Your Kids Aren't Learning: Reading Is No Longer Required in School

The system creates an incentive doom loop that teaches kids reading is unnecessary.

This series explores the most compelling reasons you have to declare independence from the peculiar institution of American schooling and make significant life changes to ensure your kids get a real education, something public schools no longer provide, if they ever did. These essays are based on my observations and thousands of conversations with students aged 13-18 and their families over the span of my 20-year career teaching in state-run schools in California.

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Ask yourself: when was the last time you saw your kid reading to prepare for the next day’s lessons at school?

Yeah, that’s what I thought. I’m sorry.

California schools are required by law to make all required texts available to all students in class and at home. Textbooks are pre-loaded onto iPads and Chromebooks in schools with 1:1 device policies. Given that the ability to pay focused attention to a complex text is the most important skill for any serious student, why aren’t we seeing kids reading chunks of nonfiction text or novels of the Western canon anymore?

Teachers have learned that holding kids accountable for reading in the digital age is difficult, if not actively discouraged by administration.

Richard Feynman taught us the way to assess understanding ages ago. I detailed his process here for parents. (If you’ve got a middle-schooler or teenager and you’re thinking about homeschooling, the Feynman test should be your go-to; you don’t need multiple-choice tests.)

But at the K12 level, holding students accountable for reading at home has two prerequisites and multiple complications.

First, a teacher must be able to craft a question that isn’t easy to Google, so it can’t be something commonly used, sold on TeachersPayTeachers, or sourced from a teacher’s manual or curriculum guide.

We immediately run into trouble because teachers aren’t content experts, as I detailed in my last post. In order to accurately assess whether or not students comprehend what they read, teachers must have the depth of knowledge to write test questions that require insight and/or the ability to apply the content/skill. Yes, you can ask for a simple summary of assigned reading, but the kids in first period will have texted your prompt to the kids in second before you can say “Bob’s your uncle”. Second period kids will Google the SparkNotes/Khan Academy summary before class. (I’ll detail the cram-and-forget process “successful” students employ in public school later.)

The second prerequisite is that teachers be willing to read what students write, and that is time-consuming.

Yes, you’re right: reading student work is one of a teacher’s primary duties. It’s one of only a few ways — regardless of content area — she can support student literacy. Offering timely criticism on the quality of student understanding also gives her feedback on her work. But who’s going to make her do all that grading?

Despite talking a good game about high quality instruction, Principals don’t care what’s happening in a classroom as long as the kids in it are under control, not too many are failing, and the parents don’t call the front office. Given that reality, do you really think an administrator will check to see whether teachers are honestly grading 150+ written responses? Teachers who are known to be poor performers remain in place year after year, hundreds of students sacrificed to them annually like virgins to an active volcano. Hell, they won’t remove teachers for years of egregious offenses against children. Would a principal even want a teacher to grade ethically, given his own powerful incentives to maximize pass rates by asking all faculty to observe equitable grading practices?

Teachers might be poorly educated, but they know how to play the school game. At this point, if they assign writing at all, they’re going to default to inflated marks so parents, the kids, counseling, and administration have no reason to complain. I know plenty of teachers who grade essays by reading the thesis statement and one body paragraph only, then circle boxes on an ambiguously-worded district-approved rubric to provide feedback, all of which amounts to a hill of beans to kids who can’t parse the scoring sheet. In all of my last three districts, the maximum number of papers assigned in a typical college prep class was one per quarter; sometimes not even that. And — except for a few sections of AP history — papers were ONLY assigned in English classes.

But there’s another major disincentive, though nobody wants to acknowledge it. What does a teacher do when a large proportion of students fail written tests because they can’t read anywhere near grade level? Things were bad in 2019. Now, following school closures where kids of all ages were thrown onto devices for most school hours, things are much worse.

