Kids can’t read anymore. Does it matter? (with author Jason Reynolds)

art of arguments and years by actually doing the research. This episode, kids aren't reading anymore. Who cares?

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math and reading scores in more than two decades. Just 40% 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 the given text to understand it's meaning. Our nation's report card is a bismal right now. So one that I'll highlight for now is from the Atlantic magazine titled America's sliding toward illiteracy. So this is a quote from the article. By some measures American students have regressed to a level not seen in 25 years or more. Test scores from NAEP, short for the national assessment of educational progress,

show that 33% 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 1992. Among fourth graders 40% are below basic in reading. The highest share since 2000. The bottom 10th of 13 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 1971 and 1978 respectively. They go through a bunch of different theories of why is it school spending is lower? No school spending has increased from 2012 to 2022 from 14,000 per student to 16,000 adjusted for inflation. Okay. So that's not the culprit. People like 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. And then people talk about smartphones and attention and there's different things. And 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 LA. So something's going in this. 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 an senior at 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 Seoul? Yeah, everybody gets your summer reading from Seoul. We would get like two, two, I think it was like two books. You know, everybody will wait

but yeah. It was not a book you were supposed to read. Yeah, you had a book that was assigned to you that you were supposed to read. Yeah. We don't get summer reading. I was like, okay, is that a new

thing? Have you ever gotten summer reading? It's like they'll never gotten summer reading. So I was like,

okay, do you read books during the school? I was like, yes, sometimes you're reading class. I was like, did I give you books to read on your own? He said no. And I was like, okay, this is a high school or who is not being assigned a single book to read in its entirety. That's crazy. And, you know, yes, such a stark difference from when we were learning multiple books here. Yeah, and like 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 and not like here's this one chapter. 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 every 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 as 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

it. But you get on like watch videos or anything like that. Yeah, you're on social media on your phone.

“Yeah. You have to, you do have to go home and get on your dial up internet to get on Facebook,”

send a Facebook status, 10 you did and I did trust me. I was on there. The my cursory gas here is that it's got to be the attention span thing. And it's not just kids. Right. I think the culture, nobody reads. Yeah. That's my thing. I think you can find surveys of how many books adults read to. 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 I'm telling them 40 year old. Well, it is the thing. It's like, yeah, you learn to scale of doing it. And it's like, yeah, even if you haven't read a book in 10 years, it's like, well, you could read a book. I think it's different. It's the same thing with me of like AI with younger people. It's like, yeah. Okay. We know how to write a 15 page essay ourselves. So if I were using AI to do it now, not great. But like, I've done the thing. So I know kind of what goes into it.

Yeah. If you've never read a single book in your entire life, how does that impact how you interpret.

“You like you're saying people can't read passages and that's 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't 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 from 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. What do you think are the pitfalls of that? I just don't think we're a society right now that values reading it in a real way. That's it to me. I think it's like,

there's no emphasis for anyone to actually spend time. I mean, 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 TikToks or something. And it's like, I'm sorry. There are great TikTok creators out there talking about politics or whatever, but like, you're not going to get a full story in, yeah, even the best version of that. It's an introduction. It's a different thing.

“And I think people just take that as like, I learned this from this TikTok. Yeah. And then yeah,”

they'll flash up the headlines and the bullet points with the statistics of whatever issue. Yeah. But you're not getting any full story from that. Yeah. And I think that's like, slowly, then 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. Yeah. Same thing where it's like, you can listen to a three hour long podcast about health or fitness or whatever.

It's some any of the dumb things we do. Yeah. I think this all the time, like, whatever we're doing

time. Yeah. Well, like, and actually read them. The amount of information that we learn 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. 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 that's like, people just want other people that think for them. Yeah. That's why

people like, oh, I'm watching the TikTok. This guy's done all the research, right? 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 to 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 90 seconds. Yeah. Yeah. Or faster if you hit that three. Yeah. You could 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 like, 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 TikToks about. Sometimes the TikTok is enough information. Yeah. And it's not something I shared that deeply about. And it's something like, oh, I'm a little bit informed about this thing. And I would be 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. Yeah. But it can't be everything. Yeah. I mean, I think it's just a big cultural thing. Like, you know, 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's implies that like, of course, like, yeah, of course,

there's going to be some guy in college who, like, gets into some like Joan Diddy-in. So we 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, it's how low the bar. Well, it's just, 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 spending 15 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 dumbass talk about nothing. It's like, yeah, like, that's cool. Like, there's so much projection. We don't incentivize people to read. Yeah. Like, somehow 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 paywalled, and I'm like,

all right, well, never mind. Yeah. Yeah, that's the search for information stops there. Yeah,

that's, that's a good point too, right? Dude, it's getting harder to access high quality. The good, yeah, the good stuff, information. So what I want to do is, I want to find out, is this literacy decline 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. Now, after the break.

