Why kids can't read (and what we can do about it), with Kate Crist
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Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and I am here with Kate Christ. Kate is a literacy specialist, more than 20 years in education. She's been a classroom teacher, an instructional coach, program coordinator. She's currently the director of Education 4500, where she works with teachers and leaders around the U.S.,

to design and implement literacy programs. And she's on the steering committee for the Project for Adolescent Literacy. Kate Christ, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast. Oh, thank you so much. I'm so delighted to be here.

I know, I'm excited to have you here because recently I heard this shocking statistic about literacy, something like 21% of US adults are illiterate. And well, first I was shocked, but then I started wondering, how is that even measured? Like, what does that even mean? So can you sort of start us at the beginning there? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think shocking is a good way to start.

That statistic should be shocking. It's, you know, one of the richest countries in the world and we have these really low rates of literacy.

And I think they have a huge impact. So there's sort of two ways we can talk about it. One is how do we know? Like what are we using to measure? And the other is what does it mean for people functionally? So the 20% of illiteracy, so there's a few different assessments that are used, sort of batch assessments, but they're samples that we can generalize from. They're large enough.

The one of the most commonly used ones is called the PIAC. We love our acronyms and education is the program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies. And that's where that 20 percent, 21 percent literacy rate comes from. That 20 percent are people who read it about a third grade level or below.

And so that means, yeah, so that means like job applications, voter registration guides, medical information packets, all of that's pretty inaccessible. Reading to your children, often inaccessible. The other statistic that comes out of the P-Act that is really important to think about is that about half of Americans read at or just below a sixth grade level.

And so those also have pretty big impacts. Conversational English, when we sort of on this podcast today, when we talk, when we talk to our friends and colleagues, that's at about a fifth grade level in terms of the complexity, the syntax, the grammar, the vocabulary that we use. Print news media is at about middle school. So anywhere sixth, seventh and eighth grade.

And then all of the things that we want to be able to do to be like empowered, in charge of our lives. So joining the military or going to a trade school or a two-year community college or a four-year university, all of that is high school and above.

Wow. So you're saying like half the U.S. population couldn't do those things because of their reading skills. Yeah. And if you look, there was a great article recently in, I think it was the New York Magazine, New Yorker. I can't remember. It was very compelling around what's happening in the military. And part of what it talked about is to get into the military, you have to take an entrance exam. And that lots of students who, lots of soldiers who want to enlist cannot pass the entrance exam.

And it has to do with their rates of literacy. And so the military is solving the problem largely by giving test prep classes to those prospective soldiers, not necessarily solving the reading problem for them, but getting them past the test. So there are like these barriers to entry in multiple places that people can't access without some serious intervention or support.

Wow. Wow. You know, when we talked a few months ago, I was really amazed by the stories you told me of some people and, you know, how they, how they do manage to get by in the world. You told me about a doctor who had trouble with literacy. Yeah. So there, I worked like a different lifetime ago, 20 plus years ago at a literacy clinic. And so I had, I

in the literacy clinic who I taught all day, who some of were, you know, what you would expect, five, six, seven, eight, 10, 12, and then lots of adults. And so I had one student who was a doctor and he had had, he had gotten married really young and his wife had helped him through medical school and read because he can, the ability to read doesn't mean or to read or not read has nothing to do with intelligence, which we can talk about as really how your brain is wired.

So he was perfectly smart. He could do all the work of a doctor. He just couldn't get through the text independently because he was severely dyslexic. And so that's and that's a solvable problem. Right. And that's what he came to the clinic for. But before he came to us, he was having people in his life help him to get through those texts.

Amazing. What are some of the other stories that stand out to you from your career helping people? Yeah, I think so. For me, my favorite stories are always about high school kids. So I taught high school for over 10 years. And a lot of what I did, because I'd had this experience in a reading clinic, I knew more than most high school teachers have the opportunity to know. I teach prep programs for high school. Don't teach you how to teach kids how to read.

