As a key element in the state’s package of early literacy reforms, Gov. Gavin Newsom included $200 million in last year’s state budget to pay for instructing elementary school teachers in the new reading strategies. On Wednesday, the State Board of Education that school districts can now use.

That list of providers is about twice as long as some advocates of reading reforms recommended. And it will include a few programs that have proven to be minimally effective, the advocates said.

But board members weeded out a half-dozen of the lowest-ranked programs. They directed the Department of Education to provide easily accessible and detailed information on each of the 31 programs to help districts select the ones that best meet their needs.

“I know that (districts) are overwhelmed, and as much guidance as we can provide would be helpful,” said board member Haydee Rodriguez, a high school teacher who has designed adult literacy programs in Imperial County.

A Sept. 30 deadline set by the Legislature last year for approving the list precluded the board from recommending substantial revisions that would have required an unscheduled follow-up meeting. 

Longtime observers said this was the first time in memory that the State Board has recommended professional development programs. The list reflects the state’s recognition, based on Mississippi and other states’ full-scale improvements, that a weak link in teacher training could undermine early literacy reforms. 

That is why the Department of Education approved a short list of vendors for the early literacy screener for reading challenges, like dyslexia, and the Commission on Teacher Credentialing, at the Legislature’s direction, revised the reading standards for teaching reading that all university credentialing programs must follow.

The next stage will occur later this year, when the State Board approves a new list of reading textbooks and materials aligned with the English Language Arts and English Language Development standards for English learners. The State Board must decide whether to repeat what it did with the math textbook adoption in November 2025, approving 64 different textbooks aligned with the new math framework. The alternative is to be more selective and only highlight textbooks emphasizing phonics and essential components of the evidence-based science of reading.

Districts can still receive state funding from the $200 million reserved for professional development if they select a program that’s not among the 31 approved this week. However, they must verify that the program aligns with criteria aligned with the science of reading.

How programs were ranked

The California Department of Education hired the nonprofit education research organization WestEd to lead an extensive review of applications from 37 eligible early literacy training providers. A panel of 29 teachers and experts measured 18 criteria, including access and suitability for English learners, under a three-point scale: strong, moderate or minimal. The maximum score was 54 points.

Scores of the 31 approved programs ranged from 30 to 53 points. The two top-ranked providers were the California Association for Bilingual Education (CABE) and SchoolKit, LLC, with 17 of 18 criteria earning a strong rating. CABE had been one of the strongest opponents of out of concern it would minimize the needs of English learners.

The lowest-ranking program on the approved list was from the large, national ed tech company Amplify Education. Other well-known California-based training providers were among the top dozen on the list. One is , developed by the Los Angeles County Office of Education; it has offered a primer on the Science of Reading, with its emphasis on phonics, aural language skills and reading comprehension for more than 12,000 TK-5 teachers since 2020. The other three providers are the Sacramento County Office of Education, the Reading League and CORE Learning.

A promise of a user-friendly, transparent website

Early literacy advocacy groups that pressed for legislation promoting the science of reading favored a shorter list of the higher-scoring programs.

“The come-one, come-all approach does not help (districts) distinguish top quality or prioritize where to invest,” said Yolie Flores, CEO of Families in Schools. “Our educators, ultimately students, including ELs, deserve a list that prioritizes the highest-quality learning that will meet their needs.”

Molly Maloney, with Oakland-based GO Public Schools, said, “The rubric scores show that some programs have minimal evidence in critical areas. The state’s approved list should provide districts with a meaningful signal of quality that they can trust.”

Critics could not agree on how many providers should be on the list. One idea was to group the programs by tiers; one advocate suggested the top 19 ranked. Nonprofit organizations EdVoice, Children Now and other groups recommended 17 programs with the highest ratings or those that could demonstrate strong evidence of improving learning.

Demonstrating effectiveness was an optional factor, not one of the 18 criteria, because some programs were too new to submit data or evaluations. Because of that, board member Alison Yoshimoto-Towery, a former chief academic officer of Los Angeles Unified, urged the board to provide districts with clarity. 

“My belief is that we’re putting the list of what’s most aligned to the criteria, not most aligned to showing student outcomes. And (districts) need to understand that,” she said.

Board President Linda Darling-Hammond cautioned board members “to resist the temptation to micromanage the list because we’ve heard people say, ‘Cut the list here. Take the ones that have this criteria and take the ones that have that criteria.’ ”

The review process was thorough and transparent, she said. All the material from the evaluations will be available online for the public, she said, enabling users to compare programs like a Consumer Report, with summaries of ratings and detailed materials for those who want to go deeper.

Marshall Tuck, EdVoice’s CEO, while advocating for a shorter list, said he was encouraged by the board’s discussion and its directive to the department. “The goal is to share expertise with districts, so guidance needs to be really strong.”

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She created the program in 1995, inspired in part by her father, who could not read or write. What began as an effort to put books into the hands of children in her Tennessee community became an international program that has distributed millions of free books.

Her idea was simple: introduce youngsters to good books. But its simplicity should not obscure its significance. A book in a child’s mailbox is more than a book. It can become a conversation between parent and child, a bedtime ritual, a story read repeatedly. It can open hearts and minds and change a child’s understanding of what books and reading are for.

That distinction has shaped my life and work. As a professor at the Warner School of Education and Human Development at the University of Rochester, where I focus on reading and literacy, I have spent my career thinking about how children learn to read. Through my work with Rochester children and families — including , Project READ and other literacy initiatives — I have also learned that teaching reading is only part of the work.

Helping children grow up to love books and enjoy reading is equally important. 

I have watched reluctant readers become increasingly enthusiastic when they are given meaningful choices about what they read. I have seen confidence grow as their skills develop, and I have seen the joy that comes when children find books that reflect their own lives, questions, and experiences. Those moments remind me that motivation and joy are part of how literacy grows.

Our public conversation about reading can become overly focused on scores, reading levels and achievement gaps. Those measures matter. Children deserve excellent reading instruction, and schools must be accountable for providing it. However, a reading score cannot tell whether a child thinks of books as something they want to return to — or whether reading has become a source of curiosity rather than simply another school task. A child can learn how to read without yet knowing why reading matters. 

Literacy is foundational because it gives children access to knowledge, information and opportunities in a world increasingly saturated with text. Reading also gives children something less easily measured: language to express their experiences and access to worlds beyond their own. Books can help children recognize themselves, encounter people unlike themselves, ask better questions and imagine new possibilities.

That is why access to books is not a sentimental issue. It is an issue of opportunity.

It’s distressing that legislators in four states — Indiana, Missouri, Maine and Washington — are looking to cut public funding for Parton’s program.

For those who work in literacy, the lesson Parton imparted with her program is both simple and demanding. We need strong reading instruction, skilled teachers, accessible libraries and community programs that reach families where they are. But we also need to create the conditions in which children can discover the pleasure of reading and recognize themselves as readers. The goal is not simply to produce children who can read. It is to help children become readers. 

Parton gave millions of children a place to begin that journey. Our responsibility is to ensure every child discovers the gifts of becoming a reader.

Davis often heard from family and friends that Juri was smart and she should consider enrolling her granddaughter in preschool early.

And a new literacy screening at one of her granddaughter’s primary care checkups confirmed it.

In recent years, literacy has become an issue that’s extended far beyond the classroom and a child’s home, reaching government — and now hospitals.

At six of Nationwide Children’s Hospital’s 13 clinics, in Columbus, Ohio, 3 to 5 year olds are receiving reading screenings during their pediatric visits. Since 2022, more than 7,000 children have received the screenings.

“When kids come into their primary care pediatrician, if they’re coming into all of their checkups, they would come in 15 times before they start kindergarten,” said Sara Bode, medical director of school-based health at Nationwide Children’s. “That was a really opportune setting for us to really think about where we are in intervening, assessing or understanding where kids are with their literacy and supporting that from the clinic.” 

The 5-minute screenings are done annually at the beginning of a regular check up by a team of “Kindergarten Readiness Coordinators,” who are former early childhood educators and now work at the hospital.

The screening does not check for learning disabilities, but can identify some challenges with language development. The screening mainly focuses on foundational skills that are learned at home through activities like reading with a parent before bed or letter games.

By doing a small read aloud with a board book, the coordinators assess a child’s letter and shape recognition, rhyming and fine motor skills — like turning a page. Afterward, they’re able to tell parents if their child is ahead, on track or needs additional support, providing an opportunity for early intervention well before a child enters a formal classroom setting.

“We have light bulb moments. … One is in a good way when we do this literacy screening and the child is knocking it out of the park … and the parents are like ‘I didn’t even know they could do this,’” Bode said. “Another light bulb moment is when kids are struggling and parents will say to us ‘I had no idea they were supposed to know these things before kindergarten,’ and we’re like ‘That’s OK. That’s why we’re doing this now, because at the age of 3 … you have all the time in the world.’ ”

The coordinators provide learning kits with different reading materials including magnetic letters and activity books. Coordinators maintain a relationship with families in the weeks, months and years to come, with additional resources like care coordination to get students enrolled in preschool, access to library readings and where to find adult education programs if a parent struggles with reading.

Families are given a personalized literacy plan, with checklists for parents to go over where their child is performing well and where they can improve. Check-ins after the initial screening occur a month and three months later, with updated assessments when the child turns four and five.

“Most of our parents, if you ask them, ‘What should your child know? What are those early literacy skills before kindergarten?’ they can’t really tell you,” Bode said, “So, this is just a real learning opportunity.”

For families, like Davis, the guidance is a helpful launching pad.

“I didn’t know where to start,” Davis said, adding that while she read to her granddaughter often, she didn’t feel like she “had the right materials to get her started the right way.”

“When you’re at home, you just think of things that you think the child would need to know, but with a coordinator, … you’re given things you should be working on. … It’s good to know I’m not jumping ahead or giving her too much that she doesn’t need now,” Davis said. “The screening really helped me get focused and to engage more with my granddaughter with different techniques.”

The majority of the children are from low-income backgrounds, Bode said, adding that the primary care clinic serves more than 85% of people and families who are on Medicaid or uninsured with “many kids who are really struggling on these assessments.”

“These clinics are all chosen because they’re in locations where, typically, we can tell by the school district, that a lot of the kids don’t start school ready,” Bode said.

Across Columbus Public Schools, about 64% of third grade children are not reading on grade level, according to , but hospital staff are hopeful early intervention is beginning to move the needle.

In Ohio, kindergarten students are required to take a at the beginning of the school year that measures social-emotional development, physical well-being and skills in literacy and math.

Recent data from the hospital found its first cohort of 332 students had over a 71% passage rate compared to the district’s average of 60%.

In the of Columbus, a predominately Black and low-income area, only 22% of children pass the readiness assessment on average, but children who partook in the screening process were over 70%, Bode said.

“We’re getting these kids connected because these are some of our highest risk populations,” Bode said. “We’re really seeing gains where we’re able to intervene, connect them to programs, teach parents what to do at home and it’s actually now translating to their language and literacy scores when they get to kindergarten.”

With the help of the kindergarten readiness coordinators, Juri has been enrolled in a local preschool for a year, where she’s ahead of the curriculum.

“She has grown from knowing her name to writing her full name. … She writes A through Z. She knows her sight words. She can write her birthday,” Davis said. “Juri has an advantage because [our clinic] saw she was ready at 3. … By the time she gets to kindergarten, she’s going to be ready. She’s going to be advanced.”

Bode is hopeful the screenings will expand to all of the hospital’s 13 locations and that it’ll work with national initiatives like , a program that gives children books at every pediatric visit and , which gifts kids books from birth to 5.

“There’s a big difference between not being delayed and being ready for school and thriving, and I do think there’s a gap and misunderstanding in the medical field about what is needed,” Bode said. “So this idea of mixing health and education is just so important … because if a kid’s not ready for kindergarten, then they are more likely to fail that third-grade reading test, then they’re less likely to graduate and their adult health outcomes are probably more affected by that than anything I’m treating in the clinic.”

More than a decade ago, Queens teacher Nicole Radosti Pipia’s fifth- and sixth-grade students seemed to love reading novels in school. 

“The Giver” by Lois Lowry was prized for its mystery. “Wonder” by R.J. Palacio taught them about kindness and acceptance. “Freak the Mighty” by Rodman Philbrick showed them the power of friendship. 

Now, she said, they don’t read any. Instead, students often spend class time reading excerpts and short stories to better prepare them for the sorts of questions they’d encounter on standardized exams.

The demands of her school’s reading program leave no room to study novels, the English teacher said.

“We’re told that we cannot deviate from the program, and if you have to do the program, there’s literally no time,” Pipia said. 

Another New York City middle school teacher, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation, said her school taught novels before the pandemic. Now, “it can be done, but not with the constraints placed on us as teachers,” she said. 

For the past few years, her school has required her to have her students — most of whom are English language learners and struggling readers — spend half of each 40-minute class period, four days a week, completing an online targeted reading intervention program, she said. They often end up clicking through the program and visiting Spotify and YouTube instead. The remainder of the period is devoted to the school’s core curriculum, which does not require novel studies. 

The classroom library she spent a decade building has become “purely decorative,” she said. With teachers no longer using books, her school is “literally throwing them away.” Even if she had the time to teach a book, the veteran teacher said, her students either have no interest in reading or barely know how. 

“Half of them have never read a book,” she said. “In 10 years, we went from kids reading multiple novels in class to them having never opened a book.” 

All New York City elementary schools and most middle schools use one of three city-approved reading curricula. Two of them — EL Education and Wit and Wisdom — require full-length books, while HMH Into Reading and Into Literature do not.

In a statement provided to New York Focus, New York City Public Schools Press Secretary Nicole Brownstein emphasized that English class is “not the only time students have access to full texts.” 

