Students don’t like to read. These rarely discussed reasons may explain why.
Kindergarten is no longer a garden.
Kindergartners are pressured to read. Before NCLB, over twenty years ago, this was unheard of and still makes no sense. Formal reading instruction once began in first grade.
Children in the not-too-distant past were given time to enjoy the start of formal schooling, play and learned how to socialize with other children and be creative.
Some children will show up to kindergarten reading, but this doesn’t mean every child will be ready, or that they’re deficient if it takes longer.
When children get off to a rocky start in kindergarten without a sense of the joy reading can bring, why would they ever like it?
Third-grade doom and gloom: Read or else….
NCLB also made third-grade high stakes. Third grade used to be when children advanced at reading. Phonics was highlighted.
Now, children may be retained based on a test. Yet, they could still read and improve in fourth grade and beyond.
Most research shows that being held back is detrimental. Retention is connected to students dropping out of school.
Second graders become apprehensive about third grade. Even if third-graders pass the test, reading has become a worrisome endeavor to avoid.
Students with reading difficulties still need books.
Children with reading difficulties may need help sounding out letters and words and improving fluency. Attention problems may also make it difficult to concentrate.
Still, students need opportunities to read or look at books. Teachers, librarians, and parents can help with this.
The more students practice and connect what they learn to the reading material they like, the more they’ll want to read.
But if students do little else but drill and focus on reading problems, why would they ever like to read?
No school library? Where’s a book to read?
Book bans currently draw negative attention to school libraries, but many poor schools closed libraries and let go of librarians years ago.
If schools have a well-funded library with reading resources (books, magazines, comics, graphic novels, etc.) students will be encouraged. Students with good school libraries do well on tests.
With no school library, and unreasonable book restrictions, reading won’t look like a priority. Without access to reading material how will students read even if they want to?
Technology: Too much time is easily wasted.
Education Week noted students spend 7 to 10 hours using online media (Klein, 2022).
There’s much to learn with technology, but too much time facing a screen steals time from reading books.
It starts early. How often do parents hand books to young children for soothing, when they’re busy or when a child needs to quiet down?
It might seem easier to give a child an iPad or iPhone to look at, but it doesn’t mean students will miraculously turn to reading books later.
Choice? Who gets to pick a book they like?
Children are often bombarded with leveled books, or decodables, instructional and boring. Or they’re always assigned book reports.
Middle and high school students leave school for the summer with a long list of books they must read.
Students need some freedom to choose books they like and they should be able to choose nonfiction or fiction.
If children never get to explore and choose books they want to read, why would they care about reading?
Analyzing reading makes it mechanical and boring.
Author Katharine Marsh described how dull mechanical instruction of reading has become with Common Core State Standards.
When children are forced to analyze everything they read, books become a chore.
Close reading is literary analysis usually designated for college students but now implemented in K-12. Young students might be asked to consider text complexity, exemplars, frontloading, scaffolding, details, vocabulary, the author’s purpose, opinion and intertextual questions, key details, opinions, arguments, and intertextual connections (Fisher & Fry, 2012).
Here’s a post to demonstrate how a child could become frustrated with too much analyzing. Why would reading be enjoyable?
Rewards and punishment give mixed messages about reading.
Some schools reward students for reading, unknowingly making reading a chore and embarrassing children who may be reading slower.
Reading Logs (timed reading), ability grouping, and forcing students to read out loud in class could be seen as punishment.
Some schools let students do stunts on teachers or administrators if they read or do well on a test (sliming and duct-taping adults to the wall come to mind). This is like hazing.
Reading is a joyful activity, and it shouldn’t depend on rewards or gimmicks that disgrace students and adults.
High-stakes standardized testing never ends.
High-stakes standardized tests are one-size-fits-all expectations. If a child learns to read slower, they may appear to be failing when they simply needed more time.
For years parents and educators have fought against high-stakes testing and they’ve been ignored.
For example, in 2012, there were concerns about kindergartners getting repeatedly tested, like in Chicago. Now, who’s questioning early assessment and all the testing students must undergo?
