Language Arts - Volume 82, Issue 3, 2005

A teacher reflects on the ways in which high stakes testing affected her ability to teach children. Her first few years of teaching were challenging as she worked to reach for rigorous curriculum, meet the needs of all learners, and construct ways to communicate with parents and the school community.

The emphasis on testing in Texas public schools has shaped literacy instruction in many classrooms. This article details how one Special Education teacher resists this testing mentality. She refuses to use the multiple-choice practice tests and prescribed programs that dominate the classrooms of many other teachers in her school; instead, she endorses authentic assessments and informed individualized instruction as a way to engage her students in the world of reading and writing.

A teacher researcher reflects on a student’s migrant narrative in order to illustrate the challenges and possibilities of developing literacy curricula sensitive to the life experiences and cultural identities of children in an educational climate of standardization and high-stakes testing. He conceptualizes a “second class” that occurs during the margins and in-between periods of the school day, an alternative pedagogical space where teachers potentially reconcile bureaucratic demands with the individual needs and capacities of diverse students.

Discourses that serve and silence inhabit the stories that we tell about teaching and learning. In this article, a teacher educator and a classroom teacher reflect on the ways dominant and alternative discourses about reading instruction and high stakes testing intersect with their respective roles as grandparent and teacher. Their stories reveal points of tension and possible change when these stories challenge dominant ways of understanding learning to read and assessing students.

This manuscript analyzes the content of the texts that were used for reading instruction in second-grade classrooms at two urban sites–one that used Open Court and the other that used Direct Instruction. Even though the practices and the texts differ, the teaching of literacy and literacy itself became part of the social practices that seem to leave working class children disadvantaged in the institutional world of schooling and in lifetime opportunities for employment.

This commentary uses Thomas Kuhn’s work to provide a new perspective on the “Reading Wars,” one which suggest that disagreements within the field of reading are “both necessary and irreconcilable” and need not be ignored or glossed over in a search for “common ground.” Rival paradigms represent incommensurable ways of seeing the world, differing in beliefs about what reading is and what counts as evidence. Masking differences behind terms like “balanced,”or “comprehensive,” or some other new label, invites an abandonment of theory.