Teachers Tackle Text Complexity

Pilot N.Y.C. program in line with elements of standards

By Catherine Gewertz, Ed Week

New York

On a freezing morning in February, teachers from a Bronx high school pore over excerpts and guidelines, trying to figure out whether they should teach The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or leave it to college professors.

A team of teachers from International Community High School joined colleagues from 17 other schools here to wrestle with the American classic in a basement meeting room as part of their city’s attempt to beef up secondary literacy instruction.

In the first year of a pilot program, the 18 schools are digging into new ways to accomplish two objectives emphasized in the common-core standards: engage students in increasingly complex texts as they move through school and help them conquer literacy skills specific to disciplines such as history and science. Spearheaded by the nation’s governors and schools chiefs, the standards have been adopted in most states, including New York.

The teachers’ daylong session illustrates the heightened attention being trained on adolescent literacy, in the wake of mounting evidence that young people are leaving high school unable to tackle the reading and writing demanded of them in college and good jobs.

Research suggests that a trend toward less challenging texts in high school, and a tilt toward narrative texts, at the expense of informational and expository ones, have left young people particularly weak at comprehending and dissecting information from difficult texts and using it to build evidence-based arguments.

A 2006 study by ACT Inc., for instance, found that the biggest stumbling block for students who fell short of the readiness scores in reading on its college-entrance exam was ....

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