I am a parent in a NYC elementary school in a district that chose HMH Into Reading out of the 3 options that the DOE has mandated (Into Reading, EL Education, and Wit and Wisdom). After listening to Sold a Story, reading Natalie Wexler's book, and seeing the extremely uninspiring MyBooks that were coming home, I started trying to get answers from the district and the school about why Into Reading was chosen. I was surprised at how poor the evidence was supporting Into Reading, and in contrast the other two curricula seemed not only to be more high quality to me personally, but also had better evidence supporting them. Our district superintendent only reassured me that "all three curricula are very high quality and based on the science of reading". When I pointed out that these curricula have pretty different structures, and could he please tell me why he chose Into Reading, he stopped answering my emails.
Later, in a conversation with the principal when I was advocating for more whole book read-alouds at the school, she told me point-blank: "If the district staff walked into a classroom and saw the teacher reading aloud to the students, we would get in trouble." She also expressed some skepticism that reading aloud is an effective pedagogical technique. This is despite the fact that EL Education and Wit and Wisdom are built around daily high-level complex read-alouds, so this pedagogical technique is literally DOE-approved, and our very own superintendent told me that all three curricula are equivalently high quality...
The whole experience has left me with the impression that at all levels of the administration, folks seem to know a lot less about curricula than you would expect, and maybe even worse, no one views themselves as responsible for being a curriculum expert. They also seem to have lost track of any common sense about education. (Like, you don't necessarily need data to support that at some point kids should read books - the data's there, but also isn't this one of the primary goals of education?) This makes them very susceptible to marketing and jargon. I am baffled by the fact that whenever I bring up this study or that study about Into Reading or EL Education, no one I'm talking to seems to have looked at these studies themselves. I have a totally different full-time job - surely I should know less than principals and superintendents!
I've started to agitate by telling other parents in the school that their kid will not be reading whole chapter books/having whole chapter books read aloud to them at any point in the curriculum. Every time, the parents respond with complete shock, which makes me feel a little less alone. But to be honest: I am frustrated and tired. I shouldn't have to sell my kid's school on reading books. It's like having to sell a doctor on exercise!
I am right there with you, you are not alone. Not having a degree in education, I went about my research like I would any other topic…wow was I shocked by what I learned!
I just assumed that admin both understood the theory behind curriculum development, how it’s written most effectively and best implemented.
Haha, was I wrong. I feel like a crazy conspiracy theorist at times.
I’ve used everything I’ve learned to make sure my son has the best educational experience and ultimately moved him to a different school…so glad I did the work to learn and move him. He’s thriving now, coming from an environment where he was hardly getting through each day…definitely not learning at highest potential.
I’m so glad you’re drawing attention to this issue! What a travesty that we are setting our kids up to fail. In a mobile device-distracted context, giving kids access to full texts early on and helping them succeed in and enjoy reading them is vital for developing an educated citizenry.
The “basalization” of reading education is a decades old problem in which text snippets only make up the reading curriculum. That was how my reading programs were designed in the 70’s/80’s. I got to read some great Shirley Jackson short stories but can’t say much else for the curriculum design. Haphazard learning rarely works!
Another issue you may have noted before is that standardized assessments’ categorization of results by reading skill perpetuates incorrectly that mistakes in comprehension can be tracked back to a particular sub skill such as “making an inference” or “summarization.” Teachers and parents receive reports such as this and thus teachers then naturally look to teach the missing skill. And so they don’t think the text matters as much as the skill teaching. This is based on faulty logic. If a child struggles with a passage, odds are she lacks the decoding skills to read it easily or she lacks the knowledge of the ideas or words in the text to reason well about it on her own.
One of the few truths of the whole language movement was the emphasis about reading whole texts, including studying themes. When children study a concept or a time period with the benefit of several related whole texts, they are likely to learn more vocabulary knowledge and knowledge of the world. That idea was good and does not have to be thrown out with the bath water.
Even though US parents went through the same school system as children— that had remarkably weak planning in knowledge building across multiple curricular areas (“Social studies” I’m looking at you!)—they would still likely be shocked that teachers aren’t planning instruction year over year based on teaching students information systematically about the world. It’s just so intuitive and shouldn’t take massive clinical trials to know that when schools teach students step by step about the world across the grade levels, these students will be better educated. That’s the self-defining term—“being educated.” We need a change.