If students do poorly on tests, or they’re bored, they could feel bad as early as kindergarten about reading. They may never want to read.
The above are suggestions to reflect upon while wondering why young people don’t care to read.
References
Marsh, K. (2023, March 22) Why kids aren’t falling in love with reading. The Atlantic. Accessed at https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2023/03/children-reading-books-english-middle-grade/673457/
Klein, A. (2022, March 28). The real reasons kids aren’t reading anymore. Education Week. Accessed at https://www.edweek.org/leadership/the-real-reasons-kids-arent-reading-more/2022/03
Fisher, Douglas & Nancy Frey. “Close reading in elementary schools.” The Reading Teacher. 66(3). November 2012.
Jeff Scott Kass says
Excellent point here, but I suspect technology plays an even larger role than you suggest. It’s not just phones, though it is phones, but it’s also ear buds, air pods, whatever the fish hook things are that extend from so many heads. For many young people, these appendages have become articles of clothing. They don them first thing in the morning and (maybe) take them out when they go to sleep at night. No one’s reading for pleasure when they already have something else pumped into their head. Or, if they are reading while ear-budding, as many high school kids do, then they’re likely reading something for school that they don’t care about and thus are comprehending very little, thus reenforcing the idea they’re lousy readers when they do poorly on a test or quiz because they didn’t retain what they barely paid attention to while reading. The pandemic worsened this issue because while during Zoom school many students developed the habit of tuning out of class and into phone world. I don’t know how this problem is solved. It’s awful.
Nancy Bailey says
Excellent points! Thank you, Jeff. The points made in this post are just a snapshot.
Adele Abrahamse Roof says
Jeff implied something here that I would like to bring more to the foreground. Decades ago, when I had a little one, I read a book called “The Plug-In Drug” by Marie Winn. As a result, I greatly limited the television my four year-old could watch. Today, it’s not just television, but phones, I pads, etc. It’s like double or triple dosing on all these technological “advances.” My point is that reading can give one some excitement, insight, riveting stories, etc. but a printed page doesn’t seem able to compete with the lure of both audio and visual stimulation. With a book, the reader has to do some work to visualize what’s happening. Now, with all that aforementioned media, you don’t even have to visualize anymore. It’s all done for you. To my way of thinking, something very nurturing and meaningful has been lost.
Nancy Bailey says
Excellent points. Thank you, Adele!
Paul Bonner says
Perhaps another to add to your list is that this hyper focus on reading sets the bar for intellectual development too low. I learn best through experience and auditory communication. I read a great deal as well. But my curiosity, creativity, and intellectual passions are driven when I am exposed by things that interest me. My wife and I encouraged our children to read through stories that interested them. When my oldest entered middle school she was in Honors and, later, AP courses. Around her tenth grade year I noticed that she no longer read books for pleasure. The demands of quantity focused curriculum removed the joy of reading. We have identified reading as literacy when in fact it is only a part of being literate. This three R mantra reduces school activity to task rather than inquiry. We begin this with Kindergarten now transformed to kinder task and end the K-12 experience with activities that overwhelm intellectual acuity. Life is short. Why do we insist on making it drudgery?
Nancy Bailey says
Great point, Paul. It’s great to determine the interests of children and lead them to the books that provide them with the information they seek.
Adele Abrahamse Roof says
This is a a great post that I will send on to my daughter who has a rising first grader. I’m sorry the direction that primary education seems to be taking these days.
Nancy Bailey says
Thanks, Adele. It doesn’t have to be that way as you know.
Phyllis Doerr says
Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter what articles are written, what research says, or the fact that ALL learning through play has been robbed from kindergarten students, In a typical public school, there is no more creativity, no free play or choice time, no learning and exploring with all of the senses. Instead, K is all academics and paper-based work. And a tragically hard, persistent push to force children to read before they are ready.
As far as reversing this sad, damaging and counterproductive trend, no one is listening, and no one has listened for the 13 years that I have been in education.
