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 The 74.

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.”

Experts have raised a variety of factors contributing to this reality: learning loss due to the pandemic, increased screen time, the dissolution of long-form reading and teacher burnout. While each of these points are critical, there’s an even deeper, more fundamental issue facing students that a flurry of educational reforms haven’t fixed and may have worsened:

They are simply not spending enough time actually reading in school.

Practice makes perfect, but without the reps, there’s no room for growth. Research kids should have at least 15 to 30 minutes of uninterrupted reading time a day. The reality? Much worse. On average, middle school and high school kids are getting about, if that.

This poses an even greater challenge for students in poverty. Kids who have little to no reading opportunities at home depend on school to fill the gaps. When reading minutes are reduced, they’re hit the hardest.

So how do educators fix it?

It turns out, they already have the answers. Here’s what the research tells us.

First, schools must protect uninterrupted reading time — and make it non-negotiable.

Right now in school, kids are bombarded with interruptions: digital devices, announcements, visual distractions, visitors. In fact, a recent of the Providence Public School District revealed that classrooms are interrupted more than 2,000 times a year, resulting in the loss of between 10 and 20 days of instructional time. What’s more, administrators often underestimate or misperceive how these interruptions might be disrupting the learning process.

Students need to be given the space to focus. If educators want to make changes, they need to get intentional about providing stronger opportunities for kids to focus in school: rethink the physical environment to reduce visual noise, streamline communications for students and build in time for cognitive processing.

That means giving students the time and space to get their reading reps in.

Second, teachers must make the time kids are spending in school worthwhile.

Giving kids the time and space they need to read, requires that they know how to do it. And there needs to be accountability and checks that tell us the practice is worthwhile. That’s where a strong curriculum comes in.

Educators need to be asking ourselves whether the work we’re asking students to do is worthy of their time and intelligence. If our kids are spending 15,000 hours in school across K-12, it’s on us to ensure they’re getting out what they’re putting in. It starts with providing high-quality instructional materials that are comprehensive, coherent, evidence-based, knowledge-rich, and grade-appropriate.

shows students learning under a coherent curriculum gain an average of 1.3 months of additional learning — 1.8 months for struggling students. With the right instruction, kids who are hit the hardest finally have the opportunity to catch up.

Unfortunately, TNTP’s 2018 multi-system study,, and its subsequent study revealed that students are rarely taught grade-level work, and they’ve often seen the materials that are being covered in a previous class. As a result, while kids are getting As and Bs, they’re demonstrating mastery of grade-level standards just 17% of the time.

Bottom line? Kids are doing the work, but they aren’t being appropriately challenged. They’re caught in an incoherent moshpit of disconnected academic programming. Schools are underestimating students’ potential, and it’s backfiring on their ability to learn to read.

Schools need to prioritize a curriculum that is cohesive, knowledge-rich, and grade-appropriate to support true learning. If we’re going to ask kids for their time, let’s make it count.

Finally, schools need to be clear-eyed about how they are measuring success.

Today, the domain of English Language Arts is made up of three key areas that are interconnected: reading, writing and oral language. these areas work hand in hand to help students build their skills; writing improves reading comprehension, while oral language supports both reading and writing.

The problem? Most testing tools that are used for instructional decision-making focus on a small slice of what it means to be proficient in the higher order skills of ELA. They rely on limited data sets like from to draw conclusions around proficiency across the whole domain, sometimes with big consequences for kids and teachers and instructional programming. Often, these tests don’t measure grade-level proficiency, they measure recall. That’s why our children can get As and still not be proficient readers.

If schools want our kids to succeed in literacy — an imperative in the age of AI — there has to be a more advanced discussion about assessment. Schools need to adopt an assessment system that aligns with the domain of English Language Arts. That means moving away from single-point-in-time multiple choice testing strategies and adopting assessment practices that hold the bar for higher order reading, critical analysis, writing, speaking, communicating and collaborating.

Solving the literacy gap doesn’t require an overhaul of our education system or an innovation that is smarter than all humans combined. As educators, we can teach children to read who attend school for 15,000 hours. We need a collaborative, aligned effort to challenge the status quo. We need leaders who are willing to pull on the right levers for change: protect reading time, provide high-quality, grade-level materials and measure what actually matters

In early 2026, a small group of first-grade students at Lucy Wortham James Elementary School in St. James, Missouri, sat together sounding out words.

Kim Williams, the school’s principal, watched as they worked through the lesson. One young boy caught her attention.

“This student had struggled significantly the year before and often avoided reading tasks,” she said. “This time, I watched him carefully tap out each phoneme, blend the sounds and read a multi-syllable word independently.”

