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It's more than just a ticket. Earlier today, I recorded and released a podcast wherein I discussed why I believe helping your child to become a good reader by reading aloud when your child is young and also by surrounding your child with high-quality books and inspiring him as well as requiring him to read those books is perhaps your simplest, most effective investment into the education of your particular child and how it's easy, but not easy, to actually do it, and yet it's incredibly effective.

I talked at length, I gave some examples of book lists, etc. After that show, I went back and I opened up my copy of Jim Trulisa's book that I referenced several times in that show called The Read Aloud Handbook, and I was just struck by how good it is, how much cogent, useful information it contains, and how well-presented some of the arguments are.

And after looking through it, I felt like I didn't do the topic of reading aloud justice. This is something that I have talked about. I've repeatedly said that perhaps one of the best things that you can do for your children is to give your children the gift of a full-time mother, especially when your child is young, and that there's so much that can be done that will pay off in spades down the road.

But I haven't presented a lot of the evidence for that. And looking through Trulisa's book, I just noticed how wonderful it is. And so what I'd like to do in this particular episode is I'd like to unhurriedly read you a few excerpts from this really wonderful book and present to you a couple of the very simple arguments and especially a couple of the numerical calculations and some of the research associated with those calculations as to why something as simple as reading aloud extensively to your children makes such a difference in all of their academic achievements and how then their academic achievements, of course, influence their entire life course.

And so I want to read some excerpts from the introduction and chapter one of this book called The Read Aloud Handbook by Jim Trulisa. Again, this book has been on the market for several decades. Jim is now retired and the book is now being updated by other persons. But these arguments are really profoundly valuable.

And what you'll see is that in many ways, if you're looking for something that even could be the great equalizer in society, one of the most powerful ways to eliminate the wealth gap or the achievement gap among classes, among races, etc., then this particular line of thinking and these particular actions are some of the best things that can be done to make progress in that direction.

So I want to begin by reading some excerpts from the introduction to help you. I always try to be cautious because sometimes I abuse the author's copyright just a little. But when I do that, I do it in hopes of inspiring you to consume the author's work by presenting it in a way that is really powerful and useful to you.

And so I'll do my best to read excerpts, but also I want to inspire you to take action on it. And I think that an author like Jim Trulise would be quite complimented most of all by your simply taking action on his recommendations. And I want to inspire you to go ahead and grab a copy of the audio book, grab a copy of the written book yourself.

Introduction. The central task of education is to implant a will and facility for learning. It should produce not learned, but learning people. The truly human society is a learning society where grandparents, parents, and children are students together. Quote by Eric Hofer. In the 30 years since the first edition of this book, much has changed in the world and in American education.

And so too, this book has evolved. Back in 1982, when the first edition appeared, there was no internet or email, no cell phones, DVD players, iTunes, iPods, iPads, Amazon, eBooks, Wi-Fi, Facebook, or Twitter. The closest thing to an instant message was a facial expression that exasperated mothers gave their children as a warning.

Texting was something you did on a typewriter. The first CD player was just going on sale. Starbucks was just a coffee bean shop in Seattle. And if you said laptop to people, they'd have thought you were talking about a TV dinner tray. For all of those differences, there are some things that remain the same.

In 1982, the US economy was in its worst recession since the Great Depression, and the nation's business leaders were looking for someone or something to blame. Sound familiar? Since SAT scores had been in a 20-year decline because lots of average and below average students, and not just the rich kids, were taking the test for the first time, the corporate executives blamed education as one of the culprits for the recession and demanded reforms and accountabilities at all levels, a more business-like approach.

If our schools were more like Japanese schools, our economy would be more like theirs. This would open the door to nearly three decades of testing mania and school reforms. At practically the same time, the cost of college began a 400% rise, outpacing the increases in medical care and median family income.

By 2011, student loans would be larger than either the nation's credit card debt or the auto loan industry. Which brings us to the present time. With all the new technology in place and billions of dollars in testing accomplished, we made a one-point improvement in reading scores between 1971 and 2008.

If you're even half sane, you have to be asking yourself, "What in the world is wrong here?" I hope this book can answer that question, as well as what we can do about it, because surely there's a better way than what we've done in the past. For all that is wrong in education, there are still some positives.

With the hundreds of distractions imposed on American children in the past 30 years, 200 cable channels, most children with TVs in their bedrooms, usually the lowest scoring students, more than half of teens attached to cell phones most of the day, single parents raising one in four children, and a baby born every 60 seconds to a teen mother, it's a wonder the scores actually rose by one point and didn't drop by 10 or 15.

If that is the case, then something must be working. This book will examine what really works. In fact, let's look now at one of those some things. And by the way, I insert for context that my copy of this book is the 7th edition published in 2013. There has since been published an 8th edition, which I do not have nor have I read, but this was published or copywritten at least in 2013.

The ideal and cheapest tutoring plan. We start with the family of Susan and Tad Williams and their two sons, Christopher and David. Of the 400,000 students taking the ACT exam with Christopher back in 2002, only 57 had perfect scores. He was the 58th. When word got out that this kid from Russell, Kentucky, population 3,645, had scored a perfect 36, the family was besieged with questions, the most common being, "What prep course did he take?

Kaplan? Princeton review?" It turned out to be a course his parents enrolled him in as an infant, a free program, unlike some of the private plans that now cost up to $250 an hour. In responding to inquiries about Christopher's prep courses, the Williamses simply told people, including the New York Times, that he hadn't taken any, that he did no prep work.

That, of course, wasn't completely true. His mother and father had been giving him and his younger brother free prep classes all through their childhoods, from infancy into adolescence. They read to them for 30 minutes a night, year after year, even after they learned how to read for themselves. Theirs was a home brimming with books, but no TV guide, GameCube, or hooked on phonics.

Even though Susan Williams was a fourth-generation teacher, she offered no home instruction in reading before the boys reached school age. She and Tad just read to them, sewed the sounds and syllables and endings and blendings of language into the love of books. Each boy easily learned to read and loved reading, gobbling books up voraciously.

Besides being a family bonding agent, reading aloud was used not as test prep, as much as an insurance policy. It ensured the boys would be ready for whatever came their way in school. By 2011, David was a University of Louisville graduate working as an engineer, and Christopher was pursuing his PhD in biochemistry at Duke.

Sometimes, Christopher's early reading experiences surface even in the biochemistry department, like when he remarked to his lunchmates the day after a Duke basketball loss, "Guess there's no joy in Mudville today." None of the other grad students grasped the reference to Ernest Tayer's classic sports poem. The Williams family experience didn't surprise me at all, because I was already familiar with reading aloud as a prep course.

Tom Parker recommends it all the time. He's the former admissions director for Williams College, now at Amherst College, two of the nation's prestigious small colleges. Parker tells anxious parents who ask about improving their child's SAT scores, "The best SAT preparation course in the world is to read to your children in bed when they're little.

Eventually, if that's a wonderful experience for them, they'll start to read themselves." Parker told me he's never met a student with high verbal SAT scores who wasn't a passionate reader, and nearly always they recall being read to. An ACT or SAT prep course can't package that passion, but parents like Susan and Tad Williams have done it and so can you.

Even parents who are illiterate or semi-literate can do it, and we'll meet them later in the book, along with a father who read to his daughter just for fun for 3,218 nights in a row, never missing a night. Never before in American history has so much been written about the subject of reading as in the past two decades.

Never has so much money been spent to test children in any subject. And never have so many reading rules and regulations been imposed on schools by a succession of administrations with little or no improvements to show for it. Strangely, the biggest impact seems to be on families that are the wealthiest and most educated.

Where 40 years ago children were spending their after-school hours at ballet classes, scout meetings, or soccer practices, millennium moms and dads now have them enrolled in after-school tutoring. The suburban paranoia over state tests has ballooned the tutoring business into a $4 billion industry, and not just for school-age children.

By 2005, Sylvan Learning was opening its 1,100 centers to 4-year-olds, while Kumon was accepting 2-year-olds. Where once these centers were mainly for remediation, half the enrollments now come from families looking to give their child an advantage. Like the mother who told the Wall Street Journal she had enrolled her 4-year-old because his "scissors skills" were not up to par.

How about the parents, that's plural, who hire consultants to help their children make better eye contact and demonstrate leadership qualities with preschool directors while they're being considered for preschool admission? Just as they've hired life coaches for themselves, helicopter parents are hiring college counselors for their children, costing between $3,000 and $6,000.

The counselors are supposed to ensure the "right" school choices are made and that the paperwork is in order and on time. All of this provokes clinical psychologist Wendy Mogul to suggest these parents may someday be on the receiving end of a class-action suit from their children for stealing their childhoods.

Not that parents are alone in their extreme behavior. They have more than enough company among school boards and high-ranking politicians who think if you "fix" the schools, you'll "fix" the kids. So, in Gadsden, Alabama, school officials eliminated kindergarten nap time in 2003 so the children would have more test prep time.

