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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘On the same page’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Big disconnect’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the story of Queen Esther — who convinced her husband, the Persian king, to spare the Jews — to the depiction of Christ’s last supper, the material is designed to draw connections between classroom content and religious texts.

“If you’re reading classic works of American literature, there are often religious allusions in that literature,” state education Commissioner Mike Morath told ����Ӱ��. “Any changes being made are to reinforce the kind of background knowledge on these seminal works of the American cultural experience.” 

With the potential to reach over 2 million K–5 students in the nation’s second-largest state, the update marks a big step in a movement embraced by conservatives to root young people’s education in what they consider traditional values. But it’s bound to raise questions about the potential for religious indoctrination in a state that has been a battleground for such disputes. Last year, for example, Texas passed a law allowing to work as school counselors.

“It is reasonable to devote some attention to [the Bible], and state education standards across the nation often require such attention,” said Mark Chancey, a religious studies professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “The problem, of course, is that sometimes the legitimate reason of cultural literacy is used as a smokescreen to hide religious and ideological agendas.”

In an interview with a Christian talk show, GOP , who describes himself as a “,” praised the curriculum changes, saying they will “get us back to teaching, not necessarily the Bible per se, but the stories from the Bible.”

The release comes four days after the state Republican party calling on the legislature and the state Board of Education to require instruction on the Bible. Texas education department officials declined to comment on the platform and have emphasized that the new curriculum includes material from other faiths.

While largely hidden from public view, the redesign sparked behind-the-scenes debate long before its release. When a leading curriculum publisher balked at the state’s request to infuse its offerings with biblical content, Texas officials turned to other vendors. They include conservative Christian in Michigan and the right-leaning Texas Public Policy Foundation, which an unsuccessful to require the 10 Commandments in every classroom, according to a list obtained by ����Ӱ��.

‘Great works of literature’

Going far beyond typical reading and writing fundamentals, the new lessons draw on history, science and the arts — “what many people call this classical model of education,” Morath said.

To understand “,” a book about a Jewish family hiding in Denmark during World War II, he said students should understand more about “Jewish cultural practices” and “the vilification of this ethnic minority.” 

A unit on “Fighting for a Cause,” one of several that officials shared with ����Ӱ��, includes the Old Testament story of Esther and how she and her cousin Mordecai “fought for what they knew was right and made a difference that not only affected the Jews of Persia but also Jewish people today.”

The mentions range in size from a page on Esther to a few paragraphs about Samuel Adams at the Continental Congress. His plea to fellow delegates to pray together, despite religious differences, is offered as a first-grade vocabulary lesson on the word “compromise.” 

Fifth graders are asked to read Martin Luther King Jr.’s “.” Written after his 1963 arrest for leading a , King compared his act of civil disobedience to the “refusal of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar” in the Book of Daniel.

“If you don’t know who Nebuchadnezzar is, you don’t know what [King’s] talking about,” Morath said. “How do you make sure that you can unlock in the minds of our kids their ability to wrestle with … ideas that have surfaced in great works of literature?” 

Not just literature, but art. A lesson on “The Last Supper,” da Vinci’s Renaissance masterpiece, points fifth graders to the New Testament. 

“The Bible explains that Jesus knew that after this meal, he would be arrested, put on trial, and killed,” the text reads. “Let’s read the story in the book of Matthew to see for ourselves what unfolded during the supper.”

While drawing parallels to religious texts, Morath said the lessons would respect bright lines regarding the separation of church and state.

“This is still a curriculum for public school and we’ve designed it to be appropriate in that setting,” he said. 

New religious-related material in a proposed Texas elementary school reading program includes Old Testament references to the Liberty Bell, an exploration of the meaning of the Jewish holiday Purim and the story of Christ’s last supper. (Texas Education Agency)

The role of Amplify

The redesign builds on a $19 million m delivered during the pandemic by Amplify, a based in New York.

Roughly 400 districts have used their materials since 2021. Some teachers give them high marks for building students’ and comprehension. But not everyone has been pleased. Last year, Morath who decried its emphasis on and minimal attention to Christianity.

