Front-page NYT article on raising reading scores never mentions actually reading

Today's paper of record has a front-page story about how much "easier" it is to improve student scores in math than in reading.  Predictably, the article mentions many specific skills and "concepts", but never explicitly mentions what would seem the most important factor: time spent actually reading.

The story describes lessons on close reading and inferences, it discusses acting out the dialogue in books, and it mentions narrative perspectives, subtext, character motivation, vocabulary, background knowledge, sentence length, text density, and cultural deficits.  It talks about the enormous differences in how much "literacy" children are exposed to outside of school.  But none of the teachers and experts quoted in the article suggests that perhaps the best way to raise reading scores is to have kids actually read.

A few months ago the same newspaper published an op-ed by a Mexican novelist, David Toscana, who asked a very important question:

One cannot help but ask the Mexican educational system, “How is it possible that I hand over a child for six hours every day, five days a week, and you give me back someone who is basically illiterate?”
...
A few years back, I spoke with the education secretary of my home state, Nuevo León, about reading in schools. He looked at me, not understanding what I wanted. “In school, children are taught to read,” he said. “Yes,” I replied, “but they don’t read.” 

Too often, this is true in America as well. Our schools have our children six hours a day for twelve years. That is a lot of time. Let the kids read!

How many books have our students read this year so far?

My assumption has long been that our students are not reading enough, and that the most important thing we could do to help them improve in this essential area would be to help them read more.  I just did a quick check of their reading logs and my own records, and we put up some stickers on our chart--so I'm going to spend a quick post on how it's going.


Last Year's results
Last year I asked this same question about the students in my own classes and the students in the academic support program I was working in, and the results were interesting:

Students in the academic support program (from both Honors and Standard classes): 6 books in ten months (on average)

Students in my classes (all Standard classes): 8.5 books in ten months (on average)

Both groups were reading, on average less than a book a month--far from ideal.  (I'd say the average should be three books a month, but I would be happy with two.  My 12 year old reads four or five every month, and it doesn't take up much of his spare time.)

This year: slight improvement

I have made an even more concerted effort this year to get my students to read more.  We have done more independent reading, and less reading of whole-class texts.  I am pretty sure there has been a real opportunity cost to this focus, but it has at least resulted in somewhat more reading.  This week my students and I calculated their reading, and the results were:

Ninth graders in my (standard-level) classes this year so far: 8.2 books in 7 months (on average)

(This average is skewed a bit by a few kids who are reading a lot (over 20); the median is 6.)

This is better than last year--by the end of the schoolyear, the average should be up to 11 or 12 books--but it is still not great.  Two of my 32 ninth grade students have only read two books all year.  (On the other hand, one of those students is actually a success story, having read zero books in the first three months and two books in the second three months.)

Does more reading mean increased vocabulary and improved skills?
So, I have been somewhat successful at getting my students to read more.  What remains unclear is how much benefit my students have gained from the increased reading.  My assumption is that the increased reading volume will mean increased vocabulary, improved reading comprehension skills, and perhaps even improved writing--but I don't know if that's true, and I can't check in a very reliable way, because I really only have a good baseline for their vocabulary.

Interestingly, whether their skills are improved or not, the reading is not obviously correlated to how well the students do in school.  One of my students, who has failed ninth grade twice already and is now taking both my grade English class and a tenth grade English class, has read 14 books this year.  He tells me he didn't finish any last year.  Nevertheless, he is failing both my class and the tenth grade English class--because he never does any written work outside of class.  In fact, as I write this, I am waiting for him to show up for an afterschool appointment to do some of his missing work.  He's not going to show; we need a new system to help kids like him!  Success or failure in school has less to do with skill than with being able to get the work done--we need to figure out how to help them do it.  I've figured out how to get this kid to read books; now I need to work on the writing piece.

I'll look into this again in June. Until then, I'll keep trying to get them to read, and I'll get the Dean to help me get my failing students to come after school to do their work.

