The Kids Can’t Read

As people often like to say, children are our future. It’s important to nurture them, to teach them, and to guide them. But most importantly, they need to actually be taught how to read. 

Some devastating new statistics show that thirty-three percent of fourth-grade students performed at or above the NAEP Proficient (which is a performance standard that describes what students should know and be able to do) level on the reading assessment in 2022. 

That means that two-thirds of children in America can’t read fluently. Another study showed that sixty-eight percent of US 4th-graders are below the optimal reading level proficiency. Not only is this extremely concerning and damaging to future generations, but it also creates an entire generation that lags behind in education. The main question is, why can’t these kids read?

The blame squarely rests on sight words.

Back in 2007, when I was in kindergarten, the way I was taught how to read was through the use of phonics. Phonics is the method that teaches students to read by correlating sounds with letters or groups of letters in an alphabetic writing system. It’s how most people were taught to read as a child, by sounding out each letter out loud and putting it together. Of course, phonics is not without its flaws. It doesn’t allow young children to understand the more complex rules of spelling, it can be exhausting for kids to decode constantly, and there are plenty of words that can’t decoded by sounding out, such as non-content words (prepositions, articles, pronouns, and auxiliary verbs). However, compared to sight words, phonics is a dream.

Using sight words relies heavily on context clues and memorization, skipping words they don’t know, and not actually teaching young students how to read. Putting more emphasis on cues and memorization rather than sounding words out and figuring out the meaning is severely damaging. This is creating an entire generation to struggle with reading and worsening literacy rates to what it was decades ago.

But it’s not just how children are taught to read. Reading books and doing word-associated puzzles are far less encouraged today as most parents often place their children in front of an iPad, and libraries are visited less and less. Children from ages 9 to 13 who enjoy reading for fun and on a daily basis have been reported to have dropped and are at the lowest levels since at least the mid-1980s. More and more are choosing to consume social media, which comes with its own problems when you are participating in online culture from a young age.

While some of this can be placed on the pandemic and the onslaught of social media over the past decade, the truth of the matter is that kids are getting the education and encouragement that they should be receiving. Immediate changes must be made, including fixing the current curriculum and encouraging reading for fun. This allows for kids not only to read better but thrive in every aspect of their education. If we continue to neglect that, we’re going to be left with an entire generation three steps behind where they could have been.

Strike Out, 

Rameen Naviwala 

Boca Raton

Rameen Naviwala is a content writer for Strike Magazine Boca. A water sign that enjoys rom-coms and reading melodramatic novels, she spends most of her time with headphones on and scribbling down whatever thought comes to mind. You can reach her at rameen.naviwala@outlook.com.