Flipping the card over, she began to read. “When,” she said. “W-H-E-N.” She placed the card back on the table and announced she wanted to keep going.

“Good job!” Madison Schwab, her first-grade co-teacher responded.

She tried another one. “Fret. F-R-E-T,” she carefully and triumphantly sounded out. 

Scarlett and her Success Academy classmates, all sitting in clusters of three or four, were playing a new literacy game called Popped!. 

At the next table, a group of students chatted with one of the game’s creators: world-renowned artist Jeff Koons, whose famous sculpture, Balloon Dog, just turned 30 and serves as the game’s mascot. 

“There is a tremendous problem with education,” Koons bluntly told The 74 in an interview Thursday, referring to reading instruction. Of the science of reading, which the game is meant to bolster, he said, “I think it’s wonderful.”

Popped! was created in collaboration with Clever Noodle, a company that promotes literacy through table-top games. Jacquelyn Davis founded Clever Noodle after she noticed her son, Madden, struggling to read during the pandemic. 

A former teacher and school leader, she began creating games, which she says are based on the science of reading and its emphasis on phonics instruction, to get her son back on track. At the encouragement of Madden’s teacher, Davis said she decided to fill the need for other students as well. 

“We want reading to be so much fun that they don’t even know they’re learning,” Davis added. “And that’s why we’re beyond grateful that Mr. Koons is going to work with us.”

In the first-grade classroom, Tanisha, 7, sat at a table in the back, surrounded by colorful posters and signs. Of Popped! she said, “I think it’s fun because I like reading, and I like reading books, too.” Her favorites? The Fly Guy and Elephant Piggy series. 

Tanisha packed up the game and headed to the rug where Koons was presented with drawings and cards to celebrate Balloon Dog’s big birthday. 

The father of seven thanked the students for their artwork saying, “Each one of these is so special … we are all artists.”

“When you see the blue dog in the future,” he continued, “it’s smiling back at you.”

Clever Noodle released Popped! in the midst of a nationwide literacy crisis and a reckoning with how schools have historically taught reading. As of April, 38 states and Washington, D.C., have passed laws or implemented policies related to evidence-based literacy instruction that broadly fall under the science of reading umbrella, according to an Education Week analysis.  

Davis noted that they were excited to bring the game to Success Academy because they were already integrating the best practices of evidence-based literacy instruction. Since its founding in 2006, the 55-public school charter network, the largest in New York, has used a phonics program for all kindergarten and first grade students. 

Koons and Davis are hoping to extend this sort of learning that is also exciting to other students through the game. 

Koons has his own reading story. He shared that he grew up with a mild astigmatism, a curve in the eye’s surface which blurs vision, which made reading challenging and, he believes, ultimately pulled him more towards the visual world. But, as an adult, reading greatly impacts his work. 

“When I make a body of work I look back and think, ‘Oh, I was reading this philosophical text and I was reading this novel’ … It just activates the mind.”

Koons is widely known for his stainless-steel sculptures depicting everyday objects, including the iconic Rabbit and Balloon Dog pieces. In 2019, a $91 million sale of his Rabbit sculpture set a new auction record, for a living artist. 

Davis relayed that when Koons was younger, he felt intimidated and not welcomed when he walked into a museum. His response was to make art that was accessible, inviting and helped people find themselves. 

“For us, reading is that,” Davis said. “Reading makes the world accessible. Reading makes math accessible. It makes science accessible … I love that [Koons] focuses on accessibility because for me reading is about access to the world.”

“That was put so well,” the artist responded. 

As the presentation concluded, Davis announced that all of the students would get their own Popped! to bring home.

“We hope you have a great time playing … and we hope you do a lot of practice over the summer, so you can stay smart and come back to school ready.”

Disclosure: Campbell Brown sits on Success Academy network board of directors emeritus. Brown co-founded The 74 and sits on its board of directors.

Indiana, like all 38 states that have adopted the phonics-based approach of teaching reading, has to navigate several challenges to put it in classrooms quickly. It’s not always a smooth change in any state, particularly since veteran teachers must toss aside lessons they have used for years and rapidly learn new approaches.

Indiana legislators, who voted last year to order the shift to science of reading, say the change is urgent and training must be done well to reverse the state’s declining reading scores that had fallen even before the pandemic.

Tempers flared at the May state board of education meeting where teachers criticized the 80 hours of science of reading training required for all preschool through fifth grade teachers as “excessive” and “burdensome.” 

Other complaints about a lack of training slots and unwieldy training schedules that added fuel to teacher frustration are easing, as more slots and more flexibility of training times are coming soon.

Indiana’s 80-hour training requirement is on the high end compared to other states. It’s almost four times as long as in neighboring Ohio, for example. But it’s also far from the highest. A few states, like North and South Carolina, are requiring twice as much.

Robert Morris, a teacher in the Duneland school district, told the state board in early May, the 80 hours of training training is unnecessarily “rigorous and time consuming,” 

“While no knowledge is a waste, it does seem excessive as a requirement,” Morris said as part of a crowd urged to attend by the Indiana State Teachers Association, the state’s main teachers union.

Dianna Reed, secretary of ISTA, told the board the mandated training has “compounded existing challenges of teacher burnout and retention.”

“Colleagues have expressed they would rather let their licenses lapse at the next renewal date, than be subjected to more hoops and mandates to prove their worth,” she said. “We are already experiencing a shortage of qualified educators and these new requirements do not signal to our teachers that their education degrees obtained…are valued.”

Teachers also complained that the $1,200 stipend the state is offering as compensation for the training amounts to $15 an hour — what retail and fast food jobs pay. 

Jeff Raatz, chairman of the Indiana Senate Committee on Education and Career Development did not respond to questions from The 74 about why the legislature chose 80 hours as its mandate. 

Robert Behning, chair of the Indiana House Committee on Education, defended requiring 80 hours, noting it is just one of several steps Indiana is taking to improve literacy.

“We want to be the best,” he said.

Behning said 80 hours may seem like a lot, but the state’s not requiring completion until 2027 and only when teachers are renewing their teaching licenses. Teachers whose licenses renew later will have more time.

Behning also said Indiana already requires 90 hours of coursework each time a teacher renews their license. Because Indiana is prioritizing reading, he said, the state will count the 80 hours of science of reading training as fulfilling that entire requirement, saving teachers 10 hours.

“I don’t find it unreasonable when we’re giving them the length of time that they’re being given to do it plus, since we’re counting it for relicensure,” he said.

Setting teacher training in the science of reading for already-practicing teachers isn’t easy. Training time, compensation, and online vs. in-person sessions differ greatly by state.

State law in Arizona and Wisconsin requires less than 50 hours of training for current teachers as they shift to the science of reading, while Florida requires 60 hours, according to experts that track reading laws.

Tennessee also requires 60 hours of training, split between online and in-person.

Some require even less. Neighboring Ohio as well as Washington, D.C., each recently announced that teachers must do 25 hours or fewer of online training as part of the shift.

But some states require more than Indiana.

North Carolina, whose legislature ordered a shift to science of reading in 2021, requires all teachers of kindergarten through fifth grade to do the two year, 160-hour 

Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS) lessons from Lexia Learning that many educators consider the gold standard program in science of reading methods. 

South Carolina also just approved in March full LETRS training for all K-3 teachers. That decision openly copies Mississippi, which also gave LETRS training to all K-3 teachers starting in 2013, as one of several pieces of the so-called “Mississippi Miracle” shift in teaching reading that led to significant score increases.

The Indiana Department of Education did not reply to questions from The 74 about how many teachers need science of reading training, but by some accounts the state’s universities have not been training teachers in reading well.

The National Council on Teacher Quality last year found that while schools like Ball State and Marian University- Indianapolis taught aspiring teachers all the elements of good reading instruction, most didn’t. It graded multiple Indiana University campuses, including Bloomngton with a D or F.

“Indiana ranks among the worst in the nation for the average number of components of reading its programs adequately address,” the council’s national Teacher Prep Review concluded.

While Indiana is requiring universities to change what they teach, the Indiana Department of Education has hired Massachusetts-based Keys to Literacy to provide free training for up to 9,000 teachers to help them adjust their teaching.

Right now, Keys offers training split between 40 hours of asynchronous online classes – those teachers can take any time – and 40 hours of synchronous classes where teachers must join up to 200 others online with an instructor at selected times. That requirement drew criticism from teachers who said it imposes a schedule on time they prepare for classes or have family plans.

When Keys to Literacy opened up new training slots in April, those filled immediately, leaving many teachers thinking they were shut out of a chance at free training. Some worried they’d be stuck paying for other training on their own.

But the legislature removed the synchronous training requirement effective July 1, so teachers can take online training any time that fits their schedule after then.

Jenner and Keys have also opened up fall and spring 2025 sessions, which make more slots and times available.

How the state will pay for extra slots or extra teachers has not been resolved, but Behning said the legislature should easily approve money when it builds a new state budget next year, if needed.

The July 1 end of the synchronous training requirement has tradeoffs, however, in how effective the training can be. Officials of Lexia, Keys and The New Teacher Project, another science of reading provider to several states, say research of all online learning shows that some time with a live instructor brings better results, as teachers saw when they taught online during the pandemic.

Back-and-forth interaction with an instructor and other students is also valuable as teachers start to take the theories behind reading and start finding ways to use them in daily lessons.

As researchers specializing in linguistics and early literacy development, we celebrate the growing movement to connect preschool instruction with the science of reading. Between 2019 and 2022, 45 states passed new laws requiring schools adopt a scientific approach to reading curriculum and instruction. In 31 states, the laws apply to preschool students as well. 

These mandates are a golden opportunity to capitalize on the unique energy, curiosity, and explosive growth in oral language that children experience during the preschool years. 

Early-learning experiences have exponential power: they can shape lifelong learning habits and accelerate literacy, particularly for English-language learners. To unlock that potential, educators and providers must ensure that students acquire a critical mass of vocabulary and related content knowledge from engaging social studies and science texts and activities.Knowledge-rich preschool curriculum is the key. To assist states and preschool providers as they revisit their literacy lessons, the Knowledge Matter Campaign recently updated its K–8 English Language Arts curriculum review tool to include “Early Childhood Essentials.”

Big Ideas for Little Learners

When students learn to read in elementary school, they draw on their vocabulary and what they already know about the subject to make sense of the words on the page. For decades, research has shown that a preschool student’s vocabulary size is a powerful predictor of their later academic success, and that background knowledge is a powerful factor in reading comprehension. Preschool curriculums that intentionally build student knowledge through activities that engage young children with complex oral language are designed with these insights in mind.

The Knowledge Matters Campaign has identified four major attributes of a high-quality, evidence-based, knowledge-building preschool curriculum:

• They are grounded in read-alouds on science and social studies topics that include target vocabulary and are compelling to young children, like space travel or weather.
• They include texts from multiple genres, such as stories and informational texts, that are presented in sequence and use the target vocabulary words.
• They teach related words, phrases, and ideas, including academic vocabulary.
• They extend learning through individual and small-group activities that prompt students to draw on their knowledge and use complex, content-rich language, such as discussions or sensory learning.

Knowledge-Building in Action

What does a knowledge-building preschool curriculum look like? Such classrooms follow multi-week units focused on a single, high-interest topic. Their walls feature art and photographs about the topic, and teachers actively engage students in read-alouds and discussions that are focused on the topic. A set of vocabulary words are gradually introduced and reinforced in texts, discussions, and activities.

For example, in the World of Words curriculum used in New York City public preschools¹, a three-week Wild Animals unit is focused on an interrelated set of 10 vocabulary words and what information students should know by the end of the unit. Teachers and students discuss these key concepts, such as that wild animals live outdoors and away from humans, and are not kept as pets, and use target vocabulary words like bear, lion, and giraffe. All the while, they connect this learning to “big ideas” such as where wild animals live and how wild animals either protect themselves or need protection from others.

Discussions are grounded in five books: a nonfiction information book, two storybooks, and two “predictable” books, which use repetitive phrases and sentence structure. Varying text types expose students to several types of academic language, in addition to the colloquial language preschoolers pick up from their peers. When teachers read and re-read these books aloud throughout the unit, students are welcomed to chime in and participate in the read-aloud.

Consider the opening lines in If I Were a Lion, an illustrated predictable book about wild animals written in verse:

If I were a lion / I’d growl and roar / and knock the dishes / on the floor.
If I were a bear / I’d have big claws / I’d rip up pillows with my paws.

Students can explore the vocabulary and ideas, learn the cadence of the passage, and build important connections about different animals, habitats, and behaviors—all while they practice early-literacy basics like print awareness and letter knowledge. Repetitive texts and related topic knowledge are especially helpful to English-language learners, since they connect new vocabulary with tangible information about the world.

A study of the curriculum found positive impacts on student vocabulary and understanding of science concepts. And in the dynamic preschool classroom, extension activities about everyday social studies and science topics are at the ready, from a visit to a school garden to a walk around the neighborhood—activities that engage and excite young children.

Plus, learning about lions and bears is a lot more fun than learning about “L” and “B.”

Schemas Make Skillful Readers

Knowledge-building curriculums also prepare students to read and understand texts about unfamiliar topics. Preschoolers don’t just learn about wild animals; rather, they experience how information can be related and organized within a theme or topic. Content-rich texts and lessons prompt students to build knowledge networks and conceptual frameworks, or schemas, that help them identify patterns and take in more sophisticated ideas. When students experience this type of understanding, they develop inferencing skills that they apply to other information.

Strong readers are not born—they are built over time, and those efforts start in preschool. As states take a closer look at preschool education, curriculums designed to build oral language and student knowledge can point the way forward. Today’s joyful chatter can be tomorrow’s persuasive essay, so long as we start early and give these curious, fast-developing students the tools and opportunities they need to thrive.

In Ohio, where students who scored poorly on state reading tests had to repeat third grade for the last decade, the state legislature ended the requirement last summer in a bill that also adopted the science of reading.

In Indiana, state officials just restored mandatory retention of low-scoring third graders after a seven year absence. Gov. Eric Holcomb signed a law this month requiring students that don’t score as proficient on the state’s IREAD-3 tests to be held back in third grade, with few exceptions. The state estimates the new law will hold back 18 times as many third graders when it takes effect in 2025  — 7,500 compared to just over 400 today.

Third grade retention and science of reading are two strategies for improving reading that have sparked similar excitement – more than a decade apart – and a rush of states to adopt them. Both Ohio and Indiana joined the third grade retention movement in 2012, though Indiana later backed away before rejoining it this spring and Ohio never fully embraced it.

Both states have also seen reading scores drop on NAEP, the “nation’s report card,” even before the pandemic, then decline more after. Such results make it only natural for legislatures to shift gears, experts said.

“Third grade is obviously a critical moment,” said American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Robert Pondiscio. “There’s nothing to be gained by giving kids more of what hasn’t worked. It should trigger different, intensive efforts.”

He and others like Timothy Shanahan, professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, said the key is not just adopting something that sounds good, but making sure it changes classroom instruction. 

Both Ohio and Indiana seem to be covering those bases, with more teacher training, new textbooks, and other student supports. Whether those are enough and how well they are used by teachers, schools and parents is still to be determined. 

Right now, the desire for immediate change, particularly in Indiana, is clear.

“About one in five students in Indiana can’t read effectively by the end of third grade,” said Indiana State Rep. Linda Rogers, one of the law’s authors. “This is not acceptable. If a child hasn’t learned basic reading skills by that point in school, they’re going to struggle to learn almost every other subject.”

Indiana education superintendent Katie Jenner told the legislature the state can’t have 14,000 third graders scoring below proficient on Indiana’s IREAD-3 test, as happened in 2023, without taking real steps to catch them up.

“The students who are just moving on are never passing. Ever. Ever,” Jenner said. “It’s hard to say that, but it’s honest.”

Indiana’s new law also requires more testing of second and third graders to identify struggling readers and for more interventions, such as l summer reading classes after second and third grade for students who are behind.

Jenner said adding these interventions and the retention mandate is a natural second step in the state’s literacy plan after focusing on having the right reading lessons through the science of reading and training teachers to teach them last year.

Requiring students to repeat third grade after not passing reading tests became law in California in 1998, rising  to national prominence after Florida adopted the policy in 2002 under then-Gov. Jeb Bush. Since then, several states have passed similar laws, though with differing policies on which students – such as special education, English Language Learners or students who have already repeated a grade – are exempt.

All shared a similar reasoning: Third grade is where students usually shift from ”learning to read to reading to learn,” or needing to read well enough they can read and learn other subjects. Students need to master reading by then, backers argued, or they will fall behind in 4th grade and beyond or may never learn to read. Mandatory retention also gives students, parents and teachers a deadline for taking reading seriously.

The strategy has promising early results, with some studies showing students making strong reading gains in the first few years after retention, though gains often faded by high school. Some of the most dramatic results came in Indiana under an earlier version of third grade retention that was dropped in 2017, a Brown University study showed.

But opponents in multiple states raised objections each time bills were introduced, usually citing studies that show smaller gains and psychological damage to students who are held back because of teasing, feelings of failure and being separated from friends. The studies have also noted Black and Hispanic students are usually held back at higher rates than white students.

Indiana was an early state in the third grade retention movement when former state superintendent Tony Bennett pushed for it in 2010. The legislature did not agree, but the state board of education mandated it with an administrative rule in 2012.

The Indiana Department of Education eased that requirement in 2017-18, telling schools to consider student performance in all subjects, even if not scoring well in reading, to decide if a student should move to fourth grade.

Third grade reading also had big changes in 2012 in Ohio, when then-Gov. John Kasich won approval from Ohio’s state legislature for his “Third Grade Reading Guarantee” that required more tests to identify students having trouble reading and for schools to hold back students who score poorly.

Unlike Indiana, which always made proficiency the threshold for promotion, Ohio set a lower score that needed to be raised over time. That set off constant debates each time the state school board had to decide how much to increase the score. Over time, the score crept higher but too many board members had reservations for the needed score to ever reach the proficiency level.

About 3,600 students were held back each year under Ohio’s retention law before several Republicans joined Democrats in opposing it last year.

“Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach to literacy that currently exists, (a change) will give local and parental control to districts when deciding to retain a child,” Republican Rep. Gayle Manning told legislators in pushing an opposition bill last year.

In the end, a joint House and Senate committee chose to give parents the final say in holding back their children as part of a compromise state budget bill. Though many Ohio Senate Republicans wanted to keep the retention requirement, they relented because the bill included the shift to the science of reading and a requirement that students keep receiving extra reading help until they can catch up.

“I wasn’t in favor of it (ending retention), but we put some things in that I wanted,” said Senate Education Committee Chairman Andrew Brenner, also a leading backer of science of reading. “I think that will help immensely to get kids back on track over the next couple of years.”

The Ohio Department of Education and Workforce does not yet know how many students avoided retention this fall because of the law change.

In Indiana, attempts by Democrats to give parents the final say in whether a child has to repeat third grade, like Ohio decided last year, were voted down by Republicans. Attempts to delay the law until the state could see how science of reading changes affect scores also were voted down.

The Alabama State Board of Education Thursday adopted a new literacy coursework for Science of Reading for teacher preparation programs in the state.

The change, approved on a unanimous vote, comes after years of a state focus on literacy scores, especially in the lower grades.

State Superintendent Eric Mackey said the standards would apply to elementary teachers, collaborative special education teachers and “could be applied to some other areas also.”

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“Mostly, they are focused again on early childhood and elementary teachers,” he said.

The Science of Reading is an interdisciplinary body of research about reading and issues of reading and writing. The Reading League’s definition, cited in the standards, includes phonemic awareness and letter instruction as instructional practices but not emphases on larger units of speech, such as syllables.

The new standards also outlaw the “three-cueing” system in institutions of higher education and K-12 schools. The rule change defines three cueing as a “model of teaching students to read based on meaning, structure, and syntax, and visual cues.”

