I'm Manny, I'm Noah.
This is Devin and this is no such thing.
The show where we settle art, arguments and yours by actually doing the research. In this episode, kids aren't reading anymore. Who cares, No, There's no no such thing, no such thing, no such thank.
Such, thank.
Such thank.
So.
As we know, there have been many stories reports about the death of reading.
The latest version of the Nation's report Card shows America's high school seniors have the worst math and reading scores in more than two decades.
Just forty percent of fourth graders are working below what's considered a basic reading level for their age.
Nearly a third of seniors did not have the basic reading skills needed to find the details in a given text to understand its meaning.
Our nation's report card is a business right now.
So one that I'll highlight for now is from the Atlantic magazine titled America is sliding toward illiteracy. So this is a quote from the article. By some measures, American students have regressed to a level not seen in twenty
five years or more. Test scores from NAEP, short for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, show that thirty three percent of eighth graders are reading at a level that is below basic, meaning that they struggle to follow the order of events in a passage or to even summarize its main idea. That is the highest share of students unable to meaningfully read since nineteen ninety two. Among fourth graders, forty percent are below basic in reading, the highest share
since two thousand. The bottom tenth of thirteen year olds, according to naep's long term trend data, are hitting lows in reading and math scores not seen since those tests began in nineteen seventy one and nineteen seventy eight, respectively. They go through a bunch of different theories of why is it school spending is lower? No, school spending has increased from twenty twelve to twenty twenty two, from fourteen thousand per student to sixteen thousand adjusted for inflation. Okay,
so that's not the culprit. People look at COVID. There was a dip, but not as pronounced as you would think, and it's kind of numbers have basically leveled out, so it's not like you could totally blame that. Then people talk about smartphones and attention and there's different things. Then there's also stuff about schools teaching kids excerpts instead of full books because no one's going to pay attention to doing that.
Oh my god.
A disturbing new report on what kids are reading, or rather not reading, in school the New York Times with this headline, kids rarely read whole books anymore, even in English class.
If four books was a typical number of books to be experiencing in high school English language arts, now we're seeing many schools reporting that kids are experiencing only one even two books in high school in LA. So something's going amiss.
Have you guys seen this? People not reading as far as among peers and also any younger people you might be around.
Yeah, I really noticed this with my brother, he's in high school now, he's in a senior year of high school. We were talking. This is a year or two ago. It was summer and I was saying, what books do you have to read this summer?
Yeah?
He said, what do you mean, what books do I have to read this summer? I was like, don't you get like books assigned from school summer reading?
Yeah?
Everybody gets your summer reading from school.
Yeah, we would get like two I think it was like two books, you know, everybody would wait till last minute to do it. Yeah, and you may have to spark no, half the book whatever.
But oh yeah, you're not a book you were supposed to read.
Yeah, you had a book that was assigned to you that you were supposed to read. And said, we don't get summer reading. I was like, okay, is that a new thing. Have you ever gotten some reading? He's like, no, we've never gotten some reading. So I was like, okay, do you read books during school? It's like, yeah, sometimes we're reading class. I was like, do they give you
books to read on your own? He said no, And I was like, okay, this is a high school who is not being assigned a single book to read in its entirety.
That's crazy And you know, yeah.
Such a stark difference from when we were reading multiple books a yere yeah.
And look a lot of kids didn't read the books, but the expectation was that you were to read the.
Book and you were talking about the book in full, not like here's this one chapter m hm.
Yeah.
My feeling on it is that there's a bit of a reaction to kids don't have attention spans, they aren't reading anyway, Why would I waste time assigning them something they aren't going to read, so it's just sort of a waste of time. So now we're at the point where the bar has been lowered to the point where it's not even an expectation for them to read.
So then it's like, yeah, why would he read?
Like my brother does not like read books for fun, you know, and like at his age, I wasn't really either.
I was reading what I had to read for school everything.
Once in a while would pick up a book, but like I didn't really start reading for fun until like after college. Most of my reading during high school was because I had to read for school.
Yeah, do you think it's mainly like the attention span thing? And why do you think that has changed so much?
The obvious thing that sticks out to me is in terms of what's changed since we were in high school, is like phone usage. Yeah, just the amount of time you spend on your phone, the kind of things you see on your phone. Like when I was in high school, you could basically text someone on your phone and that was it. Like there wasn't that you didn't like watch videos or anything like that.
Yeah, you weren't on social media on your phone.
Yeah, you have to. You did you have to go home and get on your dial up internet to get on Facebook to send a Facebook status?
And you did? And I did, trust I.
Was on there. My cursory guess here is that it's got to be the attention span thing.
And it's not just kids right now. I think the adults are nobody reads.
Yeah, that's that's my thing. I think you can find surveys of how many books adults read too, obviously, but yeah, it's easier, especially when trying to get comprehensive data. My guess is to research obviously for schools and students. Yeah, and like it seems more important than like telling them forty year old, well.
There's the thing.
It's like, yeah, you learn the skill of doing it, and it's like yeah, even if you haven't read a book in you know, ten years, it's like, well you could read a book. I think it's different. That's just the same thing with me of like AI with younger people, it's like, yeah, okay, we know how to write a fifteen page you know, essay ourselves. So if I were using ad to do it now, not great, But like I've done the thing, so I know kind of what
goes into it. If you've never read a single book in your entire life, how does that impact how you interpret you? Like they're saying people can't read passages in
that simple information, right. I think a lot of times it gets spun into like an attention span thing, which is obviously yeah, that's part of it, But I think a bigger issue is, like people can comprehend very basic things a little bit, like you know, Facebook, TikTok, brain of just sort of like people can basically read headlines and that's it.
