About 63 percent of Ohio third graders — the grade educators have long considered the most crucial for mastering reading — scored as proficient on spring 2026 state tests, up two percentage points from 61 percent in 2025.

Statewide reading proficiency also rose for all grades combined, as did proficiency for groups of students who often struggle.

That increase is cause for optimism for science of reading supporters, who cheered the progress as the state released spring 2026 test results this week. But the evidence isn’t clear yet that Ohio’s adoption of the science of reading in 2023 has students on a consistent path upward.

Third grade proficiency is still below pre-pandemic levels. It’s also below the 65 percent proficiency third graders had just two years ago in 2024 when the science of reading was being phased in. This year’s 63 percent proficiency is right in the middle of the 2024 and 2025 results.

Large changes in test scores could take a few years to show up, reading experts nationally have told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ since the science of reading has caught on in most states, particularly with schools needing to replace books, help teachers learn new ways to teach and then have the lessons start helping students.

Other factors could be holding scores back, including teachers not embracing the science of reading fully and still using old methods as well as Ohio’s decision to drop its hotly-contested requirement that students score well in reading to advance to fourth grade.

“It’s too early to tell in my view,” said Aaron Churchhill, Ohio research director of the Fordham Institute, a nonprofit education advocacy group that backs the science of reading. “We need to keep at it and give it a few years.”

Ohio Excels, a partnership of Ohio’s chambers of commerce, called the reading gains “encouraging” and said they suggest the science of reading is starting to take hold.

“At the same time, proficiency rates remain much too low, with nearly four in 10 students not proficient in reading,” said Ohio Excels President Lisa Gray. “We cannot be satisfied when so many students are still falling short of the skills they need to succeed.” 

Ohio’s adoption of the science of reading in 2023 is a source of pride for two-term Gov. Mike DeWine, who leaves office at the end of this year. That year, Ohio became one of the earliest states to ban “cueing” — having young students figure out what a word is through context or pictures — in favor of more direct, phonics-based instruction.

The state also required all teachers to take online training in the science of reading; and for all schools to use only state-approved science of reading textbooks, workbooks and online lessons.

Though many schools had already started using science of reading methods before the law and many made the shift quickly, others moved more slowly. The 2025-26 year was the first all schools had to use it.

After third grade reading scores dropped in 2024-25, state officials and science of reading backers said last fall that spring 2026 test scores would be “pivotal.” 

Backers of the change to the science of reading had several points to crow about in test results released this week. In addition to the third grade proficiency increase, the reading proficiency rate for all grades combined rose nearly two percentage points as well, to 62 percent.

And every demographic group the state measures — such as racial groups, disabled students and low-income students — also had improved reading proficiency from last year. Leading the way were Hispanic and Black students with gains of 3.5 and 3.4 percentage points and economically-disadvantaged students with a 2.7 percent gain.

“When you look at this year’s state report cards and see what has been done in a relatively short amount of time, it is a tremendous accomplishment,” DeWine said in a press release announcing the scores.

Schools that were early adopters of the science of reading also suggest that persistence in using the science of reading, and other training and ongoing coaching of teachers, can bring results.

The Elyria school district 30 miles west of Cleveland had stagnant reading results and even a decline in 2025 scores, despite receiving an award from DeWine for its science of reading efforts. But district leaders and teachers told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ last fall they were poised for gains in 2026.

They were right: Third grade reading proficiency in that district’s five elementary schools jumped from about 45% in 2025 to about 52% in 2026.

 The district was delighted with the gains, but also cautioned keeping them going will take constant work.

“We have talked about things taking time and just what a long term process it is to implement anything, and lots of different factors we have, whether it’s staff turnover or different knowledge levels of our teachers and things like that,” said Courtney Griffiths, associate superintendent of academic services. “Yes, it’s very nice to see those results. It doesn’t mean that we back off on anything that we’re doing or we feel like it’s mission accomplished.”

Literacy specialist Andrea McKenzie said early diagnostic tests of those third graders as they started as fourth graders this school year show the improvements are persisting.

“I think it’s real,” McKenzie said. “We’re not seeing a setback… It’s really sticking in fourth grade right now too.”

There are still reasons to be unsure if the science of reading shift is bringing sustainable results, along with the third grade proficiency rate still lagging behind 2024. Multiple reasons could account for gains, including drops in chronic absenteeism over time and students having had more time to catch up from missing school because of the pandemic.

And the science of reading isn’t achieving one of its most important goals — helping the worst students read better by giving them more explicit directions on the sounds letters make and how to decode words into something they can understand.

More third graders are scoring as “limited,” the state’s lowest rating, an equivalent to an F, than before the state passed the science of reading — 21% this year, compared to 20.9% in 2025 and 19.1% in 2023. 

The inability to help the students that read the worst bothers Fordham, which wants Ohio to bring back the “Third Grade Reading Guarantee” the legislature passed in 2012 requiring mandatory retention of third graders who can’t score well in reading. 

Churchill said that the percentage of students scoring as limited had dropped under that law in the years before the pandemic — falling from 27% in 2016 to 14% in 2019.

“(It) pushed schools to help struggling readers —now it’s gone,” Churchill said. “The science of reading holds great promise for students, but it needs to be paired with the accountability that a retention mandate brings.”

Something wasn’t adding up in . Students were making strong gains in reading in kindergarten and first grade. They were developing foundational skills and, for the most part, reading accurately. But as students moved across second and third grades, growth became stagnant and the end-of-grade reading proficiency began to decline.

After taking a deep dive into the data, district leaders discovered that the challenge wasn’t necessarily whether students could read the words in front of them. In fact, many could. The concern was fluency and automaticity. Students weren’t reading at a pace and with the ease needed to devote their attention to understanding what they were reading.

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For , Davidson County Schools’ director of elementary education and federal programs, the data pointed to a disconnect. The teachers had participated in training to deepen their understanding of how children learn to read, and the district had a core foundational curriculum with aligned support. But Davidson County did not have a comprehensive core reading program that pulled together vocabulary, syntax, knowledge building, fluency, and comprehension.

And the deeper they looked, the more the question shifted from: What are students missing, to what do teachers need to help students get there?

From knowing to doing

Davidson County educators had already invested considerable time in learning about the science of reading. Willard described LETRS as “some of the best professional learning” she had experienced. Instructional coaches studied “” by Nancy Lewis Hennessy. Principals, assistant principals, and coaches examined research together. And most recently, more than 200 teachers were invited to learn from about the role knowledge plays in reading comprehension.

There were plenty of moments when educators could see the connections between what they were learning and what students needed. But seeing those connections was one thing. Translating them into daily instruction was another.

Without a comprehensive curriculum, teachers still had to find and evaluate quality texts, determine how those texts could build knowledge across a topic, plan explicit vocabulary and syntax instruction, incorporate comprehension routines, and connect it all to grade-level standards.

Amber Fitts, an early literacy specialist with the Department of Public Instruction’s , saw that challenge as she worked alongside instructional coaches. They were developing a deeper understanding of what effective comprehension instruction should include. The harder part was envisioning what all of it looked like when a teacher stood in front of students on Monday morning.

“There are wonderful things” in LETRS, Fitts said. “We know what to do, but teachers don’t always know how to make it happen in the classroom.”

It wasn’t that teachers didn’t want to do the work. They needed a way to make all the pieces fit together.

The more Davidson County learned, the clearer the gap became. Educators were building the knowledge. What they needed was a way to turn that knowledge into practice, and the district had to decide how to help them do it.

What if we build it ourselves?

One option was to purchase a comprehensive core reading program. But for Davidson County, Willard estimated that could cost close to $1 million. District leaders also felt they didn’t have time to wait for someone else to solve the problem.

“We couldn’t wait on money to come for an adoption,” Willard said. “We had to do the work ourselves.”

There was urgency behind that decision. Third grade reading proficiency had fallen below the state average, something Willard said was unheard of in a district accustomed to performing at or above the state average in its elementary subjects.

“We knew there was a disconnect,” she said. “And we had to figure out where that disconnect was.”

So, they did.

Willard approached Fitts with an idea: What if Davidson County Schools created their own knowledge-building units?

The goal wasn’t simply to create another collection of lessons. They wanted something that could bring together what teachers had learned through LETRS with vocabulary, syntax, fluency, comprehension, and knowledge building, while also giving teachers the texts and instructional structure to make all of it manageable in the classroom. And if teachers were going to be expected to use the units, Willard believed teachers needed to help build them.

The district invited educators to apply for a design team and began with third grade, where the data suggested the need was greatest. Teachers worked through the summer and continued throughout the school year, creating units designed, as Willard described them, “for teachers by teachers.”

The team also made an intentional decision to connect the units to science and social studies standards, two subjects that can get squeezed out of the elementary school day when time is limited. Yet those subjects offer something essential to literacy development: opportunities for students to build the background knowledge they need to understand increasingly complex texts. Instead of asking teachers to choose between literacy and content, the team began looking for ways to build both at the same time.

Changing more than the curriculum

Creating the units was one thing. Using them required teachers to rethink some familiar approaches to reading instruction.

A teacher might traditionally spend time teaching main idea with one text, pull another text for more practice, and then move on to the next standard. The new units asked teachers and students to stay with texts longer. Students reread. They examined vocabulary and sentence structure. They built knowledge around a topic. And they encountered multiple reading standards within the same text rather than approaching comprehension as a series of isolated skills.

For Willard, that shift was particularly important because fluency had been part of what the district saw in its third grade data. Students didn’t necessarily need an endless supply of new passages. They needed opportunities to go deeper into the text already in front of them.

The texts themselves presented another shift. They were intentionally more challenging to stretch learning growth.

The team considered both quantitative and qualitative measures of text complexity, sometimes selecting texts with Lexile measures one or two grade levels above third grade. The expectation wasn’t that every child should be able to pick up those texts and read them independently. Teachers would provide the scaffolding, particularly early in the year, so students could engage with complex ideas and language while continuing to receive foundational reading instruction based on their individual needs during another part of the school day. Still, teachers noticed.

“This text, it’s too hard,” Willard remembers hearing repeatedly during the first quarter.

For veteran third grade teacher Jill Hunt, the adjustment wasn’t only about the texts. After years in the classroom, she had accumulated favorite books, lessons, and activities. Now she was being asked to use lessons that were much more scripted than what she was accustomed to. There was some hesitation. But there was also a willingness to give it a try and to do it well.

Repeated reading began giving students another way into difficult text. A child who couldn’t initially read a grade-level passage independently could listen to it, discuss it, build knowledge around it, encounter its vocabulary, and then return to it again. After several readings, that same student might begin reading portions with a partner or more independently.

The text hadn’t gotten easier. The students’ access to it had changed.

Teacher perspectives and practices were changing, too. Rather than introducing multiple instructional strategies in quick succession, the units purposefully slowed the process down.

Teachers might concentrate on sentence parsing throughout one quarter before moving to sentence anagrams during the next. That repetition gave teachers time to become comfortable with a practice and students time to internalize the routine.

Instructional coach Tina Hampton saw that shift among teachers who had completed LETRS. Initially, she heard comments like, “I already do this.” But as teachers began using the units, they started to see the difference between incorporating a practice and going deeply enough with it to change what students could do.

Leveling the playing field for teachers, too

As the units moved into classrooms, Davidson County began seeing another effect it hadn’t necessarily set out to create. Teacher experience across the district varied considerably. Some classrooms were led by veteran teachers like Hunt, who had taught third grade for years. Others were led by beginning teachers, teachers new to the grade level, or educators entering classrooms through alternative licensure pathways. That variation mattered.

A veteran teacher might have years of instructional knowledge and materials to draw upon. A teacher hired in October who had never taught a tested grade might be trying to figure out what strong comprehension instruction looked like while simultaneously learning how to run a classroom. The units provided both teachers with a common foundation.

At , Principal could walk from one third grade classroom into another and recognize the same explicit vocabulary routines and instructional structures. The teachers weren’t identical. Their experience wasn’t identical. But students were encountering common language, routines, and expectations. Beasley saw that as a way to create more equitable instruction for students.

Willard began seeing something else in it, too.

“We talk about leveling the playing field for kids,” she said, “but we forget teachers.”

For newer teachers, the detailed lessons could serve as a scaffold. One newly hired third grade teacher used the units almost as a script, Willard recalled, and the instructional results surprised her. Veteran teachers didn’t always need the same level of support. But they, too, had access to the common routines, texts, and instructional expectations.

The district had started by trying to address a student learning problem. Along the way, it was also confronting a systems question: How do you make strong instruction less dependent on the experience level of the individual teacher?

Building the plane while flying it

Davidson County Schools didn’t have a polished curriculum waiting at the end of the process. The district was creating the units while teachers were using them. Willard and Fitts continuously reminded stakeholders that they were “building the plane as they were flying it.”

Each quarter, teachers used the materials and provided feedback. The design team listened, revised, and released the next round.

At the end of the school year, teachers were asked to look back across the entire experience and provide feedback again. The team reconvened during the summer and made more changes.

That feedback loop became important to teacher buy-in. Teachers weren’t simply asked what they thought. They could see their feedback reflected in what came next.

School leaders were part of the process, too. Willard had been clear from the beginning that the third grade units weren’t optional. The data, she believed, showed that the district could not continue doing what it had always done and expect a different result. But a mandate alone wasn’t going to change classroom practice.

Principals spent time examining the data and understanding why the district was making the shift. They carried that understanding back into their schools, into PLCs (professional learning communities), classroom observations, and conversations with teachers.

And then something began happening that the district hadn’t mandated. Fourth grade teachers started asking for the units.

“Why can’t we have something like that?” Willard remembers them asking.

The work began expanding into fourth grade. At Davis-Townsend, fifth grade teachers wanted in, too.

What had started as a required response to a third grade reading problem was beginning to spread because teachers were asking to be part of it.

And within one year, third grade reading proficiency increased 10 percentage points.

“We are proud of the progress our third grade students have made,” Willard said. “This growth reflects the hard work of our students, the dedication of our teachers, and the continued support of our families.”

But she was quick to add that the gains are not the finish line.

“While we are pleased with these gains, we know our work is not done,” Willard said. “We remain committed to strengthening literacy instruction through expanding our ELA Knowledge Building Units into other grade levels, providing targeted support, and ensuring that every student develops the reading skills and knowledge needed for continued success.”

Davidson County School’s story started with declining third grade reading scores. But somewhere along the way, the problem the district was trying to solve became bigger than a test score.

