High school seniors' reading scores are down. This Arizona professor wants to turn them around

Reading scores among high school seniors are going down, according to the latest version of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP — often referred to as the nation’s report card.

Last year’s average scores were 3 points lower than in 2019 and 10 points lower than the first assessment in 1992.

So, how can we turn those numbers around? Jessica Early has some ideas.

Early is a professor of English education at Arizona State University; she spoke more about it with The Show, including if anything in the scores surprised her.

ASU

Full conversation

JESSICA EARLY: No, the scores don't surprise me at all. And the trends in these scores have been going down since prior to COVID and continue to slide.

What's interesting about the scores, and it continues to upset me and other people invested in education, is that the disparity between students who have and students who do not have is widening. So students who are struggling are struggling more and more, and there's more students, who are struggling than ever before. But the students who are doing well are doing better, if that makes sense.

So it's like both sides of the map are further and further apart, which is not a good trend.

MARK BRODIE: Yeah, I would imagine that maybe makes it more difficult perhaps to try to figure out the way out of this?

EARLY: Yeah, although we know a lot about how to teach students to read and there's a ton of research out there and best practice about what works in teaching students to read and the science of reading, and blended with holistic approaches. We need to fund schools and train teachers and give teachers time to teach students and to invest in reading and writing and, in literacy across grade levels and disciplines.

I also think that we've seen a, a big shift in schools away from teaching novels and texts that students really connect to because of the Common Core. The Common Core emphasizes nonfiction reading more than fiction, doesn't mean you can't do both, but I think we've sort of gone to an extreme of cutting out a lot of books and texts that students more easily connect to and see, right, see themselves in, in terms of experience.

Students used to read, you know, eight to nine novels a year in high school English classes and now they're reading like two.

BRODIE: Is there some part of the fact that students are reading fewer novels, is part of that because teachers or maybe schools or districts are concerned about backlash from particular novels that they might assign to students?

EARLY: That's one of the things. So, we know now more than ever that texts, texts are always highly contested, but they're more contested than they've ever been. And there was, there's recently been a report released by the National Council for Teachers of English. And one of the things that report shows is that teachers, for the most part really value teaching texts, literature from diverse perspectives, but they don't feel comfortable in their school context to do so.

And the majority of books that are being taught in high schools are the books that our parents read and even their parents read. So I think things like that are, are really problematic. Books are really complicated, and they show all different perspectives and lenses, and that's what reading's about.

BRODIE: How is this impacting other aspects of school? Like if students are not strong readers or confident readers or maybe even interested in being readers, what does that mean for their non-English language arts subjects in school?

EARLY: Well, one of the things we're noticing at the university level, and there's recent studies showing this is that professors who are teaching writing across all the disciplines at the university level are seeing exactly this, that students are coming to college and they don't have familiarity with close reading and with close and sustained long texts.

And I think this is an invitation for all of us who work in the K-12 setting, whether we're PE teachers or art teachers or English language arts teachers, to invite students to use text in sustained, important and real ways to gather information, to make sense of their ideas, and to learn more about who they want to be in the world.

I also think a huge factor that we haven't talked about yet, that's sort of sitting, it's the elephant in the room is that students are reading all the time on their phones and we're involved in texting and making text and reading all sorts of communication. It's just different than the kind of reading that, my generation or your generation took part in in or outside of school.

And it's not that that kind of reading isn't important, but it's a really kind of different kind of attention span, and we want students to be able to do both things.

BRODIE: Well, it's interesting because I would imagine, you know, especially now that so many schools and districts have, you know, phones off, phones in your backpack away for the day kinds of policies, like you have some number of hours during the day almost to get kids hooked on traditional literature or something that's not in 140 characters or, you know, on, on their phones necessarily.

So I wonder if that's maybe an opportunity during the school day when when students cannot be on their phones in many cases, to really try to get them interested in literature, to then get them to carry that through after school on the weekends when they're not in the classroom when they do actually have access to their phones?

EARLY: Absolutely. And this is what we know. We know that when students have access to text that they see themselves in, that they're engaged with, that catch their attention. That they have some choice and investment in.

I think having teachers provide some book choice and libraries that are full of books that are interesting and compelling to students, providing books that are audio and visual as well as, you know, analog, you know, the more schools can do that, this to captivate students' attention when they have them in those school hours, the better.

BRODIE: Well, how do you try to find the balance between sort of the classics, you know, the, the stories that, you know, the books that you and I read in school and our parents maybe even read in school versus more contemporary stories, more contemporary novels that students maybe will see themselves in or see the world in which they're living in, like, does there have to be some of each to, to really be successful here?

EARLY: I think so, and it's a great question and one of the things we know about how to do this is I, I think it's really important to read classic texts for all sorts of reasons, but I also know that we have all these rich, beautiful, amazing, diverse texts that we compare with those classic texts. But I think finding ways for students to connect to all different diverse topics is really important.

I do think one of the most important things is that testing in our country of any kind has really, you know, we have to assess and test students, but I also think a lot of the tests are testing in the same way they always have, and that reading’s really changed.

There, you know, learning to read and the process of learning how to decode words is the, is the same, but there's such a variety of text now, digital, multimodal, analog, Kindle, audio. And I think we need to also think about the way we assess students and how they read and think about kind of expanding the notion of what counts for being a successful reader. It's not always just a test score.