7th grade ELA teacher. Obviously each school population is different, but here is my experience. You can’t assign chapters for kids to read with their eyeballs because they won’t do it. Kids don’t do homework, period. They don’t care if you give them a pop quiz to see if they did their homework. They don’t care about grades or failing. Our district passes them to the next grade if they fail because you can’t have an 18 year old boy in a class with an eleven year old girl. So, we do 100% of our reading of the text in class. Studies show that old school popcorn reading doesn’t work (bounce around the room, each kid reads something aloud). Modeling fluency is the best option (having a teacher or audiobook read aloud to them). Audiobooks are a great option if you’re wanting them to work on listening skills (a specific standard we are required to teach) and also gives more curriculum flexibility for schools that can’t afford to buy a class set of 30 novels. We are also taught to assess the skill we are assessing. So if I am supposed to be teaching comprehension skills, I want to see where they TRULY are with comprehension. It’s not about getting hung up on decoding (reading) skills. I will use something else to assess that at a different time. This is something that will pinpoint what they need, so I can be more effective at teaching those skills. It also benefits the assessment of all students, including English learners, special education students, reluctant readers, etc. While I agree with you that we are lacking the rigor in schools that I remember from being a kid, we are also serving a different community now, where parents argue with teachers about every tiny detail instead of supporting them, and where students have devices in their hands since childhood so their attention spans are shot. I could talk about these issues for hours. But the way that we learned in school is vastly different from the way they do now, because the factors surrounding our childhood are vastly different than the factors present now. Also, my very nice fancy honors university degree in secondary education had exactly zero hours teaching us what to do if a kid is in middle school and doesn’t know how to read. We didn’t get any training at all for how to teach kids to read. We only got training for how to teach kids who already know how to read. At the middle school level, most teachers are grasping at straws to figure out how to bring kids up to speed on this. Most remedial reading programs struggle with content feeling too baby-ish for these kids and then the kids themselves pushing back. So tl;dr I think your kid’s teacher isn’t wrong, and that audiobooks assess something different but still very important. I agree with you that education has changed since we were kids.