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- [00:00]
Lori Bergamotto
From ABC News and Good Morning America, I'm Lori Bergamotto. Today's Brightly moment is brought to you by Macy's this Mother's Day. A special video from the GMA vault.
- [00:11]
Dr. Nakia Towns
Oh my, you made it.
- [00:14]
Lori Bergamotto
It was graduation day for Sabrina Hill, an Air Force veteran receiving her associate's degree in nursing from Purdue University. She hadn't seen her son Blaine Juhas, an active duty army specialist serving overseas for nine months until.
- [00:29]
Dr. Nakia Towns
Welcome home.
- [00:31]
Lori Bergamotto
It was a long drive and long flight to West Lafayette, Indiana, but Blaine says surprising his mom was worth every mile.
- [00:38]
Dr. Shawn Reardon
After a month of not seeing me, she was sobbing. So gonna be something special.
- [00:43]
Lori Bergamotto
Purdue Global's graduation team worked with Blaine to arrange the Mother's Day surprise.
- [00:48]
Dr. Shawn Reardon
Sabrina Hill, US Air Force Veteran,
- [00:53]
Lauren Piper
this
- [00:53]
Lori Bergamotto
brightly moment has been brought to you by Macy's this Mother's Day. Let Macy's be your guide to gifting.
- [01:07]
Charlie Gibson
Well, hello listeners, nice to see you again or know that you're there again. I'm Charlie Gibson, the second damed part of the bookcase with Kate and Charlie.
- [01:18]
Kate Gibson
And I'm Kate Gibson. And we are so thankful for all of you tuning in for the first time or all of you who are tuning in weekly. We're just thankful for listeners. We love what we do and it's nice to have you here.
- [01:30]
Charlie Gibson
Indeed, that's true. This is an important podcast. Often we say we have a great author, we have this, we have that, but this is important. We have done a number of these podcasts over the years on strategies to get kids of all ages off screens and into books. There's nothing more maddening to me than to see a family table at a restaurant with the parents and their kids all on their phones. But screens are not the whole problem. It's no secret that reading scores for young people are getting worse, particularly since COVID A recent study at the Stanford Graduate School of Education caught our eye on that subject and it said that there is a significant gap, significant gap between reading scores for boys and girls. Boys start school behind girls in reading proficiency. They're still behind in the 12th grade, three quarters of a year behind in the fourth grade, a full year behind in the 12th. Now that's alarming. And what also interested me, boys have it in their minds that the girls are better and that they don't catch up well.
- [02:37]
Kate Gibson
And the thing that fascinated me, as you mentioned, is that I would have thought this was a specifically American education problem. But this is true across the board, internationally. And I, I'm the mother of a seven year old kid. So first of all, I sort of wanted to know why and how this happened, and secondly, what we can do about it. So we did a piece on Good Morning America where we talked to some experts about it. But we thought it was such an important discussion that we wanted to expand it into a full podcast episode because we believe, as dad says, in the criticality of reading, and we believe that we can't visit this subject enough. Kids aren't reading. They need to be, and they should be.
- [03:17]
Charlie Gibson
So you're going to hear from the person who really authored the study at Stanford. Shawn Reardon is his name. Dr. Shawn Reardon. He's the endowed professor of Poverty and Inequality in education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. You're also going to hear from Dr. Nakia Towns, who is president of a group called Accelerate. And you will also hear from a young boy who struggled with his reading. Braden Piper is his name, and his mom, who worked with him, but also is the literacy coordinator of the county where they live. So she approaches it both from a mom's standpoint and from a standpoint of someone who has to administer programs to try to bring boys up to scale in reading. And you'll hear from Braden, who's a really interesting case study in all this. So let's start with part of our discussion with Dr. Sean Reardon at Stanford. Shawn Reardon, I know you've been studying for some time how boys perform on reading tests. How do they stack up, and what are the problems with boys reading?
- [04:22]
Dr. Shawn Reardon
Well, historically and at the present day, boys typically score substantially lower on reading tests than girls do by somewhere about a half to two thirds of a grade level behind girls, typically when we test them in middle school. That's been true for quite a long time. It's also true in other countries. It's not a thing that's unique to the United States. Almost every other country has disparity where girls are performing better in reading than boys. So it's a pretty persistent and common pattern.
