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[This year's December Days are categorized! Specifically: "Things I should have learned in library school, had (I/they) been paying attention. But I can make that out of just about anything you'd like to know about library school or the library profession, so if you have suggestions, I'll happily take them.]
So, you know how the IQ test used to be the gold standard shorthand for how smart a person is, even though the IQ test is supposed to be a measure of potential? Yeah. There are always so many people dumbfounded when someone who's not supposed to be bright and doesn't have the privileged background that a lot of wealthy people do manages to come up with something that's shockingly practical and makes them a lot of money selling it, either by themselves, or by selling it to a corporation that will proceed to make a giant return on the investment through the nationwide campaigns that generally resemble the idea of You Need a Thneed.
Once again, my dearest school librarians, I'm sorry in regard to having to put up with what I am about to describe. Unless, that is, you believe that it's true and accurate and that your students should be subjected to such a restriction. If that's the case, apology rescinded, because you're part of the problem.
There are two or three generally accepted measures of difficulty of text at work, and generally a school or school system will subscribe to one or the other - Lexiles or Accelerated Reader. Lexiles work on a point scale that works in hundreds, and each grade level roughly corresponds to a hundred point range or so, although the spread is generally wider the closer you get to the top end of the scale, which extends well beyond the bachelor's degree into highly technical writing. Accelerated Reader, on the other hand, uses a decimal system, with each whole number representative of a grade level and each decimal unit representing the equivalenth tenth of a grade level going through it. Where I am, the schools seem to have almost universally gone for Accelerated Reader, so it's the system I'm more familiar with.
The major element of Accelerated Reader's use as a form that helps readers is through a concept called the Zone of Proximal Development, which uses a formula, based on where a reader's level currently is, to calculate the range of AR levels that would make for works sufficiently challenging to encourage growth and development as a reader, without being so challenging as to be frustrating and counterproductive to the reader. And, of course, as the reader advances, as measured by assessments and completed quizzes on the materials to ensure that something was read for comprehension (each quiz is worth a set number of points, based on the difficulty of the work), their ZPD advances as well, giving them gradual access to new and more copmlex texts to continue building their reading skill on.
For people whose funding is determined by whether or not their students are making their adequate yearly progress toward passing standardized tests at predetermined grade intervals, the idea of the measuring systems and their associated assessment tools are a gods-send.
However...
Those same tools that are supposed to measure textual difficulty ad provide a zone of challenge-yet-reward for readers that follow the system can also be put to the task of restricting a reader to only those works that reside within the ZPD. Or otherwise restricting the available booksets to those books that have quizzes associated with them, such that any reading done outside the assessable range is something that brings no benefit to the reader in their school-required amount of point collection and reading according to their level.
Parents: Public libraries do not provide a Lexile or AR level reading on the spines of their books in the way the school libraries might, because the public does not all subscribe to the same system, and because our mission is different than the one of the school. So while I'm conversant enough to know what the phrase "My child is a 2.3" means, if that's what you lead with, our conversation is likely to be fraught, because you are looking to confine your child within a narrow range of possibilities based on a formulaic approach of what is "appropriate", and it's my job to subtly and blatantly encourage your child to select works that they are going to enjoy reading, to reach for materials that might be outside of their zone (and that they might enjoy and be able to read all the same, because they will want to read the story).
So, rather than just shuffle you over to a particular section where we keep all the books that are on a particular level, I'll tell you about the tool you can use to look up the AR level of the books that you've checked out, and the other tool that will let you check and see if those books have tests at your school, sure, but the conversation that you, your child, and I are going to have is going to stay rather studiously away from levels and measurements and talk mostly about the kinds of books that your child enjoyed in the past. Because that tool that you are using is not meant to be a prison that sucks all of the joy out of reading and turns it into yet another chore that gets graded and dissected and made into the most boring of things.
I still need that student to come to my library after you're done with them. Because kids who don't see the value of the library grow up to be adults who don't see the value of the library, and those adults are the kinds of people that let their libraries slip away because they only see them as a tax burden, or who only come back to the library if they have kids or an economic crisis that drives them back to the library. If we want lifelong readers who enjoy reading, we can't use the tools that offer suggestions to enforce stringent boundaries. And anyone who does that, whether parent, teacher, or, heaven forfend, school librarian, is not helping their child in the way they want to.