Three-cueing is a teaching strategy that is affiliated with “balanced literacy,” a compromise between whole language and phonics-based instruction that became prominent in the 1990s, according to the Hechinger Report. Three-cueing encourages students to guess and look for clues, such as at pictures, when facing an unfamiliar word.

The skills associated with the Science of Reading were not taught in schools for many years, as reported by Emily Hanford for APM Reports. As of May 2023, 15 states had outlawed the use of three-cueing after Hanford’s reporting, with some lawmakers and policy makers citing the podcast, according to APM Reports.

HB 173, sponsored by Rep. Leigh Hulsey, R-Helena, would have banned the use of three-cueing, with some exceptions. The legislation passed the House of Representatives on March 5 but was among the many bills that died in the final days of the session.

“This prohibition is specific to the teaching of foundational reading skills and should not be construed to impact the teaching of background knowledge and vocabulary as connected to the language comprehension side of Scarborough’s Reading Rope,” the Senate Education Policy Committee substitute reads.

Scarborugh’s Reading Rope is a visual representation of establishing proficient reading, according to the Arizona Department of Education.

Hulsey said Tuesday that her bill was “complementary” with the standards adopted by the board, and that she expected to bring it back next year.

“Ultimately, kids need to learn how to actually read, and that is done through the science of reading, learning how to decode sound out letters, and figuring out how to put those things together to actually decode the word and be able to be lifelong readers, versus someone who is just looking at words and guessing,” she said, “We’re not setting kids up for success if we’re not actually teaching them how to read.”

She said the exceptions in the bill were mainly for older learners and those with learning disabilities.

In October, members of the Literacy Task Force cited teacher training and implementation as a hurdle in implementing literacy instruction.

Mackey said they had received comments earlier. They received no additional public comments on the current version, which they voted on the intent to approve months ago.

Alabama Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alabama Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Brian Lyman for questions: info@alabamareflector.com. Follow Alabama Reflector on Facebook and Twitter.

Kids like her daughter Clara, a second grader, glommed on to its rich characters; she’s especially fond of Lily, who wears her black hair in a short bob and has a collection of plush toy lions. Fellow teachers, meanwhile, like that it “hits everything” students need to be strong readers.

“It slowly builds, introducing more and more sounds, and then it jumps right into blending those sounds into little words,” Morrison said. At least two independent studies link the program to “significant positive” results.

But that winning combo initially wasn’t enough for Ohio’s education department to put Superkids on its list of approved K-5 reading materials. Morrison homed in on a likely culprit: EdReports, a nonprofit that for nine years has operated as a kind of “Consumer Reports” for the multi-billion dollar K-12 publishing industry. At the time, Ohio leaders approved only programs that won the organization’s coveted green rating. Superkids earned a more modest yellow.

“How EdReports can be the sole basis of this process is astounding,” Morrison, also a local school board member, wrote to the state. Ohio trains teachers in the science of reading, she said, but “this list takes us three steps backward.”

Ohio ultimately relented after Zaner-Bloser, which publishes Superkids, appealed. Temporary as it was, the episode demonstrated the outsize power of EdReports in the world of high-stakes curriculum decisions — a power that has come under increasing scrutiny as more parents embrace the phonics-laden science of reading. Critics of the nonprofit say it has continued to award green ratings to reading programs that might still accommodate balanced literacy — a discredited philosophy in which teachers encourage kids to learn to read by surrounding them with books— and has slapped effective programs with yellow ratings.

In interviews with The 74, EdReports officials say they’ve gotten the message.

Starting in June, its reviews of early reading materials will reflect a fuller embrace of the science of reading. “Phonics and fluency are now non-negotiables” for a green rating, said Janna Chan, EdReports’ chief external affairs officer.  

Reviewers will also verify that materials no longer use “three-cueing” — a practice associated with balanced literacy that encourages students to identify unfamiliar words by picking up clues from text or pictures. Since 2021, at least 10 states have banned the practice.

An internal memo sent to EdReports staff in February and obtained by The 74 acknowledged growing doubts about the organization’s credibility as states pass new reading laws. CEO Eric Hirsch wrote that the organization is “most vulnerable to criticism around our reviews” of comprehensive English language arts programs called basals or “big box” curricula — programs that some have attacked for being “bloated” and giving lip service to the science of reading. Hirsch wrote the memo in response to a Forbes article that critiqued the organization and highlighted newer groups providing alternatives to its reviews.

EdReports contracts with a network of over 600 reviewers, many of them current or former teachers who earn up to nearly $3,000 per review. Working in teams of five for an average of four to six months, they determine if curriculum products meet standards and are easy for teachers and students to use.

Evidence of the organization’s considerable influence isn’t hard to find.  A 74 analysis of GovSpend, a data service that stores recordings of public meetings, reveals that since January 2021, EdReports has been mentioned over 100 times during school board meetings. District leaders and staff frequently invoke its ratings when making budget recommendations.

The “end-all, be-all for curriculum review” is how Bill Hesford, an assistant superintendent in the Bayfield, Colorado, district described the organization during a January discussion of a new math program.

That same month, T.C. Wall, assistant superintendent of the Bolivar, Missouri, schools, assured her board that all reading programs up for consideration had earned the organization’s highest rating.

“We’re starting with quality stuff,” she said.

Financially, there’s much at stake for both districts and curriculum companies. Fueled by a one-time infusion of federal relief funds, school systems spent roughly $19 billion on curriculum in the 2021-22 school year alone. Due to the time and expense such reviews require, districts typically wait as long as six years before revamping their offerings.

Pressure to ‘conform’ 

For many publishers, EdReports’s green stamp of approval is a valuable marketing tool they trumpet in press releases.

Others lost trust in its reviews years ago. 

Collaborative Classroom, a curriculum provider, publishes four literacy programs based on the science of reading used by hundreds of districts. One of them underwent four reviews in three years because, in Hirsch’s view, new features warranted a fresh examination. But the process left Kelly Stuart, the publisher’s president and CEO, exhausted and disillusioned.

“We play in this world as a nonprofit,” she said. “But if we were a for-profit company, there would be a tremendous amount of pressure on us to conform and meet all green.”  

In a world so contentious its seminal debates are called “wars,” critics have been particularly vocal — including those who initially welcomed EdReports. 

Karen Vaites, a literacy expert and advocate, once led marketing efforts for Open Up Resources, a nonprofit that offers free curriculum materials to districts. Declaring that “excellence is now easy to find,” she was among the first to point educators to EdReports in 2018.

In recent years, her views have taken a 180.

“EdReports is no longer an effective guidepost,” said Vaites, who founded the Curriculum Insight Project in January to essentially compete with the organization. One of its first projects is to review Bookworms, an Open Up Resources program that earned a yellow from EdReports, but has research showing effectiveness and won praise from districts that use it.

Vaites said she no longer has a financial relationship with Open Up Resources. But having once been an EdReports “fangirl,” she said she feels “doubly obliged to let people know that they need to look beyond” the site.

If loving memes about curriculum is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

But seriously, enough with districts adopting pricey curricula that bomb @EdReports reviews. #StopTheMadness pic.twitter.com/zAkvHIUsYS

— Karen Vaites (@karenvaites) August 10, 2018

Hirsch declined to address her specific criticisms, but said he and his team plan to gather feedback from researchers, as well as district and state leaders, to respond to critics’ concerns. By the end of the summer, the organization expects to update guidelines for all three of the content areas it reviews — English language arts, math and science — and apply them to next year’s reports. 

Hirsch told The 74 the pivot is in keeping with its mission as an organization geared toward — and staffed by — teachers.

“You’re not a great teacher if you can’t reflect on practice,” he said.

‘No counterbalance’

With backing from major foundations, Hirsch founded EdReports in 2015 to help guide districts toward materials that satisfied the then-relatively new Common Core standards, a set of guidelines in math and language arts that most states still follow. In an attempt to tap into the booming market, many publishers touted their products as “Common Core-aligned” even when their commitments were tenuous at best. Experts say a third-party reviewer was sorely needed. 

“Some publishers had a vice grip on the whole curriculum thing,” said Kareem Weaver, an Oakland literacy advocate featured in The Right to Read, a documentary about the push to provide low-income and minority students with high-quality reading instruction. “Before EdReports, there was no counterbalance to publishers’ claims of being ‘high-quality.’ ”

Now with an $11.5 million annual budget, Hirsch called the organization “amazingly transparent,” without “taking a dime from publishers.” But Weaver thinks EdReports would have a greater impact if its reviews factored in evidence of effectiveness. 

“Don’t just treat kids like guinea pigs,” he said. “Parents have to know if their kid is actually going to get the things they need in regular classroom instruction.”

Hirsch responded that solid, independent evidence of a specific curriculum’s effectiveness is rare. When it does exist, publishers typically offer it in response to reviews. But he conceded that EdReports could make the information easier to find. 

‘Bloated’ materials

Evidence is also important to state leaders, who increasingly expect districts to adopt reading programs based on research. But some experts say publishers are responding to new mandates by “overstuffing” their products — adding structured, phonics-based lessons without removing the older ones.

Vaites points to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Into Reading, one of the three programs approved as part of NYC Reads — a two-year effort to overhaul literacy instruction in the nation’s largest school district. EdReports gave it a green rating, despite complaints about its overabundance of units, lessons and worksheets. 

“As a novice teacher, you’re going to get overwhelmed when you see four pages that go along with one lesson,” said April Rose, an instructional coach at P.S. 132Q in Queens, who works with the United Federation of Teachers to support staff transitioning to the program.  With such wide offerings, some teachers struggle to find assignments for students that match the standards they’re trying to teach, she said, or hop from one skill to the next without giving students deep practice.

Jim O’Neill, a general manager at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, said Into Reading is designed to let teachers “grow while teaching with the program.” The broad range of lessons and activities, he added, is also intended to support students at multiple levels in one classroom.   

“Coming out of the pandemic, there are two things we have — students with different needs, but also new teachers who are just beginning to teach reading,” he said. “Having carefully crafted lesson plans can help them get up and going with the right resources for the right students at the right time.” 

Hirsch acknowledged bloat is a problem, but said publishers are reluctant to remove features some teachers prefer. 

He suggested that districts adopting a new curriculum view EdReports as just a starting point — and follow up with adequate training and support for teachers. 

Timothy Shanahan, an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, agreed. “School districts rely too much on these external reviews without a clear understanding of what they tell you and what they do not,” he said. “They need to give a close look at the programs themselves.”

Disclosure: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, the Overdeck Family Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation provide financial support to EdReports and to The 74.

The project brings Los Angeles in line with other large districts around the country, such as New York City, which have also begun implementing evidence-backed tactics for teaching literacy, amid a national reading crisis.

But LAUSD faces some unique obstacles. A report released in February by the advocacy group Families in Schools detailed gaps in instruction and disconnects between parents and teachers on how to teach reading. 

LAUSD lags in reading scores behind other districts in California, a state with one of the lowest literacy rates in the country.  

LA Unified’s plan also places California’s largest district at odds with state lawmakers, who this month tabled a bill that would require reading instruction based on decoding words using letters and a focus on phonics. 

The proposed law, which was backed by groups including the California State PTA and the NAACP, died in committee after the state teachers union and English learner groups registered their opposition. 

The legislature’s rejection of the bill swung the nation’s most populous state away from a national trend for mandates of science-based reading instruction. 

Dozens of states have taken up such laws and policies, including Mississippi, Ohio, Utah, Kansas, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and the Carolinas. 

The push for a unified, evidence-based approach to literacy instruction faces obstacles in Los Angeles Unified, where only about a quarter of students met reading standards on the most recent assessments. 

The district in June replaced a key intervention program aimed at boosting reading and math skills for struggling elementary school students that had employed materials based on the science of reading.  

The new approach, known as the Literacy and Numeracy Intervention Model, will cost less and reach middle school students as well, according to district officials.

Carvalho said in a December interview that the district had made “significant progress” in rolling out a unified set of curricular options aligned to the science of reading to elementary schools under the effort, and that by June 2024 it would “achieve systemic adoption for all grade levels.”

Last month he adjusted the timeline, saying in a subsequent interview that all elementary schools would have access to the materials by the start of the upcoming academic year in August. 

The superintendent said the district would use the extra time over the summer to conduct training for teachers on the new instructional approaches and materials.

“I think we’re actually in a good place so far, considering the size of our district,” said Carvalho. “It’s a massive undertaking.” 

Under the district’s new approach, Carvalho said, schools will choose from a menu of curricula that contain approaches to literacy instruction including phonics, phonemic awareness, fluency, comprehension and vocabulary. 

The so-called “science of reading” approach favored by LAUSD and many other districts today stands in contrast to the “whole-language” theory once employed by many schools, which emphasized learning to read by using visual cues and words the student already knows, rather than decoding the sounds of their letters.

“There will be a number of reading series, all meeting the criteria, and then principals and their school councils have the flexibility to adopt for their own school, any one of the ones that meet the criteria,” said Carvalho. 

The adoption of a unified approach to reading instruction will provide consistency across schools and bolster the education of transfer students in a district with large numbers of transient kids, Carvalho contended.   

Four decades of research show the science of reading works, Carvalho said, with more recent studies showing it can boost literacy rates for struggling students and reverse declines in pandemic learning loss. 

A recent study conducted by researchers at Stanford University found that test scores at 66 of California’s lowest-performing schools jumped after educators adopted approaches in line with the science of reading.  

Students in several other states have already exceeded pre-pandemic literacy levels by employing curriculum with explicit phonics instruction, according to a Brown University analysis of test score data.

Carvalho said Los Angeles schools that have already begun using the district’s approved literacy materials and teaching methods have embraced the changes and begun to show some academic progress.  

Students at Esperanza Elementary School in Westlake have made significant gains on reading assessments following the adoption of phonics-based teaching materials and methods promoted by the district, from Core Knowledge Language Arts, said principal Brad Rumble. 

Less than half of first graders at the school met reading benchmarks before the roll-out of phonics-based lessons began in 2021, according to Rumble, but 65% met standards this year. Likewise, the principal said, second graders reading on grade level rose from 39% to 61%. 

“We start with the sounds, and then we move to more complex skills, like decoding and sight recognition,” Rumble explained. “We don’t just forget what we’ve learned.” 

Students at the school tackle vocabulary development and the understanding of language structure, becoming fluent readers by grade three, Rumble said, “and then, those fluent readers comprehend what they’re reading.”

Core Knowledge Language Arts help teachers at Esperanza Elementary build systematic reading lessons, said Rumble. The gains made by students at his school point the way that Carvalho wants the rest of the district to go.   

With high numbers of students living in poverty, and large populations of homeless children and immigrant families, Los Angeles Unified faces special challenges in reading instruction.     

The Families in Schools report found that just 15% of parents knew what their schools reading curriculum was, while only about half said they had the tools to help their child learn reading. 

Just 40% of Los Angeles students can read at grade level by third grade, the report notes, with just 9% of English learners meeting standards. By eighth grade, less than 1% of English learners met standards.

The report lauded LAUSD’s new efforts to educate teachers in the science of reading and instruct parents to teach literacy at home, but said a “greater, long-term commitment is needed,” to build on recent, slight gains in test scores.  

The group’s CEO Yolie Flores, a former vice president of the LAUSD Board of Education, said the district can do better. 

“Families understand that if their children can’t read, it’s essentially game over,” said Flores. “This is why we urge Superintendent Carvalho and the LAUSD board of education to deepen its efforts.”

Flores said Carvalho’s promise to put the science of reading in every Los Angeles elementary school is a step in the right direction. The district now needs to ensure the new lessons are implemented, she said.   

“We can’t keep kicking the proverbial can down the road,” said Flores.   

Carvalho said that so far he’s heard few complaints with the program, although some concerns have been raised by members of the English-language learning community, he said, with what can been seen as a one-size-fits all approach of uniform curricula. 

The local teachers union, he said, has not registered any opposition to the project. United Teachers Los Angeles did not respond to a request for comment on the matter. 

Although other states have had success in legislative mandates for evidence-based reading instruction, California lawmakers dropped a proposed law after the state’s largest teachers union registered its opposition. 

In a letter opposing the legislation, the California Teachers Association said the bill  would duplicate current literacy programs and limit teachers’ discretion in serving diverse student populations, including English learners. 

Separately, advocates for English learners also sent letters to lawmakers in opposition to the bill, saying the state needs a plan that “centrally addresses” the needs of bilingual students.   

California assemblywoman Blanca Rubio, a Democrat and teacher who authored the bill, said her own time in the classroom informed her belief in phonics-based instruction. 

“For me, it is not one size fits all approach,” said Rubio. “The science of reading takes into account the research on how kids best learn to read. When I was a teacher, we set goals and we used the data to inform our instruction.”  

Carvalho, who supported Rubio’s bill, said results from state reading assessments taken by LA Unified students this spring will help determine whether the district’s roll-out of evidence-based reading instruction is working.   

Regardless, the superintendent is confident in the district’s new approach to literacy instruction. “I’m a true believer that the basics of reading instruction and philosophy, must be rooted in a science of reading,” Carvalho said.

Assemblymember Blanca Rubio (D-Baldwin Park) and 13 co-authors have proposed a bill that would update the state’s English curriculum with the science of reading – research that has found the best way to teach reading is through phonics, phonemic awareness, oral reading fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.

The bill calls for more instructional materials and curriculum for classrooms to align with the science of reading. It also emphasizes the need for increased professional development for teachers and more progress monitoring for students struggling with reading. 

“All English language arts, English language development, and reading textbooks and instructional materials for transitional kindergarten, kindergarten, and any of grades 1 to 8, inclusive, shall adhere to the science of reading,” reads the bill which was submitted to the Assembly’s education and higher education committee in February.

Schools would require a waiver if educators wanted to use instructional materials that aren’t aligned with the science of reading. It is supported by 12 Democrats and two Republicans in the state assembly.

 A December 2023 policy brief by EdVoice, Decoding Dyslexia CA and Families In Schools found 60% of California students aren’t reading at grade level skills by the time they reach third grade. 

“As an educator, I have firsthand knowledge of the struggles instructors face to ensure their students know how to read,” Rubio said in a statement. “California teachers work tirelessly to better the success of each student. However, California is failing its students, especially diverse students from low-income families.”

In the 2022-2023 school year, 31% of third-graders in low-income families were reading on grade level. For students not considered low-income, 63% were reading on grade level.

That trend has been steady for nearly a decade, with low-income students underperforming in reading tests every year since at least 2014.

“Historically, we’ve seen low performance in literacy in California,” said Eugenia Mora-Flores, a professor and an assistant dean at USC’s Rossier School of Education. “It’s not surprising, actually. We’ve definitely seen low literacy performance in large districts like L.A. Unified and others where we have students that are not performing at grade level.”

To address low scores, legislators want teachers to use the science of reading. Some schools across the state already use this method when teaching students. Others use “whole language,” which focuses on the meanings of words instead of breaking them down into pieces.

That’s different from the science of reading, which relies on phonics and encourages students to learn how letter combinations sound out loud to decode words based on their spellings.

“[The science of reading] is an acknowledgment that kids will learn to read if they can learn the letters, sound them out and gradually pick up on fluency over time,” said Pedro Noguera, dean of USC’s education school. “If you don’t read at proficiency by third grade, then you’re in trouble because everything in school is literacy-based. After learning to read, then you read to learn, right? If you can’t read a math problem, you can’t do the math.”

Noguera said a mandate alone won’t solve California’s literacy problem without looking at the bigger picture when it comes to teaching kids to read.

“If we just focus on the science of reading, on phonics, we’re also missing the point, right?” Noguera said. “If we want kids to be good readers, phonics is not going to take them there. They need good books. They need a comprehensive approach to literacy.” 

“All English language arts, English language development, and reading textbooks and instructional materials for transitional kindergarten, kindergarten, and any of grades 1 to 8, inclusive, shall adhere to the science of reading,” the bill reads.

Dozens of states across the country have already implemented laws enforcing the science of reading.

Last year, Indiana mandated that schools must use the science of reading by fall 2024. So have legislators in Michigan, Utah, Kansas, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Pennsylvania and the Carolinas, among others. 