“Literacy is foundational for every child’s success and every New York City Public Schools student has access to whole books both in their classrooms and via the citywide digital library,” she said, adding that there was a 14 percent increase in digital book checkouts last school year compared to the year prior. 

There’s limited data on how much students are actually reading in school. In New York state, where districts have significant autonomy over curriculum, reading programs can vary widely depending on the district, campus, and even classroom. 

For more than a decade, classrooms across the state have been shifting away from full-length books and toward shorter literary works, largely to align with state learning standards and assessments. In interviews with New York Focus, English teachers from across the state lamented that teaching novels has also become more challenging because students have less stamina for or interest in reading them anymore — even in districts that still encourage it.

“I teach fewer novels because the kids simply cannot handle it,” said Lori Atkinson, a 37-year high school English teacher at the rural Copenhagen Central School District in the North Country.

Atkinson has seen a slump in endurance and attention span. She cited the impact of the Common Core, a set of academic standards for English and math that most US states, including New York, adopted in the 2010s. It placed a greater emphasis on students’ ability to analyze short, complex passages of text. (In 2017, New York  and adopted a similar state-specific set of standards.) 

“I believe the decline in reading happened when we were forced to excerpt everything, because when you excerpt, you are not building stamina or background knowledge,” Atkinson said. “It became all about standardized tests and trying to get the mark that you were proficient.” 

But Atkinson primarily blames students’ lack of reading skills on technology, social media, and the rise of artificial intelligence. Teenagers addicted to instant gratification do not have the concentration and skills they need to stay engaged through a long novel, she said, and turn to AI to generate summaries for required reading.

When Atkinson taught ninth and 10th grade in the 1990s, she typically taught five novels and a Shakespeare play each year. Now, teaching 11th and 12th grade, she considers herself lucky to get through three books. She said she used to lend out 20 books a week to students, and now lends out one or two a month. 

The challenge extends beyond novels. Atkinson said that when she assigns a two-page article at the beginning of class, she often sees about half the class stop reading within three minutes. 

Even things that were once a treat are now a challenge to their attention spans. Last school year, after her seniors read “Remarkably Bright Creatures” by Shelby Van Pelt, she showed them a five-minute movie trailer for the Netflix adaptation. She said most of the teenagers stopped paying attention halfway through. 

Saranac Lake Central School District in the Adirondacks, where high school English teacher Kelsey Francis has worked for 26 years, still encourages educators to teach full-length texts. 

In recent years, however, the number of books Francis can get through during the school year has dropped dramatically. She attributes that, in part, to how AI has affected teaching and learning. Francis has largely stopped assigning homework because she expects students will turn to AI to complete it. Instead, students have to do most of their work by hand in class. 

Making those changes has left significantly less class time for reading. 

It also takes students much longer to get through a book. Since the pandemic, Francis said, she’s seen a major decline in student vocabulary skills and stamina. 

“They fatigue after more than a few pages,” she said. “If I were to ask them to independently read for 30 minutes, that is going to be really tough.” 

English teacher and education consultant Emily Aierstok had a similar experience in her Capital Region school district. 

Because students have shorter attention spans, she’s had to slow down the pace of reading assignments. Instead of assigning two chapters of reading for kids to do at home, she now assigns one. And in addition to requiring 20 minutes of independent reading for homework, she now begins each class with five minutes of reading time to support struggling readers. 

But last school year, Aierstok’s seventh graders read eight books through in-class and independent reading — the most in her 26 years of teaching English. She said she’s been able to overcome challenges with student stamina and interest by giving her students agency in choosing which books to read. 

New York state’s English Language Arts standards require that students read “both shorter-text and excerpts, as well as full-length works.” In a statement to New York Focus, State Education Department spokesperson JP O’Hare said the agency is committed to ensuring all students have access to skilled instruction, but also noted that local school boards and districts are responsible for selecting curricula and instructional materials. 

“Exposing all students to grade-level reading materials with age-appropriate complex ideas and language is critical to mastering the learning standards and developing the knowledge and skills necessary for success beyond the classroom,” the statement reads. 

Fewer than half of New York students in grades 3–8 are proficient in reading, according to state data. Jeff Smink, deputy director at the advocacy group EdTrust-New York, said students’ lack of exposure to full-length books has contributed to the state’s literacy crisis. 

Smink said it’s important for students to read full-length books to build stamina, learn about context, and develop a love for reading. But he’s also concerned that too many students don’t have the foundational skills to reap the benefits of reading and said that teachers should be focused on building literacy earlier.

“Just giving a book to a kid that doesn’t have those foundational reading skills is also problematic and can lead to disengagement,” he said. 

Atkinson, the Copenhagen teacher, said it’s critical teachers continue teaching students full-length books to “rewire their brain” and show students the rewards of persistence. Younger educators are not being taught the importance of novel studies in college and in teacher preparatory programs, she said, so it’s up to veteran educators to spread awareness. 

“If we never teach them a novel, then shame on us because we’re the ones who are not giving them the opportunity to build those skills,” she said. “If all we expect from them is an excerpt, then all we’re going to get from them is the bare minimum.” 

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Lt. Gov. on Wednesday vowed to pass legislation punishing public schools that do not remove graphic books from their shelves by knocking them down a notch in the state’s annual school performance ratings, which the state uses to seize control of underperforming districts.

Flanked by easels displaying printed covers of books he found obscene, the lieutenant governor said school boards and administrators have not been following a 2025 law aimed at weeding out lewd books from the shelves in Texas’ more than 9,000 campuses attended by some 5.5 million schoolchildren.

“It’s the law and we expect you to follow the law. So we’re coming for the books,” Patrick said during a news conference at the Texas Capitol. “We ask that you do it on your own and remove these books.”

The , Senate Bill 13, granted school boards the authority to approve and remove books based on complaints they receive, such as those from parents and activist groups. Before, those powers largely belonged to school librarians. But Patrick said an overwhelming majority of school boards have not taken any action, as the law nears one year in effect.

Patrick said the books on display at his news conference — which he said are on the shelves of some Texas schools despite being prohibited in state prisons — were “so filthy, so dirty, so vulgar, so pornographic” that he refused to open them out of respect for the women in the room.

He insisted the state was not banning books.

“There are no books banned in America. You can buy any book you want to buy if you want it,” he said. “But we do not take taxpayer money and buy these books for our schools. “

As lieutenant governor, Patrick presides over the Texas Senate, a position that gives him immense power to set the chamber’s agenda and ensure the passage of his preferred bills. He confirmed that, under his proposal, schools could be docked an entire letter grade — going from an “A” to a “B” rating, for example — if they were found to have a single book on their library shelves that should not be there.

Such a law, which could streamline state takeovers, would be the newest frontier in a yearslong battle wielded by Texas Republicans against books that often explore LGBTQ+ and race issues.

Librarians and childhood literacy advocates have contended, throughout fights at the Capitol and in school board rooms across the state, that some of those books are important for students who may not see their lived experience reflected in other literature — and can’t afford to buy them.

Patrick noted at his press conference, however, that more than 90% of parents and grandparents would not want their kids seeing the books he was highlighting, some of which depicted masturbation and graphic images of genitalia.

Patrick is up for reelection and will face state Rep. , D-Austin, in November.

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When Mississippi overhauled its literacy education in 2013, one of the most controversial pieces was a policy to retain third graders if they couldn’t pass the reading portion of the state’s English language arts assessment.

Years later, as education officials across the country have taken notice of Mississippi’s literacy gains, more states have adopted their own retention policies. 

More than two dozen states now have laws requiring or allowing schools to retain third grade students who are not reading at grade level, according to an analysis from the Education Commission of the States, a nonprofit that tracks state legislation in the United States. 

But the research on retention is mixed. 

Historically, most studies indicated that students who had to repeat a grade often benefited very little and had long-term negative consequences. Research from the past decade complicates that picture: Younger students may see some positive effects from retention if schools are also combining it with high-intensity tutoring and support, some studies have shown.

Federal data also shows retention rates vary widely by state. 

For most of the U.S., high school students made up a large share of those who repeated a grade level from 2011 to 2021, the most recent years in which national data was available. (The U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, the only source for consistent data across all states, is now eight months in releasing new data.) 

Mississippi stands out. The state has one of the highest third grade retention rates in the country. 

“If the retention happens in earlier grades and is combined with help — not just a threat, but some kind of positive intervention — the results, at least in the short-run, tend to be good,” said Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Education Data and Research at the University of Washington.

‘We have to do something’

Rachel Canter, an education policy expert who helped craft the Literacy-Based Promotion Act, said that in 2013, the Legislature was desperate to improve reading in Mississippi. 

“The rationale was that we have to do something about the fact that we have kids graduating high school that are barely literate,” she said. “We had been living in that reality for a long time.”

Mississippi lawmakers started looking to Florida, she said, where former Gov. Jeb Bush made ending “social promotion” — the practice of passing students because of their age — one of his signature policies.

“The argument that won was, ‘We have to do something, and we know how harmful it is when kids pass with no skills,’” Canter said. 

Tenette Smith, who at the time helped lead the Mississippi Department of Education’s literacy initiatives, said the Legislature wanted the retention policy to hold administrators and leaders accountable to the state’s children. 

The policy was met with criticism. Opponents were worried that it was punitive and would set children up for failure. Across the country, retention policies have become a partisan issue, Canter said, with Democrats largely viewing them as harmful to children. 

School administrators in Mississippi said many children would be retained if the policy was passed. But Canter took issue with that mindset and the assumption underneath it: That it’s impossible to get kids ready to read.

“We were sort of taking a leap of faith,” she said. “The goal wasn’t to retain them, but that was what was going to happen if we couldn’t get them ready.”

Despite arguments from people who doubt Mississippi’s reading success and claim the fourth grade reading scores are boosted by holding students back, Canter said Mississippi’s retention rate didn’t significantly spike after the 2013 act. 

shows that about 4% of students were held back during the 2011-12 school year. By the 2015-16 school year, after the reading gate was implemented, that percentage increased by a point.

Retention became a hallmark of the state’s literacy overhaul, but the literacy act established other components that were essential to students’ success, she said. 

The act funneled money into literacy education across the state, sending literacy coaches to schools and mandating high-quality curriculum. Teachers received literacy instruction.

“If retention is the only thing we would have done, I don’t think it would have worked,” she said.

Raising the bar for early grades

The state’s third grade retention policy has had a trickle-down effect: Retentions in Mississippi are concentrated in kindergarten through second grade, too. 

Researchers including Canter say that’s because the literacy legislation established more monitoring and higher standards in those grades as well.

That holds true at Western Line School District, with schools located on the banks of the Mississippi River. Western Line held back 68 students in kindergarten through third grade during the 2021-22 school year, compared to 56 students in all other grades combined. 

Not all of those retentions are tied to reading, Superintendent Lawrence Hudson said, but the policy raised the bar for students in early grades.

About 4 in 5 Western Line third graders passed the reading component of the state test on their first try last year, higher than the state average of 75.6%. Passing the test wasn’t the school’s focus, Hudson said. 

“We want to make sure kids are successful for the rest of their life,” he said. “We know if children have deficits at younger grades, they’ll get to third grade with those deficits. 

“The longer you wait, the harder it is to clear those deficiencies.”

Rep. John Hines, a Democrat from Greenville, fears the retention policy is making it harder for students to graduate in his Delta district, which is one of the poorest regions in one of the poorest states in the country. He said he doesn’t want students in his district to be disproportionately retained. 

But Hines can’t deny how beneficial retention was for his younger brother decades ago.

“He was extremely shy and nervous, so he wouldn’t talk, and once he became nervous, he shut down,” Hines said. “The teacher talked my mom into letting him stay back in the first grade.”

That marked the beginning of a transformation, Hines said. His brother was coaxed out of his shell and became an honors student. 

Students don’t automatically improve when they’re retained, Canter said. To help students, schools have to get them the academic support they need in that year they repeat. The decision to retain a student is difficult, she said, but combined with intervention, it can pay dividends. 

“Any time a child is retained, it is a signal that we have not done what we needed to do as adults,” Canter said. But the retention policy paired with additional support has “done great things for kids,” she said. 

Extending the gains

Despite Mississippi’s gains among fourth graders on a national reading assessment, those gains haven’t continued into higher grades. 

With hopes of extending those gains to fourth through eighth grades, Mississippi lawmakers modeled on the 2013 literacy act. 

The state education agency will deploy coaches to schools across the state, provide training for teachers, require screeners throughout the year to assess students’ proficiency and mandate that schools use agency-approved curriculum. 

There’s one glaring difference: The omits the retention policy.

Research shows holding older students back can negatively affect their chances of graduating, so lawmakers intentionally left a retention policy out, said Rep. Kent McCarty, a Republican from Hattiesburg who is vice chairman of the House Education Committee. 

Without a firm accountability component, Canter is skeptical the Adolescent Literacy Initiative will have the same impact as the 2013 literacy act. 

“Is it going to be enough?” she asked.

This story about was produced as part of a collaboration with at Stanford University and , a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Ariel Gilreath of The Hechinger Report contributed reporting. The data analysis was conducted by Eric Sagara, senior data journalist with Big Local News.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

The research-grounded guide aims to help teachers intentionally select books for their students, centering age-appropriate books that present Black, Latinx and Asian culture as wellsprings of understanding. It also highlights titles that explore complex issues such as homelessness and poverty, and those that can help educators teach about historical topics like the Holocaust or the Civil Rights Movement. One chapter explores how scented books can be used as a vehicle for multisensory literacy development. 

Lacina’s book arrives at a critical moment, in a critical state. Texas ranked second in the nation for school book bans during the 2024-25 school year, with 1,781 instances of censorship, . 

The book features contributions from a number of early literacy experts on a variety of relevant themes. Jonda C. McNair, professor at the Ohio State University, wrote a chapter on the significance of African American children’s literature. “Aspects of identity can and do impact early literacy development, and teachers should be encouraged to think critically about them,” McNair wrote in an email. 