Yeah, So that kind of leads to another question is basically does this actually matter? Like what are the impacts of this sort of thing if people just largely don't read? Like what if tech and communication and the way we share information is moving into different mediums and formats, So whether that's you know, short form video like TikTok, or longer form media but audio only like a podcast, or just like shorter texts, like what if we just learn through tweets?
Yeah?
Yeah, what do you think are the pitfalls of that?
I just don't think we're a society right now it values reading in it in a real way.
That's it to me.
I think it's like there's no emphasis from anyone to actually spend time. I mean, and it's not even just about okay, focusing to read a novel or something. It's like everyone just used to these really short whether it's bullet points or TikTok's or something, and it's like, I'm sorry, there are a great TikTok creators out there talking about politics or whatever, but like you're not going to get a full story in even the best version of that.
It's an introduction.
It's a different thing. And I think people just take that as like, oh, I learned this from this TikTok and then yeah, they'll flash up the headlines and the bullet points with the statistics of whatever issue, but you're not getting any full story from that sure, And I think that's like slowly than just degrading how we process and like comprehend not only information, but it kind of flattens out any nuance you could have for anything. And
even a podcast. I think it's the same thing where it's like you can listen to a three hour long podcast about health or fitness or whatever or whatever any of the dumb things we do. I think this all the time, Like whatever we're doing a forty five minute episode in this you would be better served if you read five articles on this in that time. Yeah, well, like and actually read them.
The amount of information that we learned for the thing that we're like, this is too much information to put in the episode, right, Like when we're doing our own research, it's like we know a lot more information. And obviously then we're saying in the episodes themselves, so like you're saying, yeah, it is only scratching the surface. I think people now want It's like people just want other people to think for them. Yeah, that's why people like, oh, I'm watching the TikTok.
This guy's done all the research already.
He this is what he finds to be the most important things, and like that's what people love AI.
Right, It's like it just summarizes things for you.
You don't have to go through read the articles, pull out the information, go through the studies, you know, actually read the conclusions, look at the data. Someone has done all that work for you and you can learn it in ninety seconds yeah.
Yeah, yeah, or faster if you hit that.
Yeah yeah, you can speed it up.
So it's like I get and look, I think in some ways it's great, right, Like, I think we are at a time where if you want to learn stuff, you know, there's more information than ever. And for a lot of things, No, I don't want to read an article about, you know, some of these topics that I'm
watching TikTok's about. Sometimes the TikTok is enough information and it's not something I care that deeply about, and it's something like, oh, I'm a little bit informed about this thing and I would be not informed at all about it if there were not a TikTok about it because I wouldn't read an article.
Yeah, they're not totally useless, but yeah, it's just a different thing.
But it can't be everything.
Yeah, I mean I think it's just a big cultural thing, like it just not pushed whether we can talk about
school curriculum. But I just think like we don't really value people actually having real deep knowledge about things at all, because even just think about something silly where it's like like the performative mail meme really annoyed me because it's like it implies that like, of course, like yeah, of course there's gonna be some guy in college who like gets into some like Joan Didion so he can talk to the cute girl at the coffee shop, but like to act like any guy sitting at a park reading
is doing that not because he wants to read, but because he's trying to get laid. It's just like that could be part of it, but like it just like, well shows how the bar well it just show Yeah, it just shows. Like I think to me, it more says like anyone saying that can't ever comprehend wanting to spend their free time spend I think fifteen minutes reading a book. So instead they're like, oh, it would be a lot cool if he was staring at his phone
watching a dumb ass talk about nothing. It's like, yeah, like that's cool.
Projection.
We don't incentivize people to read. Yeah, like some I have run into this and I you know, I should be paying some more money. But like I'll be like, yeah, I want to read more about this thing and it's paywalld and I'm like all right, well never mind. Yeah, yeah, just the search for information stops there.
Yeah, that's that's a good point too, right. It's getting harder to access.
High quality good yeah, the good stuff information. So what I want to do is I want to find out is this literacy declined real? What does it mean? And what can we do to combat it if it actually is a real problem. I'm going to talk to a teacher first, then an author, and then a scholar who's looked into this data to find out what's actually going on. Well done, after the break, after the break, that's right, all.
Right, fellas. I need you to help me with a problem that I got. You know, usually we're the ones helping other people with their problems. But I'm about to go abroad and I'm going to watch Met games. Noah, How can I watch them?
That's a tough one.
Maybe get a really large telescope.
I don't think that's the best way to do it. Manny, Do you have any solutions on how I can watch Mets games?
You broad?
I think I've got a slightly more practical solution for you, Devin. If you use Nord VPN, you'll be able to change the location of your laptop's IP address and watch the content with no problem.
What about my privacy online? I'm worried someone's watching me.
First of all, no one is watching you, Noah. But in case someone was watching you, NordVPN provides you with privacy online, leaving no digital footprint by hiding your IP address. It's like wearing an invisibility cloak while you're surfing the web.
Sounds comfy, So, Manny, I've heard about these VPNs and how they're super slipt.
How do I make sure my internet is not throttling?
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Nst All right, we're back. We're talking about the alleged decline of reading. So the first couple interviews that I want to share are with people who are active in the children's literacy space.
I'm Kelsey Kladbalter.
I've been teaching English for This is my eleventh year now and I've taught in both Chicago and Minnesota.
I teach freshman and juniors right now.
