It started 12 years ago when Emily Angiletta, Stephanie Timek and Emily Silluzio were first time teachers at the Meriden, Connecticut school, staying late to plan lessons — long after the custodians shuttered the building. 

The teachers were hired under the leadership of a new principal with a new vision of what student success would look like in a low-income school. The three educators were in their 20s, fresh out of college and trying to figure out what it meant to be effective in the classroom.

More than a decade later, their friendship is like a sisterhood or a sports team: They call each other only by their last names and can practically finish each other’s sentences with a smirk and a head nod that says “yeah, that’s what I was going to say.” 

Together, they’ve experienced getting married, losing a parent and having children. They have  also lived through the highs and lows of the classroom – some years “soaring through expectations” and others questioning if their teaching had worsened. 

“We were all learning together, struggling together, learning from our mistakes, growing together,” Silluzio said, “and I think that’s a huge part of what led to our unity. We were in the same boat.”

The Barry teachers’ close relationships show not only what a culture shift in one school has done for staff, but also students. The friendship and strong working collaboration are the results of a bold plan set in motion by their former principal Dan Crispino, who helped transform the school from 5% proficiency to a in 2019. 

Now, Crispino has been tasked with scaling Barry’s academic success across the district. 

The Meriden school district, in many ways, is similar to Angilleta, Timek and Silluzio – learning, struggling and growing together. 

An almost decade-long overhaul of the district has been a systematic transformation – rooted in consistency across classrooms and campuses, accountability, hands-on oversight, relationship and trust.

It’s about finding ways to put their students “in a position to do things that people don’t believe are possible,” said Crispino, now the district’s director of school leadership. “Their backgrounds – all these things – are tough and you can’t control everything. But, what you can control is when they’re ours and that we’re giving them every single freaking thing possible to help them be successful and to get ahead of whatever challenges.”

While there’s often an expectation that students in urban districts won’t perform well because of , which affect school funding levels and supporting high student needs, Meriden is Connecticut’s and is beating the odds in how successful it’s been at teaching kids to read.

Despite being made up of nearly – more than three quarters of whom are from low-income families –  kids in seven of the district’s eight elementary schools are reading at higher levels than expected, according to a data project focused on Bright Spot schools launched by Âé¶čŸ«Æ·.

The data analysis highlighted schools that were among the top 5% of their state in outscoring their expected reading proficiency based on the percentage of children who qualified for free or reduced priced lunch. 

Connecticut was home to 25 exceptional schools. And of the state’s top five Bright Spot schools – three were in Meriden, including its highest need campus, Pulaski Elementary School, which has a poverty rate of 87.7% and expected just 16.4% of students reading on grade level but instead had nearly 54%.

In the last seven years, the school system has reworked its master schedule and implemented a rigorously supervised accountability model from district and school leaders who are in classrooms daily. Staff across the district have meticulously tracked student progress and have improved collaboration to make data more accessible among one another. 

The district has also incorporated instructional coaches, who are assigned by grade and travel between campuses. Their role, beyond meeting with educators several times a week, is bearing the weight of lesson planning every unit by outlining curriculum and other resources. 

The initiatives are part of an underlying mission: Alignment. 

No matter the school building or the classroom, all third grade classes across the district are learning the same material on the same schedule – even if it looks a little different teacher by teacher. They’re meeting with the same coaches and district leadership. 

System alignment through relationship building

Whether it’s children who have lost a parent, are experiencing homelessness, learning English or have a disability, Meriden staff have successfully worked with many such students — including Enzo, a third grade student at Pulaski Elementary School.

He doesn’t know what he wants to be once he gets older, but he knows he enjoys math and science. Enzo knows all about the Fibonacci Sequence, he said, explaining how “one plus one is two, and two plus one is three, and three plus two is five, and five plus three is eight,” going all the way up to 13 plus eight.

He admitted he thought reading was boring, but he couldn’t sit still when he talked about a book he’s reading at home.

“It’s called ‘What Cats Want,’” said Enzo, 8. “I’m on page 102.”

He’s more than halfway through the book and he likes to read “two or four” pages before he goes to sleep. His favorite tidbit of information from the book is to be careful when you let your cat outside.

“Number one, they can get run over. Number two, they can get lost. And number three, a stranger cat can attack them,” Enzo said, holding up three green marker stained fingers. But, “I remember [everything] from page one.”

Earlier this school year, Enzo lost his father. But through services at his school, including an individualized schedule that allows him to work for 30 minutes, then take a two minute break, he’s been able to stay on track in the classroom.

But before a student like Enzo can be successful, the needs of educators must be met.

Before taking on his central office job in 2020, Crispino spent more than 20 years as a first grade teacher and as a principal at Barry for a handful of years. When he began working as a district administrator, and was asked to mirror his success at Barry across campuses, union relationships were among his top priorities.

“I would never ask anyone to do anything that I wouldn’t do or have done myself,” Crispino said. “You don’t want surprises. They’re your human resource. They’re delivering what you’re trying to put forth. If you don’t have their support, then it’s never gonna work.”

Time and expectations were the biggest concerns from educators, both in Meriden and across the country, with surveys showing staff often feel like they’re in a school day.

Step one, in Meriden, was overhauling its master schedule, which originally “was not, physically, mathematically, possible,” Crispino said. Teachers were being asked to start reading at 12:30, the same time recess was supposed to end, so everyone’s transitional time looked different and there was no uniformity when students were actually supposed to be back in the classroom and at work. 

“That had to go away,” Crispino said. 

Though it seemed simple, just taking the first step in building in five minute transitions made the schedule “viable, conducive and real,” Crispino said, which helped align schools and teachers on expectations. They also built in a reteach day at the end of every unit for concepts that had students struggling.

Next was making oversight a norm. 

Crispino and his building principals spend most of their time in classrooms, at least four times a day. It began as a practice that at first “wasn’t pretty,” Crispino said, with many complaints from union leaders who said administrators spent too much time in the classroom, but has since shifted to educators stopping them when they walk by to see if they want to check their recent data collection.

“We’re not there to get you, there’s a difference,” Crispino said. “For support and accountability, we’re going to be there.”

Coaches that changed, and streamlined, the game

With administrators who better understand what’s going on in the classroom, it means resources can be allocated better. In Meriden, Crispino has spearheaded bringing in instructional coaches who are assigned by grade levels and rotate among campuses.

“When I was a first year teacher, 
 I had to go home and write all my little lessons. I had no one to help me. I was on my own. Your admin would come in doing observations and you’d either have it or you don’t,” Crispino said, “and that’s different now.”

Veronica Germe recalled being a teacher in the state capital’s public school system. In Hartford, a district home to more than 15,000 students, she remembered how she only saw her principal in her kindergarten classroom once during the entire school year and how “visibility is the biggest difference” between the two districts.

Germe, now a K-3 grade English language arts and math coach in Meriden, is part of a team of about a dozen other elementary instructional coaches who are responsible for supporting both new and veteran teachers by managing lesson planning and acting as a resource for implementation.

“We’ve almost become a catch all in the district for all the questions K-5,” she said. 

In many districts, instructional coaches may be brushed off by educators, but in Meriden, the group has worked hard to develop a relationship where they’re “almost like a teammate,” Germe said. “We’re not evaluating them. We’re there in it with them. We’re helping and we want to get to know the students too. 
 Their scores are our scores.”

The coaches organize curriculum into bite-sized emails that are delivered before a unit. The emails give an overview of the lessons for that unit, with breakdowns of assessments, test questions to pay attention to, review slides, videos and pacing guides. The emails also explicitly outline state standards, which allows teachers to better target their instruction.

They meet with teachers every week for at least one planning session for upcoming lessons, and observe and offer advice during classroom time. The group of coaches are also able to provide pacing calendars and resources to help teachers differentiate instruction based on class needs.

Last year, Connecticut implemented a that limited the curricula elementary schools could use to teach reading. When the district fully shifted its K-3 curriculum, it was painless – “phenomenal”even – Crispino said, thanks to a rollout supported by union leaders and the instructional coaches that gave educators “everything they would need.”

Despite budget constraints, the district has committed to leaving their elementary instructional coaches untouched, and funded by Title I, a federal grant for schools with high-concentrations of low-income students.

Investing in these coaches for early grades gives all teachers and children “equal footing,” Crispino said, where everyone gets the same emails and meetings, then gets to decide what they’re doing with the resources. 

In mid-March, if you walked into Meriden’s Pulaski, Nathan Hale, or Thomas Hooker elementary schools during its rotational reading blocks, you would’ve seen almost the same snapshot in the three campuses.

While teachers have autonomy on the use of laptops, printed worksheets or using dry erase boards, the 60-minute period across a dozen classrooms generally looked the same.

During the reading rotation block, a small group of students, usually six or less, would be sitting in one corner of the room working on answering questions about a text with their teacher. In another corner, you’d see a paraeducator, tutor or reading coach with another small group.

Scattered across the classroom, students would be working alone with a loose leaf piece of paper, called “evidence paper” and taking notes and analyzing stories about komodragons, the galaxy or Harriet Tubman. Pairs also worked on poster boards or white boards figuring out vocabulary, grammar, main ideas or comparing and contrasting two texts.

After 20 minutes, it was time to rotate, and every student knew what to do without being asked twice.

The scenes were a direct mirror of how everyone’s “speaking the same language,” as Crispino would say, in every elementary building across the district. 

“The coaching, the admin, the feedback, the curriculum that’s easily accessible, these emails, 
 eliminated a lot of excuses, and when we did that, we created this high standard of excellence,” Crispino said. The alignment “built independence. It built accountability. It built engagement. It built a vibrant learning environment.”

Innovation and scalability

Last year, Angilleta, Timek and Silluzio came into a meeting with administrators rehearsed and prepared to propose a departmentalized approach to third grade, where every student would rotate among the three educators for different subjects, similar to a middle and high school model. 

The presentation wasn’t even needed, Crispino and the school’s principal Kimberly Goldbach said, laughing. It was an automatic yes.

“Part of me was like ‘You’d be an idiot to change what’s working,’ but then I said, ‘You’d be an idiot to not be innovative and creative enough to know when there’s a time to think outside the box,’” Crispino said. 

It’s paying off. Their third grade class “had the highest scores they ever had,” Crispino said. “I think our scores are going to get even better because we’re being creative and innovative at the elementary level with departmentalizing.”

Beyond the academic piece, Timek also said she’s hopeful the approach will give children, particularly those with high-needs, more resources.

“It gives these kids another chance to have a teacher that they’re not stuck with all day long. You might have a closer relationship with one kid versus the other, but the other kid can go to another class and be closer with that teacher,” she said. “They have more adults in their corner that they trust and they know that’s providing them a good education and that they can go to if they have a problem.”

The district is working to add nearly two dozen more educators into the departmentalized approach.

When asked about the scalability of Meriden’s success in other schools across the state and country, Crispino, the district superintendent Mark Benigni and various principals said it was possible, but with a few caveats.

“Can districts have a schedule like we do? Yes, but you have to make sure you’re consistent with it. Can you have instructional coaches do the work we’re doing? Yes. Should admin be in rooms? Yes. Should the central office support and understand the work happening in the trenches? Yes,” Crispino said. “You have to push [your staff and kids] to an uncomfortable place, 
 to challenge each other, have professional dialog and have high expectations, but then give them the resources to be successful.”

The science of reading is being taught in classrooms across Ohio, but the state’s education department stresses it will likely take time to track students’ progress.

The Ohio Department of Education and Workforce is particularly interested in tracking the progress of the current kindergarten students.

“This year’s kindergartners will be the first class that all four years going up to third grade, they’re going to get the science of reading,” state education department director Stephen Dackin said to the Capital Journal. “That’s a pretty good barometer of where we will be as a state in terms of our implementation and then increased outcomes in literacy.”

Ohio’s science of reading law took effect in 2023 through the state’s two-year operating budget, which gave $86 million for educator professional development, $64 million for curriculum and instructional materials, and $18 million for literacy coaches.

Ohio school districts were required to teach the science of reading curriculum starting with the 2024-25 school year. The science of reading is based on of research that shows how the human brain learns to read and incorporates phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

“While we are certainly making great progress, this is not easy,” Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said earlier this month during his state of the state speech. “Retraining seasoned teachers, who were taught the wrong way and now have to learn new methods, is certainly an exercise in perseverance. This shift takes time.”

Ohio’s literacy scores were down from last year, with 61.3% of third graders reading at or above grade level compared to 64.5% from the 2023-24 school year, according to the most recent that were released in September.

“The report card data is lagging data, so it reports on data from the previous school year, and obviously, not all districts have probably been at the point where they’ve implemented the science of reading in their districts last year,” Dackin said.

He said the education department is not surprised by a dip in performance.

“Sometimes you’re asking teachers who’ve been teaching reading for 20 years to suddenly change what they’re doing and implement something that’s new to them,” Dackin said. “We know it takes a while to do this. That doesn’t mean there’s not a sense of urgency in our state, but we also anticipate that folks are going to need some support in helping to implement.”

have passed laws or implemented new policies related to evidence-based instruction since 2013, according to Education Week. the second-worst state for fourth-grade reading in 2013 to being ranked 21st in 2022 after implementing science of reading policy.

College prep programs

A unique facet of Ohio’s science of reading law is the third-party audit of teacher preparation programs.

“Our law is the toughest in the country,” DeWine said during his state of the state speech.

Ohio colleges and universities teacher preparation programs were required to be fully aligned with teaching the science of reading by Jan. 1, 2025, but 10 colleges were found to be not aligned, according to an .

Bowling Green State University, Central State University, Cleveland State University, Defiance College, Ohio Christian University, Ohio Dominican University, Ohio University, Ohio State University, University of Toledo, and Wright State University were not in alignment.

Ohio State University had , the most of any university, according to the audit.

“My concern is how seriously Ohio State is taking this process,” Ohio House Rep. Tom Young, R-Washington Township, said during a recent Ohio House Workforce and Higher Education Committee.

“By the way I look at it, you’re not taking it very seriously at all,” he said. “Things hang in the balance here, and I’m very serious about this, and I’m not going to play games with it.”

Erik Porfeli, professor and interim dean of Ohio State’s College of Education and Human Ecology, said the university is taking this seriously.

“We mobilized quickly and addressed all 17 (issues),” he said.

Binaya Subedi, professor and interim chair of Ohio State’s Department of Teaching and Learning, said there has been professional development with faculty every week this semester.

“We are concerned,” he said. “After the audit report, we have systematically reorganized our curriculum.”

Any college or university that does not become fully aligned by next December will have their approval revoked by Ohio Department of Higher Education Chancellor Mike Duffey.

“We need all universities in compliance or we risk incongruity of literacy outcomes throughout the state for our kids,” Ohio House Rep. Tracy Richardson, R-Marysville, said during a recent Ohio House Workforce and Higher Education Committee.

“Ohio State, you cannot drag on this issue. We will be following up.”

Five colleges and universities were found to be partially in alignment and 33 higher education institutions were found to be in alignment, according to the audit.

“I have confidence that every college will be in full compliance by the end of this year,” DeWine said during his state of the state speech.

Having educator training programs be compliant with the science of reading means school districts won’t have to retrain teachers, Dackin said.

Parents for Reading Justice and OH-KID President Brett Tingley said holding the universities responsible is real accountability.

“Our literacy crisis does not begin in the classroom—it begins in teacher preparation programs,” she said during a recent Ohio House Workforce and Higher Education meeting.

“When a child learns to read, you change the trajectory of that child’s life, and when a state gets reading right, you change the trajectory of the state itself.”

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

Lawmakers in Lansing are moving aggressively to address Michigan’s K-12 literacy crisis with multiple pieces of legislation that target training for teachers, retention for struggling third graders, and consequences for teacher preparation programs.

The legislative action comes as Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has made addressing literacy a priority for 2026, her last year in office. During her State of the State address last month, Whitmer detailed steps already underway to improve literacy and recommendations in her budget proposal for the coming fiscal year. Among them is additional money she wants to invest in high-impact literacy tutoring, high-quality curriculum, literacy training for teachers, and hiring of literacy coaches.

“This is a serious problem,” Whitmer said in the address. “Our kids deserve better.”

Just 38.9% of third graders were proficient on the English language arts portion of the Michigan Student Test of Educational Progress last year. It was the lowest performance of third graders in the exam’s 11-year history, Chalkbeat and Bridge Michigan reported.

On the national front, just 24% of Michigan fourth graders were proficient in 2024 on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, an exam known as the “nation’s report card.” That compares to 30% being proficient nationally. Michigan students’ performance has been stagnant and declining even as other states that have invested heavily in early literacy have improved. Michigan now ranks 44th in the nation for fourth-grade reading on the NAEP.

This isn’t the first time Michigan lawmakers have taken aim at the state’s challenges with literacy. In 2016, fueled by similarly troubling test results in reading, lawmakers passed a Read by Grade 3 law that required early intervention, the hiring of literacy coaches, and the retention of third graders struggling to reade. The retention rule has since been rescinded. Ten years since that broad effort, Michigan’s student literacy problem continues.