“There’s one mention of Jesus, that he was a teacher a couple thousand years ago,” said Jamie Haynes, who runs a on “concerning” curriculum and library books. “The only other time we can find God, our God — the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob — is in the American unit.” 

The issue of how — and whether — to incorporate religious content was fraught long before the curriculum reached school districts.

State officials asked Amplify to provide a lesson on the story of Esther and suggested a unit on Exodus, said Alexandra Walsh, the company’s chief product officer.

While it had previously tweaked its curriculum for other states, Walsh said the company had never been asked to add biblical material. And when it suggested inserting content from other world religions, the state rejected the idea, said Amplify spokeswoman Kristine Frech.

“There was not much appetite for a variety of wisdom texts,” she said. “There was much more of an appetite for the tie to traditional Christian texts.”

The company opted against bidding on a contract to provide additional revisions. In a statement, Texas education officials dismissed Amplify’s charge that they turned down material from other religions as “completely false” and stressed that the finished product “includes representation from multiple faiths.” But the state declined to specify how many of the new lessons have religious themes or derive from Judeo-Christian sources.

In an interview with ����Ӱ��, Morath pointed to a World War II lesson that focuses on J. Robert Oppenheimer’s upon witnessing the explosion of the first atomic bomb in Los Alamos: “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The words, featured prominently in the recent Oscar-winning film, derive from the Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu scripture.   

Kindergarteners studying the Golden Rule would learn that the idea comes from the “Christian Bible,” according to the text, but that similar principles can be found in the “ancient books” of Islam and Hinduism. Another section on the Renaissance highlights Muslim settlers in Spain and their contributions to philosophy, poetry and astronomy.

‘Biblical literacy’

After Amplify bowed out, the state an $84 million contract to the Boston-based Public Consulting Group to revise the curriculum.

For the reading program, the company worked closely with several authors who specialize in , including its role in westward expansion and launching the national space program, according to a list of vendors provided by the state.

But it also leaned on conservative organizations steeped in the culture wars. Contracts went to two officials at the Texas Public Policy Foundation: Courtnie Bagley, the think tank’s education director, and Thomas Lindsay, a higher education director and vocal opponent of . The foundation, which called the 10 Commandments bill an “important step in bringing faith-based values back to the forefront of our society,” declined to comment on their contributions. Public Consulting Group officials also did not respond to questions. 

Hillsdale, another vendor, is a major player in advancing classical education. It authored the , a civics and history model that emphasizes American exceptionalism and is a favorite of conservatives opposed to lessons on institutional racism. When the Florida Department of Education dozens of math textbooks in 2020, citing content influenced by critical race theory, a analysis showed two Hillsdale representatives objected to the proposed materials.

The state did not respond to questions on the role Hilldale and the Texas Public Policy Foundation played in the new curriculum. Hillsdale officials said they provided their feedback free of charge. 

“Hillsdale never profits from its work in K-12, nor does it accept one penny from federal, state or local taxpayers,” said spokeswoman Emily Davis. She added, “Religion is taught for the sake of cultural literacy, not to promote a particular religion.” 

Originally the province of well-heeled private or parochial schools, classical education has blossomed in recent years both as a response to pandemic lockdowns and what some parents view as progressive trends in traditional public schools. The philosophy is rooted in the liberal arts and historical texts, with a sharp focus on the Greek and Roman foundations of Western civilization.

The movement entertains healthy debate about the role of religion, but most practitioners agree that giving students a strong body of knowledge requires the use of primary sources, including the Bible.

“They’re going to need to have some biblical literacy, if only to interpret John Milton, or Dante or Shakespeare,” said Robert Jackson, a senior research fellow with the at Florida’s Flagler College.

‘Devotional in nature’

In Texas, the proposed changes would go far beyond any previous attempt to inject biblical content into its classrooms.

A allows school districts to offer high school electives on the Bible. Demand has been extremely low, however. According to the Texas Education Agency, just over 1,200 of the state’s 1.7 million took the course this year.

