Don’t Blame Students for Reading Less—Change What Schools Ask Them to Read

Summary for Educators

Based on Michele Caracappa
Reading to Lead, September 15, 2026

THE BIG IDEA

When students struggle to read full-length books, educators can easily conclude that today’s students simply lack the attention, interest, or stamina to handle them. Michele Caracappa challenges that framing. Drawing on recent reporting about declining whole-book reading, she argues that schools themselves have helped create the conditions they now lament. Instructional time has shifted toward excerpts that resemble state-test passages; mandated curricula may leave little room for novels; and intervention programs can further reduce time available for sustained reading. If students rarely encounter whole books, schools should not be surprised when they struggle to read them. Caracappa’s central point is about agency: framing the problem as “kids can’t” encourages resignation, while framing it as a problem of curriculum, expectations, and opportunity creates possibilities for change. (Michele Caracappa)

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Students’ declining experience with full-length books may reflect what schools have stopped asking them to do, not simply a change in student ability or motivation. (Michele Caracappa)

• Test preparation and excerpt-based instruction can unintentionally crowd out sustained encounters with novels and other complete texts. (Michele Caracappa)

• How educators frame a problem matters. If the explanation is that students simply cannot read books, leaders may feel there is little they can change. (Michele Caracappa)

• Lower expectations can become self-reinforcing: students who are rarely expected to read complete texts have fewer opportunities to develop the stamina required to do so.

• Individual teachers can make a difference, but Caracappa argues that lasting improvement requires systemwide curriculum and policy decisions, not heroic efforts classroom by classroom. (Michele Caracappa)

• Access to rich, high-quality literature should be regarded as a basic instructional entitlement rather than something determined by school, district, or ZIP code. (Michele Caracappa)

WHY IT MATTERS

The language educators use about students can quietly determine what schools are willing to attempt.

When adults say, “These students can’t handle a novel,” that statement can become both diagnosis and destiny. Teachers assign shorter texts because students lack stamina. Students receive fewer opportunities to build stamina because teachers assign shorter texts. Eventually, the absence of reading experience becomes evidence that the original assumption was correct.

That cycle should concern school leaders.

Reading a full book requires more than decoding individual sentences. Students must sustain attention, remember information across chapters, recognize relationships among ideas, infer meaning over time, and develop increasingly complex mental representations of characters, arguments, and themes. Those capacities cannot develop fully if students encounter most texts only in fragments.

The issue is not whether excerpts have a place in instruction. They clearly do. The question is whether excerpts have become a substitute for the sustained reading experiences students also need.

Caracappa’s argument also raises an important leadership principle: when large groups of students struggle with something, leaders should examine the system before locating the problem exclusively within the students.

LEADERSHIP ACTIONS

1. Conduct a whole-text audit.
Ask each grade level: How many complete books will students actually read this year?

2. Examine instructional time.
Determine how much ELA time is devoted to full texts versus excerpts, test preparation, intervention programs, and isolated skill practice.

3. Watch the language adults use.
Listen for statements such as “our kids won’t read that” or “they can’t handle it.” Replace assumptions with a more productive question: What support would make this possible?

4. Build reading stamina intentionally.
Students who have had limited opportunities to read sustained texts may need scaffolding, structured reading time, discussion, vocabulary support, and progressively greater expectations.

5. Protect teachers from solving systemic problems individually.
If the curriculum leaves insufficient room for high-quality whole books, that is a leadership and curriculum-design problem—not something individual teachers should have to fix alone.

6. Make access to books an equity issue.
Every student should regularly encounter compelling literature and complete texts, regardless of reading level, school assignment, or neighborhood.

LEADER REFLECTION

Imagine asking every student in your school one simple question:

“How many complete books have you read in school during the past year?”

Would their answers reflect the kind of readers your school says it wants to develop?

Perhaps the most important leadership question is not “Why won’t these kids read?”

It is:

“What opportunities have we consistently given them to become readers?” (Michele Caracappa)

Original Article

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Prepared with the assistance of AI software OpenAI. (2026). ChatGPT (5.2) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com