Here are the literacy initiatives being considered in Michigan

would require that by the 2031-32 school year, all K-5 educators who provide, support, or oversee instruction, including in literacy, must have been , which refers to a body of knowledge that emphasizes phonics along with building vocabulary and background knowledge. The bill doesn’t specify a specific training program, but says the current training being encouraged for Michigan teachers — Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling, or LETRS — meets the requirements of the legislation.

would require that, beginning Sept. 30, 2027, an individual seeking a teaching certificate in Michigan must have completed a teacher preparation program that included training in the science of reading.

would bring back the third-grade retention policy Michigan previously had in place. The bill would require struggling third graders, who would be identified based on their state test scores, repeat the grade. There would be some “good cause” exemptions, such as for students with disabilities whose educational plan team leader exempts them from the requirement. Michigan’s previous third-grade retention law, which went into effect during the 2020-21 school year, was rescinded in 2023 when Democrats controlled the legislature and the governor’s office. They argued the law was punitive and wasn’t working.

During a Wednesday hearing of the House Education and Workforce committee, Rep. Nancy DeBoer, a Republican from Holland who chairs the committee, said reading gives children the independence to pick up a book and go anywhere.

“Unless you’re in the state of Michigan and you’re three-quarters of the students in eighth grade who can’t read or do math in a competent manner,” she said. “That is a tragedy we are responsible for.”

DeBoer introduced the bipartisan bill that would make training in the science of reading a requirement for K-5 teachers.

The state has funded LETRS training, but thus far hasn’t made it a requirement. In September, the State Board of Education urged that it become a mandate for all K-5 teachers, saying the lack of one “has led to inconsistent participation of Michigan educators and inconsistent access to instruction based on the science of reading for Michigan’s students.”

The science of reading also figures prominently in a bipartisan bill introduced by Rep. Tim Kelly, a Republican from Saginaw Township. He described the bill as “a long overdue rescue mission for the next generation of Michigan’s workers, citizens, and leaders.”

Kelly said Wednesday that teacher preparation programs that don’t equip teachers with the tools needed to teach children to read have forfeited their right to operate in Michigan.

“We must stop subsidizing failure,” Kelly said.

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

Members unanimously approved the legislation, another sign that improving reading outcomes is a goal shared by both Republicans and Democrats. 

“This is how I learned how to read in the 1960s,” said Democratic Rep. Lucy McBath of Georgia. “When implemented correctly, the science of reading has been proven to help children learn to read and to write more effectively.”

The bill defines the science of reading as instruction that teaches phonics and phonemic awareness, and also builds vocabulary, fluency, comprehension and writing skills. The legislation would prohibit grantees from allowing , the practice of prompting students to identify words based on pictures or other clues in a sentence. The bill now moves to the full House.

“We should not be using federal literacy funds to promote discredited approaches to literacy,” said Rep. Kevin Kiley of California, a former Republican now running for reelection as an independent. 

The committee’s passage of the bill follows a before House appropriators in which both Democrats and Republicans the growth in reading outcomes in southern states like Mississippi and Alabama and asked experts how to spread that progress more broadly. The House proposal, however, is not the only effort underway to revamp the long-running Comprehensive Literacy Development Grant program. Some advocates say updated legislation should also require schools receiving grant funds to screen children for reading difficulties, inform parents whether their children are reading below grade level and assign reading coaches to low-performing schools.

“If we’re going to update it, let’s do it right,” said Ariel Taylor Smith, senior director of the National Parents Union’s Center for Policy and Action. She expects that a Senate plan would also ensure that teacher preparation programs follow the science of reading. “Let’s actually check in on whether teacher preparation programs are doing right by kids and using the most recent research.”

The nonprofit will dig further into those issues next week at on Capitol Hill featuring leaders from Tennessee and the District of Columbia, both of which have implemented reading reforms, like pointing districts to and providing to teachers on how students learn to read. 

An ‘implementation war’

Experts welcome Congress’ interest in the issue. But broad agreement that students need phonics-based instruction doesn’t mean the debate over the best way to teach reading is settled.

There’s still a reading war, but not between the phonics and whole language camps, said Karen Vaites, a literacy advocate who highlights lessons on reading reform from states that have seen growth on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. 

Now, she said, there’s an “implementation war.”

“Everybody agrees on phonics, but how much phonics? How much instructional time should it get?” she asked. “Do you do teacher training first or do you do curriculum paired with teacher training?”

Another proposal under consideration would require the U.S. Department of Education to reserve 10% of the grant awards for states whose fourth grade reading scores on NAEP rank in the lowest 25% for two consecutive administrations of the test. Vaites questioned whether such states would make the best use of the funds. 

“I worry a lot about throwing dollars toward the people that by demonstration have the least leadership capacity,” she said.  

, part of a 2010 federal budget agreement, was the first iteration of the state literacy grant program. , tracking awards to 11 states in 2017, found that not all states directed funds toward the highest poverty schools or used the money to buy reading programs based on research. Overall, the study found no significant differences in reading performance between schools that received the funds and those that didn’t, but there were small positive effects in Louisiana and Ohio. 

Striving Readers preceded the Comprehensive Literacy State Development grants, . But the program hasn’t been revised in a decade. Smith, with the National Parents Union, said the program should reflect the latest knowledge about what’s working in classrooms. 

“We’ve learned a ton about the science of reading,” she said.

Kari Kurto, national director of policy and partnerships for the Reading League, a national nonprofit promoting the science of reading, said the grant program is important because it’s one of the only ways state education agencies “can truly influence” what happens in classrooms. She said she appreciates that the bill includes her suggestion that instruction should also support students’ oral language skills. 

“This legislation will go a long way toward solidifying our nation’s commitment to evidence-based literacy instruction,” she said. “As a Democrat, I am so thrilled to see this movement finally receiving the bipartisan support we always dreamed of.”

Concerns over local control

While every state has taken some action to improve reading instruction, recent examples in two states show that concerns remain over one-size-fits-all approaches.

California passed a reading reform bill last year, but not before lawmakers agreed to that kept the state from mandating teacher training and state-approved curricula. The California Teachers Association said an earlier version of the bill would have interfered with local control and worried the plan overemphasized phonics at the expense of other literacy skills.

In Massachusetts, and object to portions of “that attempt to legislate the specific curriculum that schools would be expected to purchase and implement.” The is also opposed.

Any federal legislation won’t delve into specific reading programs. prohibits it, but Vaites said there are still ways to strengthen the grant program.

“I think we’re all trying to figure out the mechanism that is going to hold state leaders accountable in a way that isn’t just sprinkling dollars around,” she said. 

That, more or less, is the key to translating the science of reading into classroom practice, according to a new book by Doug Lemov, Colleen Driggs and Erica Woolway called . The authors work together at , an organization built on Lemov’s bestselling by the same name.

The new volume is meant to be a practical guide for classroom teachers. It offers concrete tips and embedded QR codes that take readers to videos of teachers putting those strategies into practice.

The authors are attempting to tackle a big problem: how to boost students’ knowledge. They cite suggesting that books — even children’s books — use more uncommon words than come up in most adults’ conversations.  In practice, that means, “most of the words a student learns in their lifetime will be learned via encountering them in their reading.” The more kids read, and the wider variety of books they are exposed to, the better off they’ll be.  

When people hear the “science of reading,” they might (mistakenly) equate it with phonics, but the authors spend little time on those core foundational skills. In fact, they take systematic phonics instruction in grades K-3 as the assumed starting point for literacy instruction and note that their book is about “the science of reading beyond phonics (emphasis theirs).”

This is an important shift. In , students have made impressive gains on early reading skills, thanks in part to widespread changes in state policy pushing for new curriculum and early screening  assessments. Meanwhile, fourth and eighth grade reading scores continue to decline, and 12th grade reading comprehension recently fell to all-time lows.  

Lemov, Driggs and Woolway suggest this is partly an assessment problem. If students can’t answer a question about a reading passage, that may be due to many potential problems. It might be because they didn’t understand the question 
 or they lacked key background knowledge embedded in the text 
 or they didn’t understand the vocabulary words 
 or the passage used an unfamiliar syntax that the student couldn’t follow.

While daunting, this multitude of potential reading challenges also helps provide a roadmap for improvements.

Lemov, Driggs and Woolway start with a critical foundation: attention. They note that, “You can only learn about what you are paying attention to. Attention is always a prerequisite to learning.” But reading and books are losing the war for kids’ time and attention. That’s partly why the authors support a “high text, low tech” approach to limiting distractions in schools, and why Lemov was of school cellphone bans.

So how can teachers get kids immersed in reading? It’s not as simple as putting good books in front of students, because if they can’t read the words on the page quickly and easily, they will struggle to comprehend and make meaning out of the text. The authors cite that found, “reading fluency predicted all school marks in all literacy-based subjects, with reading rapidity being the most important predictor.”

In response, the authors suggest that, “The best way by far to improve fluency is to provide students opportunities to hear, read and reread text aloud.” They cite the strong research evidence behind the practice of , which has positive impacts even for high school students.

Lemov, Driggs and Woolway devote a full chapter to how educators can put this research into practice, including teacher and student read-alouds, along with carefully constructed and monitored independent student reading time. For instance, a teacher helping children learn how to pronounce a new word during a read-aloud might say: “That word is pejorative. Try that: pejorative. Good. Pejorative means expressing disapproval.” This type of repetition can help students store the new word in long-term memory. In scientific terms, this process is called “orthographic mapping” and it’s a key component of how readers train their brains to connect words with their meaning.

Writing can also help students develop into strong readers, particularly when it’s tied to what they are already learning. But not just any writing; students need to be explicitly taught how to structure sentences, use precise vocabulary and write with style and panache. Drawing on concepts from , the authors suggest that teachers deploy “” exercises to help students extend their initial responses to explain why something is happening, any complicating factors and the final outcome.

Recently, there’s been a lot of in the literacy world about whether students should be taught to read using whole books or if it’s fine to mix books and excerpts or other short passages. On one side, researcher Tim Shanahan there’s no evidence that whole books are superior to excerpts at building reading ability or do more to build student reading stamina. He also notes that excerpts allow for greater breadth than a single book that may offer more in depth.

Lemov, Driggs and Woolway are unapologetic advocates for Team Book. They approvingly cite dyslexia researcher about how digital technologies are reshaping our brains, and how deep reading can counter those effects. They point out that stories help readers remember things better than just a series of disjointed facts and figures. And, channeling , they value the collective culture capital that students can access when they have read Shakespeare’s plays or George Orwell’s dystopian novels.

Regardless of which side of this argument you find more persuasive, Lemov, Driggs and Woolway have done teachers a service by providing numerous tips and examples of how to put the science of reading into practice in their classrooms. 

At an event to promote , the California Democrat revealed that he “cannot read a speech” and feels he hasn’t overcome dyslexia even after a decades-long struggle. His learning disability has in his home state, but Newsom’s phrasing would soon lead to a flurry of headlines.

“I’m just trying to impress upon you, I’m like you,” he told the Atlanta audience. “I’m no better than you. You know, I’m a 960 SAT guy.”

A raft of conservative influencers and media figures seized on the remark to accuse Newsom, currently in the 2028 Democratic primary field, of insulting his African American supporters by association with his own reading challenges. (Black residents make up a plurality of Atlantans, though the crowd Newsom addresses was reportedly .) South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, an African American Republican and close ally of President Trump, for stereotyping their own voters as academically underachieving. 

The tempest soon passed, with the governor dismissing the criticism as “MAGA-manufactured outrage.” Yet the episode stood out as a wobbly foray from a Democratic star into the evolving discussion around literacy education. 

Over the past few years, lawmakers in over a dozen states around what experts call the science of reading, a long-running corpus of research reflecting what is known about how people learn to recognize and use written language. Many of the early leaders in that movement have been Republican-controlled states like Mississippi and Louisiana, generating widespread plaudits for the so-called Southern Surge in standardized test scores. But the problems surrounding early literacy is one that voters around the U.S. recognize, with achievement in the subject still mired in a post-COVID slump.

With Democrats preparing for both a slew of gubernatorial campaigns this fall and a race for the presidential nomination next year, a question remains over how to address reading within the wider portfolio of K–12 education priorities. Most blue states, including California, have taken action on the science of reading, but some voices on the left have also been skeptical of the academic progress made in the South and elsewhere. With his personal background and national profile, Newsom could make the issue his hallmark. Some political observers are waiting for him and others to step into the spotlight.  

John White, the former state superintendent of Louisiana and a longtime voice for reading reforms, said he was puzzled by the apparent reluctance of leaders in both parties to put their achievements in that area front and center. He struggled to name a politician who has built a brand predominantly around the science of reading.

“Literacy is a complicated issue, not like cutting taxes or landing a new corporate headquarters,” White argued. “If you don’t articulate what’s been accomplished, and you don’t place big political stakes on it, there’s no political gains to be reaped from it.”

Linda Diamond, a former teacher and veteran advocate for evidence-based reading instruction in California, said she believed that lawmakers in most blue states have woken up to the need for improved reading legislation. The mission now, she added, was for presidential contenders like Newsom to preach that gospel from a national pulpit.

“I think the message to convey to Democrats is to take this up, make it a winning issue,” she said, acknowledging what she called her governor’s “unfortunate turn of phrase.” 

“Sure, look at the Republican states that have done so well on reading. But don’t let the myopia of thinking that it’s only Republicans distract from the fact that the greatest harm [of literacy failures] is being done to children in poverty.”

‘We need to see action’

Local Democrats’ legislative agenda on K–12 schools has been fairly busy over the last few years. 

In 2023, Newsom signed a bill to mandate dyslexia screenings for children between kindergarten and second grade, making California the 40th state to adopt such legislation. The legislature last year, passing a law that will provide elementary school teachers training in the science of reading and mandate the use of teaching materials that reinforce that pedagogy.

But those steps were taken only after years of intra-Democratic battles in Sacramento. The state as a laggard when it comes to literacy reforms, and previous bills had been sunk by a coalition of advocacy groups for English learners and the California Teachers Association. That faction argued that universal dyslexia screening would over-identify students with the disability and that mandates for evidence-based teaching would threaten educators’ autonomy.

Megan Potente, head of the nonprofit group Decoding Dyslexia’s California branch, said she was heartened by the recent legislative activity and considered Newsom an inspiration to children diagnosed with the condition. Still, she added, the party needed to speak more loudly on the issue — both in California and elsewhere.

“The topic has been elevated, as it needs to be, but we need to see action,” Potente said. “I hope that the Democratic Party can uplift it and not ignore the successes of other states, as they’ve done so far, and really hone in on how they’ve achieved what they’ve achieved.”

At least one prominent Democrat has questioned whether blue states have anything to learn from those that have pursued strategies based explicitly on the science of reading. While running her winning campaign for governor of New Jersey, then-Democratic Rep. Mikkie Sherill seen in Louisiana and Mississippi, calling schools there “some of the worst in the entire nation.” 

The bad feelings run both ways, with Republican Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves to send Newsom assistance from his state’s core of reading tutors after the book forum last week.

It’s possible that Newsom’s personal experience with dyslexia could give him credibility in speaking for the interests of the tens of millions of Americans who struggle to read. Reeves’s predecessor as governor, Phil Bryant, cited his own early setbacks in the subject as the reason he pursued a lengthy slate of new reading laws in 2013. But in the wave of partisan brickbats against Newsom, some have even whether he truly is dyslexic, pointing to alleged inconsistencies in previous recountings of when he was assessed. 

In his memoir, Young Man in a Hurry, Newsom describes grappling with the condition “one of the struggles of [his] life, writing that his difficulty spelling in childhood could cause him to “run out of the room screaming that I didn’t know what was wrong with my brain.”

White called Newsom’s frankness about his diagnosis a “double-edged sword” in the context of U.S. politics. Though he hoped it could lead to bipartisan cooperation with others who have focused on dyslexia awareness — including of Louisiana — he warned that the needs of dyslexic children could be “lost in the partisan swirl.”

“While the issue will benefit from the attention, it is almost inevitable that it will be wrapped up in questions of veracity and identity politics and ugliness,” he concluded.

But new studies bolster the evidence that done well, virtual models can be just as effective at moving students forward as face-to-face instruction.

In Massachusetts, first graders who spent 15 minutes a day online with a tutor from stayed on track a year later without additional tutoring, according to exclusively with Âé¶čŸ«Æ·. Students gained, on average, at least five additional months of learning over their expected growth. 

Another virtual program, , produced positive results for the lowest-performing students in the Kansas City, Missouri, schools. Students who received one-on-one tutoring from certified teachers made greater progress than those who didn’t receive the extra help, .Ìę

“Virtual models are getting stronger,” said Amanda Neitzel, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University and author of the Ignite Reading study. “If you go back just a few years, we had no examples of evidence-proven models and now we are getting them.”

In addition to following Ignite Reading for two years, she recently published a study showing that elementary school students in Texas and Louisiana who received virtual tutoring from , outperformed their peers and gained nearly three additional months of learning.

Results like those have broadened the conversation about how to bring students who are missing critical reading skills up to speed. 

“Tutoring can work in many ways and in different settings,” Kevin Huffman, CEO of Accelerate, said earlier this month at the nonprofit’s annual conference. 

When the organization began funding tutoring research four years ago, there were doubts, he said, about whether virtual programs could compete with in-person models. There’s more confidence in online versions now, but as with tutoring in general, progress depends on whether providers feature the components of a high-dosage program — meaning they were offered for roughly 90 minutes a week, during the school day with a trained tutor. Ensuring kids get all the tutoring hours a program is designed to deliver is also key.

“We obsess over student attendance,” said Jessica Reid Sliwerski, Ignite Reading’s founder. Now in 24 states, the program focuses on building phonics skills and reading fluency.

In the Johns Hopkins Ignite Reading study, which focused on 13 Massachusetts school districts, 85% of students who mastered foundational reading skills “during the crucial first grade window” were still keeping up at the end of second grade, Neitzel wrote. But if students didn’t meet expectations on time, they couldn’t catch up. Some were just too far behind.