If you haven’t already, give Emily Hanford’s Sold a Story podcast series a listen. She details why and how elementary schools across our country are failing to teach American kids to read well, if at all. Obviously, this adds fuel to the “why bother assigning reading?” holocaust in middle and high schools. Teachers in upper grades have learned over time that many students don’t read well so they won’t read at home. Holding kids accountable for reading will have a serious downward effect on grades. A teacher knows this not only puts her on administration’s radar, but also makes her vulnerable to parents who believe consistent attendance and general compliance is all that should be needed for their child to “earn” an A and remain on the yellow-brick road to a university.

Have you ever asked your child if he likes reading? If you haven’t, you’re right to fear his answer.

I have a working theory that the people “reimagining” public education in this country want to turn the plebs into firemen, a la Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. They want your kid to hate reading, and they’ve developed a highly effective strategy to that end.

First, they eschew the process that worked for hundreds of years to teach hundreds of millions of people to read: phonemic awareness, then direct instruction in ​phonics, then focused practice to build ​fluency, then work to grow the child’s lexicon which builds reading comprehension​ overall. Instead of this tried and true method, John Dewey (don’t get me started) decided to move the education establishment to “whole word” reading instruction. The Progressives, who controlled education from the early twentieth century on, ran with it. Unfortunately, whole word instruction doesn’t work for a significant proportion of children. Over one-third of fourth graders aren’t competent in reading, and more than half of high school graduates aren’t proficient readers either. The inability to read fluently poses serious long-term economic and social consequences to millions of Americans. According to the Correctional Education Association and other statistical data, the illiteracy rate of adult prison inmates is estimated at 75 percent.

The traditional method of teaching using phonics is much more laborious than the three-cuing strategy used in “whole word” classrooms; the Teacher’s Union was instrumental in its abandonment in Oakland because, in one teacher’s words, the curriculum is “dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do.”

Only 19% of black kids in Oakland read proficiently.

Changes in curriculum and instruction move at what would charitably be called a glacial pace. Whole word, current issues-driven reading “experiences” still rule the day despite the fact that phonics-based instruction has better results across the spectrum of learners. Kids are left guessing, using pictures and the first letters of words to suss out language they don’t recognize and can’t sound out.

Around the 4th grade, chapter books replace picture books in classroom libraries. Maturing kids gravitate away from stories and characters they once loved. They recognize they should be beyond those titles developmentally, but many are unable to read books written for children their age.

The class moves on. Teachers read aloud to kids in 4th and 5th grade but begin to notice some students aren’t reading along. They are disengaged or act out during quiet reading time. They never choose to read a book when they have free time.

Teachers are prone to chalk it up to the rise of devices. Sure, devices are partially to blame, filling the void for bored kids. Then again, what if kids are gravitating to YouTube and TikTok and Insta not just for the dopamine, but because they lack the ability to access the great stories? Is it possible that the rise of “YouTuber” as the dominant dream career is a reaction to 100 years of “whole word” reading instruction? Every other prestigious, high-paying, high-visibility career seems to require an awful lot of focused attention to text.

In middle school, the combination of atrocious reading instruction in elementary grades, the forced reading of particular books — many of which now have a clear political agenda and are poorly written to boot — and teachers who aren’t experts in the teaching of literature or the novels themselves, turn reticent readers into reading refusers, i.e. kids who have learned to hate reading because they’re not very good at it.

In high school, the same issues around reading instruction and curriculum exist. Add in Equitable Grading practices and you deliver the coup de grace to reading. Kids who can’t read have no reason to get better at it if the onus is on teachers to control grades for systemic inequities and the legacy of racism. If schools fail to teach students to read, especially children of color, wouldn’t the modern teacher see the act of asking kids to read as problematic?

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There’s also a huge disconnect about what reading is. Conscientious students dutifully propel their eyeballs across and down the page, but often finish a text without understanding the meaning built from connected words, sentences, and paragraphs. They honestly believe they did their homework, but don’t come away with even an initial understanding of the overall message of the text.

I’ve surveyed thousands of kids informally with this simple question: “Have you ever gotten to the end of the page and not had any idea what you just read?”

They all laugh and raise their hands.

