It started 12 years ago when Emily Angiletta, Stephanie Timek and Emily Silluzio were first time teachers at the Meriden, Connecticut school, staying late to plan lessons — long after the custodians shuttered the building. 

The teachers were hired under the leadership of a new principal with a new vision of what student success would look like in a low-income school. The three educators were in their 20s, fresh out of college and trying to figure out what it meant to be effective in the classroom.

More than a decade later, their friendship is like a sisterhood or a sports team: They call each other only by their last names and can practically finish each other’s sentences with a smirk and a head nod that says “yeah, that’s what I was going to say.” 

Together, they’ve experienced getting married, losing a parent and having children. They have  also lived through the highs and lows of the classroom – some years “soaring through expectations” and others questioning if their teaching had worsened. 

“We were all learning together, struggling together, learning from our mistakes, growing together,” Silluzio said, “and I think that’s a huge part of what led to our unity. We were in the same boat.”

The Barry teachers’ close relationships show not only what a culture shift in one school has done for staff, but also students. The friendship and strong working collaboration are the results of a bold plan set in motion by their former principal Dan Crispino, who helped transform the school from 5% proficiency to a in 2019. 

Now, Crispino has been tasked with scaling Barry’s academic success across the district. 

The Meriden school district, in many ways, is similar to Angilleta, Timek and Silluzio – learning, struggling and growing together. 

An almost decade-long overhaul of the district has been a systematic transformation – rooted in consistency across classrooms and campuses, accountability, hands-on oversight, relationship and trust.

It’s about finding ways to put their students “in a position to do things that people don’t believe are possible,” said Crispino, now the district’s director of school leadership. “Their backgrounds – all these things – are tough and you can’t control everything. But, what you can control is when they’re ours and that we’re giving them every single freaking thing possible to help them be successful and to get ahead of whatever challenges.”

While there’s often an expectation that students in urban districts won’t perform well because of , which affect school funding levels and supporting high student needs, Meriden is Connecticut’s and is beating the odds in how successful it’s been at teaching kids to read.

Despite being made up of nearly – more than three quarters of whom are from low-income families –  kids in seven of the district’s eight elementary schools are reading at higher levels than expected, according to a data project focused on Bright Spot schools launched by ����Ӱ��.

The data analysis highlighted schools that were among the top 5% of their state in outscoring their expected reading proficiency based on the percentage of children who qualified for free or reduced priced lunch. 

Connecticut was home to 25 exceptional schools. And of the state’s top five Bright Spot schools – three were in Meriden, including its highest need campus, Pulaski Elementary School, which has a poverty rate of 87.7% and expected just 16.4% of students reading on grade level but instead had nearly 54%.

In the last seven years, the school system has reworked its master schedule and implemented a rigorously supervised accountability model from district and school leaders who are in classrooms daily. Staff across the district have meticulously tracked student progress and have improved collaboration to make data more accessible among one another. 

The district has also incorporated instructional coaches, who are assigned by grade and travel between campuses. Their role, beyond meeting with educators several times a week, is bearing the weight of lesson planning every unit by outlining curriculum and other resources. 

The initiatives are part of an underlying mission: Alignment. 

No matter the school building or the classroom, all third grade classes across the district are learning the same material on the same schedule – even if it looks a little different teacher by teacher. They’re meeting with the same coaches and district leadership. 

System alignment through relationship building

Whether it’s children who have lost a parent, are experiencing homelessness, learning English or have a disability, Meriden staff have successfully worked with many such students — including Enzo, a third grade student at Pulaski Elementary School.

He doesn’t know what he wants to be once he gets older, but he knows he enjoys math and science. Enzo knows all about the Fibonacci Sequence, he said, explaining how “one plus one is two, and two plus one is three, and three plus two is five, and five plus three is eight,” going all the way up to 13 plus eight.

He admitted he thought reading was boring, but he couldn’t sit still when he talked about a book he’s reading at home.

“It’s called ‘What Cats Want,’” said Enzo, 8. “I’m on page 102.”

He’s more than halfway through the book and he likes to read “two or four” pages before he goes to sleep. His favorite tidbit of information from the book is to be careful when you let your cat outside.

“Number one, they can get run over. Number two, they can get lost. And number three, a stranger cat can attack them,” Enzo said, holding up three green marker stained fingers. But, “I remember [everything] from page one.”

Earlier this school year, Enzo lost his father. But through services at his school, including an individualized schedule that allows him to work for 30 minutes, then take a two minute break, he’s been able to stay on track in the classroom.

But before a student like Enzo can be successful, the needs of educators must be met.

Before taking on his central office job in 2020, Crispino spent more than 20 years as a first grade teacher and as a principal at Barry for a handful of years. When he began working as a district administrator, and was asked to mirror his success at Barry across campuses, union relationships were among his top priorities.

“I would never ask anyone to do anything that I wouldn’t do or have done myself,” Crispino said. “You don’t want surprises. They’re your human resource. They’re delivering what you’re trying to put forth. If you don’t have their support, then it’s never gonna work.”

Time and expectations were the biggest concerns from educators, both in Meriden and across the country, with surveys showing staff often feel like they’re in a school day.

Step one, in Meriden, was overhauling its master schedule, which originally “was not, physically, mathematically, possible,” Crispino said. Teachers were being asked to start reading at 12:30, the same time recess was supposed to end, so everyone’s transitional time looked different and there was no uniformity when students were actually supposed to be back in the classroom and at work. 

“That had to go away,” Crispino said. 

Though it seemed simple, just taking the first step in building in five minute transitions made the schedule “viable, conducive and real,” Crispino said, which helped align schools and teachers on expectations. They also built in a reteach day at the end of every unit for concepts that had students struggling.

Next was making oversight a norm. 

Crispino and his building principals spend most of their time in classrooms, at least four times a day. It began as a practice that at first “wasn’t pretty,” Crispino said, with many complaints from union leaders who said administrators spent too much time in the classroom, but has since shifted to educators stopping them when they walk by to see if they want to check their recent data collection.

“We’re not there to get you, there’s a difference,” Crispino said. “For support and accountability, we’re going to be there.”

Coaches that changed, and streamlined, the game

With administrators who better understand what’s going on in the classroom, it means resources can be allocated better. In Meriden, Crispino has spearheaded bringing in instructional coaches who are assigned by grade levels and rotate among campuses.

“When I was a first year teacher, … I had to go home and write all my little lessons. I had no one to help me. I was on my own. Your admin would come in doing observations and you’d either have it or you don’t,” Crispino said, “and that’s different now.”

Veronica Germe recalled being a teacher in the state capital’s public school system. In Hartford, a district home to more than 15,000 students, she remembered how she only saw her principal in her kindergarten classroom once during the entire school year and how “visibility is the biggest difference” between the two districts.

Germe, now a K-3 grade English language arts and math coach in Meriden, is part of a team of about a dozen other elementary instructional coaches who are responsible for supporting both new and veteran teachers by managing lesson planning and acting as a resource for implementation.

“We’ve almost become a catch all in the district for all the questions K-5,” she said. 

In many districts, instructional coaches may be brushed off by educators, but in Meriden, the group has worked hard to develop a relationship where they’re “almost like a teammate,” Germe said. “We’re not evaluating them. We’re there in it with them. We’re helping and we want to get to know the students too. … Their scores are our scores.”