“Many kids start our program still not knowing basic kindergarten skills, like letter names and sounds,” Sliwerski said. That means tutors have two years of content to get through.

To Sliwerski, the findings demonstrate that third grade, when many states decide whether students are strong enough readers to advance, is too late to intervene. If kids struggle to decode unfamiliar words, they won’t be able to comprehend more complex reading assignments. 

“We are so caught up in ‘reading by grade three’ that we aren’t honoring that kids are actually supposed to have fully cracked the code and be able to fluently read grade-level text at the end of first grade,” she said. “We act like kids have all the time in the world, when they don’t.” 

The 5,700-student Chelsea Public Schools was among the Massachusetts districts using Ignite Reading as part of a project funded by One8, a nonprofit that helped schools get high-dosage tutoring off the ground. The state the program.  

At first, “our teachers were a little skeptical,” said Superintendent Almi Abeyta, a former kindergarten and first grade teacher. “They were like, ‘We just got off of remote learning. Why are we going to put kids on a computer again?’ ” 

Then they saw the data. Students made similar gains on DIBELS, a widely used early literacy assessment, whether they were Black, Hispanic, English learners or had a disability, the study found.

‘A great opportunity’

Results like those are why the Fallbrook Union Elementary School District, near San Diego, California, is now spreading the program to all of its elementary schools as part of its First Grade Promise initiative. 

In a pilot, Fallbrook STEM Academy, which serves a high-poverty population, enrolled 20 second graders in the program. Many of the students speak Spanish at home, didn’t attend preschool and lack access to books, flash cards and other early reading materials, said Principal Ana Arias. She called each parent to ask that they get their children to school a little early so they could meet with a tutor.

“I phrased it as an opportunity — a great opportunity — but I needed their commitment,” Arias said. â€œWe have so many kids in the classroom and there’s so much need. It’s very rare to have a teacher meet one-on-one with a student every single day.” 

At the beginning of this school year, the 20 students were reading at a kindergarten level. By November, 19 had advanced to a first grade level, and she’s hoping they’ll be on par with their peers by the end of the school year. 

‘Transcend time zones’ 

The latest findings build on those that Harvard University and City University of New York researchers published last year. Whether tutoring is remote or in-person, , matters less than whether the tutor is well qualified and students attend sessions regularly.

Virtual models even have some advantages over in-person programs, experts say. Schools have to pay an in-person tutor whether or not the student is present. But virtual programs “transcend time zones,” Sliwerski said, and can redeploy a tutor to meet with another student.  

If the tutor is absent, “we have a substitute ready to go,” she said. “The technology underpinning the program ensures the child receives the exact lesson they were supposed to get.”

In Kansas City, consistency was key to the strong results. Students in first through fourth grade across 14 schools met with their tutors for 30-minute sessions at least three times a week for 20 weeks during the 2024-25 school year. The more sessions completed, the stronger the growth. Some students gained more than two months of additional learning and were less likely to be placed in special education. 

On average, the students who participated in the Hoot program and those in the comparison group began the school year two grade levels behind. While many are still struggling readers, their progress was significant, said Carly Robinson, a senior researcher at Stanford University and a co-author of the study.

“This wasn’t a boutique pilot,” she said. “It’s tutoring operating inside a district system that is messy, and it still proved to be effective.”

The district had to contend with technical glitches and unexpected snow days that forced students to miss some sessions.

Not all virtual programs have been able to overcome disruptions. 

In a large suburban district in Texas, some students meeting with virtual tutors during the 2021-22 school year did worse in reading than their peers who didn’t receive the intervention. Scheduling conflicts, like school assemblies, and tutor turnover, contributed to the disappointing results.

‘A higher bar’

Those challenges grow even more complex in the middle grades with electives and block schedules where students don’t have the same classes every day. But Rahul Kalita, co-founder of Tutored by Teachers, said maintaining relationships between tutors and students is essential. 

He hopes to contribute to the research base on virtual tutoring by participating in a randomized controlled study, funded by Accelerate and focused on math in two large Indianapolis middle schools. 

“It felt like the right opportunity to test our model under a higher bar of rigor,” he said.

On top of virtual programs refining their practices, districts, he said, “have also become more sophisticated buyers of tutoring.” Multiple districts across the country pay providers higher rates if students make measurable progress or pass state tests. 

In addition, there’s growing agreement that literacy tutoring, whether virtual or not, is more effective if it’s part of a strong early reading program that includes a curriculum based on the science of reading and screening students for dyslexia or other learning difficulties. 

“You can’t throw tutoring at the problem,” Sliwerski said at the Accelerate conference. “It has to be part of a very intentional system.”

In one classroom, students identified literal and nonliteral language: an exercise in labeling text features. Students defined the types of language and carefully annotated the text with examples of both kinds, concluding with a perfunctory discussion.

In the other classroom, students identified literal and nonliteral language, but went further, grappling with what Neil Armstrong meant by “one giant leap for mankind” and connecting the famous phrase to the broader significance of the moon landing. The teacher engaged students by asking them if they, third graders firmly located on planet Earth, were part of the “mankind” of whom Armstrong spoke as he stepped onto the moon. The power of the text and the instruction echoed through that classroom.

Both teachers used the same high quality instructional materials. Only one truly supported students in building meaning. Across classrooms and districts, this pattern repeats, according to a.

In nearly two-thirds of 111 observed comprehension lessons, the work that students did supported only surface-level comprehension — a literal or task-oriented, partial understanding of the text that stops short of the deeper and fuller comprehension work readers need to engage in to succeed in later grades and beyond. Only 24% of lessons fostered robust comprehension, the kind that integrates literal and inferential understanding into a cohesive mental model of the text.

In other words: the curriculum is there. The materials are being used. But, in many classrooms, the meaning-making is missing.

SRI’s research focused on four large school districts that have implemented high quality curricula — including Core Knowledge Language Arts, Wit & Wisdom, and EL Education — for several years. Researchers surveyed 539 teachers who reported near-daily use of their district-adopted curriculum.

Students in these districts are reading and discussing knowledge-rich texts. On paper, this is what policymakers hoped for when states began recommending adoption of such curriculum.

But SRI also sent observers into classrooms in those four districts. The observations showed that teachers spent high proportions of class time on comprehension instruction, and that lessons featured many opportunities for student participation and highly engaged students. These findings represent the notable successes of the districts’ comprehension-focused curriculum implementation. But the comprehension instruction often stopped with the task — finding details, answering literal questions, naming text structures — without guiding students toward the bigger ideas and themes that define deep comprehension.

High quality instructional materials can lay the foundation for robust comprehension instruction. But they cannot deliver it on their own.

This is not just an instruction problem; it’s a systems problem. Curriculum designers, district leaders and instructional coaches may be unaware of the extent to which systemic practices determine the depth of comprehension instruction. SRI’s findings point to multiple well-meaning school and district forces that unintentionally nudge instruction toward the shallow end.

SRI researchers found narrow “standards-aligned,” “data-driven” approaches guiding teachers to focus on discrete skills and individual standards, despite the reality that comprehension standards are not individually measurable. There’s also insufficient teacher time spent discussing, analyzing and mastering the texts — and their content — as they prepare to teach knowledge-rich curriculum

Administrator classroom walkthrough observation rubrics and checklists often reward the most visible aspects of a comprehension lesson — posted objectives, student participation andx curricular materials in use — rather than what actually matters: Are students making meaning?

In short, well-intentioned systems may be signaling to teachers that addressing standards, completing tasks and tests, and simply using curriculum materials are the most important goals. But SRI’s findings suggest that these efforts might distract teachers from the true goal of teaching students to understand texts.  

SRI’s analysis of the 24% of observed lessons that did foster robust comprehension points to six teaching practices that matter. These practices include engaging students in text-specific analysis, modeling meaning-making, leveraging prior knowledge, providing instructive feedback, creating opportunities for text-based reasoning and structuring peer learning. These practices were more tightly correlated with robust comprehension — suggesting they could be steps toward how teachers might shift their practice toward that goal.

None of these are new ideas. Educators have talked for years about modeling, text-based evidence, and rich peer-to-peer discussion. What is new is the clarity with which we observed how these practices must be oriented toward the big ideas of a text â€” not merely toward a task — to move instruction from surface to substance.

For example, in one lesson, a teacher used strong instructional modeling to show students how to collect key details and paraphrase a main idea. Then, she showed students how to do it in a history text about how new navigational technologies facilitated European exploration of the New World, truly unlocking robust comprehension.

For policymakers and system leaders who championed high quality materials as a lever for literacy improvement, these findings offer both a warning and a roadmap. Fortunately, the districts involved have the literacy leadership and professional learning infrastructure to make key shifts toward robust comprehension instruction. Three next steps for literacy leaders stand out:

1. Define and communicate a clear vision for robust comprehension instruction. Districts must go beyond “fidelity” to curriculum and articulate what deep understanding looks like for students and what it demands from instruction. Discussion, writing, knowledge-building, and standards are all part of the story, but ultimately, robust comprehension must be the target.

2. Reorient professional learning around the knowledge-building texts and their meaning. Teachers need structured opportunities to build the historical, literary, and scientific content knowledge necessary to facilitate robust understandings of the knowledge-building texts. Their professional learning should require deep, collective unpacking of all the nuances in the texts. .

3. Align observation and assessment systems to priorities for instruction. If tools and interim assessments measure only surface features, surface-level instruction will persist. Systems must adopt tools that can discern whether instruction leads students toward robust comprehension and use that data transparently to support improvement.

These changes are not small lifts, but they are essential.

Perhaps the most hopeful finding in the study is this: Lessons that supported robust comprehension didn’t just deepen learning, they increased student motivation and engagement. Students liked these lessons more. The students in the robust One Giant Leap lesson could see themselves in the Apollo mission — and on the moon.

In short, the path to better literacy outcomes is also a path to more joyful teaching and learning.

SRI Education and Âé¶čŸ«Æ· both receive financial support from the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies

Wielding chainsaws, they helped the 97-year-old former Colorado governor clear out fallen timber this year to make a path for some four wheelers. 

“They just enjoyed the working relationship back then, and they enjoy the friendship now,” Romer said in a recent interview. 

But when they finish the day’s projects, it’s not unusual for the group to relax over wine and cheese and trade war stories about Romer’s tenure. Under his leadership, the district saw several years of steady gains in reading on both and . Fighting bureaucracy and a powerful teachers union, he required elementary schools to use Open Court, a phonics-based program that embraced what is known today as the science of reading. The district trained teachers to use it and hired reading specialists to make sure they stuck to the curriculum. 

“For six years, we concentrated on that. It was the most important thing we did,” Romer said. But the teacher’s union chafed against the program’s rigid design and eventually demanded over the curriculum. “They didn’t want us to be screwing around in classrooms. They wanted the door shut. We forced those doors open.”

Nearly 20 years later, those stories have a new relevance as reading scores are once again on the rise. The current superintendent, Alberto Carvalho, has taken a similar, top-down approach to literacy with a program from curriculum provider Amplify. District leaders say they’ve learned from the past about the dangers of a lockstep approach to teaching reading, but some wonder whether teachers are getting the support they need. 

Tackling a new curriculum is “not an easy shift, and the ongoing support is needed,” said Francisco Villegas, chief academic officer at the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, a nonprofit that manages 20 high-need schools in the district. “There are fewer dollars, and that likely will have implications for what the district is able to provide.” 

The Partnership schools adopted the Amplify program in 2018-19 and began to see in English language arts on the state test. Since 2022, seven of the Partnership’s 11 elementary schools have seen double-digit increases in the percentage of students meeting or exceeding state standards. At a in September, Carvalho called the Partnership a “terrific incubator” that influenced the district’s curriculum choices. 

But systemwide, leaders are to balance the budget and layoffs are expected. Compared to the Open Court years, training on the reading curriculum districtwide is more “hit or miss,” said Maria Nichols, president of the district’s principals union. LAUSD offers opportunities, both online and in-person, for professional development. School leaders, however, often don’t know which courses teachers have taken or whether they’re using what they’ve learned, she said. “We are PD rich and implementation poor.”

‘On the same page’

Romer’s team implemented Open Court at a time when was pouring millions into training to teach reading. A $133 million from the U.S. Department of Education provided even more. Nearly all of the district’s 12,000 elementary school teachers participated in and many completed follow-up sessions throughout the year.

“It was phenomenal,” Nichols said. “We were treated as professionals. There was a lot of money back then.”

Former board members, among Romer’s annual visitors, said Open Court was a way to ensure all students, in an urban district where kids often change schools, would receive strong instruction. Marlene Canter, who served on the board from 2002 through 2008, said that regardless of teachers’ level of experience or the college they attended, “everybody would be on the same page.”

For some teachers, that played out literally. Many found Open Court . There was a specific set of cards with letter sounds to post on the wall and a recommended U-shaped classroom layout that, according to a teacher guide, left “a large open space on the floor for whole-group and individual activities” and provided “an easy ‘walk-around’ for the teacher.” Critics viewed the , deployed to ensure teachers followed the curriculum, as “Open Court police” ready to catch them veering off script. 

“They took my fun and creativity away,” former teacher Stuart Goldurs complained in a . “I became an instructional robot.” 

Ronni Ephraim, who served as Romer’s chief instructional officer, said the change upset some teachers. The district asked them to replace storybooks that had been favorites in their classrooms for years with Open Court phonics-based “readers,” workbooks and classroom libraries. Despite the objections, the district saw struggling schools improve and outpace the state. 

“I don’t think top-down is bad,” Ephraim, now a consultant, said about curriculum choices. “I think the board and the superintendent have to believe in it, and then they have to make sure that everybody is prepared to teach it as designed.”

‘Big disconnect’

Critics said the program was ineffective with English learners. Over time, performance flatlined, and the district replaced Open Court with a program. 

Rob Rucker is among the LAUSD teachers who worked for the district during the Open Court years and is now adjusting to Core Knowledge Language Arts. A third grade teacher at 135th Elementary School in Gardena, one of several small cities within the district’s boundaries, he said some novice teachers valued Open Court’s structure. They didn’t yet have enough experience to write lesson plans of their own.

“I actually liked Open Court,” he said. “It was very straightforward and easy for teachers to understand.”

The Amplify program still covers the basic skills students need to decode words and recognize parts of speech. It’s also what reading experts describe as a knowledge-building curriculum. The units introduce students to early civilizations, like the Vikings in Scandinavia, and science content, such as the solar system and animal habitats.

That’s where Open Court fell short, said Nichols, with the principals’ union.

“When we tested kids, they could read beautifully,” she said, “but they couldn’t understand what they were reading.”

For a student population like LAUSD’s, with 86% living in poverty and one in five still learning English, strengthening kids’ knowledge of the world is “going to be the real game changer,” said Barbara Davidson, president of StandardsWork, a think tank, and executive director of the Knowledge Matters Campaign. Since 2015, the campaign has been a leading voice for integrating history, science and the arts into reading curriculum. 

Rucker said his students were already familiar with stories like “Alice in Wonderland” and “Aladdin,” so it wasn’t hard to keep them interested in a lesson on classic fairy tales. Getting them to relate to lessons on ancient Rome has been more challenging.

According to a district spokesperson, “the goal is to ensure that every school has access to the literacy expertise and coaching capacity it needs.” But other than a two-day training from Amplify, Rucker said he hasn’t had any additional support on how to implement the program, he said. He thinks his school would benefit from an English language arts coordinator teachers could lean on when they need someone with more experience, but because of enrollment loss, many schools have lost administrative positions. 

Some teachers feel Amplify is out of reach for struggling students, leading them to patch in other materials to make the material more relevant. 

During a recent lesson on early American irrigation systems, Kareli Rodriguez, who teaches at Stoner Ave. Elementary School on the west side of town, used pictures and videos to help her fifth graders grasp the idea. Excitement over the Dodgers’ successful World Series run helped her pique kids’ interest in a passage on Yankees’ relief pitcher Mariano Rivera.

But it’s “not realistic,” she said, for teachers to get through a lesson in the recommended 90-minute time slot with so many students working below grade level. A district coach modeled a lesson for the teachers last school year, Rodriguez said, but she couldn’t finish it in time either.

“I think that’s a big disconnect that the district needs to understand,” she said. “It’s definitely rigorous, but most of the students are always playing catch up.”

Still, like most other schools in the district, Stoner Avenue saw improvements in reading. Fifty-two percent of fifth graders met or exceeded expectations, compared to 41% last year. 

Literacy advocates hope those gains will convince leaders — as Romer did with Open Court — to stick with Amplify. â€œOur push is going to be to say, ‘You got to stay the course,’ ” said Yolie Flores, president and CEO of Families in Schools, a nonprofit that for research-backed teaching materials. Her group breaks down the science of reading for parents so they’ll know how to talk to teachers about the curriculum and help their kids at home.

District leaders gathered in October to celebrate the district’s recent improvement. Outside the auditorium at Maywood Elementary School, as students rushed back to class after lunch, Deputy Superintendent Karla Estrada took a moment to talk about lessons learned since the Open Court years, like taking feedback from teachers.

The district, she said, wants them to follow the Amplify curriculum “with integrity” while recognizing they often have to make decisions in the moment, depending on their students. 

“They let me know where something is not quite what they want,” she said. “But no curriculum is going to do everything for you.”