Natalia Kucirkova, who leads the , added, “This book responds to an urgent need in an age when texts are increasingly manipulated by technologies, generated by AI and shaped by algorithms for specific audiences and preferences. It reminds us that children need authentic literature that connects them to genuine human experiences beyond their own.”

In the conversation below, Lacina discusses the book, the challenges posed by censorship and the power of children’s literature. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How did this book originate?

Years ago, I developed a class when we did not have a children’s literature class at TCU, and my dean at the time wanted it to be a way to attract individuals from throughout the university into the College of Education. So I came up with this idea of a critical literacy and children’s literature class. … I wanted to develop a class where students could learn more about just being good human beings from reading through children’s literature that’s reflective of society. Sometimes those are very sensitive topics, like … homelessness and immigration. [We asked] how can we develop empathetic and kind college students and future teachers? We can do that by learning about other people and recognizing them not as the other, but as someone of value within our community … There’s never been a textbook that really addressed that particular topic. 

What does research show about the importance of inclusive literature and the role stories play in child development?

There’s been a lot of research published over the last 30 years, and I have an article coming out this summer in [a journal published by the International Literacy Association Children’s Literature and Reading Special Interest Group]. [The research] really came to the forefront more than 30 years ago, with a professor at the Ohio State University, Rudine Sims Bishop, who coined the term as a metaphor. Mirrors reflect your own culture, identity and personal life and we need to read books that reflect our own experiences — but just as important are the [books] that are like windows that help us understand other people’s experiences in life and that help us build more empathy and understanding.

Reading helps us identify with the protagonist — with their feelings, with their actions, and it’s important to read about experiences that are similar to our own, whether they’re positive experiences or challenges we might face in life. Children in our schools are dealing with challenges, too. That could be divorce; that could be dealing with not having enough money. In preparing our young children, we want them to be able to face life’s challenges and problem solve and be resilient and also be joyful. 

How does children’s literature, especially for the youngest readers, function as a tool for learning and development?

It helps children at all ages as they move into the workforce as adults, because we’re not going to work with people who are necessarily exactly like us, from our own socioeconomic background, our racial background, our religious background. And it helps us better understand other people, so that we can be a productive member of the workforce and get along with others to solve problems in the workplace. 

Why do you think people get worked up about children’s literature? Why is this an issue at all? 

There are various reasons why, and this is nothing new. … We can look back through history and see that there’s always been censorship, and I think books have historically been targeted over a long period of time for anti-intellectual censorship efforts. Books are primarily a source for people to learn new ideas and to critically think about a variety of topics within our society. So books are powerful, and that’s what scares people.

What do you recommend for responding to censorship in our schools and libraries?

We need leaders in education to have policies and procedures, which many school districts do. However, what’s interesting is that the , and this is not surprising at all, but who is censoring books? It’s not necessarily parents at all; 92% of all books that are challenged were initiated by pressure groups, government officials and decision makers. And that was up from 72% in 2024. Less than 3% of the challenges originated from individual parents. So I think that tells us maybe we don’t need to publicize [censorship] any longer. We need these pressure groups to listen to parents and families. 

Another thing that makes early reading so powerful is that when books are read over and over again, the ideas and pictures really stay with children right at the time when their brains are forming. 

That’s a very good strategy for developing phonemic and phonological awareness, that reading over and over with a very young child. That’s really helpful for oral language and understanding how language works. 

In the book, there’s a surprising chapter about the role of smell in early reading, and the importance of offering children multisensory early reading experiences. How did that come about? 

Natalia Kucirkova, who I met many years ago at the United Kingdom Literacy Association, is an international powerhouse scholar. … That chapter is about a novel approach in Europe, and I think we need to listen to our European peers. They focus a little bit more on creativity and multisensory approaches, where we are focusing on different things here in the U.S. What Natalia talks about is that reading is much more than decoding a text. It’s about an affective and embodied experience. 

An educator I really admire, Nichole Parks, said something recently about how readers are built on laps and that reading to a child is a gateway toward them reading for themselves. 

That’s a beautiful way to phrase that. We lose so much when we focus too much on tablets and technology. There’s so much more to reading than just reading words on a screen. It’s that entire experience — the human interaction with a child, the interaction with a book — to be able to hold the book, turn the pages and, in some instances, smell the book. A robot can’t replace that. A robot can’t replace the interaction between a teacher or a parent or a beloved family member lovingly nurturing a child during their reading process. 

Mary Derfel, assistant director of early literacy at North Carolina Department of Public Instruction’s , recently heard Canadian astronaut describe the dream that shaped his childhood.

“As a kid,” Derfel recalled Hansen saying, “I knew I wanted to go to the moon. What I learned is that I can’t get there by myself, but I can get there with a team.” 

Derfel smiled as she shared the story because, in many ways, it captures where North Carolina’s literacy work stands today.

“No one organization can carry this work by itself,” she said. “Not a school, not a district, not a university, and not even the can do this work alone. If every child is going to become a successful reader, it will take everyone moving in the same direction.”

North Carolina’s literacy journey has reached an important transition point. Over the past several years, much of the state’s energy has centered on implementation. Educators immersed themselves in training. District leaders examined curriculum and instructional materials. Schools adjusted classroom practices to better reflect decades of reading research, while Early Literacy Specialists worked alongside education leaders to help translate that research into everyday instruction.

Those efforts established the foundation for meaningful change in classrooms across the state. Now the focus is shifting.

Investing in long-term sustainability

Cynthia Barber, director of the Office of Early Learning (OEL), said the next challenge is ensuring the work continues long after state support tapers.

“We only have 115 Early Literacy Specialists, which we’re grateful for, and they’re phenomenal, but North Carolina is a huge state,” Barber explained. “If we’re going to scale their work, then we want to prepare the field to equip local leaders and coaches.”

She wasn’t describing another statewide initiative. She was describing a strategy for long-term sustainability. Rather than relying on outside expertise, OEL is investing in people already working within districts, so coaching knowledge and instructional leadership become part of each local system.

That vision began taking shape last year when OEL’s regional consultants completed The experience extended far beyond working through six modules. Participants practiced coaching conversations, reflected on their own leadership, and examined how effective coaching influences not only classrooms, but entire instructional systems.

“We’re not just coaching instruction,” Derfel explained. “We’re coaching systems that improve instruction.”

The distinction may sound subtle, but it represents a significant shift in thinking. Strong literacy instruction depends on excellent teaching. Lasting improvement depends on building systems that help excellent teaching continue long after individual initiatives end.

After completing the training, regional consultants introduced the same coaching framework to the Early Literacy Specialists within their regions. By sharing a common coaching language and consistent expectations, consultants and specialists can provide more coherent support across the state while still adapting their work to each district’s unique needs.

“When you’re trying to create a scalable model,” Barber said, “everyone has to speak the same language.”

Much like LETRS established a shared understanding of reading research, Fundamentals of Literacy Coaching is helping establish a common understanding of how educators support one another through coaching. That shared foundation is quietly reshaping how literacy support is delivered across North Carolina.

Building capacity from within

When North Carolina first introduced Early Literacy Specialists in , their responsibilities were intentionally broad to support districtwide implementation of evidence-based literacy practices aligned with state legislation. At that time, Science of Reading implementation was still in its early stages, and districts needed practical guidance, systems support, and professional learning to build a strong foundation for change.

Early Literacy Specialists worked alongside district leaders, school administrators, and instructional coaches to develop the knowledge, processes, and capacity necessary to implement evidence-based literacy instruction with fidelity as educators transitioned to a new approach to teaching reading. Several years later, that role is evolving.

As districts have developed stronger internal expertise, specialists are spending less time providing broad support across many schools and more time working intensively in one or two schools within each district. The shift reflects a deliberate strategy to help districts build the knowledge and leadership needed to sustain the work themselves. The goal extends well beyond improving a handful of campuses.

The plan also includes highlighting schools where effective coaching, instructional decision-making, and collaborative problem-solving are visible in daily practice. Within these model sites, teachers refine their instructional practices through ongoing collaboration with local instructional coaches, while principals deepen their understanding of implementation and instructional leadership. Over time, these local leaders become the driving force behind sustained literacy improvement, building district capacity and expanding successful practices across schools without relying on continued external support.

That philosophy also explains why OEL has opened Fundamentals of Literacy Coaching to instructional coaches and leaders statewide through free virtual professional learning. Rather than creating another temporary initiative, the training is designed to strengthen the coaching capacity that already exists inside school systems.

State leaders describe the approach as a gradual release of responsibility. Instead of remaining the primary drivers of implementation, they are intentionally preparing district leaders and instructional coaches to assume ownership of the work using evidence-based tools, strategies, and coaching practices.

The central role of school principals

On any given day, school principals are balancing staffing shortages, budgets, accountability requirements, student behavior, parent concerns, safety issues, and countless operational decisions.

“They have so many balls in the air,” Barber said.

Literacy remains one of their highest priorities, but it must compete with every other pressing demand.

“It’s one thing to know literacy is your pipeline to opportunity,” Derfel observed. “But the tyranny of the urgent can often overshadow the emphasis that literacy has to remain at the forefront.”

That reality has prompted another evolution in OEL’s work.

The next phase of professional learning is designed specifically for school leaders. Rather than concentrating solely on classroom instruction, the initiative will help principals deepen their understanding of implementation science, systems thinking, instructional coaching, and continuous improvement.

The reasoning is straightforward. Improving classroom instruction is essential, but sustaining improvement requires leaders who understand how successful change actually happens. When principals recognize how coaching, professional learning, and organizational systems work together, they are better positioned to create the conditions where effective literacy instruction can thrive year after year.

North Carolina’s strategy is becoming increasingly clear. The long-term goal isn’t simply to strengthen individual classrooms. It’s to strengthen the leadership systems that make excellent instruction sustainable across entire schools and districts.

Looking beyond decoding

North Carolina’s investment in foundational reading skills has transformed instruction across the state. Teachers now have a stronger understanding of how children learn to decode, and classrooms increasingly reflect the research behind effective word recognition. But both Barber and Derfel were quick to point out that reading success does not end with decoding.

Students also need rich vocabulary, broad background knowledge, meaningful discussions, and regular opportunities to think deeply about increasingly complex texts. Those experiences allow children to make sense of what they read and ultimately become successful, independent readers. For Barber and Derfel, strengthening language comprehension represents the next stage of North Carolina’s literacy journey.

One of this year’s highlights has been OEL’s partnership with the , which has provided statewide virtual professional learning focused specifically on language comprehension instruction. That collaboration has opened the door to even broader partnerships. Ashton Clemmons, associate vice president for P–12 strategy and policy for the , and several are now working closely with districts to help translate evidence-based literacy practices into everyday classroom instruction.

The partnerships extend beyond professional learning sessions. University faculty are collaborating with educators, developing resources and helping bridge the gap between literacy research and classroom practice. At the same time, the relationships have strengthened connections between OEL and North Carolina’s Educator Preparation Programs, creating opportunities to better align how future teachers are prepared before they ever enter their own classrooms. Rather than existing as separate efforts, these partnerships are becoming part of a larger statewide network focused on improving literacy from multiple directions.

The quiet work of lasting change

From the outside, North Carolina’s literacy work may appear quieter than it did just a few years ago. Yet beneath the surface, the work has entered its most important phase. The urgency of statewide training has evolved into the steady work of coaching, layered implementation, and continuous improvement. There are fewer headlines announcing state-level initiatives and more conversations taking place in classrooms, district offices, and professional learning communities. Barber believes that quieter work is exactly what lasting change looks like because implementation has moved closest to the students.

“I believe we have the infrastructure to support districts at every stage of implementation,” she said. “It’s encouraging to see districts across North Carolina making meaningful progress. While the work looks different from one community to another, we’re seeing more and more examples of educators moving in the right direction.”

Listening to North Carolina’s literacy leaders reflect on the road ahead, one idea became impossible to ignore: improving reading instruction was never the finish line. The greater opportunity is to build a system capable of sustaining that improvement for generations to come. Success will be measured not only by stronger classrooms today, but by whether those classrooms continue to thrive for years because effective instruction, expert coaching, and strong instructional leadership have become embedded in the culture.

That work is already unfolding across North Carolina. It happens when instructional coaches help teachers solve instructional challenges together. It happens when principals recognize that successful implementation requires both patience and purposeful urgency. It happens when districts openly share effective practices, when universities learn alongside practitioners, and when educators at every level embrace their role in a shared mission centered on students. While this work is far less visible than a statewide rollout, it is ultimately far more enduring.

North Carolina’s literacy story is still being written, but its next chapter will not be defined by a single initiative or one remarkable leader. It will be written in thousands of classrooms, coaching conversations, leadership meetings, and collaborative partnerships across the state. Every instructional decision, every coaching conversation, and every shared success strengthens the foundation for lasting improvement.

Jeremy Hansen’s reflection serves as a powerful reminder that meaningful change begins with a vision that extends beyond our own individual goals. For North Carolina’s educators, that vision extends far beyond raising reading scores.

The state’s true moonshot is building a literacy system that continues to learn, adapt, and improve long after any single initiative has ended. It is creating a culture where educators continuously strengthen their practice, schools build lasting instructional capacity, and every child has the opportunity to become a confident, capable reader. That is the kind of legacy that reaches beyond today’s classrooms and shapes generations to come.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

In response, the national conversation has kicked into high gear. More than a dozen states have rewritten literacy laws, banning discredited instructional methods and mandating phonics-based curricula. Districts are overhauling materials. Parents are being urged to act in a multitude of ways: reading more at home, hiring a tutor, trying multiple apps.