- [04:52]
Charlie Gibson
And does that gap between boys scores and girl scores, does that continue? First of all, what age does it start at? And does it continue all the way through secondary education?
- [05:02]
Dr. Shawn Reardon
It does, yeah. So we see it as early as kindergarten when, when children enter kindergarten, girls are scoring much better than boys in reading. And that continues through elementary school, through middle school, and through high school.
- [05:15]
Kate Gibson
It surprises me that this is consistent worldwide. I mean, if you'd asked me, I would have said that's probably true in developed nations because of the rise of technology and the loss of attention span. But you're saying that this is across the board. Any thoughts as to why that might be?
- [05:29]
Dr. Shawn Reardon
Yeah, I mean, certainly it. You know, there are a number of studies that. Where students are assessed in reading across lots of countries, Many of them develop, and fewer developing countries are in those studies. But in all of them, you always see girls, on average, performing better than boys. But the magnitude of that difference does vary substantially across countries. And one of the takeaways from that is that these disparities in reading skills are not innate. They're not a biological imperative. Because if they can be small in one country and very large in another country, that says there's something about the social and cultural context that's producing those gaps because girls and boys are not biologically different.
- [06:12]
Charlie Gibson
We have seen, I think, if I quote correctly, that the gap in math scores between girls and boys has narrowed over time, which would, it seems to me, be consistent with the idea that girls are now getting better education in what leads to STEM education, et cetera.
- [06:33]
Dr. Shawn Reardon
Yeah.
- [06:33]
Charlie Gibson
So the question is, can we do something for those boys that will narrow the gap in the reading scores?
- [06:42]
Dr. Shawn Reardon
Sure. Let me give you an example. So in the 1990s, there was a lot of concern that girls were falling behind in math in middle school. There was a number of popular books that addressed sort of the struggles of girls in middle school. And people started to really pay attention to the fact that girls were kind of getting left out of kind of advanced math coursework or having lower expectations set, and they're and were falling behind. And so there was a lot of sort of deliberate effort to. To try to train teachers and change practices in the classroom and schools to encourage girls more in math in middle school. And what we saw in the test scores over the next 20 years is that girls basically caught up to boys in math. By 10 or 20 years ago, maybe 15 years ago, girls were sort of at parity with boys in math. So we were able to sort of change the math gap through a kind of set of deliberate attention to the problem. I don't think we have attended to the sort of boys math gap in reading in the same way we attended to girls math gap in math in, you know, sort of in the late 80s and 1990s. So I take that as a optimistic sign that we knew how to sort of fix the problem in math. That suggests we could also figure out how to fix the problem in reading.
- [08:06]
Charlie Gibson
As I mentioned, we also talked to Dr. Nakia Townes. She's president of a group called Accelerate, and they work on programs that Take evidence, proven strategies to improve learning for students who may need extra help. And when it comes to reading, those students are disproportionately. Boys.
- [08:25]
Dr. Nakia Towns
Reading is not like language. You pick up language as a natural processing skill, right? If you are a student who is, you know, typical intelligence, assuming that you don't have a disability, you will learn to talk by other speaking, right? Natural brain processing. Reading is something that you will not understand unless you are taught. You have to be explicitly taught to read. You will not pick it up because books are in front of you if no one ever teaches you the code, right? If you don't know the 26 letters of the Alphabet and the 44 sounds that those letters combine to make in the English language, you can't pick it up. There's. There's no way that you would be able to. It would never occur to you in terms of how the letters represent different meaning of the language that you're speaking. So I think that in terms of all those exposures, that's the right thing to do. But we also have to pay attention to how do you explicitly teach reading and for boys and girls, just developmentally different, right? Not one better than the other, but developmentally different in terms of how we have to engage with them to teach that reading at early ages so that, as they say, you're learning to read K to 3, and at third grade, you're reading to learn. And so that's the challenge that we have really focusing on the explicit nature of. We have to teach kids the code because there's no way for them to pick it up.
- [09:50]
Charlie Gibson
One of our guests said, the terrible thing is that reading as something studied in school tends to get put aside after third grade. That is sort of assumed in third grade that you can read, but no, it needs to continue after that. First of all, A, are our schools failing to teach fourth graders and up? And B, are they using the wrong techniques on readers? Fourth grade and up?
