The Principal Who Banned Reading Aloud

OR: The Last Thing You Want Is Kids Liking Books!

ALL IT TAKES is one principal to undo so much good. Just one. One know-it-all. Here’s how it works.

We start with two brothers growing up in a small town where their mother walked with them to the public library every two weeks, a journey of one and half miles. They took out two books, one to be read to them and one to be read by them. That was enough of a value system to produce two school librarians when they grew up, both choosing to work in their home town.

The one in question here, let’s call him Jack (after all, he’s eventually going to meet an angry “giant”), applied his mother’s lessons to his own children. They were read to and immersed in a world of print. His oldest, upon graduating from one of America’s most prestigious universities, was asked how a kid from a small town could make it in such a big-time place. “Daddy—you read to me every night.”

That nightly tradition was carried on with the second child, a first-place winner in two national writing competitions while in high school. Her college application essay was on the 3,218 consecutive nights in which her father read to her as a child.

HE lesson plan of home also was applied to Jack’s K-2 school library where he’d memorize six books a week for easier reading to classes. By the time they finished second grade, they’d have been exposed to hundreds and hundreds of his readings and millions of words. He followed this practice for decades.

And then came a new assignment to a school where the principal advised Jack that all reading aloud should stop once children have left preschool. “Any reading aloud can be done in the home. If it’s not done there, that’s not my problem or yours. I want them seated at tables when they come into the library, not on story mats on the floor. They’re to be seated and working on research on the computer or reading to themselves.”

The librarian tried explaining the importance of reading aloud, as well as the futility of kindergartners and first-graders trying to do research on computers but to no avail. Reading aloud to that grade level was a waste of time and would stop immediately, declared the principal.

Little help could be garnered from the rest of the faculty which had been living under the principal’s intimidating regimen for years. Jack’s only recourses were to swallow his beliefs or appeal the principal’s decree to the superintendent’s office, a superintendent firmly entrenched in “research-based” education. That shouldn’t be a problem, Jack thought. There’s plenty of research and endorsement from the highest reaches of education for reading to children. In 1985, the U.S. Department of Education declared it’s “the single most important activity for building the knowledge for eventual success in reading” and went on to say “it’s a practice that continue throughout the grades.”¹ The week of Jack’s district hearing, the senior psychology lecturer and head of Williams College’s teaching program had penned an essay for the op-ed page of The New York Times describing the ideal elementary classroom curriculum this way:

In this classroom, children would spend two hours each day hearing stories read aloud, reading aloud themselves, telling stories to one another and reading on their own. After all, the first step to literacy is simply being immersed, through conversation and storytelling, in a reading environment; the second is to read a lot and often. A school day where every child is given ample opportunities to read and discuss books would give teachers more time to help those students who need more instruction in order to become good readers.²

HILE Jack waited for the hearing and accumulated documentation to support his practices, he dared to read aloud to his students. It was a mistake. A bad one, according to the principal, who issued a Letter of Reprimand for reading to first-graders — twice!

Finally there arrived the hearing with the assistant superintendent and director of curriculum. It couldn’t have gone smoother, Jack thought. They agreed with the research he presented and supported his philosophy. A week later their letter arrived negating much of what they had agreed with earlier. Their finding was that reading aloud be no more than 5-10 minutes a class and the rest of the time was to be spent by the students doing “research that would be based on the theme of the story.”

One faculty member noted with a wince, “Many of these children are beginning readers who can only read a few words — words like “I,” “a,” “and,” “is,” and “the.” To which another teacher replied, “A lot of research has been done using those five words but not just those five words.”

Apparently the principal hadn’t stopped to think that if children were dependent solely on what they read for vocabulary enrichment, and all they could read was decodable text, they’d soon be speaking like The Cat in the Hat.

Soon thereafter, Jack the librarian took a medical leave — using some of the more than 400 days he had accumulated through decades of service. Ironically, these events materialized one year after the local paper named him “Educator of the Year.”

