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[00:00.67] “There was a trend, it happened when COVID hit, to stop reading full-length novels because students were in trauma; we were in a pandemic.

[00:13.95] The problem is we haven’t quite come back from that,” she said.

[00:19.53] Other teachers blame standardized testing and the influence of education technology.

[00:28.30] Some students struggle to read.

[00:31.75] Only one third of fourth and eighth graders reached reading proficiency in the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress.

[00:46.63] Leah van Belle is the director of the non-profit literacy coalition 313Reads in Detroit, Michigan.

[00:55.39] Van Belle said, when her son read the book Peter Pan in elementary school, it was too difficult for most children.

[01:06.28] She said her son’s school does not have a library.

[01:11.86] Still, she said it makes sense for English classes to use shorter reading material.

[01:20.89] “As an adult, if I want to learn about a topic and research it, be it personal or professional, I’m using interactive digital text to do that,” she said.

[01:37.10] Even in schools with many resources, time is always in short supply.

[01:58.87] Terri White teaches at South Windsor High School in Connecticut.

[01:59.67] White no longer assigns the book To Kill a Mockingbird to her class.

[02:01.80] She assigns about one third of the book and provides a synopsis, or a very short version, of the rest.

[02:08.70] White says the reason is that the class has to move quickly so she can teach all the required material.

[02:19.85] White also assigns less homework because students have sports and other activities.

[02:28.62] She said she wanted her class to be “more about helping student become stronger and more critical readers, writers and thinkers, while taking their social-emotional well-being into account.”

[02:48.81] The synopses method alone, however, can harm student critical thinking skills says Alden Jones, a literature professor at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts.

[03:14.04] Jones assigns fewer books than before but gives more small tests to make sure students are reading.

[03:15.90] “We don’t value the thinking time that we used to have.

[03:20.95] It’s all time we could be on our phone accomplishing tasks,” she said.

[03:27.32] Will Higgins is an English teacher at Dartmouth High School in Massachusetts.

[03:34.23] Higgins said he still believes in teaching the classics.

[03:39.81] But he said students do not have enough time, so teachers have cut back on the number of books they teach.

[03:48.84] “We haven’t given up on Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice.

[03:55.49] We haven’t given up on Hamlet or The Great Gatsby,” he said.

[04:01.59] But Higgins admitted giving up on assigning a long book like A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.