But even with their limited scope and popularity, the courses offer ample fodder for skeptics. Writing for the Texas Freedom Network, a religious liberty and civil rights organization, Chancey, the Southern Methodist professor, the courses to be “explicitly devotional in nature.” Despite requirements for teachers to complete special training and maintain “religious neutrality,” Chancey wrote that the Protestant Bible was the preferred text in these courses, while Catholic, Hebrew and Eastern Orthodox Bibles were “presented as deviations from the norm.” In several districts, the courses were taught by local ministers.

The state is now working with a much larger canvas: not a mere elective, but an entire elementary reading curriculum, with a potential audience of millions of students.

Officials are quick to point out that adoption of the new program is voluntary. But a potential $60 per-student it is offering for participation may make it difficult for school systems to refuse.

The updated materials are now open for public review and are scheduled to go before the state Board of Education for approval this fall. Aicha Davis, a Democrat on the Republican-led board, predicted “they would totally support something like that.”

“It doesn’t surprise me that this is happening,” she said.

Even so, the test’s administrators are interpreting the flatline at 54% as good news. Paul Gazzerro, director of data analysis at curriculum provider Amplify, said it’s likely that third graders would have fallen even further behind without efforts like tutoring and additional group instruction.

“It looks as if nothing happened, but the reality is I would’ve suspected that things could’ve gotten worse,” he said. “These are students in many cases that are missing very tangible skills. They may even be grade levels behind.”

The results come amid brighter news for younger students. The mid-year data, which reflects the performance of about 300,000 students across 43 states, show that more K-2 students are reading on grade level compared with 2022 — a sign that literacy skills overall continue to slowly inch back to pre-COVID levels. 

“The actual pandemic effect seems to be lessening,” Gazzerro said.

Amplify’s latest early literacy snapshot reflects a far less disruptive year than the last one. Schools aren’t dealing with frequent quarantines as they did during last year’s Omicron wave. In addition, many states and districts are in the midst of revamping how they teach reading and are using to purchase new curriculum and train teachers.

In some cases, states are taking the lead. Tennessee has put toward teacher training and ensuring districts have a phonics-based to match. And the Texas Education Agency will soon publish a list of approved materials to follow up a requiring districts to teach phonics.

At ����Ӱ��’s request, Burbio, a data company, scanned 6,500 districts’ plans for spending American Rescue Plan funds. Over 3,800 report an emphasis on literacy, more than 4,100 mention reading and over 2,586 note ELA or English language arts. A smaller number, 530, specifically included phonics, and 258 identified science of reading in their plans.

It’s too soon to know whether these developments have had a measurable impact on students’ skills, but they’re “not hurting, that’s for sure,” said Susan Lambert, Amplify’s chief academic officer for elementary humanities. 

The return to a more predictable schedule has contributed to the growth as well, she added.

“We can make progress when kids are in the classroom,” she said. “The data shows that.” 

Amplify uses an assessment called Dynamic Indicators of Basic Literacy Skills, or DIBELS, to test student progress toward learning letter sounds and blends, recognizing sight words and gaining speed and accuracy. 

Students in K-2 haven’t caught up to peers who were in those grades just before COVID hit. But they did make more progress between fall and winter than students did last year. That’s especially true for the youngest students. In 2021-22, the percentage of kindergartners on track grew 15 points over that time period. This year, it grew 19 percentage points. 

‘Can’t spell Harry or Potter’

For teachers, it’s rewarding to see their students leap from identifying one or two sounds in a word to accurately writing complete sentences. 

JoLynn Aldinger, who teaches first grade in the West Ada School District, near Boise, Idaho, said her students’ growth over the past five months makes her want to “do cartwheels” in the classroom. 

A 25-year veteran teacher, she used to emphasize stories and comprehension over phonics. But when she had a 7-year-old in her class who took longer than her peers to learn letter sounds, Aldinger set off on her own quest to learn more about the so-called “science of reading.” 

‘I thought, ‘I have a master’s degree in reading. I should know how to teach reading,’ ” she said. “I knew what phonics was but I didn’t understand how explicit it needed to be.”

