Nearly a year ago, when Education Week hosted an online conference about adolescent literacy across the content areas, we got a lot of interested and enthusiastic responses from participants. But we also heard one piece of feedback loud and clear during a final Q & A: Many of our attendees’ students were so far behind that these educators weren’t even thinking about the nuances of teaching a sonnet vs. a scientific paper. They just wanted to get them to be able to read at all.
“This info is great,” those queries tended to go. “But what do I do when my student is three or four grade levels behind?”
As the editor of our reading coverage, the barrage of questions made me pause and consider. For one thing, there is little publicly available information other than state test scores about the extent to which older students—those in middle and high school—are performing in reading. And those state tests aren’t diagnostic—they don’t give us a lot of insight into what, specifically, students of those ages are struggling with.
So, along with my reporters, I teamed up with the EdWeek Research Center to try to gain a fuller perspective of the landscape. The research center asked a series of questions about these students in a survey taken this fall by a nationally representative sample of about 700 educators—mainly teachers but also principals and administrators. (Only those who said they worked with secondary students or on assignments about reading answered these specific questions.)
Here’s what we’ve learned, distilled into four charts. And we’ve provided links to stories that dive deeper into the questions at hand.
As always, contact me if you have any thoughts or questions about these stories: ssawchuk@educationweek.org.
1. Many educators say middle and high school students struggle with reading
The problem seems to be widespread. Fifty-eight percent—more than half of the educators—said a quarter or more of their middle and high school students had difficulty with basic reading skills.
And while 40 states have passed laws to align reading instruction with research, the majority of those policies address only grades K-3 or K-5. They don’t tackle the specific needs that secondary students have. In secondary school, content demands ratchet up significantly and more of the content must be learned through access to texts. It’s also where the different disciplines, like literary analysis and science, require students to use their reading muscles in unique ways.
Read: 4 Tips for Supporting Older Struggling Readers, From Researchers and Experts
2. Lack of motivation and limited fluency top educators’ diagnoses of the root cause
This is the big question: Why might so many older students struggle with basic reading? The educators we surveyed listed a lack of motivation as a top reason, with more than a quarter selecting that answer. About 1 in 5 selected students’ limited fluency or not reading automatically enough as a problem.
Both reasons are worth digging into a little.
On the issue of motivation, there’s widespread data to suggest that Americans on the whole, young and old, are reading less. Volume of reading is associated with better reading ability, so this is one possible factor. The ubiquity of smartphones and screens is an often-cited culprit behind this decline, and on the K-12 side of things, a debate is raging in the English/language arts field about whether popular curriculum materials that rely on excerpts rather than whole texts could also be shaping these patterns.
There’s also just the general problem that secondary students tend to be less intrinsically interested or motivated in school than younger students.
As for fluency: As our reporter Sarah Schwartz outlines in a feature in this special report, what educators assume is a problem with automaticity often has roots in word-reading problems like a limited ability to decode—to apply their sound-letter knowledge to new words—which fewer people picked on the survey as a potential root cause of older students’ reading struggles. In particular, older students who struggle to read often have difficulty cracking the multisyllabic words that tend to make up the specialized vocabulary specific to each subject (think of terms like “polynomial” or “photosynthesis”).
Read: When Older Students Can’t Read: How This Middle School Is Tackling Literacy
3. Teachers receive minimal training on helping older readers catch up
“Science of reading” training may be legion at this point, but much of it appears to focus on the youngest students. Reading intervention for older students does not appear to be a main focal point for professional development or as part of preservice preparation.
Only 38% of the educators in our survey, a little more than a third, said they’d received any training on reaching this population of vulnerable students. Exactly the same proportion said they’ve had no training.
And just 1 in 5 educators reported getting any preparation for this specific skill in their teacher-preparation programs.
Read: Teachers Need Help Reaching Teens Who Missed Basic Reading Skills. Can PD Help?
4. Supports for reading intervention decline after elementary school
A little more than half of educators said their district or school provided extra intervention time and staff to work with struggling middle and high school readers. Fewer reported having more intensive support like tutoring.
But when the EdWeek Research Center broke this data out further, the patterns became more stark: Only a third of high school teachers in the sample said that they were provided dedicated time for intervention, and similarly, only a third of the high school teachers said they were given screening assessments—tools that can help pinpoint specific reading challenges students have. (The proportions were higher for elementary and middle teachers.)
That could mean a few things: For one, it suggests that the bulk of the intervention supports are being put toward the elementary grades (likely because that’s where kids typically learn how to read, and also where the policy conversation has been focused). Or, it could mean that teachers in earlier grades are assuming that older readers are getting more supports than they actually are.
Read: State Reading Laws Focus on K-3. What About Older Students Who Struggle?
Data analysis for this article was provided by the EdWeek Research Center. Learn more about the center’s work.