I’ve spent decades as a classroom teacher, literacy coach, researcher, and now training future educators. I’ve worked with children who thrive and children who need extra support with reading. And I’ve seen how often parents are sent searching for complicated solutions while underestimating the impact of what happens in ordinary moments at home. That’s overlooking something both simpler and more immediate: Families already have powerful, evidence-based tools at their fingertips, and they don’t cost anything.

This isn’t a critique of schools. The evidence of what’s possible when schools commit fully is compelling: Louisiana became the only state to fully rebound in reading post-pandemic. Mississippi climbed from near the bottom of national rankings to the top ten in fourth-grade reading. Systematic, structured literacy instruction works when it’s implemented well. 

However, the best outcomes happen when classrooms and homes work together. The current reading crisis has exposed how much everyday language, attention and early habits have been neglected in shaping literacy, long before a child is ever formally tested.

Start with something deceptively simple: conversation. Reading is not just about decoding words on a page; it’s built on language. When parents narrate what they’re doing, ask questions and engage children in back-and-forth talk, they are building vocabulary and comprehension in real time. This isn’t enrichment. It’s the foundation strong readers stand on, and it happens in the car, at the kitchen table and at the checkout line.

Then there’s the way reading itself gets treated. Too often, it becomes something children think only “counts” as reading if it’s from a book. But literacy lives in the real world. A grocery list. A recipe. Street signs. Instructions. When children see that print carries meaning in daily life, they begin to understand why reading matters at all. 

And yet, in a culture saturated with screens and subscriptions, one of the most effective tools is analog: the public library. It’s easy to overlook because it’s free. But access to physical books — and the sustained attention they encourage — offers something many digital experiences do not. At a time when families are told to download more, the better advice may be to step into a quieter space and let a child linger with a book.

Honesty about the basics matters too. Letters and sounds are not outdated or trivial; they are essential. Helping children learn the alphabet, recognize letters in the environment or spell their own name is not busywork. It is preparation for the moment formal instruction begins and a base for whether that instruction sticks.

Perhaps most urgently, parents should stop being told to “wait and see” or “they’ll grow out of it.” These may sound reassuring, but in reading, it can be costly. Unlike spoken language, reading does not develop naturally without direct teaching. When a child consistently avoids reading, guesses at words, or becomes visibly frustrated, those are not quirks to outgrow. They are early warning signs. 

The earlier parents and educators respond, the easier the path forward, and the window for intervention narrows quickly. What looks like a behavioral problem in fourth grade often traces back to a foundational gap that could have been caught in kindergarten.

None of this will single-handedly reverse national test scores. But that’s not the point. The point is that in a moment when the literacy conversation is dominated by policy, programs and products, the most immediate and equitable intervention available risks being overlooked entirely: what families do every day.

The NAEP data tells a story of stratification: scores rising for high-performing students while struggling students fall further behind. That divide is not about capacity. It is, in part, about access to the kinds of early language experiences that wire children for reading before they ever enter a classroom. Debates about curriculum mandates and state laws are worth having. But while those debates unfold, children are sitting at kitchen tables tonight.

Parents are not a backup plan for struggling schools. They are a child’s first and most consistent teachers. The reading crisis is real. But so is the quiet, largely untapped power sitting in ordinary moments.

If better outcomes are the goal, the question shouldn’t stop at what schools will do differently next year. It should also demand answers about what’s already possible today — and why anyone has been told it isn’t enough.

States including Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi have garnered attention in the media for offering lessons other states can learn from — a February New York Times opinion piece heralded the trio as “.”

Yet the Southern surge narrative has, so far, largely ignored another commonality among those states: tremendous improvements in early childhood education.

The most commonly cited reasons behind the trend relate to , specifically a commitment to phonics-based pedagogy, and a willingness to who are not reading on grade level. Importantly, this did not happen overnight, and it didn’t occur in isolation: Rachel Canter, who led a Mississippi education policy and advocacy group that was instrumental in shaping the state’s approach, the New York Times that the “Science of reading is really important — it was a key piece of what we did,” but added that “people are missing the forest for the trees if they are only looking at that.”

Indeed, in the same 2013 legislative session in which Mississippi passed the , which codified many of its reforms, the legislature also passed its first state pre-K bill, the (ELCA). The ELCA was a state-funded initiative that established voluntary, free or low-cost, high-quality pre-K programs that operated through partnerships between private pre-K providers, school districts and, in some cases, Head Start programs. These collaboratives had to meet all put forth by the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER). Over the years, enrollment in the Collaboratives has : When they were launched in 2014, the Collaboratives served 1,774 children and by the 2022-23 school year, student enrollment in pre-K had reached 6,800.

In on how the ELCA came about, Canter explained that with major early childhood and K-3 reforms both passing at the same time, the policies were designed to align. For instance, the pre-K legislation required participating providers to administer a school readiness assessment that lined up with the one students would be asked to take in Kindergarten. Substantial funds were invested in instructional coaches for pre-K teachers, and in providing pre-K teachers with access to literacy professional development opportunities comparable to what the state’s K-3 teachers were being offered.

Around the same time, neighboring states were engaged in their own reform efforts. In 2012, the , commonly referred to as Act 3. This unified early childhood governance within the Louisiana Department of Education and set the stage for broad reforms. Over the next few years, Louisiana required every child care program that received a dollar of public money to participate in the state’s accountability system, which included getting a minimum of two quality-focused inspections per year. The bar was also raised for teacher qualifications, requiring all lead teachers in publicly funded early learning settings to have at least an , a state-based professional credential.

The efforts paid off. Researchers that from 2016 to 2019, the percentage of publicly funded early childhood education programs in Louisiana that scored proficient or above on the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) rating scale — a commonly-used measure of teacher-child interactions — rose from 62% to 85%. For child care programs specifically, excluding state pre-K and Head Start classrooms, the percentage of programs scoring proficient or above increased even more impressively, from 40% in 2016 to 73% in 2019. The kids in those classrooms, of course, are many of the same kids who later on the National Assessment of Educational Progress’ fourth grade literacy exam.

Alabama, meanwhile, has long been a leader in pre-K. In 2001, the state launched First Class Pre-K, an initiative that funds full-day pre-K across a variety of school- and community-based settings. With a focus on quality, the system has been since 2006 as part of the organization’s . However, funding constraints kept the program small. In the mid-2010s, though, First Class Pre-K began to scale. Between 2012 and 2024, the number of participating 4-year-olds from about 3,600 to more than 24,000. Around the same time, the state made a major investment in coaching for pre-K teachers, and its coaching model grew from serving around 200 teachers in 2012 to nearly 1,500 as of 2024. When Alabama began leaning fully into the science of reading with its , pre-K teachers in public schools also started getting on the subject.

Connecting early care and education reform to the Southern surge is, of course, an exercise in correlation and not causation. As Canter pointed out with regard to the science of reading, this is a multifaceted story and assigning too much credit to any one factor is unwise. Moreover, other states that have made major investments to their early childhood education systems — such as California and its universal transitional kindergarten program — have not to date seen the same types of literacy gains. What does seem fair is speculating that in a counterfactual world where Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama make the same reforms to K-3 but ignore early education entirely, the Southern surge would have been blunted. 

These states, then, offer important lessons for both early childhood and K-12 stakeholders around the importance of tightly and thoughtfully aligning both systems — in both directions — and ensuring there are enough resources present to support educators. Leaders don’t have to look far: groups like the have been developing alignment frameworks and tools for years. What’s needed is a renewed commitment, particularly among state and district leaders, to seeing early care and education not as a nice-to-have, a wholly separate enterprise, or even worse, a competitor — but as a core part of ensuring all children are reading on grade level. That might not be a miracle, but it would sure be an accomplishment.

On a chilly morning at Leonard Flynn Elementary School, first graders played with jump ropes and hula hoops outside while reading tutor Lillie Reynaga set up her materials at a table in the hallway nearby. One by one, kindergarteners came to her table and practiced blending sounds to make one-syllable words.

“We’re going to make words and they’re all going to rhyme because they’ll all end with at,” Reynaga told 5-year-old Violet, who kicked her legs back and forth on the low bench. 

For the next 15 minutes Violet repeated at-at-at and read mat, rat and fat.

“Now, do you have any guesses and what S and at come together to say?”

“Sat!” Violet called out.

“How did you know that this word is sat?”

“Because it starts with s!” 

The benefits of high-impact tutoring are on full display at this Spanish immersion public school on the edge of San Francisco’s Bernal Heights and Mission District neighborhoods. Flynn introduced the program last year and saw almost immediate results.

Among the second graders who received tutoring in first grade, nearly a third started this school year reading at grade level or above, while more than half of students who did not work with tutors last year started second grade reading at a kindergarten level.

This year, those second graders are getting the support they missed out on in first grade, along with other Flynn students from kindergarten through third grade. Tutors trained and paid by provider Chapter One visit Flynn every day to deliver short bursts of high-impact tutoring in word recognition and language comprehension.

It’s not the first reading intervention Flynn has tried, said principal Tyler Woods, but it’s having the most impact.

“Literacy interventionists would provide intensive interventions but only serve 20 or 30 students across the school,” he said. “This is a lighter touch but focused on the areas that we know our kids really struggle with, and it just reaches a lot more students.”

High-impact tutoring — a intervention characterized by its frequency, duration and alignment with school curriculum — has been so successful in San Francisco that district officials recently expanded the program to serve more than 2,700 students across 20 priority district schools. 

“This is the single most effective literacy intervention we have,” said Ann Levy Walden, CEO of the San Francisco Education Fund, which helps to fund and implement the program in partnership with the school district. “This expansion allows us to do what we know works.”

Nearly half of students in San Francisco Unified schools . A year ago, the district set a goal that specifically targets third grade proficiency: By 2027, 70% of third graders will meet state standards, up from 52% in 2022. High-impact tutoring is one of the targeted supports the district is using to meet the benchmark.

“Ensuring students are proficient readers by the end of third grade is one of our most important student outcome goals,” said district superintendent Maria Su. The district also adopted a curriculum based on the science of reading last year — the first reading curriculum change in the district in a decade. This change, along with expanding tutoring, are meant to help “focus resources on the grade levels and school communities where high-impact tutoring can most effectively accelerate literacy development,” Su said.

The cost of high-impact tutoring is $500 a student, which includes up to four sessions a week, assessments, individualized tutoring plans, progress monitoring and integration with classroom instruction. The Education Fund raises money continuously, but a year of high-impact tutoring in San Francisco costs about $2 million. This year, the district contributed $830,000. 

The district expanded high-impact tutoring after seeing results last year. After working with Chapter One tutors for five months last year, the number of students district-wide who met grade-level reading standards more than doubled, from 24% to 54%. At Sanchez Elementary in the Mission District first graders reading at or above grade level went from 15% to 59%.

At Guadalupe Elementary, in the city’s Crocker-Amazon neighborhood, the share of kindergarteners reading at grade level jumped from 39% to nearly 68%, after students participated in the tutoring program.

“It’s an early literacy gain that we have never seen before,” said principal Raj Sharma. Nearly 70% of students at Guadalupe are English learners, and about 10% are newcomers to the United States, Sharma said. “Sometimes our students don’t have any school experience at all.” 

Sharma said he specifically chose to bring high-impact tutors in to work with very young students because he believed the impact for them could be so substantial. 

“Once your foundation is strong, you can build the house on there,” he said. “Family or socio-economic status matters, but in our situation we saw that it’s beyond that. We can make a difference.”

A big challenge for school leaders is how and when to connect tutors with students. At Guadalupe, tutors meet with every student in a class either individually or in small groups in their classrooms. This approach is less disruptive for students, Sharma said, and allows for more continuity in their learning experience.

“They are just one of the small groups and others are with the Chapter One tutor, and then they can rotate,” he said. “They are not missing any instruction that’s given in the classroom. At the same time, they’re getting the reading foundations.”

Sharma and other principals said that the way high-impact tutoring is being delivered in San Francisco stands out, because tutors are trained and paid and because principals get help integrating the program into their schools. The San Francisco Education Fund partners with the San Francisco Literacy Coalition to help school leaders to develop schedules and determine which students will receive tutoring.

“The scheduling of it has been really seamless, which is not always the case when you’re trying to pair any type of extra support or intervention,” said Woods of Flynn Elementary. “Many of our students are needing support from the moment they join our school and in the past, we just haven’t had the scope of support to provide some meaningful development. This is third time we’ve been able to say, let’s figure out who needs the intervention and everybody gets it.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified a literacy organization. It is the San Francisco Literacy Coalition.

The books she read in school didn’t interest her and “constant deadlines made it even harder to connect with the stories,” she said. Reading was a chore, something to rush through for a test or school assignment. 

So when Wallace became a mother in 2019, she didn’t read to her son at home often – about once or twice a week, “maybe not even that,” said Wallace, who lives with her family in Frankfort, Kentucky.

That changed around the time her son was 3 and she was working at a local adult education center where she helped develop a family literacy program. There, she learned about on how reading to young children daily can improve school readiness, develop language and listening skills and promote social-emotional growth.

Now her family reads “three or four books every single night,” she said. 

The payoff has been clear: her son, Levi, has an impressive vocabulary for a soon-to-be 6 year old, can speak in complete sentences and most importantly “his confidence is boosting tremendously.”

“His life is going to be so much easier because he loves to read,” Wallace said. “I didn’t want him to grow up hating to read [like I did]. … I always struggled with comprehension and remembering what I read, and so it’s challenging when you don’t love doing it.”

Wallace’s initial resistance toward reading may be the new norm among parents. Earlier this year, HarperCollins UK showing a steep decline in the number of caregivers who read to their young children.

For many new parents, a dislike of reading stems from their own classroom experiences in the early 2000s that emphasized reading as a skill for testing. Many also are unfamiliar with the importance of reading to young children or may instead undervalue reading because of a dependence on online educational programs that have limited benefits for learning. 

For children not getting the benefits of being read to at home, the opportunity gap has widened, with those young students entering school unprepared compared to those who have been read to.

