# data[].attributes.body
What students can show us about how school is letting them down~ and how to fix it.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
To do this, we collected nearly 30,000 in-the-moment student surveys. Using a technology that prompted students in grades six through 12 to answer a few questions at random times during class, we captured a snapshot of their real-time reactions to school. We also surveyed third through fifth graders during the last five minutes of class, and found that elementary students were just as capable as their older schoolmates of providing rich and telling insight into their lives at school.

Across our five partner school systems, we also observed nearly a thousand full-length lessons at all grade levels from K-12, and reviewed almost 5,000 assignments and more than 20,000 individual student work samples. We visited each participating school daily for a week straight at three points in the year, which gave us the chance to see the same teachers and students at the beginning, middle, and end of their time together (and offered a much more comprehensive lens on the learning environment than a single day's lesson could have). These classrooms were not substantially different than the others in their districts, and they represented a wide range: those with new teachers and veterans; those at all age levels; a diverse range of subjects; mixed-ability classes and tracked ones. Four of these school systems were located in states that use standards aligned to the Common Core State Standards; one was not.

To assess the quality of content students worked on, we looked at four elements of every assignment: (1) whether the content in the assignments was aligned to relevant grade-level academic standards; (2) whether the assignments gave students the chance to engage in important content-specific practices, like citing evidence from rigorous texts in literacy, or discussing mathematical ideas using precise mathematical language; (3) whether the assignments gave students a chance to learn relevant content that built their knowledge of the world or helped them see how what they were learning could be applied in the real world; and (4) student performance on both the assignments themselves and against the bar for their grade-level standards.

To study instruction, we observed full-length class periods and assessed (1) whether students were doing what they were asked; (2) whether they were being asked to work on grade-level content; and (3) whether teachers were using instructional practices that gave students the chance to do most of the thinking in the lesson.

We surveyed teachers to capture their knowledge of grade-level standards, their opinions on those standards, and their beliefs about their classroom practices and their students' abilities. We conducted focus groups with nearly 100 teachers and interviewed 24 school leaders at multiple times throughout the year. And we assessed a large set of extant data provided to us by our partner districts on course access, enrollment policies, and district policies on curriculum adoption, among others.

We hypothesized that students' experiences of school were influenced by a confluence of factors-among them, the quality of the work they were doing, the instruction they received, and the expectations of their teachers-and that those factors would interact to have an impact on their academic growth. Taken together with students' in-the-moment survey responses, we were able to triangulate students' perspectives with the classes they were in, the work they were doing and instruction they were receiving, and their academic outcomes.

In addition to amassing this rich data set, we also sat down with a smaller subset of students (more than 50 over two school years), and got to know them. We observed them in class and spoke to them about their experiences, their likes and dislikes, their families, their goals. Just a few of those students are profiled here. While their names and identifying characteristics have been changed throughout this report, their stories help us understand what the data means in the real lives of individual young people.

They also help us understand what real, tangible changes school systems can make-starting tomorrow and over the long haul-to provide more students with school experiences that are meaningful, that honor their aspirations for themselves and their families, and that give them a fighting chance to meet those goals.
For our complete methodology, including further explanation of our analytical approaches and full analysis results, see the Technical Appendix.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What can 4,000 students teach us about school? Read The Opportunity Myth.

# data[].attributes.body
Why aren't kids being taught to read?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
READ THIS STORY IN SPANISH

Lea esta historia en español.

It was 2015 and Jack Silva, the chief academic officer for the public schools in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, had a problem: Only 56 percent of third-graders in his district had scored proficient on the state reading test.

Reading scores had been low for a while, but for most of the five years that Silva had been chief academic officer, he and other school leaders had been consumed with a severe budget crisis. By 2015, the district had turned the corner financially, and Silva was wondering why the reading scores were so terrible. "It was really looking yourself in the mirror and saying, 'Which four in 10 students don't deserve to learn to read?'" he said.

The stakes were high. Research shows that children who don't learn to read by the end of third grade are likely to remain poor readers for the rest of their lives, and they're likely to fall behind in other academic areas, too. People who struggle with reading are more likely to drop out of high school, to end up in the criminal justice system, and to live in poverty. But as a nation, we've come to accept a high percentage of kids not reading well. More than 60 percent of American fourth-graders are not proficient readers, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and it's been that way since testing began in the 1990s.
Percentage of U.S. students proficient in reading
SOURCE: The National Assessment of Educational Progress ( Grade 4 | Grade 8). *In 1992 and 1994, testing accommodations were not permitted.

One of the excuses educators have long offered to explain America's poor reading performance is poverty. There is plenty of poverty in Bethlehem, a small city in eastern Pennsylvania that was once a booming steel town. But there are fancy homes here, too, and when Silva examined the reading scores he saw that many kids at the wealthier schools weren't reading very well either. This was not just poverty. In fact, by some estimates, one-third of America's struggling readers are from college-educated families.

Silva didn't know anything about how children learn to read or how they should be taught, so he started searching online. As he soon discovered, virtually all kids can learn to read - if they are taught the right way. The problem is that many American elementary schools aren't doing that.

"We never looked at brain research. We had never, ever looked at it. Never."
- Jodi Frankelli

The basic assumption that underlies typical reading instruction in many schools is that learning to read is a natural process, much like learning to talk. But decades of scientific research has revealed that reading doesn't come naturally. The human brain isn't wired to read. Kids must be explicitly taught how to connect sounds with letters - phonics.

"There are thousands of studies," said Louisa Moats, an education consultant and researcher who has been teaching and studying reading since the 1970s. "This is the most studied aspect of human learning."

But this research hasn't made its way into many elementary school classrooms. The prevailing approaches to reading instruction in American schools are inconsistent with basic things scientists have discovered about how children learn to read. Many educators don't know the science, and in some cases actively resist it. The resistance is the result of beliefs about reading that have been deeply held in the educational establishment for decades, even though those beliefs have been proven wrong by scientists over and over again.

Most teachers nationwide are not being taught reading science in their teacher preparation programs because many deans and faculty in colleges of education either don't know the science or dismiss it. As a result of their intransigence, millions of kids have been set up to fail.

The problem in Bethlehem

Even though Silva had known little about how children learn to read or how reading should be taught, he'd long been aware that some older students were struggling too. He'd been a middle school and high school teacher for years, and he had students who came across words they'd never seen before and had no idea how to sound them out.

Kim Harper, the district's supervisor of literacy, noticed the same thing. She'd been a high school English teacher in Bethlehem and said that a disturbing number of her students, even students in honors classes, weren't very good readers. "They didn't like to read," she said. "They avoided reading. They would tell me it was too hard."

She didn't know what to do about it either, so she more or less shrugged it off. "I think it became easy to say, 'Well that's just the way it is. You know, we're always going to have X percent of kids who it's just going to be a struggle for,'" she said.

Even the school board president, Mike Faccinetto, said it was pretty much accepted that a lot of kids in the district would never be very good readers. "It was always, 'Well, that's not a reflection of Bethlehem,'" he said, referring to the reading scores. The kids who weren't doing well, "'Ah, well, you know those kids, their parents aren't around, or maybe they don't have two parents. And that's the best they're going to do.'"

Silva wanted to figure out what was going on. So in 2015, he assigned Harper to visit all of Bethlehem's elementary schools and find out how children were being taught to read.

Harper went to a professional development day at one of the district's lowest-performing elementary schools. The teachers were talking about how kids should attack words in a story. When a child came to a word he didn't know, the teacher would tell him to look at the picture and guess. The most important thing was for the child to understand the meaning of the story, not the exact words on the page. So, if a kid came to the word "horse" and said "house," the teacher would say it's wrong. But, Harper said, "if the kid said 'pony,' it'd be right because pony and horse mean the same thing."

Harper was shocked. First of all, pony and horse don't mean the same thing. Second, the idea that you look at pictures and guess when you don't know a word seemed odd to her. "I wouldn't have been able to use that strategy at the secondary level," she said. There were no pictures in the books her high school students read.

The teachers described their approach to reading instruction as "balanced literacy." Harper didn't quite know what that meant, but her colleague Jodi Frankelli had heard lots about balanced literacy. Frankelli was the district's new supervisor of early learning. Though her teaching experience and training were in the upper grades, too, she'd been a principal at one of Bethlehem's elementary schools. She said it hadn't been completely clear to her what balanced literacy was. The main idea seemed to be: Give kids lots of good books, and with some guidance and enough practice, they become readers. "We never looked at brain research," she said. "We had never, ever looked at it. Never."

We are not born wired to read

The scientific research on reading goes back decades, from work psychologists were doing in the 1960s to more recent discoveries by neuroscientists using brain imaging technology.

Researchers have been doing their work in labs that were sometimes right across the quad from schools of education, but reading researchers and education researchers kind of live in separate universes; they go to different conferences, publish in different journals. The big takeaway from all the scientific research on reading is that learning to read is not a natural process. We are not born wired to read.

"Balanced literacy was a way to defuse the wars over reading. It succeeded in keeping the science at bay and it allowed things to continue as before."
- Mark Seidenberg

We are born wired to talk. Kids learn to talk by being talked to, by being surrounded with spoken language. That's all it takes. No one has to teach them to talk.

But, as numerous studies have shown, reading is different. Our brains don't know how to do it. That's because human beings didn't invent written language until relatively recently in human history, just a few thousand years ago. To be able to read, structures in our brain that were designed for things such as object recognition have to get rewired a bit.

Another big takeaway from decades of scientific research is that, while we use our eyes to read, the starting point for reading is sound. What a child must do to become a reader is to figure out how the words she hears and knows how to say connect to letters on the page. Writing is a code humans invented to represent speech sounds. Kids have to crack that code to become readers.

Children don't crack the code naturally. They need to be taught how letters represent speech sounds. But by the time scientists had done all the studies to conclude this for sure, a different set of beliefs about reading was already deeply entrenched in many American schools and colleges of education.

Balanced literacy

Debates about reading go back centuries. In the 1800s, Horace Mann, the father of the public-school movement in the United States, railed against the idea of teaching children that letters represent sounds. He referred to letters of the alphabet as "bloodless, ghastly apparitions" and argued that children would be distracted from comprehending the meaning of what they were reading if they focused too much on letters. He believed children should be taught to read whole words.

On the other side of the debate were people who believed in phonics. That means teaching children that words are made up of parts and showing them how different letters and combinations of letters connect to the speech sounds in words.

No one really knew how children actually learned to read, or how they should be taught. "It was more debates among people who had philosophies," Moats said. By the 1980s, the debate was so intense that people began referring to it as "the reading war." It was phonics versus what had come to be known as "whole language."

Whole language was a movement of people who believed that children and teachers needed to be freed from the tedium of phonics instruction. Phonics lessons were seen as rote, old-fashioned, and kind of conservative. The essential idea in whole language was that children construct their own knowledge and meaning from experience. Teaching them phonics wasn't necessary because learning to read was a natural process that would occur if they were immersed in a print-rich environment. Whole language proponents thought phonics lessons might actually be bad for kids, might inhibit children from developing a love of reading by making them focus on tedious skills like breaking words into parts.

By the early 1990s, the idea that kids didn't need phonics had taken hold in many schools and teacher preparation programs, and was even a guiding principle behind reading instruction across the entire state of California. But the phonics folks kept pushing back.

The battle between whole language and phonics got so heated that the U.S. Congress eventually got involved, convening a National Reading Panel to review all the research on reading. In 2000, the panel released a report. The sum of the research showed that explicitly teaching children the relationship between sounds and letters improved reading achievement. The panel concluded that phonics lessons help kids become better readers. There is no evidence to say the same about whole language.

After the National Reading Panel report, whole language proponents could no longer deny the importance of phonics. But they didn't give up their core belief that learning to read is a natural process, and they didn't give up the reading programs they were selling, either. Instead they advocated for doing both, a balance. So, whole language didn't disappear; it just got repackaged as balanced literacy. And in balanced literacy, phonics is treated a bit like salt on a meal: a little here and there, but not too much, because it could be bad for you.

"Balanced literacy was a way to defuse the wars over reading," said Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive neuroscientist and author of the book "Language at the Speed of Sight." "It succeeded in keeping the science at bay, and it allowed things to continue as before."

He says the reading wars are over, and science lost.

Seidenberg knows of a child who was struggling so much with reading that her mother paid for a private tutor. "The tutor taught her some of the basic skills that the child wasn't getting in her whole language classroom," he said. "At the end of the school year the teacher was proud that the child had made so much progress, and the parent said, 'Well, why didn't you teach phonics and other basic skills related to print in class?' And the teacher said 'Oh, I did. Your child was absent that day.'"

For scientists like Seidenberg, the problem with teaching just a little bit of phonics is that according to all the research, phonics is crucial when it comes to learning how to read. Surrounding kids with good books is a great idea, but it's not the same as teaching children to read.

Experts say that in a whole-language classroom, some kids will learn to read despite the lack of effective instruction. But without explicit and systematic phonics instruction, many children won't ever learn to read very well.

'When we know better, we do better'

By the end of 2015, Silva and other district leaders in Bethlehem had figured out that balanced literacy didn't line up with the science.

Now they had to figure out what to do about it. They decided the first step would be a series of training sessions over the course of a school year for all the principals at the district's 16 elementary schools. The district leaders reasoned that the principals needed to be convinced of the science if they were going to convince their teachers to change the way they taught reading.

If there was one principal who was sure to resist, it was Kathy Bast, the principal of Calypso Elementary School. She was known as the district's No. 1 balanced literacy champion. "Decoding was never part of anything I ever did," Bast said. She happened to be out on medical leave when the training began, but her colleagues warned her she wouldn't like it. "They said to me, 'Kathy, we know you. You're not going to take well to this training.'"

Education as a practice has placed a much higher value on observation and hands-on experience than on scientific evidence.

But Bast had a secret. Before becoming a principal, she'd been a reading specialist. It was her job to help struggling readers. In her training to become a reading specialist, she learned a lot about how to identify children with reading problems, but she learned nothing about how to help those children learn to read. "I didn't know what to do, except just give them more books," she said. "And it wasn't working."

With time on her hands while she was on medical leave, Bast began poking around online and discovered the vast scientific literature on reading. It wasn't being published in a lot of the journals and newsletters she got as a school principal, but as her boss, Silva, had discovered, all it takes is a Google search to find it. When Bast returned to work from medical leave and joined her fellow principals in the training on reading science, she was ready to hear what the trainer had to say. And it kind of blew her mind. "Wow!" she thought. "OK, let's go get at this."

The training used a curriculum written by Moats called "Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling" or LETRS. The principals went through the training in the 2015-16 school year, the kindergarten teachers went through it the next year, and then first- and second-grade teachers did it, too.

For many teachers, the science of reading training was overwhelming at first. "I remember sitting there and my head was throbbing 'cause it was like, 'How can I take all this in?'" said Adrienne Ibarra, a reading specialist at Bethlehem's Lincoln Elementary School. She hadn't learned much about phonics when she was in college studying to be a teacher. Neither had Michelle Bosak, an English as a second language teacher at Lincoln. "It was very broad classes, vague classes and like a children's literature class," Bosak said. "But not actually teaching phonics."

Candy Maldonado, a first-grade teacher at Lincoln, described the district's old approach to reading instruction this way: "We did like a letter a week. So, if the letter was 'A,' we read books about 'A,' we ate things with 'A,' we found things with 'A,'" she said. "All we did was learn 'A' said 'ah.' And then there's apples, and we tasted apples."

The teachers had no idea how kids actually learned to read. "It was just that they do," Ibarra said.

"Almost like it's automatic," Maldonado added.

After learning about the reading science, these teachers were full of regret. "I feel horrible guilt," said Ibarra, who's been a teacher for 15 years.

"I thought, 'All these years, all these students,'" said Bosak, who's been teaching for 26 years.

To help assuage that guilt, the Bethlehem school district has adopted a motto: "When we know better, we do better." And soon, they were doing much better.

'My kids are successful, and happy, and believe in themselves'

The Bethlehem schools now use a curriculum in the early elementary grades that mixes teacher-directed whole-class phonics lessons with small-group activities to meet the needs of children at different points in the process of learning to read. At first, some of the teachers recoiled a bit at the scripted nature of the lessons; the curriculum is explicit and systematic, with every teacher on the same page each day. If the curriculum says today's the day for kindergarteners to learn words that begin with the sounds "wuh" and "guh," you can walk into any kindergarten classroom in the district and see the teacher doing that lesson.

Lynn Venable, a kindergarten teacher at Calypso who has been teaching elementary school for 21 years, said she used to think reading would just kind of "fall together" for kids if they were exposed to enough print. Now, because of the science of reading training, she knows better. She said her current class of kindergartners had progressed more quickly in reading than any class she'd ever had. "My kids are successful, and happy, and believe in themselves," she said. "I don't have a single child in my room that has that look on their face like, 'I can't do this.'"

At the end of each school year, the Bethlehem school district gives kindergartners a test to assess early reading skills. In 2015, before the science of reading training began, more than half of the kindergartners in the district tested below the benchmark score, meaning most of them were heading into first grade at risk of reading failure. At the end of the 2018 school year, after the principals and kindergarten teachers were trained in the reading science, 84 percent of kindergarteners met or exceeded the benchmark score. At three schools, it was 100 percent.
Kindergarten reading performance before and after the science of reading training
SOURCE: Bethlehem Area School District. *Low-income is defined as the percentage of students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, 2017-18.

Silva is thrilled with the results, but cautious. He's eager to see how the kindergartners do when they get to the state reading test in third grade. "We may have hit a home run in the first inning," he said. "But there's a lot of game left here."

It's impossible to know if the science of reading training is what led to the test score gains. Some of the schools in the district moved from half-day to full-day kindergarten the same year the training began, so that could have been a factor. But Bast, the principal at Calypso, thinks if her teachers had continued with the old approach to reading instruction, she'd still have a lot of struggling readers in her school. "We're actually teaching," she said. "We're doing our jobs."

The teacher prep problem

You can find schools and school districts across the United States that are trying to change reading instruction the way Bethlehem has, but according to Moats, ill-informed, ineffective reading instruction is the norm. "The gap between science-based ideas and practices and those most often used in our classrooms remains very wide and persistent," she wrote in a recent article.

A big part of the problem is at the university level, in schools of education, according to the authors of a 2016 article in the Journal of Childhood & Developmental Disorders. "Faculty have ignored the scientific knowledge that informs reading acquisition," the authors wrote. "As a result, the pre-service teachers who are being educated at these institutions fail to receive the necessary training."

In 2016, the National Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, reviewed the syllabi of teacher preparation programs across the country and found that only 39 percent of them appeared to be teaching the components of effective reading instruction.

Seidenberg says the scientific research has had relatively little impact on what happens in classrooms because the science isn't very highly valued in schools of education. "Prospective teachers aren't exposed to it or they're led to believe that it's only one of several perspectives," he said. "In a class on reading, prospective teachers will be exposed to a menu in which they have 10 or 12 different approaches to reading, and they're encouraged to pick the one that will fit their personal teaching style best."

Education as a practice has placed a much higher value on observation and hands-on experience than on scientific evidence, Seidenberg said. "We have to change the culture of education from one based on beliefs to one based on facts."

Kelly Butler has been trying to do just that for nearly two decades in Mississippi.

'Is this your science or my science?'

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

Butler works for the Barksdale Reading Institute, an organization founded with a $100-million gift from the former CEO of Netscape to help Mississippi children improve their reading skills. Back in the early 2000s, after the panel convened by Congress released its report, Butler and her colleagues wanted to know: Were teacher preparation programs in Mississippi instructing teachers to teach reading in ways backed up by the science?

So they did a study of the teacher preparation programs at the state's eight publicly funded universities. The institute reviewed syllabi and textbooks, surveyed the students in the classes, observed some of the classes, and interviewed the deans and faculty. The study found that teacher candidates in Mississippi were getting an average of 20 minutes of instruction in phonics over their entire two-year teacher preparation program. Kelly Butler was alarmed. She and her colleagues went to state education officials and pleaded with them to take action.

In 2003, in a rather extraordinary move, the state Department of Education mandated that every teacher preparation program in Mississippi require two courses in early literacy to cover what was in the National Reading Panel report. It was extraordinary because even though states have the authority to regulate teacher preparation programs, only a handful of states have specific requirements about what prospective teachers learn about reading. Colleges and universities generally don't like state officials telling them what to do. "Professors pretty much have academic freedom to construct learning in the way they think best," Butler said.

Angela Rutherford, who works with Butler and is a professor in the school of education at the University of Mississippi, put it more bluntly. "Faculty members close the door and do whatever the heck they want to," she said.

Rutherford wasn't sure the state mandate would make a big difference because many of her colleagues in teacher preparation didn't know the science themselves or didn't believe in it. She said many of them have long believed in whole language. "I had a colleague challenge me back in the fall," she said. "And her question was, 'What do you believe?' I said, 'I believe what I see in research.'"

Butler says the resistance to the science among college faculty and administrators baffles her, but it runs deep. Once, when she was talking to an education school dean about the reading science, the dean said to her, "Is this your science or my science?"

It was not clear how much impact the state mandate to teach reading science was having. Then in 2015, the Mississippi legislature passed a law called the "Literacy-Based Promotion Act." The law says that kids who aren't reading on grade level by the end of third grade cannot be promoted to fourth grade. The legislature appropriated millions of dollars to pay for training in the science of reading for all of the state's elementary school teachers.

However, if new teachers coming out of teacher prep programs didn't know reading science, the state would be spending money perpetually retraining teachers. At this point, no one really knew what prospective teachers were learning in those early literacy classes required by the state.

"I think we all agree that this is right. And maybe we're here because of that. And the whole language ones are not here because I think they would really resist, a lot."