Thank you for this comment. I am tempted to write a piece: “PSA: Everything Lucy Calkins ever liked is not automatically bad” after reading some of the comments.
Whole Language didn’t get everything wrong. Volume of reading is really good for kids, actually. The flaw of Calkins’s approach was the way she brought books into the ELA block (independent reading, mini-conferences, small group book clubs), not the fact that she brought books into the ELA block. I could go on.
"I am tempted to write a piece: “PSA: Everything Lucy Calkins ever liked is not automatically bad” after reading some of the comments."
Please do! I recommend you talk to Leah Mermelstein (https://leahmermelstein.substack.com/), a former Lucy Calkins trainer, who understands what real 'balance' in a classroom looks like.
1)Reading in class for extended periods is very important; (2) Teachers are incredibly resistant to this practice; (3) The entire TCRWP "workshop method", despite its bad questions, can be seen as a round-about way to try to make teachers comfortable with just letting their students read!
I've been teaching high school for three years and the situation in my country is even more dire (3-page excerpts max. for my students, usually weak readers). Students are then expected to read a couple of books on their own, and do some kind of creative work about it - a mood board, say, or a playlist reflecting the atmosphere of the book. Needless to say nobody is reading anything; even if they wanted to, they would not be able to do it after years of neglecting the skill.
I started educating myself - thanks edutwitter - and last year, I dumped the choice reading and the creative projects and opted for reading books together. It was amazing. Overhearing students discuss the story in the hallway. Students asking if they could please buy the book from the school so they could read it again. Parents telling me how amazed they were seeing their dyslectic daughter engrossed in a book. High quality discussions and writing. And a lot of fun to teach.
I am an educator-turned-curriculum-developer who has worked for publishers on both ends of the spectrum—knowledge-building/book-rich and excerpt-heavy/book-lite. I appreciate you shining a light on this important issue. When ELA programs rely on excerpts, the instruction can become performative. How can you truly determine a theme or central idea if you’ve only read one chapter of a 20 chapter text? It devolves into piecemeal, incoherent skills work that’s designed to tick a box on EdReports. Our children deserve so much more than that. Also, clearly it’s not working (I see you, NAEP scores).
Is this learning in the 21st century? Why have schools come to mirror the marketplace? Why did schools stop believing that they had a role in dictating the trends that shape our future?
It’s a shame that the same imperatives that drive the attention economy are appearing in our curricula. Perhaps schools should, instead, remember that they have a responsibility to protect and nurture our kids’ cognitive development. There are better options. We just have to be brave enough to choose them.
Is there any discussion with these curriculum choices about how kids aren’t reading in class because they won’t read at home? My biggest hurdles with whole class novels in 8th grade ELA was that we didn’t have time to read full books in class and most students wouldn’t read outside of class. (I’m not a homework advocate beyond independent reading, but sometimes a few pages of an assigned book is necessary!)
It would be a dream to develop a curriculum that includes full books, poetry, short stories, and student choice that doesn’t just mandate the reading but the relevant and rigorous work that accompanies it — with room for extra support and student extension.
I talk about this A LOT with a high school teacher I work with. It's a huge issue...
I've seen teachers have the best success with gradually building student reading stamina in class BEFORE releasing them to read at home independently (Doug Lemov talks about one approach on the latest season of the Knowledge Matters Podcast...episode 4 I think). The key here seems to be building a classroom culture around reading and discussing, which you can do as build their reading stamina by having them read short bursts independently in class. If older kids expect that class is built around discussing and analyzing a shared book, then they'll be more likely to show up having done the reading. Text quality matters a lot here too.
I need to listen to this episode. And yes, I agree. That’s where I found the most success, but I think it needs to be a whole school culture! So by the time kids are in 8th grade (or 5th grade, or 10th grade, or whatever), teachers don’t have to start from zero.
One of the reasons I read to my high school history students (out loud, the last 5 minutes of class) is that so many of them have never read a whole book. Ever.
You don't often hear the financial reason behind the "no books" situation - thanks for the great reporting here.
