We are witnessing a drop in pleasure reading and a rise in the share of kids reporting no homework. Also, the share of students taking Algebra in 8th grade has dropped from 34% to 23% since 2012. This can’t end well. @ChadAldeman reports: "A small amount of homework that specifically reinforces what kids are learning in school can produce learning gains. It can also help students form productive habits and routines."

Robert Pondiscio: 19 reasons that knowledge-rich curricula have not been broadly adopted in the US, despite strong research support. I'd add this one: "educators underestimate what young children can learn, and the joy with which they will learn it." open.substack.com/pub/thenex…

You're commingling two things here. 1. Introducing independent reading during the school day 2. The shift from whole books to passages There are different things, and I don't think we benefit from commingling them. I would absolutely agree that the move to passages over books in the curriculum is a major issue. There isn't great evidence for drop-everything-and-read independent reading time, because a lot of kids didn't do anything effective with that time. Those programs tended to perform poorly in efficacy studies. Instead, I'd like to see schools introduce curricula that revolve around whole books, but where we know that the work with those whole books is actually happening in classrooms. Here's a good piece by Chris Such explaining the issues with independent reading during the school day. curriculuminsightproject.sub…

Sad news ! Let’s bring back reading aloud to children every day as a first step to turn the tide ! @karenvaites

Hooray! We’ll just press the tech button and learning problems will disappear.

“We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.” Another college professor adds to the chorus of concern about student capacity. In @chronicle: “Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it. When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them. Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires. In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build. The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.” Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.”

“Technology has a place in schools. But we should be able to articulate a purpose beyond “it’s inevitable.” Are the technologies in question actually helping students be better thinkers? More creative? Better citizens? More thoughtful or empathetic or logical or curious? Or are they simply helping students do less work to create products that are more pleasing to the adults around them?”

I was thinking about this recently. (Once upon a time I thought I’d be a college English professor). If I were a prof now I’d probably have a reading lab. Sciences have them. Perhaps the humanities need them too. We meet twice a week to discuss and we meet twice a week to read aloud together for 90 mins at a stretch. In so doing I build your capacity for sustained reading- in large by making it a group social activity. I suspect that done well students might enjoy it. It would give them a discipline they know they lack. Not sure it would work but some kind of dramatic re-centering of the reading seems like one possible response.

My training as a coach says that the coachee should never feel or be “the audience”. However, when I attend conferences that have as a theme of “active engagement”, I see room after room of a big screen with a power point, the presenter in front of the screen and ..an audience !

We need to abandon the "one training and done" approach. When we ask teachers to make instructional shifts, we need to support them not just with "a" training, but with expert coaching as they make shifts. The just a "1 training and done" approach reflects an "I want to check the box mentality". This approach is neither pro teachers nor it is pro students.

Yes ! Always find “home row” !

The choreography of teaching 30 children at the same time > quite a long read but dare I say I think it's worth it. Nail this, you've nailed it! teacherhead.com/2026/01/11/t… via @teacherhead

One of my students showed me his high school course list. Notice that English has been replaced by “New Media Storytelling.” I asked what books they read this year. “We didn’t read any.” These poor kids.

A parent recently asked me for the best way to improve his daughter's SAT Reading score. The look on his face when I suggested that she read a book told me everything I needed to know about the state of reading in our culture.

Heartfelt thanks @LeaningEmma To you and @leaningshane I can only quote Charlotte’s reply to Wilbur in Charlotte’s Web… “You were my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing.”

“I second that emotion”! @LeaningEmma “Social media is fast, fleeting, and gone in a flash. But a newspaper? A newspaper holds a moment in time—a snapshot of our lives, our community, and our history.”(Moosehead Lakeshore Journal).

New Edition of Maximizing Coaching Cycles is out! a.co/d/0c2XoVWg

Two great reads here

1/2 I didn’t disparage teacher autonomy. But autonomy for its own sake should not be acceptable in any field. Tchr autonomy isn't more important than teaching in ways that help most kids. We shouldn’t sacrifice kids' learning for the sake of teacher autonomy.

Johnny Carson !