WORLD OF LEARNING: MY REVIEW OF "READICIDE: HOW SCHOOLS ARE KILLING READING AND WHAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT"

READICIDE: HOW SCHOOLS ARE KILLING READING AND WHAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. By Kelly Gallagher. Stenhouse, 2009. 150 pages.

This was a perfect book to read in conjunction with Nancie Atwell’s The Reading Zone, along with my current reading on reading, Louise Rosenblatt’s seminal Literature as Exploration.

All three authors emphasize the need for students to read what they are interested in reading, and to be given the time to pursue those interests. Both Atwell and Gallagher believe kids deserve the freedom to be captured and captivated by books, without having to fill out volumes of worksheets or paste in reams of sticky notes.

"It is not enough," notes Rosenblatt, "merely to think of what the student ought to read. Choices must reflect a sense of the possible links between those materials and present levels of emotional maturity."

If children personally connect to books, they will want to read books. If they want to read books, they will read more. Surely, more reading will lead to more proficient reading, increased vocabulary, advanced understanding and empathy, and improved thinking. Atwell persuasively argues for the connection between "frequent, voluminous reading" and success, both academically and in life.

Like Atwell, Gallagher clearly respects whole language philosophy. Readacide (a catchy title, and one that catches what I see happening to some middle school students) starts with a foreword by Richard Allington and ends with a nod to Regie Routman, two authors closely identified with whole language.

Indeed, Gallagher takes an even more active political stance than Atwell, berating what he calls the Paige Paradox, named after George W. Bush’s secretary of education. A narrow overemphasis on teaching to tests that assess reading skills, Gallagher proposes, has resulted in a dangerous de-emphasis on reading itself.

When students are assessed, those in schools with fewer resources are, unsurprisingly, found to be the ones who do worst. Low-performing schools are then given fewer tax dollars and pushed toward more "teaching to the test." A vicious cycle is now in place, where the solution to the problem creates a bigger and bigger problem.

But Gallagher does not want to eliminate accountability. Instead, he makes the case, like Atwell, that if students had more choices and read more, test scores would improve. Two other benefits would accrue: students would build more background knowledge and would acquire the habit of reading for pleasure.

Actually, I found Gallagher’s approach to be more measured than Atwell’s. "As much as I respect Atwell," he writes, "she and I part" on the issue of required reading and the dissection of that reading.

Gallagher points out that first of all, this is a given. School districts mandate titles and invest in them. Teachers must teach them. This isn’t all bad, either. There is value in being aware of a canon, as hard as it might be for stakeholders to agree on what should be in it. And there is value in an entire class focusing on one piece of literature.

More importantly, students should be challenged with works they would not choose, and should learn about methods of analyzing such works and their underlying structures. Done in the right way, this can enhance their personal reading and push it to a higher level.

Teachers, says Gallagher, need to find the "sweet spot" when teaching classic literature. While he would agree with Atwell that there is a danger in "overteaching," he might not see eye to eye with her denigration of explicitly taught comprehension techniques, promoted in influential books like Ellin Keene and Susan Zimmerman’s Mosaic of Thought and Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudis’s Strategies That Work.

This is because Gallagher worries about "underteaching" reading strategies as well. While too much attention to the details can interfere with overall understanding, I agree with Gallagher that students need to learn how to learn, and how good readers come to terms with complex test.

While making this point, Gallagher does not give up on reading by choice. He advocates what he calls the 50/50 approach, telling us that "half of the reading I want my students to do is recreational. That means there is no framing, no second- and third-draft reading, no big chunk/little chunk approach, no guided tour, and no time examining metacognition."

This appeal for balance really resonated with me. Reading Atwell, Gallagher and Rosenblatt, I’ve had to overcome my aversion to two seemingly innocuous words, "whole language." I’ve struggled with getting away from the "you're wrong and I'm right" paradigm and moving toward a "what works" model. Invective just gets in the way.

From my work with children, it’s clear to me that many kids, not reading as much as they should, are not given enough encouragement and opportunity to discover what they want to read. We should be as insistent about instilling a love of literacy as we are about developing the skills necessary for literacy.

It’s clear that Gallagher loves to read. Readacide is full of high and low literary references, and an appendix called "101 Books My Reluctant Readers Love to Read" shows that he is paying attention to what hooks kids today.