The “” report, conducted by nonprofit research organization SRI, examined literacy instruction in districts in Texas, Maryland, North Carolina and Virginia that have been using materials rooted in the popular phonics-based literacy approach for at least five years. 

Through numerous classroom observations, teacher surveys and interviews with district officials in Aldine Independent School District, Baltimore City Public Schools, Guilford County Schools and Richmond Public Schools, researchers found a majority of reading lessons lacked “depth” – meaning foundational skills were mainly limited to working on single words rather than reading them in sentences. 

Comprehension lessons in later elementary grades also mainly focused on completing a task, such as identifying a main character, rather than using a text for discussion and understanding its purpose.

“You’re not able to really think about the unpacking of a complicated sentence. You’re not thinking about really intentional vocabulary instruction or the building of kids’ word knowledge over time,” said Dan Reynolds, one of the lead authors of the report. “Ultimately, how should we be framing kids to read? Are we teaching our K-4 kids that reading is just tasks? Are we teaching them that they just need to label stuff and fill out graphic organizers?”

In recent years, has passed science of reading laws, including many that have limited the type of programming and instructional materials a school can use – a move that has drawn that it’s too restrictive and that the instruction faces its own limitations.

The report defined surface literacy skills as a student’s ability to complete tasks and understand texts based on their literal meeting while robust instruction would further push a child to understand, evaluate and synthesize what they had read for its significance. 

The study said its “comprehension observations alone are more rigorous than nearly all studies conducted in the last 50 years.” It’s not expected to be representative of reading instruction across the country, Reynolds said, but “we have four big districts in four different states, and we saw this pattern happening in all four of them with three different curricula.”

The study also found that teachers struggled with implementing comprehension-focused learning materials and said many times the curriculum was too dense, required substantial planning or may not have been developmentally appropriate. Professional development opportunities for these educators were also limited.

Researchers reported less than a quarter of observed comprehension lessons were engaging in robust learning. More than two-thirds of the lessons focused on “surface-level” comprehension. 

“It seems that these curriculums are designed to build knowledge and they don’t develop meaning, and so then why read about the Civil War or about insects?” said Katrina Woodworth, director at SRI’s Center for Education Research & Improvement. “The point is to both teach reading and to build students’ knowledge base so that they have more scaffolding for future learning of both content and meaning.” 

The SRI researchers also found that many review tools that measure comprehension don’t make a distinction between surface-level and robust instruction and skills. So, while educators are tasked with meeting a baseline standard, like having a child compare and contrast a text, it may be “unintentionally encouraging teachers to focus on surface-level goals,” the report said.

Without distinction, it weakens instruction for students and can later manifest as a skills disadvantage, Reynolds said.

“Districts had done so much to get the kids all the way there [with literacy], but it was losing voltage in the end,” Reynolds said. “If we can actually shift the way that districts are thinking about improving their comprehension instruction, they can take that all the way home and deliver really high quality comprehension instruction because so many pieces are already in place.”

Reynolds and one of his fellow co-authors, Sara Rutherford-Quach, said they saw glimpses of “magic” in the classroom when students understood a passage in wide-ranging contexts, which is the type of instruction they’re hoping to see districts incorporate more of in early grades.

“The kids were way more engaged,” Rutherford-Quach said. “Surface-level is important and necessary in some cases, 
 but it really is fundamentally different when you start talking about meaning and making it matter to the kids, and you see that they’re invested in it.”

Reynolds added that it’s unlikely robust comprehension could make up 100% of lessons in the classroom, but “we are thinking that if we can shift that needle from 24% robust lessons up to 50 or 60, then that would be a real catalyst for comprehension growth.”

The report recommended district leaders create “a shared vision for robust comprehension and define what it means for students, teachers, schools and the district,” and align how to best measure the extent of learning. It also called for better professional learning structures that could help model and rehearse robust comprehension work. 

Previous reporting from Âé¶čŸ«Æ· found the percentage of recent high school graduates who lack “robust” comprehension skills is the highest it’s ever been, according to 2023 data. The sooner districts can engrain literacy skills that go beyond just explicit tasks, the easier it will be as they continue through the K-12 system, Reynolds said.

“I see the distinction between surface level and robust comprehension as critical to comprehension in fifth grade, but I also see it in the kids when they’re in 12th grade. Surface level comprehension and robust comprehension is the difference between a two on the AP exam and a three,” he said.

For decades, too many of our children were taught to read using methods that research has shown to be ineffective. The result was predictable. Year after year, nearly half of city students left elementary school unable to read proficiently, with the deepest harm falling on low-income communities, English language learners, and children with dyslexia and language-based learning disabilities.

NYC Reads, launched just two years ago, is the city’s first serious attempt to change that trajectory. It replaces “balanced literacy” with instruction grounded in the science of reading, a body of research showing how children actually learn to decode, comprehend and enjoy written language. Teachers are receiving new training, curricula are being aligned to evidence and families are beginning to see the benefits.

The early results are promising. This year, reading proficiency among New York City students in grades 3 to 8 rose more than 7 percentage points — one of the largest single-year gains in recent memory. An evaluation of over 1,000 teachers who completed The Reading Institute’s Science of Reading Intro Course found a 34% increase in knowledge of reading science concepts, which they are now applying in classrooms across the city. Behind these numbers are children who are not only able to read books, but also tackle word problems in math, understand passages in science texts and see themselves as successful learners.

Educators themselves are telling us this shift matters. Teachers who once felt ill-prepared to help struggling readers now report “aha” moments as they change daily instructional practices, replacing outdated strategies like guessing at words with evidence-based methods that build fluency and confidence. For students who had begun to fall behind, the difference is life changing. That is the kind of momentum New York cannot afford to lose.

National research shows that third-grade reading proficiency is a . Children who cannot read fluently by the end of third grade are four times more likely to drop out of high school. They are less likely to pursue higher education, more likely to face unemployment and more likely to be entangled in the criminal justice system. The stakes could not be clearer. Literacy is not just an academic issue; it is an economic and social justice issue.

That is why the city cannot afford to let this progress stall. The new mayoral administration will face pressure to put its own stamp on education policy. But abandoning NYC Reads, or even watering it down, would mean turning back the clock to the failed practices of the past and leaving another generation of students behind.

I was encouraged to see Mayor-elect Mamdani speak positively about NYC Reads during the campaign. Now I urge him to make an early, public commitment to sustain and strengthen NYC Reads. This means fully funding the initiative, ensuring that teachers receive the ongoing training they need, and reporting progress transparently. 

It also means having a schools chancellor with a proven record of championing literacy programs grounded in reading science. If Chancellor Melissa Avilés-Ramos remains in her post, or if another literacy-focused chancellor is appointed, that could be a strong signal that the city is serious about preserving reforms already underway, including reading curriculum changes under NYC Reads.

New York City already has elected officials pushing in the same direction — from Assemblymember Robert Carroll’s legislation expanding dyslexia screening and early intervention to Assemblymember Jo Anne Simon’s efforts to ensure that teacher preparation programs use evidence-based methods in their literacy courses. The next mayor must match that commitment.

As a reading scientist, Brooklyn College professor and founder of The Reading Institute, I have seen firsthand how quickly children can grow when teachers are equipped with the knowledge and tools that research supports. When schools align instruction with how the brain actually learns to read, students who once struggled begin to thrive, and educators regain a sense of confidence in supporting all students.

Literacy is the gateway to opportunity. It is the foundation for every subject, every grade, and every pathway into the workforce. New York has begun to show what’s possible when we finally take reading science seriously. For the sake of our children, our city and our future, NYC Reads must stay.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at

Mayor Eric Adams’ shakeup to elementary school reading curriculums had a clear goal: to align instruction with the “science of reading,” the catchphrase for a longstanding body of research.

But in the , some literacy experts worried that there wasn’t enough emphasis on the basic theory and research behind the . As hundreds of schools transition away from , many teachers have craved guidance.

A free training program available to New York City teachers aims to fill that gap, helping thousands of educators parse the fundamental principles of the science of reading. The program, now in its second year, was developed by , a nonprofit launched by Katie Pace Miles, a Brooklyn College professor.

“I wanted to make sure that it wasn’t just about the how‚” Miles said. “No matter what curriculum they have, they’ve got to know: What are the tenets that actually move the needle for readers?”’

Miles underscored that the training could also help address a long-term challenge: Curriculums often come and go during a teacher’s career. Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, who will take control of the city’s schools on Jan. 1, has , though he has indicated teachers should have more flexibility around how to implement it in their classrooms.

The emphasizes phonics — how students learn the relationships between sounds and letters — a . Other segments cover vocabulary, comprehension, writing, and reaching neurodivergent learners. Âé¶čŸ«Æ· footage from three New York City public schools is woven throughout the training to show how teachers are using the science of reading in real-world classrooms.

The introductory course has free slots for nearly 1,200 New York City teachers for the remainder of this school year (it is also free for all CUNY students). When the slots are filled — or for teachers outside the city— the cost is $25. Of the 2,800 people who took the course last school year, more than 2,000 were from the city’s public schools. (The course is funded by the Benedict Silverman Foundation, which , and the Heckscher Foundation for Children.)

Experts say the training could help fill gaps for teachers who did not receive adequate instruction in their teacher preparation programs about how children learn to read, as schools of education for failing to embrace the latest research on reading. New York State officials have said they’re working .

Cut to the video: Recorded literacy lessons inspire change

At P.S. 189 in Washington Heights, Principal Johanny Grullon has embraced the additional training, setting aside time during the school’s existing Monday training blocks.

Now, virtually all of the school staff are taking Miles’ science of reading course, including art, music, and gym teachers.

“Everybody plays an important role in teaching students how to read,” Grullon said. “The gym teachers aren’t gonna take out flashcards 
 but I want them to think about: What can I do in my daily routines as kids are warming up to develop vocabulary?”

The science of reading intro course has won attention from other states. Last school year, P.S. 189 showed off the training program to the governors of Rhode Island and Colorado, along with a representative from New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office.

Julia Rosa, the library teacher at P.S. 189, was one of the first educators at the school to complete the training and helped convince her colleagues it was worth the time.

The video footage from other New York City classrooms helped persuade her to shift some of her approaches — and try new ones. When her students ask her to spell words during writing exercises, she used to reflexively give them the answers, worrying that veering into spelling exercises would district from the lesson. But videos of students making confident spelling guesses help convince her to change.

In another video, Rosa saw a phonics lesson that involved students using their fingers to trace out letters in blue sand. That activity seemed like it would make a mess in a room with over 20 children. But soon, she was off to the dollar store to buy tupperware containers to try it herself.

“Seeing it done — it gives you more confidence to try it,” she said.

Education Department officials said they hope the training will help teachers reluctant to change their practice and give them a more solid foundation as they deploy the new curriculums.

Staten Island’s superintendent is encouraging educators to take the training, and nearly 1,000 teachers in the borough are enrolled. Allison Angioletti, a district achievement and instructional specialist in the Staten Island superintendent’s office, said she hopes the training helps teachers tailor their lessons and navigate curriculums that are often packed with more content than can fit in a traditional literacy block. On Staten Island, teachers are required to use Into Reading, the .

“I want them to be good decision makers,” said Angioletti. “I want them to keep the parts that are most helpful to kids about how they learn how to read.”

Literacy experts said the relatively short course was unlikely to spur major changes in student achievement by itself. But Tim Shanahan, a former Chicago Public Schools official who oversaw that district’s training efforts, said it is still important.

“There are lots of things that need to happen to raise reading achievement,” he said, “and one of them is professional development.”

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

“The kids know exactly what to expect, and they’re so much more confident when they come to a word that they don’t know, or a big word in text, because they’ve been taught all of those little, tiny skills that they need, and the concepts of how words are made up,” Hoard said, who teaches at Emma L. Smith Elementary. “It’s not like a guessing game for them anymore.”

A small mid-Michigan district of 1,075 students, Stockbridge is among the first districts in the state to fully embrace training its teachers and building a curriculum that is supported by the science of reading, a body of research explaining how children develop reading and writing skills. This instruction relies heavily on phonics in the early years of schooling before building other essential skills like fluency, vocabulary, comprehension and the syntax of grammar and sentence structure in the later elementary grades.

After the district’s teachers and literacy coaches on how to implement the curriculum, they built a new foundation to teaching literacy that helped third-grade students increase English proficiency by 12% on standardized tests.

Now in its second year of structured literacy strategies, including daily small group and one-on-one literacy interventions and games that are scored with data tracked in real time, Stockbridge Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction Amy Hodgson said the new approach has worked so well, the district has implemented a similar teaching method in math through daily, classwide interventions. 

Building those skills in the younger grades will help them have success across subjects as they get older, she said.

“If students don’t have fluency and automaticity in math or reading, it’s very difficult for them to have the cognitive load to access the higher skills that are being demanded of them in life and in standardized testing and in all these other places,” Hodgson said. “If I’m asked to do calculus, or if I’m asked to read a complex text, and I’m still sounding out words, there’s an exhaustion that comes with that.”

A shifting focus to phonics

The school district is part of a recent nationwide shift back toward phonics-focused curricula and rather than a balanced literacy approach that incorporates a “whole language” method focused on meaning and context of words.

While the two approaches should be seen in some respects as complementary and integrated, Harvard Professor of Cognition and Education Catherine Snow said they are typically pitted against each other, with schools choosing to change approaches when a new “literacy crisis” emerges.

“It’s kind of a pendulum shift every 15 or 20 years that you get some report saying our kids can’t read, and whatever is the dominant procedure at the time gets suppressed in favor of the other one, but in both cases, they go too far with it,” said Snow, an expert on language and literacy development in children.

“You can’t just do code-focused instruction, because you will drive the kids crazy and you will teach them that reading is about pronouncing words correctly, not about meaning. You can’t just do whole language instruction, because many kids need a little bit of help getting into the system. They need someone to explain to them very systematically.”

Along with 39 other states across the country, Michigan has embraced the science of reading, a buzz term that is neither a program nor an instructional approach, said Kim St. Martin, director of the Michigan Multi-Tiered System of Supports Technical Assistance Center and consultant to the Michigan Department of Education. Instead, it is a body of research schools can choose to build their curriculum, training and assessments around, she said.

In 2024, Michigan passed a pair of K-12 literacy laws aligned with this research in an effort to boost third-grade reading scores and better identify and support students with dyslexia. In addition to aligning its curricula and assessments with lists approved by the state’s Department of Education, notes that instruction must not include methods or curricula that emphasize memorizing words or prompt students to guess unknown words using pictures.

Commonly used within whole language and balanced literacy programs, this “three-cueing” system model relies on word meaning and sentence context; as such, it does not serve students well in learning the foundations of reading and writing, St. Martin said.

“If I’m a second-grader, when I’m reading the words, there’s nothing wrong with me having pictures in text for the purpose of me getting a visual representation in my mind of understanding what it is that this text is about,” St. Martin said. “What is inappropriate is if I’m using the picture to try to decode the word, because that would prevent me from understanding how to put together the letter-sound combinations to read that word.

“Unfortunately, there have been strategies that have been taught for several years that frankly, are causing kids to guess and to use those types of three-cueing strategies.”

Michigan has committed toward creating a committee that will vet curricula aligned with the science of reading and allow schools to purchase materials approved by the committee. The state also provided $34 million to train elementary teachers on how to teach the curricula via Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS), with more than 5,000 teachers and literacy coaches completing the training to date.

The laws and funding efforts are concentrated on providing teachers with the tools they need to teach all aspects of reading to young learners, Michigan Department of Education Literacy Unit Manager DeNesha Rawls-Smith said.

“We believe that it is foundational for students that are learning to read to decode unknown words,” Rawls-Smith said. “But again, we don’t believe that phonics, or word recognition in and of itself, makes a good reader. We believe that a good reader has the ability to recognize unknown words, and they have a knowledge about language. So together with word recognition and language comprehension, you have a reader that can read and understand what they’re reading.”

How a child learns best

After studying years of student achievement data, Stockbridge K-6 Literacy Coach Cindy Stacy learned the school was doing the same thing and getting the same results that were “not amazing.”

The district used state grant funds to invest in the , an approach initially developed to support students with dyslexia which has proven successful with other students as well. It worked with Institute for Multi-Sensory Education instructors to train its teachers and literacy coaches.

“Prior to this latest shift, most elementary education programs focused on balanced literacy,” Stacy said. “There was a small piece of phonics. There was a whole language approach. There were leveled readers. With the science of reading, the whole paradigm just shifted.”

While laying the initial groundwork was difficult, Stacy said mornings at Smith Elementary are now more intentional and bustling, with students reaching for their “OG bags” that allow them to trace letters into their own sand trays. 

In Michelle Hedding’s kindergarten class, students are asked what sound letters make before tracing the letter in the sand tray. Different three-letter combinations are broken down by individual letters on a TV monitor, with Hedding asking students to pronounce the word before ultimately asking them if they’re “real or nonsense” words.

In grades K-5, students receive at least 90 minutes of reading and 20 minutes of writing instruction per day, Stacy said, with several who need more individual support pulled into small group or one-on-one intervention periods for 25-30 minutes. In grades 3 to 5, there is more focus on language and reading comprehension, vocabulary, background knowledge and verbal reasoning.

During intervention periods, literacy interventionist Amy Taylor will drill down on concepts like the sounds that different blends of letters make and how a “magic” e at the end of a word like face or home makes the preceding vowel in the word “say its name.”

Taylor, who has been with the district for 20 years, said the transition was difficult due to the belief from some teachers and staff that the use of sight words, or commonly used words children can memorize from sight, was an effective way to teach all students.