She applied for a grant from her school’s PTA, which paid $1,275 for her to receive training in methods often used with . The techniques, like pounding out syllables on their desks and spending extra time on letter blends, benefit even her strongest readers, she said. 

“I would have kids walk in my classroom who have read ‘Harry Potter,’ but they can’t spell Harry or Potter,” she said. 

Now she shows off her students’ improvement to anyone who will listen. And she asks other teachers if they’ve listened to “Sold a Story,” about how whole language or “balanced” literacy came to dominate reading instruction in U.S. schools. Research shows the approach, which focuses more on access to books and using pictures or other clues to guess words, can leave students without the phonics skills to become strong readers.  

‘Our COVID kids’

The Amplify data includes other indicators that trends are headed in the right direction. Racial gaps in reading — which during the pandemic — have narrowed slightly. And between Hispanic and white students, the disparities are even smaller than before COVID.

Since 2019-20, the gap between Hispanic and white kindergartners needing “intensive” support, for example, has fallen from 14 to 11 percentage points. And in third grade, the gap between Hispanic and white students on track dropped from 13 to 8 percentage points over the same time period. For Black students, it remains at 19 percentage points. 

Third grade, Lambert said, is when foundational skills “are supposed to come together” for students so they can learn from what they’re reading. 

That’s what Jean Hesson, elementary supervisor for the Sumner County Schools in Tennessee, hopes to see this spring when this year’s third graders take the state test. 

“These are our COVID kids,” she said. Even though the district has adopted a strong curriculum, “ultimately you have 20 wildcards sitting in front of you. You have to know where your kids are.”

As in districts statewide, Sumner teachers are now required to use phonics-based instruction. The district adopted the Wit and Wisdom curriculum for reading about history, science and other topics. It added the Fundations program for phonics and Geodes — a set of books that tie content and literacy skills together.

“The pictures don’t lend themselves to guessing words,” Hesson said. Students “truly have to decode and use their skills.” 

Almost 45% of last year’s third graders met or exceeded English language arts standards — an increase over pre-pandemic scores. Hesson is hoping that trend continues.

“If we had not had high-quality materials, teachers would have been teaching in a million different directions,” she said. “I can’t imagine the gaps that we would have created.” 

Fifty-three percent of second graders are on track in reading this fall, compared to 57% in 2019, according to Amplify, a curriculum provider. In first grade, the decline is greater — 8 percentage points.

There’s also some good news: The percentage of students in kindergarten through second grade reading on grade level is slightly higher than last year. But the rate in third grade dropped. And almost a third of those students need “intensive intervention,” like small group instruction or a double block of time on literacy during the school day, according to the results.

Susan Lambert, Amplify’s chief academic officer for elementary humanities, said she’s most concerned about students who aren’t getting strong reading instruction “to begin with” and then “aren’t receiving intervention either.”

She said teachers should be able to tell parents if their child is at risk and if they’re “slightly below grade level or really below grade level.” Then, she added, they should point to what students haven’t mastered and how they plan to work on those skills.

The results from 300,000 students in 40 states offer the first national snapshot of students’ reading performance this fall and reinforce takeaways from other recent tests. Students in some grade levels are approaching pre-pandemic levels. But as many researchers have predicted, it could take years before academic performance fully rebounds. Amplify will assess reading two more times this school year, offering educators and researchers a chance to see if students make strides by spring. But that depends on districts’ ability to overcome some of the major dilemmas they faced last year, including high absenteeism and teacher shortages.

“I actually expect we’re going to see better progress this year,” Lambert said. She noted that last year, students needed to readjust to classroom routines and teachers faced more social-emotional and behavior issues than they had in the past.

Those were the conditions in which fourth graders took the National Assessment of Educational Progress, due for release Monday. The results are expected to bring more crushing news about students’ reading skills. Those students would have been second graders when schools shut down, in the process of moving from an emphasis on word recognition to reading more challenging fiction and nonfiction. But many spent most or all of third grade learning remotely.

“Making that academic shift is big for them,” Lambert said.

