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Federal, state and local literacy requirements.

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SB 734, enacted 2019

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Educational equity is a critical focus for Maryland public schools, so we have compiled this resource to serve as a road map to educators on how to apply an equity lens to all aspects of their work. It is intended to be a valuable tool kit for Local School Systems to develop and apply their own equity policies, developing goals to enhance each system's Local Every Student Succeeds Act (LESSA) Consolidated Strategic Plan. These goals and strategies are intended to increase equitable opportunities for all of our students.

Resources for Equity and Excellence in Maryland

Contact Information

Mary Howlett-Brandon, Specialist
Equity and Cultural Proficiency
Division of Curriculum, Instructional Improvement, and Professional Learning
Maryland State Department of Education
200 West Baltimore Street
Baltimore, MD 21201
410-767-0367

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Educational equity is a critical focus for Maryland public schools, so we have compiled this resource to serve as a road map to educators on how to apply an equity lens to all aspects of their work.

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Diverse Vulnerable Learners with Reading Difficulties

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Diverse Vulnerable Learners with Reading Difficulties

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Perspectives

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Don’t Make Black Families Choose between Academics and Justice

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Don’t Make Black Families Choose between Academics and Justice

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As states begin to ease social-distancing restrictions and the school year comes to a close, the uncertainty of in-person learning for the fall looms over teachers' heads. To add to that dismay, a recent study by NWEA projects that students will retain only about 70 percent of their reading progress compared with a normal year-and these are conservative estimates that don't account for students' traumatization. If we're not working now on what Sonja Santelises, the CEO of Baltimore's schools, calls "education recovery planning," we are sure to continue to perpetuate the opportunity gap.

Moreover, the anxieties of the pandemic are now just one part of the immediate distress for students, especially students like mine in a school district just north of Minneapolis, students who are largely low income and of color. George Floyd, the unarmed Black man who died after a Minneapolis police officer pinned him to the ground by his neck a week ago, and Philandro Castile, shot dead in his car in 2016 by a police officer in a suburb of St. Paul, Minn., are alive in my consciousness. My community is beset by endless cycles of grief, rage, and a hope of justice that never comes. We are tired of being tired.

I want to tell my students that this horrific war on Black people, this real threat to their lives, is also the very reason they must fight distraction and disengagement from education. State-sanctioned murder, the pandemic's disproportionate effect on people of color, and economic anxiety-in my mind, these are all reasons to insist that our schools be more than sites for social services, however important those may be. Our schools must be places of real learning driven by evidence for how to best teach and improve outcomes, not last week's education fad.

Even when we focus on academics, we too often target low-hanging fruit like graduation rates rather than teaching and learning. Shallow successes allow us to pat ourselves on the back. But a high graduation rate is meaningless when our graduates enter the world without a fundamental grasp of the tools and knowledge necessary for full participation in life and citizenship. We can hope for a reimagining of schooling during this time, but nothing will change in our schools until we prioritize the education of our students.

Yes, there is trauma: from pandemic fear, from centuries of racism and violence. We will likely need a trauma-informed approach as school begins in some form again. Some say that means educators should let relationships be the focus. But that does not necessarily mean relationships outside of content-the "I teach kids, not content" approach. I would reframe that to say: I teach my students content. That's my job and what my students trust me to do.

Doug Lemov of the Uncommon Schools charter network writes that "relationship building starts in the classroom with attentiveness to the craft of teaching and with attentiveness to the progress and experience of the learner." I knew my students' lives because they decided to tell me, not because I made them do an emotional check-in. I provided them with routine during distance learning by greeting them and giving them a brief overview of the day in a synchronous setting. I created an opportunity for hope by not overly dwelling on the woes and news of the present. And I continued to build relationships by capitalizing on the trust that I had earned from doing the best teaching I could.

And in all this, I was helped by the subject I teach: literature. One of the beautiful things about literature is its ability to center isolating and abstracted fear in previous human experience. Albert Camus wrote in The Plague: "There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet plagues and wars always take people equally by surprise." Literature attests that people have been here before, and their experience can strengthen us -if we know how to access it.

We've some harsh realities to face next school year. For the vast majority of students, especially those in low-income families, distance learning has not been a success. Add to this the outrage, pain, and trauma associated with centuries of oppression that is now on display. While unarmed Black men and women continue to die at the hands of police, our schools first started by killing their minds. Black educators, parents, and students are tired of having to accept mediocrity in all its forms.

As educators, we owe it to ourselves and our students to not cast aside learning, no matter the challenges. Communities like mine do not have the privilege of being indifferent. There has never been a time in American history when Black people were not having to simultaneously learn and fight for our right to be alive. Yet, we are the first to be given a choice between academics or social care in times of turbulence. We choose both.

Educators must demand a higher standard and culture of education, require leaders to listen to what our communities need, and refuse to lie down when those at the top tell us "no, not right now." If we don't and instead wait for the pandemic to be over or for our neighbors or colleagues to get the big picture, we will have stifled another generation. Students will pay the price of our failure to do what it is in our power to do.

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Don't Make Black Families Choose Between Academics and Justice (Opinion)

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As states begin to ease social-distancing restrictions and the school year comes to a close, the uncertainty of in-person learning for the fall looms over teachers' heads. To add to that dismay, a recent study by NWEA projects that students will retain only about 70 percent of their reading progress compared with a normal year-and these are conservative estimates that don't account for students' traumatization.

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Report Shows School Suspension and Arrest Rates Remain Highest for Black Students - Maryland Matters

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Black students in Maryland are consistently suspended from school and arrested on school grounds at higher rates than any other racial group. The Maryland...

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Implementing High Quality Programming for SWD

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Implementing High Quality Programming for SWD

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The success of students with disabilities depends on the implementation of high-quality instruction, interventions, and services outlined in the individualized education program (IEP). We know that effective implementation relies on educators and families using ongoing data to collaboratively problem solve and refine supports to meet the unique needs of the child. While barriers do exist, we know that educators can prevent or overcome these barriers by implementing infrastructure supports that ensure educators have access to evidence-based practices and assessments, high expectations for students, clear processes for decision making and collaborative teaming, and ongoing professional learning.

The sections below highlight key implementation considerations and resources to support implementation.

Effective Delivery of Services and Instruction

Data Collection and Analysis for Continuous Improvement

Ongoing Teaming and Collaboration

Family Engagement

Support for Educators

Educators will need ongoing support, including professional learning and access to resources, to implement high-quality educational programming for students with disabilities. These supports may include ongoing training and coaching on practices to support all students with disabilities as well individual educator supports needed to implement specific components of a child's IEP, such as a new evidence-based practice, accommodations and modifications, or assistive technology. Educators can draw from freely available resources from the IRIS Center, CEEDAR Center, and National Center on Intensive Intervention, and other OSEP Technical Assistance and Dissemination Centers.

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The success of students with disabilities depends on the implementation of high-quality instruction, interventions, and services outlined in the individualized education program (IEP). We know that effective implementation relies on educators and families using ongoing data to collaboratively problem solve and refine supports to meet the unique needs of the child.

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Includes reading: includes a PowerPoint to the MD State BOE and the full Equity Guidebook

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Reading Instruction, Intervention and PD in Maryland

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Reading Instruction, Intervention and PD in Maryland

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SB 1 reports, by district.  Posted on MSDE website

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Specialized Intervention Reports 2018-2019 (SB1)

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Students win case

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Two years ago, a group of students and their teachers sued the state of California for doing a poor job teaching kids how to read - 53% of California third-graders did not meet state test standards that year, and scores have increased only incrementally since. On Thursday they won $53 million so that the state's lowest-performing schools have the resources to do better.

Under the settlement with the state, most of the funding will be awarded over three years to 75 public elementary schools, including charters, with the poorest third-grade reading scores in California over the last two years. The agreement comes after the novel lawsuit contended that the students' low literacy levels violated California's constitutional mandate to provide all children with equal access to an education, said attorney Mark Rosenbaum at the pro bono law firm Public Counsel.

"We shouldn't have to be filing lawsuits to establish a right to read," Rosenbaum said.

The plaintiffs included current or former students and educators at La Salle Avenue Elementary School in Los Angeles; Van Buren Elementary School in Stockton; and the charter school Children of Promise Preparatory Academy in Inglewood. La Salle and Van Buren will be among the schools that receive funding, Rosenbaum said, but not all the recipient schools have been named.

"We know that literacy is the foundation for all learning, and it's an essential part of participating in democracy. People who can't read and write are often uninformed, are more easily manipulated and less likely to vote," said Pedro Noguera, a professor of education at UCLA. This settlement is "just a step, and I think we shouldn't exaggerate how big a step."

A Times analysis of the 75 lowest-performing schools on the state's English language arts test, based on California's Common Core standards, illustrates the depth of the reading problem. Seven out of 10 third-graders in these schools did not meet the standards, according to state data from 2018 and 2019. The schools have about double the English learners of other elementary schools, and more than 90% of students at those schools qualify for free or reduced-price lunch - a poverty indicator.

The schools with the lowest test scores also tend to enroll higher percentages of homeless students and foster students, Noguera said.

The settlement money to improve learning will exclude hundreds of elementary schools whose students are also struggling to meet reading standards.

In more than 500 of the state's approximately 6,000 elementary schools, the majority of third-grade students scored Level 1 - the lowest - in English tests, according to the Times analysis. About 80% of the schools' population are black and Latino, higher than the state average of 60%.

The scenario is also troubling in the fourth grade, with California students lagging behind the national averages in reading on the 2019 National Assessment of Education Progress, a standardized test taken across the country.

Rosenbaum, who filed the suit along with the law firm Morrison & Foerster, said he hopes the state will expand the targeted funding to more schools, without more litigation. But settling for 75 schools now means that students will get help sooner.

The heart of their argument - rooted in the state's constitutional mandate for an equal education for all students - is one that public interest lawyers have successfully used before, though not specifically for reading. In 2004, the American Civil Liberties Union settled a lawsuit for about $1 billion that accused the state of denying poor children adequate textbooks, trained teachers and safe classrooms.

Suing the state is more effective than suing individual districts, Rosenbaum said, because "the relief can be applied to every child in California."

"This is a way to get a lot more far-reaching reforms, and I think it's good to remind everybody about the state's obligations to provide that education for all students," said Victor Leung, an attorney with the ACLU of Southern California who specializes in education issues.

As part of the lawsuit, Literacy experts including Nell Duke, a University of Michigan education professor, analyzed school records, depositions and assessment results at the schools named in the suit to determine how well they taught reading.

They found problems with classroom instruction, discipline and the lack of adequate intervention for struggling students - all of which probably contributed to the low literacy rates, Duke said.

She believes California will be a model for other states.

"I wouldn't be surprised if other suits in other states follow, and I wouldn't be surprised if some states and jurisdictions take this as a cautionary tale" and start directing more aid toward helping their neediest students learn to read, Duke said

"The settlement is a step in the right direction, but only a small step," L.A. schools Supt. Austin Beutner said in a statement. California schools lag behind most states in per-pupil funding and need more to adequately educate students, he said. "There is talent in every seat in every classroom in every one of the 1,386 schools in Los Angeles Unified. But there is not always opportunity."

To receive their grant, each school will design a California Department of Education-approved plan that analyzes why its reading rates are so low and identifies how it will measure progress and spend the money, which can be used for a range of services, including literacy coaches, social-emotional learning, bilingual reading specialists, and training teachers on methods to improve school discipline that can disrupt education.

The funding is meant for students in kindergarten through third grade and is contingent on the state Legislature's approval of the governor's block grant. If denied, the case goes back to court.

"California is committed to closing opportunity gaps by directing extra support and resources to school districts and schools that serve students who need extra help," Gov. Gavin Newsom's spokeswoman Vicky Waters said in an email statement. In addition to Newsom's budget proposal to spend $600 million on grants and services for low-performing, high-poverty schools, the literacy settlement "focuses on strengthening early literacy programs, which are critical to a child's later success in school," she said.

The settlement includes up to $50 million in grants for the elementary schools, plus $3 million to support the schools' plans, including a literacy expert to guide them from the California Collaborative for Educational Excellence, a state agency that assists schools and districts in capacity-building.

Such support is important, Noguera said, especially at schools that are already struggling.

"You don't want to just pour money into failing schools that don't have capacity to use it," Noguera said.

Results will vary at schools. Some may see fast growth in state standardized test results, although that kind of improvement typically takes time, he said.

One of the plaintiffs, retired La Salle teacher David Moch, said he is most heartened that the settlement requires schools to get parent and community feedback on the plans, as well as provisions that allow the funding to be used for creating safer and more welcoming learning environments for children who have experienced trauma. He would look not just at test results to measure improvement, but at parent involvement in the schools, and whether suspensions and referrals decrease.

Moch taught for 20 years in South L.A.'s Vermont corridor, an area of high crime rates in the city.

"We had to always teach with the recognition that we have to understand and make accommodations for whatever it is they went through that night or that evening or that morning," Moch said. But when he had enough support in his classroom - 10 students in a specialized literacy program and computers and money for culturally relevant resources - the students thrived, he said.

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See Dick and Jane read poorly. See them win a lawsuit

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See Dick and Jane read poorly. See them win a lawsuit

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K-6 Approved Science of Reading Program: link includes description of MTSS framework (core, supplemental, etc) and links to the programs approved for each tier.

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National Center on Improving Literacy (NCIL)

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National Center on Improving Literacy (NCIL)

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www.improvingliteracy.org

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Detroit, Michigan

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Listen to this story on the Educate podcast. Subscribe now:

At his Detroit high school, Jamarria Hall loved the classes where students could share textbooks, passing six torn and outdated hardcovers among 35 students to take turns reading.

Hall loved those, he said, because in most classes at Osborn High School he had no books. Instead, students copied down whatever the teacher wrote on the board. Or maybe they had a printout from the school's copy machine.

"How can you learn in that type of environment?" asked Hall, who's trying to finish his freshman credits at Tallahassee (Fla.) Community College, three years after graduating from Osborn. "It's setting you up to fail."

A federal appellate court last week agreed and in a historic ruling determined that the students' constitutional rights were violated by that level of deprivation.

In a 2-1 decision, judges from the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that students have a right to "a basic minimum education," which the court defined as giving students the opportunity to learn to read.

The ruling doesn't address the vast inequities between rich schools and poor schools, but it does set a minimum standard that states must meet in public education: providing kids with "a chance at foundational literacy."

It's the first time that a federal court has asserted that right. Advocates say the ruling could match Brown v. Board of Education in importance and hope it triggers a broader crusade against unequal education.

The ruling applies to the four states in the Sixth Circuit - Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee - and it could guide similar federal lawsuits in other states.

It doesn't mean anything will change immediately in Detroit's classrooms. It simply gives students a chance to argue their case in federal district court, to try to prove they've been deprived of those newly established rights and to ask the judge to order a fix.

Students from five Detroit public schools, including Osborn High, brought the case, Gary B. v. Snyder, against Michigan's governor and other state officials in 2016. They argued that "decades of state disinvestment and deliberate indifference" had left students struggling to read and attending "schools in name only."

At one elementary school, third-graders had only picture books to look at until their teacher bought books to read. And at Osborn High, one student had to ask her classmate how to spell the word "the," according to the lawsuit.

A district court judge threw the case out in 2018 without hearing evidence, saying the students' rights weren't being violated, even if the conditions in the five Detroit schools were "nothing short of devastating."

The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected the idea that there is a general right to an education. But it has left open the possibility that students have the right to an education that is at least minimally adequate. In a 1973 case challenging Texas's starkly unequal school financing, the justices said an education could theoretically be so bad, such an "absolute denial" of opportunity, that it might be unconstitutional.

The Sixth Circuit, for the first time, said that's just what seemed to be happening in Detroit's lowest-performing schools. Judge Eric Clay, a Clinton appointee who wrote the majority opinion, said teacher vacancies, building hazards and empty bookshelves likely deprived students of the opportunity to learn to read.

He wrote that was a right they were entitled to, pointing to the long history of reading "as a key to political power," dating to the antebellum codes prohibiting slaves from learning to read and the Klan's attacks on teachers who taught black children.

It's unclear, however, whether the decision will stand. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer could decide to appeal, either to the entire Sixth Circuit or to the U.S. Supreme Court. Or the state could decide to argue its case in district court, contending that the schools had met the Sixth Circuit's standard. The state could also settle, as Detroit's school superintendent and many local activists are urging Whitmer to do. A spokesperson said the state is reviewing the decision.

Helen Moore, an 83-year-old activist in Detroit, is calling for Whitmer to make a deal. She said the ruling was "some of the best news I have heard" in a half-century of organizing. She called it "better" than Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 ruling that desegregated schools.

"Listen, here's the secret: If you can't read, you can't do anything else. It's the doorway to education," she said. "Reading is the basis of freedom."

While the Detroit case continues, the lawyers who brought the litigation say they hope the Sixth Circuit ruling inspires "a social movement" nationwide to demand better reading instruction in schools.

Evan Caminker, a law professor and former dean at the University of Michigan law school who worked on the case, said that the suit was "surgically precise" in seeking remedies for kids in "the worst of the worst schools."

"This lawsuit is not designed to cure all evil, so to speak. This lawsuit is designed to show that there are particular pockets, where we would say it's not just that the kids are not becoming literate; it's that they don't have the opportunity to become literate," he said.

"The right we are seeking and was vindicated by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals is not a right to a particular outcome. It is not a right to be literate. That's not something our Constitution can plausibly support. It is the right to have the opportunity to become literate."
Educate is a collaboration with The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization that focuses on inequality and innovation in education.

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Is learning to read a constitutional right?

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A federal court recently ruled that underfunded schools in Detroit violated students' right to a basic education. Advocates hope the case is the beginning of a trend.

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How American Schools Fail Kids with Dyslexia

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How American Schools Fail Kids with Dyslexia

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by Emily Hanford

Featuring MD & OH families. Interviews with 3 DDMD students and their family about their struggle and the difficulties presented by public education to identify and educate students with dyslexia.

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Read an interview with neuroscientist Guinevere Eden.

"We knew something wasn't right," said Billy's mom, Maggie Gibson.

"You can tell things are off, but you don't know specifically what," said Rob, Billy's father.

The Gibsons, from Baltimore County, Maryland, have five kids. All of them have dyslexia. They know, because they paid thousands of dollars for private testing.

But when the Gibsons showed the test results to their children's schools, administrators didn't buy it, says Rob. "The schools essentially said, 'Yeah, we understand this is a test showing abnormalities from a reputed institution that recommends a child with dyslexia have this, that and the other. And, oh, we don't agree with it.' And when we got to that disagreement it was almost like we were disagreeing over reality."

The Gibsons gave APM Reports an audio recording of the meeting where they discussed the test results with staff at their son Eddie's school. In the recording, a staff member says, "We do not suspect a learning disability."

The Gibsons wanted their children to have Individualized Education Plans, or IEPs. Those are the specialized education plans that students with disabilities who are behind in school are entitled to by federal law.

But in the recording, the school staff says Eddie can't have a disability because he has passing grades and average standardized test scores.

More than a dozen families across the country interviewed by APM Reports reported getting into similar fights with their child's school. Parents say their children figure out ways to compensate for their dyslexia and get by in school, but they aren't being taught to read. Children with dyslexia need specialized reading instruction.

"I would just constantly have these anxiety attacks and it got to a point where I refused to go to school."
- Billy Gibson

But specialized instruction is expensive. The average cost to educate a student in public school is about $12,500, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. The cost to educate a child receiving special education services can be more than twice that. When the federal special education law first went into effect in 1975, Congress committed to covering 40 percent of the extra cost of educating children with disabilities. But the federal government is only covering slightly more than 15 percent. States and local districts pay for the rest.

That's one reason schools have avoided using the word dyslexia, according to Fran Bowman, a former special education teacher who now runs an educational services company that works with school districts to train teachers. "They would say, 'We don't use the word dyslexia.' Because once you open Pandora's box, you have to serve those children."

In other words, if schools acknowledge a student has dyslexia, they may be legally obligated to provide special education.

Six special education directors from around the country interviewed by APM Reports denied their schools were refusing to use the word dyslexia to keep students out of special ed.

Kevin Gorman, director of special education in Upper Arlington, Ohio, and a former school principal in another Ohio district, said schools were avoiding the word because it wasn't a term used by the state on IEP forms. Instead, the state used the umbrella term "specific learning disability." Gorman explained that schools are so concerned about adhering to the letter of the law that they are reluctant to use terms that do not appear on official paperwork.

Avoiding the word was such a problem in schools across the country that in 2015 the U.S. Department of Education issued a special letter reminding schools that not only can they use the word dyslexia, they should use the word if it can help them tailor an appropriate education plan for a student.

It's a legal requirement for schools to identify all children who have disabilities and provide them an "appropriate" education. But many schools have resisted the approaches to reading instruction that students with dyslexia need - and that would help all children read better - because of a long-running dispute about how to teach children to read.

The reading wars

You can trace the debate in the United States about how to teach kids to read all the way back to Horace Mann, the father of the public schools movement. In the 1800s, Mann railed against the idea of teaching kids that letters represent sounds. He believed children would better understand what they were reading if they first learned to read whole words.

This came to be known as the "whole language" approach. On the other side of the debate are people who say children must be explicitly taught how sounds correlate with letters. This is commonly referred to as the "phonics" approach.

The argument over which approach is best has been intense and political, with phonics cast as a traditional, conservative approach. Think of children sitting in front of a blackboard, sounding out words as a teacher points to the letters that represent each sound.

Whole language, on the other hand, holds that learning to read is a natural process and that kids don't need explicit instruction. Expose them to lots of good books and they will learn to read. That approach is seen as the more liberal, progressive way.

As with many ideas in education, there have been big pendulum shifts over the decades. Whole language was big in the 1920s, for example, as progressive education became influential. The pendulum swung back toward phonics in the 1960s. By the 1980s, whole language was popular again.

Bowman, the former special education teacher, got extensive training in phonics in the 1970s and used that approach early in her teaching career. But she says she soon got a supervisor who told her she wasn't allowed to teach phonics. "You should be teaching by the entire word, instead of these little sounds," she recalls the supervisor telling her.

Bowman says it's easier to train teachers to use the whole language method than to train them to use phonics. She thinks that's one reason whole language has been so attractive. "School districts were like 'Wow! We can just give you a bunch of books!'"

Proponents of whole language say the approach is more than that. They promote a set of strategies that emphasize comprehension, engagement, and helping children to develop a love of literature.

But by the late 1990s, there was rising panic in the United States that too many kids were not reading well. Scores on the National Assessment for Educational Progress showed most students were not reading proficiently.

In 1997, Congress called for a National Reading Panel to determine how best to teach reading. It reviewed more than 100,000 studies and in 2000, the panel published a 449-page report that was a crushing blow to the whole language movement. There was no evidence to show whole language worked and lots of evidence that teaching children the relationship among sounds, letters and spelling patterns improves reading achievement.

This is for all kids, not just those with dyslexia.

Andrea Rowson was teaching in a public school in Ohio when the report was released, but she says she didn't learn about the findings until years later. "What happens in public education is a lot of initiatives come through, a lot of information gets thrown at schools. New regulations, new this, new that," she said. "And I think it was just one of those things where (schools) said 'OK' and didn't really realize how huge it was."

'I'm not going to be anything. I don't have any dreams'

In 2012 when the public schools in Baltimore County refused to give the Gibson children IEPs, Rob and Maggie decided to hire a lawyer. "All we wanted was to secure their right to learn in public school," said Maggie.

Their son Billy was in middle school and struggling. "It just got so overwhelming," he said. "I would just constantly have these anxiety attacks and it got to a point where I refused to go to school."

Trying to get him the help he needed for his dyslexia was turning into a long and contentious process. Maggie and Rob felt that for Billy and his older sister, time was running out. They decided to send them to the Jemicy School, a private school for students with language-based learning differences in Owings Mills, Maryland.

Jemicy has about 380 students in grades one through 12. The hallways are covered in student artwork and there's a woodworking shop where students can take geometry. For students who struggle with written language, learning by doing is especially helpful.

Class sizes at Jemicy are capped at 12. The school also provides intensive reading remediation in small-group tutoring sessions.

In a recent tutoring session, Josie and Christopher - fifth-graders in their first year at Jemicy - were seated at a table with a teacher. They were working on the letter combination double vowel "oo."

"I talk to a lot of upper-class white families who were able to take their kids out and send them to private school. Those kids are doing well now, and we didn't have that opportunity."
- Pam Guest

"What are the two sounds that 'oo' make?" the teacher asked.

Christopher responded confidently with the long vowel sound that "oo" makes in the word "school." But there's another sound "oo" makes. Josie and Christopher didn't catch on.

"'Uh' as in 'book,'" said the teacher.

This tutoring is based on an approach known as Orton-Gillingham, named after Samuel Orton and Anna Gillingham, early 20th century pioneers in dyslexia research and remediation. They figured out that children with dyslexia struggle to understand how sounds and letters correspond. To teach them to read, they need to be explicitly taught the rules of the way written language works. Orton and Gillingham developed a systematic approach for doing this. Their ideas form the basis for a number of effective instructional approaches in use today.

When Billy Gibson started at Jemicy as a ninth grader, he wasn't sure he would finish high school. His dream was to be an artist, but his middle school art teacher gave him C's because he didn't follow written directions. Billy went into Jemicy thinking, "I'm not going to be anything. I don't have any dreams."

But Jemicy's small classes and intensive reading instruction helped him catch up and gave him confidence he'd never felt in school. On his first day, he says an art teacher noticed him doodling and told him she thought he could be a great artist. "You should take my class," Billy remembers her saying to him. "I won't give up on you."

Billy graduated from Jemicy in 2017. He's now studying 3D computer animation at the Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida. His goal is to work in the film industry. "Hopefully someday you'll be in the movie theater and see my name on the credits of the big screen," he said.

More than $60,000 a year

Billy's mom Maggie noticed a difference at Jemicy right away. As the parent of kids with dyslexia in public school, she says you get used to being in fight mode. "You're fighting for it to be recognized that your kid needs X, Y and Z," she said. "And then you go into Jemicy and you have a teacher conference and the teachers sit down and say, 'You know, we think your child would benefit from this, this and this. And we notice that your child needs' - whatever it is. And you're like, 'Oh my gosh! We're speaking the same language. We're all noticing the same thing.'"

But to send two kids to Jemicy cost more than $60,000 a year. Maggie and Rob are fortunate: He's a physician and they got financial help from their children's grandparents. But five private school tuitions weren't in their budget. So, with their lawyer, the Gibsons kept fighting with the Baltimore County Public Schools to try to get their three other kids better help.

The Gibsons eventually got the school system to pay for two of their children to go to Baltimore Lab School, a private school for students with learning disabilities. The Gibsons don't think they would have gotten that if they hadn't hired an attorney. Getting what you need for a kid with dyslexia is a rich man's game, says Maggie. The Gibsons estimate their family has spent more than $350,000 - including legal fees, private tutoring and tuition - to get their five dyslexic kids what they needed to be successful in school.

Without help from grandparents, Maggie says she and Rob probably couldn't have made private school work. "What does a person do that doesn't have the luxury of other people to help them?" she said. "What do you do?"

Pam Guest, for example, did not have the financial means to send her son Dayne to private school. "I talk to a lot of upper-class white families who were able to take their kids out and send them to private school. Those kids are doing well now, and they're able to go to college," she said. "And we didn't have that opportunity."

Dayne went to the Baltimore County Public Schools, too. There's no evidence that Baltimore County has more of a problem than other public school systems when it comes to identifying and providing proper instruction to students with dyslexia. But officials with the Baltimore County Schools are now admitting they have a problem. "We need to do better," said Rebecca Rider, who's been director of special education for the Baltimore County Public Schools since 2014. Under her leadership, the school system has begun to train teachers in Orton-Gillingham. Before this effort began in 2016, the county schools did not have anyone trained to provide this instruction.

Stephen Cowles, a lawyer for BCPS, said the school system is making more of an effort to identify students with dyslexia. As a result, he says the county is paying for more students to go to private schools. In the 2016 fiscal year, the county paid nearly $40 million dollars for students with disabilities who could not be appropriately served in public schools to go to specialized private schools. BCPS couldn't say how much of that money is being spent on students with dyslexia.

But helping students with dyslexia is not just about expanding special education services. Research suggests that if students with dyslexia got effective early reading instruction in their regular classrooms, some of them may not need intensive, specialized instruction. The problem is that many teachers do not know how to teach reading effectively.

Thousands of teacher preparation programs

In 2000, the National Reading Panel identified five key components of effective reading instruction. Ten years later, the U.S. Department of Education decided to find out whether people coming out of teacher preparation programs had learned those five components.

New teachers could correctly answer only about half the questions on a multiple-choice test. They rated their own preparation in how to teach reading as below "moderate."

In 2016, the National Council on Teacher Quality, a think tank in Washington, D.C., analyzed syllabi from undergraduate elementary teacher preparation programs and found that fewer than 40 percent covered all the components of effective reading instruction. And that was a big improvement from 2014 when NCTQ found just 17 percent of teacher preparation programs taught all five components.

What are teachers learning about how to teach children to read?

"We learned a lot about creating a literature-rich environment," said Rowson, the Ohio teacher. She got her initial training in the 1980s and says she learned nothing about phonics; in fact, she says her professors were against the idea of explicitly teaching children the relationship between sounds and letters. She learned the whole language approach.

Rowson says she didn't learn how to teach children to read until she was trained in Orton-Gillingham. She now trains teachers in Upper Arlington, Ohio, a school district that has significantly changed how it teaches reading in response to a formal complaint filed by a group of parents.

Amelia Smith, a teacher in Upper Arlington who got her degree in elementary and special education in 2012, says by then there was recognition that phonics was important. "We knew what it was but we weren't taught how to teach it," she said.

Upper Arlington

Read about an Ohio school district that changed the way all kids are taught to read.

One reason teachers are not being better prepared to teach reading is there's still an ideological fight going on about whole language versus phonics, according to Jule McCombes-Tolis, chief academic officer for educator training initiatives at the International Dyslexia Association. She spent more than two decades as a professor in teacher preparation programs. "The division in higher ed in reading is alive and well," she said.

McCombes-Tolis says in the wake of the National Reading Panel report, many teacher educators who believed in the whole language approach promoted the idea of "balanced literacy" instead.

But balanced literacy is basically whole language with some phonics mixed in, says Tim Shanahan, a literacy expert who served on the National Reading Panel. "Balanced literacy began as the notion of a different attempt to try to settle the reading wars. It's supposed to be the best of both worlds."

Shanahan says what's wrong with balanced literacy is that it combines a whole bunch of things that don't work with a little bit of what does work, and that's not good reading instruction. He thinks a big problem with teacher preparation programs is that many of the people who are teaching the reading instruction courses don't know the science of reading that well.

"The folks who teach these courses range in their knowledge dramatically," he said. Enroll in a teacher preparation program and your instructor might have a Ph.D. and be familiar with the latest research, says Shanahan. But "you could have somebody who - this person teaches four other things for us and we'll give them an extra course in reading instruction. They have last year's syllabus and they do their best," he said.

There are thousands of teacher preparation programs in the United States and there's very little oversight of them. In higher education, the faculty typically controls the curriculum. There is no one authority to hold accountable for how teachers in America are trained.

States do have some power and many are trying to exert more control over what gets taught in teacher preparation programs as well as what is happening in public schools when it comes to students with dyslexia.

As of this month, 41 states have some sort of dyslexia law, regulation or resolution. The laws and regulations vary widely. Some require graduates of teacher preparation programs to pass science of reading tests; others encourage public schools to provide teacher training on how to identify dyslexia.

33 states have passed dyslexia laws since 2012

An analysis by APM Reports shows that while most states have taken some kind of action to address the needs of kids with dyslexia, the laws often go unenforced and unfunded. Read more.

Sources: LegiScan, Decoding Dyslexia and staff research

Most of these laws have passed in the past few years partly due to parent advocacy groups pushing for change.