- [10:17]
Dr. Nakia Towns
So this is what I think. I wouldn't characterize it as failing. I do. I do think that people believe that after third grade that they don't need to continue the explicit teaching of the code. But as we've been talking about, even in the English language, it's very challenging, right? We have, you know, as I call it, tricks, right? When you. When you know that the word too is T o, T o, O and T w o, right? Like, even when you learn the code, you then have to be able to make those distinctions.
- [10:51]
Kate Gibson
So it's one thing to hear about these Studies from two podcast hosts and a couple of doctors. But we really wanted to put a human face on this. So through Accelerate, we were introduced to Braden Piper, a student who was struggling with reading himself. And then, thanks to Accelerate's intervention and the work of his mom, Lauren is now an enthusiastic reader. So here's Braden Piper.
- [11:14]
Charlie Gibson
So, Braden Piper, what grade are you in?
- [11:17]
Braden Piper
I'm in fifth grade.
- [11:18]
Charlie Gibson
Fifth grade. And tell me a little bit about yourself. Do you like to read?
- [11:23]
Braden Piper
Oh, well, a lot more than I used to.
- [11:25]
Charlie Gibson
Tell me about that.
- [11:27]
Braden Piper
Reading has never been, like my favorite thing ever. But I used to, like, very. I used to really, really hate it. And I don't hate it as much anymore now.
- [11:36]
Charlie Gibson
So why did you hate it? Was it boring? What was it?
- [11:40]
Braden Piper
Well, when I started school, it was during COVID and I didn't really get help reading. And like, so some weeks, I mean, some days were in person and some days are virtual. So it really. I didn't really get like a chance to learn to read in kindergarten.
- [11:57]
Dr. Shawn Reardon
Hmm.
- [11:57]
Charlie Gibson
Do you read much now in school or do you read much more at home?
- [12:01]
Braden Piper
More at home.
- [12:02]
Charlie Gibson
And what do you like to read?
- [12:04]
Braden Piper
I like to read anything that has to do with American history.
- [12:09]
Charlie Gibson
And again, Dr. Nakia Townes. So let me get to this inequity that exists because we know that boys learn reading differently than girls. Should they be separated in terms of when they learn to read and how they learn to read? And are there techniques that work better for boys than for girls?
- [12:29]
Dr. Nakia Towns
Yes, absolutely. There are definitely techniques that seem to have an outsized impact on boys learning versus girls learning versus. Based on some of the research that we've done, I don't think that necessarily you need to separate girls and boys for reading instruction. I think that obviously there's a lot of good, you know, social benefit in terms of youth development that comes in having, you know, multi gender classrooms. But I will say this. We do need to pay attention to the differentiation that they need. And part of the evidence that we have found at Accelerate with a recent study that we did with the University of Michigan is that small group high dosage tutoring had an outsized impact on the boys learning. And it wasn't to say that the girls didn't learn, but when we were doing a study that was a randomization, randomized control trial where we had some students who were getting the small group tutoring and we had other students that were getting the business as usual support in the schools, on average, the boys grew astronomically versus the boys who were not Getting the tutoring. Right. And the girls grew, but they grew at similar rates to the girls who weren't getting the tutoring. So. So they all were learning, but the boys were learning faster with the tutoring than the boys who were not getting that tutoring. When those tutors were working with those small groups, when the boys were in the small groups, even as girls were in the groups with them, they just responded to that. They responded to that one to one eye contact. They responded to that adult being able to pay explicit attention to them and help them stay on task. For boys, if they have that more direct, I think attention from the adult, they're better able to. To focus on the learning as opposed to what may be distractions when they're in the whole classroom, which is really interesting to me.
- [14:22]
Kate Gibson
So if I'm hearing you correctly, from this pilot program, we are learning that boys need more individualized or smaller group attention from reading and phonetic instructors more
- [14:34]
Dr. Nakia Towns
than girls, it seems. Right. So the girls on average did as well in terms of growth with, with the high dosage tutoring as girls who aren't getting high dosage tutoring. So that says to me, when I think about the classroom instruction environment, girls are able to thrive in that environment as well. When there's 20 students and the teacher is working and talking to all of them in whole group, the girl's ability to pick up what the teacher is trying to facilitate the learning that they're trying to facilitate, it feels like girls are able to lock in, in that situation and follow what the learning trajectory is. For boys, it seems that they were better able to do that when they were in the small group condition with the tutor. And it makes me think just about like, again, if you. All of our experiences with young boys and their focus and attention and how they want to engage when you're with them, it makes a lot of sense intuitively that they're better able to follow the instruction and have the learning that's supposed to be facilitated. It's a focus. It's an issue of focus. And I think they just to need. Need more of that personalized attention.