In a state with one of the lowest literacy rates in the country, Mora-Flores said it will come down to how well the mandate is implemented across California.

“In some ways, [the bill] can be seen as a good thing because it’s saying, at minimum, we all need to make sure kids are getting something, and you’re going to be held accountable to it because now it’s policy,” Mora-Flores said. “On the other side of that, it’s really going to come down to the quality of translation and implementation.”

This article is part of a collaboration between The 74 and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

Starting next year, Ohio school districts and community schools will have to use core curriculum and instructional materials for English language arts and reading intervention programs from lists created by the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce as part of the state’s science of reading implementation.

ODEW recently released their list for pre-kindergarten and kindergarten through fifth grade, and about a third of the state’s school districts and community schools are already using at least one of the initially approved core reading instruction curriculum, according to ODEW survey results.

This is part of ODEW’s efforts to implement the science of reading across classrooms starting next school year.

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The state’s two-year, $191 billion budget included science of reading provisions — $86 million for educator professional development, $64 million for curriculum and instructional materials, and $18 million for literacy coaches.

The science of reading is based on decades of research that shows how the human brain learns to read and incorporates phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Ohio is one of 37 states that have passed laws or implemented new policies related to evidence-based reading since 2013, according to Education Week.

“There’s nothing more important than young people knowing how to read,” Gov. Mike DeWine said back in January at ODEW. “I’m convinced that using the right curriculum and making sure all the teachers are teaching in that way based upon the science of reading is going to make a huge, huge difference in the next few years.”

It has previously been reported that 40% of Ohio’s third-graders are not proficient in reading and 33% of third graders were not proficient in reading before COVID-19.

“I think this is a great opportunity to really improve reading in the state of Ohio and it’s one thing I’m going to monitor myself very, very closely,” DeWine said.

ODEW Survey

One of the first steps in preparing to get the science of reading in every Ohio classroom was figuring out what curriculum is currently being used in schools and what professional development educators are receiving.

ODEW sent a survey in September to all public school and community school superintendents (1,007 in total) about the instructional materials they use and professional development training their educators receive. Almost all of them (995) completed the survey as of Dec. 22 and ODEW recently released the survey results.

The survey showed 789 school districts and community schools use the same core instructional materials for kindergarten through fifth grade. Of those, 93% use published curriculum while the remaining 7% use locally created instructional materials for core literacy instruction.

Professional development

Nearly 70% of school districts and community schools said their teachers previously completed science of reading professional development before this current school year, according to the survey results.

The science of reading provisions in the budget includes stipends for teachers to receive professional development in the science of reading.

K-5 teachers, English language teachers in grades 6-12, intervention specialists, English learner teachers, reading specialists and instructional coaches will receive $1,200 stipends. There will also be $400 stipends for middle and high schoolers teachers in other subject areas.

All teachers and administrators must complete their professional development by July 2025, unless they have already completed a similar course.

“It was very plain to me and to my wife, Fran as we traveled around the state last year that a lot of teachers had come out of their college without really the background in science of reading,” DeWine said. “So this is going to take a while, but I think teachers are embracing it when they really start to see the results.”

The Ohio Department of Higher Education Chancellor is required to create an audit process that shows how every educator training program aligns with teaching the science of reading instruction.

Literacy coaches

The budget will fund 100 literacy coaches that will help public schools with the lowest level of proficiency in literacy based on their performance in the state’s English language arts assessment.

More than 400 community schools and districts reported having no literacy coaches. 18 districts and community schools have between six and 10 literacy coaches, and 10 reported having more than 10 literacy coaches, according to the survey results.

In 2020, the Aldine Independent School District became the first district in Texas to adopt a high-quality, knowledge-based reading curriculum. It was a seismic change for teachers, who had been using a familiar balanced literacy program with skills-focused lessons and leveled readers for several years. But it was a necessary change for students — in 2018-19, just 30 percent of Aldine third graders were reading at or above grade level.  

Despite the challenges of COVID-19 and its effect on academic achievement, we have made strides by implementing the Amplify CKLA curriculum. Today, teachers lead highly structured, thematic units that focus on the same content over a period of weeks. All students work with the same knowledge-rich, grade-level texts, whether they read them independently or with support. That gives every student the opportunity to build vocabulary and a base of common knowledge, which boosts reading comprehension and fosters inclusive communities of learning. 

Our students have made rapid progress — within the first two years, 50 percent of third graders were reading at or above grade level. The percentage of third graders scoring “well below” benchmark dropped from 48 percent to 36 percent. These are heavy lifts in Aldine, where about 90 percent of students are economically disadvantaged and more than half are English language learners. 

Students’ academic achievement and development rely on their teachers’ understanding and execution of the Amplify CKLA curriculum. As instructional specialists, we have implemented robust curriculum-based professional learning to ensure Aldine teachers are prepared to deliver strong instruction that meets the needs of all students.  

Curriculum-based professional learning brings teachers and instructional leaders together to probe and practice individual lessons, which has helped our teachers implement new curriculum with fidelity. During these sessions, teachers internalize, annotate, collaborate, and rehearse lessons within units of study. They identify the most critical ideas and skills students should encounter, the most likely misconceptions students may experience, and the scaffolds or learning supports needed to grant access to the content to all learners.  

This sort of study doesn’t happen overnight. Here are three key aspects of this work that have shaped our progress: 

Closing the Research-Practice Gap 

Too often, research stands a world apart from the educators who work directly with students. 

Aldine provided resources and time to close that gap. Even before the new curriculum was announced, both teachers and instructional specialists like us read Natalie Wexler’s The Knowledge Gap and participated in related staff development sessions. Meanwhile, a literacy task force was studying curriculums and visiting out-of-state classrooms to make their recommendation. 

This shared reading assignment and attendant discussions helped teachers and specialists learn the science behind best practices and understand the role that building knowledge plays in literacy development. Both were critical when it came time for our teachers to trust that an unfamiliar and seemingly out-of-reach reading curriculum could be effective in Aldine classrooms. 

Revamping PLCs for Curriculum Study

In the past, meeting time for professional learning communities (PLCs) was spent on grade-level “business,” like planning field trips or sharing concerns from individual classroom observations. These are key issues, but they don’t necessarily translate into instructional innovation or academic progress. 

Even when meetings were focused on instruction, master teachers and teachers with outsized experience or confidence spoke up most often. As a result, meetings did not include the voices of all teachers, especially novices or those serving the most disadvantaged student groups. 

Our district revamped grade-level meetings to focus on in-depth curriculum study. Today, during Curriculum-based Professional Learning (CPLs), instructional specialists facilitate in-depth curriculum study sessions, which follow detailed discussion protocols. These one- and two-page discussion guides help teachers unpack and internalize the logic of each unit and lesson, identify opportunities to make cultural connections with and among students, and focus attention on the essential questions and tasks each lesson needs to ensure students master the learning goal.

This structure and guidance help ensure teachers’ time together is purposeful and driven by our common curriculum. In addition, by focusing attention on a shared resource, we’ve seen that more teachers speak up in CPLs, which gives a grade-level group a wider view of classroom practice and learning. 

Building Teachers’ Trust 

Changing curriculum means changing instructional practice and underlying beliefs. Teachers need to trust that a new curriculum will work with their students before they will teach it as intended.  

Often, teachers who work with struggling students are initially wary of high-quality, knowledge-based curriculum. In our district, second-grade teachers were concerned that students would not successfully engage with a unit based on grade-level texts about The War of 1812, for example.  

Ongoing curriculum-based professional learning with grade-level colleagues helped address these concerns. As teachers studied and practiced units and lessons together, they could see the logic and variety of ways students at all levels could access, understand, and make connections with rigorous content. And, as they experienced this new teaching in their classrooms, they could share challenges and evidence of growth. No one teacher was going it alone.  

Any change in curriculum requires strong leadership from the Central Office. But when it comes to changing what actually happens in classrooms and schools, teachers are the real decision-makers. By intentionally equipping teachers with curriculum-based professional learning, we are setting our schools up for long-lasting success. 

Edna Cruz is a bilingual skills specialist at Reed Academy in the Aldine Independent School District, which includes parts of Houston and Harris County, Tx. She is a member of the Curriculum Matters Professional Learning Network, which supports district leaders from around the country implementing high-quality instructional materials. Alaura Mack is an instructional skills specialist for English Language Arts at Reed Academy and is also a member of the Curriculum Matters Professional Learning Network.

I became passionate about helping kids learn to read — and learn to love reading. But I didn’t always have the tools and training I needed. Today I do, and it’s vital other school and system leaders develop that professional expertise, too. 

Here in Massachusetts, as in many states, schools are in the midst of a literacy overhaul that includes the adoption of new instructional materials aligned with the science of reading. They’re also getting training in these more effective ways to teach kids to read.  

That’s a big step forward. Research confirms that outdated ways of teaching reading need to go, and teachers need to be supported with effective resources and aligned professional development.

In Weymouth Public Schools, we’ve tapped state funds to help fund a new English Language Arts curriculum aligned with the best research, train teachers and hire literacy coaches, as well as pay a classroom teacher a stipend to work across all grade levels providing additional reading instruction to colleagues. Just as important, we ensured that the district’s principals, and I, also got science of reading instruction.

Training leaders alongside teachers is somewhat uncommon. But it shouldn’t be. 

In my district, principals, assistant principals and district leaders spend at least an hour a day, and usually more, observing teachers and giving them feedback. Since not all have the skills to hold deep conversations that can invoke pedagogical change, we provide training to create and calibrate walk-through tools to identify what observers should be seeing and to help them provide feedback that is thoughtful and meaningful. 

Given the major changes we’ve made in literacy instruction, my colleagues and I needed additional professional development to help teachers do their jobs well. Literacy instruction today is vastly different from how those of us in leadership positions learned to teach reading.

We now prioritize explicitly teaching phonics — the relationships between letters and sounds — whereas in the past teachers might have asked children to guess at words based on the pictures or storyline of a book. We also focus on developing background knowledge, so our students now read books and other material around important themes, allowing them to build their understanding of a topic and exposing them to more complex reading material. This also expands students’ vocabulary and helps improve their writing, speaking, and listening skills.

Sitting in professional development sessions alongside teachers in my district recently, I was able to see the challenges they faced in implementing the new curriculum, which demands more of students. And I was able to think about ways to help them. In particular, they were worried about effectively planning and pacing their lessons and ensuring they understood the science of reading and were shifting their practices accordingly. I followed up with our district’s literacy coaches and asked them to co-teach and model effective lessons; discuss the pacing with teachers; and share and talk through research and resources to deepen educators’ understanding of the science of reading. 

In addition, in training developed by the publisher of our reading curriculum and tailored to school leaders — a rare offering — I learned what to look for when I went into classrooms to conduct observations. These included clear, transparent learning goals and evidence they were being met; good lesson cadence or pacing; and high student engagement. We use the publisher’s tool, calibrated by our district leaders, to see that indicators of progress are being met by both students and teachers.

This was helpful when a principal and I dropped in on a classroom recently. The students were not talking and working in groups, which the lesson called for and which builds knowledge and improves speaking and listening skills. Good literacy instruction should foster content-related conversations among students that deepen their learning. By providing the teacher with feedback about what we did —and didn’t — see, we were able to work together to improve the learning happening in that classroom.

The district’s progress hasn’t been isolated to just a few classrooms. We track and collaborate around data in real time, using cards that we create that show individual progress for every student. Administrators and educators use these to drive discussions about what improvements need to be made, and how. We monitor students’ progress weekly and can quickly change an intervention if it is not working. The result has been a rise in test scores, with end-of-year results in reading for grades 2 to 5 over the last three years surpassing our goals and beating national benchmarks for academic growth. In 2021, we fell short of the goal of getting 100% of students to typical growth by the end of the year on our interim tests. But, in 2022, we hit 131%, meaning our growth was 31% above the typical progress for the year. Then, in 2023, we hit 146 %. We likely will surpass that this year, as our current mid-year progress toward annual growth is already at 100%.

Keeping this progress going means that school and district leaders, as well as teachers, must tap into the resources needed to successfully make this shift to better reading instruction. To do otherwise would shortchange kids and stymie the progress they must make.

This was late in the aughts, when I had just begun working with adults who couldn’t read. I had no materials, no guidance, no mentors — just a slowly growing group of students who kept finding my GED-prep program and coming back night after night to wait patiently, wearily, for me to figure out how to teach them to read. I’d quickly discovered this challenge was beyond my untrained, intuitive approach.

But now I had a solution! An experienced reading tutor had offered to work with two students. The catch — they would have to travel to her library in another part of the city.

One of these men, Nelson (student names have been changed to protect privacy), was a fierce guy in his early 30’s. He had a shaved head, a gold earring, and a stony, unsmiling face. The other, Joseph, was in his 60’s, tired and worn out from the stress of caring for his aging father and his sick grown daughter on the wages of a man with no reading skills. The two had become friends; I relished the thought of them working with this experienced tutor. I assumed they’d share my excitement, but they just stared blankly back at me. I jumped around trying to explain the qualifications of this tutor and what a lucky break this was. They didn’t budge. Finally, I asked, “Why aren’t you excited about this?”

Nelson glared furiously at me; Joseph finally offered, “We can’t get there unless someone takes us first.” The deep impact of low literacy skills was first revealed to me in this moment. Unable to read directional signage, these able-bodied grown men couldn’t even pursue a solution to their predicament. 

In my 15 years of working with adults who can’t read I’ve seen and heard countless examples of the limitations that low literacy skills impose on adults. But while educators across the country bemoan the reading crisis and call for the heads of Balanced Literacy icons, the discourse entirely avoids the adult education world. 

Those two-thirds of American 4th graders who can’t read at grade level? They will soon be adults who can’t read. 

The 95% of 8^th-graders in Detroit who can’t read proficiently? Same. 

And then what? 

It is long past time for the adult ed world to embrace the evidence and catch up to the Science of Reading. There are obstacles, of course. Adults are not only less cute than children; fewer education dollars are allotted to them, fewer teachers and schools are concerned with them, and absolutely nobody is making bank writing books to entice them to read. There is no Captain Underpants or Dr Seuss for adults reading at a 1^st or 2^nd grade level.

Forty-eight million adult Americans read below the third grade level. Forbes Magazine reported in 2020 that the plague of low literacy skills could be costing the US $2.2 trillion annually in health care, social services, and lost wages. Worse, low literacy is handed down to children; the biggest indicator of a child’s literacy fate lies in the mother’s reading level. 

Economics aside, virtually everyone, on both sides of the aisle, wants adults to be able to read. Clearly this is an issue worthy of our attention; naturally we would expect that the reading wars, the push for evidence-backed methods, the revolution that has taken down the shibboleths of the last decades are impacting the world of adult ed, right? 

You tell me. Let’s look.

Imagine your spouse or parent or neighbor can’t read. 

You know about the Science of Reading. You listened to “Sold a Story”. You believe that Whole Language is a discredited theory and that Balanced Literacy is not an effective way to teach reading.

You set out to find services. You look at libraries, literacy centers, or maybe your local municipal website. You make the happy discovery that many of these sites offer basic literacy services for adults. But when you click on the links you discover the next layer: that phrases like “adult literacy classes” and “adult basic literacy” actually mean classes in computer-training, ESL, job certifications, or GED. Lovely and essential programs, but what about those 48 million who need to learn to read? Where are the structured phonics programs for adults? 

Some literacy centers are clear that they simply don’t offer services for readers below the 4^th grade level. Others aren’t so clear. In New York City, the Mayor’s Office website offers various Adult Basic Ed links for adults who want to learn to read, but when you click to learn more there are circular links and even broken links. A prominent adult literacy foundation names its core methodology for teaching reading as Whole Language, which is like a state-funded health clinic listing blood-letting as one of its services. 

Back in the aughts, under pressure from the students in my program who were so desperate to learn to read that they wouldn’t leave, I began asking around: How do you teach reading to adults? The response from education directors, foundation presidents, teachers, and advocates was dismaying. “Are they retarded?” a director of adult education programs asked. “They probably need to work harder,” said one adult ed program manager.

“We let the students pick their own curriculum,” the local director of a regional literacy program that serves hundreds of students told me. I was confused. “You’re teaching higher level students, then?” I said. “They can read?”

“No, they can’t read,” she said. “But they’re adults so they get to choose what they want to work on.” By then I was several years into learning how to teach reading, and as a literate college graduate I was still struggling to figure it out. But this program expected low-skilled readers to direct their own hero’s journey. 

Where are the materials? 

My early group of adult students was so desperate to learn to read that they tolerated my clumsy early efforts. I cringe to remember what I put them through. The children’s books, the random workbooks, the naïve assumption that I could just show them how to sound out and that would do the trick. Here’s what I know from years in these trenches: for most of these students learning to decode is extremely difficult.  

Adults who didn’t learn to read are often the most dyslexic, had the least effective teaching, and are the most impacted by socio-economic factors. Some, if they are immigrants, never went to school at all, or they may have dropped out in second or third grade.

If raised in the U.S., most either dropped out at the earliest moment or languished for years in special education classrooms.  

All of them now have adult lives, usually with jobs (or job searches), families, and health issues. They have adult brains, often weary, and rigidly attached to ineffective decoding strategies.

The most popular strategies 

Short on decoding skills, most adults come up with strategies. First, they memorize as many words as they can by sight. Second, they use the context to make a guess. Third, they stare in frustration at the word and wait for it to pop into their head. Of course there are unique flourishes. One student would re-write the word repeatedly while sternly admonishing herself: “Get it, girl. Come on, get it.” Many will unleash a chaotic, seemingly panicked jumble of guesses.

The one thing every single one of the adult basic literacy students I’ve met shares is a complete lack of awareness of the reading code. Not one has come into my program with the understanding that sounds are more relevant than letter names or even that sounds are a thing. 

They are, as a group, a case study in the importance of direct instruction of phonemic awareness and phonics.

As much or even more than any group they require the best teaching methods.  

Why then the almost total absence among adult ed programs of evidence-backed basic literacy programs?  Why the attachment to Whole Language principles? Why the undying love for Paolo Freire, who gives us zero specific strategies for teaching reading to adults? 

Is it any wonder that basic literacy students are often considered impossible to retain for more than a few months and not really worth the trouble to run a program for? Look at what they are offered. Why stick around?

I was lucky. 

Carried along by the persistence of that first group of students, I stumbled upon the concept of evidence-based methods for teaching reading — to children. I got certified and brought the program back to my tutoring center. Through the years I kept tweaking the curriculum to better serve both adult students and volunteer tutors until I finally re-wrote the whole thing, making a simple, scripted structured phonics curriculum that volunteers can be trained to use and that follows the evidence to the best of my ability. 

Those two men I mentioned were in my program too early to reap the full benefits. They were subject to the low end of my expertise curve. But they did learn. Nelson, the younger man, told me he’d never known there was anything to reading besides memorizing all the words. He learned slowly and painstakingly to tap and blend the sounds of simple words. He came in one day trying not to smile as he told us that his uncle had left him a note, and he’d read it. Another time he told me he’d gotten lost and started reading street signs. His ex-wife, on the phone with him trying to help, started shouting, “You can read!” He told me, “Words jump out at me everywhere I go.” He was a volatile young man, often disappearing for weeks on end and then shaking his head slyly when I’d ask what he’d been up to. One day he never returned. 

Joseph learned, too, also slowly. He later said that the entire first year of tutoring gave him an excruciating headache. It was worth it. From all of our students I hear the same thing: “Why didn’t they teach us this when we were young?”

If the numbers of children currently reading below grade level are correct, we are heading into an even worse adult literacy crisis than we have now. The rallying cry for effective instruction methods for children is loud and clear. But it is time to sound the bell for the refugees of the broken reading education system as well: all those children who didn’t learn and are now adults, still not reading.

With more than half of the state’s third-graders failing to meet reading benchmarks, education stakeholders across the state agree that existing strategies must change in order to boost student scores.