Pam Guest is a leader of one of these groups, Decoding Dyslexia-Maryland. Decoding Dyslexia has chapters in all 50 states. In Maryland, the group succeeded in getting a bill through the legislature to establish a task force that reviewed how students in the state are identified and treated for dyslexia. Now the group wants funding for a pilot program to demonstrate best practices when it comes to not only helping students with dyslexia, but to teaching all children how to read.

Even though it's too late for her son, Guest says she's determined to change things so what happened to Dayne won't happen to other kids.

"It's simple," she said. "Teachers must be able to teach children how to read."

Update: Oct. 24, 2017 The map and story have been updated to reflect new analysis of state laws pertaining to dyslexia.

"Hard to Read" is one of three audio documentaries this season from the Educate podcast - stories about education, opportunity, and how people learn.

CORRESPONDENT/PRODUCER
Emily Hanford

RESEARCH AND PRODUCTION FELLOWS
Jeffrey Bissoy-Mattis
Lila Cherneff
Josh Marcus

PRODUCTION HELP
Josie Fan
Liz Lyon
Chris Julin

Special thanks: Amare, Curtis, Forrest, Hadassah, Inez, Jordan, Norah, Oliver and Ryan.

Support for this program comes from Lumina Foundation and the Spencer Foundation.

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How American schools fail kids with dyslexia

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There are proven ways to help people with dyslexia learn to read, and a federal law that's supposed to ensure schools provide kids with help. But across the country, public schools are denying children proper treatment and often failing to identify them with dyslexia in the first place.

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Dyslexia: An Ounce of Prevention is Worth a Pound of Diagnosis and Treatment

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Dyslexia: An Ounce of Prevention is Worth a Pound of Diagnosis and Treatment

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Catts & Hogan, August 23, 2020

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Making Sense of Reading Assessment, Institute for Education Science (IES)

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Making Sense of Reading Assessment, Institute for Education Science (IES)

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March 2020

As students learn to read, educators and parents want to know if they are on track to become successful readers. Assessments can help answer this question but a plethora of terms-formative, benchmark, screener, diagnostic, progress monitoring, and outcome-confuse educators and parents and often lead to over testing. The solution is a streamlined framework, where the purpose for each assessment is clearly defined.
A Streamlined Assessment System
In a recent infographic, the Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Southeast laid out a streamlined assessment system for early reading assessment. The streamlined system contains four steps:

Screening: The purpose of screening is to identify the probability of risk or success in reading achievement.

Diagnosis: The purpose of diagnostic tasks is to identify the need for instructional support in specific skill areas.

Progress monitoring: The purpose of progress monitoring, also called interim or formative assessment, is to determine whether students are learning the skills taught and/or meeting benchmarks.

Summative: The purpose of summative or outcome assessment is to measure whether students are making significant gains or losses in reading performance.

Screening, diagnosis, and progress monitoring can be combined within one assessment system to streamline these steps. The screen can identify who is at risk of reading problems and needs diagnostic tasks to set instructional objectives. Progress monitoring can be administered several times across the school year to ascertain whether instructional goals are being met and growth towards outcome performance is occurring. The summative or outcome assessment can be a standardized reading achievement test based on national norms or a criterion-referenced test based on state standards.
What are Formative Assessments?
Where do formative assessments fit into this assessment system? As originally conceived, formatives reflected the learning progressions that students demonstrated as they acquired skill in a domain, such as literacy (Heritage, 2010). Teachers can informally assess whether children are learning what they have been taught and can diagnose, reteach, and assess progress across the year. In this sense, formatives consist of teacher observations, quizzes, or curriculum-based tests such as end-of-unit tests whose ratings, or scores can serve to inform classroom instruction.

However, the meaning of formatives has shifted with the emphasis on students being proficient on the state's standards-based test. For many educators, formatives have become synonymous with benchmark assessments that indicate whether children are proficient on state standards. For example, if a grade 1 reading standard is to decode words with inflectional endings, a benchmark assessment item might be to read the word jumped. Yet, just because the student correctly reads the word does not guarantee later proficiency on the benchmark test. First, typically more than 10 items are needed to ensure reliable scores. Second, item-level mastery does not ensure proficiency on the standard. Being able to read jumped does not mean that a child will be able to read stopped, created, or running. Knowledge of spelling rules, more complex sound-spelling patterns, and other inflectional endings is required to increase the probability of being proficient on the standard on the outcome assessment. Finally, scoring proficient or not on a benchmark test does not provide instructional guidance for students far below grade-level standards, as is often the case for English learner students or students with disabilities, or for students performing above grade level. Using formative assessments that can adapt to a wide ability range are best for those populations of students (Foorman, Espinosa, Jackson, & Wu, 2016). Thus, formative assessments best fit into the progress monitoring component of a streamlined system, if they tap the skills the teacher is teaching for the diverse ability range of students in the classroom.
The Importance of Valid Measures
A streamlined assessment system must be comprised of valid measures if it is to accurately predict reading proficiency. The constructs that predict reading success are well known (Castles, Rastle, & Nation, 2018): phonological awareness, letter-name and sound knowledge, efficient decoding and encoding, vocabulary and grammatical knowledge, and comprehension strategies. The instructional practices for teaching children these constructs are also well known (Foorman, Beyler, et al., 2016). The challenge in an assessment system is to cover these critical constructs well and with sufficient depth that they predict to the ever-increasing complexity of text used to measure reading comprehension.
The Leap from Understanding Terms to Effectively Implementing Early Reading Assessments
Effective implementation of an early reading assessment system requires â€œbuy-inâ€ from administrators and teachers. In addition, extensive professional development in how to administer the assessments and how to translate data to instruction is needed. Furthermore, district and school leaders must consider the resources available to intervene with students identified as at-risk of a reading problem. In some schools the majority of students may score below the 30th percentile on the screen and, therefore, be eligible for reading intervention beyond the small-group instructional support provided in the classroom. Such situations signal a clear mandate to provide more explicit and systematic reading instruction in the classroom to reduce the numbers of students needing pullout intervention. p>

References

Castles, A., Rastle, K., & Nation, K. (2018). Ending the reading wars: Reading acquisition from novice to expert. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 19(1), 5-51. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100618772271

Foorman, B., Beyler, N., Borradaile, K., Coyne, M., Denton, C., Dimino, J., Furgeson, J., Hayes, L., Henke, J., Justice, L., Keating, B., Lewis, W., Sattar, S., Streke, A., Wagner, R., & Wissel, S. (2016). Foundational skills to support reading for understanding in kindergarten through 3rd grade (NCEE 2016-4008). Washington, DC: National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance (NCEE), Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education. Retrieved from http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/edlabs

Foorman, B., Espinosa, A., Jackson, C., Wu, Y. (2016). Using computer-adaptive literacy assessments to monitor the progress of English language learner students. (REL 2016-149). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Regional Educational Laboratory Southeast. Retrieved from http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/edlabs

Heritage, M. (2010). Formative assessment: Making it happen in the classroom. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

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educational improvement; excellence in education; educational research; statistics; statistical data; statistical surveys; national center for education evaluation and regional assistance.

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Making Sense of Terms Used in Early Reading Assessment

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The National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance (NCEE) conducts unbiased large-scale evaluations of education programs and practices supported by federal funds, such as Reading First and Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

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From the Science of Reading Facebook Group

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MSDE Guidance to Districts on Screening & Interventions

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MSDE Guidance to Districts on Screening & Interventions

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Ready to Read Act implementation guidance from the Maryland State Department of Education.

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Students with Reading Difficulties- Screening and Interventions

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Amplify: Knowlege building combined with foundational skills

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Using a fundamentally different approach to teaching reading, Amplify Core Knowledge Language Arts (CKLA)™ sequences deep content knowledge with research-based foundational skills.

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Reading Assessment

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MTU Dyslexia Center

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Public Schools are Failing Black Students with Dyslexia

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Public Schools are Failing Black Students with Dyslexia

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A grandmother’s story

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This is the second part of a two-part series on dyslexia. Listen to Part One here.
Our stories are made to be heard. Please listen if you are able.

Geraldine Robinson stepped proudly onto the stage and stated her name. What she said next was an understatement: "I am a fightin' grandmother."

Robinson, 65, is a devout and joyful Christian who's now raising three of her grandchildren. She's been a relentless advocate for two of them in particular. And, she told the audience, the stakes are high: "I am fighting for their life."

On this fall evening in 2019, the crowd gathered to celebrate the 40th anniversary of a disability rights nonprofit -- and honor this Oakland matriarch. Her grandson and his younger sister showed early signs of dyslexia.

"About 30 years ago, I had two sons that had dyslexia," Robinson said, her voice rising. "So I knew some of the signs."

Science has taught us a lot since then about what exactly dyslexia is and isn't. The neurobiological learning disorder affects the brain's ability to match letters with their shapes and sounds. It impacts reading, writing and sometimes speech. And it runs in families. So Robinson talked to the kids' teachers.

"I said, 'We have a history of dyslexia.' And they said, 'No that wasn't the problem.' That's when the fight began."

Research points to effective ways to teach kids with dyslexia to read. The approach is called "Structured Literacy." The longer the wait, though, the longer it takes. But evaluations of Robinson's grandkids never mentioned dyslexia. Instead, they assigned the kids to a different special ed category.

"Intellectually disabled," Robinson said, drawing out the words.

Her grandkids were first evaluated for special education at an Oakland charter school, records show, and already had their special education plans when they arrived at the Oakland Unified School District. Eventually, the district changed the grandaughter's primary designation to "specific learning disability," which included dyslexia but made no mention of it. Her grandson's "intellectual disability" designation remained.

That label suggests a child is globally imapired. Low expectations often translate into fewer intensive resources to address underlying learning challenges, like dyslexia. Bias adds another twist: Nationwide, black students are overrepresented in the category of intellectual disability. And some educators are more likely to punish black students for falling short, even if it's clear the work is too hard for them.

"My grandson, who didn't have a behavior problem, was never able to go on field trips," Robinson explained. "They wouldn't allow him because of his academics."

On this night, though, Robinson was feeling grateful. Because an advocate here at the Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund taught her exactly which law to cite to fight for her grandson, "which changed his life because he was able to go hang out with the rest of the kids."

Her bigger news? A few months earlier, the Oakland Unified School District agreed to pay for intensive evaluations of both kids by an outside neuropsychologist. So, Robinson said to hoots and applause, "they were tested for dyslexia after five years of fighting."

As each year slipped by, Robinson's grandkids fell further and further behind. And securing those independent evaluations wasn't the end of her fight.
Early Signs
Cheryl Theis, the education advocate who's been helping Robinson, put it this way when she introduced the family:

"They're a perfect example of doing everything right and still getting nowhere, because assumptions were made around the intersection of race and disability that these children were just low-ability children."

Robinson doesn't want to further stigmatize the kids, so she asked that they not be named. This story relies on special education records that she shared, and focuses mainly on her grandson. Because, Robinson said, as an African American boy, it's his future she fears for the most.

Many private sector resources are available to families of dyslexic learners who have the money to pay for them. Robinson is on a fixed income. She's not one of them.

I'm sure if I had the resources, I could put him in a private school and he would get the help. But because I don't have the resources I can't get the help and so he be a candidate for the state prison or whatever prison there is.

"I'm sure if I had the resources, I could put him in a private school and he would get the help," she said in an interview back in April 2019, "But because I don't have the resources I can't get the help and so he be a candidate for the state prison or whatever prison there is."

She has reason to be fearful. A study of Texas prisoners published two decades ago found that more than three-fourths were functionally illiterate and about half scored poorly on tests that indicate a likelihood of dyslexia. Studies have also shown that kids who can't read at grade level by the 3rd grade are more likely to drop out of high school.

Robinson has had full custody of the kids for a while, but even when they were toddlers they lived with her off and on. Her grandson, she said, showed red flags for dyslexia. His letters were backwards or sideways or upside down. And he struggled to match written words with their sounds.

"He would have such a hard time trying to distinguish what the word was," she said. "If I pointed out the phonics, he could say it, but then when we put it to the word, he could not read the word with the phonics in there."

Robinson read to him a lot. The Dr. Seuss books, and the Amelia Bedilia series. Her grandson loved wrestling, so they brought home wrestling magazines, but soon he wouldn't even page through them, he said, because it was too much of a struggle. Outside of those frustrations, though, Robinson said he was and is a gentle caring kid -- a "people pleaser" who will share whatever is his to make others feel good.

He's also a drummer. He started at five years old and now plays at the family's small East Oakland church. His grandmother said he " almost just automatically knew how to do it. You know, he could keep a beat right off the bat."

And he's a whiz at building and repairing things. The vacuum cleaner, the doorbell, the list goes on. A little over a year ago, when he was 12, Robinson said, a friend bought a part for her car and came over with it, but he "couldn't figure out how to put it on." That's when her "Little Man," as she calls him, stepped in.
Lost Time
"He told my friend, 'Move back, move back, I got an idea.' And he says, 'Go get me some black tape. Grandma got some black tape.'" Then "he went in up under the hood and fixed it!" Robinson recalled, still amazed and delighted. "And the car is still running. Just, creative, you know, he can see something and create it. It's just the writing and the reading part he cannot do."

That bleeds into every school subject. Nationwide curriculum standards developed about a decade ago, called Common Core, for example, rely heavily on word problems to teach math, "and so you're just not doing a math problem, you're doing reading and math," she said. "He tries, he really does try but with the schools not accepting his disability the way it is, he has lost a lot of ground."

To be clear, Oakland Unified didn't just abandon Robinson's grandson to fail. His records show he got speech therapy and was pulled out of general education classes to get extra help. But none of it involved the type of reading instruction dyslexic learners need. Though his annual special ed documents were supposed to address his strengths, they mostly didn't. They did spell out ambitious goals for him year after year. But, his grandmother said, "they never achieved the goals. He's never achieved a goal. "

Evaluations show that some teachers blamed him for his frustrations. One fifth grade teacher wrote, "He sulks a lot, is often angry, but will not talk about it. He rarely attempts any classwork." A 7th grade teacher said he "sometimes can be very difficult when it comes to his work." Robinson said teachers regularly told her that he "didn't apply himself." She knew that wasn't it.

When dyslexia goes unrecognized and unremediated, experts say, low self-esteem, depression and anxiety almost always follow. Robinson said that during her grandson's 7th grade year, he was sleeping so much she had him evaluated for narcolepsy. That wasn't the problem. One week that spring, "he came home with this headache and the shakes and the whole nine yards where he's frustrated that he can't," she said. He stayed in that state all week, she said, sleeping constantly, "terrified and stressed."

Even as the years took a toll on her grandson, though, big things were happening in Sacramento. A new law took effect in 2016 that called for experts to craft guidelines for California's public schools spelling out best practices for teacher training, universal screening, and that type of curriculum dyslexic kids need, termed Structured Literacy by the International Dyslexia Association.

But the guidelines aren't mandatory, and Oakland Unified has plenty of company when it comes to falling short with dyslexic learners. That statewide focus on this learning disability, though, likely helped Robinson, when in 2018, she filed a complaint with the California Department of Education. She prevailed.

The state ordered OUSD to assess Robinson's grandson for dyslexia. They did. There was a problem though.

"The result of that evaluation was so poor," said Theis, the advocate with the Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund who has been helping Robinson. "I mean there is no other way to put it, and again I say that as someone who has a lot of respect for people working at the school district level."

Evaluations are supposed to draw on parent and teacher interviews, class observation, and a variety of tests conducted by an educational psychologist. But, a review of the district's evaluation, ordered by the state, shows it had none of that. Theis consulted a dyslexia expert, who told her that the OUSD psychologist responsible "clearly had no training in dyslexia and how to evaluate and identify it," she said.

Rather than turn to the state guidelines or other expert sources, Theis' consultant noticed, the district psychologist had pulled her dyslexia definitions directly from two non-scientific websites.

She also conducted no new tests on Robinson's grandson. She never met him. Instead, the paperwork shows, she relied on his previous evaluations. And because those had determined he was Intellectually Disabled, she concluded, "he does not fit the profile of a student with dyslexia."

Theis says that assuming a child with Intellectual Disability cannot have dyslexia or benefit from dyslexia intervention "is factually incorrect. We know from the science that those two things are not mutually exclusive."

Plus, Robinson had contested those very evaluations. So at the next meeting to discuss the boy's special ed plan, Theis asked right away for an independent evaluation with an outside neuropsychologist, a specialist with the training to do a thorough job. And the district agreed.

"But it begs the question," said Theis, "what parent who doesn't know that there's even such a thing as the right to challenge an assessment would just go, 'Well, that didn't seem right but I guess they're the experts.'"
Finally, An Answer
OUSD officials declined to comment on specific student cases, citing privacy reasons. But in a statement, a spokesman wrote that the district "is committed to providing explicit, daily instruction in foundational literacy skills" to students. Over the past year, he added, OUSD has taken steps to implement three separate curricula that meet the state dyslexia guidelines, for students in early grades and those in special ed who've been left behind. And an early literacy screener will roll out next year.

But half a dozen literacy advocates and experts inside and outside the district said the process has been bumpy, teacher training inadequate, and implementation not far reaching enough.

As for Robinson, last fall, she got the results of those outside evaluations, which included interviews with teachers and family and several days of testing. Both grandkids, they confirmed, "have dyslexia."

Not just dyslexia. The evaluations note that both struggle with other learning differences, too. But, the evaluator concluded, neither child meets the criteria for Intellectual Disability.

This past year has been better for them. The district placed them at a different school where they've gotten access to speech-to-text and text-to-speech technology -- to help override their reading and writing difficulties. Robinson said her grandson is particularly transformed. He's in a special education class now for kids with "mild to moderate" disabilities, with some students closer to his academic level.

"He's good at math," she said, "and he was able to help other kids. By the end of the school year he had a little more self-confidence, self-worth."

An evaluation by his new special ed teacher three months ago said he'd made "immense social, emotional, and academic progress." It called him "an exceptional math student" who "always cooperates with his teacher and students alike." In science class, he's created recycling projects and presentations on natural disasters.

And, it turns out, his teacher happens to be among 170 special ed instructors that according to district officials recently received ten hours of training on one of the new structured literacy curricula. It's called SPIRE and the teacher wrote in her evaluation that Robinson's grandson was making his way through the very first level.

Robinson is grateful for these changes. But, she pointed out, "I've been fighting for this for six years."

That time lag matters. Her grandson just finished 8th grade -- at a 3rd grade reading level. His younger sister is even farther behind. Just beginning to teach them the foundations of literacy at this age, experts say, will take skill and experience that will be difficult to convey in ten hours of training.

At a school board meeting last February, OUSD Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell acknowledged that the research is clear on the type of instruction struggling readers need in order to move forward. The hitch is training. Graduate programs need to be educating their students so new teachers come into the classroom with the foundational knowledge they need, she said. As for the district, she said all teachers need to receive the training and materials they need "to make sure that all of our students learn to read."

And soon, Johnson-Trammell announced, "the NAACP is also going be raising up what we need to be doing differently around addressing dyslexia."

The superintendent's comments followed a unanimous pledge by the board to work with black and Latino families demanding "Literacy for All." That campaign, launched by a grassroots parent group called The Oakland REACH, packed the board meeting that night to challenge generations of dismal reading scores -- and push for the needed literacy resources.

So Robinson's kids are far from alone.

Kareem Weaver is a former Oakland educator who sits on the Oakland NAACP's education committee and has been pressing the district to comply with state dyslexia guidelines. For starters, he said in an interview, perceptions of educators need to change.

"That gap between expectations and student performance, that's the gap where assessment lies, where intervention lies, and where support lies," he said. "And so unfortunately many of our African American students get lost in that gap."

Credit Oakland Board of Education Public Meeting

That in-person conversation the superintendent promised to have with Weaver and others from the Oakland NAACP about dyslexia hasn't happened. Covid intervened. The pandemic has also cast an enormous shadow over OUSD's budget, raising questions about whether more intensive training for teachers will fall off the agenda.

Weaver said there is no more time to waste. Teaching those foundations of literacy that work for dyslexic students to all young learners is key to making sure more kids don't fall behind. Helping those who already are, like Robinson's grandkids, is a greater challenge. But here's a surprise: The district was once known for a reading clinic that did just that.

Launched in 2001, the Oakland Reading Clinic was highly regarded as successful. It opened at an OUSD school site, where students from as many as three dozen campuses were bussed in daily. Each received extensive instruction for nearly two full hours.

A district memo explains that the district opened the clinic to save money. Parents were lawyering up because their struggling readers weren't making any progress. And OUSD was paying big bucks to send them to a private learning center in Berkeley that teaches a well-known structured literacy curriculum called Lindamood Bell. So, OUSD teamed with that center, which provided extensive training and as much as a year of constant mentoring to district literacy teachers at their own clinic.

One parent, whose daughter with severe dyslexia attended the OUSD clinic, tells me it was their godsend.

"It taught her how to sound out words. It taught her how to recognize the symbols," said Jean Townsend of Oakland. It also taught her how to help her own daughter. That daughter is now in college, where she receives a slew of accommodations, including a notetaker, to which she is entitled under federal disability law. And when her daughter graduates, Townsend said, she wants to work in the juvenile justice system with youth whose own learning disabilities went undetected when they were in public school.

Like Robinson, Townsend is African American, and she said she had to be the constant "squeaky wheel" to make sure her child would not be abandoned to fail. But, she said, she also made it clear she was prepared to sue. And she had the means to pay for medical tests to persuade OUSD of her diagnosis, and for a private educational therapist for her daughter for two years.

Robinson doesn't have those resources, and said she had never heard of the Oakland Reading Clinic. That may be because the district never flagged her grandkids for that kind of intensive reading remediation.

Three years ago, in the midst of a budget crisis, the district decentralized the clinic. The goal, the district spokesman said, was to serve more kids without having to put them on buses. Most recently, literacy specialists assigned to the clinic were traveling to see students at their own schools. But, several OUSD literacy experts tell me the intensity and scope of the clinic's services have been in steady decline for the past few years. It's now on hold for at least the next school year due to Covid, the district confirmed.

For Robinson, every week that passes without intensive help is cause for worry.

"That's what I pray for every night, that a change will come," she said "But I need some help for the change that will come."

To compensate Robinson, records show, state education officials ordered OUSD to provide three hours of one-on-one tutoring for her granddaughter. Robinson said thet tutor had no training in dyslexia. The state ordered 20 hours of tutoring for her grandson. But OUSD has doubled that. Earlier this month a tutor -- who received the district's ten hour training in SPIRE -- began working with him remotely, she said, starting over at Level 1.

Providing remediation to students who are far behind is far more costly than intervening when they are just learning to read. So short-term costs will likely be dwarfed by those to come. And Oakland Unified's neighbor to the north offers a cautionary tale. A class-action lawsuit alleging the Berkeley Unified School District systemically failed its students with dyslexia for years is pending in federal court.

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Public Schools Are Failing Black Students With Dyslexia: One Grandmother's Story

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This is the second part of a two-part series on dyslexia. Listen to Part One here . Our stories are made to be heard. Please listen if you are able. Geraldine Robinson stepped proudly onto the stage and stated her name. What she said next was an understatement: "I am a fightin' grandmother."

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Template: Benchmark & Diagnostic Data Recording Form

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Template: Benchmark & Diagnostic Data Recording Form

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TEMPLATE Benchmark and Diagnostic Data Recording Form

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Reading Rockets

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PowerPoint on The science of Reading

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Introduction to the Science of Reading

Thanks to the input of over 100 educators, this presentation is now available free for you to use to introduce others to better reading outcomes.

Watch the presentation, then grab the files below and make it your own!

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Thanks to the input of over 100 educators, this presentation is now available free for you to use to introduce others to better reading outcomes. Watch the presentation, then grab the files below and make it your own!

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COVID-Slide and other “gap” worries already existed pre-covid for 60% of students.  These students need evidence based INSTRUCTION and INTERVENTIONS if they are to accelerate learning and close academic gaps.

Let’s be careful not to waste student time and tax payer dollars chasing tutoring that lacks an evidence base using tutors who lack any training in reading and language.  How will schools know exactly what a student needs before pushing instruction and interventions down on them?  SCREENING.  Who is screening? How are they screening?  Step by step...before we push schools to adopt or purchase “tutoring” that lacks an evidence base.  First, let’s define the evidence base.

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Many educators and policymakers are worried about low-income children falling woefully behind in math, reading and other subjects while schools are closed during the coronavirus pandemic. One proposal is to give them personal tutors. Normally, the idea of giving every poor child a professional tutor would seem too expensive but extreme circumstances have put big ideas on the table and policymakers are suggesting cheaper, if not exactly cheap, ways to do it.

Tennessee is taking the lead. Earlier in May 2020 former Gov. Bill Haslam announced that he's personally going to pay 1,000 college students up to $1,000 each to tutor children in grades kindergarten through six over the summer. Meanwhile, there are a number of proposals in Congress to dramatically expand AmeriCorps, a network of national community service programs, with recent college graduates tutoring children across the country.

Prominent members of the education research community are enthusiastically pushing for a dramatic increase in tutoring. The University of Michigan's Susan Dynarski wrote an OpEd in the New York Times on May 7, arguing for a multi-billion dollar investment in tutoring both to offset shutdown learning loss and to give jobs to unemployed college students and graduates. Robert Slavin of Johns Hopkins University wrote a May 14, 2020 blog post calling for a "Marshall Plan for education, to recruit, train, and deploy thousands of tutors in schools across America." He also suggests using new college graduates and having them work with small groups of students. Brown University's Matthew Kraft is advocating for all students at low-income schools to receive a daily dose of tutoring, either individually or in pairs of students for each tutor, for a full class period during the normal school day for an entire year. He calls it "high-dosage tutoring." Yes, there's already an acronym: HDT.
Related: Cheaper human tutors can be highly effective, studies show
I was curious to learn more about how effective individual and small group tutoring are and how much learning loss tutoring might be able to offset. And just as importantly, I wanted to know what researchers know about using novices to do this kind of work. Can academic tutoring be done properly by those who aren't trained in pedagogy?

It isn't easy to get quick or simple answers. Many studies have been done on tutoring but they vary in quality. And tutoring can be structured in so many different ways: in school or after school; once a month or every day. It can adhere to a specific scripted curriculum or tutors themselves can decide what or how best to teach. Some tutoring programs are laser focused on math or reading; some help students with a wide variety of subjects.

One effort to sum up the high-quality research on tutoring was a Harvard study from 2016. The study sorted through almost 200 well-designed experiments in improving education, from expanding preschool to reducing class size, and found that frequent one-to-one tutoring with research proven instruction was especially effective in increasing learning rates of low-performing students. But less frequent tutoring, such as weekly sessions, under-performed many other types of educational interventions. According to the study, high-dosage tutoring was 20 times more effective than low-dosage tutoring in math. In reading, high-dosage tutoring was 15 times more effective than low-dosage tutoring.

Slavin, the director of the Center for Research and Reform in Education at Johns Hopkins, has also looked at high-quality tutoring studies with a focus on specific instructional programs and curricula. He shared two meta-analyses, submitted for publication at an academic journal, in which tutoring programs generally rise to the top, above most classroom-wide approaches and performing considerably better than high-tech interventions that use educational software.

Slavin found that several tutoring programs posted effect sizes of 0.4 standard deviations or more, a statistical unit that he compared to five additional months of school over and above what students would have learned without the tutoring. (It's worth noting that none of the underlying studies achieved anything close to Benjamin Bloom's oft-cited result of " 2 sigma " or standard deviations, which would be five times these gains.)

Five months of catch-up might be not enough to offset the learning losses that some experts are predicting from school closures. A preliminary estimate publicized in April 2020 by NWEA, a nonprofit organization that sells assessments to schools, said that students are likely to return to school in the fall of 2020 with less than half of the learning gains that students usually make in math during a school year. In reading, the learning losses weren't predicted to be as dire, perhaps a loss of just 30 percent of the school year, based on the organization's analysis of historical testing data and summer learning loss calculations on the organization's Measures of Academic Progress or MAP tests.

The strong tutoring outcomes cited by Slavin were achieved when students were tutored one-to-one or in small groups. Students received daily tutoring sessions for four to eight months.
Related: This math tutoring program gets 'blockbuster' results in high-poverty schools
Slavin found that many types of people were effective tutors. College-educated teaching assistants produced learning gains through tutoring at least as high as certified teachers did, sometimes larger. Even paid volunteers, such as AmeriCorps members working as tutors, were able to produce strong results, Slavin said.

"One of the things that makes it easier to be a tutor than to be a classroom teacher is that you're doing a specific task with kids with materials that are designed to support that," Slavin said. "You start with computerized testing to figure out where kids are, and then you put the kids into a sequence and use proven strategies with them day in and day out. A much broader range of people can do that. They couldn't trade places with teachers. Classroom teaching is a much more complicated job."

The important thing, according to Slavin, is to have some training and a tested reading or math program for the tutors to follow. "One of the things that characterizes all successful tutoring programs is that they're very structured," said Slavin. "There are curricula that work better than others. But there are several that get good results."

That's not to say that every college student would make an effective tutor. Slavin says it's important to vet and interview candidates. He says an expressed desire to work with children, along with experience as a camp counselor, a Sunday school teacher or a babysitter are important.

"I think they could be terrific tutors and many studies have shown just that," said Slavin.

Unpaid volunteers haven't worked as well, Slavin said. Paying them makes it more likely that the tutors themselves show up so that a single adult can work with a child consistently. Fostering a relationship between tutor and tutee is important.

"Being an effective tutor is probably more about the structure of the tutoring program itself than the type of training tutors receive or whether the tutor is a recent college grad, teacher's aid, or full-time teacher," said Brown University's Kraft, who has been publicly a dvocating for a national tutoring corps since 2015. "The best training is on-the-job through consistent feedback from peers and supervisors, not a week-long crash course and then being left to sink or swim on your own."

There are small disputes among researchers about how many students a single tutor can work with effectively. Slavin sees evidence that small groups can be as effective as one-to-one. Kraft is concerned that some studies have shown poor results with small groups, such as a four-to-one experiment in New York City, where students' reading achievement didn't improve.

Kraft points to other more successful experiments as a model, such as a 2013-14 trial in Chicago high schools, where students learned between one and two extra years of math, over and above what the typical American high school student learns in one year. Students who were behind in math were randomly selected to receive daily tutoring by recent college graduates, who worked with students two at a time. But it was expensive. Each tutor received a stipend of $19,000 for an entire school year. The tutoring program cost $3,800 for each high school student.

It remains unclear whether small tutoring trials like this can be expanded into large programs and still achieve such impressive results.

A large study of City Year AmeriCorps tutors across almost 30 school districts and more than 300 schools was released on May 20. It found that 34,000 students in grades 3 through 10 gained between two and four months of academic growth from tutoring. That's a much smaller result. And, unfortunately, there was no control group, so we don't know how the students would have fared without the tutoring. It was a modest dosage of tutoring, between 12 and 20 hours over the course of a school year, which included a social-emotional curriculum in addition to academic instruction in math or English. Some of the students worked individually with a tutor, others in small groups and the results were averaged together. One of the things Robert Balfanz of Johns Hopkins, one of the study's authors, noticed was that the more hours of tutoring a student received, the more academic improvement a student posted. The benefits of tutoring didn't taper off or diminish, Balfanz told me in a telephone interview.

That's a sign that AmeriCorps might get even larger results if it added more tutoring hours. But many more tutors and cities would need to be added to AmeriCorps' current portfolio if we want to make a dent in correcting school shutdown learning loss on a national level. "We can't do this entirely through AmeriCorps," said Johns Hopkins's Slavin. "A lot of different groups that are doing tutoring are going to have to scale themselves up."

This story about one to one tutoring was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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Takeaways from research on tutoring to address coronavirus learning loss - The Hechinger Report

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Many educators and policymakers are worried about low-income children falling woefully behind in math, reading and other subjects while schools are closed during the coronavirus pandemic. One proposal is to give them personal tutors. Normally, the idea of giving every poor child a professional tutor would seem too expensive but extreme circumstances have put big [...]

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Intensive intervention can address dyslexia.