Two hours away in Atlanta, school officials figured that if you eliminate recess, the kids will study more. And just in case those shifty teachers try to sneak it in, Atlanta started building schools without playgrounds. "We are intent on improving academic performance," said the superintendent. "You don't do that by having kids hanging on the monkey bars." Several years later, when it was apparent the anti-recess strategy wasn't driving up the scores, a new Atlanta superintendent created what state investigators called "a culture of fear and a conspiracy of silence" in pursuit of higher scores.

Scores rose and bonuses were awarded. But a subsequent state investigation led to the largest standardized testing scandal in America, with more than 170 educators involved in the cheating, including 38 principals. In a New York Times online essay about the disappearance of recess in play, David Bornstein compared today's test-oriented curriculum with Dickens' novel Hard Times and its aptly named schoolmaster, Thomas Gradgrind.

"On average, American kids get only 26 minutes of recess per day, including lunchtime. And low-income kids get less than that," Bornstein wrote. "High-scoring Finland has 15 minutes of recess for every 45-minute class. But more on Finland later." At the high school level, the new principal at one prestigious New England high school in Needham, Massachusetts, was so alarmed by the stress levels of his students he formed a committee to develop coping strategies.

The end result was mandatory yoga classes for seniors. He also dared to end the publication of the school's honor roll in the local newspaper and pushed to lighten the homework load. Both issues provoked parental ire and within a year he'd accepted the principalship of the American School in London.

Nonetheless, four years later, the yoga classes were still in place as part of faculty efforts to build student resiliency. Homework was curtailed around holidays and notice of honor roll achievement now comes in a letter to the parents from the principal instead of publicly via the local newspaper. Other select high schools have had to make lunch periods mandatory because so many students feel every period of the day must be filled with something that will reflect positively on their college application/resume and somehow lunch doesn't fit that bill.

Where once it was only institutions like the University of Chicago that could be tagged as places where "fun comes to die," now we can apply the label to elite high schools. College admission officers and counselors are feeling the stress as well, but for different reasons. At Harvard, the nation's oldest university and recipient of the largest number of advanced placement students, a 30-year veteran of the admissions office said today's students "seemed like dazed survivors of some bewildering lifelong boot camp" and warned that "unless things change, we're going to lose a lot of them." In our pursuit of higher and higher scores, he said "the fabric of family life has just been destroyed." Ultimately there must be a way to raise a reader and a capable student without creating a stressed-out, dazed survivor.

Of course, for every parent who is pressing children's stress buttons, there is the other extreme, the ones who think the job of education is the responsibility of teachers. These parents far outnumber the pushy ones, and they create another kind of problem. From this point on, it might be helpful if I arrange the discussion according to the kinds of questions I receive from parents and educators.

For example, from the parent who is the complete opposite of helicoptering. Are you suggesting this reading stuff is the job of the parent? I thought it was the school's job. This brings us to the sponge factor, exemplified by a young lady named Bianca Cotton, whom I met in 2002 on the morning my grandson Tyler began kindergarten.

Families were invited in for the first hour to help break the ice, and I was snapping some pictures of Tyler and a new friend when I became aware of an extended conversation going on behind me in the little housekeeping section of the kindergarten. Turning around, I found Bianca cooking up a make-believe meal on a make-believe stove while carrying on a make-believe conversation on a make-believe cordless phone.

And, as you can see in the photo I snapped, she had all the body language down for talking on the phone and cooking at the same time. Every child, kindergartner or otherwise, is like a sponge, soaking up the behavior of the people around them. If Bianca had never seen an adult talking on the phone while cooking, she'd never have thought to grab a phone while cooking her first kindergarten meal.

If Bianca isn't proof enough for you, consider this. Since 1956, no newspaper, network, or news agency has a better record for predicting the outcomes in presidential elections than Weekly Reader, the late national classroom magazine. Every four years for a half-century, a quarter million children voted in the Weekly Reader presidential poll.

And in 13 of the 14 campaigns, they were absolutely correct. Like little sponges, they sat in their parents' living rooms, kitchens, and cars, soaking up parental values and then squeezed them out onto a Weekly Reader ballot. It comes down to simple arithmetic. The child spends 900 hours a year in school and 7,800 hours outside school.

Which teacher has the bigger influence? Where is more time available for change? Those two numbers, 900 and 7,800, will appear over and over in this book. Jay Matthews, the Washington Post's longtime education columnist, looked back on all the student achievement stories he'd done in 22 years and observed, "I cannot think of a single instance in which the improvement in achievement was not tied, at least in part, to an increase in the amount of time students had to learn." I've been saying the same thing for as many years.

You either extend the school day, as have the successful KIPP charter schools, or you tap into the 7,800 hours at home. Since the cost of lengthening the school day would be prohibitive in the places that need it most, the most realistic option is tapping the 7,800 hours at home.

Ronald F. Ferguson, a black scholar and Harvard lecturer, has long studied racial achievement gaps in public schools. Complicated as those issues are, Ferguson boils them down to one. "The real issue is historical differences in parenting. That is hard to talk about, but that is the root of the skill gap." According to Ferguson, black households traditionally see schooling as a job for teachers, while white families are more involved in schooling the child or paying for special services.

Contrary to the current screed that blames teachers for just about everything wrong in schooling, research shows that the seeds of reading and school success (or failure) are sown in the home long before the child ever arrives at school. For example, 21 classes of kindergartners were examined to determine which children displayed either high or low interest in books.

Those students' home environments were then examined in detail. The numbers reinforce the adage that the apple doesn't fall from the tree. Therefore, if you want different apples, change the tree. I will not go over the numbers in the following chart other than to say that children with a high interest in books come from fathers and mothers with a high interest in books.

Children with low interest in books come from fathers and mothers with a low interest in books. And you have enough of the introduction to get the flavor from it. I want to skip forward to a formula of reading success and then we're going to get into some data here.

So the question is this, is reading still important in the video age? Reading is the heart of education. The knowledge of almost every subject in school flows from reading. One must be able to read the word problem in math to understand it. If you cannot read the science or social studies chapter, how do you answer the questions at the end of the chapter?

Because reading is the linchpin of education, one can say it's a safety belt for a long life. When RAND researchers examined all the possible causes of long life expectancy, race, gender, geography, education, marriage, diet, smoking, and even churchgoing, the biggest factor was education. Another researcher went back more than a hundred years to when states initiated compulsory education.

She found that for every year of education, the individual lived an average of one and a half years longer. When her research was applied to other countries, the same pattern appeared. Similarly, today's Alzheimer's researchers have found what they consider to be an immunizing effect from childhood reading and vocabulary buildup.

And of course, these are all linked with supporting sources and studies and references. All things considered, reading, not video, is the single most important social factor in American life. Here's a formula that may sound simplistic, but all of its parts have been documented and I would add are linked in the book or cited in the book.

But all of its parts have been documented and while not 100% universal, it holds true far more often than not. 1. The more you read, the more you know. Again, 1. The more you read, the more you know. 2. The more you know, the smarter you grow. Again, the more you know, the smarter you grow.

3. The smarter you grow, the longer you stay in school. 4. The longer you stay in school, the more diplomas you earn and the longer you are employed. Thus, the more money you earn in a lifetime. 5. The more diplomas you earn, the higher your children's grades are in school and the longer you live.

The opposite would also be true. 1. The less you read, the less you know. 2. The less you know, the sooner you drop out of school. 3. The sooner you drop out, the sooner and longer you are poor and the greater your chances of going to jail. The basis for that formula is firmly established as poverty and illiteracy are related.

They are the parents of desperation and imprisonment. 70-82% of prison inmates are school dropouts. 60% of inmates are illiterate to semi-literate. The more education, the greater likelihood of employment and less likelihood of imprisonment. Why are students failing and dropping out of school? Because they cannot read well enough to do the assigned work, which affects the entire report card.

Change the reading scores and you change the graduation rate and then the prison population, which changes the social climate of America. I hope you see how powerful that particular formula is. I want to emphasize it by simply reading it again and I want to tell you that again, all of this is cited.

The more you read, the more you know. The more you know, the smarter you grow. The smarter you grow, the longer you stay in school. The longer you stay in school, the more diplomas you earn and the longer you are employed. Thus, the more money you earn in a lifetime.

The more diplomas you earn, the higher your children's grades are in school and the longer you live. The opposite is also true. The less you read, the less you know. The less you know, the sooner you drop out of school. The sooner you drop out, the sooner and longer you're poor and the greater your chances of going to jail.

And just a short bit of personal commentary, I think that the important thing is to acknowledge that when you come to a financial return on investment, college has a very high return as I'll read in just a moment in a separate section. And there's no question about that. That is proven again and again and again.

It's not to say that all people who do not go to college are destined for failure, but going to college is highly correlated with significant levels of financial success. Let's hear what the author has to say on this topic. "Considering today's economy and rising tuition costs, is college worth the money?" The economists at the Brookings Institution tackled that question and rephrased it to look like this.

If you had $102,000 to spend on either a really good college education or to put into investments like stocks, bonds, gold, or housing, where would you get the best return on your dollar? Considering the average lifetime earnings of a college graduate and the investment market for the past 60 years, the long-term return would play out like the following chart, which indicates that an associate's degree gets you in excess of a 20% rate of return, internal rate of return.

