Educational Leadership

; The 2005 ACT College Readiness Benchmark for Reading found that only one-half of the students tested were ready for college-level reading. Reading scores were the lowest in a decade.

Young people in the United States are not just substandard readers, they are increasingly reluctant readers—even in their free time. In the National Endowment for the Arts’ comprehensive 2007 survey of American reading, To Read or Not to Read, researchers found that a “calamitous, universal falling off of reading” occurs for many students at around age 13 and often continues through the rest of these students’ lives.

Educators know the commonly cited culprits behind the decline of reading: poverty, lack of parent education, print-poor environments at home, second-language issues, the over-scheduling of children, and competition from electronic media. To this list, I would like to add a factor I call readicide, meaning practices educators employ to raise reading scores that actually kill students’ love of reading. Readicide is occurring, ironically, in the one place where a love of reading should be fostered—schools.

How have schools become coconspirators in the decline of reading? I suggest four contributing factors: ( 1) Schools act as though they value the development of test takers more than the development of readers, ( 2) Schools are limiting authentic reading experiences, ( 3) Teachers are overteaching books, and ( 4) Teachers are underteaching books. Let’s look at how each of these practices leads to readicide, and examine steps teachers can take to counteract them.

these. And if we are to guide students to become thoughtful adults who possess such qualities, we must face the elephant in the room: U.S. students’ lack of reading proficiency and their general disinclination to read.

The signs are not encouraging. Consider the following points taken from a 2006 report on adolescent literacy by the National Council of Teachers of English:

; The 2004 National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that U.S. secondary school students are reading at a rate significantly below expected levels.

; The Alliance for Excellent Education points out that 8. 7 million secondary students—one in four—are unable to read and comprehend the material in their textbooks.

FACTOR 1: Schools develop test takers instead of readers. A curriculum steeped in test preparation drives shallow teaching and learning. Consider, for example, the monumental task confronting social science teachers in California, who must teach the following standard from the 10th grade curriculum: