States including Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi have garnered attention in the media for offering lessons other states can learn from — a February New York Times opinion piece heralded the trio as “.”

Yet the Southern surge narrative has, so far, largely ignored another commonality among those states: tremendous improvements in early childhood education.

The most commonly cited reasons behind the trend relate to , specifically a commitment to phonics-based pedagogy, and a willingness to who are not reading on grade level. Importantly, this did not happen overnight, and it didn’t occur in isolation: Rachel Canter, who led a Mississippi education policy and advocacy group that was instrumental in shaping the state’s approach, the New York Times that the “Science of reading is really important — it was a key piece of what we did,” but added that “people are missing the forest for the trees if they are only looking at that.”

Indeed, in the same 2013 legislative session in which Mississippi passed the , which codified many of its reforms, the legislature also passed its first state pre-K bill, the (ELCA). The ELCA was a state-funded initiative that established voluntary, free or low-cost, high-quality pre-K programs that operated through partnerships between private pre-K providers, school districts and, in some cases, Head Start programs. These collaboratives had to meet all put forth by the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER). Over the years, enrollment in the Collaboratives has : When they were launched in 2014, the Collaboratives served 1,774 children and by the 2022-23 school year, student enrollment in pre-K had reached 6,800.

In on how the ELCA came about, Canter explained that with major early childhood and K-3 reforms both passing at the same time, the policies were designed to align. For instance, the pre-K legislation required participating providers to administer a school readiness assessment that lined up with the one students would be asked to take in Kindergarten. Substantial funds were invested in instructional coaches for pre-K teachers, and in providing pre-K teachers with access to literacy professional development opportunities comparable to what the state’s K-3 teachers were being offered.

Around the same time, neighboring states were engaged in their own reform efforts. In 2012, the , commonly referred to as Act 3. This unified early childhood governance within the Louisiana Department of Education and set the stage for broad reforms. Over the next few years, Louisiana required every child care program that received a dollar of public money to participate in the state’s accountability system, which included getting a minimum of two quality-focused inspections per year. The bar was also raised for teacher qualifications, requiring all lead teachers in publicly funded early learning settings to have at least an , a state-based professional credential.

The efforts paid off. Researchers that from 2016 to 2019, the percentage of publicly funded early childhood education programs in Louisiana that scored proficient or above on the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS) rating scale — a commonly-used measure of teacher-child interactions — rose from 62% to 85%. For child care programs specifically, excluding state pre-K and Head Start classrooms, the percentage of programs scoring proficient or above increased even more impressively, from 40% in 2016 to 73% in 2019. The kids in those classrooms, of course, are many of the same kids who later on the National Assessment of Educational Progress’ fourth grade literacy exam.

Alabama, meanwhile, has long been a leader in pre-K. In 2001, the state launched First Class Pre-K, an initiative that funds full-day pre-K across a variety of school- and community-based settings. With a focus on quality, the system has been since 2006 as part of the organization’s . However, funding constraints kept the program small. In the mid-2010s, though, First Class Pre-K began to scale. Between 2012 and 2024, the number of participating 4-year-olds from about 3,600 to more than 24,000. Around the same time, the state made a major investment in coaching for pre-K teachers, and its coaching model grew from serving around 200 teachers in 2012 to nearly 1,500 as of 2024. When Alabama began leaning fully into the science of reading with its , pre-K teachers in public schools also started getting on the subject.

Connecting early care and education reform to the Southern surge is, of course, an exercise in correlation and not causation. As Canter pointed out with regard to the science of reading, this is a multifaceted story and assigning too much credit to any one factor is unwise. Moreover, other states that have made major investments to their early childhood education systems — such as California and its universal transitional kindergarten program — have not to date seen the same types of literacy gains. What does seem fair is speculating that in a counterfactual world where Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama make the same reforms to K-3 but ignore early education entirely, the Southern surge would have been blunted. 

These states, then, offer important lessons for both early childhood and K-12 stakeholders around the importance of tightly and thoughtfully aligning both systems — in both directions — and ensuring there are enough resources present to support educators. Leaders don’t have to look far: groups like the have been developing alignment frameworks and tools for years. What’s needed is a renewed commitment, particularly among state and district leaders, to seeing early care and education not as a nice-to-have, a wholly separate enterprise, or even worse, a competitor — but as a core part of ensuring all children are reading on grade level. That might not be a miracle, but it would sure be an accomplishment.

On a chilly morning at Leonard Flynn Elementary School, first graders played with jump ropes and hula hoops outside while reading tutor Lillie Reynaga set up her materials at a table in the hallway nearby. One by one, kindergarteners came to her table and practiced blending sounds to make one-syllable words.

“We’re going to make words and they’re all going to rhyme because they’ll all end with at,” Reynaga told 5-year-old Violet, who kicked her legs back and forth on the low bench. 

For the next 15 minutes Violet repeated at-at-at and read mat, rat and fat.

“Now, do you have any guesses and what S and at come together to say?”

“Sat!” Violet called out.

“How did you know that this word is sat?”

“Because it starts with s!” 

The benefits of high-impact tutoring are on full display at this Spanish immersion public school on the edge of San Francisco’s Bernal Heights and Mission District neighborhoods. Flynn introduced the program last year and saw almost immediate results.

Among the second graders who received tutoring in first grade, nearly a third started this school year reading at grade level or above, while more than half of students who did not work with tutors last year started second grade reading at a kindergarten level.

This year, those second graders are getting the support they missed out on in first grade, along with other Flynn students from kindergarten through third grade. Tutors trained and paid by provider Chapter One visit Flynn every day to deliver short bursts of high-impact tutoring in word recognition and language comprehension.

It’s not the first reading intervention Flynn has tried, said principal Tyler Woods, but it’s having the most impact.

“Literacy interventionists would provide intensive interventions but only serve 20 or 30 students across the school,” he said. “This is a lighter touch but focused on the areas that we know our kids really struggle with, and it just reaches a lot more students.”

High-impact tutoring — a intervention characterized by its frequency, duration and alignment with school curriculum — has been so successful in San Francisco that district officials recently expanded the program to serve more than 2,700 students across 20 priority district schools. 

“This is the single most effective literacy intervention we have,” said Ann Levy Walden, CEO of the San Francisco Education Fund, which helps to fund and implement the program in partnership with the school district. “This expansion allows us to do what we know works.”

Nearly half of students in San Francisco Unified schools . A year ago, the district set a goal that specifically targets third grade proficiency: By 2027, 70% of third graders will meet state standards, up from 52% in 2022. High-impact tutoring is one of the targeted supports the district is using to meet the benchmark.

“Ensuring students are proficient readers by the end of third grade is one of our most important student outcome goals,” said district superintendent Maria Su. The district also adopted a curriculum based on the science of reading last year — the first reading curriculum change in the district in a decade. This change, along with expanding tutoring, are meant to help “focus resources on the grade levels and school communities where high-impact tutoring can most effectively accelerate literacy development,” Su said.

The cost of high-impact tutoring is $500 a student, which includes up to four sessions a week, assessments, individualized tutoring plans, progress monitoring and integration with classroom instruction. The Education Fund raises money continuously, but a year of high-impact tutoring in San Francisco costs about $2 million. This year, the district contributed $830,000. 

The district expanded high-impact tutoring after seeing results last year. After working with Chapter One tutors for five months last year, the number of students district-wide who met grade-level reading standards more than doubled, from 24% to 54%. At Sanchez Elementary in the Mission District first graders reading at or above grade level went from 15% to 59%.

At Guadalupe Elementary, in the city’s Crocker-Amazon neighborhood, the share of kindergarteners reading at grade level jumped from 39% to nearly 68%, after students participated in the tutoring program.

“It’s an early literacy gain that we have never seen before,” said principal Raj Sharma. Nearly 70% of students at Guadalupe are English learners, and about 10% are newcomers to the United States, Sharma said. “Sometimes our students don’t have any school experience at all.” 

Sharma said he specifically chose to bring high-impact tutors in to work with very young students because he believed the impact for them could be so substantial. 

“Once your foundation is strong, you can build the house on there,” he said. “Family or socio-economic status matters, but in our situation we saw that it’s beyond that. We can make a difference.”

A big challenge for school leaders is how and when to connect tutors with students. At Guadalupe, tutors meet with every student in a class either individually or in small groups in their classrooms. This approach is less disruptive for students, Sharma said, and allows for more continuity in their learning experience.

“They are just one of the small groups and others are with the Chapter One tutor, and then they can rotate,” he said. “They are not missing any instruction that’s given in the classroom. At the same time, they’re getting the reading foundations.”

Sharma and other principals said that the way high-impact tutoring is being delivered in San Francisco stands out, because tutors are trained and paid and because principals get help integrating the program into their schools. The San Francisco Education Fund partners with the San Francisco Literacy Coalition to help school leaders to develop schedules and determine which students will receive tutoring.

“The scheduling of it has been really seamless, which is not always the case when you’re trying to pair any type of extra support or intervention,” said Woods of Flynn Elementary. “Many of our students are needing support from the moment they join our school and in the past, we just haven’t had the scope of support to provide some meaningful development. This is third time we’ve been able to say, let’s figure out who needs the intervention and everybody gets it.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified a literacy organization. It is the San Francisco Literacy Coalition.

The books she read in school didn’t interest her and “constant deadlines made it even harder to connect with the stories,” she said. Reading was a chore, something to rush through for a test or school assignment. 

So when Wallace became a mother in 2019, she didn’t read to her son at home often – about once or twice a week, “maybe not even that,” said Wallace, who lives with her family in Frankfort, Kentucky.

That changed around the time her son was 3 and she was working at a local adult education center where she helped develop a family literacy program. There, she learned about on how reading to young children daily can improve school readiness, develop language and listening skills and promote social-emotional growth.

Now her family reads “three or four books every single night,” she said. 

The payoff has been clear: her son, Levi, has an impressive vocabulary for a soon-to-be 6 year old, can speak in complete sentences and most importantly “his confidence is boosting tremendously.”

“His life is going to be so much easier because he loves to read,” Wallace said. “I didn’t want him to grow up hating to read [like I did]. … I always struggled with comprehension and remembering what I read, and so it’s challenging when you don’t love doing it.”

Wallace’s initial resistance toward reading may be the new norm among parents. Earlier this year, HarperCollins UK showing a steep decline in the number of caregivers who read to their young children.

For many new parents, a dislike of reading stems from their own classroom experiences in the early 2000s that emphasized reading as a skill for testing. Many also are unfamiliar with the importance of reading to young children or may instead undervalue reading because of a dependence on online educational programs that have limited benefits for learning. 

For children not getting the benefits of being read to at home, the opportunity gap has widened, with those young students entering school unprepared compared to those who have been read to.

“The gap really begins very, very early on. I think we underestimate how large a gap we’re already seeing in kindergarten,” said Susan Neuman, professor of childhood and literacy education at New York University, adding she recently visited a New York City kindergarten classroom and saw some children who only knew two letters compared to others who were prepared to read phrases. 

A found a 5-year-old child who is read to daily would be exposed to nearly 300,000 more words than one who isn’t read to regularly.

The 2025 HarperCollins survey found less than half, around 41%, of children between the age of zero to four were read to every day or nearly every day; a decline of nine percentage points from 2019 and 15 percentage points in 2012. 

The survey found that about a third of parents read to their babies and toddlers weekly. Around 20% of parents said they “rarely” or “never” read to their child between the ages of zero and two and 8% of parents said they “rarely” or “never” read to their child between the ages of three and four.

It’s something that doesn’t surprise early literacy experts in the United States who suspect similar trends across the country, believing the decline in early literacy reading is likely even higher than reported.

“Frankly, parents … will often lie because they know it’s important to read, so they’ll exaggerate the amount of time they’re reading,” Neuman said. “I think the bottom line is reading is declining big time, not just for parents reading to children, but for all segments of our society.”

But, some of the youngest parents, those born between 1997 and 2012 – also known as Gen-Z – are more likely than past generations to view reading as a school or work activity rather than fun or beneficial, according to the HarperCollins survey and early literacy experts. 

For many young adults, their experience in the classroom, especially during the peak of the No Child Left Behind Act, which mandated annual standardized testing in the early 2000s, took the pleasure out of reading and instead instilled a shift toward “skill and drill,” practices, said Theresa Bouley, an education professor at Eastern Connecticut State University.

“We went from fourth grade and sixth grade testing to every year – third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth,” Bouley said. “At that time we started using less books, more programs, more skill and drill and the purpose of reading only became learning different aspects of reading, like phonics or things like that, and not actually for purpose or pleasure or even having time to apply the skills they’re learning to actually read.”

An entire population of students may have lost the value of reading, and combined with being the first generation of digital natives, the United States’ youngest adults are among those who are now seeing some of the largest declines in literacy skills. 

And it’s likely they’re passing their habits down to their children, which can have crucial repercussions on the youngest emerging students’ skills.

“Children are not seeing their caregivers actually reading books and that sends a really strong message. … As a three year old boy, [they] want to do what dad’s doing,” Bouley said. “I think it’s equally important … [for a] child’s understanding of the purpose and joy of reading to see their parent reading.”

In Wallace’s case, she was able to make up for some lost time.

For other families, however, there isn’t a lot of opportunity to close the gap once a child enters school.

“There’s an assumption nowadays that when kids get to kindergarten, they need to know their letters and their numbers and this is highly predictive of whether or not they’ll be successful at the end of kindergarten and at the end of third grade,” Neuman said. “Teachers have a very short time to work on these kinds of things, and when children are that far behind, … I don’t see realistically that a teacher will be able to give the intensive support that children will need in order to catch up.”

Why does reading to our youngest children matter?

Early literacy researchers believe there’s a common misconception that reading to a child when they’re babies or young toddlers is useless because the child doesn’t understand what’s going on.

The activity however, “is a lot more than just reading and reading books,” Bouley said.

Reading aloud creates a foundation for literacy, she said.

Studies have shown it helps children develop communication and fine motor skills and also promote oral language skills, which are a strong predictor in future success in school. 

Books also open up a world of vocabulary that isn’t used in day-to-day language when parents speak to their children, Rebecca Parlakian, senior programs director at , an early childhood nonprofit, said.

“Shared reading does predict child vocabulary prior to school entry, and vocabulary predicts later emerging literacy skills. We also find that the quantity or frequency of parent-child book reading predicted children’s receptive vocabulary, which is the words they understand, their reading comprehension skills and their desire to read,” said Parlakian.

A study found that reading aloud to a child at eight months old was linked to language skills at 12 and 16 months, “so even infants being exposed to ongoing rich language made a difference,” Parlakian added.

And while “language and vocabulary are the primary benefits,” books also support “social-emotional skills because children are being exposed to the feelings and motivations of characters other than themselves,” Parlakian said. 

‘Skill and drill’ 

Reading aloud is also beneficial for children to develop a positive association with the activity.

“There’s a lot of warm fuzziness and social emotional development that goes on. So now in kindergarten, if the teacher whips out a book, I remember my dad read me that book,” Bouley said.

Having a positive association with books, without the pressure of assessments or skill tests, allows young children to understand the value and fun of reading. 

“It builds connections,” said Carol Anne St. George, a literacy professor at the University of Rochester. “People talk about text to text, text to world … and those are the kinds of things that help children cognitively think and classify their world around them.”

But, it’s becoming a lost art.

Instead, reading in schools has become performance-based activity or test preparation.

