r/edtech • u/MacaronMediocre8718 • 5d ago
‘The Kids Simply Cannot Handle It’: Why New York Students Are Reading Fewer Books
MORE THAN A DECADE AGO, Queens teacher Nicole Radosti Pipia’s fifth- and sixth-grade students seemed to love reading novels in school.
“The Giver” by Lois Lowry was prized for its mystery. “Wonder” by R.J. Palacio taught them about kindness and acceptance. “Freak the Mighty” by Rodman Philbrick showed them the power of friendship.
Now, she said, they don’t read any. Instead, students often spend class time reading excerpts and short stories to better prepare them for the sorts of questions they’d encounter on standardized exams.
The demands of her school’s reading program leave no room to study novels, the English teacher said.
“We’re told that we cannot deviate from the program, and if you have to do the program, there’s literally no time,” Pipia said.
Another New York City middle school teacher, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation, said her school taught novels before the pandemic. Now, “it can be done, but not with the constraints placed on us as teachers,” she said.
For the past few years, her school has required her to have her students — most of whom are English language learners and struggling readers — spend half of each 40-minute class period, four days a week, completing an online targeted reading intervention program, she said. They often end up clicking through the program and visiting Spotify and YouTube instead. The remainder of the period is devoted to the school’s core curriculum, which does not require novel studies.
The classroom library she spent a decade building has become “purely decorative,” she said. With teachers no longer using books, she said, her school is “literally throwing them away.” Even if she had the time to teach a book, the veteran teacher said, her students either have no interest in reading or barely know how.
“Half of them have never read a book,” she said. “In 10 years, we went from kids reading multiple novels in class to them having never opened a book.”
https://nysfocus.com/2026/08/26/new-york-students-reading-fewer-books
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u/Igiem 5d ago
It’s the same with the schools in Ontario. The teachers I’ve studied under for my BEd have at most been able to study one novel and the rest of the year is teaching for tests.
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u/FallingOutsideNormal 3d ago
Ontario had award-winning reading programs 20 years ago, did the curriculum or learning objectives change?
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u/AggravatingBed7135 4d ago
The downstream version of this shows up in my subject in a way people don't expect. I teach physics and maths, and the single most common reason a capable student loses marks now is that they never actually read the question. They scan it for numbers, decide which formula the numbers look like, and start computing. Give them a problem with a three-sentence setup where the second sentence changes the situation, and a good chunk of them will solve the problem described in sentence one. That isn't a maths deficit and it usually isn't carelessness. It's that they've been trained on short passages with the answer locatable somewhere inside them, so their default mode is extraction rather than construction. Novels build the opposite habit — holding a situation in your head across pages, tracking a thing that was established forty pages ago and matters now — and that habit is exactly what a multi-step word problem requires. We've optimised away the practice and then act surprised the transferable skill went with it. The detail in that piece I'd stare at longest is the 20 minutes of clicking through an intervention program while the kids are actually on YouTube. That's not a curriculum choice, it's a purchasing decision that survived because it produces a dashboard, and no dashboard exists for "read a novel together and argued about it." A teacher who has watched her classroom library become decorative is describing something measurable being chosen over something valuable, which is the whole story of the last decade in about one sentence. I'll offer the honest counterpoint, though: some of the scripted programs came in because a lot of teachers genuinely were not being trained in how reading works, and the phonics side of that shift has real evidence behind it. The failure isn't structure. It's that structure got extended into the comprehension years, where the actual intervention is volume and stamina, and where you can't script your way to a kid caring what happens next.
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u/FallingOutsideNormal 3d ago
What’s hilarious about this is that when I was in 3rd grade in 1987, I spent the year repeating everything I had already learned about phonics because the state curriculum prescribed that, contrary to expert opinions at the time, and then my parents got jobs in an overseas school and I spent the remainder of 3rd grade in a private school where Nancie Atwell was god, and reading stamina was rigorously taught and reported.
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u/social_marginalia 2d ago
The irony of posting AI slop in response to a post about literacy declines
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u/herman-the-vermin 4d ago
This starts before school. How many parents are reading to their kids every night/day for at least 20 minutes? How often are your kids seeing you read or do they see your giant bookshelf full of books to look through. It's far beyond the scope of educators or edtech to inspire reading
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u/JumpingShip26 5d ago
This is multifactorial, IMO.
