Schools Need a Strong Reading Culture to Conquer the Decline in Reading Achievement

Declining reading achievement is more than a school matter and more than a COVID-19 matter, Mark Bauerlein writes. Michael Loccisano/Getty Images

Commentary

The latest National Center for Education Statistics (NAEP) scores came out last month. Once again, results for reading were disappointing. However, the most significant takeaway from them may not be the scores themselves, but the general reaction to them.

Declines for fourth- and eighth-graders were marked, to be sure, and commentators and journalists took note of the trend with some alarm and dismay.

“Hopes for a post-COVID academic recovery were dashed Wednesday morning,” one news story at the74million.org stated. The hopes stemmed from the two-year distance we have come from the days when school doors were closed and kids kept at home. Hence, 2024 should have improved on scores in 2022, when the pandemic was thought to have done the worst damage to instruction. Now we see the truth: Two years of return to the classroom haven’t stopped the slide.

Perhaps that’s why one senses in the responses to the news a tone of exhaustion and helplessness. You can hear it in the suggestion of an attitude underlying the comments, one of “Boy, it’s really getting bad.” People worry, but don’t seem to know what to do, to have any answers. As school achievement continues to dive, more and more educators and school watchers speak of progress with ever less confidence.

It’s hard to be optimistic, one must admit. Reading scores for 12th-graders (whose scores count a lot more than do those for fourth- and eighth-graders) have been pretty much flat for decades. The absence of progress has persisted in spite of the many billions (!) of dollars that the No Child Left Behind law poured into school districts, most of it to low-income areas. More money poured in during the pandemic, fully $190 billion in emergency aid to help schools cope with the lockdowns.

Two years on, in 2024, fourth-graders dropped two points from 2022, and so did eighth-graders. How could scores worsen after the catastrophe of 2020 to 2022, when kids stayed in their rooms and the gigantic experiment in remote learning was tried and failed? Perhaps the emergency funds prevented greater decline, but that’s hardly reason for praise.

Low-performing cohorts (the bottom 20 percent) showed the largest declines. That’s not surprising. An acquaintance who is an expert in education affairs recently described a typical classroom in a low-income, inner-city institution. The class has 30 or so kids, he told me, but six of them are usually absent. The ones who show up generally fall into three groups. According to my informant, five to seven kids sit in a semicircle at the front of the room, close to the teacher who stands at the whiteboard and goes over the day’s lesson. Those kids want to learn; the teacher doesn’t have to motivate them.

Another 12 or 15 students, the biggest group, pay scant attention and take no notes. They spend more time checking their phones and gabbing with classmates than they do following the teacher’s words. The teacher doesn’t give up on them, but knows better than to try to secure their consistent concentration. That would be a futile endeavor.

The remaining half-dozen drift in and out of the room: getting a drink, going to the bathroom, heading to another room for special instruction or meetings, or just wandering. Once again, the teacher doesn’t exert much authority over them. It’s a losing effort.

The breakdown explains why so few kids in Milwaukee, Baltimore, etc., fail to reach “Proficiency” on the NAEP exams. These kids do less reading in school, and they do less reading on their own, too. Along with administering and reporting on tests, NAEP does “Long-Term Trends” reports that ask students about personal habits as well as school experiences. In the most recent one, nearly one-third of 13-year-olds said they “never or hardly ever” did any reading “on their own time.” Another 16 percent read for fun but only “a few times a year,” while 17 percent read “once or twice a month.”

In sum, for two-thirds of U.S. youth, leisure reading is virtually a nonexistent activity. Only one in seven kids (14 percent) read “almost every day,” be it the “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” series, “Nancy Drew,” “Harry Potter,” or any other young adult diversion. The contrast with 2012 is remarkable, when the rate was slightly more than one in four kids (27 percent). The falloff since then has been precipitous.

This is to say that declining reading achievement is more than a school matter and more than a COVID-19 matter. Scores depend on the reading habits kids have developed outside of school as well as they do on the pedagogy and curriculum of English Language Arts classrooms. Math scores are an all-school thing—arithmetic is not a leisure practice. Kids don’t do it for fun, just as parents don’t do math with toddlers at night the way they read “Goodnight Moon” and “Busy, Busy Town” with them at night.

With reading-as-home-entertainment disappearing from the lives of more and more young Americans, we should expect further slips and slides in school achievement in reading. This, I suspect, is why so many educators live and work in quiet despair. Trying to teach reading against the background of a youth culture of nonreading puts teachers in a bind. They love books and the kids don’t. They can’t give up, though; they have to keep trying.

Increasingly, schools are going to have to create a reading culture of their own within the building, to fill minutes during the day with fun reading to complement the homework reading. We can’t expect English teachers to solve this alone.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.