The coaches organize curriculum into bite-sized emails that are delivered before a unit. The emails give an overview of the lessons for that unit, with breakdowns of assessments, test questions to pay attention to, review slides, videos and pacing guides. The emails also explicitly outline state standards, which allows teachers to better target their instruction.

They meet with teachers every week for at least one planning session for upcoming lessons, and observe and offer advice during classroom time. The group of coaches are also able to provide pacing calendars and resources to help teachers differentiate instruction based on class needs.

Last year, Connecticut implemented a that limited the curricula elementary schools could use to teach reading. When the district fully shifted its K-3 curriculum, it was painless – “phenomenal”even – Crispino said, thanks to a rollout supported by union leaders and the instructional coaches that gave educators “everything they would need.”

Despite budget constraints, the district has committed to leaving their elementary instructional coaches untouched, and funded by Title I, a federal grant for schools with high-concentrations of low-income students.

Investing in these coaches for early grades gives all teachers and children “equal footing,” Crispino said, where everyone gets the same emails and meetings, then gets to decide what they’re doing with the resources. 

In mid-March, if you walked into Meriden’s Pulaski, Nathan Hale, or Thomas Hooker elementary schools during its rotational reading blocks, you would’ve seen almost the same snapshot in the three campuses.

While teachers have autonomy on the use of laptops, printed worksheets or using dry erase boards, the 60-minute period across a dozen classrooms generally looked the same.

During the reading rotation block, a small group of students, usually six or less, would be sitting in one corner of the room working on answering questions about a text with their teacher. In another corner, you’d see a paraeducator, tutor or reading coach with another small group.

Scattered across the classroom, students would be working alone with a loose leaf piece of paper, called “evidence paper” and taking notes and analyzing stories about komodragons, the galaxy or Harriet Tubman. Pairs also worked on poster boards or white boards figuring out vocabulary, grammar, main ideas or comparing and contrasting two texts.

After 20 minutes, it was time to rotate, and every student knew what to do without being asked twice.

The scenes were a direct mirror of how everyone’s “speaking the same language,” as Crispino would say, in every elementary building across the district. 

“The coaching, the admin, the feedback, the curriculum that’s easily accessible, these emails, … eliminated a lot of excuses, and when we did that, we created this high standard of excellence,” Crispino said. The alignment “built independence. It built accountability. It built engagement. It built a vibrant learning environment.”

Innovation and scalability

Last year, Angilleta, Timek and Silluzio came into a meeting with administrators rehearsed and prepared to propose a departmentalized approach to third grade, where every student would rotate among the three educators for different subjects, similar to a middle and high school model. 

The presentation wasn’t even needed, Crispino and the school’s principal Kimberly Goldbach said, laughing. It was an automatic yes.

“Part of me was like ‘You’d be an idiot to change what’s working,’ but then I said, ‘You’d be an idiot to not be innovative and creative enough to know when there’s a time to think outside the box,’” Crispino said. 

It’s paying off. Their third grade class “had the highest scores they ever had,” Crispino said. “I think our scores are going to get even better because we’re being creative and innovative at the elementary level with departmentalizing.”

Beyond the academic piece, Timek also said she’s hopeful the approach will give children, particularly those with high-needs, more resources.

“It gives these kids another chance to have a teacher that they’re not stuck with all day long. You might have a closer relationship with one kid versus the other, but the other kid can go to another class and be closer with that teacher,” she said. “They have more adults in their corner that they trust and they know that’s providing them a good education and that they can go to if they have a problem.”

The district is working to add nearly two dozen more educators into the departmentalized approach.

When asked about the scalability of Meriden’s success in other schools across the state and country, Crispino, the district superintendent Mark Benigni and various principals said it was possible, but with a few caveats.

“Can districts have a schedule like we do? Yes, but you have to make sure you’re consistent with it. Can you have instructional coaches do the work we’re doing? Yes. Should admin be in rooms? Yes. Should the central office support and understand the work happening in the trenches? Yes,” Crispino said. “You have to push [your staff and kids] to an uncomfortable place, … to challenge each other, have professional dialog and have high expectations, but then give them the resources to be successful.”

The “” report, conducted by nonprofit research organization SRI, examined literacy instruction in districts in Texas, Maryland, North Carolina and Virginia that have been using materials rooted in the popular phonics-based literacy approach for at least five years. 

Through numerous classroom observations, teacher surveys and interviews with district officials in Aldine Independent School District, Baltimore City Public Schools, Guilford County Schools and Richmond Public Schools, researchers found a majority of reading lessons lacked “depth” – meaning foundational skills were mainly limited to working on single words rather than reading them in sentences. 

Comprehension lessons in later elementary grades also mainly focused on completing a task, such as identifying a main character, rather than using a text for discussion and understanding its purpose.

“You’re not able to really think about the unpacking of a complicated sentence. You’re not thinking about really intentional vocabulary instruction or the building of kids’ word knowledge over time,” said Dan Reynolds, one of the lead authors of the report. “Ultimately, how should we be framing kids to read? Are we teaching our K-4 kids that reading is just tasks? Are we teaching them that they just need to label stuff and fill out graphic organizers?”

In recent years, has passed science of reading laws, including many that have limited the type of programming and instructional materials a school can use – a move that has drawn that it’s too restrictive and that the instruction faces its own limitations.

The report defined surface literacy skills as a student’s ability to complete tasks and understand texts based on their literal meeting while robust instruction would further push a child to understand, evaluate and synthesize what they had read for its significance. 

The study said its “comprehension observations alone are more rigorous than nearly all studies conducted in the last 50 years.” It’s not expected to be representative of reading instruction across the country, Reynolds said, but “we have four big districts in four different states, and we saw this pattern happening in all four of them with three different curricula.”

The study also found that teachers struggled with implementing comprehension-focused learning materials and said many times the curriculum was too dense, required substantial planning or may not have been developmentally appropriate. Professional development opportunities for these educators were also limited.

Researchers reported less than a quarter of observed comprehension lessons were engaging in robust learning. More than two-thirds of the lessons focused on “surface-level” comprehension. 

“It seems that these curriculums are designed to build knowledge and they don’t develop meaning, and so then why read about the Civil War or about insects?” said Katrina Woodworth, director at SRI’s Center for Education Research & Improvement. “The point is to both teach reading and to build students’ knowledge base so that they have more scaffolding for future learning of both content and meaning.” 

The SRI researchers also found that many review tools that measure comprehension don’t make a distinction between surface-level and robust instruction and skills. So, while educators are tasked with meeting a baseline standard, like having a child compare and contrast a text, it may be “unintentionally encouraging teachers to focus on surface-level goals,” the report said.

Without distinction, it weakens instruction for students and can later manifest as a skills disadvantage, Reynolds said.

“Districts had done so much to get the kids all the way there [with literacy], but it was losing voltage in the end,” Reynolds said. “If we can actually shift the way that districts are thinking about improving their comprehension instruction, they can take that all the way home and deliver really high quality comprehension instruction because so many pieces are already in place.”

Reynolds and one of his fellow co-authors, Sara Rutherford-Quach, said they saw glimpses of “magic” in the classroom when students understood a passage in wide-ranging contexts, which is the type of instruction they’re hoping to see districts incorporate more of in early grades.

“The kids were way more engaged,” Rutherford-Quach said. “Surface-level is important and necessary in some cases, … but it really is fundamentally different when you start talking about meaning and making it matter to the kids, and you see that they’re invested in it.”

