The Top 11 Minding the Gap Posts of 2024
Everyone else is listing their top posts, as my inbox can attest. So why not me?
These aren’t necessarily the “best” or most important posts I’ve written in the past year, but it’s interesting to see what caught people’s attention. The usual format is a “top ten” round-up, but I’m extending that to eleven, mostly because I would really like people to know about post #11. (This is my Substack, so I guess I get to make the rules!)
1. The College Kids Are Not All Right
This was by far the most-viewed post I wrote this year—somewhat to my surprise, because it’s not the kind of topic I usually write about. I generally focus on issues affecting students at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum.
The post may have ridden the recent wave of interest in a phenomenon that’s been reported by college instructors: many undergraduates at elite schools can’t handle the kind of reading assignments that were routine five or ten years ago. Professors have had to lower their expectations significantly.
I’ve noticed over the years that when I write posts touching on issues that affect students from more affluent families, they tend to get more views. I think that’s just human nature. People who read newsletters like mine are likely to be more highly educated and more affluent than average, and humans are keenly interested in things that directly affect themselves and their families.
But I do think this post addresses a serious issue. And if students at highly selective universities are no longer capable of reading an entire novel, the situation at less elite institutions must be truly alarming. We don’t have hard data on the extent of the problem, but there’s enough anecdotal evidence to indicate it’s actually happening (all the college-level instructors I’ve personally raised it with have assured me that they and their colleagues see it and discuss it all the time).
It’s less clear why it’s happening. Screens and social media undoubtedly play a big role. But, as I argue in the post, I believe the K-12 education system bears some responsibility as well. It’s become common for teachers to assign excerpts rather than whole books, apparently even through high school.
Again, the reasons for that aren’t entirely clear, but one likely culprit is the widespread view that texts are primarily a means to teach students comprehension skills that can be applied to other texts. That view has been reinforced by content-agnostic state literacy standards and standardized tests that consist largely of excerpts followed by comprehension questions.
Consider a comment from a teacher that appeared on a blog post by reading expert Tim Shanahan. In the post, Shanahan argued that excerpts and short stories provide an adequate basis for introducing concepts like metaphor and characterization. The teacher commented:
What do you think about assessments that are about the particulars of that novel they have just spent weeks picking apart? My concern is not so much about using novels, but the fact that instruction becomes about the novel and not the strategies and standards. If the assessment is about the novel which teachers have read and discussed at length, then the assessment winds up being about how well the students paid attention in class. Ok, use the novel, but see if they are applying the strategies and understandings in a different text. (Emphasis added)
2. How to Help Older Students Who Struggle to Read
This post dealt with another serious issue that, fortunately, seems to be getting more attention these days. When it comes to reading, the overwhelming focus in the media and policy has been on improving phonics instruction in K-2. But older students often struggle with reading, sometimes even if they got good phonics instruction in earlier years. The ability to decode a simple one-syllable word doesn’t necessarily carry over to complex, multisyllabic words. And even if students are able to decode longer words, with some effort, they may need to devote so much cognitive capacity to that task that they don’t have enough left for comprehension.
Post #2 describes some promising initiatives that try to address the problem.
3. Fordham Brief Calls for an End to Reading Comprehension Instruction
Post #3 originally had a different title: “A Call for an End to Reading Comprehension Instruction.” I changed it after someone used the original title to argue that I myself was calling for an end to reading comprehension instruction. In fact, I was describing the argument in a brief put out by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education think tank.
In my post, I actually argued that there is a role for instruction in certain comprehension strategies and that teachers don’t need to choose between teaching strategies and building knowledge. (I discussed the kerfuffle that led to the change in the post’s title in Post #6, “Clearing Up Misconceptions about ‘Building Knowledge.’”)
4. Literacy Experts Say Some EdReports Ratings Are Misleading
I’m glad to see this post got a lot of views—partly because I invested a lot of work in reporting it, but mainly because it’s a hugely important issue.
In many places, EdReports—an organization that rates literacy and math curricula—has become the go-to resource for defining “high-quality instructional materials.” But in recent years, some of its ratings have puzzled and dismayed literacy experts. Schools and districts are spending millions of dollars on literacy curricula that EdReports has labeled “high-quality” but that in fact don’t effectively build the knowledge that enables reading comprehension—or even cover phonics adequately. Schools are then stuck with inferior curricula for years, and students and teachers suffer.