Kelsey aka Miss C has a big following on TikTok, where she shares what it's like to teach kids today.
I have an idea that has been germinating for a while and it has taken hold of my brain, and it's called Nineties Classroom. The idea is simple, what if next year I do everything within my power to revive the spirit of the nineties in my classroom, to bring back the best parts of being a student and a teacher in that era.
Mind you, this was.
Pre phones, pre chromebooks, pre AI, pre state testing.
I think here's my vision.
Extremely limited technology, books everywhere, over stuffed couch in the corner. The room's bustling with human interaction. I feel like this is doable. I do have the affliction of believing everything's doable for me, but this one, especially nineties classroom, let's.
Do it.
So.
According to measures like the nation's report card, reading and math levels have declined to their lowest level in like over twenty years. Have you seen this in your experience teaching over the past few years.
Definitely, I mean I think just in like I said, my eleven year career, I've even noticed a decline. But I think the comparison most millennial teachers draw is just comparing our own educational experience where many of us were like very avid readers, and also there is a pretty high expectation for how much and how well we should be reading to what we're seeing now with high school age students. I've been at a couple schools where we were told, like, we do not teach novels.
We teach excerpts. We teach short texts.
Students can read full length novels that they choose to, but we don't teach novels. It's a waste of time being that is very frustrating because you can see how districts are directly contributing to the decline in students being able to engage with longer form texts.
Is it a shift because they want to just focus on maybe getting better test scores and they think that's an easy way to do it, or do they think it's more like the kids won't read longer books, so let's just not even try.
I think it's both. I think it's both for sure.
I think there's definitely the element of students will do better on standardized tests if we drill them with these short form passages and the questions they'll see on those tests. I think the instinct is understandable, But the consequences of years and years of a curriculum like this is really really negative.
So I mean the ironic thing too, is the scores aren't even going up.
Yeah, you spend more time.
Like you're doing all this to get what the kids will do for the test scores and then going down. So then I kind of asked about that, the kind of question about like, well, it's a modern world.
Maybe we're just.
Evolving in a different way and we don't need this skill as much.
Yeah, I think I've had I've been in a lot of arguments with people about this. I'm just recalling a conversation I had a few years ago at another school where I taught, and I was arguing with the math teacher who basically said, anything students need to learn they can learn from YouTube videos, Like anything you need to know how to do, you don't need to read a book.
You can watch YouTube video.
And my argument to that was just this idea of learning as a technical how to is really really different from how I conceive of learning right.
I think, like the beauty of a.
Long form text and being able to immerse yourself in a completely different perspective. It builds empathy, it broadens your worldview, It just does so many things that I think a YouTube video on how to fix a faucet is like not even in the same category of what we're talking about here. I guess the idea there is an idea that you should gain something tangible from reading, right, that you should leave with a piece of knowledge that you can then implement in the world and it will help.
You in some way. And I think the goal and.
Purpose of reading is so much more and kind of amorphous and ill defined. So I get why schools may be resistant to teach something that it's really hard to explain how this actually helps students, But the people who believe that it does are really passionate about saying.
Yes, it does.
Let's talk a little bit more about generally, like the phones. Do you think that's a big piece of why maybe they're not able to pay attention to long form books anymore.
For sure.
I mean, I have really really great students, So like right now, we're reading a Gabrielle Garcia Marquez book in my advanced literature class, and students will read parts of the book and then they'll just tell me I didn't understand any of that, and we'll try to kind of go through and break down why. And it's not actually a comprehension issue. It's like a distraction issue. So I'm like, okay, this sentence, I'll read it aloud and they'll be like, oh,
I didn't see that when I was reading it. I'm like, okay, but when I read it to you, you didn't understand it, right, And they're like, yeah, totally. So it's like they are even self aware that as they're reading, they're kind of zoning out. Their brains are going a million different places. It's something I experience as well as like a very
online person. When I am sitting down at night and trying to read, The first ten minutes are just like my brains everywhere, and then I can finally kind of get into a flow state, so I can't even imagine what they're dealing with as growing up. You know, many of them are self proclaimed iPad kids, right, like raised on iPads. Trying to sit down and like immerse yourself in a book is really challenging.
It's so fascinating. I mean, even in our conversation about the importance of reading, like, I definitely do find it a little bit harder to read than I did when I was like earlier life. Sure, and I'll have to like like go back and read a page again or like. And I think probably it does have a lot to do with how we consume information and other aspects of our lives, like in social media. So you know, on one hand, it's like, damn, I wish these kids were
reading more. On the other hand, you kind of can't blame them. It's like the world they grew up in.
Oh yeah, like you were saying, it's like so hard for us to pay attention. Like even if I'm reading a book, a printed book, Yeah, every couple pages, I'll stop and look at my phone, nothing going on. It's like, you know, and that's like I feel like I'm actually pretty good at reading every day something.
I agree now it is, Yeah, I hear her. I think that there is a lot of finger pointing. That's why I'm like, for me, it's like not about the kids not reading, it's about changing the expectations to not have them read because it's like, yeah, it's tough to read, period, It's gonna be even tougher to read if there's no.
Expectation of you to read. Yeah.
Yeah if I if I was not assigned books in high school to read, I don't know how much reading I would be.
Doing in high school.
So it's not like they say, like these kids are so much dumber, like they don't have what I had. It's just sort of like, oh, you don't expect them to do the things right and they're not going to do it.
Lastly, I asked Kelsey, what does she think would help fix this.
I think it comes down to tension.