- [15:42]
Charlie Gibson
So back to Braden Piper and what got him going in his reading. So tell me what, what was the, if you'll excuse the expression, what was the tripwire? What was the hook that got you into reading?
- [15:55]
Braden Piper
When I was in first grade, I had a tutor and she was very, very fun, very, very nice. And it gave me a lot of confidence and I learned a lot. My first grade year reading, I still wasn't the best at reading, but it helped me a ton.
- [16:11]
Charlie Gibson
Are the girls better readers than the boys?
- [16:14]
Braden Piper
Yeah, probably. Unless, like, unless like, like a straight A student, like most boys. Most girls are better than boys at reading.
- [16:23]
Charlie Gibson
Better readers. Could you tell that right away in first grade and second grade?
- [16:28]
Braden Piper
Yeah, a lot of the girls, especially one, forgot her name. But in first grade she could read like 10 books. And in first grade you're like a Greek God if you can read ten books.
- [16:49]
Lori Bergamotto
From ABC News and Good Morning America, I'm Lori Bergamoto. Today's Brightly moment is brought to you by Macy's this Mother's Day, a special video from the GMA vault.
- [16:59]
Dr. Nakia Towns
Oh my God, you made it.
- [17:02]
Lori Bergamotto
It was graduation day for Sabrina Hill, an Air Force veteran receiving her associate's degree in nursing from Purdue University. She hadn't seen her son Blaine Juhas, an active duty army specialist serving overseas for nine months until welcome home. It was a long drive and long flight to West Lafayette, Indiana. But Blaine says, surprising his mom was worth every mile.
- [17:27]
Dr. Shawn Reardon
After a month of not seeing me, she was sobbing. So gonna be something special.
- [17:31]
Lori Bergamotto
Purdue Global's graduation team worked with Blaine to arrange the Mother's Day surprise.
- [17:36]
Dr. Shawn Reardon
Sabrina Hill, US Air Force Veteran
- [17:41]
Lori Bergamotto
this Brightly moment has been brought to you by Macy's this Mother's Day. Let Macy's be your guide to gifting.
- [17:49]
Dr. Shawn Reardon
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- [18:20]
Dr. Nakia Towns
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- [18:55]
Kate Gibson
So we posed a question to Dr. Reardon, author of this important study, as to what might be causing this discrepancy between boys and girls. Is it cultural? Is it biological? Can you speak to any potentials that might cause the disparity? Is there anything you can pin the tail on that particular donkey?
- [19:13]
Dr. Shawn Reardon
Here's a couple possibilities. So one thing we Found, you know, as I said, is that the gaps are already there when kids get to kindergarten. And there's certainly a lot of other research that shows that parents spend time differently with their young daughters and their young sons. So they tend to read more to girls, they tend to think their boys are likely to be better at math. They have sort of stereotypical preconceptions, not necessarily that if you have a daughter and a son, you think that, but people who have sons might sort of think that versus people who have daughters. So, you know, I do think there's some societal, cultural ways in which we treat young children in kind of gender stereotypical ways. And, and that likely leads to some of the difference. There's also just some evidence that girls develop kind of socio emotional and some executive functioning skills earlier than boys. And so they get to kindergarten a little bit better able to kind of sit, sit still and read for a longer period of time, for example. And they have a, a kind of way of learning, developmental approach to learning that's more suited to, to that. And so there may be some sort of developmental speed differences early in childhood that lead to girls getting, being a little ahead of boys and reading when they get to school.
- [20:35]
Charlie Gibson
So back to the Pipers. Braden was sitting with his mom, Lauren, who not only approaches this problem as the mother of a student struggling with reading, but also as the literacy coordinator of her area in North Carolina as they implement intensive tutoring under a program and overseen by Dr. Towne's group, accelerated. Lauren, I understand you're a literacy coordinator, is that right? Tell me what that means.
- [21:03]
Lauren Piper
Yes, sir. So I am the literacy coordinator in my district and that means I support anything and everything related to literacy, whether it be training new teachers in our curriculum or assessments and then how to take that, that data from assessments and use it to guide instructional decisions. So I support K12. My main focus is elementary because I am such a huge advocate in foundational reading skills and no one recognizing the importance of those. So most of my work lies in the K5 world.
