Many high school students can’t read. Is the solution teaching reading in every class?

Angie Hackman teaches chemistry at Health Sciences High and Middle College in San Diego, where all teachers are required to integrate literacy instruction into their classes. Like many high school chemistry teachers, Angie Hackman said she instructs students on atoms, matter and how they “influence the world around us.” But Hackman also has another responsibility: developing students’ literacy skills. “Many students struggle at the secondary level with decoding, typically multisyllabic words, so those longer words that they’re encountering in science text, for example, or in social studies text,” Wexler said. “You could even say that four through sixth grade is left behind a bit.” Kayla Reist, another author of the Shanker Institute report, said that if states started focusing on high schoolers in reading reform legislation, they would “really have to start talking about teacher preparation programs” and professional development. In a 2008 practice guide on improving adolescent literacy, the Institute of Education Sciences, a research institution that is part of the U.S. Department of Education, stated that “many teachers report feeling unprepared to help their students or do not think that teaching reading skills in content-area classes is their responsibility.” “If you are a science teacher, you want to teach science, you really don’t want to hang out and talk about the academic vocabulary of science,” Neuman said.