Consider the Benchmark.

I teach 9th grade English at a citywide school where the English Benchmark Assessments, administered once per quarter, are a primary means of evaluating English teacher effectiveness, a kind of catch-all accountability tool that simultaneously answers the questions Are they learning? and Are they teaching? The January Benchmark featured two reading selections that rated, according to the Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test, somewhere between an 8th and 10th grade reading level. This presents a significant problem for many of my students, and it highlights one of the most glaring issues plaguing Baltimore City Public Schools: low student reading levels.

Consider X., an overage 9th grade student in my English classroom at a citywide school. He’s a future basketball standout whose enormous, spindly hand swallows my own when we greet each other at the door with a handshake. X. does not have an IEP, but his independent reading level, according to various diagnostics I have administered, falls somewhere between first and third grade, which puts him roughly six to eight years behind his peers. He’s operating with the same reading skills as a first grader.

Unsurprisingly, X. bombed the January Benchmark, scoring a meager 20.8%. When we went over students’ scores in class, X. told me that he’d guessed randomly because he simply couldn’t understand the questions or the answer choices.

X. is hardly the exception. According to one diagnostic I have used this year, my students read, on average, just below a 4th grade reading level. A different metric rates the average of all three classes at a beginning 6th grade level. The first measure I mentioned also rates about 10% of my students at a 1st grade reading level, while another 10% slot in higher than 8th. There is an obvious and wide disparity in students’ reading ability levels within my classes, though somewhere between 4th and 6th grade is a fair approximation of average class reading level. This means that, on average, my students are taking a test to determine how well they are learning English that features lengthy reading selections roughly four to six years above their independent reading level.

This is of course deeply infuriating, frustrating, and depressing. X. had literally never read a book from cover to cover in his life until we read (with a lot of help from an audio version) Elie Wiesel’s Night in class. X’s reading experience and ability reflect poorly on everybody involved in his educational life – his teachers, administrators, counselors, &c. I’m stumped as to how I should teach a lesson to a student like X. (who cannot read aloud words like “several” and “straight”) while I simultaneously teach Z. (a student who reads Poe for fun during independent reading time and asks me what words like “atavistically” and “clairvoyance” mean) and then ask them to demonstrate their understanding on the same assessment.

Worst of all is the question that ultimately rises whenever Baltimore’s crushing systemic inadequacies are exposed: what can we do as a community to fix this? I only know that it has to begin with us refusing to socially promote students to the next grade who simply cannot read, and that has to begin in early education.

We already know that the kids come as is. Until we start finding better methods of holding teachers, students, and community members accountable for student learning, they’re going to keep coming underprepared, and we’re going to continue having immense difficulty getting them where they need to be. Realistically, there's very little that I can do as a 9th grade English teacher for a student who is reading at a first grade level. X. has been lost in the shuffle for eight years. We're in the state with the best achievement on Advanced Placement tests in the nation, and yet many of our ninth graders cannot even comprehend the questions on tests designed merely to check in to ensure that they're learning something. How do we fix this?