North Carolina has invested heavily in helping teachers understand the science of reading. This district’s experience raises the question of what comes next: What does it take to move that knowledge from professional learning into daily classroom practice consistently, across teachers, classrooms, and schools?

Davidson County School leaders didn’t answer that question with another training or wait for a finished solution. They started with the data and brought teachers into the work. They tried something, listened, changed it, and tried again. The plane is still being built. But now, more teachers are asking to get on.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

That decision won’t come until next April when the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce chooses between competing visions of how math should be taught and names textbooks and other learning materials low-scoring schools will be forced to use.

In the meantime, schools will be in a holding pattern of what lessons to use while advocates and state education officials duel behind closed doors over which approaches win out.

With Ohio’s math scores still below pre-pandemic levels, the Ohio legislature and Gov. Mike DeWine passed a law this summer that mirrors Ohio’s 2023 law mandating the use of the science of reading in classrooms by requiring schools to better track math skills and give students extra help. 

The new law also requires elementary school teachers to show they are proficient in math skills before they can teach math.

But unlike the science of reading law which sets a clear path for how schools should teach, there is no consensus — both nationally and in Ohio — on how students can best learn math, with ongoing debate nationally between a self-proclaimed science of math movement and more holistic approaches favored by many educators.

The differences in math approaches are nuanced — simplified by some as focusing on teaching concepts versus teaching procedures — and have not become a full public debate in Ohio, at least not yet.

But educators are watching cautiously as the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce follows the model of the reading law and creates a list of “high quality” math textbooks and other learning materials by April 2027.

Most schools can still pick their own textbooks, but an estimated 450 schools with low test scores will have to use only books from that list. 

The department won’t clear up concerns by saying which studies or resources will guide its evaluation of materials. Asked by ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ, if the science of math was under consideration, the department did not respond, only saying it is still in the planning stages.

“It would be premature to speculate on those details,” the department told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

Both the state superintendents association and the Ohio Federation of Teachers union said during debate over the law they oppose letting the state, not each local district, decide what to use.

Ohio’s math teachers also object to the state taking that control.

“I don’t like the state telling me I have to use a certain textbook,” said Mike Lipnos, president of the Ohio Council of Teachers of Mathematics. 

Lipnos wants the state to follow a state math learning plan he helped create last year that prioritizes teaching math concepts and making sure students develop problem-solving and reasoning skills. But he sensed some opposition within the department to the plan and worries the state will instead approve science of math books he believes teach math as a set of procedures to memorize.

His organization has criticized the science of math as trying to “capitalize” off of the science of reading.

“We want to say clearly to all mathematics stakeholders that OCTM rejects the outdated and inappropriate instructional practices that are being repackaged and promoted as some sort of new ‘scientific’ ideology,” the group

The science of math wasn’t an issue in debate over the bill: Backers did not testify and have not made any public comment. University of Texas professor Sarah Powell, leader of the movement, also told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ she is not talking with Ohio officials to promote her approach.

The movement’s While backers favor teacher-led lessons with explicit instruction on how to solve math problems — prioritizing them over lessons on concepts that Powell has said can “ waste students’ time” — they say schools need a balance.

How schools teach reading has become a major issue nationally in the last several years, with the majority of states passing laws mandating use of phonics-heavy science of reading lessons. Low math scores on the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress then focused states’ attention on math. 

Ten states have passed policies to change math instruction just this year, said Lindsey Henderson, the senior policy director for math of the ExcelinEd nonprofit education advocacy group.

, such as having math coaches, teaching math at least 60 minutes a day, or making sure students can take advanced math classes. Alabama, an early adopter of some of the policies, leads the way with eight of the 11 approved and Ohio, as one of the ten states setting math policies this year, is also a leader in the effort, Henderson said.

But Henderson and other experts concede that math research is a few years behind where reading was when the science of reading caught on.

“Math doesn’t have a nice short term like the science of reading, and everybody knows what it means and everybody knows where to look for the research,” Henderson said.

The Center for Reinventing Public Education, another nonprofit research and advocacy group, characterized the two sides of the “math wars” as favoring “traditional” teacher-led classes as opposed to “reform-oriented” classes in which student exploration takes priority. 

In a recent survey of states, CRPE found that as of late last year 18 states and Washington, D.C., have passed math policies, “many of which emphasized priorities associated with the science of math.”

But the report notes that both sides claim to be “evidence-based,” which makes it hard to decide what’s best.

“The Science of Math has not achieved the academic and professional consensus that the Science of Reading eventually did, and the gap matters,” the report states. “Whether the field will eventually reach comparable agreement, remains unclear.”

In Ohio, the bill enacted this summer by the Ohio legislature and Gov. Mike DeWine comes as just 55 percent of students across all grades scored as proficient or better in math in 2025, while more than one in four scored at the lowest level, the state equivalent of F grades on state tests.

“This problem has not developed overnight, but its severity grows ever more prevalent as students who were knocked off track by the impact of the pandemic, or who were already struggling academically, continue to be promoted to the next grade despite showing very clear signs of needing significant intervention,” said State Sen. Andrew Brenner, the law’s author and chair of the Senate Education Committee.

The law passed this summer has drawn praise for several changes, including requiring tutoring of students who struggle, schools where fewer than 51% of third graders score proficient in math to develop a plan to improve and letting high-scoring middle school students combine seventh and eighth grade math into one year and start algebra in eighth grade.

The bill has been praised widely for calling attention to math and for taking steps to help improve math skills.

The law falls far short of Ohio’s 2023 science of reading bill in a few important ways, however. The reading bill budgeted over $160 million to pay for new teaching materials and teacher training, while the math bill provides no new money.

The reading bill also mandated that teachers learn the basics of the science of reading, while the math law only requires the Department of Education and Workforce to develop training by December.

Good training in how to teach math is considered crucial by wide-ranging advocates, including ExcelinEd, Lipnos’ math teachers association and its national organization.

The portion of the law that could lead to debate going forward — the requirement that the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce approve a list of “high quality instructional materials” in math â€” did not spark much discussion during hearings for the law.

In the end, the final law calls for all schools required to set math improvement plans — the 450 schools with fewer than 51% of students testing as proficient in math on state tests — to use only state-approved books and other materials.

And unlike with the reading law, which specifically banned some discredited teaching approaches and mandated phonics-heavy lessons, the law offers no definition of “high-quality.” The new Ohio law only requires that books help students build their math skills toward mastery.

The department declined to answer questions from ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ about whether schools are using bad textbooks, whether bad books are leading to bad scores or which methods of math teaching need to be added or cut.

“That’s precisely the gap,” Steve Dackin, the department’s director told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ by email.

“Historically, the Department has not been able to collect data on math materials, and there is currently no approved list to compare materials against in Ohio,” Dackin said. “As a result, we are not in a position to characterize what districts are using.”

Dackin and the department declined to say what it would base its “high quality” judgment on, saying only that books should have “coherent learning progressions, strong alignment with standards, embedded assessments that inform instruction and help teachers identify student needs, and evidence-based strategies that create more opportunities for students to engage deeply with core concepts.”

“It’s not about stopping certain materials,” he said. “It’s about ensuring classrooms use resources that truly support strong instruction.”

Davis often heard from family and friends that Juri was smart and she should consider enrolling her granddaughter in preschool early.

And a new literacy screening at one of her granddaughter’s primary care checkups confirmed it.

In recent years, literacy has become an issue that’s extended far beyond the classroom and a child’s home, reaching government — and now hospitals.

At six of Nationwide Children’s Hospital’s 13 clinics, in Columbus, Ohio, 3 to 5 year olds are receiving reading screenings during their pediatric visits. Since 2022, more than 7,000 children have received the screenings.

“When kids come into their primary care pediatrician, if they’re coming into all of their checkups, they would come in 15 times before they start kindergarten,” said Sara Bode, medical director of school-based health at Nationwide Children’s. “That was a really opportune setting for us to really think about where we are in intervening, assessing or understanding where kids are with their literacy and supporting that from the clinic.” 

The 5-minute screenings are done annually at the beginning of a regular check up by a team of “Kindergarten Readiness Coordinators,” who are former early childhood educators and now work at the hospital.

The screening does not check for learning disabilities, but can identify some challenges with language development. The screening mainly focuses on foundational skills that are learned at home through activities like reading with a parent before bed or letter games.

By doing a small read aloud with a board book, the coordinators assess a child’s letter and shape recognition, rhyming and fine motor skills — like turning a page. Afterward, they’re able to tell parents if their child is ahead, on track or needs additional support, providing an opportunity for early intervention well before a child enters a formal classroom setting.

“We have light bulb moments. … One is in a good way when we do this literacy screening and the child is knocking it out of the park … and the parents are like ‘I didn’t even know they could do this,’” Bode said. “Another light bulb moment is when kids are struggling and parents will say to us ‘I had no idea they were supposed to know these things before kindergarten,’ and we’re like ‘That’s OK. That’s why we’re doing this now, because at the age of 3 … you have all the time in the world.’ ”

The coordinators provide learning kits with different reading materials including magnetic letters and activity books. Coordinators maintain a relationship with families in the weeks, months and years to come, with additional resources like care coordination to get students enrolled in preschool, access to library readings and where to find adult education programs if a parent struggles with reading.

Families are given a personalized literacy plan, with checklists for parents to go over where their child is performing well and where they can improve. Check-ins after the initial screening occur a month and three months later, with updated assessments when the child turns four and five.

“Most of our parents, if you ask them, ‘What should your child know? What are those early literacy skills before kindergarten?’ they can’t really tell you,” Bode said, “So, this is just a real learning opportunity.”

For families, like Davis, the guidance is a helpful launching pad.

“I didn’t know where to start,” Davis said, adding that while she read to her granddaughter often, she didn’t feel like she “had the right materials to get her started the right way.”

“When you’re at home, you just think of things that you think the child would need to know, but with a coordinator, … you’re given things you should be working on. … It’s good to know I’m not jumping ahead or giving her too much that she doesn’t need now,” Davis said. “The screening really helped me get focused and to engage more with my granddaughter with different techniques.”

The majority of the children are from low-income backgrounds, Bode said, adding that the primary care clinic serves more than 85% of people and families who are on Medicaid or uninsured with “many kids who are really struggling on these assessments.”

“These clinics are all chosen because they’re in locations where, typically, we can tell by the school district, that a lot of the kids don’t start school ready,” Bode said.

Across Columbus Public Schools, about 64% of third grade children are not reading on grade level, according to , but hospital staff are hopeful early intervention is beginning to move the needle.

In Ohio, kindergarten students are required to take a at the beginning of the school year that measures social-emotional development, physical well-being and skills in literacy and math.

Recent data from the hospital found its first cohort of 332 students had over a 71% passage rate compared to the district’s average of 60%.

In the of Columbus, a predominately Black and low-income area, only 22% of children pass the readiness assessment on average, but children who partook in the screening process were over 70%, Bode said.

“We’re getting these kids connected because these are some of our highest risk populations,” Bode said. “We’re really seeing gains where we’re able to intervene, connect them to programs, teach parents what to do at home and it’s actually now translating to their language and literacy scores when they get to kindergarten.”

With the help of the kindergarten readiness coordinators, Juri has been enrolled in a local preschool for a year, where she’s ahead of the curriculum.

“She has grown from knowing her name to writing her full name. … She writes A through Z. She knows her sight words. She can write her birthday,” Davis said. “Juri has an advantage because [our clinic] saw she was ready at 3. … By the time she gets to kindergarten, she’s going to be ready. She’s going to be advanced.”

Bode is hopeful the screenings will expand to all of the hospital’s 13 locations and that it’ll work with national initiatives like , a program that gives children books at every pediatric visit and , which gifts kids books from birth to 5.

“There’s a big difference between not being delayed and being ready for school and thriving, and I do think there’s a gap and misunderstanding in the medical field about what is needed,” Bode said. “So this idea of mixing health and education is just so important … because if a kid’s not ready for kindergarten, then they are more likely to fail that third-grade reading test, then they’re less likely to graduate and their adult health outcomes are probably more affected by that than anything I’m treating in the clinic.”

To put these results in perspective, four years ago, the third grade ELA proficiency rate was 40% – nearly 30 points below its pre-pandemic highs. Moreover, according to a Universal Reading Screener, our kindergarten to second grade students were demonstrating mastery at levels far below prior cohorts. 

As executive director of the charter school, I recognized that the problem was not a lack of effort. When our staff observed classrooms, we saw teachers and leaders working incredibly hard. However, we also saw many ineffective practices, especially in our youngest grades: centers where students colored without purpose or attention, letter sounds introduced without sufficient practice, and Youtube videos replacing the joy of books read-aloud. It was no surprise so many third and fourth grade students struggled to read fluently, write complete sentences or access complex texts. 

Over the next four years, we changed almost everything about our K-5 literacy program. Today, our Title I school ranks in the state’s top 3% for 3rd Grade ELA achievement, outscoring every district in the state of Tennessee, including districts with far less diversity and far greater resources. While these results are extraordinary, the work we did was anything but. In fact, I am confident it can be replicated by any school or district. 

Here are six practices that moved the needle most. 

The Science of Reading is the tip of the iceberg. Starting in 2022, Tennessee began to implement training and curricula rooted in the Science of Reading, which we embraced and incorporated. Along the way, we learned that this evidence-based approach rests upon a broader foundation of cognitive and social science. This research has not reached most American teachers and school districts. Over the past two years — thanks to organizations like , , and — we explored the science of learning. 

Based on what we learned, we overhauled our approach to coaching and development. Today, every teacher at Nashville Classical is trained on basic concepts like the importance of securing and harnessing attention, the difference between working and long-term memory, the importance of background knowledge and the need to support encoding and retrieval. If you walk into a third grade classroom today, you might see students with a knowledge organizer on ancient Rome, quietly self-quizzing themselves on terms like patricians and plebeians. These simple daily practices are supported by science, but implementing them is not rocket science. Very few schools or districts have shared these practices with their teachers, which is a tragedy because anyone can learn them and every teacher deserves to know them. 

Don’t teach skills — build knowledge. features a listening comprehension strand, which we use to build background knowledge. In younger grades, we reinforce key terms, timelines and vocabulary through daily oral drills, content-focused songs and frequent opportunities to repeat ideas through “turn and talks.” As students move into tested grades, they practice reading short passages and answering multiple choice questions. But we avoid teaching test tricks like “crossing out wrong answers” or lessons on “how to find the main idea.” Instead, our teachers ask themselves “What background knowledge or vocabulary might prevent students from understanding this passage?” and “How can I build their knowledge to increase their comprehension?.” By eliminating time spent trying to teach abstract “critical thinking,” we have more time to build knowledge and vocabulary, which are the actual building blocks of comprehension.