So in 2015, Butler and her colleagues decided to repeat the study they'd done in 2003. This time they looked at private colleges in Mississippi, too. They examined the early literacy courses at 15 teacher prep programs. They found, with one exception, that all the state's teacher prep programs appeared to be teaching the components of reading identified by the National Reading Panel report. But when Butler interviewed deans and faculty, most of them admitted they'd never actually read the report. And when she asked them basic questions about the science of reading, most of them didn't know the answers. The schools of education were complying with the letter of the law, but many faculty members didn't really understand the science themselves.

The professors needed training.

Changing the way teachers are taught

Teachers in the K-12 education system are used to professional development. College professors are not.

A Mississippi governor's task force decided the professors would benefit from the same training that the state's elementary school teachers were getting. The teacher training used LETRS, the curriculum the teachers in Bethlehem went through. No one was going to require college instructors to do the training, but state legislators had passed a measure to encourage it. Since 2016, teacher candidates in Mississippi have been required to pass a test on reading science. If you don't pass what's known as the Foundations of Reading test, you don't get licensed to teach elementary school in Mississippi. It's now in the best interest of faculty to teach the science, because if they don't, their students won't get jobs.

In a session of LETRS training for faculty in Jackson, Mississippi, in March 2018, the trainer, Antonio Fierro, passed out a quiz. The first question was: "True or false? Speaking is natural, reading and writing are not." The answer is "true," but the question was being asked because it's not a given that the 37 people in this training, a mix of mostly tenured faculty and adjuncts, would know that.

Roshunda Harris-Allen, a professor in the teacher preparation program at Tougaloo College, said she wasn't taught reading science in college or as part of her doctorate. And she didn't learn phonics as a kid. "We were just taught - here are your sight words, you need to memorize them," she said. She said that she struggled with reading when she was a child.

Trashonda Dixon, a literacy instructor at Tougaloo, says she did get phonics instruction when she was young, but she never learned how to teach phonics. "I think we did have issues with a lack of knowledge initially," Dixon said, referring to herself and her fellow faculty members in LETRS training. "But I think we're making great strides here to correct that."

The Mississippi faculty came together for training several times over the course of a year, and some even received mentoring as they were teaching reading science to their college students. Moats said she once did some LETRS workshops for college faculty in Colorado many years ago and one of her colleagues did abbreviated training for faculty in Maryland, but Mississippi is the only place she knows of where college faculty are going through an extended course.

"I feel blessed to be part of this change," said Barbara Bowen, an instructor at the University of Southern Mississippi who went through the training. "I think we all agree that this is right. And maybe we're here because of that. And the whole language ones are not here because I think they would really resist, a lot."

The whole language hold-outs

The faculty who most resist reading science weren't in the LETRS training. Two professors at the University of Southern Mississippi agreed to be interviewed about why they didn't want to attend.

"I am philosophically opposed to jumping on the bandwagon of the next great thing that's going to teach every child how to learn to read," said Stacy Reeves, an associate professor of literacy. "Phonics for me is not that answer."

Reeves said she knows this from her own experience. In the early 1990s, before she started her Ph.D., she was an elementary school teacher. Her students did phonics worksheets and then got little books called decodable readers that contained words with the letter patterns they'd been practicing. She said the books were boring and repetitive. "But as soon as I sat down with my first-graders and read a book, like 'Frog and Toad Are Friends,' they were instantly engaged in the story," she said.

She ditched the phonics workbooks and the decodable readers. "And once I started teaching in a more whole way, a more encompassing way of the whole child - What does this child need? What does that child need? Let's read more real books," she explained, "my teaching improved, the students learned more. I feel they came out the other side much better." She admitted she had no evidence her students were learning more, but she said they seemed more engaged.

One of the central tenets of whole language is that teachers are best able to judge whether their students are learning, not standardized tests. Another key idea is that all children learn to read differently and need to be taught in different ways. But research has shown that's not true.

Our brains are much more similar than they are different, and all children need to learn basically the same things to change their nonreading brains into reading brains. "Cultural, economic, and educational circumstances obviously affect children's progress," Seidenberg wrote in his book. "But what they need to learn does not change." One of the most consistent findings in all of education research is that children become better readers when they get explicit and systematic phonics instruction.

The students who suffer most when schools don't give their students insight into the code are kids with dyslexia. They have an especially hard time understanding the relationship between sounds and letters.

Mary Ariail, former chair of the Department of Curriculum, Instruction and Special Education at the University of Southern Mississippi, remains opposed to explicit phonics instruction. She thinks it can be helpful to do some phonics with kids as they're reading books, maybe prompt a child to sound something out or to notice a letter pattern in a word. But she believes kids will be distracted from understanding the meaning of what they're reading if teachers focus too much on how words are made up of letters. "One of the ideas behind whole language is that when [reading] is meaningful, it's easy," she said. "And when it's broken down into little parts, it makes it harder."

Despite research to the contrary, Ariail and Reeves said they believe learning to read is a natural process.

"I believe children learn to read as soon as they start learning to hear," Reeves said. "Being surrounded by books, being read to often."

"It's like learning to talk," Ariail said. "A lot of children come to school already reading because they have been immersed in print-rich environments from the time they were born."

It's not clear how much they had read about reading science, but they said they do not agree with it. "One of the bones of contention is that the phonics-based approach is the scientific approach," Ariail said. "It's their science."

Ariail left her job and returned to her home state of Georgia at the end of the 2018 academic year, in part because of her frustration with the effort to change reading instruction in Mississippi. She sees it as an example of lawmakers telling educators what to do, and she doesn't like it.

Phonics isn't enough

When you talk to whole language proponents, it's clear pretty quickly that the distrust of phonics instruction is motivated by a fear that reading will be reduced to rote and boring phonics drills. One of the reasons whole language flourished in the 1970s and '80s is that it rejected the idea that children should sit quietly in rows listening to a teacher direct a lesson. "In whole language, the battle was seen as, 'Are you in favor of literacy or are you in favor of skills?'" Seidenberg said.

He said no one is advocating for rote and boring lessons. But the science shows clearly that when reading instruction is organized around a defined progression of concepts about how speech is represented by print, kids become better readers. There is also widespread support in the research for the effectiveness of teacher-directed lessons as opposed to letting children discover key concepts about reading on their own.

What's also clear in the research is that phonics isn't enough. Children can learn to decode words without knowing what the words mean. To comprehend what they're reading, kids need a good vocabulary, too. That's why reading to kids and surrounding them with quality books is a good idea. The whole language proponents are right about that.

There are proven ways to help people with dyslexia learn to read, but some public schools are denying children proper treatment and failing to identify them with dyslexia in the first place. Read more and listen.

But, according to the research, kids who can't decode will never be good readers. Some children learn decoding quickly with minimal instruction. Others need a lot more help. But good phonics instruction is beneficial for all kids, even those who learn to decode easily; research shows they become better spellers.

The belief that learning to read is a natural process that occurs when children are surrounded by books is a problem not just because there's no science to back it up. It's a problem because it assumes the primary responsibility for teaching children to read lies with families, not schools. If you're not fortunate enough to grow up in a household where there are lots of books and adults who read to you, you may be out of luck.

There is no debate at this point among scientists that reading is a skill that needs to be explicitly taught by showing children the ways that sounds and letters correspond.

"It's so accepted in the scientific world that if you just write another paper about these fundamental facts and submit it to a journal they won't accept it because it's considered settled science," Moats said.

According to all the research, what you should see in every school is a heavy emphasis on explicit phonics instruction in the early grades. There is no evidence this turns kids off to reading or makes reading harder. In fact, it's the opposite. If you do a good job teaching phonics in the early grades, kids get off to a quicker start. "And they accelerate their progress faster and read more and like it better and so it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle," Moats said. "Whereas the converse is true. When you don't give kids insight into the code and don't arm them with insight into language, both spoken and written, what happens is, 'This is a mystery. I'm not sure I'm getting what these words really say. Therefore, I'm uncomfortable. And therefore, I don't really like it.'"

The students who suffer most when schools don't give their students insight into the code are kids with dyslexia. They have an especially hard time understanding the relationship between sounds and letters. If you're a child with dyslexia from an upper-income family, someone is probably going to notice that you're struggling and pay for you to get the help you need. But kids from poor families often get left behind, and there's evidence that a disproportionate number of them eventually end up in the criminal justice system. American prisons are full of people who grew up in poor families, and according to a study of the Texas prison population, nearly half of all inmates have dyslexia. They struggled to read as kids and probably never got the help they needed.

For Butler, the main problem at this point is ignorance. Too many teachers, school administrators and college professors don't know the science. She's betting that teaching them the science is the answer. "Part of my optimism about this is it's not like we're setting out to try to figure out how to teach reading so we can then teach everybody how to do it," she said. "We know how to do it."

Seidenberg is less optimistic. He makes a comparison to climate change research. "One thing that we've learned from climate change and the other issues over which we have polarization in this country is that facts aren't the thing that change people's beliefs," he said. "In fact, confronted with data that contradict deeply held beliefs, instead of bringing people closer together, it can have the paradoxical effects of entrenching them further."

SHARE AND DISCUSS ON FACEBOOK

CORRESPONDENT
Emily Hanford

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

Resources

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Scientific research has shown how children learn to read and how they should be taught. But many educators don't know the science and, in some cases, actively resist it. As a result, millions of kids are being set up to fail.

# data[].attributes.body
by Natalie Wexler

# data[].attributes.headline
Meeting the Needs of Early Literacy Phonics Instruction

# data[].attributes.subject
Meeting the Needs of Early Literacy Phonics Instruction

# data[].attributes.headline
The Three Question Literacy Health Check by Karen Vaites

# data[].attributes.subject
The Three Question Literacy Health Check by Karen Vaites

# data[].attributes.body
An ELA self exam

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Anxiety about America's approach to reading instruction is all around us once again, making its cyclical appearance like a plague of 17-year cicadas. Much of this is due to journalist Emily Hanford, whose radio documentaries on the science of reading and our schools' unwillingness to embrace it have earned her awards and accolades while placing the issue of early literacy back near the top of the education-reform conversation.

This brings more than a little nostalgia for the late 1990s and early 2000s, the last time the country took a serious swipe at changing the way kids learn to read. The National Reading Panel declared in 1999 that students needed to be taught to read explicitly, including purposeful attention to phonics and phonemic awareness; by 2002, Congress was funding a new billion-dollar-a-year investment called Reading First, intended to get such an approach into the classroom. The program proved to be hugely popular with teachers. But it was polarizing among education-publishing oligarchs and, of course, infuriating to the "whole language" crowd, who prefer an approach that focuses on textual meaning and downplays the importance of learning to sound out words. A faux scandal soon put the initiative on ice, and almost immediately, many popular publishers starting dressing the now-suspect whole-language wolf in "balanced literacy" clothing.

It's no surprise, then, that Hanford could easily find young teachers who had never encountered the science of systemic reading instruction during their pre-service preparation programs, as well as tenured professors who continue to spout the whole-language nonsense that children can learn to read naturally, just as they learn to speak.
An "adequacy" path
So now what? Nobody seems to be in the mood to propose another big federal effort to fund professional development for teachers, especially one with the guts to separate the science-based wheat from the whole-language chaff. Besides, it would (in concept, anyway) be far more efficient to fix the problem at the root-to find a way to make schools of education teach science instead of schlock.

Plenty of good folks are trying, among them the National Council on Teacher Quality, which has been pumping out reviews of state policies that would promote good reading instruction (especially by demanding that elementary-school and special-education teacher candidates pass tests on the science of reading), as well as reviewing teaching-training programs themselves. There are isolated examples of improvement-Mississippi, for example, requires aspiring teachers to take two phonics-focused classes in reading instruction, and it passed a law supporting phonics training for professors at schools of education throughout the state. The latest results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed Mississippi students making progress in reading, even as student performance declined nationwide. Mostly, though, the states and schools of education have remained impervious to change. And as a result, the malpractice continues.

Perhaps it's time to dust off another favorite strategy from the early 2000s: the adequacy lawsuit. (Yes, I know I'm writing in Education Next, but stay with me here.) As is well-known, that round of lawsuits latched onto state constitutional language (such as passages requiring a state to provide an "adequate" or "thorough and efficient" education) to demand more funding for schools. And according to Michael Rebell, lead litigant in New York State's successful adequacy lawsuit, one of advocates' key arguments was that more money was necessary to recruit and retain qualified teachers, without whom an adequate education was impossible.

It's not such a stretch, then, to argue that states have a constitutional responsibility to ensure that the teachers produced under their aegis and employed by their public schools are prepared to provide an adequate education. And what is less adequate than an education that doesn't lead to basic literacy for children? (This is a separate question, I should note, from whether there is a so-called federal right to literacy.)

Rebell said he thinks such suits just might work, especially if courts were to find that "states are not enforcing their own laws, or are derelict in monitoring the quality of graduates from teacher-preparation programs." Al Lindseth, an attorney who spent many years opposing lawyers like Rebell, reluctantly agrees. "You could make a case," he told me, "that a state is not setting its standards for teachers high enough, or enforcing them, for students to get an adequate education."
Handicapping a court-ordered solution
For both Rebell and Lindseth, the idea brought to mind Vergara v. California, a lawsuit in which advocates asked California's courts to find the state's teacher-tenure laws to be unconstitutional because they interfered with students' right to a quality education. (See " Teacher-Tenure Decision Is NOT an Abuse of Judicial Power," Fall 2014.) That case was unsuccessful, though, because it was brought on equal-protection grounds and plaintiffs failed to show that tenure was hurting kids of color any more than their peers. An equal-opportunity challenge related to shoddy teacher preparation would likely face the same roadblock. Further, there is little, if any, legal precedent for suing schools of education; even medical schools enjoy significant protections from charges of malpractice related to the physicians they train.

All of which is why it would be important to go after states, and in particular states that have already lost finance-adequacy cases. It would also help if the chosen target states do not require elementary-school teachers to pass an in-depth test of the science of reading before entering the classroom, and if the states host several big education schools that earn failing grades when it comes to preparing candidates to teach reading effectively. States that appear to meet those criteria include Kentucky, South Carolina, and Washington.

I'm well aware that even succeeding with such a lawsuit in one or more states wouldn't solve the teacher-training problem nationwide. Furthermore, there's no guarantee that a court-ordered resolution would lead to better preparation programs (though it wouldn't be hard for a court to mandate that future teachers take a test of scientifically based reading instruction). It's even possible that an inexpert but bookish judge could find the whole-language view of reading compelling and be hoodwinked by that crowd. Or perhaps this would open the door to ever more micromanagement from the bench. (If a judge could mandate phonics, why not a particular approach to physical education?)

Still, putting the defenders of whole language and balanced literacy on trial would be its own form of justice-one that might even lead education schools nationwide to get religion on the science of reading.

Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, and executive editor of Education Next.
For more, please see "The Top 20 Education Next Articles of 2020."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Anxiety about America's approach to reading instruction is all around us once again, making its cyclical appearance like a plague of 17-year cicadas. Much of this is due to journalist Emily Hanford, whose radio documentaries on the science of reading and our schools' unwillingness to embrace it have earned her awards and accolades while placing the issue of early literacy back near the top of the education-reform conversation.

# data[].attributes.headline
4 Ways to Know if you are Using Quality Foundational Skills Materials

# data[].attributes.subject
4 Ways to Know if you are Using Quality Foundational Skills Materials

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Reading is the foundation of all other learning. It is the gateway to gaining critical skills all students need throughout their education and adult life. High-quality, standards-aligned K-2 foundational skills materials can play a key role in supporting students from their earliest years in school.

Quality, standards-aligned materials help ensure that students receive all the components of foundational skills, reducing the chance that kids have gaps in their reading and comprehension that could impact learning in other subject areas. But what is "quality" and how does one identify it? Do core programs cover all the skills or do schools need to supplement?

We put together this short guide to accompany our foundational skills reports highlighting four ways to know if you're using high-quality foundational skills materials in your classroom.

1. Quality Materials Include All Components of Foundational Skills

There's a common misconception that foundational skills are only "phonics" or that phonics is the most important foundational skill. In truth, foundational skills include more components than just phonics and need to be taught as a package deal.

Unfortunately, it is common for programs to only cover a few components of foundational skills yet still claim to be "aligned to the foundational skills standards." Take a look at your program and see if materials cover all of the following: print concepts, phonological awareness, phonics, and word recognition, and the practice in fluency.

You may be asking yourself: "But what if my program covers only two or three of these skills?" The research base is clear that missing even one skill can make it more difficult for kids to develop the proper foundation needed for acquiring literacy since the components depend on one another for mastery. For example, students will have a hard time understanding phonics if they don't first learn print concepts or phonological awareness. Kids need all foundational skills components to become proficient readers.

2. Quality Materials Have a Research-Based Scope and Sequence

The "scope and sequence" of a foundational skills program is essentially a roadmap for educators. It allows teachers to see how the program unfolds over the course of the year and how standards are addressed in each grade level. A scope and sequence makes clear what the pacing of the materials will be-whether or not the content can really be taught in the span of a school year or whether or not there is enough content. It will also provide insights into the amount of instruction, review, and practice that is available to assure students master the content.

A strong scope and sequence is not simply developed out of thin air but is guided by the research on how kids learn to read. The program should provide clear indications about what the research is before, during, and after the materials are taught.

The scope and sequence offers insight into the intentionality of materials including what progressions a program is using in relation to grade-level standards. For example, when and how are sounds and letters introduced? What is the pacing of instruction and does it align with research? Are components and skills introduced in a logical way that allows students to build their foundational skills? A scope and sequence is essential to avoiding random, accidental instructional approaches.

3. Quality Materials Offer Systematic and Explicit Instruction

Having a scope and sequence is key, but it's still necessary to ensure that the materials actually support instruction that follows the scope and sequence. In short: is there a system in place for learning? "Systematic" instruction means that there is purpose and reasoning in the content students are introduced to, when they are introduced to it, and why. If the scope and sequence is the road map, systematic instruction identifies the key stops along the way of your literacy journey.

"Explicit" instruction works within systematic instruction-at each point on the map, how will you learn what's necessary to proceed to the next destination? With each intentional piece of content presented, materials should have modeling examples for teachers and expected outcomes for students. Through systematic, explicit instruction students will have multiple opportunities to learn and practice the skills they are building.

4. Quality Materials Provide Aligned Assessments and Multiple Review Opportunities

Quality foundational skills materials not only offer the content necessary for students to learn to decode, but the materials should also support teachers to identify if students are actually mastering that content. Great materials have aligned assessments built in, tied directly to the expected outcomes detailed in the standards. These assessments are essential tools for teachers to evaluate where they need to reteach and what students are struggling with so that kids don't slip through the cracks.

Connected to assessments are multiple opportunities for review. Materials should provide ways for students to be constantly reviewing what they've learned. Daily review opportunities are important to ensuring students master knowledge and skills and that teachers have a variety of ways to monitor progress.

Foundational skills are the backbone of literacy. The research around how kids learn to read make it clear that reading is not "natural"-students require instruction in all the foundational skills applied with research-based practices and presented systematically with explicit instruction. To learn more about college and career-ready standards for K-2 foundational skills explore our reports and dig into our review rubric and evidence guide.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
4 Ways to Know if You're Using Quality Foundational Skills Materials

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Reading is the foundation of all other learning. It is the gateway to gaining critical skills all students need throughout their education and adult life. High-quality, standards-aligned K-2 foundational skills materials can play a key role in supporting students from their earliest years in school.

# data[].attributes.headline
How to Make Reading Instruction Much More Effective

# data[].attributes.subject
How to Make Reading Instruction Much More Effective

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Third grade reading proficiency matters-enormously. It is eerily predictive of academic and career success; students who don't reach this benchmark are four times less likely to graduate from high school on time. Unfortunately, K-3 literacy instruction, on which so much depends, is often a misguided, inefficient mess. While it consumes a generous portion of the school day, it typically neglects the most vital elements of literacy. That's why our success rate, despite some progress, is still abysmal: only about half of our 3rd graders perform at grade level on their own state assessments. It is even lower for poor and minority students.

This is both horrific and unnecessary. According to literacy researcher Richard Allington, studies show that "virtually every student could be reading on grade level by the end of 1st grade." In my experience, most educators acknowledge the need for intensive, systematic phonics instruction. They also know that students need to read and talk and write far more than they currently do, across the curriculum. There is wide agreement that all of these elements must be in place for K-3 students to acquire the fluency, knowledge, and vocabulary needed to become literate and articulate. We've yet to capitalize on this consensus. Or to see what prevents us from acting on it: the structure and substance of the typical K-3 literacy block and our overhyped commercial literacy programs. Their failure can often be traced to the pervasiveness of small-group, ability-based instruction.

The most successful K-3 teachers I've observed use small groups sparingly. That's because their whole-class instruction consistently incorporates the most proven (but rarely implemented) elements of successful teaching. They master simple methods for ensuring that all students are attentive, and they conduct frequent, ongoing assessments of the class's progress throughout the lesson-and then re-teach accordingly. An Education Week article last year adds credence to this approach, reporting that whole-group instruction is "almost always" more effective than the small-group, ability-based model.

These facts point to an opportunity for dramatic improvements in 3rd grade literacy. Do the math: In a two-hour reading block, five groups of students will receive about 20 minutes of reading instruction per day. In a classroom that uses small groups more sparingly, students will receive about 80 minutes-three to four times as much.

Three to four times as much. This would allow for huge infusions of instructional time into the essential components of literacy. Teachers could use this additional time to incorporate more:

* Intensive, sustained, systematic phonics. We could substantially accelerate students' mastery of the phonetic code in K-1-and still have time for kids to read and listen to far more fiction and nonfiction texts.

* Reading/general knowledge. If most students have mastered decoding in the 1st grade, they could spend record amounts of time in 2nd and 3rd grade reading literature, history, and science texts to build their knowledge base and vocabulary, which are critical to effective comprehension.

