Rabbit said, ”I can run. I can run fast. You can`t run fast.”
Turtle said, ”Look, Rabbit. See the park. You and I will run. We`ll run to the park.”
Rabbit said, ”I want to stop. I`ll stop here. I can run, but turtle can`t. I can get to the park fast.”
Turtle said, ”I can`t run fast. But I will not stop. Rabbit can`t see me. I`ll get to the park.”
This is part of an adaptation of Aesop`s fable ”The Tortoise and the Hare” included in a 1st-grade reader published by Ginn & Co. Nowhere does it mention the words tortoise or hare. In fact, says Georgia Green, a linguist at the University of Illinois, it doesn`t even include the word ”race.”
”There`s no mention of a bet or any kind of competition,” Green says.
”It`s pretty hard to understand.”
The reason these words were left out was that the publisher didn`t want to print a story that was too hard for 1st graders. So the company adapted it to a computerized readability formula that limited sentence and word length and deleted unfamiliar words. Apparently the word race was deemed unfamiliar to 6-year-olds.
Readability formulas are applied to almost all textbooks. That, in and of itself, isn`t bad. Educators and publishers need to know that instructional materials are suitable, and students must be able to understand what they read. Reading experts say, however, that formulas have become an arbitrary standard they were never intended to be. The result is school books that too often don`t make sense or are just plain boring.
”Sixth-time reruns of `The Flintstones` would be more interesting than some of this stuff,” Green says.
An oft-quoted example is a 1975 book, ”The Magic Little Ones,” a Follett Publishing Co. adaptation of the fairy tale ”The Shoemaker and the Elves.” It is a book for beginning readers and doesn`t use the words shoemaker or elves:
Tap, tap, tap. See me work. I make good things. See the red ones. See the blue ones. See the yellow ones. No, no, no. I do not want red ones. I do not want blue ones. I want green ones.
Children can learn to read from such stilted prose, experts say, but they won`t want to. The misapplication of readability formulas ”won`t make kids stupid,” Green says. ”But it turns them off from reading. It takes away their motivation, especially kids who aren`t exposed to books and reading at home. They`ll say, `This is reading? Who needs it?` ”
No one has studied the long-term impact of this attitude, but some teachers blame a lack of pleasure in reading for poor reading skills that afflict students in many schools. This, in turn, affects textbooks.
”From the early 1970s until the early 1980s there was a cry from the marketplace, saying, `My kids can`t handle these books,` ” explains Richard Morgan, president of Scott Foresman and Co. publishers. ”There are two ways you can respond to that: You can publish two texts, each of different difficulty. Another response is to reduce the readability of the standard offering from half a grade to two grades.”
For economic reasons most publishers chose the latter route.
”We wanted to do a textbook for high school vocational education,” says Donna Faull, art design and production director at Benton & McKnight, a leading publisher of vocational and home economics books. ”We began hearing that kids in those classes were poor readers. We had to lower the reading level to 3d grade.”
Because of recent criticism about the quality of public education, Morgan says, ”the worm has turned.” ”Now, if you pick up a 6th grade science book, it`s going to be 6th grade readability instead of 5th grade level as it might have been in 1978.”
Teachers tend to agree.
”For a while,” says Dee Garrity, a 5th grade teacher in south suburban Riverdale, ”there were textbooks coming out that were barely more than outlines. Textbooks today are generally better.”
But the dilemma that led to the latest round of dumbing down, as former Secretary of Education Terrel Bell called it, still exists. ”Before, the information in books was so filtered that there was hardly anything for the kids to hang on to. The new phase is to give more information to students,”
says Mary Chan, a high school teacher in Chicago. ”But if you have high school students who only read at the 6th grade level, it`s hard for them to understand. It`s kind of like being caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.”
It also could be described as a vicious cycle.
Publishers print what the market demands. Any textbook, no matter how well organized and written, is worthless if the students it is supposed to instruct can`t read it. And so you arrive back at readability formulas.
The national report ”Becoming a Nation of Readers,” which was presented recently to Secretary of Education William Bennett, outlined the application of one common readability formula: ”Three sample passages of 100 words each are selected. . . . For each passage the number of words per sentence and the number of syllables per word are computed. These figures are averaged over the three samples to give an estimate of sentence length and . . . word length for the entire (text).”
These numbers are then plugged into an equation and coupled with an analysis of the number of words not on a pre-established vocabulary list to determine the grade-level of the text.
Critics claim that none of the several readability formulas currently available takes into consideration linking of one thought to the next, which, as much as word and sentence length, helps determine whether a text is interesting or even makes sense.
”I`ve seen stuff that would put you to sleep in five minutes,” says Harriet Bernstein, director of a textbook project being conducted by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Association of State Boards of Education. ”After three pages you`re exhausted because it`s so boring. That`s the problem with readability formulas. I don`t think artificial intelligence will ever be able to consider conceptual difficulty.”
Furthermore, application of the formulas leads editors to arbitrarily break up sentences by removing such connecting words as ”because” and
”which,” thereby destroying the relationship of thoughts and actually making them more difficult to grasp, Bernstein says.
This has become particularly troublesome in science, math and social studies books, where learning depends upon an understanding of cause and effect.
The deletion of so-called ”unfamiliar words” has led to absurd proscriptions. According to one formula the words ”parrot,” ”beaver,”
”goat” and ”zoo” should not be used before the 5th grade.
One night not long ago, Margaret Marston, a member of the Virginia Board of Education and President Reagan`s National Commission on Excellence in Education, received an irate phone call. The caller was a history professor who had been looking at his child`s 7th-grade history text.
”They left the word `unalienable` out of the Declaration of Independence,” the man railed.
Marston checked the book, ”American Adventures,” which was used throughout Virginia. ”They had taken out the word `unalienable` and replaced it with an asterisk,” Marston says. ”The publisher thought it was too hard.”
California dropped readability formulas as a criteria for selecting textbooks in 1980, because they were being abused, says Francie Alexander, director of the state`s office of curriculum framework and textbook development. The mechanized measurements were replaced with human evaluators and field tests by school children. But the rest of the nation hasn`t followed suit.
”The marketplace demands to know the readability of your books,” Morgan says. ”It`s not an academic question. It`s a marketing question. If you want to participate in major markets, you have to use (readability formulas).”
Explaining scientific or mathematical concepts under these constraints is not easy. ”In the 3d grade you want to teach something about magnetism and electricity,” says Lois Eskin, a senior editor at Holt, Rinehart and Winston. ”Well, those have lots of syllables.”
To meet the demands of state and local textbook selection committees, Holt often measures readability two ways, with the technical vocabulary included and without it, Eskin says. Hopefully, she continues, the committees will see that the text is simple enough, but still able to introduce the necessary concepts.
”Readability fomulas are a guideline,” she concludes, ”they are not the Bible.”
They are, however, heavily weighted, in part because adoption committee members faced with literally thousands of pages to review look for any objective measure on which to base their selections.
”One of the biggest problems in textbook quality is a lack of knowledge about how to evaluate and a lack of time,” says Roger Farr, an Indiana University education professor and a leading authority on textbook adoption.
In March, Florida began training its textbook selection committees in evaluation techniques. The course is one of the first of its kind in the country. Ninety-nine people came to Tallahassee for 15 hours of classes, Ralph Vedros, director of the public school resource center, says. They learned about content, presentation, instructional design, classroom use, developing and applying criteria and combining data for decision making. At the end of the course they were tested.
State officials hope these classes will generate a demand for better textbooks that will eventually affect publishers.
