In my work as a public educator/scholar, I have had conversations with dozens of people seeking to understand education issues and topics because they are not themselves educators or are not literacy educators.

Yesterday, I had such a conversation for over an hour, discussing the issue of reading in my state in the context of the “science of reading” (SOR) movement.

During that discussion, a key point was made about how debates about reading proficiency of students and teaching reading are often absent nuance—and that the nuance itself is part of the problem with finding effective reform.

Like all states in the US (although at an extreme level), my home state of South Carolina has been an early and eager education reform state, including multiple iterations of reading legislation reform.

Also like most states, SC education and reading reform has been a constant cycle of crisis and new reform. We seem to refuse to acknowledge that reform itself is need of reform because so far the reform never works (or we wouldn’t need the next round of reform).

None the less, since we seem committed to shouting reading crisis every few years in order to justify yet more reading reform, this round of reading crisis serves as a powerful example of how the rhetoric around discussing reading proficiency and teaching reading is fraught with miscommunication and often unnecessary antagonism because of basic misunderstandings or problematic clarifications.

At the broadest level, what we mean by “reading” is an essential part of the conversation.

Particularly in the SOR era, there is a spectrum of what counts as “reading” for beginning readers that has on one extreme the ability to pronounce words absent meaning (such as nonsense words), and then on the other extreme, students being able to create meaning from a text without decoding (walking through a picture book and recreating the story either from memory or using the pictures).

Somewhere in the middle of that spectrum is, I think, what we should be talking about when we talk about reading—a student’s ability to eagerly and critically produce meaning from text grounded in automatic word recognition.

However, what greatly complicates how we talk about “reading” is that discussion often relies on (what should be) technical language.

Media, public, and political rhetoric around reading tends to use for “reading” both “reading proficiency” and “grade level reading.” Rarely, those two terms are used distinctly, but more often than not, they are tossed around as synonymns.

Here is a serious concern as I have noted often.

First, we have no standard metric of “proficient” or “grade level” at the federal or state level, and there is little understanding about how “proficient” is often an aspirational metric that is well above “grade level” (for example, NAEP achievement levels in which “basic” is approximately grade level).

Next, we have no clarification in the US about what percentage of students can or should be at whatever level we agree on and at what grade. [Note that I would add another issue is that we prefer “grade level” to “age level,” the latter being in my opinion a better metric.]

This, then, leads to another significant aspect of the current SOR movement; when we talk about reading, we often talk about what percentage of students are reading appropriately (?) at certain designated grades, often grade 3 or 4.

A claim made by SOR advocates helps show how this is a problem since many of them promise that 90-95% of students can be proficient readers.

Setting aside that this is a speculative claim and not a statistic supported by a valid body of science, the 90-95% argument often isn’t a clear one in terms of when.

Does that mean 90-95% of students can eventually become proficient readers or grade level readers, or that 90-95% of students can be proficient or at grade level in every single grade throughout schooling?

I think those questions are essential clarifications to address.

Among other elements of reading wars and education/reading reform, I think what we talk about when we talk about reading needs to be addressed in ways that clarify the elements noted above.

We need standard definitions for “reading,” “reading proficiency,” and “grade level reading”; we also should strongly consider replacing “grade level” with “age level” (to alleviate that distorting impact of policies such as grade retention on standardized measures of reading).

And we also need a national conversation about what are reasonable and aspirational goals for what percentage of students meet those metrics and when.

We seem to have ignored a key lesson and failure of NCLB—mandating 100% of students achieve proficiency by 2014. In other words, aspirational mandates doom reform to failure and erase any possibility that we do in fact reform reading policy in the best interests of students (and not the adults who profit in the debate and reform).

We all must do better to acknowledge what we talk about when we talk about reading—or we are destined to remain trapped in the crisis/reform cycle that hasn’t served anyone well (except for the profiteering) for over forty years.

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Note

The title is a reference to a title that is a reference. Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, which is inspired by Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.