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What Kids Aren’t Reading
I recently read an article on NPR’s “monkey see” blog called “What Kids Are Reading” that discusses trends in high school students’ reading habits. The thrust of the article is that high school students are not reading at their grade level; neither their own leisure-reading choices nor their reading assignments in school tend to be as advanced as their age group can handle. One troubling fact the article reports is that over the past hundred years, the complexity of texts students are being assigned in school has dropped by three grade levels so that high school students are now, on average, assigned texts deemed suitable for sixth graders. Certainly these claims find support in the “Reading at Risk” and “To Read or Not to Read” studies the National Endowment for the Arts has undertaken over the last decade.
My kids are just three, so I’m years away from evaluating the truth of this as it applies to my own family’s experience, but I’m curious how these claims strike others: does this ring true for you? If you are a high school or college educator, are you surprised by what types of reading your students are equipped to do? And how do you respond as an educator when grappling with underprepared students — or, beyond that, resistant ones?
And I have more questions: why do you suppose this trend is happening? Has reading simply been replaced by other activities offered up on electronic devices? Is it that teachers just can’t get the average student to do the reading if it’s perceived as complex? Do we resign ourselves to the realities that we are faced with, believing that any reading is better than no reading? I am really curious. I desperately want my kids to read fat, difficult, world-upending books, and not only when they have to — though I want them to have to. And while I’m not at all opposed to reading below one’s “grade level” (I have a couple of books in my summer reading stack that will be fast, breezy, and fun), that should never happen due to a lack of exposure to or awareness of the range of books out there to be experienced.
I also want to believe that we are not collectively lazier and less intelligent than Americans were a century ago. If we optimistically set that possibility aside, then how do you make sense of these findings?
Lettered Ladies 
Hmmm…my own “scientific” research (ie, hanging out with a 7 1/2 year old) shows that kids are BOTH very into electronic/technological stuff like video games AND good old fashioned reading. Ashton reads in bed each night (with his little book light!) and he loves going to get new books each week. He likes series books and is trying to read “only books with 200 pages or more.”
I think these are really good questions, and I don’t have any clear answers, but just some thoughts: 1. I remember a lot of these discussions coming up with Harry Potter, because although kids obviously read them, a huge percentage of the readership of those books are adults. 1b. In addition to this text, I wonder about the increasing quality of many YA books (which would seem, and which I still think, is a good thing): anecdotally I’ve heard of more and more adults reading these books (which isn’t inherently bad at all). I’m just wondering: for some readers, are YA novels “replacing” some more so-called “adult” reading? 2. When I have my students write an “Autobiography of a Reader” paper, overwhelmingly they report that the reason that they read is to escape or to relax. These are fine reasons, but one thing I try to convince them of throughout the semester is that there are many, many more reasons to read — and that part of the “pleasure” of reading can be encountering texts that stretch us, make us think, make us work, etc. Many of them seem to have never considered that point of view before. 3. I think about this a lot, even with college students, because if I pick texts that aren’t accessible (or what my students perceive as accessible), they often resist them and none of us have any fun. However, I don’t feel its my job to pick texts that will be easy for them or fun to read or whatever — but it’s a really hard tension, because I know that in my gen ed courses, this may be one of the last sustained experiences that some of them have with reading. Anyway, sorry to add to the muddle, but just wanted to affirm that I think about these questions a lot, too.
A colleague of mine has a daughter entering high school. She thinks much of this has to do with changes in our public school system. As an example, she said her daughter was once reading Oscar Wilde during a free reading period in the classroom, and her teacher made her put it away so they could read their common reading–a third-grade level book in a middle school classroom.