How to go about that change is where the consensus ends.

State education officials are doubling down on their support of a piece of legislation that they believe will provide equal opportunity for all children learning how to read, despite local school leaders’ misgivings about the implementation of the law.

Officials at the state Department of Education have embarked on a “myth”-busting tour recently, arguing that school superintendents’ public complaints about the process created to carry out the Right to Read law are rife with misinformation.

According to data from the department, over 19,500 students in the third grade are not reading on grade level. That figure represents about 54.5% of third graders statewide, where even in Connecticut’s highest performing districts, about 25% of students are trailing benchmark goals.

“The bottom line is this is something that we have to work on consistently across the state and across all school districts,” said Education Commissioner Charlene Russell-Tucker at the state Board of Education meeting earlier this month. “If we do nothing different, these are the numbers we’re [going to continue] producing year after year, and that is not acceptable. We’ve got to do something about it.”

During the 2023 legislative session, lawmakers passed the Right to Read bill, which will require that all Connecticut school districts shift to a reading program aligned with the Science of Reading — a body of research that shows the best way to teach reading is through five pillars of skill development: phonemic awareness, phonics, oral reading fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.

The legislation outlined that the state Department of Education would choose a number of programs that adhere to the Science of Reading for districts to choose from and fully implement by 2025. Eighty-five districts and charter schools applied for a waiver, arguing that their existing curriculum met state standards or that they wanted to try a different program.

Only 17 of the 85 school systems fully met the state’s standards, which prompted a vocal reproach from many district leaders who were denied waivers.

Superintendents from Greenwich, Westport and Southington — all of which requested but did not receive waivers and have some of the highest reading scores in the state, between 64% and 74% proficiency — said they do not oppose the evidence-based reading models but are critical of the department’s mandates and processes.

“We have been implementing new resources for the past five years. We have invested heavily in resources, teacher training, and a commitment to all students finding the highest level of success,” said Greenwich Superintendent Toni Jones. “The concern is that the review of district programs already on this pathway for several years is being threatened by ‘approved’ box programs required by the CSDE instead of evaluating outstanding instructional practice and materials in use right now. The legislation is strong, supported by educators, and scientifically supported, [but] the process for evaluation is severely flawed.”

Several district superintendents shared similar sentiments and added that the waiver requirements changed midway through the process and that the application was confusing.

Teachers across the state agree with the legislation’s intent to improve reading scores for all students, but they’ve also voiced frustration about being left out of the conversation.

“Where’s the emphasis on developing plans that can be modified to meet the kids? Where is the conversation about building our capacity around literacy, making sure that our teachers have the opportunity to build really dynamic lessons, and that they have the opportunity to learn from one another?” said Kate Dias, president of the Connecticut Education Association, the largest teachers union in the state. “We’re not having those conversations, [instead] we’re talking about which workbooks are the children using.”

Mainly in response to some superintendents who had spoken to news outlets following the waiver decisions in December, representatives from the Department of Education held a ‘Myth versus Fact’ presentation at the recent state Board of Education meeting where they emphasized the implementation process was unbiased, unchanged and aligned with legislation. The state also held a three-hour panel on Jan. 25 with national, statewide and local stakeholders about the importance of aligning evidence-based reading programs and curriculum.

“This is a basic civil right, and we’re going to make sure that regardless of background, everybody has that skill,” Gov. Ned Lamont said at the panel. “I think [reading] gives every one of our kids a little bit more of a head start in life. I think that’s what we’re trying to do here with this legislation and trying to get that implemented. … This is best practices, what Charlene is trying to do is say, ‘Look, these are the very best ideas, this is what seems to be working in other jurisdictions. Try this out in your community.'”

Lawmakers and other representatives from the education department continue to argue that narrowly-focused criticisms about the implementation of the law has distracted from its true purpose, and instead, the focus should be on celebrating the shift in curriculum as “a win for the entire state of Connecticut.”

“If we can demonstrate that we are providing the necessary tools for our students to have a high-quality learning experience and to get them proficient in reading and learning how to read from pre-K to three, then we’ve done our job,” Rep. Jeff Currey, the co-chair of the Education Committee, told The Connecticut Mirror.

The Science of Reading

The Science of Reading refers to decades of research in education, psychology and neuroscience and its findings on how children best learn reading skills.

Most states have shifted toward or implemented some type of legislation regarding evidence-based reading instruction, most notably in the south, including Mississippi, which has garnered national attention for significant reading scores improvement in the last decade.

“Mississippi went from being ranked the second-worst state in 2013 for fourth-grade reading to 21st in 2022,” The Associated Press reported in May 2023. Louisiana and Alabama, two other states that have implemented similar legislation, “were among only three states to see modest gains in fourth-grade reading during the pandemic, which saw massive learning setbacks in most other states.”

Russell-Tucker told members of the Black and Puerto Rican Caucus at a meeting in mid-January that Connecticut is one of at least 32 states that implemented policy related to evidence-based reading instruction.

“However, by our count, we’re up to about 19 states, including D.C., that are actually doing very specific mandates of evidence-based reading instruction that must be implemented by school districts,” Russell-Tucker said. “So, Connecticut is not alone in this regard.”

The legislation’s goals

Melissa Hickey, the reading and literacy director for the state Department of Education, told the CT Mirror that the Right to Read legislation was a collaborative effort with the Black and Puerto Rican Caucus.

“There has been many pieces of legislation in place around reading and supporting literacy with professional learning and having coaches go into districts and support,” Hickey said. “This ‘Right to Read’ actually brought it to a newer level where programs, curriculum models and compendium were included in the legislation. So — really looking at the core comprehensive materials that schools are using and ensuring that they are research-based.”

Of the 19,500 Connecticut third-grade students who are reading below proficiency, 12,900 are students of color and over 14,500 are high-need students — meaning they qualify for free or reduced lunch, are English language learners or are students with a disability.

“A child learning to read is a civil rights issue,” said Sen. Patricia Billie Miller, D-Stamford, the chair of the Black and Puerto Rican Caucus. “We have a responsibility … to make sure that children in this state can read. Frederick Douglass said that when you can read, you’re forever free.”

“An Act Concerning the Implementation of Reading Models or Programs” passed as part of omnibus education bill Senate Bill 1 and lays out that local boards of education must partially transition to a state-approved reading program by 2024 and fully by 2025.

“We’re leaving behind 19,000 of our learners, and this [legislation] is about applying the findings of what we know about how our little ones’ brains work to learn how to read and ensure every district is teaching in that way, even districts that believe that they’ve got some special sauce already,” said state Board of Education chair Karen DuBois-Walton. “This is about ensuring that every district is equipped with what we know is the right way to teach kids to learn to read.”

The approved programs were required to be evidence- and scientifically based and “focused on competency in the following areas of reading: Oral language, phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, rapid automatic name or letter name fluency and reading comprehension,” according to the legislation. The department ultimately provided over a handful of programs for districts to choose from.

As implementation continues, Dias said, she hopes the conversation will shift from what programs were chosen to how it’s actually working in the classroom.

“Currently, the entire conversation is focused on ‘What are the materials?’ and for me, the materials are the last piece of the puzzle, not the first. The first piece, to me, is what are the intentional outcomes we want from our literacy programs? Have we all agreed universally of what that is, and did we rebuild a curriculum to guide us to that pathway?” Dias said. “The real solution of how do we get to the end game, for me, is, I’m looking for the opportunity to bring talented educators to the table and give them the space to build a model curriculum that could be utilized within the state of Connecticut.”

Similarly, Charles Hewes, the state deputy commissioner for academics and innovation, said that on paper, aligning statewide reading curriculums may look like the first step toward improving literacy rates in Connecticut but that the results will begin with teacher support and resources.

“First step is to support our teachers with resources that are aligned with the Science of Reading. Another step is to make sure that they have the professional learning support as needed to implement those resources,” Hewes said. “Third, sustainable leadership and community support. Fourth, they need appropriate assessments that really draw on student needs. … These are all pieces of a bigger picture of implementation.”

Hewes and Hickey both added that the department has begun meeting districts one-on-one to help plan for their needs. The state Department of Education has also met with members of the Connecticut Association of Public School Superintendents and continues to partner with the University of Connecticut, HILL for Literacy and others to provide free professional learning.

Districts raise concerns

Much district dialogue has been centered on the waiver process rather than the Science of Reading, which most districts agree is a successful way to teach early literacy skills.

Districts including Hartford, Waterbury and New London public schools were approved for waivers, despite only reporting 14.5%, 19.1% and 26.1% of their respective third-graders were able to read proficiently.

The majority of districts that applied for waivers were rejected, and the decisions triggered confusion for superintendents in towns that have a higher percentage of students meeting reading proficiency scores.

Hewes said, however, that reading scores were not considered in the waiver process and that some districts — such as Hartford — plan to implement new and innovative reading programs that are different from what they’ve been using.

“Hartford took advantage of the waiver process to have what they wanted to implement reviewed by experts before they made any shift,” Hewes said. “It’s really important to emphasize that we were looking for alignment to the areas of reading in the legislation, and that was the function of the waiver process. It was not an evaluation of the performance of a district.”

Hartford, specifically, was approved to use a core curriculum called Wit and Wisdom, which the district said was the best fit to “meet the unique needs of our students and satisfy the guidelines outlined in the new legislation based on the Science of Reading.”

“Now that the waiver has been approved, we are excited to implement the new core curriculum on behalf of our students and teachers,” said Hartford Superintendent Leslie Torres-Rodriguez. “This new compendium of curriculum resources, in alignment with scientific research, will benefit our students and improve early childhood literacy across the district.”

But other superintendents, who weren’t successful in the waiver process, said the state’s process was confusing and inconsistent. Some superintendents also consider the new legislation overbearing.

“My concern has less to do with shifts to our programs or curriculum to purposefully align with the Science of Reading and more to do with the state mandating curriculum and programs from the top down,” said Southington Superintendent Steven Madancy. “Connecticut has always been a local control state, and recent actions fly in the face of that.”

In Greenwich, the superintendent called the evaluation rubric “frustrating and minimalistic.”

“The waiver was a very confusing process, with many moving finish lines,” Jones said, adding that the state’s evaluation team changed during the process, and they implemented a new evaluation criteria that “nobody knew about.” She also said that the rubric commented on old materials from 2018 that were not relevant to the practices the district has currently been using.

Westport Superintendent Thomas Scarice shared similar sentiments, as he felt the process was “ill-defined from the beginning.”

“Whether districts were approved for the waiver had little to nothing to do with their actual program, alignment to the research or outcomes for students,” Scarice said. “The implementation by the state Department of Education was convoluted, inconsistent and most importantly not aligned to the actual statute, leaving our district, and perhaps a number of other districts, confused. The response provided by the CSDE to our waiver was incomplete, portions were left blank and the narrative responses were difficult if not impossible to comprehend.”

Representatives from the state Department of Education called several superintendents’ criticisms “myths” at a recent state Board of Education meeting and presented a slideshow that countered the allegations.

“A myth: the waiver review tool changed throughout the process. We heard this multiple times, please know that the actual fact is it did not change. … The waiver tool remained the same. The waiver tool aligned to the legislation and the guidance that was provided to districts aligned to legislation,” Hickey said. “Another myth: the process was biased. Please, know again, … it was double blind. It was conducted by experts in literacy with no ties to Connecticut or to any districts in Connecticut.”

Hewes added that some claims “can be harmful,” to both the people “trying to execute the legislation but also education as a whole and what we try to do for our kids.”

“If we know the Science of Reading research tells us how to instruct students, wouldn’t we all want to be finding a way to make sure that we’re as closely aligned to that research in the materials and curricula that we use?” Hewes told the CT Mirror.

Scarice and Jones both said that their reading curriculums are aligned with the Science of Reading and that they’ve requested the department’s reconsideration.

Russell-Tucker presented a similar ‘Myth vs Fact’ slideshow to the leaders of the Black and Puerto Rican Caucus on Jan. 16 where lawmakers asked Russell-Tucker and her team for a follow up meeting to “take a deeper dive” into where the legislation is and existing criticisms and pushback.

Last week, the Department of Education also held a panel at the Legislative Office Building called the “Education Forum on Literacy: A State & National Conversation.” The panel was made up of several lawmakers who are part of the Education Committee, national advocates and a handful of local education leadership, including a principal and reading specialist from an elementary school in Plainfield and the Hamden superintendent.

Prior to the event, there was criticism from CEA, which said it wasn’t approached about having educators be a part of the conversation. Nevertheless, Dias said, she remains optimistic about the partnerships working to improve literacy throughout the state.

“We have a lot of people who feel passionately about improving our literacy in the state of Connecticut, and that is a good thing,” Dias said. “And while things might feel a little uncomfortable today, because we don’t all feel in the same place, the fact is, we all want the same thing, and that is really positive. We’ll get there, and today this [change] is uncomfortable, and it’s difficult, but I remain optimistic.”

This story was originally published on Connecticut Mirror

Their teacher, Sonya Taylor, was leading a lesson designed to help them recognize sound and letter patterns. In a piping, resonant voice — she stretches it out Sundays as a singer and worship leader at her church — Taylor called out a string of words for the class to echo, clapping simultaneously, before repeating the sound they had in common.

“Say ‘rub, tribe, scrub’!” 

“RUB, TRIBE, SCRUB!” 

“What’s the end sound?” she trilled in syncopated eighth-notes.

“Buh-Buh-Buh,” answered all 20 students, sounding like a school of fish.

The lesson comes from the Heggerty curriculum of phonemic tutorials, one of four reading-specific programs in use at KIPP Wisdom. Taylor’s class, along with their schoolmates in grades 1–4, are taught for hours each week how to pick apart the phonics code through a sequence of clapping, call-and-response, group discussion and independent study. The aim is to identify which letter combinations produce certain sounds and, with enough practice, to get a successful start on reading. 

As in dozens of other states over the last decade, Missouri lawmakers recently mandated that students between kindergarten and the third grade be screened for reading challenges. It’s part of a widespread campaign among educators and activists to bring English language arts into closer alignment with the “science of reading,” the sprawling body of psychological and neuroscientific research exploring how people come to understand the written word. And in Missouri, where reading scores ranked around the middle of the pack nationally even before the pandemic, school leaders hope the new regime of testing and additional support will help kids recover from substantial learning loss suffered over the last few years. 

Kim Stuckey is president of the Missouri chapter of the Reading League, an organization dedicated to spreading awareness of the science of reading. In an email, she called the state’s actions a positive step, while cautioning that more substance is needed to change how teaching candidates are trained around literacy.

“Building teacher knowledge is critical to transforming reading outcomes for all children,” Stuckey wrote in an email. “That said, teacher preparation programs need to align their coursework with science-of-reading research so that everyone is moving in the same direction.”

KIPP St. Louis, which operates six schools throughout the city, executed its own turn to the science of reading even before the change in law. The largest charter management organization in the United States, enrolling roughly 120,000 students across nearly 300 campuses, KIPP is completing a gradual overhaul of its literacy instruction, which will take effect for all of its schools by 2025. Over the last few years, that revision has brought new curricula, training and focus to a local network that was already seeing some impressive results: According to research from Saint Louis University’s Policy Research in Missouri Education Center, KIPP Victory Academy (Wisdom’s sister school) posted the best scores for reading growth of any elementary school on Missouri’s 2021 state standardized testing. 

Victory’s principal, Cetera Altepeter, said that KIPP leaders in St. Louis were eager to change their approach, in part because they felt local students “weren’t mastering” the building blocks of literacy.

“We knew that we needed to explore other things and make sure we were staying up on the science and the research,” Altepeter said. “Now we’re starting to see the impact.” 

‘There was no strategy for them’

KIPP has long been one of the most well-known and respected names within the charter sector. The network’s rapid spread was fueled by tens of millions of dollars in federal grants, awarded largely in recognition of its success raising the achievement of disadvantaged kids. 

The evidence of that success mounted over the last decade, with a 2023 study from the research group Mathematica showing that attending both a KIPP middle and high school made students more likely to attend and graduate from college.

But within the organization, some believed they could improve upon their work in foundational literacy. Chief Schools Officer Jim Manly, who previously served for eight years as the superintendent of KIPP’s schools in New York City, remembered that when he was hired in 2014, a kind of agnosticism prevailed on elementary reading strategy — perhaps because KIPP’s national network begin in a middle school. 

“One of the things I found when I got there was that they didn’t really have a point of view about early literacy and teaching kids to read, at least in New York City,” Manly said. 

At the same time, galvanized by media accounts of nationwide failure to lift reading scores or fully prepare new teachers to impart reading knowledge, states like Mississippi, Nevada, and Michigan began revamping their laws to require evidence-based practices in the classroom and new resources for schools and teachers. 

KIPP made its own move in 2019, piloting a series of measures in New York City designed to improve both instruction and professional capacity. Incoming students were tested on reading performance using the DIBELS assessment, with struggling readers assigned to additional reading intervention blocks and elementary reading staff encouraged to take LETRS, an intensive training on literacy acquisition. 

Even as COVID disrupted the work of schools around the country, the changes road-tested in New York were brought to six more of KIPP’s 27 regions in the 2020–21 school year, followed by an additional seven in 2021–22. By 2024–25, all 27 regions will have adopted the early literacy agenda.

KIPP St. Louis was one of one of the first regions to opt into the initiative. For years, KIPP Victory and KIPP Wisdom (a third elementary school, KIPP Wonder, was opened in 2019) relied heavily on the “guided reading” technique, through which pupils are taught strategies — such as using context clues or looking for pictures — to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words. Angela Jackson, the region’s head of elementary literacy instruction, said that doubts were building about the effectiveness of those methods.

“We knew that when kids get to longer texts, pictures go away, and there was actually no strategy for them,” recalled Jackson, who worked as a second- and fourth-grade teacher at KIPP Victory before taking her current job. “There were voices around the buildings: ‘I don’t think we’re doing this correctly. There has to be a better way.'”

Whether the new way will prove to be the better way remains to be seen. But data from system-wide mCLASS assessments (a literacy screening test administered throughout the academic year) offer some early signs of progress. In a sampling of students from 12 KIPP regions in the beginning stages of implementing the network’s early literacy program, just 22 percent were meeting or exceeding grade-level benchmarks at the beginning of the 2022–23 school year. By the end of that year, 66 percent were — equivalent to the national mCLASS sample. 

Kelly Haywood said she has seen some of the same promising early returns in St. Louis. The mother of two daughters at St. Louis’s KIPP Wonder Academy, she has visited and observed Heggerty sessions in her daughter Londyn’s kindergarten class. While reading together at home, the two use some of the same methods to make sense of unfamiliar vocabulary.

“She picks up on those strategies they use in school,” Haywood said. “I’ll ask her, ‘What does this say?’ and if she doesn’t know the word, we’ll sound it out. That has really helped with both of them.”

Reading’s role in learning recovery

KIPP St. Louis’s course correction has now been underway since the early stages of the pandemic, and while substantial changes have already been achieved, much more work remains.

Teachers at KIPP Wisdom and Victory are currently employing parts of four different reading programs. While each brings its own strengths, using such a broad array of materials comes with the risk of teacher burnout.

In the coming years, Jackson hopes to streamline by moving all three KIPP elementary schools toward the Core Knowledge Language Arts curriculum, which places a heavy emphasis on the explicit teaching of academic content and the cultivation of students’ subject-matter knowledge. A study released last year showed that schools relying on the Core Knowledge sequence saw large improvements in ELA, math, and science scores. 

LETRS training will also be made available to new teachers joining KIPP schools in St. Louis, Jackson added, with stipends available for those choosing to take the course in their off-hours. Roughly 70 percent of elementary literacy teachers in the region have already absorbed the first LETRS volume, which includes about 80 hours worth of sessions on phonics and decoding. 

One of them is Erica Williams, who teaches third graders. A St. Louis native and a gregarious personality in the hallways of KIPP Wisdom, Williams came to the profession by an unconventional route: Over a decade ago, concerned over her young son falling behind on reading and developmental milestones, she began volunteering in his Head Start program. After that experience led her to experiment with substitute-teaching, Williams eventually became a lead teacher in her own classroom and earned a master’s degree. 