And at least one effective curriculum has gotten low ratings from EdReports, limiting its reach.
5. Many Students Struggle to Read Beyond Third Grade
This post is sort of a second installment of Post #2, indicating that there’s a lot of interest out there in helping older students with reading difficulties.
In Post #5, I summarize and link to an article by literacy experts that provides some practical tips for classroom practice. But with a problem this widespread (teachers in grades three to eight estimate that 44 percent of their students experience difficulty reading, according to a RAND report), policymakers need to devise and implement some systemic solutions.
6. Clearing Up Misconceptions About “Building Knowledge”
In addition to correcting the misrepresentation of what I said in Post #3, in this post I tried to clarify that a knowledge-building approach to literacy doesn’t mean that students never learn to do things like make inferences or “find the main idea” of a text. Basically, the difference is what is put in the foreground.
Rather than using texts to teach supposedly abstract skills, which is the usual approach, a knowledge-building curriculum puts a particular text or topic in the foreground and brings in whatever skills or strategies will help students understand and analyze that content. I also address other misconceptions (a total of seven) that have been put forward by critics of knowledge-building curricula.
7/8. Will the Science of Reading Movement Become a Frankenstein’s Monster? and Scores for Adults Are Dropping on Tests of Basic Skills (tie)
Post #7, which came out in April, argued that the overwhelming focus on problems with phonics instruction—to the exclusion of other problems with reading instruction—could backfire. I also took this subject up more recently in Post #10.
It’s remarkable that Post #8 has already gotten an equal number of views, because it came out only a couple of weeks ago, in mid-December. (Posts often continue to get views for months after they’ve been published, so Post #7 had a big head start.) I assume people were intrigued by this sobering finding about adult skills, but my basic point was that it’s hard to separate “skills” from background knowledge on standardized tests like these, no matter whether the test-takers are kids or adults.
9/10. Is Lucy Calkins Really a Proponent of “Direct, Explicit Instruction”? and Has the “Science of Reading” Gone Overboard on Phonics? (tie)
It seems like anytime I write a post with the words “Lucy Calkins” in the title, it gets a lot of views (Post #12, which almost made the top 11, was “Is Lucy Calkins a ‘Scapegoat’ for America’s Reading Crisis?”).
I don’t mean to blame Calkins for all of America’s reading woes, but she has been enormously influential. And she did write in an article that she’s a proponent of “direct, explicit instruction”—the kind of instruction backed by cognitive science.
In Post #9, I took a critical look at that assertion. I did not focus on her approach to phonics instruction, which is generally the one thing people fault her for but is far from the only problem with her curriculum. Instead, I took a close look at one of her lessons on summarizing. (TL;DR: I doubt cognitive scientists would agree with Calkins’ characterization of her approach.)
Post #10 is similar to Post #7 in arguing that the science-of-reading movement might be overdoing the emphasis on phonics, overlooking other important components of reading—like knowledge-building. I quoted literacy experts who argue that you need to give kids just enough systematic phonics to ensure they understand the “alphabetic principle,” after which most will figure out a lot of the rest of it through their own reading.
11. The Writing Effect
In this post I tried to bring together two separate strands of research—one from cognitive science and the other from education—to argue that writing has enormous potential power to boost learning. I also argued that we’ve failed to unlock that power because we (and the researchers) have generally failed to take into account how difficult writing is for inexperienced writers—a group that includes many, if not most, K-12 students.
That point segues nicely to the basic argument of my new book, Beyond the Science of Reading: Connecting Literacy Instruction to the Science of Learning, coming out on January 21. The TL;DR on the book (although I do hope you’ll read it) is this: If schools combine a content-rich curriculum with explicit, manageable writing instruction embedded in that content, they’ll provide students with all the benefits of the “direct, explicit instruction” that Calkins claims to provide—and more.
I’ll be giving readers more of a sneak preview of the book in a future post, so stay tuned.
Note: I’m providing a voiceover of this post, which you’ll find at the top. If people seem to appreciate that feature, I’ll do my best to continue the practice for future posts.