Bad for reading, bad for America

 Bad for Reading, Bad for America

 

The average adult American cannot pass the citizenship test that Immigrants need to pass to become citizens.   Almost half of all eligible voters don’t vote- although maybe this year with such strong feelings on both sides we might see more folks voting.

In recent years there has been a heavy push to increase reading instruction and reading test scores.  But the number of hours in a school day are finite so some other subjects had to give up time to reading.  First went the arts, then went physical activity and most recently social studies have suffered.

A recent Thomas B. Fordham University study by Tyner and Kabourek correlated reading comprehension ability with reading achievement.  They concluded that the puny history lessons are not only bad for good citizenship they are bad for reading comprehension.

The study found that students who received just an additional 30 minutes a day of social studies instruction in grades 1-5 do better in reading than do students with less social studies.  Their conclusion is that social studies is the only clear, positive and statistically significant effect on reading ability.  

We teach teachers that kids need to first learn to read then we can worry about social studies.  Our kids spend much more time on reading instruction than do the children of other developed countries but they don’t read as well.  It is the common wisdom – but false- that kids will pick up social studies and science once they have learned to read. And for many schools, reading means just decoding.   These big blocks of time for reading and math are not being tested to see if they are doing the job as intended.  

Louisiana, not noted for its excellence in education, has begun to push the trend in the other direction.  Literacy curricula that use social studies curricula to align with reading are discovering that kids are excited about the lessons of history and about how and why things turned out the way they did.  They also learn some geography along the way too.  And, not surprisingly, reading comprehension scores have gone up.

Rebel teachers may find it easier to sneak in some lessons on history and government as they teach their students to read.  After all, not nearly as many eyes on the teacher when she/he sneaks those content lessons into a virtual  class.  

That might not only improve the students’ reading scores, we could also turn out better educated citizens.  That would be better for reading scores but also better for America.