“The gap really begins very, very early on. I think we underestimate how large a gap we’re already seeing in kindergarten,” said Susan Neuman, professor of childhood and literacy education at New York University, adding she recently visited a New York City kindergarten classroom and saw some children who only knew two letters compared to others who were prepared to read phrases. 

A found a 5-year-old child who is read to daily would be exposed to nearly 300,000 more words than one who isn’t read to regularly.

The 2025 HarperCollins survey found less than half, around 41%, of children between the age of zero to four were read to every day or nearly every day; a decline of nine percentage points from 2019 and 15 percentage points in 2012. 

The survey found that about a third of parents read to their babies and toddlers weekly. Around 20% of parents said they “rarely” or “never” read to their child between the ages of zero and two and 8% of parents said they “rarely” or “never” read to their child between the ages of three and four.

It’s something that doesn’t surprise early literacy experts in the United States who suspect similar trends across the country, believing the decline in early literacy reading is likely even higher than reported.

“Frankly, parents … will often lie because they know it’s important to read, so they’ll exaggerate the amount of time they’re reading,” Neuman said. “I think the bottom line is reading is declining big time, not just for parents reading to children, but for all segments of our society.”

But, some of the youngest parents, those born between 1997 and 2012 – also known as Gen-Z – are more likely than past generations to view reading as a school or work activity rather than fun or beneficial, according to the HarperCollins survey and early literacy experts. 

For many young adults, their experience in the classroom, especially during the peak of the No Child Left Behind Act, which mandated annual standardized testing in the early 2000s, took the pleasure out of reading and instead instilled a shift toward “skill and drill,” practices, said Theresa Bouley, an education professor at Eastern Connecticut State University.

“We went from fourth grade and sixth grade testing to every year – third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth,” Bouley said. “At that time we started using less books, more programs, more skill and drill and the purpose of reading only became learning different aspects of reading, like phonics or things like that, and not actually for purpose or pleasure or even having time to apply the skills they’re learning to actually read.”

An entire population of students may have lost the value of reading, and combined with being the first generation of digital natives, the United States’ youngest adults are among those who are now seeing some of the largest declines in literacy skills. 

And it’s likely they’re passing their habits down to their children, which can have crucial repercussions on the youngest emerging students’ skills.

“Children are not seeing their caregivers actually reading books and that sends a really strong message. … As a three year old boy, [they] want to do what dad’s doing,” Bouley said. “I think it’s equally important … [for a] child’s understanding of the purpose and joy of reading to see their parent reading.”

In Wallace’s case, she was able to make up for some lost time.

For other families, however, there isn’t a lot of opportunity to close the gap once a child enters school.

“There’s an assumption nowadays that when kids get to kindergarten, they need to know their letters and their numbers and this is highly predictive of whether or not they’ll be successful at the end of kindergarten and at the end of third grade,” Neuman said. “Teachers have a very short time to work on these kinds of things, and when children are that far behind, … I don’t see realistically that a teacher will be able to give the intensive support that children will need in order to catch up.”

Why does reading to our youngest children matter?

Early literacy researchers believe there’s a common misconception that reading to a child when they’re babies or young toddlers is useless because the child doesn’t understand what’s going on.

The activity however, “is a lot more than just reading and reading books,” Bouley said.

Reading aloud creates a foundation for literacy, she said.

Studies have shown it helps children develop communication and fine motor skills and also promote oral language skills, which are a strong predictor in future success in school. 

Books also open up a world of vocabulary that isn’t used in day-to-day language when parents speak to their children, Rebecca Parlakian, senior programs director at , an early childhood nonprofit, said.

“Shared reading does predict child vocabulary prior to school entry, and vocabulary predicts later emerging literacy skills. We also find that the quantity or frequency of parent-child book reading predicted children’s receptive vocabulary, which is the words they understand, their reading comprehension skills and their desire to read,” said Parlakian.

A study found that reading aloud to a child at eight months old was linked to language skills at 12 and 16 months, “so even infants being exposed to ongoing rich language made a difference,” Parlakian added.

And while “language and vocabulary are the primary benefits,” books also support “social-emotional skills because children are being exposed to the feelings and motivations of characters other than themselves,” Parlakian said. 

‘Skill and drill’ 

Reading aloud is also beneficial for children to develop a positive association with the activity.

“There’s a lot of warm fuzziness and social emotional development that goes on. So now in kindergarten, if the teacher whips out a book, I remember my dad read me that book,” Bouley said.

Having a positive association with books, without the pressure of assessments or skill tests, allows young children to understand the value and fun of reading. 

“It builds connections,” said Carol Anne St. George, a literacy professor at the University of Rochester. “People talk about text to text, text to world … and those are the kinds of things that help children cognitively think and classify their world around them.”

But, it’s becoming a lost art.

Instead, reading in schools has become performance-based activity or test preparation.

“Whether it’s parents at home and also teachers in schools, we’re seeing so few books, and so few opportunities for children to read – really read,” Bouley said.

There’s a pressure in the United States to “press reading very very early,” Neuman added. 

“If we look globally at other cultures where children are more successful, , … they don’t start formally reading with children with the expectation they should read by third grade. They recognize that play is really important in these early years, that talk and oral language is extremely important, and they focus on other things,” Neuman said. “But, we’re in a race.”

That “race” has contributed to changes in curriculum and a pullback on activities like read alouds in the classroom, which Bouley, Neuman and St. George said they’ve all seen. 

“I don’t see that time really devoted and yet that’s so critical,” Neuman said. “The language that they’re getting through that storybook and experience is really imperative. I don’t see it as much. I see a lot of skill and drill.”

Among some researchers, there’s a belief the shift happened around 2002 as the United States shifted toward an annual testing model. 

“We became inundated with assessments and preparation,” Bouley said. “So first graders, second graders, they’re constantly getting these assessments that definitely take the purpose away from reading for enjoyment to reading as skill.”

Timed reading fluency assessments, for example, “just shows kids that you can’t go back and read accurately,” and “all that matters is how many words you can read in one minute,” Bouley added. 

“So children get these messages about all that matters with reading and none of it has to do with comprehending a book and enjoying a book,” Bouley said. “It got much worse, or even started after No Child Left Behind, and then it’s just become worse and worse.”

Many of those former students are now parents, like Wallace, who may struggle with passing on literacy skills because of their own experiences in the classroom. 

From one technology-raised generation to the next 

Reading for pleasure in the United States has between 2003 and 2023, according to a 2025 study from the University of Florida and University College London.

The same study said it’s unclear whether levels of reading with children has changed over time, but it did find only 2% of its participants read with children “on the average day,” despite 21% of the study’s sample having a child under nine years old.

Declining literacy levels also go hand-in-hand with the rise of the internet and accessibility to portable devices. 

“This is a generation where we really begin to see a drop in reading for pleasure because they were part of that initial wave and flood of digital media that was totally unregulated. We had no research on the impact,” said Parlakian. 

Those patterns from the first generation of digital natives are now being mirrored to another generation of children.

A from the PNC foundation reported about 35% of parents said some of the biggest challenges in reading to children is that the child prefers screen-time or won’t sit long enough. 

“When we introduce screen time very young, and we don’t manage the amount of time children are spending on screens, … it can be difficult for children to transition from such an exciting medium to a medium like a book that may initially feel not as exciting,” Parlakian said.

While some parents may argue their young children may not have to read as much with physical books because they’re instead benefiting from educational programs on tablets or phones, early literacy experts said there’s a difference between the two activities, both social-emotionally and academically.

A lack of reading time with a parent possibly means losing bonding time. With a tablet, a parent can hand it off and walk away, Bouley said, but when it comes to reading a book, it demands a parent’s full presence.

Skills wise, until around the ages of 5 and 6, children have a “really hard time and are incredibly inefficient at transferring learning that happens on a screen to real life,” and vice versa, Parlakian said.

Reading also requires stamina — and educational programs on tablets or other devices, instead offer instant gratification, Neuman added. 

“A good storybook often takes a bit of time to develop. … There’s literary language that children are learning, … and games are very colloquial, they’re very short term and they’re bits of information that don’t connect,” she said. “Children aren’t developing comprehension, … even when they begin to learn the print, what we’re seeing is they don’t know the meaning of the print, and that’s a big problem.”

Adopting early reading practices for the Wallace family means comprehension hasn’t been a problem for 5 year old Levi who points out the words he knows in his children’s Bible, or in his other favorites like Little Blue Truck or Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?

“He can read almost a whole page by himself. He gets really excited and he has to go around and show his dad or we’ve got to FaceTime and show his mamaw,” Wallace said. “He wants everybody to see he knows how to read.”

What do puzzles, gymnastics, writing and using maps all have in common? 

They all rely on people’s ability to visualize objects as they spin, flip or turn in space, without physically moving them. This is a spatial skill that developmental psychologists call .

Whether a person is navigating a new city or doing a cartwheel, they must use mental rotation skills to move shapes or objects in their mind and make sense of where their bodies are going and what surrounds them. 

When children play with puzzles, building blocks or pattern games, they are also practicing mental rotation. 

Over time, these skills  in math, science and reading. This can look like visualizing pulley systems in physics or seeing the differences between  such as b and d, which young children often confuse. 

Strong mental rotation skills also lay the foundation for  and developing  in science, technology, engineering and math.

Most preschool-age children are not yet learning to read – but it turns out they are still using some of these same spatial reasoning skills as they think about the world around them.

,  and were curious to find out how children as young as 3 years old mentally rotate objects. 

While there is research on the  rotate objects, less is understood about how children are solving mental rotation problems. We found in our research, conducted from 2022 to 2023, that young children are using the same problem-solving  when they solve a mental rotation task. 

Children think visually, just like adults

 to understand how a sample of 148 children, all between 3 and 7 years old, solved different mental rotation problems. Eye-trackers use harmless infrared light to capture eye movements. This technology lets us observe how children solve these problems in real time. 

As part of our study, we showed each child a large picture of items such as a fire truck, as well as two smaller pictures of the same truck, one placed above the other and positioned slightly differently.

Children were asked to say which small picture on the right matched the large one on the left. In this example, the correct answer is the top picture, because that top fire truck can be rotated to match the large fire truck. The bottom fire truck was a mirrored image, and no matter how much you rotate it, it will never match the large fire truck. 

While the children thought about their response, the eye-tracker, mounted right below the computer screen, recorded their eye movements. 

By looking at where and for how long children looked at each image, we figured out what kind of strategy they were using. 

Some children focused on fewer parts of the object and spent less time studying its details. This suggests they used a holistic strategy, meaning they took in the whole image at once, instead of breaking it into pieces. These children mentally rotated the entire object to solve the task. 

Other children focused on parts of the object and spent more time studying its details. This suggests they broke the image down into pieces instead of visualizing the image as a whole, known as a piecemeal strategy. Our findings support showing that children generally use these two visual approaches to solve mental rotation problems. 

This study helped us learn where children look while solving puzzles and identify how they solve these problems – without ever having to ask the child, who might be too young to explain, about their process. 

Children were more likely to turn the whole image instead of breaking it down into pieces, a pattern of problem solving adults typically also use. This means that even very young children are already thinking about how objects move and turn in space in ways that are more advanced than expected. 

Supporting children’s visual skills

Knowing how young children mentally rotate objects may help researchers, teachers and parents understand why some children struggle with learning to read. 

Children who break an image down into pieces, instead of visualizing it as a whole, to solve mental rotation problems may be the very same children who struggle with discriminating similar-looking letters such as p and q and may later be diagnosed with . 

Parents can play an important role in building their child’s mental rotation skills. Parents can  by offering them opportunities to practice rotating real objects with toys such as three-dimensional puzzles or building blocks. Tangrams – flat, colorful puzzles that come in different shapes – can be used to practice breaking down shapes of animals into pieces. Parents can encourage their child to look for shapes that match parts of the animal or object they are building. 

Nov. 8 is , a celebration of all things science, technology, engineering and mathematics. 

Research like ours provides valuable guidance for designing early STEM activities and educational tools. By directly observing children’s problem solving in real time, we can develop better ways for educators and toy makers to support strong spatial thinking from an early age. To celebrate, we encourage people to engage in activities that test their spatial skills, such as ditching the GPS for the day or . 

Mental rotation is a powerful skill that helps us understand and interact with the surrounding physical world. From solving puzzles to reading maps, mental rotation plays a role in many everyday activities. Building mental rotation abilities can improve children’s performance in subjects such as reading, math and science and may inspire future careers in STEM fields.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

And yet, shows that the skills needed for reading begin developing before a child is born, and that signs of reading challenges can emerge as early as 18 months old.

“People don’t understand that children don’t start kindergarten with a clean slate,” said Nadine Gaab, an associate professor at the Harvard School of Education involved in the research. Learning to read “is a long process with many milestones that unfold over many years, and it starts primarily with oral language. Years of brain development lead up to the point where formal instruction puts it all together and enables them to read. The process starts in utero.”

The human brain evolved specifically for spoken language, said Perri Klass, professor of journalism and pediatrics at New York University and the national medical director of the nonprofit . Every society across the world uses spoken language, but the transition from spoken to written language is a giant leap for the brain.  

That jump, Klass said, requires the brain to recruit structures and networks throughout its many layers and folds just to recognize a letter on a page, involving the vision and memory portions of the brain. The brain then must remember the sound the letter represents and connect that letter with others to make sounds that associate with the picture on a page. Finally, at lightning speed, the brain recognizes that those letters work together to say, “Cat.”  

“Learning to read is a challenge for all children,” she said. “And for some children it’s really a struggle. It’s not that you develop spoken language and then, boom, you get to school and develop written language. Spoken and written language have been developing together directly from birth, and all the exposure to language from the environment — what they hear from their parents, whether they’re read to, talked to, whether someone sings to them or holds them — are there. So, it’s the brain the child takes to school that helps them succeed at this impressive task of learning to read.”

