Why America's Children Stopped Falling in Love with Reading

"A shrinking number of kids are reading widely and voraciously for fun," writes a New York-based children's book author in the Atlantic. But why?The ubiquity and allure of screens surely play a large part in this - most American children have smartphones by the age of 11 - as does learning loss during the pandemic. But this isn't the whole story. A survey just before the pandemic by the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that the percentages of 9- and 13-year-olds who said they read daily for fun had dropped by double digits since 1984. I recently spoke with educators and librarians about this trend, and they gave many explanations, but one of the most compelling - and depressing - is rooted in how our education system teaches kids to relate to books.... In New York, where I was in public elementary school in the early '80s, we did have state assessments that tested reading level and comprehension, but the focus was on reading as many books as possible and engaging emotionally with them as a way to develop the requisite skills. Now the focus on reading analytically seems to be squashing that organic enjoyment. Critical reading is an important skill, especially for a generation bombarded with information, much of it unreliable or deceptive. But this hyperfocus on analysis comes at a steep price: The love of books and storytelling is being lost. This disregard for story starts as early as elementary school. Take this requirement from the third-grade English-language-arts Common Core standard, used widely across the U.S.: "Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, distinguishing literal from nonliteral language...." [A]s several educators explained to me, the advent of accountability laws and policies, starting with No Child Left Behind in 2001, and accompanying high-stakes assessments based on standards, be they Common Core or similar state alternatives, has put enormous pressure on instructors to teach to these tests at the expense of best practices.... [W]e need to get to the root of the problem, which is not about book lengths but the larger educational system. We can't let tests control how teachers teach: Close reading may be easy to measure, but it's not the way to get kids to fall in love with storytelling. Teachers need to be given the freedom to teach in developmentally appropriate ways, using books they know will excite and challenge kids. "There's a whole generation of kids who associate reading with assessment now," librarian/public school teacher Jennifer LaGarde tells the Atlantic. And their article notes the problem doesn't end after grade school. "By middle school, not only is there even less time for activities such as class read-alouds, but instruction also continues to center heavily on passage analysis, said LaGarde, who taught that age group."

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