A bachelor's degree gets you a 15% internal rate of return, compared with the stock market that by their numbers is somewhere around looks like about 6.5 to 7. Gold at 2.5, long-term treasury at 2.5, and housing at 1%. Looks like an easy choice. College is double the return on anything else.

The Great Recession took its toll on everyone, but least hurt were those with the most education. Those with only a high school degree were twice as likely to be unemployed. And here I wish to interrupt Jim with an emphasis that right now in the recession related to the pandemic that we've been going through, I think you see very clearly the same exact trend.

And while I don't have all the data at my fingertips to go over with you, nor would I do it, given this is an audio program, I want you just to notice that the most highly educated people throughout the markets have been able to maintain their productivity. Most of the radical personal finance listening audience has not had any meaningful decline in income because we have not had any meaningful decline in productivity throughout the pandemic.

That's very different than the lesser educated people have faced given the significant decline, temporary decline in the job market related to the pandemic. And so you can see that we are living in an intensely knowledge-oriented society, and the most productive people are generally those who have the most formal education and who are able to continue their productivity and are in high demand no matter the market conditions.

That's the economy in which we live. Continuing with the reading. So if college is the best investment of time and money for the student, and the best way to succeed at college to be a proficient reader, then a parent's best financial investment is to spend the time and energy to raise a reader.

If the child prefers not to attend college but is an avid reader, she will still make wiser decisions in her personal and business life and certainly be a better informed voter and juror, which benefits the entire community. Overall, raising readers is a win-win situation. We just have to care enough to do it.

Notice the chain. College is a good investment of time and money. The best way to succeed at college is to be a proficient reader because being a proficient reader is the mark of success in academics all the way up through college. So thus a parent's best financial investment is to spend the time and energy to raise a reader.

And as I have commented on, this is actually quite simple. It doesn't cost a lot. You don't need to hide all our coaches. You simply need to read to your children. So you have to invest into creating the appropriate home environment where you can have your children read to and then in time surround them with books.

Let's talk about why read aloud. One day back in the 1980s, I visited the kindergarten room I had attended years earlier as a child at Connecticut Farms Elementary School in Union, New Jersey. Gazing up at me were the faces of about 15 children, each of them seated expectantly on their story rug.

"How many of you want to learn to read this year?" I asked. Without a second's hesitation, every hand shot into the air, many accompanied by boasts like, "I already know how!" Their excitement matched what every kindergarten teacher has told me. Every child begins school wanting to learn to read.

In other words, we've got 100% enthusiasm and desire when they start school, the first chapter in their life. In subsequent years, when the National Reading Report Card surveyed students, they found very different attitudes and behaviors as the students aged. Among fourth graders, only 54% read something for pleasure every day.

Among eighth graders, only 30% read for pleasure daily. By twelfth grade, only 19% read anything for pleasure daily. The Kaiser Family Foundation's 2010 Longitudinal Study of Children 8 to 18 years of age found 53% read no books in a given day, 65% read no magazines, and 77% no newspapers.

In a Bureau of Labor Statistics survey in 2010, young adults between ages 15 and 19, the largest concentration of high school and college students, reported spending only 12 minutes a day reading versus 2.23 hours watching television. Think about it. We have 100% interest in kindergarten but lose three-quarters of our potential lifetime readers by the time they're 18.

Any business that kept losing that much of its customer base would be out of business. Admittedly, there is a natural fall-off during adolescence and early adulthood. These are the busiest social and emotional times of human life. But what if the early interest never returns? If schooling's objective is to create lifetime readers who continue to read and educate themselves after they graduate, and then they fail to do so, that's a major indictment of the process.

Let's see how the childhood figures are reflected in adulthood these days. The National Endowment for the Arts surveyed adult reading habits for 25 years, and its most recent report coincided perfectly with the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) of pleasure reading among 13 and 17-year-olds. The number of adults who read literature was down 22% from its 1982 survey in every age, gender, ethnic, and educational category.

By 2002, only 46.7% had read any fiction in the previous year. When expanded in a different survey to include newspapers or any kind of book or magazine, the figure rose to only 50% of adults. In short, half of America is alliterate. As I showed in the introduction, reading scores improved by only 1 point for 17-year-olds and 5 points for 13-year-olds between 1971 and 2008.

That's 37 years, half of it devoted to national and state curriculum reform. Couple those figures with mobile multimedia usage soaring to more than 7.5 hours a day for students ages 8 to 18, and one can see a perfect storm on the horizon, threatening to hinder reading even further. But aren't kids reading when they're checking Facebook, checking tweets, or online?

There is a school of thought that finds some hope in that theory. I don't attend that school. Text messages are as close to reading as refrigerator magnets are, except the magnet messages are usually spelled better and have longer sentences. At last count, American teens are racking up 3,339 text messages a month and rising, or 6 per waking hour.

If they're only absorbing 130 to 160 characters at a time, there is little opportunity to improve reading or thinking skills. Since most of the subject matter is gossip, clothes, music, and entertainment, there is not a lot of deep thinking taking place either, especially if your responses are instant. As for online reading, studies indicate only 18% of a webpage is actually read by the visitor, with the average page view lasting 10 seconds or less.

It has always been true that a certain percent of students get through school without reading an entire book, in the old days and today. Now teachers worry the numbers are rising, including at the college level. The one refrain I hear from professors, including those teaching future teachers, is this, "Only 25 to 30% of my students are avid readers.

Few have voluntarily read a novel in the past year, and they can't name a favorite author or a favorite childhood book." One teacher at a top preparatory school explained how students pull it off, "They read the key parts of the text, or they go online, or they ask the kids who do the reading to tell them what happens, or they sit in class and listen to their teacher tell them what the reading is about and feed off that.

Having no affection for reading, they slip through the class by gaming the system." Why no affection for reading? It was either never planted or driven out by seat work and test prep, leaving no room for a pleasure connection. None of this means we're a nation of illiterates. We're not.

The average American student can read. In fact, 60% of today's young people attempt advanced education compared with 20% in 1940. In other words, they're getting by. It's when they haven't read much and then enroll in college classes that the void is exposed. 74% of community college students never achieve a diploma, and 43% of students of four-year public colleges never graduate.

Woody Allen may have been right when he said, "Showing up is 80% of life, but that doesn't include college diplomas. Those usually require more than just showing up." Why the diploma failure? Three-quarters of the incoming freshmen at New York State community colleges need remedial help in reading, writing, and/or math, putting a $33 million strain on the state's education budget.

Most of these are high school graduates. More important, these are students from working class homes or lower, often among the first members of their families attempting college. Worth noting is that students who experience the least success in classrooms at any level usually come from homes and schools with the worst print climate, the fewest books, magazines, newspapers, etc.

It's difficult to get good at reading or even read much if there's nothing to read. So how do we fix the reading problem? We start by looking at the recommendation of the 1983 Commission on Reading, funded by the U.S. Department of Education, which was alarmed by school scores. Since nearly everything in the curriculum rested upon reading, the consensus was that reading was at the heart of either the problem or the solution.

The commission spent two years poring through thousands of research projects conducted in the previous quarter century and in 1985 issued its report, Becoming a Nation of Readers. Among its primary findings, two simple declarations rang loud and clear. "The single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children." Also, "It is a practice that should continue throughout the grades." The commission found conclusive evidence to support reading aloud not only in the home but also in the classroom.

In their wording, "The single most important activity," the experts were saying, "reading aloud was more important than worksheets, homework, book reports, and flashcards. One of the cheapest, simplest, and oldest tools of teaching was being promoted as a better tool than anything else in the home or classroom." And it's so simple you don't even need a high school diploma in order to do it.

And how exactly does a person become proficient at reading? It's a simple two-part formula. One, the more you read, the better you get at it. The better you get at it, the more you like it, and the more you like it, the more you do it. Two, the more you read, the more you know, and the more you know, the smarter you grow.

Let me repeat that. The more you read, the better you get at it. The better you get at it, the more you like it, and the more you like it, the more you do it. The more you read, the more you know, and the more you know, the smarter you grow.

The vast majority of students know how to read by fourth grade. In fact, by eighth grade, 24% are below basic level, 42% are at basic level, 25% are at proficient level, and only 3% are at advanced level. To improve from basic to proficient and then advanced, one must practice by reading a lot.

This is identical to riding a bicycle. The more you ride it, fall off, climb back on, and ride some more, the better you get at it. You learn to lean left when turning left, where to place your feet when coming to a stop, etc. This practice amounts to what Margaret Meek called "private lessons." The beginning of students' negative attitude toward reading appears to begin in fourth grade, when they must take the individual skills they have learned in the three previous years and apply them to whole paragraphs and pages.

This juncture is famously called the fourth grade slump, a phrase coined from the research of the late Gene Chall. It's where school separates the readers from the strugglers and remedials. But, and this is a very loud but, if the way they have learned or been exposed to basic reading skills is so boring and joyless they hate it, they will never read outside their classroom.