I think another piece of note is the lack of physical books in schools and classrooms. I substitute teach in a PA district that uses Wonders. Wonders would be a little bit more excusable if teachers continued to cultivate reading in the classroom and classroom libraries, as well as school libraries that carry books. I have often found poor quality or non-existent classroom libraries as well as school library sessions that do not allow or encourage children to borrow books.
Our school pays for a subscription to Epic, which is an online reading and video platform. Because this is tauted by the district, reading physical books is no longer offered by the teachers to the students. Epic has grade level online short books, but no chapter books. Epic also has a large library of general kids videos that look identical to what you might find on YouTube kids. So when teachers give the student an option to "go on Epic", the teachers want the student reading a book, but often times they are watching a video about kids making slime or other video.
Wow, we read a lot of full books in 4th and 5th grade in the 90s and I genuinely didn’t know we had moved so far away from that- my favorite memories from late elementary school are getting to read aloud for a full chapter because I volunteered to read Caddie Woodlawn and Island of the Blue Dolphins. My oldest is in third grade and they promote reading full books so they can take accelerated reader tests but I haven’t heard about them reading full books in class.
You make many important points. As a former high school English teacher and current elementary school reading specialist/classroom teacher, I have always included whole books in my whole-class instruction. My concern rests with this statement:
"Nonetheless, high-stakes testing certainly helped fuel the popularity of passage-heavy, book-lite programs. It also helped push science and social studies out of the elementary school day."
Those of us who adhere to our state's social studies and science standards are oftentimes overwhelmed by the expectation to teach a knowledge-rich ELA program with competing SS and science units. Ironically, given that there is only so much time in the teaching day, adhering to a knowledge-rich curriculum like CKLA, which teaches the civil war to second graders, can also crowd out second-grade social studies standards which, in my state, do not include the fifth-grade standard of teaching the civil war.
Your points are valid and important. But as with so much in education, the devil is in the details.
Yes, the patchwork of social studies standards is the biggest challenge to the knowledge-building curriculum approach. I don’t know what to do about that. I only know that the data on abandonment of those subjects in K-5 was frightening, so knowledge-building curricula feels like the least worst answer.
Thanks for this interesting post. This seems a big problem and I am glad you have drawn attention to it.
First of all, it's probably worth mentioning that the approach and, indeed, the concept of curriculum is quite different in the UK. In my experience, basal readers are unusual and whole books are frequently read in primary (elementary) school.
With that in mind, can I ask a little more about the financial incentives that you think might be leading this practice in the USA? FWIW, I think financial incentives are one of the reasons behind the enduring use of levelled readers despite their weak evidence base so I can well believe what you are saying.
However, I am particularly interested in this quote:
"When curriculum publishers design curriculum to include trade books, they must purchase copies of those texts or license the content."
Why do they have to purchase the texts? Couldn't they just reference the books in their curriculum materials and leave schools to buy the texts? As mentioned above, I am a Brit and so this part seemed quite baffling to me. Hoping you can shed some light!
Emily Hanford’s work brought phonics back to classrooms based on science not because of a loud movement. I would suggest you back up your article with research before demanding schools add something because you “feel” it is important. That is what got us in trouble with “Whole Language and Balanced Literacy”. If you look at the research on current science of Reading curricula implementation, you will see positive improvement trends. That is what school boards, state dept of education, and superintendents base their decisions on.
I agree with the essence of your concern: schools shouldn't do things just because it's popular. Amen, sister. You're preaching to the choir.
But I think I can stand on evidence in this piece. In fact, I'm following the evidence base quite closely. The states that have seen the biggest gains in proficiency on the NAEP since 2020 have all brought knowledge-building curricula into their schools, Mississippi included. I wrote about it here: https://www.karenvaites.org/p/the-southern-surge-understanding
Knowledge-building curricula = book-rich curricula. There IS an evidence base here. State-scale change is a big deal.
As for your comment about Hanford: The science on was there for decades, though. It's one of Hanford's central points. I absolutely believe that Hanford's work – and critically, the movement around it (from dyslexia moms to motivated educators) – yielded the changes we are seeing. So, when there are other evidence-based practices like “include whole books selected in part for their capacity to build knowledge and vocabulary into classrooms, because we know that is fueling gains in Louisiana, Tennessee, and Mississippi,” then I do want movements to seek those changes.
