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Are Schools Wounding Kids?

By Kathie Marshall

When I returned to the classroom this year after six years as a literacy coach, I chose to teach a reading intervention class other teachers actively avoided—a mix of 6th and 7th graders reading at a mid-2nd to early 4th grade level.

It was a year of change for me as a teacher. I was returning to the classroom for the first time since No Child Left Behind prompted my district to introduce mandatory instructional programs. These included a scripted reading curriculum for our intervention students.

Teaching struggling readers wasn’t new to me. In the late 1990s I had created a language arts intervention course using service learning as the primary vehicle for motivation. Now, however, I found myself pushing students through a massive workbook each day. Their general...