It sounds like a tired complaint, but it’s true. The kids just aren’t reading anymore. And even when they are, they aren’t reading very well. At almost every level of testing, around half of Texas students aren’t meeting grade level expectations on the state assessment.
But the problem runs deeper than that.
Over the last five years, Texas’ national assessment scores in Grade Eight reading have lost twice as many points as they ever have in the last 30 years. This mirrors the national trend of declining literacy among adults.
Teachers say that kids’ reading stamina has declined and fewer children than ever are reading for fun.
This rot of illiteracy has even reached the highest levels of universities, with professors at Columbia, Princeton, and Georgetown complaining that their students have difficulty reading whole books or even poems.
There are several theories for this decline in literacy. The most obvious culprit is the flawed teaching method known as “whole language learning,” which has been a plague on American classrooms for over a hundred years. It’s likely that the rise of technology, especially smartphones, has also contributed to this loss in reading skills.
What’s more, even when students learn to “read,” they aren’t gaining true literacy. A recent experiment with English and Literature majors found that, despite scoring well in the literacy assessment, around one-third of these students had difficulty engaging with texts, and another third were merely proficient in their comprehension. And these are college students enrolled in majors that revolve around reading.
One explanation for this result is the way students are taught to analyze prose. “Critical literacy” encourages students to explore how texts make them feel, rather than to search for the meaning of the text. In this model, students will quite confidently report what they feel the words are saying. This approach, however, is obviously not conducive to critical thinking or truth-seeking.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that the public education system, both in Texas and across the nation, has failed to fulfill perhaps its most important function, teaching students to read. This failure didn’t occur because of external factors or because the task was just too difficult. It happened because schools let ideologically motivated programs replace effective learning methods and chose what was convenient and felt good over what would prepare students to be successful.
Luckily, the solution is not complicated. In fact, it’s probably what any reasonable person would suggest: Teach students how to read. Teach children to read using phonics, and then expose them to whole texts often. If we want students to be successful academically and as citizens, they must read high-quality works, especially the most important texts, throughout their schooling.
