The "Book It" program

Prior to the past week or so, I had never heard of the "Book It" program, in which Pizza Hut gives a coupon for a free personal pizza as a reward for some minimum amount of reading. I must have been living under a rock! I don't know how I missed it, because it's everywhere. According to the Book It website, over 900,000 classrooms use this incentives program, which I'd estimate includes at least 20 million children. That's not quite half of all K through 12 students in the US. They have modified the program for preschoolers, with at least a million pre-K children enrolled, receiving pizza coupons for being read to by their parents.

In the parents' section of the Book It website, Pizza Hut associates itself with research which does not actually have anything to do with the Book It program specifically:

Do you want to know the secret to making your child a better reader? Time. Extensive research has proven that reading aloud to a child is the single most important factor in raising a reader. It takes only twenty minutes a day. Your child’s teacher will teach your child how to read. Your job is to teach your child to want to read....

Student achievement is significantly bolstered by just 20 extra minutes of reading each day (Block, 2003).

Am I supposed to be surprised that kids read better the more they read? What has that got to do with pizza?

The parenting literature and our school systems promote rewards and incentives so universally that it goes unquestioned that providing pizza in return for reading is an acceptable system. Never mind that, according to the NIH:

Obesity in kids is now epidemic in the United States. The number of children who are overweight has doubled in the last two to three decades; currently one child in five is overweight.

Never mind the disturbing trend toward commercial advertising and marketing in the schools. Incentives for reading seems like such an obviously good idea that school districts boast about how many of their classrooms use the program, and include it in formal school improvement plans.

But where is the proof that Book It has positive effects? How do we know that a) kids aren't faking their reading logs, b) kids are, in fact, reading more than they would have even without pizzas, c) kids are not simply reading easier books to rack up so many pages or books completed, d) Alfie Kohn is wrong that extrinsic motivators (pizzas) will decrease intrinsic motivation (enjoyment of reading)? What of Robin Grille's claim that fast food incentive programs result in lower reading comprehension ability and a decline in other, unrewarded reading?

Where is the frickin' research? I have Googled every imaginable phrase involving "efficacy," "improvement," "achievement," etc and "Book It program" and I'm not finding it. Nor do I see any study results on the Book It website that show the program improves reading. Pizza Hut instead brags about the number of books students reported reading as part of its program. Fine, but we have no way of knowing whether that's more than kids would have read even without the pizzas, and we have no way of knowing whether they chose easier or shorter books. Nor do we know if kids now feel they should be paid to read, because reading is a job, reading is drudgery.

We have no proof, that I can find, that Book It improves reading ability: speed, comprehension, grammar, spelling, or vocabulary. And yet, we're using this as a part of the reading curriculum with close to half of all K-12 students. If anyone has any hard facts on the program's efficacy, please do leave a comment! Because I am utterly mystified.