“Whether it’s parents at home and also teachers in schools, we’re seeing so few books, and so few opportunities for children to read – really read,” Bouley said.

There’s a pressure in the United States to “press reading very very early,” Neuman added. 

“If we look globally at other cultures where children are more successful, , … they don’t start formally reading with children with the expectation they should read by third grade. They recognize that play is really important in these early years, that talk and oral language is extremely important, and they focus on other things,” Neuman said. “But, we’re in a race.”

That “race” has contributed to changes in curriculum and a pullback on activities like read alouds in the classroom, which Bouley, Neuman and St. George said they’ve all seen. 

“I don’t see that time really devoted and yet that’s so critical,” Neuman said. “The language that they’re getting through that storybook and experience is really imperative. I don’t see it as much. I see a lot of skill and drill.”

Among some researchers, there’s a belief the shift happened around 2002 as the United States shifted toward an annual testing model. 

“We became inundated with assessments and preparation,” Bouley said. “So first graders, second graders, they’re constantly getting these assessments that definitely take the purpose away from reading for enjoyment to reading as skill.”

Timed reading fluency assessments, for example, “just shows kids that you can’t go back and read accurately,” and “all that matters is how many words you can read in one minute,” Bouley added. 

“So children get these messages about all that matters with reading and none of it has to do with comprehending a book and enjoying a book,” Bouley said. “It got much worse, or even started after No Child Left Behind, and then it’s just become worse and worse.”

Many of those former students are now parents, like Wallace, who may struggle with passing on literacy skills because of their own experiences in the classroom. 

From one technology-raised generation to the next 

Reading for pleasure in the United States has between 2003 and 2023, according to a 2025 study from the University of Florida and University College London.

The same study said it’s unclear whether levels of reading with children has changed over time, but it did find only 2% of its participants read with children “on the average day,” despite 21% of the study’s sample having a child under nine years old.

Declining literacy levels also go hand-in-hand with the rise of the internet and accessibility to portable devices. 

“This is a generation where we really begin to see a drop in reading for pleasure because they were part of that initial wave and flood of digital media that was totally unregulated. We had no research on the impact,” said Parlakian. 

Those patterns from the first generation of digital natives are now being mirrored to another generation of children.

A from the PNC foundation reported about 35% of parents said some of the biggest challenges in reading to children is that the child prefers screen-time or won’t sit long enough. 

“When we introduce screen time very young, and we don’t manage the amount of time children are spending on screens, … it can be difficult for children to transition from such an exciting medium to a medium like a book that may initially feel not as exciting,” Parlakian said.

While some parents may argue their young children may not have to read as much with physical books because they’re instead benefiting from educational programs on tablets or phones, early literacy experts said there’s a difference between the two activities, both social-emotionally and academically.

A lack of reading time with a parent possibly means losing bonding time. With a tablet, a parent can hand it off and walk away, Bouley said, but when it comes to reading a book, it demands a parent’s full presence.

Skills wise, until around the ages of 5 and 6, children have a “really hard time and are incredibly inefficient at transferring learning that happens on a screen to real life,” and vice versa, Parlakian said.

Reading also requires stamina — and educational programs on tablets or other devices, instead offer instant gratification, Neuman added. 

“A good storybook often takes a bit of time to develop. … There’s literary language that children are learning, … and games are very colloquial, they’re very short term and they’re bits of information that don’t connect,” she said. “Children aren’t developing comprehension, … even when they begin to learn the print, what we’re seeing is they don’t know the meaning of the print, and that’s a big problem.”

Adopting early reading practices for the Wallace family means comprehension hasn’t been a problem for 5 year old Levi who points out the words he knows in his children’s Bible, or in his other favorites like Little Blue Truck or Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?

“He can read almost a whole page by himself. He gets really excited and he has to go around and show his dad or we’ve got to FaceTime and show his mamaw,” Wallace said. “He wants everybody to see he knows how to read.”

What do puzzles, gymnastics, writing and using maps all have in common? 

They all rely on people’s ability to visualize objects as they spin, flip or turn in space, without physically moving them. This is a spatial skill that developmental psychologists call .

Whether a person is navigating a new city or doing a cartwheel, they must use mental rotation skills to move shapes or objects in their mind and make sense of where their bodies are going and what surrounds them. 

When children play with puzzles, building blocks or pattern games, they are also practicing mental rotation. 

Over time, these skills  in math, science and reading. This can look like visualizing pulley systems in physics or seeing the differences between  such as b and d, which young children often confuse. 

Strong mental rotation skills also lay the foundation for  and developing  in science, technology, engineering and math.

Most preschool-age children are not yet learning to read – but it turns out they are still using some of these same spatial reasoning skills as they think about the world around them.

,  and were curious to find out how children as young as 3 years old mentally rotate objects. 

While there is research on the  rotate objects, less is understood about how children are solving mental rotation problems. We found in our research, conducted from 2022 to 2023, that young children are using the same problem-solving  when they solve a mental rotation task. 

Children think visually, just like adults

 to understand how a sample of 148 children, all between 3 and 7 years old, solved different mental rotation problems. Eye-trackers use harmless infrared light to capture eye movements. This technology lets us observe how children solve these problems in real time. 

As part of our study, we showed each child a large picture of items such as a fire truck, as well as two smaller pictures of the same truck, one placed above the other and positioned slightly differently.

Children were asked to say which small picture on the right matched the large one on the left. In this example, the correct answer is the top picture, because that top fire truck can be rotated to match the large fire truck. The bottom fire truck was a mirrored image, and no matter how much you rotate it, it will never match the large fire truck. 

While the children thought about their response, the eye-tracker, mounted right below the computer screen, recorded their eye movements. 

By looking at where and for how long children looked at each image, we figured out what kind of strategy they were using. 

Some children focused on fewer parts of the object and spent less time studying its details. This suggests they used a holistic strategy, meaning they took in the whole image at once, instead of breaking it into pieces. These children mentally rotated the entire object to solve the task. 

Other children focused on parts of the object and spent more time studying its details. This suggests they broke the image down into pieces instead of visualizing the image as a whole, known as a piecemeal strategy. Our findings support showing that children generally use these two visual approaches to solve mental rotation problems. 

This study helped us learn where children look while solving puzzles and identify how they solve these problems – without ever having to ask the child, who might be too young to explain, about their process. 

Children were more likely to turn the whole image instead of breaking it down into pieces, a pattern of problem solving adults typically also use. This means that even very young children are already thinking about how objects move and turn in space in ways that are more advanced than expected. 

Supporting children’s visual skills

Knowing how young children mentally rotate objects may help researchers, teachers and parents understand why some children struggle with learning to read. 

Children who break an image down into pieces, instead of visualizing it as a whole, to solve mental rotation problems may be the very same children who struggle with discriminating similar-looking letters such as p and q and may later be diagnosed with . 

Parents can play an important role in building their child’s mental rotation skills. Parents can  by offering them opportunities to practice rotating real objects with toys such as three-dimensional puzzles or building blocks. Tangrams – flat, colorful puzzles that come in different shapes – can be used to practice breaking down shapes of animals into pieces. Parents can encourage their child to look for shapes that match parts of the animal or object they are building. 

Nov. 8 is , a celebration of all things science, technology, engineering and mathematics. 

Research like ours provides valuable guidance for designing early STEM activities and educational tools. By directly observing children’s problem solving in real time, we can develop better ways for educators and toy makers to support strong spatial thinking from an early age. To celebrate, we encourage people to engage in activities that test their spatial skills, such as ditching the GPS for the day or . 

Mental rotation is a powerful skill that helps us understand and interact with the surrounding physical world. From solving puzzles to reading maps, mental rotation plays a role in many everyday activities. Building mental rotation abilities can improve children’s performance in subjects such as reading, math and science and may inspire future careers in STEM fields.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

And yet, shows that the skills needed for reading begin developing before a child is born, and that signs of reading challenges can emerge as early as 18 months old.

“People don’t understand that children don’t start kindergarten with a clean slate,” said Nadine Gaab, an associate professor at the Harvard School of Education involved in the research. Learning to read “is a long process with many milestones that unfold over many years, and it starts primarily with oral language. Years of brain development lead up to the point where formal instruction puts it all together and enables them to read. The process starts in utero.”

The human brain evolved specifically for spoken language, said Perri Klass, professor of journalism and pediatrics at New York University and the national medical director of the nonprofit . Every society across the world uses spoken language, but the transition from spoken to written language is a giant leap for the brain.  

That jump, Klass said, requires the brain to recruit structures and networks throughout its many layers and folds just to recognize a letter on a page, involving the vision and memory portions of the brain. The brain then must remember the sound the letter represents and connect that letter with others to make sounds that associate with the picture on a page. Finally, at lightning speed, the brain recognizes that those letters work together to say, “Cat.”  

“Learning to read is a challenge for all children,” she said. “And for some children it’s really a struggle. It’s not that you develop spoken language and then, boom, you get to school and develop written language. Spoken and written language have been developing together directly from birth, and all the exposure to language from the environment — what they hear from their parents, whether they’re read to, talked to, whether someone sings to them or holds them — are there. So, it’s the brain the child takes to school that helps them succeed at this impressive task of learning to read.”

Klass points to the new Harvard research to underscore how early that “brain the child takes to school” begins developing. For years, a prevailing attitude has been that a child starts learning to read in pre-K or kindergarten. A longitudinal study by Gaab and her colleagues using MRI scans and an array of other assessments confirmed that the bases for reading skills begin to develop in the child’s brain by birth and continue building between infancy and preschool. 

“We wanted to see how early the developmental trajectories of children who later develop good versus poor reading skills diverge, because that can give us a really important clue for when we should intervene, as well as what some of the risks and protective factors are,” Gaab said, 

A key finding of the study is that the developmental trajectories of children with and without reading disabilities start to diverge around 18 months, rather than at 5 or 6 years old as previously assumed.  

And yet, Gaab said, a wide gap currently stands between the time children are identified as having a reading impairment and the start of intensive intervention. This is particularly problematic for children diagnosed with dyslexia, she said, adding that researchers call this the The majority of school districts in the U.S. employ a “wait-to-fail” approach, meaning that many children are only flagged by the school system after they have failed to learn to read over a prolonged period of time — often years — even though there’s evidence that reading intervention is most effective earlier. The experience of failure can erode self-esteem, she said, and lead to the higher rates of anxiety and depression that are found in struggling readers.

The Study

The study, “Longitudinal Trajectories of Brain Development from Infancy to School Age and Their Relationship with Literacy Development,” is the first to track brain development from infancy to childhood focused literacy skills — a window into later academic attainment.     

Over a decade, Gaab and co-authors Ted Turesky, Elizabeth Escalante and Megan Loh conducted MRI brain scans of 130 study participants starting at 3 months old. Half of the children had a risk of dyslexia, with either an older sibling or one or both parents diagnosed with dyslexia, which can increase a child’s risk of reading challenges. For the first year of the study, the babies peacefully slept through the scan, tucked into the MRI machine wearing noise protection (“We got really good at putting other people’s babies to sleep,” Gaab said). 

At 18 months old, the babies came back for another scan, though “peacefully sleeping” was becoming a fond memory. By the time the babies were toddlers, the researchers took a break, for reasons any parent of unruly toddlers can understand. The children returned when they were a more cooperative 4 years old and every year after until age 10. 

The study also assessed such factors as cognitive abilities, literacy environment and home language. Funded by the NIH, the researchers aimed to continue for another five years and follow the participants into high school. Though the grant application had received a fundable score at NIH, future funding is uncertain due to the Trump administration’s termination of .

Building the Brain’s Architecture

Babies are born with the raw material they need to hear, see, move and remember. The nerve fibers, or axons, that connect these disparate brain regions don’t grow automatically. They are cultivated by babies’ environments. MRIs of the participants as infants showed predictably smaller brains that appear more solid or smooth in the images. By the time the children were 5, the scans showed a robust network of branching pathways of these nerve fibers, said coauthor Turesky.  

“The infant brain is very different compared to all other stages of life,” he said. “But if you look at the scan of a child at 5 years and then at 10 years, you can see there’s hardly any change in [those pathways]. Those early years are a time of very rapid growth.”

Though the human brain remains plastic and mutable for a lifetime, Turesky said, the scans underscore that earliest years are the busiest for building brain architecture — a fact that has important policy implications for early intervention and improved literacy curricula in preschools. 

Giving Them the ‘Good Stuff’

Some brains are better equipped to build the neural scaffolding that ultimately leads to reading, Gaab said, and some brains are less optimized, which means those children might struggle to read. It doesn’t mean their brains are faulty, or that there is something seriously wrong with them. 

“They’re built differently, and they’re optimized for other things, because every brain is different,” she said. “But it does point to the need for good early pre-reading instruction and the games and good oral language input, and home and school environment interactions that we know build these connections. Some brains just need more of the good stuff.”  

“Call it preventative education, just like preventative medicine,” she said. “Help these kids build these connections before they struggle and prevent them ever seeing a special educator or ever getting a dyslexia diagnosis.” A large number of studies now show that early intervention and prevention are leading to better outcomes for children at risk of dyslexia, Gaab said, and the research has led to aimed at early identification and intervention. 

That includes teaching the specific skills that can close the gap between proficient and struggling readers. Those skills include phonological awareness, letter-sound knowledge, rapid automatized naming, vocabulary and oral language comprehension. This teaching takes place naturally when caregivers read aloud to their children. Reach Out and Read, the nonprofit Klass leads, has a network of clinicians who work directly with pediatric care providers to help them integrate read-aloud experiences into their interactions with parents and provides developmentally appropriate books for caregivers to take home. 

“Our tremendous advantage in pediatric primary care is that the clinicians see the children over and over in these early years,” Klass said. “We see them for a newborn visit and a one-month, a two-month visit … The schedule is sort of engraved on all our hearts, so we get to talk with the parents about reading and early literacy repeatedly during those early years of life. 

“We know that the developing brain is shaped most of all by the interactions with the adults taking care of that child, Klass said. “The wonderful thing about this study is that it literally looks at the building of the brain and says very clearly that it’s not just that the brain is being built, but the specific structures that will allow the child to read.” 

If doctors can identify young children who are going to struggle more with learning to read as they get older, they can target those families with books and other support early on, Klass added.

“We’re hoping with…the books the caregivers are taking home, the child is learning a motivational lesson: ‘I like books. If I carry a book and give it to my parent, they might sit down and talk to me in that voice,’” Klass said. 

Klass said no one needs to tell parents to “teach” this idea to their children. The children will sort it out if they grow up around books and reading. A baby doesn’t want or need an authority on literacy to walk through the door and teach them how to read, Klass said. A baby wants their parent’s voice, presence and back-and-forth interactions. 

“Your baby wants to be on your lap hearing you read. Your baby will love books because your baby loves you.”

This gap is a of decision-making. People plan to save for retirement or stick to diets, but often fall short of their goals. In parenting, the stakes are higher: Not reading a bedtime story or skipping a day of preschool may seem momentarily insignificant, but small gaps in learning time , making it increasingly . 

Why do well-intentioned parents sometimes struggle to follow through with engaging their children, and how can behavioral science help parents close the intention-action gap?