What stood out wasn’t just that he read the word correctly – it was how he approached it.

“He didn’t guess. He didn’t look to the teacher for the answer. He applied a strategy he had been explicitly taught,” Williams said.

She has observed several meaningful changes in students over the past year.

“Students are approaching unfamiliar words with greater confidence,” she said. “Instead of guessing, they are using strategies and applying phonics patterns they’ve been explicitly taught. You can hear the difference – they are sounding out words more accurately and blending more smoothly.”

The breakthrough she observed is part of a broader effort across rural central Missouri. Through the Rural Schools Early Literacy Collaborative, literacy coaches from the national nonprofit TNTP work directly with teachers in Phelps County schools, helping them implement structured reading instruction grounded in the science of reading.

Coordinated locally through the Phelps County Community Foundation, coaches visit classrooms regularly throughout the school year. They observe instruction, model lessons and provide feedback, strengthening foundational reading instruction for kindergarten and early elementary students.

The effort is taking place at a time when reading proficiency remains a challenge across Missouri and the nation. According to the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called the Nation’s Report Card, only 27 percent of Missouri fourth-grade students scored at or above the proficient reading level, while 42 percent scored below the basic level.

Education leaders say improving early literacy is critical because reading proficiency by the end of third grade is closely linked to long-term academic success.

Before the collaborative began, the biggest challenges for K–1 teachers in St. James R-I centered on consistency, skill gaps and limited structured support.

“Teachers were using a variety of reading strategies, programs and materials,” Williams said. “While many approaches had strengths, there was not a cohesive, research-aligned framework guiding K–1 reading instruction across classrooms. This sometimes led to uneven student outcomes and confusion when students moved between grades.”

Some students entered kindergarten with limited literacy exposure, and teachers needed clearer tools to systematically build phonemic awareness, phonics and decoding skills. Identifying and addressing skill gaps early was challenging without a unified approach.

“From my perspective as principal, the most significant change since TNTP coaches began working with our teachers has been the shift to consistently structured, research-based literacy instruction grounded in the science of reading,” she said.

Instead of learning strategies in isolation, teachers now receive feedback tied directly to classroom instruction. Coaching conversations are specific, practical and immediately applicable, accelerating growth in instructional practice.

“I have seen a significant shift in teacher confidence, collaboration and mindset around early literacy instruction,” Williams said. “Teachers understand how students learn to read, have a stronger grasp of foundational skills — especially phonemic awareness, phonics and decoding – and can clearly articulate the ‘why’ behind their decisions.”

That clarity has reduced uncertainty and increased instructional precision.

“Early literacy is no longer just an initiative,” she said. “It’s a unified commitment supported by knowledge, collaboration and confidence.”

A first-year teacher finds support

For Ashley Wood, a second-year kindergarten teacher in Newburg, the coaching model provided unexpected support.

“You see so many posts online telling new teachers to run from the profession,” she said. “But when you have a support system – coaching, small groups, someone to talk through what’s working and what’s not – it makes you want to stay. It takes away that feeling that if a student struggles, it’s all your fault.”

Wood said the approach reduces “teacher guilt” – the feeling that struggling students are solely the teacher’s responsibility.

Her literacy coach, Kelly, follows a predictable rhythm each month: a Zoom planning meeting before a visit, in-person classroom observation, immediate feedback afterward and ongoing email check-ins.

“It definitely makes you feel like you are not alone,” Wood said. “As a new teacher, there are so many moments where you wonder if you’re doing it right. Having someone come in, observe and then talk it through with you – it changes everything.”

At the beginning of the year, some students did not yet recognize their starter letters – A, M, S and T – or the sounds they make.

“Now almost every single one of them knows capital, lowercase and sound,” she said. “That growth has been huge. Kindergarten is such a growth year. They come in barely recognizing letters, and by the end they’re reading.”

Wood admitted feeling nervous before Christmas break, wondering whether students would retain their skills.

“I sent home decodable passages because I thought, ‘They’re going to forget everything.’ But they came back after break and every single one of them just took off. It was like something clicked,” she said.

The improvements teachers are seeing in classrooms are reflected in early assessment data from participating districts.

In Rolla Public Schools, more than 94 percent of first-grade students demonstrated year-long growth in reading after coaching support began. In Dent-Phelps R-III School District, the share of first graders reading at grade level increased from 25.5 percent in the fall to 89.4 percent by the spring.

At Newburg Elementary School, 100 percent of kindergarten and first-grade students demonstrated growth in reading assessments, with gains that more than doubled typical annual progress.

From classroom change to district strategy

For April Williams, assistant superintendent in the St. James R-I School District, the impact is most visible during classroom visits.