Fluency — in all its forms — unlocks growth. Our benchmark assessment system measures fluency across grade levels, including for letter sounds, word reading, oral reading and silent reading. Our team took time to deeply understand the importance of each of these domains and unpacked what a fluent reader could think and do at each stage of their development, from kindergarten to middle school. Unfortunately, , prioritizing sound or word reading fluency at the expense of fluent reading in context. Our team worked to align vision of reading excellence across grades, which meant teachers were working toward a shared picture of what proficient young readers and successful adults readers can do down to the tiniest details of exactly how many words per minute a third grader should be able to read silently and what sorts of affixes, word roots, and phrases made passages appropriate for each grade. This level of granular detail meant teachers could identify students at risk early and clearly, intervening to provide the right support to the right students. 

Writing is thinking. We invested significant time in teaching students to write, starting in kindergarten. Our approach is rooted in with a focus on three areas. First, students write about complex topics directly connected to the knowledge and content they are reading about. So, our kindergarteners learn to speak in complete sentences while explaining what happens in nursery rhymes, our first graders learn to write sentences about Aesop’s Fables, and our second graders learn to write their first paragraphs about Greek myths. Next, our teaching focuses on sentence-level activities. By third grade, students have learned to expand, distill and express their ideas in complex and complete sentences. Finally, we teach students to revise. Teachers frequently display student work on document cameras, analyze it and then prompt students to apply concepts to their own work. 

Books belong in classrooms. Across the country, and many curricula emphasize short passages or excerpts. We believe books belong in classrooms and have selected curricula — Core Knowledge, Fishtank and Reading Reconsidered — built on this belief. Great books expose children to beautiful stories that have or will stand the test of time. When a classroom of second graders reaches the end of Charlotte’s Web, there is not a dry eye in sight and they are joining a cultural conversation that stretches across grades and generations. We’ve found that the experience of reading great literature has grown our children’s attention and shaped their identity in the best way possible. There is a tradition of literacy and reading at our school, which we hope students carry with them long after they graduate. 

Play the long game. We are fortunate to have an incredible team of teachers and leaders who work with our elementary students. They deserve all of the credit for these achievements and many of them stayed at our schools through a period of significant change, where we implemented new curricula, changed schedules and raised expectations. We made many mistakes along the way, but always tried to balance the pain of changing too fast with the cost of changing too slowly. While we knew that we would not see gains happen overnight, we always believed positive habits would compound each day. For our curriculum and coaching to make a difference, we needed to stop implementation of any number of distracting, shiny objects: digital tutors, complex intervention programs, AI-everything, etc. We learned that investments in the practice and delivery of instruction may not pay off the fastest, but they take you the farthest. 

Today, I’m not just the leader of our school:  I’m a parent. And something else happened around the same time our third graders took their state test – my son, a kindergartener, learned to read. This summer, while I spent a late night hunched over a laptop to analyze results, he was upstairs reading Dog Man under his covers. 

Every kid deserves the type of teaching my son got in kindergarten and will get in the years to come. The only way to make that happen is for more schools to implement the ordinary practices that create extraordinary classrooms and outcomes. 

Over the past several years, states across the country have rewritten early literacy policy at an unprecedented pace. legislation, teacher training requirements, instructional material reforms, and early intervention initiatives have reshaped the national literacy landscape.

Today, nearly every state has taken meaningful steps to strengthen reading instruction. But passing legislation was intended to be a starting point, never the finish line.

As more states move beyond adopting literacy laws, the challenge has become turning policy into consistent classroom practice. The work has shifted beyond simply deciding what should happen to ensuring that it happens for every teacher, in every school, and for every student.

, senior policy director for literacy at , has watched that shift unfold across the country.

“It doesn’t happen overnight,” Taylor said. “You have to stay the course.”

That perspective captures where literacy reform is headed. Strong policy remains the foundation, but lasting change depends on how those policies are put into practice.

Today, the work is helping those policies come to life in classrooms. Increasingly, the work centers on implementation by equipping teachers, building coaching systems, sustaining high-quality instructional materials, measuring progress, and strengthening practice long after legislation is passed.

Literacy reform is entering a new phase

Over the last decade, states have made remarkable progress building cohesive early literacy policies. Teacher training, screening requirements, interventions, curriculum guidance, and accountability measures have become increasingly common across the country. Passing legislation is only the beginning. Policies and funding create the conditions for success. A shared vision helps everyone move in the same direction.

“The most effective states don’t stop once the policy is passed,” Taylor explained. “They’re continually reflecting, improving, and asking what’s next.”

She believes successful implementation begins with two foundational elements: a comprehensive literacy policy and adequate funding to support it. Beyond those essentials, implementation also requires something less tangible but equally important — a shared vision.

Successful implementation begins with a clear vision, so everyone understands their role in achieving the desired outcomes.

“What’s everyone’s role? How are we going to arrive at the outcomes we want? How are we going to sustain the work and continuously improve?” Taylor said.

Rather than viewing literacy initiatives as one-time reforms, the strongest states approach implementation as an ongoing cycle of planning, reflection, evaluation, and refinement.

Teachers need more than training

Professional learning has become one of the most visible components of literacy reform nationwide. now offer some level of science of reading training for educators. Taylor points out that fewer than half require training for all elementary teachers and administrators. As a result, access to highly qualified teachers can vary from one classroom to the next, leaving some students with educators who have received comprehensive science of reading training while others do not.

North Carolina has distinguished itself by taking a broader approach. The ensured that pre-K through fifth grade teachers, instructional support personnel, and elementary administrators all received science of reading training, creating a common instructional foundation across schools. Even so, training alone is not enough. Teachers also need high-quality instructional materials aligned with scientifically based reading research, strong educator preparation programs, and ongoing guidance that helps translate new learning into classroom practice.

Professional learning introduces the research. Implementation happens as teachers put that learning into practice every day.

“Professional learning is important,” Taylor said, “but we also have to think about how we help teachers implement what they’ve learned.”

Coaching is becoming the missing link

If training builds knowledge, coaching builds practice.

Taylor repeatedly emphasized literacy coaching as one of the most important, and often overlooked, investments states can make.

“The most effective implementation often involves highly qualified literacy coaches,” she said.

Across the country, more states are recognizing coaching as the bridge between policy and classroom instruction. This year, approved legislation ensuring every elementary school has access to a literacy coach, joining and as the only states currently providing statewide funding for coaching in every elementary school. Taylor believes this reflects an important step forward in literacy reform.

Teachers participate in countless professional learning opportunities each year. Without ongoing, job-embedded coaching, much of that learning risks becoming “just another training.”

The same is true for high-quality instructional materials. Districts are making substantial investments in new curricula, but those investments yield the greatest return only when educators receive sustained support to understand the instructional design, make sound instructional decisions, and use the materials as intended. Coaches help educators translate research into daily instruction, provide meaningful feedback, solve implementation challenges, and sustain improvement long after workshops have ended. 

North Carolina is moving in that direction as well. Taylor praised the state’s efforts to expand a scalable coaching model through the use of ExcelinEd’s The model creates a layered system that connects the Office of Early Learning state leaders, regional early literacy consultants, early literacy specialists, district leaders, local coaches, and classroom educators.

“It creates that systemic approach that has the power to make true and lasting change,” she said. “Build a model that people can understand and see their part in, and they’ll take it and run with it.”

Literacy doesn’t end in third grade

As states support early literacy implementation, many are recognizing that the work cannot stop in third grade. Students continue developing more sophisticated reading, writing, vocabulary, and comprehension skills throughout middle school and high school.

Several states are already moving in that direction. and established adolescent literacy policies several years ago. More recently, and expanded literacy support into the middle grades, while adopted a K-12 literacy framework that prepares students throughout their educational journey. North Carolina has also taken important steps by expanding literacy training for educators who teach older students.

The shift reflects a broader understanding of literacy itself. Every content area teacher, from science to social studies, has a role in helping students become stronger readers, writers, and thinkers. All students beyond third grade are still learning to read at more advanced levels.

The best states measure more than test scores

One lesson that states are learning is the importance of beginning with the end in mind. Too often, ambitious literacy initiatives begin without a clear plan for evaluating their impact. As a result, educators may believe reforms are making a difference but struggle to demonstrate success because they never identified the evidence that they would need before implementation began.

Evaluation should never be an afterthought. Successful states define their desired outcomes early, determine how they will measure progress, and use that information to expand and sustain implementation over time.

Accountability is an important part of that process. As Taylor explained, the states making the greatest improvements in literacy have built strong partnerships between their accountability systems and literacy efforts. Accountability is about more than measuring results. It provides educators and leaders with the information they need to reflect, make adjustments, and continue improving.

What the leading states have in common

As Taylor reflects on the work happening across the country, she sees a common thread among the states making the greatest progress. Their success is not the result of a single initiative or one legislative victory. It comes from building systems that prepare educators, improve instruction, and continue improving over time.

Those systems begin with a clear vision. Strong policy provides the foundation, but successful implementation depends on everyone understanding their role and working toward the same goals. States that sustain progress invest in educators through high-quality professional learning, refine educator preparation programs, and provide the coaching teachers need to put research into practice.

Just as important, they recognize that implementation is never finished. The strongest states establish meaningful ways to measure progress, learn from the data, and make adjustments along the way. They continue refining instructional materials, expanding supports, and expanding literacy efforts long after legislation is passed.

Long-term commitment is what separates lasting change from short-lived reform. States that continue learning, improving, and investing in educators create the conditions for stronger reading outcomes that endure over time.

Why North Carolina is well positioned

Among the states Taylor follows closely, North Carolina stands out. Its statewide literacy policy, significant investment in professional learning, expanding coaching infrastructure, strong leadership, and commitment to continuous improvement have created a strong foundation for continued improvement.

“We love ,” Taylor said, noting that it included several areas beyond what many other states had already adopted, including educator preparation and comprehensive professional learning.

Equally important is the state’s willingness to reflect and improve. Rather than assuming the work is finished, state and local leaders continue examining assessment results, identifying areas for growth, and refining implementation along the way. That commitment keeps North Carolina moving forward.

Like every state, North Carolina still has opportunities to strengthen its literacy efforts. Developing a more systematic process for reviewing high-quality instructional materials, refining consistency around dyslexia screening, expanding adolescent literacy supports beyond policy, and continuing to invest in coaching could further improve the state’s literacy efforts.

Taylor offered one final piece of advice: “Remember the old adage, ‘If you fail to plan, you’re planning to fail.’ Have a plan, communicate it well, and see it through to completion from the statehouse to the classroom.”

Meaningful literacy improvement takes time. When policy is paired with thoughtful implementation, educators receive the tools, coaching, and guidance they need. Students experience consistent, research-based instruction, and literacy reform becomes everyday classroom practice.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

At first, they shyly raised their hands or whispered “that’s me” when their teacher sang an attendance song, but then they jumped up and spent the next hour stretching, dancing and singing to calm their 8 a.m. energy.

Providence Public Schools Superintendent Javier MontaĂąez watched from the back of the classroom before he made his way to the colorful carpet full of a dozen 5-year-olds. There, he did windmills with his arms and gave high fives.

Shortly after, it was time for the big task of the morning — sounding out letters and finding words that began with that letter. Montañez echoed the sound of the letter ‘H’, before giving the word “happy” as an example and following it with a pair of jazz hands. He laughed as they continued their lesson.

“It’s important to remember what it’s like to be a kid,” he said.

It’s a mentality that resonates deeply with the superintendent who five years ago was tasked to lead the school district he once attended — a district that had once let him down.

Providence Public Schools, , educates more than 19,400 students, with more than 80% Black or brown; and who qualify for free or reduced lunch. More than a third of students are English language learners.

There’s many parts of Montañez’s story that mirror a typical student in the district, including coming from a low-income Latino background.

But there’s other parts of his story he doesn’t ever want to see reflected in his students, like being “that kid out of sight, out of mind, in the back of the classroom trying to make myself smaller than what I was,” Montañez said.

The superintendent remembers what it was like to once be a kid who always felt “dumb,” with neither he nor his teachers having the resources to help. He remembers once being a kid who entered high school homeless, often sleeping under a tree at a local park or in unlocked cars. He also remembers once being a kid who was unable to read until his junior year — a kid who fell through the cracks with undiagnosed dyslexia.

In addition to being educated in the district, MontaĂąez has also spent more than 30 years as an educator in the Providence public school system; first as a second and third grade bilingual teacher, before advancing through vice principal and principal roles to interim and permanent superintendent in 2021 and 2022.

His experiences have molded and become the center of his vow to make Providence “the destination of education.”

“[When I became an educator], I saw myself again in those seats suffering. [I had to ask myself] ‘What can I do to help any of those kids that are all little Javiers that no one really saw because … they were only looking at students who were highly achieving?’” Montañez said, adding that curricula and expectations were usually watered down for kids who were struggling.

“One of the things I grabbed from the past and put into the future is: How do we help all those students who are suffering, but not forget about those students who are on the cuff of meeting expectations and those students who are exceeding?” Montañez said. “That happens through high-quality curriculum, all day, every day, in the classroom.”

In 2019, the Rhode Island education department after a found the district’s schools were “in crisis,” particularly citing issues with struggling leadership, a “broken” school culture and “an exceptionally low level of academic instruction, including a lack of quality curriculum and alignment both within schools and across the district.”

When MontaĂąez was promoted to superintendent from principal at a district elementary school  in 2021, he wasby education officials and Rhode Island Governor Dan McKee for being a local leader who “knows exactly what our schools need.” More recently, MontaĂąez was credited by Providence Mayor Brett Smiley for his work with staff.

With state aid, and under Montañez’s leadership, Providence Public Schools has overhauled its approach to literacy instruction through a five-year turnaround plan. In that time, education leaders have established and rolled out its Instructional Coherence Model — a shift to align all its schools using the same reading curriculum, instruction, professional learning, assessment, coaching and intervention.

The district has begun to see the approach pay off, with two of its elementary schools identified by ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ as Bright Spots, beating the odds of expected literacy rates based on poverty levels.

Of Rhode Island’s top five exceptional schools, Asa Messer Elementary School and Leviton Dual Language School are in the Providence school district. The two schools were expected to only have between 17 to 19% of third graders reading on grade level based on its poverty rates that are upward of 80%. Instead, both schools are between 41 to 45% proficient.