The field of offers insights into what creates intention-action gaps and identifies practical ways to bridge the gap. Many of these approaches rely on the concept of “” — subtle changes in how choices or information are presented that make the desired action easier or more likely to occur. In parenting, nudges often come in the form of reminders, feedback, or other simple tools sent through digital technology. These nudges acknowledge that busy parents aren’t failing to engage their children in learning activities that are key to the child’s future because they lack love, knowledge, or good intentions; rather, daily life is full of friction and temptations.

has shown that “present bias,” a manifestation of the intention-action gap, is central to parenting choices. Parents, like everyone, often prioritize immediate rewards over future benefits. Raising a child requires long-term effort; while considerable research shows that reading books to a toddler boosts their language skills in the future, the benefits of today’s actions can be long delayed. Meanwhile, daily distractions and fatigue demand immediate attention.

This bias can cause parents to focus on the “now” rather than the “later,” even when they value activities like reading. In our study, we tackled present bias by sending parents text-message prompts and goal-setting reminders to read to their children from a digital library that we provided to parents. These reminders were intended to “bring the future to the present.” Parents who received these reminders read to their child over twice as much over six weeks compared to parents who received the digital library with no reminders.

Notably, the parents who gained the most were those who exhibited present-biased preferences in assessments given before the experiment began. In other words, the parents most prone to procrastinate on reading were the ones who saw the greatest improvements when we helped them overcome present bias. Parents without present bias already read regularly, so the extra reminders had little impact for them.

Tools to Help Parents Follow Through

Another successful example of narrowing the intention-action gap from our research lab is the “” study, a randomized controlled trial we conducted to increase attendance in Chicago’s publicly funded preschool programs. Our intervention sent personalized text messages to parents over 18 weeks, indicating the number of days their child had been absent and highlighting the learning opportunities they missed while not in school. The messages reminded parents of their commitment to adopt good attendance habits and their goals to help their child develop kindergarten readiness skills.

For children whose parents received these messages, preschool attendance increased by about 2.5 school days, and chronic absenteeism — a measure of missing 10% or more of the school days in a school year — decreased by 20% compared to the children of parents who did not receive the messages. The helped align parents’ actions with their long-term goals. This type of light-touch program is inexpensive and easy to scale, making it a for education policymakers aiming to reduce early absenteeism.

Technology offers a promising solution to close the intention-action gap. Our recent study provided families with a tablet preloaded with a digital library of over 200 high-quality children’s books. The tablet had no apps or internet access beyond the library to reduce distractions. The goal was to remove the obstacle of finding new books and to make shared reading as easy and engaging as possible. 

The impact on children’s language skills was notable. Over an 11-month trial, low-income children whose families received access to the digital library showed approximately 0.3 standard deviations more progress in language skills (equivalent to three months of language learning on the test we gave to children) than those who did not, moving from roughly the 41st to the 50th percentile nationally. Notably, the treatment impact was significantly larger – 0.50 standard deviation, equivalent to approximately five months of language learning on the test we gave to children – for parents who exhibited present-biased preferences in assessments administered before the experiment began (as in the PACT study). Sometimes the best way to narrow the intention-action gap is to reduce barriers to the intended action. 

From Research Insights to Early Childhood Policy

These go beyond academics: They offer a for early childhood policy. Traditional parenting programs often assume that if parents are informed about the benefits of their decisions or provided with free resources, they will naturally act accordingly. However, information and resources alone don’t always lead to behavior change, especially when cognitive biases interfere. 

Relatively low-cost, behaviorally informed interventions can directly address the intention-action gap. For example, text-message programs can be through school districts, pediatric clinics, or social service agencies to encourage behaviors like daily reading, conversations, or preschool attendance. , such as the library tablet in the CAPER study, could be integrated into public early education programs or library initiatives to ensure families have access to books and find them easy and enjoyable to use. 

Such approaches can promote equity by focusing on parents who face more cognitive biases or for whom these biases cause the most harm. Behavioral tools can help before children reach kindergarten, which research shows is the most effective and cost-efficient time to empower parents as active partners in their children’s development.

Recently, Too Small to Fail released a outlining impact and lessons learned over the past decade. According to the report, research demonstrates that parents and caregivers talk, read and sing more frequently with their children after taking part in Too Small to Fail programming in laundromats, grocery stores, waiting rooms and other settings. One of the key takeaways is that trusted messengers, such as pediatricians and librarians, are the “secret sauce” to supporting families with young children in early literacy. 

Too Small to Fail founder Hillary Rodham Clinton was a child advocate before going into politics. , she helped research the 1974 report , which examined the living conditions of American children and surfaced a number of barriers facing them. The findings in that report shaped her views on education and guided her in shaping the mission of Too Small to Fail. 

Clinton is still actively involved in the work, alongside her daughter Chelsea Clinton, who chairs the initiative’s advisory council of advocates and researchers. The council, which includes Dana Suskind, founder and co-director of at the University of Chicago and Joan Lombardi, principal advisor at has helped Too Small to Fail scale its impact and stay abreast of the science behind reading. 

“As a pediatric surgeon and social scientist who believes deeply in the power of parents and caregivers to build children’s brains,” says Suskind, “I am tremendously grateful for their work. Too Small to Fail meets families where they are, recognizing and honoring their inherent wisdom, and supporting that wisdom with the resources every child deserves. It continues to harness one of our most precious and infinite resources: the support of loving grown-ups to unlock every child’s full potential.”

Lombardi adds: “Too Small to Fail has been a persistent voice in supporting parents’ engagement with their young children and pioneering innovations in communities across the country.”

In an interview with Mark Swartz, Chelsea Clinton recollects her experiences over the first decade of Too Small to Fail and sets her sights on the coming years. 

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Swartz: What stands out to you from visiting laundromats, libraries and other Too Small To Fail sites?

Clinton: I have so many memories. What stands out is just the joy. There’s so much joy on the kids’ faces and also the parents’ or grandparents’ faces when they’re reading to their children in laundromats, whether in Chicago or New Orleans or Philadelphia. And while I’ve been to quite a few of these sites, it’s only a fraction of the hundreds that we helped build. There’s such a warmth and such a sense of welcoming and hospitality. 

Swartz: What do you hear from the parents and grandparents?

Clinton: Real enthusiasm and excitement and gratitude that there now are more books that they’re able to read with their kids and in whatever language they need to be able to read them, to have those bonding moments, those teaching moments with their kids.

Swartz: You’ve talked to producers and writers about embedding Too Small to Fail messages into their shows, and that has had a tremendous reach. How did those partnerships work?

Clinton: I have this vivid memory of my mom and I going to Hollywood and speaking on a panel with lots of writers and showrunners and creative folks. We discussed the importance of reading, singing and talking to kids at every age whenever possible. Whether Orange Is the New Black or Jane the Virgin or Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, they found ways to embed the messages in ways that were organic for them. We believe it has been powerful for the audiences.

Swartz: And they didn’t say, “Thanks, but we don’t need your advice on how to create a story”? 

Clinton: We’ve had really wonderful, delightful, productive conversations with folks in Hollywood over many years. We’ve talked about the importance of parents or grandparents and anyone that’s around [young children] — about the understanding that we are effectively their first teachers. We’ve also had really productive conversations in Hollywood about the ways in which climate change affects our most vulnerable [Americans], including infants and toddlers. We always feel that if we’re sharing recent research and evidence, if it’s something that is in the context of how they’re thinking about future episodes of the future arc of a show, maybe it will be incorporated at some point. 

Swartz: Besides your own mother, who have your early childhood heroes or influences been?

Clinton: Certainly my grandmothers. I was very, very close with both of my grandmothers. I was really lucky to spend a lot of time with each of them as a kid and could not imagine my childhood without them. I only wish that I could have known my dad’s mom as an adult. I always had great teachers, and I remember preschool being so fun. I have quite clear memories of my kindergarten and first grade teachers, Mrs. Minor and Mrs. Mitchell. 

Swartz: How has your own motherhood journey influenced your understanding of the early childhood issues that Too Small to Fail addresses?

Clinton: Becoming a parent didn’t shift what I cared about as much as it sharpened everything I cared about. I cared even more intensely about early childhood education and supporting what parents and other caregivers need to be the best teachers. … Candidly, I didn’t know that I could care any more about the things that I already cared about, and then I became a parent and somehow discovered that I could. That was a revelation to me. Everything feels even more intense because it now feels so personal, because now it’s about my kids and their cohort and the world that they’re growing up in.

Swartz: What are you most excited about for the next 10 years of Too Small to Fail?

Clinton: I’m most excited about continuing to build on what’s working. We have a lot of research now that [shows that] what we’re doing is working, so we should do more of it. We should also be open to whatever our remarkable community suggests that we should try next.

Through a unique collaboration between the and , the community now ranks 12th in state literacy, up from 31st just four years ago. This dramatic improvement wasn’t magic — it was the result of a systematic, community-wide approach to literacy that could serve as a model for districts nationwide.

The key to our success? A comprehensive public-private partnership that treats literacy as a community mission rather than just a school district initiative. The Learning Alliance, a nonprofit based in Vero Beach, has created an integrated support system that extends from birth through elementary school and beyond.

Its partnership with the school district works because it addresses literacy from multiple angles all in service of one goal — 90% of students reading on grade level by the end of third grade. 

To achieve this goal, the alliance funds 25 literacy coaches and reading interventionist positions within the district, ensuring that every school has dedicated expertise to implement the science of reading in grades K through 3. The district provides similar support in older grades. 

But that’s not all. The nonprofit engages families with children from birth to age 5, providing more than 5,500 age-appropriate books and 1,700 learning kits annually to under-resourced families. It also supports robust after-school and summer tutoring programs through the Moonshot Academy, where students show 50% more growth in reading compared to their peers not in the program. The afterschool program runs in the district schools, largely with district teachers compensated for their extra work by the Alliance.

The results speak for themselves. Indian River has doubled the percentage of A- and B-rated schools from 47% to 95%, and our third-grade reading scores now outperform the state average by nine percentage points (64% versus 55%). These aren’t just statistics — they represent thousands of children who now have the foundational skills they need to succeed in school and life.

Critical to this success has been the Moonshot Community Action Network, a coalition of over 150 local leaders who ensure that early literacy remains a community priority. This network includes business leaders, healthcare providers, faith-based organizations, and community advocates who understand that literacy is fundamental to our community’s future prosperity.

For superintendents and district leaders reading this, we offer several practical recommendations:

• First, look beyond traditional funding models. While public education funding is essential, strategic partnerships with community organizations can provide both financial resources and expertise that complement district capabilities.

• Second, invest in literacy coaches and reading interventionists. Having dedicated literacy experts in every school creates a support system for teachers and ensures consistent implementation of evidence-based reading instruction.

• Third, extend your teaching time. Our Moonshot Academy afterschool program creates opportunities for students to make more progress in less time. It pairs intensive tutoring with enrichment activities to boost engagement, and it works: students in the afterschool program average at least 50% more growth in reading than peers who do not participate. 

• Fourth, expand your reach beyond school walls. The family partnerships program demonstrates that literacy support must begin before kindergarten and continue outside school hours to be truly effective.

• Fifth, build community coalitions. The broader community’s investment in literacy creates a sustainable ecosystem of support that survives changes in school leadership or funding fluctuations.

For philanthropists and community organizations, think beyond traditional grant-making. The most effective partnerships involve deep collaboration with schools, shared accountability for outcomes, and a long-term commitment to the community.

Our journey hasn’t been without challenges, but it’s proven that significant improvements in literacy are possible with the right partnership model. The students’ success isn’t just about test scores – it’s about creating a foundation for lifelong learning and opportunity.

The pandemic may have created unprecedented challenges for education, but it has also shown us the power of community collaboration. In Indian River County, we’ve demonstrated that when schools and community organizations work together with shared purpose and accountability, we can achieve remarkable results.

The question isn’t whether this model can work. The question is: Who will be next to replicate it?

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Sweeping changes to literacy instruction are underway in New York City, with all elementary schools for the first time using this September.

By requiring instruction in line with long-standing research about how children learn to read, known as the , the city is hoping to boost its literacy rates. Just under half of students in grades 3-8 , according to state exams.

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After Chancellor David Banks took the helm of the nation’s school district more than two years ago, he said the city’s approach to reading instruction and has since made the curriculum overhaul his signature initiative. His other policies, , pale in comparison to fixing reading instruction.

“None of that will even matter if kids can’t read,” he said.

But what do the new curriculums look like? How do caregivers know if they’re working? And what should you do if your child continues to struggle?

Here are answers to some common questions caregivers may have about the changes, based on interviews with reading experts and educators.

How were schools teaching reading before?

Stretching back decades, the Education Department developed by Teachers College professor Lucy Calkins, which viewed reading as a natural process that could be unlocked by exposing students to literature. Teachers delivered mini-lessons on a specific skill then encouraged students to read books at their individual levels to practice what they learned.

But most reading experts say the approach did not include enough emphasis on teaching children the relationships between letters and sounds, known as phonics, leaving behind a substantial share of students who would benefit from more explicit sound-it-out lessons.

Calkins’ curriculum also , such as encouraging students to use pictures to guess at a word’s meaning rather than relying on the letters themselves. Though she has since on phonics, the city’s public schools will no longer be allowed to use her program.

What is the philosophy behind the literacy shift?

All schools are now required to deliver regular phonics instruction that explicitly teaches the relationship between sounds and letters. Those lessons, which are prioritized , typically run about 30 minutes a day.

In addition to those lessons, schools must also use one of three approved reading programs that are designed to help build vocabulary and comprehension by exposing students to social studies and science topics alongside works of literature and poetry. that students are more likely to understand what they’re reading if they’re already familiar with the underlying topic. The new curriculums are designed to build students’ background knowledge across a range of domains.

“You should, as a parent, ask your kid about the books that they’re reading and be prepared to hear an earful from your child about how they read about Jacques Cousteau and the discovery of the giant squid — or to know a whole lot about pollinators,” said Kristen McQuillan, who consults with districts on literacy efforts and is affiliated with the Knowledge Matters Campaign, which raises awareness about the role of background knowledge in reading comprehension. Students should be bringing home writing about those books, too, she added.

Under the old curriculums, students often picked books that interested them from the classroom library that were targeted at their individual reading levels. Although the city is moving away from that leveling system — and instead having kids spend more time reading common books as a class — the practice may continue to some degree. Teachers will still have access to those leveled books, though they have been asked to organize them by topic or genre. Into Reading, the most widespread curriculum under the new mandate, also offers its own set of leveled books that schools can use.

What are the three new curriculums and which one is my school using?

The curriculum rollout began during the 2023-24 school year with 15 of the city’s 32 local school districts required to use one of the three reading programs: Into Reading from the company Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; Wit and Wisdom from Great Minds; and EL Education from Imagine Learning.

Beginning this September, all elementary schools must use one of those three programs, with local superintendents in charge of making curriculum decisions for all schools in their district. Here’s what each district is using:

What do the three new reading curriculums look like?

Into Reading from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Into Reading is . Schools in 22 of New York City’s 32 local districts must use it. The most traditional of the three curriculums, Into Reading is organized as an anthology-style textbook packed with passages specifically designed to help teach reading skills, an approach known in education jargon as a “basal reader.” Some caregivers may be familiar with the approach from .

Unlike the other two curriculums, Into Reading includes a Spanish-language version. And it covers a lot of ground, with roughly that include how plants live and grow, the relationship between sports and teamwork, and how a person’s experiences shape their identity. Some educators say that breadth can be helpful since students may be more likely to encounter subjects that pique their curiosity.

Kate Gutwillig, a veteran New York City educator who has taught all three of the mandated curriculums, recalled one instance where a fifth grader who was reading at a second-grade level was captivated by an Into Reading lesson on Greek mythology.