Reynolds added that it’s unlikely robust comprehension could make up 100% of lessons in the classroom, but “we are thinking that if we can shift that needle from 24% robust lessons up to 50 or 60, then that would be a real catalyst for comprehension growth.”

The report recommended district leaders create “a shared vision for robust comprehension and define what it means for students, teachers, schools and the district,” and align how to best measure the extent of learning. It also called for better professional learning structures that could help model and rehearse robust comprehension work. 

Previous reporting from ����Ӱ�� found the percentage of recent high school graduates who lack “robust” comprehension skills is the highest it’s ever been, according to 2023 data. The sooner districts can engrain literacy skills that go beyond just explicit tasks, the easier it will be as they continue through the K-12 system, Reynolds said.

“I see the distinction between surface level and robust comprehension as critical to comprehension in fifth grade, but I also see it in the kids when they’re in 12th grade. Surface level comprehension and robust comprehension is the difference between a two on the AP exam and a three,” he said.

But that may or may not be due to anything the schools themselves are doing. And poverty is not destiny; around the country, schools are bucking that general trend.

Last year, we set out to find the schools that were doing much better at teaching third graders to read than their poverty levels might predict. After looking at data for nearly 42,000 schools, we identified 2,158 that we called Bright Spots. While these schools didn’t always have the highest absolute scores, their students performed much better than might be expected, based on their poverty rates.

Today, we’re calling out 255 of those Bright Spots — five public schools in every state and Washington, D.C., that are beating the odds for their kids by the biggest margins.

For example, Merton E. Hill Elementary School in Orange County, California, had a student poverty rate of 87%. Given the relationship between poverty and reading outcomes across California, we expected the school to have just 29% of its third-graders reading proficiently. Instead, it surpassed 81%. As another example, Pocomoke Elementary School in Worcester County, Maryland, had 100% of its students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and yet it far exceeded statewide reading proficiency rates (71% versus 47%). 

Scroll through the list below to find the brightest stars in your state.

Bright Spots

Top Five Schools by State

(For more information on how we identified these schools, see the “About This Project” section here. Or to see where these schools are located in your state, check out our interactive map.)

Missouri lawmakers have banned educators from leaning on a model of reading instruction called the “three-cueing” method as part of a bipartisan education package signed by Gov. Mike Kehoe on Wednesday.

The law mandates that three cueing, which teaches students to , can be used to supplement lessons, but phonics should be the majority of instruction.

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State Rep. Ed Lewis, a Moberly Republican and sponsor of the legislation, told The Independent that the law builds on prior legislative efforts and work from the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

“We’ve come to the realization that phonics is crucial,” Lewis said. “The three cueing system, when used as the primary source, evidence shows a decrease in the amount of learning that occurs, and for that reason, we want to use it less.”

Three cueing is widely criticized for encouraging kids to make guesses when reading and doesn’t show how to sound out words, which is important for understanding complicated texts.

Missouri isn’t the only state to ban three cueing. By the end of 2024, had explicitly banned the method.

The problem with three cueing, which once was lauded as an alternative to phonics, came to public attention when American Public Media reporter Emily Hanford and later launched the podcast series “.”

The series between phonics instruction and context-clue-based models and state laws followed — including a passed in Missouri in 2022.

The 2022 legislation required state education officials to create a teacher preparatory course on literacy. DESE, in turn, launched its , including instruction for educators.

As of this spring, 429 school districts and over 8,600 educators have had training in Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling, or LETRS.

“It is pretty intense training,” Missouri Education Commissioner Karla Eslinger told The Independent. “It creates an opportunity for the teachers to use that science of reading, that evidence-based best practices on how you teach reading.”

The training and other science-backed materials provided by the department are not mandatory but participation has been encouraging, Eslinger said.

She expects elementary literacy rates to rise as a result of the training and other efforts since 2022, like literacy coaches the department hired.

With a charge to ban three cueing as the primary form of reading instruction, Eslinger said the department will continue to push best practices.

“We are not going to police this,” she said. “We are going to show good practice and give support to good practice, so it just bolsters what we’re doing.”

As part of a checklist school districts provide annually to the department, they will be required to confirm that they are not using three cueing as a primary instructional model.

“The work that our literacy teams are doing in the state is all being very well received. (Educators) are wanting more and more,” Eslinger said. “It is not because it is mandated, it is because it works.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com.

Next week, the unpopular teacher licensure test, the Reading Instruction Competence Assessment, will be officially retired and replaced with a literacy performance assessment to ensure educators are prepared to teach students to read.

The Reading Instruction Competence Assessment (RICA) has been a major hurdle for teacher candidates for years. About a third of all the teacher candidates who took the test failed the first time, according to  collected between 2012 and 2017. Critics have also said that the test is outdated and has added to the state’s teacher shortage.

The literacy performance assessment that replaces the RICA reflects an increased focus on foundational reading skills, including phonics. California, and many other states, are moving from teaching children to recognize words by sight to teaching them to decode words by sounding them out in an effort to boost literacy.

Mandated by , the literacy assessment reflects new standards that include support for struggling readers, English learners and pupils with exceptional needs, incorporating the  for the first time.

“We believe the literacy TPA will help ensure that new teachers demonstrate a strong grasp of evidence-based literacy instruction — an essential step toward improving reading outcomes for California’s students,” said Marshall Tuck, CEO of EdVoice, a nonprofit education advocacy organization.

Literacy test on schedule

Erin Sullivan, director of the Professional Services Division of the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, said the literacy performance assessment is ready for its July 1 launch.

“We’ve been field-testing literacy performance assessments with, obviously, the multiple- and the single-subject candidates, but also the various specialist candidates, including visual impairment and deaf and hard of hearing,” Sullivan said. 

California teacher candidates must pass one of three performance assessments approved by the commission before earning a preliminary credential: the California Teaching Performance Assessment , the Educative Teacher Performance Assessment ( or the Fresno Assessment of Student Teachers ().

A performance assessment allows teachers to demonstrate their competence by submitting evidence of their instructional practice through video clips and written reflections on their practice. 

“It’s very different,” said Kathy Futterman, an adjunct professor in teacher education at California State University, East Bay. “The RICA is an online test that has multiple-choice questions, versus the LPA — the performance assessment — which has candidates design and create three to five lesson plans. Then, they have to videotape portions of those lesson plans, and then they have to analyze and reflect on how those lessons went.”

Field tests went well

, the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing board is expected to hear a report on the field test results, approve the passing score standards for the literacy cycle of the performance assessment and formally adopt the new test.

All but one of the 280 teacher candidates who took the new CalTPA literacy assessment during field testing passed, according to the report. Passing rates were lower on the FAST, with 51 of 59 passing on the first attempt, and on the edTPA with 192 of 242 passing.

 Cal State East Bay was one of the universities that piloted the test over the last two years. 

“It’s more hands-on and obviously with real students, so in that regard I think it was very helpful,” Futterman said.

State could offer flexibility

Upcoming budget trailer bills are expected to offer some flexibility to teacher candidates who haven’t yet passed the RICA, Sullivan said. 

The commission is asking state leaders to allow candidates who have passed the CalTPA and other required assessments, except the RICA, to be allowed to continue taking the test through October, when the state contract for the RICA expires, she said.

“We are looking forward to putting RICA to bed and moving on to the literacy performance assessment, but … we don’t want to leave anybody stranded on RICA island,” Sullivan said.

The commission has approved the Foundations of Reading examination as an alternative for a small group of teachers with special circumstances, including those who would have completed all credential requirements except the RICA by June 30, but the test may not be the best option for them, Sullivan said.