Debbie is identifying a tension that the authors of this post really should address. There seems to be a pendulum swinging between approaches that center high volume reading of full texts and phonics-based approaches meant to build foundational skills. We could all use come clarity here about which grades need which kinds of texts, how much, and what kinds of interventions are needed for upper grades kids who still struggle to read.
While I do want to see elementary schools adopt curriculum that encourages kids to read deeply within whole texts, I also remember that reading deeply with whole texts was Lucy Calkins’ Units of Study’s big selling point. Seems like we are under-learning the lessons of the recent past.
Please read my response to Debbie, for starters. Also…
We don’t need a false dichotomy between book-rich and “science of reading.” To say so is to miss the key flaws of Calkins’s approach: she emphasized whole texts in classrooms, but with an emphasis on independent reading and mini-conferences, rather than whole-class work.
There is a book-rich approach with a strong evidence base. I’m sad to see comments that question that.
Yes, I want to emphasize this point about independent reading vs. whole class reading. My principal would argue that kids DO read whole books at our school because they're encouraged to do independent reading of "personal reading level" books and check off books from different genres etc. When I first started talking to her about getting more books in school she was enthusiastic about it, because she could introduce that as part of the "stations" that the district was pushing for personalized, differentiated instruction. Now, I like independent reading and I want my kid to do a lot of it, don't get me wrong. But from a pedagogical perspective there is a huge difference between all the kids reading different books at their own reading level and the whole class engaging in one challenging text together.
With a whole class text, the teacher can guide the students in terms of vocabulary, syntax, etc to make sure everyone can access it rather than weaker readers being stuck only struggling through lower level texts. There is a shared culture of the text so that classroom discussions can be specific and those vocab words can be incorporated into discussion. Comprehension questions can be deep rather than surface-level (for instance, exploring a specific character's arc rather than "what are some things you liked about the book"). Kids can see everyone else getting excited about what will happen next. The evidence really supports that this is a stronger pedagogical tool than assigned independent reading/sustained silent reading which depend more on the kid's personal reading skill and the engagement of the parents.
I personally remember every single chapter book that was read aloud to me in elementary school so vividly, and I'm sad that my kid likely won't have those memories. She's a pretty enthusiastic reader and I can give her a lot of good reading experiences at home, but I simply can't recreate the experience of a shared classroom reading of a great and difficult novel like Tuck Everlasting at home.
Does it not bother you that even in the supposed book rich curricula you mentioned, all of the books were published in the last 20 or so years? Is reading the classics just not even on the table?
Not to be pedantic, but novels like Tuck Everlasting, The Watsons Go to Birmingham, The Westing Game, Number the Stars, All is Quiet on the Western Front among others (that's just what I can recall off the top of my head) are a lot older than 20 years old...and are well on their way to becoming classics.
But I'm genuinely curious: which classics would you include in these elementary curricula?
So glad you asked! We love Nathaniel Hawthornes Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales, Andrew Lang Fairy books, Laura Ingalls Wilder, the Narnia books, Robert Louis Stevenson, The Wizard of Oz, The Hobbit, AA Milne, The Secret Garden, Howard Pyle’s Robin Hood, Astrid Lindgren, I could go on and on but I think you get the idea. John Seniors “Good Books” reading list is a good place to start if you want more examples. But really I would make the case that classics are generally older books that have stood the test of time and are just enjoyable for their own sake.
I read a lot of the books you mentioned when I was in elementary (graduated high school in 2008) and I feel that they didn’t really prepare me well for the more difficult classic books that were later assigned in high school English (Shakespeare, The Odyssey, and The Scarlet Letter stand out).
I am a parent in a NYC elementary school in a district that chose HMH Into Reading out of the 3 options that the DOE has mandated (Into Reading, EL Education, and Wit and Wisdom). After listening to Sold a Story, reading Natalie Wexler's book, and seeing the extremely uninspiring MyBooks that were coming home, I started trying to get answers from the district and the school about why Into Reading was chosen. I was surprised at how poor the evidence was supporting Into Reading, and in contrast the other two curricula seemed not only to be more high quality to me personally, but also had better evidence supporting them. Our district superintendent only reassured me that "all three curricula are very high quality and based on the science of reading". When I pointed out that these curricula have pretty different structures, and could he please tell me why he chose Into Reading, he stopped answering my emails.