* Vocabulary instruction. Most of a rich vocabulary is acquired through abundant reading. But research also shows that we can reliably supplement this with targeted, embedded vocabulary instruction.

* Discussion. To become confident, articulate speakers, students must engage in frequent, purposeful discussions about what they read. We could multiply the length and frequency of such discussions, which animate an appreciation of reading and are excellent preparation for writing.

* Writing and writing instruction. Writing has an unsurpassed capacity to help us think logically, express ourselves clearly, and understand, analyze, and retain content. It often promotes dramatic, measurable improvements across the curriculum and is crucial to success in innumerable careers.

Let's be candid here: These core elements of literacy seldom get the time they deserve in most K-3 classrooms-or our inordinately praised commercial programs. A shift to larger amounts of well-executed, whole-class instruction would at least double the amount that students receive in these critical areas. The benefits, for K-3 and beyond, would be immense.

Of course, many will argue that students don't need more time with their teacher; they can learn to read and write on their own, at our now-ubiquitous independent learning "centers," which are set up with materials for students to work independently while the teacher works with small groups. But are they learning? "According to the studies," writes literacy expert Timothy Shanahan, "No." Time spent away from the teacher, he writes, should not be considered a "productive part of the school day." I consistently observe students languishing at these unsupervised centers, ambling slowly from station to station, aimlessly turning pages or talking quietly with a partner instead of reading. And that explains, as Michael P. Ford and Michael F. Opitz found nearly two decades ago, why only about a third of the overall literacy period has any academic value.

What should we do? Take Shanahan's advice: "Brush up your skills in working with larger groups," and use the windfall of precious time to multiply the amount of instruction we provide in the most indispensable elements of K-3 literacy. Then as night follows day, 3rd grade literacy rates will rise.

Mike Schmoker is an author, speaker, and consultant. He is the author of FOCUS, 2nd edition (ASCD, 2018) and Leading with FOCUS (ASCD, 2016).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How to Make Reading Instruction Much, Much More Efficient

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Third grade reading proficiency matters-enormously. It is eerily predictive of academic and career success; students who don't reach this benchmark are four times less likely to graduate from high school on time. Unfortunately, K-3 literacy instruction, on which so much depends, is often a misguided, inefficient mess.

# data[].attributes.headline
Curriculum Advocates: Prepare for a Long, Hard Struggle

# data[].attributes.subject
Curriculum Advocates: Prepare for a Long, Hard Struggle

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
We are enjoying the early stages of a surprising and encouraging curriculum moment in education marked by robust attention and interest in scientifically-sound reading instruction. Among veteran advocates for knowledge-rich curriculum, it feels like a long overdue and welcome change in the weather.

Here's how it could end: A few years from now, maybe by 2025, imagine yet another doleful round of NAEP scores showing that kids still aren't making significant progress. The bottom that dropped out of NAEP in 2019, with our poorest performing children falling further behind, still hasn't recovered. Now imagine these depressing results follow a few years of fascination and flirtation with high-quality curricula-schools, districts, even entire states, converted to the cause of curriculum and content, turning to EdReports to select curricula that are aligned with standards, knowledge-rich, and of sufficient rigor to challenge students. As analysts digest another round of depressing test scores, a consensus forms about curriculum-based reform, and quickly calcifies: We tried it. It didn't work.

Two weeks ago in this space, David Steiner of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy looked at our emerging love affair with high-quality curricula and materials (a renaissance he helped spark as the architect of EngageNY) and concluded that "any celebration is utterly misplaced." No one should expect to see a surge in student outcomes because "we have built a system that not only fails to support the sustained use of demanding curriculum-but actively produces powerful disincentives to its use," he wrote. The list of those disincentives is long: state assessments unaligned to content; teacher evaluation systems that valorize "student engagement" conspiring against challenging material; and intervention schemes for struggling students that privilege content-agnostic basic skills and pull kids away from core curricula-a thorny and vexing problem that was the subject of this year's Fordham Wonkathon, winners of which are heralded in this week's issue of the Education Gadfly Weekly.

At Saturday's ResearchEd conference in Philadelphia, the keynote was delivered by Baltimore schools CEO Sonja Santelises, who struck a similar theme with a stirring bit of straight talk on what she describes as " educational redlining." Students in majority-white classrooms are more likely to get engaging, high-quality lessons and grade-appropriate work, she noted. Citing studies on low-quality student assignments from both TNTP and the Education Trust, she put the matter in sharp relief, quoting one student preparing for the same AP exam as students in other schools. The more fortunate students were reading The Odyssey, while in her school the assigned text was The Hunger Games. "There's nothing wrong with The Hunger Games. I love The Hunger Games. I read it when I was twelve," the girl said. "It really struck me as unfair."

Dr. Santelises is a compelling figure who spends her days at the intersection of knowledge-rich curricula, research-based practice, urban education, and low test scores. Few district superintendents are more well-versed or more committed to knowledge-rich curricula. And she knows it's exactly what the 85,000 kids whose education she is responsible for need, and what they've mostly been denied due to "educational redlining." She's also exceptionally clear-eyed, and her experience should sober those of us who have long championed curriculum as a reform lever and who might be tempted to think we're winning the argument.

"I want to be honest," she cautioned. "I've never said it's just about curriculum. What I've said is that if you don't have a strong curriculum, you're not even starting in the right place." But ultimately it's teachers who bear the responsibility of figuring out how to deliver it. They will determine, Santelises warned "whether this content-rich curriculum, this shift back to science-based reading instruction, is actually going to take hold." When teachers are ill-prepared themselves to teach challenging material, or when students are denied the opportunity to grapple with complex texts and given simplistic or overly-scaffolded work with low cognitive demands, gaps will only persist and widen. "If we don't figure this part out," Santelises said, "all of the research in the world is not going to move what happens every day with kids." She's exactly right.

Speaking afterward, Santelises went even further, describing the adoption of a knowledge-rich curriculum as "the first half of Chapter One." This is the part that curriculum advocates, and frankly most single-issue advocates in education, miss. Every structure, impulse, imperative, and habit in a large school system works at cross-purposes. Teacher training rarely valorizes it on the front end, once on the job the pressures of testing and accountability functionally demands bad practice by expecting visible results now. As Steiner observed, "Is it any surprise that over 95 percent of America's teachers use multiple, self-curated internet materials mixed together in an utterly eclectic and incoherent fashion with their district's curriculum?" And no, the answer is not "scaffolding," the most common "solution" suggested to teachers whose students are far below grade level. Santelises drew hearty laughs during her ResearchEd talk when she quipped that school administrators "sprinkle [scaffolding] like its pepper on a Caesar salad. 'You just need to scaffold!' You can get to the standards, just scaffold!'" Such facile and simplistic answers "are actually going to undermine the absolute right intent of having a more rigorous curriculum," she explained. Right again.

It's certainly bracing that American education seems poised to rediscover the centrality of what teachers teach and what students learn. But curriculum advocates (and I count myself as one) should not underestimate the enormity of the challenge or the long odds of success. Mostly they-we-must not allow ourselves the luxury of thinking or allowing others to believe that the battle is won at adoption.

Schools are complex institutions with competing priorities almost hard-wired to metabolize and neutralize any "fix." Curriculum does not exist in isolation. The road to results is long and steep. Having leaders like Santelises at the helm of a major American school district is important. Buying time for thoughtful reforms to take root is even more important.

If I may offer some unsolicited advice to my fellow disciples in the cause of research-based teaching and knowledge-rich curricula: widen your lens, embrace complexity, forget top-down initiatives, counsel patience, brace yourself for years of struggle, identify your allies doing the actual work, and prepare to protect their flank. In sum, abandon single-issue curriculum advocacy, which is naïve, unrealistic, and self-defeating. It paves the way for more of the wild, fad-prone gyrations that we see over and over in this field.

Curriculum is not the missing piece of the puzzle, it's the foundation for the rest of what schools do. It's great to see a new seriousness emerge about instructional materials and the work we ask children to do. But we are not nearing the end of the story. As Santelises observed it's the first half of Chapter One.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Curriculum advocates: Prepare for a long, hard struggle

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
American education is taking a welcome and overdue interest in curriculum, but there's no reason to expect that to result in sudden and dramatic gains in student achievement, especially for our lowest-performing children. Curriculum does not exist in isolation; schools are complex institutions with competing priorities, almost hard-wired to metabolize and neutralize any "fix."

# data[].attributes.body
Louisa Moats
Karen Vaites

Natalie Wexler

Shanahan   (He also has a blog)

Forbes

Literacy Podcast

Emily Hanford

Knowledge Matters

StandardsWork
Literacy Lass
ILA
Literacy Assoc. of Tennessee
Mark Seidenberg
The Reading League
EDVIEW360 Blog

# data[].attributes.body
Teacher Reading Knowledge and Student Readiness After LETRS

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Ensuring every child learns to read is a worthy cause and we should use any platform available to make reading a reality for every student. Lacking the ability to read well has lasting impacts on children. Teachers are essential components for addressing reading challenges, but they must receive the support they need to successfully teach every student to read well. When our teachers know better, they will do better.

Alabama is becoming more committed to supporting all children in becoming proficient readers by fourth grade. We are at a critical point in history with less than 70 percent of fourth grade students testing proficient in reading during the most recent administration of the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) test. This statistic requires a collective effort that entails all educators and the entire community to respond with urgency. Children, regardless of their demography must be provided every opportunity to learn to read well and this begins with a high-quality, well-prepared teacher.

In 2018, Alabama provided a professional learning opportunity for teachers of preK-3 students to learn about the science of reading. The response to the blended course of face-to-face training and online modules was overwhelmingly positive and well received. After just one face-to-face training, teachers openly expressed this new knowledge was vital to their success in reaching struggling readers. Teachers acknowledged they wanted quality professional learning that would help them to better teach their children by understanding the what, why, and how of the science of reading in teaching early literacy skills. Funds were invested in the pilot early literacy initiative ® ( Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling) training. This initiative is a joint collaborative partnership with the Alabama Department of Early Childhood Education and the Alabama State Department of Education. Both have been committed to supporting further implementation of the pilot.

The LETRS initiative has been overwhelmingly, positively received by the initial 283 educators who were accepted into the voluntary LETRS training. This one-time investment will pay dividends in the sheer number of students a teacher will impact throughout their career, in Alabama's classrooms, school systems, and communities. Due to the success of LETRS and the large numbers of teachers added to the waitlist, funds were allocated to train an additional 3,500 educators. Alabama recognized the need to build capacity and trained facilitators of LETRS to support offering the learning opportunity to interested preK-3 teachers statewide.

Alabama educators are committed to supporting teachers with the tools necessary to teach every student basic literacy skills to be successful in school. The LETRS comprehensive training provides these teachers a deeper understanding of the science of reading and evidence-based strategies necessary to support all students, especially those who experience language and reading challenges. The science of reading knowledge must become a critical component in the teacher's instructional toolbox of reading strategies. This level of knowledge is not always explicitly provided in early learning preservice coursework.

LETRS is not a curriculum nor canned approach to teaching reading. Instead, LETRS focuses on the science of reading and supports teachers in diagnosing reading issues, prescribing a strategy, and assessing the effectiveness of the instruction provided to support the student. This course equips teachers with the literacy skills essential for academic success.

Taken together, research findings from multiyear early education interventions suggest that the components of a comprehensive preK-3 approach to teaching can combine to make a positive contribution to young children's learning, while providing the pathways through which more children will achieve success by the end of third grade. Alabama knows science of reading training offers an opportunity for state leaders and educators alike to comprehensively address the reading crisis and low performance of Alabama's students.

The ability to read opens doors and promises our students a lifetime of freedom and choice. Children should be provided early learning experiences that foster creativity while stimulating their social emotional, language, physical, and cognitive development. Teaching every child to read increases their chances of achieving the American dream. This dream is more attainable through an education that ensures every child is taught to read well by fourth grade. Teachers are empowered to plan and provide high-quality literacy lessons when they have the knowledge of the science of reading.
Data from initial findings of Cohort 1 PreK teachers who participated in the LETRS for Early Chilidhood Educators Module.
Read the Full Report

Key Findings

Significant growth in participant knowledge
Participant Information: (LETRS Gradebook)

A total of 109 participants completed the course.

40 were preK lead teachers, preK auxiliary teachers, preschool special educators, and kindergarten teachers

69 were other participants, including coaches, principals, and administrators

Participant Knowledge Change: (LETRS pre-/post-test)

Almost all participants (97.2 percent) showed growth in knowledge from the pre- to post-test.

There was an average of 29 percentage points growth across all participants.

Improved Teacher-Child Interactions and Classroom Quality
Teacher-Child Interactions and Classroom Quality: (CLASS-Classroom Assessment Scoring System)

LETRS classrooms exceeded the performance of both the national comparison sample and the average of all First Class PreK classrooms across all three domains and 10 dimensions of the assessment (indicating better quality of teacher-child interactions).

The largest differences were observed between LETRS classrooms and the national sample for the Instructional Support domain, including the critical dimension of Concept Development.

Significant growth in meeting developmental expectations and kindergarten readiness
Child Outcomes: (Teaching Strategies GOLD)

Children in LETRS classrooms started lower, but finished higher and had larger percentage point growth compared to children in no-LETRS classrooms.

Percentages of children in LETRS classrooms who were kindergarten ready at spring 2019 were higher compared to no-LETRS classrooms.

Dr. Barbara Jean Cooper currently works at the Alabama Department of Early Childhood as the director of the office of School Readiness. She leads the First Class Pre-K Program that has been ranked No. 1 in the nation for 14 consecutive years. In 2018, Dr. Cooper was appointed as the Birth through Grade 12 Education Advisor for the Governor's Office of Education and Workforce Transformation. In this capacity, Dr. Cooper supports Governor Kay Ivey's Strong Start, Strong Finish education initiatives.

Alabama educators: To attend the Alabama LETRS Symposium on October 2-4 in Gulf Shores, AL, click here.

Click here to register for the Alabama LETRS Cohort 3 wait list.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What Happened in Alabama? Teacher Reading Knowledge and Student Readiness After LETRS

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In 2018, Alabama provided a professional learning opportunity for teachers of preK-3 students to learn about the science of reading. The response to the blended course of face-to-face training and online modules was overwhelmingly positive and well received. After just one face-to-face training, teachers openly expressed this new knowledge was vital to their success in reaching struggling readers.

# data[].attributes.headline
Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS)

# data[].attributes.subject
Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (LETRS)

# data[].attributes.body
Voyager Sopris

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Lexia Learning Systems https://www.lexialearning.com/Assets/img/logo.svg 1984 978-405-6232 info@lexialearning.com 300 Baker Avenue, Suite 320 Concord MA 01742 USA

Lexia ® LETRS ® Professional Learning

The Lexia LETRS® (Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling) Suite is comprehensive professional learning designed to provide early childhood and elementary educators and administrators with deep knowledge to be literacy and language experts in the science of reading. Developed by Dr. Louisa Moats and leaders in the field of literacy, Lexia LETRS teaches the skills needed to master the foundational and fundamentals of reading and writing instruction-phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, comprehension, and written language.
Download brochure

Why LETRS?

Research shows that only 35% of students are reading proficiently, but 95% of students CAN learn to read. And while teachers are the most essential factor in student success, only about half of teaching institutions effectively prepare teachers for literacy instruction. Teaching reading requires a deep understanding of the processes and science behind it. LETRS is the professional learning program rooted in the science of reading that empowers teachers.

LETRS®

Lexia LETRS provides a professional learning course of study based in the science of reading for elementary educators. The course teaches the how, what, and why of literacy acquisition to improve instructional practice and achieve long-term systemic change in literacy instruction.

LETRS for elementary educators is an investment in teachers' literacy knowledge and professional practice. Teachers gain essential knowledge and skills to master the fundamentals of literacy instruction required to apply and transform student learning.

LETRS® for Early Childhood Educators

LETRS® For Early Childhood Educators professional learning provides deep knowledge of literacy instruction for the youngest learners. The more children know about language and literacy before they begin kindergarten and first grade, the better equipped they are to succeed in literacy learning and beyond.

LETRS® for Administrators

Lexia LETRS® for Administrators is a professional development course designed specifically for school leadership, coaches, principals, and district administrators. The course defines the systems and infrastructures required to successfully implement a literacy initiative aligned to scientifically based research. Built from the research in implementation science and sustainability, school improvement, and shared leadership, the course provides numerous tools-including an analysis of the current systems required for improved literacy outcomes-for guiding an implementation through various stages.

Learn More

Engaged Students

Lexia LETRS provides a professional learning course of study based in the science of reading for elementary educators which teaches the how, what, and why of literacy acquisition to improve instructional practice and impact long-term systemic change in literacy instruction. The more children know about language and literacy before they begin kindergarten and first grade, the better equipped they are to succeed in literacy learning and beyond.

Empowered Educators

Many educators and education leaders are not well prepared to teach reading, or lead those who teach reading. The Lexia LETRS Suite provides science of reading-based professional learning through three different courses of study designed for elementary educators, education leaders, and early childhood educators. Each course of study teaches the how, what, and why of literacy acquisition to educators to improve literacy instruction and positively impact long-term systemic change in literacy outcomes.

Why even trained teachers need support:

Learn More about Empowered Educators

Improved Outcomes

Lexia LETRS empowers educators by going beyond the essential components of literacy. Lexia LETRS gives teachers the skills they need to master how to teach the five essential components of literacy, plus writing, spelling, and oral language.

Lexia LETRS includes five essential elements for literacy success:

Science of reading based

Teaches the content of explicit instruction

Converts research to practice

Enhances educator and leader effectiveness

Transforms instruction

A Cambium Learning® Group Brand

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Professional Learning for Educators Grades Pre-K-5 | Lexia

# data[].attributes.body
Teaching the Foundations So Every Child Can Read
by David and Meredith Liben

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This book is filled with so much information! I teach grade 5/6 and found the last 2 chapter the most useful. I actually implemented the reading fluency practice for 1.5 months and my students made improvements in the reading fluency! I will definitely be using the methods described here for years to come!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Amazon.com: Know Better, Do Better: 9781943920693: Meredith Liben and David Liben: Books

# data[].attributes.headline
Voyager Sopris Webinar: The Science of Reading

# data[].attributes.subject
Voyager Sopris Webinar: The Science of Reading

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Respected literacy experts discuss topics about the science of reading.

Learn from today's pre-eminent professionals and deepen your knowledge about topics related to the science of reading with our Science of Reading Webinar Series. You will learn why the science behind learning to read is important for student success and how you can implement it in your school or district. This informative webinar series explores what the science of reading is, how it is taught, and why it is critical to teaching students to read.

Lucy Hart Paulson

How Executive Function Affects Early Childhood Language and Literacy Skills

Executive function skills grow at a rapid rate during the early childhood years and provide an important foundation for language, literacy, cognitive, and social/emotional development. This session will describe strategies for helping young children develop these interconnected skills, making an important difference in their school and life success.

Attendees will learn to:

Describe executive function components and developmental skill expectations

Understand the impact of executive function skills on the other developmental domains

Implement evidence-based instructional strategies that facilitate the development of executive function skills in early childhood classrooms

Watch Now

Dr. Carol Tolman

Phonological Awareness, Reading, and Writing: What Teachers Need to Know

Although we may not always know what came first, (the chicken or the egg?), we do know what came first in the world of literacy: speech. Both reading and writing are based on speech. We use a "speech-to-print" system, not a "print-to-speech" system when decoding and encoding words. Without an understanding of the way sounds are represented in print, many students continue to function well behind their peers. Evidence exists in support of phonemic awareness and its foundational role, but what does that really mean, and how does that translate to practical applications in the classroom? Join Dr. Carol Tolman as she outlines the role of phonological awareness, what misspellings tell us about students' misunderstandings of phonemes, and what we can do about these errors to enhance their learning.

Attendees will learn to:

Listen to students' articulation errors as a window into their understanding of phonemes

Identify reasons for specific misspellings, leading to targeted instructional responses that improve reading and spelling

Articulate why subphonemic features are an important component of instruction

Watch Now

Dr. Susan Brady

Special Guest Dr. Louisa Moats

Is the Science of Reading Influencing Mainstream Educational Practices? Not Enough.

Scientific study of how children learn to read has been underway in the U.S. and around the world for several decades. Much has been discovered about the language and cognitive abilities related to success or difficulty in reading, about the neurological pathways that must be developed, and about implications for instruction. Yet, unfortunately, for the most part, mainstream education has not benefitted from these important developments. Join this fascinating and enlightening discussion that will target why and how this has happened. Dr. Susan Brady will identify steps to bring the gains from science to teachers and their students.

Attendees will learn:

1. Why the field of education is resisting and rejecting the science of reading

2. What strategies are being used to limit or block changes in instructional practices and in teacher preparation

3. What kinds of actions in states and schools indicate positive steps toward adopting science-based reading practices-and which do not

The presentation will end with a discussion and question-and-answer segment with Dr. Brady and literacy expert Dr. Louisa Moats.
Watch Now

Never Miss an Episode

Add your email here to sign up for EDVIEW 360 blogs, webinars, and podcasts. We'll send you an email when new posts and episodes are published.

Why Every Educator Needs to Understand the 'Science of Reading'

An interview with Louisa C. Moats, Ed.D., the nationally recognized author and authority on literacy education. Dr. Moats has written widely about the professional development of teachers, the importance of brain science, and the relationships among language, reading, and spelling.
Read Q&A

Mississippi Literacy Reforms and LETRS Deliver Results

In 2013, Mississippi passed the Literacy-Based Promotion Act, emphasizing grade-level reading skills as students move through grades K-3 and mandating retention for students who scored at the lowest achievement level on the Third Grade Reading Summative Assessment. Voyager Sopris Learning partnered with Mississippi educators to deliver LETRS professional learning to teachers of early literacy.
Read the Results

Of 'Hard Words' and Straw Men: Let's Understand What Reading Science is Really About

The time has come to call the public's attention to reading science and to dispel the misconceived beliefs and practices that are so widespread in our classrooms. Not all readers and listeners, however, are persuaded by [Emily] Hanford's reporting. [T]hese skeptics have resurrected some worn-out straw men that once again, require rebuttal.
Read Blog

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Voyager Sopris Learning Science of Reading Webinars

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Learn from today's pre-eminent professionals and deepen your knowledge about topics related to the science of reading with our Science of Reading Webinar Series. You will learn why the science behind learning to read is important for student success and how you can implement it in your school or district.

