Hard Words :: Why Aren't Kids Being Taught To Read? via APM Reports

Hard Words

Why aren't kids being taught to read?

APM Reports: 9.10.2018 by Emily Hanford

Scientific research has shown how children learn to read and how they should be taught. But many educators don't know the science and, in some cases, actively resist it. As a result, millions of kids are being set up to fail.

It was 2015 and Jack Silva, the chief academic officer for the public schools in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, had a problem: Only 56 percent of third-graders in his district had scored proficient on the state reading test.

Reading scores had been low for a while, but for most of the five years that Silva had been chief academic officer, he and other school leaders had been consumed with a severe budget crisis. By 2015, the district had turned the corner financially, and Silva was wondering why the reading scores were so terrible. "It was really looking yourself in the mirror and saying, 'Which four in 10 students don't deserve to learn to read?'" he said.

The stakes were high. Research shows that children who don't learn to read by the end of third grade are likely to remain poor readers for the rest of their lives, and they're likely to fall behind in other academic areas, too. People who struggle with reading are more likely to drop out of high school, to end up in the criminal justice system, and to live in poverty. But as a nation, we've come to accept a high percentage of kids not reading well. More than 60 percent of American fourth-graders are not proficient readers, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and it's been that way since testing began in the 1990s.

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The basic assumption that underlies typical reading instruction in many schools is that learning to read is a natural process, much like learning to talk. But decades of scientific research has revealed that reading doesn't come naturally. The human brain isn't wired to read. Kids must be explicitly taught how to connect sounds with letters — phonics.

"There are thousands of studies," said Louisa Moats, an education consultant and researcher who has been teaching and studying reading since the 1970s. 

But this research hasn't made its way into many elementary school classrooms. The prevailing approaches to reading instruction in American schools are inconsistent with basic things scientists have discovered about how children learn to read.

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We are not born wired to read

The scientific research on reading goes back decades, from work psychologists were doing in the 1960s to more recent discoveries by neuroscientists using brain imaging technology.

Researchers have been doing their work in labs that were sometimes right across the quad from schools of education, but reading researchers and education researchers kind of live in separate universes; they go to different conferences, publish in different journals. The big takeaway from all the scientific research on reading is that learning to read is not a natural process. We are not born wired to read.

We are born wired to talk. Kids learn to talk by being talked to, by being surrounded with spoken language. That's all it takes. No one has to teach them to talk.

But, as numerous studies have shown, reading is different. Our brains don't know how to do it. That's because human beings didn't invent written language until relatively recently in human history, just a few thousand years ago. To be able to read, structures in our brain that were designed for things such as object recognition have to get rewired a bit.

Another big takeaway from decades of scientific research is that, while we use our eyes to read, the starting point for reading is sound. What a child must do to become a reader is to figure out how the words she hears and knows how to say connect to letters on the page. Writing is a code humans invented to represent speech sounds. Kids have to crack that code to become readers.

Children don't crack the code naturally.

Discusses: Poverty, Balanced Literacy, Whole Language and Teacher Prep LISTEN: 00:52:45

Education & School Reports & Statistics

Ongoing
Condition of Education, NCES
Digest of Education Statistics, American education: pre k-graduate school, NCES
Diplomas Count, Education Week
Dropout and Completion Rates in the United States, USDE, IES, NCES
Education Fast Facts, NCES

Homeschooling in the United States, USDE, IES, NCES

Nation's Report Card NAEP – Reading, NCES
Progress in International Reading Literacy Study PIRLS
Program for International Student Assessment PISA
Revenues & Expenditures for Public Elem & Secondary School Districts, NCES; USDE;  IES
State of Preschool, NIEER

2017: State of Learning Disabilities, NCLD
2016: Full-Day Kindergarten in the States, Education Comm of the States
2014: Learning Curve, Pearson
2013
Recovery: Job Growth and Education Requirements Through 2020,  Georgetown Univ: Center on Education and the Workforce
2011
Double Jeopardy: How 3rd Gr Reading Skills/Poverty Influence HS Graduation, AE Casey Fnd
Education Gap Between Rich & Poor:
   Whither Opportunity?, Russell Sage Foundation
   Gains and Gaps, NBER
2009
Consequences of Dropping Out of High School, Northeastern Univ.
Left Behind in America: The Nation’s Dropout Crisis, Northeastern Univ.
Ready Willing & Unable to Serve: 75% Young Adults Cannot Join Military, Mission Readiness

Literacy Reports & Statistics

Children

Kids and Family Reading Report, Scholastic
Kids Count Data Center, Annie E. Casey Foundation
National/State Report Cards – Reading, NCES
State of Preschool, NIEER

2018: Education Leader’s Guide to Reading Growth, Renaissance

2009: Developing Early Literacy, National Early Literacy Panel - NIFL

2003: The Early Catastrophe: The 30 Million Word Gap by Age 3, American Educator