Eckert lays out the dilemma we face as secondary school educators: Do we teach to the test so that kids will have high scores on the standardized tests in order to score well for themselves (scholarships, college apps, graduation requirements, etc...) and for us (evaluations, yearly school 'report cards,' etc...) or do we teach the aspects of critical thinking and evaluation? I am not satisfied with the former and sometimes it gets me in trouble.
My own students often prefer to think of reading as the 'decoding of words (111) rather than anything more 'difficult' simply because it requires more and there is an inherent risk because the 'answer' may not be absolute or concrete. Furthermore, there may not be any one true answer and they are afraid to take risks because they have not been allowed to in the past. Hence the age-old question "Is this going to be on the test?"
I appreciate Eckert's distinction between reading and interpretation and I don't know if the world of school/teacher evaluations is ready for the open-endedness of that. I was thinking of how unlike a business model schools really are even though business leaders have been clambering for years that schools should be run as a business and should generate only the highest quality product. It seems that the most successful companies, Google would be a superb example, have very little that mirrors current education. - they reward and create opportunities for the employees to explore and create questions. The pre-college education system does exactly the opposite to both its students and its teachers.
I have certainly gone off on an aside, but I think that the main point of what I am saying is that we need to define what we really want and how that can be attained. Until that is done, we we wallow in the mire of labels and 'reform.'
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