Recent findings from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, found that one-third of American high school seniors lack basic reading skills. These rates, the lowest in more than three decades, continue with younger students, with about 40 percent of fourth graders, and a third of eighth graders, reading below the NAEP’s Basic Level.
While this stagnation can be partially attributed to learning aftershocks from the COVID-19 pandemic, Siobhan Dennis, senior director of customer experience at Wilson Language Training, points to a trend with far deeper roots.
“What we are discovering,” said Dennis, “while these scores have struggled over the past decade or three, [is that] the real plateauing, and then the decline, began even before COVID.”
The way reading is taught in schools is also up for debate. At the center are two differing styles: structured literacy, favoring science-backed phonics and linguistics; and balanced literacy, which leans on visual, syntactic, and semantic “cues.”
Some, like Faythe Beauchemin, an assistant professor at Boston College’s Lynch School of Education and Human Development, believe the comparison is futile, and that both styles of reading education have a place in classrooms.
“Children should have it all,” she said. “We need all of the components of reading to make sure that children become proficient, as well as engaged and excited, readers. So I think with this focus to more phonics-based instruction, some of the other areas can get crowded out.”
Issues of economic status and access also play a major role in students’ reading levels, affecting access to high-quality educational material. While Massachusetts has the highest youth literacy rates among American states, it also has the second largest academic achievement gap between wealthy and poor students. Dennis says low literacy rates directly correlate with higher risks for dropping out, lower self-esteem and even incarceration.
“These literacy rates are a real threat to the functioning of society,” said Catherine Snow, Harvard University’s John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education. “All of us have had the experiences in recent years of trying to fill out forms online, trying to get doctor’s appointments, trying to pay bills. Those are things that now require fairly high literacy skills to navigate.”
Research has shown that 95 percent of elementary students, regardless of their backgrounds, have the cognitive capacity necessary to read. Yet because the effects of illiteracy can negatively alter the futures of affected students in their post-school worlds, work needs to be done now to ensure teachers can optimize the lessons and skillsets they impart.
“We have a science of reading,” Snow said. “But now, we need a science of teaching reading that is equally well-developed if we want to support teachers optimally to do what they are trying to do in first- through sixth-grade classrooms.”
Guests
- Catherine Snow, the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education at Harvard University
- Faythe Beauchemin, assistant professor at the Lynch School of Education and Human Development at Boston College
- Siobhan Dennis, senior director of customer experience at Wilson Language Training