“He was able to read the Medusa myth and that kid just came to life — he wanted to read aloud and write,” she said. “There’s something good about having a lot of variety.”

Still, Into Reading has earned criticism from some observers, parents, and educators who contend that it is weaker than the other two curriculums because it , and relies too heavily . A New York University report also warned that its materials are not culturally responsive, a claim the company .

Wit & Wisdom from Great Minds

Wit & Wisdom is known for building students’ background knowledge by going deeper into a smaller number of units. The curriculum includes — ranging from civil rights heroes to a study of outer space — devoting about 6-8 weeks per topic.

The curriculum exposes students to a mix of fiction and nonfiction texts. It also stands apart for including a “close examination of artwork related to the core topics,” .

“You tend to see a bit more of that literary fiction,” said McQuillan. One fourth grade unit called “the great heart” introduces students to the biology of the heart as muscle that pumps blood while weaving in the figurative meaning of the heart as a representation of emotion and love.

Some educators say adapting to Wit & Wisdom is challenging. The lessons can be lengthy, requiring teachers to figure out how to cut it down to be more manageable. And, as with all three curriculums, students are generally expected to read the same books on their grade level as a class, a challenge for students who don’t yet have strong reading skills.

“I think that’s our biggest struggle,” one teacher who was implementing Wit & Wisdom previously told Chalkbeat. “We’re coming in assuming that the kids have the skills to do this.” (If you’re interested in a deeper look at Wit & Wisdom, .)

EL Education from Imagine Learning

Similar to Wit & Wisdom, EL Education deploys a handful of units each year that students spend several weeks unpacking. Formerly called Expeditionary Learning, the curriculum and includes lots of opportunities to write. Two kindergarten units , for instance, and a significant chunk of second grade is devoted to pollination.

The emphasis on exploring the outside world, McQuillan said, “tends to be a feature of EL that kids get excited about.”

Janina Jarnich, who teaches second grade at P.S. 169 Baychester Academy in the Bronx, that one of her favorite lessons to teach focuses on paleontology and fossilization.

“By the end of the module, they write a narrative where they are the paleontologist that makes the greatest discovery of their lives,” she said. The lesson “lends itself to lots of hands-on experiences, like making imprints and doing a ‘dinosaur dig.’” She also takes her students on a field trip to the Museum of Natural History.

Some educators noted that the curriculum can be overwhelming — an issue that some teachers said is true of many curriculum packages.

“The weakness is the difficulty of navigating all of the materials,” Jarnich said. “Even after using EL for four years, it can still be tricky to find the end-of-unit assessments and to make sure you have all of the materials necessary for each lesson.”

Are there any exceptions to the new curriculum mandate?

So far, only , a K-8 gifted and talented program. However, some other school communities .

Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, .

How do I know if the new curriculum is working for my child?

Schools are expected to screen students three times a year to assess their reading skills. Caregivers can find the results of those assessments in their , which indicate or needs more support to be performing at grade level. (These screeners are supposed to replace that assigned students a reading level from A-Z.)

Multiple experts said teachers are generally also doing more regular assessments on top of that, so it’s a good idea to get in touch with them if you have any concerns.

“The answer is: ask the teachers,” said Susan Neuman, a literacy expert at New York University. They should have a sense of whether a student needs extra help based on a range of assessments beyond the screeners, she added.

What should I do if I’m concerned about my child’s progress?

Experts said caregivers should reach out to their child’s school if they suspect their child is behind in reading or if their screener results suggest they are below grade level.

“A plan needs to be put in place, so parents do need to serve as their child’s advocate,” said Katie Pace Miles, a literacy expert at Brooklyn College who . “I would ask about what skills can be reinforced at home, and what materials can be provided to the caregivers.”

She said parents should ask their schools to outline whether they are offering their child extra small-group or one-on-one instruction, how many days a week it’s offered, and how long each session is.

“Parents should not be left in the dark,” Miles said. If a student continues to struggle despite efforts to provide extra help, caregivers may want to ask for more detailed assessments of their child and potentially request a special education evaluation, she said.

This was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at . Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

Students who started school during or after the COVID-19 pandemic have a harder time saying goodbye to their parents when they drop them off, Plains Independent School District Superintendent Robert McClain said.

Third graders are behind in their reading, teacher Heather Harris said, so the district hired a reading specialist to work with their youngest students.

They’re also struggling in math, San Antonio ISD Superintendent Jaime Aquino said.

“When I go into classrooms of students who are currently fourth graders or fifth graders who were either kindergarten or first grade [during the pandemic], you can see that there is a lack of mathematical fluency around basic facts,” he said.

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Texas school administrators, educators and education policy experts say they’re seeing troubling signs that students in the earliest grades are not doing as well academically as children who started school before the pandemic. State and federal officials devoted significant resources to help students affected by the pandemic but they mostly focused on older children whose schooling was disrupted. Experts worry that the state’s youngest students will have a harder time catching up without intervention.

A recent by Curriculum Associates Research looked at national academic growth trends in the last four years and compared them with pre-pandemic data. It found younger students — like those who were enrolled in kindergarten or first grade in 2021 — were the furthest behind in both reading and math compared to their peers before the pandemic.

According to the report, those students may be struggling because of disruptions in their early childhood experiences, difficulties building up foundational skills like phonics or number recognition, problems engaging with virtual learning during the pandemic or insufficient resources being devoted to help children in the earliest grades.

Aquino, San Antonio ISD’s superintendent, said attendance in early grades is lower than before the pandemic, which is impacting foundational learning.

“We told families to stay home during the pandemic. Now we’re sending the message: You have to be in school,” Aquino said.

Low pre-K enrollment during the pandemic may be another factor. Children who attend pre-K are nearly twice as likely to be ready for kindergarten, said Miguel Solis, president of the education research nonprofit Commit Partnership.

In the school year 2019-2020, there were 249,226 students enrolled in pre-kindergarten in Texas, according to state data. This number dropped by nearly 50,000 in the following year.

Low academic attainment can compound in ways that become increasingly difficult to fix. Harris, the Plains ISD teacher, said it’s hard for third-grade students who fall behind to catch up because their teachers will likely not be able to spend much time helping them develop foundational skills they already should have learned.

“Pre-K through second, you’re learning to read, and then third grade on up, you’re reading to learn. So there’s that huge switch of what you’re teaching,” she said.

Mary Lynn Pruneda, an education analyst at the public policy think tank Texas 2036, said the Curriculum Associates Research study raises concerns about young learners but it’s difficult to pinpoint the impact in Texas because of a lack of data.

“We have very limited data on how younger students are doing that’s consistent across grade levels,” Pruneda said.

Without data to help diagnose the problem, students are being set up for continually low results in the state’s standardized test, she said.

There are some indications of how the problem might be manifesting in Texas. In Dallas County, for example, declines in math and reading scores between 2023 and 2024 were most acute among third graders, who would have been in kindergarten during the pandemic, Solis said.

Solis said the state needs to start collecting literacy data for early grades to identify students who are not on track and intervene. He’s hopeful because some lawmakers in both the Texas House and Senate have already expressed interest in taking a close look at how young students learn foundational skills, he said.

“We can’t wait until the third grade STAAR to see how younger students are progressing,” he said.

Pruneda said one step Texas can take to start reversing the trend is raising spending in public education — something educators are desperate for — to help school districts hire and retain the best teachers possible. The superintendents of both Plains and San Antonio ISDs said it is imperative for the Texas Legislature to approve a significant funding boost next year after lawmakers failed last year to do so amid .

High-impact tutoring, like the one legislators mandated for grades 3-8, may also help early-grade students, she said.

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The Iowa Department of Education announced Wednesday that some elementary schools will use an AI reading assistant to help with literacy tutoring programs.

The department made a $3 million investment into for the use of a program called EPS Reading Assistant, an online literacy tutor that uses artificial intelligence technology. Iowa public and non-public elementary schools will be able to use the service at no cost through the summer of 2025, according to the department news release.

“Reading unlocks a lifetime of potential, and the Department’s new investment in statewide personalized reading tutoring further advances our shared commitment to strengthening early literacy instruction,” McKenzie Snow, the education department director said in a statement. “This work builds upon our comprehensive advancements in early literacy, spanning world-class state content standards, statewide educator professional learning, evidence-based summer reading programs, and Personalized Reading Plans for students in need of support.”

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The program uses voice recognition technology to follow along as a child reads out loud, providing corrective feedback and assessments when the student struggles through a digital avatar named Amira. According to the service’s website, the program is designed around the “Science of Reading” approach to literary education — a method that emphasizes the teaching of phonics and word comprehension when students are learning to read.

Gov. Kim Reynolds and state education experts, including have said that this teaching strategy will help improve the state’s child literacy rates, pointing to reading scores increasing in following the implementation of “science of reading” methods.

In May, Reynolds that set new early literacy standards for teachers, as well as adding requirements for how schools and families address when a student does not meet reading proficiency standards. These requirements include creating a personalized assistance plan for the child until they are able to reach grade-level reading proficiency and notifying parents and guardians of students in kindergarten through sixth grade that they can request their child repeats a grade if they are not meeting the literacy benchmarks.

Reynolds said the law was a “to make literacy a priority in every Iowa classroom and for every Iowa student.”

The AI-backed tutor program is being funded through the state education department’s portion from the federal , part of a COVID-era measure providing states with additional funding for pandemic recovery efforts. The federal fund allocated more than $774 million to Iowa in 2021.

In addition to the new AI-backed programming available, the fund money is also going toward Summer Reading Grants, for efforts to address summer learning loss and close achievement gaps. The elementary schools that won grants have all “affirmed their commitment to including the personalized reading tutor as part of their evidence-based programming,” according to the news release.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Iowa Capital Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kathie Obradovich for questions: info@iowacapitaldispatch.com. Follow Iowa Capital Dispatch on and .

This is why we partnered with our friends at the Campaign for Grade-Level Reading for a conversation — “Children’s Books: From Access to Opportunity” — to celebrate the power and joy of diverse home libraries, literacy-rich environments, the brain-building benefits of language development, and the importance of reading to babies and toddlers.

It was a powerhouse panel:

• Tabitha Blackwell, Executive Director,
• Norrine Briggs, Executive Director, North America, The Dollywood Foundation
• Alvin Irby, Founder and Executive Director,
• Iheoma U. Iruka, Professor of Maternal Child Health and Public Policy; Founding Director of the at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at UNC-CH
• Kyle Zimmer, First Book’s President, CEO and Co-Founder

Early Learning Nation contributor Leigh Giangreco moderated the panel.

Here are our takeaways:

1. Early childhood is the right time to celebrate diversity

Iheoma U. Iruka, provided the social and scientific contexts for the conversation. For example, the early years are a period of accelerated brain and language development, she noted, the ideal time to promote respect for diversity and the joy that goes with it.

Iruka — professor of Maternal Child Health and Public Policy and founding director of the Equity Research Action Coalition (as well as a mother of two) — cited the 2023 National Academies report, , which notes the benefit of “culturally relevant, identity-affirming and positive books for families to take home.”

She cautioned that books aren’t a silver bullet for all the challenges facing young children and their families, but they are a proven tool for fostering a love of reading.

2. Durham, North Carolina is “The City of Books”

Tabitha Blackwell, executive director of Book Harvest, described her organization’s work, which includes providing free books and resources in early learning and health care settings in Durham.

Altogether, Book Harvest provides 170 books over the first decade of a child’s life. Why all those books? “Because,” Blackwell says, “families feel isolated and crave more connectivity and guidance.”

Its program partners with families of Medicaid-eligible children. A randomized control trial conducted by Iruka found that 98% of families agreed that Book Babies helped to create a daily routine of reading. And its supports the transition into kindergarten, especially for bilingual families. “Family members are the ones doing the work,” Blackwell said. “We’re walking alongside them.”

3. Early learning starts at home—with a book

Norrine Briggs, executive director, North America of The Dollywood Foundation, said that has gifted 250 million books since 1995, and she played a video with the famed singer, author, actor and “Dreamer in Chief,” in which she declares, “If you can read, you can teach yourself anything.”

Briggs described the many ways her organization brings about collaboration among states, counties, school districts, public libraries and nonprofits — all in the name of creating moments where young children read with someone they know loves them.

Receiving a book in the mail every month, she said, “lays the foundation for consistent parent involvement.” Some children can’t even wait to get inside the door before they tear open the package addressed to them.

4. Reading should be fun

Alvin Irby, founder and executive director of Barbershop Books, promoted the idea of child-centered curation — that is, Black boys are the best judges of what Black boys do and do not want to read. and Dav Pilkey’s series probably won’t win the Nobel Prize for Literature, but these are the titles that help children become what Irby called captains of their own reading journeys. “Boys like things that are gross,” Giangreco chimed in. “You have to lean into that.”

Leveraging the cultural power of barbershops in Black communities, Barbershop Books currently operates in 20 cities. Early literacy expert Susan B. Neuman recently conducted a two-year evaluation in Philadelphia and found that Black boys exposed to books through the program were more likely to identify as readers.

Irby, a former teacher as well as a charismatic stand-up comedian, called attention to the importance of centering the diverse ways we read. “My son likes to read on the toilet,” he confessed, “so I’m going to put a basket of books there.”

5. Diverse books lead to diverse readers

Matching Dolly Parton is no easy feat, but First Book, the nation’s largest community of adults in the lives of kids, has also distributed 250 million books. And like Barbershop Books, First Book also gets researcher Neuman’s seal of approval. Its represents what the researcher calls a “research-driven roadmap for educators to foster an environment that… will drive equitable education outcomes and be foundational for future success.”

Kyle Zimmer, First Book’s president, CEO and co-founder, explained that while giving books away is an admirable strategy, her organization practices a different one: “Traditional pricing models mean the best books are out of reach,” she said. And the publishing industry has a poor record on diversity.

“Industries respond to markets,” she continued, “so the went to publishers with a business plan for an aggregated market, a vibrant market.” Zimmer announced plans for quadrupling the number of kids First Book reaches, from 6.5 million to 26 million!

Like a third of the 600 districts across the state, the Hudson schools near Cleveland didn’t use science of reading books until Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and the state legislature ordered districts last summer to implement the curriculum by the 2024-25 school year.

Since the law passed, a state survey in the fall of 2023 found about a third of districts were already using the science of reading, a third were partly using it, and another third were using methods now banned by state law. 

Realizing a change in how reading was taught was inevitable even before the law was passed, Hudson district officials started searching for new books last spring — giving them more time than other districts still using lessons that have now fallen out of favor.

“It’s going to happen,” Hudson Assistant Superintendent Doreen Osmun recalled thinking. “So let’s dig in. Let’s roll up our sleeves. Let’s have our teachers, the experts in the classroom, make sure that they are looking at this thoroughly.”

How many districts currently out of compliance will follow Hudson’s lead and meet DeWine’s original target of the start of the school year to ax old strategies like balanced literacy and whole language in favor of the science of reading isn’t clear. 

But many won’t.

The change in how reading is taught in Ohio has proven not to be easy or quick —  despite DeWine’s urgency. Schools need time to replace old books and retrain teachers, many of whom learned other approaches in college and have used them for decades. It’s both a logistical and emotional challenge, made more complicated by about 200 Ohio school districts still using old teaching approaches when the law was passed.

Officials from some of those districts told ����Ӱ�� they will take advantage of leeway in state law and approval from the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce to use the upcoming school year to implement science of reading.

