Chapter 1: Jimmy Crosby

When you read this book, you could draw the conclusion that it is written from a "liberal" standpoint as it attributes this "readicide" dilemma to George W. Bush. I would say, however, that the blame does not lie with him. It lies with an educational system that has for decades attempted to quantify student learning and performance. At some point in our past, the powers that be thought that the most effective way to evaluate the overall effectiveness of teaching and learning was through quantitative statistics. Everything must have a numerical value. This, in reality, is simply an impossible task. "Readicide" points out the flaws of this approach by detailing how standardized tests extinguish the enthusiasm of lower acheiving students by handing them low test scores that fail to account for real and authentic learning. This real and authentic learning is more and more taking a back seat to the "teaching to the test" approach school systems are adopting because of the high stakes of school report cards. Until the actual criteria for school evaluations is changed, schools will not change their approach to "teaching." "Teaching" in this case is not actually teaching. We are teaching how to pass a multiple choice test. A Wofford professor I heard this pass weekend summed it up quite well: "We must not teach our students answer recognition, but rather answer generation." I thought this was rather profound. Life is not a multiple choice test, so why are we preparing students in that way?