On the Podcast: Addressing Fake Reading and Rebuilding Student Literacy with Kelly Gallagher

Kelly Gallagher:
 

A friend of mine, Freddie Hebert, is one of the nation's leading vocabulary experts, and she told me something that I thought was really cool. They have now tagged every single word, and they've looked at instructional materials and they can tell you what grade levels certain words are born. Words come and go. For example, if you're reading in first or second or third grade, you're going to see the word balloon.

Edie:
 

Yeah.

Kelly:
 

You're not going to see the word balloon in 12th grade.

Edie:
 

Right.

Kelly:
 

So words come and go. These waves come and go. And it's easier to catch the first wave if you have knowledge of words, because if you have knowledge of words, you build more knowledge of words. And so we know of course, that the way to build words is not through weekly memorization of lists. I think the research is pretty clear on that, but the way that we build words is we get kids to read and read and read. And it is a volume issue. I say this to teachers all the time, and I hope it doesn't come across as too harsh, but I often say, "You could teach every reading standard in the world. It will not matter unless your kids are reading and reading and reading." And guess what? They're not reading. They're fake reading. And so if we don't solve the volume problem on the reading side of things, then the prior knowledge is going to become a problem because they're limiting what they could learn.

Edie:
 

Will you describe what you mean when you say fake reading?

Kelly:
 

So I would survey my kids every year. The beginning of the school year, I would give them a survey, and one of the questions I would ask was, "How many of you have fake read your way to the 12th grade?" And I would ask, "When was the last time you read a novel cover to cover?" And five years, six years, seven years in a row, pre-pandemic, the answer was over 90% of students. Many of those 12th graders not read a book since fifth grade, seventh grade. Some kids said, "Never. I've never read a book. I'm in 12th grade. I've never read a book."

Now, so I'm thinking, "This might be my school." Every time I go out there, I ask teachers the same question. "How many of you suspect your kids are really not reading?" The question has become rhetorical. Teachers laugh when I ask it because they already know kids are not reading. We live in an age of distraction addiction. And I want to say this. They are reading certain things.

Edie:
 

Right.

Kelly:
 

But they're not reading certain things that are really valuable. And so it became very obvious. I've spoken to almost teachers in almost every state in the United States and the answer's the same wherever I go. They're not reading.

Edie:
 

Yeah, and reading extensively, I think you've said this several times, is really, it's like this is the way that we're going to continue to build background knowledge.

Kelly:
 

Yeah, certainly. I mean, you could build background knowledge a lot of ways. You could watch a TikTok video. There's lots of ways. But the richest and deepest way is a book. But that's a very different reading skill, that's a very different cognitive challenge, to hold onto your thinking over 300 pages than click and go and click and go and click and go. And my concern is students are in an age of distraction addiction are losing the ability to hang in there for 200, 300 pages. And so in that chapter, I talk about the importance of rebuilding that ability for kids to do that.

Edie:
 

Yeah. It is a rebuild, isn't it?

Kelly:
 

It is a rebuild. And I don't exactly have the right terminology in my head right now, but the research indicates that there is a richness. I mean, I think it's kind of obvious. You could read an article about something or you could read a book about something. What are you going to take more from?

So it was something like Ray Bradbury, and I'm paraphrasing, he said, "You don't have to burn books. Just don't let people read them." And I think unfortunately, we're kind of to that stage. Everything is instant gratification, short attention span, click and go. And click and go is a valuable kind of reading, and I'm not discounting it, but it's a kind of reading did not exist in human history 30 years ago. And it has literally rewired the human brain in ways physiologically that have never been seen before. And it's so much immediate that there's much more of a magnetism to go down that road. Whereas I think books are getting harder and harder. We talk in the book about how books are getting shorter. They've done studies and New York Times bestsellers are significantly shorter than they used to be.

Edie:

Sometimes it can feel like we're living in a time where knowledge is controversial.

Kelly:
 

Sometimes.

Edie:
 

I liked reading that you said, "Hey, this isn't a totally new problem either. It definitely feels tough right now, but historically we've faced this." But right now in this moment, can you speak to that?

Kelly:
 

All curriculum is political, all. What you teach is a political decision. What you do not teach is a political decision. We've been arguing about curriculum, as you said, since the 1800s. Nation at Risk, 1983. We're still arguing about how to teach reading. So the argument is always there, right?

Edie:
 

Yeah.

Kelly:
 

And somebody once said to me, "Well, how could teaching math be political?" And I thought, "The way you teach numbers, interpretation of numbers, is very political."

Edie:
 

Yeah.

Kelly:
 

So that's the world in which we live in. And I think you have to kind of balance that too with this idea that, I think it was Marzano who years ago, I think when Common Core came out, they did a study in which they analyzed all the standards. And they came to this conclusion that if you were going to teach the K-12 standards to the level necessary for all kids to get the K-12 standards and understand them, you'd have to change K-12 to K-22.

Edie:
 

Yeah.

Kelly:
 

And so the problem facing teachers now is there's too much to teach, there's not enough time, and there's too many kids. Which is why it's such a hard job. I think Tom Newkirk once said, "The hardest word in curriculum development is, no." I'm not going to add. I'm not going to do this. And this is why I often say we start with reading and writing and work out, and the standards will take care of themselves.

Now, if you're teaching in a place where they're banning books, where they're eliminating access to information, I'm not going to wave a magic wand and have an answer to that.

Edie:
 

No.

Kelly:
 

But I think the answers are always begin locally.

Edie:
 

Yeah.

Kelly:
 

Like we start with the school board. We start and we move up. And I think that's grounded in research and good pedagogy and having the ability to voice that to decision makers. I remain optimistic that the pendulum will swing back. I think it should be done at the local level. And I can tell you, and some of the things that I talk about in the book, how painful and difficult and long it was from us to go from teaching the same old canon stuff to giving kids choice of meaningful, important, diverse books.

That took a long time, but it was worth the journey, and it was worth the wrestling match. And I talk about it in the book a little bit, is that I went to my superintendent in Anaheim, who I've known for years, and I said to him, "There needs to be a system. Not a brave teacher. Not a brave librarian. There needs to be a system that comes out and publicly says, 'We believe in diverse books for kids and giving them those options.'" And so in this book, we talk about how we did that and the books that we enabled kids to read. A lot of it, you're not going to get to the volume issue unless you get to the choice issue.

Edie:
 

Yeah, right.

Kelly:
 

But to take a room full of kids who don't know very much, and to take a room full of kids who don't like to read and jam teacher book, teacher book, teacher book, down their throat? Well, I'll just say it. It's a recipe for readacide.

Edie:
 

Thanks for tuning in today. To learn more about Kelly's new book and read a full transcript, visit blog.heinemann.com. And for 30% off any Heinemann professional book, use code PROFBKS30P.

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