Later, in a conversation with the principal when I was advocating for more whole book read-alouds at the school, she told me point-blank: "If the district staff walked into a classroom and saw the teacher reading aloud to the students, we would get in trouble." She also expressed some skepticism that reading aloud is an effective pedagogical technique. This is despite the fact that EL Education and Wit and Wisdom are built around daily high-level complex read-alouds, so this pedagogical technique is literally DOE-approved, and our very own superintendent told me that all three curricula are equivalently high quality...
The whole experience has left me with the impression that at all levels of the administration, folks seem to know a lot less about curricula than you would expect, and maybe even worse, no one views themselves as responsible for being a curriculum expert. They also seem to have lost track of any common sense about education. (Like, you don't necessarily need data to support that at some point kids should read books - the data's there, but also isn't this one of the primary goals of education?) This makes them very susceptible to marketing and jargon. I am baffled by the fact that whenever I bring up this study or that study about Into Reading or EL Education, no one I'm talking to seems to have looked at these studies themselves. I have a totally different full-time job - surely I should know less than principals and superintendents!
I've started to agitate by telling other parents in the school that their kid will not be reading whole chapter books/having whole chapter books read aloud to them at any point in the curriculum. Every time, the parents respond with complete shock, which makes me feel a little less alone. But to be honest: I am frustrated and tired. I shouldn't have to sell my kid's school on reading books. It's like having to sell a doctor on exercise!
That's a heckuva set of concerns. I'm writing soon about NYC, and may want to pick your brain...
That would be great.
I am right there with you, you are not alone. Not having a degree in education, I went about my research like I would any other topic…wow was I shocked by what I learned!
I just assumed that admin both understood the theory behind curriculum development, how it’s written most effectively and best implemented.
Haha, was I wrong. I feel like a crazy conspiracy theorist at times.
I’ve used everything I’ve learned to make sure my son has the best educational experience and ultimately moved him to a different school…so glad I did the work to learn and move him. He’s thriving now, coming from an environment where he was hardly getting through each day…definitely not learning at highest potential.
I’m so glad you’re drawing attention to this issue! What a travesty that we are setting our kids up to fail. In a mobile device-distracted context, giving kids access to full texts early on and helping them succeed in and enjoy reading them is vital for developing an educated citizenry.
The “basalization” of reading education is a decades old problem in which text snippets only make up the reading curriculum. That was how my reading programs were designed in the 70’s/80’s. I got to read some great Shirley Jackson short stories but can’t say much else for the curriculum design. Haphazard learning rarely works!
Another issue you may have noted before is that standardized assessments’ categorization of results by reading skill perpetuates incorrectly that mistakes in comprehension can be tracked back to a particular sub skill such as “making an inference” or “summarization.” Teachers and parents receive reports such as this and thus teachers then naturally look to teach the missing skill. And so they don’t think the text matters as much as the skill teaching. This is based on faulty logic. If a child struggles with a passage, odds are she lacks the decoding skills to read it easily or she lacks the knowledge of the ideas or words in the text to reason well about it on her own.
One of the few truths of the whole language movement was the emphasis about reading whole texts, including studying themes. When children study a concept or a time period with the benefit of several related whole texts, they are likely to learn more vocabulary knowledge and knowledge of the world. That idea was good and does not have to be thrown out with the bath water.
Even though US parents went through the same school system as children— that had remarkably weak planning in knowledge building across multiple curricular areas (“Social studies” I’m looking at you!)—they would still likely be shocked that teachers aren’t planning instruction year over year based on teaching students information systematically about the world. It’s just so intuitive and shouldn’t take massive clinical trials to know that when schools teach students step by step about the world across the grade levels, these students will be better educated. That’s the self-defining term—“being educated.” We need a change.
Thank you for this comment. I am tempted to write a piece: “PSA: Everything Lucy Calkins ever liked is not automatically bad” after reading some of the comments.