“As an administrative team, we met every Wednesday morning and did literacy walks,” she said. “We wanted to be grounded in the work, too – not just supporting teachers but really understanding what effective literacy instruction should look like.”

Those visits give district leaders a firsthand view of how instruction – and students – are changing.

“Just last week I was in a kindergarten classroom, and the words students were decoding and understanding – for February – I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “Seeing that difference in students’ abilities has been incredible.”

What began as a local effort in rural Phelps County is now expanding across Missouri.

Through the state’s Comprehensive Literacy State Development (CLSD) grant, the coaching model is being implemented in 60 schools statewide, including 40 K–5 schools and 20 middle and high schools. Literacy coaches trained in the same model used in Phelps County now support teachers across multiple regions of the state.

Education leaders say the expansion reflects growing recognition that improving reading outcomes requires not only strong curriculum but also sustained coaching and support for teachers.

For Williams, the goal is simple: ensure the work continues long after the original grant funding ends.

“Probably what changed the most is we renewed our commitment to literacy district-wide,” she said. “It wasn’t just something happening in elementary anymore – we started asking how the entire district supports literacy and keeps it at the forefront of everything we do.”

She added: “The goal is for this model to live beyond the grant — and beyond all of us. So that it simply becomes what we do.”

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

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.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

OKLAHOMA CITY — Everywhere House Speaker Kyle Hilbert goes, the topic of childhood literacy follows.

Hilbert, R-Bristow, said improving Oklahoma’s elementary reading scores is “top of the agenda for me,” and he’s been telling everyone who will listen.

“Every single event that I’m asked to go to or every single question that I’m asked where it’s economic development, tourist-related, you name it, I talk about reading because it applies to everything,” he told news reporters last month.

Early literacy has risen to the top of state lawmakers’ priorities for their 2026 legislative session, generating discussions and disagreement across the state about what policy changes and resources are necessary to improve children’s reading levels.

Only 27% of Oklahoma public school students scored at their grade level or higher on state reading tests last school year. A ranking of drew widespread public attention to Oklahoma’s ongoing struggles.

Legislators have discussed in literacy programs, but the single most dramatic change — and the most concrete reading policy idea that has emerged at the state Capitol — would be retaining struggling readers in third grade.

Republican leaders have pointed to third-grade retention as a clear solution for Oklahoma’s , but educators and parents said they’re less convinced.

Hilbert’s legislation would require students who score below a basic level in reading to repeat third grade. It also would promote earlier interventions, like summer tutoring, small-group lessons and optional retention in younger grades.

“We know if we pass this bill we will have better education outcomes,” Hilbert told a House education subcommittee in February. “That is a fact. It’s backed by science. It’s backed by data. It’s backed by research. It’s backed by evidence of what other states have done. We know what will happen if we pass this. We just have to have courage to do that.”

Research indicates retaining a student in elementary school leads to a , but retained students face a and .

Parents voice concerns over retention policy

Republican lawmakers and have pointed to Mississippi, with its strict retention requirement and improved reading scores, as a success story to emulate.

Mississippi has surpassed the national average in fourth-grade reading proficiency after on literacy initiatives and reading coaches, along with retaining its lowest-performing third-grade readers.

Oklahoma implemented similar third-grade requirements in the 2013-14 school year and by 2015-16 among early elementary grades.

School districts at the time said the retentions were necessary to prepare students for the high-stakes third-grade reading test.

The policy became unpopular among parents and educators, who complained the state placed far too much consequence on the results of one annual reading test. Lawmakers progressively for children to avoid being held back. They altogether in 2024.

Parents don’t want to return to high-stakes testing, said Wendy Hardwick, president of the Oklahoma Parent Teacher Association.

Hardwick’s twin daughters were in third grade when Oklahoma last had strict retention laws. They had already repeated first grade, and two years later, their reading skills were strong, she said. That didn’t stop them from feeling “scared to death” that a poor testing performance would hold them back again in third grade, she said.

Hardwick, who worked in public schools as a long-term substitute and later in special education, recalled the school environment was “stressful and palpable” during state testing time.

“What (students) understand is that they’re going to take this test, and if they don’t pass it, they’re going to have to take third grade again,” she said. “It’s hard to see kids of that age being put under that type of pressure.”

Senate Minority Leader Julia Kirt, D-Oklahoma City, had similar worries for her son, who was in pre-K when the retention law first passed.

Like Hardwick’s children, Kirt’s son repeated first grade. It worked out well, she said, but she feared a poor standardized test result would hold him back a second, more damaging time.

