All The Money In The World

The National Endowment for the Arts has released a report on America's reading habits.  The results are not surprising.  Americans read less and less and to the extent they do read they read less and less proficiently.  A summary:

Americans are reading less - teens and young adults read less often and for shorter amounts of time compared with other age groups and with Americans of previous years.

• Less than one-third of 13-year-olds are daily readers, a 14 percent decline from 20 years earlier. Among 17-year-olds, the percentage of non-readers doubled over a 20-year period, from nine percent in 1984 to 19 percent in 2004.¹
• On average, Americans ages 15 to 24 spend almost two hours a day watching TV, and only seven minutes of their daily leisure time on reading.²

        Americans are reading less well – reading scores continue to worsen, especially among teenagers and young males. By contrast, the average reading score of 9-year-olds has improved.

• Reading scores for 12th-grade readers fell significantly from 1992 to 2005, with the sharpest declines among lower-level readers.³
• 2005 reading scores for male 12th-graders are 13 points lower than for female 12th-graders, and that gender gap has widened since 1992.⁴
• Reading scores for American adults of almost all education levels have deteriorated, notably among the best-educated groups. From 1992 to 2003, the percentage of adults with graduate school experience who were rated proficient in prose reading dropped by 10 points, a 20 percent rate of decline.

The report airs a concern that the deficiency in reading may have civic repercussions.  It is hard to be a diligent or productive citizen when one has difficulty communicating through the written word. 

These results suggest that our schools continue to do a poor job inspiring our students to read.  As I have reported numerous times on this blog, the vocabulary of the typical American has dropped considerably over the last couple generation.  It is hard to inspire people to read (certainly to read anything worth reading) when they don't know the meaning of many of the words.  Perhaps it is time to consider how we teach reading and what we have our students read.  I suspect (with no evidence other than my own observations and suspicions) that we ask little of our students, and they are happy to meet our expectations. 

But we cannot stop at the schools.  If teenagers (and younger) are spending their free time in front of the television rather than reading, then it is hardly surprising that they don't read at a high level.   Perhaps the best present for a kid this Christmas is not a new DVD or video game but a book.

I have been an advocate on this blog for greater spending on education in our state, specifically for teacher salaries.  But all the money in the world will not change the curriculum or make responsible parents.   

Update: It just so happens that E.D. Hirsh has some ideas (pdf alert) about what schools do wrong when it comes to reading and what they could do to improve reading performance by students.