To measure early literacy skills, like letter sounds, sight words and fluency, teachers used the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Literacy Skills, or DIBELS. While the test was administered virtually during school closures, it was still conducted as teachers observed students’ reading, which increases the reliability of the results, said Paul Gazzerro, Amplify’s director of data analysis.

The sample of students from 1,400 schools is not a “niche” data set, and the results represent 2 million students nationally, he said. “I think it actually speaks somewhat to what we see more broadly.”

But some students aren’t just off-track, he said, they’re multiple grade levels behind.

That’s what Jessica Sliwerski has seen at schools using the Ignite Reading tutoring program she founded a year ago. Third graders were reading at kindergarten and first grade levels.

“They have major decoding gaps,” she said. “I’d bet heavily that many third graders graduated into fourth grade this year and are still not able to read.”

By fourth grade, the curriculum requires students to do much more than sound out words.

“It’s noticing and wondering and context-building,” said Michael Burks, principal of Kipp Bridge Academy, a charter school in Oakland, California. The school was a pilot site for Ignite, which this year expanded to 1,100 students in six states.

Kipp Bridge is using the program in first, second and fourth grade to help students make up skills missed during remote learning. “We had some kids who were on a computer in the back of the car while mom and dad were doing DoorDash deliveries,” Burks said.

But he’s pleased with progress so far. All fourth graders who used Ignite Reading last year entered this fall on grade level, he said. And between 2021 and 2022, there was a 4% increase in students mastering English language arts skills on the state test.

“We are trending in the right direction,” he said.

The downside is that because of the program’s cost, only about 20 students in the three grade levels are receiving the extra support. It costs $2,500 per seat for a year, meaning that the same student might not use the program the whole time. Ignite’s tutors work with students over Zoom, usually during the school day.

“It’s a little bit of a triage situation,” Burks said. His goal is to eventually target the program to first graders to give them a solid foundation.

Similarly, the pandemic has accelerated a movement among states and districts toward phonics-based curricula and phasing out so-called “balanced” approaches, which focus on access to books and using pictures or other cues to read unfamiliar words.

According to ExcelinEd, an education policy think tank, 12 states have comprehensive early literacy policies that include “science of reading” training for teachers, screening for students with reading disabilities and extra help for those who are struggling. Five of those states — Arizona, Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina and Tennessee — added features last year as the impact of remote learning became clear.

Four states implemented policies after the release of 2019 NAEP results, which experts said already pointed to a reading crisis. Lambert said in addition to adopting high-quality materials, district leaders need to ensure school schedules allow for extra time on literacy instruction and target individualized or small group help to schools with the highest population of at-risk students.

Next week’s results will “probably not [be] good news, but it’s not that much worse than it’s always been,” she said. “We’ve had a struggle for a long time and I hope that people at all levels understand that it’s a long game.”

Mid-year data from Amplify, a curriculum and assessment provider, shows that while the so-called “COVID cohort” of students in kindergarten, first and second grade are making progress, they haven’t caught up to where students in those grade levels were performing before schools shut down in March 2020. 

At this point in the 2019-20 school year, for example, 58 percent of first-graders were scoring at or above the grade-level goals. This time last year — when only about half of the nation’s schools were offering full-time, in-person learning — 44 percent of first-graders were on track. Now 48 percent are reaching the benchmark.

Results from fourth- and fifth-graders, however, show greater recovery, with the rates of students meeting benchmarks nearly back to the same level they were in the winter of the 2019-20 school year.

“Learning disruptions had a significant impact on our literacy outcomes,” said Susan Lambert, chief academic officer of elementary humanities at Amplify. She added that this year’s quarantines and short-term closures have likely contributed to the slow progress. “For the youngest learners to go to school for two or three days and then be out for 10 — it’s not just picking up where you left off; it’s actually starting all over again.”

Whether they skipped kindergarten and pre-K or spent much of their school years learning over Zoom, students in the primary grades didn’t have a normal introduction to reading. Educators note that less time to build vocabulary skills through socializing and disparities in children’s home lives — some had parents who read to them every night while others missed out — have contributed to the gaps. But reading experts and tutoring providers say they’re seeing students make strong gains with one-on-one support. The pandemic, they add, has only brought greater awareness to a persistent challenge. 