“It’s just a very different exam,” Sullivan said. “It’s a national exam. And while the commission looked at it and said, ‘We think this will work for our California candidates,’ it’s not the best-case scenario. So, trying to get these folks to pass the RICA and giving them every opportunity to do that until really it just goes away, that’s kind of what we’re looking at.”

The Foundations of Reading exam, by Pearson, is used by . It assesses whether a teacher is proficient in literacy instruction, including developing phonics and decoding skills, as well as offering a strong literature, language and comprehension component with a balance of oral and written language, according to the commission’s website.

Teacher candidates who were allowed to earn a preliminary credential without passing the RICA during the Covid-19 pandemic; teachers with single-subject credentials, who want to earn a multiple-subject credential; and educators who completed teacher preparation in another country and/or as a part of the Peace Corps are also eligible to take the Foundations of Reading examination.

The Foundations of Reading test has been rated as strong by the National Council on Teacher Quality.

State focus on phonics

SB 488 was followed by a revision of the Literacy Standard and Teaching Performance Expectations for teachers, which outlined effective literacy instruction for students.

California state leaders have recently taken additional steps to ensure foundational reading skills are being taught in classrooms. On June 5, Gov. Gavin Newsom confirmed that the state budget will include hundreds of millions of dollars to fund legislation needed to achieve a comprehensive to early literacy.

, which passed the Assembly with a unanimous 75-0 vote that same day, would move the state’s schools toward adopting evidence-based literacy instruction, also known as the science of reading or structured literacy. 

On paper, that seemed like the right approach. But in reality, it left too many students behind — and failed to challenge others who were ready to move forward.

So, we decided to do something bold.

Ellis Elementary, followed by several other Rockford schools, started grouping students by reading ability instead of by grade. It wasn’t seamless. It wasn’t easy. But it was necessary. And the results have been worth every bit of effort.

Coming out of COVID, our students’ learning gaps were wide — and getting wider. The urgency was impossible to ignore. As teachers, we were trying everything we could to meet the needs of all our students, but our one-size-fits-all structure just wasn’t working.

Teaching whole-group lessons to a class of students who varied drastically in their reading skills meant instruction often landed in the middle — reaching few, if any, with the depth they needed.

It became clear: Our diverse learners needed diverse instruction. That shift in mindset was the beginning of everything.

As we began exploring the science of reading, we saw the potential to align our practices with how children actually learn to read. But more importantly, our teachers were ready. There was an energy and openness at Ellis that I’ll never forget. Everyone understood that what we had been doing wasn’t enough — and they were eager for change.

You may have heard about this strategy on a recent episode of the popular podcast “,” which highlights East Elementary in Steubenville, Ohio.

Here’s how it works at my school: Every morning, for 45 minutes, all students in grades K–2 receive Tier 1 instruction using Reading Horizons. That’s 14 classrooms running simultaneously, including general education teachers and interventionists.

To begin, we administer a spelling inventory aligned to the Reading Horizons scope and sequence. Based on those results, we create skill-based groups — regardless of students’ ages or grade levels. Groups range from letters and sounds coupled with phonemic awareness (more foundational), all the way to multisyllabic decoding and comprehension strategies (more advanced).

If your school isn’t ready to jump right into grouping by skill-level across grades, a possible first step is grouping by skill-level across same-grade classrooms, e.g., re-arrange all 1st grade students for foundational reading instruction. In this model, first-grade classrooms would “shuffle” to one classroom that focuses on more foundational concepts and moves slower, while another moves faster and brings in more authentic text.

But, at Ellis Elementary, we’ve gone all in on regrouping by skill level, regardless of grade. We have 5-year-olds and 7-year-olds learning side by side, because that’s where they are in their reading journey.

Nobody learns at exactly the same pace. And that’s okay. In fact, it’s powerful.

As the instructional coach, I coordinate our skill groups, support teachers during instruction, and lead progress monitoring. We developed RH Checkpoints: simple assessments where students read and write words after each lesson to demonstrate their understanding.

We don’t move on if a group isn’t showing mastery. We pause. We support. And sometimes, we shift students into a group that’s a better fit.

This model has been a game-changer for our teachers. When they step into their English Language Arts block, they teach skills that every student in the room is ready for. There’s no guessing. No watering down instruction. It’s focused, intentional, and impactful.

And the students? They now see themselves as readers. They’re more confident, more engaged, and more successful.Teachers are happier. Students are thriving.

Grouping by ability isn’t without its challenges. Yes, it was messy at first. Yes, there were growing pains. But we committed to flexibility and collaboration. We moved beyond the idea that a teacher is responsible only for the students assigned to their classroom. Instead, we adopted a collective mentality:

All Ellis students are our students. With enough time, we found a rhythm.

There are some logistical hurdles when you mix age groups, especially for our most vulnerable learners. To address this, we try to keep groups small and ensure we have strong behavior support in place. But in four years of doing this work, we’ve never encountered a problem we couldn’t solve with a little creativity and a team mindset.

The results we’re seeing go beyond test scores, though those have improved as well. Since the post-COVID low point in 2021, third-grade, end-of-year oral reading proficiency has risen by 18 percentage points, including an 8-point gain this school year alone. The number of students identified as at-risk has dropped by 25 points, with 19 of those points occurring this year.

Even more compelling: In one class, 72% of students who began the year labeled “at-risk” have reached or exceeded the end-of-year proficiency benchmark. While that outcome represents a single class, we’re seeing similar outcomes across the board.

Here’s what I’d tell any school thinking about making this shift:

● It will feel chaotic at first. Stick with it.

● Rules and procedures are critical. Set them early.

● Everyone must be on board. From students to administration

● Be ready to regroup. Mid-year reassessment is key.

● Let the data guide you. Not assumptions. Not classrooms. Not grade levels.

This approach has created a culture where every adult is responsible for every student’s success, where no child is held back or left behind because of their age and where reading instruction is the best part of the day.

We’ve made ability-based grouping our new normal. And we’ve never looked back.

A lawsuit filed in Massachusetts state court accuses famous literacy specialists Lucy Calkins, Irene Fountas, and Gay Su Pinnell and their publisher Heinemann of pushing reading curriculums they knew didn’t work.

Adopting a consumer protection approach, the lawsuit charges the curriculum authors with “deceptive and fraudulent marketing.” The filing alleges they willfully ignored decades of research into more effective practices and used shoddy studies to prop up their own work, then charged school districts for updates when they were forced to admit their materials were not effective.

“Think about that: If your car is broken, and it’s the fault of the manufacturer, the manufacturer recalls the part and fixes it,” said attorney Ben Elga, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs. “They do not charge you for their failure. It’s outrageous.”

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The lawsuit also names Heinemann parent company HMH, previously known as Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Teachers College at Columbia University.

The plaintiffs, who are seeking class action status and inviting other families to join the lawsuit, are two Massachusetts families whose children struggled to learn to read. One of the parent plaintiffs, Karrie Conley, said in the lawsuit that due to her school district using Calkins’ Units of Study curriculum, she had to spend more on private school tuition and reading tutors for two of her children than she spent to send her older child to college.

“Nothing is more painful than trying to help them, but not knowing how,” she said in a Wednesday press conference announcing the lawsuit. “So many times I’ve asked myself, How did it get like this? I trusted that when I was sending my children off to school, they were getting instruction that had been tested and proven effective. I trusted that these so-called experts were actually experts.”