- [21:34]
Charlie Gibson
So tell me, as a literacy coordinator and as a mom, what kind of a reaction do you have? Let's just say, for fantasy sakes, let's just say you have a first grade son named Braden and he comes to you and he says, mom, I hate reading. What's your reaction?
- [21:49]
Lauren Piper
Well, interestingly enough, I knew that he was going to be not a fan of reading from very early on. Braden has always been a very active child and I have three boys and the oldest one picked up reading and loved to be read to. And as a literacy parent, I read to my kids before they were even born and have continued to do so. And he just did not enjoy sitting down and letting me read to him. I would literally have to hold on to him and make him sit down because he was so active and wanted to be up and moving, climbing trees, anything but sitting down still. So as he grew older, it got. It became more and more increasingly difficult to keep his attention. We did get him some medication that would help calm him down, but still allow his personality to shine through. And so while once we got that settled, we wanted to see if that really had an impact on the academics. And it still showed up that the reading was still a struggle for him. And so we really started trying to figure out what we could do about. About that for him.
- [22:53]
Charlie Gibson
And so what did you do?
- [22:56]
Lauren Piper
So, interestingly enough, while I'm dealing with this at home in my work life, I am was working with a new tutoring program at the North Carolina Education Corps. And the program lead was getting started and wanted my support with the literacy aspect. So we started to train community members and former teachers who came back as tutors. This program was established in response to COVID 19 learning loss. And so I'm training tutors and I decided to try some of these things that I'm training the tutors on with. With Braden at home. And he was not having it from me. He was very adamant that he had already done his learning at school and he was not doing any more at home. And it was a struggle. We struggled through that. I was trying to give him what I knew he needed. And I technically am trained to do it, but he would not hear it from. From mom. And so it. That led to quite a bit of frustration. And I started to realize that it's really. It really wasn't worth the tension it was creating in our house. And my husband agreed. So we started trying to figure out some other options. Outside tutoring is an option, but that comes with a cost, and it comes with managing schedules with three, you know, three children in total. Trying to manage all of that was a little troublesome. So it just so happened that while we were getting the program really settled at. In my at work with the tutoring program, we asked teachers to give us names of students that would be good candidates for this service, students who really needed some work around foundational reading skills. And I did not voice any of my own opinions about who should be on that list. We asked, simply asked the teachers from their perspectives, who would be A good candidate, and Braden's name ended up on that list. And so we were able to take that information and do some more assessments. And he was placed in a tutoring group. And ironically, I'm the one training the tutors, and they're doing the same things with him that I would have done at home. But yet he heard it from them differently than he heard it from me, and it seemed to really take root, and he was able to take off in his reading and show a lot of growth from that point on.
- [25:15]
Charlie Gibson
What difference did you see, Lauren, in his reading skills when he got that tutoring? First of all, was it a regular situation in your school district that there were tutories for young kids? And when you got into that discussion about how tutoring groups should be formed and you were talking about who qualified for it, were there more boys who qualified for it than girls?
- [25:37]
Lauren Piper
It seemed to be, yes, that more boys qualified. Initially, we took initial data that's done for every student, and then based on their scores, if they showed that they were at risk for reading failure, then we were able to take some additional assessments and form them into groups based on specific skill needs so that the tutor can work on those specific needs with them and then grow them from that point forward. I would say for Braden, I did notice, number one, just his desire to read at all. As I said, it was a struggle. I didn't have to hold him anymore. He was actually coming and wanting us to read together. And then when we. When we came to words in the text that were challenging, he had some practice and some skills of how to decode those words and make. And figure them out and make meaning from them. But that particular year when he first started that tutoring and he mentioned the note that his tutor wrote him, she said in her note that he was so smart and that he was going places in life, and that meant a lot to him. And even now, sometimes we'll. He'll pick up that book and read that. And at the moment when. When she first sent it home, he said, mom, my tutor thinks I'm smart. And I said, brayden, I've always told you you're smart. And he said, yeah, but you have to say that you're my mom. It's different coming from somebody else. She actually really thinks I'm smart. And so it. It's funny and it. And it made me tear up because I saw the true confidence that just flourished from that point forward. And of course, I saw it in the data because I'm on the literacy side. I saw his data from the original assessment that we did. He grew 100 points from the beginning to the end of the year. So it was very noticeable from both angles.