So, you know how the IQ test used to be the gold standard shorthand for how smart a person is, even though the IQ test is supposed to be a measure of potential? Yeah. There are always so many people dumbfounded when someone who's not supposed to be bright and doesn't have the privileged background that a lot of wealthy people do manages to come up with something that's shockingly practical and makes them a lot of money selling it, either by themselves, or by selling it to a corporation that will proceed to make a giant return on the investment through the nationwide campaigns that generally resemble the idea of You Need a Thneed.
Once again, my dearest school librarians, I'm sorry in regard to having to put up with what I am about to describe. Unless, that is, you believe that it's true and accurate and that your students should be subjected to such a restriction. If that's the case, apology rescinded, because you're part of the problem.
There are two or three generally accepted measures of difficulty of text at work, and generally a school or school system will subscribe to one or the other - Lexiles or Accelerated Reader. Lexiles work on a point scale that works in hundreds, and each grade level roughly corresponds to a hundred point range or so, although the spread is generally wider the closer you get to the top end of the scale, which extends well beyond the bachelor's degree into highly technical writing. Accelerated Reader, on the other hand, uses a decimal system, with each whole number representative of a grade level and each decimal unit representing the equivalenth tenth of a grade level going through it. Where I am, the schools seem to have almost universally gone for Accelerated Reader, so it's the system I'm more familiar with.
The major element of Accelerated Reader's use as a form that helps readers is through a concept called the Zone of Proximal Development, which uses a formula, based on where a reader's level currently is, to calculate the range of AR levels that would make for works sufficiently challenging to encourage growth and development as a reader, without being so challenging as to be frustrating and counterproductive to the reader. And, of course, as the reader advances, as measured by assessments and completed quizzes on the materials to ensure that something was read for comprehension (each quiz is worth a set number of points, based on the difficulty of the work), their ZPD advances as well, giving them gradual access to new and more copmlex texts to continue building their reading skill on.
For people whose funding is determined by whether or not their students are making their adequate yearly progress toward passing standardized tests at predetermined grade intervals, the idea of the measuring systems and their associated assessment tools are a gods-send.
However...
Those same tools that are supposed to measure textual difficulty ad provide a zone of challenge-yet-reward for readers that follow the system can also be put to the task of restricting a reader to only those works that reside within the ZPD. Or otherwise restricting the available booksets to those books that have quizzes associated with them, such that any reading done outside the assessable range is something that brings no benefit to the reader in their school-required amount of point collection and reading according to their level.
Parents: Public libraries do not provide a Lexile or AR level reading on the spines of their books in the way the school libraries might, because the public does not all subscribe to the same system, and because our mission is different than the one of the school. So while I'm conversant enough to know what the phrase "My child is a 2.3" means, if that's what you lead with, our conversation is likely to be fraught, because you are looking to confine your child within a narrow range of possibilities based on a formulaic approach of what is "appropriate", and it's my job to subtly and blatantly encourage your child to select works that they are going to enjoy reading, to reach for materials that might be outside of their zone (and that they might enjoy and be able to read all the same, because they will want to read the story).
So, rather than just shuffle you over to a particular section where we keep all the books that are on a particular level, I'll tell you about the tool you can use to look up the AR level of the books that you've checked out, and the other tool that will let you check and see if those books have tests at your school, sure, but the conversation that you, your child, and I are going to have is going to stay rather studiously away from levels and measurements and talk mostly about the kinds of books that your child enjoyed in the past. Because that tool that you are using is not meant to be a prison that sucks all of the joy out of reading and turns it into yet another chore that gets graded and dissected and made into the most boring of things.
I still need that student to come to my library after you're done with them. Because kids who don't see the value of the library grow up to be adults who don't see the value of the library, and those adults are the kinds of people that let their libraries slip away because they only see them as a tax burden, or who only come back to the library if they have kids or an economic crisis that drives them back to the library. If we want lifelong readers who enjoy reading, we can't use the tools that offer suggestions to enforce stringent boundaries. And anyone who does that, whether parent, teacher, or, heaven forfend, school librarian, is not helping their child in the way they want to.