“I was pretty nervous about it, and knowing my educators didn’t have much say in it concerned me,” she said. “Our classroom educator the year my son was in third grade said, ‘I know he can read. I’ve talked to him about it. I watch him read. He tells me he knows. We have no idea if he will show that on a standardized test.’”

Broken Arrow parent Kristine Chambers said her daughter in second grade already reads above her grade level and tests well. An extra reading curriculum her daughter received in pre-K through Broken Arrow Public Schools set her up for success today, Chambers said.

Boosting early literacy instruction should be lawmakers’ focus, she said, rather than having students repeat a grade.

“I think that instead of focusing so hard on this retention, maybe put that focus into funding for new programs, new ideas for early childhood literacy, so that we have that good base,” Chambers said. “Obviously, there’s going to be students that learn at different speeds, but I think that if we have a really good, strong reading support and intervention early, we can not have the retention possibility at third grade.”

The state’s poor reading scores demonstrate not enough schools are intervening sufficiently when young readers are struggling, Hilbert said.

That’s why his would require schools to offer summer tutoring, small-group instruction and other services. Mandatory retention “forces that accountability” for schools to take action and communicate with parents earlier, he said.

Teaching quality comes to forefront

Public school teachers have voiced disagreements, not with the concept of retention, but with doing so in third grade.

Students learn the foundations of reading in earlier grades, so the sooner a student is retained, the better, if it’s absolutely necessary, said Cari Elledge, the president of the Oklahoma Education Association, the state’s largest teacher union.

“If you wait until third grade, it might be too late,” said Elledge, a former elementary teacher. “That’s really what we’re hearing from our educators across the state, is we do support this, but if there was any way that we could shift it back a little bit to pre-K, kindergarten, first grade, that would be more beneficial.”

Republican legislators and business leaders have framed backing off of tough retention laws as the start of Oklahoma’s downturn in education rankings. But, other key factors have impacted public schools since that time.

Oklahoma experienced some of the and an . Public schools in Oklahoma now employ and over 800 uncertified adjunct instructors, both of which used to be a rarity in the state.

“When we talk about watering down things, we’ve also watered down certification and licensure, and that has been a dramatic change to public education in the state of Oklahoma,” Elledge said.

The state Legislature has steadily increased public school funding since then, though Oklahoma in per-pupil spending.

Sen. Adam Pugh, who leads the Senate Education Committee, said as lawmakers invest more dollars in public schools, they’re aware Oklahoma’s teacher workforce is now younger, less experienced and more reliant on emergency certified educators.

That’s why measures to recruit and retain more teachers, including raising teacher salaries by $2,500, doubling college scholarship funds for aspiring educators, growing a statewide team of reading coaches and adding millions of dollars to support literacy instruction in public schools.

“I also think when it comes down to it, it’s not about the curriculum,” said Pugh, R-Edmond. “It’s about the individual that’s in front of the classroom every day, and so preparing that individual to go teach kids to learn how to read, I think, is really important.”

Oklahoma City schools show improvement in early readers

Test scores were already on the decline when disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic . Scores then from 2022 to 2024.

As districts seek to claw their way back up, Oklahoma City Public Schools has found a reason for optimism this school year. Winter benchmark testing showed nearly a quarter of the district’s first graders had more than a full academic year of growth in a semester of learning.

If more first graders show accelerated growth now, more will be on track to read proficiently by fourth grade, Oklahoma City Superintendent Jamie Polk said.

A major factor in that growth has been the addition of an extra reading curriculum on top of the district’s core literacy instruction, district leaders said in a March school board meeting. The extra curriculum more explicitly covers phonics and phonemic awareness, two concepts that are essential to sounding out words.

Classrooms that showed the most growth had another key element, Polk told Oklahoma Voice. They had teachers who were trained through content-specific professional development.

“What we have found that works more than anything is … teacher clarity — teachers understanding exactly this is what the students need to know and be able to do, but also when our students can articulate what they need to know and be able to do,” Polk said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oklahoma Voice maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janelle Stecklein for questions: info@oklahomavoice.com.

“It’s something that the students are very, very proud of,” said librarian Annelise Rodriguez, who created and manages the Millionaires Club. “We’ve had kids come in when they take tours and say, ‘I’m going to be up there some day.’ Some kids get it in 45 books, and for others, it’s taken 360 books.”

The project was created three years ago to motivate and recognize young avid readers in the of roughly 600 students. Just a few weeks ago, a grandmother who didn’t speak English bowed her head to thank Rodriguez after her grandchild’s photo finally made the display. 