“What has happened in the past couple years is more dramatic, but it’s not anything new for us who work in early literacy. Children have been struggling with reading for years and years,” said Kate Bauer-Jones, who runs Future Forward, an early literacy and family engagement program that works with districts in Alabama, Georgia and Wisconsin. The program recently received a $14 million from the U.S. Department of Education to expand to eight more states.

to improve reading instruction continue to spread, but Kymyona Burk, senior policy fellow for early literacy at the Foundation for Excellence in Education, said it can take two to three years before districts start to see gains. Schools, she said, also need to identify children who might have learning disabilities and provide parents with materials to use at home.

She added that even when children returned to in-person learning, social distancing from peers and teachers still got in the way of listening and speaking, which contribute to early reading skills. 

The Amplify data also shows racial disparities, with Black and Hispanic students in K-2 not making as strong of a comeback as white students and gaps growing larger than they were before the pandemic.

Amplify assesses students with DIBELS, or Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills — a widely used measure of early reading development. The results are drawn from a national sample of 400,000 K-5 students from 1,300 schools in 37 states, allowing the researchers to compare pre-pandemic and current performance. While the schools in the research sample are more likely to be in large urban areas — and spent a longer period on remote or hybrid learning — Paul Gazzerro, Amplify’s director of data analytics, said he’s seeing similar performance across all schools using its assessment, which he described as “sobering.”

DIBELS itself doesn’t involve a lot of reading, but helps to predict how well children develop literacy skills by testing how fast and accurately they identify words, explained Rachael Gabriel, an associate professor of literacy education at the University of Connecticut.

She agreed that racial gaps in the early grades are widening and that “students are coming into K and 1 with different sets of skills” than before the pandemic. But at the same time, schools are “doubling down” on remediation and using both virtual and in-person tutoring programs to help students catch up.

She urged parents without access to tutoring to keep reading and writing with their children.

“This doesn’t solve the problem,” she said, “but it’s a protective factor that makes students more resilient” when instruction doesn’t match their needs.

Future Forward’s tutors are seeing those needs up close.

“We have first-graders who can’t sing the alphabet song,” Bauer-Jones said. “We’re seeing first graders coming in with no familiarity with text.”

During remote learning, her tutors mailed magnetic letters, books and literacy materials to children’s homes. But even if students consistently participated in Zoom sessions, those were “in no way, shape or form equivalent to in-person learning,” she said. 

In fact, she added, tutors don’t see much difference in skills between young children who skipped pre-K or kindergarten in 2020-21 completely and those who spent much of that year in virtual learning.

Now that students are back in school, Bauer-Jones is concerned about the second graders who have “never had a normal school experience,” she said, asking a question also on the minds of most teachers and parents: “What in the world are we going to see from those kids when they hit the third grade benchmark next year?”

‘Undoing the trauma’

Many of this year’s third-graders also missed key opportunities to become stronger readers, said Jessica Sliwerski, CEO of Open Up Resources, a nonprofit curriculum provider, and founder of , a virtual tutoring model that offers students 15 minutes of one-on-one help over Zoom during the school day. Now in California, New York and Massachusetts, the program will serve 1,000 students by this fall. 

Sliwerski acknowledged the challenges of expanding tutoring, but noted that depending on volunteers can limit a program’s success. Her tutors aren’t volunteers; they make $20 per hour.

“You can’t affect sustainable change through reliance on volunteers,” she said. “I want people who might go work in an Amazon warehouse to come be a tutor.”

She recounted how In October, some third graders tested at kindergarten and first grade levels, when by the end of first, they should be automatically recognizing words and reading them fluently. 

Results from a pilot program at Kipp Bridge Academy in West Oakland showed that when tutors began working with the third graders on decoding skills, they responded with 77 percent accuracy on a DIBELS “oral reading fluency” test. After 53 days, their accuracy increased to 86 percent.

Sliwerski called the growth “powerful.”

“It’s changing their identities as readers and undoing the trauma that they brought into the program when they said things like, ‘I’m not a good reader’ and ‘I hate reading,’” she said. “This group of students will not necessarily leave us on grade level, but will leave us as stronger, more accurate decoders.”

