It was hard to get a job as a teacher in Whiteville City Schools back in the day. Pam Sutton knows.

“During the ’90s, someone had to die or retire for you to get in Whiteville City,” she said.

Sutton worked for three years in Elizabethtown after graduating college, waiting for a spot to open back home. When one finally did, it was because the woman who taught Sutton in first grade finally retired.

“There was not a lot of turnover at all,” she said. “My principal, who was principal when I was in kindergarten, was still here and hired me.”

Her reminiscent smile fades as she thinks about today.

“It’s different now.”

In 2021-22, Whiteville City Schools was among the five districts with the lowest teacher attrition rates in the state. But it still had high vacancy. District officials say the discrepancy has to do with difficulty in tracking when and why teachers leave. While it’s hard to peg with a single data point, teachers say it’s a problem.

And it’s not isolated. Across many districts, educators say they feel a lack of human capital. That can spell trouble for implementing instruction grounded in the science of reading across the state.

“If we’re honest, we’re in a time of hiring crisis,” said Sarah Cain, director of elementary schools in Asheville City Schools. “And it’s a big lift for teachers to do this intense level of professional development, on top of learning new curriculum, on top of addressing learning loss. At a time when our society feels a little fractured, too.”

School districts are desperately trying to keep teachers. It’s difficult, several district leaders said, with increased workloads, persistently low pay, and — now — culture wars. But these teachers already have begun a long journey of learning how to teach reading effectively. Districts don’t want to lose out on the time and money already invested.

Why keeping teachers is critical to better reading instruction

The state is paying for teacher training in Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS). The training requires two years, and 160 hours, to complete.

When a teacher leaves, that investment goes with them. The state’s investment in LETRS is not ongoing — at some point, really soon, it stops. As new teachers come in, they won’t have access to the training unless it’s supported by local dollars.

It creates a couple problems, educators say. When a new teacher comes in without knowledge of evidence-based practices for reading instruction, there’s a disconnect among teachers in strategy meetings. Also, it takes time to get comfortable with curriculum and instructional programs — and with teaching them effectively.

“It’s hard to sit around a table of teachers when they’re planning and they’re not all on the same page,” said Lynn Plummer, director of elementary education in the Stanly County Schools. “[It makes it hard] to try to change teachers or try to change their mindsets from what they’re doing to what may be a better practice.”

Melissa Fields has seen this in Perquimans County, though at a smaller rate. For the most part, Perquimans classrooms are filled with licensed teachers. And nearly all of the teachers who began LETRS training there two years ago are still in the district.

But when there is turnover, there are pain points.

“A new teacher might come in, and maybe their neighbor teacher gives them a crash course, and then they just pick up the book and go,” said Fields, who has led the shift to science of reading in her district as the chief academic officer. “But there’s so many nuances to implementing the program with fidelity that they don’t know about.”

What happens when teachers stay

Perquimans is a standout district in implementing North Carolina’s new reading law. And one of the keys is taking care of and retaining teachers.

“My top priority when I got here was to fix teacher attrition,” said John Lassiter, the principal who took over for former state principal of the year Jason Griffin at Hertford Grammar School. “As turnover happens with administration, typically teacher attrition follows. And so for three straight years, the year before I got here and two years after, we had 30% teacher turnover.

“But that’s gone down a lot. So you can really build a successful model if there’s consistency.”

The district has worked hard under the leadership of its superintendent, Tanya Turner, and people like Fields. The stories you hear about Whiteville City in the 1990s are what you see in Perquimans now. Lassiter, for example, had Fields as his fourth-grade teacher and Turner as his teacher in fifth grade.

“I couldn’t have turned out bad, right?” said Lassiter, this year’s Northeast regional principal of the year.

Lassiter attributes student assessment growth, in part, to consistency in his teacher workforce. Before this year, a quarter of his kindergartners were on track for proficiency midway through the year. Now that number is more than two-thirds.

That growth is about what the district sees on average.

“I think our competitive advantage is consistency in leadership,” he said, including teachers as leaders when it comes to students’ reading acquisition. “We can’t build something if we’re starting over every two or three years.”

But that constant starting over is a reality for a lot of districts.

The state of teacher turnover in the state

The Education Policy Initiative at Carolina compiled a brief using Department of Public Instruction data to compare educator attrition from 2016 to 2023. It breaks down the distribution of educator attrition across North Carolina school districts.

Between September 2019 and September 2020, teacher and principal attrition fell to 9.8% and 10.4%, respectively. Since September 2020, teacher and principal attrition in public schools rose. Teacher attrition increased to 12.1% between September 2020 and September 2021. It increased again, to 15.6%, between September 2021 and September 2022.

“To put this increase into perspective, we note that each percentage point increase in attrition represents approximately 1,000 additional individuals no longer teaching” in public schools, the EPIC report said.

Principal attrition increased to 12.5% in September 2021 and 17.5% in September 2022. That means nearly one out of every five principals in September 2021 was no longer one in September 2022.

The northeast region of the state, a concentration of low-income communities and Black and Brown people, had the highest attrition. The mostly white Perquimans County Schools is an outlier in that region.

What’s making it so hard to keep teachers in schools

There are a lot of reasons teachers leave. One often tops the list.

“Teacher shortage comes right back to pay,” Fields said. “People aren’t getting paid.  We have a third-year teacher and her child is income eligible for NC Pre-K because she’s at below 75% of the state median income. She’s a third-year teacher with a four-year degree.”

“It is unacceptable,” Turner adds.

Low pay is a bitter pill to swallow, made more so by an increasingly toxic environment.

“Why would I make this less money, for this really big, important work I’m supposed to do, but I don’t feel very supported,” said Ruafika Cobb, principal at Ira B. Jones Elementary in Asheville City Schools. “And I’m always criticized for the work that I am doing. I think that has started to shift the dynamics of teaching in general, and people aren’t even coming into the profession anymore.”

A recent RAND report warns that culture war legislation can result in collateral damage, making it more difficult to keep highly qualified teachers in schools.

“Teachers described working in conditions filled with worry, anxiety, and even fear,” the report reads. “They perceived that carrying out the core function of their roles — teaching students — has become more difficult, as restrictions on their classroom instruction limited their ability to engage students in learning, support students’ critical thinking skills, and develop students’ abilities to engage in perspective taking and empathy building.

“Especially concerning is the potential for these limitations and their politicized nature to lead teachers to consider leaving their jobs or the teaching profession altogether.”

Teacher impact on reading and successful science of reading implementation

Educators report widespread impact on science of reading implementation related to teacher turnover. Not only does turnover create disparity in LETRS training among staff, but it drains student-facing time from teachers who stay as they work to catch up their colleagues.

One of the most alarming impacts is on student continuity of instruction. Reading acquisition is the result of gains in a number of areas that teachers track through assessment. In addition to changes in instructional approaches, the shift to science of reading has changed how districts expect teachers to assess students.

As districts implement the reading law, an increasing number build intervention time into school day calendars to group students by areas needing growth and to provide extra support.

Sometimes that means more training on how to assess and how to respond to assessment. Most times, educators say, teachers learn by doing. Continuity for a student depends on teachers being able to do this with fidelity, but that becomes harder when teachers leave.

“We always can envision what more teachers can do,” Cobb said. “And we don’t necessarily train them for all the ‘more’ we want them doing. And we don’t compensate them for what they’re currently doing. I think we need to start re-evaluating what all we’re asking a teacher to do.”

This article first appeared on EducationNC and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Administrators at Whiteville Primary, a school for kindergarten through second grade in Whiteville City Schools, schedule the day down to the minute. Teachers sometimes schedule their literacy blocks down to the second.

During phonics instruction, teachers might build on things their students learned while working on phonemic awareness earlier in the day. Comprehension work and read-alouds bring in vocabulary words that students worked with that day.

With the shift to instruction grounded in the science of reading, not only has instruction become more explicit — it follows a specific scope and sequence. Each lesson builds on the one before.

A student can fall behind a lot missing just one day.

That makes the state of student attendance, and on-time attendance, troubling for a state in the beginning stages of implementing the Excellent Public Schools Act of 2021.

“We just have a different mentality now about the urgency of schooling,” said Pam Sutton, the instructional coach at Whiteville Primary. “We’re seeing problems with attendance. I’m not sure if it’s due to the pandemic or what, but the mentality of parents is like attendance isn’t a big deal.”

But it is a big deal, especially for children learning to read.

This year, the State Board of Education heard data showing that chronic absenteeism, when students miss 10 or more days a year, doubled to almost 20% among elementary students in 2020-21, compared with before the pandemic. Elementary students are missing an average of 11 days of school per year.

Several studies show a negative correlation between missing school and academic outcomes. A 2018 Lexia report noted that only 17% of students who were chronically absent in kindergarten and first grade went on to read at grade level in third grade.

“We’re doing everything we can and then you have a child who’s out, so the continuity of the instruction isn’t there,” Sutton said. “If they’re not here, they miss that instruction and they miss that intervention and they miss that extra help. It all adds up.”

It’s not just days missed, either. Getting to school late – even by just a few minutes – can have a major impact on students’ ability to stay on track for grade-level proficiency, Sutton said.

Her school uses a program that adds up instructional time missed when kids come in late or leave early. That report shows how many days students are effectively missing through tardiness.

“And it’s kind of an eye opener to some parents because they didn’t think it was such a big deal,” Katie McLam said. “But everything matters.”

At Whiteville Primary, some kids had racked up 30 or more tardies just 70 days into the school year. Sutton sees them come in, sometimes just 10 minutes late. Then, they walk to their classrooms — rarely with urgency. Sometimes it takes them a few minutes to figure out what the rest of the class is doing. Other times, they go get breakfast if they haven’t had anything to eat.

“So now your 10 minutes late has turned into 30 minutes,” Sutton said. “And you haven’t started your instruction, but the class has moved on.”

Sutton says there’s a compounding effect of being late on the student’s ability to catch up — either that day or in the course of a few days.

“Some of them, it’s that anxiety of, ‘What are they doing, what am I supposed to be doing,’” she says of students’ mindsets. “And then, ‘Oh wait, my homework. Oh wait, my snack. Did I get my snack?’ There’s this whole thing happening in their minds, and it takes time to bring them down so that they can focus to learn.”

But those are precious minutes not spent on instruction. Especially, McLam said, when teachers are already pressed for instructional time.

“The day goes by so quickly when you’re trying to fit everything in that you want the students to know, and all the other things you have to do,” she said. “There’s not a lot of downtime.”

Disciplinary measures have similar effects, school leaders say. It’s important to teach students acceptable behavior, but whether the student is out of class because of absences, tardies, or disciplinary punishment — the impact on learning for the brain is the same.

At Perquimans Central, a school for pre-K through second grade, building leaders identified reading struggles as a contributor to disciplinary issues.

For years, Principal Tracy Gregory said, teachers did the best they could. But some practices they used in the past were not effective in teaching students to read. That caused anxiety and issues with self-esteem, she said, which translated to behavioral outbursts.

So they redesigned reading instruction, going all in with science-of-reading implementation. At the same time, they did all they could to avoid disciplinary measures keeping kids away.

“Kids act out because they don’t want to look dumb, even in first and second grade,” she said. “And they would be a class clown rather than being a target. But when we identify their needs, we give them the instruction they need, and they have a safe environment, you’ll see a lot of that reduced.”

And Gregory’s already seeing results. Incidence reports are down significantly, she said, this year compared to previous years.

“We are doing awesome,” she said. “I feel like this has made my job easier.”

This article first appeared on EducationNC and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

To counter this unproductive narrowing of the curriculum, states should embed civic content into statewide reading assessments. This simple change would incentivize more attention to civic learning while making reading tests more engaging, equitable and accurate.

Just 6% of American middle schoolers can read an excerpt from Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech and identify two ideas from the Constitution or Declaration of Independence that King might have been referring to. This is a symptom of the atrophy in the civic mission of schools that represents a grave danger to American democracy. Only 30% of Millennials think a democratic government is essential, compared with 70% of Americans born before World War II. Most Millennials say that if Russia invaded the United States, they would not fight to defend our country. These data are a wake-up call that the nation needs to recommit public schools to their foundational purpose: preparing young Americans for citizenship.

Including civic content on every grade’s reading test is low-hanging fruit because it encourages engagement with meaningful issues while signaling to teachers the importance of covering social studies content — all of which improves literacy instruction. While phonics (knowing letter sounds) and decoding (putting together sounds to make words) are essential foundational skills, they are not sufficient for proficient reading. Students also need background knowledge to make sense of what they are seeing on the page. Research shows that when students are given a text about a topic they are familiar with, they perform better on reading tests. Conversely, students perform more poorly when confronted with texts on topics they’ve never learned about, even if they have strong reading skills.  

Louisiana is piloting assessments that put this idea into practice, with promising results. Some texts in the state’s innovative reading test draw directly from books students have read, with additional passages extending into related topics. Designing tests around what students are expected to be taught makes sense and dovetails state expectations for learning, classroom curricula and reading comprehension assessments.

When students are familiar with the topics being tested, they stay more engaged and do better. Early research reveals that achievement gaps are somewhat smaller on Louisiana’s pilot tests, partly because the opportunity gap is being narrowed by creating more equitable opportunities for students to demonstrate their reading skills. Tests that use random texts privilege students who have more world knowledge from outside of school. Louisiana’s innovative test design encourages teachers to focus on the topics the state wants students to learn and more accurately assesses their reading skills.

Embedding civic content in reading tests would make teachers’ jobs easier and support better student learning outcomes. Every state already has adopted civics standards, and almost all state English language arts standards include expectations for reading and writing in science and social studies. But only Louisiana has prioritized content from its standards in innovative reading/language arts assessments. Every state could make similar progress by making small shifts in the direction it gives to its testing contractor. 

Including a focus on civic learning in reading tests is a simple solution that can be implemented by state education commissioners and testing directors without changing any laws or regulations. That said, this shift should be done with key stakeholders through an open and inclusive process. Leading with public engagement and input creates the opportunity to share the rationale and build trust with educators, parents and policy leaders, minimizing the risk that this becomes a polarizing idea. Parents are likely to support the change because they want tests of what’s being taught in class much more than generic standardized tests. 

In 2012, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said, “the only reason we have public school education in America is because in the early days of the country, our leaders thought we had to teach our young generation about citizenship … that obligation never ends. If we don’t take every generation of young people and make sure they understand that they are an essential part of government, we won’t survive.” 

Democracy is being tested in real life. Reading tests can signal the importance of civic learning and lead to more time and attention to this vital content. State education commissioners should make this a first step to reinvigorate public education’s mission as a bulwark of democracy.

In an evaluation of 26 public and private Ohio teacher training programs by the National Council on Teacher Quality released today, seven received A grades for instructing new educators in how to use the science of reading with young students, while six received Fs.

The report offers some encouraging news for DeWine who wants to ban other literacy approaches that have lost credibility: Colleges are teaching phonics — a key part of the science of reading — to teacher trainees. 

But just nine of the 26 programs fully covered all five parts of the science of reading — phonemic awareness, fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension, along with phonics. In addition, most did not give new teachers enough practice with students. 

“The review yields mixed results, with some programs providing strong coverage of reading science and others barely scratching the surface (or worse, actually teaching candidates bad stuff),” the report concluded.

Colleges are also training prospective teachers in strategies that many consider outdated or damaging, the study found.

“When teachers use these methods, it takes valuable time away from scientifically-based reading instruction, the best methods for children to efficiently and effectively learn to read,” said Shannon Holston, author of the report.

How well Ohio’s colleges are teaching science of reading is a big factor in whether, and how fast, DeWine can succeed in his plan to ban other reading approaches by the fall of 2024; or if the state will have to spend years retraining teachers.  

Though the state will likely start tracking what colleges teach soon, it does not now, so the NCTQ analysis offers an advanced insight.

