An Oregon paper recently published a critique of "recent textbook adoptions in the area of literacy education". The article refers to a couple of Oregon school districts, but this situation is common to many school districts. As a matter of fact, this school year the Newburgh School District has standardized the English Language Arts curriculum taught at all Newburgh Schools to use textbooks and curricula purchased from Houghton Mifflin.

Despite the attractive visual layout, the overall literary effect is flat and predictable. It has little of the nuance and voice found in great children’s literature: the quirky characters and unpredictable plot twists, colorful settings or sparkling dialogue that a child might read in a book by Roald Dahl, Graham Salisbury or Lois Lowry. Students soon learn that the primary reason for reading is to answer questions, to complete work sheets, and to prepare for quizzes or unit tests. The joy of reading for pleasure, and the possibilities for exploring themes and ideas through extended discussions or collaborative activities are limited by the curriculum’s need to push on, week after week, with a new story and its focused skills and work sheets.

Parents should ask: "Are students in my child’s classroom able to read for pleasure? Is great children’s literature a part of my child’s experience at school?"

We need a renewed public discussion involving parents, teachers and students who are affected daily by the regimen and repetition found in both the Houghton Mifflin and McGraw Hill reading adoptions that are currently used in the new literacy program.

Parents need to inquire about the quality of their child’s reading and writing experiences, the interest level and relevance of homework and school work assigned from this curriculum, the impact on teachers who must implement it daily, and -- most importantly -- whether students who might show gains in state reading tests are also forming positive lifelong attitudes about literature and writing.

Parents in the Newburgh School District, have you inquired? what have you found out?

For some good criticism of the NEA report on reading mentioned a few posts back see Stephen Krasen's Are We Reading Less and Reading Worse? Probably Not.

Here's an excerpt:

A close reading of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) report, To Read or Not to Read, as well as other research on literacy shows that it is not clear at all whether people are reading less or reading worse these days. Here are just a few of the problems with the NEA report.

The NEA quotes a Pew study that reported that only 38% of adults in 2006 said they read a book the previous day. The NEA fails to note that in a Pew study done in 2002, that figure was 34%, and in 1945 it was 21% (Link and Hopf, People and Books, 1945).

The NEA says that teenagers do very little book reading, compared to younger readers, citing the Kaiser M Generation Project. But in a footnote, the NEA notes that if you add magazines and newspapers, there is no difference among the groups. If you add time reading from the internet, available in the Kaiser paper, teenagers report reading about an hour a day, much more than the seven to ten minutes reported in another study (American Time Use Survey) they cited.

Shocking news from the Times. There seems to be a correlation between less reading and lower scores on reading tests.

Among the findings is that although reading scores among elementary school students have been improving, scores are flat among middle school students and slightly declining among high school seniors. These trends are concurrent with a falloff in daily pleasure reading among young people as they progress from elementary to high school, a drop that appears to continue once they enter college. The data also showed that students who read for fun nearly every day performed better on reading tests than those who reported reading never or hardly at all.

The study also examined results from reading tests administered to adults and found a similar trend: The percentage of adults who are proficient in reading prose has fallen at the same time that the proportion of people who read regularly for pleasure has declined.

This article is about a National Endowment for the Arts study that is available here.