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All right, we're back. We're talking about the alleged decline of reading. So the first couple of

interviews that I want to share are with people who are active in the children's literacy space. I'm Kelsey Claude Balter. I've been teaching English or this is my 11th year now. And I have 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 90s classroom. The idea

is simple. What if next year I do everything within my power to revive the spirit of the 90s 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-chrom books, pre-AI, pre-state testing I think. Here's my vision.”

Extremely limited technology. Books everywhere. Over stuff couch in the corner. The room's

bustling with human interaction. I feel like this is doable. I do have the reflection of believing everything's doable for me, but this one is especially 90s 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 over 20 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 11-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 added 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 then at a couple schools where we were told like we do not teach novels. We teach excerpts. We teach short texts. Students can read following the novels if 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 who 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 that instinct is understandable, but the consequences of years and years in real 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 doing all this to get what the kids will do for the test scores

and then those are going down. So then I kind of asked about that 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 a YouTube video and by argument with that was just this idea of learning as a technical how to is really, really different from how I can see the 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 aesthetic and kind of amorphous and ill-defined. So I get why schools may be resistant to teach something that is really hard to explain how this actually helps students but the people who believe

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 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 10 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 iPads, 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 like for sure. I have to like read 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 and so 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. 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 and nothing going on. Yeah yeah. And that's like I feel like I'm actually pretty good at reading everyday something. I agree. No it is. Yeah I hear her. I think 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 to say like these kids are so much dumber like they don't have what I had it's just sort of like well you don't expect them to do the things right. They're not gonna do it. Lastly I ask L.C. 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 after 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 is looking at the page like what is going on. A lot of us too in our teaching have really been fed this idea that everything has to be like super glitzy and engaging all the time and that student should be like

on the edge of their seat like doing fun collaborative activities and I just think like I know

“kids aren't gonna read at home so we're gonna read and discuss in class and I think that can make”

things feel a little bit dull and even tense 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 text 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 all 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

Sometimes I force myself to read when I'm like not in the mood to read because I'm just like yeah I could score on my phone for TikTok for 30 minutes or I can you know read this chapter of this book and like I'll fill 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 it 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 got”

a focus I got to like put my head down and do this yeah you know no one is we've never been on

TikTok or you know Instagram or whatever and been like I really got to get my mind and it's pretty true you know it's just like yeah yeah 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 in grossing his world but it takes more time to truly get into it and I think I'm glad that she's like you know forcing his kids to have discipline and just like

shut up and reading us and I say 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 all 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 Newbury honor”

and WACP Image Award just to name a few bullet points on his resume I want to speak to Jason in particular because of his book soundtrack which was originally released in 2025 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 had written a novel a decade ago that sat in the drawer right I wrote this thing and for whatever reason my

publishes 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 they have other stories that had written sort of you know it took precedence right and so after while the book you're getting bumped and eventually it just kind of sat in you know pergatory will draw years later a contact of his that 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 my reading it so so often and that scene you ever right when it was meant to be seen you know it's easier to understand if you could just see it totally no but let's say we're like studying it line for line yeah which is helpful but maybe helpful after we we already kind of know after we

see exactly what 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 is a company eating yes you know I mean like an nourishment that that milk is having is is still valuable whether it's being liquified or whether it's something that has to be chewed the nutrients are

“the nutrients right and so I don't like it and I think it's just weird that the lead isn't”

around like what the book is supposed to be and by the way the reason why I feel that this sort of there's this weird of leadism is because I actually don't think that people look at the literature or at books quote unquote books as art I think they look at them as sort of intellectual touchstones 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 in let alone

boundaries on the stories themselves and so I think all of it is foolish even we want the world to have stories or we don't even 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 even 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 stones from the other side of the road with our arms full of paper tones you know and pat ourselves on the back of that way for having done the hard work quote unquote better long people don't realize how much concentration it requires to also listen to a book all right yeah that's the

themselves intellectually and so I'd rather not even continue yeah I think 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 a big question