The lawsuit comes as many states are overhauling their approach to reading instruction to better align with decades of research into how children learn. What’s known as calls for explicit phonics instruction that helps students connect letters and sounds, as well as texts that help students build the background knowledge to understand what they read.

Calkins’ Units of Study curriculum and Fountas and Pinnell’s Leveled Literacy Intervention and other materials instead relied on exposure to books and promoted discredited methods such as three-cueing, in which students use the first letter of a word and various context clues, including pictures, to guess what a word might be.

These curriculums were widely used in American schools, with Calkins in particular achieving near legendary status among teachers. Critics say these instructional methods are largely to blame for American students’ low rates of reading proficiency. Journalist Emily Hanford’s and her podcast helped push these pedagogical debates into the public eye.

Calkins later and changed Units of Study to include more phonics instruction. But . Units of Study was once the , but the nation’s largest school system . Last year, Teachers College .

Fountas and Pinnell, meanwhile, have .

A lawsuit represents one perspective on a complaint. Representatives of Heinemann, Teachers College, and Calkins, Fountas, and Pinnell could not be reached for comment Wednesday. Heinemann has .

Dozens of states have adopted new curriculum standards that , but others, including Massachusetts, have not.

Elga, the lead attorney and founding executive director of , has a background in consumer protection and antitrust cases. He said he believes this is the first time that a consumer protection approach has been used to advance an education policy agenda.

“Consumer law is very broad, so there are a lot of cases that challenge products that don’t do what they say they should do or are marketed in a deceptive way,” he said. “This is the first case we’re aware of applying those laws to this type of product.”

The lawsuit is seeking unspecified damages and injunctive relief, including that the defendants provide an early literacy curriculum that reflects the science of reading at no charge.

Families have previously sued states and school districts over rock-bottom literacy rates, alleging that government entities have failed in their obligation to meet students’ basic educational needs. These and that sent millions of dollars to districts with low reading levels but without mandates on how to teach reading.

Elga said he sees school districts as victims alongside students.

“It’s our contention that one of the major problems here is that the school districts have been the victims of this faulty marketing,” he said. “So we wanted to bring a case that challenged the people who were actually distributing these types of materials.”

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

Oregon’s highest needs schools that are focused on revamping literacy instruction and boosting student reading proficiency will get federal financial help next year.

The U.S. Department of Education announced last week that it will send Oregon schools $11.5 million next school year, and could potentially allocate up to $57 million over the next five years to help the state’s Early Literacy Success Initiative. That initiative was passed by the Legislature in 2023 with an investment of $120 million in state dollars.

An investigation by the Capital Chronicle found the state has spent more than $250 million in the past 25 years to improve reading instruction in schools. But that money has failed to help more than a generation of students, with many teachers not using methods that work to teach reading. Many, the investigation found, were not taught effective reading instruction in the state’s public colleges of education.

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Over the last 25 years, nearly two in five Oregon fourth graders and one in five eighth graders have scored “below basic” on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often referred to as the nation’s report card. That means they struggle to read and understand simple words.

Schools can use the federal dollars for teacher development, reading tutors and specialists, literacy coaches and new reading curriculum, according to the news release from the U.S. Department of Education. Most Oregon schools are using one of the 15 reading curriculum on the state Board of Education’s approved materials list, but about 30% are not, , director of education initiatives for Gov. Tina Kotek’s office.

About 95% of the federal money will be funneled to districts through a competitive application process via the Oregon Department of Education, according to Marc Siegel, a spokesperson for the department. Precedence will go to schools with a high proportion of historically underserved students, including multilingual students and students with disabilities.

The rest of the federal money will help fund a comprehensive statewide literacy plan, Siegel said.

Oregon received the second highest award among the 23 state grants. Only the New Mexico Department of Education received more – about $11.9 million.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oregon Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Lynne Terry for questions: info@oregoncapitalchronicle.com. Follow Oregon Capital Chronicle on and .

Alaska’s Department of Education and Early Development released statewide assessment data on Friday that shows most students are not proficient in core subjects.

The scores are similar to overall, even though the state in January. Education Commissioner Deena Bishop said then that Alaska’s standards are still in the top third in the nation.

The Alaska System of Academic Readiness test, commonly referred to as the AK STAR assessment, evaluates student knowledge of grade-level standards in English language arts and mathematics for third through ninth graders and grade-level standards for science in fifth, eighth and 10th grades.

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Student scores fall into four levels of achievement: advanced, proficient, approaching proficient, and needs support.

Across grade levels, roughly 32% of Alaska students were proficient or advanced in both English language arts and mathematics. Nearly 37% of students across grade levels tested were proficient or better in science.

Bishop appealed to Alaskans to use the results for continuous improvement in a statement released on Friday.

“State assessments play a role in measuring how well our students meet the Alaska standards — standards shaped by Alaskan educators. By accepting the results without defense, we commit to using these data for improvement,” she said in a news release. “Alaska is not merely focused on the outcomes themselves, rather our goal is to build the capacity in our students’ foundational knowledge and ability for their future in work and life.”

Pre-pandemic comparisons to measure if students’ scores are improving after school closures are difficult because the state changed its assessment. Scores were in the 2018-2019 academic year, however. Then, 39% of students were proficient in or advanced scorers in English language arts and nearly 36% of students were proficient or better in math.

Fifth graders performed best on the 2024 tests. More than 37% met or exceeded state proficiency standards, which was a nearly 2% increase over the previous year. Nearly half of fifth graders, more than 47%, were proficient or better in science standards.

Eighth, ninth and tenth graders had lower levels of proficiency. The state said “efforts are underway” to support students in reading and offer career and technical education options.

Officials with the state Department of Education and Early Childhood did not respond to questions about how to understand this year’s scores in the contact of previous years and pandemic recovery.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alaska Beacon maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Andrew Kitchenman for questions: info@alaskabeacon.com. Follow Alaska Beacon on and .

An early look at new special education datasets reveals massive inconsistencies in how many children states are identifying as needing services, how much is being spent on them and whether that funding is tied to better outcomes, according to Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab. 

Preliminary though the research is, even the broad takeaways are especially timely, Roza recently told a group of policymakers, educators and journalists. The number of students with disabilities has risen dramatically over the last decade, as has the share of school budgets dedicated to paying for special education. 

“Historically, our tendency has been to look the other way on special ed spending,” . “It hasn’t gotten the same scrutiny [as] other elements in the district budget.”

One immediate takeaway is that states that provide sound literacy instruction for all students also post better reading scores for special education students, Roza noted. Case in point: Mississippi, where in literacy have been credited to a 10-year push by state officials to ensure evidence-based reading instruction is taking place in every classroom.

Mississippi is one of two states that dedicated the smallest portion of its education budget — some 8% — to meeting the needs of special education students, yet it is one of four where children with disabilities perform the highest on the reading portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

By contrast, Connecticut spends nearly 22% of its education budget on special education but has middle-of-the-pack reading performance among students with disabilities. More than half of the state’s third graders are reading below grade level, and a new law requiring science-based literacy instruction will until 2025. 

This finding is particularly important because the most common special education diagnosis, specific learning disability, includes children who are dyslexic or who have other neurological differences that interfere with their ability to process language or do math. More than a third of students receiving services fall into this category. 

High-quality core literacy instruction could mean fewer students who need an individualized education program — a federally mandated plan that spells out how a child with a disability will be served. Other research has shown that struggling readers whose needs are identified early are less likely to need intensive support in later grades. 

