Articles and Observations

Researched and written by Jami Hunt-Williams

Ask a high school student if they're taking math, and they'll give you an assessment. "Yeah, but I'm not good at it." A skill level. A grade. A fact about themselves they can say out loud without flinching.

Ask that same student about reading and watch what happens instead. They don't tell you their level. They tell you their feelings.

I hate reading. I hate writing.

They are not lying, and they are not exaggerating. Reading, for these students — especially at the secondary level — is not a subject they've failed at. It's a relationship they've failed in. It is abhorrent to them, not for pleasure, not for information, not in any shape or form. And most of the adults around them have made peace with it.

"There's nothing we can really do about it now. It is what it is." An upper-level administrator said that to me. Not with malice. With exhaustion. Maybe both.

It matters to me. It should matter to you. Because these students haven't just failed to become readers — they've been led, patiently, over years, to believe that reading was ever a relationship to begin with. Something alive. Something with feelings to hurt. And somewhere along the way, we did that to them. We built it. Which means we can take it apart.

In the film Detachment, Adrien Brody's character stands in front of a room of students who have already given up and does something no one had warned them about: he asks them to define "assimilate" and "ubiquitous," and then he tells them the truth. To defend ourselves and fight against assimilating this dullness into our thought processes, we must learn to read. To stimulate our own imagination, to cultivate our own consciousness, our own belief systems. We all need skills to defend and preserve our own minds. We don't need imagination when there is an image for everything. We have been ubiquitously assimilated. And it seems only a scant few are truly upset about it.

There is a way to get it back — that fish-eye lens each of us can turn on the world and keep privately in our own mind. There is a way. But you are not going to like it.

So how did a skill become a relationship? It didn't happen by accident, and it didn't happen recently. It happened the same way most bad ideas take over a school system — one well-intentioned innovation at a time, stacked on top of another, until nobody remembers which decision caused which symptom.

Charting student progress is a 19th-century practice. Pen, paper, private. One set of eyes in a one-room schoolhouse. No laminated chart. No die-cut race cars with every kid's name in the hallway so everyone can see who's winning and who's losing. Used the way it was first used, charting was efficient, fair, and quiet.

Then, starting in the 1960s, that quiet practice got a theory bolted onto it. Psychiatric hospitals were the first to formalize it — researchers exchanging tokens for privileges, built on B.F. Skinner's operant conditioning and Edward Thorndike's Law of Effect. By the 1970s, it had migrated into classrooms wholesale, adopted by educators who were reaching, in good faith, for anything that promised order and measurable progress. These are theories of extrinsic motivation, peer pressure, and social modeling — blunt instruments, more cattle prod than compass, no matter how gently we've since learned to phrase it. So yes, this was a tectonic shift in education. The question I keep asking is whether it needed to be.

In my 1978 second-grade classroom, I was taught with what would now be called "sounding out, chunking, and phonics." There was no chart telling me how I measured up against anyone else, and frankly, I didn't care. I liked to read. I liked going to the library with my grandmother. When the Iowa Test of Basic Skills bumped me out of third grade into fifth-grade reading levels, I didn't get a prize from a treasure chest or a free pizza. I had a long, boring meeting between my mother and the principal, and I went straight into fourth grade the next year. It didn't bother me at all, because nothing was riding on it except the reading itself.

That is the thing we killed. Not reading scores — the quiet, unbothered, unrewarded relationship a kid has with doing something she's good at, before anyone told her it was a competition. We traded learners who couldn't wait to get to the library with their grandmothers for students who can't wait to move their paper race car one square closer to the finish line

Here's the part that's easy to miss: that same blunt instrument never actually retired. It just found new champions — people who genuinely believed they were building something better for kids who needed structure.

In 1997, Congress folded a new mandate into the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act — a national framework, eventually called Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, built by researchers who'd spent the 1980s working with kids classified as having behavior disorders. It was explicitly, narrowly, a behavior framework. Not academics. Behavior. Within a few years, it had expanded to every student in the building, and it never once stopped being built out of the same Skinnerian scaffolding as the token economy it was supposedly retiring — reinforcement schedules, contingent rewards, tokens for compliance, tokens for a good day, tokens exchanged at the treasure chest.

And here is the part that should stop every one of us cold: the schools implementing PBIS started reporting academic gains as proof it was working. Reading scores. Math scores. The very system built and sold as "behavior only" could not, in practice, keep behavior and performance in separate rooms — because at the elementary level, there is no separate room. A kid who reads out loud without flinching gets a token. A kid who reads out loud and flinches, stumbles, or refuses — that's a behavior problem now, isn't it? Watch how fast "he won't read" becomes "he's being defiant" in a PBIS meeting. The chart doesn't distinguish between a decoding deficit and a discipline referral. It was never built to.

So the token economy didn't die in the 1980s. It got a kinder name, a research center, and federal legislation behind it, and it walked straight back into the elementary classroom wearing a badge that said positive. Sally didn't just grow up under balanced literacy. She grew up getting rewarded — or quietly flagged — for how she behaved around the thing she was never actually taught how to do.

In 2009, veteran English teacher Kelly Gallagher published Readicide, naming what those of us in classrooms already knew: schools were killing the love of reading by turning two-week novels into six-week studies in functional torture, all in the name of hitting standards. I agree with him. But I'd take it one step further. We didn't just kill the love. We built an entire emotional infrastructure — books as friends, books as comfort, books as something you're either close to or estranged from — and then we let that infrastructure collapse on top of the kids who couldn't perform inside it.

