Readicide: How Schools Are Killing Reading and What You Can Do about It

Readicide: How Schools Are Killing Reading and What You Can Do about It Written by Kelly Gallagher Stenhouse, 2009, 166 pp., ISBN 978-157110-780-0

I just returned from a year visiting secondary schools in Norway, a country that buys the most books per capita and has, combined with its Scandinavian neighbors, some of the highest scores in international tests of literacy. With their low emphasis on standardized tests, high rate of bilingual speakers, and finances that have been reappropriated to give schools with high numbers of immigrant students more money to spend on resources, the Norwegian secondary schools are offering a model of equitable and effective education. Norway is also known for historically advocating for human rights. This experience, combined with their strong model of education, is what drew me to Kelly Gallagher's Readicide: How Schools Are Killing Reading and What You Can Do about It.

In Readacide, Gallagher accuses US schools of systematically "killing the love of reading" (p. 2) by teaching to the...