Many high school students can't read. Is the solution teaching reading in every class?

A high school chemistry teachers points to writings on a white board.

By Julian Roberts-GrmelaThe Hechinger Report

Aug. 14, 2024 3 AM PT

Like many high school chemistry teachers, Angie Hackman said she instructs students on atoms, matter and how they “influence the world around us.”

But Hackman also has another responsibility: developing students’ literacy skills. She closely reads passages from their textbooks, breaks apart prefixes and suffixes and identifies root words. She dissected the word “intermolecular,” and its prefix, “inter,” connecting it to other words with that same prefix.

Every teacher at her San Diego charter school, Health Sciences High and Middle College, teaches students literacy skills, regardless of the subject. That’s because so many students arrive at the school struggling with basic reading, some scoring at the first- or second-grade level, said Douglas Fisher, a school administrator.

The goal is for high school graduates to attain “reading levels ready for college.”

The school has expected teachers to integrate literacy into their lessons since its 2007 founding. To help them succeed, the school — which last year enrolled about 500 high schoolers, roughly 80% of whom qualified for free or reduced-priced lunch — provides its teachers with daily professional development and coaching on literacy instruction and other topics.

Research suggests that while some students catch up to their peers after one-on-one interventions, a bigger impact may come from embedding reading instruction into other classes, “where these kids spend a majority of their day,” said Jade Wexler, a professor of special education with a focus on adolescent literacy at the University of Maryland.

A handful of school districts and states, including Idaho and Ohio, are starting to explore the approach.

Poor reading skills are a nationwide issue. On the 2022 National Assessment of Education Progress, known as the Nation’s Report Card, nearly 70% of eighth-graders scored below “proficient” and, of those, 30% scored “below basic,” roughly the same as California scores.

In the Los Angeles Unified School District, 72% of eighth-graders scored below proficient and 33% below basic in 2022.

“In a typical classroom that’s about 25 kids, that means about 17 are still struggling to comprehend text at the most foundational level,” said Wexler.

That may be due, in part, to larger troubles with literacy instruction. For decades, the primary methods for teaching students how to read in the U.S. were out of line with evolving research, known as “the science of reading.”

A wide body of research indicates students need explicit instruction in foundational reading skills, like phonics, in order to be able to recognize and make sense of words on the page. But many schools have also used a rival curriculum called the “whole language” approach, which generally de-emphasizes phonics.

Some high school teachers see the fallout, said Wexler.

“Many students struggle at the secondary level with decoding, typically multisyllabic words, so those longer words that they’re encountering in science text, for example, or in social studies text,” Wexler said. “We also have a lot of our kids that can decode these words at decent levels and with fluency but they still struggle to comprehend the text that they’re reading.”

In recent years, school systems have begun to make changes. Between 2019 and 2022, more than 200 laws to reform reading instruction were enacted in 45 states and the District of Columbia, according to a report by the Albert Shanker Institute.

California passed nine bills related to reading reform in that time, according to the Shanker Institute.

However, a bill to mandate the “science of reading” was tabled during this past legislative session. The California Teachers Assn. opposed the bill, saying it was a “one size fits all approach” that could harm literacy instruction already rooted in the science of reading. Also, the proposal did not meet the needs of English learners.

Some experts and educators worry reading reforms have left older students behind.

Susan B. Neuman, the report’s lead author and an education professor at New York University, said high schools were least affected by the wave of legislation up to 2022.

“It is mostly targeted on those early grades,” Neuman said. “You could even say that four through sixth grade is left behind a bit.”

Kayla Reist, another author of the Shanker Institute report, said that if states started focusing on high schoolers in reading reform legislation, they would “really have to start talking about teacher preparation programs” and professional development. That’s because many high school teachers finish their training without lessons on how to teach reading, which is typically focused on early grades.

In a 2008 practice guide on improving adolescent literacy, the Institute of Education Sciences, a research institution that is part of the U.S. Department of Education, stated that “many teachers report feeling unprepared to help their students or do not think that teaching reading skills in content-area classes is their responsibility.”

“If you are a science teacher, you want to teach science, you really don’t want to hang out and talk about the academic vocabulary of science,” Neuman said.

While a few states have passed legislation to better prepare teachers of middle and high schoolers in literacy instruction, California is not among them.

In response to questions, the California Department of Education said that a top priority for California Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond is an initiative called Reading by Third Grade and Beyond, a plan to ensure all California students learn to read by third grade by 2026.

Wexler, the literacy expert, is researching ways to build a schoolwide literacy model at the secondary level. That might include strategies like the one embraced by Health Sciences High.

Kimberly Elliot, an instructional coach at the school, said teachers of all subjects are receptive to the literacy training. But the instruction looks different in different classrooms.

“What a close read looks like in a science class might be slightly different than supporting students to break down a mathematics problem,” Elliot said.

While Hackman, the chemistry teacher, spends a lot of class time reading articles, Maggie Fallon, a math teacher, said she primarily supports literacy by teaching students new vocabulary.

“It’s more like figuring out what word equals a mathematical symbol,” Fallon said, explaining that she often asks her students to annotate word problems to derive meaning.

Faiza Omar, who took Hackman’s class last school year as a junior, learned English as a second language and didn’t receive the foundational reading interventions until high school. She said the additional reading review in her main subject classes helped “make sure everyone is on the same page.”

“It gives me understanding of what’s going on,” Omar said.

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.