But I had worked at this clinic, so I knew a little bit. And so I would tell my students, like, you can't, you know, lots of my students couldn't read at grade level. My students were sort of statistically normal. And so, and I would say, this is not your fault. This is actually a lack of opportunity. No one did this for you. We can though, like it's a, it is a solvable problem. You're going to have to work hard. I'd make a deal. Like, I'm going to give you stuff, this fluency work, this morphology work, um,

It's going to be hard. And if you do it, you will get better. And I loved it when my students got pissed because...

Because they were like, wait, what? Like, I've been, you know, it is really embarrassing and takes a toll on kids to be in school and not read. Right. So all the like misbehaviors, wiling out, quiet in the back, whatever they're doing, it might be because they're having trouble getting through the day because they can't read. And so the idea that they could do better, right?

and that they had been denied the opportunity was sort of infuriating, but also, you know, deeply motivating. That's, I mean, a teenager's anger is like their best asset. And so having them understand that it's not them and that they now could be empowered to grab it was really, really a favorite sort of period of time for me with kids.

Yeah. Yeah, no, that's amazing. I was wondering, like, how do you motivate a teenager? You know, if someone gets to that point, you know, they probably have their own coping mechanisms to make them feel less bad about themselves when they get there. 100%. 100%.

Yeah. I remember recently reading about a woman who, she was suing her high school. So talking about anger, she had graduated from high school without being able to read. And amazingly, she got into college. So she's in college now because she used text-to-speech technology, which is also like an amazing, relatively new technology that I imagine a lot of

people who have trouble reading are using now. Yeah, it's incredibly powerful. I think the challenge that story, that woman, Alicia Ortiz, right? So the challenge for folks who can't get through text independently is

Again, it's not because they're dumb, right? And they can have great listening comprehension and they can understand and have these amazing complex thoughts. So the speech, the text-to-speech technology gives them access to text when they themselves can't do it independently. It doesn't wholesale solve the reading problem.

And that's the distinction for students like Alicia Ortiz in this story is that there are ways to solve the problem. There are ways sort of around the barrier.

And if we don't give students access to the text independently, they're always going to be needing a support rather than being empowered independently. And so they're not going to be able to take that military entrance test or read the board's guide. Exactly. And so all of the, it's a tension that I see a lot in middle and high schools, especially where students need to read lots of text and

And they won't or they can't. And so they're being read to a lot, either by an audio book or text to speech. And it's sort of a fine solution in small doses. But as a large scale solution to the kids can't yet read problem, it doesn't solve the problem. It just sort of skirts around it.

So let's talk about how we got here. So how is it that so many people can't read? Is this a new problem or is it just an old problem that I wasn't aware of? Yeah, I think so. I will say two things up front. One is like, I will say a bunch of stuff that lots of people will probably disagree with. So there's a lot of sort of

Some contested information in the education field around how kids learn to read and how we got here. I have a particular point of view and my particular point of view was really informed by cognitive science. And so that's where I'm coming from. And the other thing to say is that there are people who tell this story really well, who if you're curious and interested, so...

There's two really good films, documentary style films. One is The Truth About Reading and the other is The Right to Read. And they both, I think, are both available freely for streaming or low cost. And they're really well done. And they really sort of tell this, answer this question that you've asked really, really well. And there's another podcast called Sold a Story. It's a series by a woman named Emily Hanford. And she has a few stories before. She's an education reporter.

And she talks about sort of how did we get here? Like, why are so many people not able to read? Okay. We'll put a link to all those in the show notes for the listeners. So...

How we got – so NAEP scores, which are, if you may have heard, the NAEP scores were recently released. So NAEP is the National Assessment of Educational Progress. And those score – there's math and literacy scores in fourth grade and eighth grade from 2024 were just released.

If we look at the recent NAEP scores, they're overall down. It was not a great year, but it's overall not really ever a great year on NAEP scores. Reasonable people can disagree about if NAEP is the tool we should be using, but by any measurement tool you use, American students don't read well. That's how we get adults who don't read well is because we have American students who are not reading well. And so...

The rates have been largely flat over 30 plus years. And that has largely to do with the failure of American schools to provide good reading instruction to students. And I think...

