Stop Saying Kids Can’t Read

It’s three weeks until Mississippi’s standardized test season begins, and Candace Hamberlin is feeling the pressure.

Evidence of what’s at stake hangs all around Jefferson County Middle School, where Hamberlin is in her first year teaching eighth-grade English. Inside her classroom, a large piece of black polyester with clear pouches labeled “Data Wall” shows the current reading level of each student. The school hallways are lined with posters listing schoolwide scores on an earlier practice test. One prominently displays the grade Mississippi would assign their school if that practice test had been the real thing: 175 out of 700 points, an F.

Jefferson County is one of the smallest in Mississippi; 6,800 people spread across 527 square miles along the Mississippi River. It’s also one of the poorest, with 32 percent of the population living below the poverty line. Fayette, where the only public elementary, middle, and high school are all based, is the only city in the county, home to about a dozen churches but not a single stoplight. The county is 13 percent white, but most of those families send their kids to private or parochial schools; 98 percent of the school district’s students are Black.

Inside Hamberlin’s classroom, it’s time for test-prep drills. This period has 20 eighth graders enrolled, but only 10 are present; six have been pulled out for remedial work with a consultant the district has hired to boost test scores, and the remaining four are absent for unclear reasons. The students in the room each grab a Chromebook and log in, at speeds ranging from feet-dragging to actively resistant. They open the StudySync software program, which shows them each a series of questions tailored to their weaknesses. Their faces look like they’re being marched to the guillotine.

Much of literacy instruction at Jefferson County Middle School now begins and ends with screens. In fact, Hamberlin doesn’t lecture at all on Wednesdays and Thursdays; students spend those class periods with StudySync and i-Ready, another adaptive software program, so each can focus where they need the most help.

Their teacher can’t blame them for being sick of these exercises. The students’ lives, and hers, are dominated by the looming Mississippi Academic Assessment Program (MAAP), the set of annual standardized exams that measure their progress in language arts as well as science and math. Test prep is a year-round activity. Her students must learn how to decode the meaning of unfamiliar words, make inferences, identify the central idea of a passage, analyze tone and point of view. Every Friday brings a practice test.

Before moving to eighth grade, Hamberlin logged 25 years as an elementary school teacher. Eighth grade appealed to her because it’s all about analyzing texts, not just consuming them. That’s her idea of a good time. She remembers reading the first chapter of the first Harry Potter book four times just to make sure she didn’t miss a single detail. As she talks a group of students through a reading passage by Sojourner Truth, her passion is palpable—for the material, but even more for the puzzle-solving that reading comprehension requires.