Higher Reading Scores, Dumber Readers?

U Virginia psychology professor Daniel Willingham's video below (h/t to Eduwonk) is about reading instruction. I recommend it to parents, students, teachers, administrators, and school board members - and especially to Arne Duncan, who testified before the Congressional Committee on Education and Labor that he increased teaching reading in Chicago Public Schools to two hours a day to achieve higher reading scores (see that eight-minute testimony in the "Baker's Dozen Videos on Education Reform" post on this blog).

Since Duncan seems to be a believer in standardized tests as the best measure of reading skills, it's no great leap to suspect that his reading instruction reforms were geared to helping students improve their scores on these tests: higher scores on low-level comprehension tests means higher reading skills - a simplistic view of reading if ever there was one.

Worse, Duncan's "solution" of expanding reading time to two hours a day begs the question: At the expense of time spent learning what other subjects? As Willingham argues in the video, real reading requires background knowledge of a wide variety of subjects - subjects I suspect get the axe under the Duncan plan. Results? Higher reading scores, and higher student ignorance.

Finally, Willingham's video focuses on primary grade reading instruction, so my last cavil may be beyond the scope of his argument, but it's this: real literacy goes beyond having the background knowledge, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, and other decoding skills to be able to comprehend a text. If we stop there, we stop at the authoritarian view of reading in which the author is also the authority, and the reader little more than a subject tasked with "comprehending" the content of the authorial text. Under this model, reading is a practice of social control that places the reader in a position of compliance and obedience.

Reading must be taught as more than that. Beyond denotative and connotative comprehension, which are absolutely basic necessities that of course should be included in reading instruction, comes the real meat of reading: questioning the text, holding it at a skeptical arm's length, challenging it: Who is the author? What are the author's ideological leanings? Beyond what the author included in the text, what did s/he exclude? And more.

Here's the video. I'd love to hear what other things you "read" into it:

Image by Joel Franusic