An additional 10 schools have literacy rates higher than expected.

MontaĂąez led the work at Leviton Dual Language for 10 years as principal before becoming superintendent. For the district, the improvement has just begun, MontaĂąez and his team said, hopeful that stronger gains are on the horizon.

“We’re in the early stages. Any major change takes a solid three to five years to really realize,” said Paula Dillon, deputy superintendent of academics. “Our early data points are suggesting we’re moving in the right direction. … To move a district this large in the same direction, [it’s critical to have] consistency, … and in order to have consistency and coherence, [it begins] with leadership.”

A student who didn’t think he could

One of Montañez’s earliest school-related memories is being asked in second grade to read a passage aloud. He remembers looking at the pictures on the page and beginning to make up his own story and the sound of his teacher and classmates laughing.

“From that very moment, an invisible filter went up and I told myself ‘I will never read out loud again,’” Montañez said.

Any time there were group reading activities, he made sure to have an excuse to leave the classroom.

“I don’t think I ever really got the foundation that I needed,” Montañez said. “I don’t think they knew or could recognize dyslexia the way it’s recognized now. For far too long it was … ‘You’re stupid.’ ‘You’re dumb.’ ‘You’re not trying hard enough.’ … At one point, I began believing that was true. I was dumb and I couldn’t learn.”

As each year passed, he made sure to sit in the back of the classroom and do his best to “fly below the radar.”

“For breakfast, I had an A. For gym, I had an A. Lunch, I had an A and everything else was Cs and Ds,” Montañez said, making a joke that his report card spoke Spanish because it was full of “C, C, C,” like the Spanish word for yes.

From some of his earliest years, MontaĂąez lacked stability at home. Neither of his parents had graduated from high school and didn’t view education as a priority.  As early as 9 years old, MontaĂąez was being shuffled between the homes of extended family members because of a volatile living situation with his parents.

And by the time he entered high school, he was homeless.

For years, he would often sleep at a nearby Providence park under a tree or find unlocked cars. Sometimes, depending on the weather, he would hide in the school’s locker room, and when everyone left, would come out to wash his clothing and have a safe place to sleep.

“I was thinking survival,” Montañez said, adding that he was often viewed as the kid in the back of the classroom falling asleep and a student who didn’t care.

“It wasn’t that,” MontaĂąez said. “It was the only place I felt a little safe where I could take a nap in the back room. … [So,] when I hear now that a kid doesn’t want to give it their all, [I ask] have you checked to see if that kid ate last night? … Have you checked to see if that kid is safe at night?”

For MontaĂąez, it took until his junior year for a teacher to ask those questions.

MontaĂąez was a stagehand that year. And when his drama teacher asked him to fill in and read some lines after a lead actor broke his leg, the teenager “lost it. I flipped tables. I cursed him out,” MontaĂąez said. 

When the teacher approached him a few days later, Montañez explained he felt disrespected in front of everyone, that the teacher knew “better than anyone else that I don’t know how to read and still gave me a script.”

The teacher didn’t know, but once he learned Montañez couldn’t read and had instead been learning by listening and repetition, he intervened with a plan. Every morning and evening they would stay at the school. They worked on identifying letters and decoding, starting with Curious George and comic books.

“He gave me the wraparound services that I needed. He gave me high dosage tutoring. He showed me how to decode words. He started teaching me how to read a sentence, how to write a sentence,” Montañez said.

Later in the year, there was a late night field trip. The same teacher saw MontaĂąez retreat to Roger Williams Park and hide underneath a tree, where he learned the teenager was homeless. 

The teacher told Montañez to come by his classroom the next morning, but the teenager feared he’d be reported and get in trouble.

“I never went back to the school after that day,” Montañez said. He dropped out.

What if…

Montañez only began to consider going back to school when he learned he was going to be a father at 18 and couldn’t enlist in the military without a GED.

Since then, one question has led his life and decision making: What if?

When he successfully passed his exam for a GED, the question became what if he could, against all odds, be successful in pursuing higher education? He did — attending Boricua College in New York and receiving his GED, associates and bachelors degree in less than three and a half years.

What if he found a way to translate this learning back to kids like him and prevent his experience for other students? He has — beginning his work as an elementary substitute teacher in New York before transitioning to a full-time teacher in Providence and working his way up the district.

And what if he could raise the standard, instead of lowering it, in a district that educates a majority of low-income children? He’s in the process of making it happen.

“If it wasn’t for me going through those tribulations in my younger years, I wouldn’t be as effective as an educator today and have the hindsight to say, … ‘It’s our job to find [what a student is struggling with] and give them the wraparound services they need,’” MontaĂąez said. “Everything that I do is based on student impact, student outcome and how it’s going to support students. Being a student here, and then being a teacher and working my way up to this position, helped me understand the community. It’s helped me understand the students. … The ‘what if’ keeps pushing us.” 

The work first began with MontaĂąez and other state and district education leaders aligning reading instruction, intervention and data tracking.

For years, individual school buildings were allowed to choose their own curriculum, but have now all implemented the same program and supplemental learning materials across the entire district that are rooted in the science of reading. 

Other district initiatives that have taken place under MontaĂąez include required districtwide training on phonics, a strengthened universal screening to identify struggling students, including those with dyslexia, and adopting new systems for stronger and more cohesive data collection.

Among recent changes are also regular walk-throughs by school and district leadership. Central office personnel are required to do quarterly walk-throughs of schools as principals are responsible for visiting at least 80% of their buildings’ classrooms each month.

The walk-throughs are paired with feedback that’s provided to educators within 24 hours. New role-aligned professional development for all educators also furthers cohesive and effective implementation of new curriculum and intervention.

“Using the Instructional Coherence Model to build our walk-through model and being able to give feedback and calibrate with the building leaders about what they’re seeing, what we’re seeing — if it’s the same and where we’re seeing trends — has been a game changer,” Dillon said.

Getting all students to achieve in the classroom also extends outside of school.

The development of the Office of Family and Community Engagement has offered a “family university” where parents can learn strategies to work with students and better support their learning. The office also offers translation services and resources for food, transportation and navigating a transition to a new district, state or country.

“It takes a village to do this. It’s hard work day in and day out to make sure students have what they need to be prepared and successful in life,” Montañez said. “We need [families] to be part of the school and part of the decision making because we can do it better [together].”

Third grade proficiency rates in Providence have increased year over year since 2021 and the district’s third graders have almost returned to pre-pandemic reading levels with 24% on grade level as of 2024-25, .

But despite seeing forward movement, there’s a lot of work left to be done.

With third grade students at Leviton Dual Language and Asa Masser nearly twice as proficient in reading compared to the district average, much of the success in those buildings were credited by MontaĂąez and Dillion to efforts like intensive high dosage tutoring, bilingual education programs and stable leadership. They hope to learn from those buildings and continue expansion across the district.

“We’re in a continuous improvement cycle,” Dillon said. “The only way that we can continue to improve is to know where we are and what’s working and what’s not and being willing to change that.”

As of July, the state has returned the Providence school system back to local control, about a year and a half earlier than expected. Montañez’s contract is up for renewal in 2027.

For now though, it’s about taking the small wins and pushing forward as a team.

“It took one teacher to change my life,” MontaĂąez said. “That teacher didn’t take pity on me; that teacher had high expectations. …  We need to set those expectations for our students [and] for ourselves as educators.”

The urgency could not be greater. According to the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), only 31% of fourth graders performed at or above the proficient level in reading, while 40% scored below the basic level, the highest percentage since 2002.

The Science of Reading has transformed what educators know about teaching children to read. The challenge now is no longer one of knowledge. It is .

That implementation gap has given rise to what we call the dyslexia industrial complex. This is not a criticism of dyslexia advocates, researchers, or the many organizations improving outcomes for students. Rather, it is the rapidly expanding ecosystem of evaluations, tutoring, advocacy organizations, curriculum publishers, professional development, certification programs, legislation and private intervention that has emerged to address reading difficulties. 

At its best, this ecosystem has transformed lives. At its worst, it reveals an uncomfortable truth: Public education has become increasingly dependent on external systems to provide what should be coherent, evidence-based literacy instruction within schools.

Families experience this fragmentation every day. When a child struggles to read, parents are often encouraged to seek private neuropsychological evaluations costing thousands of dollars. Although a diagnosis can unlock services and accommodations, obtaining one through public schools is often slow and inconsistent. States such as New York have responded by expanding insurance coverage for private dyslexia evaluations, expanding access for families. 

Yet these policies also reveal a larger problem. Rather than building schools’ capacity to identify and support struggling readers, they increasingly rely on outside providers to fill the gaps. The same pattern extends into instruction.

Districts now face an overwhelming marketplace of literacy programs, intervention products, tutoring services and professional development offerings. Not all evidence claims are created equal. Too often, districts assume that materials labeled standards aligned are also aligned with the Science of Reading. They are not. 

Standards define what students should learn, but they say little about how reading should be taught. Schools can adopt programs that satisfy accountability requirements while failing to reflect decades of cognitive science and reading research.

Even within schools, fragmentation persists. Multi-tiered systems of support are intended to provide increasingly intensive instruction, but core curricula, intervention programs and supplemental resources often come from different publishers, each with different instructional routines, terminology, assessments, scope and sequence.

Instead of reinforcing one another, these programs operate in parallel. Students move between disconnected instructional experiences rather than progressing through a coherent continuum of learning. Teachers must navigate multiple systems instead of developing expertise within one aligned framework.

The irony is striking. The Science of Reading has never been better understood, yet implementation has rarely been more fragmented.

When classroom instruction fails to operate as an integrated system, families naturally seek support through tutoring, private evaluations, enrichment programs and outside intervention. This is true for all students, not just those with dyslexia. The marketplace grows not because schools lack dedicated educators, but because they lack coherent systems that consistently translate research into classroom practice.

Awareness was the first step. Implementation is the next.

The next phase of literacy reform is not about discovering new science. It is about implementing the science we already have.

We’ve long described this challenge as a three-legged stool.

The first leg is research. Decades of cognitive science have shown how children learn to read. We know the importance of explicit instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, morphology, fluency, language comprehension and knowledge building.

The second leg is professional learning. States and districts have invested millions of dollars training educators in the Science of Reading. Teachers are learning the instructional practices proven most effective. For students with dyslexia, this means greater access to explicit, systematic, and cumulative instruction in phonology, phonics, word recognition, fluency and language comprehension.

But the third leg is often missing: High-quality, aligned instructional materials allow teachers to consistently implement the research they have been trained to use.

Too often, educators leave excellent professional learning only to return to classrooms equipped with instructional materials grounded in different instructional philosophies. They are expected to bridge the gap by rewriting lessons, creating supplemental resources, adapting intervention materials and reconciling conflicting instructional approaches.

Imagine asking a surgeon to attend training on a new procedure but then requiring her to use outdated instruments in the operating room. No one would expect successful implementation. Yet this is exactly what happens when educators receive Science of Reading training but return to classrooms without materials designed to support what they have learned.

We know what works. We train teachers to do it. Then we ask them to succeed with materials that don’t align with that training. Until that changes, implementation will continue to depend on extraordinary teachers overcoming ordinary systems.

Rather than introducing isolated programs that require students and teachers to learn new instructional routines, districts should prioritize interventions that complement their core literacy framework. Effective interventions reinforce, not compete with, the language, instructional routines, vocabulary and skill progressions students experience during Tier 1 instruction.

Some schools are already demonstrating what this looks like. At P.S. 125 Ralph Bunche School in Harlem, educators that support striving readers while complementing their broader literacy framework. The program aligns with their tiered interventions. It reinforces explicit decoding, morphology, vocabulary, background knowledge and comprehension through linguistically rich texts.

Publishers also have a responsibility to reduce fragmentation. Too often, instructional programs are marketed as stand-alone solutions, leaving districts to determine how they fit within existing literacy systems. Publishers should provide transparent alignment charts that show how their materials connect to widely adopted core curricula, intervention programs and assessments. These crosswalks should show how instructional routines, vocabulary, scope and sequence, and assessments reinforce one another so districts can build coherent literacy systems instead of disconnected collections of products.

Districts should not have to become curriculum engineers.

Now we must transform how schools put that knowledge into practice.

The dyslexia industrial complex did not emerge because educators failed or because families demanded too much. It emerged because public education left gaps that others stepped in to fill. Those organizations have played an essential role, and many will continue to do so. But the long-term goal should not be to make the marketplace bigger. It should be to make schools stronger.

Schools can’t “implement” those facts any more than auto factories can “implement” climate science or the Detroit Tigers’s general manager can “implement” baseball analytics. 

Put simpler: the science of reading represents what we know about how kids learn to read and what practices — like explicit vocabulary and phonics instruction â€” support that learning. But it is not, in and of itself, a model to simply apply to a classroom. 

This hasn’t stopped some critics from worrying that this research consensus requires a narrow, inflexible teaching approach that is inappropriate for some kids. In particular, advocates for English learner students in have expressed concerns that the science of reading is not suited for these children. Some have worried that reforming literacy instruction in English could distract — or even discourage — schools from supporting English learners as they develop in their home languages as well. 

Fortunately, from Joanna Yip, a policy lead at the Education Trust-New York, an education advocacy organization focused on civil rights in that state, outlines a constructive path forward to “center the needs of multilingual learners as part of a comprehensive approach to literacy instruction for all students.”

Yip’s report provides a series of recommendations for improving literacy for English learners in the state. For instance, it calls for state leaders to overhaul future literacy training with support from experts with knowledge of English learners’ linguistic development pathways. Teachers should leave those training sessions with strategies for advancing English learners’ oral language development, as well as a heightened awareness of the ways that these students’ emerging bilingual abilities can strengthen their literacy skills in both of their languages.

It also suggests they ensure that teachers can provide “evidence-based literacy support across P-12 for students who are new to the country and in the initial stages of literacy development in English.” that these students benefit when teachers help them “bridge” knowledge and skills from their first languages into English. A young student might, for instance, be a confident reader in Spanish or Arabic; effective literacy instruction will help her strengthen those skills and also use them to improve as a reader in English.

It also argues that this greater systemwide commitment to English learners’ literacy should include expanding access to programs that support their bilingualism and biliteracy. Programs that teach English learners in both languages are especially well positioned to help students grasp the core components of language from grammar to syntax and beyond. That is, when English learners are learning to read in multiple languages, they can compare and contrast them to deepen their understanding of each. 