“It doesn’t make sense to shift elementary schools to science of reading, but not address teacher preparation,” said Aaron Churchill, the Ohio research director of the Fordham Institute, which partnered with NCTQ on the study.  “Future teachers will struggle and need expensive retraining when they are expected to teach reading consistent with the science.”

The Ohio analysis is part of a larger report coming from NCTQ in June on teacher training in reading across the country. Ohio results were released early at the request of the Fordham Institute, which is active in Ohio education advocacy and helped create NCTQ in 2000. Reports from NCTQ have often been controversial and critical of teacher training programs overall.

One surprise finding: “Three-cueing,” a strategy that DeWine and legislators in other states have singled out to ban from elementary schools, is not commonly taught to new teachers. That strategy, which has students guess at words from pictures or context clues, is part of the popular whole language and balanced literacy lessons used in many elementary schools.

Only three of the 26 rated programs — the University of Akron and Ashland University’s undergraduate and graduate programs — teach new teachers to use cueing with students, Holston said. 

The report graded each teacher training program in the science of reading instruction by reviewing course descriptions and syllabi to see what classes cover. They did not observe classes.

The review gave seven Ohio programs overall A’s: Marietta College, Mount St. Joseph University, Ohio University, University of Dayton, University of Findlay, University of Rio Grande, and Youngstown State University.

Six programs were given F grades: Ashland University (undergraduate and graduate programs), Defiance College, Kent State University, Miami University, and the University of Toledo. 

Ohio State University, the state’s largest university, scored well, earning a B grade overall.

The 74 is sharing the findings immediately as the Ohio Senate weighs DeWine’s proposal. Universities have not yet had a chance to respond to the report, but The 74 plans to provide additional coverage soon.

The Ohio analysis is part of a larger report coming from NCTQ in June on teacher training in reading across the country. Ohio results were released early at the request of the Fordham Institute, which is active in Ohio education advocacy and helped create NCTQ in 2000. Reports from NCTQ have often been controversial and critical of teacher training programs overall, not just on this specific issue.

Don Pope-Davis, dean of Ohio State University’s College of Education and Human Ecology, has previously said  his school, the largest in Ohio, prepares students well in the core skills of teaching reading, including phonics. In a letter to the legislature in March, he said that 96 percent of his graduates in the last three years have passed the state’s teacher licensing test in reading knowledge.

“Our teachers perform at that level year after year because they are well-prepared to teach reading,” Pope-Davis wrote.

“What we teach at Ohio State is in no way at odds with the administration’s proposal.”

At the same time, Pope-Davis joined the Ohio Education Association and Ohio Federation of Teachers, the state’s two large teachers unions, in warning against banning any strategies that could help different students.

“No single commercial program is appropriate for all students, just as no single tool is the only implement for a given task,” he wrote. “We would urge caution with any legislation that prescriptively adopts one approach without any consideration for the individual student.”

Though DeWine, like other Republican officials in other states, is seeking to ban three-cueing, the NCTQ report did not find that it was a major part of teacher training in the state. Out of nine practices that NCTQ considers contrary to the science of reading, the most common ones taught to prospective teachers in Ohio, according to Holtson, are “guided reading,” “running records” and “miscue analysis.”

Though three-cueing is not prevalent in teacher training programs, Aaron Churchill, Fordham’s Ohio research director, said he still wants that strategy banned. School boards are still buying lessons that use it, he said, and veteran teachers who graduated years ago are using it in whole language and balanced literacy instruction.

“If Ohio reforms teacher-prep but does nothing in K-12, we’ll end up with well-prepared teachers in science of reading who end up conforming instruction to what their school is doing,” Churchill said.

Under a series of bills signed Thursday by Governor Eric Holcomb, schools will have to use reading curriculum approved by the Indiana Department of Education as following the phonics-based science of reading by fall of 2024. 

Teachers will have to take training in the science of reading before earning or renewing teaching licenses. And teacher training programs in the state will need to teach that method within a few years or lose accreditation.

The state is also banning schools from teaching students “three-cueing” strategies — in which students take cues from pictures or context to guess at words — that are part of the whole language and balanced literacy teaching approaches that have been popular the last few decades.

The Indiana changes come as some legislators say the state is having a reading “crisis.”

Passage rates on the foundational reading portion of IREAD-3, the state’s third grade reading tests, are down 10 percentage points from their 2014 peak of around 91 percent to 81 percent today. Indiana has seen a similar decline in 4th grade reading scores on the “Nation’s Report Card,” the National Assessment of Education Progress. Indiana scores peaked in 2015, but declined in 2017 and again in 2019, before falling further in 2022 after the pandemic.

Indiana’s average 4th grade NAEP reading score in 2022, however, was a hair above the national average, 217 to 216.

Still, Holcomb and the Indiana Department of Education call for raising the passage rate on IREAD-3 from 81 percent today to 95 percent by 2027.

The cueing strategies have a bullseye on them in several states this spring. Though only Arkansas and Louisiana had banned them before this year, at least eight other states, including neighboring Ohio, are looking at laws eliminating them.

Republican state Sen. Aaron Freeman, who co-sponsored a key bill in the change in the Indiana Senate, called it the most important issue before the legislature this year, other than the state budget.

“It’s critically important for children to read and we’ve got to give teachers in schools the proper tools to teach kids to read,” said Freeman. “I have no idea why we got off track and why we went down a different road. But it’s very clear to me that we’re on the wrong course and we’ve got to course correct here very quickly.”

Rep. Bob Behning, chairman of the House Committee on Education, said the change should help all students, especially poor students, in all subjects once they are able to read and understand lessons better.

“I do believe it is a potential game changer all the way around,” said Behning, a Republican.

The changes had little opposition as they were debated, but leaders in the minority Democratic party had reservations about making a move so fast after never seeing any bills about the science of reading in prior years. 

Democratic House Minority Leader Shelli Yoder called prohibiting other methods of teaching “heavy handed” and “tyrannical,” even if well-intentioned.

“If we’ve done one thing it is to communicate to teachers that we do not trust your profession, and we’re gonna micromanage it,” Yoder said. “And we’re going to make sure that you use this one method of teaching reading. That does create a bit of a pause for me.”

Though teachers next door in Ohio have made the same complaint as Yoder, Indiana’s two large teachers unions, the Indiana State Teachers Association and American Federation of Teachers Indiana, have not made the ban a major issue. They have been mostly supportive of the shift, as have state associations of school boards, principals and urban schools.

And while the state will ban schools from using cueing as part of its official curriculum, Behning said there’s no real way for the state to prevent or penalize teachers from using it on their own.

“We don’t have any cueing police,” he said.

With Holcomb’s approval of the shift last week, he joined West Virginia Governor Jim Justice, who signed a similar bill in March. Florida’s legislature has passed similar changes, which are still waiting for the governor’s signature.

Ohio, as well as Texas, have had similar bills pass one legislative house, but not both yet.

The shift to science of reading will be paid for from a $111 million fund created late last year by the state and the Lilly Endowment Inc., a philanthropy created by the family that founded the Eli Lilly and Co. Fortune 500 pharmaceutical company. The Endowment, which is independent of the Indianapolis-based company, donated $60 million to K-12 science of reading efforts and $25 million to teacher preparation programs, while the state has chipped in $26 million from the state’s federal COVID relief dollars.

The state’s new budget bill adds up to $20 million in each of the next two years for Department of Education efforts on science of reading.

Another bill that pushes science of reading signed last week allows districts to apply for grants from the department for literacy coaches, textbooks and lessons, teacher and administrator training or giving students extra reading help with tutoring or summer programs..

The bills also call for: 

• Ordering the state Department of Education to make all state learning standards and tests match science of reading, while eliminating any references to cueing.
• Creating extra help and requirements for all elementary schools in which less than 70% of third graders pass the state third grade reading test, including having a literacy coach in the school for two years, partially paid by the state and Lilly. About ¼ of the state’s 1,050 elementary schools would be affected.
• Ordering teacher preparation programs to start teaching science of reading. The Department of Education will start reviewing these programs by the 2024-25 school year and pull accreditation for those not moving toward teaching it well.
• Calls for salary increases for teachers who have had literacy training, on top of the stipends of up to $1,200 the Lilly donation is already paying as they take it.

As an elementary school teacher in Fulton County, Amy Long was used to scarcity. When she prepared reading lessons, she often found herself scrounging through a closet for workbooks only to find there weren’t enough for every student. She compiled websites where she and her colleagues could download free phonics “readers” because the school lacked a complete curriculum.

“It’s really frustrating when you have something, but you don’t have all of it,” said Long, who taught for eight years at Renaissance Elementary — a predominantly Black, high-poverty school at the south end of the Atlanta-area district. Long, now a literacy coach at another South Fulton school, kept snacks on hand for students who hadn’t eaten breakfast and saw her class roster change regularly as families moved from one rental home to another. 

Schools in largely white, well-off North Fulton offered a stark contrast.

Backed by active PTAs and strong community support, many schools stocked full sets of chapter books and computer programs that provided students with extra practice on early literacy skills. 

“It was 100% inequitable,” said Long, who has worked in the Fulton County Schools for 12 years. Students didn’t get “the same learning experience as their peers in a more affluent area, simply due to the location of their school.” 

Now, officials in Georgia’s fourth-largest district are hoping an infusion of federal relief funds will change all that. Fulton has allocated roughly a third of its $262 million in pandemic aid to replace a patchy and uneven approach to reading with a solid, phonics-based curriculum. The initiative, which includes training teachers and administrators in how children learn to read and adding K-2 literacy coaches in all 60 elementary schools, is an attempt to give students an equal shot at staying on grade level, regardless of where they live. 

“The equity issue will always be there,” said Franchesca Warren, a school board member who represents 16 schools in South Fulton. In 2016, she helped launch an advocacy group to better educate parents about the district and pushed for a stronger emphasis on literacy at her own children’s school. “This is literally a marathon. We are changing the opinions and viewpoints of South Fulton schools one parent at a time.”

 ‘Ask’ instead of ‘aks’

On a rainy Monday, first-grade teacher Sheila Brown read from a lesson handbook as she looked over her students’ shoulders at Stonewall Tell Elementary in College Park. They sorted words with short and long vowel sounds into columns in their workbooks. Shifting their attention to the white board at the front of the room, they pointed two fingers toward the vowels in “make.” 

“Remember when you see the silent ‘e’ what happens with the vowel,” Brown reminded them. She asked the name for a word with a short vowel sound that ends with a consonant, like “can” or “mad.” 

“Closed syllable!” they responded enthusiastically.

Brown, a former middle school teacher in the Atlanta district, said she’s never taught this way. Before the new program, she wanted to get students reading, but didn’t spend as much time on “the phonetic part of it,” she said. Now she understands, “Just knowing sight words is not teaching our kids.”

Since last year, the 90,000-student district has spent more than $3.5 million on two contracts with Lexia Learning to deliver its intensive “science of reading” training to more than 3,000 teachers, principals and central office administrators. In addition to the new program, each school’s “governance council” — comprised of teachers, parents and community members — has a say in how it spends a pot of money on extra materials, as long as the purchases support the district’s major objectives, like literacy.

At Stonewall Tell, some of that $46,000 was spent on plastic “phonics phones” that amplify students’ voices so they can hear how they’re sounding out words and “Kids Lips” cards that show how the mouth should look when making those sounds.

A small triumph: Brown said she now hears more students saying “ask” instead of “aks.”

Reforming the district’s reading program began by weeding out less-effective, “whole language” materials in many classrooms. Some schools had been using the Units of Study series from Columbia University’s Lucy Calkins. Reading experts say the program lacks a strong emphasis on phonics.

Over time, literacy instruction in the district had grown to be “a bit of a Wild West,” said Ken Zeff, who served as interim superintendent from 2015 to 2016 and now leads an education nonprofit in the metro region. How a student learned to read and write depended on what schools could afford and was left to local discretion. Long said teachers struggled to share ideas with colleagues across the county because everyone used different materials.

Some parents are beginning to notice a shift — and adjusting their expectations. Courtney Martin said her daughter, a kindergartner at Mountain Park Elementary in the North Fulton city of Roswell, doesn’t recognize as many common words as she thought she would. But she understands that the goal isn’t memorization. The teacher is “building new foundational skills rather than rushing through everything,” she said.

Martin serves on her school’s governance council and helps the literacy coach create classroom “sound walls,” which display the letter sounds in words. The coach, she said, is “taking more off teachers’ plates so they don’t have to worry about that.”

North and south

District leaders are counting on the investment to pay off for years to come. But in a county with one of the largest wealth gaps in the nation, the temporary windfall can only go so far. 

Fulton is geographically split — with the urban Atlanta system sandwiched in between. During the pandemic, long-standing achievement gaps between north and south schools only grew wider. 

Last year’s English language arts scores offered a sobering reminder of that gulf.

At one end of the spectrum, just 15% of students scored proficient or higher at Heritage Elementary in College Park, which sits off a main road in the shadow of America’s busiest airport — an area marked by low-income housing, fast food joints and discount stores. 

Over 40 miles away at Crabapple Crossing Elementary in Milton, a North Fulton town where two-acre spreads border horse farms and country clubs, the proficiency rate was five times higher. 

Research from Georgia State University showed that South Fulton students experienced more learning loss and took longer to bounce back than their peers in the north. The decline leveled off during the 2021-22 school year as the district implemented recovery efforts such as high-dosage tutoring and summer school. 

Ericka Thompson, a Black South Fulton mom, understands those disparate realities. In the 1990s, she bussed to a North Fulton high school under a “minority-to-majority” program, which the district phased out about a decade ago. Her two sons attend Westlake High School on the southside, where over 90% of the students are Black and some parents work 70-hour weeks.

The district, she said, did its best to diagnose students’ needs after schools reopened, but “it’s almost like who needs stitches and who needs a Band-Aid,” she said. 

Grace Love sees the district’s use of relief funds in her dual roles as parent and district employee. Two years ago, she moved her second-grade daughter from a private school into Stonewall Tell and watched “test scores skyrocket.”

But as a behavior specialist for the district in South Fulton, Love wishes the budget had included more support for grandparents raising children and parents who work two jobs and struggle to help their kids with school. District data shows graduation rates are sometimes 10 percentage points lower than in North Fulton while suspension rates are roughly four to five times higher. Earlier this year, community leaders held a town hall on curbing youth gun violence. 

“The dynamics between the north and south are very different when it comes to parental support,” Love said. “There needs to be more attention to the neediest areas if we want to make it equitable.” 

But such efforts are complicated by demographic shifts over the past 30 years. The region’s Hispanic population has more than doubled, and many Black residents have migrated from the city limits to the suburbs. That means some of the district’s highest-need schools are in neighborhoods once viewed as more well-off.

“We have parents that live in million dollar houses, and we have children that are homeless,” said Irene Schweiger, executive director of Sandy Springs Education Force, a nonprofit in one of the most diverse cities in the nation. The organization runs afterschool and mentoring programs, and stocks school “mini libraries” with books students can borrow or keep. 

Similarly, Warren’s district in South Fulton includes schools where a 100% of students live in poverty as well as subdivisions of stately brick mansions. The route from Atlanta to those neighborhoods takes commuters past Tyler Perry Studios, named for the once-homeless filmmaker turned megastar — a reminder of this Black mecca’s growth into a movie industry hub. 

The challenge for leaders has been how to spend the relief money in a way that touches all schools teaching students to read while still targeting those communities with the lowest-performing schools and most complex needs.

Early in the pandemic, the district paid $800,000 to nonprofit Vision to Learn to offer vision screenings and glasses in Title I schools. At Holcomb Bridge School in Alpharetta, for example, over 200 of the school’s 1,000 students needed glasses.

“If a child can’t see, they can’t read,” said Gyimah Whitaker, the district’s deputy chief academic officer, recently tapped to become superintendent in neighboring Decatur. “It’s going to be difficult for them to be able to distinguish a B from a D if it’s blurry.”