“My kindergarten class at the time, they were learning how to read — but the difference was, they didn’t know why,” Taylor said. “It was all memorization. They did not peel a word apart and talk about the different whys: why the word is ‘pinch.’ So, when we started the [new curricula], that was life changing for our learners and for us.
 It’s just changed our whole way of looking at a child and how they learn best.”

But how gradual is too gradual?

In a powerful new book, researcher Tim Shanahan argues that America’s classroom literacy practices move far too slowly. In , he contends that protecting students from difficult texts puts them on a treadmill with no exit.

Shanahan is a former director of reading at Chicago Public Schools, served on the National Reading Panel and writes the blog. In his new book, he walks through a number of problems with the leveled reading approach:

Kids can’t learn much from texts they can already read well

Shanahan dedicates his first chapter to a long history of how kids have been taught to read in the United States. From family Bibles in the 1700s to the McGuffey’s Readers used in one-room schoolhouses in the 1800s to the “modern” grade-level configurations beginning in the early  1900s, the texts given to students learning to read have gotten progressively easier. Beginning in the 1950s, the dominant idea became that of “leveled readers,” which attempted to match children with texts appropriate for their instructional level. Made infamous in recent years by Emily Hanford’s Sold a Story , the most popular version was the Fountas and Pinnell program, which sorted kids (and books) into an A-to-Z continuum.

Shanahan’s concerns start with how students are placed into these levels. Teachers listen to kids read aloud and count how many words they read correctly. Afterward, they ask questions to make sure the students understood what they read. These first steps make sense, but the issue comes with the false precision and subsequent placement decisions. Depending on the assessment and program being used, students may be placed in levels where they can already read 90% to 95% of the words in the assigned texts and understand 75% of the content.

Shanahan insists that being overly focused on readability in this way at the beginning of a lesson undermines learning. He writes, “Assigning students to challenging texts and making them successful — that is, making sure they can read and understand the text by the end of the lesson — is the key to raising reading achievement.”  

‘Just right’ reading levels are instructionally meaningless

Most teachers will be familiar with the idea of using “” to slowly introduce new concepts that are in the student’s “.” These frameworks strongly imply that learning can take place only when the material is neither too hard nor too easy.

But these break down once you start getting into practicalities. For example, when someone says a book is “just right” for a student, what does that mean exactly? Students’ ability to understand a passage will be tied to their background knowledge in the subject, their interest in it and how the passage is written in terms of vocabulary, sentence length or word repetition.

This presents a measurement problem when it comes to the classroom. For example, researcher Matt Burns found that the widely used Benchmark Assessment System was in identifying struggling readers. Shanahan notes that many commercial assessments have very large measurement errors, meaning a fourth grader may be assigned to reading levels ranging from grades 2 to 6. That’s too wide a range to be instructionally useful.

Instead, teachers should work with grade-level texts

Shanahan argues that leveled-reading advocates are missing the forest for the trees. By being so consumed with trying to determine what level a child is at, they assume selecting an easier text is the only appropriate way to help that student learn. But there are other, better options. To help students stay on grade-level material, teachers can pre-teach some key terms, slice the text into manageable chunks or use re-reading to make sure kids eventually understand. In short, the difficulty of a text is relevant to the amount of help students might need, but they shouldn’t avoid the challenge.

Moreover, having children work hard to read a text reinforces good literacy skills. Shanahan notes that “just right” texts eliminate the responsibility readers have to make important decisions and adjustments as they go along. When good readers confront challenging text, they slow down, re-read, make inferences, break words down into their component parts or look up words they don’t recognize. Grade-level texts require kids to practice these skills; leveled-reading materials do not.

Leveled books are well-meaning but wrong-headed

Leveled-reading advocates are very concerned about student motivation. They fear that children who face too difficult of a task will tune out or even start to question their own abilities.

But Shanahan points to a body of research suggesting that motivation can be driven by a number of factors, including the novelty of a text, how relevant it feels to a student and, yes, its level of rigor and challenge. Kids can even feel a sense of accomplishment after they’ve mastered a challenging text. Shanahan suggests that, rather than starting a lesson with material that students can already read, it would be better to begin with a more difficult passage and then work until students can read it fluently. The goal should be achievement and progress, not the mere act of reading.

More kids deserve grade-level texts

Shanahan argues that assigning students to instructional-level text — as opposed to text tied to their actual grade level — is essentially a backdoor way of holding  students back without doing the paperwork or alerting their parents. When I spoke with him, he made clear this wasn’t any type of judgment on the text itself. Books are neither good nor bad. The problem comes when fifth graders are stuck reading third grade texts.  

This can also make it impossible for kids to catch up once they fall behind. As Shanahan writes, it will be hard for those students to ever read more challenging books, “without exposure to the more advanced content, vocabulary, grammar, and the discourse and structure that more advantaged kids are experiencing.” Giving struggling readers shorter, simpler texts in effect deprives them of the very practice they need to improve.

 Shanahan is not naĂŻve in assuming these instructional changes will be easy to implement. In fact, he spends a good amount of time offering advice for teachers about how to incorporate more grade-level texts in their classrooms. Nor is he sanguine about policymakers solving these problems. He notes that the Common Core attempted to do in policy what he’s encouraging in the book — make sure more students have access to grade-level texts. Those efforts ultimately backfired as teachers became even to resort to easier instruction-level texts. To me, that suggests the root of the issue may be cultural norms in schools and schools of education. To combat that, more educators would need to embrace the challenge of providing grade-level texts to all kids.

Ultimately, Shanahan emphasizes that leveled-reading advocates have confused the goal and focused too much on reading as an isolated skill. But literacy is not a subject matter on its own, like math, science or history. It is a tool for learning about the world. It’s a good one, for sure, but the goal should be to teach kids to read so they can read to learn new things. That requires introducing more challenge than kids today are getting.

A school is no different.

In my Texas school district, I can walk into a classroom and, in the first five minutes, tell you if effective reading instruction is happening. I don’t need to see the lesson plan or even look at the teacher. I just need to look at the kids. Are they engaged? Are they in a routine? Are they getting the “reps” they need?

For too long, districts have been losing the game before it starts. They buy a new playbook (i.e., a curriculum) as a “hail Mary,” hoping for a fourth-quarter miracle. Still, they ignore the fundamentals, practice and team culture required for sustainable success.

Chapel Hill Independent School District is committed to educating all children to compete in an ever-changing world. To that end, we’ve made literacy a nonnegotiable priority across all campuses. We anchor our approach in research-based practices and a culture of continuous learning for both students and staff.

We’re building for the long run: a literacy dynasty. But our literacy success hasn’t come without putting in the work. We have a relentless focus on the fundamentals and, most importantly, a culture where every player — every teacher and administrator — fits our system.

Trust the Analytics, Not Your Gut

In reading instruction, we can’t make assumptions; all instruction has to start with the fundamentals. For decades, instruction was based on gut feelings, like an old-school coach deciding whether to go for it on fourth down or punt based on a hunch. But today, the best coaches trust the analytics, not their gut. They watch the game film.

Chapel Hill is an analytics district; we do our research. And our game film is the science of reading.

Many years ago, we started using structured literacy for a small group of students with dyslexia. It worked so well that we asked ourselves: If structured literacy is effective for a small group of students with dyslexia, shouldn’t it be essential for all students?

We didn’t just adopt a new curriculum; we redesigned our literacy infrastructure — from structured literacy professional development for every teacher to classroom coaching and a robust tiered system of support to ensure no student falls through the cracks.

That logic is our offensive strategy. It’s why we use tools like the Sold a Story podcast to show our staff why we’ve banned the strategies of a bygone era, like three-cueing. We have to be willing to reprogram the brain to align with what research proves works. But having the right playbook is only half the battle.

A great playbook is useless without the right team to execute it.

This is the most crucial part: “First who, then what.” In the NFL draft, teams don’t always draft the most talented player available. They conduct interviews and personality assessments and ultimately draft the player who best fits their system—the cultural fit.

Tom Brady is arguably the greatest quarterback of all time, but he couldn’t run a read-option offense, which requires a fast, running quarterback. He wouldn’t fit the system, and the team would fail. But put Brady in a play-action offense, sit back and watch the magic happen.

We operate the same way. When we interview, we’re not just looking for a teacher with excellent credentials and experience; we’re looking for a “Chapel Hill Way” teacher. It’s a specific profile: someone who believes in our philosophy of systematic, explicit, research-based instruction.

This culture starts with our team captains: our campus principals. We need them to believe in our playbook, not just buy in because the district office said so. We invest in their development so they can champion literacy daily, monitor instruction and ensure every classroom executes our playbook with fidelity. It’s their conviction that turns a curriculum on a shelf into a living, breathing part of our culture.

Talented teams win games. Disciplined, team-first organizations build dynasties.

Building a dynasty requires sacrifice. When an educator joins our team, whether they’re a rookie or a seasoned veteran, we ask them to let go of the “I’ve always done it this way” mindset. That’s the equivalent of a player prioritizing their personal stats over a team win.

It’s a team-first mindset. It’s about a willingness to put personal preference aside to build a championship team. For Chapel Hill ISD, our championship is ensuring every child learns to read.

Our team-first philosophy has translated into measurable results: Across campuses, students are gaining the foundational skills they need, and data shows growth for every subgroup, including students with dyslexia and multilingual learners. We want students to become a product of our expectations, rather than their environment. Our district, which serves a diverse population, including a high percentage of students classified as low socioeconomic status, consistently scores above the state average in third-grade reading.

At Wise Elementary, our largest campus[MOU1] , 56% of third graders met grade-level standards, and 23% scored above grade level on the 2023-2024 STARR assessment. And we had similar results across the district.

So to my fellow education leaders: Before you shop for a new playbook, ensure you have the right team culture in place. Define your culture. Draft the right players. Build your team. Coach your captains. And obsess over the fundamentals.

That’s how you win.

Even with millions spent on new textbooks, and teachers required to take online science of reading training, third grade English Language Arts proficiency fell from 62% in spring of 2023 to 61% earlier this year.

A jump in 2024 to 65% proficiency turned out to be a mirage, as third graders fell right back again last school year.

It’s still unclear whether the scores are cause for alarm or just a as Ohio joins the flood of states shifting to phonics-heavy lessons to help students decode and understand words better. Some supporters of the science of reading believe small gains should happen almost immediately, even if it takes longer for large improvements statewide.

“We haven’t seen much progress yet,” said Chad Aldis of the Fordham Institute, one of the advocates of adopting the science of reading. “This is disappointing.”

Others urge patience, with some districts that adopted the science of reading early, saying they are on the verge of students showing improvements.

In the Elyria school district about 30 miles west of Cleveland, educators are hoping their patience will soon pay off. 

Andrea McKenzie, Elyria literacy specialist acknowledged that scores haven’t improved since the district switched to the science of reading in 2022. But she said this year’s third graders, the first to be using the new curriculum since kindergarten, are on track for an 11 point jump in proficiency rates, according to scores on standardized progress tests.

“This is the moment I have been waiting for,” McKenzie said. “I’ve been waiting for these students to get to third grade to see this through, so I feel like this is the year.”

Though most schools adopted the science of reading right after DeWine started his push early in 2023, Ohio law gave schools until this fall to fully make the switch. Teachers need time to adjust and embrace a new approach. And even Mississippi, whose “miracle” reading gains are the model for Ohio and other states, took a few years before making gains that caught notice.

“Last school year, we had districts who were in very different places in their implementation of science of reading,” said Chris Woolard, chief integration officer of the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce. “We had some of those early adopters that have been doing this for a few years. We had others who are (still in) early stages.”

He stressed that this ongoing school year is the first that all schools must be fully using the science of reading, a “really important” consideration when evaluating results

Melissa Weber-Mayrer, Ohio’s chief of literacy, said this year is “pivotal” since schools now have to be fully using science of reading, but she also cautioned that it could be three to five years before scores grow statewide.

“Looking locally, we will see things start to move,” she said. “But it might be in a grade level, in a school, maybe in one elementary building within a larger district.,” she said.

Elyria, a district of just under 6,000 students, could be one of those pockets. The district’s four elementary schools were named Science of Reading Champions by DeWine last spring for quickly adopting materials and instruction, even as that district’s reading scores are still not rising.

Third grade reading proficiency in that district fell from 45.8% of students in 2023 to 43.8% on state tests this spring.

But the district has been pushing hard to adopt the science of reading, with the school board voting in 2022 to shift to the Core Knowledge Language Arts curriculum and start using it that fall.

The district had 34 teachers start two-year Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading (LETRS) training — a program many consider the gold standard of science of reading — in 2022, with 30 more starting in 2024 and another 22 starting this school year.

The district also hired two literacy specialists in 2022 to help the one already there work with teachers on reading lessons and with students that need extra help.

The change now has kindergarten teacher Lindsay DeCoster giving students focused lessons on letters, their sounds and how to move their tongues and teeth to pronounce them.

“In the past, we have been skipping over this part
 like they don’t need to know how to rhyme, they don’t need to know initial sounds and things like that,” DeCoster said. “If you don’t understand how your mouth needs to look and what your mouth needs to do to make those sounds, then you’re not gonna be able to.”

DeCoster, now in her 17th year as a teacher, said LETRS training improved her teaching immensely.

“I just didn’t know what I didn’t know as far as everything that really goes into teaching a child how to read,” she said. “We’ve now broken it down to the smallest, smallest component.”

With so many states adopting the science of reading in just the last few years, experts were unable to point to many strong studies showing how fast scores change after adopting the science of reading. That’s partly because districts and schools adopt new curricula, add coaches, and train teachers at different speed and intensity, often varying within a single school, as in Elyria.

But Stanford University professor Thomas Dee, who studied how low-performing schools in California improved using that state’s Early Literacy Block Grants, said changes can happen quickly if classroom methods truly change too.

He found that low-performing California students improved by about a third of a year’s worth of learning over two years, after changing the curriculum, training teachers,and adding tutoring and afterschool programs using the grants..

“I think it’s reasonable to expect measurable improvements in student literacy to follow fairly quickly on the heels of evidence-aligned changes in teacher pedagogy,” Dee told Âé¶čŸ«Æ·. “The major concern I have is that state declarations for the Science of Reading may not translate quickly—or indeed ever—into responsive changes in classroom practices.”

Teachers, he said, can fall back into old practices of having students “guess” at words using context or pictures – practices that Ohio banned in its 2023 state reading law – but which can’t be tracked.

Aldis also noted that Ohio is not gaining in another important way that can show progress — whether lower-scoring students are doing better and closing the gap to becoming proficient. Fordham reported last month that the opposite is happening. More third graders are scoring as “limited,” the state’s lowest rating, an equivalent to an F, than before — 20.9% this year compared to 19.1% in 2023.

One factor, Aldis said, could be Ohio dropping its requirement in 2023 that third graders must read well to advance to fourth grade, which motivated students and teachers to show gains on a deadline.Ìę

Casey Taylor, the literacy policy director for ExcelinEd, the education advocacy group formed by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, worked on reading efforts in the early days of Mississippi’s shift, as well as in North Carolina, which started a similar push in 2021.

She said Mississppi saw some gains in schools that used literacy coaches extensively within two years, but she cautioned, “It still took several years before we really started to see those performance levels shift at a broad, systemic approach.”

Mississippi, the second-worst worst state in reading when its literacy campaign launched in 2013, didn’t really excel for six years, she said.

“We saw some gains in the 2015 NAEP, but it wasn’t until 2019 that the nation really took note, because that was the first time we reached the national average on fourth grade reading,” she said.

North Carolina, she said, has started seeing gains on standardized progress tests teachers give their students, but not on tests like the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) yet.

Though he wants to see faster improvement in Ohio, Fordham’s Aldis agreed with Taylor in one major way – making real gains takes a long-term commitment. 

Ohio, Aldis said, has a history of abandoning improvement projects that don’t show quick results and moving on to something else.

“These reforms are just too important to follow that same path,” Aldis said. “We need to stick with it.”

North Carolina is one of several states that have passed legislation in recent years to align classroom reading instruction with the research on how children learn to read. But ensuring all students have access to research-backed instruction is a marathon, not a sprint, said education leaders and researchers from across the country on

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Though implementation of the state’s reading legislation has been ongoing since 2021, more resources and comprehensive support are needed to ensure teaching practice and reading proficiency are improved, webinar panelists said.

“The goal should be to transition from the science of reading into the science of teaching reading,” said Paola Pilonieta, professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who was part of a team that studied North Carolina’s implementation of its

That legislation mandates instruction to be aligned with “the science of reading,” the research that says learning to read involves “the acquisition of language (phonology, syntax, semantics, morphology, and pragmatics), and skills of phonemic awareness, accurate and efficient work identification (fluency), spelling, vocabulary, and comprehension.”

The legislature allocated more than $114 million to train pre-K to fifth grade teachers and other educators in the science of reading through a professional development tool called the Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (). More than 44,000 teachers had as of June 2024.

Third graders saw a two-point drop, , in reading proficiency from the 2023-24 to 2024-25 school year on literacy assessments. It was the first decline in this measure since LETRS training began. First graders’ results on formative assessments held steady at 70% proficiency and second graders saw a small increase, from 65% to 66%.

“LETRS was the first step in transforming teacher practice and improving student outcomes,” Pilonieta said. “To continue to make growth in reading, teachers need targeted ongoing support in the form of coaching, for example, to ensure effective implementation of evidence-based literacy instruction.”