Since the bulk of their time, 7,800 hours a year, is spent outside school, these hours dictate whether they read often enough to become proficient or begin to fall behind. No reading outside school, low scores inside school. Reading to these students, preferably from infancy but certainly as they got older, in school and out of school, is what the Commission on Reading was begging the nation to do, to sow the seeds of reading desire.

How can something as simple as reading to a child be so effective? As lumber is the primary support for building a house, words are the primary structure for learning. There are really only two efficient ways to get words into a person's brain, either by seeing them or by hearing them.

Since it will be years before an infant uses his or her eyes for actual reading, the best source for vocabulary and brain building becomes the ear. What we send into that ear becomes the foundation for the child's brain house. Those meaningful sounds in the ear now will help the child make sense of the words coming in through the eye later when learning to read.

We read to children for all the same reasons we talk with children, to reassure, to entertain, to bond, to inform or explain, to arouse curiosity and to inspire. But in reading aloud, we also build vocabulary, condition the child's brain to associate reading with pleasure, create background knowledge, provide a reading role model, plant the desire to read.

One factor hidden in the decline of students' recreational reading is that it coincides with the decline in the amount of time adults read to them. By middle school, almost no one is reading aloud to students. If each read aloud is a commercial for the pleasures of reading, then a decline in advertising would naturally be reflected in a decline in students' recreational reading.

There are two basic reading facts of life that are ignored in most education circles. Yet, without these two principles working in tandem, little else will work. Reading fact number one, human beings are pleasure-centered. Reading fact number two, reading is an accrued skill. Let's examine fact number one. Human beings will voluntarily do over and over that which brings them pleasure.

That is, we continually go to the restaurants we like, order the foods we like, listen to the radio stations that play the music we like, and visit the neighbors we like. Conversely, we avoid the foods, music, and neighbors we dislike. Far from being a theory, this is a physiological fact.

We approach what causes pleasure and we withdraw from what causes displeasure or pain. When we read to a child, we're sending a pleasure message to the child's brain. You could even call it a commercial, conditioning the child to associate books and print with pleasure. There are, however, displeasures associated with reading in school.

The learning experience can be tedious or boring, threatening, and often without meaning. Endless hours of worksheets, intensive phonics instructions, and unconnected test questions. If a child seldom experiences the pleasures of reading but increasingly meets its displeasures, then the natural reaction will be withdrawal. That brings us to reading fact number two.

Reading is like riding a bicycle, driving a car, or sewing. In order to get better at it, you must do it. And the more you read, the better you get at it. The past 30 years of reading research confirms this simple formula, regardless of gender, race, nationality, or socioeconomic background.

Students who read the most also read the best, achieve the most, and stay in school the longest. Conversely, those who don't read much cannot get better at it. Why don't students read more? Because of reading fact number one. The large number of displeasure messages they received throughout their school years, coupled with the lack of pleasure messages in the home, nullify any attraction books might have.

They avoid print the same way a cat avoids a hot stovetop. There is ample proof for all these hypotheses in my answer to the next question. Which country has the best readers? One of the most comprehensive international reading studies was conducted by Warwick Ely for the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, IEA, in 1990 and 1991.

Involving 32 countries, it assessed 210,000 9 and 14-year-olds. Of all those children, which ones read best? For 9-year-olds, the four top nations were Finland (569), the United States (547), Sweden (539), and France (531). But the U.S. position dropped to a tie for 8th when 14-year-olds were evaluated. This demonstrates that American children begin reading at a level that is among the best in the world.

But since reading is an accrued skill, and U.S. children appear to do less of it as they grow older, their scores decline when compared with countries where children read more as they mature. We also have a higher proportion of children in poverty and their scores decline as they go through school.

And while the racial gaps in education have narrowed in recent years, the achievement gap between rich and poor students has widened by an alarming 40% since the 1960s. When Sarah Ransdell, a professor at Nova Southeastern, a Florida research university, studied the reading comprehension of 270,000 students at 259 schools in Broward County, Florida, she found poverty was the single largest common denominator among children who failed at reading.

As you will see, these are children who are spoken to the least, who are seldom read to, who see the least print in school or at home, and who therefore struggle the most with reading. To finish, children start reading classes sooner. Just the opposite. Finland's high scores should give pause to those who think an earlier reading start (hot housing) will produce better results.

They're really not into baby Einstein toys over there. There was only a three-month difference in age between the first-place Finnish children and second-place American students. Yet the Finnish children, who are introduced to formal reading instruction at age seven, two years later than American children, still manage to surpass them by age nine.

Indeed, almost everything Finland does contradicts what some experts in America advocate. Most mothers work outside the home, most children are in child care by age one, school begins at age seven, and then only for half-days, children remain in the same school from age seven to age 16, there are no gifted programs, class size often reaches 30, there are 15 minutes of recess for every 45-minute class, Finnish students spend less time in class than any other developed nation, there is no national curriculum and no standardized testing until age 16, all meals are free, as is university education, and there is a high family literacy rate, with reading to children emphasized heavily and supported by a powerful public library system.

Finally, Finnish families are heavy users of a mechanical device that serves as a reading tutor for their children. More on that in chapter 8. In the 20 years since Eli's study, excuse me, not Beredelit, I mixed up my metaphors, I'm not going to tell you, buy the book, read chapter 8, and you'll find out what that mechanical device is that serves as a reading tutor for the children of Finnish families.

In the 20 years since Eli's study, the Finns have remained atop the International Scoreboard for Reading, Math, and Science, as measured by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD, every three years. It's worth noting that one school system in the US comes the closest to mimicking the Finnish environment for teacher assessments, student demographics, and testing regulations.

US military-based schools, exempt from mandated testing and handily outscoring their public school counterparts, who are awash in test mania. What do the best readers have in common? In Eli's study, two of the factors that produced higher achievement (two others will be found later in chapter 6) are (1) the frequency of teachers reading aloud to students, and (2) the frequency of sustained silent reading (SSR) or pleasure reading.

Children who had daily SSR scored much higher than those who had it only once a week. Those two factors also represent the two reading facts we've just examined. Reading aloud is the catalyst for the child wanting to read on his own, but it also provides a foundation by nurturing the child's listening comprehension.

In an international study of 150,000 4th graders, researchers found that students who were read to often at home scored 30 points higher than students who were read to sometimes. It stands to reason that the more often a child is read to, the more words are heard, bringing the child closer to comprehending more, and the more likely it is the child will associate reading with a daily pleasure experience.

Where does phonics fit into all this? There's more than enough research to validate the importance of phonics in children's reading. Children who understand the mechanics of reading, who know that words are made up of sounds and can break the sound code, have a great advantage as the included chart demonstrates.

The U.S. Department of Education's 1999 Early Childhood Longitudinal Study found that children who were read to at least three times a week had a significantly greater phonemic awareness when they entered kindergarten than did children who were read to less often, and that they were almost twice as likely to score in the top 25% in reading.

What phonics cannot do is motivate. Nobody has a favorite vowel or blend. Phonics is like teaching a boy how to wash his neck, an important skill for a growing boy. But teaching him how to scrub is no guarantee he'll have a clean neck even if he knows how. The missing ingredient is motivation.

If he knows how but doesn't want to wash his neck, it's going to stay dirty. But when that boy meets the right girl, he'll be motivated enough to have a clean neck. You need the combination of know-how and motivation. If you ask doctors, coaches, even probation officers about the importance of motivation for the people they're dealing with, they all will tell you it's crucial.

In a national survey of reading teachers on which education topic most interested them, motivation topped the list. Nonetheless, little actual class time is spent in pursuit of motivation, unless you think test prep is motivating. What motivates children and adults to read more is that 1) they like the experience, 2) they like the subject matter, and 3) they like and follow the lead of people who read a lot.

Is there any read-aloud proof in research? So many read-aloud claims had accumulated in a 30-year period that researchers subjected 33 of them to a meta-analysis to see if the concept lived up to those claims. Looking at the impact of frequent household reading on preschoolers, the analysis showed clear positive gains for phonemic awareness, language growth, and beginning reading skills.

In addition, there was just as much of an impact for children of a lower socioeconomic status as there was for children with a higher socioeconomic status. And the earlier or younger the reading began, the better the results. Research shows that even when children reach primary grades, repeated picture book reading of the same book at least three times increases vocabulary acquisition by 15 to 40 percent, and the learning is relatively permanent.

The international assessment of 150,000 fourth graders in 2001 showed an average 35-point advantage for students who were read to more often by parents. The OECD is a 50-year-old cooperative among industrial nations aimed at helping member nations work through the modern growth challenges, including education. For more than a decade, this organization has been testing hundreds of thousands of 15-year-olds in various school subjects and comparing scores among nations.

Since 2006, the OECD has interviewed the parents of 5,000 students who were part of the test-taking corps, asking them if they ever read to their children when they were in first grade and how often the reading took place. The responses, when compared with those children's reading scores on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) exam, showed a powerful correlation.

The more they were read to, the higher the scores at age 15, sometimes an advantage of as much as a half-year's schooling. The results were true regardless of family income. A few years after I had lectured in a Northern California community, one of its residents sent me a copy of a letter to the editor in the local paper.

