A new national survey on books in English Language Arts classes validates concerns about books going missing from US curricula—while also offering hopeful signals.
RAND dug into its regular instructional materials survey, analyzing the responses of 3,640 ELA teachers. Its report on books primarily features responses from 1,596 secondary teachers.
Here are the highlights.
Massive Variance in Work With Books
The number of books assigned in middle and high school is simply all over the map. Typically, it's low (0-3 books). Forty-one percent of students have two or fewer books assigned in ELA, and 10% of middle school classrooms have zero assigned books.
But clearly, it doesn't have to be this way. Twenty-four percent of teachers in secondary grades assign 5 or more books per year. Huzzah!
The survey doesn’t answer every question. We don’t know the complexity of the assigned texts, and as the authors note, “we do not know the form their assignment took; teachers could have used the book for whole-class instruction or as a choice for independent reading.”
Still, the breakdown offers reassurance that books aren’t lacking in all classrooms… just some of them.
RAND’s findings echo our writing on the curriculum landscape, which notes a striking dichotomy between passage-centered and book-centered curricula.
Demographics Play a Limited Role
Which schools have book-rich versus book-starved ELA classrooms? RAND finds that demographics play a role:
“Teachers serving more historically disadvantaged students (i.e., students experiencing poverty, students of color, multilingual learners, and students with disabilities) assigned fewer full books.”
It’s a troubling finding.
But again, we need to note the broad range in every subgroup. Demographics aren’t destiny: we find book-rich classroom and book-starved classrooms for every type of student:
In fact, there’s less variance than I’d have expected. Conventional wisdom suggests that teachers expect less of underprivileged students, and those expectations become self-fulfilling prophecies. The RAND survey lends some credence to the idea that schools lower aspirations for less privileged students—but it challenges it, too.
Really, it’s worth sitting with the ways this survey puts pressure on conventional wisdom:
No, students haven’t lost their capacity for sustained attention on books. Teachers are successfully assigning 5+ books per year to students in every subgroup. Even in classrooms where 50-100% of students have disabilities, you’ll find students reading 5+ books per year.
Attending a “good school” in an affluent neighborhood does not insulate a student from a book-starved education.
If demographics don’t predict the prevalence of books in classrooms, what does?
Curriculum as Culprit
Unsurprisingly, curriculum played a large role:
“Teachers who primarily used any type of publisher-developed curriculum were more likely than their counterparts who did not use publisher-developed curricula to report assigning few books. For instance, among teachers not using publisher-developed curricula, 25% reported assigning one or two books. In comparison, among teachers using publisher-developed curricula for 51 to 75% of their instructional time, this proportion grew to 41%. Differences were even larger among teachers using publisher-developed curricula for 76 to 100% of their instructional time; 49% of these teachers assigned one or two books.”
It gets worse: teachers using “standards-aligned” (SA) materials from publishers were less likely to use whole books:
“These patterns were magnified among teachers using SA materials. For instance, among teachers using non-SA materials most intensely, 44% said that they assigned one or two books, and about 20% said that they assigned five or more books. Among teachers using SA materials most intensely, these percentages were 57% and 7%, respectively. This difference suggests that the patterns of full-book assignment that we observe among teachers using publisher-developed curricula are driven, in large part, by teachers using SA curricula.”
This is a critical finding, but we need to go deeper to understand what’s happening.
RAND makes a common category error by using EdReports, the influential curriculum review website, as its guidepost for “standards-alignment.”
Since ~2019, EdReports has been under fire for problematic reviews. In fact, the Standards authors have long-signaled their concerns about its reviews for Standards alignment1.
EdReports has given its highest “all-green, standards-aligned” rating to a broad church of curricula, varied in quality. It has also published flawed reviews of some of the highest-quality programs. In response, authors have begun avoiding its review process.
In the conversation about books in curriculum, EdReports is the elephant in the room:
Multiple book-starved programs (Wonders, Into Reading, MyView, MyPerspectives) have earned top marks from EdReports. Further, these “basal” programs lack studies demonstrating their efficacy, individually or as a category.
There’s a stronger evidence base for the use of “knowledge-building” curricula2, which consistently include books. Some (Wit & Wisdom, EL Education, Core Knowledge, ARC Core) have earned all-green reviews by EdReports, but others have not.
The three most book-rich ELA curricula in K-8 are not considered “standards-aligned” by EdReports—although the architects of the Standards do not concur3. Bookworms, which performed well in efficacy studies, earned a middling review by EdReports, as did Fishtank. Reading Reconsidered hasn’t been reviewed.
So, when RAND alludes to standards-aligned curricula, it’s a real mixed bag.
Unfortunately, basals continue to enjoy greater market share than the knowledge-building and book-rich programs. The EdReports seal of approval has ushered basals onto state lists and into classrooms.
RAND’s finding about the role of curriculum is important, and it should challenge the field. However, the takeaway cannot be about “standards-aligned versus non-standards-aligned” programs. The EdReports variance renders this distinction meaningless.
