What can the state do? One step might be to continue expanding its charter school sector, especially the brick-and-mortar schools serving predominantly Black and Hispanic students.

Oklahoma’s declining NAEP scores represent a sample of students across both traditional and charter schools, but Oklahoma has been fortunate to have a relatively successful charter sector. For example, using data through 2019, a Harvard found that Oklahoma had the sixth-highest-performing charter sector in the country.

A from the Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board allows for a deeper, more up-to-date analysis. The biggest takeaways focus on size, performance and cost.

Both brick-and-mortar and virtual charters have grown in Oklahoma, collectively increasing from about 51,000 students in the 2022-23 school year to 55,000 last year. In the 2024-25 school year, 35,831 students attended a virtual charter and 19,190 were enrolled in brick-and-mortar charter schools. All told, charters serve about 8% of all public school students in the state.

A of student performance found 31 of 49 brick-and-mortar charter schools outperformed their neighboring traditional schools last year. For example, students at Stanley Hupfield Academy and John W. Rex Charter Elementary School outperformed the Oklahoma City average by 21 and 20 percentage points, respectively. The Dove and Santa Fe charter networks each had several standout schools, including Dove Science Academy, where students outscored nearby traditional schools by 34 points and which we named a Bright Spot for its third grade reading proficiency. The largest outperformance was notched by a standalone charter called Deborah Brown elementary school in Tulsa, where students scored 59 points higher than peers in the neighboring district. 

As for virtual charters, the analysis found that only one — the Oklahoma Connection Academy High School — outperformed the statewide average, while 15 did not.

Note: Brick-and-mortar charter schools are compared to the traditional public schools in their physical districts. Virtual charters are compared to all traditional schools in the state.

A new from Adam Tyner at the University of Oklahoma made similar comparisons for high schools. At that level, students attending brick-and-mortar charters had slightly lower ACT scores than peers attending traditional public schools, but they had higher graduation rates — especially the low-income students. Meanwhile, the virtual charters had significantly worse outcomes. 

Notably, Oklahoma’s charters are getting these results with significantly less money. According to the state charter board, traditional public schools received $10,643 per student in state and local funding last year, compared with $9,684 for brick-and-mortar charters. This disparity of almost $1,000 per student has widened over time and is largely due to the fact that charters do not have the same access to money for facilities and do not receive the same share of local revenues that traditional district schools do.

Closing this funding disparity would likely boost outcomes for charter students even further.

While it is impossible to know for sure whether Oklahoma’s charter schools are getting their results by cherry-picking the best students, or even whether the rise of charters may have contributed to stagnation on the part of traditional public schools, suggests that’s not the case. If anything, traditional schools tend to get higher scores when they face increased competition in the form of charter schools.

For instance, Tulane University researchers Feng Chen and Doug Harris found that the effects from this type of competition tend to materialize when charter schools a 10% market share in a given district. The new charter found that Oklahoma now has six communities where charters have surpassed this threshold, led by Oklahoma City at 23%.

When I spoke with Rebecca Wilkinson and Shelly Hickman from the Oklahoma Charter Schools Board, they said they wanted to create an annual report that was comparative and meaningful, and to dispel myths about what charters are and are not. They are optimistic about increasing market share in more communities, and they hope that success can generate even more momentum across the state. 

A of four urban districts confirms these research-based early literacy pedagogies are indeed widely implemented in these school systems. Educators are doing many things right: They are consistently delivering explicit phonics instruction that includes a clear purpose using high-quality foundational skills curricula. 

Across the four districts, between 88% and 94% of over 200 surveyed teachers reported using their foundational skills curriculum daily or almost daily. Classroom observations of 112 foundational skills lessons confirmed that instruction was focused, aligned, and explicit—hallmarks of effective early literacy teaching.

But something critical was often absent from those same lessons: the opportunity to

connect sounds and words to meaning. In a previous report, we explored how meaning is often missing in the tasks that upper elementary students are assigned — for instance, finding literal and nonliteral language in a reading passage but not what the author was trying to convey. In our latest publication, we look specifically at the foundational reading skills taught in the earlier grades.

Moreover, we found that many students meet literacy benchmarks for foundational skills on early literacy screening assessments. But by third grade — when they are expected to make meaning from more complex texts on state literacy assessments — far fewer demonstrate proficiency. 

