The People Teaching Your Children to Read Should Read Well

The people teaching your children to read should be able to read well themselves. That ought to be the least controversial expectation in education. When the argument about teacher qualifications becomes entirely about who can enter the profession, the child disappears. I want the opposite priority: begin with what the adult must be able to do for the student, then require a convincing way of demonstrating it. Protecting access to a job is not the purpose of a school.

In 2017, New York removed the Academic Literacy Skills Test requirement for initial teacher certification after a task force raised concerns about it. Removing a particular test does not establish that literacy became optional. Tests can be badly designed. But the system still owes parents an answer: what now demonstrates the reading and writing competence the job requires? A criticism of one measure cannot dissolve the responsibility to measure something that matters.

The figure circulated in the controversy was a 61 percent pass rate among test-takers from September 2013 through June 2016. These were certification candidates taking that exam, not a census showing that 39 percent of serving teachers could not read. Those are materially different claims. The result raises questions about the test and the preparation of its candidates; deciding which requires more than a shocking percentage. We should demand accuracy from the argument for standards as well as from the people the standards assess.

Here is the competence I care about. Give the teacher a demanding passage. Can they identify its argument, distinguish evidence from assertion, and explain why one interpretation fits the text better than another? Then give them a child's mistaken interpretation. Can they find the particular sentence or inference that caused the confusion and help the child work through it? Reading well and teaching reading are connected responsibilities. A credential should give us sound reasons to expect both.

Notice the irony in this particular controversy: to judge a viral claim about literacy, a parent has to distinguish the population tested from the population being accused, read beyond a percentage, and ask what a policy change actually says. These are precisely the habits a reading education should develop. We undermine the case for standards if we abandon them the moment an alarming claim favors our argument. A child deserves adults who can model the competence they demand, including when an accurate reading makes their own rhetoric less convenient.

Certification begins accountability; it cannot permanently discharge it. If a child is still struggling, pointing to the adults' qualifications does not explain what the instruction is missing. This is where the child's development must take priority over the institution's convenience: an approved process is useful only insofar as it gives us reason to expect, and a way to improve, the work done for the learner. Testing the child harder while treating the teaching as settled gets the responsibility backwards.

The same obligation follows a family out of the school system. We may choose a book, a course, or a tutor whose philosophy we admire, but admiration does not make the explanation work. Homeschooling gives us more power to replace weak instruction and seek expertise; it also leaves us fewer excuses for ignoring the evidence in front of us. The point of leaving a credentialed institution cannot be to stop caring whether the person teaching our child knows how to do it.

Debate which test establishes competence. Improve it, replace it, or remove it if there is a better way. But keep the obligation intact. The student is the reason the profession exists, and parents are entitled to ask what the qualification delivers to that student. The adults paid to teach reading should be answerable for the work, not merely for possessing permission to do it.