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Dr. Louisa Moats

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Dr. Louisa Moats  "Higher Education: Where Science Can Meet the Art of Teaching"

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Leaders and Learning in Literacy: The Tolman Hour Glass

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Ohio's Plan to Raise Literacy Achievement

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Ohio's Plan to Raise Literacy Achievement

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Stanislas Dehaene

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The Brain Prize Presents: Stanislas Dehaene

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Teacher and parent resources for learning about the science of reading

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Resource Library - Haskins Global Literacy Hub

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Trusted online resources for PARENTS and EDUCATORS

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Dr. LaTonya Goffney: Confronting the Data

Hear how they successfully challenged the traditional adoption process, studied the science of teaching reading, analyzed student data and experiences, and developed a district-wide set of beliefs and expectations.

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Science of Reading: The Podcast

S2-01. Confronting the data: Dr. LaTonya Goffney

Join Dr. LaTonya Goffney, Superintendent of Schools for Aldine Independent School District in Texas, as she recounts her two-year journey with her team of district educators to adopt a new early literacy curriculum. Hear how they successfully challenged the traditional adoption process, studied the science of teaching reading, analyzed student data and experiences, and developed a district-wide set of beliefs and expectations.

Quotes:

"If you can read, you can go anywhere. Reading is a gateway to opportunity."

"As leaders, we have to be prepared to challenge the notion of low expectations."

Resources:

The Knowledge Gap: The hidden cause of America's broken education system--and how to fix it by Natalie Wexler

Want to discuss the episode? Join our Facebook group Science of Reading: The Community.

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S2-01. Confronting the data: Dr. LaTonya Goffney - Science of Reading: The Podcast

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Join Dr. LaTonya Goffney, Superintendent of Schools for Aldine Independent School District in Texas, as she recounts her two-year journey with her team of district educators to adopt a new early literacy curriculum. Hear how they successfully challenged the traditional adoption process, studied t...

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Article: Identifying and Teaching Students w/ Significant Reading Problems

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Article: Identifying and Teaching Students w/ Significant Reading Problems

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"No child is born a reader; all children in literate societies have to be taught to read." ¹
"We are all good at speech, but disabled as readers and writers; the difference among us in reading/writing is simply that some are fairly easy to cure and some are not." ²

Helping children learn to read is big business. From expensive literacy curricula and remedial programs to one-day workshops and brain-training fads, there are too many claims of guaranteed success and too little focus on trustworthy findings. Having been researchers studying mechanisms for improving literacy outcomes for more than 30 years, we offer a more sober-and sobering-review of what is known about how to help struggling readers.

To begin, we confess that there are some rather large holes in our collective knowledge. We know more about the science of reading than the science of reading instruction. In other words, we know a lot more about what components are associated with improved outcomes for each stage of reading development (e.g., phonemic awareness and the alphabetic principle are essential for beginning readers) than we do about how to teach all these components to a class of students with diverse learning needs. Similarly, we know more about interventions for students with mild to moderate reading difficulties than we do about students with severe reading difficulties. Students with very low reading skills-those at the bottom 10th percentile of word reading and lower-have been challenging to impact. Finally, in policy development, we have not capitalized on theory and science for effectively implementing new practices in schools. ³ Still, there is much we do know that can support excellent instruction. Both here and in two online supplements- "It's Time to Act on a 20-Year-Old Consensus" and "Three Things We Need to Learn" -we offer guidance to prevent and address reading difficulties. There is no doubt that some children have reading disabilities, but the key to improved outcomes for the vast majority of struggling readers, including those with a reading disability, is enhanced core instruction-and that means enhanced curricula, assessments, pre-service and in-service professional development, and supports.

In the high-functioning system we describe below, the primary focus is on assessing changes in children's reading abilities as a response to instruction and on building educators' capacity to deliver more intense, customized interventions. To be effective, such assessments and interventions need to be delivered through a seamless system of well-coordinated general and special education supports that emphasizes prevention, reduces inappropriate referral to and placement in special education as a function of low reading ability, and provides more intensive interventions for students with reading disabilities. Inappropriate referral to and placement in special education is often a function of identifying students as needing special education who have not received an adequate opportunity to learn, as well as the view that special education is the solution for all children who do not readily learn to read. Some students are not given an opportunity to learn because they move frequently or are absent often; others are present day after day but are taught with programs and practices that are not based on the science of reading. Because so few teacher preparation programs, school districts, and commercially available programs have implemented consistently what we have learned from the science of reading, far too many students struggle-feeling like they are reading failures, not realizing that they were never provided the explicit instruction they need to succeed.* The vast majority of students with low reading achievement have preventable problems: with explicit, evidence-based instruction, they would learn to read.

These evidence-based practices are fundamental and necessary not only to develop strong readers but also to discern the differences between students with reading difficulties that can be readily supported through general education from those with serious reading disabilities or dyslexia. For the purposes of this article, we are using reading disabilities and dyslexia synonymously to refer to children with foundational decoding and spelling problems.

Students in classrooms where evidence-based fundamentals of reading instruction are deliberately implemented are far less likely to demonstrate reading difficulties. Enhanced general education instruction in the early grades reduces the number of children who do not meet grade-level benchmarks and start to fall behind, and therefore it reduces eventual referrals to special education.

We recognize that teachers-even those with the most advanced knowledge and skills-cannot and should not be asked to carry the entire burden of improving reading outcomes for all learners. We think there is ample evidence to suggest that educational systems can be organized so that the vast majority of students-close to 95 percent-will be reasonably successful readers when these organized systems are effectively implemented. ⁴ The roughly 5 percent of students who do not make adequate progress when these systems are in place are likely truly reading disabled because of the persistence of their reading difficulties. They too can improve their reading skills, but they require highly specialized, intensive interventions and may have difficulty reading throughout their lives.

Why Do Some Children Learn to Read Easily, While Others Struggle?

Learning to read is a process that occurs so readily for some youngsters that it seems to develop almost naturally. With minimal guidance and feedback, some students are on their way to recognizing the patterns of written words and inferring the ways in which our phonological system (sounds of language) map to our complex orthography (written system). But for other students-anywhere from 40 to 65 percent-the task of learning to read is much more challenging. If these students do not receive highly explicit instruction with additional opportunities for implicit learning, difficulties in learning to read proficiently are inevitable. These more challenging readers are the ones who require the most knowledgeable and skillful teachers.

Reading science has established that learning to read is an acquired process, not a natural process-it's nothing like learning to walk or talk. There are no brain systems evolutionarily designed for reading. Rather, neural circuits for language and visual processing must be repurposed and reorganized to support literacy. ⁵ One neural circuit involves the ability to process sublexical units of words, initially at the phonological level. The child must take what is essentially an implicit understanding of the sound system of language and explicitly apply it to print. ⁶ Once this repurposing begins, another neural circuit designed for face and object recognition has to become a rapid letter and word processor; this reorganization of the circuit requires considerable meaningful exposure to print. As these circuits are revamped, they form a system, which usually takes several years to become well developed, that enables the child to process print with immediate access to the meaning of the word, which is sometimes described as "language at the speed of sight." ⁷ If a child does not have access because of struggles with mastering the alphabetic principle, this system does not develop adequately and the child falls behind in the ability to automatically recognize letter patterns. Reading becomes an effortful, unenjoyable process. Because all children must reorganize these neural circuits into a reading brain, prevention programs must focus on early acquisition of these skills. It is very hard to catch up if mastering the alphabetic principle is delayed. This is why prevention is more effective and less costly than remediation. ⁸

Students with reading disabilities have great difficulty acquiring foundational, word-level reading skills; they do not decode words accurately or fluently, and often they have poor spelling. Except for assessing to determine children's responses to instruction, there are no effective methods for differentiating subgroups of children with word-level problems. Students with reading disabilities (dyslexia) are real and represent the largest group of children in special education, even though in many cases stronger instruction in the earlier grades may have prevented the special education referral; they also comprise a large portion of the general education population that does not read well but has not been identified for special education.

Preventing reading difficulties is about making sure every child is exposed to reading instruction that is sufficiently explicit and customized to support the acquisition of foundational skills within a language-rich learning environment that promotes vocabulary and background knowledge. This will reduce unnecessary special education referral and identification. Students with significant, intractable reading problems that are not responsive to evidence-based instruction meet an important threshold for special education referral and identification. However, students who have not consistently had access to evidence-based instruction (because they are absent often or because their school district is not aware of the science of reading) are the students for whom reading difficulties can be prevented. While adequately addressing all the issues related to reading disabilities and dyslexia is beyond the scope of this article, we highlight "18 Common Misunderstandings of Dyslexia" in the box on the right.

How Should Educational Systems Be Organized So That the Vast Majority of Students Learn to Read?

Nearly two decades ago, the President's Commission on Excellence in Special Education ¹⁷ made three recommendations that-if fully implemented-could dramatically improve the instruction children receive and their reading achievement. The first recommendation was to focus on results, not process. The commission observed that special education was a highly bureaucratic process that did a good job in providing civil rights protection once a child was identified, but did not show strong evidence for accelerated gains in learning. It recommended the simplification of paperwork requirements and a change in monitoring of school-based implementation of special education to a focus on outcomes.

The second recommendation was to embrace a model of prevention, not a model of failure. Many literacy problems can be resolved with early intervention, so the commission advocated for universal screening, progress monitoring, and increasingly intense intervention based on instructional response; prevention was to start upon school entry and be supported by special education personnel. These methods, originally subsumed under a response to intervention (RTI) rubric, are now often referred to as multiple tiers of systematic support (MTSS).

The third recommendation was to consider children with disabilities as general education children first. Although requirements for placement in the least restrictive environment result in many children with reading disabilities spending the bulk of their school day in general education, there is often little alignment between the approaches to literacy instruction in general and special education. The primary special education intervention often involves accommodations, not remedial interventions to significantly improve students' reading ability.

We, as well as others, have summarized a model for preventing reading difficulties that aligns with an RTI/MTSS approach. ²³ The fundamental principle of prevention is screening to identify risk early. ²⁴ The idea is that it is better to over-identify children at risk for reading problems as early as possible and provide necessary instruction than to under-identify and have large numbers of students who suffer as their problems linger without the required instructional supports. An overview of this system for preventing reading difficulties is illustrated in the "Tiers of Instruction" below.

Tiers of Instruction
The Tiers of Instruction describes a model for providing increasingly customized reading interventions to students at risk for reading problems. Commonly presented as a triangle, we have tipped the triangle to emphasize the primacy of Tier 1 instruction for all students. Tiers 2 and 3 increase intensity for students who do not respond adequately to instruction. The percentages represent estimates, based on effective implementation of a multi-tiered system, of how many children are likely to be at or near grade level and only need Tier 1 (effective, evidence-based instruction for the whole class), at risk of reading difficulties and require Tier 2 (targeted, efficient supplemental instruction), or at risk of severe challenges and require Tier 3 (intensive, customized intervention, often with special education and/or dyslexia services).

From J. M. Fletcher, G. R. Lyon, L. S. Fuchs, and M. A. Barnes, Learning Disabilities: From Identification to Intervention, 2nd ed. (New York: Guilford Press, 2019), 91. Copyright Guilford Press. Reprinted with permission from Guilford Press.

In this seamless, supportive system, all students are screened. Those at risk for reading difficulties receive continued evidence-based Tier 1 literacy instruction in the classroom, ongoing progress monitoring, and, if needed, a Tier 2 intervention that addresses their specific literacy problems. This Tier 2 intervention may be provided by the classroom teacher, a trained teaching assistant supervised by the classroom teacher, or an educational specialist such as a reading teacher. Tier 2 interventions are not part of a special education but rather an extension or supplement within general education. Students participate in Tier 2 intervention for a specified period of time, typically 8-12 weeks, with ongoing progress monitoring, approximately every two weeks. Using progress monitoring data and teachers' observations, each student's response to literacy instruction is determined (e.g., is the student reaching expected benchmarks?).

If the student's response is not sufficient to meet progress monitoring benchmarks, there are several options, including adjusting the instruction, changing the group, adjusting the group size, changing the intervention, or providing an increasingly intensive intervention (which may be longer, e.g., 30-45 minutes rather than 20 minutes, and more customized to each student's needs). If inadequate instructional response continues, the educational team or parent/guardian may determine that an eligibility evaluation for special education is in order. The advantage to this approach is that students are provided appropriate, evidence-based instruction early; for the majority of students, this rapid Tier 2 intervention is adequate for becoming strong readers. Only those students with persistent and significant reading difficulties would be referred for special education or dyslexia services.

Throughout this model, screening and progress monitoring are critical. Most schools across the United States are implementing screening approaches to reading difficulties that ostensibly identify those youngsters who are at risk for reading failure. It is mandated for dyslexia in over 40 states. ²⁵ Effective screeners (1) require 10 minutes or less per child, (2) demonstrate strong psychometric properties (e.g., are valid and reliable), (3) provide readily usable data that identify students as either at risk or not at risk, (4) are developmentally appropriate and can be administered two to three times per year, and (5) are easily scored. Errors in identifying which children are at risk of reading difficulties are inevitable, but we think schools should focus on reducing errors that result in not identifying risk (false negatives). In other words, it is better for a child who does not need extra instruction to get it than for a child who does need extra instruction to go without.

For progress monitoring, short probes involving timed word or passage reading are used so that teachers can make instructional decisions. ²⁶ These types of assessments are aimed at improving instruction and determining each student's incremental progress, recognizing that for students who are consistently making inadequate progress, additional interventions may be warranted. (For an easy-to-use review of progress monitoring tools, see here.)