do you believe we're in a reading crisis hmm 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 point to 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 hypersdemulation yeah and you know it's like oh I have so many other things to do there was a point in the world where there was data cinema radio eventually television and then there was the book and the only one of

those things that you could that you could entertain yourself on the go with would have been the book but look as an object to have on the body on the person in a way that noun the phone is and in that laptop and on that phone is the world right a kaleidoscope 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 are how I want to make sure that they are literate and it's right 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 till and there are other questions that one must ask right number one is as reading the model in the home we did blame in kids it's always like man those kids they're not did 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 higher for young people so that they can meet to the expectation I don't disagree with that I just think we need to also recalibrate with 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 so like so like if if we're recalibrate in the baseline then maybe we maybe we don't start with Melville or Hinway or

Steinbeck right maybe maybe we start with something that fits a little more contemporary and something that fits a little more fresh yeah maybe we start with me or we start with some of our contemporaries and partners right they love cat and underpins and I know everyone's like but that's not literature it's like is it not if if if if if Pookie got millions of kids to read and you don't think because because no one had a problem with cat and that no one had a problem

with the silliness and the goofiness of of Dr. Seuss back back then especially like we didn't have any issues with that why not lean into to dog man and like why not that's all got my brother to read like if it was younger he wouldn't want to read anything else we got him into the diarrhea we wouldn't be kidding capping underpants yeah you got to level up yeah lastly Jason told me an anecdote about how such an intense focus on data and numbers can result in negative

outcomes add that an event at a Forbes years ago they were talking about spreadsheets it's all great cut and drive bottom line mathematics right this is what this is what the chart showed that we're doing projections we're doing this there was a majority kept saying what they say the numbers are all that counts are the numbers and then it was my turn to speak and I said you know that's something that in the literary world that scares me if any of I ever heard anyone say

“the numbers are the only thing that counts I say because if you look at the numbers the numbers”

were so it's tell you something like kids and you know especially let's say 2012 right I say kids and 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 did we mean that published 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 it maybe they're not reading because there is a deficit when it comes to them reading things they feel directly connected to and if we'll say

well the you know kids shouldn't have to feel directly connected to this that in the third

that 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 and study the samples of the books that are working and say well if long way down works in a particular way why does it work and how do we how do we figure out how to incorporate this more if ghost is working in a certain way

granted you can't always get this right because artists artists authors are artists and they're

making the things they're making you 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 vastness 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 yeah whether that's like he's saying hoarding 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's the thing um 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 be technology yes that was missy 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 run a business and not thinking about podcasting think again more Americans listen to podcast

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on the iHeart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcast and for more behind the scenes follow at cliver and at tiktok podcast network on tiktok hi mani i'm Noah devan 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 firm 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 18 years for uh i went to high rad and i've been doing this 42 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's saying the public is being

misled as to the severity of the issue um what if we've been looking at this wrong wow the entire time a lot of luck can't wait to hear this yeah sit down if you're listening sit down sit down stop your cars if you're cooking over now get a soul at least all right here's what Paul had to say there's been all these articles more recently but also then it's like when you do a search for it these kind of come up every every few years 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 always never been in a reading crisis i just don't

bird that you know the crash landing in the in the Hudson that's a crisis everybody's behavior and that was extreme because it was needed so i'll 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 claimed for claim this happened in the 40s it happened in the 50s 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 populations 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 learner special each 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 can tend 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 a ep that's the letters of national assessment of educational progress it comes out of the Department of Education the dirty

little secret about nate 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 that the 70th percentile that is designed for only 30% 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 fluctuated

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 match the term basic at the nate level so the crisis people like journalist and pandits and people trying to sell things generally they say that you know two thirds of students aren't proficient

well technically on nate 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 nate which certainly maybe 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 nate 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 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 and 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 70s students were smoking pot 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 talked about the 80s and 90s and the students that I'm teaching now are just they're brilliant they're they're very bright

idealize our past and I think we get a little depressed about being older and we want you know 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 1980s people have made a lot of money and politicians careers have been made George W. Bush became president of the United

