This summer, New York City schools are preparing for a shift in reading instruction, and recent reports indicate that it’s not just for lower grades, but for high schools as well. One shift in particular has caused some alarm—a shift to focusing on short excerpts rather than whole texts.
While it may come as a source of alarm in New York City, the shift to excerpts in place of whole texts has been going on for twenty-plus years, coinciding with the rise of the Big Standardized Test as a means of measuring student achievement in reading.
Balancing texts against excerpts has always been a challenge for English teachers. There are only 180 days in the year, and only so much success one can have assigning out of school reading. So compromise has always made sense. Do you really want to take a full six months to work through Moby Dick, or will it be good enough to give students just a taste?
Still, to really hit the high notes of literacy, teachers and students need to work through full texts. To delve into the full context, not just some key quotes. To take time to dig in and reflect on the ideas contained in the text. To discuss with fellow readers, sharing and exploring ideas, examining different perspectives and interpretations. Maybe even take a pair of works and really think about how they connect. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Heart of Darkness both involve a journey on a river connecting to themes tied to identity and racism; how does a thoughtful examination of how the two play off each other illuminate each text further.
A non-fiction text also offers opportunities to examine and reflect. How does the author connect and control the reality that’s reflected in their writing? What can we find and explore outside the text that will bring greater understanding to the ideas within the full text? Does the book offer a full picture of the world it depicts?
This is a critical part of becoming a literate person—to be able to dig and reflect and examine and explore a full text. To take time to do all that and then craft a thoughtful response. This should be a major part of every student’s education.
The problem is that none of that— none of it— is on the Big Standardized Test.
The basic model of the high stakes testing we’ve been subjecting students to for the past twenty-some years is this:
Read a short excerpt of a work that you are seeing for the first time. Answer some multiple choice questions about it, and do it, by yourself, RIGHT NOW. Move on to the next excerpt. No context, no time to reflect. Imagine sitting in a corporate office, alone, and someone emails you a single page from a multi-page contract and says, “You have sixty seconds to decide whether or not we sign this contract.”
We know many things about testing in the education world, and one big thing is that the best test is one in which the task most closely matches what the teacher has been teaching. If you have been teaching a student to add fractions, and you have daily practiced adding fractions, then the best test of how well the student has learned to add fractions is a test in which they must add fractions.
But the inverse of this is also true; if the test is already set, the best way to prepare for it is with a battery of activities that most closely resemble the test itself.
And so as the Big Standardized Tests have spread, publishers have cranked out varieties of coaching workbooks, practice activity sets, and worksheets that are all collections of short excerpts accompanied by a set of multiple choice questions. In many cases, these are not even excerpts of “real” works, but proprietary works created by the publisher. Administrators have handed these to teachers, particularly those with “at risk” students facing the test soon, and said some version of “Use these. Yeah, you may have to cut a book or two from your plan for the year, but we need to get those scores up.”
Instead of teaching students how to read a whole book, we teach them how to take a standardized test.
There are certainly other forces that push teachers in the direction of excerpts over complete texts, most notably a belief that students lack the stamina or motivation.
Other excerpt only policies are a response to laws newly passed to forbid “depictions of sexual conduct,” like the Florida law that has led to districts reducing study of Shakespeare plays to just excerpts that exclude the naughty bits. (Says Hillsborough County School District, “[W]e have not excluded Shakespeare from our high school curriculum. Students will still have the physical books to read excerpts in class.”)
One can even point the finger at a culture in which we watch clips instead of movies and read headlines instead of articles.
But as long as high stakes testing pushes a quick, superficial solo reaction to a context-free excerpt, schools will de-prioritize teaching reading and literacy as a reflective, collaborative, thoughtful deep dive into a complete work. And that will be a loss for students.
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