Progress monitoring data can be useful in many ways. First, these data can document that students are learning the critical aspects of reading (e.g., sound-spelling patterns, vocabulary) being taught. Second, the types of responses students provide can guide instruction by highlighting each student's needs for reteaching and additional practice, while those elements that appear to be successfully learned can be monitored for maintenance. Third, data from these measures can facilitate decisions about curriculum (e.g., whether additional or different programs are needed), grouping (e.g., some students may benefit from a more advanced group; others may benefit from a mini one-on-one lesson to enhance performance), and interventions (e.g., whether to continue an intervention). Fourth, these data-especially ongoing progress monitoring data-can inform decisions about referral to and placement in special education. If special education eligibility becomes an issue, the best signal is the intractability of the child's reading problems when provided with the explicit instruction that works for most children.

How Can a Supportive, Integrated General and Special Education System Be Implemented?

Developing a systemic approach to supporting teachers so that they can meet the needs of the range of readers in their classrooms requires ongoing screening, monitoring students' responses to instruction so that teachers can adjust instruction to meet students' needs, and fidelity of implementation to ensure adherence to treatment protocols. But seamlessly assembling all these pieces is not easy.

First, most educators, including teachers and school leaders, would benefit from ongoing situated professional development that builds on the knowledge they have and extends it in ways that may be readily implemented in their school setting. What happens when you say "professional development" to most educators? Do they smile with anticipation about what they will learn and how they can implement it in their school? Typically, no. Too often, professional development is a one-day exposure to ideas (of varying quality), many of which are lost before the next day at school.

We are suggesting a distributed professional development model that provides ongoing learning opportunities as each aspect of the new system is launched. This model can follow standards like those from Learning Forward. Workshops on how to screen children and offer highly effective Tier 1 instruction would be followed with in-class coaching and support until the majority of educators were aligning their practices with data on outcomes. Then, educators would learn how to extend their Tier 1 practices with Tier 2 supplemental interventions, increasing time in literacy instruction for students who are not making sufficient progress. This would ensure that the instruction children receive in Tiers 1 and 2 is well aligned, which increases effectiveness.

Adding Tier 3 instruction requires yet more professional development, coaching, and coordination. Tier 3 more intensively focuses intervention on students' skill gaps and may be guided by more diagnostic and progress monitoring assessments. Students in Tier 3 may be candidates for special education and/or dyslexia identification and services. Because of the focus on individual skill gaps, it is not as tightly aligned with Tier 1 (regular classroom instruction), but Tier 1 remains essential for providing a comprehensive reading program. For example, a child receiving Tier 3 intervention for specific decoding skills needs Tier 1 core instruction to continue progressing in vocabulary, listening comprehension, writing across genres, and other aspects of English language arts.

Building up the seamless system takes time and a great deal of in-class support for teachers-but it is far more effective than scattershot workshops. Preventing and addressing reading difficulties is hard, but the effort pays big dividends in reducing reading difficulties. We urge schools, districts, and states to put far more effort into systemic supports (especially the professional development and coaching for teachers and administrators described here). We recommend beginning in grade 1, where the strongest evidence of the efficacy of these approaches exists, and then expanding to other grades.

What Can Teachers Do Now to Support Students with Reading Difficulties or with Mild to Moderate Disabilities or Dyslexia?

Most of what we describe above requires system-level change. But teachers want to do what's best for their students today. Here are six steps that teachers can implement in their classrooms now (and that school leaders should start supporting immediately).

1. Use academic learning time deliberately and purposefully to ensure students receive the maximum amount of evidence-based instruction. Academic engagement-i.e., time on task-is an excellent predictor of academic outcomes.²⁷ Consider how much time you spend explicitly teaching and providing highly focused instructional time. Observation studies reveal that surprisingly little class time is devoted to explicitly teaching the high-priority skills associated with improved reading outcomes.²⁸ Consider ways to structure your classroom, teaching, and resources so that maximum time is spent on instruction and minimal time is lost to transitions, over-explaining, and behavioral management.

2. Consider the value of the one-minute lesson. Many students with significant reading difficulties benefit from a one-minute lesson in which they are provided a mini review of a challenging task, an opportunity to practice word reading with feedback, or a chance to demonstrate what they know with feedback. Time is always an issue, but do not allow it to block you from spending highly focused instructional minutes with the students who need you the most.

3. Offer customized instruction that reflects students' learning needs. Many of the students you teach learn to read almost effortlessly. However, students with reading difficulties, disabilities, or dyslexia require highly customized instruction that aligns with their specific learning needs. How can you determine what this customized instruction might be? Examine their screening and progress monitoring data. Determine the high-priority areas in which they require additional instruction and practice. Identify ways to include this type of work each day in an individual mini lesson or with a small group of students with similar needs. Provide practice opportunities with feedback so they have multiple opportunities to acquire proficiency.

4. Give struggling readers instruction in small groups, in pairs, or one on one. Many students with reading difficulties benefit from the specialized instruction that is allowable in small-group, paired, and one-on-one instruction. These formats provide opportunities to tailor instruction to their needs with appropriate practice and targeted feedback.

5. Create many opportunities to read a range of text types and a range of text levels. Students who struggle with reading benefit from opportunities to generalize their reading to varied text types, including digital texts, informational texts, and narrative texts as well as hybrid informational and narrative texts such as biographies. This variation in text types is not just for older students but can be part of the listening comprehension and text reading of younger students, including beginning readers. Also, consider ways to vary the text levels that students read. Students can read and comprehend more advanced texts when they have adequate background knowledge, are motivated by the topic, and/or have additional instructional support.

6. Provide explicit instruction that incorporates clear feedback. Explicit instruction with feedback is highly effective, especially when students are having difficulty learning with less explicit methods. Teachers who offer this type of evidence-based instruction do the following:

Identify, prior to teaching, what they expect the students to do or say.

State clearly and in as few words as possible what they need students to know.

Model what they expect students to say or do.

Ask students to demonstrate what is expected (e.g., blend phonemes, read a word, read a text silently).

Provide prompt feedback that is specific and clear (e.g., "I heard several of you blending the sounds /r/, /a/, /t/ and then saying the word 'rat.' That is what I expect. I also heard several of you only saying the word 'rat' and not blending the sounds. I will give you three more sounds, and I want everyone to both blend the sounds and say the word.").

Give selected students opportunities to respond independently (and avoid only calling on the most capable students).

Control the task difficulty by making the task less difficult for students in need of adaptation and then gradually increasing the task difficulty as their performance improves.

Maintain high levels of student success, engagement, and response.

Wrap Up

The degree to which a student expresses a reading difficulty is always an interaction between the child's opportunity to learn (due to absences, instructional quality, or other issues) and the extent of the student's reading impairment. Thus, youngsters who are provided a genuine opportunity to learn to read-including high-quality, explicit, evidence-based instruction-and yet still present with significant reading difficulties are likely to have a severe reading impairment. In contrast, children who have not consistently been able to access high-quality, evidence-based instruction and present with significant reading difficulties are likely to have reading problems that could have been prevented and still can be remediated. This difference is of the utmost importance. Currently, there are students with preventable reading problems who are suffering academically and emotionally, and who are placed in special education often to receive accommodations without effective remediation. And there are students with severe reading disabilities or dyslexia who are not getting the intensive interventions they need-in part because special education is overwhelmed with large numbers of students who do not actually have reading disabilities.

This must end, but teachers cannot solve these problems on their own. These are systemic problems-and that is why we have proposed a new, seamless, three-tiered system of general and special education to address them. Far too many students and teachers are struggling. It is long past time for leaders of schools, districts, and states-not to mention teacher preparation programs, curriculum developers, and professional development providers-to step up, change their policies and programs, and focus on meeting children's needs.

Sharon Vaughn is the executive director of the Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is also the Manuel J. Justiz Endowed Chair in Teacher Education and a professor in the Learning Disabilities and Behavior Disorders program. She has earned a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Institute for Literacy and Learning and the Special Education Research Award from the Council for Exceptional Children. Jack M. Fletcher is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Houston, where he is also the associate vice president for research administration. A former member of the President's Commission on Excellence in Special Education, he has earned the International Literacy Association's Albert J. Harris Award and the International Dyslexia Association's Samuel Torrey Orton Award. This research was supported by grant P50 HD052117 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (the authors are solely responsible for the content).

*To learn more about how preparation programs, professional development, and other key supports could be improved, see "Teaching Reading Is Rocket Science" in the Summer 2020 issue of American Educator. ( return to article)

Endnotes

1. G. R. Lyon et al., "Rethinking Learning Disabilities," in Rethinking Special Education for a New Century, ed. C. E. Finn et al. (Washington, DC: Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and Progressive Policy Institute, 2001), 287.
2. A. Liberman, "How Theories of Speech Affect Research in Reading and Writing," in Foundations of Reading Acquisition and Dyslexia: Implications for Early Intervention, ed. B. Blachman (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997), 5.
3. L. Sanetti and M. Collier-Meek, Supporting Successful Interventions in Schools: Tools to Plan, Evaluate, and Sustain Effective Implementation (New York: Guilford Press, 2019).
4. J. Fletcher and S. Vaughn, "Response to Intervention: Preventing and Remediating Academic Difficulties," Child Development Perspectives 3, no. 1 (2009): 30-37; and A. VanDerHeyden, J. Witt, and D. Gilbertson, "A Multi-Year Evaluation of the Effects of a Response to Intervention (RTI) on Identification of Children for Special Education," Journal of School Psychology 45, no. 2 (2007): 225-256.
5. S. Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read (New York: Penguin Random House, 2009).
6. Liberman, "How Theories of Speech."
7. M. Seidenberg, Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can't, and What Can Be Done About It (New York: Basic Books, 2017).
8. Fletcher and Vaughn, "Response to Intervention."
9. A. VanDerHeyden, M. Burns, and W. Bonifay, "Is More Screening Better? The Relationship Between Frequent Screening, Accurate Decisions, and Reading Proficiency," School Psychology Review 47, no. 1 (2017): 62-82.
10. J. Fletcher and D. Currie, "Vision Efficiency Interventions and Reading Disability," Perspectives on Language and Literacy 37, no. 1 (2011): 21-24.
11. J. M. Fletcher et al., Learning Disabilities: From Identification to Intervention, 2nd ed. (New York: Guilford Press, 2019).
12. A. E. Cunningham et al., "Disciplinary Knowledge of K-3 Teachers and Their Knowledge Calibration in the Domain of Early Literacy," Annals of Dyslexia 54 (2004): 139-167; and L. Spear-Swerling and P. Brucke, "Preparing Novice Teachers to Develop Basic Reading and Spelling Skills in Children," Annals of Dyslexia 54 (2004): 332-364.
13. J. Worthy, "'We Know for a Fact': Dyslexia Interventionists and the Power of Authoritative Discourse," Journal of Literacy Research 50, no. 3 (2018): 359-382.
14. R. Peterson and B. Pennington, "Developmental Dyslexia," The Lancet 379, no. 9830 (2012): 1997-2007.
15. S. Shaywitz et al., "Persistence of Dyslexia: The Connecticut Longitudinal Study at Adolescence," Pediatrics 104, no. 6 (1999): 1351-1359.
16. A. Ellis, Reading, Writing and Dyslexia: A Cognitive Analysis (Hove, UK: Psychology Press, 1993).
17. US Department of Education, Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, A New Era: Revitalizing Special Education for Children and Their Families (Washington, DC: 2002).
18. M. Snowling and M. Melby-Lervåg, "Oral Language Deficits in Familial Dyslexia: A Meta-Analysis and Review," Psychological Bulletin 142, no. 5 (2016): 498-545.
19. See, for example, M. Melby-Lervåg, T. Redick, and C. Hulme, "Working Memory Training Does Not Improve Performance on Measures of Intelligence or Other Measures of 'Far Transfer': Evidence from a Meta-Analytic Review," Perspectives on Psychological Science 11 (2016): 512-534.
20. Dehaene, Reading in the Brain.
21. M. Scheiman, "Effect of Vergence/Accommodative Therapy on Reading in Children with Convergence Insufficiency: A Randomized Clinical Trial," Optometry and Vision Science 96, no. 11 (2019): 836-849.
22. L. Tamm, "Comparing Treatments for Children with ADHD and Word Reading Difficulties: A Randomized Clinical Trial," Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 85, no. 5 (2017): 434-446.
23. Fletcher and Vaughn, "Response to Intervention."
24. For similar models, see G. Batsche et al., Response to Intervention: Policy Considerations and Implementation (Alexandria, VA: National Association of State Directors of Special Education, 2005); and J. Kovaleski, A. VanDerHeyden, and E. Shapiro, The RTI Approach to Evaluating Learning Disabilities (New York: Guilford Press, 2013).
25. Y. Petscher et al., Screening for Dyslexia (Washington, DC: US Department of Education, Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, Office of Special Education Programs, National Center on Improving Literacy, 2019).
26. L. Fuchs et al., "Bringing Data-Based Individualization to Scale: A Call for the Next-Generation Technology of Teacher Supports," Journal of Learning Disabilities (forthcoming).
27. C. Greenwood, B. Horton, and C. Utley, "Academic Engagement: Current Perspectives on Research and Practice," School Psychology Review 31, no. 3 (2002): 328-349; and J. Stallings, R. Johnson, and J. Goodman, "Engaged Rates: Does Grade Level Make a Difference?," Journal of Research in Childhood Education 1 (1986): 20-26.
28. D. Chard and E. Kameenui, "Struggling First-Grade Readers: The Frequency and Progress of Their Reading," Journal of Special Education 34, no. 1 (2000): 28-38; and S. Vaughn et al., "Reading Instruction for Students with LD and EBD: A Synthesis of Observation Studies," Journal of Special Education 36, no. 1 (2002): 2-13.
29. See, for example, M. Lovett et al., "Treating the Core Deficits of Developmental Dyslexia: Evidence of Transfer of Learning After Phonologically- and Strategy-Based Reading Training Programs," Developmental Psychology 30, no. 6 (1994): 805-822; and R. Morris et al., "Multiple-Component Remediation for Developmental Reading Disabilities: IQ, Socioeconomic Status, and Race as Factors in Remedial Outcome," Journal of Learning Disabilities 45, no. 2 (2012): 99-127.
30. M. Lovett, R. Barron, and J. Frijters, "Word Identification Difficulties in Children and Adolescents with Reading Disabilities: Intervention Research Findings," in Handbook of Learning Disabilities, ed. H. Swanson, K. Harris, and S. Graham (New York: Guilford Press, 2013).
31. Morris et al., "Multiple-Component Remediation."
32. C. Denton et al., "An Evaluation of Intensive Intervention for Students with Persistent Reading Difficulties," Journal of Learning Disabilities 39, no. 5 (2006): 447-466.