Compared to winter results, the end-of-year data on the widely used Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills, or DIBELS, shows that fewer students were at risk of not learning to read — a decline to 38 percent from 47 percent in kindergarten and a drop to 32 percent from 43 percent at first grade. But the scores at third grade, a critical year for developing more advanced reading skills, haven’t bounced back in the same way.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ����Ӱ�� Newsletter

The results provide some hope that a full in-person return to school this fall could see young children quickly regain the early literacy skills they missed while learning from home. But students entering fourth grade might need more targeted support to get back on track not only in English language arts but across other content areas as well. In keeping with anecdotal evidence and other assessment results, the Amplify data confirms that the severe disruption in learning caused by the pandemic has disproportionately impacted Black and Hispanic students, but the setback for white students has been minor.

“It is really encouraging to see that when we get back to instruction, the kids in the early grades are really responsive,” said Susan Lambert, Amplify’s chief academic officer for elementary humanities. But the pandemic, she added, has magnified existing gaps in reading for Black and Hispanic students. And many in the upper elementary grades will need extra intervention from tutors, reading specialists and others specifically trained in literacy.

The racial disparities were also noted this week in of pandemic-related learning loss from McKinsey and Company, which found that while students ended the year about five months behind in math and four months behind in reading, students in majority Black schools had six months of “unfinished learning” in math and those in high-poverty schools were seven months off track.

In the Amplify report, the DIBELS data represents about 400,000 students from 1,400 schools in 41 states from both the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years. The sample also mostly reflects students in large, urban metro areas, which serve a higher proportion of Hispanic students than the nation as a whole.

Just prior to schools shutting down in early 2020, 32 percent of Black, 30 percent of Hispanic and 20 percent of white first-graders were severely off track. When the 2020-21 school year ended, 44 percent of Black and 38 percent of Hispanic first graders were significantly behind, but the proportion of white students in that range had increased by only 1 percentage point. At third grade, white students were even less likely to be well off track in reading at the end of the 2020-21 school year than they were before the pandemic.

Kymyona Burk, the policy director for early education at ExcelinEd, a think tank focusing on state education initiatives, said the results match the trends in students returning to school in person. Black and Hispanic students were more likely to finish out the year in remote learning, while white students returned at higher rates.

When students are learning to read in the classroom, teachers are better able to “check for understanding,” Burk said. But at home, a lot of students lacked a reliable internet connection, chronic absenteeism was high and even when students were attending remote classes, many turned off their cameras or didn’t want to speak on screen.

She added that for students who were already struggling readers, remote learning “was an easy way to check out of the process,” while more motivated readers probably weren’t deterred by the virtual format.

As districts decide how to plan recovery efforts this fall, Amplify suggested that it’s essential to collect data on students’ literacy skills and then to organize daily schedules and educators’ time to allow for extra reading instruction.

At last week’s Reagan Institute Summit on Education, Amplify CEO Larry Berger urged educators to take an informal inventory of students’ reading skills when school starts and focus on reestablishing relationships.

High-stakes assessments at the beginning of the year “could do more harm than good,” he said, but added it’s important to gather “enough data to understand where resources need to be deployed.”

This year, lawmakers in several states, including Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, North Carolina and Tennessee, have joined Alabama and Mississippi in passing legislation focusing on comprehensive literacy instruction, Burk said, adding that some are providing guidance on which materials to adopt and ensuring teachers are receiving training using those resources.

These laws, she said, improve equity for Black, Hispanic and low-income students since schools predominantly serving white and upper-income students were already offering high-quality reading instruction.

The Center on Reinventing Public Education’s review of district plans for using federal relief funds shows that several have prioritized literacy efforts. These include $25 million to hire and train 850 literacy tutors in grades K-5 in Chicago, a reading intervention coordinator in Maryland’s Montgomery County Public Schools, and elementary and secondary literacy specialists in Columbus, Ohio schools.

Both Lambert and Burk added that upper elementary teachers will need some support in how to teach foundational reading skills.