Education Expert Says The Average College Freshman Reads at a 7th Grade Level, Obviously
New American - Dr. Sandra L. Stotsky, professor emerita at the University of Arkansas, recently said that Renaissance Learning’s latest report revealed that a large number of college freshman are reading at a seventh-grade level. Stotsky, who received her Ed. D. from Harvard, is a well-known and respected figure in the world of education. She served on the Common Core Validation Committee in 2009-10 and, along with colleague James Milgram, professor of mathematics at Stanford University, refused to approve Common Core’s standards, which she called “inferior.” In a recent interview with Breitbart Texas, Stotsky said: We are spending billions of dollars trying to send students to college and maintain them there when, on average, they read at about the grade 6 or 7 level, according to Renaissance Learning’s latest report on what American students in grades 9-12 read, whether assigned or chosen. Stotsky continued by noting the reading levels of 53 of the most frequently mentioned titles listed in the NAS (National Association of Scholars) report, Beach Books 2013-2014: What Do Colleges and Universities Want Students to Read Outside Class? The readability levels of 23 of the 53 titles were available, with an average ATOS book level of 6.8. (An ATOS [Advantage-TASA Open Standard] level on a book indicates how difficult the text is to read.) The highest ATOS book level found was 10.2 and the lowest ATOS book level found was 4.0 (fourth-grade reading level!).
Least shocking news of all time, nobody knows how to read anymore. I was just talking about this in a blog yesterday, how impossible it is to read a book. You want to read, but it’s impossible because the entire world is going on around you. Back in the day before the Internet and Twitter, sure, read to your heart’s desire. But now if you’re reading a book and something happens and you’re 2 minutes late, you might as well not show up at all. That’s why you have to constantly be scrolling Twitter and watching TV and browsing the Internet. No time to think about motifs and themes of the green light and the white car. Don’t really care who Miss Havisham is supposed to represent, someone on Twitter just vined a sick dunk from a Sun Belt game! Besides, reading is overrated, that’s what they invented movies for, duh.