[illustrated by Jia Liu]

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Identifying and Teaching Students with Significant Reading Problems

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"No child is born a reader; all children in literate societies have to be taught to read."

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Article: It's Time to Act on a 20 Year Consensus

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Article: It's Time to Act on a 20 Year Consensus

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The issues we are raising in our and the President's Commission on Excellence in Special Education report articleare not new.Twenty years ago was a heady time for literacy research and practice in both general education and special education. The publication of the National Reading Panel (NRP) report ¹ is a widely recognized landmark for literacy practices. Less frequently recognized are reports on reforming special education, such as the Fordham Foundation/Progressive Policy Institute report Rethinking Special Education for a New Centu r y, ² the Office of Special Education Programs report Identification of Learning Disabilities: Research to Practice, ³ A New Era: Revitalizing Special Education for Children and Their Families. ⁴

Although the NRP report addressed literacy instruction for all children, including struggling readers, reading was also emphasized in the three reports on special education. This emphasis was essential because of the number of children identified for special education with reading disabilities, which the President's Commission estimated at up to 40 percent of all children served in special education. Moreover, it is widely recognized that most of the children served in special education under the specific learning disability category have difficulties with foundational reading skills, including the ability to decode and spell words accurately and fluently. One study ⁵ found that four of five children in six large middle schools who did not meet criteria on the state reading accountability assessment had significant difficulties with decoding and fluency. More sobering is that only about 25 percent of these students were identified for special education. Another ⁶ reported that only one in four boys and one in seven girls with significant reading difficulties were identified by the schools as learning disabled. Other reports address the long-term national concerns about the lack of significant growth in literacy skills in American schoolchildren, such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

The educational system cannot support practices in which children are provided inadequate reading instruction in general education and then referred to special education to meet their needs. All three reports raised concerns about the number of children served in the specific learning disability category because of poor reading skills. Special education has two purposes. One is to provide civil rights protections for students with disabilities. The second is to provide specially designed instruction, which in special education is usually remedial. We know that remedial instruction must be very explicit, customized, and intensive to be effective. The intention was that this instruction would be available for students with reading disabilities, not for students with garden-variety reading difficulties. Admittedly, it is difficult to tell the difference between these two groups of children, which is why assessments of instructional response are so important.

As of 2020, there has been progress. The Office of Special Education Programs now uses a targeted monitoring system in which outcomes are more prominently featured. The 2004 implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), ⁷ and the more recent reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (the Every Student Succeeds Act) in 2015, ⁸ have more language encouraging early intervention, prevention, and RTI/MTSS (response to intervention/multiple tiers of systematic support). IDEA also has provisions that support identification of children for special education that focus on RTI and specific requirements that exclude children from intervention if there is not data-based documentation of adequate instruction in reading and math. Implementation of RTI/MTSS and of these special education requirements for core instruction continues to be a concern, leading to ongoing concerns about inappropriate identification of struggling readers for special education. More generally, integration of general education and special education is an ongoing concern, and they continue to be treated as separate systems.

No More Waiting to Fail

The eligibility process for special education and dyslexia in an MTSS model is different from the traditional model. In an MTSS model, children have been screened and monitored from the beginning of their schooling, facilitating early identification of literacy needs that can be quickly addressed. Traditional eligibility models for special education often wait until students have failed and then are referred without an ongoing intervention to determine that they have had sufficient and appropriate instruction. In these traditional models, students are usually referred for special education in the later grades, after failure, and at a time when remedial interventions require considerable intensity to accelerate gains because the child has not had access to print because of reading difficulties. One way to think about it is that in an MTSS model, schools identify all students who may require supports and provide them as early as possible. Perhaps we will have some students receiving these supports who would eventually have not needed them, but this is ultimately a more productive decision than waiting until students are in fourth or fifth grade, demonstrate significant reading problems, and also have developed a poor esteem about their success as readers.

Identification for Special Education and Dyslexia Requires Multiple Criteria

The Office of Special Education Programs report ⁹ specified three essential criteria for identifying individuals with disabilities for special education: (1) students have been provided evidence-based instruction and their persistent response to this high-quality instruction is lower than expected; (2) assessment of low achievement-for example, low reading achievement that is typically determined through norm-referenced achievement tests; and (3) consideration of exclusionary criteria to ensure that low achievement is not due to another disability (e.g., intellectual disability, sensory disorder) or to environmental and contextual factors (e.g., limited English proficiency). Youngsters cannot be identified with disabilities, including dyslexia, solely based on their instructional response-although, instructional response can be used as a data source for referral and identification. ¹⁰

IDEA explicitly states that children may be identified for special education only with documentation that low achievement is not the result of inadequate instruction. ¹¹ This is fleshed out in the regulations, which state ¹²:

To ensure that underachievement in a child suspected of having a specific learning disability is not due to lack of appropriate instruction in reading or math, the group must consider, as part of the evaluation described in §§300.304 through 300.306-

(1) Data that demonstrate that prior to, or as a part of, the referral process, the child was provided appropriate instruction in regular education settings, delivered by qualified personnel; and

(2) Data-based documentation of repeated assessments of achievement at reasonable intervals, reflecting formal assessment of student progress during instruction, which was provided to the child's parents.

And yet, many practitioners in special education are reluctant to exclude children despite concerns about the adequacy of core reading instruction, especially if the phonics component is incidental instead of what it should be: explicit, well organized, and integrated with other components of the reading program. However, these provisions in IDEA emerged because of concerns about the disconnection between general education and special education; they were designed to prevent inappropriate referral and placement. If a district has a special education eligibility process that is based on cognitive discrepancies, including an IQ-achievement discrepancy and patterns of strengths and weaknesses, the identification component is not directly related to instruction, isolating special education from general education. It leads to costly, unnecessary testing as well as questions about how the adequacy of instruction requirements are met, which must be added. In an MTSS model, a comprehensive assessment is still involved, but consistent with the Office of Special Education Programs consensus report, ¹³ it focuses on instructional response data available through progress monitoring, additional norm-referenced testing of achievement levels, and assessments related to other conditions and contextual factors (e.g., limited English proficiency) that might explain low achievement.
Sharon Vaughn is the executive director of the Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is also the Manuel J. Justiz Endowed Chair in Teacher Education and a professor in the Learning Disabilities and Behavior Disorders program. She has earned a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Institute for Literacy and Learning and the Special Education Research Award from the Council for Exceptional Children. Jack M. Fletcher is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Houston, where he is also the associate vice president for research administration. A former member of the President's Commission on Excellence in Special Education, he has earned the International Literacy Association's Albert J. Harris Award and the International Dyslexia Association's Samuel Torrey Orton Award. This research was supported by grant P50 HD052117 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (the authors are solely responsible for the content).
Endnotes

1. National Reading Panel, Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction (Bethesda, MD: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000).

[illustrated by Jia Liu]

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It's Time to Act on a 20-Year-Old Consensus

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The issues we are raising in our article are not new. Twenty years ago was a heady time for literacy research and practice in both general education and special education. The publication of the National Reading Panel (NRP) report1 is a widely recognized landmark for literacy practices.

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Subscribe now to a brand-new podcast series all about the science of how children learn to read.

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Choosing Reading Curricula K-5 - Resources for Districts Based on the Science of Reading by Michelle Elia | This newsletter was created with Smore, an online tool for creating beautiful newsletters for individual educators, schools and districts

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Moving an Entire System: Youngstown City School District’s Work to Improve Learning for Every Child Reflects Strong Commitment to Equity, Collective Practice

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Moving an Entire System: Youngstown City School District’s Work to Improve Learning for Every Child Reflects Strong Commitment to Equity, Collective Practice

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Youngstown City School District (YCSD), one of Ohio's urban eight districts, is improving literacy achievement through a commitment to the use of evidence-based literacy practices across the district.

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APM Reports audio documentary

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Listen to this audio documentary on the Educate podcast. Subscribe now.

Sonya Thomas knew something wasn't right with her son C.J. He was in first grade and he was struggling with reading. "Something was going on with him, but I could not figure it out," she said.

Teachers and school officials told her that C.J. was behind but would catch up. They told Sonya to read to him at home. But she did read to him. C.J. liked the Veggie Tales stories and "The Big Friendly Giant" by Roald Dahl. His older sister read the Goosebumps books to him.

C.J. went to Amqui Elementary, a public school in Nashville, Tennessee, where 80 percent of the students were Black or Hispanic and almost all of them were from low-income families. Test scores show most children in the school were struggling with reading. But Sonya didn't know that. She sent C.J. to Amqui because she liked the school and it's where her best friend's son went; her friend picked the kids up after school because Sonya worked late as a nurse.

C.J. is the youngest of Sonya's four kids. The three older ones had no trouble learning to read but something was different with C.J. "I started asking myself, does he have a learning disability?" She sent a handwritten note to the school, requesting that he be tested. Records show the school didn't do it.

Second grade came and went. Then third and fourth grade, and C.J. was still having trouble reading. Sonya didn't know what to do. Tutoring? Private school? Those weren't things she could afford. She was desperate.

And she knew something about how C.J. felt. She'd struggled to learn how to read, too.

As she grew older, she says it wasn't that she couldn't read the words; it's that she didn't know what a lot of the words meant. Not just when she was reading, but when people were talking, too. She noticed it with colleagues at work. "Sometimes when they would have conversations, I didn't know what they were talking about," she said. "I would find myself Googling words." It was embarrassing. She did not want this to happen to C.J.

But the schools kept telling her C.J. was doing fine. His grades were good. He was a well-behaved kid. Then, seventh grade, 2018. C.J. had moved to a new school that year, a public charter school in Nashville. C.J.'s adviser called Sonya in for a meeting. She told her that C.J. was reading on a second-grade level.

"I lost it," Sonya said. "I sobbed." Remembering the moment during an interview brought tears to her eyes.

The adviser said the school would help C.J., and Sonya wanted to believe it. But she'd put her faith in the school system for years, and now she had a seventh grader who was reading on the level of kids nearly half his age.

Sonya was determined to figure out what happened with C.J. - and to help other families in the same situation. "Nobody else should walk away feeling like that," she said.

The kids left behind

There are kids like C.J. all over the country. Learning to read does not come easily to them. Schools tell their parents: Read to them. They'll be OK. But many won't be.

Reading is essential - not just for school success, but for life. When children have trouble learning to read, it can kick off a devastating downward spiral. 1 Struggling readers are more likely to report feeling sad, lonely, angry, anxious and depressed. 2 Their poor reading skills make it hard for them to keep up in other subject areas. They're more likely to have behavior problems, to drop out of school and to end up in the criminal justice system. 3

Despite the high stakes, lots of kids in this country can't read very well. You can see it in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a standardized test given every two years to measure the reading comprehension of American students. More than a third of fourth graders don't read on a basic level.
U.S. fourth-graders' reading levels over time
SOURCE: The National Assessment of Educational Progress. *In 1992 and 1994, testing accommodations were not permitted.

Why are so many children struggling with reading - the most basic, most fundamental academic skill?

It's a question I've been reporting on for several years. What I've found is that reading instruction in many schools is based on a belief that if children are read to a lot, reading should come pretty easily for them. Decades of scientific research on reading shows this isn't true. Some kids learn to read easily, but many children struggle. It doesn't matter how much they are read to or the number of books in their home. They will not become good readers unless they are taught how their written language works. 4

But prevailing approaches to early reading instruction in this country minimize direct instruction. 5 The teacher's role is mainly to guide students, to create an environment that is conducive to learning how to read: setting up reading groups, reading with kids, helping them find books on their reading level.

This approach creates a lot of struggling readers. Some of these struggling readers get the help they need but a lot can depend on their family income, their race and ethnicity, and what kind of school they go to. Family income matters, because if a school isn't teaching a child how to read, there are other options such as paying for tutors or private schools. Race matters, because white children are significantly more likely to go to public schools where more kids are successful with reading; that means when white kids struggle, their reading problems tend to stand out and get attention. 6 And if a child has a reading disability, a white child is much more likely to get special education services.

America's approach to reading instruction is having an especially devastating impact on Black, Hispanic and American Indian children.
U.S. fourth-graders' reading levels by race/ethnicity
SOURCE: The National Assessment of Educational Progress, 2019.

The downward spiral that can start with early reading problems is a source of profound inequality in our society. This could be prevented if more educators and policymakers understood what cognitive scientists have figured out over the past several decades about what's going on when kids struggle with reading.

A proposal for understanding reading difficulty

Wes Hoover is a cognitive psychologist who first got interested in reading when he was a graduate student at the University of Texas in the 1970s. 7 At the time, a big debate was going on among academics about what children need to learn to become good readers. The fight was focused on phonics instruction.