They’re also spending about $13.1 million on dropout prevention efforts, which includes the costs of running three student and family engagement centers — two in South Fulton and one in Sandy Springs. The centers offer families free groceries, donated clothes and hygiene items, counseling and referrals to housing assistance. 

And the district opened in-school “academies” at the five South Fulton high schools. The smaller, more-sheltered environment — which combines online classes with in-person instruction and counseling — has put graduation back within reach for students thrown far off track by the pandemic.

“I didn’t pass a single math class in all of high school,” said Darryn Williams, who attends Creekside High. “My 10th grade year, we went virtual. That messed me up, completely.”

He spent more time that year helping his five younger siblings get through remote learning than on his own schoolwork. By December of this school year, however, he had earned enough credits in the academy to be a senior and will graduate on time next month. 

When the academy opened last fall, teachers began posting small certificates on a bulletin board each time a student passed a course. They soon ran out of space. Now, a dozen rows of the celebratory signs plaster the hallway. 

But the district’s biggest bet is on improving literacy, a growing concern as federal money dries up next year. With some educators on staff now certified to offer the course, the district will continue to train future teachers in the science of reading. Whether elementary schools will be able to keep their literacy coaches remains undecided.

Long, one of those coaches, spends part of her days at Stonewall Tell helping teachers connect the scientific theory they absorbed through hours of training to their more immediate push to get 5-, 6- and 7-year-olds to master phonics and spelling. 

She also works directly with small groups of students who were “super, super affected” by the pandemic. Last fall, some second graders, she said, were still learning how to form letters. 

South Fulton students who transfer to schools in the north often struggle to keep up with new classmates who are further ahead, Long said. She hopes the new reading program will keep them from getting lost.

“We know better now, so we can do better,” she said. “We need equity for all students, no matter what side of the county they’re on.”

Perquimans Central Elementary is a school for pre-kindergarten through second grade in North Carolina’s rural northeast. Years ago, when Melissa Fields served as principal there, she adopted Lucy Calkins’s Units of Study, a “balanced literacy” curriculum for teaching reading.

Units of Study is rooted in a whole-language approach to literacy instruction. The version Perquimans used recently received low marks from curriculum evaluators, and many of its practices – such as cueing readers to look at pictures to guess at words – lack evidence that they work for most students.

When Fields was principal, she said, it seemed to work for many young learners. And for those still struggling, Fields tried to offer more intensive support by using grant money to train six teachers in Reading Recovery, an intervention also questioned in recent years.

In kindergartners, first-graders, and second-graders, Fields said, it was hard to see the drawbacks of this approach.

“They did not have enough skills to sustain that [reading growth],” Fields said. “They were focusing so much on reading for meaning with balanced literacy, that they had not really gotten those decoding skills strong enough. So when the picture cues went away and the text became more complex, we saw that these kids we thought were readers in the primary grades couldn’t sustain that as they got older.”

That’s the “why” behind North Carolina’s strong pivot away from balanced literacy and whole language instruction. After decades of steadily disappointing scores in reading proficiency, the state turned to legislation to bar programs and practices rooted in whole language.

The state enacted the Excellent Public Schools Act of 2021 two years ago this week, but schools are implementing the law, which grounds instruction in the science of reading, for the first time this school year.

Now, all across the state, educators are talking about how the brain learns to read and how to teach in simpatico with that science. Time will tell if it moves the needle – after all, there’s a long implementation journey ahead. But amid national criticism over the use of legislation to guide literacy instruction, many North Carolina education leaders and teachers say things already look and feel different.

As the district’s chief academic officer, Fields now leads the instructional changes in Perquimans — modeling the path away from whole language for teachers.

“The transformation is real,” Perquimans Central Elementary Principal Tracy Gregory said.

Science of reading training is intense, but many are embracing it — and using it

If you pause in the halls of several first- and second-grade classrooms across the state, you’ll notice that instruction looks similar in different districts. Not long ago, it could vary wildly from school to school within a single district. But teachers are now using a common playbook, even if they have different curricula.

As part of the Excellent Public Schools Act, legislators allocated money to train teachers in the “why” and the “how” of the science of reading. The state has spent more than $90 million to train NC Pre-K instructors, elementary teachers, instructional coaches, and administrators in Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS).

LETRS isn’t a program or curriculum. It’s training that shows teachers what students need to learn in order to read and write – and it walks through a scope and sequence in which students should learn these things. It covers the primary domains of literacy acquisition – like oral language, phonemic awareness, vocabulary, writing, and spelling. And, yes, it talks about the importance of explicit phonics instruction.

You get a sense when you watch Tricia Yow as she stands in front of her first-grade class at Endy Elementary in Stanly County.

“Let’s talk about our next ending blend,” she says, holding up a card that displays “- st” before pronouncing it carefully. “Remember, those ending blends can be a little bit tricky. When they’re at the end of words, we can hear every single sound in this word, right?”

She wants her students to learn the blend, not focus on the individual letters. She grabs another card with the word “must.”

“We can hear every single sound, but we’ve got to make sure, and we’re going to do that by tapping out the word, OK?”

She puts a hand in the air and stretches out all five fingers. The students follow suit. The class taps a finger for every sound they make – /m/ /u/ /s/ /t/.

“Now, I’m telling you,” she repeats. “These ending blends, they’re very quick, right? So when we’re tapping it out, we have to make sure we listen for the sounds of those blends, OK? We slow it down. We tap it out. OK, eyes up here. Let’s tap it one more time. Ready?”

The students tap out the sounds, tapping separately but quickly for /s/ and /t/.

This example is now typical of instruction in elementary school literacy blocks. To adults who already know this stuff, it may seem like overkill. As teachers now know, it’s actually critical for wiring kids’ brains for reading.

Students are playing with and manipulating sounds. Instruction no longer starts with letters. Teachers don’t expect students to already know that /s/ and /t/ make separate sounds at the end of the word “must.” They teach the blend explicitly, and repeat the instruction until a student masters it.

Yow is engaging the students with hand activities and eye contact, to keep their attention and activate other parts of the brain. Sometimes, teachers will pause to make sure students know the meaning of the word they’re decoding.

That’s what MaceLynn Clifton is doing with her small group of second-graders at Whiteville Primary.

“The word is brace,” she says, and she repeats it one more time. The “ce” at the end makes an /S/ sound, and her Reading Horizons curriculum teaches it alongside the /S/ sound that “ci” can make, calling them both “rainbow s” sounds.

As Yow did with her class, Clifton has her small group tap out the sounds – /b/ /r/ /a/ /s/. Four sounds, she confirms with them. She makes sure every student gets that. She pauses for a moment and continues.

“I might need a brace if I hurt my leg or my arm,” she says. “Kind of like a cast. Or you could use it in another way. Somebody could say, “I had to brace myself on something.’ It means you had to get steady, you had to find something to hold on to.”

Teachers are moving through short vowel sounds and blends. Teachers help students deconstruct syllables, and talk about how vowels sound different in closed syllables versus open syllables.

“I think they’re almost forgetting how they used to teach,” Gregory said. “There was a big pushback at the beginning. They were used to Reading Recovery and whole language and looking at the picture instead of decoding the word. But when we brought in the data, that was a turning point because the teachers want our students to be successful – not just here, but when they move on.”

Making LETRS work, for teachers and students

LETRS training began in 2021 and covers 160 hours of study across eight units. It takes two years to complete. The rollout was bumpy, coming while in-person schooling resumed after COVID-19, but the mood has been more positive this year.

“I think the resistance was not because teachers didn’t appreciate it, or that teachers didn’t believe in what the science of reading is offering for us,” said Lynn Plummer, director of elementary education in Stanly County Schools. “I think the resistance just comes from the time constraint and putting my whole heart into this job and working eight, 10, 12 hours a day, but then I’ve also got to find time outside of my school day to complete this additional training.”

But teachers find it more manageable as districts get better at building LETRS time into their calendars. The state divided districts into three cohorts for the training. The first cohort started in August 2021 and scheduled to finish this summer. The final cohort started at the beginning of this school year and is about halfway through.

“But we’re already starting to hear, anecdotally from teachers, that while the amount of time involved in LETRS is very overwhelming, the content is helping them,” said Melissa Hedt, Asheville City Schools’ deputy superintendent of accountability and instruction. “They’re already finding ways to apply the content. We thought we’d hear that more in year two … but I’ve been surprised to already be hearing teachers and school principals starting to talk about how they’re seeing shifts in classroom practice.”

And districts are sensing an impact from the instructional shift already.

“I think our second-grade teachers would probably tell you that they are seeing students come to them with a much stronger foundation of phonics and phonemic awareness and having those foundational skills under their belt,” said Plummer, whose district began LETRS about two years before the state passed its law.

“It’s really given kindergarten teachers, first-grade teachers – even second-grade — the permission to slow down a little bit and don’t push comprehension from the get-go,” he said.

Whiteville City Schools is similar to Perquimans, with students spending kindergarten through second grade at one school before transitioning to another school for third through fifth grades. Before this year, it was sometimes a rocky transition for rising third-graders.

“Our teachers over there were like, ‘Oh, no. We’re losing something in the transition,’” said Katie McLam, the district’s director of curriculum and instruction.

It was a troubling trend that grew more disturbing during the pandemic. But as teachers dove into both LETRS training and reading assessment data, the root cause for the trends became apparent.

“Memorizing words might get you through second grade,” said Pam Sutton, the instructional coach at Whiteville Primary. “But beyond that, you need skills to attack your science words, your tier three words, those social studies words – to be fluent. And that looks like memorization, but we get to that fluency in different ways.”

Early returns show promise for reading outcomes

At the beginning of last year, 22% of kindergartners in Perquimans were assessed as proficient. At the end of the year, it was 64%. That 42-point gain was higher than the state and national averages.

“And we saw similar gains like that in first grade and second grade, where we were really kind of outpacing the growth of the state and the nation,” Fields said.

Whiteville City and Stanly have seen similar growth, McLam and Plummer each said. This month, DPI presented statewide data showing gains measured using Amplify’s mCLASS with DIBELS 8 assessment.

The gains are motivating teachers as they navigate the gargantuan task of completing LETRS on top of everything else. It’s a marked shift from early reports during the first cohort’s commencement of LETRS. The rollout happened quickly, with the first cohort beginning just four months after the state enacted its law.

Many districts didn’t have time to prepare, so their calendars didn’t block off adequate time for LETRS training. Teachers reported feeling overwhelmed, and because the early units of LETRS focus more on the “why” of the science rather than the “how” of instruction, some teachers said they didn’t think the training was worth the stress.

“But I think that as they’re seeing success, and they start seeing that students are doing well – especially at the foundational level – we’re seeing increased success,” said Theresa Melenas, executive director of instructional services in Clinton City Schools. “That will only spur teachers forward.”

Districts advise patience in transition to science for reading

There’s still work to do.

Leveled readers, books designed to help students predict words, still find their way into students’ hands in some schools. Teachers, used to teaching letter sounds first, sometimes slip into old habits. Some research says background knowledge is important to developing as a skilled reader. LETRS handles strategies for incorporating that in later units, so many schools haven’t seen significant instructional shifts there.

But it’s year one of the journey with the science of reading. Several district leaders said they’re watching for three to five years down the road before the state sees significant movement in reading scores across the board. Some said they expect to see major gains when the kindergartners who come in after full implementation matriculate to third grade. That would mean the 2027-28 school year.

“People can’t expect this to be a quick fix,” McLam said. “It’s not going to be, and they want it to be. I understand that. I mean, we all want our children to be successful in life. But this is just gonna take some time, and I think we just have to keep proving this through sharing the data and the information that we get.”

And by watching and listening to the teachers. That’s what lifts the spirits of Rebecca Little, an instructional coach at East Albemarle Elementary in Stanly County.

“I’m blessed with the teachers we’ve got in this building,” she said. “They’re willing to say, ‘What’s best for this kid?’ Even though they’re tired, it’s, ‘What’s best for this kid?’”

This article first appeared on EducationNC and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

A chunk of Gov. Mike DeWine’s proposed budget zeroes in on what’s called the science of reading method.

Specifically, it includes $64 million for science of reading curricula, $43 million each year for the next two years to offer science of reading instruction for educators, and $12 million to support 100 literacy coaches in schools and districts.

“I truly believe there’s nothing more important than the science of reading, and making sure that every single child in the state of Ohio, as they are learning to read, has the benefit of the science,” DeWine said at a March 23 event. DeWine has been making literacy stops in classrooms around Ohio to learn about how the science of reading method has been implemented in lessons.

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The science of reading method incorporates phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension, said Brett Tingley, the president of both Parents for Reading Justice and OH-KID (Ohio Kids Identified with Dyslexia).

“Teaching reading should be systematic, explicit, and direct based on the system of processing language,” said DeJunne’ Clark Jackson, president of the Center for Literacy and Learning, a Louisiana-based literacy nonprofit organization.

Meanwhile, some skeptics argue that the science of reading method doesn’t do enough to provoke the kind of thinking that enables deep comprehension in realistic reading situations.

“We must teach comprehension as a multidimensional experience,” wrote educators Jessica Hahn and Mia Hood in Education Week. “We want children to comprehend what’s happening literally in the text (who did what when), but we also want them to be able to analyze how parts of the text (literary devices, figurative language, structural choices) work together to develop ideas. And we want them to interpret the purpose and significance of the text in relation to their lives and to society.”

How children best learn how to read has been debated for decades, and a recent six-part podcast series from American Public Media called Sold a Story has thrust this hotly-debated issue further into the national spotlight.

A little more than half of the states and the District of Columbia have passed laws or implemented new policies related to evidence-based reading instruction since 2013 as of August, according to Education Week. DeWine is hoping Ohio can be added to that list.

Structured literacy

Structured literacy is an approach to reading instruction that applies the knowledge of the science of reading method, and it includes explicit and systematic instruction in foundational reading skills, including phonics. The science of reading says most children need explicit phonics when learning how to read.

“Phonics isn’t the only component of literacy instruction, but it can’t exist without phonics,” said Troy McIntosh, executive director of the Ohio Christian Education Network.

The science of reading method prioritizes this.

“To have a student say that they can comprehend what they’re reading, there’s two components to that, that go hand in hand, and it’s word recognition and language comprehension,” said Lindsey Roush, an assistant professor at Walsh University’s division of education.

Walsh University, a private Catholic college in North Canton, converted all their education courses to be aligned with the science of reading method in 2019, Roush said.

The method focuses on how letter sounds and printed letters work together, she said.

“We want their eyes to stay focused on the word and start from those little points of the sounds to bigger chunks of the word to analyze the word to be able to decode it and understand it,” Roush said.

Which is where phonics comes into play.

“Phonics is a very big part of this in terms of really getting down to those phonemes the letter sounds and understanding which sound each of those letters make, individually, and as they’re grouped together in different formats,” Roush said.

Balanced literacy

There is another approach to reading instruction called balanced literacy that does not teach phonics in an explicit, systematic way, but prioritizes students’ comprehension of a text.

Critics of that approach say it’s not based on the science. “It’s not using the foundational skills,” alleged Danielle Fontenot, vice president of program development at the Center for Literacy and Learning.

Balanced literacy incorporates the three-cueing method, which encourages children to read words by asking three questions: Does it make sense? Does it sound right? Does it look right? For example, there could be a picture of a horse on a book’s page and a student may say “pony.”

“When you get to books without pictures your strategy’s not working,” Tingley said.

The science of reading method eliminates guessing, Roush said.

“We don’t want them looking at pictures,” she said.

Whole language is another approach to reading that is more in line with balanced literacy that, as the name suggests, teaches students the whole word instead of parts of the word, Jackson said.

The balanced literacy and whole language methods teach children the “habits of poor readers,” Tingley alleged.

“The children are the ones who are suffering,” she said. “It’s hard to have someone you love struggle to read. … If you can’t read, you can’t do a story problem. You have a hard time in math, you can’t access science or social studies, so reading is the most important thing.”

