is the answer. This information is also available to any parents who have Internet access that allows them to send e-mail, but the real reason they are writing is not for information. I suspect that the reason they are writing is to express their displeasure with me, to somehow blame me for their children's failings. (Maybe someday I'll write a rant about how such parents don't seem to worry about the grades until it is too late to fix them. They never show up at parent-teacher conferences; they never call to ask about the specific conditions they agree to by signing the class disclosure and the AR Contract; they never make any effort to contact me at any other time, only the day after the end of the term when Little Billy or Susie has earned a D or an F. But not today. Today I want to talk about the Accelerated Reader program.)
Students in my classes have already heard some of this because I was raving about it in class last week, at which time I told them I was going to get angry calls from parents just like I have every term for the past seven years that we have used AR at this school. Well, now that the angry calls have begun, I find that I am tired of defending this program. I have no special attachment to it, and I am perfectly happy to evaluate students' reading skills in some other way. Of course no other way would work any better for students who never read, and most other methods would actually require more work for students who do, but I don't think any of that matters to those trying to escape responsibility. At this point, I am for any reading program that will make students accountable for their own reading skills.
When I talked about it in class last week, in front of many cynical ninth graders who often find it easy to criticize...well...everything, I asked them to consider a few questions which I will discuss here.
Is it reasonable for students in a junior high school English class to be required to read and illustrate their understanding of what they read? According to Standard 4 Objective 2 of the state language arts core curriculum, students will "demonstrate competency in reading self-selected texts," and one way of doing this is to "read independently for a variety of purposes, e.g., to enjoy, gather information, answer questions, accomplish a task." Clearly then, the "smart people" with all the training to inform their decisions believe that students should be required to read outside of class and illustrate their understanding of this independent reading. English teachers who do not require independent reading are not doing their jobs. If you would answer no to the question above, please take it up with the state office of education.
Whose responsibility is it to ensure that students read "at grade level"? Most people immediately respond that it is the teachers' responsibility. In a junior high school, this responsibility usually falls more specifically to the English teacher. And I'm okay with that provided that I have the necessary resources: willing students, responsible parents, supportive administrators, necessary materials, and enough time. The problem is that English teachers in junior high schools never have all of those resources. I only see my students 50 minutes per day, and there are more than 30 students in each class. How much individual time is that per student? No one can learn to read well in less than two minutes a day, so the very idea of independent reading assumes that students will spend time at home involved in reading. This, however, is not something that teachers can enforce; parents must. Interestingly, most of the people who would answer no to the first question (those who don't believe it is reasonable to require students to read) are also the quickest to blame teachers when their children can't read well enough to graduate from high school. Can you see the hypocrisy in this? We are supposed to teach children to read well without requiring them to read! Can you imagine a basketball coach trying to get his team to learn how to dribble and shoot without making them actually practice it? Obviously the team wouldn't be very good. The same applies to reading: if you don't practice it often, you don't improve. Why, then, do people who wouldn't dream of criticizing a coach or a band teacher who requires students to practice skills after school or at home feel perfectly justified to criticize an English teacher or a reading program that requires students to read?
Now that we have established that it is, in fact, reasonable to require students to read, let's discuss some questions that are more specific to the Accelerated Reader program. Many of these questions are asked by students and parents who are frustrated with AR.
How did we evaluate independent reading skills before AR? Most often it was with something called the book report. When I was in junior high school, I had to write two of them per term. Sometimes they took the form of an oral presentation. When I first started teaching, I required my students to write book reports as well. Click here to see the requirements. Does anyone want to return to this? With AR, the focus is on the reading itself. Evaluation is quick and simple; students must only answer 10-20 multiple-choice questions about the book, and it usually takes less than 15 minutes. With book reports, the reading is only the beginning. Students must then write a lengthy report that will be scored not just on whether or not they seem to understand the book, but also on writing, neatness, and presentation. It is not only more work for both students and teachers, but it doesn't genuinely measure whether students actually understood what they were reading because so much of the work involved is not reading. Book reports are no better than AR for students who do not read, and they only create more work for students who do.
Why can students only read the books on the AR list? Why can't they read anything they want? First of all, students can read anything they want. In fact, the note at the top of our Accelerated Reader Contract encourages students to do just this. But in order to earn AR points for an English class, it is true that students must read from our "prescribed" list. There are two things that make this perfectly fair. First, our list has almost 5,000 books to choose from, with a wide range of ability and interest levels as well as numerous "classics" and recent popular titles. Our list is ever-growing, and when new books come out, we usually buy tests for them. We even have an open offer to students and parents that if a book is not on our list, they can write a test for it, and we will put the test online with the rest of them. If a student cannot find a a single acceptable book from this expansive list, the problem is not with the list.