Students who need to read in school

It works to make kids do their homework in school

Leafstrewn has just gone through a remarkable episode in which the headmaster's proposal to cut the administrator of an alternative program for kids who are having a lot of trouble in school was met with such opposition from the faculty that she changed her mind.  The episode was remarkable mostly for the teachers' support for a program serving a small fraction of our students, support that will mean losing teacher jobs, but also because the headmaster admitted, quite gracefully, that she had made a mistake.  Everyone came out looking pretty good, and I was proud of our school.

The episode also reminded me of how effective this particular alternative program has been. Five students from my ninth grade classes last year are now in the program, and four of the five have spoken to me positively about it (the fifth I haven't happened to bump into). As the potential cut to the program was in the balance over the past week, I've been thinking a lot about what has made it so successful for my former students.  It certainly helps that the program has very good teachers and a caring and very hands-on administrator, but perhaps the key element of the program is that the students are made to do their homework in school.  As one of them told me recently, after I'd asked if he was doing the assigned reading, they have to get the work done, or they don't get to go home at the end of the day.

This is a simple but extremely important practice.  It seems indisputable that the number one proximate cause (as opposed to indirect factors like poverty) of student failure at Leafstrewn is failure to do homework.  Having an even better teacher might help, being more genetically gifted might help, and coming from a richer and more educated family certainly helps, but the line separating passing from failing is basically whether kids get their homework done. Certainly for my five students from last year who are now in our alternative program, had they all done their homework, they all would easily have passed English for the year.  (Another program here, the "Tutorial" program, essentially gives students time, space and encouragement to do their homework in school.) This makes me wonder, again, about the value of homework, and it makes me think that Bruce Baker is right and the (modest) success of programs like KIPP is mainly due to spending more money on, among other things, a longer schoolday.  It also makes me think, again, about the value of reading in school.

A student who doesn't read

I had a chat today with a former student who isn't in this alternative program.  I'll call him "Billy."  Billy is a bright, polite, very appealing kid whose family has not had it easy, to put it mildly.  When he was in my ninth grade class two years ago, Billy told me regularly that he wanted to drop out of school so that he could get a job and help support his family.  Like everyone else, I told him that he would be able to help his family better if he stayed in school.  Billy passed my class, barely.  He read virtually none of the assigned reading or our whole-class texts.  He did, however, read four or five Alex Rider books (which are at about a fifth grade level).  Those may have been the only books he has completed in high school.

Billy told me he had failed English in 10th grade and he was in danger of failing this year as well. I asked why. He said: "Because I don't do my homework."  I said, "Do you do the reading?"  He said, "No.  Never."  I said, "But you read in my class.  I remember you reading Alex Rider."  He said, "Yeah, because we read in class. I don't read at home.  I never read at home in your class either."  I don't think that's strictly accurate--I remember him reading Alex Rider at home as well--but it gets at an important truth.

Reading is the most important academic skill.  As I wrote last year, "Our school has kids under its control for over six hours a day.  There is no good reason we can't have them sitting and silently reading books for at least an hour each day.  Nothing else we do with them is as important; nothing else would be as efficient, productive, and individualized." Or, as a Mexican novelist recently wrote in the New York Times, "One cannot help but ask the Mexican educational system, “How is it possible that I hand over a child for six hours every day, five days a week, and you give me back someone who is basically illiterate?”"

If we think reading is valuable, we should be using time in school to have them do it. That a child as bright and wonderful as Billy--a student who devoured Alex Rider books during a six-week independent reading unit--can have read fewer than ten books over his whole high school career is shameful for our school.  We have taken care of Billy in many ways, and we have always treated him with gentleness and respect, but we have mostly not done for him what we would do for our own children--given him books he can read and time to read them.

Homework in School and Social Justice

The proximate cause of these students' failure is that they don't do their homework, but they all share a deeper cause as well: Billy, the students I had last year who ended up in the alternative program, and every student I have this year who is in danger of failing, all come from families that are at the low end of the economic spectrum.  If we really want to "reform" education in a way that will help poorer children succeed, we should start by finding a way to do what our excellent alternative program here at Leafstrewn does, and give kids time to do their homework--especially their reading--in school.

