American Students from Fourth Grade to College are Struggling to Read

Really, Americans, period, are struggling and we should all be concerned.

Hiya!

After a while, proficient readers can forget that reading is a skill. Since, with practice, reading becomes automatic, even second nature. But true reading requires more than decoding letters strung together on a page (or screen). True literacy requires comprehension, which demands focused attention to decipher not just the words and sentences but the writer’s intention behind them.

This sort of concentration isn’t always easy to achieve, but I can do it on demand when I need to, like reading a novel in one sitting while traveling or the dense scientific research I read for this newsletter. Still, I sometimes forget that I can only do this because I learned and developed the necessary skills. But it seems youth today, from grade school through college, aren’t learning these skills.

Grade School

Most children in The United States learn to read using one of two primary methods: phonics or whole language, which is also known as “balanced literacy.”

Phonics teaches kids how to read by sounding words out and breaking longer words into units — which I how I was taught to read. Meanwhile, balanced literacy teaches kids to read using the belief that, like learning to speak, learning to read comes naturally when children are exposed to suitable materials. Balanced literacy involves teachers and parents reading books aloud to kids and encouraging them to memorize words or use a book’s illustrations to guess them.

Many school districts in The United States have utilized balanced literacy programs for decades. However, since 2013, 37 states and the District of Columbia have passed laws or other policies connected to evidence-based reading instruction — a method called “the science of reading,” which focuses on phonics, vocabulary, and comprehension.

Mississippi was one such state, and in October 2022, they announced that their fourth-grade reading scores, since implementing phonics, jumped from 49th in the nation to 29th, according to the Urban Institute’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). This jump fueled other states to adopt phonics into their teaching methods.

While impressive, there is more to this that wasn’t reported. Child psychologist Marion Blank points out in Scientific American that in the 29th position,

“Mississippi had gone from the bottom of the pile to being just as bad as everywhere else.”

This is because, in the same year, NAEP reported that 65 percent of the nation’s fourth-graders had only basic reading skills.

According to Blank, some educators argue that having basic reading skills, one level down from proficiency, isn’t a bad thing. But that’s a bit challenging to accept when the fact remains that about four out of ten fourth-graders cannot read. The NAEP’s biennial testing consistently reports that two-thirds of children in The United States are unable to read with proficiency, and, incredibly, 40 percent are virtually nonreaders.

So, when looking at the bigger picture, while Mississippi’s improvements are great, it’s clear there’s a more significant issue going on. While phonics may produce better test results than whole language, it’s still lacking. Blank, who specializes in childhood literacy, discusses more than a few flaws involved with phonics in Scientific American, but one in particular seems the most relevant to me. She writes:

The phonics method of converting each letter to a particular sound is totally unsuited to the English language.

She goes on to explain how the letter ‘e,’ the most common printed letter in English, has 11 different pronunciations. Think of “eat,” “end,” “eye,” and “vein,” for example. Heck, even the word “eleven” uses three separate “e” pronunciations. Not to mention the ever-frustrating rules regarding the “silent e” in words like “are,” “cage,” or “fine.”

Blank says things like this turn children away from reading because it makes reading a complicated and laborious process involving decoding rules that — let’s be honest — don’t always make sense. For instance, why are “colonel” and “kernel” pronounced the same?