Whole Language didn’t get everything wrong. Volume of reading is really good for kids, actually. The flaw of Calkins’s approach was the way she brought books into the ELA block (independent reading, mini-conferences, small group book clubs), not the fact that she brought books into the ELA block. I could go on.
"I am tempted to write a piece: “PSA: Everything Lucy Calkins ever liked is not automatically bad” after reading some of the comments."
Please do! I recommend you talk to Leah Mermelstein (https://leahmermelstein.substack.com/), a former Lucy Calkins trainer, who understands what real 'balance' in a classroom looks like.
Absolutely!
I’m here for it!
My take is:
1)Reading in class for extended periods is very important; (2) Teachers are incredibly resistant to this practice; (3) The entire TCRWP "workshop method", despite its bad questions, can be seen as a round-about way to try to make teachers comfortable with just letting their students read!
I've been teaching high school for three years and the situation in my country is even more dire (3-page excerpts max. for my students, usually weak readers). Students are then expected to read a couple of books on their own, and do some kind of creative work about it - a mood board, say, or a playlist reflecting the atmosphere of the book. Needless to say nobody is reading anything; even if they wanted to, they would not be able to do it after years of neglecting the skill.
I started educating myself - thanks edutwitter - and last year, I dumped the choice reading and the creative projects and opted for reading books together. It was amazing. Overhearing students discuss the story in the hallway. Students asking if they could please buy the book from the school so they could read it again. Parents telling me how amazed they were seeing their dyslectic daughter engrossed in a book. High quality discussions and writing. And a lot of fun to teach.
Thank you for sharing! Are you in the US? UK? I was curious from your opening.
Belgium. Top of the education pack 20 years ago, but in rapid decline ever since.
I am an educator-turned-curriculum-developer who has worked for publishers on both ends of the spectrum—knowledge-building/book-rich and excerpt-heavy/book-lite. I appreciate you shining a light on this important issue. When ELA programs rely on excerpts, the instruction can become performative. How can you truly determine a theme or central idea if you’ve only read one chapter of a 20 chapter text? It devolves into piecemeal, incoherent skills work that’s designed to tick a box on EdReports. Our children deserve so much more than that. Also, clearly it’s not working (I see you, NAEP scores).
Amen to all.
Is this learning in the 21st century? Why have schools come to mirror the marketplace? Why did schools stop believing that they had a role in dictating the trends that shape our future?
It’s a shame that the same imperatives that drive the attention economy are appearing in our curricula. Perhaps schools should, instead, remember that they have a responsibility to protect and nurture our kids’ cognitive development. There are better options. We just have to be brave enough to choose them.
Thanks for a great piece!
Is there any discussion with these curriculum choices about how kids aren’t reading in class because they won’t read at home? My biggest hurdles with whole class novels in 8th grade ELA was that we didn’t have time to read full books in class and most students wouldn’t read outside of class. (I’m not a homework advocate beyond independent reading, but sometimes a few pages of an assigned book is necessary!)
It would be a dream to develop a curriculum that includes full books, poetry, short stories, and student choice that doesn’t just mandate the reading but the relevant and rigorous work that accompanies it — with room for extra support and student extension.
I talk about this A LOT with a high school teacher I work with. It's a huge issue...
I've seen teachers have the best success with gradually building student reading stamina in class BEFORE releasing them to read at home independently (Doug Lemov talks about one approach on the latest season of the Knowledge Matters Podcast...episode 4 I think). The key here seems to be building a classroom culture around reading and discussing, which you can do as build their reading stamina by having them read short bursts independently in class. If older kids expect that class is built around discussing and analyzing a shared book, then they'll be more likely to show up having done the reading. Text quality matters a lot here too.
I need to listen to this episode. And yes, I agree. That’s where I found the most success, but I think it needs to be a whole school culture! So by the time kids are in 8th grade (or 5th grade, or 10th grade, or whatever), teachers don’t have to start from zero.
Always easier on paper!
One of the reasons I read to my high school history students (out loud, the last 5 minutes of class) is that so many of them have never read a whole book. Ever.
