Reading.
Once foundational to ELA classrooms, the experience of reading itself has become rare, watered down, and sidestepped.
In recent decades, whole books have given way to excerpts. Excerpts have given way to passages. Passages have given way to AI-generated summaries. The logic? It’s more efficient, more manageable, more targeted to a specific standard; students cover more ground.
But what they are doing less of, in classrooms across the country, is actually reading — slowly, attentively, in the sustained way that builds the cognitive capacities that all other learning depends on.
This post is about what gets lost in compressing reading, what’s critical about literacy in this moment, and what it looks like to design a curriculum that treats long-form reading not as a logistical nuisance but as the foundation that holds everything else up.
Excerpts, Excerpts Everywhere, Nor Any Book to Read
The move away from whole books and toward shorter texts grew out of legitimate pressure: time constraints, standardized test formats that feature brief passages, the need to expose students to a variety of genres, and, increasingly, the belief that reading skills are wholly transferable — that a student who can summarize a 300-word passage can, with practice, summarize anything.
Recent research and survey data confirm this trend toward excerpts. By and large, students are reading fewer whole books than they used to, and several widely-adopted ELA programs have contributed to that trend by subordinating whole-text reading to shorter excerpts. In 2023, a quarter of educators across grades 3–8 reported that their students primarily read excerpts [1]. Another recent survey found that students read few — or in some cases no — books in the top-adopted ELA programs in the country [2].
It’s important, too, that we contextualize this shift in ELA classroom within broader literacy trends outside the classroom. To put plainly: fewer and fewer Americans are reading. Over the past two decades, reading for pleasure declined by over 40% across the population [3].
The concern here extends beyond reading scores, though we know those, too, are declining. But there are broader societal implications that are cause for concern. We know that reading promotes empathy, it supports mental health, it fosters critical thinking.
So what, then, is the responsibility of ELA teachers and school leaders in the wake of this literacy and reading crisis?
The ELA Classroom as a Space of Resistance
Here is the uncomfortable truth: at the exact moment when students need sustained reading most, many ELA programs are giving them less of it.
We’ve all seen the headlines: Attention spans are declining. Reading for pleasure has fallen off a cliff. College professors are sounding alarms about students who cannot get through a chapter without reaching for their phones. AI summarizers are acting as an easy alternative to difficult texts. Whether intentional or not, the response from much of the ELA curriculum industry has been to accommodate that decline rather than counter it. Shorter passages. More excerpts. Skills checklists that can be practiced on 400-word texts. In an attempt to meet students where they are, we aren’t helping them get where they need to be.
The ELA classroom is one of the few places in a young person’s education where they are asked to follow a complex argument across many pages, to inhabit a character’s perspective across an entire novel, to stay with a text long enough for meaning to develop rather than arrive instantly. Those experiences are critical. They are a form of cognitive and intellectual development that cannot be replicated through a skills checklist or a standardized passage, yet they are experiences that the broader culture is actively working against.
This is why we think the responsibility of ELA instruction right now is not just to teach reading. It is to defend it.
This is not to say we are defending reading against technology categorically, because that binary doesn’t serve anyone. But we need to defend reading against the logic of compression that has hollowed out what reading instruction means. Against the assumption that if a skill can be assessed on a short passage, it should be taught on one. Against the complicity in the false belief that students cannot sustain attention through a whole book, when the question we need to be asking is this: what would it take to build that capacity?
The answer is not to make reading easier. It is to make reading something worth doing, and then to support students in doing it. That means engaging texts: novels, long-form journalism, poetry, graphic novels that have something real and relevant inside them, something worth the effort. It means discussion that gives students a reason to go back to the text, to look for something they missed, to change their mind about what they think. It means scaffolds and language supports that lower the barrier to entry without removing or compromising the cognitive demand. It means teachers who understand productive struggle with a difficult text is a necessary part of the process. And it means having a curriculum that supports that process.
The ELA classroom has a timely opportunity — and, we would argue, an obligation — to be a space where students develop the reading stamina and critical literacy skills that the rest of their lives will require. Because reading facilitates empathy; it facilitates self-discovery and curiosity, And because a person who cannot read slowly, skeptically, and with sustained attention is poorly equipped for a world that will ask them to evaluate an enormous amount of text, much of it generated by machines, most of it designed to seem more authoritative than it is.
These are the literacy skills each student deserves. They’re the literacy skills our communities and society needs, now more than ever.
That is a high-stakes literacy challenge. The ELA classroom is the perfect place to meet it.
What Real Reading Looks Like in a Curriculum
Saying that students need to read more is easy. Designing a curriculum that makes sustained reading structurally possible is harder, and it requires specific design decisions beyond intentions.
At Inquiry by Design, long-form texts are used in every grades, not as a supplement to the skills work but as the foundation from which everything else grows. Students read novels, long-form journalism, graphic novels, and poems — real texts, not passages written for a curriculum, each intentionally curated because they have something worth thinking about inside them.
Those texts are in students’ hands physically. A Student Reader that a student holds, annotates, and returns to across the unit. This is a curricular design decision about what reading is: a sustained, cognitively demanding act that requires time, attention, and the kind of struggle that builds capacity.
And crucially, the reading is never isolated from the rest of the literacy work. Discussion grows from what students noticed in the text. Writing grows from what developed in discussion. Language instruction appears at the point of use, tied to the specific text and the specific demands it makes on the reader. Reading is not a separate block that feeds into other blocks. It is the shared intellectual foundation from which everything else — writing, language, thinking, knowledge-building — develops. This is what Connected by Design looks like.
Taking back teaching, in this context, means refusing to accommodate declining reading stamina by removing its cause. It means designing curriculum that treats the struggle of difficult reading not as a barrier to learning but as the mechanism through which learning actually happens.
This is the fifth post in The Connected Learning Project, a blog series from Inquiry by Design. Connected learning isn’t just a framework we write about — it’s the design principle behind everything we build. Inquiry by Design is a print-first English Language Arts (ELA) and Spanish Language Arts (SLA) curriculum for grades 6–12, built so reading, writing, language, and discussion work together in every lesson. We serve 40+ districts and nearly 500,000 students nationwide.