States almost exclusively on his role as an education governor other politicians I 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 got in a better education than I did you know I don't know yeah they would not have said that so I do think there is a people love to glorify you to say you know when they went to school and whatever but I do think that our parents would say we got better education 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

a difference yeah yeah and we're 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 oh yeah yeah and and to be clear for on pause but half 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 yeah issue is 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 going to hear him talk 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 40 states have passed legislation incorporating new programs that fall under this category I'm sure there's tons more reading it into there obviously but just so you when you hear him say science of reading it's he's talking about like a movement and that like studying reading so Paul broke down the science of reading into a sort of

three-pronged multiverse he's a comic book guy this is one is the miracle versus crisis framing two is marketing and three is research one way I talk about this is there's the science of reading movement is sort of a multiverse so you got journalist 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 what you just asked it got him huge political capital while George Bush was a governor of Texas there there was some intense standards and high stakes 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 raise 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 state scores were going up their night scores were going down and it's harder to manipulate those night scores so

it was never a miracle and I think so you get this the media likes crisis miracle crisis miracle

I think that I'm just scoring 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

“I think that's 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 just happened is states have banned all of these reading programs units of study by Lucy Calkin's stuff up fontus and penale which

were moderately popular but the United States has never had one reading program units of study

same companies that own 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 upon themselves to tell people about their research thanks to the research the science of reading movement really it kind of started around 2012 to 2014 but it really took off around 2018 2019 2020 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 calls by balanced 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 positive there's been no research that shows that systematic phonics is more effective for 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? Science 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 70 to 80% of teachers are 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 whitewash the curriculum we were starting to let students read text that they saw themselves in 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 the 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 the 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 it says this weird antagonism toward having any joy in reading and Jason was saying it's a bit too of getting caught so caught up with the data that the issues that people can't in are not reading like the issue is not that the test scores aren't with the you know like yeah sure that's a byproduct of it and like you I understand wanting tests obviously to measure to measure

stuff you know 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 test if people are really get at the test but they still can't read or comprehend it doesn't really matter what the score is saying I asked what could we do to actually fix this whether you want to

cuddle 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 yeah Paul got to this about the impacts of stuff outside of the classroom to really

“important research done on what impacts student learning and it's over 60% outside of the school”

schools I'm sorry I love 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

changing you know 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 scores and math scores are not a reflection of the quality of learning or the quality of teaching there are flexion 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 schools in the country department of defense why those kids have males those kids have health care those kids have 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 is you know defying the odds we don't want to talk about 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 or families like you know we can start there we need to put everyone in the military now I'm

drafting all you know everyone is a soldier so here's my king of the world question so he gets right the new world's 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 won't children when they magically walk

“through the school door to pretend their lives don't exist and I think this is a controversial thing to”

say but you know like 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 are used 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 experience teacher one of the dirty secrets of education is that the bad kids the the struggling kids disproportionately are putting classrooms with beginning teachers and there's kind of an unwritten

role that if you hang around as a teacher they'll give you the good kids and that's kind of criminal to me that's 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 experience teachers I think we would”

say 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 14 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 yeah so as long as we stay obsessed with test scores 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 for there's so much money and I think there's a better approach I'd like 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 strongly correlated with how literacy I've said many times we should start buying every child at birth you know 20 books a year let the kid pick ten let the family pick ten and then the system picks ten yeah and you know by the time you graduate 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 or run for twenty twenty eight he said no but I don't know maybe we can start it right here what are you guys thoughts my boy Paul said we need to look ourselves in the mirror schools are reflection I like that of society of society not the way around and not a projection error reflection but I think that's so true is that if we as a society valued reading yeah the kids

would be reading yeah they're not even if the even if the teacher didn't sign them books they would be at home reading if we said reading is as cool as watching TikToks and we really felt that

of entertainment and we are 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 learning for the test yeah yeah like yeah like why would you yeah we need to make books sexy again in any form anyway yeah yeah let me be clear all your books the issues far beyond reading yeah let's say that we've a intellectual crisis yeah brain crisis it's not cool the 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 a like a desire to be curious about stuff that's a beautiful

way to say 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 things we just are asking questions yeah yeah do you know what questions they need to them yeah and in an hour or less once a week perfectly on Wednesdays yeah the few minutes later for some ads yeah yeah I mean in many ways I think we're writing a book yeah we read a book a week shoots the transcript out that's text just read the show

boom yeah give it a shot yeah scroll down you can there's probably a transcript but if you would prefer to read our books every week we're coming out with the book every week it's crazy publishing

publishing is wild these days no such thing is a production of kaleidoscope content our executive

producers are Kate Osborn and Mangesh Hottickadur the show is created by Manifadel no Friedman and Devon Joseph theme and credits song by Mani mixing by Steve bone thank you Steve our guest this week for Kelsey Kellogg Felter Jason Reynolds and Paul Thomas scroll down for links to their work and

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