You don't often hear the financial reason behind the "no books" situation - thanks for the great reporting here.
I think another piece of note is the lack of physical books in schools and classrooms. I substitute teach in a PA district that uses Wonders. Wonders would be a little bit more excusable if teachers continued to cultivate reading in the classroom and classroom libraries, as well as school libraries that carry books. I have often found poor quality or non-existent classroom libraries as well as school library sessions that do not allow or encourage children to borrow books.
Our school pays for a subscription to Epic, which is an online reading and video platform. Because this is tauted by the district, reading physical books is no longer offered by the teachers to the students. Epic has grade level online short books, but no chapter books. Epic also has a large library of general kids videos that look identical to what you might find on YouTube kids. So when teachers give the student an option to "go on Epic", the teachers want the student reading a book, but often times they are watching a video about kids making slime or other video.
Thanks for the great post. Kids should be reading books!
Brilliant piece! Thank you for shining a light on the importance of curriculum!
Wow, we read a lot of full books in 4th and 5th grade in the 90s and I genuinely didn’t know we had moved so far away from that- my favorite memories from late elementary school are getting to read aloud for a full chapter because I volunteered to read Caddie Woodlawn and Island of the Blue Dolphins. My oldest is in third grade and they promote reading full books so they can take accelerated reader tests but I haven’t heard about them reading full books in class.
You make many important points. As a former high school English teacher and current elementary school reading specialist/classroom teacher, I have always included whole books in my whole-class instruction. My concern rests with this statement:
"Nonetheless, high-stakes testing certainly helped fuel the popularity of passage-heavy, book-lite programs. It also helped push science and social studies out of the elementary school day."
Those of us who adhere to our state's social studies and science standards are oftentimes overwhelmed by the expectation to teach a knowledge-rich ELA program with competing SS and science units. Ironically, given that there is only so much time in the teaching day, adhering to a knowledge-rich curriculum like CKLA, which teaches the civil war to second graders, can also crowd out second-grade social studies standards which, in my state, do not include the fifth-grade standard of teaching the civil war.
Your points are valid and important. But as with so much in education, the devil is in the details.
Yes, the patchwork of social studies standards is the biggest challenge to the knowledge-building curriculum approach. I don’t know what to do about that. I only know that the data on abandonment of those subjects in K-5 was frightening, so knowledge-building curricula feels like the least worst answer.
American Reading Company is also book based.
Yes, it's one of the ten curricula that make up the knowledge-building category. Check out those links for more.
Thanks for this interesting post. This seems a big problem and I am glad you have drawn attention to it.
First of all, it's probably worth mentioning that the approach and, indeed, the concept of curriculum is quite different in the UK. In my experience, basal readers are unusual and whole books are frequently read in primary (elementary) school.
With that in mind, can I ask a little more about the financial incentives that you think might be leading this practice in the USA? FWIW, I think financial incentives are one of the reasons behind the enduring use of levelled readers despite their weak evidence base so I can well believe what you are saying.
However, I am particularly interested in this quote:
"When curriculum publishers design curriculum to include trade books, they must purchase copies of those texts or license the content."
Why do they have to purchase the texts? Couldn't they just reference the books in their curriculum materials and leave schools to buy the texts? As mentioned above, I am a Brit and so this part seemed quite baffling to me. Hoping you can shed some light!
Emily Hanford’s work brought phonics back to classrooms based on science not because of a loud movement. I would suggest you back up your article with research before demanding schools add something because you “feel” it is important. That is what got us in trouble with “Whole Language and Balanced Literacy”. If you look at the research on current science of Reading curricula implementation, you will see positive improvement trends. That is what school boards, state dept of education, and superintendents base their decisions on.
I agree with the essence of your concern: schools shouldn't do things just because it's popular. Amen, sister. You're preaching to the choir.
But I think I can stand on evidence in this piece. In fact, I'm following the evidence base quite closely. The states that have seen the biggest gains in proficiency on the NAEP since 2020 have all brought knowledge-building curricula into their schools, Mississippi included. I wrote about it here: https://www.karenvaites.org/p/the-southern-surge-understanding
Knowledge-building curricula = book-rich curricula. There IS an evidence base here. State-scale change is a big deal.
