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Practice in Reading Comprehension for Task I

The following example and suggestions are based on “The Community as Commodity” by Robert B. Reich, found in the booklet Information for Students 2003-2004. We will only refer to several paragraphs from one of the sections here, but these general suggestions will be applicable throughout the entire reading. When you must write about a reading, your first step is to read actively. In other words, search for meanings, connections and patterns, and be alert for the ways that ideas and sections fit into the whole. (In this particular essay and others like it, with subheadings such as Residential Sorting, University Sorting, Risk Sorting, etc. the author has been thoughtful enough to break the essay into subheadings, but this is certainly not always the case.)

Please read the subsection entitled School Sorting found on pages 7 & 8. As you would do with the essay as a whole, note the opening for introductory ideas. In this case you might underline the opening sentences, which seem to be the keys to the subsection.

School Sorting

As the stakes in getting a good education continue to rise, parents more aggressively seek the best education they can afford for their children. And the best deals are where other students are at least as intelligent, ambitious, and intellectually stimulating-and less likely to use up the scarce attention of teachers by being troublesome or needing a lot of extra help.

These opening sentences are underlined because they tell what the section is about, and thus contain the general idea for the section.

Peer effects among school-age children are significant--a fact that parents of teenagers will hardly find surprising. High-school students are more likely to go to college when more of their classmates are college-bound. And whatever their level of ability, students do better in groups more able than they, on average, and worse in groups less able, although the process isn't symmetrical. Students of less ability are helped more by being together in classrooms with students of greater ability than the more able are hurt by being combined with the less. New evidence strongly suggests that such childhood peer effects extend beyond schools to the communities surrounding them. After a random sample of poor inner-city families received housing vouchers that enabled them to move to higher-income suburbs, their children's behavior improved relative to children in families who wanted the vouchers but lost out in the lottery.

The underlined phrase that opens this paragraph states a major claim of the section--that peer effects among school-age children are significant. The rest of the paragraph backs this point up with further details: for instance, high school students are more likely to go to college if they are amongst others who are also college-bound. When you read the essay, be alert for general points and be alert for the details and examples that back them up and clarify such examples.

Here too, the sorting mechanism is becoming far more efficient. Wealthier and more ambitious parents are choosing highly regarded private schools or good public schools in tony suburban communities where other students are likely to exert a positive influence, troublemakers can be easily extruded, and slower learners are quietly isolated. ("Tuition" for a good public school in a wealthy neighborhood is, in effect, included in the purchase price of an upscale home there, and the corresponding property taxes.) Or they choose publicly funded "charter" schools with more leeway than public schools about whom to admit or expel. In most states, charters have little room explicitly to exclude or expel, but they can craft their offerings in such a way as to deter less desired students, for example by failing to offer services for children with learning disabilities or admitting children only from the surrounding upscale neighborhood. (A recent study of charter schools in Michigan found that most of them excluded students who were especially costly to educate, such as those requiring special-education services; charter schools in many of the most affluent school districts refused to accept applicants from outside the district boundaries.)

Once again, we have underlined what seem to be the most important lines in this paragraph--lines that convey the main points. As always we would want to bear in mind how the author’s points back up the general points of the essay as a whole. Likewise, if any particular word (or words) is unfamiliar to you--for instance, maybe “tony”--then you would want to look that word up in the dictionary.

*Now we will look at some tips for approaching the short reading.