A Rigorous Test for ELA Teacher Licensure
The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) just published Will Flanders’ The FORT Gap: How Inconsistent Teacher Preparation Is Fueling Wisconsin’s Literacy and Educator Crises, a report on how results on Foundations of Reading Test (FORT) show that Wisconsin’s teacher candidates aren’t sufficiently prepared in the Science of Reading, which is the gold-standard in reading instruction. That’s bad news for Wisconsin teachers—and worse for Wisconsin’s students, who won’t have teachers properly prepared to them how to read. Flanders’ report is an excellent summary of the issue for Wisconsin audiences—and for all Americans, since insufficient preparation for English Language Arts (ELA) teachers, especially in the Science of Reading, is a nationwide problem.
It isn’t the only problem for our ELA classrooms. The worst flaw of Common-Core style ELA instruction is that it focuses on skills instruction and neglects literary content—full-lenth, sophisticated, classic works of fiction and nonfiction. Notables such as Doug Lemov, Natalie Wexler, and E. D. Hirsch, Jr. have argued persuasively students need to be taught to read good books as an essential component of learning how to read. As the classical education schools know, the Science of Reading needs to be married to the enduring, challenging content that sparks children to want to read. That same combination inspires our own The Cather Standards: Model PreK-12 State English Language Arts Standards (National Association of Scholars and Freedom in Education); the Cather Standard, by saying what students should learn, implicitly provides a curriculum for ELA teacher preparation.
Implicitly only, alas. The existing standard National Evaluation Series (NES) English Language Arts (301) examination doesn’t entirely ignore good books. One of its five content domains is Analyzing and Interpreting Literature—although even in this domain, only 2 of the 4 competencies really address literature knowledge rather than techniques of how to analyze literature. ELA teachers should be tested centrally for their thorough content knowledge of good books from American literature, Western literature, and World literature.
Of course ELA teachers could read the Teaching Library sections of The Cather Standards for suggestions on what books to read and to teach. Just as many states and localities require ELA teachers to take the FORT in addition to the regular NES English Language Arts (301) test, they also should require ELA teachers to acquire focused preparation on literature content knowledge.
The best requirement would be something like NAS’s model Education Licensure Core Curriculum Act, which requires humanities teachers for Grades 7-12 to take eight undergraduate survey courses in the humanities, including a year-long survey of British Literature and a year-long survey of American Literature. So far as standardized tests go, the Classic Learning Test is intended for high school students, but would require more content knowledge of enduring literature than any existing test for ELA teachers. If the College Board resuscitated its GRE Subject Test in Literature in English, that also could serve as a good test. The National Evaluation Series also could simply create a test that focused explicitly and entirely on literature content knowledge. States and localities ought to use the work of any assessment company that will craft a rigorous standardized test of literature content knowledge for ELA teacher licensure.
And every state absolutely should focus on the Science of Reading, and adopt FORT as a requirement for ELA teacher licensure. Literature content and the Science of Reading need to go hand in hand. We need reform in both areas—in state standards, in teacher licensure, and in every aspect of ELA instruction.
America’s students need teachers who can instruct them both in how to read and on the enduring classics that will make them want to read.