One side said: If kids know how the sounds in words are represented by letters, reading comprehension will follow. Teach kids decoding.

The other side said: If kids are focused on the meaning of what they're reading, they can figure out what the words say. Teach kids comprehension.

"Word recognition is complex. Language comprehension is complex. But the big idea of reading is that if you can master those two complex skills, then you can master reading comprehension."
Wes Hoover

Hoover studied under a professor, Philip Gough, who was trying to figure out the relationship between decoding and comprehension. 8 Gough was particularly interested in why some people have a hard time understanding what they read. He was interested in reading difficulty.

What Gough knew was this: When children start school, the vast majority of them are already quite good at speakingtheir native language. "The average American 6-year-old," he wrote in a paper, "has a mastery of English [that] would be the envy of any college graduate learning English as a second language." 9

But young children don't know how to read most of the words they know how to say. If children can learn to decode, Gough thought, they should be able to comprehend text up to the level at which they can comprehend spoken language.

In 1986, Gough and a colleague, William Tunmer, came up with an equation to describe this idea. They called it the Simple View of Reading. 10

The equation says that a person's ability to comprehend what they read is the product of their decoding skills and their language comprehension ability.

Language comprehension is your ability to understand meaning when someone is talking or when text is read out loud to you.

Decoding is your ability to read printed words quickly and accurately. (Decoding is more commonly referred to now as "word recognition" in the Simple View equation, because scientists have discovered that readers become so skilled they don't have to sound out most of the words they see; they know the words instantly, on sight.) 11

The Simple View doesn't say that reading is simple. It says that reading comprehension can be divided into two parts.

"It's the big idea of reading," Hoover said. "Word recognition is complex. Language comprehension is complex. But the big idea of reading is that if you can master those two complex skills, then you can master reading comprehension. That's the hypothesis."

The hypothesis was first tested and verified in a study Hoover published with Gough in 1990. 12 It's been confirmed in more than 150 studies since. 13 The studies show the only way to be a good reader is to have both good language comprehension ability and good word recognition skills, as this figure illustrates.

The Simple View doesn't say how word recognition or language comprehension skills develop. And it does not say how they should be taught. 14 But it makes clear that the first task of the beginning reader is to learn how to decode the words he or she knows how to say.

Children who don't learn to decode in the early grades can easily grow into adulthood without knowing how to read. I met some of these kids at a juvenile detention facility in Houston. They're being taught to read as part of an ongoing study by researchers at the University of Houston who are investigating the links between reading problems and involvement with the juvenile justice system. 15

Stumped by the words

I visited the Burnett-Bayland Rehabilitation Center in February 2018. It's a large, tan building surrounded by metal fencing. The lobby reminded me of an auto repair shop: worn-out stuffed chairs, old magazines, a chemical odor.

I was led through two large locked doors by a staff member, who took me on a tour. It was all boys, as young as 10. More than 90 percent of them were Black or Hispanic. They walked the halls in blue jumpsuits, their hands clasped behind their backs. We passed the units where they slept on thin plastic mattresses and the isolation room where they were sent when their behavior was out of control. And then we got to a windowless cinderblock room with heavy locked doors on each side. Inside were a table and two green chairs. This was where the boys visited with their families once a week. It was also where some of them were finally being taught how to read.

I sat in on a few of these tutoring sessions. They included short lessons on concepts as basic as how two letters can represent one sound. There were vocabulary building activities. Then the students did some reading. Some of the boys could barely read. 16

"B-l-ee ..." said one boy I'll call Mateo, struggling to read the word "bleak." I wasn't allowed to use the boys' real names or ask why they were here. Mateo was 15 at the time, short and skinny with a shadow of a mustache above his lip.

He was trying to read a story about a man taking a bus ride. Occasionally, he'd successfully sound out and there'd be a flash of recognition. "Woman!" he exclaimed after slowly decoding the word. But it was clear from earlier in the lesson that Mateo didn't know the meaning of a lot of the words he was trying to say: fleet, sneer, gloat. If someone had read the story out loud to him, he wouldn't have understood it all. Mateo had a reading comprehension problem because he was having a hard time with both word recognition and language comprehension.

But if Mateo had been taught how to sound out words earlier in his life, it's likely he would have known the meaning of a lot more words at the age of 15.

That's because of something reading researchers call "Matthew" effects, a term borrowed from the Bible. 17 It's the idea that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Here's how it works in reading.

Let's say you start school, and you get off to a good start learning how to decode words. Now you can read the words you know how to say, and through reading you begin to learn the meaning of words you've never heard before. That's how the rich get richer.

But the opposite can happen. You have a hard time learning to decode. Maybe you have a learning disability. Or maybe no one teaches you how to decode. Or both. Now you're a struggling reader. You can't read very well, so you don't read much, and you miss out on the opportunity to learn the meaning of new words through reading. One study estimated that a fifth grader who reads at the 90th percentile encounters about 2 million words every year just in text she or he reads outside of school. 18 A reader at the 10th percentile encounters just 8,000 words. That's the poor getting poorer.

When a person reaches age 15 without knowing how to sound out the word "bleak," is that a learning disability or was the child never taught how to read?

The kids in the study at the juvenile detention facility in Houston all read at the third grade level or below when they started in the tutoring program. Latashia Crenshaw, who was director of Education Support Services for the juvenile probation department when I visited, estimated that close to half the kids who come through the system have disabilities that were never identified by their schools. When she talked to their parents, they would tell her: "I knew my son had a problem in first grade when I was coming up to the school every day, telling you that something was wrong, and no one listened."

The University of Houston researchers are betting that a lot of the struggling readers locked up in the juvenile detention system can be taught how to read. Students in the study each receive 24 reading lessons of 90 minutes each. The researchers are collecting data over time to see if the reading lessons translate into things like reduced criminal activity or better educational outcomes.

I asked some of the kids in the study what they remembered about being taught to read in school. "That it was hard," said a 17-year-old I'll call DeShawn. "I just didn't know none of the words." I asked what he was learning in his reading lessons. "Like, 'ph.' It's a 'f,'" he said. "Like physics. I never knew that."

DeShawn might have a learning disability. But that's not why he couldn't read the word "physics." Someone finally taught him what he needed to know, and now he can read that word.

'Surround him with books'

Paul Morgan is a professor at Penn State University who studies the risk factors for learning difficulties. 19 He had a case study in his own home about a decade ago.

His younger son was in first grade and reading was really hard for him. Morgan's other son had been fine. "Our oldest is a voracious reader and took to it readily," he said. "He seemed to benefit from what our local school did in terms of teaching reading."

"If you can't read well in the early grades it really starts to have negative consequences on your social emotional development and your behavior."
Paul Morgan

When Morgan and his wife brought up their younger son's struggles with the school, they were told: "Read storybooks to him, surround him with books." But they'd been reading to him since he was a baby. They had tons of books in their home.

Morgan knew, from his own research, that his son needed something he wasn't getting enough of in school. He needed to be taught how to read words. So, Morgan and his wife started doing that.

"We were in a position to reorganize our work schedules," he said. They bought a book online and every morning, one of them would work with him before school. "And then he was OK. Things made sense to him. He was decoding and starting to read quickly and fluently."

They caught the problem and were able to fix it. That's not going to be the case with every child. Some kids will need lots of help. But intervening early is critical because when kids don't get off to a good start with word recognition, it can begin to affect their motivation and their mental health. 20

"If you can't read well in the early grades, your peers notice, your teacher notices, you notice," Morgan said. "And it really starts to have negative consequences on your social emotional development and your behavior."

Children who are still struggling with reading at the end of first grade rarely catch up because the kids who get off to a good start reading words are catapulting ahead. It's the rich get richer phenomenon. Everyone else quickly gets left behind.

Yet a 2019 Education Week survey found that more than half of teachers and 56 percent of postsecondary instructors who teach courses on reading said kids don't need a good grasp of phonics to read. 21 That doesn't necessarily mean they reject phonics instruction. The majority of teachers describe their approach to teaching reading as "balanced literacy" and that typically includes some phonics. But it also includes the idea that readers don't need to understand how the sounds in words are represented by letters. It's that idea from the 1970s that if kids are focused on the meaning of what they're reading, they can figure out what the words say.

This idea has been repeatedly debunked by cognitive scientists, but it lingers in education because the idea that children need to be taught how to read words has long been resisted by many educators and literacy experts. 22 Even as some people who previously dismissed the importance of phonics instruction now embrace it, an assumption that continues to undergird reading instruction is that reading skill develops naturally, as long as kids are in an environment that supports and encourages lots of reading.

When this approach doesn't work for a child, there are typically two responses.

1. There must be a problem in the home. The child wasn't read to enough.

2. There must be a problem in the child. He or she has a disability.

But usually it's neither. Most of the time, when kids can't read, it's because they weren't taught how to do it.

The importance of language comprehension

You can't be a good reader without good word recognition skills. Reading scientists refer to word recognition as a "sine qua non" of being a good reader. 23 But good word recognition skills are only half the equation. Research shows that once kids have mastered the basics of decoding, their ability to understand what they read is largely determined by the level of their language comprehension. 24

There's a lot to language comprehension. 25 It's all the words you know the meaning of, and your understanding of how language works - grammar, syntax. 26 It also includes the things you know. For example, if you don't know what "sine qua non" means, you may not have fully understood the paragraph above. "Sine qua non" is a Latin phrase that means "an essential condition; something that is absolutely necessary."

Knowledge is critical when it comes to understanding what you read. 27 Consider this passage:

Australia failed to fully capitalise on the second-wicket stand of 182 between Smith and Finch, as Michael Clarke's men were stunted by the off-breaks of Ravichandran Ashwin and a curious collective failure against back-of-a-length bowling. 28

You may be able to read all the words just fine but have absolutely no idea what this passage is about - unless you know something about cricket. This passage is from a BBC report on Australia's victory in the 2015 Cricket World Cup semi-final.

Your ability to comprehend what you read is linked to your knowledge. This is one reason there's an association between a child's reading comprehension and their family's income; more income often means more opportunity for experiences that build knowledge of the world.

But how well you do on a reading comprehension test is going to be partly a function of what's on the test. A 10-year-old in New Zealand, where there's lots of cricket, would probably fare much better on a test that included a passage about cricket than a 10-year-old in the United States would. The American kid would likely do better with a passage about baseball. But of course, some kids know much more about baseball than others. A famous study found that struggling readers who know a lot about baseball did better comprehending a passage about baseball than good readers who don't know much about baseball. 29

The challenge with reading comprehension tests is that, at the end of the day, they are tests of knowledge, and in the United States we don't have a canon of knowledge we've decided every child needs to master. We have common standards, which are essentially lists of things students should be able to do, such as "determine the main idea" and "describe characters in a story." 30 We don't have agreed upon curriculum. It's up to states, to schools - sometimes to individual teachers - to decide what to teach. They choose the books, the materials, the content.

One of the ironic consequences of nationwide concern about poor reading scores is that schools appear to be focusing more on reading instruction at the expense of other subjects. 31 Time spent on reading instruction in the early grades typically takes 90 minutes to three hours daily; science and social studies might be 30 to 45 minutes, a few times a week - at best. Add to this the fact that kids who are struggling with reading are often pulled out of class during science and social studies for extra reading help.

When schools don't put enough focus on general knowledge, it can be particularly harmful to the reading development of kids from low-income families. Consider two children.

One starts school with lots of knowledge and vocabulary. Her parents are college graduates who chat with her about lots of things. She attends summer camps, goes on vacations, takes trips to the science museum.

Another child hasn't had the same opportunities: he rarely leaves his neighborhood, his parents work late, there may be few bedtime stories.

You can teach both of these kids how to decode, but the girl will likely have an edge when it comes to reading comprehension because of the knowledge she is acquiring outside of school. If a goal of education is equity, schools have to pay attention to building knowledge and vocabulary, exposing kids to lots of content, helping them access a wide range of information and experiences. And schools need to encourage kids to read a lot. Because reading is one of the best ways to learn.

That's why teaching kids how to read words is so important. A child who comes to school weak on the language comprehension side of the equation will never catch up if he doesn't get good at decoding. But if a child is taught to decode in the early grades, he has just been given his best shot.

'I ain't none a yo' mama!'

Making sure that children get off to a good start with reading is critical because of the downward spiral that can begin as soon as kids begin to struggle. This means recognizing the factors that can make learning to read more challenging for some kids.

One of the big challenges for many children is when the language they speak at home is different from the language they use at school. English language learners, for example. Kids who speak Spanish or Korean or Arabic at home. But this can be native English speakers, too.

Julie Washington is a speech-language pathologist at Georgia State University who studies language and reading development in African American children. She's specifically interested in the role of African American English. 32

African American English is a dialect of English. Every language has dialects. They're rule-governed variations of a parent language that can affect not just the pronunciation of words but also vocabulary and grammar.

"An example of African American English is, 'One day, me and my mom was at home,'" Washington explained. "That is completely acceptable in African American English."

There was a moment early in her career when she realized that children who come to school speaking African American English might have a harder time learning how to read.

She was reading "Are You My Mother?" by P.D. Eastman with a 4-year-old girl. The book is about a baby bird who is looking for his mother. He approaches different animals and objects and asks, "Are you my mother?"

When Washington was done reading the book, she asked the girl to retell the story.

"Is you my mama?" the girl exclaimed. "I ain't none a yo' mama!"

"We've decided as a country that if you are having trouble reading and you're poor, you're having trouble with reading because you're poor. Because our policy does not allow you to be both learning disabled and poor."
Julie Washington

When she went back to her office, Washington thought about how much work that girl had to do. She listened, recoded the story into her own language, and then retold it. "That takes a lot of working memory," Washington said. "It takes a pretty good vocabulary."