We can talk about what good reading instruction is and what we know kids need to learn to read. But I think it's also really important to say that by and large, teachers, this is not an attack on teachers, right? They have been doing what they are told. So they go to teacher prep programs and get told this is how you teach kids how to read. And then they go to teach in schools and schools say, here's your curriculum to use to teach kids how to read. And all of that stuff is wrong. Right.

But if you don't know better, you can't do better. And so there is a big sort of problem in teacher prep and instructional materials that are because those materials aren't aligned to what we know is good instruction.

And that's sort of like probably, I mean, that's what Soul to Story is about. That could be a, you know, a doctorate dissertation all in and of itself. Was there some sort of policy change like 30 years ago when it got to this point? No, I think so. What we know about, so two things are true. What we know about how kids learn how to read has gotten significantly better over the last 20, 30 years because cognitive science, brain imaging, we just know more about how our brains work.

And that has been really insightful to understand what it is that's happening for students when they learn to read. American reading instruction in general has had, like all of American education, has had big pendulum swings. About 20 years ago, there was a big, huge, unresolved disagreement in the American education landscape about

about whether or not we should teach sort of this whole language approach, so looking at words as wholes and memorizing patterns, or if we should sort of teach through a phonics approach. And it turns out we should be teaching through a phonics approach and not through a whole language approach, but that idea around whole language has really taken root and stuck.

And there's lots of really great reasons why that's the case, but reading instruction is still largely misaligned. So what we know about reading and good reading instruction is largely not happening in American classrooms.

Are you still quoting 30-year-old movies? Have you said cool beans in the past 90 days? Do you think Discover isn't widely accepted? If this sounds like you, you're stuck in the past. Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide. And every time you make a purchase with your card, you automatically earn cash back. Welcome to the now. It pays to discover. Learn more at discover.com slash credit card based on the February 2024 Nelson Report.

So, I mean, like help the listeners who don't have kids or who are older and haven't engaged with the education system for a while. Like how are kids taught to read right now? So I will say that I will like, here's the ideal. Here's what we know. And then here's sort of what ends up happening in the classroom. So we know that reading.

Reading comprehension is really two big buckets of things. This is a very simplistic view, right? But it's two buckets of things. It's what we call language comprehension and word recognition. So what are the words say and what are the words mean? So knowing that L-O-V-E spells love and then knowing that love means it's like deep and abiding feeling of care for somebody, right?

And those two things multiplied together get us to reading comprehension. Reading itself is a contrived process. So you and I learn to speak. Everyone learns to speak naturally. If we're exposed to enough people talking as babies, we learn how to speak. Learning to read is not like that. I can listen to Mozart or Beethoven all day long. I can watch a concert pianist. It's not going to teach me how to play the piano that way. And so similarly, reading has to be directly taught.

And so reading is taught ideally along these two buckets. So you teach kids about what words say, right? L-O-V-E spells love. You teach them the patterns of the English language.

And at the same time, you teach them the knowledge and vocabulary of the world. And that those two things, they draw on that knowledge and vocabulary to be really good analytical thinkers. And what the words say just gets increasingly automatic as kids get better and better at it as they get older and older. And so ideally, our instructional approach does both this decoding stuff and

and this language comprehension stuff in equal measure in classrooms. And what often happens in classroom is the decoding part of the word recognition, the foundational skills, the phonemic awareness is not happening systematically in classrooms.

It should be happening every day, 20 to 45 minutes a day, and it's not. And then the knowledge building is also not happening systematically in classrooms. So rather than learning about Mars rovers, kids are learning about themes like being thoughtful or being in a community or having courage.

And so what you really need is those like coherent bodies of knowledge and this direct instruction about how words are made. I've heard that kids love nonfiction books. They do. Yeah. I mean, if you have little kids, like you go to the library, like my son came home, he's six now with a bag full of books about dirt bikes. I was like, oh boy, here we go. Right. He loves them. He thinks they're great. Yeah. How fun. Yeah.

So it's really a curriculum problem right now in that those two buckets of things aren't always happening. Yeah. And it's sort of a methods and approach and materials.

Yeah. Okay. So let's say you're a parent and or a grandparent and you notice that your child or grandchild isn't like reading as well as you think they should. But like kids learn different things at different rates. So at what point should an adult start to worry? Yeah. So great question.