In the 2019-20 school year, the National Center for Education Statistics, part of the U.S. Department of Education’s research arm, began collecting data compiled by states on district-level special education spending. A number of states have yet to provide any information, but Edunomics researchers were able to combine the first two years of information with existing records to begin building an overview. 

Between the 2013-14 and 2022-23 school years, the number of children in special education rose from 6.5 million to 7.5 million, even as public school enrollment fell by more than 400,000. In four Northeastern states — New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Maine — 1 in 5 students now have an individualized education program, or IEP, while in 11 states, 13% or fewer receive services.

From state to state, diagnoses are wildly inconsistent, raising questions about the subjectivity of how students are funneled into special ed. New Mexico, for example, diagnoses specific learning disabilities in 8% of students, versus less than 3% in Kentucky and Idaho. However, despite identifying a high number of children with learning disorders, New Mexico has some of the lowest literacy rates among special education students in the country. 

New York refers almost three times as many children for speech and language services as Vermont and Maryland. Students in Maine are more than three times as likely to be categorized as “other health impairment” — a diagnosis category that includes ADHD — as pupils in Montana, Nevada and Utah.

States also vary wildly in how many special education staffers schools employ, with Ohio and Idaho having less than 20 per 200 students. Hawaii, New York and New Hampshire have three times as many. Yet Hawaii significantly underperforms national averages. 

The data also raise questions about the quality of staff delivering services and inequities in how teachers are assigned to schools. Since 2007, the number of special education teachers has risen by 12%, while the number of specialists and paraprofessionals has jumped by 35% and 37%, respectively. 

One reason higher staffing levels don’t necessarily correlate to better student outcomes could be that instruction is being delivered by paraprofessionals — often low-skilled, entry-level staff — and not special education teachers. 

The data also suggest that the perennial shortage of special educators contributes to inequities in which kids get the most qualified instructors. In Massachusetts — which Edunomics researchers praised for its unusually transparent spending reports — low-poverty schools have higher numbers of licensed special educators. High-poverty schools have fewer teachers and far more paraprofessionals. 

Districts often cite federal maintenance-of-effort laws, which put strict guardrails on attempts to lower special education spending, as a reason why they don’t scrutinize the cost-effectiveness of their services. While some of these assumptions are incorrect, more legal flexibility would help, said Roza.

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation provide financial support to Edunomics Lab and ����Ӱ��.

State officials are looking to hire workers — teachers and non-teachers alike — to teach elementary and middle school students how to read this summer.

The New Mexico Summer Reading Program will provide reading instruction in small group, four-hour classes of children ranging in age from those becoming kindergarteners to ninth graders.

People hired to help children read will start the program in June and continue for four to six weeks through July, according to a news release.

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The deadline to apply is May 24; however, the state is encouraging people to apply by May 17 so they can start in June.

More information and the application can be found at . The program’s website shows 42 summer reading locations across New Mexico.

Three state agencies, the New Mexico Public Education Department, the Higher Education Department and the Early Childhood Education and Care Department said Monday they need “hundreds of additional instructors” for the program, which has a goal to serve 10,000 students.

“You do not need to be a licensed teacher to become a literacy instructor, but we encourage retired educators and educators on summer break to consider joining this historic statewide literacy effort,” said Public Education Secretary Arsenio Romero.

Summer reading instructors would make $35 per hour, according to the news release. That’s significantly higher than the in New Mexico of $20 per hour.

People would have to commit to working for at least 25 hours per week.

The weeklong training will be paid at the same rate $35 per hour rate.The specialized training will be done by literacy experts prior to the program, at the end of May or the beginning of June.

New Mexico ranks 50th in literacy with 79% of fourth grade students reading below grade level, to the children’s literacy nonprofit Reading is Fundamental.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Source New Mexico maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Shaun Griswold for questions: info@sourcenm.com. Follow Source New Mexico on and .

New Hampshire public school teachers and officials would be required to update how they teach reading under a bill heading to Gov. Chris Sununu’s desk.

, which passed the Senate by voice vote Thursday, would formally implement the “five essential components of reading” into curricula across the state. That teaching process, developed in 1997 by the National Reading Panel, focuses on teaching phonetics rather than older instructional models that allow students to guess words based on visual patterns.

The approach for decades as a more thorough way to teach reading, but not all New Hampshire school districts have implemented it on their own, proponents of the bill say.

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“This bill can ensure all New Hampshire children are afforded reading development and instruction that’s delivered in a manner that meets their individual abilities and their individual needs,” said Rep. Corrine Cascadden, a Berlin Democrat, in testimony to the Senate.

Under , elementary schools are required to teach literacy up to third grade, instruction that includes “reading, writing, speaking, listening, reasoning, and mathematics.”

The bill requires instruction up to fifth grade and adds specific requirements for that instruction. According to the bill, the teaching must be measurable and evidence-based, and must include instruction in the five components: “phonemic awareness, phonics (both decoding and encoding of sounds and words), fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.”

The instruction would need to be aimed at allowing each student to achieve “grade level literacy,” the bill states.

The bill also expands on the current requirement that schools teach mathematics by requiring “mathematics reasoning” and “mathematics calculation” in state statute.

If signed into law, the bill will not take effect until July 2027, which sponsors say is intended to give schools more time to implement it.

Cascadden, a former elementary school principal in Berlin, said she had implemented the five components in 2005, when they were recommended by the state’s Department of Education at the time. “We saw success in the percentage of kids that improved in literacy,” she said.

But she said there has been less emphasis on the practice, and that some schools had since “fallen by the wayside.”

The bill passed the House nearly unanimously in March, 365-9.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Hampshire Bulletin maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Dana Wormald for questions: info@newhampshirebulletin.com. Follow New Hampshire Bulletin on and .

In its 2016 state-by-state, college-by-college Teacher Prep Review, the branded the reading preparation program at Rhode Island College (RIC) with an “F.”

Then, in 2023, the gave it an “A+.” A meteoric change.

The council has been assessing teacher-preparation programs nationally since 2000. Its evaluations are controversial and often dismissed as out of touch with what teacher prep programs were actually doing. Well, yes. The council has long condemned the now debunked approach to reading instruction as outright harmful, even though it dominated higher education’s prep programs for 50 years. Instead, its evaluation criteria judges programs according to the novices need to become competent reading teachers.

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To be fair, the University of Rhode Island got an “A.” But today is about the “A+” story. What happened in the relatively short time between “F” and “A+”?

Recently, in a conference room at RIC, I put that question to Associate Professor  (special education) and Associate Professor . (Interim Dean Carol A. Cummings and Interim Associate Dean Beth Pinheiro were also there.)

RIC’s transformation story starts slowly. Around 2009, the reading professors began refining their coursework with more science-based lessons, in effect seeding what will become fertile curricular soil. “We didn’t feel like we were jumping on a bandwagon or letting go of anything,” like Balanced Literacy, Obel-Omia said. “We were just building our competencies.”

McDermott-Fasys has of how RIC worked with various partner organizations toward “shared responsibility between general education and special education.” Together, they broke down silos that too often led to the need for “specialized language schools [which] in our area often had no seats available.” (And cost a fortune.)

Mending the division between general and special education led to the realization that a successful revamp of their reading program would hew to the needs of the dyslexic population. What works for them, works for all kids.