Like I think a lot of teachers myself for a long time in my career to avoid any kind of tension, and I'm unfortunately like to help students read better, they have to do the very unpleasant work of sitting there and actually forcing themselves to read, and you, as the teacher, have to do the very unpleasant work of like calling out when they're not or being like all right, y'all. We are reading this book right now. We are five minutes in, and I see no one as looking at
the page like what is going on. A lot of us two in our teaching have really been fed this idea that everything has to be like super glitzy and engaging all the time, and that students should be like on the edge of their seat, like doing fun collaborative activities. And I just think, like, I know, kids aren't going to read at home, so we're going to read and discussing class, and I think that can make things feel a little bit dull and even ten sometimes, But I think it's worth it.
As far as maybe bigger picture, like whether it's from a I don't know if it's a government policy standpoint. Do you think there's things that could be coming from a higher level that could help get these literacy rates up. Do you think it would be a change in the testing or what sort of programs might work.
Curriculum that emphasizes the importance of long form texts is necessary. I'm actually really lucky to teach at an IB school, and the IB curriculum is designed around a variety of long form and short form texts. But you really deep dive into certain authors. So like, for example, when students study poetry, they study a set of poems by one author, and that's like a really cool opportunity to go deep
into their style. You also have to read like a certain number of novels, a certain number of dramas, and I think that is really really beneficial for students other schools that have not had that type of curriculum that have more pushed like the test prep thing.
I feel like the test prep.
Model is what we really need to move away from, and that is definitely something that can be influenced, like at the state and policy level.
I like this what she said. I think, you know, I read for fun.
I don't think it's boring to read for fun, but I do think there is that tension that, like, sometimes you don't want to read. Sometimes I force myself to read when I'm like not in the mood to read because I'm just like, yeah, I could scroll on my phone for TikTok for thirty minutes, or I can, you know, read this chapter of this book, and like I'll feel better after reading the chapter of the book than I
will after scrolling TikTok. Definitely, but it takes, you know, like she's saying, sometimes, you know, it takes a little bit to get into it. You know, you have to kind of have to force yourself like, Okay, I gotta focus. I gotta like put my head down and do this. You know, no one is We've never been on TikTok or you know, Instagram or whatever and been like I really gotta get my mind and yeah, you know, it's just like yeah, yeah, we're doing it.
Yeah.
So I think there is that discipline, and it like you will get to a place that is rewarding and will feel like you know, like we're talking about, you get engrossed in these worlds, but it takes more time to truly get into it.
And I think it.
I'm glad that she's like, you know, forcing those kids to have discipline and just like shut up and read in class. And it's like, yeah, we can do all that collaborative fun stuff once you read the book, and if you read at home, we wouldn't have to do this.
Yeah, right.
So next up, I spoke to number one New York Times bestselling children's book author Jason Reynolds. He's written books such as Long Way Down, Ghost and many, many more. Jason has also received the Newberry Honor and NAACP Image Award, just to name a few billet points on his resume.
I wanted to.
Speak to Jason in particular because of his book Soundtrack, which was originally released in twenty twenty five as an audiobook only. I wondered, in a time of a so called literacy crisis, why would you publish something only as audio. It turns out it started off as a traditional print novel unpublished.
I'd written a novel a decade ago that sat in a drawer, right, I wrote this thing, and for whatever reason my publishers at the time, I don't know if they didn't see it right, they didn't see the vision of the story, or if there are other stories that I'd written sort of you know, took precedence right, And so after while, the book kept getting bumped, and eventually it just kind of set and you know, precatorial drawer.
Years later, a contact of his at Penguin Random House Audio was looking for original audio projects, and Soundtrack, which is a book about music, was released into the world anyway.
Now.
Soundtrack is also available in print, but very much reads like an audio first project. And Jason's focus was on the format serving the story. He used this example of an older fellow you might be familiar with.
I love Shakespeare, and sometimes I wonder just how much of a disservice we have done by reading it so often and not seeing it ever right when it was meant to be seen. You know, it's easier to understand if you could just see it, but instead we're like studying it line for line, you know.
Which is helpful, but maybe helpful after we already kind of know.
After we see it exactly exactly.
Why I asked what he thought about, you know, audiobooks, people who look down on them.
People are just so weird about about that. Right. It's like if you give a baby a bottle of milk, this account is eating, yes, you know what I mean, and the nourishment that that milk is having is it's still valuable, whether it's being liquefied or whether it's something
that has to be cheated. That the nutrients are the nutrients, right, And so I don't like it, and I think it's just weird that leadism around like what the book is supposed to be and by the way, the and why I feel that this sort of there's just weird and leadism is because I actually don't think that people look at literature or at books quote unquote books as art. I think they look at them as as sort of
intellectual touchdowns. And it's the only of all the art mediums, by the way, I would argue that it might be the only one that is this way. People put boundaries on even the container that a story can be, and let alone boundaries on the stories themselves, And so I think all of it is foolish. Either we want the world to have stories or we don't. Either we want to make them super accessible, or we want to create gates around them so that only a few of us
have an opportunity to access them. Either we're going to complain about how we want them to be at the forefront of culture, right And if we complain about it, then we fight to make it so that they are at the forefront of culture by making them accessible and changing, and by creating multiple formats in which they can live.
Or we sort of throw sts from the other side of the road with our you know, our arms full of you know, paper tones, you know, and pat ourselves on the back of that way for having done the hard work quote unquote let alone. People don't realize how much concentration it requires to also listen to a book.
Oh right, yeah, yeah, that's a big thing.