Second, prescribed reading has existed since the beginning of public education. Students in schools have always had "assigned reading," but before AR, the list of choices was much smaller. In seventh grade, I was given a list of 25 books to choose from and assigned to read and write book reports on two of them each term. Obviously, in order to ensure that students had actually read the books they were reporting on, teachers required students to read from a list of books the teachers themselves were very familiar with. (No one, not even an English teacher, can read every book in the world.) None of the books on the assigned reading lists were modern, popular titles like Harry Potter. They were all "classics," incredibly long and boring, with type so small I could barely see it. They were old books, written hundreds of years before I was born (or so it seemed to me at the time), and it was very difficult to enjoy many of them. Compared to the "olden days," Accelerated Reader provides students with more choice than they have ever had before, yet we still have students and parents complaining that AR "punishes" students by forcing them to read things they don't like.
Is it "punishment" if a science teacher requires a student who doesn't like bugs to do an insect collection? Is it "punishment" for a history teacher to require students to memorize the states and capitals even if there are some of the states that the student doesn't like? We hope that by requiring reading and making it part of the grade, students will be motivated to read often and much, but it is completely unrealistic to expect that everything a student will do on the road to becoming educated will be thoroughly enjoyable for the student. Learning, by definition, requires work and effort, not all of which is going to be fun. Students may not like solving algebra story problems, but they are going to have to do it a lot in order to graduate from high school. Strangely, no one ever complains that it's unfair or that it is "punishment" to make students do their math homework, yet we always get a huge outcry from requiring reading as homework and by testing understanding using the AR program.
Most of the reading people do after leaving school is not entertaining. It is work-related, informational or functional text that is not designed to be "fun." To require students only to read things that are "fun" will not prepare them for life beyond the classroom, yet we have made every effort to offer students as much choice as possible in their indpendent reading. Yet we are still loudly criticized for doing so. Is it any wonder I am tired of defending this program?
Why do students have to fill out an Accelerated Reader Contract, and why are there so many stipulations involved? Believe me, no one hates the contracts more than I do, but they exist for a reason. Here's the story: The first year we had AR at our school, we had no contracts. Students could test whenever they wanted; they didn't need a teacher to enter a monitor password; they didn't have to have a copy of the book; there were no restrictions in place whatsoever. Some students who had done no reading would log on to the AR program on the last day of the term and take as many tests as they could, just guessing at the answers, hoping to luck out and actually get some AR points. Obviously this was cheating, but we were unable to completely prevent it. Then, some deceptive students started actually writing down the answers to some of the tests while they took them; they would then give (or sell) these answers to their equally deceptive friends. This too was cheating. As you can tell, there was a lot of cheating going on, but we still had faith in the goodness of the 98% of the students who used the program honestly. Then it happened. I caught a student cheating red-handed. He had been given the answers to a test by a friend, and he was using those answers to take the test himself, having never read the book. It was, of course, the last day of the term, so he had no AR points, which killed his term grade, and I planned to give him an unsatisfactory citizenship grade for cheating. An administrator at the school informed me that I could not give the student a U in citizenship because, and I quote, "He didn't know it was cheating." Can you believe that? Because we live in a world where lawsuits determine policy, and because that student's parents were threatening a lawsuit against the school, we were unable to "punish" the cheater...but we then had to "punish" the vast majority of students who didn't cheat by requiring contracts at the beginning of each term. The contracts have grown wordier over the years because we have to define cheating more strictly every time someone else threatens a lawsuit to protect a cheater. If it were up to me, there would be no AR contracts, but it is another case of the dishonest few ruining it for everyone. So if you are going to blame anyone for the AR contracts, blame the cheaters. The contracts exist so that we can bring them to justice. (This is also true of the class disclosures, computer permission forms, and many other official legal documents all students and parents must sign on the road to finishing high school. Sad but true.)
Given all this background information, I'd like to leave you with a question that I can't answer:
If AR deserves all the complaints it generates, what method of evaluating reading comprehension will work better?
Do you want to go back to doing book reports? Maybe we should petition the legislature to simply not require reading in schools anymore? What will end these calls and e-mails from the angry parents of students who don't read? And why are they angry at me for doing my job?
It's easy to criticize, but I'd like to hear some solutions now too.
