It is summer, what are your students reading?

[Richard Allington]

The best way to reduce one's reading ability to avoid practice. In
other words to avoid reading something of interest to you. We know
that students who fail to read during the summer months typically lose
2-3 months of reading proficiency. Students who do read during the
summer gains a month or more in reading proficiency. Unfortunately, we
also know children from low-income families are far less likely to
read during the summer than students from middle-class families. Two
large-scale studies have illustrated that 80% of the reading
achievement gap that exists between poor kids and rich kids stems from
summer reading loss by poor kids.

In our research we have allowed poor students to self-select 12 to 15
books from a book fair we set up for summer reading. The effects of
this free book distribution was that the kids randomly assigned to get
the free summer books generated substantial reading growth while the
control group kids (no books) experienced summer reading loss. In
fact, the gains of the free books kids was as large as the gains kids
had after attending summer school. Twice as large as summer school
gains for those kids who read all of the books they selected!

Our hypothesis, supported by other research, was that poor kids don't
read during the summer because they don't own any books and don't have
or don't use their library cards. In other words, getting poor kids to
read during the summer was actually quite easy: Just give them books
they wanted to read! Our annual costs were about $42 per child, far
less than the cost of summer school.

So the question remains: Will we make sure all children have books in
their hands that they can and want to read during the summer? Or will
we continue to blame the teachers and parents of poor children for
their reading difficulties?

[Richard Allington]