Thousands of little countries that don't read

There's an interesting op-ed in the Times today about reading in Mexico ("The Country that Stopped Reading").  Its author, David Toscana, an eminent Mexican novelist, argues that his native country, which took next-to-last place in a Unesco survey of reading habits, ought to encourage a love of reading by providing students with enjoyable and compelling texts and giving them time to read in school:

One cannot help but ask the Mexican educational system, “How is it possible that I hand over a child for six hours every day, five days a week, and you give me back someone who is basically illiterate?”

...

A few years back, I spoke with the education secretary of my home state, Nuevo León, about reading in schools. He looked at me, not understanding what I wanted. “In school, children are taught to read,” he said. “Yes,” I replied, “but they don’t read.” I explained the difference between knowing how to read and actually reading, between deciphering street signs and accessing the literary canon. He wondered what the point of the students’ reading “Don Quixote” was. He said we needed to teach them to read the newspaper. 

When my daughter was 15, her literature teacher banished all fiction from her classroom. “We’re going to read history and biology textbooks,” she said, “because that way you’ll read and learn at the same time.”

The US is very different from Mexico, but I'm afraid that the Common Core and other Ed Reform efforts are taking us in the wrong direction.  We, too, can learn from Toscana's prescription: give kids enjoyable books and time to read.  Thousands of our children are not getting that, and thousands of our kids are, in themselves, little countries that don't read.

For vocabulary, input volume matters

A recent issue of Edweek has another lame article purporting to connect research to the Common Core--again, most of the "research" is incredibly weak and the experts say silly things.  Nevertheless, the article does mention one classic piece of research, and looking back at that study leads, as usual, to the conclusion that reading volume matters a lot.

Unnecessary new research...
According to the first paragraph of the article:

     Children who enter kindergarten with a small vocabulary don't get taught enough words—
     particularly, sophisticated academic words—to close the gap, according to the latest in a
     series of studies by Michigan early-learning experts.

Well, duh.  Anyone who had looked carefully at the vocabulary research, or indeed simply thought logically about the matter, would know that no scientific studies are necessary to conclude that kids with small vocabularies can't possibly be "taught" enough words to close the gap, since the only truly significant way kids learn words is through reading them and hearing them used.  I have never yet read a study purporting to show that any class of students, anywhere, has been "taught" enough words to make a significant increase in their vocabularies.  The main study discussed in the article found limited vocabulary instruction across the board, and less instruction in "academically challenging words" at high-poverty-schools.  Neither of these findings is necessarily significant, because vocabulary instruction just doesn't make much of a difference.

...and humorless experts!
Throughout the article, ostensible experts are quoted saying silly things.  For instance, one scholar says that Kindergarteners should be taught academic words like "predict."  That might be reasonable, but then she goes on, "Why would you choose to emphasize the word 'platypus'? It makes no sense."  Hm.  What makes no sense to me is that someone who can't imagine a reason to emphasize a really interesting, cool, loveable word like "platypus" would have anything to do with children's education, let alone be on the faculty at the University of Michigan.

What we should be thinking about
The article spends a fair amount of space, and a cool decision tree sidebar graphic, on which words to teach.  Thinking a lot about this is probably a waste of time, since teaching words doesn't make much of a difference, except, perhaps, insofar as kids enjoy them.  What then should we be thinking about?  Well, the only decent piece of research cited by the article is the classic 1995 study by Hart and Risley that reveals the remarkable disparities in the numbers of words heard by kids from different socioeconomic backgrounds.  Upper-middle class kids hear 11 million words per year, while poor kids hear 3 million; by the age of three, upper-middle class kids know twice as many words.  The  two "key conclusions" of the Hart and Risley study are the following:

• The most important aspect of children’s language experience is quantity.
• The most important aspect to evaluate in child care settings for very young children is the amount of talk actually going on, moment by moment, between children and their caregivers.

