Agree or Disagree

Topic: Readicide
Statement
Before
Textual Evidence
After
Agree Disagree Agree Disagree
A curriculum
steeped in multiple-
choice test
preparation drives
shallow teaching
and learning.
Knowing that the tests are
coming in the spring and that
they will cover an impossible
amount of standards thrusts
teachers into an unwinnable
situation; either they teach all the
standards shallowly to make sure
the content on the test is covered
before the students sit down to
take the exams, or they slow
down and teach deeply, thus
sacrificing their test scores by not
covering all the content that will
be on the exam. (p. 10)

*T+he biggest
danger of sprinting
through various
readings in any
content area is that
we graduate
students who do
not develop an
interest in any
content area.
There is a big difference
between memorizing facts and
understanding history, between
teachers simply being
information dispensers versus
teachers turning students into
deep thinkers. Unfortunately, I
was exposed to the sprint-
through-the-book philosophy,
and as a result, it was nearly 20
years after high school before I
started reading history again. I
fear many of my students, in this
rush to cover all material for the
spring tests, will leave our schools
uninterested in history, in
science, in literature, and in
reading. (p. 10)

Rather than lift up
struggling readers,
an emphasis on
multiple-choice test
preparation
Workbooks replace novels.
Reading becomes another
worksheet activity. Students are
taught that the reason they
should become readers is to pass

ensures that
struggling readers
will continue to
struggle.
a test.
Reluctant readers drown in test
preparation, ensuring any chance
they may have had of developing
a lifelong reading habit is lost.
Worse than turning off to
reading, students grow to hate
reading. (p. 17)
Test preparation
reading plays a
large part in
maintaining
Apartheid
Schools.

School officials did not count
many students who gave up and
dropped out. (p. 19)
In addition, of the at-risk
students who remained, many
were retained, some repeatedly,
in the ninth grade as means of
preventing them from taking the
tenth-grade test. (p. 19)
More telling are the scores for
low-income eighth graders, which
have remained unchanged (p.
22).
The gap between the poor and
the nonpoor has also remained
unchanged (p. 22).

The Texas
treatment actually
harmed students in
the long run.
Statewide, while students were
showing a 20 percent increase on
state reading tests, there was a
sharp decrease in their college
readiness. (p. 20)
When teachers and students
spend their energies preparing
for shallow high-stakes
assessments, deeper learning
the kind of thinking valued in
colleges and the workforce
suffers. In this massive attempt to
prepare all kids for college and
the workforce, a readicide
curriculum actually sets them
back. (p. 21)