Klass points to the new Harvard research to underscore how early that “brain the child takes to school” begins developing. For years, a prevailing attitude has been that a child starts learning to read in pre-K or kindergarten. A longitudinal study by Gaab and her colleagues using MRI scans and an array of other assessments confirmed that the bases for reading skills begin to develop in the child’s brain by birth and continue building between infancy and preschool. 

“We wanted to see how early the developmental trajectories of children who later develop good versus poor reading skills diverge, because that can give us a really important clue for when we should intervene, as well as what some of the risks and protective factors are,” Gaab said, 

A key finding of the study is that the developmental trajectories of children with and without reading disabilities start to diverge around 18 months, rather than at 5 or 6 years old as previously assumed.  

And yet, Gaab said, a wide gap currently stands between the time children are identified as having a reading impairment and the start of intensive intervention. This is particularly problematic for children diagnosed with dyslexia, she said, adding that researchers call this the The majority of school districts in the U.S. employ a “wait-to-fail” approach, meaning that many children are only flagged by the school system after they have failed to learn to read over a prolonged period of time — often years — even though there’s evidence that reading intervention is most effective earlier. The experience of failure can erode self-esteem, she said, and lead to the higher rates of anxiety and depression that are found in struggling readers.

The Study

The study, “Longitudinal Trajectories of Brain Development from Infancy to School Age and Their Relationship with Literacy Development,” is the first to track brain development from infancy to childhood focused literacy skills — a window into later academic attainment.     

Over a decade, Gaab and co-authors Ted Turesky, Elizabeth Escalante and Megan Loh conducted MRI brain scans of 130 study participants starting at 3 months old. Half of the children had a risk of dyslexia, with either an older sibling or one or both parents diagnosed with dyslexia, which can increase a child’s risk of reading challenges. For the first year of the study, the babies peacefully slept through the scan, tucked into the MRI machine wearing noise protection (“We got really good at putting other people’s babies to sleep,” Gaab said). 

At 18 months old, the babies came back for another scan, though “peacefully sleeping” was becoming a fond memory. By the time the babies were toddlers, the researchers took a break, for reasons any parent of unruly toddlers can understand. The children returned when they were a more cooperative 4 years old and every year after until age 10. 

The study also assessed such factors as cognitive abilities, literacy environment and home language. Funded by the NIH, the researchers aimed to continue for another five years and follow the participants into high school. Though the grant application had received a fundable score at NIH, future funding is uncertain due to the Trump administration’s termination of .

Building the Brain’s Architecture

Babies are born with the raw material they need to hear, see, move and remember. The nerve fibers, or axons, that connect these disparate brain regions don’t grow automatically. They are cultivated by babies’ environments. MRIs of the participants as infants showed predictably smaller brains that appear more solid or smooth in the images. By the time the children were 5, the scans showed a robust network of branching pathways of these nerve fibers, said coauthor Turesky.  

“The infant brain is very different compared to all other stages of life,” he said. “But if you look at the scan of a child at 5 years and then at 10 years, you can see there’s hardly any change in [those pathways]. Those early years are a time of very rapid growth.”

Though the human brain remains plastic and mutable for a lifetime, Turesky said, the scans underscore that earliest years are the busiest for building brain architecture — a fact that has important policy implications for early intervention and improved literacy curricula in preschools. 

Giving Them the ‘Good Stuff’

Some brains are better equipped to build the neural scaffolding that ultimately leads to reading, Gaab said, and some brains are less optimized, which means those children might struggle to read. It doesn’t mean their brains are faulty, or that there is something seriously wrong with them. 

“They’re built differently, and they’re optimized for other things, because every brain is different,” she said. “But it does point to the need for good early pre-reading instruction and the games and good oral language input, and home and school environment interactions that we know build these connections. Some brains just need more of the good stuff.”  

“Call it preventative education, just like preventative medicine,” she said. “Help these kids build these connections before they struggle and prevent them ever seeing a special educator or ever getting a dyslexia diagnosis.” A large number of studies now show that early intervention and prevention are leading to better outcomes for children at risk of dyslexia, Gaab said, and the research has led to aimed at early identification and intervention. 

That includes teaching the specific skills that can close the gap between proficient and struggling readers. Those skills include phonological awareness, letter-sound knowledge, rapid automatized naming, vocabulary and oral language comprehension. This teaching takes place naturally when caregivers read aloud to their children. Reach Out and Read, the nonprofit Klass leads, has a network of clinicians who work directly with pediatric care providers to help them integrate read-aloud experiences into their interactions with parents and provides developmentally appropriate books for caregivers to take home. 

“Our tremendous advantage in pediatric primary care is that the clinicians see the children over and over in these early years,” Klass said. “We see them for a newborn visit and a one-month, a two-month visit … The schedule is sort of engraved on all our hearts, so we get to talk with the parents about reading and early literacy repeatedly during those early years of life. 

“We know that the developing brain is shaped most of all by the interactions with the adults taking care of that child, Klass said. “The wonderful thing about this study is that it literally looks at the building of the brain and says very clearly that it’s not just that the brain is being built, but the specific structures that will allow the child to read.” 

If doctors can identify young children who are going to struggle more with learning to read as they get older, they can target those families with books and other support early on, Klass added.

“We’re hoping with…the books the caregivers are taking home, the child is learning a motivational lesson: ‘I like books. If I carry a book and give it to my parent, they might sit down and talk to me in that voice,’” Klass said. 

Klass said no one needs to tell parents to “teach” this idea to their children. The children will sort it out if they grow up around books and reading. A baby doesn’t want or need an authority on literacy to walk through the door and teach them how to read, Klass said. A baby wants their parent’s voice, presence and back-and-forth interactions. 

“Your baby wants to be on your lap hearing you read. Your baby will love books because your baby loves you.”

This gap is a of decision-making. People plan to save for retirement or stick to diets, but often fall short of their goals. In parenting, the stakes are higher: Not reading a bedtime story or skipping a day of preschool may seem momentarily insignificant, but small gaps in learning time , making it increasingly . 

Why do well-intentioned parents sometimes struggle to follow through with engaging their children, and how can behavioral science help parents close the intention-action gap?

The field of offers insights into what creates intention-action gaps and identifies practical ways to bridge the gap. Many of these approaches rely on the concept of “” — subtle changes in how choices or information are presented that make the desired action easier or more likely to occur. In parenting, nudges often come in the form of reminders, feedback, or other simple tools sent through digital technology. These nudges acknowledge that busy parents aren’t failing to engage their children in learning activities that are key to the child’s future because they lack love, knowledge, or good intentions; rather, daily life is full of friction and temptations.

has shown that “present bias,” a manifestation of the intention-action gap, is central to parenting choices. Parents, like everyone, often prioritize immediate rewards over future benefits. Raising a child requires long-term effort; while considerable research shows that reading books to a toddler boosts their language skills in the future, the benefits of today’s actions can be long delayed. Meanwhile, daily distractions and fatigue demand immediate attention.

This bias can cause parents to focus on the “now” rather than the “later,” even when they value activities like reading. In our study, we tackled present bias by sending parents text-message prompts and goal-setting reminders to read to their children from a digital library that we provided to parents. These reminders were intended to “bring the future to the present.” Parents who received these reminders read to their child over twice as much over six weeks compared to parents who received the digital library with no reminders.

Notably, the parents who gained the most were those who exhibited present-biased preferences in assessments given before the experiment began. In other words, the parents most prone to procrastinate on reading were the ones who saw the greatest improvements when we helped them overcome present bias. Parents without present bias already read regularly, so the extra reminders had little impact for them.

Tools to Help Parents Follow Through

Another successful example of narrowing the intention-action gap from our research lab is the “” study, a randomized controlled trial we conducted to increase attendance in Chicago’s publicly funded preschool programs. Our intervention sent personalized text messages to parents over 18 weeks, indicating the number of days their child had been absent and highlighting the learning opportunities they missed while not in school. The messages reminded parents of their commitment to adopt good attendance habits and their goals to help their child develop kindergarten readiness skills.

For children whose parents received these messages, preschool attendance increased by about 2.5 school days, and chronic absenteeism — a measure of missing 10% or more of the school days in a school year — decreased by 20% compared to the children of parents who did not receive the messages. The helped align parents’ actions with their long-term goals. This type of light-touch program is inexpensive and easy to scale, making it a for education policymakers aiming to reduce early absenteeism.

Technology offers a promising solution to close the intention-action gap. Our recent study provided families with a tablet preloaded with a digital library of over 200 high-quality children’s books. The tablet had no apps or internet access beyond the library to reduce distractions. The goal was to remove the obstacle of finding new books and to make shared reading as easy and engaging as possible. 

The impact on children’s language skills was notable. Over an 11-month trial, low-income children whose families received access to the digital library showed approximately 0.3 standard deviations more progress in language skills (equivalent to three months of language learning on the test we gave to children) than those who did not, moving from roughly the 41st to the 50th percentile nationally. Notably, the treatment impact was significantly larger – 0.50 standard deviation, equivalent to approximately five months of language learning on the test we gave to children – for parents who exhibited present-biased preferences in assessments administered before the experiment began (as in the PACT study). Sometimes the best way to narrow the intention-action gap is to reduce barriers to the intended action. 

From Research Insights to Early Childhood Policy

These go beyond academics: They offer a for early childhood policy. Traditional parenting programs often assume that if parents are informed about the benefits of their decisions or provided with free resources, they will naturally act accordingly. However, information and resources alone don’t always lead to behavior change, especially when cognitive biases interfere. 

Relatively low-cost, behaviorally informed interventions can directly address the intention-action gap. For example, text-message programs can be through school districts, pediatric clinics, or social service agencies to encourage behaviors like daily reading, conversations, or preschool attendance. , such as the library tablet in the CAPER study, could be integrated into public early education programs or library initiatives to ensure families have access to books and find them easy and enjoyable to use. 

Such approaches can promote equity by focusing on parents who face more cognitive biases or for whom these biases cause the most harm. Behavioral tools can help before children reach kindergarten, which research shows is the most effective and cost-efficient time to empower parents as active partners in their children’s development.

Recently, Too Small to Fail released a outlining impact and lessons learned over the past decade. According to the report, research demonstrates that parents and caregivers talk, read and sing more frequently with their children after taking part in Too Small to Fail programming in laundromats, grocery stores, waiting rooms and other settings. One of the key takeaways is that trusted messengers, such as pediatricians and librarians, are the “secret sauce” to supporting families with young children in early literacy. 

Too Small to Fail founder Hillary Rodham Clinton was a child advocate before going into politics. , she helped research the 1974 report , which examined the living conditions of American children and surfaced a number of barriers facing them. The findings in that report shaped her views on education and guided her in shaping the mission of Too Small to Fail. 

Clinton is still actively involved in the work, alongside her daughter Chelsea Clinton, who chairs the initiative’s advisory council of advocates and researchers. The council, which includes Dana Suskind, founder and co-director of at the University of Chicago and Joan Lombardi, principal advisor at has helped Too Small to Fail scale its impact and stay abreast of the science behind reading. 

“As a pediatric surgeon and social scientist who believes deeply in the power of parents and caregivers to build children’s brains,” says Suskind, “I am tremendously grateful for their work. Too Small to Fail meets families where they are, recognizing and honoring their inherent wisdom, and supporting that wisdom with the resources every child deserves. It continues to harness one of our most precious and infinite resources: the support of loving grown-ups to unlock every child’s full potential.”

Lombardi adds: “Too Small to Fail has been a persistent voice in supporting parents’ engagement with their young children and pioneering innovations in communities across the country.”

In an interview with Mark Swartz, Chelsea Clinton recollects her experiences over the first decade of Too Small to Fail and sets her sights on the coming years. 

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Swartz: What stands out to you from visiting laundromats, libraries and other Too Small To Fail sites?

Clinton: I have so many memories. What stands out is just the joy. There’s so much joy on the kids’ faces and also the parents’ or grandparents’ faces when they’re reading to their children in laundromats, whether in Chicago or New Orleans or Philadelphia. And while I’ve been to quite a few of these sites, it’s only a fraction of the hundreds that we helped build. There’s such a warmth and such a sense of welcoming and hospitality. 

Swartz: What do you hear from the parents and grandparents?

Clinton: Real enthusiasm and excitement and gratitude that there now are more books that they’re able to read with their kids and in whatever language they need to be able to read them, to have those bonding moments, those teaching moments with their kids.

Swartz: You’ve talked to producers and writers about embedding Too Small to Fail messages into their shows, and that has had a tremendous reach. How did those partnerships work?

Clinton: I have this vivid memory of my mom and I going to Hollywood and speaking on a panel with lots of writers and showrunners and creative folks. We discussed the importance of reading, singing and talking to kids at every age whenever possible. Whether Orange Is the New Black or Jane the Virgin or Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, they found ways to embed the messages in ways that were organic for them. We believe it has been powerful for the audiences.

Swartz: And they didn’t say, “Thanks, but we don’t need your advice on how to create a story”? 

Clinton: We’ve had really wonderful, delightful, productive conversations with folks in Hollywood over many years. We’ve talked about the importance of parents or grandparents and anyone that’s around [young children] — about the understanding that we are effectively their first teachers. We’ve also had really productive conversations in Hollywood about the ways in which climate change affects our most vulnerable [Americans], including infants and toddlers. We always feel that if we’re sharing recent research and evidence, if it’s something that is in the context of how they’re thinking about future episodes of the future arc of a show, maybe it will be incorporated at some point. 

Swartz: Besides your own mother, who have your early childhood heroes or influences been?

Clinton: Certainly my grandmothers. I was very, very close with both of my grandmothers. I was really lucky to spend a lot of time with each of them as a kid and could not imagine my childhood without them. I only wish that I could have known my dad’s mom as an adult. I always had great teachers, and I remember preschool being so fun. I have quite clear memories of my kindergarten and first grade teachers, Mrs. Minor and Mrs. Mitchell. 

