Reading Study

As a lifelong reader myself and the mother of two somewhat reluctant readers, I was struck by the National Endowment for the Arts study that came out this week on Americans reading habits, "To Read or Not To Read: A Question of National Consequence,"
http://www.nea.gov/news/news07/TRNR.html

The report found that Americans are reading less in almost every age group over the 20 years from 1984 to 2004. Less than one-third of all 13-year-olds are daily readers and only half of all young adults from 18 to 24 read a book for fun during the previous year.

While the percentage of 9-year-olds who read for pleasure every day has remained about the same - at 54 percent, the number of middle-school children, at age 13, who read for fun is just 35 percent, down 5 percent, and most shockingly, the percentage of teen-agers who read for pleasure dropped from 31 percent to 22 percent.

The results, according to the report, are lower test scores in reading among 17-year-olds, lower achievement in school and poor reading and writing skills in college and on the job. In other words, the drop in reading is very bad news for our society.

Why the big drop in readers? The report notes that big television watchers are less likely to be big readers. And the Internet may also be a factor. There's also a correlation between education and how likely people are to read. The report found that Hispanics had the lowest percentage reading for pleasure at 18 percent, followed by African-Americans at about 32 percent.

It's a disturbing trend. I know how many worlds can open up through books. And yes, the Internet does that as well but there is a distinction between reading on the Internet - which is mostly for information and communicating with others and reading a novel. But I've heard some experts say that the NEA report didn't take the Internet into account when measuring people's reading habits and they point to other studies that refute those findings. Here's a blog from Linda Frye Burnham at communityartsnetwork, www.communityarts.net/blog/archives/2007/11/new_nea_reading.php
that makes that point.

As a parent, I've done everything I can to make my kids readers. I read to them every night. I read myself. They have plenty of books at home and they each have library cards. And fortunately, the school makes them read a half hour a day as well. But while they sometimes get into the books they read, they read with their eye on the clock. Even when they've gotten into one book or another, it hasn't transferred to all books. When I was 10, I was reading "Little Women" and "The Secret Garden," and other classics. But I was an unusually bookish kid so I guess I can't expect that of kids. Then too, boys tend to choose non-fiction and look for books that are factual and my boys usually choose non-fiction over fiction. So that may be a factor as well.

And even though I'm a lifelong reader, I read a lot less too. Blame the Internet, blame TV, blame those darned kids. If it weren't for my monthly book club, I probably wouldn't read many books at all.

The report found that students who live in homes with fewer than 10 books scored much lower than those who lived in homes with 100 or more books. And that held true even when the scores of students from homes in which parents were high school educated but had plenty of books were compared with the scores of students who had college-educated parents but fewer than 10 books.

Another report by ETS and the Urban Institute
called "The Family: America's Smallest School," comes to some of the same conclusions asit looks at some of the factors at home that lead to school success. For a full report www.ets.org/Media/Education_Topics/pdf/5678_PERCReport_School.pdf

They cite factors such as growing up in a two-parent family, being read to as a child, having parents who are involved in their children's education and even having a wide variety of books and literature at home as factors in kid's school success. Duh. It all seems so very obvious and at the root of it, it still seems to boil down to whether a kid is poor or not poor. If you're a single mom, trying to make ends meet with no transportation, it's going to be very difficult to get to that parent-teacher conference in the middle of the work day or volunteer for the school play and chances are you're not going to have a lot of extra money for books and computers and all that good stuff our kids take for granted.

Still, it's good to remind parents that these things matter I guess. There are certainly plenty of success stories of kids who grew up in poor homes with parents who cared. But the more tangible suggestions: better day care, mentoring programs for children of single parents, make more sense to me, than this general "Woe is me," cry that we have too many single parents. Yes, there's a lot of single parents but that's a trend that's unlikely to reverse anytime soon.

Those of us who have read to our children since infancy and provided more books than they know what to do with know the hard truth: it's still hard to get them to read. I'm grateful the schools require half an hour a day or they might be reading even less. I know children who are avid readers but they seem to be born, not created. Are we all seeing a kind of literary Decline of Rome? I hope not. But who am I to talk? Here I am blogging instead of reading.