# data[].attributes.body
by Emina McLean

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
By Emina McLean
Being able to read is critical to success in later life, while illiteracy is often a pathway to unnecessary hurdles and issues in life. Therefore, teaching children to read is of paramount importance. Unfortunately, many dedicated teachers have been misled by menacing misconceptions about reading instruction.

In this article, you will discover more about 4 such misconceptions. These common misconceptions in reading instruction I outline in this article involve:

1. Meaning

2. Context cues

3. Analytic and synthetic phonics

4. Balanced literacy

1. Meaning

The question I ask to counter this is, how do you get to the meaning of a written word if you can't decode it?

Once we move from speaking and listening to reading written words in the early years of school, children need to learn the code. Then, they can decode words and access the oral vocabulary that they already mostly know. It is just that children are accessing it via the new medium or print, rather than the medium of speech which they have become familiar with over time.

An Example Experiment

The best way to illustrate this is to make up a new code using non-alphabetic symbols. Write a simple sentence containing common vocabulary and ask the audience to read the sentence. They will not be able to decode the words as the code is unknown to them, and they will not be able to tell you what the words mean either.

But what part of this task is unknown to them? It is not the meaning. The words are common words. They know them. They just do not know yet that they know them, right? The unknown part is the code, which will give them access to the meaning of the words that are already in their vocabulary.

So, what do we do next in this experiment? We tell them the sounds each symbol represents. There are adult reading studies that have done just this. Now they can decode the words. with some conscious effort of course, given this code is new knowledge. Yet, but just like that, they are reading for meaning without any focus at all on meaning. You don't have to teach meaning. Rather, you need to teach access to meaning.

Decoding Gives Children Access to Meaning

In the early years, most children already know the meaning of most words they come across. Such words are part of the children's oral vocabulary.

Read-alouds in the early years are different in that they often contain more interesting and rare words because they are usually beyond the reading capacity of the student. I am talking about books they are reading themselves. What they need to learn is how to access the meaning in written form, and we teach them how to do this via teaching them phonics, or the alphabetic code, or how speech maps to print.

It is, of course, different for older children. They are reading and learning new and complex words that are not that common in our everyday spoken language. But again, that is still about them being able to decode those words first, and then we can focus on meaning after that, through our direct and indirect vocabulary instruction.

The Simple View of Reading

The misconception that because reading is a meaning based activity, that is where we need to start our instruction ignores the Simple View of Reading equation:

This misconception disregards how word reading develops. We must have regard for the steps involved to get us to the final product.

Sometimes, when people promote this misconception, they are arguing for the Simple View of Reading in some form of reverse sequence. That is, let us focus on meaning (Reading Comprehension), and work our way backward to figure out why it is read that way.

Instruction should start with equipping children with the word reading skills that will give them uninhibited access to meaning in written form. Word-level reading instruction should be explicit and systematic in the early years, with a concurrent focus on developing Tier 2 vocabulary for later reading comprehension.

2. Context Cues

There is no reason to look away from the word if our word-level reading instruction and in turn their word-level reading skill is sound.

The questions I ask to counter this is, why is this an unfamiliar word for this child? What about this word is unfamiliar?

Therefore, the answer involves children knowing how to actually read it. It is usually nothing to do with the meaning of the word, at least in the early years. If they do not know how to decode it, surely the answer is to teach them how to decode it?

We do not need to encourage students to look away from the unfamiliar word given children can:

Decode all unfamiliar decodable words, if we teach the phoneme-grapheme correspondences for the 44 speech sounds from simple through to most complex, incorporating polysyllabic words, morphology and etymology.

Children can read all unfamiliar if we teach these words using 3 evidence-based methods.

The 3 Evidence-Based Methods

There is no reason to look away from the word if our word-level reading instruction and in turn their word-level reading skill is sound.

The only way students will read words accurately and then store their form for accurate, automatic word reading is through practising decoding all the way through the word, or by learning non-decodable words via sight word learning, mispronunciation correction, and morphology instruction.

96% of Words are Predictable

In 1966, Hanna, Hanna, Hodges and Rudorf published 'Phoneme-grapheme correspondences as cues to spelling improvement'. Based on analysis of over 17,000 words, they concluded that:

About 50% of words in English are predictable or regular based on phoneme-grapheme correspondences (PGCs)

A further 34% are predictable except for one irregularity, most commonly a vowel.

Another 12% are quite irregular in terms of English PGCs but they are predictable if you teach your students morphology and etymology.

That leaves 4% of words which are truly irregular and unpredictable; no amount of phonics instruction will support students to read these words. Many others have written about this since. One example is here and the complete reference is:

Berndt, R. S., Reggia, J. A., & Mitchum, C. C. (1987). Empirically derived probabilities for grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences in English. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 19(1), 1-9.

84% of Words are Predictable through Phonics

Through phonics instruction, we can unlock 84% of words for children.

Through etymology, morphology and essential sight word instruction for truly irregular words, we unlock almost all words for children. Looking away from the word is not reading, it is problem-solving, hypothesising, guessing, whatever you like to call it. No one learns how to complete a task by looking away from it!

I think it is important to note too that at some point in their schooling, children will have to read without picture cues, teacher prompts, and predictable text structures. Where will they be then if they have come to rely upon them?

There is one context within which it is acceptable to look for cues outside of the unfamiliar word, and that is, to hypothesise about what would make sense for meaning after the word has been decoded or read. That is, the word is unfamiliar because they do not know what it means.

You should teach your students to look for cues/clues to support comprehension, but not for the actual word reading. This distinction is very important.

3. Analytic vs Synthetic Phonics

There are 2 ways of teaching phonics.

Key Differences

The key differences between analytic phonics and synthetic phonics is usually in how structured and systematic they are. Synthetic phonics is fundamentally structured and systematic, as it follows a defined scope and sequence and has an explicit teaching method. Analytic phonics can vary from structured and systematic to incidental, all the way through to child-directed.

Synthetic phonics starts with phonemes (the smallest subword unit possible) and children learn phoneme-grapheme correspondences in order to be able to decode whole words through blending from part to whole. It is often called the bottom-up approach.

Analytic phonics is concerned with larger parts of words (subword units) like onset-rime and morphemes, and even whole words. Rather than learning to read words by blending from part to whole, the focus is on looking for patterns within words, usually drawing upon prior knowledge, to figure out what the whole word is and why. It is often called the top-down approach.

The Problem

The main problem with analytic phonics is that unless it is structured and systematic (i.e. explicitly teaching onset-rime/word families, and explicitly teaching morphemes), it encourages guessing or hypothesizing, as the primary strategies, and the less structured it is, the less effective it is going to be. All too often it puts a lot of the teaching responsibility on the child.

The question I ask is, what does the research tell us?

National Reading Panel Report

Let's start with the National Reading Panel Advice to Teachers Report (2005) Their review of 38 phonics studies found that s ystematic phonics instruction was best. Systematic phonics instruction means that an explicit phonics curriculum is required, and teachers should be following an explicit scope and sequence rather than trying to teach phonics skills either as students appear to need them (incidental phonics) or by letting students discover the PGCs for themselves.

They found that students who were taught synthetically did somewhat better on various reading measures than students who were taught analytically, that is, they seemed to demonstrate greater learning from the simpler approach. Synthetic phonics instruction was found to be more effective than analytic phonics instruction as evidenced by a greater effect size, but this difference was not statistically significant. If there were more studies at that time, perhaps it would have been. Based on the NRP findings, it was not a matter of one being better than the other. If synthetic and analytic phonics were taught systematically, they were equally good.

Recent Review of Systematic Phonics
Buckingham, J. (2020). Systematic phonics instruction belongs in evidence-based reading programs: A response to Bowers. The Educational and Developmental Psychologist, 1-9.
For a more recent review of the literature, I recommend reading:

A key quote is:

Synthetic vs Analytic Phonics
Johnston, R., McGeown, S., & Watson, J. (2011). Long-term effects of synthetic versus analytic phonics teaching on the reading and spelling ability of 10-year-old boys and girls. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 25, 1365-1384.
One of the papers referenced in this review by Buckingham (2020) was a randomised control trial which had two components. Study 1 focused on comparing word-level reading, reading comprehension and spelling skills of students taught by analytic or synthetic phonics approaches and Study 2 focused on comparing regular and irregular word reading in both approaches. Here is the complete reference:

Some key quotes and findings are:

My experience in Australia of analytic phonics is that it is almost never systematic, while synthetic phonics almost always is.

I agree with Timothy Shanahan, author of National Reading Panel Advice to Teachers Report, who has written on his blog about his views on the importance of an analytic approach becoming part of a synthetic phonics approach as soon as possible. That is, at some point, students need to start analysing patterns and morphemes, especially for spelling, but we need to lay the right foundation first.

In the early years, we must ensure our phonics instruction is systematic, following an explicit scope and sequence, with daily instruction, practice and review.

4. Balanced Literacy

There are 2 broad approaches to teaching children to read. These are:

Whole language

Structured teaching

The question I ask to counter this is, what is Balanced Literacy?

Structured Literacy, Balanced Literacy and Whole Language are all ways to approach word-level reading instruction, but they are also ways to approach literacy more broadly (linguistic comprehension and reading comprehension aspects of reading, as well as spelling and writing).

The Reading Instruction Continuum

In my view, there is an instructional continuum. On the far left of the continuum we have Whole Language, with key tenets like reading is natural, exposure to rich texts and being read to a lot is sufficient, and no phonics instruction is required. Nothing is structured or systematic in the instruction, and it involves ad hoc teaching of banks of sight words. On the far right of the continuum is Structured Literacy in which we teach the five keys to reading (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and reading comprehension) explicitly, following a scope and sequence for each aspect.

The Chasm that is Balanced Literacy

Balanced Literacy incorporates everything and anything in between those two approaches. I do not really mind Balanced Literacy that sits quite close to Structured Literacy on the continuum. It works pretty well! I like Balanced Literacy less and less the closer it moves toward Whole Language.

It is the incapacity to define it and make it a uniform approach that is its biggest problem. I think there is a misunderstanding about just how explicit and systematic we need to be, to be effective educators in literacy, in order to teach all children to read and write well and leave no one behind.

Here are some key quotes that illustrate its nebulous nature:

Balanced Literacy is not a reasonable compromis e. You cannot assess the effectiveness of an approach if it means different things to different people. Therfore, unless you do not care about effectiveness, you cannot regard balanced literacy as a reasonable compromise.

Here are two continua I use in conversations with schools and I have written about their use in a recent blogpost.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
4 Menacing Misconceptions in Reading Instruction

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
By Emina McLean Being able to read is critical to success in later life, while illiteracy is often a pathway to unnecessary hurdles and issues in life. Therefore, teaching children to read is of paramount importance. Unfortunately, many dedicated teachers have been misled by menacing misconceptions about reading instruction.

# data[].attributes.body
The Reading Brain in a Digital World

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
From the author of Proust and the Squid, a lively, ambitious, and deeply informative epistolary book that considers the future of the reading brain and our capacity for critical thinking, empathy, and reflection as we become increasingly dependent on digital technologies.

This book comprises a series of letters Wolf writes to us-her beloved readers-to describe her concerns and her hopes about what is happening to the reading brain as it unavoidably changes to adapt to digital mediums.

Wolf draws on neuroscience, literature, education, technology, and philosophy and blends historical, literary, and scientific facts with down-to-earth examples and warm anecdotes to illuminate complex ideas that culminate in a proposal for a biliterate reading brain. Provocative and intriguing, Reader, Come Home is a roadmap that provides a cautionary but hopeful perspective on the impact of technology on our brains and our most essential intellectual capacities-and what this could mean for our future.

Available today. Click here to buy.

New York Times Book Review, New & Noteworthy
"The author of "Proust and the Squid" returns to the subject of technology's effect on our brains and our reading habits. This is an even more direct plea and a lament for what we are losing, as Wolf brings in new research on the reading brain and examines how the digital realm has degraded her own concentration and focus."

Publishers Weekly, Starred Review 2018

A decade after the publication of Proust and the Squid, neuroscientist Wolf, director of the Center for Reading and Language at Tufts University, returns with an edifying examination of the effects of digital media on the way people read and think. A "researcher of the reading brain," Wolf draws on the perspectives of neuroscience, literature, and human development to chronicle the changes in the brain that occur when children and adults are immersed in digital media. When people process information quickly and in brief bursts, as is common today, they curtail the development of the "contemplative dimension" of the brain that provides humans with the capacity to form insight and empathy. In describing the wonders of the "deep reading circuit" of the brain, Wolf bemoans the loss of literary cultural touchstones in many readers' internal knowledge base, complex sentence structure, and cognitive patience, but she readily acknowledges the positive features of the digitally trained mind, like improved task switching. Wolf stays firmly grounded in reality when presenting suggestions-such as digital reading tools that engage deep thinking and connection to caregivers-for how to teach young children to be competent, curious, and contemplative in a world awash in digital stimulus. This is a clarion call for parents, educators, and technology developers to work to retain the benefits of reading independent of digital media.
Nature
"This rich study by cognitive scientist Maryanne Wolf tackles an urgent question: how do digital devices affect the reading brain? Wolf explores the "cognitive strata below the surface of words", the demotivation of children saturated in on-screen stimulation, and the power of 'deep reading' and challenging texts in building nous and ethical responses such as empathy. She advocates "biliteracy" - teaching children first to read physical books (reinforcing the brain's reading circuit through concrete experience), then to code and use screens effectively. An antidote for today's critical-thinking deficit."

A cognitive neuroscientist considers the effect of digital media on the brain. In this epistolary book, Wolf (Director, Center for Reading and Language Research/Tufts Univ.; Tales of Literacy for the 21st Century, 2016, etc.) draws on neuroscience, psychology, education, philosophy, physics, physiology, and literature to examine the differences between reading physical books and reading digitally. Access to written language, she asserts, is able "to change the course of an individual life" by offering encounters with worlds outside of one's experiences and generating "infinite possibilities" of thought. She is worried, however, that digital reading has altered "the quality of attention" from that required by focusing on the pages of a book. Researchers have found that "sequencing of information and memory for detail change for the worse when subjects read on a screen." Reading digitally, individuals skim through a text looking for key words, "to grasp the context, dart to the conclusions at the end, and, only if warranted, return to the body of the text to cherry-pick supporting details." This process, Wolf asserts, is unlike the deep reading of complex, dense prose that demands considerable effort but has aesthetic and cognitive rewards. Physicality, she writes, "proffers something both psychologically and tactilely tangible." The author cites Calvino, Rilke, Emily Dickinson, and T.S. Eliot, among other writers, to support her assertion that deep reading fosters empathy, imagination, critical thinking, and self-reflection. The development of "critical analytical powers and independent judgment," she argues convincingly, is vital for citizenship in a democracy, and she worries that digital reading is eroding these qualities. Borrowing a phrase from historian Robert Darnton, she calls the current challenge to reading a "hinge moment" in our culture, and she offers suggestions for raising children in a digital age: reading books, even to infants; limiting exposure to digital media for children younger than 5; and investing in teaching reading in school, including teacher training, to help children "develop habits of mind that can be used across various mediums and media." An accessible, well-researched analysis of the impact of literacy.
Library Journal (starred review)
"Wolf (Tufts, Proust and the Squid) provides a mix of reassurance and caution in this latest look at how we read today. . . . A hopeful look at the future of reading that will resonate with those who worry that we are losing our ability to think in the digital age. Accessible to general readers and experts alike."
San Francisco Chronicle
"Wolf is a lovely prose writer who draws not only on research but also on a broad range of literary references, historical examples, and personal anecdotes. The strongest parts of Reader, Come Home are her moving accounts of why reading matters, and her deeply detailed exploration of how the reading brain is being changed by screens.... Wolf makes a strong case for what we lose when we lose reading."
The Wall Street Journal
"The digital age is effectively reshaping the reading circuits in our brains, argues Ms. Wolf. But there's hope: Sustained, close reading is vital to redeveloping attention and maintaining critical thinking, empathy and myriad other skills in danger of extinction. Luckily, her book isn't difficult to pay attention to."

BLURBS
"In this profound and well-researched study of our changing reading patterns, Wolf presents lucid arguments for teaching our brain to become all-embracing in the age of electronic technology. If you call yourself a reader and want to keep on being one, this extraordinary book is for you". Alberto Manguel, Author of A History of Reading, The Library at Night, A Reader on Reading, Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions

"This is a book for all of us who love reading and fear that what we love most about it seems to slip away in the distractions and interruptions of the digital world. Here we are challenged us to take the steps to ensure that what we cherish most about reading -the experience of reading deeply-is passed on to new generations. Wolf is sober, realistic, and hopeful, an impressive trifecta. Her core message: We can't take reading too seriously. And for us, today, how seriously we take it, will mark of the measure of our lives. " Sherry Turkle, Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science, MIT; author, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age; Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other

" Our best research tells us that deep reading is an essential skill for the development of intellectual, social, and emotional intelligence in today's children. In our increasingly digital world - where many children spend more time on social media and gaming than just about any other activity - do children have any hope of becoming deep readers? In her must-read READER COME HOME, a game-changer for parents and educators, Maryanne Wolf teaches us about the complex workings of the brain and shows us when - and when not - to use technology." Catherine Steiner-Adair, Author of The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age

" Scholar, storyteller, and humanist, Wolf brings her laser sharp eye to the science of reading in a seminal book about what it means to be literate in our digital and global age. Informed by a review of research from neuroscience to Socratic philosophy, and wittily crafted with true affection for her audience, Reader Come Home charts a compelling case for a new approach to lifelong literacy that could truly affect the course of human history. From the science of reading to the threats and opportunities posed by ubiquitous technologies for the modern preschooler, Reader Come Home reminds us that deep literacy is essential for progress and the future of our democracy. Bolstered by her remarkably deft distillation of the scientific evidence and her fully accessible analysis of the road ahead, Wolf refuses to wring her hands. With rigor and humility she creates a brilliant blueprint for action that sparks fresh hope for humanity in the Information and Fake News Age. Reader Come Home is this generation's equivalent of Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is the Message. Maryanne Wolf has written a seminal book that will soon be considered a must read classic in the fields of literacy, learning and digital media." Michael Levine, Sesame Street, Joan Cooney Research Center, Co-Author of Tap, Click, and Read: Growing Readers in a World of Screens.

"A love song to the written word, a brilliant introduction to the science of the reading brain and a powerful call to action. With each page, Wolf brilliantly shows us why we must preserve deep reading for ourselves and sow desire for it within our kids. Otherwise we risk losing the critical benefits for humanity that come with reading deeply to understand our world."-Lisa Guernsey, Director, Director, Learning Technologies, New America, co-author of Tap, Click, Read: Growing Readers in A World of Screens

"Maryanne Wolf has done it again. She has written another seminal book destined to become a dog-eared, well-thumbed, often-referenced treasure on your bookshelf.... Reader Come Home conveys a cautionary message, but it also will rekindle your heart and help illuminate promising paths ahead." -International Dyslexia Association
"Wolf wields her pen with equal parts wisdom and wonder. The result is a joy to read and reread, a love letter to literature, literacy, and progress."-"Timely and important.... if you love reading and the ways it has enriched your life and our world, Reader, Come Homeis essential, arriving at a crucial juncture in history."-BookPage, Well Read: Are you reading this?, Robert Weibezahl Shelf Awareness, Reader, Come Home "The book is a rewarding read, not only because of the ideas Wolf presents us with but also because of her warm writing style and rich allusion to literary and philosophical thinkers, infused with such a breadth of authors that only a true lover of reading could have written this book. It is a necessary volume for everyone who wants to understand the current state of reading in America.""I've just finished reading this extraordinary new book... This book is essential reading for anyone who has the privilege of introducing young people to the wonders of language, and especially those who work with children under the age of 10." -Englewood Review of Books "How often do you read in a deep and sustained way fully immersed, even transformed, by entering another person's world? Maryanne Wolf cautions that the way our engagement with digital technologies alters our reading and cognitive processes could cause our empathic, critical thinking, and reflective abilities to atrophy. This in turn could undermine our democratic, civil society." - -Stanford Daily
"MaryAnne Wolf's Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (2018) returns after 10 years to map a cognitive landscape that was only beginning to take shape in her earlier book, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (2008). In Reader Come Home Wolf is looking to understand how our brains might be adapting to a new type of reading, and the implications for individuals and societies. The book is a combination of engaging synthesis of neuroscience and educational research, with reflection on literature and literary reading." -

"Wolf is a serious scholar genuinely trying to make the world a better place. Reader, Come Home is full of sound....advice for parents." -

"Reader, Come Home provides us with intimate details of brain function, vision, language, and neuroplasticity. Wolf has endeavoured to make something extremely complicated more accessible and for the most part she succeeds. The book is written as a series of letters to you, the reader. If you are a parent, it will probably be the most important book you read this year." -Bookshelf (Also published at guelphmercury.com )

PRAISE FOR READER, COME HOME FROM INDIA
" In her new book, Wolf...frames our growing incapacity for deep reading. She...explains how our ability to be "good readers" is intimately connected to our ability to reflect, weigh the credibility of information that we are bombarded with across platforms, form our own opinions, and ultimately strengthen democracy." -

"Wolf raises a clarion call for us to mend our ways before our digital forays colonise our minds completely." - Deccan Herald

PRAISE FOR READER, COME HOME FROM ITALY
"Maryanne Wolf goes to the heart of the problem: reading is a political act and the speed of information can decrease our critical thought." - Corriere della Sera, Pier Luigi Vercesi

"Neuroscience-based advice to parents of digital natives: the last book of Maryanne Wolf explains how to maintain focus and navigate a constant bombardment of information."- La Repubblica, Elena Dusi

"Are we able to truly read any longer? This is the question that Maryanne Wolf asks herself and our world."-Anderse, Germana Paraboschi

"This last beautiful book of Maryanne Wolf both suggests that we protect children from screen dependency and also that we.... need to give back the joy of the reading experience to our children!"-Corriere della Sera, Alessandro D'Avenia

"The heart of this book brings us to our own "deep reading" processes--- the ability to enter into the text, to feel that we are part of it." -Il Sole 24 Ore, Carlo Ossola

ADDITIONAL ANNOUNCEMENTS, REVIEWS, AND MENTIONS
The Guardian, Skim reading is the new normal. The effect on society is profound(chosen as one of the top stories of 2018)
San Francisco Chronicle, Weekend Booking, John McMurtrie San Francisco Chronicle, 'Reader, Come Home,' by Maryanne Wolf', Sophie Haigney National Post, I skim, you skim, we're all skimmers in a digital world. But it's altered our brains, Robert Fulford Chicago Tribune, One essential book for learning how to spot fake news and read anew in the digital era, The Biblioracle The Paducah Sun, Technology isn't making us dumber, we are, Sean Niestrath The Wichita Eagle, Turn the page or scroll down: Technology is reshaping reading lessons-and kids' brains, Suzanne Perez Tobias The Washington Post, What we lose by reading 100,000 words every day, Jennifer Howard

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
From the author of Proust and the Squid, a lively, ambitious, and deeply informative epistolary book that considers the future of the reading brain and our capacity for critical thinking, empathy, and reflection as we become increasingly dependent on digital technologies.