Prompting the letter was an article about a fifth-grade teacher who had been named Teacher of the Year, including a quote from another teacher who marveled at the honoree's ability with voices as he read to his students. That apparently outraged a father in the district who wrote, "I also am disturbed by his apparent taking of class time to read aloud to his students, capturing the voices of the characters and the attention of the students.

When did our schools become babysitting centers with story time? By the time my daughter is in the fifth grade, I hope she is able to read to herself. If he wants to recreate characters, he should join a local theater group." Far from being "babysitting," reading aloud has a rich intellectual history.

More than 2,000 years ago, Hebrew fathers were urged by the Talmud to take their children upon their laps and read to them. 1,000 years later, in that manual of Christian monastic life called the Rule of St. Benedict, chapter 38 specifies that meals be taken in silence except for the spoken word of the monk designated to read aloud to the diners.

Does anyone think this was babysitting the monks, the people who kept the lights on through the Dark Ages? I would also note that reading aloud at table is still practiced at least once a day among the Benedictines, sometimes spiritual readings, other times secular, but never textbooks. In one monk's words to me, "We have a 1,500-year-old love affair with books and manuscripts." As of this writing, the monks at St.

John's Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, are listening to "Marcel Brewer and a Committee of Twelve Plan a Church, a Monastic Memoir" by Father Hilary Thimmesch. The church in question is St. John's very own, an edifice so magnificent the architect I. M. Pei once said it would be world famous if it were located in New York City.

Then there is the history of the reader aloud in the labor force. One could even argue that this foreshadowed audiobooks. When the cigar industry blossomed in the mid-1800s, supposedly the best tobacco came from Cuba, though much of the industry later moved to the Tampa, Florida area. These cigars were hand-rolled by workers who became artisans in the delicate craft, producing hundreds of perfectly rolled specimens daily.

Artistic as it might have been, it was still repetitious labor done in stifling factories. To break the monotony, workers hit upon the idea of having someone read aloud to them while they worked, known in the trade as la lectura. The reader, of which there were hundreds in the Tampa area alone, usually sat on an elevated platform or podium in the middle of the room and read aloud for four hours, covering newspapers, classics, and even Shakespeare.

Somehow none of that sounds like babysitting to me. As labor became more organized in the United States, the readings kept workers informed of progressive ideas throughout the world as well as entertained. When factory owners realized the enlightening impact of the readings, they tried to stop them, but met stiff resistance from the workers, each of whom was paying the readers as much as 25 cents per week out of pocket.

The daily readings added to the workers' intellect and general awareness while civilizing the atmosphere of the workplace. By the 1930s, however, with cigar sales slumping due to the Great Depression and unions growing restive with mechanization on the horizon, the owners declared that the reader aloud had to go. Protest strikes followed, but to no avail, and eventually readers were replaced by the radio.

But not in Cuba. The Cuban novelist Miguel Barnett reports, "Today, all over Cuba, this tradition is alive and well. Readers are in all the factories, from Santiago to Havana to Pinar del Rio. The readings have specific timetables and generally begin with the headlines of today's newspapers. After reading the newspaper, the readers take a break and then begin reading the unfinished book from the day before.

Most are women." Unlike the factories of yore, today's Cuban factory settings include modern lighting, air conditioning, and microphones with amplifying systems. Considerably better conditions than many contemporary American urban classrooms, I might add. Considering the stifling boredom in the American classroom and the fact that many high schools look like factories, schools seem to me to be the perfect setting for "reading aloud" a la Cuba, especially when you couple the history of reading aloud with the academic benefits noted here.

As for babysitting, any babysitter who could accomplish all of that would be a bargain. You mentioned background knowledge. What is it? The easiest way to understand background knowledge is to read the following two paragraphs and see if there is a difference in your understanding of each. 1. But Sabathia, who pitched three days earlier in game three, gave up a lead-off broken-bat double to Austin Jackson.

He struck out the next two batters, then walked Miguel Cabrera intentionally with first base open. Paragraph 2. Callas and Rhodes put on 84, but with the ball turning, Mark Wall could not hit with impunity and his eight overs cost only 37. The run still had to be scored at more than seven and over, with McGrath still to return and Warren having two overs left, when Rhodes pulled rifle to Bevan at deep square leg.

You probably had an easier time grasping the first paragraph, a newspaper account of a baseball game in 2011. The second paragraph came from a newspaper story on the World Cricket Championship in 1999. Any confusion was because the less you know about a subject or the vocabulary associated with that subject, the slower you must read, the more difficult comprehension becomes and the less you understand.

Sounding out the cricket paragraph phonetically wouldn't have helped much, would it? Background knowledge is one reason children who read the most bring the largest amount of information to the learning table and thus understand more of what the teacher or the textbook is teaching. Children whose families take them to museums and zoos, who visit historic sites, who travel abroad, or who camp in remote areas, accumulate huge chunks of background knowledge without even studying.

For the impoverished child lacking the travel portfolio of affluence, the best way to accumulate background knowledge is by either reading or being read to. Yes, educational TV can help, but most at-risk children are not exposed to it often enough. The background knowledge of at-risk students took a further hit with No Child Left Behind when 71% of districts narrowed their curriculum to math and reading, curtailing subjects like art, music, science, and languages.

The lack of background knowledge surfaces very early in a child's school life. In the longitudinal kindergarten study, researchers found that more than 50% of children coming from the lowest education and income levels finished in the bottom quartile in background knowledge. So once again, poverty rears its ugly head as an obstacle to learning.

What are the skills a child needs for kindergarten? Let me make an analogy here. Inside a child's brain, there is a huge reservoir called the listening vocabulary. You could say it's the child's very own Lake Pontchartrain, the famous estuary outside New Orleans that overflowed because of all the water brought by Hurricane Katrina.

That extra water breached the levees and tragically flooded New Orleans. We want the same thing to happen, but not in a tragic way. This time, the levees will be breached inside the child's brain. The first levee would be the speaking vocabulary. You pour enough words into the child's listening vocabulary and it will overflow and fill the speaking vocabulary pool.

Thus, the child starts speaking the words he's heard. It's highly unlikely you'll ever say a word if you've never heard the word. More than a billion people speak Chinese, so why not the rest of us? Because we haven't heard enough Chinese words, especially in our childhoods. The next levee is the reading vocabulary.

It's nearly impossible to understand a word in print if you've never said the word. And finally, there's the writing vocabulary. If you've never said the word or read the word, how in the world will you be able to write it? All the language arts flow from the listening vocabulary, and that has to be filled by someone besides the child.

Simple. As you read to a child, you're pouring into the child's ears and brain all the sounds, syllables, endings, and blendings that will make up the words she will someday be asked to read and understand. And through stories, you are filling in the background knowledge necessary to understand things that aren't in her neighborhood, like war or whales or locomotives.

The one pre-kindergarten skill that matters above all others, because it is the prime predictor of school success or failure, is the child's vocabulary upon entering school. Yes, the child goes to school to learn new words, but the words he already knows determine how much of what the teacher says will be understood.

And since most instruction for the first four years of school is oral, the child who has the largest vocabulary will understand the most, while the child with the smallest vocabulary will grasp the least. Once reading begins, personal vocabulary feeds or frustrates comprehension, since school grows increasingly complicated with each grade.

That's why school entry vocabulary tests predict so accurately. How is it that some kids get a head start on vocabulary? Conversation is the prime garden in which vocabulary grows, but conversations vary greatly from home to home. The eye-opening findings of Drs. Betty Hart and Todd Risley at the University of Kansas from their research on children's early lives demonstrate the impact of this fact.

Published as "Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children," the research began in response to what Hart and Risley saw among the four-year-olds in the university lab school. With many children, the lines were already drawn. Some were far advanced and some far behind. When the children in the study were tested at age three and then again at nine, the differences held.

What caused the differences so early? The researchers began by identifying 42 normal families representing three socioeconomic groups, welfare, working class, and professional. Beginning when the children were seven months old, researchers visited the homes for one hour a month and continued their visits for two and a half years. During each visit, the researcher tape-recorded and transcribed by hand any conversations and actions taking place in front of the child.

Through 1,300 hours of visits, they accumulated 23 million bytes of information for the project database, categorizing every word, noun, verb, adjective, etc. uttered in front of the child. The project held some surprises. Regardless of socioeconomic level, all 42 families said and did the same things with their children. In other words, the basic instincts of good parenting are there for most people, rich or poor.

Then the researchers received the data printout and saw the meaningful differences among the 42 families. When the daily number of words for each group of children is projected across four years, the four-year-old child from the professional family will have heard 45 million words, the working class child 26 million, and the welfare child only 13 million.

I repeat, when the daily number of words for each group of children is projected across four years, the four-year-old child from the professional family will have heard 45 million words, the working class child 26 million, and the welfare child only 13 million. All three children will show up for kindergarten on the same day, but one will have heard 32 million fewer words.