But it's just nonsense and like silly ways for people to sort of figure out ways to separate themselves intellectually. And so I'd rather not even our tea.
Yeah, I think it would be beautiful if we were saying we can't get kids to read, they're just listening to audiobooks.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think you know, I think that'd be a pretty good place for us to be.
Yeah, of course.
Next I asked the big question, do you believe we're in a reading crisis? Here's what Jason Reynolds had to say.
Do I believe we're in a reading crisis? I think globally we're in a reading crisis, and I think there are lots of things that we could maybe put to figure out what is causing the crisis. It's impossible for us to deny the impacts of technology. It's simply because of the injection of hyperstimulation. And you know, it's like, yo, I have so many other things to do. There was a point in the world where there was theater, cinemaup, radio,
eventually television, and then there was the book. And the only one of those things that you that you could entertain yourself on the go with would have been in the book. But book as an object to have on the body, on the person in a way that now the phone is and in that laptop and on that
phone is the world a Collido scope of distraction. And by the way, we talk about this in this way because I write for kids, we always talk about young people because we see and I get why I write the stakes or how we want to make sure that they are literate. So like it makes sense, but the majority of adults don't read. It could even be argue that they read less because they don't have to. So
then there are other questions that one must ask. Right Number one, as reading being modeled in the home, we be blaming kids. It's always like, man, those kids, they're not they just don't read anymore, man, And it's like, well, yes, and we should sort of sort this out. But I think there are other questions that we have to ask ourselves. Like I've heard I've had arguments around like expectations that we should keep expectations high for young people so that
they can lead to expectations. I don't disagree with that. I just think we need to also recalibrate what the baseline is to meet them where they are for this moment in this culture, at this particular era of society. Right,
That's all I'm saying. Right, So, like, so like if we're if we're recalibrating the baseline, then maybe we maybe we don't start with Melville or Hidden Way or start back, right, Maybe maybe we start with something that feels a little more contemporary and something and that feels a little more fresh. Maybe we start with me, or we start with some of our contemporaries and partners. Right, they love Captain Underpants, And I know everyone's like, but that's not literature. It's
like it is it not? If Pilki got millions of kids to read, you know what you think? Because because no one had a problem with Cat and the Hat, no one had a problem with the silliness and the goofiness of Doctor Seuss back back then, especially like we didn't have any issues with that, why not lean into dog Man and like, why not?
That's how I got my brother to read, Like when he was younger, he wouldn't want to read anything else. We got him into the Diary ver One Can and Captain Underpants.
Yeah, you gotta level up.
Yeah.
Lastly, Jason told me an anecdote about how such an intense focus on data and numbers can result in negative outcomes.
I'd done an event at Forbes years ago. They were talking about spreadsheets. It's all very cut and dry, bottom line mathematics. Right, this is what, this is what the chart show. We're doing projections, we're doing this. There was a mantra they kept saying where they said, the numbers
are all that counts, right, the numbers. And then it was my turn to speak, and I said, you know, that's something that then the world that scares me if anyone, if I ever heard anyone say the numbers are the only thing that counts, I say, because if you look at the numbers, the numbers will say tell you something like kids, and you know, especially let's say twenty twelve, right, they'll say kids in black communities aren't reading. Right, black
boys especially I'm reading. Publishers say based on the numbers, right, if black boys aren't reading, then we need not publish books about black boys because they don't read, So it'll be a waste of our time to publish books about black boys because that's what the numbers say. Until you get somebody with a different interpretation of the numbers. And if I walk in that room and I see those
same numbers, I say, black boys aren't reading. So we should probably publish books about black boys so that they could read. But we can bring them in. Maybe they're not reading because there is a deficit when it comes to them reading things they feel directly connected too. And the people will say, well they you know, kids shouldn't have to feel directly connected to this, that and the third. Not every kid does.
But if we're paying attention to what's going on, maybe these are at least some things we should consider. Why don't we do tests and study the samples of the books that I'm working and say, well, if long Way Down works in a particular way, why does it work, and how do we figure out how to incorporate this more. If ghost is working in a certain way, why does it work? If they hate you give work in a particular way, why does this book work? And granted you
can't always get this right because artists are artists. Authors are are artists, and they're making the things they're making. Don't You don't want to turn this into some.
Sort of empirical rubric that you repeat over and over and over again, because you rob yourself and you rob the young people of understanding the beauty and fastness of what art could actually be. Right, So I'm not saying that. I'm just saying I'm just saying we do have ways to study what is happening to figure out how we shift curriculum in general that might be a little more engaging. I'm not saying that this is the only answer. I'm saying that maybe this is the beginning of the bigger answer.
But I think it's a good point where it's like you can look at the stats and then end up doing the opposite of what you want by making it less appealing. Yeah, whether that's like he's saying, holding certain standards for too long or expectations for too long and not adjusting them to actually get people to read, carving out basically certain groups and being like, well they'll never relate to this or something, so why bother that sort of thing, when like, obviously that's not true.
Yeah, he's got a good idea about like packaging reading in certain ways because we're not going to be able to beat technology, so to speak.
That was miss c and Jason Reynolds on reading. But when we're back after this commercial break, we hear from someone who says there is no crisis in reading. Oh and we've been looking at this all wrong.
I'm Manny Noah Devin.
All right, we're back, So we're talking about the so called reading crisis in America. So lastly I talked to Paul Thomas.
I am a professor of education at Furman University, which is in Greenville, South Carolina, and probably from my voice you can tell I'm from South Carolina. I've been here my whole life. I was a high school English teacher for eighteen years before I went to higher ed and I've been doing this forty two years now.