Literacy training in her preparation program was “pretty surface-level,” Williams recalled, with little emphasis on the mechanics of sound and word formation. By contrast, she said, her experience with LETRS opened her eyes to the “ever-involving” process of how young brains develop. 

“I’m doing it to become more effective as a teacher,” Williams said. “I’m intrigued by it, and I also see the need.” 

The need, particularly after the COVID era, is greater than ever. In spite of the impressive growth statistics flagged by Saint Louis University researchers, only 49 percent of KIPP Victory’s third and fourth graders demonstrated basic literacy skills on Missouri’s 2023 round of state standardized tests. Far beyond St. Louis, one of the most troubled school districts in the country, Missouri’s reading scores on the 2022 NAEP exam plummeted to their lowest level in decades. 

In response, Missouri’s legislature has adopted an initiative called Read, Lead, Exceed, which mandates that schools test their youngest students for reading challenges, develop improvement plans for those that fall behind and regularly communicate with parents on their progress throughout the school year. 

Rebecca Treiman, who researches language development at Washington University in St. Louis, called those proposals “good steps.” But she argued that even high-quality training and classroom materials would have a limited impact if teacher turnover in Missouri, which reached new highs during the pandemic, did not abate. Both average and starting teacher salaries in the state are among the lowest in the country, a fact that some have blamed for ongoing churn.

“You might have a trained teacher, but teachers need experience putting this into practice,” Treiman said. “Making sure kids go to school every day, and making sure that teacher salaries are good enough, is really important.”

KIPP St. Louis Executive Director Garrett applauded the change in policy and said schools in the network were benefiting from it, while noting that the local affiliate ”started basically putting all our teachers through that a year ahead.”

Jackson said that Missouri’s new laws around student assessment and family outreach would present schools with the challenge of hiring new interventionists to devise personalized action plans and work with parents; with many already operating under a manpower deficit, that task could be significant. 

Still, she added, higher standards could ultimately galvanize improvement, both inside and outside the charter sector. 

“It’s a lot to take hold of, and it’s going to hold us accountable,” she said. “We are identifying kids who are at risk, we are telling parents that we’re doing something about it, and from that perspective, I think it’s great.”

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the City Fund provide financial support to KIPP and The 74.

PIERRE — The state House Education Committee unanimously voted Wednesday at the Capitol to support Gov. Kristi Noem’s $6 million effort to train teachers in phonics literacy. The bill now goes to the Joint Appropriations Committee.

The effort, spearheaded by the state Department of Education, provides extensive professional development to teachers in what the bill calls the “Science of Reading.” It extends to training for public school, private school and tribal teachers.

The legislative ask is a continuation of the department’s literacy program that started in 2023 and was paid for by federal COVID relief funds. Those funds expire by September. The $6 million would continue the program for the next four years and will offer training to all elementary schools and teachers in the state.

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“In four years, when the money runs out, we’re hoping and believe that the need for the money will as well,” Department of Education Secretary Joseph Graves told lawmakers.

Half of all South Dakota students aren’t proficient in English Language Arts exams, according to assessment data from the 2022-2023 school year. According to the latest national KIDs Count report, 68% of South Dakota fourth graders aren’t proficient in reading – an increase of four percentage points since 2021.

Early literacy skills are closely linked to reading achievement throughout school and adulthood, and experts argue reading could be the most important skill needed for success as an adult, according to the department. People who can’t read are less likely than others to vote, read the news or be stably employed.

The bill was widely supported by education lobbyists and did not have any opponent testimony.

The bill follows a global debate – often called the “reading wars” – about how best to teach children to read. One side advocates for an emphasis on phonics, which is understanding the relationship between sounds and letters, while the other side prefers a “whole language” approach that puts a stronger emphasis on understanding meaning, with some phonics mixed in.

Graves called whole language teaching a “vague” and “loosey-goosey” method based on the idea that children will naturally learn to read. Critics of phonics-based instruction argue that phonics lessons are boring, prevent children from learning to love reading and distract from the ability to understand meaning in text.

“Proficiency rates in literacy fell (across the nation), and it quickly became clear that elementary schools filled with whole language teaching resulted in Johnny not being able to read,” Graves told lawmakers.

The Science of Reading program comes from “gold standard research” and “huge statistical meta-analyses” pointing to five foundational components of literacy education, Graves said: phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension.

Most of South Dakota’s teachers who were trained in phonics before “whole language” and “balanced literacy” was the standard have retired.

Jennifer Macziewski, a first grade teacher in Rapid City, received Science of Reading training three years ago through a state grant. The training was a two year course, so she just started implementing the instruction for her classroom this year.

Macziewski has been teaching for 13 years, she told South Dakota Searchlight after the committee meeting. About 75% of her students typically finished the school year having reached the literacy proficiency benchmark prior to the Science of Reading instruction. About 40% reached that benchmark by the end of the first semester.

She credits that anticipated success to the change in teaching.

“That’ll open a lot of doors for them,” Macziewki said. “Typically it would take them longer to learn to read, but I already have some kids who’ve hit the third grade benchmark. They’re going to start reading to learn instead of learning to read now, which will free up resources for teachers to help students who haven’t met those benchmarks yet.”

The new instruction is explicit and systematic and “opens up the code of reading” to children so they can decipher words “as long as they can memorize that secret code.”

“Instead of students having to learn thousands of words by memorizing them, they just have to memorize 100 or so unique words,” Macziewki said. “There’s an improvement in their writing too because they better understand the language, are able to break apart sounds and break down the words.”

English Language Arts standards will be up for review across the state beginning in 2024. Students are currently tested in English Language Arts standards in third through eighth grade, and in 11th grade.

The South Dakota Board of Regents plans to focus on the Science of Reading in teacher preparation programs across the state as well, Graves said, adding that if the state is going to improve its reading proficiency scores, then this type of support is needed.

“As we do this and as we continue to offer the training to teachers, we’re convinced the data will quickly demonstrate SOR’s efficacy,” Graves said. “Teachers in schools which adopt it will show increasing reading proficiency rates while those who do not will be left behind and thereby nudged into pursuing this effective program.”

Two other education bills died in the House committee on Wednesday.

One bill would have established a grant program for 30 new South Dakota teachers as a way to incentivize graduating students to stay in-state or encourage out-of-state educators to move to South Dakota.

The second bill would have established qualifications for future members of the Board of Education Standards, with a majority of the seven-member board having a professional background in education.

South Dakota Searchlight is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. South Dakota Searchlight maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Seth Tupper for questions: info@southdakotasearchlight.com. Follow South Dakota Searchlight on Facebook and Twitter.

But many states don’t adequately train or help teachers to carry out those ambitious plans, according to a new analysis.

The report, released today by the nonprofit National Center on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), identifies five key areas where education authorities can arm teachers with better skills to teach the fundamentals of literacy — from establishing strict training and licensure standards for trainees to funding meaningful professional development to classroom veterans. While a handful of states were singled out for praise, others were criticized for inaction or half-measures. 

Dozens of states use licensure tests with little or no content related to the “science of reading,” the extensive body of research into how people understand written language (including one, Iowa, that administers no licensure test that deals with reading whatsoever.) The vast majority do not require districts to choose reading curricula that reflect the science of reading. 

NCTQ President Heather Peske, a former high-ranking K–12 official in Massachusetts, applauded recent changes in state law as “well-intentioned,” but cautioned that they could only meet with success if executed with care.

“Passing state policy is the very beginning stage of doing this work,” Peske said. “It’s really the implementation that we need to focus on now.”

Though it has germinated in academic and policy circles for years, the legislative push around early literacy first gained public prominence in Mississippi, which enacted a rash of new laws around reading instruction a decade ago. That dramatic overhaul included changes to public pre-K offerings, new resources provided to districts (including special coaches assigned to underperforming schools), and even the controversial practice of holding back third graders who failed an end-of-year exam. 

Mississippi was identified in the report as one of the national leaders implementing necessary reading reforms, along with Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, Minnesota, Ohio, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Virginia. By contrast, Maine, Montana, and South Dakota were rated “unacceptable” across the five recommended action items.

Even as aspiring teachers are being trained, the authors argue, many are being set up to fall short in their first assignments. Just 26 states provide detailed standards for what teaching candidates need to know about the science of reading, including critical aspects like phonics, phonemic awareness, and fluency. Twenty-one states don’t establish any standards for the specific instruction of English learners, who account for as much as 20 percent of all K–12 students in places like Texas.

In spite of the clear signs that thousands of teachers are minted each year with incomplete or inaccurate notions of the science of reading, a majority of state education departments allow outside entities and accreditors to approve literacy offerings in schools of education and other teacher preparation programs. Just 23 states administer their own process of approval, and only 10 consult literacy experts in the decision of whether to approve individual programs.

Once those new teachers enter the classroom, many will be stuck using materials that are poorly aligned with the best research on how to improve reading outcomes, the study concludes. Only nine states — Nevada, Arkansas, Tennessee, Connecticut, Delaware, Rhode Island, Ohio, Virginia, and South Carolina — require that districts use high-quality reading curricula, such as those approved by vetting organizations like EdReports. The remaining states, accounting for 40 million K–12 students, make no such requirement; 20 states don’t even collect data on which curricula districts are using, so families must make their own inquiries into whether their children have access to effective instruction.

Even while popular early literacy approaches, such as “guided reading” and “balanced literacy,” have fallen out of favor with education experts in recent years, hundreds of school districts still spend millions of dollars each year to access them. Some include wealthy suburban districts in high-achieving areas like Greater Boston, where high average reading scores are complicated by large disparities between high- and low-performing students.

Peske said that while the report did not delve into regulatory questions like whether to introduce universal dyslexia screening or to retain low-scoring elementary students for extra reading instruction, those issues were also important parts of state rules around foundational literacy. But teacher preparation and support stood above the rest, she concluded.

“We know teachers matter most; they’re the most important in-school factor in impacting student outcomes,” she said. “So if we’re actually going to see improvement in student reading rates, we need to make sure teachers are prepared and supported to implement and sustain scientifically based reading instruction.”

High-dosage tutoring is one of the most effective tools to help students recover from lost learning, including in subjects like reading, where many are far behind. 

But what if schools didn’t wait until students fell behind? What if all kindergartners got a reading tutor from the start?

That’s what the early-literacy tutoring company Once is testing out. They have a hunch the results will look good. 

By contracting with schools and tracking outcomes, the company hopes to convince more schools and districts to invest in early literacy tutoring, according to Matt Pasternack, Once’s chief executive and co-founder. 

“It sounds crazy, but why couldn’t you just teach every kid in America to read one-on-one?” Pasternack said.

The program includes daily, 15-minute sessions during school, but is flexible, according to Pasternack.

Pasternack said the curriculum is informed by the science of reading, a growing movement to change literacy instruction and re-emphasize phonics. Alone with a tutor, students are taught to recognize letters, the sounds that they make and how they blend to form words. 

By the end of the year, Pasternack hopes all students can decode fluently, which he thinks will enable them to learn “more autonomously in every grade afterward.”

The two-time grantee received roughly half-a-million dollars from Accelerate, a national nonprofit that has given roughly $21 million to various groups to scale tutoring efforts post-pandemic. Once worked with “hundreds” of students during the 2022-2023 school year and will work with over 1,000 during the upcoming school year, according to Pasternack. The program has been offered at public, charter and private schools in states including California, Hawaii, Texas, New York, and Ohio, and in Washington, D.C. 

The program costs schools about $400 per student and has been given to entire classes and as an intervention for selected students.

Schools are required to provide personnel to be tutors, such as paraprofessionals or other existing school staff. Once provides a scripted curriculum and ongoing coaching. Pasternack said school staff are generally not compensated for the additional tutoring duties, but the program is working to partner with local universities so they can get course credit. 

One-on-one key to teaching phonics

Pasternack said “one-on-one instruction simplifies the implementation of the science of reading.” 

He said phonics is challenging to execute in large classrooms because it requires “near-perfect classroom management.”

“In order to teach those types of skills, you need to hear what every single child is saying,” Pasternack said.

“Master teachers” excel at large-group instruction, but many others struggle, Pasternack said. 

Rebecca Kette, an intervention specialist at Orchard STEM School in Cleveland and a former Once tutor and coordinator, said one-on-one time was beneficial to meet her students’ needs.

“I think a constant struggle for classroom teachers is that individualized attention for children,” Kette said.

Patrick Proctor, the education department chair at Boston College and a professor focused on bilingual education and literacy, said without individualized attention, teachers can’t meet students’ phonic needs.

“A whole-group phonic program is not designed to meet every student where they are at, but rather is focused at on-average expectations of where students should be,” Proctor said in an email.  

‘Everything in a package’

Once tutors get two half-days of training upfront followed by weekly sessions with Once coaches. All tutor sessions are recorded and viewed by the coaches, who provide feedback during weekly meetings. 

“The way that they tutor and train people, you understand the curriculum and are able to deliver it,” said Joseph Salazar, a Once tutor and coordinator and an English as a Second Language teacher at Seaton Elementary in Washington, D.C.

Salazar said he knows how much goes into designing lessons, so he appreciates Once’s script and curriculum. Even if he didn’t have teaching experience, he said he’d feel confident.

“Once provides everything in a package,” Salazar said.

Empowering school employees, like paraprofessionals who may not have prior experience in literacy instruction, is important for scalability, according to Matthew Kraft, an education and economics professor at Brown University who has studied tutoring expansion models.

“Scaling tutoring requires expanding the pool of tutors,” Kraft said in an email. “Paraprofessionals offer an attractive pool of labor for tutoring because they have lots of experience working with students and they are already employed by school districts.”

Early results and criticism 

Pasternack said research about Once is “extremely preliminary.” He’s “hopeful” more results will be available “by the middle of this year.”

A report by LXD Research highlighting the impact of the Once program on students at seven schools last academic year concluded there was a positive correlation between Once lessons and students’ scores on the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) assessment.

“Overall, the more lesson cycles students completed in Once, the higher their scores,” Rachel Schechter, the report’s author, writes.

Salazar said that of the six students he tutored last year, all started below benchmark and five met or exceeded reading-level benchmarks by the end. 

Kette said her students showed “big gains” in oral-reading fluency.

Laura Justice, a distinguished professor at Ohio State’s Department of Educational Studies and the executive director of its Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy, agreed there is “strong evidence” for the efficacy of small-group lessons on decoding and comprehension skills. But before scaling a program like Once, it’s important for claims to be “assessed using experimental methods,” she said. 

Justice said there isn’t evidence supporting the idea that one-on-one is more effective than small-group tutoring. 

Pasternack said he’s open to exploring small groups, but that it would pose several challenges for the program.

“All the kids need to say the exact same sound at the same moment otherwise they’re going to listen to each other, rather than reading,” Pasternack said.

Justice also said it should be tested whether daily sessions really boost outcomes more than sessions two or three times per week.

“There is a threshold of additional instruction that is needed to help children advance, but instruction above that threshold does not necessarily pay off,” she said in an email.

Pasternack said that Once has “documented cases” of students that missed sessions and attended approximately two or three sessions per week. 

“The kid just moves half as quickly,” Pasternack said. “You can’t move faster in less time.”

Proctor said he’s skeptical about the logistics of scaling Once. Tutoring a class of 16 students one-on-one for 15 minutes each amounts to four hours of instructional time a day. But, since school days are complicated, he said it would take longer. 

“Likely it wouldn’t happen every day for every child because schedules are challenging,” Proctor wrote. “Multiply that by every day of the school year and you get a lot of slippage.”

Pasternack responded by saying schools aren’t required to use Once programming everyday.

“We work with each school to create a schedule that works for that school,” Pasternack said.

Proctor also challenged the belief that schools “need to be going so heavy on phonics and decoding in kindergarten.”

“The point of kindergarten is to develop social skills, introduce children to literacy, language, and numeracy, explore music, play,” he said.

But Pasternack said declining kindergarten enrollment makes him think current standards may not be working.

Additionally, Pasternack said Once isn’t just about decoding. Each lesson emphasizes phonemic awareness, includes comprehension questions, and revolves around reading an episode, he said, “in a suspenseful and engaging epic journey of a group of animals searching for safety, wisdom and connection.”

Ultimately, Pasternack said he hopes Once can build on existing research and “broaden the conversation.”

“We don’t want to play games with the data,” he said. “We are truly curious. Does scripted, explicit, one-on-one instruction in foundational literacy change the trajectories of the students who receive it in kindergarten?”

Correction: Rachel Schechter is the founder of LXD Research and the author of a report on the Once tutoring program. Her named was misspelled in an earlier version of this story.

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Overdeck Family Foundation provide financial support to both Accelerate and The 74.

Texas lawmakers passed a measure at the end of their regular 2023 session that helped move the state forward in its effort to improve reading outcomes. HB 1605 includes several elements, including creating a process and incentives for districts to purchase high quality instructional materials approved by the State Board of Education. Importantly, it also bans the use of three-cueing, an ineffective instructional practice commonly used in balanced literacy that teaches young readers to rely on visual and meaning cues to guess a word.

Research tells us that early readers need, instead, to learn how letters and sounds work together to create words. Thanks to HB 1605, three-cueing can no longer be used in classrooms or taught in teacher preparation programs, an incremental step toward improving reading outcomes.

The word “incremental” is key here. Texas policymakers have been trying to improve reading rates for decades, from 1996’s Texas Reading Initiative, and 2019’s HB 3, which created “Reading Academies” to train teachers and principals. But Texas has not had the single-minded focus that states like Mississippi have used to improve reading outcomes for all students.

What’s more, Texas legislators missed an opportunity this spring to approve a deeper overhaul of reading instruction in Texas classrooms. Rep. Harold Dutton, D-Houston, proposed legislation that would have required schools and districts to teach reading based on the five elements of the science of reading. The bill stalled during the session, but one element survived in HB 1605— a ban on three-cueing, a reading instruction method that encourages students to rely on context clues like repetitive sentence patterns, the first letter of a word, and pictures as they learn to read.

As Texas legislators look forward to the 2025 session, they have an opportunity to create a comprehensive policy that ensures all students receive research-based instruction — and remove ineffective strategies like balanced literacy from Texas classrooms. Such a policy needs to include support for educators and accountability for change — along with giving districts access to high quality instructional materials and early screeners.

Success takes more than passing a law. The hardest work comes next.

That lesson is important for Texas and any other state seeking to improve reading instruction. States that devote serious attention to improving reading outcomes — Mississippi and Colorado, for example — excel in implementing change after a strong policy is signed into law. They focus on:

• Insisting upon the use of research-based reading principles — the science of reading — in classroom instruction and in curriculum and materials;

• Providing a culture of accountability to ensure change happens and an infrastructure of support so that educators are able to make the needed changes;

• Ensuring schools of education and teacher training programs understand and embrace the science of reading so that new teachers are ready to teach reading well;

• Working with parents and community leaders to communicate clearly about the changes and to champion effective reading strategies; and

• Sticking to these fundamentals even when results do not improve overnight.

Research-Based Lessons from the Magnolia State

Texas can learn from Mississippi the absolute importance of relentlessly embracing research in improving student reading. Mississippi’s 2013 Literacy-Based Promotion Act requires all students receive instruction based on the science of reading. Classrooms must use research-based instruction and materials. And aspiring elementary school teachers must pass a foundational reading test before receiving a state license.

After legislators passed that law, state education officials, led by Carey Wright, the Mississippi superintendent of education from 2013-2022, and Kymyona Burk, then literacy director at the Mississippi Department of Education, got busy implementing the law.

They deployed reading coaches trained in science of reading to the lowest performing schools. Coaches were assigned to classrooms to work with teachers a few days a week for the entire school year, building relationships with instructors and providing consistent job-embedded learning. Research shows that hands-on professional development is most effective for educators. The state still follows that strategy.