All of which reminds me of the time a decade ago when the superintendent of a large Southern urban school district declared he wanted no more recess, that elementary recess time could be better used with students at their desks, on task, learning, instead of hanging on the monkey bars. And just to make sure those teachers didn’t try to sneak in the recess, he and the school board made sure new school construction didn’t include playgrounds.³ What came of it all? The scores never rose but the superintendent did — he went on to another large district and then into consultant work, leaving behind the results of his “insightful” leadership.

Principal the giant declared it wasn't his problem if the children are not read to at home. Wrong again. Back in 2006, New York Times columnist and Columbia professor Sam Freedman wrote about a van-load of men visiting a Barnes & Noble a few miles from where they were living, a halfway house in Newark, New Jersey. For many in the van, including their 300 housemates back at the house, this would be their first trip to a bookstore — ever. They all had serious prison records but few had graduation records. The average education level was eighth grade.

Their tour guide was a woman wearing the title "Leisure Education Director" and on the day in question she was trying to show her guys that you could actually enjoy a book, that they served purposes other than "filing an appeal."⁴ If their teachers and parents had taught those lessons earlier, half the van might have been empty that day. For that deficit in their lives, they and we all pay the price. Yes, Mr. Principal, it is your problem. Your ex-librarian was serving as an early primary "Leisure Education Director" so a few of those kids on the story mats wouldn't need such an education director later in life.

Strange as it may seem in an era when brain research has taught us so much about how children learn, there are still few a educators who think the medicine can’t be any good if it doesn’t scald the throat going down. They’d surely benefit from a dose of Mark Twain’s wisdom: The cat that sits on a hot stove lid never sits on another hot stove lid; in fact, it avoids all stove lids, hot or cold, thereafter. And sadly, the child who never associates school and reading with pleasure and a love of learning will avoid everything to do with school and reading thereafter — the very opposite of what school and Jack the librarian — and his mother — were trying to accomplish.

UPDATING THE STORY: By 2011, Principal the giant had been removed from his principalship and reassigned to a lower profile position. The removal was by a unanimous vote of the school board. Unfortunately it comes almost two years late. Better late than never, I suppose. — JT

NOTES and FURTHER READINGS

"Playing to Learn," by Susan Engel, The New York Times, Feb. 2, 2010. Prof. Engel describes the ideal elementary classroom curriculum. www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/opinion/02engel.html
Richard C. Anderson, Elfrieda H. Hiebert, Judith A. Scott, Ian A.G. Wilkinson, Becoming a Nation of Readers: The Report of the Commission on Reading (Champaign-Urbana, IL: Center for the Study of Reading, 1985), p. 23.
"Many Schools Putting an End to Child's Play" by Dirk Johnson, The New York Times, p. A1, A16. www.nytimes.com/1998/04/07/us/many-schools-putting-an-end-to-child-s-play.html.
“ON EDUCATION: Tasting Freedom‚ as Simple Joys in the Barnes & Noble‚" by Samuel G. Freedman, The New York Times, August 2, 2006. Freedman follows a van-load of residents from a halfway house on their first visit to a bookstore — ever. www.nytimes.com/2006/08/02/education/02EDUCATION.html.

"What should be our goals in reading to teenagers?" Excerpt from The Read-Aloud Handbook (Jim Trelease, Penguin 2006): Consider the read-aloud experiences of Nancy Foote of Higley, Arizona, recipient of the Presidential Award for Excellence. www/trelease-on-reading/com/rah-ch3-pg3.html#reading2teens
"How is it that some kids get a head start on vocabulary? Excerpt from The Read-Aloud Handbook (Jim Trelease, Penguin 2006): In the landmark study Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experiences of Young American Children, Hart and Risley examine the wide disparities in the vocabulary of rich and poor children before age 5, a gap that seldom closes. www.trelease-on-reading.com/rah-ch1-pg3.html#vocabulary
"Should I read to my students even if my principal tells me to stop?" ASK THE TEACHER: Carol Veravanich answers readers' questions. The Orange County (CA) Register, May 19, 2009); Teacher responses to the column are particularly telling in a state that ranks at the bottom of the national reading scores and is obsessed with accountability and scorekeeping for each minute of the school day. www.ocregister.com/news/read-198833-day-reading.html.

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