Paul says that all these stories, these pessimistic stories, but the decline of reading and more specifically the decline of reading scores and schools are fundamentally misreading the data and misleading the public. He said, we can't read, that's what he said data, saying the public is being misled as to the severity of the issue. What if we've been looking at this wrong. Wow, the entire time.
I love it.
I can't wait to hear this.
Yeah, sit down, if you're listening, sit down, sitting down, stop your cars, if you're cooking over now, get a school at least all right, here's what Paul had to say. There's been all these articles more recent. But also then it's like when you do a search for it, these kind of come up every every few years. So I'm sure you're very well familiar. I'll ask you. Are we in a reading crisis?
No, this is sort of paradoxical. Either we have always been in a reading crisis or we've never been in a reading crisis. I just don't like the word crisis because I always use like the example of the plane that the Sulenberg that you know, the crash landing and the Hudson, that's a crisis. Everybody's behavior in that was extreme because it was needed. So I worry when we say crisis, we're going to do extreme things. And that's
what's happening. And as you mentioned a second ago, almost word for word, almost claim for claim, this happened in the forties. It happened in the fifties, So I don't think we're in a crisis. I just think the situation we have with reading is essentially the same it's always been.
We're underserving certain population of students, and overall, most people learn to read and function relatively well in the world, and probably read more and can read better than we think now those underserved populations like black and brown children, multi lingual learners, special needs students, to me, it's a crime that we don't serve those students, but we never have. That is not some new thing that's been caused by a particular reading program.
So one of these stats that people tend to use in these articles is this National report Card. You contend that this is being totally misread or misrepresented as far as what it's actually measuring and then what the numbers are saying. Can you kind of explain what the National Report Card is and then how it's being misused when we're talking about this crisis.
We usually use NATE in AEP that's the of the letters of the National Assessment of Educational Progress that comes out of the Department of Education. The dirty little secret about NATEE is it was designed with a little bit of intent, probably a lot of intent to make schools look bad. The terminology in NATE is very confusing. The word that everybody focuses on is proficient. So proficient on NATE is at the seventieth percentile that is designed for
only thirty percent of children to reach. That's the way statistics work, that's the way standardized testing works. The misinformation I think comes from that. States use the word proficient differently. So we give state assessments generally like third grade and eighth grade, and then sometimes we've fluctuated, but in high school. So when we give a third grade test at the state level and we're looking for proficiency, we tend to
think of that as grade level. So the expectation is in South Carolina that ideally all children can be proficient in third grade. Those standards for proficient at the state level matched the term basic at the NAPE level. So the crisis people like journalists and pundits and people trying to sell things generally they say that, you know, two thirds of students aren't proficient. Well, technically on NAPE that's true. It doesn't mean they're not at grade level, and it
certainly doesn't mean they can't read. Now, historically about a third of students sometimes a little more, are below basic on NAPE, which certainly may be worth being concerned about. Nobody has ever created a standard definition for grade level reading. We don't have that in the United States. Every state has their own NAPE, has their own and we have never sat down as a country and decided what's the threshold. Saying that two thirds of students aren't proficient readers is
at best misleading, and I think purposefully so. I think we like for schools to be failing, and I think we like as a country, we like for teachers to be bad, and we like for students. You know, at any point, we all older people all say that kids are you know, can't read, don't read, can't do math, and it's kind of embarrassing. I mean, just to keep saying that over and over.
What would be the motivation for people making these measures to make want the schools to look bad or what's kind of Can you kind of tease that out a little more.
I think it's just human nature to idealize what it was like when we were young. I try to be realistic. I went to junior high in high school in the seventies, students were smoking pots in the bathroom in my junior high And you cannot tell me that we were a brighter generation, that we were more dedicated to learning than the students that I taught throughout the eighties and nineties and the students that I'm teaching now are just they're brilliant,
They're very bright human beings. They've had way better education than I did. And I think it's just this urge to idealize our past, and I think we get a little depressed about being older and we want something to complain about. Some of it to me too, is I mean, just the nature of a capitalist market society. There is profit. There's political and financial profit. In crisis, there's political and
financial profit. Education reform is an industry. Since the early nineteen eighties, people have made a lot of money, and politicians career have been made. George W. Bush became President of the United States almost exclusively own his role as a as a as an education governor. Other politicians have figured that out. So there's there's profit, human nature, you know, idealizing our past, criticizing our current status. I think there's a lot of factors that go into it.
I hear him on the good old days.
Yeah, but I would say, I don't think my parents would have said they've gotten better in education.
Than I did. They would, I don't know, they do not, Yeah, they would not have said that.
So I do think there is a people love to glorify a should say, you know, when they went to school and whatever. But I do think that our parents would say we got better educations than they did, right, Yeah, I don't know if I can say that about my brother. Yeah, And you know there's a distance, but it's not that much of it there.
Yeah. Yeah.
Or like even if reading levels are actually not in a crisis, it does seem to be the case that we don't even assign books well.
Yeah, yeah, And to be clear, for on Paul's behalf, he's not saying there's nothing to be done and that we're doing better.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think it's it's like the way we're then approaching how to fix this issue is more the issue he has, as you'll hear he has lots of problems with kind of the way things are going. We go pretty deep. First off, you're gonna hear him talking about what's called the science of reading. So this isn't just like the study of reading. It's it's kind of a catch all term for a recent wave of new curriculums and teaching styles. Over forty states have passed legislation incorporating
new programs that fall under this category. I'm sure there's tons more we can get into there, obviously, but just so when you hear him say science of reading, it's he's talking about like a movement and not like studying reading. So Paul broke down this science of reading into a sort of three pronged multiverse. He's his comic book Guy as it says, one is the miracle versus crisis framing, two is marketing, and three is research.