If legislators expect the teacher to get this child caught up, she'll have to speak 10 words a second for 900 hours to reach the 32 million mark by year's end. I hope they have life support ready for her. Those 42 children would perform differently in class because their word totals created different brains.

By the time the study group reached age 3, the professional's children had 1,100 word vocabularies to the welfare children's 525. Similarly, their IQs were 117 vs. 79 by the time the study finished. Brain differences have nothing to do with how much parents love their children. They all love their children and want the best for them.

But some parents have a better idea of what needs to be said and done to reach that "best." They know the child needs to hear words repeatedly in meaningful sentences and questions, and they know that plunking a two-year-old down in front of a television set for three hours at a time is more harmful than meaningful.

Sociologists George Farkas and Kurt Barron studied the research on 6,800 children from ages 3 to 12 and found that children from the lower SES were far more likely to arrive at school with smaller vocabularies 12 to 14 months behind, and they seldom made up the loss as they grew older.

The message in this kind of research is unambiguous. It's not the toys in the house that make the difference in children's lives. It's the words in their heads. The least expensive thing we can give a child outside of a hug turns out to be the most valuable. Words. You don't need a job, a checking account, or even a high school diploma to talk with a child.

If I could select any piece of research that all parents would be exposed to, meaningful differences would be the one. That's feasible. The authors took their 268-page book and condensed it into a six-page article for American Educator, the Journal of the American Federation of Teachers, which may be freely reproduced by schools.

There is one inexpensive, common-sense move that parents could make that would impact their children's language skills and maybe their emotional development as well, yet it goes largely unpublicized here in the United States. First, consider how badly it would affect a conversation with someone if she wouldn't look at you while you were talking to her.

Most conversations would slow to a crawl. Let's apply that principle of human behavior to children in strollers. Until the 1960s, nearly all strollers were engineered so the child was facing the parent. Now it's either way, but far more often facing away. Does it make a difference? Researchers found it makes a huge difference in how much conversation takes place between parent and child, twice as much when the child faces the parent.

It was even more frequent when the child walked with or was carried by the parent. Of course, it's not going to help that much if the child is facing the parent and the parent is on the cell phone all the time. I interrupt the author to comment that it's far worse since 2013, because it's not going to help the parent all that much if the child is not facing the parent.

Excuse me. It's not going to help if the child is facing the parent, the parent is on the cell phone all the time, and also the child is on the cell phone all the time. Make my living staring at a screen and a microphone and evaluate what that is, but it is deeply, deeply harmful to conversation for us to be disconnected from the ones that we are together with physically so that we can try to forge somewhat tenuous connections from our virtual friends.

Where is the better vocabulary? Conversation or reading? Most conversation is plain and simple, whether it's between two adults or with children. It consists of the 5,000 words we use all the time called the basic lexicon. Indeed, 83% of the words in normal conversation with a child come from the most commonly used thousand words, and it doesn't change much as the child ages.

Then there are another 5,000 words we use in conversation less often. Together, these 10,000 words are called the common lexicon. Beyond that 10,000 mark are the rare words, and these play a critical role in reading as we grow older. The eventual strength of our vocabulary is determined not by the 10,000 common words, but by how many rare words we understand.

If we don't use these rare words very often in conversation, where do we find them? The chart included in the book shows that printed text contains the most rare words. Whereas an adult uses only nine rare words per thousand when talking with a three-year-old, there are three times as many in a children's book and more than seven times as many in a newspaper.

As you can see from the chart, oral communication, including a TV script, is decidedly inferior to print for building vocabulary. As shown by the data for printed material, the number of rare words increases significantly. This poses serious problems for at-risk children who hear fewer words and encounter print less often at home.

Such children face a gigantic word gap that impedes reading progress throughout school. And that gap can't possibly be breached in 120 hours of summer school or through morphonics instruction. How can I give my kids words if I don't have them? This is a question I've heard from parents who have learning disabilities or for whom English is a second language.

While there are few easy answers in parenting, this one is easier than most. There is a public agency that comes to the rescue in such instances. In fact, it's been doing this job for more than a century. What the agency does is take all the nouns, verbs, and adjectives a person would ever need and bundle them into little packages for anyone to borrow.

Free! It asks only that you bring the packages back in a few weeks. I'm referring to the American Free Public Library, the People's University. And for those who can't read the words, they are now available on audio cassette and CD. Forty years ago, you had to be blind to get a recorded book in America.

Now, anyone can. Has anyone ever applied reading aloud and SSR, sustained silent reading, to an at-risk school? Just as parents in low-income situations need to be reminded that their task is not insurmountable, so too do educators who work with children coming from those homes. Reading achievement and pleasure do not have to be mutually exclusive.

During his ten years as principal of Boston's Solomon Leuenberg Middle School, Thomas P. O'Neill Jr. and his faculty proved it. The pride of Boston's junior high schools during the 1950s and early 1960s, Leuenberg subsequently suffered the ravages of urban decay. And by 1984, with the lowest academic record and Boston teachers calling it the "Looney Bin" instead of "Luenberg," the school was earmarked for closing.

But first, Boston officials would give it one last chance. The reins were handed to O'Neill, an upbeat first-year principal and former high school English teacher whose experience there had taught him to "sell" the pleasures and importance of reading. The first thing he did was abolish the school's intercom system.

As a teacher, I'd always sworn someday I'd rip that thing off the wall. Now I could do it legally. He then set about establishing structure, routine, and discipline. "That's the easy part. What happens after is the important part—reading. It's the key element in the curriculum. IBM can teach our graduates to work the machine, but we have to teach them to read the manual." In O'Neill's first year, sustained silent reading was instituted for the nearly 400 pupils and faculty for the last ten minutes of the day, during which everyone in the school read for pleasure.

Notice "ten minutes." Each teacher and administrator was assigned a "room," much to the consternation of some who felt those last ten minutes could be better used to clean up the shop or gym. "Prove to me on paper," O'Neill challenged them, "that you are busier than I am and I'll give you the ten minutes to clean." He had no takers.

Within a year, critics became supporters and the school was relishing the quiet times that ended the day. The books that had been started during SSR were often still being read by students filing out to buses, in stark contrast to former dismissal scenes that bordered on chaos. The next challenge was to ensure that each sixth, seventh, and eighth grade student not only saw an adult reading each day, but also heard one.

Faculty members were assigned a classroom, and the school day began with ten minutes of reading aloud to complement the silent ending at the end of the day. Soon, reading aloud began to inspire awareness, and new titles sprouted during SSR. In effect, the faculty was doing what the great art schools have always done, providing life models from which to draw.

In the first year, Leuenberg's scores were up. In the second year, not only did the scores climb, but so too did student enrollment in response to the school's new reputation. Three years later, in 1988, Leuenberg's 570 students had the highest reading scores in the city of Boston. There was a 15-page waiting list of children who wanted to attend.

And O'Neill was portrayed by Time as a viable alternative to physical force in its cover story on Joe Clark, the bullhorn and bat-toting principal from Paterson, New Jersey. Today, Tom O'Neill is retired, but the ripple effect of his work has reached shores that not even his great optimism would have anticipated.

In the early 1990s, a junior high school civics teacher in Japan, Hiroshi Hayashi, read the Japanese edition of the Read Aloud Handbook. Intrigued by the concept of SSR and Tom O'Neill's example, he immediately decided to apply it in his own school. Contrary to what most Americans believe, not all Japanese public school students are single-minded overachievers, and many are rebellious or reluctant readers, if they are readers at all.

Although SSR was a foreign concept to Japanese secondary education, Hayashi saw quick results in his junior high school with just 10 minutes at the start of the morning. Unwilling to keep his enthusiasm to himself, he spent the next two years sending 40,000 handwritten postcards to administrators in Japanese public schools.

His personal crusade has won accolades from even the faculty skeptics. By 2006, more than 3,500 Japanese schools were using SSR to begin their school day. Who has the time these days? People carry on these days as though the universal clock has somehow shrunk from 24 hours to 18. Granted, there are a few people whose work schedules are truly beyond the norm.

But they are few and far between. If there were a national time shortage, the malls would be empty, Netflix would be defunct, and the cable TV companies would be bankrupt. Ultimately, what it boils down to is Sister Patricia Joseph's cautionary words to me when I was 16. I was the designated class artist, and she had asked me to draw something for her bulletin board over the weekend.

I showed up empty-handed on Monday with the excuse that I hadn't had enough time. With a steely look, she said quietly, "That's alright, James. But please understand even the busiest people find the time for the things they truly value." Her thought was on target that day, and it still is.

If you understand what you've read so far and you truly value children and their futures, you will find the time. Like Sister said, it's all about the value system. The last word on reading aloud, vocabulary and old brains. Of all the endorsements for reading aloud, the following is the most unusual and perhaps most sobering.

Back in the mid-1990s, two men and a woman sat talking in an office of the University of Kentucky Medical Center. One man was an epidemiologist, the other man was a neurologist, and the woman was a psycholinguist. All were involved in what would become a celebrated Alzheimer's study. Two of them had been researching an order of nuns who had consented to regular mental examinations and brain autopsies upon death and had turned all their personal records over to the researchers.

