Just Read

"You can't have prosperity unless people can read. It's just as simple as that. You know, one of the things that we have committed ourselves to in America is to help eradicate persistent poverty. But there is a direct link between illiteracy and persistent poverty."

"We create a city the size of Chicago every two-and-a-half years, filled with kids who never finished high school. ... Pregnant teenagers. Kids who are on drugs. Push-outs, as well as drop-outs. ... You don't find people running around with a sense of urgency -- 'We're killing our children! Do you know how many dropped out TODAY?! Why don't we DO something?!' ... People are going to meetings."

"Society don't want you because you can't read. That's the way I feel about it. I'm just an outcast to the whole world -- you know -- like a waste of breath. ... It really puts a burden on your self-esteem."

"Reading is the gateway skill. It leads to all sorts of success, both academically and in life. It's the skill that undergirds most of the curriculum. And if children aren't learning that skill by the end of third grade, they're in desperate trouble."

"Read. As much as possible. Mostly new stuff."

“The act of reading is as complex as the children we teach. Effective school-wide reading instruction demands deeply knowledgeable and skilled teachers working within a well-functioning literacy instructional system. Without adequate reading skills, the academic proposition becomes untenable.”

"Teaching Reading IS Rocket Science."

"Why don't we just stop everything when kids aren't learning to read? ... Why are we even DOING anything else? Why aren't we pulling out all the stops and saying, wait a minute, if you don't learn to read, there are so many disastrous consequences."

"Parents who deliver their children to school on that momentous first day of Kindergarten, proudly starting them on the venerable path to education, make a big mistake: they assume that their child's teacher has been taught how to teach reading. They haven't."

"In a single school year, the average student spends 581 of 720 (81% of) available hours on assignments that are not high-quality. This is particularly significant for students of color and students living in poverty who have less access to high-quality standards-aligned materials than their peers. ... A 2015 study found that low-income students are less likely than high-income students to have high-quality content and curriculum in the classroom. And students of color and those from low-income backgrounds were less likely than white and higher-income students to be in classrooms with grade-appropriate assignments."

"I think we can't underestimate the costs associated with reading failure in the early grades, and its associations with so many negative life outcomes. Incarceration and involvement with the juvenile delinquency system is just one of those negative outcomes, but it's also probably one of the most dire."

"Thus, for me, reading is a value. It's a value -- like loving my country or revering honesty. It's this status as a value that prompts me to say, 'Don't expect the schools to do the job for you.'"

"As of this writing (2019 ), however, no one has blamed an approach to reading instruction that leaves so many students unprepared to tackle high-school-level work. What the vast majority of educators, reformers, commentators, and government officials still haven't realized is that elementary school is where the real problem has been hiding, in plain sight."

" … vocabulary size is a convenient index to a person's breadth of knowledge. Vocabulary size is the single most reliable correlate to reading ability. … In schools, the most effective route to highly contextualized verbal experiences is a highly coherent, well-planned-out communal school curriculum centered on (broad domain knowledge ) subject matters."

"The predictability of reading, for life success, is so strong, that if you look at the proportion of middle-schoolers who are not at the 'basic' level -- who are really behind in reading -- that's a very strong predictor of problems with the law and the need for jails."

"This business of being unable to decipher what’s on the printed page has huge consequences for a child’s self-esteem. That is the child’s general concept of who he or she is, and has huge consequences for how we see ourselves relative to our peers, and forces us to defend against this bad feeling in a number of ways that I call the Compass of Shame."

"Teachers spend 7-12 hours per week searching for and creating instructional resources (free and paid), drawing from a variety of sources, many of them unvetted. ... When teachers don't have access to great materials, they hunt for them online, often leading to inconsistent quality that impacts low-income students of color the most. ... Teachers working in schools that have a high proportion of students who receive free and reduced lunch are searching for materials online at higher rates. The assignments teachers select or create tend to be lower-quality than what the district or state provided."

"Every public major concern has a much higher incidence of reading problems attached to it, from juvenile delinquency, to teen pregnancy, to failure to graduate from high school, to drug problems. You take anything that it is that we say is a major concern, and there is a higher than expected incidence, by far, of individuals who have struggled with reading or had a frank learning disability."

"The Science of Reading movement continues to grow. ... It's vital we focus on research-based practices to deliver classroom instruction that allows students to learn. If they aren't learning, we need to examine our practices."

"Spending any amount of time in classrooms where children are working on beginning reading instruction, you can almost watch children who are struggling begin to turn off and exhibit behaviors that are going to interfere with their learning."

"And while vocabulary is important for reading comprehension, research has also found that it's a component in decoding ability. One study found that when children know a word's meaning, they can more quickly learn how to recognize it automatically, because the visual letters, corresponding sounds, and meaning all map together when a reader recognizes a word."

"The point shouldn't be to place students in books easy enough to ensure good reading, but to provide enough scaffolding to allow them to read harder books successfully. So far, I've identified 23 studies that have done just that. They've had students practice oral reading prior to reading for comprehension, or teachers pre-taught vocabulary. Such scaffolding allowed students to read these frustration-level texts as if they were at their instructional levels."

" ... (regarding children) we find that early (breadth and depth of) vocabulary predicts their later inference-making skill because they've got these rich semantic networks that enable them to fill in missing details in a text ... we also find that their early inference skills predict their later ... depth of vocabulary knowledge ... "

"We recognize literacy as a fundamental human right that empowers individuals in a society. We also know that grim life outcomes are connected to illiteracy. ... We believe in a future where a collective focus on applying the Science of Reading through teacher and leader preparation, classroom application, and community engagement will elevate and transform every community, every nation, through the power of literacy."

"One of the visions of the Founding Fathers ... is that literacy is essential to a democratic culture, that you cannot have democracy if you do not have a literate, educated population."