# data[].attributes.headline
Structured Literacy and Balanced Literacy, How Do They Compare

# data[].attributes.subject
Structured Literacy and Balanced Literacy, How Do They Compare

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Helping Students Read Better and Learn More

The Iowa Reading Research Center strives to improve the literacy skills of all students through research with students, professional learning for educators, and technical assistance for school districts.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Iowa Reading Research Center | The University of Iowa

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Striving to improve the literacy skills of all students.

# data[].attributes.headline
Will the Science of Reading Catch on in Teacher Prep?

# data[].attributes.subject
Will the Science of Reading Catch on in Teacher Prep?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Mary Sacchetti spent six years and tens of thousands of dollars preparing to become a special education teacher and then a reading specialist.

But even after she earned her master's degree from a highly ranked university, she still felt like she didn't have the necessary knowledge and skills to teach all students how to read. It wasn't until her Philadelphia charter school paid for Sacchetti to earn certification through an explicit, systematic phonics program that she finally understood the evidence-based strategies for teaching early reading.

"That's when I was like, 'Oh my God, I did not know any of this,' " said Sacchetti, who has since left education to stay at home with her children. "The fact that it's systematic, the fact that there are rules-I just felt so empowered.

"Now I feel like I could take a student, and I could teach them how to read, whereas before, I felt like I was just reading with kids," she continued. "How many students are not learning how to read because teachers are not teaching them to read? Not with bad intentions, but because they don't know."

The National Reading Panel named five essential components of reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. To be a reader, a student must learn how to decode words and also comprehend them.

"A fundamental piece of whole language is that reading is natural," said Amy Murdoch, an associate professor and the director of the reading science program at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati. "And what the science shows is that is absolutely not true. Reading is something humans invented, and it's not at all natural."

Over the years, whole language has fallen out of vogue, and an approach known as balanced literacy has gained traction-in fact, nearly 70 percent of teachers say that's their philosophy, according to an Education Week Research Center survey. Proponents say balanced literacy combines explicit instruction, guided practice, and independent reading and writing. Critics, however, say that balanced literacy is just whole language rebranded, with a bit of phonics sprinkled in.

"Who wouldn't want balance?" Murdoch said. "Many people look to balanced literacy as the answer. But what balanced literacy typically is, is not systematic, explicit instruction."

Even so, balanced literacy dominates the nation's colleges of education. In an Education Week Research Center survey of more than 530 professors of reading instruction, just 22 percent said their philosophy of teaching early reading centered on explicit, systematic phonics with comprehension as a separate focus. Most-57 percent-said they ascribed to a balanced literacy philosophy. Only 4 percent said that their philosophy was whole language.

Nearly a fifth of professors said they agree or strongly agree with the idea that most students will learn to read on their own if given the right books and time to read them. And while most professors correctly identified the five essential components of reading, phonics was the least known-87 percent of professors picked that, compared to the 95 percent of professors who picked comprehension. Twelve percent of professors incorrectly picked exposure to authentic and meaningful texts.

A common refrain from graduate students, Murdoch said, has been, "You've told me everything I learned in undergrad is wrong, and I've been teaching reading the wrong way. Why didn't I learn this in undergrad?"

A 'Lockstep' Approach?

Professors who are skeptical of systematic phonics instruction told Education Week that phonics is necessary-but they don't want it to be done in isolation, without opportunities for students to make meaning of the words they're learning to read. And they worry a systematic approach can make it harder for teachers to differentiate instruction for advanced readers.

"Yes, readers do need to know how to decode words. That's not even a question," said Mary Lose, a professor of reading and language arts at Oakland University in Rochester, Mich. "Yet this label [of systematic phonics] is least aligned with my philosophy because it suggests a lockstep approach to phonics teaching and learning that doesn't take into account what each child already knows, and it proposes a one-size-fits-all approach to supporting a child's decoding skills."

The Education Week Research Center survey found that 55 percent of professors said they put "a lot" of emphasis on phonics in their courses; 36 percent said "some," and 5 percent said "a little."

More than half of professors said they thought students could understand unfamiliar words they see on the page even if they don't have a good grasp of phonics. Melanie Keel, an assistant education professor at Wingate University in North Carolina, said many students can learn to read with minimal phonics, or when phonics is incorporated through a balanced literacy approach.

"When we say everyone has to do it this way, when we have kids that already know it and it just comes more naturally for them, then we're doing them a disservice," she said. "We can push them in other ways to help them grow as readers in areas that they need, more than one-size-fits-all, 'this is how we're going to do our whole class.' I think it really comes down to what the children in your class need and knowing your children as readers."

Even so, Murdoch said frequent assessments are key to a systematic, explicit approach to reading instruction.

"We want to understand exactly where a child is and match the instruction where they are," she said.

But the rest do need systematic phonics to be proficient readers, and all students could benefit from it, experts say.

Otherwise, teachers might not realize that some students are struggling to read and instead are relying on pictures and context clues to get by, said Deborah Reed, the director of the Iowa Reading Research Center and an associate education professor at the University of Iowa.

"If you start with the assumption that really, everyone should be fine, and [you] should focus on the love of reading and comprehension skills, then you risk children falling through the cracks," she said. "If you start from the bottom up [with systematic phonics], you can rule out kids who don't need certain instruction."

You Don't Know What You Don't Know

Proponents of systematic phonics instruction say the science is clear. So, why haven't teacher educators gotten on board?

To start, academic freedom makes it so the approach to instruction is left up to individual professors-the dean can't mandate that anyone teaches phonics.

Also, from John Dewey on down, many of the most influential and revered theorists in teacher education have urged an exploratory, project-oriented way of learning, in which students learn principles intuitively. But a systematic, explicit phonics approach typically requires direct instruction and modeling. That's the opposite of what many education professors tell their students is good teaching.

The debates on reading are also highly emotional and polarizing. Even the term "science of reading" can rub people the wrong way, said P. David Pearson, an emeritus professor and the former dean of the University of California, Berkeley's Graduate School of Education, who considers himself in the "radical middle" between the whole language and the phonics camps.

"As if the other research that's done that shows that vocabulary is important, that comprehension is important, that rich talk about text is important-that those aren't scientific," he said. "Well, they're just as scientific as the research that shows that phonics is important. I resent their appropriating the mantle of science."

Researchers found that the teacher educators who participated in a training on research-based reading instruction had a significantly better understanding of the cognitive science than those who had not. Notably, the students of the professors who went through the training not only performed better on the reading assessment than their peers-they also scored higher than the teacher educators who hadn't gone through the program.

"If teacher educators do become more knowledgeable themselves, then that carries over to the teacher," said Emily Cantrell, a co-author of the study and a clinical assistant professor of reading and language arts education at Texas A&M University.

Slow-Moving Change

That's why some proponents of systematic, explicit phonics instruction have focused their efforts at the top-training the professors of reading. For example, Murdoch, the Mount St. Joseph professor, said her university is starting a doctoral program focused on the science of reading. It will be one of just a few in the country.

After all, for professors who have spent decades teaching reading instruction a certain way and publishing research, making such a significant change in their practice is hard, those in the field say. They might feel like their reputations are on the line, and such a change requires grappling with the realization that they may have given scores of teacher candidates inadequate training.

"If you've been teaching something for 10, 20, or 30 years, to go back and say, 'Oh, I've been wrong'-that's really hard for somebody to do," Cantrell said.

Transforming the practice of teacher educators has been the focus of Kelly Butler, the chief executive officer of the Barksdale Reading Institute, a nonprofit working to improve the quality of reading education in Mississippi, for nearly two decades now.

In 2003, Butler reviewed eight public teacher-preparation programs in Mississippi to see how they prepared candidates in early literacy instruction. The study found that preservice teachers were getting an average of 20 minutes of phonics instruction over the course of two years in their program, and not all five components of reading were being taught in every program. As a result, the state education department later mandated that every undergraduate elementary education program in Mississippi require two courses in early literacy that cover the five essential components of reading.

Butler published a similar review in 2016 of both the public and private teacher-prep programs in the state, and found that while a lot of progress has been made, many professors still could not explain the scientific principles of reading.

Now, the Barksdale Reading Institute has developed a professional growth model for professors of early literacy across Mississippi. The program is "designed to create safe place for faculty to say, 'Nobody ever taught me this either,'" Butler said.

Initially, about 45 professors from across the state signed up to go through a research-based, commercial program for teaching literacy known as LETRS, or the Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling. Of those, about 35 professors completed the faculty-only training.

Then, the Barksdale Institute hosted seminars for the faculty who went through the training to discuss the content of LETRS and learn how to model direct, explicit instruction to preservice candidates. The studies had found that there was virtually no modeling occurring in reading courses, Butler said. (Nationally, 86 percent of professors said they model how to teach phonics in their reading courses, according to the Education Week Research Center survey.)

Of the initial 45 Mississippi professors who signed up, just 28 consistently came to the seminars. And a third of the faculty, when quizzed on the content of the LETRS training, continue to miss basic questions, Butler said.

There have been some bright spots. One of the professors who has transformed her approach to teaching reading is Billie Tingle, an assistant teaching professor at the University of Southern Mississippi. She went through the training and the seminars hosted by the Barksdale Institute, and has since overhauled everything in her early literacy classes that promoted balanced literacy-her PowerPoints, her lectures, her assigned textbooks.

"The past couple years, I've really focused on being a learner and making that my priority and hopefully taking [the science of reading] into my classroom, so I can help just one student that will take this and promote it in one classroom, in one school, in one state," Tingle said.

Now, Butler is working with the state superintendent to enact a policy that would require all faculty who teach early literacy courses in Mississippi to be trained in the science of reading and pass a test. However, they're experiencing pushback: The deans of teacher preparation programs in the state have written a unanimous letter saying they're not opposed to LETRS training for faculty-but they don't want to test people who already hold a PhD.

If the state board of education does not pass this policy, Butler said she's prepared to appeal to state legislators, and urge them to put into law that professors need to know the science of reading-"or the legislature is forever going to spend $15 million a year to retrain their teachers, which makes no sense."

'A Trend You Cannot Ignore'

Many proponents of systematic phonics are hopeful that the tide is slowly turning-that as states pass legislation requiring teachers to be trained in the science of reading, and as school districts begin to consider teachers' knowledge of brain-based reading principles when hiring, colleges of education will be forced to get on board.

The mission of Read by 4th is, as the name suggests, to make sure all students in Philadelphia can read on grade level by the time they enter 4th grade. Since 2014, the campaign has been helping colleges of education in the city get accredited by the International Dyslexia Association under its Knowledge and Practice Standards for teachers of reading. Those standards call for systematic, explicit instruction in reading.

So far, four universities in the city have programs that are accredited. By the end of the year, Scharff said, three additional programs might gain accreditation.

Change is slow, she said, but it's aided by the fact that William Hite, the superintendent of the Philadelphia school district, has said he wants to hire teachers who graduated from IDA-accredited programs.

"I think for the first time in my career, I have real glimmers of hope that in higher ed, there may be room to change," Murdoch said. "We still have a long way to go-but I do see some hope."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Will the Science of Reading Catch On in Teacher Prep?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Mary Sacchetti spent six years and tens of thousands of dollars preparing to become a special education teacher and then a reading specialist. But even after she earned her master's degree from a highly ranked university, she still felt like she didn't have the necessary knowledge and skills to teach all students how to read.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.colorincolorado.org/ - a bilingual site dedicated to the instruction of ELLs. Specifically helpful is this link: https://www.colorincolorado.org/resource-library/reading-tip-sheets-educators

https://www.readingrockets.org/ - contains a plethora of articles and research focused on reading; most articles address ELLs.

https://www.edutopia.org/ - similar to Reading Rockets.

https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/ - this contains scholarly publications for effective outcomes in regard to ELLs

http://www.readwritethink.org/ - the purpose is to provide teachers with classroom resources and professional development; while we have a defined reading curriculum, reviewing the ELL supports of similar lessons can aid teachers in providing more effective language support.

https://readenespanol.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/QSSSA-Strategy-1.pdf - this short presentation offers an amazing strategy known as QSSSA which can be used across content areas.

https://strategiestosupportenglishlearners.weebly.com/ - at the risk of sounding overconfident, this is a website I made in undergrad. While this resource is not directly related to reading, I do recommend those interested to look over the strategies: comprehension checkpoints, modifying speech, know your EL, and welcoming classroom. The listed strategies can impact EL's comfort and confidence in taking risks to read or participate in class.

# data[].attributes.body
by Emily Hanford

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Listen to this audio documentary on the Educate podcast. Subscribe now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The kids left behind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A proposal for understanding reading difficulty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stumped by the words

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Surround him with books'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The importance of language comprehension

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who gets help?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Share and discuss on Facebook
Support for this program comes from The Spencer Foundation, Lumina Foundation, and The Hollyhock Foundation.
Don't miss our next investigation
Enter your email below to receive notifications of new stories.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Many kids struggle with reading - and children of color are far less likely to get the help they need

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A false assumption about what it takes to be a skilled reader has created deep inequalities among U.S. children, putting many on a difficult path in life.

# data[].attributes.body
Applying the Science of Reading in Tennessee. SCORE Tn.

# data[].attributes.headline
Proust and the Squid   by Maryanne Wolf 

# data[].attributes.subject
Proust and the Squid   by Maryanne Wolf 

# data[].attributes.body
The act of reading is a miracle. Every new reader's brain possesses the extraordinary capacity to rearrange itself beyond its original abilities in order to understand written symbols. But how does the brain learn to read? As world-renowned cognitive neuroscientist and scholar of reading Maryanne Wolf explains in this impassioned book, we taught our brain to read only a few thousand years ago, and in the process changed the intellectual evolution of our species.

# data[].attributes.body
Should we continue to use curricula that is not teaching kids to read?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Key points

Five popular reading programs are found to be unsupported by cognitive science.

Foundational skills such as phonics, spelling, and handwriting are best learned from explicit instruction.

Reading programs with minimal guidance-whole-language based, constructivist, discovery-may not be adequate for teaching foundational skills.

A debate is raging over five major reading programs in America said to be incompatible with cognitive science. The crux of the matter is that these expensive, taxpayer-funded programs all emerged out of a discredited theory of reading methodology that has dominated reading curricula and teaching practice for three decades. During this time, the U.S. has experienced declining reading scores and a growing gap in reading performance among children vulnerable to reading failure, including children of low socioeconomic status, children of color, English learners, struggling readers, and children with learning disabilities or symptoms of dyslexia. The problem has intensified with the educational challenges of the pandemic.

The reading programs under fire have in common too little explicit and systematic instruction for teaching foundational skills such as phonics, spelling, and handwriting. A grassroots movement among many educators, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, educational psychologists, parents, and even some state legislatures seems to be gaining momentum to have the failed programs replaced or at minimum supplemented with grade-appropriate resources for explicitly and systematically teaching the requisite foundational skills. The effort moves beyond the age-old "reading wars" because it is now widely recognized to be supported by decades of research in cognitive science. The top five programs are being called out by name:

Red-flag catchwords-often unfamiliar to parents-that characterize these programs include the following highlighted terms:

Programs that grew out of whole language methodology, the debunked theory

Programs that encourage students to use the three-cueing strategy for figuring out unknown words-also debunked by cognitive science

Programs that teach kids to memorize words, skip words they can't read, or guess words from context or pictures as opposed to reading and spelling words automatically by paying attention to letters and spelling chunks

Exclusive use of guided reading in reading workshops

Pulling in phonics word study in a haphazard mix known as balanced literacy but with no explicit, systematic instruction

Exclusive use of leveled text and no use of decodable text

Exclusive use of guided reading without explicit instruction in foundational skills

Absence of spelling books or any grade-by-grade curriculum for teaching spelling explicitly and systematically.

A Call for Change, Based on Cognitive Science

A riveting report on these failed programs complete with decades of research from cognitive science provides compelling support in the movement's call for change. The report's title, " At a Loss for Words: How a Flawed Idea Is Teaching Millions of Kids to Be Poor Readers," refers to the fact that the programs teach ineffective word reading strategies when readers encounter unknown words; the programs support guessing, reading by looking at the pictures, over-reliance on context cues, and the skipping of unknown words-all strategies commonly used by poor readers (Stanovich, 2000). Too many children in these programs are in fact "at a loss for words" because they aren't being taught to map the letters on the page to the sound and meaning of words, a process called decoding. But decoding is a critical process that leads to brain words -stored representations in the brain used for fluent reading and writing.

According to developmental reading scientist Mark Seidenberg (2017), a thought leader in the movement, "Phonics is 'buried' in many commercial reading programs. Teachers might be able to use what's there to construct a coherent sequence, or they might not." [emphasis added] (Reported in Swartz, 2019)

Beyond that, these five reading programs do not provide resources for teaching spelling explicitly and systematically in a grade-by-grade curriculum. In Brain Words: How the Science of Reading Informs Teaching (2019) Gentry and Ouellette clarify the role of spelling instruction in creating brain words, critical for accurate and automatic word reading and a hallmark for reading comprehension and text composing. "The spelling-to-read movement spotlights the importance of spelling representations in the brain for orthographic mapping and spelling's role in automatic word reading which drives reading comprehension." (Gentry, 2021) In essence, if you can spell a word correctly, you can read and comprehend it both in isolation and in context. To read and comprehend this paragraph, you have just activated 137 internal representations of correctly spelled brain words from your long-term memory without conscious effort.

The Architecture of the Literate Brain and the Need for Explicit Instruction

Brain words for automatic reading and automatic spelling are part of the essential architecture for literacy in the brain. But in too many instances, these five programs are not building this architecture.

Scientists who have investigated the architecture of the brain for learning highlight the advantage of explicit instruction rather than minimal guidance as provided for spelling in the five reading programs under fire. The aim of explicit and systematic phonics and spelling instruction, in fact, is to get brain words into long-term memory, including the studied words' meaning, pronunciation, written form, and correct spelling. Programs such as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Into Reading may provide a weekly wordlist but they provide minimal guidance and minimal time for learning the words (Gentry, 2021).

In a groundbreaking article in Educational Psychologist, Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark (2006) describe the architecture of long-term memory as "the ultimate justification for instruction" and report that "if nothing has changed in long-term memory, nothing has been learned." Teaching spelling explicitly and increasing the number of brain words in long-term memory is a brain-changer for literacy. Think of the third-grader who in one weekly spelling book lesson on single-syllable homophones can learn the meanings and spellings of sell, cell, sail, great, and grate and commit them to long-term memory. This lesson increases the child's vocabulary and the child can then access these brain words for the rest of her life. This learning experience is a direct result of explicit instruction: Explicit instruction, and not just minimal guidance, fits the teaching of foundational skills like a glove.

The five reading programs named above are lacking in explicit instruction and systematic approaches to decoding and spelling. As a result, students are missing out on opportunities to create brain words. It is not surprising that in reviewing demonstrated effectiveness of reading programs, educational psychologist David Kilpatrick concluded programs such as reading recovery and leveled literacy intervention can at best be categorized as "popular interventions with minimal results." (2015)

By the end of first grade in your school or district, students should have 300-plus brain words stored in their visual memory bank that they instantly and automatically recognize, connect to their spoken language, and pronounce, write, and spell correctly without conscious effort. This can easily be taught in structured literacy with a modern spelling book and explicit systematic instruction. Too many children in the five reading programs above are still guessing at words in grades two, three, and four because they had minimal guided instruction in the foundational skills. Explicit instruction in both decoding and spelling is essential for literacy.

Correction: In the "5 Programs under Fire" table above, please note that Reading Recovery was founded by Marie Clay; it has been promoted in America by Fountas and Pinnell. Twelve U.S. colleges and universities host University Training Centers (UTC) for Reading Recovery.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
5 Popular Reading Programs May Be Harmful to Children

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Five popular reading programs are found to be unsupported by cognitive science. Foundational skills such as phonics, spelling, and handwriting are best learned from explicit instruction. Reading programs with minimal guidance-whole-language based, constructivist, discovery-may not be adequate for teaching foundational skills. A debate is raging over five major reading programs in America said to be incompatible with cognitive science.

