An Open Letter to Each Researcher Cited by PARCC in their Support of Close Reading

This is a copy of the email I sent to each researcher cited by PARCC as supporting close reading. I am interested in seeing their replies and will post accordingly with permission.

Dear Professor XXX,

I have been reading the Common Core Standards, PARCCs testing frameworks, as well as the cited research that these two groups list as support for close reading as the "guiding principle of the standards" and central focus of assessment for 60 million children. Frankly I am hoping you can explain how a single way of reading represents the whole of such an embodied act.  I'm a mom with a 12 year old son and the narrowness of this approach (imagine this is it for 13 years) makes more than a bit wary.

This is the paragraph that PARCC provides:

Close Reading of Texts

As noted above, the close reading model is a central guiding principle of the standards and as a result will be a central focus of the PARCC Assessment System. The Model Content Frameworks provide guidance for focusing on the close, sustained reading of complex text. Close reading stresses engaging with a text of sufficient complexity directly and examining its meaning thoroughly and methodically. It emphasizes using texts of grade-level-appropriate complexity and focusing student reading on the particular words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs of the author, encouraging students to read and re-read deliberately. By directing student attention on the text itself, close reading empowers students to reflect on the meanings of individual words, the order in which sentences unfold, and the development of ideas over the course of the text — to ultimately arrive at an understanding of the text as a whole. A significant body of research links the close reading of complex text—regardless if the student is a struggling reader or advanced—to significant gains in reading proficiency, and finds close reading to be a key component of college and career readiness.5

And this is the 'research' (not sure all of this actually is research) cited:

1. Ericcson, K. A., and W. Kintsch. 1993. The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance. Psychological Review 100(3):363–406; 
2. Plant, E. A., et al. 2005. Why study time does not predict grade point average across college students: Implications of deliberate practice for academic performance. Contemporary Educational Psychology 30; 
3. Ericcson, K. A., and W. Kintsch. 1999. The Role of Long Term Working Memory in Text Comprehension. Psychologia;  
4. Kintsch, W. 2009. Learning and constructivism. Constructivist Instruction: Success or failure? eds. Tobias and Duffy. New York: Routledge; 
5. Hampton, S., and E. Kintsch. 2009. Supporting Cumulative Knowledge Building Through Reading. In Adolescent Literacy, Field Tested: Effective Solutions for Every Classroom, eds. Parris, Fisher, and Headley. International Reading Association; 
6. Heller, R., and C. Greenleaf. 2007. Literacy Instruction in the Content Areas: Getting to the Core of Middle and High School Improvement. Washington, DC: Alliance for Excellent Education; 
7. The Education Trust. 2006. Gaining Traction, Gaining Ground: How Some High Schools Accelerate Learning for Struggling Students; ACT. 2006. Reading Between the Lines. 

Which text that you've written from this cited list would you recommend that I read that might explain why close reading should be the only approach an entire country adopts for all of its public school children? I am thinking about this as quite recently my husband and I were talking about Seamus Heaney's wonderful book, The Spirit Level.  You may have read it. Heaney closes the book with the poem, Postscript.

Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

I was telling my husband that the closing lines of the poem stopped my breath and did what I suspect the poet might have wanted, caught my heart off guard and blew it open. My husband said how when he read the poem--read it aloud, he recalled a rather cool morning in Ireland when the two of us, much younger than we are now, were motoring about, newly in love, and had stopped in at a pub for a bit of hot tea. He was recalling how soothing that morning had been.

I'm pretty sure we weren't having a 'close reading' lesson when we read The Spirit Level. In some ways we might have been following cummings' adage about feelings being first. I worry that this 'read like a detective' (David Coleman's phrase, not mine) dictum will harm my child, narrow his understanding of the many reasons we read, and above all else will dim his pleasure of the text.

I am curious as to what you have to say as it is your work that is cited in support of such a single method of reading to be exclusively used for all children beginning at age 8 until they exit the system at 17 or 18. I await your response.

Sincerely,
Mary Ann Reilly