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FREE Beautiful Online Decodable Phonics Books for Early Readers and Dyslexia

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Here’s a great resource of free decodable books and stories found online. I use these fabulous readers as supplements with my students that I tutor reading online. All early readers can benefit from using decodable texts. Decodable texts are essential for dyslexic students.…

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K-12 Literacy and Math Progress Monitoring Tools

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K-12 Literacy and Math Progress Monitoring Tools

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Review

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Hasbrouck and Tindal, 2017 Normed Fluency Measures

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View the results of the updated 2017 study on oral reading fluency (ORF) by Jan Hasbrouck and Gerald Tindal, with compiled ORF norms for grades 1-6. You'll also find an analysis of how the 2017 norms differ from the 2006 norms.

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Achieve the Core

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Supporting Our Youngest Readers: Teaching the Skills of Reading - Peers and Pedagogy

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My 3-year-old is always on the move, rarely still long enough to show an interest in learning. So, I was surprised to walk in on him staring at his sister’s first grade worksheet- a handwriting practice sheet for the letter “r.” “Rrr….rrrr…rrrr” they said together, as he pointed to each r on the pag…

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This document is designed to assist those that are just beginning their journey toward understanding the science of reading. Dr. Mark Seidenberg defines the science of reading “as a body of basic research in developmental psychology, educational psychology, cognitive science, and cognitive neuroscience on reading, one of the most complex human behaviors, and its biological (neural, genetic) bases. This research has been conducted for decades in the US and around the world. The research has important implications for helping children to succeed, but it has not been incorporated in how teachers are trained for the job or how children are taught.”

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This document is designed to assist those that are just beginning their journey toward understanding the science of reading. Dr. Mark Seidenberg defines the science of reading "as a body of basic research in developmental psychology, educational psychology, cognitive science, and cognitive neuroscience on reading, one of the most complex human behaviors, and its biological (neural, genetic) bases. This research has been conducted for decades in the US and around the world. The research has important implications for helping children to succeed, but it has not been incorporated in how teachers are trained for the job or how children are taught."

As you may be painfully aware, the science of reading has NOT been incorporated into most teacher training programs. In order to help with this process, I have curated resources to help you on your science of reading journey. Understanding the "why" you are doing a certain practice is just as important as knowing "how". Finally, I want to applaud you for taking this step in your teaching career. I know it may be difficult; you may even become angry because you have not been taught this information in your undergraduate and graduate programs or even your advanced certifications for reading. But every journey begins with a first step. Thanks for taking the first step on this journey.

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This document is designed to assist those that are just beginning their journey toward understanding the science of reading. Dr. Mark Seidenberg defines the science of reading "as a body of basic research in developmental psychology, educational psychology, cognitive science, and cognitive neuroscience on reading, one of the most complex human behaviors, and its biological (neural, genetic) bases.

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Guidance for Educators Using Balanced Literacy Curriculum

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Guidance for Educators Using Balanced Literacy Curriculum

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Up to 17% of students have dyslexia and a larger number — ~40% — struggle to learn to read using Balanced Literacy.  When a school’s multi-tiered support system includes core reading PD/programs that are explicit, systematic and include phonemic awareness & decoding instruction, there is a good chance struggling and dyslexic students will learn to read and NOT Need expensive special education.

If you use balanced literacy programs like F&P, LLI, Reading Recovery, Lucy Calkins (reading/writing) and you want to ensure equity (ALL students reading) and you want to avoid sending students to special education, take a hard look at your core instruction and make changes ASAP!  There’s no need to disadvantage students and send them to special education where, honestly, they never catch up.

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Limiting Children to Books they Can Already Read

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Limiting Children to Books they Can Already Read

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Fifty years ago, when I was becoming a teacher, reading instruction consisted of a ubiquitous classroom practice: placing students in instructional groups according to their reading level. These groups were sometimes known by various colors or animals. I distinctly remember the redbirds, the bluebirds, and the buzzards among the most popular appellations. Today, although groups are now labeled with letters (Level G, Level L, etc.) and ornithological monikers are out of fashion, assigning students to instructional groups according to their reading levels is still a common practice in classrooms across the country.

A recent survey aimed at identifying the most popular current programs used to teach reading ¹ found that one common feature of all the top sellers was that they organize their teaching around leveled books. Other recent surveys show that teaching reading with leveled books is on the increase and that teachers believe it is endorsed or supported by their state educational standards, ² though, in most cases, it is not.

But how effective is such teaching? Does it work?

On the surface, those are easy questions. Leveled readers obviously work. Most American students are learning to read, at least at basic levels, ³ and since most are being taught with leveled books, there must be some potency in the approach.

But the real question isn't whether children can learn from leveled books, but whether such leveling confers any learning advantages. Might students do even better if taught with books they can't already read so well? That's the real question. In this article, I examine the research on leveled reading approaches and offer more effective ways that classroom teachers can ensure their students acquire the skills and knowledge they need to not only read a text but also comprehend it. First, I provide a brief history lesson in how we got here.

Teaching with Gradually More Difficult Texts

The idea of testing students to place them in different levels of text for instruction was first recommended more than 100 years ago, ⁴ and an early survey indicated that 58 percent of primary-grade reading instruction was already being delivered in small ability-based groups and that 42 percent of the teachers were adjusting text levels to facilitate learning. ⁵ They may not have referred to these texts as "leveled readers," and no company that published basal readers had yet coined the term "guided reading," but the practices of that time were markedly similar to those of today.

During the 20th century, research identified text features that correlate with reading comprehension, ⁶ and publishers started to control these features to a degree previously unimagined. One reading program I remember from my childhood bragged that it never introduced more than one new word per page, and any word that was introduced was repeated 15 times over the following pages. That's why those texts could be so mind-numbingly repetitive: "Oh. Oh. Oh. Look, Jane, look." If learning to read meant learning words-and at least since the time of Horace Mann that's been an idea held by many-then the accumulation of words gradually from selection to selection was how someone would best advance in learning to read.

But such tight readability controls made beginning reading texts so artificial that they eventually elicited an adverse reaction. The most remarkable of these reactions was the adoption of "whole language" policies by California in the 1980s. ⁷ These reforms required that the texts used to teach reading not be designed for reading instruction, and severely limited the text revisions that could be made for pedagogical purposes. What this meant was that for a brief period of time, even the beginning reading materials got much harder, ⁸ perhaps so hard for beginning readers that they represented a significant impediment to learning. ⁹ If the old basal readers were easier than necessary, these new books were decidedly too hard for the beginners, and they provided teachers with little or no guidance on how to teach with texts that the older students couldn't read successfully on their own. Exacerbating the effects of these harder books was that California's policies simultaneously discouraged phonics and spelling-instruction that could have helped students to better read the challenging materials, and the term "whole language" often came to mean "whole class" instruction in many schools. ¹⁰ Perhaps the thinking was, why group for instruction if nobody could read the books anyway?

It was in this environment that Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell published their landmark book in 1996, Guided Reading: Good First Teaching for All Children. There was nothing terribly original in their presentation, but they rediscovered and championed a set of teaching procedures that in the not-too-distant past had been widely used to facilitate reading instruction. They recognized that texts varied in difficulty and that one could guide student progress successfully across a gradually harder progression of books. To do this successfully, they asserted that teachers would need to group children, matching different books to students based on their varied levels of reading. Their approach offered immediate relief for those beginning reading classes where easier books made sense, but even in the grades beyond, the shift was welcome because of the lack of any pedagogical support for teaching challenging books. Fountas and Pinnell's approach, although reminiscent of earlier popular instructional practices, differed from them in one important regard: because of the burgeoning availability of high-quality children's trade books, they could propose doing this without textbooks.

In the Fountas and Pinnell version of guided reading, teachers assess students to determine their reading levels and then assign them books that they can read with a high degree of accuracy and comprehension. Over time, if retesting shows improvement, the students are switched to more demanding books. When it doesn't work so well, students may languish for long periods at their current levels. Such languishment has been enough of a problem that in the second edition of their book, they recommend moving students up sometimes even when the testing shows no evident improvement. (This seems to me like a judicious amendment to the original plan, but it raises the question about why these students can be expected to learn from the harder books when it is assumed that no one else would be able to.) Currently, this approach to reading, in which leveled books are matched to student reading levels for reading instruction, predominates in U.S. classrooms.

Determining Text Levels

There are basically two ways to determine how difficult texts may be and to set their levels: quantitative readability measures and qualitative judgments about texts. Although they approach the task differently, the purpose of both is to array texts on a continuum of difficulty.

The quantitative study of readability identifies text features that may affect comprehension and then tries to array these features in an algorithm that will allow accurate predictions of text difficulty. It turns out that accurate predictions can be obtained with only two text variables: vocabulary and sentence complexity. Such formulas are imperfect, but reasonably accurate. They aren't able to make fine distinctions, and until recently, haven't been able to measure beginning text levels very well. Nevertheless, quantitative readability algorithms are able to provide a largely reliable and accurate scientifically derived text gradient.

Still, it is important to remember that readability was not developed to match books to students in a way that would facilitate learning. Readability measures predict comprehension, not reading progress. The idea of using these kinds of measures to establish which books would best promote learning to read came later.

With the advent of computer technology, readability measurement has improved. ¹¹ The newer readability measures that have emerged are now widely used by researchers and publishers and were employed by the Common Core State Standards to specify text level aspirations for the various grade levels. Despite all this, when teachers speak of "leveling" books, they are most likely referring to Fountas and Pinnell levels.

Researchers provide a useful history of the development of this qualitative leveling system. ¹² Basically, an early version of the approach was developed for use with Reading Recovery, ¹³ a short-term reading intervention for first-graders who have difficulty learning to read, and Fountas and Pinnell refined and expanded this system to apply to texts from beginning readers through eighth-grade texts. Texts are evaluated by judges who place them on a multipoint continuum (from A to Z) based on 10 criteria: genre/forms, text structure, content, themes and ideas, language and literary features, sentence complexity, vocabulary, words, illustrations, and book and print features. ¹⁴

No studies have evaluated the reliability of these judgments, but a couple of small studies suggest that the Fountas and Pinnell gradient correlates reasonably well with the better-validated quantitative readability measurements. ¹⁵ Publishers have now leveled tens of thousands of books using this scheme. But given its complexity-the simultaneous qualitative evaluations of 10 factors with no explicit prioritization rules-it is unclear how accurate these levels may be (a point Fountas and Pinnell themselves make ¹⁶). Clearly, this approach lacks the scientific rigor of the quantitative approaches and may result in varied book placements depending on who makes the judgments. But until more evidence is available, let's at least for the sake of argument accept that these levels are sufficiently accurate to consider their use.

To sum up, there are two approaches to setting text levels-one based on a great deal of scientific evidence and one less well understood. Nevertheless, existing data suggest that both can place texts on a reasonable comprehensibility continuum, from easy to difficult. The problem is that research does not support the idea that either approach can identify from which texts students will learn best. The point of leveling is both to establish a text gradient and to place students in the appropriate text along that gradient. The latter is the issue to which we now turn.

Book Levels That Promote Learning

More than 70 years ago, Emmett Betts published an influential textbook on the teaching of reading. ¹⁷ Betts claimed all readers have three reading levels: independent, instructional, and frustration. According to Betts, the independent level refers to texts that readers can handle on their own without assistance. Instructional-level texts are a bit harder, but not so hard that students can't improve their reading from working with them under the guidance of a good teacher. And, frustration level? These books would be so difficult that learning would be unlikely even with supportive teaching.

Betts wrote that the way to determine these levels was to have students read from the books aloud and answer comprehension questions. Instructional-level texts, according to Betts, were those that could be read with 95-98 percent accuracy (in terms of word reading) and understood with 75-89 percent comprehension-the criteria that continue to be used today. Instructional-level texts generate small numbers of mistakes and misunderstandings, which can then presumably be addressed successfully through instruction and practice. Betts claimed that research supported the idea of matching books to students in this way to optimize learning. This instructional-level scheme is what is used today in most popular reading programs.

It's easy to understand why someone might propose (or adopt) such an approach. It is incredibly frustrating when students can't read a text very well. At a time when teachers were limited to one grade-level text for reading, there would be plenty of students who wouldn't be able to read it proficiently. Under those circumstances, teachers would gladly embrace the idea of working only with books that children could already read well. But as gratifying as the idea of teaching students at their instructional levels may have been, there are legitimate questions about the degree of effectiveness of this approach. When there is so little to learn from a particular text, it is possible that progress will be needlessly slow moving.

Despite Betts' original claims and the current popularity of leveling, research evidence has not been especially supportive of the approach. The study Betts referred to as the source of the instructional-level criteria was a doctoral dissertation of one of his students, ¹⁸ and that study neither matched books to students for instruction nor evaluated learning. Betts' doctoral student simply checked to see how many oral reading errors fourth-graders could make and still maintain 75-89 percent reading comprehension; that was the source of the 95-98 percent accuracy criterion. Years later, the researchers were questioned about the source of comprehension numbers, and they couldn't remember from whence those had come. ¹⁹ Not a very substantial basis for such a widely recommended instructional practice.

In the 1960s and 1970s, William Powell challenged Betts' criteria, though he fully accepted the kind of evidence Betts had used to set them. ²⁰ Powell thought Betts got the numbers wrong. To that end, he conducted studies in which children from grades 1-8 were evaluated in much the same way as in Betts' doctoral student's study. Powell found a couple of interesting things. He reported different instructional levels for different grades; that is, some children could tolerate more disfluency and still comprehend what they were reading. He also reported that some students could tolerate quite a bit of disfluency, suggesting Betts was placing students in books that were too easy.

Later, another study tested how well second-graders could read the books they were taught with, and then measured how much they learned. The researcher found that texts that could be read with about 85 percent accuracy and less than 50 percent comprehension led to the biggest learning gains. In other words, students learned more from books that were at their "frustration levels."

Over the past few decades, there have been several direct tests of the instructional level, and these have all ended with one of two outcomes. Instructional-level texts either have provided no learning advantages or have done harm. One example of the latter is another study with second-graders. ²¹ This study was the first randomized control trial of this practice. Students were tested and, using Betts' criteria, randomly assigned to one of three treatments. One group worked with texts at their instructional levels, one worked with texts two grades above this, and the third worked with books four grades above. Students read in pairs, practicing reading fluency with a partner. At the end of the school year, the students placed in books above their instructional level had made significantly bigger learning gains than those placed in the books supposed to facilitate their learning. This study was later replicated with third-graders. ²² Other studies again found big learning advantages from working with books at the children's grade levels rather than reading levels. ²³ Even students with learning disabilities have been found to obtain no benefit from these text placements. ²⁴

Betts saw a problem-students being taught from books that many couldn't read-and he proposed a solution, moving students to books that they could. Another solution, one he apparently didn't entertain, was that teachers could adjust their instruction in particular ways to facilitate students' interactions with these hard-to-read books. As a recent study found-this one with high school students-most students who were asked to read grade-level materials were able to learn more than those placed in the easier books. ²⁵

Basically, what this research reveals is that limiting students to texts they can already read well reduces their opportunity to learn-by limiting their exposure to sophisticated vocabulary, rich content, and complex language. With knowledge of the research on effective reading instruction, skilled teachers can facilitate students' productive interactions with harder text.

But what has happened since states started requiring that students be taught to read more challenging text?

In 2010, the majority of states adopted the Common Core State Standards. These standards, for the first time ever, set text levels that students were supposed to be able to read by the time they reached particular grade levels. The levels were set high to enable students to reach levels of proficiency that would ensure later life success.

States may have thought they had accomplished something pretty big by adopting those standards, and likewise district administrators may have thought they had dealt successfully with the complex text requirements when they purchased new textbooks matched to these new requirements. However, according to national surveys, ²⁶ all that has happened is that teachers, seeing that more of their students are now struggling with these newer texts, have increasingly relied on the idea of instructional-level teaching, and more and more are placing students in below-grade texts for reading instruction.

A More Effective Approach

As a teacher, I always taught with leveled books and worked hard to match texts to students in the ways described here. However, as I've learned of the research, I've gone a very different way-except with beginning readers. I know of no studies with kindergartners or first-graders showing that they should be trying to read particularly demanding texts (in contrast, there is a benefit to teachers reading aloud demanding texts to build young children's knowledge and vocabulary).

I've come to think of reading as the ability to make sense of the ideas presented in text, by taking advantage of the affordances and overcoming the barriers included in the text. Learning to read means becoming aware of these text features-and learning how to deal with them. Instructional-level texts are usually too easy to provide students with the opportunities to confront text features that they cannot already manage.

Affordances or barriers-and these are basically the same things-are features that authors build into their texts to facilitate communication. A particular text feature serves as an affordance if it does that, and-for some readers-it may serve as a barrier to understanding. For example, an author might aim for clarity and accuracy through apt diction, and for readers who know the meanings of the words so chosen, this can be a powerful text affordance. But for readers with more limited vocabularies? That potential affordance may become an unfortunate barrier for them.

It's not, however, as simple an equation as instructional-level theory makes out. It is not that some students have better vocabularies, so we should let them work with the relatively difficult books (the ones with the rich content and complex language), and that the other students-those who know fewer words-should be segregated into easier and more limited texts. That approach can have some unfortunate implications for students who are minorities and those from low socioeconomic backgrounds. ²⁷

What if, instead of segregating them into what some students call the "stupid books," we placed them in books with demanding vocabulary and taught dictionary skills, use of context, and morphology? What if we taught them when it was essential to figure out an unknown word meaning and when they might be able to soldier on successfully without doing that?

And, of course, vocabulary is just one of many such text features. Studies have long shown that teaching students how to disentangle the grammar of some sentences, ²⁸ how to take advantage of the cohesive links across a passage, ²⁹ and how to identify and use a text's organizational structure ³⁰ all can improve reading comprehension. Teaching students to negotiate these features of a text only makes sense if students are to be confronted by challenging texts, and none of them have value for students reading, what for them, are easy books.

If we are serious about raising reading achievement, we must think hard about whether it makes sense to continue teaching students to read books they can already understand so well. These easier books make learning unnecessary and, without adequate challenge, may even drain the fun out of learning. That doesn't mean that every selection used for reading instruction must significantly challenge students, only that grade-level texts should be part of the instructional mix.

Instead of a steady diet of instructional-level texts, students should be reading a range of texts in their classrooms. Some proponents of leveled reading claim they too support this idea, but they propose that instructional-level texts should be the focus of small-group teaching. I recommend just the opposite, having students reading really demanding texts when the teacher is close by and ready to help, and less demanding ones when on their own or when a teacher just isn't going to be available.

But this is not just an avenue to higher achievement (though research suggests that it could be), it is also an issue of equity. If fourth-graders are taught from a second-grade book, when will they have the opportunity to confront the language and ideas of fourth-grade books? This is a cruel math problem that tells students they are best served by books that don't match their interests, their curiosity, or their social aspirations. Leveled reading emphasizes students' current limitations, rather than increasing their possibilities, especially for the least advantaged of our students. We can do better.
Timothy Shanahan is a distinguished professor emeritus of urban education at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the founding director of its Center for Literacy. Previously, he was the director of reading for Chicago Public Schools. A past president of the International Literacy Association, he was the chair of the National Early Literacy Panel and a member of both the National Reading Panel and the English Language Arts Work Team for the Common Core State Standards Initiative. He writes about education at www.shanahanonliteracy.com.
Endnotes

1. S. Schwartz, "The Most Popular Reading Programs Aren't Backed by Science," Education Week, December 3, 2019.
2. D. Griffith and A. Duffet, Reading and Writing Instruction in America's Schools (Washington, DC: Thomas Fordham Foundation, 2018); and J. Kaufman et al., Changes in What Teachers Know and Can Do in the Common Core Era (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2018).
3. National Assessment of Educational Progress, Results from the 2019 Mathematics and Reading Assessments (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, 2019).
4. L. Zirbes, "Diagnostic Measurement as a Basis for Procedure," Elementary School Journal 18, no. 7 (1918): 505-522.
5. W. Theisen, "Provisions for Individual Differences in the Teaching of Reading," Journal of Educational Research 2, no. 2 (1920): 560-571.
6. G. Klare, The Measurement of Readability (Ames, IA: Iowa State UP, 1963).
7. California State Board of Education, English-Language Arts Framework for California Public Schools, Kindergarten through Grade 12 (Sacramento, CA: California State Department of Education, 1987).
8. E. Hiebert, "Changing Readers, Changing Texts: Beginning Reading Texts from 1960 to 2019," Journal of Education 195, no. 3 (2015): 1-13.
9. E. H. Hiebert and C. W. Fisher, "The Critical Word Factor in Texts for Beginning Readers," Journal of Educational Research 101, no. 1 (2007): 3-11.
10. P. Pearson, "The Reading Wars," Educational Policy 18, no. 1 (2004): 216-252.
11. A. Stenner et al., "How Accurate Are Lexile Text Measures?," Journal of Applied Measurement 7, no. 3 (2006): 307-322.
12. P. Pearson and E. Hiebert, "The State of the Field: Qualitative Analyses of Text Complexity," Elementary School Journal 115, no. 2 (1991): 161-183.
13. B. Peterson, "Selecting Books for Beginning Readers: Children's Literature Suitable for Young Readers," in Bridges to Literacy: Learning from Reading Recovery, ed. D. DeFord, C. Lyons, and G. Pinnel (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1991), 119-147.
14. I. Fountas and G. Pinnell, "Guided Reading: The Romance and the Reality," Reading Teacher 66, no. 4 (2012): 268-284.
15. J. Hoffman et al., "Text Leveling and Little Books in First-Grade Reading," Journal of Literacy Research 33 (2001): 507-528; and P. Hatcher, "Predictors of Reading Recovery Book Levels," Journal of Research in Reading 23 (2000): 67-77.
16. Fountas and Pinnell, "Guided Reading."
17. E. Betts, Foundations of Reading Instruction (New York: American Book, 1946).
18. P. Killgallon, "A Study of Relationships among Certain Pupil Adjustments in Language Situations" (unpublished PhD diss., Pennsylvania State University, 1942).
19. H. Beldin, "Informal Reading Testing: Historical Review and Review of the Research," in Reading Difficulties: Diagnosis, Corrections, and Remediation, ed. W. Durr (Newark, DE: International Reading Association, 1970), 67-84.
20. W. Powell, "Reappraising the Criteria for Interpreting Informal Reading inventories," paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Reading Association, Boston, MA, 1968.
21. A. Morgan, B. Wilcox, and J. Eldredge, "Effect of Difficulty Levels on Second-Grade Delayed Readers Using Dyad Reading," Journal of Educational Research 94, no. 2 (2000): 113-119.
22. L. Brown et al., "The Effects of Dyad Reading and Text Difficulty on Third-Graders' Reading Achievement," Journal of Educational Research 111, no. 5 (2017): 541-553.
23. M. Kuhn et al., "Teaching Children to Become Fluent and Automatic Readers," Journal of Literacy Research 38, no. 4 (2006): 357-387.
24. R. O'Connor, H. Swanson, and C. Geraghty, "Improvement in Reading Rate Under Independent and Difficult Text Levels: Influences on Word and Comprehension Skills," Journal of Educational Psychology 102 (2010): 1-19.
25. S. Lupo et al., "An Exploration of Text Difficulty and Knowledge Support on Adolescents' Comprehension," Reading Research Quarterly 54, no. 4 (2019): 457-479.
26. D. Griffith and A. Duffett, Reading and Writing Instruction in America's Schools (Washington, DC: Thomas Fordham Foundation, 2018); and V. Opfer, J. Kaufman, and L. Thompson, Implementation of K-12 State Standards for Mathematics and English Language Arts and Literacy: Findings from the American Teacher Panel (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2016).
27. A. Sørenson and M. Hallinan, "Effects of Ability Grouping on Growth in Academic Achievement," American Educational Research Journal 23, no. 4 (1986): 519-542.
28. V. Mih and C. Mih, "Reducing Children's Reading Comprehension Difficulties through a Training for Enhancing Sentence Organization Skills," Cognition, Brain, Behavior. An Interdisciplinary Journal 16, no. 3 (2012): 387-401.
29. J. Irwin, "Linguistic Cohesion and the Developing Reader/Writer," Topics in Language Disorders 8, no. 3 (1988): 14-23.
30. K. Wijekumar, B. Meyer, and P. Lei, "Web-Based Text Structure Strategy Instruction Improves Seventh Graders' Content Area Reading Comprehension," Journal of Educational Psychology 109, no. 6 (2017): 741-760.

[Illustrations by Angela Hsieh]

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Limiting Children to Books They Can Already Read

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Fifty years ago, when I was becoming a teacher, reading instruction consisted of a ubiquitous classroom practice: placing students in instructional groups according to their reading level. These groups were sometimes known by various colors or animals. I distinctly remember the redbirds, the bluebirds, and the buzzards among the most popular appellations.

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A catalyst for outreach and advocacy, sharing ideas, providing professional training, raising awareness and inspiring progress.
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AIM PATHWAYS ™ is a unique, interactive digital platform designed to deliver evidence-based and IDA-accredited teacher training in the science of reading.
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Connecting top researchers and practitioners with educators in the field to develop powerful new learning approaches and make them part of teachers' best practices.
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Working with school administrators and teachers across the country to deliver evidence-based instruction grounded in the science of reading.
Meet our AIM Pathways Partners

Word recognition expert Dr. Linnea Ehri will be the recipient of the AIM Institute for Learning & Research's Hollis Scarborough Award at AIM's 10th Annual Research to Practice Symposium on Monday, March 14, 2022.

Read More about Dr. Linnea Ehri to Receive AIM's Hollis Scarborough Award

Over the past year, AIM has had the privilege of working closely with Dr. Julie Washington as AIM examined its work with an equity lens both in the curriculum we use with students in school at AIM Academy and in the content and coursework of AIM Pathways teacher training.
Listen to Dr. Washington speak about her work with AIM Institute and on AIM Pathways in this video.
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Last fall, AIM began working with educators in 10 Louisiana schools as part of the state's K-2 Literacy Coaching Pilot. More than 161 educators participated in Pathways to Proficient Reading as part of the program allowing teachers across the state how to dig deeper, says Jane Anne Watson, the pilot's Northern Louisiana Literacy Coordinator. "Now they know that you have to dig deeper and how to do it."

AIM Pathways is one of four literacy training providers approved by Louisiana for the statewide roll out of it's Literacy Foundations Training program which as part of Act 108 requires early literacy training based on the Science of Reading for K-3 teachers of reading, math, science, and/or social studies as well as principals and assistant principals of schools that include the K-3 grade levels.

Read More about Perfect Attendance and Course Grades Over 90% Highlight Experience of Louisiana Educators in Literacy Coach Pilot Project

The AIM Institute for Learning & Research is pleased to announce an important addition to the organization's administrative team who will help advance literacy instruction and the Science of Reading among educators and administrators nationwide. Cindy Hadicke, a former teacher and principal, most recently served as an elementary education consultant to the Kansas State Department of Education. She assumes her role as AIM's Director of Client Success and Implementation on July 12.

Read More about Former Kansas Department of Education Consultant Joins AIM Team

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AIM Institute is a center for educational excellence and professional development disseminating to educators the latest research, technology, training tools and best practices in the Science of Reading and language-based learning disabilities including dyslexia. AIM is a WILSON® Accredited Partner and provides Orton Gillingham training and teacher training with our IDA-Accredited, AIM Pathways online, digital teacher training platform.

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Most Americans have likely never heard of Lucy Calkins, but their children's teachers probably have. Calkins, a professor of education at Columbia University, has created one of the nation's most widely used reading instruction programs, and, according to a groundbreaking new report, the program is deeply flawed.

Calkins' Units of Study series, which thousands of American teachers are using to teach children to read, "would be unlikely to lead to literacy success for all of America's public schoolchildren," the report concluded. "Children who arrive at school already reading or primed to read ... may integrate seamlessly into the routines of the Units of Study model and maintain a successful reading trajectory. However, children who need additional practice opportunities in a specific area of reading or language development likely would not."

Listen to the latest episode of the Educate podcast to hear reviewers talk about the report's findings.

The report was released by the nonprofit educational consulting group Student Achievement Partners (SAP). The group asked prominent reading researchers to review Calkins' Units of Study, more commonly known as "reading workshop." It appears to be the first time a group of reading researchers has reviewed a curriculum and determined whether the lessons reflect more than 40 years of scientific research on how reading skill develops.

"As far as I know, [this review] is new and different and necessary," said Sue Pimentel, a founding partner of SAP.

The United States has a serious reading problem. Recent test scores show more than a third of the nation's fourth-graders can't read at a basic level. That's despite the fact that scientists have discovered so much about how the brain learns to read and what children need to be taught. "I think there's frustration out there," Pimentel said. "It was time to take a close look. Is there a mismatch happening between what the research is saying and what publishers are producing?"

Calkins' Units of Study is the third most widely used set of core materials to teach reading, according to a survey by Education Week. But, as APM Reports has shown, the Units of Study lessons and materials frequently assert an idea about how people read that has been proven wrong by cognitive scientists. The idea, known as three cueing, encourages children to look at pictures and use contextual clues to identify words as they are reading. Scientific research shows that skilled readers do not use cues to read words and that instructing children to use these cues teaches them the habits of struggling readers.

The SAP reviewers identified cueing as a major flaw in Calkins' program.

"The program strongly recommends use of the three-cueing system as a valid procedure for assessing and diagnosing a student's reading needs," noted David Paige, an associate professor at Bellarmine University and one of seven researchers who conducted the review. "This is in direct opposition to an enormous body of settled research and even runs contrary to the Units of Study foundational skills materials that support the teaching of phonics."

In 2018, Calkins developed a Units of Study for teaching phonics. Before that, her instructional materials had largely ignored phonics.

Calkins did not respond to an interview request from APM Reports. She sent a statement through her publisher, Heinemann, in which she said that she and her team will "learn from this review as we have learned from everything else."

Research shows that beginning readers who focus on letter-sound relationships increase activity in the area of the brain best wired for reading and that phonics instruction improves children's reading success.

Paige reviewed the new phonics curriculum and other Units of Study materials and found they don't provide children with the kind of explicit instruction and practice time that research has shown is needed for all students to develop good reading skills. "The materials are contradictory," Paige said in an interview. "The materials do talk about phonics, they do teach some phonics, but then it's all just contradicted with the infusion of this [cueing] stuff throughout the curriculum."

In December, Calkins denied that her method for teaching reading is based on the cueing system. But reviewers found numerous instances of it in her curriculum materials. "The three-cueing system is baked into this program," said reviewer Claude Goldenberg, an emeritus professor at Stanford University.

Goldenberg called Calkins "dishonest" for denying that she advises teachers to use a cueing approach. "Anyone who uses her program is using [cueing], whether they call it that or they call it something else," he said.

Reviewers were also asked to look at how well Calkins' materials cover other essential aspects of reading proficiency such as building vocabulary and knowledge. Calkins has long maintained that her approach supports the development of oral language and reading comprehension skills.

However, the reviewers found her materials lacking in these areas too.

Reviewers concluded that the program's approach to knowledge-building and language development is "too unsystematic to ensure that all students would encounter adequate challenge or receive sufficient supports for successful progress, particularly in grades K-2."

For students who come from homes where they're exposed to sophisticated oral language and who acquire knowledge from well-educated parents, the lack of explicit instruction in these areas might not be a problem. But other students may be left behind, according to reviewer Marilyn Adams, a prominent reading researcher who is a visiting scholar at Brown University. "Students who enter school having had fewer opportunities to grow academic knowledge and vocabulary depend critically on such opportunities to catch up and move forward," Adams wrote.

And even students who develop vocabulary and knowledge at home could be learning more than what Units of Study provides. "All students are short-changed when knowledge-building opportunities are missed," Adams wrote.

Reviewer Tim Shanahan, an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago, agreed. "One suspects that students who are already on or above grade level in reading may do fine [in Units of Study] ... though they may not learn as much as they possibly could."

Reviewers did have positive things to say about Units of Study. They noted that the lessons are engaging and "beautifully crafted," and that the materials are organized "above all on the value of loving to read and the encouragement of reading and writing as lifelong habits."

"That's really important," Paige said. "Kids have to see a value in being able to read, and if they don't see a value, then they learn it as just something that they can do."