Linda Fenner, a founding member of Citizen Advocates for Public Education (CAPEOhio), said she wonders if there is a “global solution or a one-size fits all program” that works best for teaching all students how to read.

“Different kids need different things in order to learn how to read,” she said. “The kids who need the most support really need different things and in different combinations.”

Ohio school districts

It’s unclear which Ohio school districts are using which methods when it comes to the reading curriculum. Ohio law gives local schools and districts sole authority regarding decisions about curriculum, so there is no required state curriculum, said Ohio Department of Education Spokesperson Lacey Snoke.

But one thing is clear — there are Ohio school districts not teaching the science of reading method and DeWine is working hard to change that through his proposed budget.

“This is a problem that we know how to fix,” Tingley said. “And we owe it to these children to fix it.”

Athens City School District in Athens County currently uses what would be considered a balanced literacy approach, but supports DeWine’s science of reading method budget proposal, Superintendent Thomas Gibbs said in an email.

“We have continued to see stagnation in our reading scores and have been internally training and reviewing different curriculum that is more in line with the Science of Reading,” Gibbs said. “The allocation of dollars in the budget to purchase new materials that are in line with SOR and dollars to support the additional time and commitment our teachers will have to put into professional development is necessary and would be a good investment.”

Athens Schools third grade English Language Arts reading scores from the 2017-18 to the 2020-21 school year have been between 9% to 29% for limited scores, between 17% to 25% for basic scores, between 13% to 22% for proficient scores, between 11% to 20% accomplished, and between 12% to 34% for advanced scores, according to ODE.

Ohio’s tests scores

Ohio’s test scores dipped in the latest report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which published in October.

Eighth grade math proficiency dropped from 38% in 2019 to 29% in 2022. In reading scores for the same grade level, proficiency went from 38% in 2019 to 33% in 2022, according to the NAEP data.

Fourth graders saw decreases as well, going from 38% in 2019 to 33% in 2022 in reading scores, and from 38% in 2019 to 29% in 2022 in math.

“I believe that one of the biggest educational mistakes we have made over the last three to four decades is abandoning direct phonic instruction,” McIntosh said. “That has been disastrous for Ohio’s kids.”

“One of those ‘aha moments’”

Roush distinctly remembers being introduced to the science of reading method through Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS) professional development training about four years ago.

“It’s just one of those moments, I feel as an educator, like one of those ‘aha moments,’ like, why haven’t we been doing this?” Roush said.

She previously taught for 13 years at McKinley Elementary School, part of Lisbon Exempted Village Schools in Columbia County, and remembers seeing frustrated students struggling to read before the district switched to the science of reading approach.

“If we can prevent that, of course, we should want to do that as educators,” Roush said.

She remembers students looking at a picture in a book that was near the word on a page and say something that might have started with the same letter, but was ultimately incorrect.

“(It) made zero sense whatsoever, because they were just simply guessing by looking for context clues in the pictures rather than trying to decode the word,” she said.

She starting noticing a difference after incorporating the science of reading method in her third grade classroom.

“It started to click with students,” Roush said. “The big thing was seeing them start to problem solve and how to break apart a word. If they came to a word that they didn’t know, they had the strategies to decode that word.”

Educators say it’s worth putting in the time to learn the science of reading method.

“It’s our obligation to do what’s best for students and if we have been doing it one way for so long and it isn’t working, then we have an obligation to our students to know better and do better,” Fontenot said.

Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David DeWitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com. Follow Ohio Capital Journal on Facebook and Twitter.

The presidents of both the Ohio Education Association and Ohio Federation of Teachers praised DeWine for making literacy a priority in a new state budget bill. But both object to DeWine’s attempt in that same bill to make Ohio one of the first states to ban teachers using “cueing” — having young students figure out what a word is through context or pictures — in reading lessons. 

That strategy is a large part of long-used teaching approaches like whole language or balanced literacy.

“I would strongly, strongly urge the house to consider removal of language that explicitly bans any particular instructional practices,” OEA President Scott DiMauro told an Ohio House subcommittee considering DeWine’s plan last week.

DiMaruo said if the state offers training and teaching materials for science of reading, “there’s no need for the heavy hand of the state government to single out any specific instructional practices.”

OFT President Melissa Cropper said limiting teachers to one approach would take away other methods that may work best for some students.

“Banning certain methods opens the door to politically-charged attacks that can limit a teacher’s ability to choose the most appropriate method for meeting a student’s needs,” she told the subcommittee.

But DeWine, acting state education superintendent Stephanie Siddens and legislative leaders in the state’s Republican majority, which has often dismissed union concerns, are not deviating from DeWine’s plan to join Arkansas and Louisiana in banning cueing in favor of phonics-based lessons. Teachers still hope ongoing discussions with DeWine and his staff can help shape the final bill.

DeWine has been promoting science of reading at events in Columbus, Dayton and Cincinnati, including a discussion Thursday in which former Mississippi state Superintendent Carey Wright came to Columbus to tell how changing to science of reading approaches helped students there leap from 49th in 4th grade reading nationally in 2013 to 22nd in 2022 on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

Siddens called three-cueing “counter-productive” for students after that event, in which Wright and others dismissed that approach as having children “guess” at words.

“You can’t guess your way into reading,” Wright said. “You have to be taught explicitly how to read.”

DeWine, when told after that meeting that teachers had called his plan too limiting, disagreed: “The science of reading is not one size fits all.” 

“Look at what the state of Mississippi did,” he said. “They did it, frankly, by being very strong in regard to the science of reading. So the evidence is just … there.”

Andrew Brenner, the Republican chairman of Ohio’s Senate Education Committee, said he sees such strong support for DeWine’s plan he sees less need to file a separate bill to require phonics to be taught.

“We believe that the governor’s plan will get through the budget mostly intact,” he said.

He dismissed teachers’ objections about banning cueing, asking if teachers prefer the low reading scores of many third graders on state tests, which DeWine has cited as a reason for his push.

Cropper said blaming any teaching approach for low scores “is an unsafe assumption.”

“There has been no analysis done on which districts are using which teaching methods or curriculum,” she said. “Many other factors contribute to students’ academic success including their socioeconomic status.”

More than half of all states have passed laws encouraging or incorporating science of reading in classrooms, as the so-called “reading wars” have ramped up over the last 10 years. Ohio has made science of reading part of the state’s recommended literacy improvement strategy since 2018, but has not required schools to use it.

DeWine’s proposed ban would go much further. Similar legislation has been filed in Indiana (SB 402), New Hampshire (HB 437), Florida (SB 758), West Virginia (SB 274), and Texas (HB 2162) with experts expecting more soon in Nevada, Oklahoma, and South Carolina.

Mississippi, however, did not have such a ban to achieve the results DeWine praised. After DeWine and Carey spoke at the same event last week, the OFT’s Cropper asked Carey from the audience if Mississippi needed a ban or just focused on promoting and teaching science of reading.

Carey said there was no such ban, but the state continually told schools and teachers to avoid cueing and that teachers were often glad to be trained in science of reading methods, for which they received continuing education credits.

Both Cropper and DiMauro testified they would prefer promoting science of reading over any bans or mandating training for all teachers as DeWine wants. They praised DeWine for setting aside money in the budget for training, stipends for teachers doing the training, and for books and other curriculum materials for districts wanting to change.

But they raised concerns over DeWine’s aim to have the entire state change by the fall of 2024 and forcing even high school science and math teachers to do training. They noted that the state department of education doesn’t have a training plan yet, doesn’t know how long such training would need to be, how many teachers already have strong science of reading training and how well state teacher training programs are teaching it.

“We ask that all of you seriously look at, not just what does it take to implement or impose some state level mandates in terms of literacy instruction, but to truly get buy-in and meaningful implementation of that program,” DiMauro said. “We know there are many unanswered questions right now.”

The approach, known as “balanced” literacy, has been dominant in U.S. classrooms for decades, but has come under fire recently amid research and reporting exposing its shortcomings. Criticism crescendoed this fall after the release of the influential Sold a Story podcast, which linked America’s “reading crisis” to schools’ use of literacy materials that teach children to guess words they don’t know based first on pictures and sentence structure — a method called “three cueing.”

But actually ridding classrooms of these approaches may prove challenging. Since Oct. 20 when the podcast launched, districts have continued to make large purchases of materials that include the problematic three-cueing tactics.

Over that time span, at least 225 districts have spent over $1.5 million on new books, trainings and curriculums linked to three cueing, according to The 74’s review of their purchase orders accessed through the data service GovSpend. Two districts — Palatine, Illinois and Conroe, Texas — each spent over $170,000 on the materials and four others spent more than $50,000.

Previous analyses have highlighted sales going to the reading materials’ primary publisher, finding some large school systems had spent $10 million or more over the last decade. But this report is the first known to zero in on individual districts’ purchasing of the key authors in question, spending decisions made during a national re-examination of literacy instruction.

Along with books and worksheets, at least nine districts indicated that they had paid for new professional development in the flawed literacy approaches and schools made at least 85 purchases of an assessment system for early readers rife with inconsistencies.

The numbers likely understate the total because school districts in many cases have not yet submitted their more recent purchase orders to the GovSpend database, a process which can take several months, GovSpend staff said. From Oct. 21 to Nov. 31, the database shows over $1.2 million in total spending on the curricular materials, and from Dec. 1 through Feb. 27, the date The 74 pulled the figures, under $350,000.

Matthew Mugo Fields, president of New Hampshire-based Heinemann, the publisher at the center of Sold a Story, said none of his company’s literacy programs are designed to prioritize guessing.

“Guessing at words in lieu of decoding is not the instructional intent of those programs,” he said.

In some cases, district officials stood by the literacy materials, saying their teachers swear by them. Others defended their purchases as one tool among many at educators’ disposal for teaching kids how to read, acknowledging that they were insufficient on their own.

Krissy Hufnagel, curriculum director for schools in Mason, Ohio, the state where balanced literacy first took root, said her district had to bolster their supply of books after losing some of the titles they sent home with families during the pandemic. She has followed along for years the debate over how best to teach literacy, she said, and “absolutely” agrees with her district’s $69,500 purchase in October of guided reading materials for first graders from the Fountas and Pinnell Classroom, one of the key curriculums whose efficacy has been cast into doubt.

“It’s just one piece of the puzzle,” Hufnagel said. “We purchased decodables, we purchased read-alouds and we purchased guided, leveled books.”

Decodable books encourage young readers to develop their skills in phonics by using words they can sound out and by excluding pictures that would give away challenging words. Schools are increasingly prioritizing phonics-based instruction thanks to a vast body of research documenting its central role in how young children can become strong readers.

Heinemann says it is working to incorporate its stand-alone phonics materials into its other existing programs. In the Oct. 21 to Feb. 27 timeframe, 13 districts’ purchase orders mentioned phonics and totaled roughly $4,300.

Timothy Shanahan, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois Chicago studying early literacy, described the mix-and-match approach as a “bandage.” The most common curriculums that incorporate cueing — the Reading Recovery program, Lucy Calkins’s “Units of Study” and Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell’s “Leveled Literacy Intervention” — have a limited research base, he said.

“You’re actually teaching kids to read like poor readers rather than like good readers,” he said. Students may still make progress using those techniques, but their gains are “overwhelmingly” better when learning via a more structured, phonics-driven approach.

Vicky Wieben is a parent who said she’s seen the harms of three cueing first hand. When her son struggled to read in the early grades, their school in an affluent suburban district outside Des Moines, Iowa, sent home books from the Reading Recovery program along with laminated instructions for the parents. The sheet told her to prompt her son to look at the picture when he didn’t know a word, then use the surrounding words for context and, if none of that worked, see if he could sound it out using the letters, she said.

“Anything that took any kind of sounding out … he would just be silent,” Wieben said. His teacher joked that the child’s imagined stories were better than the books themselves. But the mother knew that was a red flag. “He would make up what he was seeing in the picture and hope that that was good enough,” she said.

Her son, now a seventh grader, still has “holes and gaps” even in elementary school content, she said, and tested at a third-grade level in sixth grade.

Millions of other youngsters have had similar struggles. In 2022, national exams showed two-thirds of U.S. fourth graders were below proficient in reading, the age by which educators hope young people will have finished learning to read and begun reading to learn. Scores dipped after the pandemic, but even before COVID, only 35% of learners notched at or above proficient.

In an effort to turn things around, more than half of states have passed measures promoting the “science of reading,” an approach that, compared to balanced literacy, places a greater emphasis on sounding out words.

Sara Hunton, curriculum coordinator for Portales schools in New Mexico, said her district had to purchase “supplemental materials” after the state’s 2019 law because the Leveled Literacy Intervention program they use isn’t on the state’s approved list.

Researchers like Shanahan emphasize that the debates are “not black and white,” and that studies show young learners need not just phonics instruction, but also lessons in vocabulary and access to challenging reading material, among other things.

In 2022, Lucy Calkins, a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College once revered for her literacy program, updated her Units of Study curriculum to give students more direct instruction in phonics. Fields, Heinemann’s president, said the Fountas and Pinnell Classroom is going through a similar update process and will be including more decodable books in its next iteration. Fields did not specify any elements of either program that the authors are removing and distanced their instruction from the three-cueing method.

“We don’t use, nor have we ever used, the term ‘three cueing,’ to refer to what it is that we do,” he said.

Michelle Faust, a literacy coach working in Lexington, South Carolina, was skeptical of the new Units of Study. Over a decade ago, she was trained in the Calkins approach, but soon saw its weaknesses in the classroom. Yet, she was pleasantly surprised with the updates.

“My kindergarten teachers have been working with the new Units [of Study] this year — and they are science of reading people — and they are happy with the revisions,” she said. “Lucy has taken the Sold a Story podcast to heart and revised accordingly.”

Updated or not, Terri Marculitis, director of curriculum and instruction for Middleborough Public Schools in Massachusetts, said her district will never again purchase materials from Fountas and Pinnell Classroom. The school system bought materials until last school year, she said, and the results were “poor at best.”

“We have students in high school who have significant gaps in foundational literacy,” she said. She attributes those holes to the flawed curriculum “100%.”

Fields did not respond directly when asked whether Heinemann’s sales had changed in the wake of Sold a Story, but said the company has had to have “clarifying conversations” with several school district customers in recent months.

Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell declined The 74’s request for an interview. Lucy Calkins sent a written statement.

“Our new publications are informed by the science of reading research, new research on comprehension and by ongoing classroom-based research,” she said. The professor, whose LLC through which districts hire her team for training is reportedly worth nearly $23 million, added that she holds monthly office hours to help educators implement her materials on the ground.

Emily Hanford, the American Public Media reporter who created the blockbuster Sold a Story series, said she’s not surprised schools are continuing to purchase the materials her podcast warned against. Yes, reading instruction needs to change, she said. Yes, schools need to do better. But “no one changes a culture quickly,” Hanford said.

“There are people who have been using these materials for a long time. … These ideas have been entrenched in American education for decades now, so things aren’t going to necessarily change quickly.”

See the full list of district purchase orders marked Oct. 21 though Feb. 27:

The COVID pandemic — the topic that has dominated education conversations for the past three years — is largely missing from the State of the State addresses that governors are delivering to their legislatures this winter. 

Instead, state leaders are using their bully pulpits to call for bigger investments in early learning and in the transition into the workforce and college. They are supporting better pay for public school teachers while pushing for public money to flow to private schools, which could ultimately make it more difficult to fund public school pay increases. 

FutureEd analyzed 44 governors’ speeches and partnered with The 74 to convert our analysis into a series of interactive maps. We found that despite the academic gaps exposed in last year’s National Assessment for Educational Progress scores, there was surprisingly little talk of learning loss and efforts to catch students up. There was also little explicit “culture war” rhetoric around teaching racial history or banning books — and more lofty talk about the value of education.

“Education is a great equalizer in our society,” said Democratic Gov. Janet Mills in her Feb. 14 address to the Maine legislature. “Every child, regardless of where they live, deserves a world-class education that will prepare them for a successful adulthood.”