Look at the age at which reading is introduced. Developmental psychologists call kindergarten through first grade the convenience-and-shared-play phase — bonds form with whoever is nice, nearby, and willing to share. That is precisely the age when we hand a child a book, put her on our lap, and tell her that books are friends.

Sweet little Sally crawls up with a book she calls "Chicken Book," even though that's not the title, and you don't correct her because you're cuddling. She's praised the way you praise a kind child, not a technically improving one. At school, balanced literacy tells her the same thing: books are everywhere, they are kind, they build bridges to lap-sitting.

By second and third grade, Sally's friendships shift to mutual trust and assistance. When she doesn't know a word on her worksheet, she looks to her friends. They're busy with their own, so she draws instead — she's good at that. The teacher redirects her back to the worksheet. She marks what her tablemates mark. At home, she's decided the pictures in her books aren't good enough, so she draws over them. She still crawls into laps. She just tells her own stories now instead of reading someone else's.

By fourth and fifth grade, her friendships rely on psychological closeness and a sense of safe harbor. She's a little embarrassed that her friends read in the morning group and she reads in the afternoon group, but she's popular — basketball, soccer, art club — so nobody teases her. Her reading teacher watches the same shows she does, and Sally has learned that if she starts a conversation about the show, the other kids will carry it and she won't have to read aloud. That closeness is a safe harbor from a reading level everyone in the building already knows about, and nobody has fixed. She's in fifth grade, reading two grades behind, and her Tier 3 intervention isn't working. Four tutors have quit in as many weeks because she is, quite reasonably, furious with all of them. She wants to be an art teacher. She knows that means college. None of that matters yet, because right now, all Sally knows is that she hates reading

Sally is a sophomore living the picture-perfect high school experience — varsity basketball, president of the Art Club, a best friend who quietly types up the meeting minutes she can't. Her parents are beaming. She's promised them she'll bring up their English grade. Her teachers look at her work and shake their heads.

I don't shake my head. I stand back and applaud her because Sally is an engineering genius. She has spent a decade building a working academic life within a text-heavy world without being able to read that text, and she pulls it off every day. She isn't behind. She's an expert at survival — distraction, compliance, deflection, all in service of protecting her dignity.

So when an administrator throws up his hands and says "it is what it is," he isn't describing Sally. He's surrendering to a system that defaulted to paper race cars and token economies instead of teaching a kid to read — not because anyone decided that was the better trade, but because it's what the system had on hand.

And here is the part that took me months of looking backward to see clearly: nobody did this on purpose. Not the third-grade teacher who will swear to you, honestly, that Sally loved reading in her room — because she probably did, for those forty-five minutes, before the cuddle turned into the cheating turned into the self-redacted unreadable text three years later. Not the interventionist. Not the administrator with his hands in the air. Every one of them was doing their job inside a system built from decades of well-meaning theories arriving all at once and never once talking to each other — whole language insisting reading was a feeling to be caught, behaviorism insisting feelings could be charted and rewarded, standards insisting the chart mattered more than the child underneath it. Nobody built that on purpose. It wasn't a villain. It was weather. A perfect pedagogical storm that touched down without warning and, for reasons no one can fully explain, skipped the kid at one desk and leveled the one sitting next to her. There's no single moment to point to. That's exactly what makes it so hard to stop.

Here is where most people get the secondary classroom wrong. They walk in, run a room full of teenage Sallys through the same elementary-style worksheets that failed the first time, and get blank stares, crossed arms, silence — and they call it a body. A lost cause. Something to mourn instead of investigate. And a nation stands and looks at Sally, drawing a line around her body, and millions of other bodies just like hers, with an Expo dry-erase marker. Another casualty in the educational skirmish, a battle on a die with 20 faces, everyone fighting a different enemy, and only a few people raising a banner for Sally. We are running back to get her - make sure she has a proper burial and all. No child left behind, right? 

Spoiler Alert: Sally isn't dead; she's playing possum.

We don't even know how to determine a time of death. Was it during the cuddle? Was it while she was getting “help” from her friends? Was it when Sally started creating her own pictures and blacked out the written words? Truth be told, Sally does not even know, because she has been hiding behind this screen so long that she is the marionette and her evasion is the puppeteer.

And we need to call her on it — not with another worksheet, but with the one thing an elementary classroom cannot offer and a secondary classroom can: a teenager can actually reason for herself and be reasonable about herself. She can hear "you were never taught this — you were taught to feel something about it instead" and evaluate that sentence, turn it over, recognize herself in it. A seven-year-old absorbs a teacher's warmth. A sixteen-year-old can be told the truth.

That is the opportunity secondary education has and keeps refusing to take. Someone has to tell these kids that reading is not a relationship. It is a function. A skill. Not intuitive, not something you're born knowing how to feel your way through — a structure, with rules, that has to be taught. We spent nearly thirty years building a warm, fuzzy, take-a-guess kissing booth out of something that was never supposed to be one, and we failed an entire generation by refusing just to teach them the mechanics. When you reward "good" readers and panic over "poor" ones, you don't create better readers. You create readers who are paranoid, word-phobic, and done.

We owe secondary students the thing we withheld — not another chart, not another treasure chest, not a worksheet that talks to them like they're seven. We owe them an honest account of what happened to them, and then we owe them a way out that doesn't ask them to perform gratitude for finally being taught. Strip the stigma. Retire the cattle prod for good this time. Stop asking them to want it before they can do it.

It is time to stop the autopsy of the American high school reader and start the recovery. Not with a chart. With something that actually works — something built specifically for the ones who've already been failed once by every intervention that assumed the problem was love. I'm building it now. And you are not going to believe how simple it is.