The following letter by E. D. Hirsch, Jr., was submitted to the New York Times shortly after the release of The Knowledge Deficit.

“Reading” is Driving Out Reading

by E. D. Hirsch, Jr.

A Times front-page story last Sunday reports on how the accountability provisions of the No Child Left Behind law are causing schools to cut back on history, art, and science in favor of  a narrow focus on reading and math. The story offers a pungent comment by David McCullough: “History is being put on the back burner or taken off the stove entirely.” Just a few days before, Sandra Day O’Conner and Roy Romer similarly complained in an Op-Ed in the Washington Post that a narrow focus on reading and math is pushing out a basic knowledge of American government and civic traditions.   

History, civics, science and fine arts aren't the only subjects being pushed out when schools spend ninety to a hundred and twenty minutes each day on drills in reading. We are coming to understand that this narrow focus on reading leads to stagnant or low student performance in reading. According to the most recent figures from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), reading scores in grade four have improved modestly across the nation, but the scores in grade eight have remained low and stagnant. It’s those later scores in reading that count, for what does it profit a student or the nation if, after students improve their performance in the mechanical skills of reading in early grades, we find that, when they reach high school and are about to enter the global economy and the political life of the nation, they can't understand what they read?

It’s a mistake simply to blame the accountability provisions of the No Child Left Behind law for this unfortunate narrowing of the school curriculum, and the consequent narrowing of the general knowledge that students now possess about history, science, and the arts. The law itself didn’t require that schools neglect these subjects. It did not require the schools to assume that once children became fluent in the basic mechanical skills of reading that progress in comprehension would follow a natural course of development. That has turned out to be a false assumption, as the NAEP reading scores show. Of course, the early, mechanical skills of reading are supremely important, and we can be grateful that American students now do much better in these requisites of reading, thanks to the work of the National Reading Panel, and to other scientists and reformers. But that progress in decoding has not been followed by a comparable advance in students’ understanding of what they read.   

Who says that ideas don’t matter? The theory about reading that dominates in the schools and in the reading programs which the schools use is that the fast track to reading comprehension is through mastery of formal comprehension skills. These bulky, expensive programs are filled with uninformative stories that leap from one subject to another, in the service of practicing of “comprehension strategies” rather than systematically acquiring knowledge. The education reporter Linda Perlstein has spent many hours in the schools observing in detail what goes on day after day in these reading classes, and is working on a book about the depressing things she has found. I learned about her work some months ago from a Washington Post article in which she described the deadening activities that are being conducted under the idea that practicing comprehension strategies such as “finding the main idea,” “summarizing,” and “questioning the author” will provide a shortcut to greater expertise in reading.  

The formalistic ideas about reading that sponsor these activities are fundamentally mistaken. As I point out in my forthcoming book, The Knowledge Deficit, to be released next month, there is very slender scientific support for this huge expenditure of time and effort during the many hours being devoted to reading to the neglect of coherent and substantial subject matter. We have known for some time that reading comprehension of a text is a skill that is not governed so much by formal strategies as by actual knowledge of the topics that the text is about.   

What does he know of reading who only reading knows? The ability to read a wide variety of texts addressed to a general reader, the ability to learn a variety of new skills from the spoken or written word, these are ultimately abilities that depend on broad general knowledge — the very thing that is being driven out by a narrow, formalistic focus on reading. The answer to the reading problem is a language-arts program that focuses on knowledge and is part of a coherent education in history, science, general cultural knowledge, and the arts.

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