As my co-author and I wrote in an article : “Crucially, these (sorts of) activities extend the core research often cited as Science of Reading, but they do not replace them.” Teachers do not need to avoid, modify or deviate from the consensus on how best to teach English literacy when working with English learners. Just like English-dominant children, these students benefit from the science of reading’s core components, things like the explicit teaching of vocabulary and phonics, as well as instruction that helps children practice smooth, fluent decoding of text. 

For English learners, quality literacy instruction in English means , like supporting their development in their first languages and helping them make connections with elements of the English language. 

Yip’s report credits New York for its “strong history of supporting multilingual learners,” and notes that this “can serve as a foundation for future state policy development.” It is true that New York has been a gateway destination for linguistically and culturally diverse immigrants to the United States since the Colonial Era. As such, its K–12 schools have deep institutional experience providing multilingual children with opportunities to learn English, acclimate to English-dominant U.S. society and .Ěý

In recent years, the state has made considerable efforts to improve how public schools serve these children, most notably through its 2014 and 2025 . The toolkit offers ideas for how teachers can support English learners’ English literacy in multilingual settings. For instance, while English and Spanish do not share perfectly identical phonological structures, there are some points of overlap. Teachers can use these similarities and differences to help students’ literacy in both languages. 

They can, , show students that the letter “f” makes the same sound in English as it does in Spanish, while also instructing students in the many other ways that English spelling can represent that sound (i.e. “ph” as in “phoneme” or “gh” as in “enough”). 

However, the report charges that New York schools have not done enough to incorporate English learners in their recent literacy reforms, relying mostly on voluntary guidance and “uneven implementation” instead of systemic improvements. What’s more, it notes that literacy teaching and instructional materials that are not research- or evidence-based remain too common in New York public education — which harms English learners and English-dominant students alike. 

For instance, in 2024, the state launched a major literacy reform that provided $10 million in funding to the New York State United Teachers, its main teachers union. The funding supported professional development for teachers around literacy instruction— that the resulting training did not align with the research behind the science of reading.

Yip’s recommendations are excellent and would bring New York more fully into alignment with the research on how English learners learn best. While these students’ linguistic development is unique, as they are simultaneously growing language proficiencies in more than one language, the early literacy research that we refer to when we talk about the science of reading is also useful guidance for teaching them to read in English.Ěý

In other words, they should not miss out on the phonics instruction, explicit teaching of vocabulary and other foundational elements of the science of reading that help all students learn to read. If New York is able to systemically advance these priorities in its literacy instruction without abandoning its long and deep commitment to students’ multilingualism and multiliteracy, that would be a model for other states — particularly those blessed with large numbers of English learners — to follow. 

The views expressed here are Conor P. Williams’s alone, and do not reflect those of his employer or any other affiliated organizations.

As assistant secretary of elementary and secondary education under George W. Bush, I had the privilege of helping to translate that research into policy. It was an optimistic time. We believed that if we could align classroom practice with what decades of research had taught us about reading development, we could dramatically improve children’s lives. 

Looking back, we were right about the science. But we were strikingly naĂŻve about its implementation. 

Last week, New York released its latest state reading assessment results. The were discouraging. Reading proficiency had declined, particularly in grades 3 through 5, leading many to question whether — the evidence-based literacy program introduced in 2023 — was working at all.Ěý

It’s a fair question. If all we have is a single set of state test scores, that conclusion is understandable. But state assessments capture only one moment in a much longer process of instructional change. To understand whether NYC Reads is making a difference, we have to look beyond a single test.

To answer that question, my team of researchers at New York University has spent the past three years in dozens of New York City classrooms, many in schools where reading achievement had remained stubbornly low for years. We weren’t looking for dramatic transformations. We wanted to understand whether the daily work of teaching and learning was beginning to change.  

At first, the changes revealed themselves in small ways. Children no longer looked immediately to the teacher when they came to an unfamiliar word. Instead, they looked back at the print. You could see them quietly sounding out the word, stretching the phonemes with their fingers, and trying again. During dictation, children held up their whiteboards proudly after spelling words they would not have attempted only months earlier. Teachers were no longer carrying the cognitive burden of every lesson; children were beginning to carry more of it themselves. 

The conversations had changed as well. Rather than asking children simply to recall a fact or identify a character, teachers pressed them to explain their thinking, justify an answer with evidence from the text, or connect a new idea to something they had learned the week before. Just as striking, children began asking their own questions — about insects, weather, communities or whatever topic they happened to be studying. 

Vocabulary was no longer treated as a list of words to memorize but as a way of making sense of increasingly complex ideas. Reading instruction felt less like a performance by the teacher and more like an intellectual partnership between teachers and children. 

But observations can be deceptive. Good researchers learn to distrust first impressions, no matter how encouraging they may seem. Were these classrooms simply more engaging? Were teachers becoming more skillful without children learning substantially more? Or were the changes we observed beginning to alter children’s reading trajectories in measurable ways?

We began looking beyond classroom observations to the children’s assessments. The first school we examined had struggled with reading achievement for years. Judging only by its reputation, few people would have expected dramatic progress. Yet the end-of-year assessments told a different story. Children who had entered kindergarten with little or no measurable word reading were now reading at levels that placed them well above national norms. One child finished the year at the 98th percentile in sight-word reading. Others reached the 90th and 86th percentiles. These were not isolated successes; they were signs that something within the school had begun to change. 

A second school served predominantly multilingual learners. Here the picture was equally revealing. Many children still required intensive support by the end of kindergarten, reminding us how much work remained. But alongside them were classmates reading comfortably within the core range, some reaching the mid-90th percentiles on foundational reading measures. The averages alone could never capture that story because they concealed what mattered most: the distribution itself was beginning to shift.  

The school-level findings were encouraging, but they raised an even larger question. Were these schools exceptional, or were they revealing a broader pattern? Three schools, no matter how compelling their stories, cannot answer that question. To find out, we widened the lens.

We analyzed districtwide reading data collected before the initiative began and compared it with data gathered during the first years of implementation, following the progress of nearly 4,000 students. Unlike an annual state assessment, which provides a snapshot of performance at a single point in time, these nationally normed screeners were designed to measure growth. They allowed us to ask a different question: Were children making meaningful progress as readers?

The results closely mirrored what we had been seeing in classrooms. Across successive cohorts, children continued to make steady gains in reading, with growth evident across grades and among most student groups. The progress was neither dramatic nor complete. Too many children were still struggling to read proficiently, and important differences remained among schools. But the pattern itself was remarkably consistent. 

Classroom observations, school-level assessments, and districtwide screening data were all pointing in the same direction. Independently, each offered only a partial picture. Together, they suggested that meaningful instructional change was beginning to take hold.

So, when I look at the state assessment, I don’t see a contradiction. I see a different measure answering a different question. It reminds us that New York still has a great deal of work to do, particularly in the upper elementary grades where reading becomes increasingly demanding. 

But I do not believe those results tell us we are on the wrong path. Rather, classroom observations, school-level assessments, districtwide growth data and state results lead me to a different conclusion: meaningful instructional change has begun.

Looking back, I think this is another lesson we failed to appreciate when the National Reading Panel was first released. We assumed that once the science was clear, progress would reveal itself quickly. We now know better. Educational change takes time. The important question is not whether the work is finished. The important question is whether it is moving in the right direction.

I believe that it is. Educational change appears first in classrooms, then in children, then in schools, and only later in statewide results. This is not the moment to abandon course. It is the moment not to blink.

The (S.4689) would strengthen the federal government’s oversight of the science of reading through amendments to the , which currently provides $194 million to aid literacy instruction in 23 states.Ěý

“Capable students are dropping out of high school simply because they were never taught to read,” said U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee chairman Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana. “This legislation aims to address the national literacy crisis by strengthening evidence-based literacy instruction … and empowering states, local communities and parents with more resources.”

After the bill’s 20-2 passage out of the Senate HELP Committee, it now heads to the floor for a full senate vote. Other bills, including one that would explicitly identify dyslexia as a learning disability under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, also passed Thursday.

The READ Act closely mirrors and expands on a similar bill that unanimously passed the House of Representative’s Education Committee in March, but has not yet been taken up for a full House vote.

Both the Senate and House bill aim to define the science of reading in federal law as instruction that teaches phonics and phonemic awareness and also builds vocabulary, fluency, comprehension, oral language and writing skills. 

A report released earlier this year found nearly a third of teachers still used “discredited” methods to teach kids how to read and aren’t fully committed to the science of reading. Both bills, however, would reject the use of federal funds for other teaching methods, such as three-cueing, where students are asked to figure out unfamiliar words through context clues or pictures.

The READ Act further includes proposals for prioritizing federal support for the bottom 10% of underperforming states and shifting funding of individual literacy projects to more systematic widespread efforts like requirements for early literacy screening.

It also has language that calls for teacher preparation program audits, expands professional development opportunities and creates new requirements for states to provide more detailed annual reports with the number of students receiving intervention, the number of teachers receiving professional development and the number of districts using high-quality learning materials aligned with the science of reading if they’re receiving the grant.

Keri Rodrigues, co-founder and president of the National Parents Union, said the bill’s passage out of committee is the result of years of advocacy from families.

“This is a bill that codifies the fact that the sky is blue,” Rodrigues said. “We’re just very excited that folks are seeing the importance of this, and we’re able to finally get [lawmakers] to show they can prioritize kids, they can be swayed based on evidence, they can actually make good decisions for kids and frankly do the right thing in what is a very difficult political climate.”

Lawmakers on Thursday also considered the (S.3010), another piece of legislation that would affect students who are learning to read.

The 21st Century Dyslexia Act proposed to add and explicitly define dyslexia as a disability covered under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act — requiring schools to provide accommodations and other services needed for dyslexic students to be successful in the classroom.

Under IDEA, students with “” are protected, but Cassidy argued that making dyslexia a disability category — similar to what was done with — would “increase screening, identification and the number of students receiving appropriate accommodations.”

“When reading scores haven’t moved and 20% of readers are dyslexic — and therefore learn to read differently — we either choose or choose not to do something positive for these students,” Cassidy said. “If we’re serious about addressing the inexcusably low literacy rates, we must pass this bill.”

More than a dozen organizations, including The Reading League, National Center for Learning Disabilities and International Dyslexia Association , with concerns it would undermine support and confuse states.

In a written statement, the organizations also argued the legislation could be harmful because it used an outdated definition of dyslexia from the early 2000s. A new definition, which removed old IQ-discrepancy requirements, was from the International Dyslexia Association.

Democratic lawmakers, such as Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, brought up the challenges Thursday. 

“There are 27 states, including Indiana, Florida, Kansas, Ohio, South Carolina, that effectively ban the use of this definition. Congress banned the use of this definition in the 2004 version of the IDEA,” Murphy said. “When you define dyslexia as relational between intelligence and reading ability, … many students with dyslexia … are judged to have lower intelligence levels. They don’t get services because you essentially have to show that there is a substantial difference between your reading ability and your assessed level of intelligence.”

Murphy recommended to “convene a national conversation on this issue of the definition,” and for the federal government “to provide a higher level of technical assistance to states as they seek to get services out to people with disabilities,” before the bill ultimately passed 12-10.

Listening to him desperately try to understand stories, struggling to sound out words and losing the plot, was a deeply painful experience for us both. I read the whole book out loud to him. After we finished reading together, he lay in his top bunk and stared at a copy of “Diary of a Wimpy Kid.” I hoped he’d be able to read the words, but I know the truth is that he picks books like that because he can follow the pictures when the letters are too jumbled to make sense of.

This isn’t the first kid I have seen struggle to read. In fact, I have seen hundreds of them. 

In 2010, I was a special education teacher at North High School in Denver. My first week on the job, I was asked to screen incoming freshmen to place struggling readers in an intervention class. As I sat and listened to each one read, I heard the same pain that I hear at night when I listen to my own son. 

The average child in that incoming ninth grade class was reading at a sixth grade level. There were enough 15-year-olds reading below a third grade level to fill an entire classroom. They were old enough to get a learner’s permit to drive a car, but they had been failed so acutely by their education that they could not even write their last names. They could not read the words “question” or “equation,” but had to somehow keep up with high school algebra.Ěý

The worst part of this story is that these kids are in the majority. In nearly every state, fewer than half of students are reading on grade level. Nearly 7 out of 10 high school seniors graduate without being considered proficient readers. These are the people who will be reviewing your medical records, building your houses and measuring the dosage on your prescriptions. 

This cannot continue. So what is the solution? 

The , introduced by a bipartisan coalition led by Sens. Bill Cassidy and Maggie Hassan, is a great start to addressing the nation’s literacy crisis. The legislation is a chance to finally stop pretending this problem will fix itself. If passed, it will help states use proven strategies to teach kids how to read, identify and support struggling students early, and give teachers and families the tools they need to step in before it’s too late. 

In practice, the Read Act would mean that more children are screened early for literacy challenges, so problems are caught before they turn into years of frustration. It would require schools to notify parents if their child is falling behind and to clearly explain what the screening or assessment showed, what supports the school will provide to get students back on track, and what families can do at home to help. Just as importantly, the Read Act would push states to ensure that teachers are trained in evidence-based reading instruction and that classrooms are using high-quality materials that actually teach kids how to read, so fewer families are left trying to fill the gaps on their own.

The science of reading points to an interdisciplinary body of research that emphasizes a structured way of teaching how letters combine into sounds, how sounds combine into words and how words combine to generate meaning. 

Mississippi’s rise from 49th in the nation to the top 10 in fourth grade reading started when the state adopted the science of reading. But the state also backed that shift with literacy coaches, early screening and targeted interventions to help struggling students before they fell too far behind. Using the same approach, Louisiana and Alabama are seeing similar gains. But nationwide, progress remains uneven, with some states embracing these evidence-based strategies while others have been .

The future of America’s children and the country’s prosperity rely on a solution to this problem, and the stakes are too high to patchwork it together. Families need a real, national plan to ensure that children do not continue to fall behind. 

Reading is not optional, and families are no longer willing to accept a system where children are promoted year after year without the skills they need. All students deserve a future where they can thrive, and families like mine deserve a future where they aren’t left reading bedtime stories with a knot in their stomachs. Literacy needs to become a national priority, and that needs to happen now.

More than 40 states now mandate evidence-based reading instruction in public schools. The specifics in these new laws and regulations vary — most require that schools use high-quality curriculum based on the Science of Reading, many invest in new teacher training, and some ban discredited methods. But they all have one thing in common: a focus on the early grades. 

