I’ve been arguing this point for several years with teachers, reading specialists and principals. But let’s take a deeper dive.
Many school districts use a popular reading leveling system called Lexile. When you enter the name of a popular book in this case that contain black characters, the Lexile scoring is consistently very low. For example, here are three very popular books at my school:
- 'The Hate U Give' - HL590L
- 'Long Way Down' - HL770L
- 'Dear Martin' - HL720L
***The average Lexile for 6th-7th-8th graders is 855L-1295L
If one of my students had a Lexile range greatly above or below the ranges listed above, their teachers would discourage them from reading the book. There’s no wiggle room with this as some schools are very insistent on using this system and rely on it to improve data/reading scores. In addition, some schools now rely on test scores and data as a means of image, promotion and sometimes survival against other competitive schools.
The other main issue is familiarity. When those who are in the driver's seat of making decisions regarding what children read are constantly recommending the same books over and over again because of familiarity, rather than expanse of knowledge, we get the same end result. My question is where is the teacher and student input in the selection of these books? I often think about this and use myself as an example. 'The Color Purple,' is one of my personal favorites, but for this generation, it doesn't resonate with them. I can't continue to recommend this book. I would have to read the current literature to identify what is popular then merge the literature into the curriculum then maybe circle back to the classics once the book is read.
In years past, I’ve had many not too pleasant encounters with teachers who felt as the school librarian I should support their students identify books in the collection by Lexile. I instead listened to them and showed them books that were of interest to them. Principals wanted to write my tail up for being difficult but didn’t for fear of a grievance. This continues to be a struggle.
At the end of the day...in my opinion, reading is reading and leveling is just plain wrong and discourages reading at any level. If we continue to use this system, we can and will discourage readers and frustrate them.
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