Research shows that motivation matters. But in interviews, reviewers noted that an assumption that seems to underlie Units of Study is that if children are motivated to read, they will learn how to do it. This doesn't align with scientific evidence that shows reading skill does not develop naturally through exposure to text. Children have to learn how written language works, and for most children, this requires explicit instruction.

In her statement, Calkins cited an analysis by her organization at Columbia, the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, that showed students in New York City schools that have been using her materials and professional development for an average of 10 years outperformed students in other New York City Schools by 30 percentage points on the 2019 state reading test. She declined, through a representative, to provide a list of those schools.

It's important to note that curriculum is only one part of what leads to better reading outcomes for students, and that it's unlikely any one curriculum would lead to success for all students. "The most important tool in the classroom is a really knowledgeable teacher," Paige said.

But he noted that one of his concerns after reviewing Units of Study is that teachers may be picking up from the curriculum materials incorrect ideas about how skilled reading develops.

"Teachers have not received the best training in how to teach reading," Paige said. As a result, when they get into the classroom, "they really don't understand what to do. So they quite often rely on a curriculum to guide them. And unfortunately, so much of [ Units of Study] is flawed."

Listen to Emily Hanford and Stephen Smith discuss these events and more in the latest episode of Educate.
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Experts say widely used reading curriculum is failing kids

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Most Americans have likely never heard of Lucy Calkins, but their children's teachers probably have. Calkins, a professor of education at Columbia University, has created one of the nation's most widely used reading instruction programs, and, according to a groundbreaking new report, the program is deeply flawed.

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Strategic Plan

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Tipping The Scale on Fountas & Pinnell - Breaking The Code

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Fountas and Pinnell, as well as other balanced literacy programs, places a great deal of emphasis on this guided approach to reading and group work because, fundamentally, they see reading as a social activity, rather than an individual’s ability to decode text, something that happens in the confine…

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Tipping The Scale on Fountas & Pinnell

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Colorado: Bill to require disclosure of reading instruction by district

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Colorado: Bill to require disclosure of reading instruction by district

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Amid growing concern about how schools teach children to read, a group of Colorado parents want to make it easier for the public to know which literacy curriculum their local schools use.

Proposed legislation, awaiting a hearing in the House Education Committee, would require districts to post online the reading curriculum used at each school, as well as how many children are struggling to read versus reading at grade level, and how the school is spending additional state money provided to help students who are reading significantly below grade level.

Just 40% of Colorado students read at grade level, a percentage that has barely budged in recent years. Advocates and policymakers increasingly are scrutinizing the way reading is taught. Many Colorado schools use what's known as a "balanced literacy" approach that critics say is not supported by cognitive science on how children learn basic literacy skills. In particular, they say some of the reading strategies it promotes impede the development of good decoding skills.

Curriculum matters because it shapes how teachers approach a subject. Colorado's constitution prevents the state from dictating which curriculum districts adopt, and many districts don't mandate a specific curriculum for all their schools, either. That means schools in the state are using vastly different approaches to teach students to read.

This is why advocates say parents need information about what's being taught in schools so they can make informed decisions.

"Easy access to that information would have changed my options earlier," said Lindsay Drakos, a member of COKID, a group of parents of children with dyslexia who are pushing for policy changes. "I could have reacted more quickly."

By the time her older daughter was diagnosed in fifth grade, Drakos already had concerns about her younger child then in kindergarten. It would be months before she learned through word of mouth that a nearby school used structured literacy, an approach that includes explicit phonics instruction and that is particularly helpful for dyslexic students.

The information that the bill asks districts to post online is information that districts will have to start submitting to the Colorado Department of Education, under recent legislation that updates a law requiring schools to identify and offer assistance to students with the greatest reading challenges. The law also requires early elementary teachers to get more training.

The Colorado Association of School Executives, which represents superintendents and other district leaders, opposes the new requirements. Executive Director Lisa Escárcega, who is a candidate for the State Board of Education, said ongoing website maintenance would be a burden to districts, and the Colorado Department of Education could make the information available in a single place.

"We don't understand the necessity for the bill," she said. "All this information they're asking for is collected by the Department of Ed, so why wouldn't the Department of Ed put it all in one place?"

While last year's legislation requires districts to do more reporting, it doesn't actually require the education department to publish that information. A spokesperson for the Colorado Department of Education said the agency is in the process of updating its school data dashboard and probably will include some additional reading information in the future. People will also be able to find information about curriculum in each school's unified improvement plan, a long, dense document that gets stored on the department's website.

Drakos said parents are far more likely to look at their district website than at a state agency they might not know exists.

Advocates for more transparency say they've also been told that if they have questions about curriculum, they should just ask. But finding out what curriculum schools use to teach reading isn't easy. Drakos said she recently waited 18 days to hear back from the Cherry Creek district about its literacy curriculum. On school tours, she said, parents often get condescending answers when they ask about how reading is taught.

Chalkbeat submitted public records requests asking dozens of Colorado districts to provide the names of their core literacy curriculum - a comprehensive curriculum meant to guide instruction for all students in a classroom - used in kindergarten to third grade. While many districts provided concise lists right away, others said they had no documents containing the information or that they would charge a fee to compile the list.

Some provided long lists that failed to distinguish between core reading curriculum and other kinds of curriculum, such as programs aimed at struggling students.

Lewis-Palmer, a 6,800-student district near Colorado Springs, initially provided a list showing 14 core curriculums in use at its five elementary schools. After further questions from Chalkbeat, district officials pared down the list to three items.

The Boulder school district initially said Chalkbeat's request involved "such a large volume of records" that it would have to charge $90 for the four hours of staff time that it would take to get an answer. Officials later agreed to provide the records for free.

Denver initially provided a list showing two district-supported reading curriculums and many other curriculums that were potentially in use, too. Saying they had no document tracking which curriculums were in use at which schools, officials asked for at least $270 to poll elementary schools before later discovering the information in a spreadsheet that they provided for free.

The Douglas County school district, which serves 65,000 students southeast of Denver, already posts all approved curriculums and textbooks on its website, but it's not clear which are in active use at which schools. Marlena Gross-Taylor, the district's chief academic officer, said she is determining which schools use which curriculum, and whether they align with state and district standards as part of a larger strategic plan.

"That's what we have inherited as a district," she said of the curriculum list.

Morgan Polikoff, a researcher at the University of Southern California, said, "In general, there's very good reason to believe that curriculum materials matter for teacher instruction and for student outcomes."

But he doubts a law requiring districts to publicly post their curriculum will have much impact or prove useful to most parents.

California has a law requiring curriculum disclosure, and when Polikoff downloaded some of that data for a research project, he found the list "close to unusable." It was long and messy, sometimes with incomplete curriculum names or just publishers listed. He also said even if curriculum names are reported, they may not be used faithfully in classrooms.

Instead of mandating public reporting of curriculum materials, Polikoff believes states should select acceptable curriculums. But in Colorado, state education officials cannot tell schools what to use. The department does maintain a list of curriculums that meet its standards. That list is currently under review.

At the same time, parents have greater ability to choose their children's school here than in some states. In that context, advocates said curriculum disclosure is an important first step.

"It gives you something to Google. It gives you something to look on CDE's website and see if it's approved. It gives parents a starting point," said Karin Johnson, a member of COKID. "It's like truth in advertising and being an informed consumer on behalf of your children. Reading is their first job."

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It can be hard to find out how schools teach reading. Advocates want that to change.

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Amid growing concern about how schools teach children to read, a group of Colorado parents want to make it easier for the public to know which literacy curriculum their local schools use.

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Cecil County, Science of Reading Results

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Cecil County, Science of Reading Results

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Right now, we need to be sharing positive stories in K-12 education! That's true because we're going through a tough moment - and we don't just mean the challenge of the coronavirus. Midway through this school year, the nation reflected on worrisome NAEP outcomes suggesting that literacy instruction needs work.

Once, Cecil County had a flawed approach to literacy - and weak outcomes. We think our turnaround story can add important and encouraging color to the conversation.

In our district, a focused effort to improve literacy outcomes paid off for students and for teachers. Jeff calls it the biggest win of his career! Yet it once felt like a gamble.

In 2016, we brought in a new curriculum called Bookworms, in order to align with key reading research. It puts a huge premium on work with authentic texts; kids read 205 authentic books between kindergarten and 5th grade during Tier 1 instruction!

Bookworms is a relatively 'scripted' program, but its daily routines are tightly optimized to develop skilled readers. Foundational skills are emphasized, and frequent assessment is paired with targeted differentiation resources, which has really accelerated student growth for our learners.

And boy, has this work paid off. In Cecil County:
1. Our reading outcomes went through the roof:
We were clearly underperforming in literacy before the change. Of 24 counties in Maryland, we are #16th for wealth, but our reading outcomes were near the bottom of the state.

After changing curricula, our proficiency growth went up 11.4% points between 2016 and 2019, which made us the fastest-improving county in Maryland on the PARCC assessment.

Our steady growth continued through this winter's midyear assessments.

After the curriculum change, we noticed that our 4th graders performed higher than the previous year's 5th graders in MAP testing, which is normed against millions of kids. We've seen drastic jumps in all sub-groups and in all grades.

Perhaps the most powerful outcome: our intervention program is shrinking! Today, we have very few children needing Tier 3 intervention for reading. Before, children were doomed to repeating the same intervention without making much improvement. Now our kids are moving and growing!
2. Our students are demonstrably more engaged with reading.
After we changed curriculum, our public libraries reported shortages of books with the authors and themes studied in Bookworms! The library asked for our text list, in order to expand its collection in these areas to meet the growing demand.
3. We empowered our teachers as instructional leaders.
Our teachers say they have become actual teachers of reading because of Bookworms, which is so carefully aligned with reading research that it has an "educative" effect. Teachers can't help but learn excellent practices in the initial years of using the materials. Their comfort with foundational skills is far higher, for example.
4. We gained a culture of collaboration.
When the curriculum was Do It Yourself, teachers were on different pages... literally.

Using a common curriculum created a systemwide Professional Learning Community. Our teachers now have a common language and understanding. In meetings, they no longer simply share out what they are doing in class - instead, teachers actually have substantive conversations about student work.
5. We improved equity.
Our previous "hodge podge" approach to curriculum resulted in significant discrepancies in instruction classroom to classroom. We've nipped that in the bud.
6. We saved money.
We saved around $1M per year by using Bookworms instead of Journeys or Wonders, the other programs we considered. Best of all, a significant portion of our investment goes to PD each year. We're investing more in teachers.

As district leaders, we aren't the only ones thrilled with the outcomes. In surveys, 80% of our teachers give this new curriculum a thumbs up.

Does this all sound too good to be true? It shouldn't. These gains didn't come easy, so we'll share the journey - including its challenges.

Jeff was Associate Superintendent of Academics when our 2016 PARCC scores showed 30% proficiency. It simply wasn't good enough. He'd been a high school math teacher, and didn't have strong opinions about how reading should be taught. Jeff simply wanted improvement, and when the Bookworms curriculum was recommended through University of Delaware contacts, it sounded promising.

Yet at the time, guided reading was nothing short of gospel in Cecil County. In retrospect, we can see that we were not really teaching reading: we were good at getting kids to read in their comfort zone, but not always delivering instruction that would grow students as readers. Also, guided reading was keeping many kids trapped in low-level texts.

We had to make a serious mindset shift to implement Bookworms. That mindset shift started with Cathy, a long time believer in guided reading. Once she began learning reading research behind Bookworms, she was stunned at how much she hadn't known, and ready to lead a change.

Some folks plan a phased rollout of new curriculum, but our implementation approach was "all in." We went whole hog with a districtwide implementation of Bookworms in the 2016-17 school year. In the process, we asked folks to take a leap of faith. We provided PD on the materials and how to use them, but we saved a lot of the PD on the reading research behind the curriculum for year two. Our thinking was: when you're asking teachers to change practice, sometimes you have to go ahead and change practice, and the change in beliefs follows when teachers see students respond... which is what ultimately happened.

We had growing pains in the first 4-6 months. Teachers were concerned about pacing; some struggled to get through 45-minute lessons in 45 minutes. The culprit: they were over scaffolding, unpacking texts so much before reading that students almost didn't need to read them! Teachers learned to dial back the pre-teaching and allow students to learn from the text itself, which is a beautiful thing.

Teachers also had fears: Did the curriculum go too fast for struggling kids? Was the text complexity simply too high for our lowest learners? Was it taking away teacher autonomy?

We needed to work through those fears, and that meant a lot of time in schools in that first year, logging listening time. Sometimes you just need to let people vent. And while you're being proactive with support, you also need to hear - and react to - the issues you didn't anticipate.

The fears began to dissipate as soon as teachers saw growth in DIBELs and MAP testing. We knew things were on track when teachers said, "I've never seen my kindergarten students reading so well so early in the year." Now, two years later, we hear NONE of the initial concerns about this work. It's amazing what schoolwide reading improvement does to motivate a team.

We embraced two key things in order to foster success:

First, grace and space for teachers. In Year 1, we told building leaders to stay out of classrooms at the beginning. We didn't think they knew the curriculum well enough to know what to look for and critique, and teachers deserved time to get their feet wet before being evaluated, even informally. We gave everyone time to come up the learning curve.

Second, flexibility. We had to alter the school day for Bookworms, which has a firm requirement of 2 hours and 15 minutes of instructional time. We also allowed teams to departmentalize, because we were implementing math curriculum at the same time, and this allowed all teachers to focus on one change, rather than two.

But the ultimate success factor was the quality of the curriculum. Perhaps this is stating the obvious, but our positive story only came together because the curriculum quickly drove up our outcomes, leading to buy-in. Evidence-based curriculum works - implemented well, of course.

Seeing our outcomes, some might wonder why everyone isn't doing this work. So... why do other districts persist with weak reading programs - or even try high-quality curriculum and bail on it? Some district leaders aren't ready for the hard conversations. It's difficult to ask teachers to put practice ahead of beliefs, and leaders need to be ready to work through doubts and fears. In addition, we have seen districts attempt curriculum pilots in which a small number of naysayers create resistance to change. It's one reason that we recommend the just-go-whole-hog approach.

Our advice to district leaders: this is a risk worth taking, with a payback that is greater than we could have imagined.
Dr. Jeffrey Lawson is the Superintendent and Dr. Cathy Nacrelli is the Elementary ELA Supervisor in Cecil County Public Schools (MD). They can be reached at jalawson@ccps.org and cnacrelli@ccps.org.
A Note on the Distance Learning Era

You might wonder how we are experiencing distance learning while using Bookworms. We've enjoyed the reflections on this topic from teachers in Baltimore and district leaders in Tennessee.

Although we didn't use the Bookworms curriculum in our recent "at home learning" materials (because students didn't have access to the books at home), we certainly used the Bookworms routines, and we relied on our Bookworms-inspired learnings about good reading instruction, to craft lessons that:

Provide quality grade level texts, fiction and nonfiction, for all students

Incorporate reading and then rereading opportunities in our "at home" lesson plans

Utilize questions that help students identify and discuss text structures

Focus discussion questions on grade level standards

Incorporate discussion and sharing of ideas around fiction and nonfiction texts

Interact with text rather than completing isolated grammar worksheets

Read and write about what you've read

And READ some more!

People talk about the "educative value" of high-quality curriculum, and this is something we have experienced, as well. We know what good looks like, so our team is better prepared to create lessons for this unique challenge, with focus on the right instructional priorities.

When we think about our "hodge podge" curriculum era, and what distance learning would have looked like if every teacher was tasked with DIY Distance Learning, we are even more convinced that our curriculum investment has been essential to our efforts to provide strong instruction to all students.

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Cecil County Had the Highest Literacy Growth in Maryland. Here's How We Did It. - Curriculum Matters

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Right now, we need to be sharing positive stories in K-12 education! That's true because we're going through a tough moment - and we don't just mean the challenge of the coronavirus. Midway through this school year, the nation reflected on worrisome NAEP outcomes suggesting that literacy instruction needs work.

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Facilitator’s Guide: Foundational Skills for Reading

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Facilitator’s Guide: Foundational Skills for Reading

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K-3

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Professional learning communities facilitator's guide for the What Works Clearinghouse practice guide: Foundational skills to support reading for understanding in kindergarten through 3rd grade

Region:

Description:

The Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Southeast developed a Professional Learning Community (PLC) Facilitators Guide to support educators in the implementation of recommendations from the What Works Clearinghouse's. The practice guide focuses on the foundational reading skills that enable students to read words, relate those words to their oral language, and read connected text with sufficient accuracy and fluency to understand what they read. The practice guide, developed by a panel of experts comprised of researchers and practitioners, presents four recommendations that educators can use to improve literacy skills in the early grades.

Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) are a form of professional development in which small groups of educators with shared interests work together with the goals of expanding their knowledge and improving their craft. REL Southeast developed PLC materials focused on the practice guide that were designed to assist a literacy leader in guiding a professional learning community in applying the recommendations from the practice guide. The materials include a facilitator's guide, participant activities, and videos. The facilitator's guide includes a framework for facilitators to conduct each of the ten PLC sessions. It also includes participant activities, discussion questions, small- and whole-group activities, and implementation and reflection activities. The participant's activities include reflection questions, lesson plan examples and templates, video-viewing guides, and sharing opportunities. The videos illustrate practices presented in the foundational reading skills practice guide.

Publication Type:

Reference Guide

Online Availability:

Publication Date:

September 2016

Contact:

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educational improvement; excellence in education; educational research; statistics; statistical data; statistical surveys; regional educational laboratory program; rel; rigorous studies; fast response projects; no child left behind

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Professional learning communities facilitator's guide for the What Works Clearinghouse practice guide: Foundational skills to support reading for understanding in kindergarten through 3rd grade

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The Regional Educational Laboratory Program (REL) consists of a network of ten laboratories that serve the educational needs of a designated region by providing access to high quality scientifically valid education research through applied research and development projects, studies, and other related technical assistance activities.

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Regional Educational Laboratories, Institute for Education Science

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Regional Educational Laboratories, Institute for Education Science

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California’s Special Education Local Plan Areas: Funding Patterns, Inclusion Rates, and Student Outcomes

This study by REL West examined the association between different SELPA types and district configurations and outcomes including SELPA funding patterns, inclusion rates of students receiving special education services in the general education environment, and academic outcomes for students receiving special education services. » More info

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The National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance (NCEE) conducts unbiased large-scale evaluations of education programs and practices supported by federal funds, such as Reading First and Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

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The National Center on Improving Literacy is a partnership among literacy experts, university researchers, and technical assistance providers, with funding from the United States Department of Education.

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The National Center on Improving Literacy is a partnership among literacy experts, university researchers, and technical assistance providers, with funding from the United States Department of Education.

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Equity and Equality Are Not Equal - The Education Trust

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There is a common misconception that equity and equality mean the same thing — and that they can be used interchangeably, especially when talking about education. But the truth is they do not — and cannot. Yes, the two words are similar, but the difference between them is crucial. So please, don’t t…

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MSV = Meaning (first), Syntax, Visual Cues (3 cueing)

Maryland COMAR used to require all teachers to know how to implement 3 cueing.  There is no science that supports 3 cueing and these requirements were replaced this year (2020) with the Maryland Literacy Competencies.  SO WHY ARE SCHOOLS STILL USING MSV IN INSTRUCTION AND ASSESSMENT?

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Recently, in a facebook group for reading specialists, a post stood out. It was beautifully written to explain issues with commonly-used strategies for early readers. The post had been widely-praised and shared by educators.

I thought it was a gorgeous introduction, as well as a perfect exemplar (more on that below), and deserved to be openly-shared.

The author, Tiffany Peltier, didn't have her own blog, so I asked if I could republish her post. She said Yes. Woot!

Tiffany spent years as a PreK, K, and 1st grade teacher; today she is working on her doctorate in Educational Psychology.

Tiffany Peltier Explains the Trouble With MSV

"As a reading specialist, have you heard of the 3-cueing system? Do you use meaning, structure (or syntax), and visual cues (MSV), among others, to help kids learn to read?

Have you seen strategies like the photo below? Do you use them with students to help them read words?

I'd like to start a discussion about what these strategies are and how it plays out when we teach reading to our students.

Back in 1967, Ken Goodman, an education professor, proposed a new theory of how children learn to read. Since then, others have used this theory to build their philosophies on, and their writings and/or programs around, such as Marie Clay, Irene Fountas and Gay Sue Pinnell, Jan Richardson, Jennifer Serravallo, and Lucy Calkins, among others.

They created the idea of using leveled texts that start with predictable books in kindergarten. These books include words that are high-frequency and are pretaught, along with new words that can be predicted based on the pictures ("The cow walked in the house. The donkey walked in the house. The horse walked in the house.") and other words that are front-loaded by the teacher ("This is Bobby and Sophia - can you point to Sophia? Find the word "Sophia" on the page. It starts with the /s/ sound. Good!")

While this was ensuing, researchers from the fields of neuroscience, psychology, cognitive science, speech/language pathology, and reading (among others), were doing studies on how kids learn to read. They completed studies that suggested the Simple View of Reading was the most robust theory of learning to read, that while skilled readers don't rely on context to *decode* words, poor readers do, and instead, skilled readers process virtually every letter in the word in order to read. They also found from neuroscience that, in the brain, decoding the word must happen *before* the comprehension of the word.

They realized that the very strategies and leveled readers that teachers had been told by their schools to use (looking at the picture, front loading the words from the book, using context to predict words with the first sound) would actually draw kids' attention away from what they really need in order to become skilled readers - understanding the complex relationship of the letters and sounds they represent.

Because, when you give a struggling reader a challenging word and the option of predicting based on the picture and context or struggling through decoding every sound, predicting seems much easier. They learn to try to look at the first letter(s) and guess. *Why* take the harder road?

The problem with that is their brains are then not able to store that word efficiently in their sight word bank for easy access for next time (there are two routes to reading - as shown by neuroscience - through automatic word recognition within 1/4 of a second of words stored in a sight word bank and through phonic decoding which takes longer, sounding out the word and then pronouncing it as a whole - words get stored in the automatic sight word bank after going through phonic decoding route 1-4 times in a good reader in 2nd grade).

Students don't get the full representation of that word transferred to their sight word bank because they didn't have to struggle through sounding it out. And using the leveled, predictable texts provided by many programs today, kids aren't *able* to sound them out because many of the words in the book are much too hard and contain phonics patterns they haven't yet learned (for example, in kindergarten books - c[ow], h[or]se, donk[ey], firef[igh]t[er], etc).

Please feel free to leave questions below... I'd love to hear your thoughts 😊"
Karen's Note: You can find Tiffany on Twitter if you want to share thoughts and questions.
Additional Reading

You'll find much more detail on the issues with these strategies in a recent documentary, At a Loss for Words. Pro tip: listen to the audio version... there is nothing quite like hearing people talk about these issues. If you're short on time, this overview of the documentary is a good read.

I also need to insist that you watch this short "Purple Challenge" video, in which a parent (who is also a researcher) did an unforgettable experiment to show how the guessing approach was not giving her daughter reading skills. It might be the best "explainer" of this issue of all.

Here's a great blog on the issues by kindergarten teacher Lindsay Kemeny, and another blog that unpacks the issues with MSV, featuring insights from Marilyn Jager Adams.

One question that often comes up: are picture books bad in all circumstances? When is it OK to encourage kids to consider context, such as pictures? Timothy Shanahan penned an excellent blog to answer this FAQ, explaining why context cues are problematic for word recognition, but perfectly sensible for comprehension work.

You can also search #EduTwitter. In social media, educators have discussed the same themes: that the MSV approach interferes with - or even "negates" - the phonics lessons. And it teaches kids bad habit of looking away from words, which reading specialists need to un-teach in order to help kids successfully decode.

Let's Discuss the Awesomeness of Tiffany's Post

I love Tiffany's post so hard. It's clear and accessible. It assumes no prior knowledge on the part of the reader (other than having seen or used these strategies), so it's a perfect on-ramp to the conversation about reading instruction issues. We also get a layman's intro to the concept of orthographic mapping... a complex concept that everyone ought to know.

Also, it's not judgy! The tone is perfect for helping a reader reflect on his or her practice.

I asked Tiffany whether anything in particular inspired her to write this post. Her response:

"As I was completing my Masters and teaching 1st grade, I first learned of the enormous gap between what researchers know about reading development and instruction and what actually happens in schools. How could we have such a large body of research on how to teach reading effectively; yet, teachers and district leaders not understand these fundamental principles? How could this body of research have existed for decades; yet, outdated methods still rule the majority of popular curricula materials in teachers' hands? Why doesn't it seem like anyone is doing anything about this atrocity that affects kids' futures?

I had wished that I had this knowledge my first year of teaching. I remember, as the year was coming to an end, feeling like I'd failed two of the little ones in my classroom. They were about to leave first grade but were clearly not ready for second grade level texts. I stayed after school a few days a week with them to do what I thought at the time was the best-I had them read leveled books to me. I knew how to do a running record. I didn't know how to assess their foundational skills. I didn't know how to pinpoint the phonics patterns in which they needed instruction. And I definitely didn't understand the importance of phonemic awareness, even though I know now they lacked this underlying skill that had prevented them from spelling words like "hand" and "spot."

Now, my mission is to close this gap in any way I can. It's the main reason I'm pursuing my doctorate. I know that teachers want this information. They went to school to learn, use their own time to go to trainings, scour the internet for ideas. Closing the research to practice gap is something that teachers deserve and kids desperately need. I hoped by joining Facebook groups and meeting teachers where they are, I can play a small part in bridging the divide by passing on what I've learned."

Tiffany's post isn't the only post by an educator that has inspired me lately. Mark Anderson wrote a superb blog, Learning How Kids Learn to Read, which gives a masterful introduction to reading research. He even includes PD materials, right down to print-ables!

We can all take lessons from Tiffany and Mark on how best to introduce teachers to research - in style and tone.

Today, many teachers are just joining the national conversation about reading instruction, and they deserve our warmest welcome and our clearest on-ramps.

With Gratitude

Thank You to Tiffany for letting me share her words!

She also shared this beautiful image of her family. I thought about using it as the blog header image, but it's too beautiful to meme. Instead, I'll close with it, so we can all reflect on the loveliness of the educators who sneak in time after the kids are in bed to share their insights in the social airwaves. ❤️

Keep sharing, y'all.

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The Trouble With Common Word Recognition Strategies

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Recently, in a facebook group for reading specialists, a post stood out. It was beautifully written to explain issues with commonly-used strategies for early readers. The post had been widely-praised and shared by educators. I thought it was a gorgeous introduction, as well as a perfect exemplar (more on that below), and deserved to be...

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3 Questions to Ask About Your Reading Instruction

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3 Questions to Ask About Your Reading Instruction

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Dear Superintendents, School Board Members, District Leaders, and Anyone Else Invested in Literacy Outcomes,

You've probably noticed a growing buzz about reading instruction.

Literacy is definitely having a moment right now; it started building last winter, and every single trend has continued to accelerate. Big time. Just this week, we had significant press, parent activism, and state announcements around literacy. Update: just hours after I published this blog, one topic hit the front page of the New York Times.

Many are trying to lean into this conversation, but don't know where to start. I'm happy to help!

Here are handy resources for knowing if your ELA approach aligns to key reading research.

Three Questions to Ask About Your Reading Program

Does your ELA program align to the key evidence?

Here are 3 screening questions to ask with your team:
1. Are we getting ALL kids working with texts at their grade level?
Leveled reading groups, in which students work with texts at their reading level, are pervasive in Tier 1 instruction. Unfortunately, there's actually no evidence that they work. ( Really.)

The crux of the issue: steady work with low-level texts becomes a self-reinforcing cycle, meaning that kids that start below-benchmark seldom catch up to grade level.

Here you'll find additional reading on this issue, as well as a list of curricula that incorporate grade level work for all students.
2. Is our curriculum designed to build background knowledge from the earliest grades, in order to support reading comprehension?
Long-established research shows that kids' background knowledge is essential to reading comprehension. The trouble is, this research isn't widely-known, so most curricula don't align to it.

Here's a primer on the research. The curricula that earn strong reviews for knowledge-building are listed in this piece.
3. Do we have a daily, systematic phonics program in early grades - and does the rest of the ELA program reinforce it?
The first half of the question is straightforward: you want daily, systematic phonics for all students. It's simply the most proven way to ensure that all kids succeed with foundational skills (as explained here).

Here's some devil in the detail:

Other parts of your curriculum can send inconsistent messages by encouraging students to guess words based on pictures or context, rather than sounding words out, which interferes with phonics learning (explained here). Experts recommend using programs free of "cueing," to ensure foundational skills success.

Great ELA curricula are coherent, so the text and writing work reinforce the phonics work and vice versa. Those nuances are described in more detail in this blog, along with comprehensive curricula.

Teachers report weak phonics training in teacher prep, so many feel unprepared to deliver foundational skills lessons with ease. PD is key.

There's more to ELA - much more. But you can start with these 3 questions, which cover the things most commonly tripping up districts today.

Red Flags

Don't know the answers to the questions above? Here are some look fors:

Balanced Literacy: this is one of those education terms with varied definitions and really varied implementations, so it's tough to say anything categorical about it. However, issues with the criteria above are frequently spotted in balanced literacy classrooms, so if you are a "balanced literacy district," you'll want to read the research and dig deeper.

Guided Reading: another term with varied meaning, yet most of the time, guided reading includes small group work which is done with leveled readers (i.e. texts at a student's reading level / instructional level, as opposed to the grade level). So, if you are a "guided reading" district, read this for additional considerations.

Reading Workshop / Fountas & Pinnell: These are characteristic balanced literacy programs, and reviews of their materials have helped to illustrate the flaws of balanced literacy. For example, reviews of Teachers College Reading Workshop Units of Study found substantive issues which are also apparent in comparable programs.

I hope that schools using these programs get to know the content knowledge research, then look at the relatively new "knowledge-building" curricula. They share many of the same virtues as Reading Workshop / F&P (authentic texts at the heart of instruction, daily writing, loads of discourse, read alouds in early grades)... with a stronger research backbone.

Basal Readers: Most basal series scored poorly when reviewed. For example, in EdReports reviews:

Wonders scored poorly on content knowledge

Journeys scored poorly on text and task quality, and very poorly on content knowledge

Reading Street scored so poorly on text selection and foundational skills that they stopped reviewing

Updated versions of some of these programs, published in 2019-20, have attempted to address issues. Check your version, and ensure that your teachers get good PD if you choose to upgrade to the new version.

"We let teachers create curriculum" - Where to start? The shortcomings of the DIY approach deserve their own blog.

Suffice it to say: if many popular curriculum authors can't get this research right, what makes you think your teachers have been given the time, the professional learning, the frameworks to do better? CAO Nakia Hardy has written about this misconception.

Some day I'll find or pen a piece that does this topic justice. In the meantime, please know: walkthroughs of schools with DIY curricula tend to show huge instructional inconsistencies. I'd be very worried about that.

More Ways to Check On Curriculum Alignment

You're probably starting to sense that many curricula in K-12 schools today don't align to research. Regrettably, that's the case. It's one reason that Chief Academic Officers have said that We Have a National Reading Crisis in EdWeek.

You needn't take my word for it! Two respected curriculum reviewers, EdReports and Louisiana Believes, make it easy to find the quality materials, and to pinpoint issues.

Additional Background

Looking for an accessible intro to the key reading research? Check this out.

Trying to understand this 'literacy tsunami,' from the media attention to the parent activism to the educator perspectives? I got you, friend.

Three Reasons To Lean In

Some wonder if this is a pendulum swing, or "reading wars" that will subside at some point.

Also, folks are in their feelings about literacy. We're witnessing educator guilt and shock at learning new research that contradicts practices. People sometimes take critiques of practices personally. Fear of change will always be present. Some may be reluctant to lean into hard(ish) conversations.

Here are three reasons this literacy conversation has staying power - and it's worth leaning in:

Far-From-New-Research

Much of the research noted above is 20+ years old (think settled by the National Reading Panel)... we just haven't been able to get it into classrooms. Well-validated research, not fads, drive this conversation.