The state similarly provided a training program, Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling,– so that sitting educators could learn and practice the science of reading. Burk traveled the state to help teachers and principals understand LBPA’s requirements. Wright regularly reported on progress to the Legislature.

The strategies have paid off. In 2012, Mississippi ranked 49th out 50 states on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in fourth grade reading. In 2022, Mississippi ranked 21st. 

To be sure, Texas has attempted to embrace some research-backed practices. The Reading Academies legislators authorized in 2019 require K-3 teachers and principals to complete and pass an intensive course on the science of teaching reading. The Texas Education Agency projects that 132,000 teachers will have completed the academies by the end of this year.

But the implementation of the academies has been inconsistent. Districts can hire an outside expert to lead a comprehensive and immersive cohort with live coaching, or they can choose to implement it locally, hiring the cohort leaders themselves. The district may also choose an online-based model versus a more expensive and intensive in-person version. So, while districts have options to best implement given their context, that also creates wide variation in what content is delivered. It is easy for districts immersed in a balanced literacy approach to use the academies to reinforce that flawed philosophy, rather than help teachers and principals understand and implement the science of reading.

Providing a Culture of Accountability and Infrastructure of Support

A key element of Mississippi’s 2013 law is that all the state’s third graders must read at grade level by the end of their school year. If they do not, students cannot enter fourth grade, unless they pass the state’s reading exam during subsequent opportunities or receive an exemption.

This aspect of the law mirrors what Texas passed under then-Gov. George W. Bush in 1999. Texas, however, no longer requires third graders to pass a reading test before advancing to the next grade. Given that only 48% of Texas third graders met the state’s standards on Texas’ 2023 reading exam, legislators and education leaders should study how Mississippi has used this practice to good effect.

Of course, the decision to hold students back is never an easy one. That’s why Wright, Burk and their team worked hard to design — and communicate — a plan that would neither be punishment nor repetition. Instead, they insisted upon retention as intervention. Students who are held back have personalized, specific reading plans and supports designed to ensure the student can develop missing skills.

The state’s use of retention as an intervention has paid off. A recent Boston University study found that Mississippi students who repeated the third grade scored higher on the state reading exams in sixth grade than fellow students who barely passed the third-grade test.

Mississippi’s requirement that aspiring elementary school teachers pass a Foundation of Reading test before receiving a state license is another part of the state’s culture of accountability. The test not only impacts who gets credentialed, but the exam informs the state which schools lag in preparing candidates.

Accountability plays a key role as well in Colorado’s effort to improve reading instruction. The state’s Reading to Ensure Academic Development Act emphasizes the need for teachers to be proficient in the science of reading, channels resources to students below proficiency in the science of reading, and sets district reporting requirements to hold schools accountable.

For example, districts must provide teachers at least 45 hours of training in the science of reading. And starting in the 2024-2025 budget cycle, districts must show proof to the state that principals and administrators have passed the evidence-based training.

What’s more, districts must screen K-3 students to assess any reading deficits. They must also report to the state the number of students with significant reading deficiencies and their progress in reading.

In a report released in June, NCTQ found that only 27% of Texas’ 51 preparation programs adequately provide training in phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension, and offer little-to-no instruction that contradicts research-based practices.

The organization also reported that 20 of the state’s 51 programs teach multiple techniques or approaches that contradict proven research. Only three schools —Houston Baptist University, Texas A&M-Texarkana, and Sul Ross State University — earned an A+ for their use of the science of reading.

As NCTQ concluded, better teacher preparation will lead to more students learning to effectively read.

Colorado certainly has focused on better preparation after state lawmakers insisted upon it. The state created strong teacher preparation standards, a rigorous licensure test, and assistance helping preparation programs instruct prospective teachers in the science of reading.

In Colorado, NCTQ found, teacher preparation programs used an average of 4.6 of those five elements. That was the highest score of any state and beat the national average of 2.6. NCTQ also reported that 11 of the state’s 16 schools of education received an A or A+ on the organization’s scorecard for effectively preparing educators to teach reading.

What’s more, Colorado requires all teacher preparation programs meet state standards before becoming fully licensed. Otherwise, the State Board of Education will sanction the program until its reading coursework improves.

Texas and other states can learn from this model. NCTQ found that while Texas requires a licensure test for reading instructors, it recommends that the state requires pre-K through fifth-grade teachers pass a licensure test that aligns with scientifically-based reading instruction. The organization also recommends the state publish the passing rates for those tests.

Working with Parents and Community Leaders to Champion Effective Reading Strategies

Here, too, Texas and others should learn from Colorado, Minnesota and Mississippi in giving parents the information and tools to effectively use their voice.

Colorado’s READ initiative calls upon schools to provide parents regular, recurring updates about the progress of interventions their students might receive. That kind of information matters. Parents need data before they can sound off.

In Minnesota, the National Parents Union organized across several groups to engage parents, business leaders and educators to push the state to adopt a science of reading approach. This summer, their efforts paid off when Gov. Tim Walz signed the READ Act, which requires the use of high-quality screeners, research-based curriculum, better information for parents and provides resources to train educators on the science of reading. Balanced literacy is pervasive in Minnesota classrooms, and reading scores fell sharply in the pandemic and have not recovered.

In Mississippi, Kymyona Burk and others within the state’s education department traveled the state to talk with educators and parents about what the law means for children and to clearly outline the roles and responsibilities for educators and parents. This focused on communications was intentional: to inform parents and teachers and to enlist them as champions of quality reading instruction.

Mississippi also benefited from the commitment of Jim Barksdale, a Mississippi native who previously served as Netscape’s CEO. His $100 million gift to create the Barksdale Reading Institute helped state leaders spread understanding about the importance of the science of reading.

To be sure, Texas students have champions like the Katy Literacy Coalition, which advocates for the science of reading in an affluent suburban district outside of Houston. Likewise, the Parent Shield organization that Trenace Dorsey-Hollins founded in Fort Worth is driving an important conversation in that city about reading instruction, especially in disadvantaged communities. The Fort Worth Education Partnership is working across the community to help parents understand precisely where their children stand in their reading proficiencies. But there is not a statewide advocate ensuring that Texas does this right for every child, in every classroom across the state.

Sticking to These Fundamentals Even If Results Don’t Improve Overnight

Scores on the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress reading exam show that Colorado fourth graders dipped slightly lower than their results on the 2019 NAEP reading exam. That was not unusual. Most states declined. None showed an increase. Still, Colorado’s fourth graders scored significantly higher than the national average.

The state’s eighth grade reading scores were similar. They slightly declined for Colorado eighth graders, as they did in many states. Still, Colorado eighth graders scored higher than the national average.

Mississippi’s results tell a similar story for the state’s fourth graders. Their scores beat the national average, even though they declined from the 2019 NAEP reading exam. And those fourth-grade scores continued a longer upward trajectory. The fourth-grade performance in 2022 showed an increase of eight points from 2011.

The good news is that Brown University researchers found that South Carolina, Iowa, Mississippi and Tennessee have now recovered from or exceeded COVID-related declines in reading. Most other states did not experience that same progress. The improvements were attributed to each state’s focus on improved reading instruction as well as a faster return to in-person learning.

The lesson for Texans — and anyone in a state taking on this work — is that progress takes time. And sometimes it is uneven. It takes persistence for all of the needed changes to line up in ways that change student outcomes.

Success requires committing to the research-based approach to reading, unequivocally. All ideas are not good ones when it comes to teaching reading, and it matters to say that out loud. There are many open questions in education, but how to best teach reading is mercifully not one of them. Education has no shortage of fads and shiny new things, implemented poorly, that seasoned educators can just ignore or wait out. The science of reading can’t be one.

Texas is poised to make an incredible impact on its young people if it figures out how to teach reading consistently well. Nearly 6 million students are enrolled in Texas public schools — about 60% of those children are economically disadvantaged and nearly 22% are English language learners. 

Creating 6 million strong readers means giving 6 million children the ability to learn and navigate their futures.

Disclosure: Anne Wicks served as an advisor to the Highland Park Literacy Coalition, a parent organization which advocated for Highland Park ISD to eliminate balanced literacy and to embrace the science of reading. The Texas district announced that change in the spring of 2022.

The brick walkway along the Ella Mae Shamblee Library on Evans Avenue in Fort Worth’s Morningside neighborhood is lined with plaques commemorating the respected educators, veterans, and musicians who have come out of the historically Black community. Inside the library on a scorching July afternoon this summer, Trenace Dorsey-Hollins and a group of parents were making their own history. The Parent Shield leaders, a grassroots organization that Dorsey-Hollins launched in 2022, were hosting the first of nine “Freedom July” mobile literacy clinics.

Parent Shield’s mission is to educate and unite powerful parents to demand a high-quality education for all children. Their goal that afternoon was to inform parents in Fort Worth’s two lowest-income City Council districts about their children’s reading ability and to arm caregivers with information about what research-based reading instruction includes. True to their organization’s belief that parents are their children’s first line of defense, the team then informed parents about the actions they can take with teachers.

As the initial group of parents settled into their seats, their children gathered up free snacks and sat with assigned reading teachers. There, they walked through a set of literacy checkpoints with the certified teachers, including the DIBELS assessment, which helps measure three key components of early literacy — phonemic awareness, phonics and fluency. After the children completed their sessions, the educators explained to parents whether their child was on track with reading — and if not, where they were falling behind.

While the children were busy reading with the evaluators, Dorsey-Hollins walked the adults through a slide show that highlighted the reading realities within the city. She started by explaining that 64% of the nearly 160,000 students who attend school in one of the city’s school districts or charter schools did not read at grade level in 2022 on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness reading exam.

She broke the data down further to show that only 26% of Fort Worth Black third graders were reading at grade level. They were followed by 29% of Hispanic third graders at grade level, and 54% of White third graders on track. The average is low across all groups, but Dorsey-Hollins emphasized to the parents that “our Black and Brown babies are being left behind.” She explained that only 13% of Fort Worth students scored high enough on SAT or ACT exams to be considered ready for college, a career or the military. Parents were shocked.

Dorsey-Hollins herself is the mother of two daughters, one of whom has special needs, and a stepson. The Fort Worth native became an advocate for them after witnessing the low expectations for students when her oldest daughter was given a low reading score.

Dorsey-Hollins knew her daughter was a stronger reader than the score indicated, so Dorsey-Hollins followed up with questions. It turns out that that teacher assigned all students the same starting grade so she could measure growth over time against just one baseline. The rightfully frustrated Dorsey-Hollins took her case to the principal, who decided to reevaluate all the students in the class. “I am a mama who is concerned,” she shared with the group at the Shamblee Library.

The even tone in her voice belied Dorsey-Hollins’ fierce determination to improve the reading skills of all the city’s students. Perhaps her determination comes from being the daughter of a bull rider. Whatever the origin, it certainly came through as she explained the science behind quality reading instruction.

She walked through the five elements of that instruction identified by the 2000 National Reading Panel Report:

1. Phonemic awareness — understanding the relationship between letters and their sounds;

2. Phonics — sounding out whole words;

3. Fluency — reading with expression and accuracy;

4. Vocabulary — words a student knows and understands; and

5. Comprehension — understanding of texts.

She emphasized that students need to learn to read before they can learn other subjects. “This is what will close the achievement gap,” Dorsey-Hollins stated with authority.

One mother interrupted to say she had wondered what was going on with her child’s reading. She herself had been schooled in phonics. A dad spoke up as well, saying he did not remember his child’s school sending home any information about phonics.

The end of Dorsey-Hollins’ presentation included a reminder that parents can choose another school if their child is not learning at the appropriate level. She wanted parents to know they have options. 

Volunteers handed out cards with questions the parents could ask their child’s teacher. In both English and Spanish, the cards contained prompts like, “Is my child on grade level in math and reading?” and, “Where has my child done well and where do they need more support?”

Parent Shield’s Freedom July campaign, a potent combination of parent advocacy and literacy awareness, continued through the month, with follow-up social media posts promoting “A Literate Fort Worth is a Great Fort Worth.” At one Parent Shield gathering on a Saturday morning in late July, Dorsey-Hollins announced that the Boys & Girls Club of Fort Worth and the office of Mayor Mattie Parker had committed to supporting the organization’s literacy campaign.

This is not the first time Ft. Worth has made early literacy a priority, but the city has never before focused on improving instruction. Sadly, a 2016 mayoral-led campaign to get all third-grade students in the Fort Worth Independent School District reading at grade level by 2025 fell well short of the mark. While that effort increased students’ access to books and time to read, it did not focus on ensuring that students received research-based instruction and support. Only about 32% of Fort Worth ISD third graders were on grade level on the state’s 2023 reading exam.

A “Literacy Coalition” Forges Ahead with Science

Dorsey-Hollins and her team of reformers are not the only parents attempting to make a difference in reading instruction across Texas.

Amy Traynor and Elisha Kalvass are the driving force behind the Katy Literacy Coalition in the affluent Katy Independent School District outside of Houston. Each are parents of students with dyslexia, so they came attuned to their students’ reading needs. Kalvass herself has dyslexia and Traynor had worked as an occupational therapist within the Katy Independent School District.

They described their work over the last four years as righting the ship within the district on reading. Kalvass even quit her job so she could learn how to teach her daughter how to read.

“Amy and I, along with others, decided we would force them to teach all Katy students how to read,” Kalvass said.

In 2019, the Katy school board approved new four-year targets for third grade reading improvement, setting low goals that alarmed Traynor and Kalvass. They said the board accepted poor literacy rates as the norm, something that infuriated them and drove them to become advocates for the science of reading.

Kalvass and Traynor understood that for research-based instruction to take hold, the district needed to stop implementing what they said was a flawed approach — balanced literacy. Balanced literacy focuses heavily on helping children learn to read through lots of exposure to books and encourages children to use context clues like pictures to guess at words, but it eschews explicit instruction about letters, their sounds, and how they combine to make words. Many children do not just pick up reading. They need direct instruction to learn how letters and words work to access more complex texts.

In 2020, the Katy Literacy Coalition succeeded in electing two trustees to the Katy ISD school board who advocated for the science of reading and its five components of phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. The trustees then persuaded a majority of the board to get rid of the problematic balanced literacy reading instruction strategies and curriculum created by Lucy Calkins at Columbia University and Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell at the Ohio State University.

Even then, the reading textbooks Katy administrators have adopted are not necessarily aligned with the science of reading. Notably, Traynor, Kalvass, other advocates and outside experts have not been at the table as the district selects new curriculum.

What’s more, teachers may not be receiving the proper training. Thanks to HB 3, passed by the 2019 Texas State Legislature, all K-3 teachers and principals in Texas are required to attend a Texas Reading Academy to learn the science of reading, why it matters and how to implement stronger instruction in their classrooms.

Traynor and Kalvass say Katy ISD educators were routed into a separate Katy ISD-led version of the reading academy where the science-of-reading was not emphasized. The law allows for districts to choose how they deliver the reading academies to their teachers and principals. They can hire an outside expert, or they can do it themselves in-house, an option that typically reinforces the district’s current approach. Katy ISD chose the latter.

Traynor and Kalvass are right: States and districts must make sure that educators — both teachers and principals — are trained correctly, given research-based professional learning and coaching, and have access to high quality instructional materials for their classrooms. The Katy Literacy Coalition posted to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, that teaching children how to read is “the single most important thing public education should provide.”

A “Reading Initiative” That Made Strides, But Fizzled Out

What’s eerie about the work of parent leaders like Trenace Dorsey-Hollins, Elisha Kalvass, and Amy Traynor is how they mirror what was happening in Texas more than 25 years ago. In January 1996, while in his second year as governor, George W. Bush set a goal that every Texas child would learn to read, starting with reading at grade level by third grade.

The goal gave birth to the Texas Reading Initiative, which included such elements as increasing awareness of students’ reading skills in kindergarten through third grade, funding statewide intensive reading programs and stimulating private-sector programs.

The initiative let districts determine how to teach reading, but sought to hold them accountable for their success in getting students reading at grade level. At the same time, it offered teachers $150 a day to receive training in the most effective methods and provided $203 million in grants for reading academies and teacher training.

The Texas Education Agency also provided districts with reading assessments to determine the literacy skills of students in kindergarten through second grade. The Texas Legislature required districts to select from among the state education commissioner’s list of approved reading instruments to determine a student’s phonemic awareness, oral reading abilities, and reading comprehension.

The agency likewise awarded the University of Texas at Austin a grant to create the Texas Center for Reading and Language Arts, helmed by nationally recognized reading expert, Dr. Sharon Vaughn. The center ran the reading academies, which drew upon the state’s education service centers to train educators in how to effectively develop students into proficient readers. The academies were a key part of the commitment to provide every Texas student in kindergarten through third grade with the essentials to become strong readers.

At the same time, Bush toured the state, talking with the business community and local leaders about how researchers were finding substantial evidence for this approach. Similarly, TEA experts crisscrossed Texas, hosting reading summits to amplify the importance of scientifically supported reading instruction.

Later, in the 1999 Legislature, Bush proposed requiring students to pass the state third grade reading test before moving to the next grade. Legislators in the Democratic-controlled House and Republican-led Senate agreed with that proposal, and that policy remained in place until 2009. Students in fifth and eighth grades were also required to pass the state exam in both reading and math to be promoted to the next grade, a policy which ended in 2021 due to the pandemic’s disruption of education.

Texas reading scores did improve throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s. Texas’ fourth graders saw their scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress reading exam increase from 1994 to 2005, except for one decline in 2003. Texas fourth graders surpassed the national average for their peers around the country during that period, including a significant five-point jump from 1994 to 1998.

Over the next decade, the Texas Reading Initiative eventually lost momentum. The program’s primary champion had moved on to become president of the United States and tough budgets in Texas forced literacy instruction to compete with other pressing state needs. There are lessons to be learned from its demise.

Implementation Hampered “Reading First”

The Texas Reading Initiative, however, did form the basis of the Reading First initiative that George W. Bush launched in his first term as president. The Republican nominee campaigned in 2000 upon improving literacy around the country, and Reading First became a priority during his initial week in office.

The $5 billion initiative included money to help states and local districts implement scientifically based reading strategies. And it included funds to help model Head Start and other pre-school reading programs begin developing readers.

Reading First brought on board top reading researchers, focused on teaching phonics, sought to get rid of strategies like letting students use pictures to guess about a word, provided dollars to train reading instructors, and gave states money to adopt a reading skills diagnostic. The initiative particularly sought to help students in schools that serve low-income neighborhoods.

The program faced pushback from those opposed to these strategies. And it depended upon states to implement the programs with fidelity, a risky assumption. The program also came to an end after the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General reported that consultants involved with reviewing Reading First grants had conflicts of interest with prospective publishers.

Still, the program made an impact during its limited life. As of April 2007, the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences reported, grants had been awarded to 1,800 school districts and funds distributed to 5,880 schools. The program had also trained 100,000 teachers in the science of reading. As a result, IES concluded that Reading First had “consistent positive effect on reading instruction” and that it “had a positive and statistically significant impact on first grade students’ decoding skill.”

At the same time, IES claimed, the program had “no statistically significant impact on student reading comprehension.” In other words, it helped how reading was taught and it improved students’ ability to turn printed letters into spoken words by connecting sounds and letters. But it did not meaningfully improve student understanding of more complex texts.

Despite its aborted run, journalist Emily Hanford, whose reporting on the science of reading has helped build a new groundswell of awareness of this issue, believes the science of reading work taking root around the country now would not have happened without Reading First. And writing in City Journal about how the program benefited students from high-poverty backgrounds, the Manhattan Institute’s Sol Stern concluded that Reading First was “one of the best investments ever in federal education spending.”

Texas is Attempting a Return to Science of Reading

Now you will find that Texas, like a growing number of states, is attempting to return to the foundational research-based principles of reading in its more than 1,250 school districts. Except Texas legislators only went so far in the 2023 regular legislative session.

