WHEN THE READING LIGHT WENT ON

David Tokofsky, Los Angeles Unified school board member and former Marshall High School Academic Decathlon coach:

The thing I remember about elementary school are those SRA reading kits. They would be ranked by level--red, blue, green-- and there would be 25 little stories for each level. You wanted to read as many of them as you could. You wanted to excel and get through the whole box and do them all. Some critics might say that was a rat race, but I was thrilled by that. It was the pleasure of reading but it was also being quantified.

Just like those summer reading charts. The public libraries put up charts and graphs showing every book the kids would read over the summer. It seems to me that in many ways today, a lot of [educational] leaders have swung things so far away from that, focusing just on the joy of reading without any measurement of how people are doing or how much they are reading.

But it was joyful to be in those races to read as much as you could at the library or as many of the short stories as you could in the SRA box. It was just as pleasurable as sitting on the rug in fourth grade and hearing Miss McCool read us “To Kill a Mockingbird.”