# data[].attributes.body
Interview with Emily Hanford

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What Teachers Should Know About the Science of Reading

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How the Brain Learns to Read - Prof. Stanislas Dehaene

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Dr. Mary Dahlgren "Sound Walls and Phonemes"

# data[].attributes.headline
Using the Alphabet Arc to increase speed and accuracy of letter recognition

# data[].attributes.subject
Using the Alphabet Arc to increase speed and accuracy of letter recognition

# data[].attributes.body
The Florida Center for Reading Research is an excellent resource for all things literacy.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The PAST can be downloaded above. Please also download and carefully read the instructions before using. Information can also be found in the manual "Equipped for Reading Success" by David A. Kilpatrick, Ph.D in chapter 11 on how to effectively use the test. Make sure to also practice using the test before using it with [...]

# data[].attributes.headline
The Florida Center for Reading Research is packed with excellent resources, activities and teacher/student supports.

# data[].attributes.subject
The Florida Center for Reading Research is packed with excellent resources, activities and teacher/student supports.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Kindergarten and First Grade Student Center Activities Phonological Awareness | Phonics | Fluency | Vocabulary | Comprehension

# data[].attributes.headline
Dr. Carolyn Strom talks about the Reading Brain

# data[].attributes.subject
Dr. Carolyn Strom talks about the Reading Brain

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Danielle Scorrano: [00:00:00] Hello and greetings to our READers across the podcast universe, wherever you are in the world, whenever you're listening to this episode, welcome to the READ Podcast. As you know, READ, the Research Education and ADvocacy Podcast connects you with prominent researchers, thought leaders and educators who share their work insights and expertise about current research and best practices and education and childhood. I'm Danielle Scorrano, the The Research and Development Director at The Windward Institute, and I'm bringing a lot of Friday and sunny summer energy, partly because I am in fact recording this episode on a Friday, and this conversation airs in the height of our summer. There's never a better time for learning, right?? But more importantly, I am so excited because I am joined by a truly incredible leader, educator, thinker, disruptor, Dr. Carolyn Strom. Welcome Dr. Strom, to READ Podcast.

Dr. Carolyn Strom: I'm so excited to be here. Thank you!

Danielle Scorrano: Me too. I'm so [00:01:00] excited. And for all of our READers, joining us for this conversation, I want to give you an official background of Dr. Carolyn Strom. Dr. Carolyn Strom is a clinical assistant professor of early childhood literacy at NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Her work is focused on bridging the divide between scientific research and instructional practices. Mm. I love that. We're going to talk so much about that during this episode, she graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of Pennsylvania, has a master's degree from USC in reading education and a PhD from NYU. As a teacher, educator and classroom researcher, Dr. Strom is passionate about linking what is known about how the brain learns with how reading is taught. Currently she's leading initiative with early childhood educators and families called "Cortex in the Classroom." This work focuses on the practical application of reading research and on the development of how new instructional media can support early reading. Dr. Strom has studied the course of read of children's [00:02:00] reading and spelling development for the past two decades and published her research and The Reading Teacher, The Reading League Journal and the Handbook of Learning Disabilities. She has maintained an active clinical practice where she works with children who have dyslexia and related reading difficulties. She was a state certified reading specialist with advanced phonics training and was a classroom teacher for eight years. Dr. Strom, I'm so excited to talk to you because as I was rereading your bio, I mean, there's so many avenues that we could talk and where you can share your perspective. And we will talk a little bit more about your background, but I should have also said that you're somewhat of neighbor as you live and work in New York City. And we probably aren't literal neighbors as people define it because New York City is so vast, but it's nice to think that we're so close to each other.

So maybe I should start before we talk about your background. Can we set the scene? Where are you? How are you showing up this morning?

Dr. Carolyn Strom: Uh, I used to live in Brooklyn, but we recently moved to Westchester. And I'm home today working, and it's a Friday and classes are over [00:03:00] it's the summer. And I'm been doing a lot of work this morning. So just to kind of in, in the zone and excited to be here.

Danielle Scorrano: Oh, I love that you're in the zone. I'm also in the zone. I'm also from Westchester. We can talk about that offline. But I read your official bio. And what I didn't say is I've long been identifying as someone who's a connector of science and story. And I feel that you also identify as that. So I would say that I admire you for your unique skill to connect science and story. So I, in your own words, tell us your story from childhood through school, leading to where you are, professionally.

Dr. Carolyn Strom: Great. Thanks for that question. So thinking about that, I guess I've always been curious, even when I was a young kid about how language works. I grew up with two twin brothers and they had speech delays. So they got speech services. And I was always interested in the way that they spoke. So they would say upstairs as up-to or hamburger for hambuga go, right. Or, "hambuga" hamburger. [00:04:00] And I was always intrigued by the phonemes in language from a young age, if that makes any sense. And when I started to read, I was curious about homophones and how the word blue and blew sounded the same but were spelled differently in me. It meant different things. So I was always curious about. words, and sounds, which I think if anyone who teaches reading and sort of supports reading you, you, you sort of you're, you have to be interested in that because it's sort of what's what the kids are doing, right.

But I didn't really think about education as a system, until I went to college and took a service learning course, and shadowed high school teachers in urban areas, and also learned about inequities in schools and met high school kids that couldn't read, and I really got exposed to sort of the inequity. I learned about the inequities in our education system, and how they're tied to social inequalities. And I got really passionate about doing something, or at least trying to do something about this problem that we have, that, we have all these, this educational justice that's going on in our country. That so many kids are graduating that can't read. And I really got exposed [00:05:00] to this idea that the majority of kids in our country are not reading proficiently. And just to think about that in the healthiest and wealthiest country, we still sometimes have, somehow cannot get all kids. Reading was sort of this really big life-changing moment for me. It just seemed like such an injustice that we're living in this kind of world. So, I joined Teach for America right after college and taught in Compton, California, and stayed in the classroom for eight years, and really just fell in love with teaching and just learn so much about one how to teach kids to read, we had a really strong phonics program in Compton at the time. And I just was fascinated with sort of how to break down the words for the kids. But I was also, you know, really impacted by the context that the kids were learning in. So a lot of my kids were living in homeless shelters. There was food insecurity, there was a lot of violence. And I just started to realize, like, there's so much more to teaching reading than just the mechanics. I fell in love with teaching the mechanics of reading, but also realized that when you're looking at kids reading, you [00:06:00] can't take out the context. Right. And the role of culture and context, in what is going on. And, you know, that those experiences led me to get a master's degree, and I, and at the time it was called remedial reading, kind of thing. So, we dove deep into phonics and I learned, I was lucky to learn a ton of methods, a lot of phonics methods and kind of, sort of how, how to teach explicit systematic phonics. We did not get into the brain stuff in my master's degree, which looking back, I find so interesting, and I felt like I wanted to know more beyond just the methods, beyond just. systematic explicit phonics. I wanted to know why these things happened and what was going on in kids' brains. And that's what led me to do doctoral work and start to work with dyslexia, with dyslexic kids to learn more about sort of what goes on in children's brains as they learn to read. And when I started to learn about this and a doctoral program, I couldn't believe that I had taught and gotten a master's and had never really learned how the brain processes.

Danielle Scorrano: Yeah. Why do you think [00:07:00] that is? Because I got a master's degree, not in reading education but social studies and special education. But, for me when I was in the classroom, I was simultaneously learning at Windward how the brain learns to read. Why do you think master's programs may or any of your observations may have kept that out for teachers?

Dr. Carolyn Strom: It's such a big question. I think a lot about that. I think there's a lot of ways to answer that question. I think that a lot of the neuroscience and cognitive science is not always accessible. It's often not written for the teacher audience, and so therefore it doesn't make its way sort of to teachers through and you would think it would make its way through the universities, but in universities, cognitive science neuroscience are really often siloed from education. And so there's really been a longstanding disconnect between basic science, neuroscience, cognitive science, and the applied sciences, which are, which is education.

Danielle Scorrano: Which then brings me back to before, my first [00:08:00] question was seeing you as the connector of science and story. So in looking at your graduate degree, and then in you're going through a doctoral program, learning more about the neuroscience, how do you then show up where you are now, Dr. Strom, teaching people about the neuroscience of the reading brain?

Dr. Carolyn Strom: Yeah. Well, so the conclusion, you know, usually at the end of a PhD program, you're going to decide to do some line of research. And what I realized was there was so much research and the problem from my perspective was how do we communicate this research, right? You shouldn't have to get a doctoral degree to understand how the brain learns to read. Why, why don't know this? So that's sort of what I do now in my work preparing teachers who are getting their graduate degrees in childhood ed and they're taking literacy classes. I really center and have changed my curriculum over the years to really center the brain and center what's going on in the brain as kids learn to read, and doing a lot of outreach with state, with state education departments and districts and [00:09:00] schools around the story of how the brain learns to read in a way that's accessible to people.

Danielle Scorrano: I tuned into a recent webinar, I believe it was Amplify that offered the webinar, that you taught and I'll have it on the READ Podcast website, because it was truly a story. I felt immersed in the brain, as it was learning to read. You had animation. Instead of having to know the technical term of the brain, you talked about different roadways, and then you have the Scarborough Reading Rope as the tree and it made it so memorable for me. And so for those listeners that haven't tuned into some of your webinars in the past, and we don't have the pictures to show because we are listening to our ears. When you say that our brains, first of all, let's talk about just the brain itself. When you say that our brains are not wired for reading or when the neuroscience talks about that brains are not wired for reading, what does that even mean?

Dr. Carolyn Strom: Yeah. So I'll go back to the story [00:10:00] metaphor, and then I'll kind of get into that question, when you talked about sort of the images that I was using to explain the brain. So the way that I explain it in sort of my model is that we're not, we don't have a civilization in our brain that's meant for reading. We build this civilization. So when we talk about, we don't have a system for reading, I like to think about, we don't have a civilization in our brain that's set up for reading. And then you connect all these neighborhoods. So I think that's the mappings that you were talking about. But in terms of when we say our brains are not wired for reading, what we mean is we're wired for spoken language. The spoken language comes naturally. We seem to learn it just by immersion, but we're not wired for a written code or written code is an invention, right? It was only invented about five or 6,000 years ago. It's a cultural invention. So we are, we don't have the brain system to turn letters into sounds. We have to create that system. And that's what we mean when we say we're not wired for reading, but we're wired for spoken language.

Danielle Scorrano: So you say we have to [00:11:00] create these civilizations. We have to create these neighborhoods. When do we start to do that? I mean, when I think back to when I started to learn to read it just, I honestly don't remember how I learned to read and maybe a lot of people in education and the general population feel the same way unless you struggled. So when did these skills for reading actually begin? And how does this process happen implicitly in our brain?

Dr. Carolyn Strom: Yeah. And so great that you bring that up because most of us don't remember learning to read. We remember experiences with books, but we don't remember the mechanics of like how we learned to read. And you know, when we ask, when does reading begin, it really begins at birth with spoken language. So spoken language, as I say is the hub of written language, right? Everything starts with spoken language, the vocabulary, you hear the phrases, you hear the background knowledge, you get your, the way you tune into language. The spoken language is the foundation. Right. We're wired for that. And reading depends on spoken language. Our written system is based on our spoken system. [00:12:00] So really that's when it begins, right, when you're beginning with spoken language. So reading starts with spoken language, but then the key thing that will need to happen for kids is they will need to tune into the sounds that they hear and hear individual speech sounds because that is the important or what's called phonemic awareness.

You're going to have to learn to tune into speech sounds and to map them to, right, and to be able to associate letters and sounds. Those earliest skills are what are so important to learning to read.

Danielle Scorrano: Okay. So then, so now you have the spoken language, even before kids are even presented with words and on a book, for example, I'm actually, it's so funny when I was thinking back to how I learned to read. I remember sitting in my parents' house in Florida, where I lived and seeing the Hooked on Phonics commercial. And I don't know if I had learned with phonics. My mom was a teacher at the time, so maybe she was using phonics, but then as we get to maybe preschool or you actually work a lot with early childhood [00:13:00] teachers, our brain then becomes plastic, right? Being exposed to it, it's actually being changed as we're being taught explicitly, this written code? So what happens in the brain as we're approaching a letter or even strings of letter to make a word, to hear the speech, what we say that I guess a technical word is decode, to make sense of the words in front of us? How does that process happen?

Dr. Carolyn Strom: So interesting. So it really depends on where you are in development, right. So for skilled readers, you'll look at a word, right. And you're processing all the letters in parallel and you're immediately when the word sort of hits your eyes, right, you're instantly triggering the pronunciation. But if you're a new reader, a novice reader or a struggling reader, you're going to see the word differently. It's going to be unfamiliar to you. So you're going to need to approach it, what's called serially or analytically, sound by sound, right, and really take each letter, turn it into a sound and connect those sounds to meaning. So I guess if we're thinking of the story that I, the way that I [00:14:00] frame it, for educators and for families, I say, you know, we have an area of our brain that is designed for face recognition and object recognition and visual, right?

But we don't have an area of our brain that's designed for looking at a letter and turning it into a sound. But we have this area of our brain that's designed for faces and objects, and what we do is we co-op that area. We take that area and we apply it to letters. And so when you brought up the plasticity, I think that's what you mean. I say that we like refine the visual cortex in my model, it's vision villages. And again, it's so hard to talk about the model without showing it, but we say sort of that area changes and then connects to what's called sound city which processes phonemes.

Danielle Scorrano: Okay. So let me just hear, I'm putting on my teacher, family hat, listening to you talk about that. So we are born with the ability to hear sounds and to recognize them as words. And we're born with the ability to [00:15:00] see objects. So I'm looking at your face. I can look outside my window and see the cars passing and buzzing. And so, as we're learning to read then our brain actually has the ability to rewire or to, you said co-op, to create that area for visual recognition to then understand letters. Is that how it works?

Dr. Carolyn Strom: These neurons, right, that have specialized for faces and objects, they change and they begin to recognize letters. So what we see is an area of the brain becomes specialized for letters and letter strings, and that didn't exist at birth, right. And it doesn't exist in non-readers. So the brain has literally changed once it has learned to read. New sort of neuronal clusters have formed an area of specialization. I can't say it enough that a non reading brain looks different than a reading brain. We've actually changed the brain once you've learned to read. And you're using an area of the brain that's this older area for faces an objects and spoken language, which these are not connected and you're bringing [00:16:00] them together. You're creating connections between these two areas or neighborhoods in the brain and you're creating neural pathways between them that didn't exist before.

Danielle Scorrano: That's so fascinating. And to hear it again, I know this isn't the first time I've heard it, but for all our READ listeners, it is so fascinating. I mean, now my question is, we're sitting in, you're in Westchester, I'm in New York and this would air in July. So as of this episode in the past few months, there's been a lot of buzz in New York City focused on explicit systematic instruction in phonics. When we think about the brain, it's not an easy process for us to just automatically switch that area for neurons to recalibrate to see letters. Right? I mean, I would imagine it's not this natural process as some of our whole language advocates or people that believe in that philosophy, right? So what do we need then? Especially for kids that struggle, what do we need then to help our brain [00:17:00] switch those areas, so that the vision village then ties to the sound city areas of the brain to learn letters.

Dr. Carolyn Strom: Yeah. So I, for that, you know, I think we should step back. You talked about what's going on in New York City. You know, it's really exciting that everyone's kind of coming around to the research around phonics, right, and around the science of reading. But I think the next step is to kind of really asking how did we get here in the first place? How do we get to this point where research has been around for decades and as a whole field, somehow it didn't make its way into the curriculum. Right. And so I think we really need to ask ourselves that sort of, how did we get here so this doesn't happen again, right. So how can we make sure that teachers really understand and families really understand what's going on in the brain and I think it has to do with looking at these misconceptions, like you said. There seem to be these three misconceptions about reading. So it seems to be that people think that learning to read is a natural skill and we need to share how it's not, right, and actually show what's going on in the [00:18:00] brain to show that it actually, isn't going to click. It's not just about immersion, right. Once everyone understands that we're acquiring this new tool, right, this tool, this written language, I think that would really help. Right. And we need to also deconstruct that, like there's no clicking. So I think there's still this phenomenon or that people think that like, oh, just one day it will click.

Danielle Scorrano: Yeah.

Dr. Carolyn Strom: That, that kids will just pick it up, and that's actually not what goes on. We need to share sort of what the science shows over time and how there's a progression over time. And it takes many years. It's such a myth that reading would ever click and I think also, you know, this idea that we memorize words as opposed to map words, sound by sound. And I think just sort of sharing exactly how the brain maps words instead of memorizes words would help people understand the mechanics.

Danielle Scorrano: Okay. I like how you brought those three myths and misconceptions, because they're really important. I think also there's a piece too, about the spoken language and the exposure to language as well. When you [00:19:00] talked earlier in our conversation about the foundations of language, I always think too that a child can map a word, but if they don't have the language, the background knowledge of vocabulary for that, that also is really important, in addition to phonics. So what do you think about that?

Dr. Carolyn Strom: I think phonics, you can't, part of decoding a word is understanding its meaning. Right. So in order to successfully decode a word, you need to translate it into sounds and bring those sounds up into verbal memory for words. So I never understand, the sort of saying that like phonics is not about meaning and phonics takes away meaning because learning to read words also means learning to understand their meaning.

Danielle Scorrano: Yeah, yep.

Dr. Carolyn Strom: A kid has not successfully decoded a word if they don't understand what it means. So there actually is a lot of room for vocabulary in phonics instruction, right, in word knowledge.

Danielle Scorrano: Yeah. I love it, I think that's really important to clarify for anyone even questioning or even our listeners that [00:20:00] are advocates of the science of reading to know that nuance. I think that's really important.

Dr. Carolyn Strom: I want to make sure to add one thing to that.

Danielle Scorrano: Of course.

Dr. Carolyn Strom: You know, phonics addresses word level reading, right, including meaning, but word level reading. And you still need a program, a curriculum, in the instruction for vocabulary and knowledge building. So following the science of reading is not just phonics. It's looking at all of the science of reading, which shows us how important the spoken languages and how important building knowledge and vocabulary is explicitly. You have to build that stuff explicitly as well. So I think, you know, we had to get away from this conversation about phonics versus balanced literacy, because phonics is an approach to word level reading. It's a tool for word level reading and balanced literacy is just sort of like a framework for thinking about literacy instruction in general.

Danielle Scorrano: That brings me back to how you conceptualize the Scarborough Reading Rope as a tree. And I want to bring that in, but when you talk about sharing the [00:21:00] science, I'm drawn back from your webinar and what I've heard you say, how can we share scientific knowledge more effectively? We talked about starting with children's brains, using those visual metaphors, you mentioned vision village and sound city.

Dr. Carolyn Strom: And I'll say it doesn't have to be those. If people want to use the language, you know, that I've shared in the webinars, that's great. But the bottom line is we need to just stop. So we need to strip the jargon from the science, right? When we keep talking about, and people won't like that I say this, but when people keep talking, just referring to the occipital lobe, and these scientific terms that a lot of educators and families just don't have the background for, it shuts people down. Right. People want to know what do you mean? Why is this significant to my practice? So we need to explain the science in some way that's accessible and applicable. If we can no longer just think that research changes practice by itself or that science scales itself, it clearly doesn't like we have had this problem in this field for a really long time. There's a ton of research and it doesn't make its way into practice. That's a huge [00:22:00] problem. So, I believe in visuals and metaphors and stories, making the science sort of come to life like that. But whatever it is, we have to do a better job at connecting the science to practice.

Danielle Scorrano: Absolutely.

Dr. Carolyn Strom: Through telling the story of the brain. I mean, you should, if you take one class about learning, teaching a child to read, you should leave knowing about the brain. And that's just not the case. I know that will sound crazy to people who aren't in education, but it's not the case, that is not typically what you learn about in teaching classes. It's about methods and it's not about learning processes so much.

Danielle Scorrano: Yeah, and I think that's an important piece of the framework in understanding the whole child. So going from the story of the brain, you then talk about these concrete - I love how you have these - these classroom and kitchen table practices and strategies. I love that. And so when we talked to, I guess we can talk, we'll separate educators and families, and I'm sure there's a lot of overlap in how we talk about the reading brain to families and teachers, but specifically let's [00:23:00] first talk about educators. So what are the concrete, high leverage practices that we talk about with educators to help them translate the reading brain to methods?

Dr. Carolyn Strom: Right, so one of the things that we talk about a lot in the brain, right, is that being able to attend to individual sounds and words, being able to hear individual sounds and words is so important to reading. Being able to identify them and manipulate them, that's called phonemic awareness. But we see it's one thing to just tell people that and show it in the brain and everyone understands and knows it's important, but then what do they do with that?

So that's what I call the kitchen table practices. So an example of a kitchen table practice is instead of playing, I see, I spy with my little eyes, something that begins with C, you call attention to the sound. So I hear with my little ear something that begins /c/. Right, so to call attention to sounds. And so what we find is if families have that insight that oh, individual sounds are important, [00:24:00] right, and finding objects with that start with the same sound. What's another thing that starts with the /c/, tuning kids ears into individual sounds is we've seen it work. We've seen that that's what the brain needs to do. And then, but we need to share sort of very concrete everyday ideas. Otherwise we're not going to translate the science into the practice. So I spy with my little eye, instead of that, I hear with my little ear.

Danielle Scorrano: That's such a great idea.

Dr. Carolyn Strom: There's a game called turtle talk where you say a word, a mystery word, and your child has to say it to, to say it fast. So you say, what's the word I'm thinking of, b-o-o-k, word book, right? So little games like that that call attention to sounds. That's a lot of what we work on with families.