In my nonprofit’s work supporting districts to implement new curriculum and instruction, we’ve seen educators work tirelessly to shift classroom practice. We’ve then seen them joyfully experience the positive impacts on teaching and learning. And we’ve been hearing a consistent question.

What about high school?

Time and again, school and district leaders would pose the same questions about grades 9-12 that we were exploring in K-8. They wanted guidance about what high-quality English curriculum should look like. They were looking for materials that would nurture literacy for older students, especially those who struggled with grade-level texts. They were asking: How could they identify well-designed materials that truly support strong English instruction in high school, especially as it relates to building knowledge through rigorous, content-rich texts?

At the same time, we were hearing from publishers. Some were expanding their programs for younger students to include high school English, while others were interested in strengthening existing materials. Several were just getting started developing something new. No matter where they were on this journey, publishers wanted thoughtful, evidence-based criteria and feedback to ensure their materials reflected the strongest research and instructional design principles. 

They weren’t simply looking for a rating — they wanted guidance that would help them build evidence-based curriculum that met the needs of high school teachers and students. 

These many questions converged. It became clear that there was an opportunity to create a shared framework that could support both sides of the equation: helping publishers develop stronger curriculum, while helping districts make more informed adoption decisions. That inspired the Knowledge Matters .

We had past experience to draw on: In 2023, we created a review framework for evidence-based, knowledge-building ELA in . We built on that foundation while bringing together additional experts with deep experience in high school English, to ensure the criteria reflected the unique demands of academic expectations and classroom instruction in grades 9-12. 

That yielded a set of about two dozen criteria across eight domains, starting with a curriculum’s alignment to the science of reading. A strong curriculum uses evidence-based practices that accelerate student literacy, such as building vocabulary and knowledge through reading a substantial and coherent volume of texts. That helps students grapple with challenging texts, including through communal close reads that build students’ stamina, confidence and ability to ensure that what they read makes sense. It also engages students with content-rich topics drawn from history, science, the arts and literature, because a rich knowledge base is what makes complex texts comprehensible and literary analysis meaningful. 

Our tool identifies the features of a curriculum that foster this growth, including activities that systematically develop academic and domain-specific vocabulary; guidance for educators to engage students in productive and sustained academic discussions; explicit instruction in writing and frequent writing opportunities anchored in texts; targeted supports to grant equitable access to grade-level content; and predictable, effective instructional routines and teacher-facing materials to inform professional learning.

We then field-tested the tool by reviewing Novel HS ELA, a knowledge-rich, novel-based 9-12 program published by , The curriculum was designed to foster engagement with rich literature while also developing the knowledge, analytical skills and reading experiences that prepare teenagers for success in college, careers and civic life. Working through the review process helped us refine the tool while providing meaningful feedback to support the development of the materials. It also provided insights into how hard many publishers are working to put strong curriculum into the hands of great teachers. 

Ultimately, our goal is pretty simple: help more educators gain access to the strongest possible instructional materials. We believe that better curriculum sets the foundation for strong teaching, and that clearer guidance helps both curriculum developers and school systems move the field forward. 

When educators have a common language of excellence, both teaching and learning thrive. Our hope is that this tool supports high school educators to develop a shared understanding of what high-quality literacy instruction looks like and where instructional time is best spent. The tool isn’t just a way to evaluate materials — it’s an opportunity to identify and inspire the rigorous, engaging, effective English curriculum and instruction that all high school students deserve.

Over the last decade, has embraced evidence-based reading instruction. Legislatures have passed literacy laws, and teacher preparation programs are (slowly) shifting their . Those changes are paying off: According to from the DIBELS early reading screener, 30% of second graders ended the year far offtrack in reading, the best mark since 2019-20.Ěý

Massachusetts is the latest state to join the movement. Last month, Gov. Maura Health a that requires school districts to use evidence-based reading instruction, prohibit the use of three-cueing and other discredited word-guessing strategies, require educator preparation programs to teach evidence-based literacy methods, expand screening for students with dyslexia and create a process for the state department of education to review and approve K-3 reading curricula.

Massachusetts is now a test case for what I like to think of as the Lexington Problem.

If a district has low reading scores and uses instructional practices that are inconsistent with what has been about how children learn to read, the case is clear for switching to an evidence-based science of reading approach.

But Lexington’s young readers are not struggling. They have relatively strong . So, perhaps not surprisingly, the prospect of being forced to change their literacy practices hasn’t sat well with Lexington’s leaders.

Famously, Lexington is the place where the first shots of the Revolutionary War were fired. Today, it’s a wealthy suburb about 10 miles outside of Boston. Its are extremely well-educated — 84% have a bachelor’s degree or higher — and the median price for purchasing a house is $1.2 million.

As state legislators debated the science of reading bill, Lexington Public Schools attracted because it continued to use literacy materials associated with (much-maligned) balanced literacy approaches, including Lucy Calkins’ Units of Study . (The district uses a supplemental program called in an attempt to fill in gaps.) The superintendent has been an outspoken of the state legislature’s efforts.

Perhaps in spite of its curricular choice, and thanks in part to the families it serves, Lexington’s students score pretty well on state tests. Last year, 70% of its third graders scored in reading, compared with 42% statewide. Lexington doesn’t have a lot of poor kids, but its low-income third graders outperformed their peers statewide (44% versus 24%). Only 25% of Lexington’s children with disabilities reached the same bar, but even so, that was higher than the statewide average of 14%.

ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ even named two Lexington schools — Joseph Estabrook and Harrington Elementary — to our list of Bright Spots schools whose third grade reading scores outperformed what would be expected based on their poverty rates.

The new law includes a waiver allowing districts to continue using unapproved reading curricula if those are “based on evidence-based literacy instruction” and can “meet quality standards” as determined by the state department of education. While it’s not clear yet what that process will look like, EdReports gives Lexington’s current program a rating of “,” so it seems unlikely it would pass muster. 

In an ideal world, Lexington’s leaders would see the writing on the wall and adopt a new, better curriculum for K-3 literacy. It’s quite likely that its students would earn even higher scores if it did a better job teaching foundational skills.Ěý

But Lexington’s test results illustrate a broader policy problem. Science of reading reforms have been most successful when they focused on basic skills where the evidence is strongest and the policy solutions are clearest. States can require phonics instruction. They can prohibit three-cueing. They can require universal screening and force changes at colleges of education.

But literacy involves more than the basics. Strong reading outcomes also depend on vocabulary, background knowledge, writing and countless other factors that are harder to regulate from a state capitol. 

And that’s what makes cases like Lexington so complicated. As Massachusetts moves from identifying a problem to implementing solutions, it should remain careful not to confuse compliance with success. A district using the “right” curriculum will not automatically produce strong readers, just as a district using a disputed curriculum will not necessarily fail its students. The best way forward is to keep focusing on the goal of helping more kids learn to read.

I grew up hearing that line. However bad things were in Oklahoma — from teacher pay to life expectancy — our nation’s poorest state, Mississippi, was presumed to have it worse. It was a cruel quip, but also a comforting one. At least somebody was behind us.

In education, however, that old prayer of gratitude has become obsolete. Mississippi, for one, has posted impressive gains in student learning, especially in the early grades. Oklahoma has been moving in the opposite direction. According to I conducted of National Assessment of Educational Progress data, the Sooner State now ranks 48th in the nation when fourth and eighth grade math and reading results are combined. Among the dozen states in the region, Oklahoma ranks dead last.

That is bad news for Oklahoma, but it is also a warning to every state that assumes lasting decline can’t happen there. 

In the 1990s, Oklahoma was not a superstar, but neither was it an educational basketcase. The state generally hovered around the national average and occasionally beat the average. And for years, Oklahoma outperformed Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee on the Nation’s Report Card. What I found when examining the NAEP scores over time is not just that Oklahoma ranks near the bottom today, but that Oklahoma experienced a generational erosion of performance that unfolded over decades and accelerated after 2015. 

Oklahoma’s math scores were on the rise until around 2015, when math scores plateaued before steep declines during the COVID-19 era. Because most states’ math in the era following the passage of No Child Left Behind, Oklahoma’s score increases did not translate into rankings increases, and the state fell from 30th to 40th in the nation in math scores from 2000 to 2015. Since then, Oklahoma’s math scores have dropped sharply, with declines larger than many other states, even as the entire .

In reading, the story is simpler: Oklahoma has experienced both relative and absolute decline over the last decade. In 2024, Oklahoma posted its worst reading scores on record in both fourth grade and eighth grade. In the years since 2015, the state’s reading rank fell from 34th to 48th.Ěý

These shifts are sobering, but they are also confounding. Oklahoma has not experienced a unique economic shock or demographic shift that obviously accounts for the scale of its educational decline. Indeed, all but one major student group in Oklahoma performs poorly relative to comparable students in other states. 

White students, Hispanic students, Black students, wealthier students and poorer students all significantly underperform the national average. Only Native American students stand out positively, ranking first nationally among the 14 states with sufficient data to report scores. It is common to explain away weak test scores with demographics. But when a state’s relatively advantaged students also post dismal results compared with their peers elsewhere, demographics are probably not the main story.

The regional picture looks even worse. Oklahoma now ranks last among the 12 states in the region in combined math and reading achievement. Oklahoma’s current regional ranking is attributable not only to Oklahoma’s decline, but also to experiencing noteworthy change. Tennessee was the first state in the region to pull ahead of Oklahoma, overtaking it in 2013. Mississippi surpassed Oklahoma in 2019, followed by Louisiana, which passed Oklahoma in 2022. 

It’s a depressing state of affairs for Oklahoma, but Oklahomans are unlikely to accept this story as final. Public frustration with the state’s education system is rising, according to . The state’s schools are , and policymakers are increasingly looking to for ideas. 

The larger lesson is not just for Oklahoma. Educational decline can happen slowly, almost invisibly, until it becomes impossible to ignore. Other states should take note before they find themselves becoming someone else’s punchline.

A recently added carveout to a math interventions bill would exempt some Ohio schools from teaching the science of reading curriculum — despite a statewide mandate.

Lawmakers in the Ohio House Education Committee recently approved changes to that would excuse Ohio’s classical schools from having to teach the science of reading, which is based on of research that shows how the human brain learns to read and incorporates phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.

“This legislature and the governor placed a major emphasis … on science of reading to great effect, and now is not the time to start carving out loopholes for certain schools,” said Devin Babcock, senior legislative director for ExcelinEd in Action.

Ohio school districts were required to starting with the 2024-25 school year after the law took effect in 2023 through the state’s two-year operating budget.

The budget gave $86 million for educator professional development, $64 million for curriculum and instructional materials and $18 million for literacy coaches.

“We’ve held the line as a state for the last few years, as have all the other states that have made this move,” Babcock said.

“If you’re a public school taking public money, then let’s do the best thing for kids and use the science of reading that we’ve adopted here as a state.”

have passed laws or implemented new policies related to evidence-based instruction since 2013, according to Education Week. the second-worst state for fourth-grade reading in 2013 to being ranked 21st in 2022 after implementing science of reading policy.

that follow the K-12 curriculum of Hillsdale College, a Christian liberal arts college in Michigan.

Some tenets of include teaching Latin and a close reading of Western classics, among other things, according to Hillsdale College.

Ohio S.B. 19 — which passed in November — originated as an academic intervention bill to help students who score below proficient on state assessment tests.

The bill would allow a public school student who scored below proficient in a state assessment test in math or English language arts to receive academic intervention services at no cost.

The Ohio Education Association testified in opposition to the bill in March,

“The bill is well-intentioned, but the details matter,” OEA President Jeff Wensing said in his testimony. “These tests provide useful information, but classroom educators have more information about a student’s knowledge and abilities in the subject.”

The bill would require school districts or individual schools to come up with a math achievement improvement plan if 51% or less of the district or school’s students who took the third-grade math achievement assessment scored at least a proficient score on the assessment.

Under the bill, schools would be required to develop math improvement and monitoring plans for each student that qualifies for math intervention services within 60 days after getting the student’s third-grade assessment math results.

A math improvement and monitoring plan would identify the student’s “specific math deficiencies,” describe the additional instructional services they will receive, offer a chance for their parent or guardian to be involved, outline a monitoring process and offer high-dosage tutoring at least three days a week.

“From the experience of Reading Improvement and Monitoring Plans (RIMPs), I can tell you that this is an onerous task that will often fall on classroom teachers,” Wensing said in his testimony. “Educators’ time is in too short supply to add more paperwork, administrative tasks and exercises in compliance.”

Ohio Sen. Andrew Brenner, R-Delaware, introduced the bill, which has had five hearings in the Ohio House Education Committee.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a missed opportunity. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SRI Education and ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ both receive financial support from the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies.

In a survey of more than 1,200 K-3 educators in the fall of 2025, researchers at the Fordham Institute, an education reform nonprofit, found 30% of teachers don’t “favor phonics,” a major pillar in the science of reading that teaches students how letters represent sounds and how to blend those sounds together.

The number of teachers “less informed and committed” to the science of reading is even greater in high poverty schools, according to the .

“Despite everything that has been said and written in the past few years, nearly a third of teachers still put phonics and cueing on equal footing,” the report said, also finding “progress that has been made in some teachers in high-poverty, majority-nonwhite schools are still, on average, less informed about and committed to basic principles of the [science of reading] than teachers in whiter and/or more affluent settings.”

About half of all surveyed K-3 teachers said they teach with a “structured approach” which includes a mix of  “instruction in phonics, decoding, and related skills,” the report said, adding nearly one in three teachers use a “balanced approach,” where students are asked to figure out unfamiliar words through context clues or pictures – a practice known as cueing, which has been banned in some states. 

Thirty percent of teachers reported favoring both phonics and cueing for reading instruction and 2% said they preferred cueing over phonics, according to the report.

The report also found teacher belief and use of the science of reading is between nine to 15 percentage points lower in low-income schools compared to those in higher-resourced schools.

Researchers recognized schools have experienced “significant , , and even ‘,’” around the best way to teach kids to read for decades, which in part accounts for teacher hesitancy and/or inexperience with parts of the science of reading. 

As of late March, 42 states, and Washington D.C. have implemented laws around the science of reading, according to . But even with these initiatives, some teachers expressed concerns that the “pendulum swings too far to one side and we need balance.”

“While I support our current emphasis on phonics, I worry that kids are going to lose out with less comprehension and vocabulary instruction,” one teacher said in the report, with another adding “the pendulum swings like political winds. Let us teach. Please!” 