A Perfect Storm of Momentum

Many forces fuel the interest in literacy:

National concern about declining literacy outcomes

Significant media coverage

Important new books like The Knowledge Gap and Know Better. Do Better

Passionate 'early adopters' in pioneering schools that have aligned to this research

New curricula and training providers make it easier to align - thus adding to the pool of successful 'early adopters'

Growing parent activism, especially from the dyslexia community

Increased state activism

Social media is accelerating all of the above and connecting people across communities

None of these trends seems likely to wane. Rather, they all seem poised to accelerate.

Leaders to Learn From

Those pioneering educators who've brought this research into practice? They are inspiring others with their outcomes, and they'll inspire you, too!

The easiest way to connect with the teachers, coaches, and administrators implementing these practices is via the #ELAchat, #CurriculumMatters, and #KnowledgeMatter s communities in Twitter. Follow these folks!

A network of district leaders using top-rated curriculum can be found via CurriculumMatters.org. A School Tour is visiting districts using knowledge-rich curricula; you can follow it here.

There is incredible promise in this national reading conversation. If you're new to it - welcome, and thank you for leaning in. Kids win if we can get these things right.

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The Three-Question Literacy Health Check

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Dear Superintendents, School Board Members, District Leaders, and Anyone Else Invested in Literacy Outcomes, You've probably noticed a growing buzz about reading instruction. Literacy is definitely having a moment right now; it started building last winter, and every single trend has continued to accelerate. Big time.

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2 Boys w/ Dyslexia: Wealthier student gets help more quickly

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2 Boys w/ Dyslexia: Wealthier student gets help more quickly

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Less well off student gets helped belatedly...

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NEW YORK - For both boys, the struggles at school started in the first grade.

Isaac Rosenthal was a fast talker with a big vocabulary. But when it came time to read, he couldn't keep up with his classmates. He didn't pick up on the rhyme scheme in Dr. Seuss books, and often mispronounced words whose meaning he knew (like "Pacific," for which he'd substitute "the other ocean").

Landon Rodriguez, four years younger than Isaac, was energetic and talkative at home but quiet and withdrawn at school. When he brought home reading assignments, Landon often confused Bs and Ds, and he labored through even short passages.

By the end of that seminal school year, both of their parents knew that something was wrong. In second grade, each boy was diagnosed with an unspecified learning disability and started receiving special education services at their public schools. "The teachers had no clue how to teach him," said Debbie Meyer, Isaac's mother.

Both families ultimately realized their sons needed support the public schools could not provide, particularly when it came to the all-important task of teaching them to read.

But that's where their similarities ended.

Isaac and Landon grew up just 15 blocks from each other in Harlem, but they inhabit very different worlds. Isaac, whose parents make a six-figure income through work as a consultant and liquor distributor executive, goes home each afternoon to a newly renovated brownstone. Landon, whose mother Yolanda immigrated from the Dominican Republic as a child and is raising her three children alone, shares a bedroom with his siblings in a public housing complex.

Both families set their sights on an option known as "private placement": a federal guarantee that school districts must pay for tuition at a private school if they can't meet the needs of a child with a disability. That set both families on an arduous and circuitous path - one biased toward wealthier families who have the money to hire pricey lawyers and the time and savvy to do extensive research on how private placement works.

Indeed, once the two families made the decision that their sons' needs could not be met in the public schools, their educational journeys could not have been more different.

Who gets private placement? White, wealthy families

When Congress passed the landmark Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in 1975, guaranteeing children with learning disabilities a "free and appropriate education" for the first time, it built in the private placement safety net for parents. In some cases, public school officials acknowledge they can't accommodate a student and agree to pay tuition at a private school. But sometimes families must sue the school district in order to get the tuition covered.

In New York City, where private placement is unusually common, the city spent almost $800 million in the 2016-17 school year on private school tuition for students with disabilities, city budget documents show. City officials settled close to 4,000 lawsuits for tuition reimbursement that year. Washington, D.C., spends about $20 million for 883 students. Overall, private placement is much more popular in coastal states and large cities, where there's a bigger supply of specialized private schools. There are more than 10,000 privately placed students in both New York and California, compared with only two in Michigan and none in Nevada.

The stakes can be high: In New York City, only half of special education students graduate public high school within four years, and the city itself estimates 15% never receive all the services to which they're entitled by law. With those odds for public school students, a spot in a specialized private school can be a lifeline.

But which students are getting these coveted funded private school spots? Critics have long argued the process is skewed toward wealthier families, but no federal data exist to show the number or demographics of students who participate in private placement - much less how they fare. In fact, it's so confusing that several media outlets have used the wrong numbers to describe the phenomenon, publishing the number of kids in private schools who get some special education services from their districts, rather than the number whose tuitions are funded by the public schools.

To help fill this void, the Teacher Project surveyed all 50 state departments of education about private placement trends. Seventeen states responded with demographic information about students in publicly funded private schools - data that for the most part revealed a stark overrepresentation of white and wealthier students.

In five of the seven states which reported the largest private placement enrollments, white students are significantly overrepresented. In California, Massachusetts and New York, for instance, the share of white students in private placement exceeds the share in public special education by about 10 percentage points. And in both California and Massachusetts, low-income students with disabilities were only half as likely to receive a private placement as their wealthier special education peers. (New York did not release complete income data.)

Even though it's technically free, private placement is less accessible to low-income families because securing one often requires lawyers, expensive outside evaluations or other out-of-pocket costs, said Jennifer Valverde, a law professor at Rutgers University who specializes in special education

"Basically, if you're poor, you've got second-class remedies available to you," she said.

The problem is likely worse than the data even suggest. Most states don't collect information on students whose (usually wealthy) families place their children in private schools, and then sue the district to reimburse tuition costs for the ones with disabilities. In New York City, more than 4,500 families sued for tuition reimbursement in 2018 alone.

Beyond the disparities in who gets access to private schools, there are glaring divisions in the quality of the schools themselves. On one end, elite schools in New York City offer state of the art facilities, cutting-edge teaching techniques and sticker prices of $100,000-a-year. But on the other, a tier of schools - often geared toward children with "emotional disturbance" diagnoses, who are disproportionately students of color - practice questionable, sometimes harmful, disciplinary techniques like secluding children in locked rooms at far higher rates than the surrounding public schools. In recent years, for instance, Accotink Academy in Washington, D.C., restrained kids 321 in a single school year, and the Dooley School in Richmond, Virginia, restrained kids nearly 1,000 times (even though it enrolls only 63 students). Both schools have majority-black student bodies and a focus on emotional disturbance.

NYC's public schools are segregated too: The city is in uproar over push to ax gifted programs. This school is doing it anyway

Indeed, the investigation showed an utterly unregulated shadow school system that often vaults families with means into nurturing, rigorous schools largely unavailable to their poorer peers. The system shunts the hardest-to-teach kids into schools-of-last-resort, which tend to be subject to fewer checks and balances than their public counterparts.

Jennifer Valverde, law professor at Rutgers University

Basically, if you're poor, you've got second-class remedies available to you.

When Landon's mom, Yolanda Rodriguez, began looking for a private school for her son, she didn't know how thoroughly the odds were stacked against her. She just knew she had to act. "At the rate he's going, he's not going to be able to pass his classes," she said last spring. "It's upsetting, but I'm willing to do anything to help him."

Isaac: 'Like you're not as good as everyone else'

Before Isaac started kindergarten, his mother, Debbie Meyer, visited the zoned elementary school he was supposed to attend in Harlem's District 5. She discovered spelling errors on one of the posters a kindergarten teacher had made.

So she sought out another option, eventually settling on Central Park East II, a well-regarded public school that accepts students from across the city. Getting in required some maneuvering. The parents had to meet with school officials and drop Isaac off for a solo visit; they also personally lobbied the school's principal, according to Debbie.

"I thought we won the lottery," she said.

At Central Park East II, teachers go by their first names, and Isaac enjoyed the progressive approach, including lessons on chemical processes taught through baking bread.

But as reading became a bigger and bigger part of school, Isaac's feelings began to change.

"I realized I wasn't as advanced as my classmates and my friends. I was falling behind," Isaac, who is now 14, recalled. "It was dehumanizing, like you're not as good as everyone else."

When, in second grade, the school diagnosed him with a learning disability, they assigned Isaac basic supports, including meetings with a speech and occupational therapist and a classroom with two teachers.

But they never addressed the root cause of Isaac's struggles with reading, Debbie said. When the occupational therapist noticed Isaac hunching low over his desk to hide his work during writing assignments, for example, she proposed working on his abdominal conditioning.

Debbie was beginning to suspect something else was going on. Her husband's family had a history of dyslexia, a disorder that interferes with the brain's processing of written words, and she recognized the signs in Isaac. (School officials had previously told her they couldn't specify whether his learning disability was dyslexia.)

At the end of third grade, Debbie tried an experiment. She paid $10,000 to send Isaac to a summer camp for students with dyslexia that included hours of dedicated phonics instruction each day, along with sports and horseback riding. Isaac blossomed there, writing pages-long letters home to his family. The experience affirmed for Debbie that Isaac needed specific reading instruction for kids with dyslexia, something even his comparatively well-resourced public school wasn't providing.

Billionaire Richard Branson has dyslexia: We're wired differently, he says

Debbie's sister-in-law had already found her kid with a disability a spot in a private school partially paid by the city. So Debbie knew there were private schools that could offer the kind of specialized teaching Isaac needed.

When Isaac returned to public school for the start of fourth grade, Debbie decided she was going to do everything in her power to make it his last year there.

Landon: Trying to read, then tears

Just blocks away in the Harlem River public housing project, Yolanda Rodriguez, Landon's mother, had few of the same resources as Debbie. She knew nothing about dyslexia, couldn't afford to send her son to a reading-intensive summer camp, and knew no one who had sent a child to a private school on the city's dime.

Landon, unlike Isaac, attended his zoned elementary school: PS 76, where only 3% of students were white and 95% received free or reduced-price lunch. Almost a quarter of students at the school had a disability, and Landon slid by undetected for more than two years because he had no behavioral issues and his learning challenges were more subtle.

But Landon had one advantage over many of his classmates: As part of a school partnership with a local nonprofit, he was one of a handful of students assigned an out-of-school mentor in kindergarten.

Almost immediately, Landon's mentor, a former attorney named Colin Gilland, noticed the young boy had unusual difficulty reading. "The early reports from the teacher were that he was doing great," Gilland recalled. "So I was surprised, because when I did homework with him, he struggled with reading."

The problems continued when Landon moved to nearby PS 200 in first grade. In second grade, Gilland asked the school to give Landon an evaluation, then watched with dismay as a teacher simply read words aloud and asked Landon to repeat them.

The school district ultimately reached a similar conclusion as it had with Isaac: Landon was diagnosed with an unspecified learning disability and put in a class with other special education students. Many of them had severe behavioral and emotional needs.

Landon got little-to-no specialized support in reading. By the time he finished second grade, he was still reading at a kindergarten reading level. "It's frustrating seeing your son trying to struggle to read," Yolanda said. "Especially when he starts crying."

Yolanda had no idea publicly funded private schools were even an option - until Gilland told her about them.

Isaac: Thousands of dollars for lawyer, dyslexia exam

After Debbie decided she wanted a taxpayer-paid spot in a private school for Isaac, she followed a well-worn playbook she had picked up from family and friends.

She knew from their stories that it was unlikely Isaac's special education team at Central Park East would recommend him for a private placement. And she wasn't willing to wait to find out.

So the family began preparing to get Isaac a private school slot through "place and chase": paying the tuition out of pocket and then suing the city for reimbursement.

This more costly route is used frequently in the wealthiest parts of the city, and almost never in the poorest parts, advocates say.

Debbie's first step was hiring a lawyer.

She selected from a range of special education law firms, many of which specialize in private placement. Attorney Neal Rosenberg stood out, having successfully represented the former head of telecom giant Viacom, who got the government to reimburse private-school tuition for his son. The case eventually reached the Supreme Court, establishing the precedent that a family does not even have to enroll their child in a public school before suing for reimbursement at a private one. Isaac's family paid Rosenberg a retainer of $2,500.

Debbie Meyer

We were willing to do whatever we had to do: take equity on our house, ask our relatives, whatever we needed to do to make it happen.

Next, Debbie knew, Isaac would need to take a time-consuming and costly medical exam called a neuropsych. The exams, which usually cost $5,000 and are almost never covered by insurance, have become a necessary step for families seeking a private placement. They can definitively diagnose conditions like dyslexia, measure how far a student has fallen behind in class, and even recommend specific teaching approaches or private schools.

With a neuropsych in hand, families can make a stronger case to their public school and, if necessary, to a special education court, that their child's current school isn't working, said Jared Stein, a lawyer at the nonprofit Advocates for Children. Some private schools also consider the neuropsychs when they're deciding who to admit.

For families who can afford the exam out of pocket, options abound. Debbie, for example, got a bevy of recommendations for neuropsychologists from her sister-in-law, a doctor, and ultimately interviewed five before making her decision. The results confirmed Isaac had dyslexia and an above-average IQ.

With the neuropsych and lawyer on their side, the family began touring private schools. Because they could afford to pay tuition up front, Isaac's family could look at more than the "approved" special education private schools that are set up to receive tuition funding directly from the city. They could consider a diverse array of "nonapproved" private schools where parents typically have to front the tuition - and then hope they win their lawsuit.

Debbie visited five "nonapproved" private schools during the second half of Isaac's fourth grade year and fell in love with one of them.

The Windward School, a $54,000-a-year institution with a gleaming Upper East Side building, has a standard class size of 12, with two teachers assigned to each room. The school is an acknowledged leader in educating children with dyslexia and runs its own training institute; even gym teachers are required to study the science of reading. Best of all, Windward emphasized its ultimate goal was to get students back into mainstream schools. Debbie knew it was the right place for Isaac.

"We were willing to do whatever we had to do: take equity on our house, ask our relatives, whatever we needed to do to make it happen," Debbie said.

Isaac passed Windward's entrance exam in the spring of his fourth grade year, and the family put down a $5,000 deposit to secure a spot for the coming fall. That summer, the family's lawyer notified the city they were planning to place Isaac in a private school and sue for reimbursement.

Just the threat was enough. City officials ultimately agreed in an out-of-court settlement to reimburse about 80% of Isaac's tuition costs. Isaac started Windward that September as a fifth grader.

As Isaac recalls, it was the first time he realized "there are other kids like me."

Landon: Waiting for pro bono help

Yolanda's options were more limited. She would never be able to front tuition payments, so when Landon was in third grade, she started trying to convince his public school, PS 242 (his family had moved him again in search of better services) to recommend him for private placement. Unlike Isaac's family, she had no lawyer on her side.

School officials repeatedly told her public school was Landon's only option. "When people see you by yourself, they feel like they can talk to you any type of way," she said.

Yolanda, who works at a nonprofit helping victims of sex-trafficking, couldn't afford the retainer most private lawyers charge; she had to find a free one. Luckily, Landon's mentor put them in touch with Stein at Advocates for Children, which helps low-income families obtain special education services.

Stein says many low-income families aren't so lucky. "There's definitely far more need than availability," he said.

Next, like Isaac, Landon would need a neuropsych. Families who can't afford the neuropsych out of pocket typically have to wait months for it. Only two organizations in the city offer the evaluation pro bono, and both have long waiting lists.

Once school started in the fall, Yolanda and Landon visited several state-approved private schools, so they'd have some options lined up if the school relented. Landon loved The Community School in Teaneck, New Jersey, a small, grassy campus with classes of just five or six students. School officials even said they had a slot open.

Four months after joining the waitlist for a neuropsych, Landon finally got an appointment. The conclusion was exactly the same as in Isaac's case: Landon had dyslexia and an above-average IQ.

For Yolanda, the diagnosis was a sort of epiphany. She realized some of Landon's obstinate behaviors, including refusing to finish homework, were rooted in an inability to understand the work. "I finally understood why he was acting the way he was acting," she said. "It made me have more heart, and made me have more patience with him."

But the delay in accessing the neuropsych would ultimately cost the family. When the lawyer presented Landon's school with the results in January, officials relented, but only in part. They didn't permanently approve Landon for a private school, but said he could attend one for the remainder of that school year. After that, he would have to return to the public system.

By that point, however, there were no spots left at any of the state-approved private schools that specialize in dyslexia, including at The Community School.

Since Yolanda could not afford to go off the state-approved list, she knew Landon would have to remain at PS 242 for the foreseeable future. In February, she broke the news to her son.

"I had to tell him it would've been different if I just had the money to go somewhere else."

Landon's story illustrates what several families, advocates and researchers say is the double disadvantage of private placement: Poorer families not only face bigger barriers in securing it, but also are presented with few high-quality options once they do.

"There's a significant difference within the approved schools in terms of the quality," said Greg Cangiano, a New York special education lawyer. That's true not just in New York but across the country.

In this sense, the private landscape mimics the public one. But families said it can feel like a betrayal to go through the arduous and often emotionally exhausting process of accessing private placement only to discover options that seem worse than the public schools.

Yolanda Rodriguez

When people see you by yourself, they feel like they can talk to you any type of way.

In New York, competition for the most popular private placement schools has only grown more fierce as several have opened up to students whose families pay their own way or front the tuition, subsequently suing the city for reimbursement. That leaves fewer and fewer slots for parents like Yolanda.

Partly as a result, advocates say, the top special needs private schools on the state-approved list increasingly enroll wealthier and whiter student bodies. Thirty percent of the almost 3,000 students the city recommended for state-approved private schools last year were white, even though white students make up less than 15% of the city's special education enrollment, state data show.

For its part, the New York City Department of Education said it is working to make it easier for parents of all income levels to access special education options for students.

"We have hired more staff and added more programs through our $33 million citywide investment in special education and have been working hand in hand with the state to improve the impartial hearing process so that all families can pursue their due process rights quickly and easily," spokeswoman Danielle Filson said.

Isaac: Limos at school dropoff, but he loves reading

Almost as soon as Isaac started at Windward as a fifth grader, his reading started to improve. He learned rules for sounding out words he didn't recognize, and teachers across subjects coordinated to help him better understand language patterns. All reading materials were tailored to his level; teachers even rewrote New York Times articles in simpler language.

Three weeks into his fifth grade year, Isaac called down from his bedroom asking to keep the lights on so he could continue reading. "My husband and I looked at each other like: 'Who is that child up there? Where did he come from?' " Debbie recalled.

Windward would not let a reporter sit in on classes. But in an interview, principal John Russell said its approach relies on a near-religious adherence to reading science.

Each lesson is scripted in painstaking detail, and each moment of the day is a chance to reinforce language and vocabulary lessons. Teachers, for example, never instruct students to talk to each other during lessons, a common feature of mainstream classes, for fear that they'll pick up classmates' speaking errors. Instead, they designate time for students to check in individually with teachers.

The results are impressive: Thirty-six percent of students who have entered the school since 2005 had scored below average on a national reading exam. By the time they left the school, the number was down to 4%, according to Russell. New York City Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza visited last year to pick up tips for the city's approach to teaching literacy.

Dyslexia: USA TODAY readers with the disability share how tech helps them

Windward is picky about who it lets in. Students must have both a dyslexia diagnosis and an above-average score on an IQ test, and they can't have a history of serious behavior or attention deficit problems. The selective admissions allows the school to create "homogenous" classes of students with nearly identical learning needs, Russell said.

But "there's a huge lack of diversity" at Windward, Debbie says. Eighty-four percent of the students are white. Some of Isaac's classmates arrived at school in limousines or town cars. A plaque in the school's lobby commemorates two of the school's largest donors: the Hollywood power couple Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, whose son attended the school.

Isaac missed the diverse group of friends he made at his public elementary school, though he stayed in touch with a number of them. Windward ends in eighth grade, so when Isaac graduated last spring, he was one of only a handful of students from his class to attend a public high school. At Bard Early College High, Isaac will earn an associate degree along with his high school diploma.

Special accommodations: How the college admissions scandal hurt families of students with disabilities

The family doesn't regret its decision. Over a meal last year in an Upper West Side diner, Isaac and Debbie ticked off how much had changed in just four years.

Isaac is now a confident reader: Last spring he finished "The Autobiography of Malcolm X." He's written complex research papers on topics like the Harlem Renaissance, and recently took and passed two state Regents exams - standardized tests students typically don't take until high school.

At Windward, "his whole self-image changed," Debbie said.

Landon: Disappointment, then hope

After the disappointment of seeing a coveted slot at The Community School open up and then slip away before his approval came through, Landon finished out the school year at PS 242. Over the last few months, his situation there grew worse.

Early last spring, one of the two teachers for Landon's class of 20 quit. She was not replaced. Many of the kids in the class, a mixture of special education and regular students, have serious behavior needs. Landon said there were classroom fights almost every day, and his teacher often lost his voice from screaming. He often spent independent reading time with his head down on his desk. Toward the end of the school year, his mom said he hadn't brought home a homework assignment in months.

It's not that PS 242 was a bad school, Yolanda said. Her youngest daughter, who doesn't have special education needs, is thriving there. But the school simply couldn't accommodate Landon, she said.

The city's Department of Education is "committed to supporting students with dyslexia and reading disabilities," spokeswoman Filson said in an email. "Over the last four years we have trained approximately 10,000 teachers in reading programs."

But at PS 242, the situation seemed hopeless for Landon. "We can't really learn anything," he said.

The temporary approval he'd gotten to attend a private school at city expense expired at the end of the school year. The family filed a lawsuit with Stein, their pro bono lawyer.

In June they got some good news. Just weeks after Stein notified the city of the lawsuit, the school's special education team told the family it had "reconsidered," and would now recommend Landon for a private school placement starting in the fall.

In September, Landon started classes at the Community School - the one in New Jersey he liked. He's one of six students in his class, and he spends almost an hour each day on games and drills to help him decode words. "It helps me read more," Landon said.

The sudden success feels especially sweet because of the difficult path the family traveled to get there.

"I feel like we made it," Yolanda said. "Because it was a struggle and I watched him cry, be frustrated, be upset. Now he's so happy. It's a good feeling."

She added, "He wants to go to school now."
Sarah Carr and Sharon Lurye contributed to this report. Corrections and Clarifications: A previous version of this story used an outdated number to show how many special education students in New York City never receive all the services they're entitled to by law. The city estimates that figure at 15%. The story also has been updated to reflect that Debbie Meyer has one sister-in-law who found a private school for her child with a disability.

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Two boys with the same disability tried to get help. The rich student got it quickly. The poor student did not.

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NEW YORK - For both boys, the struggles at school started in the first grade. Isaac Rosenthal was a fast talker with a big vocabulary. But when it came time to read, he couldn't keep up with his classmates.

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Part I - Leadership for Science of Reading

1. Create and fill a new position for a cabinet-level DPI official to be called "The Assistant Superintendent for Reading Science Implementation." The incumbent shall have a singular focus on supporting implementation of the Science of Reading in all Wisconsin schools, public and private, that express a desire to do so. The incumbent shall be a person with extensive background and experience in implementing in the Science of Reading. She or he shall report directly to the State Superintendent, with a staff of at least 3 including administrative support. The incumbent shall secure professional coaching by a qualified consultant who has direct, successful experience with state-level systems change.

2. A Reading Science Implementation Task Force shall be convened by September 1, 2020. Quarterly meetings shall be open to the public with publicly posted minutes and agendas. Membership shall be determined by the Assistant Superintendent for Reading Science Implementation and must require demonstrated background or committment to Reading Science. The Task Force shall develop goals and action plans for the Assistant Superintendent for Reading Science Implementation and his/her office, and shall advise the State Superintendent on progress and resource needs. The Task Force shall include the Chairs of the Education Committees and the Chairs of the Colleges and Universities Committees in the State Legislature. The Task Force shall be terminated when at least 80% of Wisconsin's 4th Grade students are proficient on the NAEP.

3. A Scientific Advisory Board shall be convened by January 1, 2021. The Advisory Board shall be made up of no fewer than 5 researchers and implementation scientists selected by the Task Force. They shall have demonstrated expertise in Reading Science and/or state-level implementation of Reading Science. Their role shall be to ensure that the training, coaching, and resources made available by the Assistant Superintendent for Reading Science Implementation meet acceptable levels of scientific rigor. The Board shall be advisory to the Reading Science Implementation Task Force.

Part II - Training, Coaching, and Resources for Educators

The Task Force shall identify resources for statewide distribution in these areas:

○ Training and technical support for all educators who are interested.

○ Classroom coaching for all educators who are interested.

○ Guides to high-quality curricula and instructional resources.

Part III - Support Colleges of Education in Using the Science of Reading

All Schools of Education in the state will be offered the opportunity to revise instruction on the Science of Reading in their curricula. Standards for this instruction should be based on the International Dyslexia Association Knowledge and Practice Standards for Teachers of Reading.

Part IV - Improve School Report Cards

DPI should modify the state report card grades, an action that does not require a law change.
A school should be required to have at least 60% reading proficiency to "Meet Expectations" and at least 80% to "Exceed Expectations."

Part V - Comply with State Laws

The DPI shall begin closely following all state laws relevant to reading programming, including those identified in the proposed audit of DPI oversight of reading, including statutes requiring:

○ The evaluation of teacher preparation programs that is reported to the public.

○ Publication of results of the Foundations of Reading Test required for licensure.

○ Annual reporting on the method of reading instruction used in school districts and the textbook series used to teach reading in the districts.

○ Recommendations regarding how the programs and operations of school districts with low reading performance may be improved and periodic assessments of school district implementation of the recommendations. We believe that this problem calls for a comprehensive, coordinated initiative aimed at giving every teacher in Wisconsin access to training and support to use the Science of Reading.

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Part I - Leadership for Science of Reading Create and fill a new position for a cabinet-level DPI official to be called "The Assistant Superintendent for Reading Science Implementation." The incumbent shall have a singular focus on supporting implementation of the Science of Reading in all Wisconsin schools, public and private, that express a desire to do so.

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How not to talk about the science of reading

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If the science of reading proponents are going to "win the reading war" they will need to change tactics. Science isn't the problem. Reading isn't even the problem. There should be little debate about that. The main obstacle is the methodology in which the war is waged. I understand passion, believe me. Being passionate about a cause is commendable. However, passion doesn't always lead to sound systematic change efforts. The science is solid, the tactics of those working in the name of SoR are not.

It isn't the professional websites, webinars, or publications that are turning people away. Unfortunately, it is some of the Facebook groups, tweets, building "cliques", and advocates that need to adjust their approach if the science of reading approach is to truly take hold. There are great educators advocating for an admirable cause. Tactics of some, however, will need to change to forward their position. Directing that profound passion to proven systematic change strategies will go far in redirecting schools and bringing educators together on the best practices in reading. Take them or leave them, here are some things that advocates may want to consider.

It can't be us vs. them. There are two other major debates going on in this country and their tactics are the same. It is pro vs. anti. As we've seen over the past several decades, putting the concept into us vs. them never changes anyone's mind. You are wrong, I am right thinking will galvanize those who think like you, but does little to change the minds of the other side. You can win over some undecided people, however, with us vs. them you risk the person agreeing with "them" at which point they are unlikely to come to your way of thinking. So, stop talking like that. Don't bring the feeling of us vs. them to your conversation. Don't "accuse" people of aligning with "them". It does nothing for your cause. When I send someone to a message board to learn, please don't accuse that educator of being "them". We are all educators, we are one. Not two. Starting talking that way. It doesn't mean giving up your convictions. Just change how you talk to people.

Stop demonizing. When a side comes across as saying there is absolutely nothing good about a particular group of people or concepts you immediately lose credibility with those who currently align to the those beliefs. You will win way more people over talking about the pros of your stance then you will with negative discussions about the other. For instance, if I've used something with success, and have experienced that success first hand, you telling me it is the worst thing on the face of the earth does little to make me want to listen further. Your tone goes a long way in getting someone else to listen. There are BETTER ways to do something. Sell it.

Stop attacking administration. Just stop. I'm trying to get educational leaders on board. They don't need to hear, "Why is admin so pig-headed?" "If admin knew what they were doing..." "Principals are so clueless..." "If administrators weren't so....". You need administrators. Make a talking points sheet for them. Invite them. Don't blame them.

Stop planting seeds of paranoia. This is reading. Not a conspiracy. Not spy vs. spy. Reading. Keep the focus on reading.

Stop personal attacks. People are being attacked by name. It doesn't further your cause. It rallies your troops, but does nothing to bring new people inline with your effort.

Start using data. Start highlighting classrooms and schools using their actual scores. Stop spending time on how others fail and focus on how SoR succeeds.

Start using experts. Learn from how the experts spread their message. You have educational leaders in SoR that get their message across without chasing people away. I've seen too many posts of people leaving because it isn't an inviting community. To win, it needs to be.

Start acknowledging success. If someone says something worked in their classroom, tell them great. However, let them know why SoR would work even better. Build them up to change, don't belittle them into submission.

Read to listen, not respond. PLEASE read what people write, instead of skimming so you can develop some "witty" comeback that "proves your point." I sent a reading specialist to a site. The discussion was about the five components of reading and why teaching each component was valuable. It completely aligned with SoR. This specialist said, "I agree, there needs to be a balance." All someone saw was the word balance and this specialist was labeled and told she aligned with whole language and that she knew nothing about reading. So much for sending new people. The respondent didn't even fully read before responding. We work hard getting people to listen. Don't chase them away by not.

Assume positive intent. Everyone, no matter their view, is trying to do best by kids. Remember that. Everyone is working toward the same goal; to service students in the best way. Just because someone has different view doesn't mean they don't care about kids. Their practices can be improved, and they need your help, but don't accuse them of not caring.

Be the Red Cross, not the Marines. Stop thinking war, start thinking resources and support.

Here's my prediction. Some advocates won't get past the title. I will be accused of being "whole language" because they won't read past the title. I will get BLASTED as being anti SoR. Not the case. To promote SoR, tactics need to change. It doesn't mean lose the passion, just channel it differently. Reading depends on it.

Kindergarten teacher, elementary administrator, camp director, husband, dad, grandpa, race car driver, outdoorsman View all posts by Eric Becker

Published

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The Science of Reading cannot Win the Reading Wars....unless strategies are changed

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If the science of reading proponents are going to "win the reading war" they will need to change tactics. Science isn't the problem. Reading isn't even the problem. There should be little debate about that. The main obstacle is the methodology in which the war is waged. I understand passion, believe me.

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Tier I and Tier II

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Need to complete the COVID-19 Screening Questionnaire? Here is the form for students and employees and the form for visitors and contractors.

Are you an MSJ employee looking for the contact tracing form? You can find it in the MSJU COVID-19 Testing Scheduler site. Use your Mount username and password to login to that site.

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The Science of Reading in Teacher Preparation | School of Education | myMount

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Need to complete the COVID-19 Screening Questionnaire? Here is the form for students and employees and the form for visitors and contractors. Are you an MSJ employee looking for the contact tracing form? You can find it in the MSJU COVID-19 Testing Scheduler site. Use your Mount username and password to login to that site.

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Provided by Mt. St. Joe’s

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National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ)

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Teacher Prep Review: Program Performance in Early Reading Instruction (2020)

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Pediatrician’s Guide to Early ID of Children at Risk for Dyslexia

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Pediatrician’s Guide to Early ID of Children at Risk for Dyslexia

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Ohio Chapter, American Academy of Pediatrics

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Welcome - Ohio Chapter, American Academy of Pediatrics

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Early Literacy Curriculum, University of MD.  MSDE is requiring all PK programs in MD to use this #SOR curriculum.

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Welcome to CSW
What is CSW?
Children Study Their World (CSW) is an early childhood curriculum for four-year-olds, based on principles of project-based inquiry and driven by evidence-based practices that build teacher capacity and support successful implementation.

CSW consists of eight interdisciplinary, content-rich projects that build upon children's knowledge and increase in complexity.

CSW was developed by the Center for Early Childhood Education and Intervention (CECEI) with funding from the Maryland State Department of Education, Division of Early Childhood.

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Children Study Their World: Curriculum for Fours | UMD College of Education

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What is CSW? Children Study Their World (CSW) is an early childhood curriculum for four-year-olds, based on principles of project-based inquiry and driven by evidence-based practices that build teacher capacity and support successful implementation. CSW consists of eight interdisciplinary, content-rich projects that build upon children's knowledge and increase in complexity.