Swartz: How has your own motherhood journey influenced your understanding of the early childhood issues that Too Small to Fail addresses?

Clinton: Becoming a parent didn’t shift what I cared about as much as it sharpened everything I cared about. I cared even more intensely about early childhood education and supporting what parents and other caregivers need to be the best teachers. … Candidly, I didn’t know that I could care any more about the things that I already cared about, and then I became a parent and somehow discovered that I could. That was a revelation to me. Everything feels even more intense because it now feels so personal, because now it’s about my kids and their cohort and the world that they’re growing up in.

Swartz: What are you most excited about for the next 10 years of Too Small to Fail?

Clinton: I’m most excited about continuing to build on what’s working. We have a lot of research now that [shows that] what we’re doing is working, so we should do more of it. We should also be open to whatever our remarkable community suggests that we should try next.

Through a unique collaboration between the and , the community now ranks 12th in state literacy, up from 31st just four years ago. This dramatic improvement wasn’t magic — it was the result of a systematic, community-wide approach to literacy that could serve as a model for districts nationwide.

The key to our success? A comprehensive public-private partnership that treats literacy as a community mission rather than just a school district initiative. The Learning Alliance, a nonprofit based in Vero Beach, has created an integrated support system that extends from birth through elementary school and beyond.

Its partnership with the school district works because it addresses literacy from multiple angles all in service of one goal — 90% of students reading on grade level by the end of third grade. 

To achieve this goal, the alliance funds 25 literacy coaches and reading interventionist positions within the district, ensuring that every school has dedicated expertise to implement the science of reading in grades K through 3. The district provides similar support in older grades. 

But that’s not all. The nonprofit engages families with children from birth to age 5, providing more than 5,500 age-appropriate books and 1,700 learning kits annually to under-resourced families. It also supports robust after-school and summer tutoring programs through the Moonshot Academy, where students show 50% more growth in reading compared to their peers not in the program. The afterschool program runs in the district schools, largely with district teachers compensated for their extra work by the Alliance.

The results speak for themselves. Indian River has doubled the percentage of A- and B-rated schools from 47% to 95%, and our third-grade reading scores now outperform the state average by nine percentage points (64% versus 55%). These aren’t just statistics — they represent thousands of children who now have the foundational skills they need to succeed in school and life.

Critical to this success has been the Moonshot Community Action Network, a coalition of over 150 local leaders who ensure that early literacy remains a community priority. This network includes business leaders, healthcare providers, faith-based organizations, and community advocates who understand that literacy is fundamental to our community’s future prosperity.

For superintendents and district leaders reading this, we offer several practical recommendations:

• First, look beyond traditional funding models. While public education funding is essential, strategic partnerships with community organizations can provide both financial resources and expertise that complement district capabilities.

• Second, invest in literacy coaches and reading interventionists. Having dedicated literacy experts in every school creates a support system for teachers and ensures consistent implementation of evidence-based reading instruction.

• Third, extend your teaching time. Our Moonshot Academy afterschool program creates opportunities for students to make more progress in less time. It pairs intensive tutoring with enrichment activities to boost engagement, and it works: students in the afterschool program average at least 50% more growth in reading than peers who do not participate. 

• Fourth, expand your reach beyond school walls. The family partnerships program demonstrates that literacy support must begin before kindergarten and continue outside school hours to be truly effective.

• Fifth, build community coalitions. The broader community’s investment in literacy creates a sustainable ecosystem of support that survives changes in school leadership or funding fluctuations.

For philanthropists and community organizations, think beyond traditional grant-making. The most effective partnerships involve deep collaboration with schools, shared accountability for outcomes, and a long-term commitment to the community.

Our journey hasn’t been without challenges, but it’s proven that significant improvements in literacy are possible with the right partnership model. The students’ success isn’t just about test scores – it’s about creating a foundation for lifelong learning and opportunity.

The pandemic may have created unprecedented challenges for education, but it has also shown us the power of community collaboration. In Indian River County, we’ve demonstrated that when schools and community organizations work together with shared purpose and accountability, we can achieve remarkable results.

The question isn’t whether this model can work. The question is: Who will be next to replicate it?

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Sweeping changes to literacy instruction are underway in New York City, with all elementary schools for the first time using this September.

By requiring instruction in line with long-standing research about how children learn to read, known as the , the city is hoping to boost its literacy rates. Just under half of students in grades 3-8 , according to state exams.

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After Chancellor David Banks took the helm of the nation’s school district more than two years ago, he said the city’s approach to reading instruction and has since made the curriculum overhaul his signature initiative. His other policies, , pale in comparison to fixing reading instruction.

“None of that will even matter if kids can’t read,” he said.

But what do the new curriculums look like? How do caregivers know if they’re working? And what should you do if your child continues to struggle?

Here are answers to some common questions caregivers may have about the changes, based on interviews with reading experts and educators.

How were schools teaching reading before?

Stretching back decades, the Education Department developed by Teachers College professor Lucy Calkins, which viewed reading as a natural process that could be unlocked by exposing students to literature. Teachers delivered mini-lessons on a specific skill then encouraged students to read books at their individual levels to practice what they learned.

But most reading experts say the approach did not include enough emphasis on teaching children the relationships between letters and sounds, known as phonics, leaving behind a substantial share of students who would benefit from more explicit sound-it-out lessons.

Calkins’ curriculum also , such as encouraging students to use pictures to guess at a word’s meaning rather than relying on the letters themselves. Though she has since on phonics, the city’s public schools will no longer be allowed to use her program.

What is the philosophy behind the literacy shift?

All schools are now required to deliver regular phonics instruction that explicitly teaches the relationship between sounds and letters. Those lessons, which are prioritized , typically run about 30 minutes a day.

In addition to those lessons, schools must also use one of three approved reading programs that are designed to help build vocabulary and comprehension by exposing students to social studies and science topics alongside works of literature and poetry. that students are more likely to understand what they’re reading if they’re already familiar with the underlying topic. The new curriculums are designed to build students’ background knowledge across a range of domains.

“You should, as a parent, ask your kid about the books that they’re reading and be prepared to hear an earful from your child about how they read about Jacques Cousteau and the discovery of the giant squid — or to know a whole lot about pollinators,” said Kristen McQuillan, who consults with districts on literacy efforts and is affiliated with the Knowledge Matters Campaign, which raises awareness about the role of background knowledge in reading comprehension. Students should be bringing home writing about those books, too, she added.

Under the old curriculums, students often picked books that interested them from the classroom library that were targeted at their individual reading levels. Although the city is moving away from that leveling system — and instead having kids spend more time reading common books as a class — the practice may continue to some degree. Teachers will still have access to those leveled books, though they have been asked to organize them by topic or genre. Into Reading, the most widespread curriculum under the new mandate, also offers its own set of leveled books that schools can use.

What are the three new curriculums and which one is my school using?

The curriculum rollout began during the 2023-24 school year with 15 of the city’s 32 local school districts required to use one of the three reading programs: Into Reading from the company Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Wit and Wisdom from Great Minds; and EL Education from Imagine Learning.

Beginning this September, all elementary schools must use one of those three programs, with local superintendents in charge of making curriculum decisions for all schools in their district. Here’s what each district is using:

What do the three new reading curriculums look like?

Into Reading from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Into Reading is . Schools in 22 of New York City’s 32 local districts must use it. The most traditional of the three curriculums, Into Reading is organized as an anthology-style textbook packed with passages specifically designed to help teach reading skills, an approach known in education jargon as a “basal reader.” Some caregivers may be familiar with the approach from .

Unlike the other two curriculums, Into Reading includes a Spanish-language version. And it covers a lot of ground, with roughly that include how plants live and grow, the relationship between sports and teamwork, and how a person’s experiences shape their identity. Some educators say that breadth can be helpful since students may be more likely to encounter subjects that pique their curiosity.

Kate Gutwillig, a veteran New York City educator who has taught all three of the mandated curriculums, recalled one instance where a fifth grader who was reading at a second-grade level was captivated by an Into Reading lesson on Greek mythology.

“He was able to read the Medusa myth and that kid just came to life — he wanted to read aloud and write,” she said. “There’s something good about having a lot of variety.”

Still, Into Reading has earned criticism from some observers, parents, and educators who contend that it is weaker than the other two curriculums because it , and relies too heavily . A New York University report also warned that its materials are not culturally responsive, a claim the company .

Wit & Wisdom from Great Minds

Wit & Wisdom is known for building students’ background knowledge by going deeper into a smaller number of units. The curriculum includes — ranging from civil rights heroes to a study of outer space — devoting about 6-8 weeks per topic.

The curriculum exposes students to a mix of fiction and nonfiction texts. It also stands apart for including a “close examination of artwork related to the core topics,” .

“You tend to see a bit more of that literary fiction,” said McQuillan. One fourth grade unit called “the great heart” introduces students to the biology of the heart as muscle that pumps blood while weaving in the figurative meaning of the heart as a representation of emotion and love.

Some educators say adapting to Wit & Wisdom is challenging. The lessons can be lengthy, requiring teachers to figure out how to cut it down to be more manageable. And, as with all three curriculums, students are generally expected to read the same books on their grade level as a class, a challenge for students who don’t yet have strong reading skills.

“I think that’s our biggest struggle,” one teacher who was implementing Wit & Wisdom previously told Chalkbeat. “We’re coming in assuming that the kids have the skills to do this.” (If you’re interested in a deeper look at Wit & Wisdom, .)

EL Education from Imagine Learning

Similar to Wit & Wisdom, EL Education deploys a handful of units each year that students spend several weeks unpacking. Formerly called Expeditionary Learning, the curriculum and includes lots of opportunities to write. Two kindergarten units , for instance, and a significant chunk of second grade is devoted to pollination.

The emphasis on exploring the outside world, McQuillan said, “tends to be a feature of EL that kids get excited about.”

Janina Jarnich, who teaches second grade at P.S. 169 Baychester Academy in the Bronx, that one of her favorite lessons to teach focuses on paleontology and fossilization.

“By the end of the module, they write a narrative where they are the paleontologist that makes the greatest discovery of their lives,” she said. The lesson “lends itself to lots of hands-on experiences, like making imprints and doing a ‘dinosaur dig.’” She also takes her students on a field trip to the Museum of Natural History.

Some educators noted that the curriculum can be overwhelming — an issue that some teachers said is true of many curriculum packages.

“The weakness is the difficulty of navigating all of the materials,” Jarnich said. “Even after using EL for four years, it can still be tricky to find the end-of-unit assessments and to make sure you have all of the materials necessary for each lesson.”

Are there any exceptions to the new curriculum mandate?

So far, only , a K-8 gifted and talented program. However, some other school communities .

Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, .

How do I know if the new curriculum is working for my child?

Schools are expected to screen students three times a year to assess their reading skills. Caregivers can find the results of those assessments in their , which indicate or needs more support to be performing at grade level. (These screeners are supposed to replace that assigned students a reading level from A-Z.)

Multiple experts said teachers are generally also doing more regular assessments on top of that, so it’s a good idea to get in touch with them if you have any concerns.

“The answer is: ask the teachers,” said Susan Neuman, a literacy expert at New York University. They should have a sense of whether a student needs extra help based on a range of assessments beyond the screeners, she added.

What should I do if I’m concerned about my child’s progress?

Experts said caregivers should reach out to their child’s school if they suspect their child is behind in reading or if their screener results suggest they are below grade level.

“A plan needs to be put in place, so parents do need to serve as their child’s advocate,” said Katie Pace Miles, a literacy expert at Brooklyn College who . “I would ask about what skills can be reinforced at home, and what materials can be provided to the caregivers.”

She said parents should ask their schools to outline whether they are offering their child extra small-group or one-on-one instruction, how many days a week it’s offered, and how long each session is.

“Parents should not be left in the dark,” Miles said. If a student continues to struggle despite efforts to provide extra help, caregivers may want to ask for more detailed assessments of their child and potentially request a special education evaluation, she said.

This was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at . Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

Students who started school during or after the COVID-19 pandemic have a harder time saying goodbye to their parents when they drop them off, Plains Independent School District Superintendent Robert McClain said.

Third graders are behind in their reading, teacher Heather Harris said, so the district hired a reading specialist to work with their youngest students.

They’re also struggling in math, San Antonio ISD Superintendent Jaime Aquino said.

“When I go into classrooms of students who are currently fourth graders or fifth graders who were either kindergarten or first grade [during the pandemic], you can see that there is a lack of mathematical fluency around basic facts,” he said.

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Texas school administrators, educators and education policy experts say they’re seeing troubling signs that students in the earliest grades are not doing as well academically as children who started school before the pandemic. State and federal officials devoted significant resources to help students affected by the pandemic but they mostly focused on older children whose schooling was disrupted. Experts worry that the state’s youngest students will have a harder time catching up without intervention.

A recent by Curriculum Associates Research looked at national academic growth trends in the last four years and compared them with pre-pandemic data. It found younger students — like those who were enrolled in kindergarten or first grade in 2021 — were the furthest behind in both reading and math compared to their peers before the pandemic.

According to the report, those students may be struggling because of disruptions in their early childhood experiences, difficulties building up foundational skills like phonics or number recognition, problems engaging with virtual learning during the pandemic or insufficient resources being devoted to help children in the earliest grades.

Aquino, San Antonio ISD’s superintendent, said attendance in early grades is lower than before the pandemic, which is impacting foundational learning.

“We told families to stay home during the pandemic. Now we’re sending the message: You have to be in school,” Aquino said.

Low pre-K enrollment during the pandemic may be another factor. Children who attend pre-K are nearly twice as likely to be ready for kindergarten, said Miguel Solis, president of the education research nonprofit Commit Partnership.