Rep. Harold Dutton of Houston, a Democrat who served in the Texas House during the Bush governorship, authored legislation that pushed for a more comprehensive embrace of the science of reading. His bill, HB 2162, would have required the Texas Education Agency to provide districts with a list of reading screeners that could assess the foundational literacy skills of K-3 students, based on the five elements of the science of reading. The legislation would have required scientifically based reading interventions for students identified for intervention. And it would have kept school districts, open-enrollment charter schools, and educator preparation programs from using three-cueing — a method that utilizes letters, sentence structure and context, rather than phonics — in reading instruction.

The bill died, although Dutton’s effort to curb three-cueing survived in HB 1605. That measure requires the use of high-quality instructional materials, among other things, and prohibits the use of or teaching of three-cueing by educator preparation programs, school districts and open-enrollment charter schools. Gov. Greg Abbott later signed HB 1605 into law.

That was at least some progress, although hard work remains, largely at the local level to change practice in classrooms and in teacher preparation programs. In a local-control world, that’s where reading instruction directives move from policy to practice, and it is where a new idea is most vulnerable to fading away.

As we will report in our next chapter, none of these reforms will work if leaders and educators don’t follow through and enact them properly. We will also dive deeper into the importance of successfully implementing effective reading strategies.

Disclosure:Anne Wicks served as an advisor to the Highland Park Literacy Coalition, a parent organization which advocated for Highland Park ISD to eliminate balanced literacy and to embrace the science of reading. The Texas district announced that change in the spring of 2022.

To help boost literacy achievement in Maryland’s elementary schools, the Blueprint Accountability and Implementation Board approved a proposal Thursday that will send literacy experts to schools in each of Maryland’s counties and the city of Baltimore by the end of this school year.

Before these teams arrive at the schools, Rachel Hise, executive director of the Blueprint board, said school leaders must complete a draft literacy plan for elementary students by Jan. 15.

The goal for the initiative, which the state Board of Education also unanimously approved last week, is to ensure students in third grade are reading at a proficient level.

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Maryland’s latest standardized test scores showed improvements with 48% of third-grade students proficient in English language arts, an increase from 41% in 2019 and 46% last year.

However, some schools with students in that grade had fewer than 7% at a proficient level.

“I think that we all see the challenge but also the opportunity to make some progress sooner than later,” said Blueprint board chair and former Montgomery County Executive Isiah “Ike” Leggett. “We can learn and adjust as we go forward.”

Through the initiative, ten literacy experts working in groups of two will visit 10% of elementary schools located in all 24 school systems starting in January until the end of the current 2023-24 school year. That is in addition to 50 schools that will be reviewed through the Department of Education’s existing expert review teams.

It’s unclear which specific schools will be visited next year, but the experts will observe classroom instruction, evaluate literacy plans based on the school’s data and assess whether instruction is implemented consistently based on the state’s “Science of Reading” program, a national movement to teach students based on phonics instructions sound, comprehension and vocabulary.

The literacy teams will then submit a report with recommendations to the department, the Blueprint board and staff and each school system.

“This effort to improve early literacy instruction will improve the learning experiences of Maryland’s youngest students and prepare them for success at every step in their learning journey,” Clarence Crawford, president of the state Board of Education, said in a statement Thursday.

Deann Collins, deputy state superintendent with the department’s Office of the Deputy Superintendent of Teaching and Learning, said Nov. 9 during a virtual board of education meeting this literacy initiative coincides the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future education reform plan, which is overseen by the Blueprint board also known as the AIB.

Collins said money is already appropriated as part of the Blueprint and coincides with Maryland Reads and other statewide reading programs.

According to a summary from the department, it will cost $1.3 million to visit the schools and form an instructional support team to work with teachers, administrators and other staff at the school systems, also called local education agencies (LEAs).

“It’s a chance to assess, not an ‘I gotcha’  that the LEAs have implemented and are making progress in the science of reading strategies that they’ve been implementing,” Collins said. “These experts will serve as an added value to not only review, but also provide concrete feedback to the LEAs on their literacy plans.”

Depending on the outcomes of this initiative, the department would use a similar process to assess math in elementary schools next school year.

Interim Superintendent Carey Wright, who began last month, said literacy teams were also used when she was superintendent in Mississippi, where turnarounds in literacy rates and standardized test scores have been dubbed the “Mississippi Miracle.”

“This gives us a chance to really get in and see what kind of help our districts need,” she said during last week’s meeting. “It’s going to inform our work, but it’s also to give us a chance to really bolster what they’re doing. It is not evaluative. It is strictly good feedback.”

Reading Partners Baltimore, a nonprofit that offers literacy tutoring, supports the decision to create a team of literacy experts to help improve reading in the state.

“Today’s decision to provide every school district in Maryland with literacy experts who will support the continuous improvement of reading instruction is a significant step toward providing students with the opportunities to succeed in school today and in the future,” Zenobia Judd-Williams, executive director of Reading Partners, said in a statement. “We look forward to working with our partners in Baltimore City to ensure children have access to their civil rights to become confident readers.”

In Indianapolis, the NCAA also partners with local TV station WISH for an “I Love to Read” challenge that encourages third graders to log their daily reading time. This year, more than 30 Indianapolis schools participated from five districts. The NCAA entices students and schools with prizes ranging from Scholastic Books and Visa gift cards to invitations to college basketball games.

Over the last decade, reading scores in Indiana have been on a steady decline, to the point of stagnation. This year’s state Reading Evaluation and Determination (IREAD-3) test results showed that third-graders’ scores rose just 0.3% from 81.9% proficiency last year, and that number hasn’t improved much in years. Earlier this year, the state passed HB 1558, a science of reading bill that places greater emphasis on phonics than context clues and guessing. Since third graders who aren’t proficient in reading by the end of the school year are less likely to graduate from high school on time and more likely to drop out altogether than those who are proficient, the NCAA hopes to help teachers by encouraging students to spend more time reading.

Earlier this month, nearly 5,000 eager third graders filled the Indiana Farmers Coliseum for a showdown between Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and Spalding University. During the free event, which Indiana-Purdue won 70-63, encouraging messages from college student athletes and even celebrities like Taylor Swift and Usher played during timeouts and halftime to promote the importance of reading daily. The third graders are invited to attend another game Nov. 20, hosted by Butler University. 

At the game, which was preceded by a pep rally, each student was given a free book to take home. Other prizes include thousands of dollars in credits from Scholastic and new books for school and classroom libraries.

Victor Hill, the NCAA’s associate director of inclusion, education and community engagement, said the organization decided to develop the literacy program after superintendents of Indianapolis’s four districts emphasized the impact the national reading crisis was having on their schools. The NCAA launched the program in Houston in 2016 with more than 7,000 students from Title I schools, and since then more than 300,000 students nationwide have participated. 

“We don’t want to take credit for what the teachers do, but they did say the competition really sparked an interest in a lot of the kids, and they saw kids reading who hadn’t been reading before,” Hill said. “They sent us pictures of kids reading during lunch, during recess, and the school library saw a spike in books being checked out.”

In Indianapolis, the response from students and teachers has been overwhelmingly positive, even from students not in third grade. The competitions get the entire school excited as they cheer on the third graders to read as much as possible. But Hill said the biggest challenge is getting parents to initiate at-home reading. Through ads on WISH-TV and announcements geared to parents at the pep rallies and basketball games, the NCAA encourages families to read with their children for at least 30 minutes a day, hoping the excitement will continue when students are home.

“We tell the children during our pep rallies, ‘If your parents, your brothers or sisters are busy, if you’ve got a cat or a dog, sit and read to them. Read to your goldfish. Just read,’” Hill said.

While her son, Roy, would ace spelling tests at the Leadership School in St. Louis, Missouri, his mom said, he would cry while doing homework because he couldn’t read any of the questions.

Ross-Porter’s realization solidified when she received a letter in the mail from his public charter school — part of a new statewide literacy awareness campaign — informing her that Roy had a reading deficiency.

“He made it through kindergarten and first grade and nobody said he was behind or he needed tutoring or extra help,” Ross-Porter said. “I don’t know where the disconnect is.”

Ross-Porter is like many parents around the St. Louis area who are now receiving the same letters in the mail, explaining that their child scored below grade level in reading.

The letters are coming as a surprise for some who are unaware of how their child is really doing in school, said Rachel Powers, a partner with The Opportunity Trust, a St. Louis education foundation.

“Parents really just don’t know. Everyone thinks, ‘My kid is good. My kid is fine’,” Powers said. “Or maybe they’re like, ‘Something seems off, but I don’t really know what to do about it. The report card seems OK, but they are struggling with their homework.’”

The Opportunity Trust and Learning Heroes, a national parent advocacy organization, announced on Oct. 24 the launch of Go Beyond Grades STL. It’s an awareness campaign for Missouri families in the City of St. Louis and St. Louis County, they said,to improve the gap between the perception and reality of their child’s progress in the classroom.

Go Beyond Grades STL is partnering with St. Louis nonprofits to connect with parents in order to help them understand their child’s achievement scores and teach them how to communicate with schools, along with offering them other resources. It’s also working with schools to improve relationships between teachers and families.

The campaign is part of a national Go Beyond Grades movement organized earlier this year by Learning Heroes, in New York City, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Houston, Boston and Sacramento.

Learning Heroes representative David Park said the organization created the national Go Beyond Grades campaign because of the increasing number of parents who are unaware of how their child is doing at school.

“There’s a significant amount of parents who believe their child is fine — and it’s not their fault,” Park said. “Eighty percent of students nationally come home with a B or above on their report card.”

In the St. Louis area, that number is nearly 90%, according to an August survey commissioned by Learning Heroes and conducted by Edge Research, a Virginia-based research firm. The survey found that 96% of St. Louis parents believed their child was at grade level in reading and 94% thought their child was at grade level in math.

Most students aren’t even close, Powers said.

St. Louis has been hit especially hard by the pandemic, which burdened elementary and middle schoolers with some of the worst learning damage suffered by any students in the United States, recent research shows.

In 2022, 42% of students in the City of St. Louis and St. Louis County were at grade level for reading, while 36% were at grade level for math, according to The Opportunity Trust.

In just the City of St. Louis, the numbers drop to 23% for reading and 17% for math.

“Parent-teacher conferences are 15 minutes (long),” Park said. “What we’re pushing more than anything is ongoing communication with the child’s teacher — setting up a learning plan and touching base regularly — that’s what teachers say is the most important.”

Ross-Porter said that would be essential for her. The second-grade mom said she can’t understand Roy’s achievement scores and what they mean for her son’s progress. She said she doesn’t even know what the school letter about Roy’s reading scores really means.

Mary LaPak, a representative for Rockwood School District, the largest public school system in the St. Louis area, said while the district hasn’t worked with Go Beyond Grades STL, it values a trusting relationship between parents and teachers.

“We encourage transparency and recognize that open communication is vital between parents and Rockwood staff in order to support all students,” LaPak said in an email. “Rockwood parents are essential partners and allies in the education of our children.”

Powers said parent-teacher communication about the recent reading letters is one of the main reasons The Opportunity Trust launched Go Beyond Grades in the St. Louis area. The letters are part of a new literacy law passed earlier this year in Missouri.

The legislative piece was included in the Missouri Read, Lead, Exceed initiative, created by the state education department. It’s a comprehensive plan that aims to increase evidence-based literacy instruction, a part of the science of reading, in order to improve the state’s low reading scores.

The law requires schools to identify students who are reading at one or more grade levels below what they should be. If a student is found with a reading deficiency, parents are sent a reading success plan, which provides a set of goals and skills needed in order for the child to reach their grade level. 

“We wanted to get the word out about what that law means for families, what it means for schools, how families and teachers and educators connect and work together to really address this issue that is happening,” Powers said. 

Powers said staff with Go Beyond Grades have been contacting St. Louis area schools to pinpoint when letters will be sent and learn how they plan on implementing the reading success plans. They also have been talking to parents about what they can expect if they receive a letter and what resources they should seek out to help their child.

“We want to make sure parents don’t just get a letter at their house and then they go on about their business,” Powers said. “And then it kind of gets lost in the shuffle. Like, no, this is really important, this really means something if you’re getting this letter, this is really important for your family.”

When parents are involved in their children’s schooling, students show higher academic achievement, school engagement and motivation, according to a 2019 American Psychological Association review of 448 independent studies on parent involvement.

High levels of family engagement also helped decrease chronic absenteeism for students before the pandemic, according to research published earlier this month by Learning Heroes and other partners.

Ross-Porter said her involvement in Go Beyond Grades STL prepared her for October parent-teacher conferences. She and Powers worked together to decipher Roy’s test scores so she could arrive armed with a long list of questions to ask Roy’s teacher.

“The questions that she gave me were able to get me better answers, just because of the way the questions are worded,” Ross-Porter said.

Powers said she hopes Go Beyond Grades STL can one day go beyond the boundaries of the St. Louis area and help parents across Missouri. For now, billboards are going up around the city and county to alert families to the importance of being involved in their child’s education.

“How do we make sure folks are clear about what to expect from their schools and how to partner with their educators to really support their children? Because at the end of the day, that’s what we’re fighting for,” Powers said. “What we’re trying to really support is our kids, so they can have a strong future with the basics of reading and math.”

Disclosure: The Opportunity Trust provides financial support to The 74. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York provide financial support to Learning Heroes and The 74.

Back for Season 5, Michael and Diane catch up on their summers and book reading, Diane’s new entrepreneurial venture, Point B, the season ahead — and then offer some hot takes on the reading wars and Lucy Calkins, four-year college-for-all and education jargon.

Listen to the episode below. A full transcript follows.

Diane Tavenner: Hey, Michael.

Michael Horn: Hey, Diane. We are back. It’s been a little while.

Diane Tavenner: It’s been more than a minute, for sure. It is really good to be here with you and in a little bit of a new space and new time.

Michael Horn: Indeed, indeed. And we should say most people are accustomed, I think, at this point, to us starting at the beginning of the academic year, which traditionally, or not traditionally, unfortunately tends to happen at the end of August, early September. But, Diane, you have some big news, like, you’re no longer on an academic calendar, so everyone knew you were stepping down from Summit after 20 years. Tell us what you’re doing now as we enter this fifth season.

Diane Tavenner: Well, Michael, I’m so glad to be back in conversation. I have missed it a lot, the rhythm of it. And what you’re pointing out is this idea that for the first time in my entire life, I did not have a back to school experience. And I’ll be honest, that has been an anchor point for me for my whole life. That sort of sets the schedule for the fall. So here we are. It’s a little bit later, but I’m learning to be fluid with that time because I am not in schools anymore. I have co founded a new company called Point of Beginning, and we are working on a product called Point B, and it’s a technology product that is really focused on helping students and right now, high school students.

But I think eventually, potentially younger students figure out and this probably won’t come as a shocker to a lot of people if you’ve been listening for a few years, figure out their purpose and what a pathway towards fulfillment will be post-high school. And while that can certainly be inclusive of four year college, we want to really focus on and expand the other possible pathways that exist for people, to help them, discover them, explore them, create their own vision for what that will look like, figure out how to make good choices, and then enact those pathways. And so we’re about three months in about a week away from the first version of the product being tested by real people and in a real startup.

Michael Horn: That’s exciting, Diane. So I have a couple reflections, but before we have those, my Point B, like, how do people find it on the Web? Learn about what you’re doing. I assume there’s going to be some schools that are like, do we get to sign up so our students can use this?

Diane Tavenner: Well, it’s super early, but you can always reach out to me. You can find us on the Web at mypointb.org, and you can start to check out what’s happening there. Sign up for updates if you’re interested, and, of course, reach out to me. We want to talk with, work with anyone and everyone. And so if this is an area of interest or passion, I hope you will reach out and I hope we’re going to get a lot of opportunities to sort of touch on these subjects that are so fascinating over the course of this season. Michael, because I do think this season’s a little bit different. I think we’re going to do some throwbacks to Season 1, but also a little bit different. So do you want to just talk a little bit about what’s happening? I will say off the top, one of the things that’s different is we will have video this year. I missed that memo. So you can see I didn’t really dress up for you today, but I’ll try to look better going forward. But what else is different?

Michael Horn: Yeah, no, I’m glad you prompted us on that because folks who have been listening to this for now in our fifth season are going to say, gee, there’s some differences that I noticed. One, we’re on video, we’re coming to you from the Future of Education channel. But all that means is that you can find us in more places. So it’s still Class Disrupted, still Diane and Michael having conversations, although we’re going to have a lot more guests helping us drive the conversations this particular year. We’ll get more to that in a little bit. But the Future of Education, as you know, is this other conversations that I started a few years back and it’s something that broadcasts on MarketScale, it broadcasts on YouTube, it broadcasts through my Substack newsletter. But if you’ve been listening to us through The 74, if you’ve been listening to us through wherever you listen to podcasts, whether that’s Apple, Google, whatever Spotify, I don’t know where else people listen to podcasts, I am, but those are some of the big ones, right? You can still do that. You’ll still find us at Class Disrupted. Nothing has changed on that front. It’s just a few other avenues for us to get to connect with listeners and hopefully get some feedback, get some conversation started because we are all about listening and trying to find different pathways through education. And what I love about what you’re doing at Point B is to me it touches on what I think is increasingly people are recognizing as like one of the central issues of education, which is it’s not just the academic knowledge and skills. Yes, those are important, but they need to be in fulfillment of something and we have left a generation of individuals at the moment without having a real sense of purpose. And I think it shows up in our mental health stats. I think it shows up in the challenges we have around post secondary completion. I think it shows up in the challenges we have for employers to find employees that are psyched to be there and ready to be productive and contribute. And I think it prevails throughout is just there’s a lot of people adrift Diane, so I love that you’re tackling this and that, as you said, we’re going to get know, beat up different angles of what it means to chart that pathway and purpose over this season.

Not as a shameless plug for Point B, but really just to really get at this issue that I think is so undergirding so much of what we do. I think it’s great that we’re going to get to dig into this.

Diane Tavenner: Well, one of the gifts of this transition, Michael, has been the ability to just really go back and be a learner in so many different ways. And one of the things I’ve been eager to catch up with you about is what you’ve been reading this summer, because that’s always a big part of our conversations. And I feel like, oh, my gosh, we’ll go each week, we’ll talk about what we’re reading, but there’s this whole backlog right now. And so I’m really curious what you’ve been reading, what you’ve been learning. As I know my list, which is quite long, was very related to the transition. And I went kind of deep in areas of personal health and transition health and things like that as I kind of reflect on 20 years and you don’t always take care of yourself. And there’s these moments of reflection of like, how can I kind of catch up on that? I also did some deep diving on organizations and businesses and how when you get to start fresh, what do I want to bring forward, what do I want to do differently? What’s the modern stuff there? And so those are some fun books, like Farther, Faster, and Far Less Drama, Janice and Jason Fraser and 10X Is Easier Than 2X, which is a term I’m kind of allergic to in Silicon Valley, but I actually read [the book] and got a lot of value from it. That’s Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy. I’m going to get that wrong. Atomic Habits by James Clear as I changed my entire life. How do I have the routines and the habits that are really supporting how I want to be living? And then some other I finally felt like in a place where I could kind of reflect on the pandemic. And so Premonition by Michael Lewis, which is a fast-paced and fascinating and a story I wish I had known all these seasons, quite frankly. So that was really interesting. And we continue to be in tough times. And so also digging into How Civil Wars Start: And How to Stop Them by Barbara Walter.

Michael Horn: Wow.

Diane Tavenner: That’s some of my list. How about you? What is on your list?

Michael Horn: You’ve, gosh, you’ve gotten to read some interesting books. Here are mine. I’ll be curious what your take is. I’ll try to spin an arc of it, but mine, as you know, I had finally started to get into Harry Potter with my kids. So we have now completed the full set of Harry Potter books. I have read every single one. Number four, and the last one are my favorite. I thought they were the best written of them all, so that was super fun.