Here are some of the topics trending among the nation’s governors this year:

(Click here if you are having trouble viewing maps)

Teaching Profession

The teaching profession was a top priority across party lines, with 24 governors discussing ways to improve pay and support educators. Most of those governors proposed raising salaries, largely in response to shortages in their states but also as a way to recognize the important role teachers play. 

In Kentucky, Democratic Gov. Andrew Beshear is supporting an across-the-board 5% pay hike, which he called “both vital and necessary to address Kentucky’s shortage of nearly 11,000 public school teachers.” Idaho Republican Gov. Brad Little also pledged to increase salaries — both for starting teachers and for all instructors — by an average of $6,300 annually because “students and their families deserve quality teachers who are respected and compensated competitively.”

South Carolina Republican Gov. Henry McMaster took a different approach, offering both salary increases and one-time $2,500 retention bonuses, paid out in two installments. Virginia Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin wants to provide retention bonuses as well as $50 million in performance-based compensations. Republican state leaders began supporting teacher pay hikes in response to widespread teacher protests against low pay in red states in the years before the pandemic — perhaps realizing that many rank-and-file teachers in their states are Republicans, even though teacher unions, favorite Republican political foils, lean left.

Governors also pitched additional strategies to address recruitment and retention challenges. Maryland Democratic Gov. Wes Moore is pushing legislation to strengthen the teacher pipeline with loan forgiveness, fellowships and grow-your-own programs. Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp is proposing grants to help paraprofessionals become teachers. Nevada Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo is adding $30 million to provide stipends and tuition for student teachers. And in Wisconsin, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers announced plans to invest more than $20 million in recruiting, developing, and retaining teachers and student teachers.

School Choice

Unlike the bipartisan support for teacher compensation, the school choice proposals in 15 State of the State addresses nearly all came from Republican governors. The only Democratic governor to broach the subject, Arizona’s Katie Hobbs, pledged to provide more accountability for a broad expansion of education savings accounts that her predecessor pushed through the legislature. “Any school that accepts taxpayer dollars should have to abide by the same accountability standards that all district schools do,” she said. 

Iowa Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds proposed, and has since signed, a measure that would provide nearly $8,000 in state funding to each family who sends their child to a private school — the same amount the state provides for each public school student. “Every parent should have a choice of where to send their child — and that choice shouldn’t be limited to families who can afford it,” she said. Ohio Republican Gov. Mike DeWine proposed expanding eligibility for the state’s voucher program to include middle-class families. He also proposed increasing funding for charter schools.

Some governors emphasized the importance of parents in making educational decisions for their children, including Idaho’s Little, who plans to make permanent a grant program that helps families pay for such educational expenses as computers, instructional materials and tutoring.

While school choice programs open to all students, like those in Iowa and Arizona, are drawing much of the attention — and criticism — this year, governors in Nebraska and South Dakota have focused specifically on children in need, including those in foster care or living in poverty.

Curriculum and Instruction

With support for the “science of reading” sweeping the country, governors are responding with calls for explicit, evidence-based reading instruction. “The evidence is clear. The verdict is in. There is a great deal of research about how we learn to read. And today, we understand the great value and importance of phonics,” said Ohio’s DeWine, one of 11 governors who mentioned literacy in their speeches; altogether, 19 proposed some sort of curriculum initiatives or restrictions.

Some governors, such as Iowa’s Reynolds, are focusing on training teachers to implement reading initiatives. Youngkin called for extending the use of reading specialists under the Virginia Literacy Act to fifth grade.

In Wisconsin, Evers announced a $20 million investment to increase literacy programming and implement evidence-based reading practices. He, along with Youngkin and Colorado Democratic Gov. Jared Polis, also proposed investments in high-quality math curricula, training and support. 

In Nevada, Lombardo wants to reinstate a rule holding back students who aren’t reading proficiently, and Indiana Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb is proposing to reward schools that improve their third-grade reading results. 

This focus on literacy and academic initiatives marks a big shift from last year, when culture wars and critical race theory were prominent in the State of the State addresses. Mississippi Republican Gov. Tate Reeves is one of the exceptions, with comments on gender and sexuality. “There is no room in our schools for policies that attempt to undercut parents and require the usage of pronouns or names that fail to correspond with reality,” he said in proposing a Parents’ Bill of Rights requiring schools to “adhere to the will of the parents” on such matters.

Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott framed his push for education savings accounts as a way to empower parents and to fight “woke agendas” and “indoctrination.” Likewise, West Virginia Republican Gov. Jim Justice voiced support for “parents’ rights” by directing school districts to make all curricula available online, “where we can see every single thing that’s being put into our little kids’ heads.”

In Illinois, Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker spoke out against restricting what’s taught in schools, saying it undermines historic investments in education. “It’s all meaningless if we become a nation that bans books from school libraries about racism suffered by Roberto Clemente and Hank Aaron, and tells kids they can’t talk about being gay, and signals to Black and brown people and Asian Americans and Jews and Muslims that our authentic stories can’t be told,” he said.

Higher Education

College affordability emerged as a top priority among the 23 governors who mentioned higher education, but their proposed solutions differed across party lines. Governors from both parties called for expanded scholarship programs, but only Republicans — from South Carolina, Utah and Virginia — called for tuition freezes. GOP governors were also the only ones to mention repairing aging campus buildings, with proposed investments ranging from $65 million in Nevada to $275 million in Missouri. 

New Mexico Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham touted her state’s program that provides free public higher education to all state residents, and Illinois’s Pritzker pledged another $100 million for scholarships helping to make community college free for eligible students. Others pushed for expanded scholarship programs: Arizona’s Hobbs is allocating $40 million to create the Promise for DREAMers Scholarship Program, while North Dakota Republican Gov. Doug Burgum is doubling his state’s investment in the Native American Scholarship program. Governors in other states, including Montana, Georgia and Hawaii, emphasized the need for expanded scholarships and programs to encourage students to become health care providers. 

Several governors proposed using these investments to encourage students to stay in their state for college and ideally, for their careers. Indiana’s Holcomb pitched a $184 million increase in higher education funding to reward universities “for keeping their graduates in careers in our state. After all, Indiana’s college campuses need to be the epicenters of brain gain — not brain drain!” Nebraska Republican Gov. Jim Pillen offered $39.4 million to fund over 4,200 scholarships for Nebraska students attending school in state.

Workforce Development

At least 29 governors across the political spectrum voiced support for improving students’ career readiness, including through apprenticeships and dual-enrollment programs. 

Virginia’s Youngkin hopes to accelerate dual-enrollment partnerships between high schools and community colleges so that eventually, “every child graduates with an industry recognized credential.” Kentucky’s Beshear announced a $245 million investment to renovate and rebuild career and technical centers in high schools. And Colorado’s Polis argued for career-connected learning in high school. 

Apprenticeships were a large focus, with Iowa’s Reynolds increasing funding for health care apprenticeships, Missouri Republican Gov. Mike Parson expanding apprenticeships in areas such as information technology and public safety, and Montana Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte doubling the Trades Education Credit. Wisconsin’s Evers is connecting apprenticeships to other initiatives, including through a $10 million investment in clean energy job training and reemployment.

Early Education

Even as Congress failed to fund early care and early education in recent spending packages, 20 governors from both parties made the early years a priority in their speeches. 

Pritzker announced a broad Smart Start Illinois plan to expand access to pre-K and child care, help build new facilities and ramp up home visiting programs for young families. While only Democratic governors — including those in Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan and New Mexico — discussed the need for universal pre-K, several Republican governors also advocated for expanding early learning and child care options, particularly better access for kids from low-income families. For example, Missouri’s Parson is planning to invest $56 million to expand pre-K options for low-income children, and Nevada’s Lombardo is providing $60 million for similar efforts. 

Governors are also calling for bureaucratic changes: New York Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul wants to make it easier for eligible parents to access child care assistance, saying, “Less than 10% of families who are eligible … are actually enrolled. This is the legacy of a system that is difficult to navigate — by design. That has to change.” Similarly, South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem said her state would work with providers to overhaul rules and regulations. 

Mental Health

Sixteen governors acknowledged the rise in mental health challenges post-pandemic and the need to expand access to services, particularly for children and teens. Some focused specifically on school-based services, while others supported community-based approaches.

Several Democratic governors called for increasing the number of school counselors, psychologists and social workers, including Kansas Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly, who is proposing to expand Mental Health Intervention Teams in schools. In Wisconsin, Evers announced he is investing more than $270 million to allow every district to expand school-based mental health services.

Though largely a priority among Democrats, mental health also came up in a few Republican speeches: Missouri’s Parson proposed an additional $3.5 million for more youth behavioral-health liaisons, and Ohio’s DeWine hopes to address the shortage of pediatric behavioral-health professionals and facilities. 

While the culture wars and other divisive political issues continue to play out in schools and colleges, it is perhaps encouraging to see significant numbers of state leaders from both parties proposing pragmatic policy responses to teacher shortages, student mental health needs, low reading scores and other systemic challenges facing the nation’s educators.

Maps by The 74’s Meghan Gallagher

South by Southwest Edu returns next week to Austin, Texas, running March 6–9. As always, the event offers hundreds of panels, discussions, film screenings and workshops on education policy, politics, innovation, and of course, this being 2023, the rise of artificial intelligence.

One keynote session will feature the renowned architect Frank Gehry chatting with his younger sister, educator Doreen Gehry Nelson, about creativity, critical thinking and collaboration in education. In another, pollster John Della Volpe will share new data from the November 2022 midterm elections and discuss how to engage with rising Gen Z leaders. 

In yet another, filmmakers will screen a new documentary featuring Oakland-based activist Kareem Weaver, who, fed up with bleak reading scores in his home city, filed a petition with the NAACP demanding change in early reading instruction. 

There’s actually too much to see and hear in the span of just four days, so The 74 has streamlined the selection process. We’ve scoured the schedule to highlight a few of the most significant presenters, topics and panels that might be worth your time. 

Here’s a highly subjective list of 23 sessions you shouldn’t miss in 2023:

Monday, March 6:

11:30 a.m. — Are Smartphones the Next Teen Addiction Crisis?: In this session by two educators and a psychologist who treats addiction, panelists will share the neuroscience behind teen brains’ unique susceptibility to tech — and how adults can help students fight it via a science-based digital media curriculum and resources designed to empower teens to develop healthy relationships with their devices. Learn more.

11:30 a.m. — Developing & Assessing Creative Skills with AI: The LEGO Foundation’s Bo Stjerne Thomsen joins experts in early childhood education, critical thinking, and game-based learning to discuss how educators can chart student progress in hard-to-measure areas while kids play. This discussion will explore new ways to engage kids in creative play in a way that develops essential skills and new methods for assessing growth. Learn more.

11:30 a.m. — Beyond School: Designing Education Infrastructure: The lab director of Community & Implementation at Stanford d.school joins two leading philanthropic leaders to explore opportunities for change that happen when we treat our schools as “vital pieces of community infrastructure.” Panelists will discuss what we unlock when educators draw on what students are capable of across physical space, tech innovation and social connection. Learn more.

1 p.m.— Is Virtual Learning the Disruptor Teaching Needs?: The pandemic exposed millions of students to the opportunities and limitations of virtual learning. Three years after the most significant disruption to schooling in recent memory, a panel of educators and advocates ask how virtual learning can reshape how we recruit, train, hire, and deploy teachers and how a virtual education workforce could provide new solutions to ongoing staffing problems. This session is moderated by The 74’s Greg Toppo. Learn more.

1 p.m. — The Race to Secure 1 Million Teachers of Color: The pandemic accelerated a looming teacher shortage, with a twist: Just 20% of teachers are people of color, even as non-white students comprise the majority of U.S students, according to the Education Trust. Yet 40% of public schools do not have a single non-white teacher on record. How can we rethink teacher recruitment and training to ensure that teachers represent the students they serve? This panel explores a national initiative to recruit 1 million teachers of color over the next decade. Learn more.

1:30 p.m. — Building a Bipartisan Path Forward in Education: Polarization in education policy threatens to erode the broad support that schools have long enjoyed. The Aspen Institute and a bipartisan group of state policymakers developed Opportunity to Learn principles to undergird a new, positive bipartisan agenda for improving public education. The panel features Aspen’s Ross Wiener as well as two state lawmakers (one Democrat and one Republican) to explore how this approach can help rebuild support for public education. Learn more.

2:30 p.m. — Educator Teams: Early Results & HR Implications: Mesa Public Schools, Arizona’s largest school district, has committed to building team-based staffing models in half of its schools. It now has 30 schools with innovative staffing models, and early results are promising. This panel features a representative of Mesa schools as well as two scholars from Arizona State University, which is partnering with the district on new ways to address teacher shortages and workforce design. Learn more.

Tuesday, March 7:

10 a.m. — Design-Based Learning Unwrapped: Build Our Future (keynote, livestreamed): In this keynote session, renowned architect Frank Gehry chats with his younger sister, Doreen Gehry Nelson, about their respective careers, sharing their perspectives on the roles that “creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration” play in education. Gehry Nelson created a well-known method of design-based learning, a teaching methodology that has been applied in K-12 classrooms worldwide since 1969. Learn more.

11:30 a.m. — Librarians as VIPs: Scaling Media Literacy: In this session, the National Association for Media Literacy Education will discuss implementing “train-the-trainer” models for scaling media literacy education and instruction in schools, districts and communities. This session is led by Donnell Probst, a NAMLE associate director and former college reference librarian. Learn more.

11:30 a.m. — The Long Game: How We Invest in Education: Adequate school funding is a key to educational attainment, but the benefits don’t stop there. It affects earnings, crime and poverty, research shows. Join a panel of experts from the Learning Policy Institute, the Public Policy Institute of California and the Tennessee Department of Education to hear how funding becomes more equitable to ensure better outcomes, especially as schools tap federal pandemic relief funds. This session is led by The Dallas Morning News’ Eva-Marie Ayala. Learn more.

1 p.m. — K-12 Assessments of the Future: Emerging approaches to demonstrating mastery, as well as advanced computational methods, hold the power to improve assessment while reducing time and administrative costs. Hear leaders across research, government and philanthropy talk about how innovation is creating the assessments of the future. Learn more.

1:30 p.m. — “The Right to Read” Screening & Q&A: This new documentary film features Oakland-based NAACP activist Kareem Weaver, who was fed up with bleak reading scores in his own community and filed a petition with the NAACP demanding change in early reading instruction. The session also features American Public Media’s Emily Hanford, whose breakout podcast “Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong” is shining a light on the Science of Reading. Learn more.

2:30 p.m. — Empowering College Hopefuls Through YouTube: For the first time, Arizona State University is offering its courses for credit through YouTube. The partnership, called Study Hall, aims to help potential college-goers navigate higher education by earning credit for their first year of college online. The session features Study Hall’s Hank Green, a popular YouTuber who has been called “one of America’s most popular science teachers.” His videos have been viewed more than two billion times on YouTube. Learn more.

3:30 p.m. — Bridging Offline Students’ Connectivity Barriers: About 15 million students in the U.S. live with unstable internet access — or no access at all. A $65 billion broadband-for-all plan is in place, but the effort isn’t expected to reach the last mile for all students until 2030. In the meantime, what are low-barrier options for students without internet access to access carefully curated resources of digital content on their devices? Hear Endless OS Foundation’s Bunmi Esho talk about alternatives. Learn more.

Wednesday, March 8:

11:30 a.m. — Gen Z Is Here, Are We Ready?: John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, has been called one of the world’s leading authorities on global sentiment, opinion, and influence, especially among youth in the age of digital and social media. In this discussion hosted by the Walton Family Foundation, he’ll share new data from the November 2022 midterm elections and the panel will explore how to engage with rising Gen Z leaders to bring their unique vision for unity and collaboration to fruition. Learn more. 

