The Absurdity of Standardized Reading Guidelines

This article on ranking books based on complexity for various grade levels in New Republic popped up in Book Riot's Critical Linking yesterday, and got me all kinds of twitchy. And not in a good way. 

Rather than summarizing the absurdity of ranking books by complexity and using the rankings to decide what books should be assigned to each grade level, I'll let you read the original article. Go on, I'll wait.

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In theory, sure. Ranking books based on complexity seems like a perfectly reasonable way to make sure that students in various grade levels are reading texts appropriate to their age and language skills. We wouldn't want to assign Tolstoy in 3rd grade and Dr. Seuss in 12th, I suppose. 

But when you break down the actual "Lexile" scores, which the author of the New Republic article did, the results are dumbfounding:

A close look at the scores, which even the creators of Common Core and the Lexile rankings admit can't be the final measure of complexity, reveals that The Sun Also Rises is deemed appropriate reading for a 3rd grader, while Mr. Popper's Penguins is more appropriate for 5th graders. The Hunger Games is more complex, in theory, than The Grapes of Wrath.

For one thing, I strongly believe that complexity--or its inverse, simplicity--of language is an active choice. No one will argue that Hemingway wrote simple, staccato sentences because he was incapable of writing long, flowery, complicated ones; his short, straightforward language--with here and there a winding, complex line or two--is part of what makes his style his own, and is study-worthy in and of itself.

Blaine Greteman, author of the New Republic article, says it better than I ever could:

They’ve long been rewarded for getting “the point” of language that makes “a parade of its complexity,” and they’ve not been shown that our capacity to manage ambiguity without reducing it enables us to be thinkers rather than mere ideologues.

But I would also argue that there is to complexity than language alone. I'm no expert in Lexile rankings, but they seem to overlook important things like themes, subject matter, and how these texts fit into the bigger context of life and history and growing up. The Hunger Games may have more complex language in it than The Grapes of Wrath (even that I find hard to believe, unless it's because The Hunger Games has some sentences of questionable grammar which make them ), but Collins' world is one that is capable of being understood in its entirety without any contextual knowledge.

The Grapes of Wrath is an interesting story on its own, but in the context of greater world history--the suffering and poverty of the Depression, the mistreatment of migrant workers in history and today, the difficulties of finding an economic system that works for everyone--it becomes so much more powerful than simply the sum of its parts. It challenges readers to think about history and modern times, about big things like poverty and hunger and workers rights, family loyalty and friendship and the naivete of the young, in a way that The Hunger Games just doesn't.

At the end of the day, that is what makes literature great is all about: the ambiguities of language, as Greteman points out, but also how they help us illuminate the eternally complex, complicated, messy world we live in.