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Reading Acquisition from Novice to Expert

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Reading Acquisition from Novice to Expert

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This document is designed to assist those that are just beginning their journey toward understanding the science of reading. Dr. Mark Seidenberg defines the science of reading “as a body of basic research in developmental psychology, educational psychology, cognitive science, and cognitive neuroscience on reading, one of the most complex human behaviors, and its biological (neural, genetic) bases. This research has been conducted for decades in the US and around the world. The research has important implications for helping children to succeed, but it has not been incorporated in how teachers are trained for the job or how children are taught.”

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This document is designed to assist those that are just beginning their journey toward understanding the science of reading. Dr. Mark Seidenberg defines the science of reading "as a body of basic research in developmental psychology, educational psychology, cognitive science, and cognitive neuroscience on reading, one of the most complex human behaviors, and its biological (neural, genetic) bases. This research has been conducted for decades in the US and around the world. The research has important implications for helping children to succeed, but it has not been incorporated in how teachers are trained for the job or how children are taught."

As you may be painfully aware, the science of reading has NOT been incorporated into most teacher training programs. In order to help with this process, I have curated resources to help you on your science of reading journey. Understanding the "why" you are doing a certain practice is just as important as knowing "how". Finally, I want to applaud you for taking this step in your teaching career. I know it may be difficult; you may even become angry because you have not been taught this information in your undergraduate and graduate programs or even your advanced certifications for reading. But every journey begins with a first step. Thanks for taking the first step on this journey.

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This document is designed to assist those that are just beginning their journey toward understanding the science of reading. Dr. Mark Seidenberg defines the science of reading "as a body of basic research in developmental psychology, educational psychology, cognitive science, and cognitive neuroscience on reading, one of the most complex human behaviors, and its biological (neural, genetic) bases.

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DDRI: Curated Information on the Science of Reading

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DDRI: Curated Information on the Science of Reading

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Decoding Dyslexia Rhode Island - Scientifically-Based Reading Instruction

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Public Schools are Failing Black Students with Dyslexia

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Public Schools are Failing Black Students with Dyslexia

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This is the second part of a two-part series on dyslexia. Listen to Part One here.
Our stories are made to be heard. Please listen if you are able.

Geraldine Robinson stepped proudly onto the stage and stated her name. What she said next was an understatement: "I am a fightin' grandmother."

Robinson, 65, is a devout and joyful Christian who's now raising three of her grandchildren. She's been a relentless advocate for two of them in particular. And, she told the audience, the stakes are high: "I am fighting for their life."

On this fall evening in 2019, the crowd gathered to celebrate the 40th anniversary of a disability rights nonprofit -- and honor this Oakland matriarch. Her grandson and his younger sister showed early signs of dyslexia.

"About 30 years ago, I had two sons that had dyslexia," Robinson said, her voice rising. "So I knew some of the signs."

Science has taught us a lot since then about what exactly dyslexia is and isn't. The neurobiological learning disorder affects the brain's ability to match letters with their shapes and sounds. It impacts reading, writing and sometimes speech. And it runs in families. So Robinson talked to the kids' teachers.

"I said, 'We have a history of dyslexia.' And they said, 'No that wasn't the problem.' That's when the fight began."

Research points to effective ways to teach kids with dyslexia to read. The approach is called "Structured Literacy." The longer the wait, though, the longer it takes. But evaluations of Robinson's grandkids never mentioned dyslexia. Instead, they assigned the kids to a different special ed category.

"Intellectually disabled," Robinson said, drawing out the words.

Her grandkids were first evaluated for special education at an Oakland charter school, records show, and already had their special education plans when they arrived at the Oakland Unified School District. Eventually, the district changed the grandaughter's primary designation to "specific learning disability," which included dyslexia but made no mention of it. Her grandson's "intellectual disability" designation remained.

That label suggests a child is globally imapired. Low expectations often translate into fewer intensive resources to address underlying learning challenges, like dyslexia. Bias adds another twist: Nationwide, black students are overrepresented in the category of intellectual disability. And some educators are more likely to punish black students for falling short, even if it's clear the work is too hard for them.

"My grandson, who didn't have a behavior problem, was never able to go on field trips," Robinson explained. "They wouldn't allow him because of his academics."

On this night, though, Robinson was feeling grateful. Because an advocate here at the Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund taught her exactly which law to cite to fight for her grandson, "which changed his life because he was able to go hang out with the rest of the kids."

Her bigger news? A few months earlier, the Oakland Unified School District agreed to pay for intensive evaluations of both kids by an outside neuropsychologist. So, Robinson said to hoots and applause, "they were tested for dyslexia after five years of fighting."

As each year slipped by, Robinson's grandkids fell further and further behind. And securing those independent evaluations wasn't the end of her fight.
Early Signs
Cheryl Theis, the education advocate who's been helping Robinson, put it this way when she introduced the family:

"They're a perfect example of doing everything right and still getting nowhere, because assumptions were made around the intersection of race and disability that these children were just low-ability children."

Robinson doesn't want to further stigmatize the kids, so she asked that they not be named. This story relies on special education records that she shared, and focuses mainly on her grandson. Because, Robinson said, as an African American boy, it's his future she fears for the most.

Many private sector resources are available to families of dyslexic learners who have the money to pay for them. Robinson is on a fixed income. She's not one of them.

I'm sure if I had the resources, I could put him in a private school and he would get the help. But because I don't have the resources I can't get the help and so he be a candidate for the state prison or whatever prison there is.

"I'm sure if I had the resources, I could put him in a private school and he would get the help," she said in an interview back in April 2019, "But because I don't have the resources I can't get the help and so he be a candidate for the state prison or whatever prison there is."

She has reason to be fearful. A study of Texas prisoners published two decades ago found that more than three-fourths were functionally illiterate and about half scored poorly on tests that indicate a likelihood of dyslexia. Studies have also shown that kids who can't read at grade level by the 3rd grade are more likely to drop out of high school.

Robinson has had full custody of the kids for a while, but even when they were toddlers they lived with her off and on. Her grandson, she said, showed red flags for dyslexia. His letters were backwards or sideways or upside down. And he struggled to match written words with their sounds.

"He would have such a hard time trying to distinguish what the word was," she said. "If I pointed out the phonics, he could say it, but then when we put it to the word, he could not read the word with the phonics in there."

Robinson read to him a lot. The Dr. Seuss books, and the Amelia Bedilia series. Her grandson loved wrestling, so they brought home wrestling magazines, but soon he wouldn't even page through them, he said, because it was too much of a struggle. Outside of those frustrations, though, Robinson said he was and is a gentle caring kid -- a "people pleaser" who will share whatever is his to make others feel good.

He's also a drummer. He started at five years old and now plays at the family's small East Oakland church. His grandmother said he " almost just automatically knew how to do it. You know, he could keep a beat right off the bat."

And he's a whiz at building and repairing things. The vacuum cleaner, the doorbell, the list goes on. A little over a year ago, when he was 12, Robinson said, a friend bought a part for her car and came over with it, but he "couldn't figure out how to put it on." That's when her "Little Man," as she calls him, stepped in.
Lost Time
"He told my friend, 'Move back, move back, I got an idea.' And he says, 'Go get me some black tape. Grandma got some black tape.'" Then "he went in up under the hood and fixed it!" Robinson recalled, still amazed and delighted. "And the car is still running. Just, creative, you know, he can see something and create it. It's just the writing and the reading part he cannot do."

That bleeds into every school subject. Nationwide curriculum standards developed about a decade ago, called Common Core, for example, rely heavily on word problems to teach math, "and so you're just not doing a math problem, you're doing reading and math," she said. "He tries, he really does try but with the schools not accepting his disability the way it is, he has lost a lot of ground."

To be clear, Oakland Unified didn't just abandon Robinson's grandson to fail. His records show he got speech therapy and was pulled out of general education classes to get extra help. But none of it involved the type of reading instruction dyslexic learners need. Though his annual special ed documents were supposed to address his strengths, they mostly didn't. They did spell out ambitious goals for him year after year. But, his grandmother said, "they never achieved the goals. He's never achieved a goal. "

Evaluations show that some teachers blamed him for his frustrations. One fifth grade teacher wrote, "He sulks a lot, is often angry, but will not talk about it. He rarely attempts any classwork." A 7th grade teacher said he "sometimes can be very difficult when it comes to his work." Robinson said teachers regularly told her that he "didn't apply himself." She knew that wasn't it.

When dyslexia goes unrecognized and unremediated, experts say, low self-esteem, depression and anxiety almost always follow. Robinson said that during her grandson's 7th grade year, he was sleeping so much she had him evaluated for narcolepsy. That wasn't the problem. One week that spring, "he came home with this headache and the shakes and the whole nine yards where he's frustrated that he can't," she said. He stayed in that state all week, she said, sleeping constantly, "terrified and stressed."

Even as the years took a toll on her grandson, though, big things were happening in Sacramento. A new law took effect in 2016 that called for experts to craft guidelines for California's public schools spelling out best practices for teacher training, universal screening, and that type of curriculum dyslexic kids need, termed Structured Literacy by the International Dyslexia Association.

But the guidelines aren't mandatory, and Oakland Unified has plenty of company when it comes to falling short with dyslexic learners. That statewide focus on this learning disability, though, likely helped Robinson, when in 2018, she filed a complaint with the California Department of Education. She prevailed.

The state ordered OUSD to assess Robinson's grandson for dyslexia. They did. There was a problem though.

"The result of that evaluation was so poor," said Theis, the advocate with the Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund who has been helping Robinson. "I mean there is no other way to put it, and again I say that as someone who has a lot of respect for people working at the school district level."

Evaluations are supposed to draw on parent and teacher interviews, class observation, and a variety of tests conducted by an educational psychologist. But, a review of the district's evaluation, ordered by the state, shows it had none of that. Theis consulted a dyslexia expert, who told her that the OUSD psychologist responsible "clearly had no training in dyslexia and how to evaluate and identify it," she said.

Rather than turn to the state guidelines or other expert sources, Theis' consultant noticed, the district psychologist had pulled her dyslexia definitions directly from two non-scientific websites.

She also conducted no new tests on Robinson's grandson. She never met him. Instead, the paperwork shows, she relied on his previous evaluations. And because those had determined he was Intellectually Disabled, she concluded, "he does not fit the profile of a student with dyslexia."

Theis says that assuming a child with Intellectual Disability cannot have dyslexia or benefit from dyslexia intervention "is factually incorrect. We know from the science that those two things are not mutually exclusive."

Plus, Robinson had contested those very evaluations. So at the next meeting to discuss the boy's special ed plan, Theis asked right away for an independent evaluation with an outside neuropsychologist, a specialist with the training to do a thorough job. And the district agreed.

"But it begs the question," said Theis, "what parent who doesn't know that there's even such a thing as the right to challenge an assessment would just go, 'Well, that didn't seem right but I guess they're the experts.'"
Finally, An Answer
OUSD officials declined to comment on specific student cases, citing privacy reasons. But in a statement, a spokesman wrote that the district "is committed to providing explicit, daily instruction in foundational literacy skills" to students. Over the past year, he added, OUSD has taken steps to implement three separate curricula that meet the state dyslexia guidelines, for students in early grades and those in special ed who've been left behind. And an early literacy screener will roll out next year.

But half a dozen literacy advocates and experts inside and outside the district said the process has been bumpy, teacher training inadequate, and implementation not far reaching enough.

As for Robinson, last fall, she got the results of those outside evaluations, which included interviews with teachers and family and several days of testing. Both grandkids, they confirmed, "have dyslexia."

Not just dyslexia. The evaluations note that both struggle with other learning differences, too. But, the evaluator concluded, neither child meets the criteria for Intellectual Disability.

This past year has been better for them. The district placed them at a different school where they've gotten access to speech-to-text and text-to-speech technology -- to help override their reading and writing difficulties. Robinson said her grandson is particularly transformed. He's in a special education class now for kids with "mild to moderate" disabilities, with some students closer to his academic level.

"He's good at math," she said, "and he was able to help other kids. By the end of the school year he had a little more self-confidence, self-worth."

An evaluation by his new special ed teacher three months ago said he'd made "immense social, emotional, and academic progress." It called him "an exceptional math student" who "always cooperates with his teacher and students alike." In science class, he's created recycling projects and presentations on natural disasters.

And, it turns out, his teacher happens to be among 170 special ed instructors that according to district officials recently received ten hours of training on one of the new structured literacy curricula. It's called SPIRE and the teacher wrote in her evaluation that Robinson's grandson was making his way through the very first level.

Robinson is grateful for these changes. But, she pointed out, "I've been fighting for this for six years."

That time lag matters. Her grandson just finished 8th grade -- at a 3rd grade reading level. His younger sister is even farther behind. Just beginning to teach them the foundations of literacy at this age, experts say, will take skill and experience that will be difficult to convey in ten hours of training.

At a school board meeting last February, OUSD Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell acknowledged that the research is clear on the type of instruction struggling readers need in order to move forward. The hitch is training. Graduate programs need to be educating their students so new teachers come into the classroom with the foundational knowledge they need, she said. As for the district, she said all teachers need to receive the training and materials they need "to make sure that all of our students learn to read."

And soon, Johnson-Trammell announced, "the NAACP is also going be raising up what we need to be doing differently around addressing dyslexia."

The superintendent's comments followed a unanimous pledge by the board to work with black and Latino families demanding "Literacy for All." That campaign, launched by a grassroots parent group called The Oakland REACH, packed the board meeting that night to challenge generations of dismal reading scores -- and push for the needed literacy resources.

So Robinson's kids are far from alone.

Kareem Weaver is a former Oakland educator who sits on the Oakland NAACP's education committee and has been pressing the district to comply with state dyslexia guidelines. For starters, he said in an interview, perceptions of educators need to change.

"That gap between expectations and student performance, that's the gap where assessment lies, where intervention lies, and where support lies," he said. "And so unfortunately many of our African American students get lost in that gap."

Credit Oakland Board of Education Public Meeting

That in-person conversation the superintendent promised to have with Weaver and others from the Oakland NAACP about dyslexia hasn't happened. Covid intervened. The pandemic has also cast an enormous shadow over OUSD's budget, raising questions about whether more intensive training for teachers will fall off the agenda.

Weaver said there is no more time to waste. Teaching those foundations of literacy that work for dyslexic students to all young learners is key to making sure more kids don't fall behind. Helping those who already are, like Robinson's grandkids, is a greater challenge. But here's a surprise: The district was once known for a reading clinic that did just that.

Launched in 2001, the Oakland Reading Clinic was highly regarded as successful. It opened at an OUSD school site, where students from as many as three dozen campuses were bussed in daily. Each received extensive instruction for nearly two full hours.

A district memo explains that the district opened the clinic to save money. Parents were lawyering up because their struggling readers weren't making any progress. And OUSD was paying big bucks to send them to a private learning center in Berkeley that teaches a well-known structured literacy curriculum called Lindamood Bell. So, OUSD teamed with that center, which provided extensive training and as much as a year of constant mentoring to district literacy teachers at their own clinic.

One parent, whose daughter with severe dyslexia attended the OUSD clinic, tells me it was their godsend.

"It taught her how to sound out words. It taught her how to recognize the symbols," said Jean Townsend of Oakland. It also taught her how to help her own daughter. That daughter is now in college, where she receives a slew of accommodations, including a notetaker, to which she is entitled under federal disability law. And when her daughter graduates, Townsend said, she wants to work in the juvenile justice system with youth whose own learning disabilities went undetected when they were in public school.

Like Robinson, Townsend is African American, and she said she had to be the constant "squeaky wheel" to make sure her child would not be abandoned to fail. But, she said, she also made it clear she was prepared to sue. And she had the means to pay for medical tests to persuade OUSD of her diagnosis, and for a private educational therapist for her daughter for two years.

Robinson doesn't have those resources, and said she had never heard of the Oakland Reading Clinic. That may be because the district never flagged her grandkids for that kind of intensive reading remediation.

Three years ago, in the midst of a budget crisis, the district decentralized the clinic. The goal, the district spokesman said, was to serve more kids without having to put them on buses. Most recently, literacy specialists assigned to the clinic were traveling to see students at their own schools. But, several OUSD literacy experts tell me the intensity and scope of the clinic's services have been in steady decline for the past few years. It's now on hold for at least the next school year due to Covid, the district confirmed.

For Robinson, every week that passes without intensive help is cause for worry.

"That's what I pray for every night, that a change will come," she said "But I need some help for the change that will come."

To compensate Robinson, records show, state education officials ordered OUSD to provide three hours of one-on-one tutoring for her granddaughter. Robinson said thet tutor had no training in dyslexia. The state ordered 20 hours of tutoring for her grandson. But OUSD has doubled that. Earlier this month a tutor -- who received the district's ten hour training in SPIRE -- began working with him remotely, she said, starting over at Level 1.

Providing remediation to students who are far behind is far more costly than intervening when they are just learning to read. So short-term costs will likely be dwarfed by those to come. And Oakland Unified's neighbor to the north offers a cautionary tale. A class-action lawsuit alleging the Berkeley Unified School District systemically failed its students with dyslexia for years is pending in federal court.

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Public Schools Are Failing Black Students With Dyslexia: One Grandmother's Story

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This is the second part of a two-part series on dyslexia. Listen to Part One here . Our stories are made to be heard. Please listen if you are able. Geraldine Robinson stepped proudly onto the stage and stated her name. What she said next was an understatement: "I am a fightin' grandmother."

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Equitable Practices for Reading and Dyslexia 

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Equitable Practices for Reading and Dyslexia 

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Screening, Instruction, Intervention

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Literacy for All: Equitable Practices for Reading and Dyslexia

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In these three video presentations, teachers, administrators, and parents learn from the experts about how to identify students who are at risk for reading struggles in pre-k and early elementary school. You will also discover best practices for teaching all students to read, including those who need additional interventions.

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See the TAB on Dyslexia, Dysgraphia and Dyscalculia

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PA Technical Assistance & Training (PaTTAN)

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PA Technical Assistance & Training (PaTTAN)

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PD and Conferences

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Working with the Bureau of Special Education (BSE), Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE), PaTTAN provides a full array of professional development and technical assistance targeted to improving student results. This professional development and technical assistance takes many forms in order to meet the varied needs of PaTTAN's constituents. Week-long summer institutes, ongoing professional development series, webinars, on-site assistance, and individual student or teacher supports are some of the means by which PaTTAN provides support to schools.

Locate PaTTAN Consultant Contact Us

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Working with the Bureau of Special Education (BSE), Pennsylvania Department of Education (PDE), PaTTAN provides a full array of professional development and technical assistance targeted to improving student results. This professional development and technical assistance takes many forms in order to meet the varied needs of PaTTAN's constituents.

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On a summer afternoon, Ciara Whelan, a teacher at a New York City elementary school, knocks on the apartment door of one of her students in the Bronx.

Melissa, the student's mother, welcomes her guest with a huge platter of snacks - shrimp rolls and dill dip. Melissa explains that this past school year - third grade - her daughter, Sapphira, fell behind in her reading because she got a phone and spent too much time messaging her friends on apps like TikTok. (We're not using their last names to protect the student's privacy.)

"I think it was not even about school itself - I think it was just distractions in class," Melissa says.

This home visit is the kickoff to a reading program called Springboard Collaborative.

Springboard runs after-school and summer programs with struggling readers in low-income elementary schools in 13 cities across the U.S., including Girls Prep Lower East Side Elementary School, which Sapphira attends. Once each week, a family member - mom, dad, grandma, an older sibling - attends an hourlong workshop to help learn and practice the strategies students are learning in class.

"Parent engagement is the beating heart of our programs," says founder Alejandro Gibes de Gac. "It's the spirit in the cocktail."

Here's why he believes this is so important. About 1 in 3 fourth-graders in the U.S. is reading below grade level, according to the test known as the Nation's Report Card. This figure hasn't changed for decades - not with more testing, not with the Common Core.

Gibes de Gac points out that children spend most of their waking hours outside the classroom. Like an orange, he likes to say, you can try to squeeze as much juice as you can out of that wedge that is class time, but there's a lot of untapped potential in the remaining segments. Yet most parent-engagement efforts from schools, he argues, are lightweight, marginal - a fundraiser here, a game night there. He says few programs directly share teaching strategies from the classroom for a core subject.

Sapphira's Springboard program is held in an upstairs classroom at Girls Prep Lower East Side, a charter school in Manhattan. A roomful of dads and moms are crammed into little chairs alongside their daughters. Everyone is wearing a blue T-shirt that says "SPRINGBOARD COLLABORATIVE" on the front. Jehron, Sapphira's dad, sits with his daughter, holding an index card to help mark her place in the book Sideways Stories From Wayside School.

"You're going too fast, OK?" he tells her. "Right now you need to slow down."

After a few minutes of reading together, Whelan tells parents to ask students to summarize what is happening every few pages, to check comprehension. "If they can't tell you, it doesn't always mean the book is too hard," she explains.

In the past seven years, Springboard has collected what Gibes de Gac calls, tongue-in-cheek, a "nauseating" amount of data to prove its effectiveness. For example: In just five weeks, on average, 3 out of 4 students get to the next reading level or even further. One district, Oakland Unified School District, had an independent evaluation that found that Springboard was one of its most effective literacy investments.

The program also gives books to each child. Backpacks full of school supplies and tablets are offered as incentives for completing the whole program. The idea, Gibes de Gac explains, is for families to practice setting goals and forming new positive habits. When the program follows up six months later, the evaluations show that families are still reading together more than before.

Gibes de Gac started this program when he was only 22, and his personal experiences played a big role in its development. His father is a Chilean playwright who was imprisoned by Augusto Pinochet's regime for a political play titled Libertad! Libertad!. His mother, a teacher, was born in Puerto Rico, and his parents met in Paris and subsequently toured with their own theater company.

When Gibes de Gac was in kindergarten, his parents came to the United States in search of better schools. It wasn't always a friendly place to be. As an eighth-grader, he published a memoir of his experiences being bullied as an immigrant student. "I became passionate about the right of other people to a great education."

He made it to Harvard University. Then Teach for America in Philadelphia. "I was teaching in a Puerto Rican neighborhood. I saw myself in my students. I saw my parents in their parents.

"It was more than just our shared language and complexion," he explains. "It was the look! My students' parents looked at their children with all the love, commitment and potential that any parent sees in their child. And yet my school and our system approached low-income parents as liabilities rather than assets."

He said that the school system often treated his parents as "pushy immigrants with bad English." Instead, he says, parents are "the single greatest underutilized resource to helping children who are struggling."

This is true, he maintains, even if parents aren't educated or fluent in English. About a third of Springboard parents don't speak English as a first language, and many, like Sapphira's parents, are immigrants.

To prove that families like his own could be powerful partners in learning, he held his first Springboard workshop eight years ago at the school where he taught in Philadelphia.

At the first home visit, teachers ask for parents' help. "The parent promises the child, 'Here's how much and how often I'm going to read with you together.' " And the child, in turn, promises to read on his or her own. That promise is powerful: On average, Gibes de Gac says, 91% of the families come to every single workshop.

That has been true for Jehron, who works as a private driver. Melissa, Sapphira's mom, has been busy at her job as a nanny. The family commutes an hour and a half each way to Girls Prep.

"So far so good," says Jehron. "She's doing really well. I think she went up half a level."

Sapphira is not so enthusiastic about spending her summer mornings inside. "It's ... OK."

But, she admits, she can see the improvement too.

"When I'm reading, [it] sounds more better, every time ... because I know most of the words."

Springboard plans to scale up by franchising its model, with a goal of reaching 100,000 children in the next four years. It is also creating an app. Currently it's running tests in different cities to see which parts of the program are essential and which could be cut if a particular school lacks the budget for them. For example, the free tablet and backpack, it has found, don't seem to make much difference in the program's success.

The key instead is the promise that parents make to their children.

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What If You Could Change Your Child's Future In One Hour Every Week?

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On a summer afternoon, Ciara Whelan, a teacher at a New York City elementary school, knocks on the apartment door of one of her students in the Bronx. Melissa, the student's mother, welcomes her guest with a huge platter of snacks - shrimp rolls and dill dip.

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FREE PD for teachers and parents

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Introduction to the Science of Reading

Thanks to the input of over 100 educators, this presentation is now available free for you to use to introduce others to better reading outcomes.

Watch the presentation, then grab the files below and make it your own!

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Thanks to the input of over 100 educators, this presentation is now available free for you to use to introduce others to better reading outcomes. Watch the presentation, then grab the files below and make it your own!

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Educator directed PD

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The Science of Reading - The Reading League

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The Reading League's mission is to advance the understanding and use of evidence-aligned reading instruction through the science of reading.

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The story of a group of parents who took on the system, and won.​​​​​​​

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Online resources to deal w/ COVID school landscape

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TheDyslexia and Reading Disabilities Resource Guide For Families and Teachers Affected by COVID-19 is provided by the International Dyslexia Association (IDA) to deliver resources, both from and IDA and external sources, to students, families, and teachers affected by school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Included in the guide you will find

Information on IDA's provider directory and branches

Information on IDA's Accredited Educator Preparation Program

Teacher and educator resources, including webinars, articles, and guides

Family and student resources, including webinars, blogs, and fun activities

Government and nonprofit resources

and much, much more

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Dyslexia and Reading Disabilities Resource Guide for Families and Teac

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The Dyslexia and Reading Disabilities Resource Guide For Families and Teachers Affected by COVID-19 is provided by the International Dyslexia Association (IDA) to deliver resources, both from and IDA and external sources, to students, families, and teachers affected by school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Incl

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Recognizing English Language Learners with Reading Disabilities: Minimizing Bias, Accurate Identification, and Timely Intervention

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English language learner (ELL) is a broad term used in North America to refer to students who are learning English as a second or additional language. They may ...

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IDA Perspectives

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Recognizing English Language Learners with Reading Disabilities: Minimizing Bias, Accurate Identification, and Timely Intervention

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English language learner (ELL) is a broad term used in North America to refer to students who are learning English as a second or additional language. They may ...

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Asking the Right Questions About Reading Instruction

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Asking the Right Questions About Reading Instruction

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How is this reading program different from all other reading programs?

It's not Passover yet, but we should be asking the following four questions:
Do the 60% or more of students across the country not meeting grade level proficiency in reading all have learning disabilities?

Why is student growth stagnant even though so many children receive reading pullout services?

Why do so many students have IEPs?

Why is the importance of "fundamental" skills recognized in all disciplines and endeavors but literacy education?

To answer these four questions, I can't help but use metaphor. The following is a quote taken from the book Cured, by Dr. Jeffrey Rediger, who describes the work of the scientist, Antoine Bechamp, a less-known contemporary of Louis Pasteur. Bechamp thought Pasteur's approach to killing germs with antibiotics was dangerous and short-sighted.

According to Dr. Rediger, Bechamp "compared the situation to a pile of excrement sitting on the ground, attracting flies. Do you keep swatting the flies away one by one, indefinitely? Or do you remove the pile of excrement?"

Rather than using an ever-increasing smorgasbord of antibiotics to treat illness, Bechamp urged physicians to first focus on prevention of disease. Keeping tissues healthy and ensuring cells have the nutrients to function optimally should be the priority, according to Bechamp.

Nobody listened, and today we are seeing the effects of the over-use of antibiotics and a movement toward prevention.

In education, we continue to "swat flies." Just as the medical establishment's focus had long been on "killing the germs," the education establishment continues to pour money into interventions without removing the underlying cause of failure. Unfortunately, we cannot intervene our way out of problems caused by ineffective core instruction.

When, as Dr. Rediger suggests, we "fixate on tearing down disease at all costs instead of building up flourishing health and immunity," there's a tendency to overprescribe antibiotics to patients at an alarming rate. This is the same risk we are confronted with in literacy education.

If we screen children for dyslexia but, at the same time, continue to use teaching strategies such as picture cueing, whole word memorization, and repetitive leveled books, we will spend a fortune on "destroying the microbe" without addressing the fundamental cause. Many of the screened children will be deemed at-risk for dyslexia and placed in groups for remediation when all they really needed was to be taught correctly from the start.

In school districts across America, administrators are finally recognizing the importance of explicit instruction for some children. On the surface, this approach gives the appearance that the problem can easily be eradicated. However, it is simply another example of the "kill the germ at all costs" theory Bechamp found questionable. In the medical model, despite obscene amounts of money spent on finding the next miracle pill, we haven't been able to eradicate many of the most serious diseases.

Perhaps rather than focusing on remediation or a quick fix when signs of a problem arise or are finally recognized, we should build a strong "immune" system. Let's ask our schools to find ways to create a learning environment free of toxins by nurturing a healthy foundation.

The quality of a question determines the quality of an answer. We in education should be asking better questions.

How is reading taught in general education? This is THE most important question, as it determines the number of children in intervention services and special education!

Which assessments point to the skills necessary for reading success?

Do the assessments being used value "levels" over skills?

Does an A-Z gradient system help inform us sufficiently to give children targeted instruction?

Are children being taught with phonics but told to use the context and pictures receiving conflicting and confusing messages?

Do the books used in our classrooms encourage guessing instead of decoding words?

Do reading teachers understand how to teach reading using evidence-based practices or are they using the same ineffective strategies that do not produce results?
It's time to stop swatting flies, remove the excrement, and ask better questions.
Faith Borkowsky is the founder of High Five Literacy and Academic Coaching, with over thirty years of experience as a classroom teacher, reading and learning specialist, regional literacy coach, administrator, and tutor. Ms. Borkowsky is a Certified Dyslexia Practitioner and provides professional development for teachers and school districts, as well as parent workshops, presentations, and private consultations. Ms. Borkowsky is the author of the award-winning book, Failing Students or Failing Schools? A Parent's Guide to Reading Instruction and Intervention and the "If Only I Would Have Known..." series. She is also a board member of Teach My Kid to Read, a 501(c) non-profit organization with a mission to support and empower students, teachers, and parents through education so all kids, including those with dyslexia, learn to read.

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Asking the Right Questions About Reading Instruction and Intervention

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It's not Passover yet, but we should be asking the following four questions: Do the 60% or more of students across the country not meeting grade level proficiency in reading all have learning disabilities? Why is student growth stagnant even though so many children receive reading pullout services?

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Letter sound knowledge, phoneme awareness, RAN

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ABSTRACT

ABSTRACT
It is now widely accepted that phonological language skills are a critical foundation for learning to read (decode). This longitudinal study investigated the predictive relationship between a range of key phonological language skills and early reading development in a sample of 191 children in their first year at school. The study also explored the theory that a failure to establish automatic associations between letters and speech sounds is a proximal causal risk factor for difficulties in learning to read. Our findings show that automatic letter-sound associations are established early, but do not predict variations in reading development. In contrast, phoneme awareness, letter-sound knowledge and alphanumeric RAN were all strong independent predictors of reading development. In addition, both phoneme awareness and RAN displayed a reciprocal relationship with reading, such that the growth of reading predicted improvements in these skills.

Introduction

Fluent reading skills are a critical foundation for educational success, but many children experience problems in learning to read. Developmental dyslexia, a disorder characterized by impaired word reading and spelling, is estimated to affect between 3 to 8% of the population (Peterson & Pennington, 2015), but this diagnosis represents the lower end of a continuous distribution of reading and spelling skills (Fletcher, 2009). It is, therefore, critically important to determine the cognitive skills that predict variations in reading development, to allow us to identify and treat children at risk of reading difficulties.

Learning to read depends on mastery of the alphabetic principle: that written letters represent the sounds of speech (Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1989, 1990). It proceeds in stages from early visually driven associations between printed letters and word pronunciations to later more sophisticated use of phonological information to drive efficient word recognition processes (Hulme & Snowling, 2009). There is a growing consensus that early reading development is dependent on phonological skills (Fletcher, 2009; Hulme & Snowling, 2013) and that deficits in these skills are probably causally related to difficulties in learning to read. Following on from this, a subset of phonological language skills - phoneme awareness, letter-sound knowledge and rapid automatized naming, have been identified as strong and independent predictors of variations in reading skill (Hulme & Snowling, 2014).