Together they studied a multi-tiered support system that teaches educators to chart and monitor struggling students. This framework can apply to all subjects, and problematic behavior, by sorting skills and remediation, in this case for reading, into three tiers of intensifying personalized support:

Tier I is for all kids, the general education that builds foundational skills. Tier II are intervention techniques for those showing signs of struggling. Tier III is for students whose special needs lie beyond the capacity of a regular classroom teacher, like those with serious dyslexia.

But RIC’s reading redesign folks wanted more. In 2016, they began working with the Center on their protocol.

They identified what RIC graduates should know and be able to do to support all their students, whether they had special needs or not. Then the program redesigners took a microscope to their curriculum looking for redundancies, gaps and opportunities.

Proficient reading requires many skills to come together. Glitches in any one of those skills can screw up a kid’s progress. For example, the inability to hear the distinction between the sounds that make up words will leave the kid entirely in the dust. Thus, a course of study must teach novices to:

Provide an aligned sequence of all the necessary skillsHave assessments that flag problemsBe equipped with techniques that ameliorate or resolve those problems.

The professors broke down their courses into units that could be mapped. What was actually being taught? In what order? With what intensity? The mapping laid bare previously unseen details of their curriculum. Some competencies seemed randomly spread across the four courses already designated for teaching reading.

The shocker: finding few early intervention units (Tier II). If kids are struggling with general education, what are available methods of getting the kid back on track before turning to specialists? And whose responsibility are early reading problems, the classroom teacher or special educators? The redesign team decided that responses to early red flags should be shared by both.

So they reorganized the content into four new, well-aligned courses. Two classes focus on the foundational skills. But a new, dedicated intervention course equips all teachers to help a child starting to struggle. The specialists still have their specialized training, but now they also take a general education course so everyone shares an understanding of the spectrum from general to special education.

The philosophy of the elementary department changed from “my course” to “our scope and sequence,” McDermott-Fasy proudly told me.

When Rhode Island’s 2019 passed, RIC compared its demands with the newly-aligned program. They were in superb shape. The state approved their program in 2023, the same year the council gave them the “A+”.

The ’s new document estimates that with effective instruction, over 90% of students would learn to read without needing specialist attention.

Rhode Island has about 4th graders, of whom roughly 3,300 kids were proficient in the 2023 English Language Arts state test. As new and improved teachers emerge from Rhode Island’s public prep programs, they’ll join the existing classroom teachers also learning science-backed techniques.

In the fullness of time, we could have 9,000 proficient 4th-grade readers, prepared for academic success and a better shot at thriving in their lives.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Rhode Island Current maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janine L. Weisman for questions: info@rhodeislandcurrent.com. Follow Rhode Island Current on and .

Assemblymember Blanca Rubio (D-Baldwin Park) and 13 co-authors have proposed a bill that would update the state’s English curriculum with the science of reading – research that has found the best way to teach reading is through phonics, phonemic awareness, oral reading fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.

The bill calls for more instructional materials and curriculum for classrooms to align with the science of reading. It also emphasizes the need for increased professional development for teachers and more progress monitoring for students struggling with reading. 

“All English language arts, English language development, and reading textbooks and instructional materials for transitional kindergarten, kindergarten, and any of grades 1 to 8, inclusive, shall adhere to the science of reading,” reads the bill which was submitted to the Assembly’s education and higher education committee in February.

Schools would require a waiver if educators wanted to use instructional materials that aren’t aligned with the science of reading. It is supported by 12 Democrats and two Republicans in the state assembly.

 A December 2023 by , and found 60% of California students aren’t reading at grade level skills by the time they reach third grade. 

“As an educator, I have firsthand knowledge of the struggles instructors face to ensure their students know how to read,” Rubio said in a statement. “California teachers work tirelessly to better the success of each student. However, California is failing its students, especially diverse students from low-income families.”

In the 2022-2023 school year, 31% of third-graders in low-income families were reading on grade level. For students not considered low-income, 63% were reading on grade level.

That trend has been steady for nearly a decade, with low-income students underperforming in reading tests every year since at least 2014.

“Historically, we’ve seen low performance in literacy in California,” said Eugenia Mora-Flores, a professor and an assistant dean at USC’s Rossier School of Education. “It’s not surprising, actually. We’ve definitely seen low literacy performance in large districts like L.A. Unified and others where we have students that are not performing at grade level.”

To address low scores, legislators want teachers to use the science of reading. Some schools across the state already use this method when teaching students. Others use “whole language,” which focuses on the meanings of words instead of breaking them down into pieces.

That’s different from the science of reading, which relies on phonics and encourages students to learn how letter combinations sound out loud to decode words based on their spellings.

“[The science of reading] is an acknowledgment that kids will learn to read if they can learn the letters, sound them out and gradually pick up on fluency over time,” said Pedro Noguera, dean of USC’s education school. “If you don’t read at proficiency by third grade, then you’re in trouble because everything in school is literacy-based. After learning to read, then you read to learn, right? If you can’t read a math problem, you can’t do the math.”

Noguera said a mandate alone won’t solve California’s literacy problem without looking at the bigger picture when it comes to teaching kids to read.

“If we just focus on the science of reading, on phonics, we’re also missing the point, right?” Noguera said. “If we want kids to be good readers, phonics is not going to take them there. They need good books. They need a comprehensive approach to literacy.” 

“All English language arts, English language development, and reading textbooks and instructional materials for transitional kindergarten, kindergarten, and any of grades 1 to 8, inclusive, shall adhere to the science of reading,” the bill reads.

Dozens of states across the country have already implemented laws enforcing the science of reading.

Last year, Indiana mandated that schools must use the science of reading by fall 2024. So have legislators in Michigan, Utah, Kansas, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Pennsylvania and the Carolinas, among others. 

In a state with one of the in the country, Mora-Flores said it will come down to how well the mandate is implemented across California.

“In some ways, [the bill] can be seen as a good thing because it’s saying, at minimum, we all need to make sure kids are getting something, and you’re going to be held accountable to it because now it’s policy,” Mora-Flores said. “On the other side of that, it’s really going to come down to the quality of translation and implementation.”

This article is part of a collaboration between ����Ӱ�� and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

The St. Louis NAACP recently launched the “Right to Read” campaign, which focuses on improving proficiency and educational equity for students of color. Its mission: By 2030, all children in the city and county of St. Louis will receive the materials and support they need to help get them reading well by third grade.

The campaign began with a Jan. 17 screening of a film it’s named after, called . The documentary follows Oakland-based NAACP activist Kareem Weaver, who filed a petition with the school district demanding change because of low reading scores. LeVar Burton, who hosted the television series Reading Rainbow for 23 years, was an executive producer.

The St. Louis NAACP will soon launch a listening tour to get feedback from superintendents, teachers, parents and nonprofits about how to improve student reading.

Education chairman Ian Buchanan said the chapter plans on partnering with local school districts in the coming months in order to reach that goal. 

“This extreme crisis in literacy has impacted Black and brown students more acutely than others. And so, given this reality, we want to take a stand and put a line in the sand to say, ‘Hey, we know that we can do better and we know that we can do better collectively,’ ” Buchanan said. “So this is a call to action for all school districts to recalibrate, to recommit and to be more deeply committed to improving literacy scores.”

With more than 16,500 students, St. Louis Public Schools has had bleak reading scores for the past 10 years. But the disparity between Black and white students has been skyrocketing. In 2013, 19% of Black third graders scored as proficient in reading on standardized tests, versus 43% of their white classmates. But by last year, that disparity had increased by 23 points, to 14% versus 61%.

that students with low literacy rates have a higher risk of dropping out of high school, entering poverty or becoming involved in the criminal justice system.