Teachers’ feelings on the training

Pilonieta was part of a team at UNC-Charlotte and the Education Policy Initiative at Carolina (EPIC) at UNC-Chapel Hill that studied and districts’ of that training. The team also studied teachers’ knowledge of research-backed literacy practices and in small-group settings after the training.

They asked about these experiences through a survey completed by 4,035 teachers across the state from spring 2023 to winter 2024, and 51 hour-long focus groups with 113 participants.

Requiring training on top of an already stressful job can be a heavy lift, Pilonieta said. LETRS training looked different across districts, the research team found. Some teachers received stipends to complete the training or were compensated with time off, and some were not. Some had opportunities to collaborate with fellow educators during the training; some did not.

“These differences in support influenced whether teachers felt supported during the training, overwhelmed, or ignored,” Pilonieta said.

Teachers did perceive the content of the LETRS training to be helpful in some ways and had concerns in others, according to survey respondents.

Teachers holding various roles found the content valuable in learning about how the brain works, phonics, and comprehension.

They cited issues, however, with the training’s applicability to varied roles, limited differentiation based on teachers’ background knowledge and experience, redundancy, and a general limited amount of time to engage with the training’s content.

Varied support from administrators, coaches

When asking teachers about how implementation worked at their schools, the researchers found that support from administrators and instructional coaches varied widely.

Teachers reported that classroom visits from administrators with a focus on science of reading occurred infrequently. The main support administrators provided, according to the research, was planning time.

“Many teachers felt that higher levels of support from coaches would be valuable to help them implement these reading practices,” Pilonieta said.

Teachers did report shifts in their teaching practice after the training and felt those tweaks had positive outcomes on students.

The team found other conditions impacted teachers’ implementation: schools’ use of curriculum that aligned to the concepts covered in the training, access to materials and resources, and having sufficient planning time.

Some improvement in knowledge and practice

Teachers performed well on assessments after completing the training, but had lower scores on a survey given later by the research team. Pilonieta said this suggests an issue with knowledge retention.

Teachers scored between 95% to 98% across in the LETRS post-training assessment. But in the research team’s survey, scores ranged from 48% to 78%.

Teachers with a reading license scored higher on all knowledge areas addressed in LETRS than teachers who did not.

When the team analyzed teachers’ recorded small-group reading lessons, 73% were considered high-quality. They found consistent use of explicit instruction, which is a key component of the science of reading, as well as evidence-backed strategies related to phonemic awareness and phonics. They found limited implementation of practices on vocabulary and comprehension.

Among the low-quality lessons, more than half were for students reading below grade level. Some “problematic practices” persisted in 17% of analyzed lessons.

What’s next?

The research team formed several recommendations on how to improve reading instruction and reading proficiency.

They said ongoing professional development through education preparation programs and teacher leaders can help teachers translate knowledge to instructional change. Funding is also needed for instructional coaches to help teachers make that jump.

Guides differentiated by grade levels would help different teachers with different needs when it comes to implementing evidence-backed strategies. And the state should incentivize teachers to pursue specialized credentials in reading instruction, the researchers said.

Moving forward, the legislation might need more clarity on mechanisms for sustaining the implementation of the science of reading. The research team suggests a structured evaluation framework that tracks implementation, student impact, and resource distribution to inform the state’s future literacy initiatives.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

L.A. Unified surpassed pre-pandemic math, reading and science levels on 2024-25 state test scores released Thursday and closed the gap with the rest of California, even as the state’s test scores rose overall.

District officials attributed the increases to tactics such as targeted funding for struggling schools, small group instruction, tutoring and using the phonics-based science of reading.

But disparities remain. 

While LAUSD students narrowed achievement gaps between Black, Hispanic; and white and Asian students, inequities persist, with 68.9 percent of white students meeting reading standards compared to 41 percent of Latino students, who make up most of the district’s enrollment. Overall, 53.3 percent of the district’s 540,000 students are still not reading at grade level, compared to 51.2 percent of the entire state. 

The district also continues to face challenges including falling enrollment, financial troubles and threats from the federal government.  

Still, officials celebrated the increases across the state and in L.A. Unified in particular.

“This is a proud moment,” said Governor Gavin Newsom at a press conference with LAUSD superintendent Alberto Carvalho held inside the Alexander Science Center School in Exhibition Park, a neighborhood in the south region of L.A., where many students are low income. “We’re not only moving in the right direction; we’re leading in that respect.”  

L.A. Unified students made big gains in reading on the exams, outpacing those made by the state as a whole, and achieving a 46.5% reading proficiency level on 2024-25 Smarter Balanced assessments, up from 43.1% the previous year and 44.1% in 2018-19.

Likewise, 36.8% of LAUSD students achieved math proficiency on the 2024-25 state exams, up from 32.8% the previous year and 33.5% in 2018-19.

Statewide, reading proficiency rose to 48.8% and math proficiency rose to 37.3%. LAUSD, a huge and diverse urban school district, historically underperforms the state overall and serves a higher percentage of higher-needs students. 

“Los Angeles Unified is having a very special moment in history, one without precedent,” said Carvalho. “Today, we celebrate the fact that we can proudly say that as Los Angeles goes in terms of education, so goes the state of California.”  

Carvalho said the district’s early adoption of approaches aligned with the science of reading helped boost students’ test scores. Newsom cited  he signed Thursday to promote the use of phonics-based techniques for teaching reading in all California schools.

As the largest school district in California, LAUSD’s new test scores helped lift those of the state overall and capped a string of positive metrics for the district. Carvalho, who boasted of L.A. Unified’s progress in his opening of schools address, just reupped his contract with the district to remain superintendent for another four years.

In an interview with reporters on Wednesday, Carvalho explained that the district’s improvement was not only due to using the science of reading, but also to tactics that targeted increased funding at underperforming schools, providing needier students with extra tutoring and supplemental training for teachers.

“We outperformed last year’s already improved performance,” said Carvalho, “with Black, Latino, low income, poor kids, students with disabilities, performing better than pre-pandemic levels.”

Black students showed the strongest gains overall on the Smarter Balanced assessments, and Latino students also made larger gains compared to both white and Asian kids in reading and math on the exams.

LAUSD Deputy Superintendent of Instruction Karla Estrada said LAUSD’s improvements were also the result of the district’s deployment of small group instruction, wraparound social services, and efforts to boost attendance.

Carvalho said the district is already looking to redouble those efforts.

“We are already examining and analyzing and detailing over the practices that we believe produce these results, and refining the approach to actually accelerate the rate of improvement that we’ve seen,” Carvalho said. “This is strategic. It is deliberate. I believe it settles a number of contentious unknowns of the past.”

Former LAUSD board member David Tokofsky, who consults with districts and labor groups on policy and operations, said LA Unified’s latest test scores are impressive, but the district and the state can still do better to achieve stronger results.

“The gap between Black and brown kids and white and Asian kids continues to be expansive,” said Tokofsky of the new scores. “The good news is the gap between the state scores and the district scores has been reduced to near nothing.”

While this may work for some schools, in our district, Rockwood School District in Missouri, we’ve chosen a different path. We keep students together in their class during whole-class instruction — regardless of ability level — and provide support or enrichment by creating flexible groups based on instructional needs within their grade level.

We’re building skilled, confident readers not by separating them, but by growing them together.

Children, like adults, learn and grow in diverse groups. In a Rockwood classroom, every student contributes to the shared learning environment — and every student benefits from being part of it.

Our approach starts with whole-class instruction. All students, including English multilingual learners and those working toward grade-level benchmarks, participate in daily, grade-level phonics and comprehension lessons. We believe these shared experiences are foundational — not just for building literacy, but for fostering community and academic confidence.

After our explicit, whole-group lessons, students move into flexible, needs-based small groups informed by real-time data and observations. Some students receive reteaching, while others take on enrichment activities. During these blocks, differentiation is fluid: A student may need decoding help one day and vocabulary enrichment the next. No one is locked into a static tier. Every day is a new opportunity.

Students also engage in daily independent and partner reading. In addition, reading specialists provide targeted, research-based interventions for striving readers who need additional instruction.

We build movement into our instruction, as well — not as a brain break, but as a learning tool. We use gestures for phonemes, tapping for spelling and jumping to count syllables. These are “brain boosts,” helping young learners stay focused and engaged.

We challenge all students, regardless of skill level. During phonics and word work, advanced readers work with more complex texts and tasks. Emerging readers receive the time and scaffolded support they need — such as visual cues and pre-teaching or exposing students to a concept or skill before it’s formally taught during a whole-class lesson. That can help them fully participate in every class. A student might not yet be able to decode or encode every word, but they are exposed to the grade-level standards and are challenged to meet the high expectations we have for all students.

During shared and interactive reading lessons, all students are able to practice fluency and build their comprehension skills and vocabulary knowledge. Through these shared experiences, every child experiences success.

There’s a common misconception that mixed-ability classrooms hold back high achievers or overwhelm striving readers. But in practice, engagement depends more on how we teach rather than who is in the room. With well-paced, multimodal lessons grounded in grade-level content, every learner finds an entry point.

You’ll see joy, movement, and mutual respect in our classrooms — because when we treat students as capable, they rise. And when we give them the right tools, not labels, they use them.

While ability grouping may seem like a practical solution, research suggests it can have a lasting downside. of nearly 12,000 students found that those placed in the lowest kindergarten reading groups rarely caught up to their peers. For example, when you group a third grader with first graders, when does the older child get caught up? Even if he learns and progresses with his ability group, he’s still two grade levels behind his third-grade peers.

This study echoes what researchers refer to as the in reading: The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. Lower-track students are exposed to less complex vocabulary and fewer comprehension strategies. Once placed on that path, it’s hard to catch up. Once a student is assigned a label, it’s difficult to change it — for both the student and educators.

In Rockwood, we’re confident in what we’re doing. We have effective, evidence-based curricula for Tier I phonics and comprehension, and every student receives the same whole-class instruction as every other student in their grade. Then, students receive intervention or enrichment as needed.

At the end of the 2024–25 school year, our data affirmed what we see every day. Our kindergarteners outperformed national proficiency averages in every skill group — in some cases by more than 17 percentage points, according to our data. Our first and second graders outpaced national averages across nearly every domain. We don’t claim to have solved the literacy crisis — or know that our model will work for every district, school, classroom or student — but we’re building readers before gaps emerge.

We’ve learned that when every student receives strong Tier I instruction, no one gets left behind. The key isn’t separating kids by ability. It’s designing instruction that’s universally strong and strategically supported.

We recognize that every community faces distinct challenges. If you’re a district leader weighing the trade-offs of ability grouping, consider this: When you pull students out of the room during critical learning moments, the rich vocabulary, the shared texts and the academic conversation, you are not closing the learning gap, but creating a bigger one. Those critical moments build more than skills; they build readers.

In Rockwood, our data confirms what we see every day: students growing not only in skills, but also in confidence, stamina and joy. We’re proving that inclusive, grade-level-first instruction can work — and work well — for all learners.

The Indiana Department of Education is the latest to try “outcomes-based contracting” — a pay-for-performance strategy that hires companies to tackle thorny education issues and pay them largely based on how much students improve.Ìę

Indiana’s task: Helping catch up from missing school during the pandemic.

State education secretary Katie Jenner said she and her staff looked at other states for guidance on how they solved middle school reading troubles, but found none successful enough to copy. 

But companies and non-profits contacted her all summer offering solutions after the state announced that middle school reading scores fell last year, she said.

“Not a day goes by that I’m not pinged multiple times by vendors across our country who have the next best thing since sliced bread,” Jenner told the state school board last month. 

“Put your money where your mouth is,” Jenner said. “If you are awesome and outstanding, move the needle. Help us move the needle for kids, rather than us just writing a check for millions of dollars and it still being status quo.”

Jenner’s not saying yet how the state will structure contracts — how much pay will be guaranteed and how much incentive-based — or even if the state will put out a formal request for proposals for the work. But several other states, including Texas, Florida and Arkansas, have examples and lessons on how to do it, as does the Center for Outcomes-Based Contracting created in 2024 by the Atlanta-based Southern Education Foundation.

“It brings clarity, aligns goals, and ideally creates real accountability across both the provider and the district,” said Mike Cohen, CEO of Cignition, a virtual tutoring company that met many of its contracted learning goals in Denver. “That said, there are definitely risks — especially when external factors like student attendance or district scheduling are out of the vendor’s control.”

He added: “If students don’t show up, it’s very hard to deliver outcomes, no matter how strong the instruction is.”

The center suggests having at least 40 percent of a contract dependent on clearly-defined student gains, though results so far have been mixed and advocates are still refining how to set goals and compensation.

The model is gaining in popularity. After backing a pilot with just four districts in 2022, the Southern Education Foundation now counts 60 districts and regional or state education agencies as testing the strategy.

Whether this model helps students learn more is unclear. Research is limited, so evidence of success remains anecdotal. Because some students usually improve and others don’t, schools typically pay per-student bonuses for a percentage of students, while vendors receive no extra pay for the remainder.

The that about half of the learning goals spelled out in member contracts in 2025 were achieved, with vendors earning about 68 percent of possible bonuses.

“As this work has started to scale, we’re starting to see that the rigor and integrity of the contracts are being maintained, and we’re seeing more and more outcomes for kids, which is the whole point of the work,” said center executive director Brittany Miller.

The idea of basing pay on performance isn’t new. Salespeople have long been paid by commissions, while executives and athletes have bonuses as big parts of their contracts. But school districts and states don’t often build contracts with outside companies around results.

That started to change right after the pandemic when some districts started hiring tutors with incentives as they used pandemic relief money. Two of those — Ector County Independent School District in Odessa,Texas, and Duval County Public Schools in Jacksonville, Florida — saw many students make strong gains, while others didn’t.

Duval County is still using the approach, the district told Âé¶čŸ«Æ·, and now offers 50% guaranteed pay and 50% incentive-based. 

“The approach is working well, boosting student growth in math,” said district spokesperson Sonya Duke-Bolden, with fewer 9th grade students needing math help than before.

Ector County hasn’t used the model once its pandemic tutoring contracts ended, however, and is still evaluating if it would use it again.

The Denver Public Schools are in a similar position, after Cohen’s Cignition achieved strong results and the other didn’t and was unable to collect much of the bonus pay. 

after studying eight districts that adopted the strategy as they used pandemic-relief money for high-dosage tutoring. Researchers wrote that districts and vendors worked together closely and tracked student data intensely since pay was so dependent on results. 

Vendors told researchers they appreciate a chance to showcase their curriculum, staff or online learning program, but are hesitant to embrace the contracts when results are so dependent on students actively participating and on imperfect measures of gains.

“OBC fosters collaboration, improves service alignment with student needs, and enhances data tracking,” researchers found. “However, financial risks for vendors and the complexity of implementation pose challenges.”

As with most outcomes-based contracts, Indiana’s will center on struggling students, who often have attendance and motivation problems too, so gaining results won’t be easy.

“We’re already working with a population of students that we would deem not at grade level or struggling in some capacity when it comes to their reading skills,” said Anna Shults, chief academic officer of Indiana’s education department. “These are students that have been probably given a plethora of support along their entire educational continuum, and it’s just still not working.”

Shults said the state will look to the , a part of the non-profit American Institutes for Research, or the , an arm of the U.S. Department of Education, for vendors that have promise. Districts could then choose to tap into a still-undetermined pool of state dollars to hire tutors.

Jenner is also seeking donations and grants to help cover contracts.

Even as she sorts out the details, Jenner is excited by the concept, on broader education issues. She told the committee it’s a careful way to take on the state’s reading problem.

“We will only pay if a partner helps us deliver outcomes for our students,” Jenner said. “It’s our responsibility to make sure in Indiana we are getting a return on investment.”

That’s great news, right?

Not so fast. According to a variety of other exams, including formative assessments from Curriculum Associates and and the national NAEP exams, student reading scores have continued to decline.

So are kids making progress in reading, or not?  

The answer may depend on what aspect of reading you look at. That is, not all reading tests measure the same thing. Amplify’s is primarily composed of short, one-minute assessments evaluating whether kids know their letter sounds and can understand how those sounds combine into words. Children who master these basic skills are more likely to be better readers than those who don’t.

But reading for comprehension depends on more than just decoding letters into sounds. Your brain might be able to decode words like “ribonucleic” or “semiquincentennial” but may have long forgotten the knowledge of biology and history necessary to understand their meaning.

Under what’s known as the , comprehension depends on two factors: decoding (sounding out words) and language comprehension (understanding the meaning of words and sentences). Critically, if kids can’t decode a word, they won’t be able to understand it. This is fundamental. However, even if students can decode a word, if they don’t recognize it, they won’t know what it means.

In other words, both skills matter. And yet, many states have a disconnect between the policies they’re pursuing to improve reading outcomes and the tests they’re relying on to tell them if those policies are working.

Let’s start with the policy side. According to an EdWeek , 40 states and the District of Columbia passed “science of reading” laws between 2013 and 2022. Thanks in part to reporting from the Sold a Story podcast, 26 states strengthened those laws or adopted new ones in just the last few years.

However, it’s proven much easier to change policies around decoding and phonics than to improve more complex skills. A 2023 of what’s actually in those state reading laws found that they rarely emphasize oral language or writing, and just six states touched on the development of background knowledge. While many of the “science of reading” bills provide additional money or supports, they may not be to affect reading comprehension scores.