When DeWine first announced the goal in his state of the state address in January 2023, the state had no idea how many schools were already using the science of reading and how many were using other approaches.

The law also relied on the state to take several steps before schools could even act. The biggest was to create a — books, workbooks, computer programs, videos  — based on the science of reading schools should use and a separate list of others that they now can’t. 

Knowing the timeline was tight, the legislature left the language vague and mandated the change “not later than the 2024-2025 school year,” offering flexibility. 

“Depending on where a district is, it may take longer to get to full implementation,” said DeWine spokesman Dan Tierney.

With the state education department being reorganized and its director not hired until December, everything was on hold until the first, incomplete list of approved materials came out in January. More materials were added in March and April. A list of approved intervention materials for students who are struggling was released in May. 

Chad Aldis, head of Ohio operations of the conservative-leaning Fordham Institute and a  backer of the shift to science of reading, said he understands the delay because of the work involved, particularly the “heavy lift” reviewing and approving books and other teaching materials.

“The idea that districts after February or March would be able to purchase new curricula, get teachers trained and be up to speed would have been a little bit ambitious,” he said. “I wish it could have been done sooner. But the process just took time so I think it’s a fair result that we see.”

He cautioned that it could take a few years to see gains in reading test scores as lessons change.

Among the previously-favored and popular books that are now not allowed are materials by Columbia University’s Lucy Calkins and the duo of university professors Irene Fountas and Gay Sue Pinnell, an emeritus professor of Ohio State University.

An intervention program known as Reading Recovery, which was brought to the United States by Pinnell, was also banned by the state, though advocates are suing to allow it.

After the survey, the department gave districts $64 million to help pay for new teaching materials – about $105 per student for elementary schools that need all new books and $8 for materials to help struggling students. Districts that already shifted to the science of reading and needed to make fewer changes received less money.

The department has also created a series of online lessons for teachers in the science of reading, requiring less than eight hours for some high school teachers and administrators and 22 hours for most elementary school teachers. So far, 33,000 teachers have completed that training and another 15,00 have registered for it.

Ohio’s training has been much smoother than in neighboring Indiana, where a required 80 hours and some early scheduling troubles flared into protests to the state board of education. Ohio’s online sessions are much more flexible than Indiana started with and take less time, so both major teachers unions in Ohio have reported only minor concerns.

Districts are also planning their own training as part of regular professional development as the year goes on.

In Hudson, a suburban district regularly among the state’s top scorers on state tests, the district tossed out now-banned books by Calkins as well as the Fountas and Pinnell “Classroom” reading materials it has used since 2020. The school board then purchased Benchmark Advance books approved by the state and by the national EdReports rating organization.

Osmun called the change “challenging,” since the state didn’t have a list of approved books until January.

Some districts needing to change have not moved as fast, including Solon, another suburban school district that often has the best test scores in the state. But Ohio education officials rated Solon as  “not aligned” with the science of reading. That district is waiting for the state to create a final list of approved materials before picking new ones, a district spokesperson said. 

The district isn’t sitting still, though. Solon teachers in the 2023-24 school year received training in reading and dyslexia, which is similar to science of reading training. More specific science of reading training will happen this coming year after the district picks new books.

Some low-scoring districts are also using the school year to change. The East Cleveland schools, one of the poorest in the nation and has been under academic supervision by the state, was also rated by the state as “not aligned,” but will use the upcoming year to select new books.

East Cleveland director of curriculum, instruction, and assessment  Tom Domzalski said the district spent last year on an already-planned overhaul of its math curriculum, so it left reading to this fall.

“My math is in a worse place than my reading curriculum,” he said. “We put our time and our energy into the area that needed that time and energy.”

He also echoed concerns of other districts about not wanting to rush after the state released its first list of approved materials in January.

“A good curriculum review process takes anywhere between six and 12 months,” he said. You can get it done in 90 days, too. If you’ve got the right group of people, and you’ve got folks that are in place for it, but how successful is it going to be?”

And that’s a good thing, says Dr. Susan B. Neuman, professor of childhood and early literacy at New York University, even if a parent or caregiver feels as though they might crack if they read their toddler “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?“ one more time. Repetition is one of the elements that help connect children not only with words but with the world those words create.

Neuman has researched and written extensively on literacy learning for young children. Her paper for the journal Contemporary Educational Psychology, “,” examines an intervention designed to improve low-income children’s vocabulary and knowledge in science.

In choosing books for the study, Neuman says, one of the criteria was the book’s “repeatability.”

“We wanted short reads,” Neuman says, “ones where the child could say, ‘Oh, that was so much fun. Read it to me again!’ And that’s when you say to yourself, ‘All right. I’ve made it.’ ”

The year-long study involved pre-K through first grade classrooms in 12 elementary schools with from 71% to 100% free-and-reduced lunches (a community poverty measurement) in a large metropolitan area. Classrooms were randomly selected to participate in a supplemental program in which the children were read aloud to about science topics. The control classrooms simply offered the usual curriculum; the study’s total sample included 24 intervention classrooms and 21 control classrooms. Before classes began, pre-K and kindergarten teachers for the intervention classrooms participated in a day of training to review the texts to be used and examine how the topics built on one another to establish big ideas in science. Teachers in each school were assigned a coach responsible for supporting the intervention throughout the year.

The results were noteworthy: Children in the read-aloud group learned significantly more words and science concepts than those in the control groups, with growth for English language learners (ELL) exceeding that of native speakers.

More than Words

has long been a passion for Neuman, who helped bring public attention to the fact that exist in the U.S. in which there are virtually no books for children living in poverty. Indeed, poverty is one of the most powerful determinants of whether a child is ready to learn to read at the “starting gate” of preschool and kindergarten. In the late 1990s, acknowledging the “word gap” experienced by children in poverty helped spur interest in foundational skills such as print concepts (for instance, that we read from left to right in English), word recognition and phonics, Neuman says. But even recognizing and addressing the word gap fails to tell the whole story. Before they reach kindergarten, the average cognitive score of children in the nation’s highest socioeconomic group is 60% above the score of children in the lowest-income group—an even deeper problem for children who are non-native English speakers, who now represent nearly one in five U.S. students.

Learning to read and acquire knowledge is a cumulative process. As children begin to grow their vocabulary and gain conceptually rich knowledge, they’re then able to learn at a faster rate, a snowball effect that enables them to keep deepening their understanding of the world. So, while the focus on teaching children fundamentals and phonics was important, Neuman said she and her team were concerned by how little interest there seemed to be in vocabulary-building and seeing to it that children developed the background knowledge so central for comprehension.

“(For a long time) there was the notion that children should just learn words without them being connected to knowledge,” she says. “Even when I went to school, we would have this list of words to learn, and we’d have to look up their definition in a dictionary. But we never knew exactly why we were doing this.

“Why should a child learn to read? Why would they want to do this?”

One very good answer to that question? Science!

“Our study focused on science for a number of reasons,” Neuman says. “Children are fascinated with their world. They’re interested in their environment; they’re fascinated with such common things as the weather. Worms are interesting. Animals are interesting. Everything is new.

“Math is important, but to a young child, it isn’t as intriguing as science. Also, science is very structured as a domain, so you can use it to develop concepts. When you develop concepts, you begin to cluster ideas together and children begin to make inferences,” Neuman explains.

She adds, “For example, a child might learn that insects have six legs and three body parts. Is a moth an insect, then? Yes. Well, what about a spider? Well, no, because spiders have eight legs. The child begins to understand similarities and differences, which form concepts that provide them with the rich knowledge base that allows them to fill in those semantic gaps where the meaning may not be crystal clear, but you fill in the blanks. That’s how children begin comprehending.”

From concepts like, “Bugs have six legs,” the conversation expands to domains, such as “Bugs are living things; lions are living things. What do living things need?” That discussion leads to big ideas that crosscut the concepts, such as all living things needing food, water and air. And from there, it isn’t long until you’re talking with a bunch of kindergartners about habitats.

“What you see them doing is building a schema, or a knowledge network that allows them to remember those concepts and recall them when they’re needed,” she says. “When they learn about survival, for instance, and they read in different genres, they have that knowledge of vocabulary that becomes deeper and deeper over time.”

Reading Aloud

The researchers set up the study as a read-aloud program because studies have shown that this is one of the most important vehicles for developing rich vocabularies and content knowledge. Before the children can read on their own, a teacher or parent reading to them introduces the idea that those squiggles on the page are words, those images are connected to the squiggles, and they can learn to read those squiggles, too.

“Nothing else is quite as powerful as the read-aloud experience,” Neuman says. “What we know is that very often when parents read to a child, they’re not just reading the book, they’re talking about things related to the book — how they’re living, what they’ve done. For instance, a parent might say, ‘Do you remember when we did this?’ The book will recall events and histories between the parent and child, which becomes so powerful for them.

“And when a child is looking at a book and asking questions, the parent responds, and the questions keep coming. So, parents need to be responsive to children’s queries.”

Those questions and answers create our old friend, , the back-and-forth mechanism that adults use to extend children’s language.

It’s also important, Neuman says, to call it quits when the book isn’t working for the child. Nobody wants bedtime book-reading to be like soldiering through a bad book-club selection.

The Right Book

The researchers used specific criteria to select books for the program, Neuman says.

1. The books had simple text, with beautiful, simple pictures that represented the diversity of the children they were working with.
2. The books were “predictable,” meaning they had repeated lines that would encourage the children to chime in and would encourage the reader to solicit the child’s response, “What do you see?”
3. The illustrations were clear. Neuman says even many pre-K books that may have only a few main words often have confusing illustrations. Clear illustrations with bold colors are best because children love bold colors and will pay attention to them.
4. Keep it simple and short. “A lot of times, parents make a mistake by selecting something a bit too complicated for children,” she says. “They’ll look and see that it’s a picture book. But you need to look inside and if there’s too much detail or too many words, maybe pass on that one. I’d rather read, repeat and read the story again than have a too-complicated book that loses the child’s interest.”

Nonfiction for the Win

Though some adults may think children need storybooks with cute animals and characters to pique their interest, Neuman says the research shows that they’re equally interested in informational, nonfiction or narrative nonfiction texts.

“We just did an eye-tracking study where we were looking at children’s attention as they’re being read to,” she says. “It’s very clear from our study that they like informational text just as much as storybooks and their attention was high with both genres. Yet, they remembered more, and the learning was stronger from the informational text. So, I encourage parents and teachers to think about that.”

The bottom line, Neuman says, is that children need both word and world (content knowledge) to learn to read and understand complex texts in later grades. Starting early is crucial, and children learn to understand words when they hear them frequently over time and in multiple domains.

So go ahead; start from the top. And again.

Brown Bear, Brown Bear, what do you see …

As researchers specializing in linguistics and early literacy development, we celebrate the growing movement to connect preschool instruction with the science of reading. Between 2019 and 2022,  passed new laws requiring schools adopt a scientific approach to reading curriculum and instruction. In 31 states, the laws apply to preschool students as well. 

These mandates are a golden opportunity to capitalize on the unique energy, curiosity, and explosive growth in oral language that children experience during the preschool years. 

Early-learning experiences have exponential power: they can shape lifelong learning habits and accelerate literacy, particularly for English-language learners. To unlock that potential, educators and providers must ensure that students acquire a critical mass of vocabulary and related content knowledge from engaging social studies and science texts and activities.Knowledge-rich preschool curriculum is the key. To assist states and preschool providers as they revisit their literacy lessons, the Knowledge Matter Campaign recently updated its K–8 English Language Arts  to include “Early Childhood Essentials.”

Big Ideas for Little Learners

When students learn to read in elementary school, they draw on their vocabulary and what they already know about the subject to make sense of the words on the page. For decades, research has shown that a preschool student’s vocabulary size is a powerful predictor of their later academic success, and that background knowledge is a powerful factor in reading comprehension. Preschool curriculums that intentionally build student knowledge through activities that engage young children with complex oral language are designed with these insights in mind.

The Knowledge Matters Campaign has identified four major attributes of a high-quality, evidence-based, knowledge-building preschool curriculum:

• They are grounded in read-alouds on science and social studies topics that include target vocabulary and are compelling to young children, like space travel or weather.
• They include texts from multiple genres, such as stories and informational texts, that are presented in sequence and use the target vocabulary words.
• They teach related words, phrases, and ideas, including academic vocabulary.
• They extend learning through individual and small-group activities that prompt students to draw on their knowledge and use complex, content-rich language, such as discussions or sensory learning.

Knowledge-Building in Action

What does a knowledge-building preschool curriculum look like? Such classrooms follow multi-week units focused on a single, high-interest topic. Their walls feature art and photographs about the topic, and teachers actively engage students in read-alouds and discussions that are focused on the topic. A set of vocabulary words are gradually introduced and reinforced in texts, discussions, and activities.

For example, in the  used in New York City public preschools, a three-week Wild Animals unit is focused on an interrelated set of 10 vocabulary words and what information students should know by the end of the unit. Teachers and students discuss these key concepts, such as that wild animals live outdoors and away from humans, and are not kept as pets, and use target vocabulary words like bear, lion, and giraffe. All the while, they connect this learning to “big ideas” such as where wild animals live and how wild animals either protect themselves or need protection from others.

Discussions are grounded in five books: a nonfiction information book, two storybooks, and two “predictable” books, which use repetitive phrases and sentence structure. Varying text types expose students to several types of academic language, in addition to the colloquial language preschoolers pick up from their peers. When teachers read and re-read these books aloud throughout the unit, students are welcomed to chime in and participate in the read-aloud.

Consider the opening lines in If I Were a Lion, an illustrated predictable book about wild animals written in verse:

If I were a lion / I’d growl and roar / and knock the dishes / on the floor.
If I were a bear / I’d have big claws / I’d rip up pillows with my paws.

Students can explore the vocabulary and ideas, learn the cadence of the passage, and build important connections about different animals, habitats, and behaviors—all while they practice early-literacy basics like print awareness and letter knowledge. Repetitive texts and related topic knowledge are especially helpful to English-language learners, since they connect new vocabulary with tangible information about the world.

A  found positive impacts on student vocabulary and understanding of science concepts. And in the dynamic preschool classroom, extension activities about everyday social studies and science topics are at the ready, from a visit to a school garden to a walk around the neighborhood—activities that engage and excite young children.

Plus, learning about lions and bears is a lot more fun than learning about “L” and “B.”

Schemas Make Skillful Readers

Knowledge-building curriculums also prepare students to read and understand texts about unfamiliar topics. Preschoolers don’t just learn about wild animals; rather, they experience how information can be related and organized within a theme or topic. Content-rich texts and lessons prompt students to build knowledge networks and conceptual frameworks, or schemas, that help them identify patterns and take in more sophisticated ideas. When students experience this type of understanding, they develop inferencing skills that they apply to other information.

Strong readers are not born—they are built over time, and those efforts start in preschool. As states take a closer look at preschool education, curriculums designed to build oral language and student knowledge can point the way forward. Today’s joyful chatter can be tomorrow’s persuasive essay, so long as we start early and give these curious, fast-developing students the tools and opportunities they need to thrive.

High-dosage tutoring is one of the most effective tools to help students recover from lost learning, including in subjects like reading, where . 

But what if schools didn’t wait until students fell behind? What if all kindergartners got a reading tutor from the start?

That’s what the early-literacy tutoring company is testing out. They have a hunch the results will look good. 

By contracting with schools and tracking outcomes, the company hopes to convince more schools and districts to invest in early literacy tutoring, according to Matt Pasternack, Once’s chief executive and co-founder. 

