We’re teaching reading wrong, writes Natalie Wexler in The Atlantic. U.S. schools spend a lot of time on reading skills in the early grades, very little teaching history, science or the arts. If students struggle with comprehension, “history and science may continue to be relegated to the far back burner through middle school.” Reading proficiency hasn’t improved in 20 years on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), writes Wexler. The latest results showed gain

. . .  researchers trained adults to read in a new language, printed in unfamiliar symbols, and then measured their learning with reading tests and brain scans. Professor Kathy Rastle, from the Department of Psychology at Royal Holloway said, “The results were striking; people who had focused on the meanings of the new words were much less accurate in reading aloud and comprehension than those who had used phonics, and our MRI scans revealed that their brains had to work hard