Too few classes provide incentive for students to assess their comprehension and, when they judge it weak, go back and read again. Kids know if the reading is checked at all, it will be checked via worksheet. “Doing the reading” means getting from the first assigned page to the last, regardless of understanding. Diligent students who “do the reading” also know they won’t likely be tested on it. Test questions come from the slide deck lecture notes they copied off the screen. Yes, even in English classrooms.

Assigning old-school post-reading comprehension questions and worksheets is pointless if they’re Google-able. Kids are wise to the fact that they can copy-paste a worksheet question right into Google’s query box and, more often than not, all the answers for the entire worksheet will pop up. If it’s a commonly-read book, any number of “homework help” sites offer exactly the information the teacher wants a kid to write down. A student can also minimize her workload if a friend is willing to share her completed assignment; the File > Make a Copy procedure is a winning workflow in the digitalized classroom.

If a teacher uses reading comprehension questions, she needs to be in the room while students talk through the questions and record their answers on paper. If not, she won’t get an accurate view of student understanding. (Of course, this also assumes she’ll actually read their answers and not just glance at the sheet, see it filled out, and award the student full credit.) The harsh reality is that the 1:1 device classroom and Google Suite for Education make the in-class, hand-written, focused essay the best method of formative assessment, in my opinion.

The body of evidence (including an avalanche of teacher anecdotes) that digital workflows harm student learning grows daily. Teachers lack proper incentive to do the work necessary to hold students accountable for reading to learn. So why assign reading in the first place? Kids will often cheat the reading with SparkNotes and Khan Academy summaries or by copying another kid’s work. The only way to ensure they don’t is to assign in-class writing, which places a large after-school workload on a teacher’s shoulders AND will likely result in low grades (at least at first) which makes the teacher look bad.

As a result, teachers in most core content classes rely on in-class presentations (sometimes teacher lecture, but more and more often YouTube vids) to deliver information, backed up by digital comprehension and review assignments they hope at least some students will do without Siri or Alexa. A teacher will tell herself and her students that if they cheat, they’re really only cheating themselves.

This, of course, is true. In the bad old days before smart phones, kids would fail exams if they didn’t complete the practice and review provided by reading and related homework assignments. That is no longer the case. Students have seen unlimited test retakes offered across enough core classes that they expect to be given as many attempts as they need to pass. This is yet another of the unintended — but very real — consequences of Equitable Grading practices.

This leads to a big question, one which most K12 teachers and administrators don’t give one whit about: how does anyone ever see, let alone master the great nuances of English, History, and Science without reading within the discipline?

By making allowances for children who won’t/can’t read, and by teaching them through system-wide policies that they don’t need to read in order to pass courses, students never learn that reading is the keystone of abiding understanding, clear thinking, and effective problem-solving. They never become accustomed to standard operating procedure in the most effective, i.e. rigorous, classrooms:

1. Focused reading, then

2. Attendance in class (physical and mental) where lecture and questioning build additional neural hooks to help students recall information from reading and tie it to new information delivered by the teacher;

3. At-home study of notes and any review work, usually based on that initial reading;

4. Re-reading of key points from assigned reading or reviewing annotations of the text along with portions of the text itself; and, finally

5. Applying knowledge via the Feynman test, essay exams, lab reports, etc.

This process cements learning and makes a student competent in a subject. Any other shortcuts simply won’t do. When all of the above is done well, kids know their stuff. Too often though, the steps to understanding are skipped, the work of teaching short-changed, and the labor of learning dismissed — the adults in the system avoid it for two self-reinforcing reasons: they don’t want to do the work and they believe too many kids would fail, i.e., be harmed.

Projects may engage kids temporarily, cram-and-forget studying may result in satisfactory test scores, Socratic Seminars may be interesting (but will not deepen understanding if the kids haven’t read well), but in the long-run, the information presented will be lost.

None of it was ever learned in the first place.

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The Dissident Teacher is an actual classroom teacher, and the stories shared by DT here are true. Ask any California kid in a PreK-12 California public school; he’ll tell you.