There’s a historical parallel here. In the early 2000s, the Bush-era Reading First initiative spent $1 billion a year to change how reading was taught in schools. An evaluation of the program found that it in the sense that teachers modified their classroom instructional practices to be more aligned with research. Student decoding skills also improved by a noticeable degree, but it wasn’t enough to meaningfully change reading comprehension scores. Congress eventually the program. 

States may be on a similar trajectory right now. Each has its own test of reading comprehension in grades 3 to 8. But those are not equipped to measure discrete skills like decoding or vocabulary.

Part of the problem is that comprehension is tied up in so many other facets of language and knowledge. As , how well students comprehend any given reading passage is inherently linked to their vocabulary and background knowledge on that particular topic. If the passage happens to be about dolphins or , kids who know more about those subjects will look like they have better reading comprehension skills than those who don’t simply because of their incoming background knowledge.

So how can states get out of this trap? There’s really only one way forward — they need to break their reading tests down into more discrete, manageable chunks.

In the early grades, they would need to understand how many of their kindergartners and first graders are mastering basic decoding skills. Many states now require universal screening tests of exactly these skills, but they rarely report the scores publicly or share them with parents. In England, they do this through a very simple 40-word phonics check that is administered to every 6-year-old. The 2025 results aren’t out yet, but in prior years more than 80% of English 6-year-olds passed. How many American kids could meet the same standard? We don’t know, but any state or district could adopt its own version of the phonics check. At the national level, NAEP could implement one as well.

States might also want to copy how and other structure their testing systems. Instead of having kids read totally unfamiliar text passages, like we do in America, these systems rely on a core body of content that they expect all kids to master. Then, they test kids on their ability to understand and make connections across what they’ve learned. No state does this right now, but they could. Similarly, states could take a harder look at their tests in subjects like civics, history or science, which could function as discipline-specific reading exams that are arguably more important for the real world than asking kids to “find the main idea” from short, disconnected reading passages.

Without closing the gap between what skills they want students to demonstrate and what they’re actually measuring on their tests, state leaders will have no clue if students are mastering decoding or being prepared for higher-order skills. Those same leaders may also continue to wonder why they aren’t seeing gains in reading comprehension scores. 

Five years after the start of the pandemic, young Indiana students have made great leaps in their reading skills, but the state’s middle school students are floundering and sinking.

State tests taken this spring have touched off celebrations of progress with third graders, whose reading proficiency rates had their biggest jump in 12 years, mostly through a state program to train and coach more teachers in the science of reading.

But sagging English scores on state ILEARN tests for middle school students — scores that match results in other states and the decline in 8th grade reading scores from 2022 to 2024 on the National Assessment of Educational Progress — have Indiana education officials searching for a way to help older students so their struggles don’t persist into high school and affect their lives. 

“The third, fourth, fifth grade (scores) are moving,” state education secretary Katie Jenner told the state school board this summer. “Where we’re seeing the major lag in data are our late middle schoolers, seventh and eighth grade.”

These students, who were in second and third grade when the pandemic hit in spring 2020 — grades in which students learn key reading skills like sounding out and “decoding” what words mean — simply haven’t caught up from schools being closed and most classes forced online for a year. Those grades had a big drop in reading scores from the pandemic and have only fallen further behind since.

The pandemic knocked down the state’s 7th grade English proficiency rate from just under 50% in 2019 to just over 41% in 2021, for example. The decline has continued, with just under 38% of 7th graders scoring as proficient in English this spring.

“We have to remember, these are our students who intermittently came to school during the pandemic,” said state board member Pat Mapes. “We have still not caught up the skill set that they’ve lost during that time. This is kind of just what we’re going to see for a while, until we can get their skills developed.”

The answers won’t be easy. The state has a tight budget, so it may need to seek grants from donors who have already invested heavily in reading for young students. And while there are theories about why older students are having trouble — including the pandemic blocking them from learning to decode and understand words — experts nationally say there are no great examples of schools or states that have helped these students catch up to use as models.

States such as Florida and Virginia are trying to help struggling middle schoolers by creating individualized reading plans, said Casey Taylor, senior policy director of early literacy for ExcelInEd, the education advocacy organization founded by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush. She also praised Alabama for piloting more coaching in reading for middle school teachers, but said the efforts haven’t produced enough data to trumpet them as solutions.

“Those are a few of the examples that we’re looking at, but we don’t have a model to point to as a successful approach in full yet,” Taylor said.

Indiana’s education secretary Jenner, though, still pledges to offer a plan soon to help these students, using what limited evidence she can find.

“There’s not a state we can copy and paste, who has figured it out,” she told the state board, while promising, “Our eye’s on that ball. Stay tuned.”

Reading scores in Indiana have been controversial for several years, after they started declining in 2015. Improving reading skills has been a major focus of state officials who required schools to shift to using science of reading strategies in 2023. 

The state’s Republican supermajority reinstated in 2024 a requirement to have third graders with poor reading scores repeat third grade that Democrats removed in 2017.

The state also started requiring more second graders to take IREAD exams — the state’s reading-only tests for young students — instead of just in third grade, to give early warning of struggles.

The Lilly Endowment, the charitable foundation created by the founders of the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical company, gave the state $60 million in 2022 to help schools shift to the science of reading for kindergarten through second grade, donations that are still paying for ongoing work.

The Lilly donations and tax dollars are paying for one effort that Jenner and others are crediting for a jump in third grade IREAD scores this year — the Literacy Cadre program that launched in 2022 to help teachers learn and then improve their skills with science of reading.Ìę

Marian University and the University of Indianapolis have staffers that help schools with reading strategies and train school staff to then train teachers. The cadre started with 41 schools in 2022 and has grown to 564 today.

All the efforts combined boosted reading proficiency among third graders from 82.5% in 2024 to 87.3% in 2025, a jump the state school board said was the largest since IREAD started in 2013.Ìę

Schools in the cadre saw a seven percentage point jump in reading proficiency from 2024 to 2025, nearly twice the 3.6-point increase for non-Cadre schools.

School districts that have received help from the cadre credit the guidance with helping them focus on ways to improve.

“They basically trained us,” said India Williams, a reading coach with the Evansville Vanderburgh school district. “They came and trained myself and the principals, then we went and trained the teachers, and the teachers worked with the students, and the students learned. ”

But the cadre and Lilly’s donations were all focused on young readers — students who mostly started school after the pandemic — not students who had lost time in class when they would typically master reading skills.

Several national experts say many students never learned to “decode” words — to use phonics to figure out what a written word sounds like — a skill that science of reading lessons focus on. They refer to a “decoding threshold” in which students can make sense of words easily enough that their brains can focus on learning from what they read instead of just deciphering the words.

It’s what some call a shift from learning to read to reading to learn.

“If a student is unable to decode longer, more complicated text, all of their attention will be devoted to decoding text, and they won’t be able to comprehend what they’re trying to read,” researcher Rebecca Sutherland said when releasing a study on the issue last fall. “The findings give us a clearer understanding of what supports many older students need to read on grade-level.”

If that’s the issue in Indiana or elsewhere, there’s no quick fix.

“As persuasive as the decoding threshold thesis might be, the wish for a magic wand to wave at curriculum and standards hints at a serious problem: There is no immediate or obvious solution at hand to address the issue,” Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote for Âé¶čŸ«Æ· in March.

Middle school teachers don’t always know how to teach skills like decoding, since they are often more focused on teaching higher level reading skills like comprehension and interpreting literature, Pondiscio and others noted.

ExcelInEd’s Taylor said bringing some strategies being used for young readers to middle schools could help.

“For most kids, more time and repetition is really what they need, but they need that from equipped educators who are trained in how to identify, how to plan instruction and intervention to fill those gaps,” Taylor said. “We need to carry some of those supports that are present in early literacy policy into secondary or into the middle grades.”

It’s why states, including Indiana, are having teachers at all levels train in the science of reading. 

More support for middle school teachers might be needed, however, said Robert Behning, chairman of the Indiana House education committee. 

Behning, who also helps lead Marian University’s Center for Vibrant Schools, one of the two organizations helping to train and coach teachers as part of the Literacy Cadre, is working on a reduced version of the Cadre efforts — a “Cadre light” — aimed at middle schools, where students typically have different teachers for each subject, rather than a single teacher.Ìę

He cautioned that the state may not have the money for a major effort for middle schoolers, on top of its early grades work. It already had to trim money for schools to buy science of reading materials from the last state budget.

Behning said there may be ways that money Lilly has already committed to literacy efforts, plus another $86 million Lilly is already offering in grants to schools in and around Indianapolis, that can include work with the middle grades.

Whether Lilly would pay for more middle school help is unclear. The organization’s officials say they are encouraged by progress in the younger grades so far, but would not commit to offering more money.

Jenner, however, told the state board last month that she is seeking money to help middle schoolers, as it has younger students.

“We believe wholeheartedly that we’ve solved multiple other challenges and that we are up for the challenge there,” she said.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled the Lilly Endowment’s name.

But when the manuscript for J.K. Rowling’s fourth book landed on his desk, Saylor sat up straight: It was huge. Bigger, more complex and narratively intricate than virtually any storybook ever aimed at children.

“I had to really think,” he said in a recent interview. “‘How are we going to typeset this book? How are we going to print a million copies? How are we going to get enough paper?’”

Bound and shipped, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire clocked in at a formidable 734 pages —  2.5 pounds. It was, of course, another in a series of massive hits that collectively spent atop The New York Times Bestseller List, ensnaring both children and adults, including most of Saylor’s friends.

He jokes that until the advent of Potter, “mostly no one cared that I worked in children’s books.” As excitement for the series grew, friends would ask him when the newest installment was due 
 and what happens next?

“Suddenly my job became important,” he said.

But the book and its six co-volumes now serve another purpose. They’re an eloquent proof point in an ongoing conversation in the publishing world: Are kids still reading books?

By the time Potter arrived, Saylor had lived through waves of predictions about the next extinction-level event to doom his industry. First it was TV, then video games. Before that it was radio and comic books, once derisively called “.”

“I’m only slightly jaded by these reports,” said Saylor, 65, “only because people are always predicting that kids are going to stop reading, and that the end of publishing is near.”

This time, it feels different.

Even as children’s publishing explodes with new talent and excitement from fans , new distractions and diversions are precipitously driving down the share of young people who read for fun. It’s a long-simmering problem that even the optimist Saylor acknowledges his industry must confront. 

‘The reading class’

Over the course of , from 1984 to 2023, the proportion of 13-year-olds who said they “never or hardly ever” read for fun on their own time has nearly quadrupled, from just 8% to 31%.

During that time, the percentage of middle-schoolers who read for fun “almost every day” has fallen by double digits, according to surveys conducted for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the test widely known as “the nation’s report card”: In 1984, 35% of middle school kids read for fun almost every day. By 2023, it was just 14%.

The phenomenon is part of a larger shift away from reading, research suggests. from the University of Florida and University College London found that daily reading for pleasure has dropped more than 40% among all age groups over the last two decades, “a sustained, steady decline” of about 3% per year.

Findings like these have sparked fears that, after more than a century of steadily expanding literacy, reading is devolving into an act relegated to a small group of elites, a “” that enjoys books while the rest of us see them as, in the words of scholar Wendy Griswold, “an increasingly arcane hobby.”

It’s a strange and thorny problem that in some sense seems contradictory: If you followed around a young person for a day, you’d likely see that she is reading constantly, but often in tiny fragments. In addition to school assignments, she’s taking in a ton of atomized content: alerts, text messages, memes and social media posts. All those bits add up for sure — one that the typical American reads the equivalent of a slim novel every day — but it isn’t the same as sitting down to read a book.

For young people, that’s having downstream effects, with NAEP reading scores slumping even before the pandemic and college professors increasingly reporting that students are uncomfortable tackling long reading assignments, let alone . 

Adam Kotsko, an assistant professor who teaches in the , a discussion-based classics program at North Central College in Naperville, Ill., recently that his students are intimidated by any reading longer than 10 pages. They seemingly emerge from readings of as little as 20 pages, he said, with “no real understanding.”

That has put pressure on professors to design courses with fewer readings: “I got to a point where I was cutting to the bone so much that there wasn’t even enough to discuss in some class sessions,” he said in an interview. “It seems like the habits of sustained reading are not being taught in the first place, in some cases, and they’re just being replaced with nothing.”

While COVID lockdowns took a toll on reading, the problem predates the pandemic. Many observers point to several possible culprits, including schools’ fraught approaches to reading instruction and two decades of test-driven K-12 school pedagogies, which often de-emphasize fiction in favor of short non-fiction passages. 

This has all taken place amid the dawn of smartphones — the iPhone turned 18 in June — and the rapid, unregulated rise of social media. So Kotsko and his colleagues are careful not to place the blame on students’ shoulders, but on a schooling and media ecosystem they can’t control.

“We are not complaining about our students,” he . “We are complaining about what has been taken from them.”

‘Continuous partial attention’ 

Gabriel Baez, 15, said phones are “a big distraction” at his South Florida charter school. As soon as teachers give students even a moment of downtime, the phones come out. Several teachers have begun requiring students to stash them in special pouches during class. “No distractions — that’s the only thing that I think helped a lot of us.”

A sophomore, Baez said he’s excited to read the science fiction thriller Ready Player One — a novel about, of all things, video games. He loved the 2018 Steven Spielberg movie, but said most days he’s overscheduled and barely able to find a minute to open a book. 

He’s in class from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m., then does homework until 5 p.m. Dinner is at 6 p.m., then he studies a bit more. From 7 to 8 p.m. it’s soccer training, then bed so he can wake up early and do it all again. “I really don’t have time unless I decide to substitute something.”

For many young people, school is what gets in the way of books. 

Julia Goggin, 15, grew up reading books and loving them. She consumed the first few Harry Potter books unassisted in second grade and finished the series by fourth grade. She read a lot in middle school. 

In high school? Not so much. 

Like Baez, she’s heavily scheduled, running cross country in the fall and track and field in the winter. She’s in her school’s theater group, which means after-school rehearsals. Then homework. All of it leaves little time for reading anything aside from school assignments.

“If a school is too overbearing about forcing kids to read a lot, it makes them not want to read for fun because it’s not fun anymore,” she said. “Because school isn’t fun.”

A junior at a private high school in Wilmington, N.C., Goggin enjoys reading, but said her two younger brothers, eighth- and ninth-graders, don’t. “They never got into reading the same way I did when they were little. Since then, I guess, they’ve just played video games instead. That’s, like, all they do all day.”

Over the years, she has noticed a change in herself: As a kid, she read for relaxation. “But now all I want to do is scroll on TikTok, which is really bad,” she said with a laugh. “Now I have to be more conscious: Instead of going on my phone, I have to make the decision to read, which is different than before. When I was younger, it was just a default.”

To be sure, young people in the U.S. are reading words — lots of words. Perhaps more than ever.

In her most recent book, the literacy scholar noted that research from as far back as 2009 found that the average American reads what amounts to 34 gigabytes of information, or about 100,500 words, daily — from newspapers, magazines, books, games, messages and social media posts. For a bit of perspective, To Kill a Mockingbird, the Harper Lee classic, clocks in at about 100,000 words.  

While all that grazing certainly adds up, Wolf said, it’s “rarely continuous, sustained, or concentrated.” Rather, those 34 gigabytes represent “one spasmodic burst of activity after another.”

She said the fact that young people are reading all those words should comfort no one. “It means nothing.” The inability — or the unwillingness — to go deeper is what’s more important. “I think we have, really, a demise of deep reading, which for me is synonymous with critical thinking and empathy and the beauty of the reading act.”

While the 20th century saw literacy rates in the U.S. , technological developments such as movies, radio, TV and the Internet shifted modern culture away from reading and writing and toward visual and oral communication. One unintended result: at least two generations of young people who see books and reading as optional.

In the meantime, 65% of 8-to-12-year-olds now have an iPhone or other smartphone, according to by the market research group YPulse — and 92% of 8-to-12-year-olds are on social media, where they’re inundated with memes and short-form videos. 

Carl Hendrick, a Dublin-born professor at in Amsterdam and co-author of the 2024 book , accuses this generation’s parents of all but abdicating their responsibilities. 

He likens smartphones’ cognitive disruptions to the health effects of cigarettes, recalling that he grew up in Ireland at a time when smoking was ubiquitous. “You could smoke on buses — you could smoke on airplanes. You could smoke anywhere. We look back on that now with horror. And I think the same thing will be true of phones. We’ll go, ‘How did we allow 11-year-olds to go onto social media?’”

Hendrick, who has emerged internationally as a for improving classroom instruction via better understanding of learning science, said digital distractions are taking a toll, hijacking kids’ ability to engage their working memory on difficult texts and problems. That kind of laser-like focus, he said, is rapidly disappearing from our lives due to the “weaponized distraction” of social media. “It’s at an extraordinary level of sophistication to try and ,” he said.

In a recent newsletter, he laid down the gauntlet: “Solitude, slowness and sustained attention are no longer default states but acts of resistance. And as those conditions erode, so too does the possibility of the moral work that deep reading once quietly performed.”

While social media sites are the latest offenders, the phenomenon is hardly new. In 1998, the sociologist and computer researcher Linda Stone coined the term “” to capture the ways in which the first digital television networks allowed users to “connect and be connected” 24/7. She described a kind of early , or “fear of missing out.” But it also generated an artificial sense of “constant crisis,” a dopamine-generated high alert that’s hard to extinguish.

By contrast, Hendrick said, giving oneself over to reading deeply, whether it’s literature, philosophy or any complex text, offers something more: a rehearsal for real life, and for the patience we need to deal with one another. “It is a rehearsal in understanding before judging, listening before reacting,” he wrote recently. “This is not merely a virtue. It is a survival skill for a pluralistic, tolerant society.”