“It sounds crazy, but why couldn’t you just teach every kid in America to read one-on-one?” Pasternack said.

The program includes daily, 15-minute sessions during school, but is flexible, according to Pasternack.

Pasternack said the curriculum is informed by the , a growing movement to change literacy instruction and re-emphasize phonics. Alone with a tutor, students are taught to recognize letters, the sounds that they make and how they blend to form words. 

By the end of the year, Pasternack hopes all students can decode fluently, which he thinks will enable them to learn “more autonomously in every grade afterward.”

The two-time grantee received roughly half-a-million dollars from Accelerate, a national nonprofit that has given roughly $21 million to various groups to scale tutoring efforts post-pandemic. Once worked with “hundreds” of students during the 2022-2023 school year and will work with over 1,000 during the upcoming school year, according to Pasternack. The program has been offered at public, charter and private schools in states including California, Hawaii, Texas, New York, and Ohio, and in Washington, D.C. 

The program costs schools about $400 per student and has been given to entire classes and as an intervention for selected students.

Schools are required to provide personnel to be tutors, such as paraprofessionals or other existing school staff. Once provides a scripted curriculum and ongoing coaching. Pasternack said school staff are generally not compensated for the additional tutoring duties, but the program is working to partner with local universities so they can get course credit. 

One-on-one key to teaching phonics

Pasternack said “one-on-one instruction simplifies the implementation of the science of reading.” 

He said phonics is challenging to execute in large classrooms because it requires “near-perfect classroom management.”

“In order to teach those types of skills, you need to hear what every single child is saying,” Pasternack said.

“Master teachers” excel at large-group instruction, but many others struggle, Pasternack said. 

Rebecca Kette, an intervention specialist at Orchard STEM School in Cleveland and a former Once tutor and coordinator, said one-on-one time was beneficial to meet her students’ needs.

“I think a constant struggle for classroom teachers is that individualized attention for children,” Kette said.

Patrick Proctor, the at Boston College and a professor focused on bilingual education and literacy, said without individualized attention, teachers can’t meet students’ phonic needs.

“A whole-group phonic program is not designed to meet every student where they are at, but rather is focused at on-average expectations of where students should be,” Proctor said in an email.  

‘Everything in a package’

Once tutors get two half-days of training upfront followed by weekly sessions with Once coaches. All tutor sessions are recorded and viewed by the coaches, who provide feedback during weekly meetings. 

“The way that they tutor and train people, you understand the curriculum and are able to deliver it,” said Joseph Salazar, a Once tutor and coordinator and an English as a Second Language teacher at Seaton Elementary in Washington, D.C.

Salazar said he knows how much goes into designing lessons, so he appreciates Once’s script and curriculum. Even if he didn’t have teaching experience, he said he’d feel confident.

“Once provides everything in a package,” Salazar said.

Empowering school employees, like paraprofessionals who may not have prior experience in literacy instruction, is important for scalability, according to Matthew Kraft, an education and economics professor at Brown University who has studied .

“Scaling tutoring requires expanding the pool of tutors,” Kraft said in an email. “Paraprofessionals offer an attractive pool of labor for tutoring because they have lots of experience working with students and they are already employed by school districts.”

Early results and criticism 

Pasternack said research about Once is “extremely preliminary.” He’s “hopeful” more results will be available “by the middle of this year.”

by LXD Research highlighting the impact of the Once program on students at seven schools last academic year concluded there was a positive correlation between Once lessons and students’ scores on the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS) assessment.

“Overall, the more lesson cycles students completed in Once, the higher their scores,” Rachel Schechter, the report’s author, writes.

Salazar said that of the six students he tutored last year, all started below benchmark and five met or exceeded reading-level benchmarks by the end. 

Kette said her students showed “big gains” in oral-reading fluency.

Laura Justice, at Ohio State’s Department of Educational Studies and the executive director of its Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy, agreed there is “strong evidence” for the efficacy of small-group lessons on decoding and comprehension skills. But before scaling a program like Once, it’s important for claims to be “assessed using experimental methods,” she said. 

Justice said there isn’t evidence supporting the idea that one-on-one is more effective than small-group tutoring. 

Pasternack said he’s open to exploring small groups, but that it would pose several challenges for the program.

“All the kids need to say the exact same sound at the same moment otherwise they’re going to listen to each other, rather than reading,” Pasternack said.

Justice also said it should be tested whether daily sessions really boost outcomes more than sessions two or three times per week.

“There is a threshold of additional instruction that is needed to help children advance, but instruction above that threshold does not necessarily pay off,” she said in an email.

Pasternack said that Once has “documented cases” of students that missed sessions and attended approximately two or three sessions per week. 

“The kid just moves half as quickly,” Pasternack said. “You can’t move faster in less time.”

Proctor said he’s skeptical about the logistics of scaling Once. Tutoring a class of 16 students one-on-one for 15 minutes each amounts to four hours of instructional time a day. But, since school days are complicated, he said it would take longer. 

“Likely it wouldn’t happen every day for every child because schedules are challenging,” Proctor wrote. “Multiply that by every day of the school year and you get a lot of slippage.”

Pasternack responded by saying schools aren’t required to use Once programming everyday.

“We work with each school to create a schedule that works for that school,” Pasternack said.

Proctor also challenged the belief that schools “need to be going so heavy on phonics and decoding in kindergarten.”

“The point of kindergarten is to develop social skills, introduce children to literacy, language, and numeracy, explore music, play,” he said.

But Pasternack said declining kindergarten enrollment makes him think current standards may not be working.

Additionally, Pasternack said Once isn’t just about decoding. Each lesson emphasizes phonemic awareness, includes comprehension questions, and revolves around reading an episode, he said, “in a suspenseful and engaging epic journey of a group of animals searching for safety, wisdom and connection.”

Ultimately, Pasternack said he hopes Once can build on existing research and “broaden the conversation.”

“We don’t want to play games with the data,” he said. “We are truly curious. Does scripted, explicit, one-on-one instruction in foundational literacy change the trajectories of the students who receive it in kindergarten?”

Correction: Rachel Schechter is the founder of LXD Research and the author of a report on the Once tutoring program. Her named was misspelled in an earlier version of this story.

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Overdeck Family Foundation provide financial support to both Accelerate and ����Ӱ��.

To be clear, the music legend, business executive and philanthropist doesn’t bring 2.4 million children’s books to the post office every month and drop them in the mailbox herself, but she is far more than just the face of . Every chance she gets, Dolly Parton reads bedtime stories on video and shares her inspiration behind the gift-booking program and The Dollywood Foundation. Best of all, as soon as every ZIP code in a state is covered, she shows up in person to celebrate.

Launched in 1995, the Imagination Library sends free books to 1 in 10 U.S. children under 5 years old. The program operates in all 50 states. Here’s a look at how Dolly’s delivering early literacy in three of them.

Arkansas

“The children don’t know her as a famous singer,” laughs Charlotte Rainey Parham, executive director of the . “To them, Dolly is the book lady.”

To help pay for the books and distribution, the Arkansas Imagination Library receives funds that originated as the largest federal grant ever received by the Arkansas Department of Education. Thanks to this investment, 43% of all the eligible children in Arkansas are enrolled, says Brooke Ivy Bridges, affiliate resource director of the Arkansas Imagination Library.

“And we’re working hard to increase that number,” Bridges says, describing efforts to develop partnerships with birthing hospitals. “That way, before a family even leaves the hospital with its new baby, the newborn is registered. By the time the child starts kindergarten, he or she will have a home library of 60 books.”

Before coming to work at the Arkansas Imaginary Library, Bridges was involved as president of one of the Rotary clubs in Little Rock—and as a mom. “My daughter loves Dolly,” she says. “She has grown up seeing a life-size Dolly Parton cutout here in my home office. She loved her books from the Imagination Library.”

In many rural communities, Bridges notes, public libraries are less accessible, so home libraries become even more important. She adds that, in multigenerational households, grandparents, aunts, or uncles also get involved in reading to children. “The ultimate goal is to create a family conversation around the love of reading,” she says.

Colorado

Laura Douglas, ’s director of operations, says there have been Imagination Library programs in communities throughout Colorado for about 15 years. But it really took off in November 2021 when Governor Jared Polis signed legislation to make it part of the state budget. “Half of our book bill is paid by the state of Colorado,” she explains, “and the other half is paid by the local affiliates.”

Douglas, who previously worked for the , travels across the state, meeting with local affiliates and training them how to implement the program. She and her team are working to improve access where early literacy resources can make the most difference, including Spanish-speaking migrant communities.

Douglas notes that these families especially appreciate dual-language books. Partnering with the state’s is vital to the mission but presents challenges. “Those children don’t necessarily have a permanent home location or a permanent address,” she says, “So those books are mailed to a local preschool, rec center or other central location.”

Douglas appreciates the cultural diversity of the books in the program and singles out Emily Kate Moon’s as a personal favorite.

Jack Tate, president and CEO of Imagination Library of Colorado, captures the sentiment of many of the state programs when he emphasizes the importance of partnerships to drive expansion. Rotary Clubs, libraries, early childhood councils and United Ways have been especially enthusiastic. “One of our United Way affiliates told me why they liked the program,” he says. “They see it as a tangible way to bring the whole community together, because all the children get books, and that has a really great way of unifying a community.”

California

runs . State Librarian Greg Lucas credits Governor Gavin Newsom and bipartisan support from Senators Shannon Grove and Toni G. Atkins for a $68.2 million one-time funding commitment in October 2022 to promote early literacy through free books.

A self-described “broken-down old newspaperman,” Lucas is preparing to fill leadership roles to conduct this massive undertaking. “We have 2.4 million kids under five. Los Angeles alone has 500,000,” he says. “That’s not what the program looks like in Delaware. California is the most diverse group of people that have ever been brought together as equals in the history of human civilization.” Chaired by Jackie Wong of , the Imagination Library board in California is actively shoring up existing local partnerships.

Lucas says the San Diego Literacy Council is jumping in feet first, prioritizing the ZIP codes with the lowest literacy rate. He also mentions Long Beach, which has the largest population of Cambodian Americans in the country. Other communities speak Mandarin, Vietnamese, Russian and Farsi, among other languages.

Lucas is optimistic that those 2.4 million young children in California will get their books, thanks to the simple power of its model: “A package arrives, addressed to you, with a cool book inside that’s going to make you think and make you eager to get the next one.”

The main character of her children’s book is a toy instrument, a banjolele (half-banjo, half-ukulele) named Baby. With illustrations by Marcela Avelar, came out this past November, but its journey began six years earlier. June was taking part in the Kennedy Center’s program, founded by Michelle Obama, which sends artists and creators into schools throughout the nation. Students loved her story about Baby, and Turnaround Art’s Kathy Fletcher encouraged her to turn it into a book. “When I heard Valerie tell the enchanting story,” Fletcher told me. “I knew it would be an immediate favorite as a children’s book. I’m so happy that this beautiful book, with its positive, inspiring message is out and reaching children everywhere.”

When not , June lives in Humboldt, Tennessee, and Early Learning Nation magazine caught up with her for a brief but intense call. Here’s what we learned.

1. Anything can be creative. Last month at South by Southwest, June and gave a talk together about creativity. Her message to people who don’t think they’re creative is: Think again. You may not play an instrument or write poetry, but any pursuit can take a creative form, if you think of it that way. “Maybe you like to design your nails,” she says, “Or maybe you love to cook. It’s about the tone of things. It’s the way you do it.”

As a struggling musician, she worked as a house cleaner, and there were lots of times during those seven years that she hated the drudgery and counted the minutes until she could get out of there. “There were other days,” she notes, “when I saw myself as a domestic artist, and I was ready to go make other people’s homes beautiful and to have it be a sanctuary for them when they came back.” June and Ayers urged their SXSW audience to think of creativity as an antidote to overwork, media oversaturation and all the toxic elements of our society. “There is a revolutionary power in creativity,” she asserts, “and in the communities that it builds.”

2. At first, all it takes is 10 minutes a day. Although banjolele is one of the easier instruments to learn, June confesses that, unlike singing, not every part of music comes naturally to her. “I never doubted my ability to belt out a song,” she says, recalling the time she sang “This Land Is Your Land” in Mr. Wallace’s fourth-grade class. “Instruments, that was the hard part. And keeping time,” she adds, thinking back on the girls on the playground who mastered elaborate hand-clapping games. “I couldn’t keep the rhythm at all. It was very embarrassing. So I decided, Why not become a musician for a living? I like a challenge.”

Learning anything new can be frustrating, but her rule is to start with 10 minutes a day. “I get mad at the instrument and sometimes have to walk away,” she says. “But it’s still there waiting for me the next day.” With practice, the 10 minutes stretches out to a half-hour and then an hour or more. And before you know it, people like and start noticing. Her 2021 album The Moon and Stars: Prescriptions for Dreamers, Rolling Stone magazine declared, “ultimately feels like a record about perseverance, survival and acceptance, about turning one’s gaze from scars to nighttime stars.”

3. Different is good. As a singer, June always knew she didn’t sound like other singers. Her tone is a bit scratchy and sometimes nasal and won’t remind anyone of her 80s idols, Whitney Houston and Tracy Chapman. The word idiosyncratic comes up a lot. “Her voice is at once grounded and cosmic, earthy yet divine,” . June admits, “I always used to ask myself, Why am I doing this? And the answer was always, I’m doing it for me. I’m doing it because I love it, for my joy.” She’s grateful for the growing audience that does connect to her music. For those who don’t — it’s simple: “Not everything’s for everybody.”

4. Yoga means unity. The word yoga, June explains, comes from a Sanskrit word meaning to join or unite. “The ultimate goal is union,” she says. “Which is the point of anything that gets you out of the ego and the self and all the things not helping people to grow and build community.”

Her forthcoming publication, , concerns, in her words, manifesting dreams. It’s not just about working on yourself, she says, referring to a theme common to many wellness titles. Whether readers are connecting to nature or to their communities, the aim is overcoming the forces constantly trying to divide us, based on race, class and status. “I don’t think everybody has to be volunteering for everything at every meeting of their neighborhood association,” she says. “You could be a hermit and create a harmonious world by aspiring to unity.”

5. Kindness takes a little extra effort. The years she spent cleaning houses, among other memories, help June to try a little harder when people are less than pleasant. “Think about the neighbor that you just don’t get along with,” she says, “or the person at the coffee shop who’s grumpy all the time who clearly doesn’t like you. How do you build a community and keep love in action with them?” That person’s stress is not yours to take on, she counsels, but there’s a lot of darkness in the world, and you just have to remember a lot of us are worried and frightened and don’t always remember to smile.

There’s something good waiting at the other side of fear. According to June, the lesson of her book is this: “There’s a little voice inside you that says, I’m scared and I’m terrified, but I really, really, really see myself one day able to make it through a song.”

Mark Swartz: Why is diversity especially important in picture books?

Ernestine Benedict: Access to diverse books from the earliest ages is important for so many reasons. First, all children, especially babies and toddlers, need books where they can see themselves and their experiences. Seeing characters that look like them and stories that represent their own experiences tells children that their lives are worthy of being thought about, discussed and celebrated, and we want to be doing that at the earliest ages of life.

These picture books play an important role to help nurture positive self-identity and self-esteem for every child. Books that reflect children’s lives also invite children in: they send a message that books and reading are for them. This is an important entry ramp to literacy and education in general.