The autopsies, when coupled with autobiographical essays written by the nuns when they were about 22 years old, showed a clear connection. Those with the densest sentences, the most ideas jam-packed into a sentence without breaking them into separate clauses, were far less likely either to develop Alzheimer's or to show its ravages.

Simply put, the larger the vocabularies and the more complex the thinking processes in youth, the less chance of Alzheimer's damage later, even if they developed a disease. Could the rich vocabulary and crammed thinking process in one's youth be an early insurance policy against Alzheimer's? As the three discussed these issues, the neurologist Bill Marksbury, father of two, asked Susan Kemper, the psycholinguist, "What does this mean for our children?" In his absorbing book about the study, Aging with Grace, David Snowden, the epidemiologist, describes what followed, quoting, "The question caught me off guard, but when I saw the look on his face, I realized that he was speaking as a father, not as a scientist." Bill has three grown daughters, and it was clear he wanted to know whether he and his wife, Barbara, had done the right things as parents.

"Read to them," Susan answered. "It's that simple. It's the most important thing a parent can do with their children." Susan explained that idea density depends on at least two important learned skills, vocabulary and reading comprehension. And the best way to increase vocabulary and reading comprehension is by starting early in life by reading to your children, Susan declared.

I could see the relief spread over Bill's face. "Barbara and I read to our kids every night," he said proudly. In the years since our study came out, I have been asked Marksbury's question many times. Parents ask me if they should play Mozart to their babies or buy them expensive teaching toys or prohibit television or get them started early on the computer.

I give them the same simple answer Susan Kemper gave to Marksbury, "Read to your children." And I hope on that note that if you are interested in more details, you will be motivated to go ahead and buy this wonderful book from which I have been reading to you and read it for yourself.

Again, this is the Read Aloud Handbook by author Jim Trillese. I was reading to you from the seventh edition, the preface and the first chapter. I want to add just simply one comment that is from my personal experience and also a little bit of data analysis on this topic.

I have often been... I have long been a reader, but I have often wished that I were more of a reader. I, like you, have frequently found myself distracted by shinier and oftentimes more enticing things. And I've noticed that whenever I stray away from reading, the quality of my thoughts goes down, the quality of my life goes down, the quality of my ability to focus goes down, the quality of my motivation goes down, and I suffer from it.

And then I recognize what's happening and if I can correct and I go back to steadily reading, it provides a calming thing for me. And it changes my motivation, it gives me clarity on my thinking, etc. My thinking is better because of my reading ability. But I'm vastly ahead of many people due to years and years of doing it.

And I want to point out that in reading, there is simply no substitute for quantity when it comes to the basics, the basics of especially things like vocabulary acquisition. I got into this heavily a couple of years ago when I started really digging into foreign language acquisition. I had never done any kind of foreign language acquisition.

I had never... I took... Let me rephrase. I took two years of high school Spanish, just like most people did. I had Spanish one and Spanish two. I did a few things right, namely I tried to use the Spanish that I learned and I developed the habit of trying to talk to people.

And in college, when I was getting ready to go to Costa Rica for a study abroad program, in preparation for that, because of course, I was quite aware of the fact that I couldn't speak Spanish, I got a box of flashcards from Barnes & Noble that had 1000 Spanish vocabulary words and I forced myself to memorize those 1000 words before the trip.

And when I arrived on the trip, I could speak Spanish. It was quite poorly spoken, but I could communicate in most cases. And that made all the difference in the world from my experience. But I never was a reader in Spanish because it was too hard. And I came across too many words that I didn't understand.

I'm now glad for that experience. I was annoyed about it for a long time, but I'm now glad for that experience because it's given me a greater amount of empathy for people who are not readers. It's really, really frustrating to read a book and in every paragraph encounter three or four words that you don't understand.

You think it doesn't matter. You think, "Ah, it's only three to four words. You should be able to skip past it and just go on with your life." It does matter. It's really annoying and it makes you not want to read. And over the years, I would pick up various Spanish books and screw up my enthusiasm.

"I'm going to read this." And I'd find myself put off by my inability to read the words. And I recognized how isolating that is, how stunting that is, how what a block it is to learning. That's something I never struggled with in English. So over the years, last two years specifically, I started studying foreign language acquisition.

I came across some of the leading academics in the field. The most commonly cited academic in the field at this point that I could find is Stephen Krashen, who's also spoken and written extensively on simple reading, not for foreign language acquisition, but for primary language acquisition. But I also came across the work of Paul Nation, Dr.

Paul Nation, New Zealand academic who has similarly talked about things. And they both talked about extensive reading. And I came across a paper that Dr. Paul Nation had written where he talked about how much input you need to learn the most frequent 9,000 words in a language. Now, there are various estimates as to how many times you need to actually see a word in order for you to remember it and understand it.

And back to Jim Trulise's image, first a word has to go into your listening comprehension. And then later, some of those words will flow down to your speaking pool where you can actually use them in speaking and then maybe sometime you can use them in writing. But you got to put a lot more words into your comprehension first.

And you need to be exposed to words a lot of times. And there are different estimates, but Dr. Paul Nation used the number of 12 in this particular publication from 2014. He said that 12 repetitions of a word is a safe bet in most cases. The idea being that if you come across a word 12 times and you don't know it, but then you look it up and you figure out what it is, after about 12 times, you'll be able to remember it.

So you need to see a word 12 times in order for you to remember it. What this means is that if you start reading, you're going to very quickly learn the most frequently used vocabulary of any language, especially including your own, but you're certainly going to be able to acquire foreign language vocabulary as well.

And so if you calculate the goal of acquiring a 2000-word vocabulary, and then we'll go up from a 2000-word vocabulary to a 3000-word vocabulary, 4000-word vocabulary, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9000-word vocabulary. And the 9000-word vocabulary would basically be vocabulary that would allow you to function at the college level in most cases.

Not to say that you know all the words, you certainly don't. I think the English language has the largest vocabulary in the world, like 250,000 words if memory serves me correctly. But you know all of the most important words, and then you'll acquire the specialized vocabulary of whatever your personal area of expertise is.

So how many words – so Natschen did a study and he calculated how much do you have to read in order for you to see these words 12 times in order for you to be able to learn them. And so at the 2000-word level, you need to be exposed to basically two novels is the number, 170,000 tokens.

And there are basically 120,000 tokens per novel is the estimate that you would use, 220,000 words per novel. So if you're exposed to two novels, you'll be able to acquire, if you can understand them, 2000 words. Then to go from a 2000-word vocabulary to a 3000-word vocabulary, you need to be exposed to an additional 300,000 words or three novels.

To go from a 3000-word vocabulary up to five, total five books read, five novels, full-length novels, to go from a 3000-word vocabulary to a 4000-word vocabulary, you need to add an additional 530,000 words read or about six novels. To go from 4000 to 5000, you need to add 1,060,000 words read for about nine books.

To go from a 5000-word vocabulary to 6000, you need to add 1.45 million words read. The next step requires an additional 2 million words read. To go the next step up from 7000 to an 8000-word vocabulary, another 2.4 million words read. And then to make that final jump, to gain an additional 1000 words, you need to read an additional 3 million words to gain that next 1000 level of vocabulary.

Now, you can speed up the process sometimes. You may be able to study vocabulary intensively. There may be a case for it, but you can acquire it very naturally with reading. And the number is actually quite manageable. So at this point in time, once I read this, everything became clear to me and I said, "That's it." The total number of words needed to acquire a 9000-word foreign language vocabulary is about 11 million words.

And if you're reading books that have had 120,000 words in them, then your number is basically something like just under about 100 books. And if you'll do that, you'll acquire the language. It's not possible that you not do it. Now, in the beginning, you often have to use some specialized tools to help you with translation.

You have to learn some basic vocabulary. You have to work with very simple beginner texts. But as soon as you can get into books, and as soon as you can read 10 million words, 11 million words, you'll have that professional vocabulary that you want in the foreign language. And everything else just kind of clicks into place.

So the point is, this is the process for readers. It's a numerical process. For me, that became my simple outline. And so today, I track how much I have read, or at least how much I've read in a tracked way, just to get an idea of how I am doing.

Over the last year or two, I've been learning French. I've read as of today, 1,290,409 words in French. So I know I'm about 10 to almost 15%, 12% of the way towards my goal. And it may take me seven or eight years to work my way towards that 10 million words read.

But I know that I can already tell by my current vocabulary, I can already tell that my ability to recognize words is very good. I can pick up at this point in time. A year ago, I couldn't pick up any text and really understand it other than the obvious cognates.

But there's so few of those, you can't do it. Today, I can pick up almost any text and I can get the gist of it, at least in terms of recognition. I can't use those words. I can't use them actively. They don't spill out of me with spoken language.

I couldn't write them in any chance, but I can recognize them. And that's the first stage of learning. So in many ways, I feel like a kindergartner going through that process. And so you can do this and you can help your children. And it's a numerical thing. Can you expose your children to 10 million words?