As for your comment about Hanford: The science on was there for decades, though. It's one of Hanford's central points. I absolutely believe that Hanford's work – and critically, the movement around it (from dyslexia moms to motivated educators) – yielded the changes we are seeing. So, when there are other evidence-based practices like “include whole books selected in part for their capacity to build knowledge and vocabulary into classrooms, because we know that is fueling gains in Louisiana, Tennessee, and Mississippi,” then I do want movements to seek those changes.
Debbie is identifying a tension that the authors of this post really should address. There seems to be a pendulum swinging between approaches that center high volume reading of full texts and phonics-based approaches meant to build foundational skills. We could all use come clarity here about which grades need which kinds of texts, how much, and what kinds of interventions are needed for upper grades kids who still struggle to read.
While I do want to see elementary schools adopt curriculum that encourages kids to read deeply within whole texts, I also remember that reading deeply with whole texts was Lucy Calkins’ Units of Study’s big selling point. Seems like we are under-learning the lessons of the recent past.
Please read my response to Debbie, for starters. Also…
We don’t need a false dichotomy between book-rich and “science of reading.” To say so is to miss the key flaws of Calkins’s approach: she emphasized whole texts in classrooms, but with an emphasis on independent reading and mini-conferences, rather than whole-class work.
There is a book-rich approach with a strong evidence base. I’m sad to see comments that question that.
Yes, I want to emphasize this point about independent reading vs. whole class reading. My principal would argue that kids DO read whole books at our school because they're encouraged to do independent reading of "personal reading level" books and check off books from different genres etc. When I first started talking to her about getting more books in school she was enthusiastic about it, because she could introduce that as part of the "stations" that the district was pushing for personalized, differentiated instruction. Now, I like independent reading and I want my kid to do a lot of it, don't get me wrong. But from a pedagogical perspective there is a huge difference between all the kids reading different books at their own reading level and the whole class engaging in one challenging text together.
With a whole class text, the teacher can guide the students in terms of vocabulary, syntax, etc to make sure everyone can access it rather than weaker readers being stuck only struggling through lower level texts. There is a shared culture of the text so that classroom discussions can be specific and those vocab words can be incorporated into discussion. Comprehension questions can be deep rather than surface-level (for instance, exploring a specific character's arc rather than "what are some things you liked about the book"). Kids can see everyone else getting excited about what will happen next. The evidence really supports that this is a stronger pedagogical tool than assigned independent reading/sustained silent reading which depend more on the kid's personal reading skill and the engagement of the parents.
I personally remember every single chapter book that was read aloud to me in elementary school so vividly, and I'm sad that my kid likely won't have those memories. She's a pretty enthusiastic reader and I can give her a lot of good reading experiences at home, but I simply can't recreate the experience of a shared classroom reading of a great and difficult novel like Tuck Everlasting at home.
Does it not bother you that even in the supposed book rich curricula you mentioned, all of the books were published in the last 20 or so years? Is reading the classics just not even on the table?
Not to be pedantic, but novels like Tuck Everlasting, The Watsons Go to Birmingham, The Westing Game, Number the Stars, All is Quiet on the Western Front among others (that's just what I can recall off the top of my head) are a lot older than 20 years old...and are well on their way to becoming classics.
But I'm genuinely curious: which classics would you include in these elementary curricula?
So glad you asked! We love Nathaniel Hawthornes Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales, Andrew Lang Fairy books, Laura Ingalls Wilder, the Narnia books, Robert Louis Stevenson, The Wizard of Oz, The Hobbit, AA Milne, The Secret Garden, Howard Pyle’s Robin Hood, Astrid Lindgren, I could go on and on but I think you get the idea. John Seniors “Good Books” reading list is a good place to start if you want more examples. But really I would make the case that classics are generally older books that have stood the test of time and are just enjoyable for their own sake.
I read a lot of the books you mentioned when I was in elementary (graduated high school in 2008) and I feel that they didn’t really prepare me well for the more difficult classic books that were later assigned in high school English (Shakespeare, The Odyssey, and The Scarlet Letter stand out).
I see some classics and modern classics. I loved the classics of my day, but I have no reason to say that the modern classics are lesser books.