The real takeaway: basals and anthology programs are keeping books from American classrooms. In addition, EdReports has played a pivotal role in promoting basals and gatekeeping book-rich curricula, and states went along. Today, basals have the largest market share in almost every state, so RAND’s finding on the role of “publisher-developed” curriculum will be weighted by their prevalence.
The sooner states (and RAND4) grasp and grapple with these nuances, the better for schools.
If RAND published its analysis with different criteria, and compared teachers using knowledge-building curricula versus other commercial programs, the outcomes would assuredly look different. I bet we’d find that knowledge-building curricula outperformed every category for creating book-rich middle school experiences. If you want to understand why RAND is not approaching its analyses this way, see Footnote 4.
More Research Needed? Geez, I Hope Not.
The RAND report closes with a call for more research:
“Although adjacent research suggests that full-book reading enhances a variety of student outcomes, the field needs specific research on full-book reading in ELA instruction.”
My first reaction is… seriously?? We need more research to validate that books belong in ELA?
This is an evidence-based reaction, not just a visceral one.
Research has already found work with whole books to accelerate reading gains, as I recently testified to the DC Board of Education.
Notably, a large body of research supports the role of reading volume in reading skill development. It’s hardly a secret. When I met David Liben, one of the key architects of the Common Core standards, in 2013, he couldn’t stop talking about this research. It was a staple of Common Core implementation guidance and Standards Institutes5. David and Meredith Liben still preach the importance of reading volume.
In curricula that transition from passage to passage, teachers and students can’t achieve the flow state that comes from work with longer texts, because of all the transitions between texts. Reading volume gets compromised in the process. This isn’t just a theoretical point; the word counts in basals are much lower than book-centered curricula. Kids read less when passages dominate the content, full stop.
The only literacy leader kind-of, sort-of defending passage-centered programs is Tim Shanahan, in a recent column6. Yet Tim is an author of multiple basal curricula: Wonders7 and the new Emerge program, so he has a conflict of interest. I don’t see any other literacy researchers making the case for passage-centered programs. We should listen to that silence.
The case for books in reading curriculum can rest on the research and points above—or simply on the precautionary principle: until there is clear evidence that passage-only curriculum causes no harm to student reading skills and stamina, we should demand curricula with whole books.
I can (reluctantly) agree with RAND that more research would be nice, because voices like Shanahan’s have disproportionate influence, and the field seems to have forgotten the volume of reading research. After all, the Reading League is giving high marks for content to curricula that contain no books, and the Science of Reading era may have caused the pendulum to swing too far away from books. The field needs a course-correction.
Still, asking the field to wait for new research feels like a shameful waste of time and resources. The better course is relying on the research we already have.
Open Question of the Hour
Please tell us in the comments: why do you think the research on the importance of volume of reading has received little attention in the Science of Reading era?
This Week’s Curriculum Reading List
iReady: NBC News covered the iReady backlash, and we were honored to see our work quoted.
Early reading: in a new study, “more time spent on phonics was associated with lower DIBELS scores, whereas more time spent on comprehension was linked with higher scores on the standardized tests designed to evaluate literacy skills in K-8 students,” according to a study reported in EdWeek.
Common language on curriculum: Kristen McQuillan thinks we need some, and the Fordham report proves her right. The Michigan ELA curriculum list, which mixes foundational skills-only materials and comprehensive programs, drives the point home.
Elementary math materials: Facts on Fire is a widely-used supplement in our network. Gene Tavernetti interviewed author Bria Poncy about the materials for his podcast.
Math curriculum reality-check: Holly Korbey wants you to know that In Math, Worksheets Rule.
Curriculum bells and whistles: “seductive details” in curriculum only work when they are coherent with the curriculum, suggests a new study.
Since 2018, the Standards authors and architects have been publishing content to counter EdReports signals.
In 2018, Student Achievement Partners – an organization founded by the Standards authors – published “We’re Bullish on Bookworms” to show their support for Sharon Walpole’s program in the wake of its first (of two) flawed EdReports reviews.
In 2020, SAP published a widely-circulated report on Teachers College Reading Workshop Units of Study. EdReports had notoriously dragged its feet in reviewing TCRWP, and the SAP report seemed to push EdReports off the fence about Balanced Literacy curricula. The damning EdReports reviews of TCRWP and F&P soon followed.
In 2021, SAP published a report on issues with Wonders, after the McGraw-Hill program received a surprising all-green review. In subsequent webinars and articles, Sue Pimentel (lead author of the CCSS in ELA) and her fellow panelists made clear that the concerns were not unique to Wonders. They spoke of “basal bloat” to reflect the category-level nature of the issue.
In 2022, the Knowledge Matters Campaign published a list of curricula endorsed for their “knowledge-building” virtues. This list directly countered the EdReports assessments of the curriculum landscape. The Campaign is run by StandardsWork, an organization co-founded by Pimentel. The team behind the curriculum guidance included Pimentel, Meredith Liben, and David Liben—all authors or architects of the CCSS ELA and its related guidance documents.