Danielle Scorrano: Question for that actually now I have a friend whose daughter is struggling to read. Her husband actually has dyslexia. And we know from the research that there's a high family risk. If they have familial risks, they're more likely to have dyslexia, I think it's like 50 to 70%. [00:25:00] So she's convinced that her daughter has dyslexia, which she's going through the right processes then to get her screened and things like that. In the games that you talked about, should parents be noticing when a kid is struggling to let's say, find a, an object in the room that starts with, or not being able to understand the book? If they're having difficulty, would you automatically say, oh, maybe it's time for that child to get screened or is there more other markers?

Dr. Carolyn Strom: I think that those are some markers. I would look for probably a cluster of markers and also with look at the age of the child. Right. But yes, with kids who have dyslexia, usually, I mean, the it's called the phonological deficit model that they have a chronological deficit, which usually means like B is struggling to identify sounds, manipulate sound, segment sounds, blend sounds. Yeah. Those are, that's definitely something to look out for and things to practice early with. And also, if you're worried, there's so many home-based synthetic systematic phonics programs now it's also, can't hurt to teach your child at least [00:26:00] correspond letters and sounds.

Danielle Scorrano: Yeah, I think also, as I was thinking too, like you said, there's a host of other challenges that a child with dyslexia or a language-based learning disability would show, obviously having a clear connection with the child's teacher, which then brings me to teachers. So what are some things that you share with teachers in the classroom that are these high leverage practices?

Dr. Carolyn Strom: Yep. So one area of research that I'm interested in, it hasn't made its way to all classrooms is the area of alphabetics research. So there's a lot of research on how to teach the alphabet, and what is effective and what is not effective. So one practice we really emphasize is what's called embedded picture mnemonics. So there's a lot of research that, Linnea Ehri has done a ton of this research that shows that if you teach letters, letter sounds, embedded pictures that makes sense to kids, they learn the letter sound correspondence faster and they become really engaged. And so that's one high leverage practice. I highly recommend that people look into embedded picture mnemonics if your students are especially early readers or having [00:27:00] trouble learning letter sound correspondences because we want to get that knowledge as quickly as possible. And the other thing I talk about with early childhood teachers is the importance of writing. All the research, especially the brain research now on handwriting and how handwriting really activates areas of the brain that are involved in reading. It's makes so much sense, but what we see is that it actually activates the letterbox area of the brain, which is involved in reading. And it's, you know, early spelling, right, those early spelling attempts are so important to link letters and sounds. So, you know, even with three-year-olds, we're starting with writing words as they sound, making that process, and sometimes handwriting in the early years is not embedded in the phonics portion. It's not embedded in learning letter sounds. But what we really know is when you're learning a letter sound, it also helps to write the sound or write the letter, right. And not treat handwriting as a separate part of the day from when you're learning letters and sounds. Does that make sense?

Danielle Scorrano: Yeah, I mean, it makes a lot of sense to me. I [00:28:00] taught that at The Windward School, which uses a lot of that and emphasizes highly the importance of handwriting. So I guess I'm trying to put my hat on for someone that hasn't seen it. So you might see in a typical elementary maybe not typical, but if you're in an elementary school classroom, you may see handwriting being taught as its own block and then learning phonics or early reading in another block where you're saying it should be, it's more effective if it's together, and you're maintaining that integrity of handwriting because of the, is it muscle memory or is it just the fact that you're holding your pencil, it's translating into your brain itself? How does that work?

Dr. Carolyn Strom: You're activating the motor areas of your brain, which, which you're adding movement to the whole process. So the letter and sound is being associated with another area of your brain, the movement, script notation, you know, actually writing out the shape helps you be aware of the structure of letters. Multisensory, you're adding like a [00:29:00] sensory piece to it in writing, it adds that physical sense. And you have to reproduce it and think about the shape of a letter, right? You're really, your mind is becoming analytical and focused on that letter. And reading is all about paying attention to the internal details of letters.

Danielle Scorrano: Yeah, I love that you brought about the multisensory aspect because that was the thing I was thinking about. So I think that's important for teachers to understand and how all these integrated practices are small but mighty. Right? It's seemingly like, oh right, I don't have to shift practice so radically, you know, there are things that we can do to infuse better reading instruction. As long as we're maintaining the integrity of explicit, systematic, sequential instruction, there are things that we can say that are high leverage. And I like how you brought those pieces up. You talked a little bit about some areas that you're currently passionate about. So where, in all the work that you're doing right now, where do you see the focus of your work going in the near [00:30:00] future?

Dr. Carolyn Strom: Well, I'm really excited about everything that's going on in our field. I'm excited that this podcast exists. I'm excited that other podcasts exist and that there's so much free PD going on around the science of reading and that New York City is calling attention to some of the challenges, some of the problems in their current curriculum. So I just feel very excited for our field and to be in New York City at this time, and I think it's a really exciting time for teacher education, right, to really think about what we want teachers coming out of their schooling with, what we want under the undergraduate programs to look like, what we want graduate programs to look like if we put the science of learning at the center, if we don't just talk about teaching methods, but we talk about learning processes and connecting to the cognitive neuroscience that exists in the field. And I think our whole sort of society, at least in New York City, it feels like there's a real movement happening around this. And we really will take a look at teacher education now and see sort [00:31:00] of how we can improve the way that we're educating and preparing our teachers to teach kids to read.

Danielle Scorrano: Absolutely. And we see that, I mean, at least where I come from, it's necessary for kids who struggle, but it's good for all kids. I mean, learning the way that the brain reads and exposing children to high quality explicit instruction in phonics or high quality research-based instruction benefits all kids. So I'm excited too, for the movement that's happening and excited to what you offer as well in the near future and beyond. Beyond the movement though, what are some roadblocks that you see that we need to overcome as a community to advance this work?

Dr. Carolyn Strom: That's a great question. I think one is what we talked about with misconceptions. We really need to make sure that everyone really understands how children learn to read. We need to shift our focus and say, this is just really important that teachers need to know not just what to do, but how it works in the brain. So I think we just have to get over those misconceptions. [00:32:00] Another area that I'm interested in and concerned about is sort of the way that early childhood hasn't been a part of the conversation as much, right. So a lot of this conservation is about K-12 or K-5. And there's much that goes on in the brain at the early years before the age of five. And so I think we really need to include early childhood educators in all of this, and look at preschool curriculum as well and what we're doing in those really early years to get kids ready for kindergarten.

So I'd really love to see us sort of shift our focus or include kids ages three to five in these discussions. And if we don't do that, then, I think we're still gonna keep getting kids in kindergarten who come not ready for kindergarten and who could be, who could have made more of those early years.

Danielle Scorrano: Yeah, that's actually, that's a really good point. It's one that I've been constantly thinking about, and I know your work encompasses that scope as well. So I think those are valid points for us all to consider from school leaders, to policy makers, to researchers and educators.

Dr. Carolyn Strom: And I think, you know, the other thing is we can [00:33:00] do a better job of looking at learning media. So all of these streaming services have kids shows, right? But if you look at a lot of the shows on early reading that claim to teach reading, they're not based on the research a lot of the time and they're not really effective. And so I think we can do a better job at using the science right to design a sort of curriculum for streaming services. I have a small project going on that right now that I'm just really excited by, because I think that, we can leverage media much better in terms of reaching all kids.

Danielle Scorrano: Yeah. Tell me more about this project. That's really exciting.

Dr. Carolyn Strom: So I'm in the middle of developing a cartoon curriculum that is based on the research around embedded picture mnemonics where each letter has a character and a song and a personality. It's a cartoon curriculum and it's based on all the early reading research. And it's really exciting to think how big of an impact that media can have, right, and to reach all kids, not just in the classrooms, but wherever they are which is on screens.

Danielle Scorrano: Oh, what an exciting time. We talked about the movement and the energy. I feel [00:34:00] so energized by this conversation. As we close, I want to thank you for your time, Dr. Strom. And I would like to end this conversation by giving, passing the mic to you. Is there anything that you'd want to share related to research, education, advocacy, or anything that you wanted to leave our readers with in this bright July summer episode?

Dr. Carolyn Strom: Well, I guess first I'd want to say, thanks for listening. Doing any sort of extra learning about your field is just such an amazing thing to do. And I just really respect that, so I'd want to thank everyone for listening to this and spending time. And I guess, I mean, one parting thing, I don't really have that I guess, but I guess that I would say I look forward to working in this field for the next 20 years with all of you. I think that the history of reading instruction in this country has been so political and so fraught, and it really doesn't need to be. We know what to do to help all of our kids learn to read [00:35:00] and we can do it now. And so I guess I just say to everybody, thank you for being in this field, and I'm really looking forward to all the work that's going to be done in the next 20 years, and hopefully we'll come, we'll look in 20 years or less than 20 years, five years, 10 years, but definitely 20 years and have really made a change in this country. So I think it's, um, it's a great time to be alive and in this field,

Danielle Scorrano: Oh, I love that. Dr. Strom, I usually say that this episode has been a dream and I should even just rephrase that by saying, this is an exciting reality. Thank you for bringing not only the reading brain to the reality, but showing us and giving us a path on how we can ultimately improve the reading outcomes, and the lives of our children and their families. So thank you for being here on the podcast.

Dr. Carolyn Strom: Thank you for having me, Danielle.

Danielle Scorrano: Thank you so much.

Thank you, Dr. Carolyn Strom for joining the READ Podcast. I love how Dr. Strom shares my passion for connecting science and [00:36:00] story, and there are so many resources that she provides. I encourage you to check them all out this summer and throughout the school months. All of the resources for further learning are on the READ Podcast webpage, and you can check them out under episode 34's bookmarks. You can also learn more about READ and listen to past episodes by visiting readpodcast.org.

My goal is to continue to connect with and learn from inspiring leaders and advocates in research and education. If you have any thoughts, questions, or ideas of topics and speakers, feel free to reach out via email at info@readpodcast.org. I also invite you to like, subscribe, and share the READ podcast with friends and colleagues. You can also like or follow The Windward Institute's, social media pages to find out more about upcoming speakers, episodes and events. Until next time READers!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
episode 34 - what every educator and family should know about reading with carolyn strom

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Episode 34 - What Every Educator and Family Should Know About Reading with Carolyn Strom, PhD - The Windward School

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Danielle Scorrano: [00:00:00] Hello and greetings to our READers across the podcast universe, wherever you are in the world, whenever you're listening to this episode, welcome to the READ Podcast. As you know, READ, the Research Education and ADvocacy Podcast connects you with prominent researchers, thought leaders and educators who share their work insights and expertise about current research and best practices and education and childhood.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Science of Reading refers to the vast and growing body of interdisciplinary research that indicates how children learn to read and helps inform effective K-5 literacy instruction & intervention.

# data[].attributes.body
Why are so many professionals in the field of education ignoring the research in how kids learn to read?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

There's an idea about how children learn to read that's held sway in schools for more than a generation - even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read. In this podcast, host Emily Hanford investigates the influential authors who promote this idea and the company that sells their work. It's an exposé of how educators came to believe in something that isn't true and are now reckoning with the consequences - children harmed, money wasted, an education system upended.

Sixty years ago, Marie Clay developed a way to teach reading she said would help kids who were falling behind. They'd catch up and never need help again. Today, her program remains popular and her theory about how people read is at the root of a lot of reading instruction in schools. But Marie Clay was wrong.
Sold a Story is an independent investigative journalism project from American Public Media. We rely on your donations to support this kind of rigorous reporting.
The controversial educational publishing company has sold instructional materials and professional resources in almost every state, earning at least $1.6 billion over a decade. Explore a map of school districts.

More states are now requiring districts to adopt curriculum that adheres to the science of reading. Look up the policy in your state.

At least 15 states have passed laws about how schools teach reading since the Sold a Story podcast was released in 2022, but there is pushback.

Here's a reading list put together by Emily Hanford.

This discussion guide, created by a teacher, invites educators, parents, community members and kids to have a conversation about the podcast.

Emails and voice messages poured in from people who listened to Sold a Story.

We'll let you know when we release new episodes of the podcast. Enter your address below.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
There's an idea about how children learn to read that's held sway in schools for more than a generation - even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read.

# data[].attributes.headline
In this article, Dr. Moats explain the origin and development of LETRS and the rationale for the course content.

# data[].attributes.subject
In this article, Dr. Moats explain the origin and development of LETRS and the rationale for the course content.

# data[].attributes.body
Incredible results from training teachers to implement their knowledge from LETRS into their literacy classrooms.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
At Vado Elementary School in Vado, New Mexico, students have been thriving since their teachers participated in LETRS professional development. Here, kindergartners in Patricia Ramos's class are listening to a whole-group read-aloud.

In 1999 and again in 2020, I was honored to write Teaching Reading Is Rocket Science for the AFT. This report (which is available for free at go.aft.org/keo) summarizes key findings from reading science and their implications for teaching literacy. It also outlines what all early childhood and elementary teachers should know about language, reading, and writing development-a challenging set of concepts that teachers should be studying from the beginnings of their teacher preparation programs to the ends of their careers. I'm heartened that the AFT's reading courses* are grounded in this science, but my hope has long been that all teacher preparation programs across the country would be informed by science and structure their literacy courses accordingly. Although there has been significant progress in the last 20 years, ¹ we are still far from that goal. Consequently, the students who would benefit the most, including struggling readers and English learners, continue to fall behind at unacceptable rates.

To remedy that, I'm hoping to reach all teachers who have not yet had an opportunity to learn this science with LETRS (Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling) professional development. ² Yes, this is a commercially available program published by a for-profit company. And yes, as the lead author of the program, I have a financial stake in it. However, as a former teacher, psychologist, and researcher, my primary goal is to ensure that every child learns to read-because I know that most children can and will if they are well taught. ³

Several decades ago (yes, I'm also past retirement age), I hoped that the then-emerging science of reading would be widely adopted by professors, state and district policymakers, textbook publishers, and professional development providers. When I saw resistance in some areas and slow progress in others, I sought ways to improve and distribute the courses I had been creating for my graduate students. LETRS was the eventual result.

No information presented in LETRS is unique or proprietary-it just breaks down the "rocket science" of reading instruction into carefully sequenced units so that teachers build the insights and knowledge necessary to succeed. Although LETRS has become popular in recent years, my sincere hope is that in the near future it becomes unnecessary because teachers are already masters of this science as they graduate from their preparation programs and are routinely supported by well-informed administrators and science-based materials. Until that day comes, LETRS is my best effort to give our nation's teachers the information they need. In this article, I explain the origin and development of LETRS and the rationale for the course content.

Lee Anna Vasquez, a reading interventionist, uses a sound wall to teach students the articulatory features of phonemes. Here, she shows students how to produce /i/ sounds as in itch (left) and ice (right).

Investing in Teachers' Expertise

LETRS is not a program of instruction for teaching reading to children. It is a professional development course of study in which more than 200,000 educators are currently participating. At least four states and 2,500 districts require or suggest that K-3 teachers take LETRS, and the number of participants continues to grow. The goals of LETRS are, in a nutshell, to build teachers' knowledge of language structure and the processes involved in learning to read words, spell, and comprehend, and then to help teachers apply these understandings in their classrooms. Unlike some program developers who believe that fidelity to a curriculum in a box makes teacher expertise unnecessary, my LETRS colleagues and I believe that teachers are indispensable facilitators of students' learning, and thus, teachers must know enough to be good decision makers and problem solvers. Our favorite saying, adapted from Maya Angelou, is, "When we know better, we do better."

Teaching reading is complex. Consider the choices teachers are faced with daily: How do I parcel out instructional time? Which students require more work on which essential components of literacy? How do I use assessments to learn what I really need to know to differentiate instruction? How do I organize and sequence information for instruction in various component skills? How can I integrate the various components? How can I stimulate growth in my students' language comprehension? Published instructional programs are helpful tools, but it is teachers who confront and resolve these challenges. Instructional problems can only be solved by those who know a fair amount about how print represents language, how children learn to read and write, why some may have difficulty, and what kind of instruction is likely to help students succeed. LETRS was developed in response to evidence that teachers, for the most part, were not receiving enough of this vital information in their pre-service or in-service training-and were eager to learn more.

How Did LETRS Evolve?

I created the prototype for LETRS in the early 1990s-not as a published program but as two graduate courses I pieced together for teachers earning master's degrees at Saint Michael's College in Colchester, Vermont. At the time, working as a psychologist specializing in language-based learning disorders, I was conducting clinical evaluations of people of all ages who were experiencing dyslexia and other learning difficulties. Through those case consultations, I observed that teachers on the receiving end of my reports seldom had the background, training, or contextual support to implement the recommendations. Those reports often called for systematic, explicit teaching of language skills, including phoneme awareness, phonics, spelling, vocabulary, syntax, text reading comprehension, and writing, both in the regular classroom and in intervention settings.

I petitioned Saint Michael's, where I was a part-time instructor, to offer two electives-Language 1 and Language 2. The first course focused on understanding and teaching word recognition, and the second course focused on oral language and teaching language comprehension. Through informal surveys of teacher knowledge that included such tasks as counting phonemes, identifying orthographic patterns, identifying morphemes, parsing sentences, or recognizing characteristics of narrative text structure, I found that most of the teachers who took the courses (and who were otherwise competent and dedicated) had not previously studied this content. Most were eager to learn and knew that their pre-service preparation in literacy had been inadequate. ⁴ Simultaneously, a growing body of research (which I summarized in the original Teaching Reading Is Rocket Science report and which was authoritatively set forth in the National Reading Panel's report Teaching Children to Read ⁵) affirmed that reading and writing were dependent on language skills that, if explicitly taught, would make a critical difference in children's literacy growth.

I later offered these Language 1 and 2 courses during the 1990s and into the 2000s at the Greenwood Institute in Putney, Vermont, and at Simmons College (now Simmons University) in Boston, where my colleagues and I taught graduate students. I also adapted the courses for teachers in the Washington, DC, Early Interventions Project, ⁶ where I was site director for a project funded by the National Institutes of Health in nine schools that primarily served students of color from low-income families. At the end of that project, the teachers had raised their students' relative standing between grades K-4 from the 17th percentile on average to the 48th percentile in overall reading achievement. ⁷ Data analyses at the conclusion of that project indicated that the professional development component was instrumental in both teacher and student growth.

Through that first decade of teaching both courses to teachers in varied settings, I modified the pace of learning and the activities used to reinforce critical concepts. I discovered, for example, that the most difficult component of instruction for teachers to grasp in sufficient detail was phonology and phoneme awareness. Multimodal phoneme awareness activities and analysis of spelling errors turned out to be extremely important in understanding how speech is represented by print. I also learned that the querying process expected of teachers during text reading-the indispensable teacher's tool for building a mental model of the text-took a great deal of practice and coaching. On the whole, the evolution of course content and pedagogy (which continues to this day) has involved slowing down the pace, giving tons of varied practice, and increasing the frequency with which concrete activities are linked with theory and research. The third edition of LETRS that is now in use was thus refined over about three decades.

LETRS, Year 1: Foundational Reading and Spelling Skills

The LETRS courses, which are designed for teachers in grades K-3, are to be implemented over two years. In the first year of LETRS (book 1, units 1-4), teachers learn how to teach phoneme awareness, beginning and advanced decoding, word recognition, and spelling. In the second year (book 2, units 5-8), participants shift their focus to oral language, vocabulary, reading comprehension, and writing in response to reading. Several theoretical frameworks for understanding reading and writing in grades K-3 provide conceptual cohesion and are woven throughout the eight units. Each unit, however, allows teachers to focus on one important aspect of teaching at a time. The courses build knowledge in a progressive sequence in which one topic supports and is connected to the next-a feature that distinguishes LETRS from professional development offered as a patchwork of various options that teachers can self-select.

Theoretical Frameworks and Illustrations

LETRS continually references several widely accepted, scientifically validated models of reading acquisition and reading processes. The two-part organization of LETRS parallels a well-validated construct called the Simple View of Reading. ⁸ The Simple View states that reading comprehension is the product of word recognition and language comprehension (WR x LC = RC). Proficient reading requires competence in each skill domain. Thus, each major component of reading receives equal time in professional development, including the subskills integral to each part of the equation. Allocation of instructional time across these domains and integration of basic skills with meaning making are constantly reinforced throughout LETRS.

Other models and frameworks that provide conceptual glue are Linnea Ehri's phase theory of reading development, ⁹ Hollis Scarborough's rope model, ¹⁰ Mark Seidenberg's triangle model of word recognition, ¹¹ and Jane Oakhill and Kate Cain's research on reading comprehension. ¹² Research from brain science is also referenced, especially in discussions of learners with dyslexia and related reading difficulties. ¹³

Phoneme Awareness

The ability to recognize printed words out of context, quickly and accurately, is gained not by a visual imprinting process, but by building a mental map connecting speech with print. By learning incrementally how graphemes (letters and letter combinations) represent speech, novice readers and spellers gradually build a mental storehouse of known words that can be instantly recognized and recalled. ¹⁴ Every phase of this process depends on the ability to recognize and mentally manipulate the phonemes or speech sounds that make up words (phoneme awareness). From pre-alphabetic, to partial alphabetic, to full alphabetic, and then to consolidated word recognition and recall, children must gradually differentiate the sounds in spoken words and map them to letters and letter sequences.

The second unit of LETRS is all about phonemes and phoneme awareness. While many sources on teaching reading name phoneme awareness an essential component of instruction and give examples of activities that help students build awareness in K-1, LETRS appears to be unique in its requirement that teachers learn the phonemes of English-not as sounds represented by letters of the alphabet, but as building blocks of speech that are distinguished by articulatory properties or features. Learning the consonant and vowel sound systems in English allows teachers to understand why certain phonemes are more difficult to perceive and learn than others, why many students confuse specific phonemes, and why English learners typically benefit from explicit instruction in how the sounds of their home language differ from, and overlap with, English.