Well, it's a new year, but some things never change. The term ended two days ago, and I have already received a handful of angry e-mails (over the weekend) from parents who are demanding to know why their students' grades are so low. I know without even checking the grading system that lack of AR points is the answer. This information is also available to any parents who have Internet access that allows them to send e-mail, but the real reason they are writing is not for information. I suspect that the reason they are writing is to express their displeasure with me, to somehow blame me for their children's failings. (Maybe someday I'll write a rant about how such parents don't seem to worry about the grades until it is too late to fix them. They never show up at parent-teacher conferences; they never call to ask about the specific conditions they agree to by signing the class disclosure and the AR Contract; they never make any effort to contact me at any other time, only the day after the end of the term when Little Billy or Susie has earned a D or an F. But not today. Today I want to talk about the Accelerated Reader program.)
Students in my classes have already heard some of this because I was raving about it in class last week, at which time I told them I was going to get angry calls from parents just like I have every term for the past seven years that we have used AR at this school. Well, now that the angry calls have begun, I find that I am tired of defending this program. I have no special attachment to it, and I am perfectly happy to evaluate students' reading skills in some other way. Of course no other way would work any better for students who never read, and most other methods would actually require more work for students who do, but I don't think any of that matters to those trying to escape responsibility. At this point, I am for any reading program that will make students accountable for their own reading skills.
When I talked about it in class last week, in front of many cynical ninth graders who often find it easy to criticize...well...everything, I asked them to consider a few questions which I will discuss here.
Is it reasonable for students in a junior high school English class to be required to read and illustrate their understanding of what they read? According to Standard 4 Objective 2 of the state language arts core curriculum, students will "demonstrate competency in reading self-selected texts," and one way of doing this is to "read independently for a variety of purposes, e.g., to enjoy, gather information, answer questions, accomplish a task." Clearly then, the "smart people" with all the training to inform their decisions believe that students should be required to read outside of class and illustrate their understanding of this independent reading. English teachers who do not require independent reading are not doing their jobs. If you would answer no to the question above, please take it up with the state office of education.
Whose responsibility is it to ensure that students read "at grade level"? Most people immediately respond that it is the teachers' responsibility. In a junior high school, this responsibility usually falls more specifically to the English teacher. And I'm okay with that provided that I have the necessary resources: willing students, responsible parents, supportive administrators, necessary materials, and enough time. The problem is that English teachers in junior high schools never have all of those resources. I only see my students 50 minutes per day, and there are more than 30 students in each class. How much individual time is that per student? No one can learn to read well in less than two minutes a day, so the very idea of independent reading assumes that students will spend time at home involved in reading. This, however, is not something that teachers can enforce; parents must. Interestingly, most of the people who would answer no to the first question (those who don't believe it is reasonable to require students to read) are also the quickest to blame teachers when their children can't read well enough to graduate from high school. Can you see the hypocrisy in this? We are supposed to teach children to read well without requiring them to read! Can you imagine a basketball coach trying to get his team to learn how to dribble and shoot without making them actually practice it? Obviously the team wouldn't be very good. The same applies to reading: if you don't practice it often, you don't improve. Why, then, do people who wouldn't dream of criticizing a coach or a band teacher who requires students to practice skills after school or at home feel perfectly justified to criticize an English teacher or a reading program that requires students to read?
Now that we have established that it is, in fact, reasonable to require students to read, let's discuss some questions that are more specific to the Accelerated Reader program. Many of these questions are asked by students and parents who are frustrated with AR.
How did we evaluate independent reading skills before AR? Most often it was with something called the book report. When I was in junior high school, I had to write two of them per term. Sometimes they took the form of an oral presentation. When I first started teaching, I required my students to write book reports as well. Click here to see the requirements. Does anyone want to return to this? With AR, the focus is on the reading itself. Evaluation is quick and simple; students must only answer 10-20 multiple-choice questions about the book, and it usually takes less than 15 minutes. With book reports, the reading is only the beginning. Students must then write a lengthy report that will be scored not just on whether or not they seem to understand the book, but also on writing, neatness, and presentation. It is not only more work for both students and teachers, but it doesn't genuinely measure whether students actually understood what they were reading because so much of the work involved is not reading. Book reports are no better than AR for students who do not read, and they only create more work for students who do.
Why can students only read the books on the AR list? Why can't they read anything they want? First of all, students can read anything they want. In fact, the note at the top of our Accelerated Reader Contract encourages students to do just this. But in order to earn AR points for an English class, it is true that students must read from our "prescribed" list. There are two things that make this perfectly fair. First, our list has almost 5,000 books to choose from, with a wide range of ability and interest levels as well as numerous "classics" and recent popular titles. Our list is ever-growing, and when new books come out, we usually buy tests for them. We even have an open offer to students and parents that if a book is not on our list, they can write a test for it, and we will put the test online with the rest of them. If a student cannot find a a single acceptable book from this expansive list, the problem is not with the list.