I start to worry if kids aren't reading really simple stuff, cat, bat, fog, log in kindergarten, because it just, there's just a foundation that's set. If at the end of first grade, you have concerns about your child's reading, you're correct. And there's a correlation we know between success, like reading at grade level at the end of grade one, at the end of first grade correlates really directly to finishing high school.

Wow. Because if you're a child in a school and you haven't mastered the code, pretty soon you're reading books in lap. No one's reading out loud to you or few people are reading out loud to you, right? You're more and more required to read independently. But if you can't get through what the words say, you can't read independently. So we see this Matthew effect where those who've mastered the code, they're good to go. They get more and more and more. And those who didn't,

get, you know, over time, get less and less and less because they just, they can't pick up a book, right? That's how we get this 20% and 50% of adults. It's because they didn't get instruction that met the need. Did you call that the Matthew effect? Yeah, yeah. The Matthew effect, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Oh, okay. Yeah. Okay. And so if you are concerned, what do you do at that point? Should you go badger your school or are you on your own? I think you should always ask the school, right? And it is entirely possible that the school where your child or grandchild goes is like, oh yeah, we know. Kate's having a hard time.

Here's what we're doing for her. We recognize her phonics are struggling. Here's the gaps we see. Here's what we're doing in class. Here's what you could do at home. That would be amazing. But if your kid is struggling to read at the end of fifth or the end of first grade, it's probably not what's happening, right? So, and if you don't know yet, so what we often, so I would, I always say, go ask the teachers. The teachers spend a lot of time with your kids. They are doing the best they know how to do. So ask them what they're doing.

And if they say, oh, don't worry about it, I would continue to be worried about it. I would say, thank you so much. And then I would go do something else. So I think the general advice I give to parents, whether the kid is really young, so seven, eight, nine or much older is generally the same, but then has to flex because adolescents are a different sort of group of kids, right? Than our young school age kiddos.

I say there's a few really great resources and we can link the show and show notes, I guess, to these two. Yeah. There are some materials that are made and designed specifically for parents to use at home with kids.

recognizing what is essentially not happening in schools, right? There are sort of companies that have made materials that I think are really good and that will satisfy the needs of most kids. The Reading League puts out a really fun set of videos called Reading Buddies. My kids have watched them.

I think they're really good. There's a man named Spencer. He has a company called Toddlers Can Read and he puts out stuff for free. And then you can also enroll in courses and he'll teach you like whiteboard and a marker. Super simple.

Um, and then there's programs, reading dynamics or how to teach your kids how to read in a hundred. There's like these things you can buy at home that I think are really, if you have the ability to buy them or the ability to watch some videos and learn, it's totally worthwhile for every parent of young kids to do it. Hmm.

Kids should be writing in daily, like, you know, writing grocery lists, writing a to-do list, writing a tomorrow I would like to, just real world writing situations are really helpful. Take your kid to the library, to your point about nonfiction, what are they interested in? Let's get like a whole cache of books, use the library. Librarians are very good at this. So if you say,

This is my daughter, Kate, and she is really, really interested in unicorns. She reads, you know, at about, she's 10, but she reads at about a second grade level. That librarian will be like, great, let's get all this fantasy stuff together. And you read it with your kid.

Right? You read some sections. They read some sections. Read something that's hard out loud. Have them follow along. Have them read back to you that same exact passage. Those are the kinds of things we can do at home. And then two other things I always say is if you have the money, get a reading tutor. Like, don't mess about. If you have the funds to spend. And if you...

I will say if parents start asking other adults, they will be shocked at how many people are like, yeah, my kid can't read either. Like it is right. That's how we get here. That's how we get to 50% of adults in sixth grade. So there are a lot of other families just like yours whose kids are struggling and are not sure what to do. But somebody in your little text thread or in the pickup line, somebody does know what to do. Somebody does know the name of a good literacy tutor or a free program at the library or

So ask around and then tell your kid it's not their fault. Be really clear. Like, I know this is hard and it must feel awful and we're going to get something to work for you and it's not your fault. We're going to get you help and fix this because you don't want them to carry any kind of shame around literacy. You really don't want that to happen.

