Cobb County superintendent Joe Redden has directed administrators to devise a better rating process for the Accelerated Reader selections by August, when schools reopen for the 2001-02 school year. Administrators are still considering how to do that. The program motivates students through a point system. Students choose their own books, based on their reading level, and have to pass a computer comprehension quiz to progress to higher levels. The tougher the reading, the more points a student collects.
Students redeem the points for a variety of rewards.
But the program designers say the reading levels reflects the difficulty of the text, not the theme or content. The reading levels consider how many words a sentence has, the vocabulary, the number of characters per word. Whether middle school students should be allowed to is another matter. The 1,000-page novel by Norman Mailer follows the story of murderer Gary Gilmore from his crime spree to his execution by firing squad. It is up to school districts to determine whether the books' themes are appropriate for students' age groups, said Amy Wemark, Accelerated Reader product manager.