Others felt the shift toward the science of reading has led to “far more non-fiction texts” at the “expense of rich literature” and that “guided reading … is out, phonics-based small groups are in.”

For educators more positive about the science of reading, said the growing emphasis around phonics has “drastically changed how quickly students are able to learn to read,” according to the report. 

“They are happier learners because they aren’t as frustrated with reading,” one teacher said. Another added: “the shift to the science of reading has been huge … and has profound effects on teaching kids to read.”

The science of reading is rooted in : phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension, but most of the conversation around the evidence-based approach has centered on phonics.

Hesitancy around the science of reading is concerning to researchers, said David Griffith, one of the report’s co-authors.

“Almost every literate person I’ve ever met remembers getting phonics,” Griffith said. “There is abundant evidence that phonics is successful, and what the research shows is that you need to know how to decode words in order to learn how to read. … If kids don’t learn to do this, then they won’t learn to read, and if they don’t learn to read, they won’t learn much else.” 

Griffith acknowledged teacher concerns about the trade-off of incorporating more phonics-based instruction and feeling students would miss out on comprehension, “but I would push back…  that there is some sort of balance that we need to strike in terms of helping kids learn to decode,” he said. “Kids need to learn to decode, and then once they’ve done that, there are many other things that we can start doing.”

Griffith also argued having more non-fiction texts in K-3 could level the playing field for students who may not have exposure to certain background knowledge or vocabulary that would make them successful early readers. Lacking this kind of curriculum and instruction has created disparities and affected skills like finding the main idea or inferring for many children, he said.

“A weak reader who knows about baseball will outperform a strong reader who doesn’t know anything about baseball,” Griffith said. “Your ability to draw inferences is entirely dependent on whether you understand what the passage is talking about and whether you have the right vocabulary.”

The report found more than 40% of teachers hadn’t “fully internalized the importance of knowledge and vocabulary to reading łŚ´Çłžąč°ůąđłóąđ˛Ô˛őžą´Ç˛Ô.”

The report found teacher knowledge around the science of reading is inconsistent.

Griffith said “the chaotic information environment that the typical teacher is subject to,” has been the biggest thing hindering implementation now.

“An older teacher tells you one thing. Your curriculum tells you something else,” he said. “You read an article online written by some think tank and it tells you a third thing. Teachers want to do the right thing, … [but there’s a] lack of clarity … about points that really should be clear.”

Teachers in higher-resourced schools scored slightly higher than average in their science of reading knowledge and commitment (in the 54th percentile), while those in low-resourced schools scored below average in the 44th percentile.

The report called it a “substantial difference that will have dire consequences for poor students should it persist,” that shows “the fragmented nature of curriculum adoption and the complexity of translating exposure to science of reading–aligned training into better practice.”

Griffith added that teacher turnover in those environments likely play a role.

“Teaching is just harder in high-poverty schools. There is less time to think, there’s less time to do research on the science of reading or anything else. There is probably not a long tradition of veteran teachers building strong curricula over multiple years,” he said.

Across the country, most K-3 teachers have received some type of professional development in the science of reading, the report also found. Those who have completed those courses have a better understanding of the evidence-based approach than those who rely on what they were taught in higher education and teacher preparation programs. 

Even though most educators receive professional development, researchers said teachers’ knowledge of the science of reading declined as the grade level increased, with kindergarten teachers “exhibiting the deepest knowledge and third-grade teachers exhibiting the least understanding.”

“These differences may reflect the fact that science of reading–aligned trainings and curricula often disproportionately target kindergarten, where a focus on decoding is particularly crucial. Still, given the number of third graders who are still struggling with decoding — and the continuing need to build knowledge and vocabulary in higher grades — the mediocre performance of teachers in higher grade levels is grounds for concern,” the report said.

Other findings from the report included how 93% of teachers use multiple reading curricula, some which still use practices like cueing. And that many teachers reported “limited insight into the needs of English learners and students with dyslexia.”

“If we could somehow improve the quality of pre-service preparation, we would really be making progress, because it is hard to change the practices of teachers who have been teaching for 15 to 20 years,” Griffith said. “It would be enormously helpful if teachers got the right message at the start of their careers.”

Fordham researchers called for colleges of education to require instruction aligned to the science of reading.

The report also found teachers in states with reading-aligned licensure tests had a deeper understanding of the evidence-based reading model, which became another recommendation for better implementation. Other suggestions included mandates around K-3 teacher training to be completed within their first three years in the classroom and a push for states to establish approved curriculum lists.

High school students are still reading full books in English classes — but not very many on average. And teachers working in more affluent school systems seem to assign more books than their counterparts in high-poverty communities.

That’s according to . RAND’s report found that about 90% of these teachers assign at least one book and nearly 60% assign three or more books throughout the school year. On average, teachers assigned four full books in secondary grades.

But the study also reveals stark inequities about who is reading whole books and how often. Teachers in schools that serve higher populations of students from low-income families and students of color are less likely to assign more than two books for the year than those working in wealthier, whiter schools. Teachers leading classrooms with more students with disabilities or multilingual students were also less likely to assign fewer full books.

The data offers a sharper picture of the reality in English classrooms across the country during . RAND’s report indicates that reading entire novels might be one of many activities inside schools influenced by socioeconomic circumstances.

In short, what was once a trademark of high school English class — the novel — is maybe only playing a supporting role now, said Ashley Woo, a RAND researcher and the report’s author.

“It does look like most teachers, most secondary ELA teachers, do assign full books in class,” she said. “It seems like a lot of them assign a relatively small number of books.”

Some of the debate around what students read in class has revolved around , in an era when short-form videos and one-sentence captions take up so much attention. There’s criticism that too many modern reading curricula emphasize reading short passages from novels or short stories. Yet or a prescribed number of books a student should read a year.

The survey, which RAND conducted in 2025, found a possible connection between reading entire books and curriculums. Teachers who reported that they leaned more on publisher-developed curriculums said they taught fewer whole books than teachers who reported they relied more on lessons they developed or that their schools developed.

Woo said this might be because publisher-developed material often includes excerpts instead of full books. But she added that there needs to be more research about the role full books play in curriculums developed by publishing companies.

Other out-of-school factors like poverty might also play a role in how many books teachers assign. Teachers at schools with higher populations of students from low-income families were twice as likely to assign no books than schools with low poverty levels — 12% compared with 6%, according to the RAND report.

While the report’s analysis mostly focused on middle and high school data, the survey also included responses from more than 1,900 elementary educators. They reported a vast range in the number of books they assigned.

Nearly 20% of teachers in grades K-2 reported assigning no books, while 50% reported assigning 20 or more books, presumably shorter ones intended for early readers. Among teachers of grades 3-5, 14% reported assigning no books, 22% reported assigning three to four, and 20% reported assigning five to nine. Elementary teachers indicated that reading full books didn’t “crowd out” time spent on early literacy skills, the researchers also wrote.

The data suggests “there are a lot of teachers who are not prioritizing full book reading in elementary classrooms at all,” Woo said.

Woo said that more research is needed to fully understand how reading full books shapes students in the classroom.

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

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 ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ.

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 science of reading is being taught in classrooms across Ohio, but the state’s education department stresses it will likely take time to track students’ progress.

The Ohio Department of Education and Workforce is particularly interested in tracking the progress of the current kindergarten students.

“This year’s kindergartners will be the first class that all four years going up to third grade, they’re going to get the science of reading,” state education department director Stephen Dackin said to the Capital Journal. “That’s a pretty good barometer of where we will be as a state in terms of our implementation and then increased outcomes in literacy.”

Ohio’s science of reading law took effect in 2023 through the state’s two-year operating budget, which gave $86 million for educator professional development, $64 million for curriculum and instructional materials, and $18 million for literacy coaches.

Ohio school districts were required to teach the science of reading curriculum starting with the 2024-25 school year. The science of reading is based on of research that shows how the human brain learns to read and incorporates phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

“While we are certainly making great progress, this is not easy,” Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said earlier this month during his state of the state speech. “Retraining seasoned teachers, who were taught the wrong way and now have to learn new methods, is certainly an exercise in perseverance. This shift takes time.”

Ohio’s literacy scores were down from last year, with 61.3% of third graders reading at or above grade level compared to 64.5% from the 2023-24 school year, according to the most recent that were released in September.

“The report card data is lagging data, so it reports on data from the previous school year, and obviously, not all districts have probably been at the point where they’ve implemented the science of reading in their districts last year,” Dackin said.

He said the education department is not surprised by a dip in performance.

“Sometimes you’re asking teachers who’ve been teaching reading for 20 years to suddenly change what they’re doing and implement something that’s new to them,” Dackin said. “We know it takes a while to do this. That doesn’t mean there’s not a sense of urgency in our state, but we also anticipate that folks are going to need some support in helping to implement.”

have passed laws or implemented new policies related to evidence-based instruction since 2013, according to Education Week. the second-worst state for fourth-grade reading in 2013 to being ranked 21st in 2022 after implementing science of reading policy.

College prep programs

A unique facet of Ohio’s science of reading law is the third-party audit of teacher preparation programs.

“Our law is the toughest in the country,” DeWine said during his state of the state speech.

Ohio colleges and universities teacher preparation programs were required to be fully aligned with teaching the science of reading by Jan. 1, 2025, but 10 colleges were found to be not aligned, according to an .

Bowling Green State University, Central State University, Cleveland State University, Defiance College, Ohio Christian University, Ohio Dominican University, Ohio University, Ohio State University, University of Toledo, and Wright State University were not in alignment.

Ohio State University had , the most of any university, according to the audit.

“My concern is how seriously Ohio State is taking this process,” Ohio House Rep. Tom Young, R-Washington Township, said during a recent Ohio House Workforce and Higher Education Committee.

“By the way I look at it, you’re not taking it very seriously at all,” he said. “Things hang in the balance here, and I’m very serious about this, and I’m not going to play games with it.”

Erik Porfeli, professor and interim dean of Ohio State’s College of Education and Human Ecology, said the university is taking this seriously.

“We mobilized quickly and addressed all 17 (issues),” he said.

Binaya Subedi, professor and interim chair of Ohio State’s Department of Teaching and Learning, said there has been professional development with faculty every week this semester.

“We are concerned,” he said. “After the audit report, we have systematically reorganized our curriculum.”

Any college or university that does not become fully aligned by next December will have their approval revoked by Ohio Department of Higher Education Chancellor Mike Duffey.

“We need all universities in compliance or we risk incongruity of literacy outcomes throughout the state for our kids,” Ohio House Rep. Tracy Richardson, R-Marysville, said during a recent Ohio House Workforce and Higher Education Committee.

“Ohio State, you cannot drag on this issue. We will be following up.”

Five colleges and universities were found to be partially in alignment and 33 higher education institutions were found to be in alignment, according to the audit.

“I have confidence that every college will be in full compliance by the end of this year,” DeWine said during his state of the state speech.

Having educator training programs be compliant with the science of reading means school districts won’t have to retrain teachers, Dackin said.

Parents for Reading Justice and OH-KID President Brett Tingley said holding the universities responsible is real accountability.

“Our literacy crisis does not begin in the classroom—it begins in teacher preparation programs,” she said during a recent Ohio House Workforce and Higher Education meeting.

“When a child learns to read, you change the trajectory of that child’s life, and when a state gets reading right, you change the trajectory of the state itself.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com.

Lawmakers in Lansing are moving aggressively to address Michigan’s K-12 literacy crisis with multiple pieces of legislation that target training for teachers, retention for struggling third graders, and consequences for teacher preparation programs.

The legislative action comes as Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has made addressing literacy a priority for 2026, her last year in office. During her State of the State address last month, Whitmer detailed steps already underway to improve literacy and recommendations in her budget proposal for the coming fiscal year. Among them is additional money she wants to invest in high-impact literacy tutoring, high-quality curriculum, literacy training for teachers, and hiring of literacy coaches.

“This is a serious problem,” Whitmer said in the address. “Our kids deserve better.”

Just 38.9% of third graders were proficient on the English language arts portion of the Michigan Student Test of Educational Progress last year. It was the lowest performance of third graders in the exam’s 11-year history, Chalkbeat and Bridge Michigan reported.

On the national front, just 24% of Michigan fourth graders were proficient in 2024 on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, an exam known as the “nation’s report card.” That compares to 30% being proficient nationally. Michigan students’ performance has been stagnant and declining even as other states that have invested heavily in early literacy have improved. Michigan now ranks 44th in the nation for fourth-grade reading on the NAEP.

This isn’t the first time Michigan lawmakers have taken aim at the state’s challenges with literacy. In 2016, fueled by similarly troubling test results in reading, lawmakers passed a Read by Grade 3 law that required early intervention, the hiring of literacy coaches, and the retention of third graders struggling to reade. The retention rule has since been rescinded. Ten years since that broad effort, Michigan’s student literacy problem continues.

Here are the literacy initiatives being considered in Michigan

would require that by the 2031-32 school year, all K-5 educators who provide, support, or oversee instruction, including in literacy, must have been , which refers to a body of knowledge that emphasizes phonics along with building vocabulary and background knowledge. The bill doesn’t specify a specific training program, but says the current training being encouraged for Michigan teachers — Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling, or LETRS — meets the requirements of the legislation.

would require that, beginning Sept. 30, 2027, an individual seeking a teaching certificate in Michigan must have completed a teacher preparation program that included training in the science of reading.

would bring back the third-grade retention policy Michigan previously had in place. The bill would require struggling third graders, who would be identified based on their state test scores, repeat the grade. There would be some “good cause” exemptions, such as for students with disabilities whose educational plan team leader exempts them from the requirement. Michigan’s previous third-grade retention law, which went into effect during the 2020-21 school year, was rescinded in 2023 when Democrats controlled the legislature and the governor’s office. They argued the law was punitive and wasn’t working.

During a Wednesday hearing of the House Education and Workforce committee, Rep. Nancy DeBoer, a Republican from Holland who chairs the committee, said reading gives children the independence to pick up a book and go anywhere.

“Unless you’re in the state of Michigan and you’re three-quarters of the students in eighth grade who can’t read or do math in a competent manner,” she said. “That is a tragedy we are responsible for.”

DeBoer introduced the bipartisan bill that would make training in the science of reading a requirement for K-5 teachers.

The state has funded LETRS training, but thus far hasn’t made it a requirement. In September, the State Board of Education urged that it become a mandate for all K-5 teachers, saying the lack of one “has led to inconsistent participation of Michigan educators and inconsistent access to instruction based on the science of reading for Michigan’s students.”