“You have a young African American, male or female, who may be a parent, who dropped out of high school — their literacy level is extremely poor and there’s no way that didn’t create this burden, blocking (them) from opportunities and being successful in the long haul,” chapter president Adolphus Pruitt said. “So we thought of economic empowerment and literacy as being one in the same.”

Missouri’s reading proficiency scores have also declined over the last decade. For third graders, scores dropped from 48% in 2013 to 42% in 2023. These results prompted a new literacy law to be passed last year, requiring schools to create success plans for students with reading deficiencies.

The law is part of a comprehensive plan, , that aims to increase evidence-based literacy instruction, part of the science of reading.

Buchanan said Right to Read’s initial goal is to close the literacy gap between Black students and the state average. There’s a focus on third grade because that 1 in 6 children who aren’t reading proficiently by then won’t graduate from high school on time.

Even school districts in higher-income communities have wide gaps between Black student reading proficiency and the state average. 

For example, just 9% of students in the Kirkwood School District qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, but only 33% of Black students were reading proficiently at the end of third grade in 2023, according to state data. 

“The data tells us that all we really need to do in order to first eliminate the gap between Black students and the state average is to move, on average, one or two students per third grade, per school, per year to proficiency,” Buchanan said.

Other local nonprofits that are committed to boosting student literacy are partnering with Right to Read this year. For example, parent advocacy group has been managing a literacy campaign called Bridge 2 Freedom since last summer. 

The campaign distributes books, hosts essay writing contests and is part of a free parent academy that teaches families to become better advocates for their children and connects them to services and academic resources.

“A lot of our parents who come into the program didn’t know that they had rights. They didn’t know the right questions to ask,” said CEO Krystal Barnett. “They didn’t know that they could ask for their kids’ reading scores. They didn’t even know that a report card was not an accurate depiction of what a child can do in school.” The academy, she said, “puts people in the position to make different decisions and to get better results.”

More than 300 parents have participated in Bridge 2 Hope’s parent academy. Other organizations around the U.S. have pursued similar paths of making parents education advocates, such as Oakland REACH, which worked with its local NAACP branch to push the Oakland Unified district to adopt a research-based reading program.

Barnett added, “I think the Right to Read will open the eyes of people about what strong reading instruction can actually do for a child.”

Another St. Louis initiative is training older adults as tutors to help advance student reading proficiency. The Oasis Institute partners seniors with students in kindergarten through third grade who need academic or social emotional support. A found that the parent-led tutoring effort produced similar gains in reading for youngsters as instruction from classroom teachers.

Nonprofit is also teaming up with Right to Read. The organization was launched in 2020 as a local chapter of the , a national organization that has more than 300 branches across the U.S. 

Founder Lisa Greening said Turn the Page STL is a network of nonprofits with one goal in mind: improving St. Louis students’ reading proficiency. 

The organization is especially focusing on the area’s lowest-performing districts, where Greening said Black and brown children still receive an inequitable education.

“We have the resources here in St. Louis. We’re just not connecting with each other,” she said. “I don’t know anything more important than a child being able to read, because that is one of the most critical self-determinants of life.”

Buchanan said pulling together resources across the St. Louis community to help dissolve systemic inequities is essential.

“Literacy is an issue across the board, even with affluent students,” he said. “But one of the things that history tells us is that when white America has the flu or a cold, Black America has pneumonia.”

Let me get this hard sell on the table right up front: You should listen to “,” a podcast about reading instruction in U.S. schools. After all, you can be concerned that 1 in 3 American fourth graders read and still not want a deep dive into how literacy is taught. But “Sold a Story” is about more than a national problem; it’s about a deeply personal struggle experienced by families of all kinds.

In the hands of adept reporter and storyteller Emily Hanford, that deep dive unfolds with crystal clarity, emotional anchors and dramatic cliffhangers to spotlight why many students struggle to read: It is because many schools don’t teach them the specific skills they need to successfully do so.

The podcast’s basic premise is that extremely popular approaches to teaching young kids to read — to decode written words — give short shrift to explicit lessons that connect letters in words to the sounds they represent. In many schools, this explicit phonics instruction is sprinkled into reading lessons, but in woefully inadequate amounts and crowded out by other strategies, including “three-cueing” — which coaches students to use context or pictures to guess what unknown words are. Research, much of it decades old and now called the , shows that systematic phonics instruction is key to helping students become fluent readers. But these other approaches have largely ignored it.

Why? In six episodes, Hanford and her colleague Christopher Peak deftly stitch together the complete picture: an overview of those popular approaches to reading instruction, the national political battle over how to teach literacy and the reading guru whose three apostles, with their billion-dollar publishing company, championed this flawed approach.

The podcast focuses on the idea, established by reading guru Marie Clay, that children can become readers by leaning on context clues instead of sounding out words. Two very popular curricula from celebrated authors — “Units of Study for Teaching Reading” from Lucy Calkins and “Leveled Literacy Intervention” from Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell — were the primary promoters of this flawed idea in school districts and education schools across the country, generating millions of dollars for them and their publisher, Heinemann.

Throughout, Hanford and Peak ground these episodes not in who should be blamed, but in who bears the consequences. The fallout is hitting students struggling to learn to read, parents flummoxed by their children’s lack of progress and teachers who keep saying something like, “If only I had known. …”

Of course, the significance of that fallout hinges on whether Hanford and Peak’s provocative claims about the scope and quality of these curricula are actually correct. There are compelling reasons to believe they are.

Regarding its scope, a 2019 nationally representative Education Week found that “Leveled Literacy” intervention was used by 43% of K-2 early reading and special education teachers, while “Units of Study” was used by 16%. These curricula are Heinemann’s biggest sellers. Hanford and Peak found Heinemann brought in over $233 million in the past decade from just the 100 largest districts. Imagine their business across the remaining 13,000 smaller school districts. 

As to the quality, EdReports, a nonprofit reviewer of K-12 instructional materials, last year found lacking — labeling both as “does not meet expectations.” However, you need not lean on expert reviews to see the disconnect in this curricular approach. In a tacit admission, Calkins revised her “Units of Study” curriculum to incorporate the Science of Reading. The disconnect is even plainer in Fountas and Pinnell’s of their approach that encourages guessing words from context. They write, “If a reader says ‘pony’ for ‘horse’ because of information from the pictures. … His response is partially correct, but the teacher needs to guide him to stop and work for accuracy.”

That response lays bare how detached their approach is from teaching students to actually read text. Getting “pony” from the word “horse” can be “partially correct” only if the goal is something other than teaching students to read accurately, because it rewards children for learning to do something other than read the word. It rewards guessing. Such a strategy might get students partial meaning in the short run, but it will produce struggling readers over time. Indeed, it has.

Hanford deserves credit for her work championing the Science of Reading and pressing the case against predominant approaches to literacy used in many schools across a nation of struggling readers. Fortunately, some states and districts are . recently outlawed three-cueing, and New York City has to increase phonics instruction. But it will take time and deliberate efforts to change instruction in schools. In the interim, “Sold a Story” gives frustrated parents of struggling readers good questions to ask and the courage to demand better instruction. Clear, engaging and, yes, enraging reporting like this can help policymakers, teachers and families ensure that they are not sold a story that might hold their young readers back.