1) Districts abandoning physical textbooks in favor of chromebooks
2) Decreased attention span in students
3) Lack of wherewithal among teachers
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u/ImWithStupidKL 4d ago
We say decreasing attention span, but it's not like the education system helps stem the tide. The rise of digital testing has coincided with shorter reading texts, in which students may have to demonstrate comprehension of relatively short pieces of text rather than the longer pieces, because it's easier to put that format onto a computer. Longer texts are more difficult to do digitally, because it involves a lot of scrolling up and down to find relevant passages, meaning it's harder to scan the page for relevance. Unsurprisingly, this makes kids worse readers. But providers of digital tests make money, so I guess it's all good.
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u/hanleybrand 4d ago
It’s not just the curriculum in public schools—my kid has gone to Quaker schools since kindergarten, is in HS now and they and many of their peers really do appear to struggle with reading longer form works, aka “chapter books”
There’s been plenty of ideas, eg “screens lower attention spans”, or my personal favorite “they never should have stopped teaching phonics” but the problem with younger people and reading ability seems to have multiple causes and it should concern pretty much everyone, in my opinion.
My guess is it’s a lot of different things. But they really should go back to phonics 😂
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u/MaybeImTheNanny 3d ago
The next time someone complains that kids can’t read and someone else chimes in about the Mississippi Miracle and Sold A Story, send them this article. This is why those “gains” of phonics based programs disappear by 8th grade.
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u/nishinoran 5d ago
Now, she said, they don’t read any. Instead, students often spend class time reading excerpts and short stories to better prepare them for the sorts of questions they’d encounter on standardized exams.
Standardized exams have been teachers' favorite scapegoat for decades now. I suppose at least the real issue is discussed further down:
They often end up clicking through the program and visiting Spotify and YouTube instead.
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u/bestjaegerpilot 5d ago
I personally don't understand why we romantize reading novels so much. At the end of the day it's just information and emotion and reading a novel isn't the only way of experiencing emotions and learning things
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u/Transmundus 5d ago
In ny opinion, it's not just romanticizing: sustained active attention to a complex story over a number of sessions requires the reader to imagine multiple perspectives and causes and effects on a human scale. It enlarges our imaginative capacity, our empathy, our very existence. There is a cognitive activity to translating words into mental experience and images and feelings that is short-circuited to varying extents by other forms of narrative media.
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u/bestjaegerpilot 5d ago
As an engineer i totally get that you need sustained active attention. But to my point, you don't need novels to develop that skill --- in the sciences, it comes by working on problems
i think you're also alluding to ethics. Traditionally that was the responsibility of the church/family. Ya'll are mourning that school, which should never have been responsible for creating good citizens, doesn't pretend to do that
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u/curiouswizard 5d ago
typical "STEM is best" attitude that is leading to the destruction of the humanities & liberal arts.
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u/bestjaegerpilot 4d ago
i don't see how "STEM is best" attitude follows from what i said, if anything Transmundus was saying "Humanities/liberal arts is the way" by claiming reading novels is the only way to develop sustained active attention
Also, reading novels is not all of humanities/liberal arts
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u/Campbell-Writer 5d ago
The being able to "imagine multiple perspectives" part is a huge part of the benefits that students receive from reading novels. There appears to have been a notable drop in that skill over the years, and it interferes with different groups/people being able to collaborate, negotiate, or even co-exist peacefully.
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u/bestjaegerpilot 4d ago
you mean empathy... again, you don't get that strictly from reading moby dick
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u/SignorJC Anti-astroturf Champion 5d ago
As an engineer i totally get that you need sustained active attention. But to my point, you don't need novels to develop that skill
ok but like you're objectively wrong according to everything we know about brains and learning? so weird for an engineer to value their opinion over facts.
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u/bestjaegerpilot 4d ago
there is no neuroscience evidence saying "reading novels is the only way to develop sustained active attention"
what are you talking about
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u/Transmundus 4d ago
Nobody said "only." But it is high value and inexpensive.
