If I had never experienced the environment in one of my observations, Gallagher’s whole idea of “readicide” would seem foreign to me. After all, I can point to three or four teachers who fostered and nurtured my love of reading, and most of them DID NOT offer me a choice in reading material. If I had been allowed to choose, I probably would not have read anything outside of Beverly Cleary before high school! My two school-aged children also participate in the A. R. program used by our local school system, and both of them read for pleasure even though they have PLENTY of distractions to keep them from reading at home. So is the “Paige Paradox” really at work in our schools?
Then, I did an observation last fall. My host teacher “teaches” a class commonly called “Success Maker” because that is, ironically, the name of the computer program the students use in her class. Children are placed in this class if they perform poorly on standardized tests or are identified as needing learning support in reading and/or math. The students are assigned a terminal, and for a whole class period, they work in Success Maker. These students have to “top out” of the Success Maker program at grade level in BOTH reading and math to leave the class even if they perform much better in one subject area than the other one. There is just one tiny, little problem. Very few of these students actually “top out” of the Success Maker program.
The teacher, who is a dedicated and experienced teacher, lamented to me that many of the students who start Success Maker in the 6th grade are still in the class in the 8th grade. Even though she actively takes on the role of support teacher and cheerleader, many of the students never test out of her class before they head to high school. Even stranger to me was and is that many of them will not even ask her for help with the math portion of the program even though her help greatly improves their scores. (She cannot help them with reading.) Now I can imagine Gallagher saying something like, “Hmm… Putting students in a class (in place of their exploratory class) where they do nothing but read and do math in a test-like situation day in and day out is not making most of them “successful.” Imagine that!”
One day, an eighth grader walked in and exclaimed, “I hate this class!”
Shocked, I questioned,” What? Why do you ‘hate this class’”?
She replied simply, “It’s boring.”
I then said something about generic and encouraging about how “wonderful” it would be to have the ability to “control” how long I was in a class “I hated,” and I tried to encourage her to focus and work harder so she could reach grade level and leave the class. (The eighth graders goofed off A LOT!)
She hung her head, shook it back and forth, and said, “Ain’t no gettin’ outta Success Maker…”
As she walked to her seat, I began to wonder what went wrong – not just with her but with MOST of the children in the class. They were capable and bright students, but they were becoming a part of the Many Children Left Behind referenced by Gallagher. My host teacher and many good teachers like her, I am sure, are trying everything they know to help them, but for the majority of these students, their efforts are not working. As I prepare to head into the classroom, I can’t help but ask myself, “Why?” and “What can I do about it?”