That little girl had to do a lot of work because there was a difference between the language she knew and the language of the book.

"The kid who comes to school whose language system mirrors the book doesn't have that work to do," she said. "He can go straight for decoding and not have to do all of those other steps in between."

Washington says schools need to understand that children who are heavy dialect users may need more time, and more help, to be successful with reading. 33 She says almost all low-income African American children speak African American English at home. Middle- and upper-income kids are more likely to either not use dialect at all, or to be able to code switch. "They've had more access outside of the community," Washington said. "They go to schools where there are more kids using mainstream English."

Who gets help?

Think of family income as a kind of buffer when it comes to the risk of being a struggling reader.

But it's not just your family's income that can tilt things in your favor when it comes to learning how to read; it's the income level of the school you attend too. Research shows that schools where the majority of kids are from poor families are less effective on average at promoting reading achievement. 34 Who goes to high-poverty schools? 35 According to the U.S. Department of Education, nearly half of all Black and Hispanic students in the United States attend high-poverty schools but only 8 percent of white students do.

When children from low-income families are concentrated in the same schools, it can be difficult to identify the children with reading disabilities such as dyslexia because so many of the kids are struggling. "I go into poor schools - nobody has dyslexia in a poor school," Washington said. "In the face of a population where eight and a half out of ten are struggling with reading, who has a reading disability? The answer is, we have no idea."

She says part of the problem is the way federal law defines learning disabilities. The law says a child cannot qualify for a learning disability if that child's learning problems are primarily the result of economic disadvantage. 36 "We've decided as a country that if you are having trouble reading and you're poor, you're having trouble with reading because you're poor," she said. "Because our policy does not allow you to be both learning disabled and poor."

The purpose of the policy was to prevent low-income children of color from being overidentified for special education. 37 But the policy has had unintended consequences, according to Paul Morgan.

"We hear from teachers that they have been told not to refer any more children of color," he said. "That they're already at their threshold."

Research by Morgan and his colleagues shows that white children in the United States who are struggling the most with reading are significantly more likely than children of color to get special education services. 38
Who gets special education?
Among children whose reading achievement placed them in the lowest 10 percent of all scores, white children were more likely to be receiving special education services.

This data suggests that more than half the children of color in this country who are struggling the most with reading are not getting the help they need and are entitled to by federal law. It also suggests that many white children are not getting help, either. Morgan says getting special education services for a student with a reading disability can be difficult no matter who you are or what kind of school your child goes to. "Too often parents have to fight for their children to be provided the services," he said. "And when the school says 'no,' there's not much of a recourse for the parent to engage in, short of legal action, which is very costly."

It's a system that favors people with money. I've interviewed parents who have spent thousands of dollars on attorneys to try to get their children into special ed, because in many schools, special education is the only way for struggling readers to get the kind of explicit instruction they need. 39

Kids who don't get into special ed, or don't have families that can pay for tutors or private school, may never get what they need to become good readers. Like the kids at the juvenile detention facility in Houston.

'Why isn't everybody in this country angry like me?'

When Sonya Thomas was told her seventh grade son was on a second-grade reading level, it changed her life.

The next month, in October 2018, she helped found a parent advocacy group called Nashville PROPEL. 40 The name stands for "parents requiring our public education system to lead." It's a group of mostly Black parents whose children are zoned to some of the lowest-performing schools in the entire state.

Sonya says many parents don't know how far behind their kids are. "They don't know until it costs them." Like it cost her and her son C.J.

Sonya wanted to figure out what happened to C.J. Why has he had such a hard time learning to read? Does he have a learning disability the school system missed?

She requested all of C.J.'s school records, and APM Reports hired Zack Barnes, an assistant professor of special education at Austin Peay State University, to review them. 41 Barnes used to teach in the Nashville schools, so he was familiar with the forms and records in C.J.'s file. He went over them with Sonya and me.

The records show C.J. started off behind. A reading assessment in kindergarten shows he was "below benchmark." But it doesn't say what he was behind in.

At the beginning of first grade, C.J. took a reading test that placed him at the 24th percentile nationally. That means more than three quarters of first graders in the country were doing better than he was. There's a form in the file that says C.J. had no problem understanding and using vocabulary but that he spoke slowly and sometimes had a hard time asking and answering questions.

"I do remember having some concerns about his speech," Sonya said. "Like not talking a lot, being really shy." She says she sometimes had a hard time understanding what he was saying.

There's no indication in the records that C.J. was evaluated for a speech issue or a reading problem. There is the handwritten note from Sonya when C.J. was in first grade, asking the school to test him for a learning disability.

"I am very concerned," the note says. "Please assist me." But he wasn't tested.

At the end of first grade, C.J. scored at the 12th percentile on the same test he had taken at the beginning of the year. The gap between C.J. and his peers had grown even wider. Sonya teared up when Barnes pointed this out. "This tears me all to pieces," she said.

We spent nearly two hours going over C.J.'s entire school file, grade by grade. There are nearly 200 pages of records, and Barnes noticed a pattern. Some years C.J. got pulled out of the classroom for extra help with reading. His test scores went up. Then the help stopped. Barnes likened it to a lifeguard saving someone and then allowing them to drown a few minutes later. "I don't think what we are seeing is uncommon, across the country," he wrote me later in an email.

Barnes says things might have been different if C.J. had been in special education. He would have had an Individualized Education Program and rights to services protected by federal law. But to get into special ed, you need to be identified with a disability. To determine if C.J. has a disability, he'd need a full evaluation from a school psychologist. C.J. never got one of those. Barnes says he should have. "He's this kind of student that we really need to dig deep on to figure out, how can we help C.J.?"

Barnes offered to help Sonya get C.J. an evaluation. She was grateful, but angry. C.J. just finished eighth grade. She had asked for him to be tested for a learning disability in first grade. She wonders how many other kids needed help and didn't get it. "There is this heavy feeling that I have," she said, pausing for a long sigh. "I don't know how to fix it. Except to keep telling parents to question everything and everybody, so they don't have to go all of these years like I did, to try to get down to the bottom of it."

I contacted the Nashville Public Schools to see if someone could answer questions about what happened with C.J. A spokesperson declined to comment.

When reading instruction is based on the flawed assumption that reading will come pretty easily to most kids as long as they're in the right environment, reading instruction is tilted in favor of the few. The few who don't need much instruction. The few from families who can pay to get their kids what they need.

The bottom line is that learning to read is not easy for many kids. Reading difficulty is natural. 42

Cognitive scientists have known this for a long time. In 1980, Phil Gough wrote this: "The statistically average child, normally endowed and normally taught, learns to read only with considerable difficulty. He does not learn to read naturally." 43

Sonya Thomas wants everyone to know about what she and C.J. have gone through. And she wants to help other parents get what they need for their kids. She's now executive director of PROPEL, the parent group she helped to found. It's her full-time job. She wants to see a movement of parents across the country demanding better reading instruction.

"Why isn't everyone in this country angry like me? Why are they not losing sleep?" she said. "It's unacceptable for children to not have a chance right off the bat. And we are not going to let anybody sleep until we have changed for the better for all children."

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Many kids struggle with reading - and children of color are far less likely to get the help they need

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"No child is born a reader; all children in literate societies have to be taught to read." ¹
"We are all good at speech, but disabled as readers and writers; the difference among us in reading/writing is simply that some are fairly easy to cure and some are not." ²

Helping children learn to read is big business. From expensive literacy curricula and remedial programs to one-day workshops and brain-training fads, there are too many claims of guaranteed success and too little focus on trustworthy findings. Having been researchers studying mechanisms for improving literacy outcomes for more than 30 years, we offer a more sober-and sobering-review of what is known about how to help struggling readers.

To begin, we confess that there are some rather large holes in our collective knowledge. We know more about the science of reading than the science of reading instruction. In other words, we know a lot more about what components are associated with improved outcomes for each stage of reading development (e.g., phonemic awareness and the alphabetic principle are essential for beginning readers) than we do about how to teach all these components to a class of students with diverse learning needs. Similarly, we know more about interventions for students with mild to moderate reading difficulties than we do about students with severe reading difficulties. Students with very low reading skills-those at the bottom 10th percentile of word reading and lower-have been challenging to impact. Finally, in policy development, we have not capitalized on theory and science for effectively implementing new practices in schools. ³ Still, there is much we do know that can support excellent instruction. Both here and in two online supplements- "It's Time to Act on a 20-Year-Old Consensus" and "Three Things We Need to Learn" -we offer guidance to prevent and address reading difficulties. There is no doubt that some children have reading disabilities, but the key to improved outcomes for the vast majority of struggling readers, including those with a reading disability, is enhanced core instruction-and that means enhanced curricula, assessments, pre-service and in-service professional development, and supports.

In the high-functioning system we describe below, the primary focus is on assessing changes in children's reading abilities as a response to instruction and on building educators' capacity to deliver more intense, customized interventions. To be effective, such assessments and interventions need to be delivered through a seamless system of well-coordinated general and special education supports that emphasizes prevention, reduces inappropriate referral to and placement in special education as a function of low reading ability, and provides more intensive interventions for students with reading disabilities. Inappropriate referral to and placement in special education is often a function of identifying students as needing special education who have not received an adequate opportunity to learn, as well as the view that special education is the solution for all children who do not readily learn to read. Some students are not given an opportunity to learn because they move frequently or are absent often; others are present day after day but are taught with programs and practices that are not based on the science of reading. Because so few teacher preparation programs, school districts, and commercially available programs have implemented consistently what we have learned from the science of reading, far too many students struggle-feeling like they are reading failures, not realizing that they were never provided the explicit instruction they need to succeed.* The vast majority of students with low reading achievement have preventable problems: with explicit, evidence-based instruction, they would learn to read.

These evidence-based practices are fundamental and necessary not only to develop strong readers but also to discern the differences between students with reading difficulties that can be readily supported through general education from those with serious reading disabilities or dyslexia. For the purposes of this article, we are using reading disabilities and dyslexia synonymously to refer to children with foundational decoding and spelling problems.

Students in classrooms where evidence-based fundamentals of reading instruction are deliberately implemented are far less likely to demonstrate reading difficulties. Enhanced general education instruction in the early grades reduces the number of children who do not meet grade-level benchmarks and start to fall behind, and therefore it reduces eventual referrals to special education.

We recognize that teachers-even those with the most advanced knowledge and skills-cannot and should not be asked to carry the entire burden of improving reading outcomes for all learners. We think there is ample evidence to suggest that educational systems can be organized so that the vast majority of students-close to 95 percent-will be reasonably successful readers when these organized systems are effectively implemented. ⁴ The roughly 5 percent of students who do not make adequate progress when these systems are in place are likely truly reading disabled because of the persistence of their reading difficulties. They too can improve their reading skills, but they require highly specialized, intensive interventions and may have difficulty reading throughout their lives.

Why Do Some Children Learn to Read Easily, While Others Struggle?

Learning to read is a process that occurs so readily for some youngsters that it seems to develop almost naturally. With minimal guidance and feedback, some students are on their way to recognizing the patterns of written words and inferring the ways in which our phonological system (sounds of language) map to our complex orthography (written system). But for other students-anywhere from 40 to 65 percent-the task of learning to read is much more challenging. If these students do not receive highly explicit instruction with additional opportunities for implicit learning, difficulties in learning to read proficiently are inevitable. These more challenging readers are the ones who require the most knowledgeable and skillful teachers.

Reading science has established that learning to read is an acquired process, not a natural process-it's nothing like learning to walk or talk. There are no brain systems evolutionarily designed for reading. Rather, neural circuits for language and visual processing must be repurposed and reorganized to support literacy. ⁵ One neural circuit involves the ability to process sublexical units of words, initially at the phonological level. The child must take what is essentially an implicit understanding of the sound system of language and explicitly apply it to print. ⁶ Once this repurposing begins, another neural circuit designed for face and object recognition has to become a rapid letter and word processor; this reorganization of the circuit requires considerable meaningful exposure to print. As these circuits are revamped, they form a system, which usually takes several years to become well developed, that enables the child to process print with immediate access to the meaning of the word, which is sometimes described as "language at the speed of sight." ⁷ If a child does not have access because of struggles with mastering the alphabetic principle, this system does not develop adequately and the child falls behind in the ability to automatically recognize letter patterns. Reading becomes an effortful, unenjoyable process. Because all children must reorganize these neural circuits into a reading brain, prevention programs must focus on early acquisition of these skills. It is very hard to catch up if mastering the alphabetic principle is delayed. This is why prevention is more effective and less costly than remediation. ⁸

Students with reading disabilities have great difficulty acquiring foundational, word-level reading skills; they do not decode words accurately or fluently, and often they have poor spelling. Except for assessing to determine children's responses to instruction, there are no effective methods for differentiating subgroups of children with word-level problems. Students with reading disabilities (dyslexia) are real and represent the largest group of children in special education, even though in many cases stronger instruction in the earlier grades may have prevented the special education referral; they also comprise a large portion of the general education population that does not read well but has not been identified for special education.

Preventing reading difficulties is about making sure every child is exposed to reading instruction that is sufficiently explicit and customized to support the acquisition of foundational skills within a language-rich learning environment that promotes vocabulary and background knowledge. This will reduce unnecessary special education referral and identification. Students with significant, intractable reading problems that are not responsive to evidence-based instruction meet an important threshold for special education referral and identification. However, students who have not consistently had access to evidence-based instruction (because they are absent often or because their school district is not aware of the science of reading) are the students for whom reading difficulties can be prevented. While adequately addressing all the issues related to reading disabilities and dyslexia is beyond the scope of this article, we highlight "18 Common Misunderstandings of Dyslexia" in the box on the right.