The science of reading also figures prominently in a bipartisan bill introduced by Rep. Tim Kelly, a Republican from Saginaw Township. He described the bill as “a long overdue rescue mission for the next generation of Michigan’s workers, citizens, and leaders.”

Kelly said Wednesday that teacher preparation programs that don’t equip teachers with the tools needed to teach children to read have forfeited their right to operate in Michigan.

“We must stop subsidizing failure,” Kelly said.

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 .

Members unanimously approved the legislation, another sign that improving reading outcomes is a goal shared by both Republicans and Democrats. 

“This is how I learned how to read in the 1960s,” said Democratic Rep. Lucy McBath of Georgia. “When implemented correctly, the science of reading has been proven to help children learn to read and to write more effectively.”

The bill defines the science of reading as instruction that teaches phonics and phonemic awareness, and also builds vocabulary, fluency, comprehension and writing skills. The legislation would prohibit grantees from allowing , the practice of prompting students to identify words based on pictures or other clues in a sentence. The bill now moves to the full House.

“We should not be using federal literacy funds to promote discredited approaches to literacy,” said Rep. Kevin Kiley of California, a former Republican now running for reelection as an independent. 

The committee’s passage of the bill follows a before House appropriators in which both Democrats and Republicans the growth in reading outcomes in southern states like Mississippi and Alabama and asked experts how to spread that progress more broadly. The House proposal, however, is not the only effort underway to revamp the long-running Comprehensive Literacy Development Grant program. Some advocates say updated legislation should also require schools receiving grant funds to screen children for reading difficulties, inform parents whether their children are reading below grade level and assign reading coaches to low-performing schools.

“If we’re going to update it, let’s do it right,” said Ariel Taylor Smith, senior director of the National Parents Union’s Center for Policy and Action. She expects that a Senate plan would also ensure that teacher preparation programs follow the science of reading. “Let’s actually check in on whether teacher preparation programs are doing right by kids and using the most recent research.”

The nonprofit will dig further into those issues next week at on Capitol Hill featuring leaders from Tennessee and the District of Columbia, both of which have implemented reading reforms, like pointing districts to and providing to teachers on how students learn to read. 

An ‘implementation war’

Experts welcome Congress’ interest in the issue. But broad agreement that students need phonics-based instruction doesn’t mean the debate over the best way to teach reading is settled.

There’s still a reading war, but not between the phonics and whole language camps, said Karen Vaites, a literacy advocate who highlights lessons on reading reform from states that have seen growth on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. 

Now, she said, there’s an “implementation war.”

“Everybody agrees on phonics, but how much phonics? How much instructional time should it get?” she asked. “Do you do teacher training first or do you do curriculum paired with teacher training?”

Another proposal under consideration would require the U.S. Department of Education to reserve 10% of the grant awards for states whose fourth grade reading scores on NAEP rank in the lowest 25% for two consecutive administrations of the test. Vaites questioned whether such states would make the best use of the funds. 

“I worry a lot about throwing dollars toward the people that by demonstration have the least leadership capacity,” she said.  

, part of a 2010 federal budget agreement, was the first iteration of the state literacy grant program. , tracking awards to 11 states in 2017, found that not all states directed funds toward the highest poverty schools or used the money to buy reading programs based on research. Overall, the study found no significant differences in reading performance between schools that received the funds and those that didn’t, but there were small positive effects in Louisiana and Ohio. 

Striving Readers preceded the Comprehensive Literacy State Development grants, . But the program hasn’t been revised in a decade. Smith, with the National Parents Union, said the program should reflect the latest knowledge about what’s working in classrooms. 

“We’ve learned a ton about the science of reading,” she said.

Kari Kurto, national director of policy and partnerships for the Reading League, a national nonprofit promoting the science of reading, said the grant program is important because it’s one of the only ways state education agencies “can truly influence” what happens in classrooms. She said she appreciates that the bill includes her suggestion that instruction should also support students’ oral language skills. 

“This legislation will go a long way toward solidifying our nation’s commitment to evidence-based literacy instruction,” she said. “As a Democrat, I am so thrilled to see this movement finally receiving the bipartisan support we always dreamed of.”

Concerns over local control

While every state has taken some action to improve reading instruction, recent examples in two states show that concerns remain over one-size-fits-all approaches.

California passed a reading reform bill last year, but not before lawmakers agreed to that kept the state from mandating teacher training and state-approved curricula. The California Teachers Association said an earlier version of the bill would have interfered with local control and worried the plan overemphasized phonics at the expense of other literacy skills.

In Massachusetts, and object to portions of “that attempt to legislate the specific curriculum that schools would be expected to purchase and implement.” The is also opposed.

Any federal legislation won’t delve into specific reading programs. prohibits it, but Vaites said there are still ways to strengthen the grant program.

“I think we’re all trying to figure out the mechanism that is going to hold state leaders accountable in a way that isn’t just sprinkling dollars around,” she said. 

That, more or less, is the key to translating the science of reading into classroom practice, according to a new book by Doug Lemov, Colleen Driggs and Erica Woolway called . The authors work together at , an organization built on Lemov’s bestselling by the same name.

The new volume is meant to be a practical guide for classroom teachers. It offers concrete tips and embedded QR codes that take readers to videos of teachers putting those strategies into practice.

The authors are attempting to tackle a big problem: how to boost students’ knowledge. They cite suggesting that books — even children’s books — use more uncommon words than come up in most adults’ conversations.  In practice, that means, “most of the words a student learns in their lifetime will be learned via encountering them in their reading.” The more kids read, and the wider variety of books they are exposed to, the better off they’ll be.  

When people hear the “science of reading,” they might (mistakenly) equate it with phonics, but the authors spend little time on those core foundational skills. In fact, they take systematic phonics instruction in grades K-3 as the assumed starting point for literacy instruction and note that their book is about “the science of reading beyond phonics (emphasis theirs).”

This is an important shift. In , students have made impressive gains on early reading skills, thanks in part to widespread changes in state policy pushing for new curriculum and early screening  assessments. Meanwhile, fourth and eighth grade reading scores continue to decline, and 12th grade reading comprehension recently fell to all-time lows.  

Lemov, Driggs and Woolway suggest this is partly an assessment problem. If students can’t answer a question about a reading passage, that may be due to many potential problems. It might be because they didn’t understand the question … or they lacked key background knowledge embedded in the text … or they didn’t understand the vocabulary words … or the passage used an unfamiliar syntax that the student couldn’t follow.

While daunting, this multitude of potential reading challenges also helps provide a roadmap for improvements.

Lemov, Driggs and Woolway start with a critical foundation: attention. They note that, “You can only learn about what you are paying attention to. Attention is always a prerequisite to learning.” But reading and books are losing the war for kids’ time and attention. That’s partly why the authors support a “high text, low tech” approach to limiting distractions in schools, and why Lemov was of school cellphone bans.

So how can teachers get kids immersed in reading? It’s not as simple as putting good books in front of students, because if they can’t read the words on the page quickly and easily, they will struggle to comprehend and make meaning out of the text. The authors cite that found, “reading fluency predicted all school marks in all literacy-based subjects, with reading rapidity being the most important predictor.”

In response, the authors suggest that, “The best way by far to improve fluency is to provide students opportunities to hear, read and reread text aloud.” They cite the strong research evidence behind the practice of , which has positive impacts even for high school students.

Lemov, Driggs and Woolway devote a full chapter to how educators can put this research into practice, including teacher and student read-alouds, along with carefully constructed and monitored independent student reading time. For instance, a teacher helping children learn how to pronounce a new word during a read-aloud might say: “That word is pejorative. Try that: pejorative. Good. Pejorative means expressing disapproval.” This type of repetition can help students store the new word in long-term memory. In scientific terms, this process is called “orthographic mapping” and it’s a key component of how readers train their brains to connect words with their meaning.

Writing can also help students develop into strong readers, particularly when it’s tied to what they are already learning. But not just any writing; students need to be explicitly taught how to structure sentences, use precise vocabulary and write with style and panache. Drawing on concepts from , the authors suggest that teachers deploy “” exercises to help students extend their initial responses to explain why something is happening, any complicating factors and the final outcome.

Recently, there’s been a lot of in the literacy world about whether students should be taught to read using whole books or if it’s fine to mix books and excerpts or other short passages. On one side, researcher Tim Shanahan there’s no evidence that whole books are superior to excerpts at building reading ability or do more to build student reading stamina. He also notes that excerpts allow for greater breadth than a single book that may offer more in depth.

Lemov, Driggs and Woolway are unapologetic advocates for Team Book. They approvingly cite dyslexia researcher about how digital technologies are reshaping our brains, and how deep reading can counter those effects. They point out that stories help readers remember things better than just a series of disjointed facts and figures. And, channeling , they value the collective culture capital that students can access when they have read Shakespeare’s plays or George Orwell’s dystopian novels.

Regardless of which side of this argument you find more persuasive, Lemov, Driggs and Woolway have done teachers a service by providing numerous tips and examples of how to put the science of reading into practice in their classrooms. 

At an event to promote , the California Democrat revealed that he “cannot read a speech” and feels he hasn’t overcome dyslexia even after a decades-long struggle. His learning disability has in his home state, but Newsom’s phrasing would soon lead to a flurry of headlines.

“I’m just trying to impress upon you, I’m like you,” he told the Atlanta audience. “I’m no better than you. You know, I’m a 960 SAT guy.”

A raft of conservative influencers and media figures seized on the remark to accuse Newsom, currently in the 2028 Democratic primary field, of insulting his African American supporters by association with his own reading challenges. (Black residents make up a plurality of Atlantans, though the crowd Newsom addresses was reportedly .) South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, an African American Republican and close ally of President Trump, for stereotyping their own voters as academically underachieving. 

The tempest soon passed, with the governor dismissing the criticism as “MAGA-manufactured outrage.” Yet the episode stood out as a wobbly foray from a Democratic star into the evolving discussion around literacy education. 

Over the past few years, lawmakers in over a dozen states around what experts call the science of reading, a long-running corpus of research reflecting what is known about how people learn to recognize and use written language. Many of the early leaders in that movement have been Republican-controlled states like Mississippi and Louisiana, generating widespread plaudits for the so-called Southern Surge in standardized test scores. But the problems surrounding early literacy is one that voters around the U.S. recognize, with achievement in the subject still mired in a post-COVID slump.

With Democrats preparing for both a slew of gubernatorial campaigns this fall and a race for the presidential nomination next year, a question remains over how to address reading within the wider portfolio of K–12 education priorities. Most blue states, including California, have taken action on the science of reading, but some voices on the left have also been skeptical of the academic progress made in the South and elsewhere. With his personal background and national profile, Newsom could make the issue his hallmark. Some political observers are waiting for him and others to step into the spotlight.  

John White, the former state superintendent of Louisiana and a longtime voice for reading reforms, said he was puzzled by the apparent reluctance of leaders in both parties to put their achievements in that area front and center. He struggled to name a politician who has built a brand predominantly around the science of reading.

“Literacy is a complicated issue, not like cutting taxes or landing a new corporate headquarters,” White argued. “If you don’t articulate what’s been accomplished, and you don’t place big political stakes on it, there’s no political gains to be reaped from it.”

Linda Diamond, a former teacher and veteran advocate for evidence-based reading instruction in California, said she believed that lawmakers in most blue states have woken up to the need for improved reading legislation. The mission now, she added, was for presidential contenders like Newsom to preach that gospel from a national pulpit.

“I think the message to convey to Democrats is to take this up, make it a winning issue,” she said, acknowledging what she called her governor’s “unfortunate turn of phrase.” 

“Sure, look at the Republican states that have done so well on reading. But don’t let the myopia of thinking that it’s only Republicans distract from the fact that the greatest harm [of literacy failures] is being done to children in poverty.”

‘We need to see action’

Local Democrats’ legislative agenda on K–12 schools has been fairly busy over the last few years. 

In 2023, Newsom signed a bill to mandate dyslexia screenings for children between kindergarten and second grade, making California the 40th state to adopt such legislation. The legislature last year, passing a law that will provide elementary school teachers training in the science of reading and mandate the use of teaching materials that reinforce that pedagogy.

But those steps were taken only after years of intra-Democratic battles in Sacramento. The state as a laggard when it comes to literacy reforms, and previous bills had been sunk by a coalition of advocacy groups for English learners and the California Teachers Association. That faction argued that universal dyslexia screening would over-identify students with the disability and that mandates for evidence-based teaching would threaten educators’ autonomy.

Megan Potente, head of the nonprofit group Decoding Dyslexia’s California branch, said she was heartened by the recent legislative activity and considered Newsom an inspiration to children diagnosed with the condition. Still, she added, the party needed to speak more loudly on the issue — both in California and elsewhere.

“The topic has been elevated, as it needs to be, but we need to see action,” Potente said. “I hope that the Democratic Party can uplift it and not ignore the successes of other states, as they’ve done so far, and really hone in on how they’ve achieved what they’ve achieved.”

At least one prominent Democrat has questioned whether blue states have anything to learn from those that have pursued strategies based explicitly on the science of reading. While running her winning campaign for governor of New Jersey, then-Democratic Rep. Mikkie Sherill seen in Louisiana and Mississippi, calling schools there “some of the worst in the entire nation.” 

The bad feelings run both ways, with Republican Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves to send Newsom assistance from his state’s core of reading tutors after the book forum last week.

It’s possible that Newsom’s personal experience with dyslexia could give him credibility in speaking for the interests of the tens of millions of Americans who struggle to read. Reeves’s predecessor as governor, Phil Bryant, cited his own early setbacks in the subject as the reason he pursued a lengthy slate of new reading laws in 2013. But in the wave of partisan brickbats against Newsom, some have even whether he truly is dyslexic, pointing to alleged inconsistencies in previous recountings of when he was assessed. 

In his memoir, Young Man in a Hurry, Newsom describes grappling with the condition “one of the struggles of [his] life, writing that his difficulty spelling in childhood could cause him to “run out of the room screaming that I didn’t know what was wrong with my brain.”

White called Newsom’s frankness about his diagnosis a “double-edged sword” in the context of U.S. politics. Though he hoped it could lead to bipartisan cooperation with others who have focused on dyslexia awareness — including of Louisiana — he warned that the needs of dyslexic children could be “lost in the partisan swirl.”

“While the issue will benefit from the attention, it is almost inevitable that it will be wrapped up in questions of veracity and identity politics and ugliness,” he concluded.