Why is something we all grapple with. Why do I like avocados but not olives? Why are my children so perfectly beautiful yet try my patience so routinely? Why was I born an American?
We know now the “what” of 2024 NAEP scores. The average reading score for both fourth and eighth grade students is the same as it was when the test began in 1992. The small progress gained in the years between disintegrated even as we tried to hold onto it. More troubling, even, is that students at the bottom are doing worse. Students at the 10th percentile now score ten points lower than the 10th percentile did in 1992.
The “what” turns to “why” as we look to next steps. Why are scores dropping? Why don’t the billions of dollars we’ve spent seem to make a difference? Why is it so hard to teach children how to read?
Let’s explore some possibilities. Here are four, though there are certainly more that could make the list.
Teachers are not as skilled as either they need to be, or used to be. In other words, the problem lies with teaching.
The acquisition of initial reading skills aren’t the problem but students don’t have enough general background knowledge to read at higher levels.
We’ve never figured out how to teach all students how to read proficiently.
We know how to teach students to read proficiently but we can’t summon the political will to demand the right approach.
I think the answer is mostly (4), which also explains (2): we know how to teach kids how to read. We simply choose other approaches or other priorities. By doing so, American public education fails children, parents, and teachers.
It’s true that the teaching force has changed in the past fifty years. Smart and talented women, in particular, used to go into teaching because it was a career open to women. Then society changed, women entered the boardroom and the laboratory and the Capitol. Between 1971 and 2000, the “likelihood of a female teacher having been among the highest-scoring 10 percent of high school students on standardized achievement tests fell from 24 to 11 percent.” But the English language hasn’t changed. So if teachers are to blame, there must be something specifically difficult about teaching kids how to read that defies training, curriculum, and desire.
That something for many children and teachers was balanced literacy. If you haven’t followed the reading wars or listened to Emily Hancock’s outstanding podcast Sold a Story, the gist is that thousands of schools and teachers bought into the idea that the way to teach kids how to read was to have them guess what a word was by looking at photos or other context clues. Instead of sounding out “h-a-t”, the child might read, “Sally put on a hat” and look at a picture of a girl wearing a hat. “Hat!” the child would exclaim. Of course, you can’t apply to this to fluent reading, or reading chapter books, or really reading at all. So there was something specifically difficult for many teachers, it was self-inflicted by schools and districts, and it’s now largely on its way out. Even if you agree that whole-language instruction is a clear villain in the reading story, this approach only became widely popular in the 1990s. It doesn’t explain the entire long history of American schools failing to teach kids how to read.
Indeed, even in schools that maintained a phonics focus, getting all children reading proficiently has remained illusory. In 1990, fourth-grade NAEP scores in reading were the same as they had been in 1971. Which sounds a lot like us bemoaning that fourth-grade NAEP scores in 2024 were the same as in 1992. There have been peaks and valleys, but net gains in reading proficiency escape us despite trillions in federal and philanthropic spending over fifty years.
Between the late 1980s and 2018, the number of teachers whose main expertise was reading increased by 80 percent. Maybe those reading teachers don’t know how to teach reading well. Maybe they aren’t prepared to teach reading to the specific students they work with. Or maybe the ways they are trained to teach reading are ineffective. This sounds like a teaching problem as opposed to a teacher problem. It’s not the people teaching, but rather the approach. Most people don’t go into a career they don’t want, so at the least we can reasonably assume that teachers want to be successful and want their students to learn. Teachers don’t choose to fail, but they may make choices that, unfortunately and unintentionally, end up in failure. Principals, superintendents, state and federal education leaders all shoulder some of that blame. Someone has to stand up and say, “This isn’t working.”
E.D. Hirsch, professor emeritus at the University of Virginia, has tried to be that someone. Hirsch has argued for decades that the problem isn’t with how we teach reading but rather with the lack of background knowledge that schools provide to students. In his 2006 book “The Knowledge Deficit”—which he wrote at 78 years old!—he argues that our romantic ideas of how kids learn have led to our ongoing failure to teach kids how to read. By “romantic” he doesn’t mean “hopes and vibes”, though it’s not far off. Hirsch writes that “romanticism as a broad intellectual movement that has greatly influenced American thought…[is more about] a complacent faith in the benefits of nature” than anything else. In other words, the idea that learning is natural and that even learning to read is natural is a value that undergirds the entire design of the American education system. Yet as Hirsch thoroughly demonstrates over the course of the book, nothing about learning to read is natural. Even more importantly, learning to read is as much about a child’s background knowledge as it is about sounding out letters.
Hirsch makes the case that early literacy isn’t our problem —the problem begins around 3rd grade when students transition from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.” Reading comprehension is treated as a discrete skill, one that, as shown on NAEP, most American 4th graders fail to master. What if, asks Hirsch, we focused on giving students more general knowledge? The Core Knowledge Curriculum, developed by Hirsch, was designed to solve this problem. A 2023 study followed students who started kindergarten in schools using Core Knowledge, and tracked them into middle school. The paper explains that for 30 years, there’s been a debate about the best way to achieve reading comprehension—is it building general knowledge or building “procedural skills” that leads to more comprehension? “The results from this study would provide the first experimental evidence suggesting that building General Knowledge leads to higher Reading/English-LA achievement.” That seems clear enough.
If the path to long-term reading success is paved with general knowledge, why hasn’t this evidence received more attention? The answer may lie in the response to research that was published in 1977. The federal government launched a massive experiment to figure out the best way to teach kids in 1968 called Project Follow Through. After nine years, the project concluded and the evidence was clear. Of the nine teaching models studied, only one improved basic academic skills, problem-solving skills, and self-esteem. It was called “Direct Instruction” and the model is as direct as it sounds. “It emphasizes the use of small group, face-to-face instruction by teachers and aides using carefully sequenced lessons in reading, mathematics, and language in kindergarten and first grade.”
Slam dunk, right? That must be the approach schools widely adopted, right?
Of course not. The federal government ultimately recommend all of the programs to school districts, even the ones that didn’t work. One external report stated that “the audience for Follow Through evaluations is an audience of teachers who don’t need statistical finding of experiments to decide how to best teach children.” Despite the large positive impact of direct instruction, education experts pushed back. Professor Douglas Carnine of the University of Oregon outlines many of the individuals and organizations who fought explicitly against direct instruction in his 1999 report titled “Why education experts resist effective practices”. It’s a painful read, forcing the reader to wonder what could have been if almost five decades ago we had united the field around a teaching approach that works. Carnine echoes Hirsch, making the case that romantic ideals of learning have resulted in educators and administrators fooling themselves about how students actually learn. “This romantic notion of learning has become doctrinal in many schools of education…and has closed the minds of many experts to actual research findings about effective approaches to educating children.”
This essay is titled “Why is it so hard?” I think its clear that the answer is: because we have chosen to make it hard. Because we haven’t made good choices. Because we give in to the pressure of some who use the mantle of “expert” as a bully pulpit. Because there aren’t enough E.D. Hirsch’s or Douglas Carnine’s who stand up for what is true and good for kids. We know how to teach kids how to read. They need phonics, then to build background knowledge, and all of it should be surrounded with a direct instruction approach. Anything else is ego or excuses.