These conclusions do NOT say that we should be spending our time deciding which words to "emphasize" or "prioritize" or teach; instead, what matters is how many words kids are hearing or reading.  In fact, I see no reason not to transfer the second conclusion of the Hart and Risley study to schools of older children, too, with only slight modifications. As children get older, we need to add reading to our model, since as we get older reading is essential for experiencing high volumes of sophisticated language, and the quality of the input may become more important, since you do want them to hear or read words thast they don't actually know, but the quantity is still much more important than the Edweek article acknowledges.  So I would extrapolate thus:

• The most important aspect to evaluate in child-care settings for older children (i.e., schools) is the amount of sophisticated language actually experienced by the children, whether from a caregiver (i.e. teacher) or by reading.

Of course, I suspect reading is probably more important than teacher-talk. The Hart and Risley study focused on talk among families, which is primarily one-on-one, and the best way to simulate that in a classroom with a student-teacher ratio of at least 20:1 is by having each child reading a book. So I'll conclude where I always do, with another form of my usual hypothesis:

• The most important aspect to evaluate in child-care settings for older children (i.e., schools) is the amount of reading actually going on.

One third of my ninth grade class reports never finishing a book in middle school

I do not want to be one of those teachers who says, "My students never read a book until I inspired them, and now they love reading!"  I don't think I'm particularly inspiring, and I know that many of my students are never going to LOVE reading.  Nevertheless, I am going to report a conversation my students and I had in one of my ninth grade classes yesterday.

After my ninth graders read their free-choice books for 30 minutes (yesterday was a 70-minute block), I asked them to discuss with a neighbor how the reading in class was going, how it compared with reading at home, and when they had first started to enjoy reading.  After a couple of minutes I let them share out if they wanted to. The sharing led to a pretty interesting ten-minute discussion of reading in general, and for the first time in this class a number of kids talked openly about how little they had read for much of their lives.

First it came out that about half of the students much preferred reading in school to reading at home, because in school there weren't nearly as many distractions.  Of course, the other half of the students preferred reading at home for exactly the same reason!

Then about six kids talked about how and why they had first started to read.  Every story had the same structure: "Until I was in __th grade, I hated reading.  It was hard for me, I was bad at it, and I hated it.  Then in ___the grade I read _________, and that book made me like reading.  Now I still don't like reading just anything, but if I get a book I like, I'll read right through it."  The grade at which these epiphanies occurred varied, but for every one of the six kids who talked, the epiphany had happened in fifth grade or later.  Three of the kids said they had never enjoyed reading at all until this year--one of them after taking a summer literacy class that did a lot of in-class independent reading and two of them after finding books they liked in the first month of school in my class..

One of those kids, who said he had never really enjoyed a book until he read John Green's Paper Towns (he's now in the middle of The Fault in Our Stars  and liking it less), said that in fact he had, during the two years he spent in middle school (he went to BB&N), never finished a whole book.  I was surprised, and someone else said, "Me too."  I pressed them, but they asserted that this was true.  I heard other rumblings, so I said, Okay, raise your hand if you didn't finish a single whole book in middle school.  A third of the class raised their hands.

Could they possibly be telling the truth?  I told this story to a few of my colleagues, and one of them couldn't believe it.  I myself think it's plausible.  They didn't say they hadn't ever read a book, only that over those two years they had never finished a book.  If the class is structured in a traditional way, with a lot of emphasis on whole-class texts, and if teachers don't pay close attention to what kids are reading independently, with a significant amount done in class, then it is pretty easy for students to get away without reading much.

Again, I am not telling this story because I think that trying to create a culture of reading is going to make these kids love reading.  Many of them will probably still not like it very much.  But I do think there is a lot of room for improvement if a third of the students in that class can have gotten through the last two years without finishing a single book.  To change that all you have to do is give them quiet time and books to read.

Beyond the issue of whether students are reading or not, there lies another, deeper issue: sometimes I'm not even sure that having kids read more is going to help them that much.  That's why the question that a colleague of mine recently asked--How do we measure the effects of what we're doing?--is so haunting.  Even if our students read five times as much this year as last year, and even if it makes a real difference to them, how will we know?

I'll try to hold off on worrying that until another time.  For now, I'm just going to be happy that most of my students seem to be enjoying the reading they're doing in class.