The reports that children form their perspectives on race much earlier than most parents realize. Babies as young as 3 months old start to prefer faces from certain racial groups, and by age 4, children can exhibit race-based discrimination. Ensuring that all children — regardless of their own race and ethnicity — grow up with picture books with characters and stories that feature diverse races and cultures contributes to racial equity and empowers children to form better relationships and connections in an increasingly diverse world. Stories that feature a wide variety of characters and experiences are a powerful way for all families to challenge stereotypes and expand our worldview from the start.

Swartz: How did the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and First Book initially come together around the cause of diverse books? What problems are you trying to solve?

Kyle Zimmer: The Diverse Books for All Coalition is working to address three issues: the lack of access to affordable, quality children’s books by and about diverse cultures and races; the need for a clear narrative about the value and benefits of diverse books; and support for parents, caregivers and educators to effectively define, advocate for and integrate diverse books in their programs, classrooms and communities.

What we realized is that, while there have been some promising individual efforts to address these issues, the efforts have been too fragmented and aren’t moving the needle fast enough at a time when our schools and our kids need our support more than ever.

Swartz: Even for children who aren’t reading yet?

Zimmer: Children start learning about their own identities and valuing differences at the very earliest ages. That’s why the coalition is working to include parents, caregivers and educators on the value of providing all children, starting from birth, with beautiful books that celebrate different races and cultures.

Swartz: What values brought the coalition and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation together?

Zimmer: To achieve systemic change, we need to bring the full power of the sector, and that means working together across organizations. The vision of the coalition aligned with the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s commitment to diversity and racial equity. The foundation also understands the power of collaboration — so there is considerable common ground between the work of the coalition and Kellogg’s priorities. We are grateful to the Kellogg Foundation for supporting this work, and hope other funders join as well. True systemic change can only happen when we join forces and work across organizations.

After 90% of surveyed educators indicated that children in their programs would be more enthusiastic readers if they had books with characters, stories and images that reflect their lives, First Book launched the in 2013 to increase access to diverse books. The coalition really takes this work to an entirely new level.

And while First Book is the catalyst and backbone for the coalition, this is a shared, co-owned approach: together we are co-creating what we want to accomplish, and how we will measure impact. I’m energized by the prospect of multiplying this effort by 27 organizations with shared values and learnings.

Swartz: How did the group decide to form the coalition?

Zimmer: We used a very intentional, consultative approach, starting the process with one-on-one, individual conversations with each organization. We wanted to hear what specific issues were important to them regarding the need for diverse books; how it impacted their work, and the children and families they served. What did they see as the critical elements for a successful collaboration, and at the end of the process, what did they feel was important to accomplish together?

After conducting those interviews, we provided a report that identified common priorities, and we convened the group to explore those areas. There was definite interest in working collectively. This is not the First Book show. It’s important to us that every member’s voice, needs, expectations and goals were heard and valued from the outset — and continue to be.

Swartz: How did ZERO TO THREE become involved with the Diverse Books for All Coalition?

Benedict: Our mission is to ensure that all babies and toddlers have a strong start in life. So, while we don’t directly distribute children’s books, educating and advocating for parents to integrate diverse books from the youngest ages is very much a part of our mission. Having a number of partner organizations as part of this coalition, we were excited to have the opportunity to take part as we see the critical need for this type of collaborative effort, especially now. ZERO TO THREE intends to use our megaphone to support the work of the coalition.

Swartz: How can educators and caregivers discover and obtain diverse children’s books?

Zimmer: Local booksellers and libraries are great resources for parents and caregivers to learn about and obtain diverse children’s books. In addition, many coalition members regularly lift up titles of diverse books on our respective websites and through our social media platforms. For example, on the , our professional curation team highlights a range of diverse books, searchable by age, topics, format and the like.

Anyone can go on the site and look at the titles, but in keeping with our nonprofit mission, only eligible educators — those at Title I schools and community programs where 70% or more of the children served are from economically challenged neighborhoods — can purchase books from our site.

Swartz: How can libraries and others get involved?

Benedict: Libraries have been focused on diverse books for years as part of their missions. We’ve had initial discussions with the American Library Association so that we’re aware of each other’s work, and we are continuing those discussions to see how we can support each other, share resources and learnings.

We are open to discussions with other organizations that use book distribution as part of their theory of change, and are interested in contributing to the work of the coalition.

Swartz: Which authors or books are you especially excited about?

Zimmer: Sorry — that’s an impossible question to answer. That’s like asking a parent: which child is your favorite? There are so many voices we need to hear from, so many wonderful stories to share. The important thing is that we provide all children with the broadest range of beautiful books featuring characters and experiences—to build understanding and empathy and excite them about reading.

It’s also important that children get to choose their books, with the support and guidance of parents, caregivers and educators. At the end of the day, I’m excited about authors and books that get kids excited to read and help all children feel seen and appreciated for who they are.

Progress, Sure, But So Far to Go

At the end of the five years, the Diverse Books for All Coalition aims to double the number of affordable, quality children’s books by and about diverse cultures and races — which is measured and reported by the .

The most recent numbers show that out of 3,183 children’s books published in the U.S. in 2021, only 436 were about Black/African Americans; 337 were about Asians; 234 were about Latinos; 62 were about Indigenous people; 21 were about those of Arab descent; and 6 were about Pacific Islanders.

Books written by authors from diverse races and cultures were similarly under-represented: out of the 3,183 children’s books published in the U.S., only 307 were written by Black/African American authors; 463 were by Asian authors; 311 were written by Latinos; 47 were written by Indigenous authors; 21 were written by those of Arab descent; and 8 were written by Pacific Islanders.

The Campaign for Grade-Level Reading’s webinar on Oct. 11 celebrated a milestone in West Virginia early literacy: DPIL now reaches all 55 counties in the state. Only 10 other states can claim this distinction.

Moderated by Malai Amfahr, senior program officer of Constituency Outreach and Engagement, CGLR, the panel featured:

• Kelly Griffith, state coordinator in the Office of Teaching and Learning with West Virginia’s Department of Education
• Tarabeth Heineman, executive director of the June Harless Center
• Brittany Fike, early and elementary learning specialist at the June Harless Center
• Alicia Syner, program developer for imagination library at the June Harless Center

Here are our takeaways:

1. “A home library is a birthright.” Heineman’s assertion captures the intent of this unique program. Here’s how it works: When families sign up their children, they receive one free book in the mail every month, starting with a customized version of “The Little Engine That Could” personalized with the child’s name and a message from the singer.

The subscription continues until the child “graduates” at five years old and receives a Ready for Kindergarten book. A newsletter and book activity sheets support caregiver-child interactions.

Beyond boosting early literacy, has been shown to enhance school readiness, to boost parent engagement and to further life skills. Receiving books in the mail makes them feel especially precious. A mom on the webinar reported, “We love getting mail, and we love surprises,” while another stated, “It may look like a book, but for our family, it’s a whole lot more.”

2. It’s not just any books. Early childhood literacy experts make their selections from the Penguin Random House catalogue. Some are in Spanish or braille, according to readers’ requests. According to the 2021 (which focuses on Cuyahoga County, Ohio), “What cannot be overstated is the immense satisfaction respondents experienced when interacting with DPIL books. Whether it was the child’s enjoyment of the books, or the appreciation for the diversity and uniqueness of the books’ characters, or the usefulness of the reading tips that come with DPIL books, the overwhelming majority of respondents found these books to be worthwhile.

Representation matters in children’s books, Fike maintained, telling a story about a girl who asked, “Are there other books with little girls who look like me?”

3. Community benefits ensure greater participation. “When schools and communities are well prepared to deliver best practices,” said Griffith, a former first grade teacher, “it impacts the students. This helps our students be better prepared for their future,” The partners encourage child care providers to sign up, and outreach extends to food banks, the foster system and even fire departments. Statewide read-aloud events also promote enrollment.

4. Partnerships drive growth. In 2007, DPIL began serving 13 West Virginia counties. The effort could never have reached all 55 counties without , a $47 million partnership of the federal government and 423 counties in 13 states; and and the (ELTAC) at . While the State of West Virginia doesn’t fund DPIL, it has . Griffith noted that 52% of eligible West Virginia children are currently registered.

5. A mixed funding stream means shared success. State lottery proceeds originally fueled DPIL in West Virginia, but today the costs of the program (approximately $2.10 per child per month) are split between and local support, led by the Harless Center. Heineman promised, “If you have Dolly in your corner, it’s positive from the get-go”

A visit from the singer herself, with a brief performance and a fireside chat, supercharged funding earlier this year and inspired Governor Jim Justice to declare Aug. 9 as Dolly Parton Imagination Library Day. “We were all on a Dolly high for a whole month,” said Syner, a megafan who has reportedly shown up at events in Dolly drag.

Philanthropic supporters have included the United Way, hospitals, schools, libraries, banks and civic groups (the Rotary Club, for example) as well as individuals. Advising, “Stick with the mission and persevere, and you’ll find another funding source,” Syner reminded participants that the number one reason people don’t give is they aren’t asked.

Mark Swartz: Your name has become strongly associated with the concept of and the vast difference between a home that has books everywhere and a home that doesn’t. How did you come to look at that variable?

Susan Neuman: It was literally out of frustration. I was in Philadelphia at the time, and we were trying to understand why so many communities seemed to be succeeding and others not. We conducted an audit that turned up enormous differences in access to print for those children who were living in concentrated poverty. It was not just in the home. It was in the child care institutions, it was in the library, in the school library. It was everywhere.

Swartz: How did JetBlue get involved?

Neuman: They have a social responsibility office, and they have been giving books for a long time. They wanted to gain a better understanding of the impact they were having. So we selected [D.C. neighborhood] Anacostia as well as Detroit and Vermont Square in Los Angeles. And again, we saw massive differences. We saw that those places with concentrated poverty virtually had no books. The sheer inequity was extraordinary to me. And it seems like an easy fix, but somehow it hasn’t been fixed.

Swartz: What do we know about the best ways to get books out there?

Neuman: First of all, choice is critical. Book reading is not just about reading. It’s about finding out stuff and becoming an expert in a domain. So kids want to be smart, or they want to be funny or they want to have the best knock-knock jokes. Another thing is to make it precious. dispense books wrapped in cellophane. The children say, “Oh my gosh, this is mine. It’s never been touched.”

Swartz: Are you tracking what’s popular? Is there a surprise runaway bestseller?

Neuman: The ones with diverse characters. In Anacostia, which is primarily African American, all those African American books were taken. TV- and movie-related books, too, which is fine, we’re trying to establish that early reading habit very early.

Swartz: How do create a culture of reading?

Neuman: We’ve tried very hard to find the trusted leaders in a community, and every community will be different. In Anacostia, it was Pastor Maurice, who always had a gaggle of kids hanging out with him and who believed that kids should be reading. He was a big prophet of reading.

Swartz: What else works?

Neuman: We’re always looking for the big bang. What is the big thing that’s going to make the difference? But I’m convinced it’s not going to be just one big thing. It’s going to be collaboration among community members working together to support our children, to view every single child in that neighborhood as our children, and coming together in all sorts of different ways to support literacy early on.

Swartz: What worries you most about the way reading is taught?

Neuman: We still have this pedagogy of poverty that the children who live in poverty should acquire nothing but basic skills and basic foundations. People are returning to the importance of phonics and phonemic awareness and forgetting that these children have interest, choice and a love of reading when we give them opportunity. It really worries me that we haven’t learned the lessons of the past.

Swartz: What gives you hope for the future of literacy?

Neuman: I’ve spent a lot of time working with children in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx. We have a vocabulary intervention for 3- and 4-year-old kids, and they are so capable and such robust language learners. We just had this wonderful study where the children learn the word ‘hypothesis’ and it was just by watching videos.

Swartz: I noticed a lot of references in this paper to Urie Bronfenbrenner’s 1979 book . How did this work shape your approach?

Neuman: Bronfenbrenner really inspired me, and the reason is that is it takes a community in a neighborhood to create a literacy learner. It’s not just parent involvement. And typically what we’ve done is we’ve relied on the school, we’ve relied on the home, but we haven’t recognized that the community or the neighborhood has a powerful influence on children’s learning. Much of my work in the past year in particular has focused on literacy in barbershops and different social offices, in nail salons, laundromats and playgrounds. I’m trying to surround children with the notion that books matter.

For the I-LABS researchers, the project shows that a well-structured, evidence-based reading instruction program can make a measurable difference in teaching children key reading skills, even if delivered fully online and just for two weeks.

“We were surprised at how successful it was,” says Dr. Yael Weiss-Zruya, a research scientist at I-LABS and first author of the study, “” published in Frontiers of Human Neuroscience. The study details a virtual reading program in which 83 5-year-old children worked remotely with teachers on key reading skills. By the end of the camp, the children who participated had improved significantly in all measures compared with children who did not take part in the virtual camp.

In 2019, I-LABS researchers, including study co-author Jason Yeatman, had set up a two-week summer reading program at the university to teach early literacy skills to pre-kindergarten students. Weiss-Zruya inherited the program just before the pandemic started and the researchers quickly began to consider how it might be adapted to an online version.

“The team put a lot of thinking into how to keep the kids engaged,” she says. “With the in-person program, the hands-on activities kept it interesting for the children. But trying to keep them engaged remotely, we knew, would require more prompts from the teachers, more visuals. We needed to be more creative.”

Weiss-Zruya adds, “We created themes for the day — one day it was a farm theme, another day it was space — and the teachers got dressed up accordingly.”

Including, yes, a teacher wearing a chicken on his head. Anything for science.

An essential element to the reading program was the ability of the kids to interact with each other and the teacher. Because social interaction is such an important part of learning for children in this age group, the researchers made certain that participants could get to know each other in as close to in-person connections as possible.

“We mixed the groups every day, so each kid eventually got to be in a group with all the kids during the two weeks of the camp,” Weiss-Zruya says. “We didn’t turn off the mics, but we put in a lot of effort in explaining Zoom manners; like, you need to stay in the Zoom window in the video box, and if you need to say something, wait for your turn or raise your hand, let the teacher know. But we did encourage them to interact with each other.

“So many parents want to sign their kids up for different apps that will just automatically teach them to read. They’ll put the kids in front of the computer or iPad and forget about them and hope the kids will learn to read. That’s very different from how we know to help kids learn. I’m not saying anything against these programs, but we can’t trust them solely to teach children to read. It’s important that kids have both the peer learning environment and the direct interaction among the kids and teachers, and this is a bit more challenging in an online setting.”

To facilitate that interaction and discussion in the group sessions, the research team mailed a kit to each child containing such items as worksheets, books, crayons, Playdoh, DUPLOs (LEGO building block sets) and a set of child-sized headphones. For families without internet connection or a computer that could be devoted to the daily time needed for participation, the project provided iPads and internet connection.

The in-person reading camp involved playing with cards and toys, so the team had to sort how to translate those activities into PowerPoint presentations compelling enough to engage a bunch of 5-year-olds—a tough crowd by any standard. Waving a colored plastic egg or other prompts to “vote” on the right answer and other playful activities did the trick.

The program focused on phonology — distinguishing different sounds — letter knowledge, and mapping letters to sounds. Each day’s program ended with a story, underscoring the idea that the goal of reading is to comprehend what’s written.

