SINCE Susan Adler, Alberta Dougan, and Jesus Garcia like ideas, here's one to ponder: young people in this country can't read. Decode, maybe. But read with comprehension, absolutely not. The saddest thing about this crisis is that it is no secret. The 2001 results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) for reading, published in every major newspaper, showed some improvements at the elementary level. But after fourth grade, students fall through the cracks by the tens of thousands. In places like Cleveland, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and the District of Columbia, over half of the eighth-graders tested failed to reach even the level on the NAEP. At the 12th-grade level, the situation is just as dire. Visit the website of the National Center for Education Statistics, and you'll discover that the basic level for the 12th-graders is what most of us might expect of a fifth-grader. (1) Let this fact sink in. We are talking about the majority of high school students in some of the biggest cities in this country. It is these students--often children from impoverished schools and homes--who leave high school without the skills of literacy that pave the way to college, economic opportunity, or a decent future. We should all be appalled. The question put to the social studies professionals in my original article was, are you going to do about this? While nodding in the direction of the problem, Professors Adler, Dougan, and Garcia devote the bulk of their response to describing the complexities of changing curriculum policy, the and overlapping constituencies of interest, and the and not so subtle forces that are a part of this complex enterprise. Their response reminds me of a department head who approached me after a recent talk. I have a lot of things on my plate, he explained. This reading thing you're talking about--that's the job of the language arts department. No it isn't. What good are from the social studies if kids don't possess the skills to read the newspaper? To marginally literate high school students, how can social studies come alive if their prospects for the future are dead on arrival? invite Professors Adler, Dougan, and Garcia on a tour of a typical comprehensive high school, one that, like many, is still separated into ability tracks. In the social studies classes of the general track, they will find no shortage of big ideas. Kids their in their preferred learning styles--a euphemism for anything that avoids serious reading and writing. If you go down the hall to the AP classroom, you may find a less-stimulating pedagogy. Faced with the impossibility of getting through the curriculum, many teachers bolt out of the starting gate and leave their students in the dust. Observing the rat-a-tat-tat of overheads in such classrooms--and adolescents futilely trying to get it all down--is a dreary experience at best. But often you'll find something here that you'll find nowhere else in the social studies curriculum, and it is this feature that redeems such classrooms. The end-of-the-year AP history exam still reserves a chunk of points for the Document Based Question, in which students review seven to 12 primary documents and then write an argumentative essay. Indeed, if you want to find a place where kids get weekly practice in reading and writing essays in social studies, look first to the AP class. The problem with this picture becomes apparent when we look at who is sitting in these classes. White and Asian students constitute 79% of the students taking the AP U.S. history exam. (2) More often than not, children of color are placed in social studies classes, where they study big ideas and display their understanding using multiple intelligences. One practice prepares students for the demands of college; the other, fear, does not. …