No, group or organization, no child development specialist, no persuasive article, including lots of data on the topic has been effective in making one iota of change. It’s going in the other direction.
And in my elementary school, the library has been closed for four years, and it will not be reopened because we don’t have space for it.
Game over.
Nancy Bailey says
Coming up to 10 years of blogging on school reform issues, Phyllis. And I understand and share with you your frustration. It’s hard to believe an elementary school could close the library when there’s such supposed interest in reading. But there it is. Thank you for showing us the reality.
Adele Abrahamse Roof says
Phyllis, you make some excellent points, and some of them are why I chose to homeschool my young daughter for many years until she went off to high school. I realize that not everyone has the option to home school for six years, that I had,, all because of a supportive husband.
Brian says
I blame school. Starts too early in life, takes too much of each day, goes on for many more years than necessary, and instruction is far too indirect and amorphous. The Finns use explicit, direct instruction – notably synthetic phonics – during a relatively short school day. Their results speak for themselves.
Nancy Bailey says
How do you expect the greater population of children to learn? Schools have been manipulated by those who know little about child development for years because there’s an attempt to monetize them. When they’re gone, people will pay for them.
The Finns have a simple syllabic structure compared to ours. They also emphasize comprehension, and most 7-year-olds know how to read when they start school
Rick says
The cumulative effect of cell phone/internet/social media use (addiction) has shortened the attention spans of all those who are hooked on the endless variety and instantaneous availability of information, entertainment, and personal communication. As a result, too many students simply lack the patience required to make reading a pleasurable or meaningful activity – especially when assigned readings are inherently uninteresting or pointless. It’s really hard to like an activity that takes hours of concentration when the coin of the information realm is the nanosecond.
Nancy Bailey says
I agree. Thanks, Rick.
Brian says
Okay, I see. Let’s unpack this.
So Finns don’t learn to read using synthetic phonics. Instead, they learn to read…. before they get to school? Okay.
But then, when they do get to school, they do synthetic phonics… for fun? But they totally don’t need it because they already know how to read?
And even if Finns were learning how to read using synthetic phonics, which they’re totally not because they already know how to read and are learning reading comprehension instead, we can’t learn from the Finns because it’s easier to learn to read Finnish using synthetic phonics than it is with English so it’s not a fair comparison?
This is funny because while they’re not learning how to read using synthetic phonics in Finland it would seem to be a good way to learn to read in Finnish, which makes it even stranger that they would teach synthetic phonics to Finnish kids even after they’d learned to read and they no longer need it.
I think I get what you’re doing, you don’t want to concede any ground because you don’t want anyone to be able to say – aha, synthetic phonics is useful, maybe even necessary, because you’re afraid that this will encourage us to commit to synthetic phonics more than the Finns do? – but in so doing you paint yourself into an odd corner.
Nancy Bailey says
Here’s an explanation and I don’t disagree with how Finland does education. There’s a lot of play, which Americans have removed from the classroom. Some schools have little if any recess which is unbelievable.
The use of the term synthetic phonics sometimes means a focus on phonics minus picture books which I would not agree with. I know that picture books can be critical to helping a child learn to read and to like reading. I hope I’ve made myself clearer.
https://www.cypnow.co.uk/best-practice/article/supporting-reading-literacy-finland#:~:text=At%20pre%2Dschool%20level%20the,reading%20comprehension%20strategies%20are%20introduced.
Brian says
“synthetic phonics sometimes means a focus on phonics minus picture books”
That’s interesting. Can you point to a classroom teacher who follows this practice? A pundit who advocates for getting rid of picture books?
Is this grounded in what someone has said, or is doing? Or is it an impression?
Nancy Bailey says
There are different phonics approaches and synthetic phonics is one. It focuses on sounds and decoding picture books but there’s concern that this limits the enjoyable material children get to read. https://www.nurseryworld.co.uk/news/article/synthetic-phonics-damages-children-s-love-of-reading
You seem to think I’m anti-phonics, which I am not. I do believe that some children need more phonics, and I worry that children in preschool and kindergarten are being drilled on sounds before they’ve had a chance to understand that reading is enjoyable.