In other words, early success with word reading does not always translate into later success with comprehension. 

This mirrors national trends: relying on early literacy assessments indicates that 56% of K–2 students nationally are “on track” for learning to read, but only 31% of fourth graders performed at or above the proficient level on the 2024 NAEP reading assessment, a test that requires students to comprehend with greater depth.

What we found in our research, which included hours of classroom observation, was that only about one in five lessons gave students the chance to apply their phonics knowledge beyond single words to connected text: sentences, passages or stories that build reading fluency. And in more than half of lessons, teachers addressed word meaning just once or not at all.

In other words, students are learning how to blend sounds together to read words but not consistently how to make sense of them. We’ve made real progress on decoding, but the connections between decoding and meaning are often missing.

That stems, in part, from how early literacy instruction is structured and supported. Decoding and language comprehension are often taught in distinct lessons with different curricula, and teachers receive separate professional learning for each.

While this structure can support focused instruction, it can also give the false impression that meaning making does not belong in phonics lessons. At the same time, K–2 literacy data systems — including screeners and progress monitoring — tend to emphasize phonemic awareness and phonics, reinforcing the idea that those are the outcomes that matter.

The findings from this study point to an area for growth in foundational skills instruction that may help: bridging processes. These processes are the mechanisms that connect word recognition and language comprehension and should be incorporated into word recognition or phonics instruction, supporting students to build more meaning as they learn to decode. Two key bridging processes are vocabulary knowledge, which is understanding the meanings of words, and reading fluency or the ability to read connected text accurately and smoothly.

Without these bridging processes, decoding single words can be devoid of meaning.

Students may be able to sound out words yet still struggle to understand what they read. Importantly, bridging processes must be built into phonics instruction early on, and students should work on them throughout their early years of schooling, not just after they have successfully learned to decode words.

The encouraging news is that incorporating bridging processes does not require an overhaul of instruction or instructional systems. In many cases, bridging processes can be embedded into existing lessons in small but powerful ways.

Consider a phonics lesson on the two common sounds for double o, as in mood and look. A teacher might briefly define a target word — such as, “a brook is a small stream” — and show a picture of a brook before students practice reading it. Then she might instruct students to turn to a partner and share a sentence with the word brook.

This can take less than a minute but can anchor decoding in meaning, which is important for all students, especially for emergent multilingual students to expand their vocabulary as they are learning English. 

Similarly, building fluency doesn’t require a pivot away from explicit phonics instruction.

It requires ensuring that students regularly read sentences, passages and texts that incorporate the phonics patterns they are learning. 

For example, after decoding a list of words like book, cook, hood, soon, tool, and boot, students might read a simple sentence like, “We went to fish in the brook,” applying their phonics knowledge to connected text. Then they might read a short story about animals at a brook with several other double o words.

Our study found that such opportunities to build fluency were surprisingly rare and did not meaningfully increase from kindergarten through second grade. 

This is a missed opportunity. 

Stories and passages that use targeted phonics skills are often provided in early literacy curricula but are sometimes skipped due to pacing or a lack of understanding their importance. 

Fluency develops through practice with connected text; without it, students struggle to transition from decoding single words to understanding longer texts.

Bridging processes are critical for students to connect word recognition and language comprehension. Adequately addressing them requires more than individual teacher effort. District leaders must clearly assert that these processes are fundamental to foundational skills instruction and reflect this priority in curricula, professional learning and classroom observation tools.

District and school leaders should expand the data they use to capture a broader view of reading development, aligning tools with bridging processes and incorporating information beyond word recognition.

School leaders and instructional coaches should provide professional learning opportunities around bridging processes, leveraging existing structures like professional learning communities to teach educators how to embed vocabulary and fluency practice into phonics lessons without sacrificing instructional focus. 

This can be done through watching exemplar videos, conducting peer observations, lesson rehearsal and engaging in coaching conversations.

The promise of early literacy reform has always been that strong foundations would lead to strong readers. But developing students’ decoding skills alone is not enough.

If we continue to teach decoding and language comprehension as separate endeavors, the result will be the same: early gains that fade when students are asked to read and comprehend longer texts. But if we build the bridges through vocabulary knowledge, reading fluency practice and intentional meaning making in phonics instruction, we can change that trajectory.

SRI Education and ����Ӱ�� both receive financial support from the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A shifting focus to phonics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How a child learns best

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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