11:30 a.m. — The Promises & Perils of Artificial Intelligence: In this 90-minute interactive workshop led by Stanford d.school educators, participants will engage in the fundamental concepts underpinning Artificial Intelligence through symbolic play and hands-on design work. Participants will learn how AI can be used to address societal challenges, explore classroom applications, identify ethical implications and prototype different outcomes for social justice and the education system. Learn more.

1 p.m. — Designing Credentials for Innovative School Models: Experts say K-12 schools must increasingly offer education that’s personalized, skill-based, and interdisciplinary. But traditional school transcripts are ill-suited to capture the richness of these approaches. This panel discussion by representatives of the Mastery Transcript Consortium, the XQ Institute, the Aurora Institute and Big Picture Learning will explore insights and lessons learned from their credential design efforts. Learn more.

1 p.m. — Unlocking the Power of High-Impact Tutoring: Pandemic learning loss has engendered countless tutoring initiatives nationwide. Could tutoring be not just a short-term fix but an enduring feature of the U.S. education system? And what does research show about the benefits of online and hybrid models? This session, featuring former Tennessee Commissioner of Education Kevin Huffman and current Tennessee Chief Academic Officer Lisa Coons, will look at new research and on-the-ground implementation of evidence-based tutoring programs that improve outcomes for all students, particularly those historically excluded from such services. Learn more.

2:30 p.m.— The Trouble with the Superintendency: As the pandemic recedes across the U.S., K-12 superintendents are retiring in droves. Top executive-search firms say business is brisk, with departures as high as any in recent memory. The American Association of School Administrators last fall found that about one in four superintendents had left their jobs in the past year, a marked increase from previous years. In their wake they leave a shallower recruiting pool. So is it time to rethink the superintendent pipeline? Should districts be more engaged in succession planning and growing future superintendents from within? This panel explores Texas school districts that were intentional about developing leaders and whose boards picked high-performing successors from within, allowing the district to keep raising the bar without losing momentum. Learn more.

3:30 p.m. — Awe & Wonder: Learning Design Beyond the Classroom: Educators should be intentionally designing the learning experience, say two experiential learning experts from the Minerva Project, an innovative college program that has made waves in higher education. This workshop will show how they design integrated online and offline immersive experiences that connect the curriculum to the real world “using awe and wonder as pedagogically useful tools.” Learn more.

4 p.m. — Drag Story Hour: Fight for Queer Herstories: As drag queen story hours come under fire from conservatives nationwide, advocates say it’s more important than ever to understand their aim: Using drag as a traditional art form to promote literacy, teach about LGBTQ lives and activate children’s imaginations. This session, featuring three drag queens, will discuss the importance of LGBTQ family programming. Learn more.

Thursday, March 9

10 a.m. — ​​How to Prevent School Shootings & Violence: This session features Nicole Hockley of Sandy Hook Promise, who will discuss the group’s “Know the Signs” school shooting and violence prevention programs. The session will bring together leaders who are equipping students with social and emotional skills to spot warning signs in their peers and intervene safely. Learn more.

10 a.m. — Educating Away Hate: In this session, two educators from the Groundswell Project UK will talk about young people and extremism, and how we can best challenge hate narratives in our schools and communities. Groundswell has been working in schools to counter hate narratives from the far-right to Islamism to misogynist extremism and other forms of violence. This session will offer best practices to educate youth on these issues. The session will also include personal testimony and examples of how young people can be misguided into extremist thinking — and how to help support vulnerable young people. Learn more.

Disclosure: The Walton Family Foundation and XQ Institute provide financial support to The 74.

Currently, state law allows districts to teach reading however they want. Under his proposed bill, Gov. Mike DeWine would force them to pick only phonics-based Science of Reading materials from a list the Ohio Department of Education will create. 

Dewine has also asked the state legislature to ban use of any “three cueing” materials or lessons — an approach considered the foundation of popular teaching methods known as Whole Language, Balanced Literacy or, particularly in Ohio, Reading Recovery. 

“The jury has returned,” DeWine, a Republican, said in his State of the State speech late last month where he led off his address with the importance of the Science of Reading. “The evidence is clear. The verdict is in.”

“There is a great deal of research about how we learn to read,” he said. “And today, we understand the great value and importance of phonics. Not all literacy curriculums are created equal, and sadly, many Ohio students do not have access to the most effective reading curriculum.”

DeWine is seeking $129 million from the legislature to retrain teachers and replace elementary school textbooks. 

With hearings on the bill just beginning, it’s still unclear whether DeWine’s ban, which other states are also considering, will win support. 

While DeWine’s plan to back the Science of Reading won strong applause at his speech and praise from some Republicans, there has been no debate yet on his ban, which only became public when bill language was released a week ago. And one of the state’s teachers unions has raised concerns about mandating a single approach to teaching reading.

There could also be logistical issues to such a dramatic shift going into effect in less than 19 months. 

How many Ohio schools or teachers will need to change how reading is taught remains unclear: The state does not track how many teachers are trained in the Science of Reading or how many elementary schools are using it to teach children. The state education department could only say that “many” teachers are not trained in the Science of Reading. 

Additionally, the state’s Department of Higher Education said  it does not know which reading methods colleges and universities are training prospective teachers in.

DeWine’s ban also puts Ohio State University’s Reading Recovery, a widely used reading intervention program based on three-cueing, in his crosshairs. Officials of the program did not respond to requests for comment.

The so-called “Reading Wars” of the last decade have pitched supporters of phonics against those who back related methods like whole language and balanced literacy in which students are taught to guess words they don’t know from cues such as context, pictures or letters.

As studies in support of phonics and other Science of Reading concepts have mounted, even ardent champions of other methods like Lucy Calkins of Columbia University’s Teachers College have backed down and started incorporating more phonics into their books and lessons.

In the last 10 years, more than half of all states have passed laws encouraging or incorporating Science of Reading in classrooms. Ohio has moved in that direction in recent years, making Science of Reading part of the state’s recommended literacy improvement strategy, but not requiring schools to use it.

Only a few states have gone as far as DeWine proposes, including Arkansas and Louisiana, which have already banned schools from using any of the methods based on three-cueing. 

But officials in eight other states are joining Ohio in seeking similar bans, according to Tom Greene, national legislative director for ExcelinEd in Action, the education advocacy group created by former Florida Republican Gov. Jeb Bush. 

Legislation has been filed in Indiana (SB 402), New Hampshire (HB 437), Florida (SB 758), West Virginia (SB 274), and Texas (HB 2162) with bills expected soon in Nevada, Oklahoma, and South Carolina outlawing three-cueing, he said.

“Eliminating three cueing is a strong step in the right direction to ensure all kids are proficient readers by the end of the third grade,” Greene said. “These state leaders are looking at the research, hearing personal stories of struggling readers and listening to the concerns of teachers about the harmful effects of this approach.”

But Scott DiMauro, president of the Ohio Education Association, one of two teachers unions in the state, has already said educators shouldn’t be limited in how they teach reading. 

DiMauro said last week — before the full scope of DeWine’s plan was made public — that all teachers use phonics as part of their lessons, but they are “just one piece of a larger puzzle” when it comes to teaching reading, and that a “one size fits all” solution was not a good move. 

 “As far as saying approach x versus approach y, as a prescribed reading plan, we don’t don’t think it’s appropriate,” DiMauro said. 

Ohio State Senate education committee chair Andrew Brenner, who plans his own bill to require phonics, predicted the change would not only affect elementary schools, but also the state’s universities and teacher training programs. 

DeWine’s plan sets aside $43 million in each of the next two years for the Ohio Department of Education to create training in the Science of Reading for any teacher who hasn’t had it, run training sessions and pay teachers a stipend for attending.

DeWine’s plan is built into his proposed two-year state budget. Though the budget bill won’t likely be passed until just before the end of June, portions of it could be split off for a vote sooner as part of Brenner’s bill or others.

Critchfield has served on the Idaho State Board of Education for seven years, two of them as president. She also spent several years as a substitute teacher, and served on the rural Cassia County school board for 10 years.

Idaho, while a deep red state politically, is undergoing dramatic change as newcomers arrive in unprecedented numbers, many of them from the West Coast, where the political climate is decidedly different. This makes Idaho an interesting national case study, especially as a new state superintendent takes office, with strong ideas about strengthening her department’s support and oversight of school districts.

Under the Ybarra regime, districts reported receiving little of either support or oversight. As a result, they tended to ignore state mandates. Idaho EdNews assiduously tracked these departmental oversight failures, and districts’ flouting of state regulations.

During the former state chief’s tenure, districts failed to conduct meaningful teacher evaluations, and ignored the state’s transparency laws. Test scores stagnated, and Ybarra rarely engaged with state lawmakers. 

Ybarra, who took a job as a kindergarten teacher earlier this month, defended her record during the campaign, saying she improved state graduation rates and college and career readiness.

Critchfield, who was sworn into her four-year term Jan. 6, is pledging a new day. 

Idaho has long been a state where the concept of local control of public education is sacrosanct, where parental choice is seen as a top value and where public charter schools have proliferated and thrived.

How does Critchfield envision her new role, and the Idaho Department of Education’s place in the state’s education ecosystem? What lessons can Idaho teach the rest of the country? I recently interviewed Critchfield to get her perspective on these issues. 

The conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The 74: What do you plan to change about how the State Department of Education operated under your predecessor?

Debbie Critchfield: Literally everything. The transparency piece is huge. And earning and deserving the respect and trust of our districts and our legislature. We have to reestablish trust around education. There are things that I believe need to happen immediately. The Department of Education is an agency designed to support schools. We need to demonstrate that we do provide that service. I’m looking at standing up some regional support centers around the state so that our folks in the most rural parts of the state and anywhere in the state aren’t dependent upon trying to contact someone in Boise.

What are some of the key issues you want to address early in your term?

I’m a big believer in the science of reading, and I believe that has been pushed to the side, and we in Idaho have not acknowledged sufficiently what it does for kids. You can expect to see that as a main point of conversation when we talk about literacy. Looking at our math scores, we’re no better than most states. I will want to work with our State Board of Education on a major math initiative. I’ve signaled to those folks that that’s a conversation that they can expect.

And then there is the workforce piece. We at the state, as well as local boards and districts, need to be initiating conversations with their community businesses and industries. One of the biggest services that we can do for our students is providing that connection — how what I’m learning in class translates to the outside world. 

I talk to people in schools and districts frequently who are interested in having us help build these types of relationships and programs for their students. They’re not sure how to go about it. Fortunately, there are lots of models out there to draw from.

What made you decide to run for the state superintendent position?

Well, there were two things, actually. First, the COVID experience really highlighted the missed opportunities that Idaho didn’t move on. We had this interesting time in education where everything, all these state and federal laws, rules, requirements, etc. were waived. That created so many opportunities to try new things. But it felt like many of the educational leaders at the state level just kind of held their breath and then it was like, “Oh, OK, COVID’s over, let’s go back to business. Let’s go back to how things were.”

So that’s the first thing that motivated me. A frustration with the lack of vision, the lack of leadership. There was this tremendous opportunity to reimagine and create a system wrapped around what is most valuable for kids. Public education is in many ways still based on an 1850s model. There are some things that still work, and many that don’t. I felt frustration over the missed opportunity.

Second, I also felt frustrated with our lack of progress. We’re moving, but is it forward and is it towards the outcomes and the goals that we have for our kids? What are we preparing our kids to know and be able to do? Having been on the State Board of Education for the past eight years, I had a front row seat. And it became clear to me that I was doing as much as I could as an appointed volunteer. I needed to change roles to really advance some of the things that I heard from communities, parents, students and teachers.

What did you say on the campaign trail that resonated with voters and allowed you to defeat a well-known incumbent?

I would ask people all the time: Can you tell me what the vision is for K-12 education in Idaho? And every group I spoke to, whether it was business leaders, parents, teachers, they’d all look at each other and just shrug. No one knew. I didn’t know. And I’ve been in a position where I should know. No one knew because there was no vision. 

So then I could tell people here’s my plan, my vision. We’ve got to prepare our kids for the jobs and opportunities of a growing state. To me, this means providing a meaningful experience for high school students, and making sure that they’re prepared at the earliest levels. Providing fundamentals of reading and math for our very earliest learners, to make sure that by the time they hit high school, they’re prepared for that next thing, which to me is less about seat time and more about the application of knowledge. I’m a big fan of any type of work-based learning, project-based learning. internships, apprenticeships, particularly for juniors and seniors.

Those seemed like basic, educational, non-political messages, and they resonated.

Idaho has been stagnant or moving backwards for years in what locally is called the go-on rate, the percentage of high school students who go on to some kind of post-secondary opportunity. The rate for the most recent year was just 37%. That might be in part because of the disconnect between schools and workforce experiences. How do you plan to address that?

 I like to reference two numbers together because I believe they tell an interesting story. First of all, the go-on rate is not a perfect measure because it does not capture everything. It misses, for example, military service. But having said that, it is a data point we have to work with, 37%. But at the same time, 80% of graduating high school seniors have taken at least one dual credit class (high school and college credit).

When I look at those numbers side by side, what it tells me is that students want to jumpstart their future. They want the ability to learn from things that are going to benefit them from outside of high school. There are a lot of opportunities that we are not bringing into the schools, that would indicate to a student that there are a lot of ways that you can be prepared for life after school, and to have early access to things that you’re interested in. That may not always look like college.

For the past eight years, the Department of Education has not fulfilled its accountability role. How do you turn that culture around?

It is going to be a process. Over the past few years, local control became this pat answer, and a cover for a lack of leadership. When our districts asked for support with something, they’d often hear, “Oh, sorry, that’s a local control issue.” Local decision-making the way I define it does not mean being left alone. 

I celebrate local decision-making. But how about if I help you look at and have access to all the best information that’s out there? So before you choose curriculum, which is your decision, and I don’t look to change that, why don’t I offer you some information that might help you make a decision? Did you know that there are several factors that you could consider before you decide? Did you know that these other districts are having success with this particular curriculum?

I’ve heard all over the state that districts have really felt left alone, they feel as though they’re in silos and it really has been every man for himself. Again, it’s under that guise of, “Oh, sorry, local control, can’t help you.” I don’t accept that.

What’s your view of the impact charter schools have had on Idaho public education?

I think there are missed opportunities here. What I mean by that is that we have charter schools that are doing incredible things across the state, and these are things that district-run public schools can do as well. But here’s a real disconnect. I hear about this not just from parents, but from people involved in education. “Well, they’re a charter so they get to design their start and stop times and they get to design the projects that they do.” And I tell them: so do you. You get to do that same thing. 

I believe I can do a lot of matchmaking between innovative charters and district schools. But we have to break down some of the misconceptions, that charters aren’t public schools, and they are not held to the same if not higher standards of accountability.

Finally, what makes Idaho a special place that other states might want to look to for ideas and inspiration?

We’re geographically spread out and diverse in our communities in a number of ways. But statewide we’re talking just over 300,000 students. That gives us the ability to really impact and effect change quickly. We don’t have to wait five or 10 years to really see the result of the work that we’re doing. That’s something that I believe makes Idaho unique. We’ve just lacked the leadership to make it happen.

While many have rightly called for districts to invest federal COVID relief dollars in expanded learning time and intensive tutoring, district leaders and educators must not neglect their collective responsibility to strengthen core instruction for all children. The best lever to accelerate learning in America is to use the science of how children learn to read, comprehensively outlined by the National Reading Panel more than 20 years ago, in the year 2000. And, implement these recommendations in every elementary school in America, based on what newer evidence also shows about the role of knowledge in comprehension.

The human brain is wired to speak and absorb language — but not to read. Only 20% to 30% of children learn to read without explicitly being taught. The remaining 70% to 80% need effective curriculum and structured instruction to gain the literacy skills to keep on track with their learning progression. 

The Science of Reading begins with a proven approach that utilizes phonemic awareness and phonics to systematically correlate sounds with letters and sound patterns with clusters of letters. 