- [27:24]
Kate Gibson
So why does Dr. Towns think we need to rethink the way we teach boys to read in general?
- [27:31]
Dr. Nakia Towns
Like, the process of learning to read, as we talked about it, is not something that you can just pick up. It is not like speech. And so we just have to respect the fact that in order to teach kids how to read, we have to spend the time. You know, the work that we've seen with the research that we've done, it is, you know, in core instruction. For most early readers, they need at least 150 minutes. That's two and a half hours a day of their school day should be spent around literacy, meaning reading, writing, vocabulary, spelling. Like it's. It's the majority of the school day. And then if you have a struggling reader, they need at least 30 to 40 minutes additional time, three to five times a week. So it is an intensity of supports that kids need in the schooling process. And again, for boys, they benefit from having that small, small group, dynamic groups of no more than four for at least that additional support time, if not a portion of the 150 minutes, having small group time there in order for them to actually get the reading code. So it is just a discipline around the process of explicitly teaching kids how to read.
- [28:41]
Charlie Gibson
Nakia, you said something that really surprised me. You said they have to know 26 letters. Well, of course that's given. Then you said there's 44 sounds.
- [28:51]
Dr. Nakia Towns
Phonemes is the technical terms. When you hear. People hear phonemic awareness or phonological awareness, like we string together those sounds across the English language that we're teaching kids. The stst the ch is ch. You know, TR is tr. GR is gr. And that's what he's learning. Just like the S sound is S. But there's a combination of those sounds. There's 44 of them that really build the code that kids have to also be able to master.
- [29:18]
Charlie Gibson
I would have thought it was much more than 44, but that's really interesting at the base.
- [29:22]
Dr. Nakia Towns
Yeah, exactly. You start, you know, you get more complex as you. As you go along. And as we said, as you get into informational text, that thermodynamics. Right. There's all kinds of Latin roots and longer words, but that's the base of what kids have to learn. So it's doable. Right? I mean, but the 44 is also empowering. Right? It's Doable to get to those 44 letter sounds that are then able to unlock, you know, 90% of the English language for you.
- [29:48]
Kate Gibson
We wanted to close again with the author of the report who gives us just a little bit of hope as to why maybe the future for boys in reading isn't so terribly bleak.
- [30:00]
Charlie Gibson
You made the point when we started that reading is the key to everything. And it really is. It is an absolutely essential skill. It involves vocabulary, it involves the ability to write, it involves the ability to make an argument. It involves the ability to see the world through the eyes of others, which is so important. So societally, I mean, I get your concerns here, but societally, how much should we worry about this?
- [30:30]
Dr. Shawn Reardon
I think we should. So one thing you said is it. It enables you to see the world through the eyes of others. And I think that's one of the great things about reading, is that it can create a kind of empathy, that it lets you see the world from a different perspective, whether it's someone describing something technical to you and you read about it, or whether it's a piece of fiction in some, you know, other time and place in society. It's a way to kind of enter a different world and to under and to be able to imagine a world that's different than your own. And as a society, we want people to be able to do that because we want to be able to improve our society. And if we can't sort of imagine different versions of it and different ways to change it, then we're sort of stuck in the same world we have with all its warts and wrinkles. Right. And charms, obviously. But, but, but I think, Charlie, that, that thing you said, I think is right on that it lets us see the world through other people's eyes. And that's. I think a healthy society needs people who grow up being able to do that.
- [31:35]
Kate Gibson
But I am determined, I am determined to end this on a note of hope. It sounds to me also like there is hope in there, because we did. In fact, maybe we haven't completely turned the tide, but it seems to me that we have stemmed the tide a little bit from the 1990s where there was a Barbie that said math is hard to now, where Ada Twist scientist is on every children's bookshelf. So it sounds to me like there's hope if we focus on it.
- [32:02]
Dr. Shawn Reardon
I would agree. I mean, I think if you look across countries, if you look across different communities in the U.S. you see lots of variability in how large the disparity is in some Places it's pretty small. In some places it's enormous. But I think you're right. That should be taken as a sign of hope because it means it's possible for it to be more equal than it is right now in some places.