Yeah. That's why I'm so excited you're here. Cause this is a really big problem. Like so many people listening must be having this problem. Yeah. It's so common. And like, it is, you know, if you're someone who likes to push, right. I say, ask your school, like, what is your approach to literacy instruction? Um, do you use, are your materials aligned to the science of reading?

Ask your school district, right? What is our approach as a district? Why are like, tell me why we have these literacy, if your literacy outcomes are poor, ask why. Ask about instructional materials, students.

Superintendents should have in their contract growth for literacy rates. It should be a non-negotiable. We shouldn't have people running our school districts who don't have a laser focus on stuff that matters most, like learning to read. So those are sort of political things, right? Or like community-based, you know, pushing the narrative a little bit. But those are also things that people who are inclined to do is really helpful. And there's some

great resources we can put in show notes about like, how do I do that? And how do I like, how do I, how do I talk about it? What questions do I ask? What answers do I worry about? All that kind of those great community resources for that kind of stuff. And then, you know, I was thinking about adults too, because it, you know, it seems like so many of the materials must, you know, by their nature, they have to have simple language. But if you're,

30 or 50, you don't want to be reading books that are like the cat in the hat. You know, what materials are available for adults who want to learn to read? Yeah. So there's a, excuse me, there's a few companies that are making, so there's, when we learn to read because the English language has like such a coded language, right? There's so many codes and rules that

into how words are spelled and how to read them, sort of decode and encode the words. There are texts that are controlled for what you've learned. Those patterns that you've learned are called decodables. And I hear lots of people like, oh, decodables are boring. I'm like, well, you've never taught a five-year-old to read because they are like magic because they're like, oh my God, I'm reading a book, right? It's so cool. And so the...

There are decodables made for adults, and those are really helpful. There's a, and we can do some show notes linking, I'm sure here, but CityShares makes some pretty cool stuff. There are, most of them are, there's another, there's one I'll have to, we'll look it up and put it in the notes. There's a woman who's made a series of things just for adults.

that are, so the topics are relevant, right? So we're not talking about like the fat cat with the jam and the ham, right? Like we want to have compelling stories. And most adults don't need that really, really basic sort of consonant, vowel, consonant. What they need is they have some amount of the code and they just need a little bit of help to crack the rest of it and to accelerate that sort of independent reading. And so there are some resources for that. And

Adult literacy centers vary by region for what sort of services they provide, but they are a good place to start. Sometimes run by community college or local charity organizations like Catholic Charities in the state of Nevada. Catholic Charities runs a lot of adult literacy centers. And being able to go there and get help as well is often another good place to start for folks. Yeah.

And is that where you'd start to like, so let's say you're a listener and you want to help, like you want to volunteer to help people learn to read kids or adults. Like what can you do as an individual? So your libraries, again, like librarians are the saviors of the literacy world, right? So often a good place to start is your local library, right? So you can go down and say like, hey, I really want to help

Like I understand that kids in our school community or adults in our community have low rates of literacy and I want to be involved. And librarians know all the stuff that's happening and can sort of plug you in and hook you in. You could also ask your local school, like, can I come and help with reading instruction? If you're a grandparent or a parent or an auntie, oftentimes you can come in and help

in this school. And lots of schools are doing, lots of schools are doing pretty cool stuff, but they don't necessarily have the staff to do all the different parts and pieces. And they would love you to come run like a table during the literacy block. And it's really fun. I will promise you being in a classroom is kind of the best place to be.

Awesome. Great. Well, those are all such great resources. We'll have links to those in the show notes. For regular listeners, this is the end of the episode, but if you're a Grammarpalooza supporter, if you support the show, which we appreciate so much, you're going to get a bonus episode and we're going to talk about phonics or the science of learning to read and that. And it's something that I learned in junior high, but I can barely remember what it was. So we're going to get into the nitty gritty of that.

Kate Christ, where can people find you? They can find me on LinkedIn just for Kate Christ, or they can find me on Instagram at educate4500. Kate, thank you so much for being here with us and sharing all these great resources. Thank you so much for having me.