Now, you can go back and you can say, "Well, how long does that take? How long does it take to actually acquire those words?" Well, here it depends on your reading skill. And I'll just give you an example from myself where I tracked this stuff to try to figure out and did some measurements to try to figure out my own numbers.

I can read pretty quickly in English. I don't do much speed reading. I have studied a little bit and I can speed read things if they are in my area of expertise. I can't speed read anything that's outside of my area of expertise. I can read a financial book, any book on the shelf at Barnes & Noble, I can read a financial book in 5 to 15 minutes because I'm familiar with the concepts.

I can pick it up. I can see the headings. I can look at the table of contents and I can close the book and pretty much, I won't be able to give you the stories in it, but just to flip through the pages and I could summarize the book for you because it's something that I know very, very well.

Give me an entry-level medical textbook, I don't know it. It's not my field. I don't understand it. I can't do it at all. I have no context. So this is where you see familiarity. But let me just give you an example here. The first thing you can do to figure out how long it would take to be exposed to these words is look at the word count and then compare the length of the word count to an audiobook version of that word count.

Let's begin with an audio example and I'll tell you how I did this with foreign language. The same principle applies to your children. A book that I read last year, I read the Jason Bourne novel by Robert Ludlam. I read the trilogy, the original trilogy. It wasn't awesome, it was okay, but I read the original trilogy in French.

First thing you can do is I like to, I use Kobo.com to get, and one of the things that nice thing that Kobo does is they include a word count on the books. Amazon will include a page count, but they include a word count. So as an example here, La Vengeance dans la Peau has a word count, it's a 904-page novel.

It has a word count of 262,000 words in it. Now Kobo estimates that that will take 21 to 23 hours to read. We'll come back to those hour estimates in a moment. But for me, what I have found is that I have my, we can start with the very least with how long it takes to read aloud.

And so I also have the audible recording from this book, and the audible recording for this book is 28 hours and 18 minutes long. So remember the word count is 262,000 words and it's 28 hours and 18 minutes long. So if we divide that, we get 1,690 minutes. The audible reader is reading at a rate of 155 words per minute.

That comes out to 9,300 words per hour. So when I'm reading, if we were to go back and recognize that I read to you for about an hour and I guess 15 minutes, hour and 20 minutes from the book that I read to you, you would wind up with probably around 12,000 words that I read to you.

Now go back to that language acquisition, those numbers that I said from the Paul Nation foreign language study. If your goal is 10 million words in a foreign language, or if your goal for your child is to read your child over time 10 million words, and you're reading books that are not a lot of pictures, with a child usually you're starting, you're always starting with pictures and you're reading slowly and you're talking and you're giggling and you're laughing, you're not just reading.

But if you're just reading, then you probably would be reading at about 9,000 words per hour. So if you take 9,300 words per hour and your goal is to expose your child to 10 million words, depending on how long you want to do that, that's 1,075 hours of reading.

So 1,075 hours of reading, let's say you do 30 minutes per day, that would be 500 and, excuse me, 1,075 hours times two for 35 minutes a day. Then over the course of about six years at 30 minutes a day, you would wind up reading the 10 million words that you want to, to give your child the gift of a large vocabulary.

You can do it faster. And this is the same thing with foreign language acquisition. If I need to read and I need to have read to me at the slowest pace, listening to the audio book, which was how I started learning French, I just put on the audio book and I listened and I read along and I use link to read and track my word count and then I listen to the audio book, I know I need 1,075 hours of reading.

And so if I were super intense and I needed to learn French really quickly and I needed to do it really very fast and I had a year, well, in three hours a day of reading, I can expose myself to the 10 million words. If I was doing it full time and I really had a motivated reason, I could do eight hours a day of reading, then in 134 days I could do it and I could have a very broad vocabulary.

I don't do that. It's not my goal, but if 30 minutes a day, right, you could do the math. You can figure out how long it takes you to read the 10 million words at the slowest pace, which is an audio book. Now let's go back to the Kobo estimates.

The Kobo estimates for that book of 262,000 words are 21 to 23 hours to read it, rather than the over 28 hours that are required for the reader. And so here you can just simply do a reading test for yourself and you can calculate how long it would take you to figure out how to read the amount of words that your goal is to read.

And your speed will vary based upon your proficiency. For me as an accomplished English reader, I read at a significantly faster rate than the estimates are. So for example, I read a book, I did actually tracked it this past year. I was curious what my English reading speed was.

I read an English novel that was, it was actually Doug Casey's book, Drug Lord, which is part of his trilogy. That was interesting and great. I really enjoyed it. Great trilogy. But I read an English novel, it was 150,000 total words, 555 pages. The Kobo estimate on that particular book is 12 to 13 hours to read it.

I tracked, I read, I didn't speed read it. I read it at my enjoyable novel pace. I read every word, just kind of working my way through it, enjoying front to back. No, just I was reading it to enjoy it as a simple pleasure novel of an interesting story written by an interesting guy.

It took me 6.9 hours, total of 414 minutes to read it, which was a little under half, just about half of the 12 to 13 hours that the Kobo estimate gave to it. So my English reading speed with that novel was 362 words per minute or 21,739 words per hour.

So I can accumulate a lot of English words much more quickly. Now in foreign language, with Spanish, I read a little bit faster, maybe about 15% faster than the Kobo estimates. I did a speed test, but I don't have that data in front of me, but I did a speed test for myself on a Spanish book.

And then with my French books, I'm pretty slow, but a little tiny bit faster than the narrator. At this point in time, I've bumped the narrator up to about 1.1, 1.2 speed on Audible when reading books. And that's fine. I still have to absorb, even if I know the word, I still have to absorb the meaning.

So you can calculate, that's my point, you can calculate how quickly you can get to this goal if you want to. Now go to your own reader, right, your child. And I want you to calculate how many words your child would be exposed to if you read to your child three hours a day versus 30 minutes a day.

Think back to how transformative 10 minutes a day is for those classrooms. 10 minutes a day of silent reading and/or 10 minutes a day of being read to. 30 minutes a day is wonderful, do what you can do. But imagine if you can read to your child for three hours a day.

Imagine the vocabulary acquisition that is possible for you. Imagine if you can be more. And here where we wind up saying that childhood is not all about reading. There are other things that are important, right? Free play, et cetera, is important. Academics are not everything. But you can calculate the reading speed that you have of reading aloud or your reading speed yourself.

And you can put that on a chart and you can just, it's shocking how big of a return it is. I want you to imagine the difference for yourself, for your children, et cetera, if you read to them and/or they read to themselves. If you recognize how you cannot learn something that you cannot understand, in order for you to understand something, you need vocabulary.

And vocabulary can be imparted so efficiently with reading. There is no better way of acquiring vocabulary than reading. Because your speed, you can go as fast or as slow as you need to. And it should show you why it's so powerful and why reading to your children, especially when they're before the age of reading, why it makes a difference.

And of course, you can supplement. You can use audio books. You can use things like that as well as a supplement. And so there's no supplement for reading to your child. My children, if I let them, I mean, they wouldn't read all day because of course they need to play and be active and move.

But it's like they can't get enough because we've always read to them and they just, "Oh, can you read this? Can you read that?" And so if you get good books, you can pump that into them. And then that enhances their brain and enhances their vocabulary. And it just, you can see it.

It affects them more than virtually anything else. There are many other things that you can do to help your children, right? Lots of exercise, lots of sunshine, lots of playing music and lots of love and hugs and snuggles and all that stuff. But in terms of intellectual development, to prepare your child for academic excellence, kindergarten, first grade, second grade, third grade, most important thing is simply reading.

There's no way around it. Reading aloud to them, having them read aloud to, right? Use audio books. We do have an embarrassment of riches. We use a ton of LibriVox books. LibriVox books have wonderful classic stories, high-quality literature available. And your child will be able to listen to literature that's several grade levels beyond their reading ability.

And in addition, Audible is wonderful for paid ones, for more current ones. LibriVox is all stuff that's in the public domain. And then of course, your reading to your child and/or having your child read to by others is one of the best things that you can possibly do. It's simple.

It's inexpensive. It doesn't take that much time, but it pays off in spades, in massive, massive dividends. So I hope that this additional information, kind of some of these numbers in my reading from the book will help you to see why there's really no better investment that you can make into your children's educational future than simply reading to them and then surrounding them with books that they love, that they will read themselves.

And if you'll do that, 80% of your work is done. If you will intentionally create and cultivate a reader for a child, then all you need to do is supply the right books and the educational process is automatic. The heavy lifting is in the beginning. First, a lot of hours of reading, but that's fun.

That's bonding time. It's snuggling time. Then teaching how to read, how to decode the phonics. Then continuing to read just for time together, but then supplying the right books. Once that's done, education is basically done. Talk about mathematics another day. The evidence is abundant. Read to your children. It's a wonderful investment into them and into your family life and into their educational future.

If you come to me and you say, "I didn't save a dime for my kids' college, but I read to my children for an hour a day, every day for the first 10 years of their life," you won't have a thing to worry about with college, I promise. Absolutely guaranteed.

Thanks for listening. Be back with you soon.