One way I talk about this is the science of reading movement is sort of a multiverse. So you've got journalists who have two stories. They have crisis and miracle, so they're constantly saying education is in crisis, but this school or this state is doing miraculous things. I mentioned George W. Bush the Texas Miracle, and it's a perfect template for what you just asked. It got him huge
political capital. While George Bush was governor of Texas, there was some intense standards in high states testing curriculum reform. They raised state testing scores pretty dramatically, and this is something that's kind of dangerous. It's really easy to create standards, teach to the test, and raised test scores. So at the same time he was claiming a miracle and the
media was kind of eating that up. Researchers in Texas scholars education professors looked at the data and noticed at the same time that Texas's state scores were going up, their NATE scores were going down, and it's harder to manipulate those NATE scores, so it was never a miracle. And I think, so you get this, the media likes crisis miracle, crisis miracle.
I think that only just scores. It a bit where you can teach to the test and get those individual scores up, but then the actual like overall reading scores, even these ones from NAPE are going down, so it's like, well, who's better off. It's like, great, you can take one test, but you might not be able to think.
Ye.
I think that's a pretty important point. Yeah, So now here's the next multiverse.
Marketing.
The other multiverse is marketing. Textbook publishers don't really make any money if we keep a book that works or a program that works. So the weird thing that just happened is states have banned all of these reading programs Units of Study by Lucy Halkins, stuff by Fontas and Pineale, which were moderately popular, but the United States has never had one reading program. Units of Study at its most was in one out of five schools. There's no way
that it was causing a crisis. But the same companies that owned those programs own the new programs that states are adopting. In a market society, churn is really important. The other multiverse is actual research, and that's the one that is really kind of frustrating because a lot of times it's behind a paywall. A lot of times research is incredibly difficult to read, and scholars have a tendency to be very insular. They don't really take it on
pund themselves to tell people about their research. They do their research. The science of reading movement really it kind of started around twenty twelve to twenty fourteen, but it really took off around twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen, twenty twenty. But the research is now catching up. There's states where you can actually do the research and see what's happening, and a couple of weird things about this movement. One,
there's not a single scholarly publication. There's not a single experimental or quasi experimental published study that shows we have a reading crisis caused by balance literacy or by reading programs. Nobody's done that research. It doesn't exist. And this whole movement, which says it's a science of reading, is based on the absence of scientific evidence.
So, for example, Paul said, there's been no research that shows that systematic phonics is more effective. Are all students for learning comprehension? And of course we want kids to be able to understand what they're reading or well, it's kind of not really reading.
Is it.
Size of reading has attached itself to a thing called structured literacy, and structured literacy is scripted curriculum. Weirdly, that was a big thing in Texas around the Bush era, and it kind of died out because educators saw that it was a really bad thing. Scripted curriculum takes away teacher autonomy and it also treats every child exactly the same. To me, those are the two most damning things about
the movement. I'm a big advocate for teacher autonomy. Just a little side note, seventy to eighty percent of teachers of reading or women and we have as a nation decided that they have to be told what to do and they can't be professionals. And to me, there's a huge amount of misogyny in this whole movement, which is kind of the sign of the times. Also, these scripted curriculum programs have whitewashed the curriculum. We were starting to
let students read text that they saw themselves in. Yeah, you know, girls and children of color, you know, and that was a good thing. We weren't doing a great job, but it was better. There's several studies out showing that these scripted structured literacy programs are going in the opposite direction. And you know, text are being kind of muted, and we're using the text simply to help children pronounce words. We're not worried about the content of it. We're not
worried about students being engaged. There's a weird thing going on on social media where the science of people are saying that that kids don't have to like to read, and it's kind of weird. They're arguing that if they if they learn their phonics, they will they will start liking to read. And it's like this weird, I don't know, this weird antagonism toward having any choy in reading.
And Jason was saying this a bit too, of getting caught so caught up with the data, Like the issue is that people can't and are not reading, Like the issue is not that the test scores aren't with it, you know, like yeah, yeah, sure, that's a byproduct of it.
And like I understand wanting tests obviously to measure to measure stuff, but.
We shouldn't be, okay, if the issues the test scores are bad, just trying to improve the test scores, right, Like the test scores should be reflective of reading, comprehension and you know all these other things, not just how well people can take the tests. People are really good at the test, but they still can't read or comprehend. It doesn't really matter what the scores say.
I asked, what could we do to actually fix this, whether you want to call all the crisis or just a simple problem.
Yeah.
So Jason also mentioned this where it's like we're talking about the schools and kids not wanting to read, but there's no model for people at home. And Paul got to this about the impacts of stuff outside of the classroom too.