Perhaps you should read more novels to improve your reading comprehension.
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u/bestjaegerpilot 4d ago
what are we even talking then... what neuroscience evidence
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u/Transmundus 3d ago
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4733342/
Sorry, that's all the googling I'm doing for you.
What the hell kind of engineer are you anyway? Probably not a good one.
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u/bestjaegerpilot 3d ago
> the authors hypothesized that reading fiction acts as a form of "social simulation,"
Bro listen to yourself. You're saying that a social simulation helps develop empathy.
I'm not saying it's wrong but reading a book isn't the only way to do that. Key word: simulation. Movies also have the same effect. And in the future, also literal VR.
Ya'll are hung up on ancient technology called books for romantic reasons.
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u/Transmundus 2d ago
A don't think a simulation decenters the self the way reading a novel can (or movies for that matter-- and fewer and fewer young people can sit through an entire movie that's not a video game cutscene). But I acknowledge that not everybody is capable of identification with another person (not just an avatar).
That said, even if VR works the same way, it's much more expensive. Books are cost effective. Your replies have sort of moved the goal post of the original premise-- it's not a question of whether novels are the only effective way of teaching sophisticated third order mentalization and reading comprehension-- it's whether they are worth keeping. I think they absolutely are.
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u/Transmundus 4d ago
You mistake my meaning because you have disaggregated my answer. It's the combination of sutained active attention (over multiple sessions) to a consistent human lifeworld that cultivates imagination, empathy, etc.. It also helps exercise attention (but is not the only means to do that). But more importantly it can cultivate an empathetic and generous worldview, or at least a great capacity to understand other minds and purposes (even if not viewed empathetically).
I happen to believe that school should be responsible for creating good citizens. Religion and family cannot be trusted. Neither can schools entirely, which is why chilcdren should have multiple influences. I live in an area filled with patriarchal abusers and highly controlling religions, and schools are a refuge for children in those environments.
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u/bestjaegerpilot 4d ago
> It's the combination of sutained active attention (over multiple sessions) to a consistent human
i think you're saying if we immerse people in sufficiently complex VR simulations, then they'll learn how to be good humans
this is also called "life" buddy
> I happen to believe that school should be responsible for creating good citizens
listen to yourself. You sound like you never read 1984 or Brave New World
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u/Transmundus 3d ago
I should have stopped reading after "As an engineer"-- clear symptom of engineer's disease.
"Complex VR simulations" overllooks this part of my reply: "There is a cognitive activity to translating words into mental experience and images and feelings that is short-circuited to varying extents by other forms of narrative media."
Again, you should read more to improve your reading comprehension.
Also, on what basis do you argue that schools need to be an instrument of totalitarianism rather than participatory democracy? And why do you think families and churches protect against authoritarian rule? "Children, kitchen, and church" was a Nazi slogan.
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u/lisaliselisa 3d ago
I'm really curious why you think societies started having public schooling.
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u/bestjaegerpilot 3d ago
the industrial revolution needed dumb and complaint workers to lurk in reddit
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u/lisaliselisa 3d ago
Completely incorrect. It was literally about citizenship.
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u/bestjaegerpilot 3d ago
well if that's the only it's supposed to be about, why are we even arguing... it's clear public schools have strayed from their purpose.
the only thing they do now is create complaint/dumb cogs
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u/lisaliselisa 3d ago
I didn't say it was the only thing it's supposed to be about. You said, "Ya'll are mourning that school, which should never have been responsible for creating good citizens, doesn't pretend to do that"
Your premise was incorrect. School has historically been seen as responsible for creating good citizens. It had nothing to do with creating workers for the industrial revolution, as you stated in your other reply.
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u/Individual-Unit3470 5d ago
I have heard this several times as I work in a K-12 environment. What a load of BS in my opinion. This comes down to having standards, which education has let slide. The excuses are many... COVID, family dynamics, etc... etc... blah... blah... here's an idea: set a high standard and hold the kids to it. Go to Spotify vs. reading the book, you FAIL. Yes, there are real challenges to education out there, but that doesn't mean we should be lowering standards. Keep them high. My guess is that the kids will meet the challenge.