- [32:27]
Charlie Gibson
I think one of the most interesting parts of all this, Kate, to me is that girls used to trail boys in terms of STEM learning, science and technology and engineering and math. And because of intensive programs in many states, they've been brought up to close to the levels that boys excel in those subjects. And the same thing could be done, could be done in terms of reading. There are some states, I'm told, that have really decided we're going to solve this problem and have thrown resources into it and have brought boys up closer to girls in terms of, of reading proficiency. And I think that should be done everywhere. Yeah.
- [33:07]
Kate Gibson
And I would encourage parents, first of all, I, that gives me hope because, you know, frankly, when you read this report, it feels a little bleak, especially when you're looking at sort of the downturn of reading, both boys and girls, and boys are a little worse off. I'm the mother of a seven year old and listen, I am the last person who should tell people how to raise their kids because I listen, man, I'm figuring it out as I go along too. But I have a seven year old boy. And I would encourage you parents not to give up. If they don't want you to read them Harry Potter, go to the nonfiction section of the Kids of the Kids libraries of bookstores. There are great nonfiction selections. If your kid's into Formula one racing, you'll be able to find books about that. If your kid's into football, you'll be able to find books about that. If, like my kid, your kid is obsessed with dinosaurs, he's been reading every book he can about the famous dinosaur bones at the Field Museum in Chicago. Also, if your kid maybe doesn't like to be read to try an audiobook or try one of those programs with the audiobook that reads right along and highlights as it's being read. There are lots of different ways you can go about this problem. It just means you may have to go about it from the left and the right and the top and the bottom. But don't give up because there's lots of resources out there encouraging kids to read both at your local library and at your bookstore. And if you are feeling lost, I encourage you also to speak to somebody who's an expert in this. Talk to the person who runs the kids section at your bookstore or talk to your local librarian. They might have some ideas you haven't thought of yet.
- [34:47]
Charlie Gibson
Yeah, one of the things that we heard, and it sort of is a trope and it sort of, I don't know, goes. Goes in one ear and out the other, is that, is that the kids should see you reading. And one of the interesting parts to me is they see their mothers reading more than their fathers. And I think maybe that translates for boys. So as a father, although you're long since grown, but I think it's important that the kids see their fathers read. Reading anything, newspapers, magazines, but particularly books. Because kids, as Dr. Reardon told us at one point, kids don't read full books anymore. Attention spans are so short. I think that's encouraged again, by screens. You know, that we live in a sort of TikTok generation where anything that's more than 30 seconds, you're bored with it. So I think they do need to see their father's reading. Anyway, this is really, really important stuff. So we hope if you're listening to this podcast, if you're a parent of boys or a grandparent of boys particularly, this has been something of a help. It certainly was to us, Ed. To Kate, who's, as I say, as she says, is working with a 7 year old. And Jack's making progress. He's making progress.
- [36:02]
Kate Gibson
But again, I went at it left, I went at it right, I went at it top, I went at it bottom. Like, we're going to get this kid into books. For one thing. He can't fit into the family if he doesn't read. My daughter's an obsessive reader, I'm an obsessive reader. Maybe we'll make it competitive when he's finally comfortable reading all the way through. Maybe it'll be, how many books can
- [36:22]
Dr. Nakia Towns
you finish in a month?
- [36:23]
Kate Gibson
He loves competition and it'd be a competition I'd be happy to lose. So don't give up on boys just because you see them playing video games and saying, oh, mom, I don't want to read. Just keep trying, keep trying. There are various ways that can get your kid's nose into a book, I promise.
- [36:40]
Charlie Gibson
So we'll finish. We have no quota today. We'll just finish with the people who make this podcast possible. And our thanks to Dr. Reardon, Dr. Towns and to Braden Piper and his mom, Lauren.
- [36:50]
Kate Gibson
The book Case with Kate and Charlie Gibson is a production of ABC Audio and Good Morning America. It is edited by Tom Butler of TKO Productions. Our executive producer is Simone Swink. We want to make mention of Amanda McMaster, Sabrina Kolver, Arielle Chester at Good Morning America, and Josh Cohan for ABC Audio. Follow the bookcase wherever you get your podcasts, and be sure to listen, rate and review. If you'd like to find any of the books mentioned in this episode, we have them linked in the episode description.
- [37:21]
Dr. Nakia Towns
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Dr. Nakia Towns
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Kate Gibson
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