How Should Educational Systems Be Organized So That the Vast Majority of Students Learn to Read?

Nearly two decades ago, the President's Commission on Excellence in Special Education ¹⁷ made three recommendations that-if fully implemented-could dramatically improve the instruction children receive and their reading achievement. The first recommendation was to focus on results, not process. The commission observed that special education was a highly bureaucratic process that did a good job in providing civil rights protection once a child was identified, but did not show strong evidence for accelerated gains in learning. It recommended the simplification of paperwork requirements and a change in monitoring of school-based implementation of special education to a focus on outcomes.

The second recommendation was to embrace a model of prevention, not a model of failure. Many literacy problems can be resolved with early intervention, so the commission advocated for universal screening, progress monitoring, and increasingly intense intervention based on instructional response; prevention was to start upon school entry and be supported by special education personnel. These methods, originally subsumed under a response to intervention (RTI) rubric, are now often referred to as multiple tiers of systematic support (MTSS).

The third recommendation was to consider children with disabilities as general education children first. Although requirements for placement in the least restrictive environment result in many children with reading disabilities spending the bulk of their school day in general education, there is often little alignment between the approaches to literacy instruction in general and special education. The primary special education intervention often involves accommodations, not remedial interventions to significantly improve students' reading ability.

We, as well as others, have summarized a model for preventing reading difficulties that aligns with an RTI/MTSS approach. ²³ The fundamental principle of prevention is screening to identify risk early. ²⁴ The idea is that it is better to over-identify children at risk for reading problems as early as possible and provide necessary instruction than to under-identify and have large numbers of students who suffer as their problems linger without the required instructional supports. An overview of this system for preventing reading difficulties is illustrated in the "Tiers of Instruction" below.

Tiers of Instruction
The Tiers of Instruction describes a model for providing increasingly customized reading interventions to students at risk for reading problems. Commonly presented as a triangle, we have tipped the triangle to emphasize the primacy of Tier 1 instruction for all students. Tiers 2 and 3 increase intensity for students who do not respond adequately to instruction. The percentages represent estimates, based on effective implementation of a multi-tiered system, of how many children are likely to be at or near grade level and only need Tier 1 (effective, evidence-based instruction for the whole class), at risk of reading difficulties and require Tier 2 (targeted, efficient supplemental instruction), or at risk of severe challenges and require Tier 3 (intensive, customized intervention, often with special education and/or dyslexia services).

From J. M. Fletcher, G. R. Lyon, L. S. Fuchs, and M. A. Barnes, Learning Disabilities: From Identification to Intervention, 2nd ed. (New York: Guilford Press, 2019), 91. Copyright Guilford Press. Reprinted with permission from Guilford Press.

In this seamless, supportive system, all students are screened. Those at risk for reading difficulties receive continued evidence-based Tier 1 literacy instruction in the classroom, ongoing progress monitoring, and, if needed, a Tier 2 intervention that addresses their specific literacy problems. This Tier 2 intervention may be provided by the classroom teacher, a trained teaching assistant supervised by the classroom teacher, or an educational specialist such as a reading teacher. Tier 2 interventions are not part of a special education but rather an extension or supplement within general education. Students participate in Tier 2 intervention for a specified period of time, typically 8-12 weeks, with ongoing progress monitoring, approximately every two weeks. Using progress monitoring data and teachers' observations, each student's response to literacy instruction is determined (e.g., is the student reaching expected benchmarks?).

If the student's response is not sufficient to meet progress monitoring benchmarks, there are several options, including adjusting the instruction, changing the group, adjusting the group size, changing the intervention, or providing an increasingly intensive intervention (which may be longer, e.g., 30-45 minutes rather than 20 minutes, and more customized to each student's needs). If inadequate instructional response continues, the educational team or parent/guardian may determine that an eligibility evaluation for special education is in order. The advantage to this approach is that students are provided appropriate, evidence-based instruction early; for the majority of students, this rapid Tier 2 intervention is adequate for becoming strong readers. Only those students with persistent and significant reading difficulties would be referred for special education or dyslexia services.

Throughout this model, screening and progress monitoring are critical. Most schools across the United States are implementing screening approaches to reading difficulties that ostensibly identify those youngsters who are at risk for reading failure. It is mandated for dyslexia in over 40 states. ²⁵ Effective screeners (1) require 10 minutes or less per child, (2) demonstrate strong psychometric properties (e.g., are valid and reliable), (3) provide readily usable data that identify students as either at risk or not at risk, (4) are developmentally appropriate and can be administered two to three times per year, and (5) are easily scored. Errors in identifying which children are at risk of reading difficulties are inevitable, but we think schools should focus on reducing errors that result in not identifying risk (false negatives). In other words, it is better for a child who does not need extra instruction to get it than for a child who does need extra instruction to go without.

For progress monitoring, short probes involving timed word or passage reading are used so that teachers can make instructional decisions. ²⁶ These types of assessments are aimed at improving instruction and determining each student's incremental progress, recognizing that for students who are consistently making inadequate progress, additional interventions may be warranted. (For an easy-to-use review of progress monitoring tools, see here.)

Progress monitoring data can be useful in many ways. First, these data can document that students are learning the critical aspects of reading (e.g., sound-spelling patterns, vocabulary) being taught. Second, the types of responses students provide can guide instruction by highlighting each student's needs for reteaching and additional practice, while those elements that appear to be successfully learned can be monitored for maintenance. Third, data from these measures can facilitate decisions about curriculum (e.g., whether additional or different programs are needed), grouping (e.g., some students may benefit from a more advanced group; others may benefit from a mini one-on-one lesson to enhance performance), and interventions (e.g., whether to continue an intervention). Fourth, these data-especially ongoing progress monitoring data-can inform decisions about referral to and placement in special education. If special education eligibility becomes an issue, the best signal is the intractability of the child's reading problems when provided with the explicit instruction that works for most children.

How Can a Supportive, Integrated General and Special Education System Be Implemented?

Developing a systemic approach to supporting teachers so that they can meet the needs of the range of readers in their classrooms requires ongoing screening, monitoring students' responses to instruction so that teachers can adjust instruction to meet students' needs, and fidelity of implementation to ensure adherence to treatment protocols. But seamlessly assembling all these pieces is not easy.

First, most educators, including teachers and school leaders, would benefit from ongoing situated professional development that builds on the knowledge they have and extends it in ways that may be readily implemented in their school setting. What happens when you say "professional development" to most educators? Do they smile with anticipation about what they will learn and how they can implement it in their school? Typically, no. Too often, professional development is a one-day exposure to ideas (of varying quality), many of which are lost before the next day at school.

We are suggesting a distributed professional development model that provides ongoing learning opportunities as each aspect of the new system is launched. This model can follow standards like those from Learning Forward. Workshops on how to screen children and offer highly effective Tier 1 instruction would be followed with in-class coaching and support until the majority of educators were aligning their practices with data on outcomes. Then, educators would learn how to extend their Tier 1 practices with Tier 2 supplemental interventions, increasing time in literacy instruction for students who are not making sufficient progress. This would ensure that the instruction children receive in Tiers 1 and 2 is well aligned, which increases effectiveness.

Adding Tier 3 instruction requires yet more professional development, coaching, and coordination. Tier 3 more intensively focuses intervention on students' skill gaps and may be guided by more diagnostic and progress monitoring assessments. Students in Tier 3 may be candidates for special education and/or dyslexia identification and services. Because of the focus on individual skill gaps, it is not as tightly aligned with Tier 1 (regular classroom instruction), but Tier 1 remains essential for providing a comprehensive reading program. For example, a child receiving Tier 3 intervention for specific decoding skills needs Tier 1 core instruction to continue progressing in vocabulary, listening comprehension, writing across genres, and other aspects of English language arts.

Building up the seamless system takes time and a great deal of in-class support for teachers-but it is far more effective than scattershot workshops. Preventing and addressing reading difficulties is hard, but the effort pays big dividends in reducing reading difficulties. We urge schools, districts, and states to put far more effort into systemic supports (especially the professional development and coaching for teachers and administrators described here). We recommend beginning in grade 1, where the strongest evidence of the efficacy of these approaches exists, and then expanding to other grades.

What Can Teachers Do Now to Support Students with Reading Difficulties or with Mild to Moderate Disabilities or Dyslexia?

Most of what we describe above requires system-level change. But teachers want to do what's best for their students today. Here are six steps that teachers can implement in their classrooms now (and that school leaders should start supporting immediately).

1. Use academic learning time deliberately and purposefully to ensure students receive the maximum amount of evidence-based instruction. Academic engagement-i.e., time on task-is an excellent predictor of academic outcomes.²⁷ Consider how much time you spend explicitly teaching and providing highly focused instructional time. Observation studies reveal that surprisingly little class time is devoted to explicitly teaching the high-priority skills associated with improved reading outcomes.²⁸ Consider ways to structure your classroom, teaching, and resources so that maximum time is spent on instruction and minimal time is lost to transitions, over-explaining, and behavioral management.

2. Consider the value of the one-minute lesson. Many students with significant reading difficulties benefit from a one-minute lesson in which they are provided a mini review of a challenging task, an opportunity to practice word reading with feedback, or a chance to demonstrate what they know with feedback. Time is always an issue, but do not allow it to block you from spending highly focused instructional minutes with the students who need you the most.

3. Offer customized instruction that reflects students' learning needs. Many of the students you teach learn to read almost effortlessly. However, students with reading difficulties, disabilities, or dyslexia require highly customized instruction that aligns with their specific learning needs. How can you determine what this customized instruction might be? Examine their screening and progress monitoring data. Determine the high-priority areas in which they require additional instruction and practice. Identify ways to include this type of work each day in an individual mini lesson or with a small group of students with similar needs. Provide practice opportunities with feedback so they have multiple opportunities to acquire proficiency.

4. Give struggling readers instruction in small groups, in pairs, or one on one. Many students with reading difficulties benefit from the specialized instruction that is allowable in small-group, paired, and one-on-one instruction. These formats provide opportunities to tailor instruction to their needs with appropriate practice and targeted feedback.

5. Create many opportunities to read a range of text types and a range of text levels. Students who struggle with reading benefit from opportunities to generalize their reading to varied text types, including digital texts, informational texts, and narrative texts as well as hybrid informational and narrative texts such as biographies. This variation in text types is not just for older students but can be part of the listening comprehension and text reading of younger students, including beginning readers. Also, consider ways to vary the text levels that students read. Students can read and comprehend more advanced texts when they have adequate background knowledge, are motivated by the topic, and/or have additional instructional support.

6. Provide explicit instruction that incorporates clear feedback. Explicit instruction with feedback is highly effective, especially when students are having difficulty learning with less explicit methods. Teachers who offer this type of evidence-based instruction do the following:

Identify, prior to teaching, what they expect the students to do or say.

State clearly and in as few words as possible what they need students to know.

Model what they expect students to say or do.

Ask students to demonstrate what is expected (e.g., blend phonemes, read a word, read a text silently).

Provide prompt feedback that is specific and clear (e.g., "I heard several of you blending the sounds /r/, /a/, /t/ and then saying the word 'rat.' That is what I expect. I also heard several of you only saying the word 'rat' and not blending the sounds. I will give you three more sounds, and I want everyone to both blend the sounds and say the word.").

Give selected students opportunities to respond independently (and avoid only calling on the most capable students).

Control the task difficulty by making the task less difficult for students in need of adaptation and then gradually increasing the task difficulty as their performance improves.

Maintain high levels of student success, engagement, and response.

Wrap Up

The degree to which a student expresses a reading difficulty is always an interaction between the child's opportunity to learn (due to absences, instructional quality, or other issues) and the extent of the student's reading impairment. Thus, youngsters who are provided a genuine opportunity to learn to read-including high-quality, explicit, evidence-based instruction-and yet still present with significant reading difficulties are likely to have a severe reading impairment. In contrast, children who have not consistently been able to access high-quality, evidence-based instruction and present with significant reading difficulties are likely to have reading problems that could have been prevented and still can be remediated. This difference is of the utmost importance. Currently, there are students with preventable reading problems who are suffering academically and emotionally, and who are placed in special education often to receive accommodations without effective remediation. And there are students with severe reading disabilities or dyslexia who are not getting the intensive interventions they need-in part because special education is overwhelmed with large numbers of students who do not actually have reading disabilities.

This must end, but teachers cannot solve these problems on their own. These are systemic problems-and that is why we have proposed a new, seamless, three-tiered system of general and special education to address them. Far too many students and teachers are struggling. It is long past time for leaders of schools, districts, and states-not to mention teacher preparation programs, curriculum developers, and professional development providers-to step up, change their policies and programs, and focus on meeting children's needs.

Sharon Vaughn is the executive director of the Meadows Center for Preventing Educational Risk at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is also the Manuel J. Justiz Endowed Chair in Teacher Education and a professor in the Learning Disabilities and Behavior Disorders program. She has earned a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Institute for Literacy and Learning and the Special Education Research Award from the Council for Exceptional Children. Jack M. Fletcher is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Houston, where he is also the associate vice president for research administration. A former member of the President's Commission on Excellence in Special Education, he has earned the International Literacy Association's Albert J. Harris Award and the International Dyslexia Association's Samuel Torrey Orton Award. This research was supported by grant P50 HD052117 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (the authors are solely responsible for the content).

*To learn more about how preparation programs, professional development, and other key supports could be improved, see "Teaching Reading Is Rocket Science" in the Summer 2020 issue of American Educator. ( return to article)

Endnotes

1. G. R. Lyon et al., "Rethinking Learning Disabilities," in Rethinking Special Education for a New Century, ed. C. E. Finn et al. (Washington, DC: Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and Progressive Policy Institute, 2001), 287.
2. A. Liberman, "How Theories of Speech Affect Research in Reading and Writing," in Foundations of Reading Acquisition and Dyslexia: Implications for Early Intervention, ed. B. Blachman (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997), 5.
3. L. Sanetti and M. Collier-Meek, Supporting Successful Interventions in Schools: Tools to Plan, Evaluate, and Sustain Effective Implementation (New York: Guilford Press, 2019).
4. J. Fletcher and S. Vaughn, "Response to Intervention: Preventing and Remediating Academic Difficulties," Child Development Perspectives 3, no. 1 (2009): 30-37; and A. VanDerHeyden, J. Witt, and D. Gilbertson, "A Multi-Year Evaluation of the Effects of a Response to Intervention (RTI) on Identification of Children for Special Education," Journal of School Psychology 45, no. 2 (2007): 225-256.
5. S. Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read (New York: Penguin Random House, 2009).
6. Liberman, "How Theories of Speech."
7. M. Seidenberg, Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can't, and What Can Be Done About It (New York: Basic Books, 2017).
8. Fletcher and Vaughn, "Response to Intervention."
9. A. VanDerHeyden, M. Burns, and W. Bonifay, "Is More Screening Better? The Relationship Between Frequent Screening, Accurate Decisions, and Reading Proficiency," School Psychology Review 47, no. 1 (2017): 62-82.
10. J. Fletcher and D. Currie, "Vision Efficiency Interventions and Reading Disability," Perspectives on Language and Literacy 37, no. 1 (2011): 21-24.
11. J. M. Fletcher et al., Learning Disabilities: From Identification to Intervention, 2nd ed. (New York: Guilford Press, 2019).
12. A. E. Cunningham et al., "Disciplinary Knowledge of K-3 Teachers and Their Knowledge Calibration in the Domain of Early Literacy," Annals of Dyslexia 54 (2004): 139-167; and L. Spear-Swerling and P. Brucke, "Preparing Novice Teachers to Develop Basic Reading and Spelling Skills in Children," Annals of Dyslexia 54 (2004): 332-364.
13. J. Worthy, "'We Know for a Fact': Dyslexia Interventionists and the Power of Authoritative Discourse," Journal of Literacy Research 50, no. 3 (2018): 359-382.
14. R. Peterson and B. Pennington, "Developmental Dyslexia," The Lancet 379, no. 9830 (2012): 1997-2007.
15. S. Shaywitz et al., "Persistence of Dyslexia: The Connecticut Longitudinal Study at Adolescence," Pediatrics 104, no. 6 (1999): 1351-1359.
16. A. Ellis, Reading, Writing and Dyslexia: A Cognitive Analysis (Hove, UK: Psychology Press, 1993).
17. US Department of Education, Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, A New Era: Revitalizing Special Education for Children and Their Families (Washington, DC: 2002).
18. M. Snowling and M. Melby-Lervåg, "Oral Language Deficits in Familial Dyslexia: A Meta-Analysis and Review," Psychological Bulletin 142, no. 5 (2016): 498-545.
19. See, for example, M. Melby-Lervåg, T. Redick, and C. Hulme, "Working Memory Training Does Not Improve Performance on Measures of Intelligence or Other Measures of 'Far Transfer': Evidence from a Meta-Analytic Review," Perspectives on Psychological Science 11 (2016): 512-534.
20. Dehaene, Reading in the Brain.
21. M. Scheiman, "Effect of Vergence/Accommodative Therapy on Reading in Children with Convergence Insufficiency: A Randomized Clinical Trial," Optometry and Vision Science 96, no. 11 (2019): 836-849.
22. L. Tamm, "Comparing Treatments for Children with ADHD and Word Reading Difficulties: A Randomized Clinical Trial," Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 85, no. 5 (2017): 434-446.
23. Fletcher and Vaughn, "Response to Intervention."
24. For similar models, see G. Batsche et al., Response to Intervention: Policy Considerations and Implementation (Alexandria, VA: National Association of State Directors of Special Education, 2005); and J. Kovaleski, A. VanDerHeyden, and E. Shapiro, The RTI Approach to Evaluating Learning Disabilities (New York: Guilford Press, 2013).
25. Y. Petscher et al., Screening for Dyslexia (Washington, DC: US Department of Education, Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, Office of Special Education Programs, National Center on Improving Literacy, 2019).
26. L. Fuchs et al., "Bringing Data-Based Individualization to Scale: A Call for the Next-Generation Technology of Teacher Supports," Journal of Learning Disabilities (forthcoming).
27. C. Greenwood, B. Horton, and C. Utley, "Academic Engagement: Current Perspectives on Research and Practice," School Psychology Review 31, no. 3 (2002): 328-349; and J. Stallings, R. Johnson, and J. Goodman, "Engaged Rates: Does Grade Level Make a Difference?," Journal of Research in Childhood Education 1 (1986): 20-26.
28. D. Chard and E. Kameenui, "Struggling First-Grade Readers: The Frequency and Progress of Their Reading," Journal of Special Education 34, no. 1 (2000): 28-38; and S. Vaughn et al., "Reading Instruction for Students with LD and EBD: A Synthesis of Observation Studies," Journal of Special Education 36, no. 1 (2002): 2-13.
29. See, for example, M. Lovett et al., "Treating the Core Deficits of Developmental Dyslexia: Evidence of Transfer of Learning After Phonologically- and Strategy-Based Reading Training Programs," Developmental Psychology 30, no. 6 (1994): 805-822; and R. Morris et al., "Multiple-Component Remediation for Developmental Reading Disabilities: IQ, Socioeconomic Status, and Race as Factors in Remedial Outcome," Journal of Learning Disabilities 45, no. 2 (2012): 99-127.
30. M. Lovett, R. Barron, and J. Frijters, "Word Identification Difficulties in Children and Adolescents with Reading Disabilities: Intervention Research Findings," in Handbook of Learning Disabilities, ed. H. Swanson, K. Harris, and S. Graham (New York: Guilford Press, 2013).
31. Morris et al., "Multiple-Component Remediation."
32. C. Denton et al., "An Evaluation of Intensive Intervention for Students with Persistent Reading Difficulties," Journal of Learning Disabilities 39, no. 5 (2006): 447-466.

[illustrated by Jia Liu]

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Identifying and Teaching Students with Significant Reading Problems

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"No child is born a reader; all children in literate societies have to be taught to read."

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Dr. Louisa Moats

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To be used only after explicitly teaching the words with orthographic mapping.

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The ability to read, and read well, opens up doors academically, professionally, and personally. We know that learning to read is not a natural process, yet watching a child fluently read a book he or she loves is nothing short of a work of art. Fortunately, how children learn to read, and best practices for teaching reading, are some of the most studied aspects of human learning. The science of reading has established that there are critical elements of reading instruction that when delivered in a systematic and explicit manner, result in reading proficiency (Vaughn, 2020).

Savvas learning solutions are grounded in-and driven by-the science of reading.

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The Science of Reading - Savvas (formerly Pearson K12 Learning)

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The ability to read, and read well, opens up doors academically, professionally, and personally. We know that learning to read is not a natural process, yet watching a child fluently read a book he or she loves is nothing short of a work of art.

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Stanford study on brain waves shows how different teaching methods affect reading development

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Stanford study on brain waves shows how different teaching methods affect reading development

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Beginning readers who focus on letter-sound relationships, or phonics, instead of trying to learn whole words, increase activity in the area of their brains best wired for reading, according to new Stanford research investigating how the brain responds to different types of reading instruction.

In other words, to develop reading skills, teaching students to sound out "C-A-T" sparks more optimal brain circuitry than instructing them to memorize the word "cat." And, the study found, these teaching-induced differences show up even on future encounters with the word.

The study, co-authored by Stanford Professor Bruce McCandliss of the Graduate School of Education and the Stanford Neuroscience Institute, provides some of the first evidence that a specific teaching strategy for reading has direct neural impact. The research could eventually lead to better-designed interventions to help struggling readers.

"This research is exciting because it takes cognitive neuroscience and connects it to questions that have deep meaning and history in educational research," said McCandliss, who wrote the study with Yuliya Yoncheva, a researcher at New York University, and Jessica Wise, a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin.

Instructional strategies

Theories on reading development have long supported the importance of a phonics foundation, especially for early learners and struggling readers, yet investigating the way in which brain mechanisms are influenced by the choices a teacher makes is a fairly recent endeavor, according to McCandliss.

As the field of educational neuroscience grows, however, both brain researchers and educational researchers can improve their understanding of how instructional strategies can best be harnessed to support the brain changes that underlie the development of learning, he added.

In the study, released this month in the journal Brain and Language, the researchers devised a new written language and contrasted whether words were taught using a letter-to-sound instruction method or a whole-word association method. After learning multiple words under both approaches, the newly learned words were presented in a reading test while brainwaves were monitored.

McCandliss's team used a brain mapping technique that allowed them to capture brain responses to the newly learned words that are literally faster than the blink of an eye.

Remarkably, the researchers said, these very rapid brain responses to the newly learned words were influenced by how they were learned.

Words learned through the letter-sound instruction elicited neural activity biased toward the left side of the brain, which encompasses visual and language regions. In contrast, words learned via whole-word association showed activity biased toward right hemisphere processing.

McCandliss noted that this strong left hemisphere engagement during early word recognition is a hallmark of skilled readers, and is characteristically lacking in children and adults who are struggling with reading.

In addition, the study's participants were subsequently able to read new words they had never seen before, as long as they followed the same letter-sound patterns they were taught to focus on. Within a split second, the process of deciphering a new word triggered the left hemisphere processes.

"Ideally, that is the brain circuitry we are hoping to activate in beginner readers," McCandliss said.

By comparison, when the same participants memorized whole-word associations, the study found that they learned sufficiently to recognize those particular words on the reading test, but the underlying brain circuitry differed, eliciting electrophysiological responses that were biased toward right hemisphere processes.

"These contrasting teaching approaches are likely having such different impact on early brain responses because they encourage the learner to focus their attention in different ways," McCandliss said. "It's like shifting the gears of the mind - when you focus your attention on different information associated with a word, you amplify different brain circuits."

While many teachers are now using phonics to teach reading, some may be doing it more effectively than others, McCandliss said.

"If children are struggling, even if they're receiving phonics instruction, perhaps it's because of the way they are being asked to focus their attention on the sounds within spoken words and links between those sounds and the letters within visual words," he said.

"We can direct attention to a larger grain size or a smaller grain size, and it can have a big impact on how well you learn."

Monitoring brain waves

The study involved 16 literate adult participants, yet, according to McCandliss, gained its statistical power by teaching all participants in two different ways, much like what a typical student may experience when learning from different teachers or trying to master irregular words that don't conform to letter-to-sound mapping, such as "yacht."

The new written language was based on line features that formed symbols representing different letters of a new alphabet. The symbols were joined to represent a distinct visual word.

Each participant was trained to read two sets of three-letter words under identical conditions that provided practice viewing words and listening to corresponding spoken words. The only difference between the two training conditions was a set of instructions at the beginning that encouraged the readers to approach learning the words in one of two ways.

One instruction asked learners to approach the task of learning each word by picking out each of the three-letter symbols and matching each to the corresponding sound in the spoken word. The other focused on teaching the association between whole printed and spoken words.

After training was completed, participants were hooked up to an electroencephalograph, or EEG, that monitored brain waves while they took a reading test on word-figures they had already learned. Following the letter-sound style of training, participants were also tested on their ability to read new words composed of the same letters.

"When we looked under the hood, we found that the participants could learn to read under both forms of instruction but the brain activation showed that learning happened in very different ways," McCandliss said.

He said the results underscore the idea that the way a learner focuses their attention during learning has a profound impact on what is learned. It also highlights the importance of skilled teachers in helping children focus their attention on precisely the most useful information.

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Stanford brain wave study shows how different teaching methods affect reading development

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Beginning readers who focus on letter-sound relationships, or phonics, instead of trying to learn whole words, increase activity in the area of their brains best wired for reading, according to new Stanford research investigating how the brain responds to different types of reading instruction.

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Built for These Times: Making the Shift to the Science of Reading 

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Built for These Times: Making the Shift to the Science of Reading 

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Register now for our free virtual symposium, Built for These Times: Making the Shift to the Science of Reading on March 4, 2021, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. EST.

This event is your front-row seat to learning more about the science of reading and how to start making the shift in your classroom and district. Certificates of attendance will be awarded.

Here's who will be among the dream team of speakers:

Scroll down to see the agenda. Speakers also include Dr. Carolyn Strom, Dr. Pamela Snow, DeJunne' Jackson, Dr. Bruce McCandliss, Margaret Goldberg and Lani Mednick (The Right to Read Project), Dr. Jan Hasbrouck, Dr. Todd Davis (Aldine I.S.D.), and Janise Lane (Baltimore City Public Schools).
We've also put together a free digitalswag bag , including some fun virtual meeting backgrounds and our primer, Science of Reading, A Primer: Part One, so you can share your newfound love of the science of reading.
Can't attend live? We'll record the event and send it out to all registrants afterward so you won't miss a thing.

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Register now for our free virtual symposium, Built for These Times: Making the Shift to the Science of Reading on March 4, 2021, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. EST. This event is your front-row seat to learning more about the science of reading and how to start making the shift in your classroom and district.

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Maryanne Wolf

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The Most Popular Reading Programs Aren’t Backed by Science

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The Most Popular Reading Programs Aren’t Backed by Science

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By Sarah Schwartz

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There's a settled body of research on how best to teach early reading. But when it comes to the multitude of curriculum choices that schools have, it's often hard to parse whether well-marketed programs abide by the evidence.

And making matters more complicated, there's no good way to peek into every elementary reading classroom to see what materials teachers are using.

"It's kind of an understudied issue," said Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can't, and What Can Be Done About It. "[These programs] are put out by large publishers that aren't very forthcoming. It's very hard for researchers to get a hold of very basic data about how widely they're used."

Now, some data are available. In a nationally representative survey, the Education Week Research Center asked K-2 and special education teachers what curricula, programs, and textbooks they had used for early reading instruction in their classrooms.

The top five include three sets of core instructional materials, meant to be used in whole-class settings: The Units of Study for Teaching Reading, developed by the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, and Journeys and Into Reading, both by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. There are also two early interventions, which target specific skills certain students need more practice on: Fountas & Pinnell's Leveled Literacy Intervention and Reading Recovery.

An Education Week analysis of the materials found many instances in which these programs diverge from evidence-based practices for teaching reading or supporting struggling students.

At this point, it's widely accepted that reading programs for young kids need to include phonics-and every one of these five programs teaches about sound-letter correspondences. What varies, though, is the nature of this instruction. In some cases, students master a progression of letter-sound relationships in a set-out sequence. In others, phonics instruction is less systematic, raising the possibility that students might not learn or be assessed on certain skills.

Phonics is "buried" in many commercial reading programs, Seidenberg said. Teachers might be able to use what's there to construct a coherent sequence, he said, or they might not.

And frequently, these programs are teaching students to approach words in ways that could undermine the phonics instruction they are receiving.

Several of these interventions and curricula operate under the understanding that students use multiple sources of information, or "cues," to solve words. Those can include the letters on the page, the context in which the word appears, pictures, or the grammatical structure of the sentence.

Observational studies show that poor readers do use different sources of information to predict what words might say. But studies also suggest that skilled readers don't read this way. Neuroscience research has shown that skilled readers process all of the letters in words when they read them, and that they read connected text very quickly.

Even so, many early reading programs are designed to teach students to make better guesses, under the assumption that it will make children better readers. The problem is that it trains kids to believe that they don't always need to look at all of the letters that make up words in order to read them.

Still, teachers may not know that cueing strategies aren't in line with the scientific evidence base around teaching reading, said Heidi Beverine-Curry, the co-founder of The Reading League, an organization that promotes science-based reading instruction.

Classroom teachers also aren't usually the people making decisions about what curriculum to use. In Education Week's survey, 65 percent of teachers said that their district selected their primary reading programs and materials, while 27 percent said that the decision was up to their school.

Even when teachers want to question their school or district's approach, they may feel pressured to stay silent. Education Week spoke with three teachers from different districts who requested that their names not be used in this story, for fear of repercussions from their school systems.

Cueing Strategies Persist

Reading Recovery, the 1st grade intervention used by about 20 percent of teachers surveyed, was developed in the 1970s by New Zealand researcher Marie Clay. Thirty-minute lessons are delivered one-on-one, and generally follow a similar structure day to day. The idea is to catch students early before they need more intensive intervention, said Jeff Williams, a Reading Recovery Teacher-Leader in the Solon school district in Ohio.

Students read books they've read several times before, and then read a book that they've only read once, the day before, while the teacher takes a "running record." Here, the teacher marks the words that the student reads incorrectly and notes which cue the child apparently used to produce the wrong word.

For example, if a child reads the word "pot" instead of "bucket," a teacher could indicate that the student was using meaning cues to figure out the word.

During the rest of the lesson, students practice letter-sound relationships, write a short story, and assemble words in a cut-up story. At the end, they read a new book.

The program also requires intensive teacher training, which is administered through partner colleges.

Fountas & Pinnell's Leveled Literacy Intervention follows a similar lesson structure, but it's delivered in a small group format rather than one-on-one.

In both programs, text is leveled according to perceived difficulty. Teachers are told to match students to books at a just-right level, with the idea that this will challenge but not overwhelm them.

Students in the lowest levels read predictable text: books in which the sentence structure is similar from page to page, and pictures present literal interpretations of what the text says. One LLI book, for example, follows a girl as she gets dressed to go sledding in winter. "Look at my pants," the first page reads, facing an image of the girl holding up a pair of pants. "Look at my jacket," is on the next page, with a photo of the girl pointing to a jacket.

Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, the founders of LLI, declined an interview for this story through their publisher, Heinemann. The company also declined to comment.

The main point of disagreement concerns these predictable texts and the teaching methods that align to them. For Williams, the Reading Recovery teacher leader in Ohio, predictable text can be a useful orienting tool when children are still learning how print works. The repetitive sentence structure demonstrates that words have consistent meaning, and the frequent pictures provide a context to link to the words, he said.

He gave the word "hippopotamus" as an example. By pointing out that "hippopotamus" starts with the letter "h," and linking that word to a relevant picture and story context, the student can connect the word and the meaning of the word.

"When it's in isolation and we just say arbitrarily, 'This shape makes this sound,' that's a little abstract for little kids," Williams said.

But other experts say using predictable text this way teaches young children the wrong understanding of how the English language works.

"You build this foundation of, English is a language that I have to memorize," said Tiffany Peltier, a doctoral student at Oklahoma University, who studies reading instruction.

But kids don't memorize words to learn them. Instead, they decode the letter-sound correspondences. After several exposures, the word becomes recognizable on sight, through a process called orthographic mapping.

Of course, a picture of a hippopotamus can convey useful information. It could help a child understand what the animal looks like, or what it might do in the wild. But a picture of a hippo won't help the child read the word.

In predictable texts, students don't have to recognize the individual sounds in the word, said Peltier, even though learning how to do that is highly correlated with reading ability. So do Reading Recovery and LLI attend to the sounds in words at all?

Both have daily sections for letter and word work. Reading Recovery tests students on 50 phonemes when they enter the program, and teachers target the ones that students don't know, said Williams.

But basing instruction around individual student errors-rather than progressing through a systematic structure-can leave some gaps, said Kristen Koeller, the educator outreach manager at Decoding Dyslexia California, who used to be a Reading Recovery teacher.

For example, she said, she might have a student who didn't know the /ow/ sound, like in the words "how" or "wow." Koeller would work with the student on that sound, but she wasn't expected to explain the difference between when "ow" makes the /ow/ sound, like in "how," and when "ow" makes and /o/ sound, like in "show."

Phonics does happen in Reading Recovery lessons, she said. "But it is not systematic, it is not multisensory, and it depends largely on the teacher's knowledge base and the book that is selected."

LLI does include a scope and sequence for phonemic awareness and phonics instruction. But students enter the program at different points, and it's possible that they might need more practice with skills that are deemed below their level-or that they will exit the intervention before they reach all of the sound-letter correspondences that they don't know.

The company, Fountas & Pinnell Literacy, identifies two main studies that it claims validate the program's effectiveness in grades K-2. Both are from the Center for Research in Educational Policy at the University of Memphis, and both were funded by Heinemann, which publishes LLI.

The 2010 paper, which the company calls its "gold standard" study, found that kindergarten, 1st, and 2nd graders who received LLI made greater gains than students who received no intervention. But these gains were only consistent on Fountas & Pinnell's own assessment, rather than an external validator of reading achievement. Results on DIBELS, a separate early literacy test, were mixed. Kindergartners and 1st graders in the treatment group did better than the control group on some subtests, but 2nd graders saw no difference.

Reading Recovery, by contrast, has a much stronger evidence base for effectiveness. Most notably, an independent evaluation of the federal grant expanding the program found that students who received the intervention did better on assessments of overall reading, reading comprehension, and decoding compared to similar students who received their schools' traditional literacy interventions. But even that study has invited controversy.

Psychologists James W. Chapman and William E. Tunmer published a critique of the evaluation, arguing that many of the lowest-achieving students were excluded from the program, potentially inflating success rates.

The executive director of the Reading Recovery Council of North America did not respond to requests for comment.

Three core instructional programs also made the top five most popular list among teachers, according to the Education Week survey: The Units of Study for Teaching Reading, by Heinemann, and Journeys and Into Reading, both by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Units of Study for Teaching Reading was developed by Lucy Calkins, a researcher and the founding director of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project.

The program follows a "reader's workshop" model. Teachers give a short "mini-lesson" at the beginning of class, and then students spend the majority of time practicing that skill independently as the teacher monitors them and works with small groups.

"We think about what is it that a good reader does. What is the life that a good reader leads?" Calkins says in a video describing reading workshop on the Units of Study website. "So above all, that means putting reading front and center."

Calkins declined an interview for this story through her publisher, Heinemann. The company also declined to comment on the program itself.

Units of Study instills these reading habits in children, and teaches them that reading is something to value, said Susan Chambre, an assistant professor of education at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. It also introduces a variety of genres and gives students choice in what they read. "The fact that we are immersing kids in literature-that is important," Chambre said.

But Chambre struggled with Units of Study when she used it as a kindergarten teacher in an inclusion classroom. The program assumed a lot of knowledge-of oral language, of phonics-that students just didn't have. Chambre would watch children mumble through sentences, making up words by looking at the pictures.

"For those kids who come in [to school] and can learn foundational skills easily, and have a fair amount of general knowledge and a fair amount of vocabulary, they would come out okay," Meredith Liben, the senior fellow for strategic initiatives at Student Achievement Partners, said of the Units of Study for Teaching Reading.

But a lot of students don't come into school with that knowledge, and the program isn't explicit enough to fill in the gaps, Chambre said. Starting in kindergarten, students are taught reading "super powers" that encourage them to "search for meaning, use picture clues, and use the sound of the first letter of a word to help them read," according to kindergarten sample lessons downloaded from the Heinemann website. One sample lesson encourages teachers to say things like "Check the picture," "Try something," or "Does that look right?" when students struggle, which prompts students to take their eyes off of the letters in a word.

In a public statement responding to science-based critiques of her program, Calkins wrote that asking students to guess or "try it" when they come to hard words teaches reading stamina. She also argued that there is value in predictable texts for young children, who are "approximating reading" when they rely on syntax and picture clues.

Though billed as a core reading program, the Units of Study in Reading doesn't teach phonemic awareness or phonics systematically or explicitly. "At best it's a suggestion, and there's a lot of focus on the three-cueing system," Liben said.

The Teachers College Reading and Writing Project recently released a separate phonics program, the Units of Study in Phonics. In her recent statement, Calkins emphasized the importance of a systematic phonics program, and said it would be a "wise move" for teachers to include more decodable texts in lessons with emerging readers. Still, marketing materials for the units imply that the company believes phonics should not play a central role in the classroom.

"Phonics instruction needs to be lean and efficient," the materials read. "Every minute you spend teaching phonics (or preparing phonics materials to use in your lessons) is less time spent teaching other things."

Menu of Choices

The other two core instructional programs, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's Journeys and Into Reading, differ in some significant ways from the rest of this list. Into Reading is the company's newer product-this is its first academic year in schools. According to HMH, more than 6.7 million students use Journeys in school.

Both programs include an explicit, systematic program in phonemic awareness and phonics. In an emailed statement to Education Week, a representative for HMH wrote that the company suggests teachers follow this sequence, as phonics skills build cumulatively. Decodable texts are available for purchase.

Because these programs are meant to be comprehensive, they include lessons and resources for teaching other foundational skills-like writing letters, spelling, and fluency-as well as explicit vocabulary instruction, anchor texts and student texts, writing instruction, and comprehension instruction.

Seidenberg, who has reviewed the Journeys materials but not Into Reading, said that the amount of materials, lessons, and instructional choices in the program was overwhelming. "It looks like the publisher's response to all the debate about reading instruction was to make sure that they included everything," he said.

In the emailed statement, HMH said that teachers can "choose from a variety of resources to make the best instructional decisions for their students and to align with district curriculum requirements."

When Milton Terrace Elementary in Ballston Spa, N.Y., started using Journeys, teachers were using the materials differently, said Kathleen Chaucer, the principal. (The school is no longer using the program.) For example-even though the program offers decodable books, kids were practicing in leveled texts, which didn't offer opportunities to use patterns they learned, Chaucer said.

Journeys includes six teacher manuals for its 1st grade program alone, Seidenberg said. "There is so much information in those teacher manuals, it raises serious questions about whether anyone is actually using them," he said. "And if they are using them, are they just picking through them to find the pieces that they're comfortable with?" Chaucer said that's what happened at her school.

A Perfect Program?

It's hard to find a perfect curriculum, said Blythe Wood, an instructional coach in the special education department at the Pickerington school district, and the vice president of the International Dyslexia Association of Central Ohio.

She's critical of Leveled Literacy Intervention, specifically, for the focus it puts on looking at words as wholes, and the lack of decodable text. But there are good and bad parts to most commercial materials, she said.

"The knowledge base of the teacher, and being able to identify the needs of the student, are more important than a boxed program," Wood said. "We're not going to meet every kid with one box."

Taking a hard look at curriculum is important-but more important is making sure teachers have the training they need to evaluate practices themselves, said Beverine-Curry, of The Reading League. "Just handing teachers materials or a program or a curriculum is not going to do the job."

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Become a catalyst for change in education. Dive into the Science of Reading with our FREE presentation and resources, co-created with 100+ dedicated educators like you. If you're looking for worksheets that you had previously accessed on the page, make sure to check out our new free Resource Bundles below.

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Become a catalyst for change in education. Dive into the Science of Reading with our FREE presentation and resources, co-created with 100+ dedicated educators like you.

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Keep scrolling and grab the resource bundles below to start transforming your classroom!

If you're looking for worksheets that you had previously accessed on the page, make sure to check out our new free Resource Bundles below.

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