The pressure for young children to read is a concern. For over 20 years this change in kindergarten standards has changed the dynamics of early childhood learning. This pressure for kindergartners to read, being forced to sit and listen to sounds, is not backed by research.
The scandalous Reading First did show that children who focused on phonics early understood sounds but were not good at comprehension.
Brian says
Nope, trying to understand what the arguments are here.
One camp argues that:
1) teaching kids to guess at words isn’t constructive, even harmful – that’s a clear, understandable assertion.
2) They then are able to point to lots of concrete examples of this.
So, maybe they premise – that teaching kids to guess isn’t a problem – is wrong, but I think they have evidence that this happens.
Another camp argues that
1) picture books are helpful, and that denying kids picture books is harmful – that’s a clear, understandable assertion.
2) But I can’t find any examples of concrete examples of this.
I need to be convinced of the first camp’s premise, that guessing is generally a harmful practice, but I don’t need to be convinced this is a common practice. I believe they have the goods there.
Conversely, exposing kids to picture books seems helpful, and denying them seems harmful – maybe I’m wrong, but seems like an easy case to make.
But I’m struggling to find evidence this is a real-world practice.
See what I mean?
I’ll keep an eye out for the practice, but it feels something like arguing “my oponents want lower taxes, well we can all agree painting ourselves green is ridiculous, and those who are arguing for lower taxes often paint themselves green>
It’s an interesting observation, if there are examples of people painting themselves green, though it does not, in an of itself, prove that lower taxes are a bad idea, it does mean all the assertions of those painting themselves green should be examined carefully.
But if there aren’t a lot of people advocating lower taxes painting themselves green it doesn’t seem like it advances the discussion.
So it makes sense, in that context, to ask for examples of people who are, in practice, painting themselves green.
Similarly, know of anyone who bans picture books in their classrooms? Or who advocates that teachers ban picture books?
Thanks
Nancy Bailey says
I think you’re referring to the post about SoR folks not being on board for picture books. I had many tell me on Twitter they used them and liked them. Others said the pictures were a concern (likely due to 3-cueing negativity). A group emphasized decoding picture books, or that read alouds are fine but not letting children who can’t read yet look at them on their own. Many insisted that picture books don’t teach children how to read.
So, when the SoR advocates mention picture books there are a lot of thoughts about them, but on social media one rarely if ever sees an article talking about structured literacy including picture books. Since I wrote that post, I’ve seen nothing about them on Twitter or in articles, so the importance of them is rather pushed aside.
I said something similar and revived it recently about school libraries. Many say Yes we love our school libraries, but they don’t usually discuss the terrible loss of school libraries in the country that I can see, that is until it is mentioned to them.
Michael says
Excellent essay; towards the subject, one could note:
a) NAEP average reading proficiency scores have increased over the last few decades, although gaps persist, largely due to societal racism – this indicates that our educators are more effective than as suggested by those that speak of doom and gloom, and that much of our focus should be on broader issues like poverty and racism (a further note: chasing endless growth in test scores is a foolish endeavor)
b) an over emphasis on a wage slavery based economy has severely limited the ability of parents to focus on their children (recently we achieved the largest single year drop in child poverty just by an expansion of the Child Tax Credit, however, the expansion was later reversed)
c) books are poorly written
Nancy Bailey says
Thank you, Michael. This is interesting. There’s been much discussion about proficiency lately and I think your statement covers it well. I need to spend some time reading about that because I’ve never believed the crisis analogy surrounding reading. I worry about the pushdown of reading, and children with disabilities lost in inclusion classrooms that have large class sizes.
Your statement about wages also sounds sadly legitimate.
I’m not exactly sure what you mean by books are poorly written. I worry more about ed-tech, but I will not challenge you.
Thank you for your thoughtful comment. I appreciate it. I hope others will too.