I did have this moment of pang, Diane, because, as you know, my kids recently turned nine, and I had this moment when I finished the 7th Harry Potter book. I was like this, like 90% likelihood this may be the last book I read out loud with my kids, right? And to be fair, one of them had already opted out, like she had read them all without me and gotten ahead, and one of them was nice and held on for my sake at my slow pace. So we got through all those Harry Potter books, and then I personally, because they’re nine, was going deep on what does it mean when they’re teenagers? And so Lisa Damour has been in my ear constantly over the last few months with her collection of three books, which I highly recommend. The most recent one is about The Emotional Lives of Teenagers in general. The first two are about girls raising girls who are teenagers. So she’s terrific. It’s been really helpful. And it does strike me a lot of the parenting advice is all really the same at the end of the day, but it actually helps to hear it in different modalities and formats and hear it again every three months or so.

So that was great. And then, of course, I had my history kick still going in the background. So I finished just before we started recording this, actually, a couple of days ago, the Ron Chernow biography of Ulysses S. Grant, which is a terrific book if you want to get angry about the South’s actions during Reconstruction after the Civil War. I learned a ton from it. Just really interesting about the development of him also as a leader and sort of how his values came out over time and like a really reticent hated to speak, for example, even while he was president, but then he traveled around the world after he was president and became quite a public speaker. And so just development and learning, right, as themes throughout all this.

Diane Tavenner: Interesting.

Michael Horn: So it’s fun, Diane.

Diane Tavenner: That is really fun. And I will just say that your girls are nine. My son is 21. For those who’ve been following our kids sort of growing up over these years. And I have sort of welcomed a second son to our family who’s also in that age group, so hopefully we’ll get a chance to talk about him. But Rhett, who I talk about here sometimes as something to potentially look forward to, Michael, he is writing an alternative history novel, right? So it’s really fun. And so I’m getting to read and talk with him and brainstorm with him about that, which is pretty awesome.

And it goes back to the founding of the US. And he’s got some interesting alternative narratives there. So I’m like, back into kind of those founding family founder, founding Father stories.

Michael Horn: Families, yeah. Yeah. That’s awesome.

Diane Tavenner: And families.

Michael Horn: Well, being in Lexington, Massachusetts, and having just taken my family to Williamsburg, Virginia, where as a kid, I went every single spring break. Diane but my kids had never been there. And so my brothers, my parents, they all descended on Williamsburg, and we had an old family reunion and lots of nostalgia. But I was really impressed with how the place has updated its language and the way it talks about a lot of people in a lot of different roles who now, to be fair, I think when I was a kid, my kids were far more interested in the restoration and talking to the characters than I remember ever being as a kid. I remember just being not that let’s put it that way as a kid, but it was a heck of a lot of fun. So I’ll be very curious to read.

Diane Tavenner: Yeah, well, his angle is, what if we didn’t just have Founding Fathers? What if there was actually a founding mother at the Constitutional Congress? What might be?

Michael Horn: Different question. It’s a good question. So before we wrap up and before we preview what’s going to be the next episode, let’s do just a few hot takes, if you will, because I’ve been burning on a few issues, sort of gnawing at me, and, you know, I’ve been sending you texts like, can we please talk about so I want to do this now. And so I’ve got a couple for you. You probably have one or two for me.

Diane Tavenner: I do.

Michael Horn: Awesome. The one I want to go into is we’ve covered, obviously, the reading wars on this podcast and sort of the ignoring, I would say, of the evidence right. Of how certain people need phonics and phonemic awareness to learn how to read and to decode. Right. And sort of what that’s done. And you’ve made the point like, this should not be a problem we have in our country. Everybody should be able to learn how to read at this point. So I was listening to the Daily, the New York Times podcast, their coverage of it, and Michael Barbaro, classmate of mine at Yale, he and I worked very closely on the newspaper together.

And so I was listening to his version of sort of about Lucy Calkins and sort of the history behind that and things of that nature. And what occurred to me was she and Fountas and Pinnell and all those people, they really messed people up with the Three Cueing method and all these things that sort of gave short shrift to teaching people to really learn how to decode. But they also had some really good things in there. And I guess I just had this moment of know, we’ve talked about how we’re not thrilled with banning curriculum and stuff like that. And I guess I had this pit in my stomach, Diane, where I was like, Writer’s Workshop is something that’s a staple of the Lucy Calkins curriculum. Right. And I don’t know. I’d love your take as an educator, because I’m not one.

I just learned a lot about this space. But my take is, if the child doesn’t know their letters and can’t do any sounding out Writers Workshop, you’re layering something over a novice learner that probably doesn’t make a heck of a lot of sense. But once you have any ability to decode and do these stuff, even if it’s not spelled right, I think there’s probably a lot of value in having Writers Workshop to be able to like the purpose of writing is right? And to be able to spin these stories or respond to prompts or react to things that you’ve read aloud in class or whatever else. And the discussion format of the Writers Workshop and the ability to edit your peers work and things of that nature. It strikes me, Diane, that that’s something like, we really wouldn’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater there, but I’m just sort of curious. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Writers Workshop is like, this terrible thing, and I’m just not understanding.

Diane Tavenner: No. I have gotten a lot of joy from the passion of your texts that have been coming through over the summer about this. So it’s so fun to be back in conversation. Here’s what I would say. And as a former English teacher, as, you know, generally higher level middle and high school, but I was a reading instructor, too, for preschool through adults for a period of time, and this is where nuance is so important. And when we get into these battles and these wars, we lose the nuance, and we do throw the baby out with the bathwater. As an English teacher, writers workshops are among one of the most powerful tools and activities you can use, I believe. And I think most great English teachers believe that, too, and use them incredibly well, even with younger children, as you’re talking about.

And so what I hope does not happen is that people just hear anything that’s been associated with these non-scientific methods and ban them, if you will. And I think this connects to another thing you’ve been talking about, which is, like, jargon in our work and how we use it. So you’ll get to that in a moment. But no. Writers Workshops enable the practice of an extraordinary suite of skills that are really important that even young kids can start to practice. And it’s a tool that can be used all the way up. I mean, it is all the way up into professional circles. And so we should most certainly hold on to writers workshops. We should know what we’re doing.

We should be critical and disciplined and apply the science and all of those things, but they should not be banned, for sure.

Michael Horn: OK. All right. Well, I feel a little bit better. You have a hot take first before I go on my second one.

Diane Tavenner: Jargon well, I mean, here’s what the conversation that’s happening everywhere I turn right now in my networks and communities. And that is that the data is going to come out. We’re going to see yet another year of, I believe, decline in four year college enrollment. And so that’s several years. And we’re not seeing the bounce back that I think people thought would happen after. COVID there’s a bigger trend that is at play here. And I think what I’m hearing is people, who, like me, who have spent the last 20 years really focused on four-year college for all kids. They know that this has to be questioned, that this is maybe not the strategy for everyone going forward.

We need to be thinking about different pathways. They know it’s fraught. They don’t even know how to talk to their communities about it. I keep hearing people are like, I don’t know how to start that conversation, let alone do something about it. And of course, my worry is that we have to be doing something right now, and if we can’t even talk about it, there is an issue. So this is top of mind for me and I think has huge implications for high schools, for sure, in America, which we’ve been pounding away for years now, about how they need to be redesigned. There’s a lot of stuff going on out there. It’s a really interesting moment in time.

Michael Horn: Yeah, that’s super interesting. Just a quick reflection on it is I was talking to Scott Pulsipher recently, the president of Western Governors University, and for those that don’t know, it’s an online, competency-based university. And as he likes to say, we didn’t invent competency-based education. No, you didn’t. But I think they’re the first players to do so at such scale that they do. And they had 230,000 enrollments in the last academic year that just completed Diane. And they now have I’m going to mess this up, but it’s like 340 or 350,000 alums in their 23-year history. And just to put that in perspective, Harvard University has 400,000 alums.

And it was interesting because they’re an online, competency-based institution, $4,000 for every six months. So low cost. Students complete the bachelor’s in an average of two and a half years. And he was just saying for the learners that come to them, which historically were adult learners, but increasingly, by the way, now 12%, I think, of their population, something like that, is 18- to 24-year olds. That’s changing. Right. He said, for them, education is not the end. It is a means to a better life. Right.

And so I guess that’s my reflection there is, I think, part of starting that conversation is like, what’s the end? What are you trying to prepare for? And framing education as that vehicle as opposed to the oh, the purpose is college. Right? Because that’s a pretty empty purpose once.

Diane Tavenner: You get through it, right, and what we’ve all discovered or are discovering. Yeah, certainly lots on that one to dig in over the course of the year.

Michael Horn: We’re going to revisit that a few times, I suspect. All right, last one for me. You alluded to it a moment ago, which is jargon. And it comes directly out of this, though, conversation of the reading instruction and things of that nature, because I guess my reflection, Emily Oster, who’s reading I love, or writing I love, she had this great piece recently about a harrowing incident for her. She got in an accident running on the road and she got hit by a biker and went to the ER and she was listening to all the doctors talking in jargon around her. And she said, sometimes jargon is sort of parodied, but it actually serves a really important purpose, which is it allows people to shortcut conversation and professionals in a field to very quickly communicate with each other to more efficiently get work done, she said. Now it can also alienate people outside of you and make them feel dumb, which then makes them feel like they don’t understand and then a whole bunch of downstream effects of that, which is not good. But used well within the field, like in an emergency situation, it really short circuits right to the purpose and helps, in her case, get the treatment that she needed to have. And so I guess my reflection was we also have a lot of jargon in education and I think the reading wars, in quotes, I can do this now because people can see me video, sorry for those listening to the audio, but we use a lot of jargon in education to try to signal certain things. But the problem within education, at least my reflection, and I’m curious, your take, is that we don’t all mean the same thing by the words. We all have vastly different definitions. And so we’ll have these fights like constructivists versus behaviorists. Or someone will be like, oh, we’re an inquiry-based school, or we’re a project-based learning school. Or direct instruction and let’s just go back to the reading thing. 

There is direct instruction in that example, right, of teaching someone phonics and phonemic awareness. There is inquiry, I suppose, on the question what you’re going to write about in Writers Workshop. There might even be hopefully a project with a performance at the end, like the actual completing right. There’s some constructivist, there’s some behaviorist. It’s all a little bit right. And we set up these progressive education versus classical. We have these words, A, we don’t know the definitions, but like, most of what we’re doing is pulling from the right amount to get the right effect for the kid to help advance them. And so I just find a lot of these buzz phrases, at best counterproductive, but also potentially quite misleading, Diane, because we think we’re saying the same thing when we are in communication and we’re all just talking past each other. But I’d love your reflections.

Diane Tavenner: I’ve had this experience hundreds of times over the last 20 years. I distinctly remember being on a panel at one point and having this conversation about the word knowledge versus skills. Yeah, that’s another one levels and there is not a shared definition of that. And so people use those things interchangeably and they’re different when you’re talking about designing schools and learning experiences, et cetera, and it completely derailing any sort of meaningful understanding of what each other’s are saying and therefore ability to move forward. So it’s a very significant issue.

Michael Horn: Yeah, well, I guess my hope for schools is that we just start maybe doing more of the plain English thing so that parents know what we’re talking about and then maybe we’ll know what we’re talking about as well and communicate better with each other.

Diane Tavenner: Well that’s a good let’s leave it there. Maybe this season to try to be.

Michael Horn: Yeah, that is a good question.

Diane Tavenner: As possible. I like that one. And you sort of mentioned at the top. But as we kind of wrap up this first welcome back session and look forward, I think we’re both really excited for more interesting guests and people to talk to this year. And one of our favorite people is going to kick us off in our next episode. So we are excited to bring back Todd Rose. He joined us in season one and he’s been doing a ton of fascinating work over the last few years. It’s so relevant to everything we talk about and broader and so we’re going to have a great conversation with him.

Michael Horn: Yeah, I can’t wait. And it goes directly, I think, to the hot take you had around. If it’s not four-year college, what are we preparing students for? Because what his research recently has shown is that everyone thinks that everyone else is aiming at four year college, but that’s actually not the goal for a lot of the individuals themselves. And we’ll talk about how he does that research, what he’s found success actually means to individual families on the ground. I think it’s going to be a terrific conversation to help set what should be a really exciting set of explorations for us and for our audience this season.

Diane Tavenner: On Class Disrupted. Well, I can’t wait. Michael and I’m so glad to be back with you and until next time, thanks for joining us on Class Disrupted.

The last year has witnessed a surge in focus on the importance of background knowledge to reading comprehension. Researchers, including Knowledge Matters’ Scientific Advisory Committee, have outlined the practices necessary to effectively cultivate content knowledge in literacy instruction, and policy analysts have lamented its absence in state legislation addressing the ‘Science of Reading’. 

This has been a welcome shift in the national conversation about children’s literacy, and one we have been proud to advance.

Naturally, educators want to know how these key research insights and practices should be translated into curriculum design. In our estimation, this is where the conversation needs to be – and also where it has been coming up short. Emerging and evolving curriculum review efforts have not been precise enough in truly informing the field about what defines “knowledge building” in ELA curricula. Rubrics and guidelines that aren’t specific will only produce watered down results that confuse and disappoint. The stakes are too high not to get this right.

The new Knowledge Matters Review Tool identifies eight dimensions to high-quality, content-rich ELA curricula:

· Laser-like focus on what matters most for literacy

· Communal close reading of content-rich, challenging texts

· Systematic development of high-value academic language to support building knowledge

· A volume of reading organized around conceptually coherent texts to build knowledge

· Regular discussions grounded in texts and topics to build knowledge

· A volume of writing to build knowledge

· Targeted supports to ensure all students have access to challenging, grade-level content

· Ease of enacting curriculum

The Knowledge Matters Campaign recognizes eight K-8 ELA programs that have distinguished themselves across each of these eight dimensions. While they differ greatly in their details, all of them do a far better job of building content knowledge than the ELA programs in widest use across the country, including some that have received positive reviews for alignment to standards. 

This new tool is a natural progression of the Knowledge Matters Campaign’s efforts to demonstrate what “good” looks like from the perspectives of leading experts and pioneering educators. The voices we’ve captured in our School Tour visits have shown that schools using these curricula are particularly special learning environments, characterized by high-levels of student engagement and support for teachers in making the shift to this way of teaching. By illuminating the design principles behind excellent reading and writing instruction, we hope to advance the pace at which this kind of learning experience, which is far more equitable to students, becomes the norm, rather than the exception, in US schools.

As we add transparency to our review approach, we also wanted to add transparency to our review process. In fact, this tool has a proud heritage.

The authors of the Knowledge Matters Review Tool, Susan Pimentel (StandardsWorks co-founder), David Liben, and Meredith Liben, have a long and storied history of illuminating for educators how standards and curriculum work together. This team served as lead and contributing authors on the Common Core English Language Arts standards, then as authors of the original Publisher’s Criteria and Instructional Shifts that drove the design and development of some of the highest quality ELA curriculum on the market today. For over a decade, these three individuals led important work to support the implementation of college and career-ready standards at Student Achievement Partners.

Sue, David, and Meredith’s work is marked by their careful analysis of research paired with a deep understanding of classroom instruction. This trio’s expertise has brought excellence to our work: first, in the thoughtful curation of leading curricula in the space, and now, in the development of a tool that can be used by the field to make their own assessments.

Our hope now is that more educators and decision makers use this tool to inform their curriculum choices and recognize that the highest-quality curriculum is the scalable, equitable path to ensure strong readers.

BIRMINGHAM — Training remains a major challenge for implementing new state literacy guidelines, educators said at a meeting of a state task force on Thursday.

Members of the Alabama Literacy Task Force also discussed implementing a “continuum” of training on the new standards and expressed concerns about not reaching all children.

“As long as we allow what I call the fraying of the edges, there’s those that are going to accept that,” said Jackie Zeigler, the District 1 representative on the Alabama State Board of Education.

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The Alabama Literacy Act, passed in 2019, put reading coaches in schools and provided for special training for K-3 students struggling with reading, with an aim of having students read at grade level by fourth grade. Third-grade students who are not reading at grade level run the risk of being held back.

The law also created the Literacy Task Force to make recommendations about reading programs, continuum of teacher training in the science of reading and an annual list of vetted assessments.

The 2023-24 school year is the first year of full implementation after several delays of the retention portion of the Literacy Act.

The Alabama Legislature made changes to the law last spring, including changes to the amount of time that previously purchased assessments could be used by districts. Assessments vetted by the Task Force will be valid for three years beginning with the 2023-24 school year. In that time, assessments can be added but not removed.

Task Force Chair Kristy Watkins, director of curriculum instruction at Jasper City Schools and a new member of the group, said that one of the problems she has been seeing on the district side is getting teachers to teach to the course of study standards, not the textbooks.

“That is where I am struggling,” she said.

Watkins said she has had questions from a teacher about first-graders not being taught adverbs, which are not in the standards. Watkins said the teacher told her she does not have the time.

Short said that she remembered she could not get everything done in a textbook each year, so she had to shift her idea to teaching the five big ideas of the textbook.

The discussion came in a small group discussion that went through previous memorandums issued related to the Alabama Literacy Act.

Cailin Kerch, clinical coordinator of early childhood elementary at the University of Alabama, said that a new test for the early childhood reading instruction will be more “rigorous” in the science of reading than the previous version.

Science of reading

The science of reading is a body of research that looks into how kids learn to read. The skills associated with learning to read were not being taught in many schools for many years, as reported by Emily Hanford for APM Reports.

According to the Hechinger Report, balanced literacy rose in prominence in the 1990s as a bridge between phonics and whole language instruction. Whole language was the philosophy that kids learned to read through exposure. Balanced literacy includes methods such as “three-cueing,” which encourages kids to look for clues, such as at pictures, to guess an unknown word.

Watkins said that she sometimes gets teachers who are not trained in science of reading before they come to her.

“I have to retrain you to come in and do science of reading,” she said. “So, it’s aggravating.”

In the whole group discussion, the Task Force also discussed losing some districts. Zeigler said that she worries about “most” in terms of helping most but not all kids.

Bonnie Short, director of the Alabama Reading Initiative, said that districts who are further along in their progress might not be able to access all of the help that they might need.

Limited support (LS) schools are defined in the Alabama Code as being schools not in the bottom 5% of reading proficiency. An Alabama Reading Initiative regional literacy specialist will visit Limited Support One schools once a month. An Alabama Reading Initiative regional literacy specialist will visit Limited Support Two schools quarterly. The local superintendent will “determine the level of limited support that each regional literacy specialist shall provide.”

Short said more intervention might be required.

“Even our LS one schools that get monthly support, they really need more than that,” she said. “And our LS two schools, while they may be trucking right along, they may need additional pieces and parts. But I’m limited.”

Short also suggested a cohort for some of the highest performing districts so they can share their skills. She said they still have room to grow but less than other districts.

Reading camps

Another aspect of the law that they needed to look further into were the summer reading camps.

Under the law, the camps are under the Task Force. The Alabama State Department of Education has been mostly working with that portion so far, said Mark Dixon, president of A+ Education Partnership, an advocacy group that aims to improve public education in Alabama.

“It was something that we received funding for, to be able to support,” Short said after the meeting about the summer learning programs.

The summer learning programs are avenues to improve literacy instruction for students outside of the normal school year.

Some of the changes, such as extending the amount of time that some current assessments are allowed to be used, has given the Task Force some time to work more on other things such as a continuum of training. Dixon said that some of those changes could be to their benefit.

“You’ve given yourself a little breathing room,” he said.

In discussion, the members said that they could use that time to focus on the “continuum” for teachers and other school employees outlined in the law. A smaller subcommittee had looked into that portion of the law in the past. Since then, other legislation, like the Numeracy Act, has passed, so they want to make sure they do not overwhelm teachers. They also said they want to bring in other groups and look at what other states are doing.

Short said that she does some work with higher education groups.

“Do you start with those groups separate?” she asked the members. “Do you start with those groups together? I think it’s probably important to have our vision board.”

The next meeting will be in January.

Alabama Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alabama Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Brian Lyman for questions: info@alabamareflector.com. Follow Alabama Reflector on Facebook and Twitter.