Ironically, one of the big drivers of the “whole language” movement was to foster a love of books and reading. But what educators missed at the time was that not teaching all kids to read proficiently at a young age meant reading became “more and more laborious” as they got older, since they couldn’t handle more complex texts, said Holly Lane, director of the .

“Nobody likes doing something that they’re not good at,” she said. “They may love the idea of reading, but they don’t like the act of reading.”

That, to many observers, is the original sin of the reading problem: the nation’s uneven commitment to teaching reading in ways we now know are more effective, such as explicit phonics instruction, which systematically teaches students the relationships between letters and sounds. Other, less effective methods, such as “whole language” instruction, emphasize immersion in texts rather than attention to isolated skills.

Like many educators who are pushing schools to embrace scientific approaches to literacy, Lane is hopeful about improvements in states like Louisiana and Mississippi. But she worries that progress at the elementary school level will be wasted if educators can’t help students at the secondary level develop the stamina to read longer, more difficult texts. Without that, she said, they won’t develop into readers. “When they leave high school, even if they can read, they don’t.”

Others worry that the rush to teach phonics without attention to solid background knowledge will continue to yield disappointing results. Phonics instruction is “trendy to care about right now,” said Boston University’s Elena Forzani, but it’s being enacted “in pretty superficial ways” that ignore student motivation. “We’re teaching kids to read in a content and motivational vacuum,” said Forzani, who directs the university’s programs.

In order to be able to read deeply, she said, students need many opportunities to enjoy, analyze, discuss and write about a text and the issues or problems it presents. But when she visits classrooms, she sees students reading short, disconnected “popcorn passages” with new topics every day, sometimes multiple times a day. 

While more and more kids are getting the explicit phonics instruction they need at an early age, the vast majority are learning to read “in a very isolated fashion — the focus is on the skills. And kids don’t care about that. They’re humans, like the rest of us. You only want to learn a new skill if it’s going to do something for you.”

‘Very good readers — and voracious readers’

When he visits schools to sign books, the Japanese-American writer and illustrator Kazu Kibuishi sees this in action. His popular nine-volume series of graphic adventure novels, about siblings who must find their kidnapped mother, finds a rapt audience of dedicated fans.

“I don’t really buy that kids are not reading anymore, because I see the opposite of that all the time,” he said in an interview. “I find kids to be very good readers — and voracious readers.”

But state-of-the-art digital entertainment has conditioned them to want more from their media. “Their minds are encoded to get information as fast as possible,” he said. “They have to turn that off when they go to school.”

Kibuishi’s publisher, Scholastic, has gone all in on graphic novels — Saylor, the creative director, even established an imprint . Teachers and librarians regularly tell him that kids read them avidly and repeatedly, “until they fall apart.”

Kibuishi said he creates comics that provide “high-quality, dense information” on every page, with fast-moving, high-stakes plotlines, rich illustrations and heightened emotions from his characters. His inspirations are the classic Marvel comics from the 1950s through the 1980s. “Big ideas were baked into small spaces,” he said.

Creators like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby “put a tremendous amount of life experience” into the slim stories, which he compares to little sponge dinosaurs that expand exponentially in water. 

A self-described average student, Kabuishi found his calling in storytelling after reading Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea in high school. “I read it pretty much in one sitting,” he said. “And when I was done with the book, I was transformed.”

The words “felt like pictures, and the book was so short,” he said. It was the first time reading didn’t feel like homework. “I felt like I was on a fishing boat. I felt like I had just experienced the rise and fall of this fisherman’s journey with this fish. And it was so poetic.” The little book “felt so much bigger than any other book than I’d been asked to read in class.”

The struggle to find such magic books is real, said Kelsey Clodfelter, a veteran English teacher at a Chicago public high school. She teaches students whose skills are often years behind where they should be by 10th or 11th grade. 

“When reading is hard for you, when it is literally difficult for you to decode words at the age of 16 or 17, reading is a very painful experience,” she said. “It’s also really embarrassing.”

Clodfelter, 35, who has a large said Common Core reforms of the past decade essentially replaced book-length readings with short non-fiction texts designed to prepare students for the kind of reading they’ll do “in the real world.” While it didn’t prohibit longer reading assignments, it may have made it harder for many teachers to assign appropriate books. 

And COVID, she said, “really did a number on us in terms of the transactional nature of school,” sending students the clear message that grades mattered more than learning, that standards in general were lower — and that nearly any effort was satisfactory.

The upshot, she said, is that she’s working harder all the time to get kids through reading assignments: She often swaps classic texts for contemporary memoirs, such as by actress Jeanette McCurdy. She invites students to read silently in class for 20-minute stretches. She creates book groups, and even sits with them and reads passages aloud.

“Students still won’t read the book,” she said.

‘Nobody can learn this much’

These days, even the most elite students are rebelling against reading.

, a longtime University of Virginia professor, said he has noticed lately that his students — “some of the most successful that the system produces” — not only complain about long readings but about “being asked to learn as much as I ask them to learn.”

Like Clodfelter, Willingham believes the pandemic scaled back expectations that have yet to be restored.

Each year since 1985, he has taught an introduction to cognitive psychology course that has changed little in 40 years. Students read about a chapter a week, averaging 30 pages or so. A careful reading, he said, would require about four hours of work.

“This is the first year since the pandemic [that] I’ve been hearing from students, ‘This is an unreasonable expectation. Nobody can learn this much.’”

A leading authority on cognitive science in the classroom, Willingham suggests to his students that they consider different study strategies. Long an advocate for the importance of broad background knowledge in reading instruction, Willingham said he’s “actually cheered and optimistic” that more educators are realizing the importance of a rich curriculum. 

But he worries about the time young people spend online — recent research suggests that they now spend most of their waking hours , he said.  

That may be the biggest irony embedded in this dilemma: The Internet has seemingly decimated young people’s desire to read books, offering them endless distractions and opportunities to do something — anything — else.

But dig a little deeper and you’ll find it is also doing a lot of heavy lifting, making it easier than ever for young people to find great books and connect to likeminded people who desperately want to talk about them.

Daphne LaPlante, 25, a video editor in Austin, Texas, posts videos to , and elsewhere proclaiming her love of books. She got her start on the app in 2021, in her final year of college.

Scrolling on the popular video app, she realized that other young people were also hungry for conversations about books. One of her favorites, the fantasy novel Six of Crows, was being made into a TV show, she recalled, “and I had nobody to talk to about it.” So she turned on her phone’s camera and hit record. Soon her videos began detailing what she’d read each month, and before long she was recommending books. After a while, publishers took note and started sending her advance copies of new titles.

LaPlante now has more than 40,000 followers on TikTok and over 30,000 on Instagram, and jokes that she has become a “micro-influencer” in the corner of the social media site known as . Born during the pandemic, it has become so influential that it has both crowned new hits and turned a few backlist books into . One industry analysis suggests that BookTok has changed behaviors: In 2021, the year it started gaining momentum, in the U.S. by 9%, to 825.7 million copies, the most since the research company NPD BookScan began tracking sales data in 2004.

“I think a big part of getting people into reading is community,” she said.

For the past year-and-a-half, LaPlante and a friend have also recorded a podcast called , about their love for 2010s-era young-adult dystopian fiction, epitomized by The Hunger Games and similar titles. “There are a lot of people, like me, who read those and were obsessed with them as a kid,” she said.

‘I don’t want to eat the f***ing salad’

If he’d had a mobile phone 25 years ago, Hendrick, the Irish educator, might well have been on BookTok, forcefully recommending his favorite literature, history and philosophy books. He recalled getting lost as a young man in The Great Gatsby, reading it cover-to-cover in two days. He has since read and taught it many times, but wonders: If he was 16 now, what incentive would he have to read such a book, given all the social forces in teens’ lives? With so much “easily attained dopamine” via social media, video games, movies and elsewhere, why would anyone go through the effort?

He thinks about what books must look like to his six-year-old daughter. “She can read,” he volunteered. “She’s really clever, but she just doesn’t want to because everything else is so 
.” After considering it for a second, he finally said, “She’s in McDonald’s and I’m telling her to eat the salad, and she’s going, ‘I don’t want to eat the f***ing salad. There’s all these chicken nuggets. Why would I do that?’”

To bring back reading, he said, schools may very well have to do more than just improve instruction and reading stamina and find a few tasty books. They’ll have to get mobile phones out of classrooms, he said — actually, he thinks buying a phone for a 10-year-old “should be outlawed.” Many states and schools, to their credit, are getting the message and for much of the school day. But they may also have to consider a back-to-basics approach that treats reading as an indicator of public health.

“With cars, we mandated seat belts,” he said. “We mandated speed limits. It may be the case that we need to say, ‘Kids have just got to read for an hour in silence on their own. That’s just it — in the same way you’ve got to eat certain vegetables.’”

In 20 years, Hendrick predicted, we’ll likely discover that reading and, more broadly, deep cognitive focus, offer the same kinds of benefits as exercising or a balanced diet. We’ll look back on this decade, he said, with its easily attained dopamine, its endless mental chicken nuggets and distractions, and realize, “We were weaponizing mental health problems.”

A quarter-century ago, Hendrick recalled, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the novelist Norman Mailer was unequivocal when asked about their significance. “He said, ‘It’s going to take us 10 years to figure this out. Call in the novelists.’ His thing was, we need to get the writers in to make sense of this.”

People, in other words, need books. No matter how advanced our digital media have become, nothing can replace the depth of understanding they afford. “For me, when I read Shakespeare or The Sound and the Fury or [James] Joyce, I was finding out what it meant to be alive,” said Hendrick. “My struggles were the struggles of other people. And I was learning about ethics and morality. Where are we going to end up without that?”

We’re often left out of schoolwide instructional conversations. We don’t always have mentors who understand our setting. And there’s still resistance in some buildings to true inclusion and co-teaching. 

But when it comes to reading, especially in special education, we celebrate small victories. A student decoding her first word. Another raising his hand to read aloud. A reluctant reader smiling as she opens a book. But those moments — joyful as they are — shouldn’t be rare. And they shouldn’t feel miraculous. They should be common. 

I’ve been a special education teacher for seven years. And I’ve seen firsthand what happens when we as teachers believe in students with disabilities — and give them structured, high-quality reading instruction. I’ve also seen what happens when we don’t. 

Far too often, we quietly accept that some kids, especially those with individualized education programs, just won’t learn to read. That they’ll always struggle. That their reading growth will be slow, if it comes at all. We build systems that manage that failure. We adjust our expectations. And we wait. 

This year, I stopped waiting.  

For years, I cobbled together lessons from online worksheets and Pinterest printables, trying to meet each student’s reading needs during 30-minute blocks that felt shorter every day. I’m often responsible for more than 40 students across kindergarten through fifth grade, with service times ranging from 30 to 300 minutes per week. 

I had no curriculum, no sequence, no scaffolding — and worse, no results. 

That changed this past year when, for the first time, I began using an evidence-based, structured, supplemental foundational curriculum. I’m not in the business of promoting one curriculum over another, but you can find programs like this from , , , and others. Whatever you choose, ensure it’s research-based, structured, focused on foundational reading skills, and proven-effective for the resource room population.

 My program followed a consistent daily routine, built-in review, and offered skill checks that I could actually use to inform my IEP goals. Once my students understood the structure, they knew what to expect. They knew where we were going. And they started to believe that they could get there. 

Many of my students went from dreading reading instruction to asking to come early. They saw their own progress and became more motivated by it.  

This was the year I saw the most academic growth of my career. 

Students with disabilities face daily uncertainty in school: instructions they don’t understand, tasks they’re not ready for, expectations that shift depending on the classroom. This is why routines and procedures matter so much. 

From the first week of school, I taught every group the expectations of our classroom. Together, we created a classroom contract around three core values: Be kind. Work hard. Respect our learning environment. We didn’t just sign it — we lived it. Eventually, students began referring one another back to it. It gave them ownership. It gave them structure. 

That consistency made my room feel safer. And when students feel safe, they can take academic risks. They can read aloud. Ask questions. Try again. 

Even for students I saw just once a week, the structure stuck. That’s the power of routine. It doesn’t just save time — it builds trust. 

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is about language — and how much of it our students are expected to process at all times. For students with disabilities, especially those with ADHD or slow processing speed, every word we say adds to their cognitive load. That’s why I’ve learned to cut “language clutter” wherever possible. 

Instead of giving constant verbal feedback, I use gestures or visual cues. I simplify my instructions. I give students room to think. This shift has made a remarkable difference — not just in student focus, but in confidence. 

Teaching isn’t about how much we say. It’s about how much our students can absorb, make sense of, and apply. 

This past year affirmed what I’ve always believed but hadn’t always seen: students with disabilities can make significant reading growth — when we give them the proper support. 

That starts with structured instruction that’s actually usable in a resource setting. It means giving special education teachers access to curricula that are efficient, repeatable, and grounded in research — not just programs that check a box. 

It also means investing in mentorship and training tailored to the realities of resource classrooms. New teachers need more than general guidance — they need support from people who understand their schedules, caseloads, and instructional demands. Educators need to understand the reading brain, the science behind structured instruction, and what real IEP implementation entails. 

Finally, we need to create school cultures where general and special educators collaborate, rather than compete — where co-teaching is supported from the top down, and students benefit from a unified team. 

As I move into a new role as a reading specialist this coming school year, that’s where I’m putting my energy. I want to help other teachers implement IEPs with fidelity, understand the reading brain, and make structured literacy work in real classrooms. 

We don’t need to wait for perfect conditions. We just need to start with what works, stay consistent, and hold onto the belief that every student — especially those with IEPs — deserves the chance to become a reader. 

At first, the visit was heartening. Students diligently worked on mastering letter sounds, blending them and identifying spelling patterns to form words. But as we moved from classroom to classroom, my smile began to fade. By the end of the walk, I was taking deep breaths. The principal asked what was wrong. The diagnosis was hard to hear for the principal to hear, but necessary to deliver: The school needed to check into Balanced Literacy Rehab.

For more than a decade, I’ve helped educators shift away from Balanced Literacy, a common but increasingly discredited approach, toward research-aligned practices. The transition is harder than it sounds, because even when schools obtain new materials and commit to better methods, ingrained habits can sabotage change.

Adopting a new curriculum is only a first step. Real change is like training for a marathon: buying the right gear doesn’t build endurance. Success comes from commitment, coaching, time and deliberate practice. Over time, I’ve come to recognize several warning signs that indicate a school needs Balanced Literacy Rehab.

The first is that principals think the new program is being implemented but they don’t really know, because they often lack tools to verify what’s happening in classrooms. That’s not because they don’t care; rather, many don’t come from early literacy backgrounds, so concepts like or may be entirely new. Managing buses, cafeterias and playgrounds leaves little time for poring over curriculum guides.

Practical tools can help, whether they be that outline what to look for in a third-grade literacy classroom during the second quarter, or shared Google Forms that tag lessons as strong, developing or off-track, giving principals visibility. Literacy coaches can help get these systems running and build leaders’ own instructional knowledge. Data collected in this way allows them to identify trends by grade level or across a district and provide teachers with feedback on how to improve their instructional practices. If it’s unclear whether educators are using the new curriculum — or how well — they might as well be teaching behind a curtain.

The second warning sign is that teachers are using both the new and the old programs. Schools adopt a new curriculum, but teachers cling to favored materials from the past. It’s like buying new furniture but never clearing out the old couches. This instructional clutter leads to confusion, especially for students.

This isn’t about laziness; the guided reading groups, leveled-book bins and strategy charts that are central to Balanced Literacy represent years of effort and identity for many teachers. Letting them go can feel like a loss, so the teachers bargain: “I’ll do the phonics lesson, but I’m keeping my leveled library.” Unfortunately, mixed instructional models send mixed messages. Students may engage in explicit phonics lessons in the morning, only to be told later to guess the word using the picture. For children with learning differences, that inconsistency can be especially damaging. About 1 in 5 students in the U.S. struggle with dyslexia, which makes decoding even . Confusing mixed signals can undermine their confidence and progress as readers. Instructional coherence — fully embracing new methods and letting go of ineffective ones — is essential.

The third sign is that the science of reading is implemented in kindergarten through second grade, but that’s where the shift stops. In third grade and up, teachers continue to rely on outdated comprehension practices focused on “skills and strategies” rather than building the background knowledge that fuels true understanding. Foundational skills like phonemic awareness, phonics and decoding are necessary, but they’re not sufficient; reading comprehension relies heavily on background knowledge and vocabulary. This becomes increasingly important in the upper elementary grades, when students encounter more challenging vocabulary, including critical words and phrases that are used across subjects but often mean different things depending on the context.

To help students understand complex texts, schools must provide rich, knowledge-building content — not just lessons on, say, how to “identify the author’s purpose.” That means reading and discussing meaty texts, writing thoughtfully about them and exploring important ideas in depth. Content matters at least as much as comprehension strategies.

Changing instruction is hard. It takes time, tools and support. Teachers can feel overwhelmed by competing messages, and principals often struggle to steer change while managing countless other demands. But the effort is worth it. When schools move beyond surface-level change — when they truly adopt coherent, research-backed practices — reading instruction becomes more effective and more joyful. Students thrive. Teachers regain a sense of purpose. And the work becomes deeply fulfilling.

The path to better reading instruction is real. It just takes a clear diagnosis, a good treatment plan and the willingness to see it through.