Referencing charts with the 25 consonant phonemes and the 18 vowel phonemes in English (plus schwa, the unstressed vowel), teachers learn how to pronounce, describe, and compare them. The charts we use (below) show clearly which consonants differ only in voicing and which share a place of articulation (e.g., the tongue is behind the teeth with /t/, /d/, /n/, /s/, /z/, and /l/). The vowel chart shows that each vowel differs from its neighbor by subtle changes in the position of tongue, jaw, lips, and air flow. Armed with this information, teachers are in a better position to select easier or harder examples of contrasting sounds (for example, the vowels /ĭ/ and /ŭ/ are easier to distinguish in speech than the vowels /ĭ/ and /ĕ/, and the consonants /ch/ and /b/ are easier to distinguish than the consonants /ch/ and /j/).

Figure 2: English Consonant Phonemes by Place and Manner of Articulation

Because students learning English disproportionately have a hard time learning to read English, and because students whose home language is Spanish comprise 75 percent of English learners in the United States, ¹⁵ we deliberately contrast the phonemes of English with those of Spanish using the consonant and vowel charts. When Spanish-speaking students learn a sound in English that is not in Spanish, such as /z/, instruction should be explicit and systematic and refer to articulation. There are many phonological differences between the two languages, as well as differences in the way letters are used to represent sounds (e.g., the letter j represents the sound /h/ in Spanish); explicit instruction in how each system works is extremely helpful to teachers of multilingual learners and to their students.

Building Teacher Knowledge of Phonology

Learning the phoneme charts and the pronunciation of the phonemes is only the beginning step. Literate adults store words in their memories by consolidating each word's sound(s), spelling, and meaning into an amalgamated unit. We often observe that it is quite difficult and requires much practice for teachers to uncouple their awareness of the sounds in a word from their knowledge of its spelling. The number of letters in a printed word often does not correspond to the number or the identity of its phonemes. For example, box has four phonemes (/b/, /o/, /k/, /s/) and scratch has five (/s/, /k/, /r/, /a/, /ch/). Teachers must direct their attention away from print to identify phonemes, or else they will continue to confuse letters with sounds and to be unclear about the sounds in words during phoneme manipulation practice. They will also continue to teach students misleading information such as the idea that English has "five vowels" ( a, e, i, o, u) or that the qu combination is "one sound." English has 18 vowel sounds and five letters to represent them (plus a few helpers: w, y, and gh). The qu combination is actually a consonant blend (/k/, /w/) in which the letter u represents a consonant glide. If u always represented a vowel, then the word quick would have two syllables (two different vowel sounds); obviously, it does not.

In LETRS, we engage participants in several activities that help them uncouple their phonological (sound) processing systems from their orthographic (print) processing systems. For example, we have teachers write out a phonetic transcription of the sounds in the names of the 26 letters, to see where there is overlap and where letter names differ substantially from the sounds they represent (such as w, /w/). Clarity about which is which-phoneme or letter name-allows teachers to put themselves in the shoes of the novice learner who comes to reading armed with oral language and who must figure out how spoken words match up with print. The step after a phoneme awareness "warm-up" in a code-focused lesson is teaching how the elements and patterns of our writing system represent language at several levels: the sounds, meanings, and grammatical roles of words.

Decoding and Spelling

Once the first reference point for learning the print system-identification and sequencing of phonemes in spoken words-has been thoroughly explored by teachers, the next two units of LETRS address phonics and spelling instruction. We want teachers to integrate phoneme awareness, decoding, spelling, and word reading for automaticity in their foundational skill lessons, but we build teachers' competence with one element at a time before expecting that integration to occur. We emphasize the value of a structured phonics lesson plan that progresses through an "I do, we do, you do" format for teacher-led instruction. As they learn the phonics lesson sequence, teachers see and practice many specific activities for the purpose of explaining concepts, providing practice, and applying concepts to text reading and writing. Demonstrations occur through embedded videos and role-play sessions. We also ask participants to apply what they are learning with at least three students in their classes through "bridge to practice" assignments.

One goal of LETRS is to equip teachers with knowledge of English orthography sufficient to explain why words are spelled the way they are. To do so, teachers are encouraged to draw upon any of the following five distinct sources of information:

1. Language of origin. English is a richly expressive language largely because it has adapted words from many languages; learning about those languages helps unlock some spelling mysteries. For example, words of French origin often use ch for the sound /sh/ (charade, brochure, Charlotte), but words of Greek origin often use ch to represent /k/ (character, chorus, scholar).

2. Phoneme-grapheme mapping. Graphemes are letters and letter groups that represent phonemes. For example, the graphemes in sleigh are s-l-eigh, while the graphemes in thatch are th-a-tch. Some letters, like e, have many jobs to do in this sound-letter correspondence system.

3. Position-based spellings. Noting the position of a sound makes the spelling far more predictable. For instance, "long a" is represented by ai in the middle of syllables, but ay is used at the ends of syllables (gain/gay, bail/bay, paid/pay). The same pattern holds for the slider vowel (diphthong) /oi/, which is spelled oi if it is followed by a consonant but oy if it is not (toil/toy, coin/coy).

4. Arbitrary rules of letter use. Although English spelling is more rule governed than many people believe, there are some arbitrary patterns that must be learned either explicitly or implicitly. For instance, no words in English end in the letters v or j; the letters c, u, and x are among those that are not doubled; and certain letter sequences do not occur within syllables, such as cw or ngk.

5. Morphology. The meaningful parts of words (morphemes) are preserved in spelling even though they may not match pronunciation very closely. For example, in ex-press-ion, ex is a prefix, press is a root, and ion is a suffix. If students have not learned these morphemes, they may write "ekspreshun," which is the way the word sounds.

When teachers have not had ample opportunities to learn how to explain words' spellings, they are much more inclined to believe-and teach-that the English writing system is chaotic and nonsensical. Believing that is the case too often leads educators to rely on "sight" word methods such as "using your eyes like a camera," drilling with flash cards, telling students to look at pictures and use context to guess an unknown word, or reciting letter sequences to memorize words.

One central goal of LETRS is to put meaning over rote memorization. That's why part of the phonics lesson plan is working with the meanings of words that students are learning to decode or spell. Our theoretical frameworks emphasize the importance of connecting sound, meaning, and spelling while the mental code-mapping process is under construction. Decodable words, phrases, sentences, and stories should be targets for practicing what has been directly taught and should be used for activities such as multiple-meaning webs, antonym and synonym pairings, segmenting and blending words by morpheme (e.g., play-ful, play-ful-ness, re-play-ed), sentence anagrams, sentence sequencing, and summarizing.

One of the skills we help teachers develop is selecting different kinds of texts for varied purposes. To that end, we ask participants to analyze and compare the words in leveled texts, predictable texts, "sight word" texts, and decodable texts (which are designed to reinforce the use of phonics to tackle unknown words). Careful analysis of texts is eye-opening for many participants who have not realized that leveled and predictable books require students to try to read many words whose spelling-sound correspondences have not been directly taught. While analyzing decodables, teachers can identify the specific correspondences that will enable students to read the words independently-without relying on contextual guesswork.

Understanding of the process of reading development, combined with knowledge of the writing system itself, usually results in teachers shifting toward using decodable books to reinforce instruction in phonics. The transition away from leveled texts may pose challenges if schools have limited funds, but some free or inexpensive materials are available online.

In Keren Buenfil's first-grade class, two students change the initial sound of save from /s/ to /c/, making the word cave.

Assessments

Differentiation of instruction and assignment of students to flexible, needs-based small groups is only valuable if relevant data are driving the grouping process. Within book 1 of LETRS, teachers learn to use a phoneme awareness screening test, the LETRS Phonics and Word Reading Survey, and the LETRS Spelling Inventory (a diagnostic survey). In addition, we encourage the use of Acadience Reading's screeners, progress-monitoring tools, and supplementary diagnostic tests. These informal measures provide enough data to make initial decisions about student grouping. We have teachers work through case studies with student and classroom data from these sources so they can learn how to use the data to meet students' needs.

We also coach teachers on interpretation of spelling and reading errors. Students' errors or naive attempts at word reading or spelling are windows into their processing of both speech and print. Linnea Ehri's phase theory, combined with error analysis, can indicate whether a student needs additional work on phoneme awareness and, if so, which sounds need practice and at what level of challenge. Likewise, the data can indicate which phonics concepts should be targeted, which morphemes the student is ready to learn, and whether the student is receiving sufficient practice to become fluent and automatic in word reading and/or spelling.

LETRS, Year 2: Vocabulary, Language Comprehension, and Writing

Referring again to the Simple View of Reading (Word Recognition x Language Comprehension = Reading Comprehension), participants in the second year of LETRS focus on the language comprehension part of the equation. Beyond the translation of the written alphabetic code into speech, comprehension of written text involves very much the same verbal capacities as comprehension of spoken language. Those include background knowledge, knowledge of word meanings, understanding of complex sentence structures, awareness of text structures (such as narrative and informational text formats), and abstract reasoning (including inferencing). Furthermore, the process of comprehension during reading begins with literal meanings and builds to a mental model of deeper meanings and associations. We envision the teacher playing a very active role in facilitating text comprehension through careful pre-reading preparation, purposeful questioning during reading, and use of various after-reading activities to help students deepen and consolidate their understandings. All of this, we recommend, should occur with high-quality texts selected for their knowledge-building potential.

Oral Language and Literacy

Throughout LETRS, we emphasize the intricate interaction between and interdependence of oral language competence and literacy. We review data on early language development and the contextual factors that facilitate it, especially the verbal behavior of caretaking adults, such as taking turns while talking about shared experiences, enthusiastically answering children's questions, and purposefully mixing in new vocabulary. (This aspect of early childhood experience is a major focus of LETRS for Early Childhood Educators, ¹⁶ which is aimed specifically at the needs of children 0-5 years of age.)

Vocabulary

Book 2 of LETRS begins with a unit on understanding and teaching vocabulary. Teachers learn that knowledge of individual word meanings is a major factor in overall reading comprehension outcomes. To bring the issue home, teachers complete exercises designed to challenge their own comprehension, such as reading passages with obscure words. Book 2 reviews research on the relationship between word-learning opportunities and overall language and reading growth between infancy and third grade, with an emphasis on how to narrow gaps that arise early in development. During the unit, participants are also expected to acquire and then evaluate how well they have retained relevant professional terms so that they expand their own vocabulary while they are learning principles of instruction to apply with students.

Like many other professional development sources, we discuss routines for in-depth teaching of selected words. ¹⁷ The needs of multilingual learners for expanded vocabulary support are addressed throughout. Teachers use example texts to select, plan, model, and share how they would teach key terms to their students. Through practice exercises, they also apply techniques such as teaching multiple meanings of words, categorizing, scaling words on a qualitative dimension (e.g., miserable to ecstatic), and using semantic feature analysis. In addition to promoting students' use of new words, a goal of the unit is to upgrade the complexity and precision of teacher talk in the classroom so that students will be continually exposed to richer and less common vocabulary.

Text-Driven Comprehension Instruction

Units 6 and 7 of LETRS prepare teachers to facilitate their students' understanding of complex and worthwhile texts. We do not want teachers to equate comprehension instruction with reading a text silently and applying comprehension strategies to answer multiple-choice questions. Reading should be undertaken for a stated purpose, and that purpose should serve a larger, knowledge-building goal. Our aim is for teachers to view themselves as chief navigators-active guides who will help students make connections between what they know and what the text says. To prepare teachers for that role, we ask them to distinguish the mental processes involved in constructing a text's meaning and the visible products that students generate along the way. We examine what occurs in the mind during reading and review research showing where comprehension can and does break down. We ground this discussion with a graphic illustration depicting the contributions of long-term memory and working memory as we make sense of language.

Our emphasis is not so much on teaching traditional strategies (such as making predictions, finding the main idea, questioning, and summarizing), but on selectively employing such techniques in the service of exploring the meanings in a specific text. Research-supported strategies are embedded within three distinct phases of teaching a text for a defined purpose: before, during, and after the reading. Our comprehension planning guide addresses key considerations and actions to take in each phase. Here are some activities teachers rehearse during these LETRS units:

Preparing the text (before reading):

Decide and state the "enduring understandings" you want your students to take away from the reading.

Preview the text to identify and select key vocabulary for in-depth instruction.

Preview the text to find challenging forms of academic language, such as unusual syntax, word use, figures of speech, or pronoun references.

Prepare an introduction to the content that will build sufficient background knowledge to begin the reading.

Anticipate where you will probably ask questions that will help students make inferences and build their mental models of what the text says.

During the reading:

Inject clarifications as necessary, such as brief definitions of topic-specific terminology.

Pose queries to help students clarify, associate, summarize, and predict what might happen.

After the reading:

Use graphic organizers, two-column note charts, story boards, and/or illustrations to review, retell, or summarize the reading.

Structure writing tasks that respond to the reading.

Writing in Response to Reading

The final unit of LETRS addresses beginning writing instruction. We discuss why writing is challenging for many students and review research showing that mastery of writing foundations (handwriting, spelling, punctuation, basic grammar) facilitates composition of longer and higher-quality text. This unit devotes more time to a topic introduced in unit 6: how to recognize and construct simple, compound, and complex sentence structures, and how to link sentences together in a cohesive paragraph or composition. To wrap up the unit, we review writing samples with the help of an evaluation rubric and use them to pull together many other concepts taught throughout the whole LETRS course of study.

During small-group instruction, students build consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words.

Impact of LETRS

LETRS professional development is designed to be implemented over two years so that teachers have time to absorb, integrate, and apply the concepts. Teachers often experience complex emotional reactions as they learn more about the science of reading and the structure of language. Some teachers express grief and regret over their past use of ineffective (but widespread) practices and anger that their prior opportunities to learn about teaching reading were inadequate or even misinformed. A common reaction of participating teachers to their experience in LETRS is, "Why didn't anybody teach me these things before?" The value of the information is readily apparent when students begin to make progress. Student growth quickly validates teachers' efforts to teach language, reading, and writing explicitly.

In translating concepts and guidance from research, we encourage teachers to confront and abandon ideas, practices, and programs that many have used or been taught-often under district or state standards and requirements-that do not align with current understandings grounded in evidence. For example, many districts are still wedded to programs and approaches based on "cueing systems," a tenet of guided reading that does not recognize the central role of phonology or phonic decoding in learning to read and spell. An underlying assumption that reading is primarily a visual imprinting activity drives other misconceived but all-too-common practices, such as posting "sight" words on an alphabetic word wall regardless of the beginning sounds in the words (e.g., posting out, once, only, and often under o). Many district and state standards require kindergarten and first-grade readers to memorize dozens of words on flash cards or spell lists of words by rote visual memory, even though in reading science, all words are eventually learned "by sight" through a process of speech-to-print mapping, beginning with phoneme-level processing. ¹⁸ Turning away from common but unsupported practices poses dilemmas for teachers and schools because the misconceived ideas have been established in reading education for so long. Many published programs have yet to catch up to the science, and relatively few incorporate good instruction with both components of the Simple View equation. The transition from status quo to new approaches can be fraught with problems of curriculum alignment and time allocation that have no easy solutions. Nevertheless, many schools and districts have reported significant gains after deciding to move ahead, such as the Cedar Rapids Community School District in Iowa, Enid Public Schools in Oklahoma, and the Cullman City Primary School in Cullman, Alabama. As several educators at Vado Elementary School in New Mexico explain, the transition away from unsupported practices can be difficult-but the rewards are soon apparent. As kindergarten teacher Patricia Ramos put it, "Now with explicit teaching, the light bulb moments are brighter for sure."

Perhaps the dramatic gains in Mississippi between 2014 and 2019 are the best example of what can happen when all aspects of a system are working toward the same goal. Mississippi was the only state to make significant progress on fourth-grade reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in 2019, after a five-year effort that included LETRS training for K-4 teachers, K-8 special education teachers, elementary-grades administrators, and most professors of reading. ¹⁹

In my experience, knowledge-building through LETRS is more likely to result in student improvement if it is supported with in-class coaching, training for school leadership, alignment of instructional materials, and assessments that enable teachers to differentiate instruction. It is very frustrating for teachers to participate in LETRS if these supports are not provided by a school or district, and certainly the impact of the training will be diluted if teachers are left on their own to do the best they can with materials that are not based on the science of reading.

A lesson we have learned many times over is that schools with low-performing students can "beat the odds" when instruction aligned with scientific research is consistently delivered and supported. Although it has taken decades for many textbook publishers, college faculty members, and organizations to embrace reading science, we are optimistic that, finally, our collective efforts may be paying off.
Louisa C. Moats has been a teacher, psychologist, researcher, graduate school faculty member, and author of many influential scientific journal articles, books, and policy papers on the topics of reading, spelling, language, and teacher preparation. After 15 years as a licensed psychologist specializing in evaluation and consultation with individuals who experienced reading, writing, and language difficulties, she served as a site director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development's Early Interventions Project and research advisor and consultant with Sopris Learning.
*To learn about the AFT's courses, see go.aft.org/0ki. ( return to article)

‡For free decodable texts, see opensourcephonics.org. ( return to article)

§We use the Phonological Awareness Screening Test, which is available for free (along with guidance for using it) at thepasttest.com. ( return to article)

**Acadience's materials are available for free at acadiencelearning.org/acadience-reading/k-grade6. ( return to article)

Endnotes

1. G. Drake and K. Walsh, 2020 Teacher Prep Review: Program Performance in Early Reading Instruction (Washington, DC: National Council on Teacher Quality, January 2020).

2. Moats, L.C. & Tolman, C.A. (2019). LETRS (3rd edition). Dallas, TX: Voyager Sopris.

3. J. Torgesen, "The Prevention of Reading Difficulties," Journal of School Psychology 40, no. 1 (2002): 7-26.

4. L. Moats and G. Lyon, "Wanted: Teachers with Knowledge of Language," Topics in Learning Disorders 16, no. 2 (1996): 73-86.

5. National Reading Panel, Teaching Children to Read: An Evidence-Based Assessment of the Scientific Research Literature on Reading and Its Implications for Reading Instruction (Washington, DC: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, US Department of Health and Human Services, April 2020), nichd.nih.gov/publications/pubs/nrp/smallbook.

6. L. Moats and B. Foorman, "Literacy Achievement in the Primary Grades in High-Poverty Schools," in Educating the Other America: Top Experts Tackle Poverty, Literacy, and Achievement in Our Schools, ed. S. Neuman (Baltimore: Brookes Publishing, 2008), 91-111.

7. Moats and Foorman, "Literacy Achievement."

8. W. Hoover and W. Tunmer, The Cognitive Foundations of Reading and Its Acquisition: A Framework with Applications Connecting Teaching and Learning (Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2020).

9. K. Miles and L. Ehri, "Orthographic Mapping Facilitates Sight Word Memory and Vocabulary Learning," in Reading Development and Difficulties: Bridging the Gap Between Research and Practice, ed. D. Kilpatrick, R. Joshi, and R. Wagner (Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2019).

10. H. Scarborough, "Connecting Early Language and Literacy to Later Reading Disabilities: Evidence, Theory, and Practice," in Handbook of Early Literacy Research, ed. S. Neuman and D. Dickenson (New York: Guilford, 2001), 97-110.

11. M. Seidenberg, Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can't, and What Can Be Done About It (New York: Basic Books, 2017).

12. K. Cain, J. Oakhill, and C. Elbro, "Reading Comprehension: From Research to Practice," The Reading League Journal 1, no. 3 (2020): 32-38; and J. Oakhill, K. Cain, and C. Elbro, "Reading Comprehension and Reading Comprehension Difficulties," in Reading Development and Difficulties: Bridging the Gap Between Research and Practice, ed. D. Kilpatrick, R. Joshi, and R. Wagner (Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2019), 83-116.

13. S. Dehaene, Reading in the Brain (New York: Penguin Viking, 2009); and J. Fletcher et al., Learning Disabilities: From Identification to Intervention, 2nd ed. (New York: Guilford, 2019).

14. L. Ehri, "Orthographic Mapping in the Acquisition of Sight Word Reading, Spelling Memory, and Vocabulary Learning," Scientific Studies of Reading 18 (2014): 5-21; and Miles and Ehri, "Orthographic Mapping Facilitates."

15. National Center for Educational Statistics, "English Learners in Public Schools: Table 1," Institute of Education Sciences, US Department of Education, May 2022, nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cgf#T1.

16. L. Paulson and L. Moats, LETRS for Early Childhood Educators, 2nd ed. (Dallas: Voyager Sopris Learning, 2019).

17. I. Beck, M. McKeown, and L. Kucan, Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction, 2nd ed. (New York: Guilford, 2013).

18. D. Kilpatrick, Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2015); Miles and Ehri, "Orthographic Mapping Facilitates"; and D. Share, "On the Role of Phonology in Reading Acquisition: The Self-Teaching Hypothesis," in Explaining Individual Differences in Reading: Theory and Evidence, ed. S. Brady, D. Braze, and C. Fowler(New York: Psychology Press, 2011), 45-68.

19. K. Burk, "The Perfect Storm: Mississippi's Momentum for Improving Reading Achievement," Reading League Journal 2 (2020): 28-34, 47; and E. Hanford, "There Is a Right Way to Teach Reading, and Mississippi Knows It," op-ed, New York Times, December 5, 2019.

20. C. Denton, B. Foorman, and P. Mathes, "Schools That 'Beat the Odds': Implications for Reading Instruction," Remedial and Special Education 24, no. 5 (2003): 258-61; B. Foorman et al., "The Impact of Instructional Practices in Grades 1 and 2 on Reading and Spelling Achievement in High Poverty Schools," Contemporary Educational Psychology 31, no. 1 (2006): 1-29; and Moats and Foorman, "Literacy Achievement in the Primary Grades."

[Photos by Pamela Wolfe]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In 1999 and again in 2020, I was honored to write Teaching Reading Is Rocket Science for the AFT. This report (which is available for free at go.aft.org/keo) summarizes key findings from reading science and their implications for teaching literacy.