A Bounty Program for Teaching Kids to Read? $20K Would Go a Long Way
In this video, Dr. Justin Baeder discusses the idea of incentivizing reading instruction results and the current challenges schools face in getting students to read proficiently.
Key Takeaways
- Reading instruction needs urgency - Too many students aren't learning to read at grade level, and current approaches aren't working fast enough
- Incentives could drive change - A bounty-style program might motivate schools and teachers to prioritize evidence-based reading instruction
- The science of reading is clear - We know how to teach reading effectively; the challenge is implementation at scale
Transcript
I think we need a bounty program for teaching kids to read.
We know how to teach kids to read.
We have all the knowledge that we need.
You can get a $20 book off of Amazon or you can make up your own flashcards and teach your kid to read.
But so many kids slip through the cracks because there's not enough individual help for them.
You have to have tutors.
You have to have interventionists.
You have to have people who can work with kids one-on-one if they're falling behind in reading or else they're never going to catch up.
And I think a bounty program might actually be the best way to do that because in a lot of schools, there are the resources.
There are enough people to help the small number of kids who need that intense level of help but poverty in this country is so concentrated the needs are so concentrated in a small number of schools that there aren't enough adults to go around and you have whole classes that are pretty much behind and need that help and there just aren't enough adults to help them so i think one way we could address this but also address the problem of kids being way behind is with a bounty program hear me out on this i think The bounty for helping a kid who is behind in reading to catch up and become a fluent reader should increase as the kid gets older because the stakes get higher, right?
If you're an adult who cannot read, the stakes of that are monumental.
You're going to face huge obstacles in life.
You're much more likely to be incarcerated.
So I think we should put some money to that and say, look, we're going to end up paying in a lot of cases for social services, for prisons, if we don't get kids to read.
Why don't we pay people to tutor older and older students to help them learn how to read?
We know how to do this.
We know how to teach every kid to read.
You can get a $20 book off of Amazon and teach your kid how to read.
fairly quickly.
And the farther behind you are, the more intense that work becomes.
So the bigger the bounty should be.
But I think we could solve this problem.
Like if you could make $20,000 for helping teach someone to read, of course people would be willing to put the time in that.
And then there are lots of people who dedicate their time to doing that for free, but that solution doesn't quite scale.
There aren't enough people out there who are willing to put in the dozens or hundreds of hours that it takes to help someone learn how to read at an older age.
Let me know what you think about this idea though.
I think this might have some wings.