In the school year 2019-2020, there were 249,226 students enrolled in pre-kindergarten in Texas, according to state data. This number dropped by nearly 50,000 in the following year.

Low academic attainment can compound in ways that become increasingly difficult to fix. Harris, the Plains ISD teacher, said it’s hard for third-grade students who fall behind to catch up because their teachers will likely not be able to spend much time helping them develop foundational skills they already should have learned.

“Pre-K through second, you’re learning to read, and then third grade on up, you’re reading to learn. So there’s that huge switch of what you’re teaching,” she said.

Mary Lynn Pruneda, an education analyst at the public policy think tank Texas 2036, said the Curriculum Associates Research study raises concerns about young learners but it’s difficult to pinpoint the impact in Texas because of a lack of data.

“We have very limited data on how younger students are doing that’s consistent across grade levels,” Pruneda said.

Without data to help diagnose the problem, students are being set up for continually low results in the state’s standardized test, she said.

There are some indications of how the problem might be manifesting in Texas. In Dallas County, for example, declines in math and reading scores between 2023 and 2024 were most acute among third graders, who would have been in kindergarten during the pandemic, Solis said.

Solis said the state needs to start collecting literacy data for early grades to identify students who are not on track and intervene. He’s hopeful because some lawmakers in both the Texas House and Senate have already expressed interest in taking a close look at how young students learn foundational skills, he said.

“We can’t wait until the third grade STAAR to see how younger students are progressing,” he said.

Pruneda said one step Texas can take to start reversing the trend is raising spending in public education — something educators are desperate for — to help school districts hire and retain the best teachers possible. The superintendents of both Plains and San Antonio ISDs said it is imperative for the Texas Legislature to approve a significant funding boost next year after lawmakers failed last year to do so amid .

High-impact tutoring, like the one legislators mandated for grades 3-8, may also help early-grade students, she said.

The full program is now LIVE for the , happening Sept. 5–7 in downtown Austin. Explore the program featuring more than 100 unforgettable conversations on topics covering education, the economy, Texas and national politics, criminal justice, the border, the 2024 elections and so much more.

This article originally appeared in at .

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

The Iowa Department of Education announced Wednesday that some elementary schools will use an AI reading assistant to help with literacy tutoring programs.

The department made a $3 million investment into for the use of a program called EPS Reading Assistant, an online literacy tutor that uses artificial intelligence technology. Iowa public and non-public elementary schools will be able to use the service at no cost through the summer of 2025, according to the department news release.

“Reading unlocks a lifetime of potential, and the Department’s new investment in statewide personalized reading tutoring further advances our shared commitment to strengthening early literacy instruction,” McKenzie Snow, the education department director said in a statement. “This work builds upon our comprehensive advancements in early literacy, spanning world-class state content standards, statewide educator professional learning, evidence-based summer reading programs, and Personalized Reading Plans for students in need of support.”

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The program uses voice recognition technology to follow along as a child reads out loud, providing corrective feedback and assessments when the student struggles through a digital avatar named Amira. According to the service’s website, the program is designed around the “Science of Reading” approach to literary education — a method that emphasizes the teaching of phonics and word comprehension when students are learning to read.

Gov. Kim Reynolds and state education experts, including have said that this teaching strategy will help improve the state’s child literacy rates, pointing to reading scores increasing in following the implementation of “science of reading” methods.

In May, Reynolds that set new early literacy standards for teachers, as well as adding requirements for how schools and families address when a student does not meet reading proficiency standards. These requirements include creating a personalized assistance plan for the child until they are able to reach grade-level reading proficiency and notifying parents and guardians of students in kindergarten through sixth grade that they can request their child repeats a grade if they are not meeting the literacy benchmarks.

Reynolds said the law was a “to make literacy a priority in every Iowa classroom and for every Iowa student.”

The AI-backed tutor program is being funded through the state education department’s portion from the federal , part of a COVID-era measure providing states with additional funding for pandemic recovery efforts. The federal fund allocated more than $774 million to Iowa in 2021.

In addition to the new AI-backed programming available, the fund money is also going toward Summer Reading Grants, for efforts to address summer learning loss and close achievement gaps. The elementary schools that won grants have all “affirmed their commitment to including the personalized reading tutor as part of their evidence-based programming,” according to the news release.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Iowa Capital Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kathie Obradovich for questions: info@iowacapitaldispatch.com. Follow Iowa Capital Dispatch on and .

This is why we partnered with our friends at the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading for a conversation — “Children’s Books: From Access to Opportunity” — to celebrate the power and joy of diverse home libraries, literacy-rich environments, the brain-building benefits of language development, and the importance of reading to babies and toddlers.

It was a powerhouse panel:

• Tabitha Blackwell, Executive Director,
• Norrine Briggs, Executive Director, North America, The Dollywood Foundation
• Alvin Irby, Founder and Executive Director,
• Iheoma U. Iruka, Professor of Maternal Child Health and Public Policy; Founding Director of the at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at UNC-CH
• Kyle Zimmer, First Book’s President, CEO and Co-Founder

Early Learning Nation contributor Leigh Giangreco moderated the panel.

Here are our takeaways:

1. Early childhood is the right time to celebrate diversity

Iheoma U. Iruka, provided the social and scientific contexts for the conversation. For example, the early years are a period of accelerated brain and language development, she noted, the ideal time to promote respect for diversity and the joy that goes with it.

Iruka — professor of Maternal Child Health and Public Policy and founding director of the Equity Research Action Coalition (as well as a mother of two) — cited the 2023 National Academies report, , which notes the benefit of “culturally relevant, identity-affirming and positive books for families to take home.”

She cautioned that books aren’t a silver bullet for all the challenges facing young children and their families, but they are a proven tool for fostering a love of reading.

2. Durham, North Carolina is “The City of Books”

Tabitha Blackwell, executive director of Book Harvest, described her organization’s work, which includes providing free books and resources in early learning and health care settings in Durham.

Altogether, Book Harvest provides 170 books over the first decade of a child’s life. Why all those books? “Because,” Blackwell says, “families feel isolated and crave more connectivity and guidance.”

Its program partners with families of Medicaid-eligible children. A randomized control trial conducted by Iruka found that 98% of families agreed that Book Babies helped to create a daily routine of reading. And its supports the transition into kindergarten, especially for bilingual families. “Family members are the ones doing the work,” Blackwell said. “We’re walking alongside them.”

3. Early learning starts at home—with a book

Norrine Briggs, executive director, North America of The Dollywood Foundation, said that has gifted 250 million books since 1995, and she played a video with the famed singer, author, actor and “Dreamer in Chief,” in which she declares, “If you can read, you can teach yourself anything.”

Briggs described the many ways her organization brings about collaboration among states, counties, school districts, public libraries and nonprofits — all in the name of creating moments where young children read with someone they know loves them.

Receiving a book in the mail every month, she said, “lays the foundation for consistent parent involvement.” Some children can’t even wait to get inside the door before they tear open the package addressed to them.

4. Reading should be fun

Alvin Irby, founder and executive director of Barbershop Books, promoted the idea of child-centered curation — that is, Black boys are the best judges of what Black boys do and do not want to read. and Dav Pilkey’s series probably won’t win the Nobel Prize for Literature, but these are the titles that help children become what Irby called captains of their own reading journeys. “Boys like things that are gross,” Giangreco chimed in. “You have to lean into that.”

Leveraging the cultural power of barbershops in Black communities, Barbershop Books currently operates in 20 cities. Early literacy expert Susan B. Neuman recently conducted a two-year evaluation in Philadelphia and found that Black boys exposed to books through the program were more likely to identify as readers.

Irby, a former teacher as well as a charismatic stand-up comedian, called attention to the importance of centering the diverse ways we read. “My son likes to read on the toilet,” he confessed, “so I’m going to put a basket of books there.”

5. Diverse books lead to diverse readers

Matching Dolly Parton is no easy feat, but First Book, the nation’s largest community of adults in the lives of kids, has also distributed 250 million books. And like Barbershop Books, First Book also gets researcher Neuman’s seal of approval. Its represents what the researcher calls a “research-driven roadmap for educators to foster an environment that… will drive equitable education outcomes and be foundational for future success.”

Kyle Zimmer, First Book’s president, CEO and co-founder, explained that while giving books away is an admirable strategy, her organization practices a different one: “Traditional pricing models mean the best books are out of reach,” she said. And the publishing industry has a poor record on diversity.

“Industries respond to markets,” she continued, “so the went to publishers with a business plan for an aggregated market, a vibrant market.” Zimmer announced plans for quadrupling the number of kids First Book reaches, from 6.5 million to 26 million!

Like a third of the 600 districts across the state, the Hudson schools near Cleveland didn’t use science of reading books until Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and the state legislature ordered districts last summer to implement the curriculum by the 2024-25 school year.

Since the law passed, a state survey in the fall of 2023 found about a third of districts were already using the science of reading, a third were partly using it, and another third were using methods now banned by state law. 

Realizing a change in how reading was taught was inevitable even before the law was passed, Hudson district officials started searching for new books last spring — giving them more time than other districts still using lessons that have now fallen out of favor.

“It’s going to happen,” Hudson Assistant Superintendent Doreen Osmun recalled thinking. “So let’s dig in. Let’s roll up our sleeves. Let’s have our teachers, the experts in the classroom, make sure that they are looking at this thoroughly.”

How many districts currently out of compliance will follow Hudson’s lead and meet DeWine’s original target of the start of the school year to ax old strategies like balanced literacy and whole language in favor of the science of reading isn’t clear. 

But many won’t.

The change in how reading is taught in Ohio has proven not to be easy or quick —  despite DeWine’s urgency. Schools need time to replace old books and retrain teachers, many of whom learned other approaches in college and have used them for decades. It’s both a logistical and emotional challenge, made more complicated by about 200 Ohio school districts still using old teaching approaches when the law was passed.

Officials from some of those districts told �鶹��Ʒ they will take advantage of leeway in state law and approval from the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce to use the upcoming school year to implement science of reading.

When DeWine first announced the goal in his state of the state address in January 2023, the state had no idea how many schools were already using the science of reading and how many were using other approaches.

The law also relied on the state to take several steps before schools could even act. The biggest was to create a — books, workbooks, computer programs, videos  — based on the science of reading schools should use and a separate list of others that they now can’t. 

Knowing the timeline was tight, the legislature left the language vague and mandated the change “not later than the 2024-2025 school year,” offering flexibility. 

“Depending on where a district is, it may take longer to get to full implementation,” said DeWine spokesman Dan Tierney.

With the state education department being reorganized and its director not hired until December, everything was on hold until the first, incomplete list of approved materials came out in January. More materials were added in March and April. A list of approved intervention materials for students who are struggling was released in May. 

Chad Aldis, head of Ohio operations of the conservative-leaning Fordham Institute and a  backer of the shift to science of reading, said he understands the delay because of the work involved, particularly the “heavy lift” reviewing and approving books and other teaching materials.

“The idea that districts after February or March would be able to purchase new curricula, get teachers trained and be up to speed would have been a little bit ambitious,” he said. “I wish it could have been done sooner. But the process just took time so I think it’s a fair result that we see.”

He cautioned that it could take a few years to see gains in reading test scores as lessons change.

Among the previously-favored and popular books that are now not allowed are materials by Columbia University’s Lucy Calkins and the duo of university professors Irene Fountas and Gay Sue Pinnell, an emeritus professor of Ohio State University.

An intervention program known as Reading Recovery, which was brought to the United States by Pinnell, was also banned by the state, though advocates are suing to allow it.

After the survey, the department gave districts $64 million to help pay for new teaching materials – about $105 per student for elementary schools that need all new books and $8 for materials to help struggling students. Districts that already shifted to the science of reading and needed to make fewer changes received less money.

The department has also created a series of online lessons for teachers in the science of reading, requiring less than eight hours for some high school teachers and administrators and 22 hours for most elementary school teachers. So far, 33,000 teachers have completed that training and another 15,00 have registered for it.

Ohio’s training has been much smoother than in neighboring Indiana, where a required 80 hours and some early scheduling troubles flared into protests to the state board of education. Ohio’s online sessions are much more flexible than Indiana started with and take less time, so both major teachers unions in Ohio have reported only minor concerns.

Districts are also planning their own training as part of regular professional development as the year goes on.

In Hudson, a suburban district regularly among the state’s top scorers on state tests, the district tossed out now-banned books by Calkins as well as the Fountas and Pinnell “Classroom” reading materials it has used since 2020. The school board then purchased Benchmark Advance books approved by the state and by the national EdReports rating organization.

Osmun called the change “challenging,” since the state didn’t have a list of approved books until January.

Some districts needing to change have not moved as fast, including Solon, another suburban school district that often has the best test scores in the state. But Ohio education officials rated Solon as  “not aligned” with the science of reading. That district is waiting for the state to create a final list of approved materials before picking new ones, a district spokesperson said. 

The district isn’t sitting still, though. Solon teachers in the 2023-24 school year received training in reading and dyslexia, which is similar to science of reading training. More specific science of reading training will happen this coming year after the district picks new books.

Some low-scoring districts are also using the school year to change. The East Cleveland schools, one of the poorest in the nation and has been under academic supervision by the state, was also rated by the state as “not aligned,” but will use the upcoming year to select new books.

East Cleveland director of curriculum, instruction, and assessment  Tom Domzalski said the district spent last year on an already-planned overhaul of its math curriculum, so it left reading to this fall.

“My math is in a worse place than my reading curriculum,” he said. “We put our time and our energy into the area that needed that time and energy.”

He also echoed concerns of other districts about not wanting to rush after the state released its first list of approved materials in January.

“A good curriculum review process takes anywhere between six and 12 months,” he said. You can get it done in 90 days, too. If you’ve got the right group of people, and you’ve got folks that are in place for it, but how successful is it going to be?”