Jacquelyn’s dyslexic son is a first-hand example of the method’s success. He attended two schools that used an approach to reading instruction disproven by science. His confidence tanked, his anxiety rose and he hated to read so much, he cried when asked to practice. His third school, a strong Science of Reading school, changed everything. He arrived in second grade 1.8 years behind. The school said this gap must be closed and took full responsibility for his success. With heavy phonics in the classroom and three one-on-one sessions a week with the reading specialist, he ended third grade on track.

His challenges are not uncommon, but the interventions and support he received are all too rare and make all the difference. This is possible for every child if their teachers do what science proves works.

The Science of Reading also emphasizes that children need background knowledge and vocabulary to comprehend text rather than solely drawing from their own experiences. This is critical to reduce the learning gap that too often parallels the opportunity gap between students from low-income backgrounds and their more affluent peers. For example, the more privileged child understands a passage about the Inuit because her family took a cruise in Alaska, while the lower-income child who has not had this travel experience is stumped not only by “Inuit,” but also “caribou” and “beluga whales.” The key is giving students mirrors that reflect themselves and windows onto worlds beyond their own. A curriculum that develops rich knowledge in subjects such as social studies, science and the arts is an essential foundation for proficient reading.

In tutoring a high school junior, Jacquelyn found that the student struggled mightily to understand the poem Blackberry Picking by Seamus Heaney; she had never eaten a blackberry, much less picked one off a vine. But Jacquelyn’s young son understood the poem completely; he picks blackberries every summer at his grandma’s house. With this background knowledge, the poem made sense to him. The solution isn’t to deny that high school junior access to Heaney’s poem, but to introduce her to a new experience — and new vocabulary — through careful reading of the text and explanations that make the verse come to life.

The earliest years of a child’s education are critical for gaining functional literacy. From pre-K through third grade, students learn to read, and from grade three forward, they read to learn. Whether it’s science experiments, math word problems or drama scripts, students cannot learn if they cannot read, and 75% percent of children who are behind in third grade will never catch up. Many students have been grievously harmed by their schools’ reliance on curricula that lack explicit phonics instruction and — even worse — teach children to guess at words using approaches that have long been debunked by research. The resulting deficit trails students for the remainder of their academic life and beyond: For example, struggling readers are four times more likely to drop out of high school.

None of this is necessary. Neuroscientists have demonstrated that 95% of children are cognitively capable of reading on grade level when exposed to effective curriculum and instruction — proof that it is entirely possible to reverse the current devastating trend.

Colleges of education must prepare elementary teachers to teach reading aligned to this science. This means the professors who prepare these teachers must know the Science of Reading. States should certify only colleges of education that follow this approach and credential only elementary educators who have these skills. Districts must move to implement curricula aligned to the Science of Reading that include both the mechanics (phonics, phonemic awareness to build decoding skills and fluency) and the building blocks of comprehension (vocabulary and robust background knowledge). They also need to ensure all current elementary school teachers know how to teach reading based on the science. 

Intensive tutoring should be given to any student at risk of not catching up by fourth grade, but that should be the exception. While powerfully effective, having a well-trained tutor with high-quality materials meet regularly and frequently with students, individually or in small groups, is resource-intensive. If students receive effective instruction to begin with, the need for tutoring declines, enabling schools to target limited resources to those who need it most.  

Some places are already working to change the situation. In Mississippi, where groundbreaking literacy legislation invested in professional development on the Science of Reading, literacy coaches, additional interventions for struggling students and specialized training at colleges of education — including a Foundation of Reading exam for prospective teachers — students vaulted from 49th in the nation in reading to 29th on the National Assessment of Educational Progress between 2017 and 2019. Texas, Tennessee and North Carolina, among other states, are also moving systematically in the right direction. 

Advocates, educators and parents must work together this school year to push all states and districts toward action. As the nation’s education system recovers from the pandemic, it is not enough to return to the pre-COVID status quo. Policymakers and other decision-makers have a unique opportunity and a moral responsibility to build back better and more equitably — and help America’s children benefit from what the Science of Reading has proven works for over two decades. Not to do so would be nothing short of malpractice.

Disclosure: Andrew Rotherham is a co-founder and partner at Bellwether Education and a member of the board of directors of The 74.

In my day job as an education researcher, I know that too many kids never learn to read well. Kids who don’t learn to read fluently by 3^rd grade will struggle as the material gets more complex. 

That fact hit home this spring when I noticed my 8-year-old son had picked up a bad reading habit at school. When he came to a word he didn’t recognize, he would guess. 

Rather than sounding out the word and breaking it down into parts, he looks at the first letter or considers other context clues and then tries to guess. Sometimes he looks to me for confirmation and takes his eyes off the page. If I step in to tell him he got it wrong he’ll just try again, without even looking back down. 

As a parent, this process drives me crazy. You can’t read without looking at the words! I also know this guessing strategy is not going to serve him well as he encounters more challenging texts. 

My wife and I are working with my son to slow down, sound out unfamiliar words and use his finger to track his reading. He’s getting better. 

But these problems are not unique to my kid or his neighborhood school in suburban Virginia. Many schools across the country continue to rely on literacy programs that encourage these practices. Meanwhile, reading scores were declining even before COVID-19 hit, and school closures only made things worse. 

All this led me to start a new initiative to help parents establish positive reading habits from the beginning—before bad habits have time to take root. I’m calling it Read Not Guess. 

Read Not Guess will start with a 30-day challenge to help parents get their kids ready to start the next school year strong. It’s free and open to all, and parents who sign up will receive a daily email with a short lesson. The lessons, which run from July 18 to Aug. 19, are meant for busy families and should take only five to 10 minutes to work through. 

I designed the Read Not Guess summer learning challenge to serve parents who want to help their kids but don’t know how or who just need some extra guidance. It will combine the best of a good phonics instruction book plus friendly nudges and regular encouragement, delivered in bite-sized lessons over email. 

By the end of the challenge, children will understand that English is read left to right, be able to identify and sound out the most common phonemes (letter sounds), begin blending those sounds into words, and start reading complete sentences. Parents will gain a deeper understanding of phonics; practice talking to their child about reading; and learn tools, games and assessments to monitor their child’s reading progress going forward.

Why should parents do all this work? Can’t they just rely on the schools to teach their kids to read? It’s been hard to be a parent through the pandemic, and it might be tempting for parents to take it easy this summer. 

But with many schools still in various stages of upgrading their reading curriculum, some classrooms may still be teaching legacy programs that encourage guessing, even though the evidence suggests good readers can sound out difficult words. Parents do not need to shoulder the full burden, but they can play an active role in building good habits and monitoring their child’s progress. Even relatively light-touch parent interventions can lead to big literacy gains for children, especially the most disadvantaged. Skills-based parental supports — like what Read Not Guess will offer — have even more promising results. 

Summer is a time for barbecues and swimming pools. But while school is out and the kids are at home, summer also presents an opportunity for parents to step in and help their children learn to read — not guess. It’s too important to leave to chance.

“We’re asking you to take a pledge today,” he said during the May 20 Zoom session, providing a link for participants to sign. Other elements of Thurmond’s agenda include library cards for 100,000 children, free access for families to ebooks and a campaign to deliver 1 million books to children’s homes.

The event followed the work of a literacy task force Thurmond created last fall. But the superintendent, who is running for reelection, was clear that as long as he’s in charge, California won’t follow the lead of other states — adopting a statewide literacy policy that prioritizes phonics, the connections between letter sounds and written words.

“We are not promoting a one-size-fits-all approach in California,” he said. “That’s been tried before. Our state is too large, is too diverse.” 

Critics dismissed Thurmond’s plan to combat what they describe as a literacy crisis in the nation’s most populous state. 

District leaders, advocates and some lawmakers want all schools to screen for dyslexia, a learning disability, and adopt phonics-based instruction. While New York City Mayor Eric Adams has mandated a phonics-based curriculum and Michigan lawmakers are pushing legislation that would require dyslexia screening, California, some argue, passed up an opportunity to address long-standing achievement gaps in children’s reading.

Overall, 37 percent of the state’s fourth-graders score below the basic level on federal reading tests. The average score for Hispanic students is 27 points below that of white students, and the gap between Black and white students is even larger.

“We keep applying patchwork solutions to a system that never worked,” said Todd Collins, a school board member of the Palo Alto Unified School District in Silicon Valley. He’s also an organizer of the California Reading Coalition, which last year issued a “report card” ranking districts on the percentage of high-need Hispanic students proficient in reading by third grade. “Library cards and e-books are not going to fix a system that doesn’t teach kids right in the first place.”

Some members of Thurmond’s literacy task force agree. Kareem Weaver, part of the Oakland NAACP’s education committee and leader of a nonprofit focusing on literacy, said the group produced “a grab bag” of solutions. 

But they “didn’t get to the root cause of why kids aren’t reading,” he said. “We’re not explicitly teaching them how to read and crack the code.”

Thurmond isn’t opposed to districts adopting phonics-based instruction but instead emphasized that because of relief funds and a budget surplus “California has more resources than we’ve ever seen” to provide teacher training and increase the number of reading specialists in schools. Legislation passed last year requires new teachers entering the field to know how to teach “foundational reading skills,” but the state isn’t pushing districts to adopt a specific curriculum.

During Thurmond’s online event, only Tyrone Howard, an education professor at the University of California Los Angeles and president-elect of the American Educational Research Association, emphasized phonics. 

“I’m old school,” he said. “The data shows that phonics instruction can go a long way in helping kids to develop the fundamentals around reading.”

Roughly 20 states have adopted so-called “science of reading” laws based on decades of research that emphasize phonics, fluency and vocabulary development as the foundations of learning how to read. Some experts who previously embraced strategies that encouraged children to depend on pictures and familiar words to read ones they don’t know have since changed their views. Once an exemplar of this approach, Lucy Calkins updated her curriculum based on the research, according to a recent New York Times article that generated a spirited reaction. 

The question in California is whether a commitment is enough.

“We’ve been committing since ‘A Nation at Risk’ and we haven’t gotten there yet,” said Barbara Nemko, superintendent of the Napa County Office of Education, referring to the landmark 1983 report that inspired education reform efforts. One of Thurmond’s task force co-chairs, she added that if the label “science of reading” has become divisive, “then call it something else.”

Policymakers and education groups in the state are also divided over dyslexia screening, even though over 30 states already have such laws in place. 

Thurmond promised to make a literacy screener currently in development at the University of California San Francisco available to schools once it’s ready, possibly by the 2023-24 school year. But the California Teachers Association opposes a dyslexia screening bill that was introduced last year and never received a hearing. They said mandated screening “lessens the instructional time available for learning the required curriculum.” The California School Boards Association also opposes it.

Reading Recovery and Mississippi

Thurmond isn’t the only state leader whose response to what some have called a literacy crisis has come under fire. Some question the support of researcher and state board Chair Linda Darling-Hammond for Reading Recovery, a long-running tutoring program for first graders offered in about 3,000 schools. In a 2010 book, state testimony on pandemic recovery and a recent literacy task force hearing, Darling-Hammond linked the program to successful schools. 

A recent study, presented at a research conference, found that children who participated in the program scored lower on state tests in third and fourth grade than those who didn’t participate. Her comments, said Collins from Palo Alto, show “we have a dated and misguided understanding of what works.”

But Darling-Hammond, who also led President Joe Biden’s education transition team and recommended Miguel Cardona to be U.S. education secretary, told The 74 that her statements about the program have never been in the “context of an endorsement” and noted that Reading Recovery is listed in the U.S. Department of Education’s “clearinghouse” of recommended programs. 

She underscored the limitations of the study, including the fact that the researchers collected follow-up results from just a quarter of the third graders and 16% of fourth graders who were part of the original sample. She noted that a separate study on Reading Recovery, presented at the same conference, found positive results for students in England through age 16.

“I think different interventions work well for different students,” Darling-Hammond said “I hope we won’t get wrapped up in a silver bullet idea about any intervention.” 

She said California fourth graders’ reading scores have inched closer to the national average since 2013 and highlighted the state’s plan this year to spend $500 billion on literacy initiatives, including reading coaches and specialists. Those positions are necessary, she said, because the state hires too many teachers without full credentials.

“In the schools with the greatest needs, you might have half or more of the teachers without any training to teach reading,” she said.

She also pointed to gains in Mississippi, which in 2019, made more progress in reading than any other state. But she said people often “simplify” the state’s approach by only highlighting teacher training in phonics-based instruction.

“It’s a very robust program,” she said. “Phonics is very important. Phonemic awareness is very important, but that is not all they do.” 

‘An equity issue’

With the state taking what Darling-Hammond called a more “decentralized” direction than Mississippi, some school and district leaders have moved on their own to revamp the way they teach children to read. 

In 2019, when Lilia Espinoza took over as principal of Hardin Elementary in Hollister, California, she found staff members who worked hard on student reading with little to show for it.

“Historically, this school has struggled to really pump out students who are on grade level,” she said. With a high English learner population — as is the case in many California schools — she said teachers thought if children couldn’t read a word, they just didn’t understand the vocabulary instead of not being able to sound it out.

She reached out to Chartwell, a private school in Seaside, California, that offered training in structured literacy and using practices that have worked with struggling readers. 

Hardin teachers and reading specialists now devote 45 minutes to an hour each day to explicit phonics lessons as part of a larger English language arts curriculum. Children can get “antsy” during that time, Espinoza said. But despite remote learning, the number of students referred to special education has dropped from 21 in 2017-19 to three this year. She thinks the gains would have been stronger if it hadn’t been for the pandemic.

Now, she worries that other “budget issues” will lead the district to cut funding for reading intervention teachers. She started with four, is now down to two, and might only have one next year. She wrote a letter to state leaders asking for more specialists.

“It’s an equity issue,” she said. “Not being able to secure support for early literacy for all students is not OK.”

Rep. Barbara Smith Warner, D-Portland, is asking her colleagues in the Joint Ways and Means Committee of the legislature to allocate $31 million of Oregon’s federal Covid relief funds for schools, as well as money from the state’s Student Investment Account, to bring teachers up to date in how to teach reading. 

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A portion of the funding would also pay for tutoring that can get struggling students up to grade level in reading. Both the teacher training and student tutoring would be administered online by Eastern Oregon University, and would be available to K-5 teachers and students in more than 60 school districts that have four-year graduation rates below 67% and that qualify for “targeted support and improvement” under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act.

“We know that kids are further behind than ever in their learning,” Smith Warner said. “This just feels like such a smart, focused thing that we can do. Not only are you teaching teachers how to teach reading better, but it will always be with them no matter what school they go to.”

Smith Warner has the support of several colleagues, including Reps. Brock Smith, R-Port Orford, and Bobby Levy, R-Echo, she said. She also has support from the non-profit literacy group Oregon Kids Read and the Oregon chapter of the nationwide advocacy group Decoding Dyslexia. 

The primary reason students struggle to read is not because of any cognitive deficits or learning disabilities, but because they have not learned phonological skills – that is, how sounds connect with letters – according to the Journal of Educational Psychology. 

Yet students across the United States struggle with reading proficiency, in large part because their teachers were not instructed in how to teach reading in ways that line up with science and best practices, according to the Journal of Learning Disabilities. This is because of decades of political and ideological battles over reading science and how students should be taught, according to James Kim, an expert on literacy intervention at Harvard University. 

Oregon is no exception to low reading proficiency among students. For years, schools in the state have struggled to increase reading proficiency among fourth and eighth graders. 

The National Assessment of Educational Progress is often called the nation’s report card. It measures students’ grasp of math and reading.

In 2019, the most recent year for which data is available, just about one-third of Oregon fourth graders and eighth graders tested at or above proficient in reading. This mirrors nationwide scores for fourth and eighth graders, too.

Proficiency is defined as having competency and knowledge of subject matter and an ability to apply it to real world situations. 