Really, these EdReports issues have been hiding in plain sight for years, and the Standards authors led the field in signaling them… albeit subtly. If You Knew, You Knew.
I may need to make the key research favoring knowledge-building ELA curricula a standard footnote in everything I write. For now, it’s Footnote 1 in my call for a National Curriculum Database.
The Knowledge Matters Campaign recommends Bookworms, Fishtank, and Reading Reconsidered via its list of knowledge-building curricula. This curated list of the highest-quality programs was created by the architects of the CCSS ELA; for more, see footnote 1, above.
Notably, the Knowledge Matters Campaign fails to recommend any of the book-starved basals.
In fact, the focus on “knowledge-building curriculum,” and use of this category name, was a response to the failures at EdReports, and the need for a name other than “high-quality materials.” The oral history of this shift is germane, and can be found in a previous post, Footnote 2.
Why does RAND consistently use EdReports as the measure of curriculum quality, years into questions about its validity as a guidepost? One point of note: the historic funders of RAND’s curriculum reports, and the funders of this latest research, include longtime funders of EdReports. RAND would likely feel some form of pressure to do so, direct or indirect. Funder dynamics are also cited in the continued support for EdReports in the broader “standards-aligned materials and PD” community.
One can wonder why EdReports never considered reading volume in its review criteria in the first place, given the weight the Standards architects gave to the research supporting its importance.
When I published this piece, Tim’s website was down, and this footnote started with: “I’m afraid Tim Shanahan’s website is down at the moment, so links to his columns will not render. I have reached out to Tim to let him know of the issue, which will hopefully be addressed soon (fingers crossed; my writing links Tim’s work heavily).”
Update: the website is back online, so the column on whole books vs excerpts is accessible. I’m updating this footnote with better details.
Tim says “we lack research showing that books do a better job [than passages] of increasing reading ability.” Yet he failed to include the studies reported by others like Natalie Wexler and Sarah Schwartz, and disregarded the volume of reading research entirely.
I was particularly struck by this comment:
Since when is the goal 500 words of sustained attention?
Tim’s column alluded to his role as a curriculum author:
“It’s important that I point out here that I’ve worked on various textbook reading programs, on and off, for almost 50 years. All those programs from various publishers depended heavily on short stories, magazine-style articles, and excerpts from longer works. Those programs have also usually included options for book-length texts as well.”
Wonders, the curriculum with no books in grades 3+, is not mentioned by name. Also, “usually” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in the comments above.
In the last year, many have expressed surprise that Tim is an author of Wonders. Even journalists who regularly used Tim as a source confessed they didn’t know this detail about his work. I appreciate that Tim doesn’t post about this often, nor is this detail in his website bio.
Yet Tim’s LinkedIn is clear about his role as a McGraw-Hill author. It’s all over the McGraw-Hill marketing materials for Wonders and especially for Emerge, where it’s front and center in the promotional copy:
The opening page of the Wonders student materials looks like this:
I’m surprised when anyone is surprised about this information.
I'm thrilled you're giving this issue attention! Many moons ago, my first conviction as a young teacher was that we needed to design school to produce Much. More. Reading. Practice. It's the simplest path to an educated citizenry.
As a middle school English teacher, I packed as many books as possible into the year: read alouds and independent reading with follow-ups. My 80ish students gained more than a year on average in reading achievement. I wish I'd known then to also use a more challenging read-WITH approaches as Doug Lemov advocates.
Sadly, even the upper bound of 5 novels per year from the RAND data may not be enough to close the gap created by decades of reading losses. The summer reading program by Prof. Kim of 4 novels found about a 1 to 1.5 month reading level bump. (That's more of a free reading environment and not in an instructional setting, so we may hope that school-based reading would have a bigger influence.) That is exciting to know that independent reading matters, but it's a small lift when we're years behind. https://wallacefoundation.org/report/helping-children-become-summer-bookworms#key_takeaways
Then consider Anderson et al.'s classic finding: the median students read roughly 282,000 words from books per year. That estimate pre-dates smartphones, which have since cratered out-of-school reading. Five middle-grade novels might total around 250,000 words combined. That means even the RAND identified "book-rich" classrooms are barely hitting what used to be the median. Acceleration is what is needed now more than ever, not just median-level reading practice.
Reading books really shouldn't be a debate. If kids were reading fiction, history, science, and art books, they would know stuff.
They would be able to write better.
They would be smarter.
How can we rearrange curricula and the school day to find more time for book reading? Reading is not just for English class.
This was great, Vaites. As always.
One of the under discussed reasons for the decline of the book-rich ELA classroom is that teachers don't know WHAT to assign. Few, if any, authoritative book lists exist that teachers can reference and, outside the vague and preachy castigations to select "culturally relevant" books, they are not taught in ed prep programs HOW to select a book, i.e. how to consider (or not) students' reading levels, how to align (or not) with content-area classes, how to build a thematic unit around an anchor text (or not!). Even worse, few teachers are taught HOW to teach a book.
A classroom of reluctant readers just exacerbates this insecurity.