Really important research done on what impacts student learning, and it's over sixty percent outside of the school schools. I'm sorry. I love educator, I'm an educator. I love schools. I love education. Schools do not change society. Schools reflect society. And we've got this kind of idealistic It was the Arnie Duncan nonsense. He was one of the worst Secretaries of Education ever. But you constantly talk about game changing. This is a game changer. There's kind of a joke
about this. He said it all the time, and I'm sorry. Schools just don't change. They reflect. So a lot of these reading scoreres and math scorers are not a reflection of the quality of learning or the quality of teaching. Their reflection of the negligence of our society. I mean, we talked about the Nate data. One fun fact about Nate that people ignore the highest scoring ski rules in
the country. Department of Defense. Why those kids have mills, those kids have health care, those kids have a stable home. Way above Massachusetts is the highest scoring state. Department of Defense is way above them, I mean significantly above them. I've seen one article on that, like, we don't, you know, we want to talk about Mississippi as you know, defying the odds. We don't want to talk about Well, why
don't we just change the odds. I'm for universal health care, but why don't we just have it for children at least our families? Like you know, we can start there.
We need to put everyone in the military.
Now I'm drafting everyone's a soldier.
Now.
So here's my King of the World question. So he gets to write the New Worlds for education and to get these scores back up, what would he suggest inside and outside the classroom?
It always strikes me as odd that we want children when they magically walk through the school door, or to pretend their lives don't exist. And I think this is a controversial thing to say, but you know, a kid is sick or hungry if they don't care about learning to read, I think they're making a really rational decision. Some colleagues and I several years ago we published a book called Social Context Reform. It was a reaction to the no excuses kind of idea that there's no excuse,
we just have to do in school. Poverty is an excuse.
Social context reform argues that we need social reform before worrying about education. So this would include things like universal health care, food security, job security, and housing security.
Now in school, I think there are absolutely things we must do, especially at the early grades. I think we need smaller class size, particularly once we identify students who are struggling, they should be guaranteed two things, small class size and an experienced teacher. One of the dirty secrets of education is that the bad kids, the struggling kids, disproportionately or put in classrooms with beginning teachers. And there's kind of an unwritten rule that if you hang around
as a teacher, they'll give you the good kids. And that's kind of criminal to me. I mean, that's just it's not a policy, it's just kind of a thing that happens. But if our struggling students were guaranteed smaller class size and experienced teachers, I think we would see some real growth. Now, the problem is when you measure teacher impact, it's almost not there. Teacher impact on student
achievements about one to fourteen percent. It's very small. So the problem is it's very hard to measure teacher impact. So two things can be true. Teachers are incredibly important, and it's not going to show up in the data. So as long as we stay obsessed with test scorers, we're probably going to miss the good things we could be doing. For reading. We need to quit buying programs like I mean, we just need to stop it. I mean, constantly changing and buying. There's so much money, and I
think there's a better approach. Oddly, I think we would be better off just buying children books. There's a lot of research that access to text in the home and community and school are strong, strongly correlated with high literacy. I've said many times we should start buying every child at birth, you know, twenty books a year. Let the kid pick ten, let the family pick ten, and then the system picks ten. Yeah, and you know, and by the time you graduated high school, just imagine everybody would
have a library. Honestly, that's not that much money, and it's probably less money than we're spending on, you know, commercial programs.
My last question was, are you considering a run for twenty twenty eight? He said no, But I don't know.
Maybe we can start it right here well be in someone's administration at least.
I what are you guys thoughts?
My boy Paul said, we need to look ourselves in the mirror.
Schools are reflection.
Schools are a reflection, I like that of society. Society around, and they're not a projection and a reflection.
But I think that's show true, is that if we as a society valued reading, the kids would be reading. Yeah they're not even if the even if the teacher didn't assign them books, they would be at home reading. If we said reading is as cool as watching tiktoks, and we really felt that as a society.
The kids will be out.
And that goes to Jason's point too about just like the arc of entertainment. And we kept adding these things, but you know they don't disappear. But like there's obviously benefits to reading a book, you know, just as leisure. And yeah, if we don't uphold that anywhere outside of clar for the learning, for the test even yeah, like yeah, like why would you.
Yeah, we need to make books sexy again in any form any fun.
Yeah. Yeah, let me be clear, audio books. The issue is far beyond reading.
Yeah, we have a intellectual crisis, brain crisis.
It's not cool to think about things now. It's not cool to do research. It's not cool to be an expert. It's not cool to know things now. It's cool to not know anything and say whatever you want.
You need to think about things.
Yeah, there doesn't seem to be about like a desire to be curious about stuff.
That's a beautiful way to say it.
It's just like, and why would you be curious about anything? It's all like just shown to you on your phone, and you know, just like the the incentives are backwards.
We stopped rewarding curiosity in this society.
We need free thinkers.
Not those times.
Are asking questions.
Yeah, yeah, questions and answer them in an hour or less once a week perfectly on Wednesdays.
Yeah, a few minutes there for some ads. I mean, in many ways, I think we're writing a book basically book.
Yeah, we write a book a week.
Shoots the transcript out that's text. Just read the show boom, Yeah it give it a shot. Yeah, scroll down you can. There's probably a transcript button.
If you would prefer to read our books every week.
Who're coming out with the book every week?
It's crazy publishing publishing as wild these days. No such thing as a production of Kaleidoscope content. Our executive producers are Kid Osborn and man Gesh hot Cadur. The show was created by Mandy Fidel, Noah Friedman, and Devin Joseph Femen. Credits song by Manny, mixing by Steve Bone. Thank you Steve our guest this week. We're Kelsey, Khalaude Felter, Jason Reynolds,
and Paul Thomas. Scroll down for links to their work, and go to our newsletter at No Such Thing dot Show for more, especially if you want to get deeper into the research Paul is discussing in the last bit of the episode. If you have feedback for us or a question, our email is Manny Noah Devin at gmail dot com, or you can leave us a voicemail by calling the number in our show notes. If you like the show, please share it with a friend and leave
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