Throughout the COVID-19 epidemic, children throughout the world have had limited (or no) access to consistent, structured teaching. From early in the pandemic, researchers and early learning specialists sounded the alarm over the probability of significant losses in reading and math achievement, and warned that school closures would increase the disparity between students from lower- and higher-income families. Indeed, a recent policy analysis by Stanford University researchers confirmed these pessimistic predictions and showed that in more than 100 U.S. school districts throughout the U.S., students fell about 30 percent behind in reading fluency scores in fall 2020. Students in lower-achieving schools fell even farther behind. A 2021 study of 5.5 million students in grades 3-8 by the Northwest Evaluation Association’s (NWEA) Center for School and Student Progress showed similar losses in reading and math achievement.

As U.S. schools shut down physically in March 2020, teachers and school systems quickly went into action to try the best they could to deliver online learning. Studies comparing online and face-to-face instruction in pre-pandemic K-12 education have shown that virtual programs can be as effective as face-to-face instruction — sometimes even more effective. But most online programs have served older children, grade 6 and up, and many have been heavily weighted to families of mid-to-high socioeconomic status.

Success in online learning during the pandemic depended in large part on students’ access to the necessary technology, the amount of caregiver support from home, the level of student engagement and other factors.

Because reading is a foundational skill for participation in the modern world, educators and researchers are keenly aware of the urgency in finding solutions to early literacy learning. While online learning seems like an attractive possibility, scant research existed to see if that was even possible. The I-LABS online reading program goes a long way to answering that question.

Dr. Patricia Kuhl, the study’s faculty author and I-LABS codirector says that the reading camp shows that an online program designed to promote learning socially can work “phenomenally well.” The camp can be used all over the world by children anywhere, she says.

The limitation of the present model is that it involved a group of six children, with breakout sessions of three children to one teacher; I-LABS was set up to do no more than four groups of six children a month. Weiss-Zurya says the next step is to see if more children can be added without reducing the program’s effectiveness. The project will also begin to work on semantics and the structure of language, as well as deploying powerful Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to see if the online reading camp program induces the same brain changes observed in the children when the program was being delivered in person.

But first things first. Thanks to I-LABS’ virtual reading camp, 83 5-year-olds are now on their way to becoming people who read. Today, 83 children. Tomorrow? With appropriate resources, maybe the world.

Today, McDaniels, 57, is exercising his education muscle with a vocabulary-building series from called “What’s the Word?” as well as a children’s book, Darryl’s Dream, a semi-autobiographical story that focuses on social-emotional topics like how to deal with stress and confusion. “Once you get to rehab and therapy,” he says, “you discover that all those things existed when you were little; it’s just that nobody addressed it.”

In an interview, McDaniels and Makeda Mays Green, vice president at Nickelodeon, share about their collaboration on “What’s the Word?” and advice on how to make literacy fun for early learners. Here are five literacy lessons from the conversation:

1. Music drives literacy. In McDaniels’s succinct formulation: “You put a rhythm to it, you learn it.” Over Zoom, he demonstrates for me why the ABCs is “one of the best raps in history” and Dr. Seuss is “the best rapper ever.” Mays Green cites Schoolhouse Rock as one of the new series’ inspirations. “We’re using music to teach kids the meaning of the words they’re singing,” she says. “We know from a number of studies that kids have the innate ability to grasp messaging when it comes through the vehicle of music.”

Partnering with a musical legend beloved by parents (and, let’s face it, grandparents) makes it more likely that an adult will enjoy the program alongside the young audience. “Darryl embodies a love of learning and the value of literacy,” she continues. “That means listening, speaking, reading and writing.”

2. Comic books are good reading tools. McDaniels originally learned his ABCs so he could keep up with the exploits of Spider-Man and Iron Man. “Something in there was so powerful,” he recalls. “It made me want to learn to read, so I could understand what was going on.” With his thick, square glasses, the protagonist of Darryl’s Dream was more of an awkward Clark Kent than a Superman, and that double-identity, too, captured the appeal of comics. (Among favorites more likely to be found in the children’s section of the library, he names Sounder, Curious George, Charlotte’s Web and, above all, Pippi Longstocking. He was bowled over when a recent episode of the revisionist superhero series The Boys acknowledged Pippi’s superpowers.)

Later in life, when he rapped about such personal struggles as discovering he was adopted, he made sense of it all through his first literary love: “I’m a superhero in the comic books / My make believe is your reality / I’m everything I pretend to be / Everything I need is inside of me / And anything else is the enemy.”

3. Hip-Hop brings down barriers. Run-DMC helped U.S. audiences discover a whole new musical vocabulary — not to mention the emerging hip-hop culture, fashion and attitude — but they also provided an opportunity for fans around the world to learn English. “I was just in Austin for the South by Southwest conference,” the artist says, “and a guy from Guatemala introduced himself by saying, ‘You know how I learned English? Listening to RUN-DMC on the radio!”

For many fans, the signature moment in the band’s career occurred in the “Walk This Way” video, when Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler used his microphone stand to break through a wall separating rap and rock. Mays Green of Noggin says children continue to respond to this penchant for literal and figurative barrier breaking—just as he rapped in “King of Rock”: “Now we crash through walls / cut through floors / Bust through ceilings and knock down doors.” For some reluctant readers, watching a rule breaker pick up a book can be inspiring.

4. “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” McDaniels loves this quote from Albert Einstein, explicating, “He didn’t say knowledge wasn’t necessary. He knows that if you put imagination with knowledge, nothing is impossible.”

For McDaniels, imagination starts with coloring books, arts and crafts and storytelling, and it continues through envisioning your future. Kids should aim high, but the higher they aim, the more discipline it will take. School is where dreams and discipline come together. “Showing up on time, getting in line when the bell rings, if you can’t do that, I’m not going to hire you for my million-dollar company. School is preparation if you want to be a doctor, lawyer, entertainer, whatever.”

5. “Let the kids tell you who they are.” In recent years, McDaniels has appeared at countless school assemblies, and he sees a lot of reason for hope as well as concern. “The kids need the permission to discover their purpose,” he says. “That’s the whole key to empowerment. A lot of curricula and techniques don’t allow that.”

Maybe the reason adults don’t ask open-ended questions is that they’re afraid of the answers, but McDaniels urges, “You’ve got to give them a minute where you can ask them, ‘What is your journey? What do you want to be? What do you see yourself doing?’” If they know you’re really listening, they’ll have a lot to say.  “Kids discover who they are by exploring and learning more about the world, other people and the many possibilities that exist for them,” says Mays Green. “And early literacy is key to that learning and self-discovery.”

McDaniels is thrilled about teaching early learners literacy skills with “What’s the Word?” because he still loves watching cartoons, and being a cartoon that kids relate to and learn from is even better. ”Reading prepares you for your destiny. Literacy sets you up for a dream coming true.”

K. T. Horning, director of the at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, provided evidence that the publishing industry has begun to showcase more authors and characters of color. Furthermore, Michaela Goade recently became the first Native American illustrator to win the Randolph Caldecott Medal for best children’s picture story. However, representation on shelves still doesn’t amount to the demographic makeup of the United States.

Here are our takeaways from the webinar:

1. Books shape children’s attitudes and beliefs about themselves and the world.

Iheoma U. Iruka, founding director of the Equity Research Action Coalition, emphasized the importance of what happens during a child’s first 1,000 days. “That’s when the foundations of brain development are built,” she said.

Once a book becomes a favorite, it becomes a part of children’s lives — forever. Mom and dad will be asked to read it over and over. It will become the springboard for children learning to read.

“Reading achievement predicts futures,” Iruka said.

Years later, they will probably still be able to recite passages from memory and to conjure the illustrations in their mind. So the words matter. The pictures matter.

2. “When you speak to the children, you speak to the family.”

Shabazz Larkin, author and illustrator of , was an electrifying presence on Zoom, bursting with enthusiasm and insight — for instance, pointing out the way children’s books reach the adults on whose laps the children are sitting.

As someone with a lap, this struck me as simultaneously obvious and mind-blowing. When families read together, they’re discovering the world together, and the white suburban fantasy that the majority of children’s books depict slights the real world. When he first envisioned The Thing about Bees, he was thinking about the white bread illustrations of Norman Rockwell. “I always felt it was a world that wasn’t mine,” he said, recalling that he thought to himself: “Let me paint some new people in this classic American world.”

3. Books are machines for belonging and respect.

Larkin underscored the urgency of this function, noting that even in his own home, situated in a diverse part of Brooklyn, with its walls covered by portraits of Black people, his son once confided that he didn’t like the color of his own skin. “How is this possible?” he wondered.

Patty Wong, who recently became the first Asian American president of the recalled, “I rarely saw myself or my diverse community in picture books. Children need to see themselves and others.”

Sensitive to what constitutes age-appropriate materials and attuned to the interests of young readers, teachers and librarians are champions of diverse books.

All of the webinar speakers also forcefully weighed in against banning books, encouraging participants to buy books, to be vocal on social media and to show up in city council and school board meetings.

4. Large and small publishers are making a difference.

Kyle Zimmer, CEO and cofounder of , conveyed the scope of her organization’s reach by citing statistics: 17 million books distributed annually to more than 500,000 educators. Engaging publishers in demand is how to elevate the market for diverse content, she said. “We push the prices down and promote relevancy and diversity.”

First Book launched the initiative to build empathetic “change-makers.” Author and curator Cynthia Leitich Smith introduced the of HarperCollins, which offers books for and about Native Americans. She stressed that many titles feature everyday plots. “We are not defined by the bad things that have happened to us,” she said.

In a more independent vein, Philip Lee, publisher of , served up his vision of food-themed children’s books that tie into family, climate change and activism.

5. Distribution matters.

As a publisher, Lee spoke from experience when he said that printing books is only half the battle. The product must reach readers, and many or most potential readers of diverse books lack easy access. That’s why First Book has an elastic definition of the educators in its community — including, for example, barbers. Readers to Eaters partners with farmers markets.

And Too Small to Fail’s Patti Miller praised an effort from the to distribute 25,000 diverse books and support from the to focus on this issue.

Michelle Torgerson, president and CEO of Raising A Reader, outlined their book distribution reach to partners including child care, library and housing communities, and NBCDI’s Jocelyn Sturdivant described Read to Succeed, which is devoted to stocking home libraries with culturally relevant and developmentally appropriate children’s books.

Panelists noted that there are many kinds of diversity. Beyond inclusive texts, children’s literature should also provide a window on disability, LGBTQ families and minority religious groups. Again and again, participants cited a construct set forth by : children’s books act as mirrors, windows and sliding glass doors. “These windows,” Bishop has written, “are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created and recreated by the author.”

The “stuff” Mitchell’s referring to encompasses a journey from illiteracy to authorship, from poverty to stability and from fame on the sports field to nonprofit leadership.

Mitchell played just one season as wide receiver with the New England Patriots, but what a season it was, culminating in a Super Bowl victory in February 2017. After the game, in which he caught five passes in the fourth quarter, , “Everybody had confidence to have Malcolm in those spots if he got it. He proved everybody right because he came up with the plays.”

A knee injury ended Mitchell’s football career, but unlike many athletes who get lost without a ball in their hands, he threw himself into a cause close to his heart. He had struggled to read as a child and profoundly understood how severely limited life’s options can be if you can’t read. As a student-athlete at University of Georgia he had started Read with Malcolm LLC in order to publish his own children’s books, and soon after retirement he built upon this platform with a new nonprofit, the Share the Magic Foundation. The Atlanta-based organization promotes reading and diverse representation, partnering with Raising A Reader and other nonprofits and corporate sponsors to promote literacy and to get books into the hands of children who need them.

Mitchell offers these five tips for teachers, parents and advocates who want to make a difference.

1. Start Them Young

What keeps Mitchell up at night? “The idea that ���Բ�DzԱ�’s potential is capped based on a start they never asked for.” The start matters. Mitchell’s life story reinforces this philosophy with poignancy and punch. His single mother worked at a call center for several years before going back to school for her master’s degree. They moved frequently, as more affordable duplexes became available in assorted small cities in northern Florida. Violence was a near-constant background presence, along with other hazards of growing up poor. “We were so proud my sister graduated from high school without a child,” he says. “That was a glorious achievement, though we didn’t celebrate it out loud.”

As a writer twice named Children’s Author of the Year by the Georgia Writers Association and as a father of a 1 1/2-year-old son, Mitchell recognizes the importance of building an early relationship with books. Similarly, he’s glad his son is growing up around guitars, even if he’s not playing them. “Just introducing things at an early age is my biggest focus,” says Mitchell. “We’ll worry about the details later.”

2. Find Someone Who Believes in You

For Mitchell, those people include his mother, his grandmother and his high school football coach. “When I was in fourth grade,” he recalls, “my mom taught me Psalm 23, ‘Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. I will fear no evil for God is with me.’ And then she looked at me said, ‘You’ll do great things in life. I believe in you.’”

He describes his grandmother, who raised seven children, as “impeccable, hard-nosed and tough. She was sweet to her grandkids, but she applied a tremendous amount of pressure on her kids. I think that old saying, ‘Pressure either busts pipes or makes diamonds,’ is true.”

Mitchell credits Valdosta Wildcats coach Rance Gillespie for sitting him down and talking to him about how best to take advantage of the opportunities that colleges were offering him. “Not only was he a great coach who made me a better football player,” Mitchell explains. “He was a mentor for all of us. He was the guidance counselor and the administrative assistant. For a lot of us who grew up in that community, we didn’t have fathers either, so he was instilling some intangibles that we could use off the field. Responsibility, accountability, hard work, determination, relentlessness, the will to never quit.”

3. Share the Magic

The name of Mitchell’s nonprofit is also its credo. Again, his mother’s example drives him: “I’ve watched my mom her entire life, even through her financial challenges, sacrifice herself for the well-being of others.” He views it as his duty to ensure others have what they need to get ahead—especially kids who, like he did, are growing up with single moms. “How can I willingly and knowingly letting someone else suffer when they don’t have to?” he asks.

His answer lies in writing children’s books that inspire generosity and good deeds, running the organization and joining forces with others in the service. He takes inspiration from another football great, Warrick Dunn, whose campaign provides down payment assistance, furnishings and more to single-parent families. Though they’ve never met, Mitchell says, “The idea that there’s someone out there that’s supporting women like my mother is extraordinary.”

4. Be Present

If you want to help your community, Mitchell advises, you can’t phone it in. You have to be there in person. Attendance counts, whether you’ve got a Super Bowl ring on your finger or you’re just an ordinary human being with something to offer. Showing up will help you to find your voice and to determine where it fits and how it can be deployed for the greatest impact. “People forget the most important rule of leadership,” he says. “You have to lead people who want to be led.”

5. Know Your Stuff

Mitchell believes in learning all about a subject before speaking about it—and then sticking to your areas of expertise. “I know books and literacy rates,” he says. “It’s rare to hear me talk about anything else.” (When I try to lure him to opine on social media contributing to the spread of uninformed opinions about things like vaccination or climate change, he responds deftly, as if eluding a cornerback: “That’s something I can’t talk much about, because I don’t know.”)

As someone who has experienced poverty and who has researched the subject, Mitchell stands on solid ground when he describes the vicious circle of poverty and illiteracy. When he was young, he says, “Academic achievement wasn’t the highest priority. The highest priority was survival. So why wasn’t I reader or why aren’t many young African American boys reading? Because it hasn’t been introduced in a way that forces it to be a priority over daily survival.”

The five tips here might be further boiled down to the lesson of Mitchell’s 2020 book My Very Favorite Book in the Whole Wide World: “Sometimes the best stories can be found inside ourselves.”