With the $31 million, Smith Warner wants to pay teachers to undertake training in a program called Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling, which was created by literacy expert Louisa Moates. The training involves learning the science of how the brain learns to read and how it develops phonological awareness – understanding how sounds connect with letters – learning how to identify students with dyslexia, and using research to come up with targeted instruction for students who are struggling.

Teachers in Portland, Beaverton and Lake Oswego have already been offered such training by their districts, and Smith Warner wants it available at schools statewide. 

The training would be over six to 12 months, and would be administered online through Eastern Oregon University in LaGrande. 

The training played a large role in helping Mississippi fourth and eighth graders make historic gains in reading during the last few years.

In 2013 the Mississippi Legislature mandated that new teachers pass an exam on reading science to be licensed to teach in elementary schools. The state had some of the lowest reading scores in the country. 

At the urging of a Mississippi governor’s task force, college professors who taught education as well as elementary school teachers around the state began to undertake Language Essentials training. By 2019, the state’s fourth and eighth graders increased their reading scores by more than 10% over the previous year. That was the largest gain of any state. 

In Oregon, the $31 million sought by Smith Warner would pay for substitute teachers to fill in for teachers taking time off for the training. 

Funds would also go to paying for tutoring in the Ignite! Reading program, which involves individual instruction over Zoom for 15 minutes a day, five days a week, until a struggling student is caught up in reading. The tutoring would reach about 4,000 Oregon students with the greatest need, according to Smith Warner.

Oregon Capital Chronicle is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oregon Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Les Zaitz for questions: info@oregoncapitalchronicle.com. Follow Oregon Capital Chronicle on Facebook and Twitter.

The state will divvy up more than $150 million, much of it from its American Rescue Plan funding, through a new grant program called Maryland Leads.

Maryland Leads is “a choose-your-own adventure style program … with a curated list of options that only includes programs and strategies we know can effectuate positive results for children,” Choudhury wrote in a statement to The 74.

“This is about Maryland doing the work, leading the way.”

The seven strategies that the effort highlights are:

• Grow-your-own staffing programs to develop teaching talent in-house
• Staff retention programs that improve teachers’ schedules, boost mentorship opportunities and give pay incentives for those who stay from one year to the next
• “Science of reading” approaches that systematize literacy acquisition
• High-quality tutoring during the school day for students that fell behind during the pandemic
• Restructuring schedules to allow for afterschool learning, summer programming and more effective family engagement
• Collaborations with industry leaders and higher education institutions to prepare students for college and careers
• Community school models that engage families and connect them with needed social services

Districts may invest in as few as two or as many as seven practices to receive funds. School systems that scale up science of reading approaches unlock an additional $2 million in funding, while those that build grow-your-own staffing programs receive an extra $1 million. Funds must be spent before the end of the 2023-24 school year.

“It’s a really ambitious approach,” Phyllis Jordan, associate director of Georgetown University’s FutureEd think tank, told The 74. “The issues that the state is singling out … are the evidence-based practices that are going to get you to make a difference for students.”

FutureEd has tracked states’ and districts’ American Rescue Plan spending rollouts, and Jordan said that Maryland stands out for its effort at guiding districts toward approaches that have been proven effective. 

“Districts often like to make their own decisions. And this way, [Choudhury] is not dictating what they should be doing, but he is giving them incentives,” the researcher said. “Providing this sort of menu of options that can bring them extra money seems like a smart approach.”

“It’s exciting to see Maryland leading through this new program that aims to use American Rescue Plan funds in innovative ways,” U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in the release. “I’m heartened that Maryland Leads will help districts and schools both respond to the challenges posed by the pandemic and seize the opportunity our current moment offers to reimagine education.”

The grant builds on an ongoing effort in the state called the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future to uplift schools and support historically underserved students. The 13-year plan seeks to boost teacher pay above a $60,000 starting salary by 2026 and convert nearly 1 in 3 schools into community schools that help struggling families access nutrition and health care by 2035, among a number of other goals. 

The funds provided by the new grant will remain a fairly small percentage of the total money many districts in the state received in COVID relief. Baltimore City Public Schools was allocated $443 million, according to FutureEd’s numbers, while Montgomery County received $252 million and Prince Georges County got $272 million.

Still, the state effort “gives [districts] some guideposts about the right sort of programs,” said Jordan.

Initiatives to help districts grow their own staff can help recruit a more diverse and qualified set of teachers, successful models show, and can help retain staff. Science of reading approaches have been hailed by educators and researchers alike. Community schools approaches, known to support students and families living in poverty, have been a key part of the Biden education agenda and recently made headlines when Mackenzie Scott donated $133 million to the nonprofit Communities in Schools. And high-quality tutoring can provide a potent academic boost to students who have fallen behind, research shows.

Districts may apply for grants through the Maryland Leads program through April 7, and grants will be awarded April 22. The grants will be non-competitive, with the possibility that each of the state’s 24 school systems, which serve entire counties (with the exception of Baltimore City), could receive funds. The Maryland Department of Education will hold sessions to inform school leaders on the slate of approaches throughout February and March.

“A return to normal is not good enough,” Choudhury wrote in a letter introducing the Leads grant. “Gaps existed then and they will persist now unless we do something differently.”

Go deeper on the some of the strategies specified in Maryland’s plan:

—Grow Your Own Teacher Programs: Efforts to train a more diverse, home-grown teacher workforce in Rhode Island and Colorado (Full RI story & full CO story)

—Science of Reading: Texas educators help students gain literacy skills through the pandemic (Read the full story)

—Community Schools: Inside MacKenzie Scott’s $133 million donation to America’s top organization focused on preventing student dropouts (Read the full story)

—Summer Learning: Tulsa returns 11,000 students to campuses in July by putting fun before academics (Read the full story)

—High-Quality Tutoring: As schools push for more tutoring, new research points to its effectiveness — and the challenge of scaling it to combat learning loss (Read the full story)

Well, if you ask Mary Clayman, it’s the equivalent of rocket science. “We cannot put any curriculum in front of a teacher and expect them to become a master of their craft,” said Clayman, Director of the DC Reading Clinic.

“There is a huge body of knowledge that teachers need to have access to and to understand to be able to adequately diagnose and intervene with a student.”

In her role at the reading clinic, Clayman trains teachers in the science of reading, which she defines as “this vast body of knowledge, decades of research, fMRI studies, which is cognitive science, information on the English language, [and] the theoretical underpinnings of how we think children acquire print.”

But that leads to a big question for education leaders: “Is the instruction in schools informed by this vast body of knowledge?”

If this video isn’t playing, click here to watch.

Clayman was among a panel of experts assembled by the Progressive Policy Institute and The 74 on Wednesday to deal with the enormous question of how educators will close the achievement gap in literacy that has grown to a chasm during the COVID-19 pandemic. The panel was also sponsored by Education Reform Now DC.

Dr. Kymyona Burk, Policy Director for Early Education at the policy and research group, ExcelinEd, laid out the challenge that educators face. Even before the chaos and disruption of the pandemic, only about 35 percent of the nation’s 4th-graders were scoring as proficient in reading. But that number doesn’t tell the full story, she said.

“We can no longer mask how our states are performing by how well our white students are performing,” said Dr. Burk. If you look at a racial breakdown of those reading scores, 45 percent of white students are scored as proficient, while only 18 percent of Black students and 23 percent of Hispanic students.

“Whether we call it learning loss, interrupted learning, unfinished learning, all of these terms, our proficiency rates in English declined but what’s also very eye-opening, for math, it decreased even more.” In some states, the pandemic decline in reading proficiency has been measured at 3 percent, in others at 12 percent.

“Students who are not proficient readers turn into adults who are not proficient readers,” Dr. Burk said.

Cassandra Gentry, a parent leader with the group Parents Amplifying Voices in Education in Washington D.C., spoke from experience about the plight of students who lost so much learning time during the pandemic.

Gentry said she was the guardian of a 5th-grader who wasn’t proficient in reading last year, “and after 19 months, she has really lost a lot more.” The young girl did not attend kindergarten or 1st grade, “so she did not learn the basic fundamentals that she needed in order to be proficient. She’s still struggling because of that.”

“So one of the things that I noticed about the science of reading is that early childhood intervention is so important.”

Gentry also noted the importance of getting reading programs in all schools, not just a select group of them. “We need equity,” she said. My school doesn’t have reading clinics; they don’t have reading partners.”

“Our children of color and our Hispanic children are in need of these resources also,” Gentry added. “This science of reading is going to have to be equitable.”

The panelists offered a variety of ideas about how to improve literacy for students … and adults. Allister Chang, a member of the D.C. State Board of Education, said he has “extended literacy programs to spaces like barber shops and laundromats and to weave literacy programs into the daily rituals of people’s lives.”

“That’s where I’ve seen the greatest impact.”

Chang also urged that education leaders learn from health care decision makers. “They’re currently investing more and more in what they call the social determinants of health,” he said. “In 2018 Kaiser Permanente invested $200 million to take on housing instability, knowing that the investment would actually reduce their health care costs downstream.”

He added: “Let’s advocate for similar funding to be invested in what we can call the social determinants of education.”

Dr. Burk called for states to use the huge influx of federal money from President Biden’s American Rescue Plan to “invest in people.”

“Invest in your teachers; build their knowledge,” she said. “Empower your teachers to stand in front of children every day and know that they are skilled enough to address the different needs, the different proficiencies and challenges that students bring into those classrooms.”

Dr. Michael Durant, chief academic officer of the Academy of Hope Adult Charter School in Washington, D.C., said it’s important to deal with other social challenges that “people have to battle before they even set foot into a classroom.”

“We’re dealing with homelessness; we’re dealing with food disparities; we’re dealing with lack of transportation; we’re also dealing with child-care issues,” he said. “All of those resources are needed, especially when you want a person to be able to be committed to education.”

Dr. Christina Grant, Acting State Superintendent of Education in Washington, perhaps put it mostly directly.

“Our country is only as good as our most literate person,” she said. “We have to make sure that our resources and our priorities are all in alignment of ensuring that our children are learning and are being taught in the best ways to make them love reading.”

Today at 1 p.m. Eastern, The 74 is honored to partner with the Progressive Policy Institute to present an online panel discussion: “The Science of Reading and Closing Literacy Gaps in a Post-COVID World.” Joining the conversation will be:

• Dr. Kymyona Burk, early education policy director for ExcelinEd
• Mary Clayman, director of the D.C. Reading Clinic
• Cassandra Gentry, a parent leader with DC PAVE
• Dr. Michael Durant, chief academic officer of Academy of Hope Adult Charter School
• Rep. Allister Chang of the D.C. State Board of Education
• Christina Grant, Acting State Superintendent of Education in Washington, D.C.

You can register for free and get the Zoom viewing info here, or watch the Wednesday livestream by refreshing this page at 1 p.m.  You can also stream directly on The 74’s Facebook page.

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See some recent coverage of literacy and equity from The 74:

• Giles: Schools in Washington, D.C. Are Facing a Reading Crisis. The District’s New Literacy Initiatives Could Change That
• A New Kind of Curriculum Night: Armed With Protest Signs and Data, Diverse Group of Minneapolis Parents Demands Better Reading Instruction for Their Kids
• The Gifted Gap: Best and the Brightest among Black & Low-Income Students Fall Behind Their Whiter, More Affluent Peers, Study Finds
• Whitmire: Looking for Answers to the Current Male Education Crisis? Start With Elementary School
• Curriculum Case Study: From ‘Focus’ to ‘Exceptional,’ How a Delaware School Transformed Student Literacy in Just 3 Years

March 12, 2020, was my last typical day in the classroom before COVID-19 changed everything. When my district closed the following day, I assumed, as did many, that this was a temporary precaution. As the closure continued, fear began to set it in. With each passing week, I worried that the growth in reading my first-graders and I worked so hard for would fade away.

Many schools have been closed for in-person instruction for over a year. While models of hybrid and remote instruction have evolved, many students have not re-entered the classroom. Teachers and caregivers rightfully worry about the long-term adverse effects of interrupted instruction.

Many pre-pandemic instructional approaches to teaching reading were already failing students and teachers. Only one-third of students in the U.S. had achieved reading proficiency at grade level in 2019. As the years go by, the gaps become larger, and as instruction shifts from learning to read to reading to learn, students who are reading below grade level seldom catch up to their peers. And for many children, the consequences of reading failure extend beyond difficulty in the classroom. These students often confront significant social and emotional challenges as they become increasingly aware of their differences from their classmates.

Teachers are not immune from the consequences of reading failure. They want nothing more than to help their students experience success, and the pressure they feel to ensure their students succeed despite factors beyond their control can be overwhelming. It is unsurprising that nearly half of new teachers leave the field within the first five years.

The stress of COVID-19 has only exacerbated these challenges. When my district reopened for in-person classes in the fall of 2020, we were faced with difficult decisions about how to best deliver instruction. One factor that helped streamline this transition for educators at my school was our background in and knowledge of instructional practices aligned with the science of reading. Having an extensive knowledge base of what we needed to teach allowed us to focus on how we would teach.

The science of reading is a vast body of scientifically based research about reading and writing. This research has been conducted over the last five decades and has resulted in thousands of studies that inform effective literacy assessment and teaching practices. The findings from the science of reading can inform educators about which approaches and programs provide the most benefit to the most learners, closing gaps in foundational skills and other aspects of reading and writing.

At our school, all students take a series of short screening tests to assess reading ability at the beginning of the school year. Using results from these tests and other ongoing student progress assessments, I then tailor lesson plans and provide supplemental instruction throughout the year. If a student receives a low score in a particular area, I conduct a follow-up assessment to learn the underlying reason for the difficulty. For example, if students score poorly on a measure of oral reading fluency, I then administer a phonics test to see if their fluency is being hampered by phonic patterns they have not yet learned.

Next, I analyze data from all the students’ assessments and create small groups focused on the literacy skill(s) students need to work on. One group may receive additional instruction on reading and writing words with a consonant-vowel-consonant pattern, while another practices words featuring the silent E. If a student is not making adequate progress, I adjust the intensity of reading instruction, the amount of one-on-one time spent with that student or the group’s size. Implementing evidence-aligned instructional practices in small groups focused specifically on topics students need the most practice with allows me to maximize limited instruction time — which has become especially critical in ever-evolving distance learning environments.

This model shifted minimally during the 2020-21 school year, even in the midst of school closures. As educators training in the findings derived from the science of reading, my colleagues and I built virtual lessons that center on the critical components of foundational reading skills. We conducted reading exercises to practice skills such as phonemic awareness, the ability to identify and manipulate the individual sounds in spoken words, on video with small groups of students. Using other online platforms, we created interactive lessons in which students practiced reading and writing specific words, and reading full sentences and answering corresponding comprehension questions. The software enabled us to see all students’ screens at once and gauge who was on target and who needed additional support. It also provided information for planning subsequent lessons.

Understanding evidence-based approaches to learning dictated our lesson planning, while the digital tools help bring them to fruition. Having a strong understanding of the science of reading also allowed us to teach creatively and flexibly, to effectively meet each student’s needs.

Educators at my school learned a great deal during our brief time teaching remotely, and we applied some of these methods when we resumed in-person instruction. A major obstacle of COVID-era teaching, even in person, is that students cannot leave their classrooms and I cannot pull together students from multiple classrooms who have similar skill levels. To ensure small-group instruction could continue, we leveraged our student teachers, who were able to participate only in remote instruction even after we returned to the classroom. The student teachers virtually led small groups composed of students needing intervention on the same skills from the four classrooms in our grade level.

There are multiple factors that teachers cannot control; one person alone cannot make the systematic changes needed for all children to reach proficiency in literacy. But one knowledgeable teacher can forever change the trajectory of a student’s life. Students will face many challenges once they leave the classroom. Low literacy does not need to be one of them.

Jessica Pasik is a reading specialist with the Fulton City School District in New York, an adjunct professor of literacy at SUNY Oswego and a board member of the national literacy education nonprofit The Reading League.