Another recent theory has suggested that dyslexia reflects a failure to automatize associations between speech sounds and letters (e.g. Blomert, 2011; Blomert & Froyen, 2010; van Atteveldt & Ansari, 2014). Proponents of this theory suggest that the phonological deficit in dyslexia is a secondary consequence of problems in learning to read, whereas a deficit in forming automatic associations between letters and phonemes is a proximal cause. This theory might be seen as an extension of the view that letter-sound knowledge is critical for early reading development (Hulme, Bowyer-Crane, Carroll, Duff, & Snowling, 2012; Melby-Lervåg, Lyster, & Hulme, 2012). However, the automatic letter-sound integration hypothesis is more specific. According to this view letter-sound associations have to be learned to the point of being automatized in order to support the development of accurate and fluent word recognition skills.

In addition to evidence that these three phonological language skills may be causally related to variations in learning to read, there is also mounting evidence that the relationships they share with reading may be bi-directional. Phoneme awareness, in particular, has been found to share a reciprocal relationship with reading, such that learning to read leads to subsequent improvements in phonemic skills (Castles & Coltheart, 2004; Hulme, Snowling, Caravolas, & Carroll, 2005; Perfetti, Beck, Bell, & Hughes, 1987). For example, Perfetti et al. ( 1987) found a reciprocal relationship between several tests of phoneme awareness and early reading development in 1 st graders, with a phoneme deletion test exhibiting the most marked reciprocal relationship. The authors suggested that while a level of phoneme awareness was necessary in order to begin the process of learning to read, more advanced phonemic awareness develops in tandem with the development of reading. Indeed, evidence suggests a possible virtuous circle of reciprocal relationships between phoneme awareness, letter-sound knowledge and reading (Muter et al., 2004), with increased phonemic awareness improving the learning of letter-sound correspondences (Fox & Routh, 1984; Treiman & Baron, 1983), in turn leading to improvements in reading which then drives further refinements of phonemic and letter-sound knowledge.

The extent to which RAN and reading skill may share a reciprocal relationship appears less clear-cut. This may be due to differences in the age of participants and the types of RAN measure used across studies. For example, Compton ( 2003) reported a reciprocal relationship between RAN digits and word, but not non-word, reading in a representative sample of 1 st graders, that was most marked in the poorest decoders. A reciprocal relationship between RAN and word reading speed was also reported in a training study of older Swedish children with reading difficulties (Wolff, 2014). However, in a large representative sample of Norwegian children followed from school entry to grade 4 (Lervåg & Hulme, 2009), alphanumeric RAN predicted the development of word reading fluency but not vice versa. The same pattern was found in a longitudinal study of Dutch children in 1 st and 2 nd grade, using a composite measure of alphanumeric and non-alphanumeric RAN (Verhagen et al., 2008). Most studies showing reciprocal relationships between the development of reading and RAN have used alphanumeric RAN tasks either early in reading development (when letter and number name knowledge are not expected to be fully automatized) (Compton, 2003; Peterson et al., 2017), or in samples of children with reading difficulties (Wolff, 2014). Thus, it may be that alphanumeric RAN is influenced by reading development only during that phase of development when knowledge of letter and digit names are not yet fully automatized.

In summary, evidence indicates that phonological language skills (letter-sound knowledge, phoneme awareness and RAN) may be causally related to variations in learning to read, while evidence for a relationship between letter-sound integration and reading is far from conclusive. This longitudinal study, therefore, examines the role of letter-sound integration as a predictor of early reading development alongside other better established predictors (phoneme awareness, letter-sound knowledge and RAN). We measure these skills during the first year of school when children are aged 4-5 years old. Theoretically, this is a critical period of development, since it encompasses the first year of formal reading instruction, when the foundations of children's decoding skills are being established. Measuring children's performance during this period enables us to establish how early automatic associations between letters and speech-sounds emerge. We predict that this early time window of development may be when the automaticity of letter-sound correspondences might make the greatest contribution towards growth in word reading. Furthermore, tracking the development of these foundational skills throughout the first year of school will allow us to investigate potential reciprocal relationships with reading during this critical period of development.

Method

Participants

One hundred and ninety one children (107 male, 84 female) participated in the study. Children were recruited at school entry from 7 primary schools in Greater London. The average age of the children at the start of the study was 4 years, 6 months (range = 4 years, 0 months, to 5 years, 2 months, SD = 3.54 months). Ethical approval was given by the University College London Research Ethics Committee. Head teachers gave written informed consent for children to take part, and the parents of each child were given the option of withdrawing their child from the study before it began.

Design and testing procedure

The children were tested 4 times over a period of 14 months: a) September - December, (Reception Term 1); b) January - March, (Reception Term 2); c) May - July, (Reception Term 3) and d) September - November (Year 1 Term 1). At each time-point children were tested individually in two sessions each lasting approximately 30 minutes. All testing was completed in school. There was a small amount of missing data where children were absent from school. In addition, some children did not complete all tasks at each time-point due to time constraints. However, as tasks were not administered in a fixed order, data can be considered to be missing completely at random (MCAR).

Tests and materials

The children completed an experimental task designed to measure automatic letter-sound integration and a range of measures assessing early reading and language skills.

Letter-sound priming task

This task involved the successive presentation of a visual letter prime and an auditory letter-sound target. Children were required to decide on each trial whether the second stimulus (the "target") was a speech-sound or a "robot sound". Fifty percent of trials consisted of speech sounds; the other 50% of trials involved the presentation of a scrambled speech sound ("robot sound"). Response time (RT) was measured to the auditory stimuli (speech/scrambled speech decision RT). Figure 1 details the trial structure across the three experimental conditions.

Stimuli

Stimuli in this task were recordings of the 5 letter-sounds /tə/ (293ms), /də/ (263ms), /və/ (428ms), /zə/ (413ms) and /dʒə/ (357ms). Scrambled versions of these stimuli were created in Matlab by randomly assembling 5ms segments of the original signal (Ellis, 2010). These scrambled sounds were identical in length, energy and spectral composition to the original speech sounds but sounded completely unlike speech. The lowercase letters corresponding to the letter-sounds were used as the letter primes and were presented in Arial font (approximately 23 x 20mm). On 50% of trials a letter prime was presented and on the other 50% of trials one of five novel letter-like forms (adapted from Taylor, Plunkett, & Nation, 2011) was presented.

Apparatus

Stimuli were presented and responses recorded (speed and accuracy) using E-Prime Software (version 2.0) using a Psychology Software Tools Serial Response Box (SRB; model 200a) and a laptop running Windows 7. Auditory stimuli were presented through headphones.

Procedure

Children were instructed to attend to both the letter and speech-sound and decide whether the sound was a "real" speech-sound using "yes" and "no" response keys on the response box. Before the task began children were familiarized with the procedure in thirteen practice trials.

On each trial a centrally located fixation point was presented for 1000ms, followed by the letter or non-letter stimulus, presented in black and appearing on a white screen for 500ms. The auditory target was presented over headphones and its onset was synchronous with the offset of the visual letter. Each trial was followed by the visual prompt "Real sound?" Response times from the response box were recorded from the onset of the auditory target. The experimenter monitored the child's performance, controlling the presentation of trials.

There were six conditions in the letter-sound priming task. In the congruent condition, the prime and target were the same letter/sound. In the incongruent condition the prime and target were not the same letter/sound. In the baseline condition, the prime was a novel letter and the target was a speech-sound. There were three additional control conditions to prevent children detecting the relationship between primes and targets and generating expectancies. In these control conditions the target was a non-speech sound. Novel symbols and scrambled speech-sounds were yoked to create pseudo baseline, congruent and incongruent control conditions.

The letter-sound priming task was completed across two sessions on consecutive days to reduce attentional demands. In total there were 20 congruent and 20 incongruent trials. In the congruent condition there were four trials of each pairing and in the incongruent condition each letter prime was presented once and paired with all other speech-sounds. There were 40 baseline trials to ensure equal probability of the presentation of a novel symbol relative to a real letter prime. This resulted in 180 trials in total, including 20 "catch" trials to ensure children were attending to the screen. On catch trials the same letters were presented in a black and white animal print (for example, zebra stripes) and children were instructed to make a different response (using a different button on the response box).

Letter-sound knowledge

Children completed the letter-sound knowledge (LSK) subtest from the York Assessment of Reading for Comprehension (YARC; Hulme et al., 2009). This test required children to say the sound corresponding to 32 letters and digraphs.

Reading

Children completed the Early Word Recognition (EWR) subtest from the YARC (Hulme et al., 2009). This test required children to read aloud a list of words of increasing difficulty without time pressure. The maximum possible score is 30.

Phoneme awareness

Children completed the sound deletion subtest from the YARC (Hulme et al., 2009). In this test children heard a word (and saw an accompanying picture) and were required to repeat it and then repeat it again after deleting a sound (for example "Can you say seesaw? Can you say it again but this time don't say saw?"). Practice trials ensured children understood the instructions. There were 17 items of increasing difficulty and the number of items answered correctly was recorded.

Rapid automatised naming (RAN)

Children completed two RAN subtests (colours, and digits) from the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (Wagner, Torgesen, & Rashotte, 1999). Each subtest required children to name two 9 × 4 arrays of stimuli as quickly and accurately as possible. The time taken to name all of the items was recorded as was the number of errors (incorrect naming and/or omission of an item). Testing was discontinued if the child made four or more errors on the first stimulus array.

Results

Means and standard deviations for all measures at each time-point are shown in Table 1. Measures show a good range of scores, with the exception of EWR and Phoneme deletion, where many children were at floor at Time 1 (T1). As expected, measures of reading, letter knowledge, phoneme deletion and RAN were significantly correlated at each time point. Standardised measures correlated well across time points. Children improved substantially in performance on all phonological tasks over the course of the study, most markedly between T1 and T2. For correlations between all measures across all time points see Appendix 1 in the online supplementary materials.

A Longitudinal Study of Early Reading Development: Letter-Sound Knowledge, Phoneme Awareness and RAN, but Not Letter-Sound Integration, Predict Variations in Reading Development

08 June 2019

The emergence of letter-sound priming

Only correct responses were considered and outliers were removed from the raw reaction time (RT) data. RTs over 5000ms were first removed as this was considered to reflect a lapse in attention. A non-recursive outlier removal procedure was then used (Selst & Jolicoeur, 1994). Finally, RT data were excluded from the analysis where response accuracy was below 75% correct. Following these steps, at T1, 85% of the RT data were included in the analyses, at T2, 83% of the RT data were included, at T3, 89% of the RT data were included and at T4, 82% of the RT data were included.

The mean correct response times in each condition, together with 95% within-subject confidence intervals (Morey, 2008) are shown for each time-point in Figure 2. At T2-4 it is clear that there is an identical pattern across conditions, with faster responses in the congruent condition compared to the baseline condition, and no appreciable slowing in the incongruent condition. However, at T1 children show a contrasting pattern, with similar response times in the baseline and congruent condition and slowing in the incongruent condition.

Response times for the baseline, congruent and incongruent conditions for each time point were compared using a mixed effects linear model treating participants and items as crossed random effects.

At T1 there was no significant difference between RTs in the congruent and baseline condition (marginal mean difference = − 7.15 = [95% CI −37.53, 23.22], z = − 0.46, p = .644; d = .03) but children were significantly slower in the incongruent than baseline condition, (marginal mean difference = 38.33 = [95% CI 8.09, 68.56], z = 2.48, p = . 013, d = .13).

At T2, 3 and 4 RTs in the congruent condition were significantly faster than in the baseline condition (T2, marginal mean difference = − 59.30 = [95% CI −86.11, −32.49], z = − 4.34, p = .000; d = .20; T3 marginal mean difference = − 55.58 = [95% CI −78.02, −33.14], z = − 4.86, p = .000; d = .18; T4 marginal mean difference = − 37.46 = [95% CI −59.80, −15.12], z = − 3.29, p = .001; d = .13) but there was no significant difference between response times in the baseline and incongruent conditions (T2 marginal mean difference = − 0.07 = [95% CI −27.03, 26.89], z = − 0.00, p = . 996, d = .01; T3 marginal mean difference = − 6.82 = [95% CI −29.16, 15.53], z = − 0.60, p = . 550, d = .02; T4 marginal mean difference = − 12.89 = [95% CI −35.20, 9.41], z = − 1.13, p = . 257, d = .04).

The relationship between letter-sound priming and reading related skills

We modelled the development of reading skills using growth curve models. As most children at T1 could not read, we had to restrict the reading growth model to T2, T3 and T4. Furthermore, at T1 there was no statistically significant facilitation effect in the letter-sound integration task, but between T2 and T4 there was a statistically significant facilitation effect (faster reaction times to letter sounds that were preceded by their corresponding printed letter). Because growth was faster between T2 and T3 compared to between T3 and T4, we fitted a nonlinear growth model where we freely estimated the middle time point. This gave us a model with a significant intercept ( m = 7.899 words, p < .001) at T2 (initial status), significant growth ( m = 8.223 words per year, p < .001) and significant variance in both the intercept and rate of growth ( sd = 6.410, p < .001 and sd = 4.107, p = .049 for intercept and growth, respectively).

First, we wanted to see if our measure of facilitation in the letter-sound integration task was a predictor of initial status and growth in word reading. In order to correct for measurement error in the reaction time measures we created latent variables for both baseline and congruent reaction times by grouping the items into four parcels for each construct, at each time point. These parcels were then used as indicators of a latent baseline reaction time construct and a latent congruent reaction time construct that allowed us to estimate the true score regression of reading growth on facilitation in the letter-sound integration task. We assessed facilitation by taking the residual of congruent reaction times after regressing them on baseline reaction times.

The full model is shown in Figure 3. Here, both baseline reaction time and the residual of congruent reaction time (i.e. facilitation: congruent reaction time that is independent from baseline reaction time) at T2 are used as potential predictors of initial status and growth in word reading (between T2 and T4). As can be seen from Figure 3, shorter baseline reaction times at T2 were associated with better initial status and faster growth in early reading skills. However, baseline reaction time explained 89.70% of the variance in congruent reaction time and the residual of congruent reaction time was not a significant predictor of either initial status (unique R2 = .017) or the rate of growth (slope; unique R2 = .020)) in reading skills. This model had a good fit to the data, χ2 (39) = 64.351, p = .007, RMSEA = .059 (10% CI = .031-.084), CFI = .980, TIL = .972.

The results of the model in Figure 3 show clearly that the degree of facilitation in the letter sound integration task at T2 (the unique effects of congruent reaction time after accounting for baseline reaction time) plays no appreciable role in predicting individual differences in initial reading levels or rates of growth in reading between T2 and T4. However, in that model baseline RT is a predictor of both initial reading level and the rate of growth in reading. The different measures of RT in the letter-sound integration task were very highly correlated, and in subsequent analyses we proceeded to assess the dimensionality of the RT measures and their possible role as predictors of reading development. It seems quite possible, based on the model in Figure 3, that a measure of overall speed on the letter-sound integration task (rather than the degree of facilitation on the task) would be a unique predictor of reading development.

To examine the dimensionality of the RT measures from the letter-sound integration task we estimated a confirmatory factor analysis where we included the three measures (baseline, congruent and incongruent) in the same latent variable at each of the four time points. This model had scalar invariance, χ2 (12) = 17.453, p = .133, and a very good model fit, χ2 (60) = 83.866, p = .023, RMSEA = .047 (10% CI = .018-.069), CFI = .984, TIL = .982. As can be seen from Figure 4 the standardised factor loadings were strong for all three reaction time scores at all time points (ranging from .812 to .955). There were strong and significant correlations between this overall RT factor at T2, T3 and T4 but no significant correlations between this factor at T1 and the later time points. This model shows that the three reaction-time scores load very well on a single latent variable that has the same structure at all time points and shows strong stability between T2 and T4. The absence of correlations between T1 and the later time points, presumably reflects children's insecure letter knowledge at T1.

To see if this overall latent RT factor predicted growth in reading we re-estimated the model in Figure 3 but replaced the observed baseline and congruent reaction-time scores with the overall latent reaction-time factor. As Figure 5 shows, the reaction-time factor predicted both the intercept and rate of growth of reading skills; faster reaction times being associated with better initial skills and faster growth in reading. The model had an excellent fit to the data, χ2 (8) = 4.569, p = .803, RMSEA = .000 (10% CI = .000-.055), CFI = 1.00, TIL = .1.01.

However, when letter knowledge, phoneme awareness and RAN were included as predictors, the overall latent-reaction time factor did not predict any unique variance in either initial status or the growth of reading. In this model (see Figure 6), letter knowledge, phoneme awareness and RAN all predicted unique variance in both the initial status ( R² = .664) and the growth of reading ( R² = .373). RAN was estimated by a latent variable with RAN colours and RAN digits as indicators while letter knowledge and phoneme awareness were estimated by latent variables with only one indicator where the residual was fixed according to their measures' reliabilities (α = .85). This model had an excellent fit to the data, χ2 (25) = 32.551, p = .143, RMSEA = .040 (10% CI = .000-.075), CFI = .994, TIL = .89.

The correlations between the latent variables in Figure 6 are shown in Table 2. As might be expected RAN, letter knowledge and phoneme awareness show moderate correlations with each other. Overall reaction time on the letter-sound integration task also shows moderate correlations with RAN, letter knowledge and phoneme deletion ( r 's between .33 and .39), this suggests that performance on the letter-sound integration task reflects in part variations in phonological skills and letter-sound knowledge.

A Longitudinal Study of Early Reading Development: Letter-Sound Knowledge, Phoneme Awareness and RAN, but Not Letter-Sound Integration, Predict Variations in Reading Development

Possible reciprocal relationships between RAN and reading development

Finally, we wanted to examine potential reciprocal relationships between reading development and the development of RAN, phoneme awareness and reaction time. We estimated four models where the growth of these three variables were estimated in parallel with the growth of reading. In particular, we were interested in whether the initial status of one process predicted the growth of the other process when the initial status of the other process was controlled. As growth was nonlinear for all of the measures we freely estimated the factor loading for the middle time point. There were negative residuals for the first time point for reading, RAN colours, phoneme awareness and reaction time, however, as they were all non-significant we fixed them to zero.

As the growth of reading had a different relationship with the growth of RAN colours compared to RAN digits we estimated the two growth processes in separate models. Simplified versions of these models are shown in Figure 7a and 7b for the colour and digit versions respectively. Initial status for both RAN digits and colours predicted the growth of reading after controlling for initial levels of reading; these coefficients are negative meaning shorter times on the RAN tasks were associated with faster growth in reading. In addition, there was a reciprocal relation between reading and the growth of RAN digits: higher levels of initial reading skill were associated with slower rates of growth in RAN digits. This pattern is consistent with the view that children with the weakest reading skills at the beginning of the study, may have had insecure knowledge of digit names, and that which allowed for growth in digit naming speed as reading development increased. Furthermore, there were significant correlations between the growth of the two RAN constructs and the growth of reading. The model fit was good for both RAN colours, χ2 (6) = 9.003, p = .173, RMSEA = .051 (10% CI = .000-.116), CFI = .996, TIL = .991, and RAN digits, χ2 (5) = 6.616, p = .251, RMSEA = .041 (10% CI = .000-.115), CFI = 998, TIL = .994, respectively.

There were also reciprocal relationships between phoneme awareness and reading as the initial status of one process predicted the growth of the other process (see Figure 7c; children with higher initial reading levels showed greater growth in phoneme awareness, and similarly children with higher initial levels of phoneme awareness showed a greater growth in reading. In addition, there were significant correlations between the growth of the processes after controlling for starting levels in the other processes. The model fit was good for this model, χ2 (7) = 7.773, p = .353, RMSEA = .024 (10% CI = .000-.095), CFI = .999, TIL = .998.

No reciprocal relationships were found between the latent reaction-time construct and reading (see Figure 7d); the model fitted the data well, χ2 (56) = 65.836, p = .173, RMSEA = .030 (10% CI = .000-.057), CFI = .995, TIL = .994.

Discussion

This longitudinal study examined the relationships between developing reading skills and a range of predictors of reading in a sample of 191 children assessed at four time points during their first year of formal reading instruction (mean ages: 4;6 years to 5;6 years). Measures included well established predictors of reading (phoneme awareness, letter-sound knowledge, RAN), as well as a novel measure of automatic letter-sound integration.

We used latent growth curve modelling to examine relationships between these measures and reading development. This statistical technique eliminates measurement error by constructing latent variables that take only the common variance of their indicators into account. It also allows potential reciprocal effects to be examined. Since measures of reading were at floor at the start of the study, growth models were estimated from T2 onwards.

The current longitudinal study used a measure of letter-sound integration that had been used previously in a concurrent study with older children (Clayton & Hulme, 2018). The results from the letter-sound integration task showed a robust priming effect, which was in evidence as soon as children had learned letter-sound correspondences (from T2 onwards after just 4 months in school). Thus, we have evidence of letter-sound integration emerging earlier than suggested by some previous research (Froyen et al., 2009). The priming effect reported from T2 onwards directly replicates the pattern observed in our previous study with the same task (Clayton & Hulme, 2018), but extends this finding to younger children in the earliest stages of learning to read. In line with our earlier findings from a concurrent study with older children (Clayton & Hulme, 2018) the extent of the priming effect on the letter-sound integration task was not a predictor of reading in this younger sample. The presence of robust priming effects on the letter-sound integration task at T2 demonstrates that the task is sensitive to children's knowledge of letter-sound relationships, but it is striking that the degree of facilitation on this task is not a reliable predictor of individual differences in reading development. It would be useful for future studies, however, to examine whether alternative measures of letter-sound integration can be developed that are related to individual differences in reading development.

Faster response speeds on the different conditions of the priming task were associated with better letter-sound knowledge, phoneme awareness and RAN performance. These findings are consistent with previous results showing overall slower responding on the task in children with dyslexia (Clayton & Hulme, 2018). In the current study, a latent variable representing the shared variance in speed of response across conditions of the letter-sound priming task was found to predict both reading status at T2 and growth of reading between T2 and T4. However, once letter-sound knowledge, phoneme awareness and RAN were added to this model, it did not predict any additional unique variance. This pattern suggests that overall reaction times on the letter-sound priming task are related to reading ability, but not as well as better established measures (letter-sound knowledge, phoneme awareness and RAN).

Our growth models clearly showed that letter-sound knowledge, phoneme awareness and RAN were all strong, independent predictors of word reading, predicting both initial reading status of children after only a single term of formal reading instruction and growth in reading over the remainder of the year. These longitudinal results measured across a relatively narrow time window extend those from previous research examining predictors of early reading development (Allor, 2002; Lervåg, Bråten, & Hulme, 2009; Lervåg & Hulme, 2009; Muter et al., 2004), and highlight the important role phonological skills play in the earliest stages of learning to read.

The finding that both phoneme awareness and alphanumeric RAN share a reciprocal relationship with early reading development has important implications for both theory and practice. It suggests, not only that the development of phonemically structured phonological representations are critical for learning to read, but that reading experience, in turn, exerts a positive influence on the development of such representations. This pattern raises the possibility that the phonological deficit in dyslexia, especially in older children, may be partially a consequence of reading failure (Peterson et al., 2017). From a clinical perspective, tests of phoneme awareness and RAN have great benefits as assessment tools for children at risk of reading difficulties, not least because they are simple to administer. However, if the relationship between these predictive skills and reading is reciprocal then assessment using these skills potentially loses an element of predictive power in identifying children with reading disorders (Hogan et al., 2005; Peterson, 2017), at least later in development, once reading is established.

To conclude, this longitudinal study of children during the first year of reading instruction provides further support for a close relationship between phonological skills (phoneme awareness, letter-sound knowledge and RAN) and early reading development. In the case of phoneme awareness and alphanumeric RAN, this relationship appears to be a bi-directional one, with increasing reading accuracy leading to improvements in these core phonological skills. By contrast, the study found that automatic integration of letter-sound correspondences could be measured early in development (after just 4 months of formal reading instruction) but did not predict variations in word reading skill. Furthermore, although overall response speed on the letter-sound integration task did predict growth in reading, it did not provide a unique contribution over and above letter-sound knowledge, phoneme awareness and RAN.

Time 1
Mean age 55.63 (3.54) months

Time 2
Mean age: 59.20 (3.41) months

Time 3
Mean age: 63.29 (3.51) months

Time 4
Mean age: 66.72 (3.52) months

Measure

NN

M (SD)

Reliability

NN

M (SD)

Reliability

NN

M (SD)

Reliability

NN

M (SD)

Reliability

LSK Raw Score

1184

13.47 (8.40)

.85 a

1179

24.49 (4.84)

.85 a

1187 w

27.98 (3.88)

.85 a

1179 w

27.96 (3.41)

.85 a

Phoneme Deletion Raw Score

1181

2.70 (2.28)

.85 a

1174 w

4.23 (2.57)

.85 a

1183 w

5.95 (3.03)

.85 a

1178

6.02 (3.37)

.85 a

RAN

Digits

1121

50.91 (18.83)

.82 b/.91 t

1142

40.58 (13.39)

.82 b/.91 t

1174

35.42 (12.40)

.82 b/.91 t

1167

34.10 (11.63)

.82 b/.91 t

Colours

1172

64.79 (22.29)

.71 b/.78 t

1158

59.51 (23.78)

.68 b/.78 t

1175

52.51 (18.26)

.75 b/.78 t

1172

51.97 (17.10)

.75 b/.78 t

LSI Priming task

Acknowledgments

We thank Ella Barnard, Eleanor Brown, Emily Hall, Hannah Logue and Lydia Yeomans for their assistance with data collection and both the schools and the children who took part. This research was supported by ESRC Grant ES/L008270/1. The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Supplementary material

Supplementary material for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [ES/L008270/1].

References

Hulme, C. , & Snowling, M. J. (2009). Developmental disorders of language learning and cognition. New Jersey, US: John Wiley & Sons.[Google Scholar]

Morey, R. D. (2008). Confidence intervals from normalized data: A correction to cousineau (2005). Reason, 4(2), 61-64.[Google Scholar]

Wagner, R. K. , Torgesen, J. K. , & Rashotte, C. A. (1999). Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing (CTOPP). Austin, Texas: Pro-Ed.[Google Scholar]

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A Longitudinal Study of Early Reading Development: Letter-Sound Knowledge, Phoneme Awareness and RAN, but Not Letter-Sound Integration, Predict Variations in Reading Development

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ABSTRACT ABSTRACT It is now widely accepted that phonological language skills are a critical foundation for learning to read (decode). This longitudinal study investigated the predictive relationship between a range of key phonological language skills and early reading development in a sample of 191 children in their first year at school.

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Thank you once again to Dr Kerry Hempenstall (member of IFERI's Advisory Group) for the provision of summaries and links to research looking at the validity and reliability of the form of assessment known as miscue analysis or running records:

"This article has raised a number of concerns about the use of running records. These concerns include: (1) a lack of clarity in the guidelines about whether running records are appropriate for beginning and fluent readers, (2) problems with the comparability of running records taken on different texts, and the lack of assessment of comprehension, (3) the absence of evidence to support the use of self-corrections as an indicator of effective reading, and (4) erroneous interpretation of the meaning of oral reading errors." (p. 16-17). ... "The problems associated with the analysis of errors in running records mean that this practice cannot be recommended. ... It is time to reappraise the widespread use of running records as the main assessment of children's reading in the first years at school. There is a need for other assessments that link more directly to what it is that children require for fluent reading. Teachers need to have access to carefully constructed tests of reading accuracy and comprehension, as well as measures of grapheme-phoneme correspondences, phonological awareness, and word recognition. The use of such tests will provide teachers with crucial information about what children currently know and what they still need to learn to become successful independent readers." (p.18)

Blaiklock, K. (2004). A critique of running records of children's oral reading. New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, 39, 241-252. Retrieved from https://www.google.com.au/#q=%22lack+of ... ds+are+%22

"Running records have traditionally been viewed as producing accurate assessment results because they provide an approximation of authentic school and home reading. However, reliability data have not been conclusive regarding the use of running records (Ross, 2004). ... Running records have traditionally been viewed as producing accurate assessment results because they provide an approximation of authentic school and home reading. However, reliability data have not been conclusive regarding the use of running records (Ross, 2004)." (p.114). ... "Hoffman, Roser, and Salas (2001) found that teachers using the Fountas and Pennell leveling structure can reliably level text. However, when texts leveled in that manner assess student reading performance, they produce highly unreliable results. Running record scores that are acquired from a single-leveled text reading would not necessarily represent a student's true reading level. ... Making absolute decisions with a running record requires the teacher to average student scores on at least three passages with at least two raters. Our results indicate that the most limiting factor in rendering students' running record scores reliable is the number of passages used. That finding supports the contention of Ross (2004) that passage might exhibit a sizable source of error variance when scoring running records. Using a single score obtained from reading a single passage to portray that student's universe score would be highly questionable." (p. 123). ... "Teachers should recognize that traditional text-leveling procedures do not fully account for all factors that affect the difficulty of a text. Even when controlling for text level, type, and structure, there are still naturally occurring topical variations between texts that will render one more difficult than another".(p. 125)

Fawson, P.C., Ludlow, B.C., Reutzel, D.R., Sudweeks, R., & Smith, J.A. (2006) Examining the reliability of running records: Attaining generalizable result. The Journal of Educational Research, 100(2), 113-126. Retrieved from https://llmotivation.wikispaces.com/fil ... ecords.pdf

"In summary, there has long been a significant difference of attitude toward miscue analysis and running records between the (mainly) whole language fraternity and reading researchers. The underlying theory has been thoroughly discredited (Gough, 1993; Perfetti, 1985; Rieben & Perfetti, 1991; Nicholson, 1991; Stanovich, 1986, 2000; Turner& Hoover, 1993), and the method of assessing the miscues has been shown to be unreliable (Allington, 1984; Leu, 1982). One would imagine that miscue analysis would have slipped quietly into education's long history of intuitively derived concepts that proved incorrect when the light of empirical study was played upon them. However, consistent with the long standing disconnect between evidence and practice in education, miscue analysis and running records remain evident in many education settings (Beatty & Care, 2009), no doubt partly due to the continued acceptance among educators of the 3 cueing process."

Hempenstall, K. (2013). Miscue mischief. April 11, 2013. Retrieved from http://www.nifdi.org/resources/news/hem ... e-mischief

"This study revealed that children who were reading at or above grade expectations were more likely to make use of graphic and phonic cues when they approached an unfamiliar word in a text. As has been suggested (e.g. De Lemos, 2002; Adams, 1990) the ability to decode graphic and phonic information is a reliable determinant of higher reading ability. Therefore, these findings suggest that Goodman and colleagues may have underestimated the role of the grapho-phonic cueing system and overestimated the role of the semantic and syntactic cueing systems in relation to differentiating reading ability."

Beatty, L., & Care, E. (2009). Learning from their miscues: Differences across reading ability and text difficulty. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, Oct 2009. Retrieved from http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/artic ... difficulty

Back to Debbie Hepplewhite again:

Following all the objective observation of children's reading above, I'm just going to add a personal anecdote - because this was one of many aspects of my teaching experience that alerted me to the fact we can teach reading badly, or wrongly, with poor consequences for children's reading habits:

I am a practitioner with a primary teaching background (in England) and was trained to use a form of running record and miscue analysis. Many years ago I deliberately focused on infant teaching for a while because I couldn't understand why, teaching juniors, so many of them struggled with reading and writing so I wanted to investigate. I noted that most of my struggling readers' mistakes ('miscues') were based on the very reading strategies that I was also being told as a (then) infant teacher to teach the children! How could this be? In effect, the errors were invariably based on word-guessing from various cues and very poor, or no, application of phonics decoding (this is before the official promotion of systematic synthetic phonics in England). So, as teachers we were being trained in the multi-cueing reading strategies which, in effect, caused the children's reading errors! We were trained that it was not good if children relied on their phonics and that they SHOULD be using a range of strategies (guess from the picture, the context, the initial letter). 'Phonics' was the very poor relation and used more 'to check' if the word that had been guessed matched the first letter, or letters, of the printed word.

Yes - THAT bad!