" ... all students, regardless of their race, gender, class, or anything else, (should) have the support they need to ensure they can learn. What equity does not mean is lowering the bar to where students happen to be currently. Embracing equity means building a challenging curriculum, not because being difficult is inherently virtuous, but because it’s good for kids.”

"That's horrifying to think of that, but they really do. Their prison building programs are based on the literacy rates in their third grades, and they figure in twenty years they're going to need this many prisons based on the number of kids who can't read in third grade. I mean, that's how close the correlation is."

(2019 NAEP reading scores for 12th-graders) "showing ... statistically significant drops in English. 'What this demonstrates is a system-wide failure to teach our children how to read and comprehend text,' (Emily) Solari wrote. ... Solari added that literacy instruction in the United States still does not incorporate much of what experts refer to as the 'science of reading' — the body of research showing how kids acquire written language skills. (She continues) 'Our education system is not equitable ... much of this evidence base is not making it into classrooms to inform the teaching practices that teachers implement every day.'"

"Curriculum should serve as a foundational organizing force in student learning, informing instruction, assessment, and professional development. Well-structured, strong curricula provide educators with instructional materials and resources to cover a clear scope and sequence of the knowledge and skills students are expected to master. But in far too many cases, schools don’t support educators and students with a well-structured curriculum — or any, for that matter. Only 7 percent of English language arts teachers in elementary schools report regular use of high-quality instructional materials. ... This pernicious status quo is a lose-lose that harms students and educators alike. Teachers end up spending large amounts of their time searching for or creating instructional materials. This can undermine the quality and coherence of what students are actually taught — an outcome that has a disproportionately negative effect on low-income students, students of color, and English learners."

"Do we have the people coming through the school system who can really perform the job functions that American business has to have? The answer to that now is clearly 'no.'"

(Regarding the acquisition of reading skill:) "It's like any skill. Once you've acquired it, it seems easy. It seems natural. I think parents, children, teachers don't appreciate how extraordinarily difficult this is. ... We need to reconceptualize what it means to 'learn to read.'"

(Research study: Early reading success and its relationship to reading achievement and reading volume: replication of '10 years later') "Results showed that 1st grade reading skills were a strong predictor of 10th grade outcomes. ... Some researchers have conceptualized this relationship between strong reading skills, engagement in reading, and development of reading-related cognitive abilities as a "virtuous circle" (Snowling & Hulme, 2011). Other researchers have described the process by which children who fail to establish early reading skills find reading to be difficult and unrewarding, avoid reading and reading-related activities, and fail to develop reading-related and cognitive abilities as a "vicious circle" that is disastrous for their cognitive development and school achievement (Pulido & Hambrick, 2008). An early start in learning to read is crucial for establishing a successful path that encourages a "lifetime habit of reading" (Cunningham & Stanovich, 1997, p. 94) and for avoiding the decline in motivation for reading that can have devastating effects on reading growth and cognitive development over time."

"Improving the quality of curriculum is 40 times more cost-effective than class size reduction. ... When students who started the year off behind grade level were given more grade-appropriate assignments, stronger instruction, deeper engagement, and higher expectations, the gap between these students and their higher-achieving peers began to narrow substantially."

"Teachers are not immune from the consequences of reading failure. They want nothing more than to help their students experience success, and the pressure they feel to ensure their students succeed despite factors beyond their control can be overwhelming. It is unsurprising that nearly half of new teachers leave the field within the first five years."

"In spring 2019 and spring 2020, my team and I surveyed educators across the nation through RAND's American Educator Panel. ... The majority of U.S. school systems have not adopted strong curriculum."

"Research from 27 countries shows a student’s success in school is linked to the number of books in a child’s home and the time spent reading books. Regardless of other factors such as ethnicity and socioeconomic status, children whose families have access to books and a daily habit of reading are primed for literacy proficiency and lifelong learning."

"According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the millennials in our (U.S.) workforce tied for last on tests of mathematics and problem-solving among the millennials in the workforces of all the industrial countries tested. We now have the worst-educated workforce in the industrialized world. ... After all, there has been no improvement in high school math and reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress after more than 40 years of trying every 'proven practice' we can think of."

"Written language is a code. Certain combinations of letters predictably represent certain sounds. And for the last few decades, the research has been clear: Teaching young kids how to crack the code -- teaching systematic phonics -- is the most reliable way to make sure that they learn how to read words. ... But knowing how to decode is an essential step in becoming a reader. If children can't decipher the precise words on the page, they'll never become fluent readers or understand the passages they're reading. ... If a student can't decode, it doesn't matter how much background knowledge and vocabulary he understands -- he won't be able to understand what's on the page."

"The combination of deficient decoding skills, lack of practice, and difficult materials results in unrewarding early reading experiences that lead to less involvement in reading-related activities. Lack of exposure and practice on the part of the less-skilled reader delays the development of automaticity and speed at the word-recognition level. Slow, capacity-draining word-recognition processes require cognitive resources that should be allocated to comprehension. Thus, reading for meaning is hindered; unrewarding reading experiences multiply; and practice is avoided or merely tolerated without real cognitive involvement."

"First, the evidence for the effectiveness of reading strategies is weak for students in the third grade or earlier. ... (Reading comprehension) strategies require attention and space in working memory (e.g., Cain, Oakhill, and Bryant, 2004; Calvo and Castillo, 1998). Students who are still learning to decode fluently do not have enough working memory space available to implement (such) strategies. Their working memory is occupied by decoding. A natural conclusion is that there is not much point in teaching reading strategies before students have gained that fluency—for most students, that will be in the third or fourth grade."

"Your assumptions are your windows to the world. Scrub them off every once in awhile or the light won't come in."

"Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble."