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 Kelly Gallagher. Portland: Stenhouse, 2009. 150 pp. $17.50. ISBN: 978-1-57110-780-0.

Despite our proclivity for reading- and our best intentions-it can be difficult for English teachers to find time to engage with professional texts. It is critical, though, to connect with authors who can provide a context for the effects of policies on our practices and provide a voice for those of us who see how political decisions affect our students. Readicide by Kelly Gallagher is exactly this type of book. It links high-stakes assessment with daily instruction, relating both of these factors to the future of this generation of adolescents. Kathleen Dudden Rowlands's review highlights key aspects of Gallagher's argument and illustrates why it is a "must read" for today's English teachers. Kelly Gallagher has nailed it. He has given classroom teachers a clear overview of the complex political and policy issues surrounding current (and largely flawed) literacy instruction, and he has combined that overview with practical, student- and classroom-tested approaches to countermand the damage those policies generate. In this well-researched and carefully documented account, Gallagher explains how the current high-stakes testing climate has reshaped classroom instruction in ways that "murder" reading (hence "readicide")-both for pleasure and for competence, in and out of the classroom. At the same time he offers teachers original instructional alternatives that he uses successfully with his urban public school students.

Gallagher defines readicide as "the systematic killing of the love of reading, often exacerbated by the inane, mind-numbing practices found in schools" (2). Calling on well-known and increasingly dire reports from the research arms of NAEP, ACT, and the National Assessment of Adult Literacy, among others, that document diminishing adolescent literacy proficiencies, he minces no words in painting a chilling portrait of the United States as a nation populated by increasing numbers of marginally literate citizens.

Some may find it disingenuous to draw on reports from organizations known for standardized testing to document the decline of literacy caused, in part, by a reliance on such assessments. However, well-established national tests such as the SAT, ACT, and even the NAEP are not the root of the problem. Such examinations are taken annually at most. Some are taken by...