Not only that, I also noticed that my very able, advanced readers - very articulate and with great comprehension - had this reading habit of making up all the little words and even great chunks of sentences - in effect, matching how they spoke or predicting what they thought the sentence would be. They reflected worrying inaccuracy word-by-word - but they had great comprehension to all intents and purposes. They also read with the much promoted 'fluency and expression' - and yet they were so inaccurate and seemed oblivious to these inaccuracies. Very interesting, and worrying, too - was that their level of writing did not match their reading level and comprehension level - it was much, much weaker and they were often reluctant writers. It's not that they could not express themselves orally, it was that they were not good spellers and not fluent with handwriting. Again, this was before the uptake of systematic synthetic phonics in England - the teaching principles of which include teaching not only print-to-sound decoding (reading), but also the reverse sound-to-print for encoding (spelling).

We have progressed a great deal in England thanks to the dedication of some individual politicians and others to the point where we have the systematic synthetic phonics teaching principles embedded in the statutory national curriculum for English for Key Stages One and Two (primary) - but we still have problems with 'mixed methods' and even 'mixed messages' - as you can see from the various threads on the IFERI message forum!

I am now a teacher-trainer and part of my training includes some discussion about running records and miscue analysis (still the basis of the Reading Recovery intervention programme!). I point out that we can all note exactly the same features of a child reading a text (that is, end up with the identical running record of the child's reading) - but that our 'professional understanding' will heavily influence how we interpret the 'miscues' or errors.

As a systematic synthetic phonics teacher, I would be concerned by a child guessing at the words, not reading all the words accurately, not noticing that the sentences as read by the child did not make sense because of wrongly-guessed words, stumbling because the words included letter/s-sound correspondences that the child did not know (one or two, fine, but lots, not fine). I can recognise by the way a child reads a text how the child has been taught to read in the first place by the range of such miscues. I can recognise when a book is not suitable for a child to be asked to read independently because the child has to guess so much just to 'get through' the book. This is a very stressful situation which many children continue to be put through because of lack of adult's knowledge and understanding about reading instruction and reading practice - and the continued practice of Book Bands levelling or Levelled Readers in other countries.

In other words, children are mistaught.

A mixed methods or whole language teacher, however, would think it is just fine for a reader to take calculated word-guesses from various 'cues'. After all, aren't they teaching multi-cueing in the first place?

I must add, however, that during all these years of me on my personal voyage of discovery of 'why' so many children were not strong in their foundational literacy skills (even when they were highly articulate), the published reading book schemes were designed on the basis of repetitive and predictable texts - not cumulative, decodable phonics books. I personally approached various publishers at that time - urging them to produce cumulative, decodable phonics books that would match systematic phonics teaching. Even any existing phonics programmes at that time did not have any matched, decodable reading books.

In England, we have made a lot of progress and now we have a number of good quality cumulative, decodable reading book schemes which are SO important for beginner readers to be able to practise their phonics code knowledge and decoding skills - building up their reading fluency and confidence. Unfortunately, however, we also have a Book Bands cataloguing system which continues to include the kind of early reading books which, in effect, children cannot get through without resorting to guessing. Many teachers still provide a mixture of these different types of books - which is potentially very damaging for the weaker readers in particular - and which undermine any good explicit phonics teaching.

The story continues.....

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Miscue Analysis - Running Records: What does the research show us? - iferi.org

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Thank you once again to Dr Kerry Hempenstall (member of IFERI's Advisory Group) for the provision of summaries and links to research looking at the validity and reliability of the form of assessment known as miscue analysis or running records: "This article has raised a number of concerns about the use of running records.

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Open for Comment

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Thank you for your interest. The public comment period for the NAEP Reading Assessment Framework closed on June 23, 2020. The Framework is currently being revised based on feedback gathered during the public comment period and discussions by the National Assessment Governing Board.​

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MSEA Blog

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K-5

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Bookworms Reading and Writing Beta | Curriculum Access

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The English Learners/Title III Office provides technical assistance to local school systems to ensure that the systems establish, implement, and sustain high-quality language instruction educational programs. Through the programs, English Learners (ELs), including immigrant children and youth, develop both English language proficiency and meet the same challenging academic standards that all children are expected to meet.

Contact Information

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The English Learners/Title III Office provides technical assistance to local school systems to ensure that the systems establish, implement, and sustain high-quality language instruction educational programs. Through the programs, English Learners (ELs), including immigrant children and youth, develop both English language proficiency and meet the same challenging academic standards that all children are expected to meet.

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Aouad, J. and Savage, R. (2009). The component structure of preliteracy skills: Further evidence for the simple view of reading. Canadian Journal of School Psychology, 24 (2), 183-200.

Catts, H., Adlof, S., and Weismer, S. (2006). Language deficits in poor comprehenders: A case for the simple view of reading. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 49, 278-293.

Gough, P., Hoover, W., and Patterson, C. (1996). Some observations on a simple view of reading. In C. Cornoldi and J. Oakhill (eds.), Reading comprehension difficulties: Processes and intervention (pp. 1-13). Mahway, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

*Gough, P. and Tunmer, W. (1986). Decoding, reading, and reading disability. Remedial and Special Education, 7, 6-10.

Hoover, W. and Gough, P. (1990). The simple view of reading. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2, 127-160.

*Kamhi, A. (2007). Knowledge deficits: the true crisis in education. ASHA Leader, 12 (7), 28-29.

*These articles are short and easy to read.

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The Simple View of Reading is a formula demonstrating the widely accepted view that reading has two basic components: word recognition (decoding) and language comprehension. Research studies show that a student's reading comprehension score can be predicted if decoding skills and language comprehension abilities are known.

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Tier I and Tier II

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How can I teach RAN to improve my students' reading?

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RAN, This blog entry explores the role of rapid automatized reading or RAN on reading achievement.

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Montgomery County English Language Arts Elementary Curriculum review report

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Montgomery County English Language Arts Elementary Curriculum review report

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The Teaching Foundational Reading Skills course will help you more effectively prepare your students in grades K-3 with the skills they need to become successful readers. This is a critical challenge for elementary school teachers: In 2015, only 36 percent of fourth-graders scored at or above the proficient level on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Reading competency at fourth grade strongly predicts future success in school, since reading becomes increasingly central to learning in all content areas as students advance to higher grades.

This course is organized around the recommendations of the Foundational Skills to Support Reading for Understanding in Kindergarten Through 3rd Grade Practice Guide, published in July 2016 by the U.S. Department of Education's What Works Clearinghouse. This Practice Guide, developed by a panel of expert researchers and practitioners, provides educators with specific, research-based recommendations for effective teaching practices. It focuses on the foundational skills that enable students to read words, relate those words to their oral language, and read with sufficient accuracy and fluency to understand what they read. The foundational reading skills addressed in this course are shown in the framework below.

The core elements of teaching foundational reading to grades K through 3 are: comprehension, fluency, morphology, word recognition, decoding, letter-sound relations, phonological awareness, language, vocabulary, and background knowledge.

Course Objectives

This Teaching Foundational Reading course follows the Practice Guide in being organized around four major research-based recommendations, with specific classroom how-tos that will help you effectively implement them with your students. After a short Getting Started unit, each of the four major units of the course address one of the following recommendations:

1. Advance students' speaking and listening language skills, including vocabulary knowledge and the use of inferential and narrative "academic" language.

2. Develop students' awareness of the segments of sounds in speech, and how sound segments link to letters.

3. Teach students to decode words, analyze words parts, and write and recognize words.

4. Support students' development of reading accuracy, fluency, and comprehension through reading connected text.

Learn More

Unit 1: Elements of Reading Foundations and Building Upon Students' Language Knowledge

In Unit 1, we first provide an overview of the four major recommendations in the Foundational Skills Practice Guide, each of which we consider in one unit of this course. We then consider, through classroom videos and participant discussion, the many components involved in teaching children to read, and the many skills children need to master to become successful readers. We then turn to the first recommendation from the Practice Guide, which is to further students' speaking and listening vocabulary, language use, and comprehension skills.
Unit 2: Phonological Awareness and Letter-Sounds
In Unit 2, we explore Recommendation 2 in the Foundational Skills Practice Guide, develop awareness of the segments of sound in speech and how they link to letters.

We will begin by reviewing the recommendation and core content, phonological awareness and the alphabetic principle. We will let you experience this content as your students would, by playing "games" with sounds and letters. Next, we will see it in practice by viewing some teachers facilitating their students' developing phonological awareness and knowledge of letter-sound connections. We will then discuss some related debates about instruction. You will have the opportunity to hear from our expert panel and try this out with your own students.
Unit 3: Word Decoding, Recognition, and Writing
In Unit 3, we explore the Recommendation 3 in the Foundational Skills Practice Guide, teach students to decode words, analyze word parts, and write and recognize words.

We will begin by reviewing the recommendation and core content, strategies for teaching students to decode words from simple to complex. We will let you experience this content as your students would, by playing "games" with word patterns and parts. Next, we will see it in practice by viewing lessons aimed at teaching these decoding and word analysis skills. We will then discuss some related debates about instruction. You will have the opportunity to hear from our expert panel and try this out with your own students.
Unit 4: Reading Connected Text to Support Fluency and Comprehension
In Unit 4, we explore the Recommendation 4 in the Foundational Skills Practice Guide, ensure that each student reads connected text every day to support reading accuracy, fluency and comprehension.

We will begin by reviewing the practice guide and core content, emphasizing ways to support children as they read connected text. These approaches will help children apply and extend the word-identification knowledge they are building during instruction that draws on the previous units. We will let you experience this content as your students would, by playing "games" in which you reflect on your own self-monitoring and strategic word recognition when reading connected text. Next, we will see it in practice by viewing examples of teachers implementing instructional practices that support children's fluent reading. We will then discuss some debates about reading instruction. You will have the opportunity to hear from our expert panel and try this out with your own students.

As you engage in supporting your own professional development, there are many ways to demonstrate your learning and earn professional development hours.

A certificate of completion for 30 hours of professional development will be provided on request to participants who: (1) spent at least 30 hours participating in the course; (2) participated in the discussions, posting at least one new discussion or one reply to a discussion in at least three units of the course; (3) submitted responses in at least three Demonstrate Your Learning sections; and (4) provided feedback on at least two other submissions.

A certificate of completion for 20 hours of professional development will be provided on request to participants who: (1) spent at least 20 hours participating in the course; (2) participated in the discussions, posting at least one new discussion or one reply to a discussion in at least two units of the course; (3) submitted responses in at least two Demonstrate Your Learning sections; and (4) provided feedback on at least one other submission.

You can submit the certificate to your local agency with a request for CEUs. Granting of CEUs will be subject to the policies and procedures of your state and local agency.

Certificates will be available for download after the requirements are met.

Jill Grifenhagen

Jill Grifenhagen is an Assistant Professor of Literacy Education in the Department of Teacher Education at North Carolina State University. Dr. Grifenhagen was an elementary classroom teacher in Washington, DC, and Boston prior to earning her Ph.D. from Peabody College of Education and Human Development at Vanderbilt University. Dr. Grifenhagen's research focuses on the role of teachers' talk to foster children's early language and literacy development in the classroom. She is interested in the intersection between language and literacy development as well as preparing children from all backgrounds for the academic and language demands of schooling today. In turn, Dr. Grifenhagen seeks to develop the best training and supports for teachers to improve practices in language and literacy.

Dennis Davis

Dennis Davis is an Associate Professor of Literacy Education in the Department of Teacher Education and Learning Sciences in the NCSU College of Education. Dr. Davis currently serves as co-editor of Journal of Literacy Research. He received his Ph.D. in Teaching, Learning, and Diversity from Peabody College at Vanderbilt University. Prior to that, he was an elementary teacher in Texas. Dennis' research and professional development activities focus on elementary and middle grades literacy instruction with an emphasis on reading comprehension, assessment, and supporting readers when they find reading challenging in school.

Marcia Kosanovich

Marcia Kosanovich is a reading educator with 25 years of experience in teaching, creating and delivering professional development, and designing curricula. She completed a doctorate in Elementary Education with an emphasis in literacy at Florida State University. She is a former Pre-K-fifth grade classroom teacher and tutor and taught undergraduate and graduate courses. Dr. Kosanovich is the lead author of many literacy guidance documents for educators at the state, district, and school levels. She has co-authored intervention reading curricula, research articles in peer-reviewed journals, and chapters in books. She is the former Director of Curriculum and Instructional Projects at the Florida Center for Reading Research and Deputy Director for the National Center on Instruction for Literacy. Currently, Dr. Kosanovich is the Chief Executive Officer for MK Educational Research & Practice, LLC, and engaged in school leadership and literacy projects for the Regional Educational Laboratory-Southeast at Florida State University.

Alex Dreier

Alex Dreier is the Instructional Design Lead at the Friday Institute for Educational Innovation at the NC State University's College of Education. His primary work focuses on the instructional design, content development, and overall management of the Institute's MOOC-Ed initiative. Prior to joining the Institute, Alex managed the online training courses for EdTech Leaders Online, a nationally recognized online professional development organization at Education Development Center, Inc. He holds a B.A. in Psychology from Tulane University and an Ed.M. in Technology, Innovation, and Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Friday Institute Online Professional Learning Courses provide a scalable, accessible, and flexible approach that is aligned with the principles of effective professional learning. Our approach is grounded in authentic, active, and collaborative professional learning activities. The approach builds upon the following key design principles:

Self-directed learning, through personalizing your experience by identifying your own goals, selecting among a rich array of resources, and deciding whether, when, and how to engage in discussions and activities to further your own learning and meet your goals.

Peer-supported learning, through engaging in online discussions, reviewing your colleagues' projects, rating posted ideas, recommending resources, crowdsourcing lessons learned, and participating in twitter chats and other exchanges appropriate to the individual course.

Job-embedded learning, through the use of case studies, classroom and school related projects; developing action plans; and other activities that center your work on critical problems of practice and data-informed decision-making in your own classrooms, schools or districts.

Multiple voices, through learning about the perspectives of other teachers and administrators along with those of students, researchers and experts in the field. Our courses are purposefully not designed around one or two experts who present online lectures. They provide exposure to a rich set of perspectives presented within the context of course elements that reflect these core principles.

You will see these design principles implemented in our courses through the following instructional elements:

Conceptual Frameworks

Resource Collections

Asynchronous Discussions and Twitter Chats

Student Scenarios

Expert Panels

Participant Projects and Peer Feedback

Crowd-sourcing

Professional Learning Community (PLC) Guides

Primary Audience

K-3 Teachers
Teacher's Aides
Parents
Reading Specialists
Teacher Educators
Professional Development Leaders

Previous Courses

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The Teaching Foundational Reading Skills course will help you more effectively prepare your students in grades K-3 with the skills they need to become successful readers. This is a critical challenge for elementary school teachers: In 2015, only 36 percent of fourth-graders scored at or above the proficient level on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

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Phonemic awareness, although of great importance, is one of the least understood components of reading instruction. Less than a third of teacher prep programs reviewed by the National Council for Teacher Quality are providing training in phonemic awareness. This is probably why many teachers and teacher educators have misconceptions about phonemic awareness and have trouble identifying the definition and applying the skill, like counting the number of phonemes within words. Yet, phonemic awareness is the foundation for instruction in word-level reading skills and the typical deficit of a student with dyslexia.

What is phonemic awareness?

Phonemic awareness is the ability to distinguish, synthesize, and manipulate the smallest sounds (or phonemes) in words that make a difference in the word's meaning. There are 4 phonemes in the words clap (/k/, /l/, /ă/, /p/), shapes (/sh/, /ā/, /p/, /s/), box (/b/, /ŏ/, /k/, /s/), and quick (/k/, /w/, /ĭ/, /k/) even though each of those words has a different number of letters.

To demonstrate phonemic awareness, try each of the following tasks:

Isolation: What is the last sound your mouth makes when you say the word "fix"?

Blending: Tell me the word that I am saying in this robot voice: /k/ /y/ /oo/ /t/

Segmentation: Break apart the sounds in the word "swished"

Addition: Say "white" - Add /k/ to the beginning.

Deletion: Say "quip" - Take off the /k/

Substitution: Say "click" - Change /l/ to /w/

The answers are at the bottom of the post!

Why does phonemic awareness matter?

According to research, phonemic analysis skills in kindergarten are among the best predictors of later reading achievement. Deficits in phonemic awareness abilities consistently separate children with and without a disability in word-level reading (i.e., dyslexia). These deficits persist into adulthood if adequate intervention is not given. We also have a large body of research evidence that suggests instruction in phonemic awareness promotes the acquisition of reading skills.

In order to sound out a word, a child must not only match each letter in the word to its corresponding sound, but then also synthesize, or blend, those sounds together. Even if children have all of the phonics knowledge in the world, without phonemic awareness the child will be left at guessing what the actual words on the page say. For example, one little boy in my first grade class at the beginning of the year picked up the book, "The Hill" to read to me. He promptly said "the" (had clearly memorized it in Kindergarten) and then went on to sounding out the next word. /h/..... /ĭ/...... /l/......, /h/..... /ĭ/...... /l/......, /h/..... /ĭ/...... /l/......, /h/... /ĭ/.... /l/..., /h/... /ĭ/.... /l/..., /h/... /ĭ/.... /l/... He couldn't synthesize the sounds together and pronounce the word "Hill."

A few children come into PreK with this skill. Some pick up this skill more naturally along the way. Others don't. For children at-risk of reading difficulties, phonemic awareness is the most common deficit. Yet studies suggest this is the skill least likely to be taught in intervention for students with reading difficulties, accounting for less than 2% of total reading intervention time.

What are some common misconceptions about phonemic awareness?

There are still many misconceptions around phonemic awareness. Many people conflate phonemic awareness with phonological awareness. Phonological awareness is the ability to distinguish, synthesize, and manipulate the sounds of the English language. This is the bigger umbrella term over phonemic awareness. It includes rhyming, word awareness (separating words in sentences), syllable awareness, onset-rime awareness (str-ing, spl-ash, b-ig), and phonemic awareness skills.

The problem with conflating the two is that phonemic skills are the high-impact skills. These are the ones that are directly correlated with reading (to sound out and read a word, you must have phonemic blending skills) and spelling (to break apart the sounds and connect them to letters, you must be able to segment phonemes). So when teachers work on rhyming or clapping syllables, there is no direct effect on word reading or phonemic awareness. If this time was spent instead on phonemic awareness skills, more direct benefits would ensue.

Another misconception is that you must first teach students how to rhyme or segment syllables before moving onto phonemic awareness tasks. This is not true. Although rhyming and syllable awareness are less complex skills, it does not mean they are prerequisites to phonemic awareness or even that working on these skills first will show a benefit to phonemic awareness lessons in the future. Teachers can go straight to phonemic awareness games and tasks with students before they even know their letter sounds.

Many people think you have to only do phonemic awareness orally-that is not true. These two skills of phonemic awareness and letter-sound correspondences can be taught simultaneously-that is where the most "bang for your buck" will be found. Phonemic awareness also plays a large role in orthographic mapping-or turning unfamiliar words into familiar, sight words (but that is a whole other future post).

The last one I'll discuss is more of a misunderstanding than a misconception. When pronouncing the phonemes, it's important to hold continuous sounds (like /fffff/, /shhhhh/, /sssss/, /lllllll/, /mmmm/) out long and also make sure to not add an "uh" at the end of clipped sounds (like "buh" for /b/ or "juh" for /j/). Saying the sounds in the most pure way possible will help students to better understand how to segment and blend sounds themselves.

How can this look in a PreK or Kindergarten classroom?

When I taught PreK and Kindergarten, these are some of the games we played to work specifically on phonemic awareness:

Jumping the sounds in words (/ch/-/ĭ/-/p/)

Saying a sound each time you take a step to line up (/b/-/l/-/ŏ/-/k/)

Saying a word in a sentence segmented and having students blend the word: "It is time for /l/-/ŭ/-/n/-/ch/!" (Side note: I also used this with our now 3 year old... he loved this game!)

Sorting pictures by their number of phonemes during center time (and using nuts and bolts to screw the picture to the correct number).

Playing Candy Land or another board game with FCRR's phoneme pictures-move a space for each sound in the word!

Using Elkonin boxes in small group settings to segment and blend words-you can use race cars, fruit loops, or even dinosaur stomps with the littlest ones for fun! Add letters that they've learned so far!

Allowing students to use invented spelling-teaching them explicitly how to segment sounds in words and assign a letter to each sound.

Phonemic awareness is the foundation underlying all of reading. It's what separates poor word readers from skilled word readers. And, it can be taught.

So go have fun! Teach your 2, 3, or 4 year old phonemic awareness skills at home to get them on the path to reading. Share this info with their teachers. And include the neighbors in on your games too!

[Answers to phonemic tasks: /s/, "cute," /s/-/w/-/ĭ/-/sh/-/t/, quite, whip, quick]

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The Foundational Importance of Phonemic Awareness

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Phonemic awareness, although of great importance, is one of the least understood components of reading instruction. Less than a third of teacher prep programs reviewed by the National Council for Teacher Quality are providing training in phonemic awareness. This is probably why many teachers and teacher educators have misconceptions about phonemic awareness and have trouble...

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Blending

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Colorado List of Reviewed and Approved Instructional Programs

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Colorado List of Reviewed and Approved Instructional Programs

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Core, Tier 1, Reading Instruction

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You are here

Approved Programs

The READ Act requires the department to identify evidence-based instructional programs and professional development programs for use by local education agencies. This page includes links to providers and programs that have been identified and approved for the use of READ Act per pupil funds through the READ Act Instructional Programming Review Process. Districts choosing to use READ Act per pupil funds to purchase these instructional programs and professional development related to these programs will submit the request through the annual READ Budget Submission.

The Advisory List of Instructional Programming was updated on May 2, 2022.

The next instructional programming review will be conducted during the 2023-2024 school year.

Questions & Rubric Requests

Completed rubrics for any reviewed program will be made available upon request. Please contact READAct@cde.state.co.us with all rubric requests and questions related to instructional program review.​

This page includes information and resources for selecting scientifically and evidence-based instructional materials.
Jump to a Section: Download READ Act Instructional Programming Advisory List Information Spreadsheet (XLXS)

Core Programming

Core Instruction is instruction provided to all students, and is typically guided by a comprehensive core reading program. Part of core instruction is typically provided to the class as a whole, and part is provided during the small group, differentiated instruction period. Although instruction is differentiated by student need during the small group period, materials and lesson procedures from the core program can frequently be used to provide reteaching, or additional teaching to students according to their needs.

Approved for Grades Kindergarten Through Third

Benchmark Education- Benchmark Adelante (2022) Spanish program

Houghton Mifflin- Arriba la Lectura (2020) Spanish program

McGraw Hill- Maravillas (2020) Spanish program

Spalding - The Writing Road to Reading (2012)

Approved for Grades Kindergarten Through Second

Approved for First through Third Grade

Supplemental Programming

Supplemental Instruction is instruction that goes beyond that provided by the comprehensive core program because the core program does not provide enough instruction or practice in a key area to meet the needs of the students in a particular classroom or school. For example, teachers in a school may observe that their comprehensive core program does not provide enough instruction in vocabulary or phonics to adequately meet the needs of the majority of their students. Selection and implementation of a supplemental program in these areas can strengthen the initial instruction and practice provided to all students.

95 Percent Group - 95 Phonics Core Program, First Edition

American Reading Company - Foundational Skills Toolkits (2020)

Benchmark Education Company - Benchmark Phonics

Carnegie Learning - Mondo Bookshop Phonics 1st Edition

Curriculum Associates - iReady

Curriculum Associates - Magnetic Reading

Edgenuity - MyPath

Imagine Learning - Language and Literacy

Istation - Istation Early Reading

Istation- Istation Espanol Lectura Temprana Spanish program

Lexia - Core 5 Reading

Literacy Resources - Heggerty Phonemic Awareness Curriculum

Open Up Resources - EL Education Foundational Skills Block, First Edition

Reading Horizons - Reading Horizons Discovery

Reading Simplified - Reading Simplified Academy

Really Great Reading - Blast

Savvas Learning Company -Savvas Essentials: Foundational Reading

Spalding - The Writing Road to Reading

Step By Step Learning - Small Group Automation Tool

Vista Higher Learning - Discover Phonics, 1st edition

William Sadlier - From Phonics to Reading

Wilson - Fundations

Zaner-Bloser - Superkids Phonemic Awareness Daily Lessons and Intervention

Zaner Bloser - The Superkids Foundational Skills Kit

Supplemental Programming - Approved by Specific Grade and Literacy Component

American Reading Company - ENIL Toolkits Spanish program
Kindergarten, First Grade, Second Grade for Phonological & Phonemic Awareness, Phonics & Word Study, and Text Reading Fluency

Center on Teaching and Learning- ECRI
Kindergarten (Phonological & Phonemic Awareness and Phonics & Word Study), First Grade (Phonological & Phonemic Awareness, Phonics & Word Study, and Text Reading Fluency), and Second Grade (Phonics & Word Study, and Text Reading Fluency). This program must be used in combination with Wonders 2017.

Waterford - Waterford Reading Academy

Kindergarten and First Grade - Phonological & Phonemic Awareness, Phonics & Word Study, Vocabulary, and Text Reading Fluency

Kindergarten - Listening Comprehension

Intervention Programming

Intervention is the practice of providing scientifically-based, high-quality instruction and progress monitoring to students who are below proficient in reading. Intervention is provided withintensity that is matched to student need. This involves more time daily, above and beyond 90+ minutes of universal (Tier 1 or core) instruction, which is focused on the specific needs of the student as identified by a diagnostic measure. Instruction can be intensified in three ways: (1) more time, (2) more targeted instruction, and (3) smaller group size.

95 Percent Group - Teaching Blending, Phonics Screeners for Intervention, Phonics Chip Kit, Phonics Lesson Library, Multisyllable Routine Cards

95 Percent Group - Phonological Awareness, Screener for Intervention, Phonological Awareness PA Lessons Deluxe Kit

95 Percent Group - Vocabulary Surge: Unleashing the Power of Word Parts (Level A & B)

Benchmark Education Company - Benchmark Phonics Intervention (Level 1, Level 2)

Cengage - Reach into Phonics Foundations

Center for Collaborative Classroom - SIPPS

Curriculum Associates -Ready Reading

Edgenuity - MyPath

Imagine Learning - Language and Literacy

Istation- Istation Espanol Lectura Temprana Spanish program

McGraw Hill - Corrective Reading

McGraw Hill - Reading Mastery Signature Edition

McGraw Hill - WonderWorks (2022)

McGraw Hill - Wonder Works

Reading Simplified - Reading Simplified Academy

Really Great Reading Company - HD Word, First Edition

Really Great Reading - Blast

Step By Step Learning - Small Group Automation Tool

Valley Speech - Esperanza Spanish program

Intervention Programming - Approved by Specific Literacy Component

Center on Teaching and Learning- ECRI
Kindergarten, First Grade and Second Grade for Phonological and Phonemic Awareness, Phonics and Word Study, and Text Reading Fluency. This program must be used in combination with Wonders 2017.

Learning By Design - Spell-Links
Phonological & Phonemic Awareness (basic & advanced levels), Phonics & Word Study, and Text Reading Fluency

Valley Speech and Learning Center - WELLS 2 Spanish program
Phonological & Phonological Awareness, Phonics & Word Study, Vocabulary and Text Reading Fluency

*Programs marked with an asterisk must be teacher directed in combination with the online component for approval in the budget planning survey.

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Advisory List of Instructional Programming

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The READ Act requires the department to identify evidence-based instructional programs and professional development programs for use by local education agencies. This page includes links to providers and programs that have been identified and approved for the use of READ Act per pupil funds through the READ Act Instructional Programming Review Process.

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University of Florida, online

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University of Florida College of Education

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Teachers will (a) develop substantive understanding of six components of reading as a process: comprehension, oral language, phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, and vocabulary; (b) scaffold student learning by applying the principles of research-based reading instruction and integrating the six components of reading; and (c) engage in the systematic problem solving process.

RED 5355: Teaching Reading in the Elementary School (3)

RED 5337: Teaching Reading in the Secondary School (3)

Teachers will understand how to select and administer appropriate assessments and analyze data to inform reading instruction to meet the needs of all students. Teachers will engage in the systematic problem solving process.

RED 6546: Diagnosis of Reading Difficulties (3)

Teachers will have a broad knowledge of students from differing profiles in order to understand and apply research-based instructional practices by differentiating process, product and context. Teachers will engage in the systematic problem solving process.

RED 6548: Remediation of Reading Difficulties (3)

Teachers will, through a culminating practicum, demonstrate knowledge of the components of reading, as well as assessments and data analysis, to implement a comprehensive research-based reading plan of instruction for all students. Teachers will engage in the systematic problem-solving process.

RED 6941: Practicum in Diagnosis and Remediation of Reading Difficulties (3)

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Reading Endorsement and Certification (Online & On campus)

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Teachers will (a) develop substantive understanding of six components of reading as a process: comprehension, oral language, phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, and vocabulary; (b) scaffold student learning by applying the principles of research-based reading instruction and integrating the six components of reading; and (c) engage in the systematic problem solving process.

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March 2020 -

We're making this free version available to support teachers and parents impacted by the pandemic. We'll keep in online for free for as long as possible. If we do have to start charging to support this edition we promise to post news of any changes here at least three weeks prior to implementing them.

Please contact us if you find errors, problems, or have suggestions for making this edition more useful.
If you are new to Reading for All Learners please spend a few minutes reviewing the Instructor Guide. The Instructor Guide is a very quick read and following this guide is vital!
If you are new to teaching reading take a look at the pronunciation guide to make use you are modeling sounds accurately. If you aren't sure which books to start with please consider running our free placement assessment series. Also you can find a correlation to leveled readers which can be useful in determining a starting point. Finally, visit the Reading For All Learners resources page to find progress tracking sheets, completion certificates and lots more.

Thanks for all you are doing to help kids learn during this challenging time. We are grateful for the opportunity to be able to support your efforts. Please help us with this effort by sharing this resource. As always, feel free to reach out to us using any of the methods found at the bottom of this page with any questions or concerns.

Sincerely,

Andy Hofmeister
CEO
Academic Success for All Learners

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reading for all learners home education and school closure edition

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Reading for All Learners Home Education and School Closure Edition

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March 2020 - We're making this free version available to support teachers and parents impacted by the pandemic. We'll keep in online for free for as long as possible. If we do have to start charging to support this edition we promise to post news of any changes here at least three weeks prior to implementing them.

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Presentation to State BOE, January 2020 to provide an update to the State Board on the 2007 Report of the Task Force on the Education of Maryland’s African American Males, the 2019 Task Force on Student Discipline Regulations, and other student support initiatives.

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MCAP // PARCC -- includes disaggregated data by School

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We are pleased to share the most current information available to help our stakeholders measure student achievement in all 24 districts from year to year.

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NWEA Study of Learning Loss during COVID School closures

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NWEA Study of Learning Loss during COVID School closures

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The COVID-19 slide: What summer learning loss can tell us about the potential impact of school closures on student academic achievement - NWEA

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COVID-19 school closures will likely impact student academic achievement. Research on summer learning loss can offer insights to help educators, policy makers, and families understand, plan for, and address some potential impacts of this extended pause when students return to school.

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Submission to Ontario, Canada Human Rights Commission

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Submission to Ontario, Canada Human Rights Commission

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To provide an update to the State Board on the 2007 Report of the Task Force on the Education of Maryland’s African American Males, the 2019 Task Force on Student Discipline Regulations, and other student support initiatives.

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Links on Evidence Based Reading Instruction

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Links on Evidence Based Reading Instruction

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Achieve the Core

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Supporting Our Youngest Readers: Teaching the Skills of Reading - Peers and Pedagogy

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My 3-year-old is always on the move, rarely still long enough to show an interest in learning. So, I was surprised to walk in on him staring at his sister’s first grade worksheet- a handwriting practice sheet for the letter “r.” “Rrr….rrrr…rrrr” they said together, as he pointed to each r on the pag…

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Guidance to Implement Reading Screening for Els

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Guidance to Implement Reading Screening for Els

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First DRAFT. Second draft will include additional stakeholders.