Second, prescribed reading has existed since the beginning of public education. Students in schools have always had "assigned reading," but before AR, the list of choices was much smaller. In seventh grade, I was given a list of 25 books to choose from and assigned to read and write book reports on two of them each term. Obviously, in order to ensure that students had actually read the books they were reporting on, teachers required students to read from a list of books the teachers themselves were very familiar with. (No one, not even an English teacher, can read every book in the world.) None of the books on the assigned reading lists were modern, popular titles like Harry Potter. They were all "classics," incredibly long and boring, with type so small I could barely see it. They were old books, written hundreds of years before I was born (or so it seemed to me at the time), and it was very difficult to enjoy many of them. Compared to the "olden days," Accelerated Reader provides students with more choice than they have ever had before, yet we still have students and parents complaining that AR "punishes" students by forcing them to read things they don't like.
Is it "punishment" if a science teacher requires a student who doesn't like bugs to do an insect collection? Is it "punishment" for a history teacher to require students to memorize the states and capitals even if there are some of the states that the student doesn't like? We hope that by requiring reading and making it part of the grade, students will be motivated to read often and much, but it is completely unrealistic to expect that everything a student will do on the road to becoming educated will be thoroughly enjoyable for the student. Learning, by definition, requires work and effort, not all of which is going to be fun. Students may not like solving algebra story problems, but they are going to have to do it a lot in order to graduate from high school. Strangely, no one ever complains that it's unfair or that it is "punishment" to make students do their math homework, yet we always get a huge outcry from requiring reading as homework and by testing understanding using the AR program.
Most of the reading people do after leaving school is not entertaining. It is work-related, informational or functional text that is not designed to be "fun." To require students only to read things that are "fun" will not prepare them for life beyond the classroom, yet we have made every effort to offer students as much choice as possible in their indpendent reading. Yet we are still loudly criticized for doing so. Is it any wonder I am tired of defending this program?
Why do students have to fill out an Accelerated Reader Contract, and why are there so many stipulations involved? Believe me, no one hates the contracts more than I do, but they exist for a reason. Here's the story: The first year we had AR at our school, we had no contracts. Students could test whenever they wanted; they didn't need a teacher to enter a monitor password; they didn't have to have a copy of the book; there were no restrictions in place whatsoever. Some students who had done no reading would log on to the AR program on the last day of the term and take as many tests as they could, just guessing at the answers, hoping to luck out and actually get some AR points. Obviously this was cheating, but we were unable to completely prevent it. Then, some deceptive students started actually writing down the answers to some of the tests while they took them; they would then give (or sell) these answers to their equally deceptive friends. This too was cheating. As you can tell, there was a lot of cheating going on, but we still had faith in the goodness of the 98% of the students who used the program honestly. Then it happened. I caught a student cheating red-handed. He had been given the answers to a test by a friend, and he was using those answers to take the test himself, having never read the book. It was, of course, the last day of the term, so he had no AR points, which killed his term grade, and I planned to give him an unsatisfactory citizenship grade for cheating. An administrator at the school informed me that I could not give the student a U in citizenship because, and I quote, "He didn't know it was cheating." Can you believe that? Because we live in a world where lawsuits determine policy, and because that student's parents were threatening a lawsuit against the school, we were unable to "punish" the cheater...but we then had to "punish" the vast majority of students who didn't cheat by requiring contracts at the beginning of each term. The contracts have grown wordier over the years because we have to define cheating more strictly every time someone else threatens a lawsuit to protect a cheater. If it were up to me, there would be no AR contracts, but it is another case of the dishonest few ruining it for everyone. So if you are going to blame anyone for the AR contracts, blame the cheaters. The contracts exist so that we can bring them to justice. (This is also true of the class disclosures, computer permission forms, and many other official legal documents all students and parents must sign on the road to finishing high school. Sad but true.)
Given all this background information, I'd like to leave you with a question that I can't answer:
If AR deserves all the complaints it generates, what method of evaluating reading comprehension will work better?
Do you want to go back to doing book reports? Maybe we should petition the legislature to simply not require reading in schools anymore? What will end these calls and e-mails from the angry parents of students who don't read? And why are they angry at me for doing my job?
It's easy to criticize, but I'd like to hear some solutions now too.
posted by MRT at 7:51 AM
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