Last year, Windsor Park students read 400 million words as part of the Millionaires Club. They are on track to beat that record, with over 315 million words read by the end of February. It’s one of the ways the school has attained its high reading proficiency rates, an achievement that earned its ranking on The 74’s Bright Spots list. The highlighted schools have third grade literacy scores that are much higher than might be expected, based on the schools’ poverty rates. 

With its 29% poverty level, nearly two-thirds of Windsor Park third graders were projected to be proficient in reading in 2024, but its actual score was 96%. That rate jumped to 99% last year. Nearly 50% of students are Hispanic, 29% are white and 15% are Asian. 

Windsor Park is a magnet school for gifted and talented children. Texas schools to screen their students, and all children in the Corpus Christi Independent School District who score in the top 3% receive an invitation to transfer to Windsor Park, said Principal Kimberly Bissell. Transportation is provided. 

The consists of multiple tests that grade students’ achievement in reading and math, as well as problem-solving and critical thinking abilities. Students can transfer in any grade to Corpus Christi’s gifted and talented schools.  

Windsor Park is also the district’s only elementary school. The worldwide educational program allows teachers to write their own curriculum and offer rigorous instruction along with inquiry-based learning.

“We have kids who are in first grade reading at a middle school or high school level,” Bissell said. “Those things have always been true, but the initiative behind their personal achievement has certainly ramped up in the last few years with our new approaches.”

The Millionaires Club, which is expanding to other schools in the 33,000-student district, is one of them. The number of words children read are tracked through Accelerated Reader, an online program that records finished books and comprehension. 

Windsor Park also recently launched a called “thinking classrooms.” Originally created for math education, it students working in small groups, solving problems while standing up at whiteboards and building on pieces of knowledge as they go. But Bissell said Windsor Park implemented this approach across all its classes. 

It especially improved students’ writing skills because the children use the whiteboards to organize text and story structure, she said. 

In Hanna Patton-Elliott’s third grade classroom on a recent morning, students became “doctors,” pulling on blue medical gloves before separating into groups of two or three. Each group had to assess a passage of text on a whiteboard — the “patient” — by finding the main idea. The children then diagnosed their “patients” by writing a conclusion for what the passage was about.

Patton-Elliott said that at the end of the class, students rotate and evaluate one another’s work as “attending doctors” — the staff who oversee the work of a medical team. 

“I’m going to give them an opportunity to write the conclusions for other people’s work, but then also go back and look at it as the first attending doctor,” she said. “So we’ve got lots of things going on. We’ve got some reading skills, we’ve got the main idea, we’ve got organization, but then also we’ve got some creative writing, too. The metaphor seems to be working for breaking this down and organizing it.”

The activity is part of the curricular materials written by Windsor Park teachers under the International Baccalaureate program. Teachers create their grade-level curriculum together to ensure that the same lessons — such as finding the main idea of a story — are taught in each classroom, even if the activities may be different. Because Windsor Park classes are interdisciplinary, teachers try to connect the same ideas in all academic subjects, so what the children learn in reading, for example, is referenced in math class.

Much of Windsor Park’s instruction uses standards from the Texas Education Agency, but infuses it with student-led learning and group collaboration. The curriculum also allows children to make decisions and manage their own instruction, such as choosing the grading rubrics for an activity. 

“We find not just for gifted learners, but as a best practice, this idea of choice and student agency really builds writing, as well as reading and everything that English Language arts envelopes,” Bissell said. “When you offer choice with expectations, they do a lot better.”

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. 

Policymakers in Washington are starting to pay attention. Last year, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon named “Evidence-Based Literacy” as her No. 1 academic priority. And this month, the House Appropriations Committee held a on the science of reading.

So what role should the federal government play in reading policy?

Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as stealing the playbook from the best-performing states. The so-called “” states of Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama,and Louisiana have seen the biggest gains in recent years, and many states have tried to copy them with their own science of reading bills — to of success.

The federal government also has a record of big investments in reading not leading to improved outcomes. That’s at least partly because reading policy is tricky, given all the potential reasons a child may or may not understand the words on the page.

But that doesn’t mean federal leaders are helpless. They just need to find the right levers. Here are five potential ideas:

1. Create a new national reading panel

In 1997, Congress brought together a group of experts to “assess the status of research-based knowledge, including the effectiveness of various approaches to teaching children to read.” After reviewing thousands of research articles, the group focused on five critical components of reading instruction — phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.

The document that came out of that work, the , became a foundational text for the field. But it’s now decades old, and researchers know a lot more today than they did back then. It would be useful to have an update and a new consensus document from an esteemed body of experts.

2. Expand the National Assessment of Educational Progress

The NAEP exams have been instrumental in documenting the extent of students’ challenges, but they don’t say much about the underlying reasons why kids are having such reading comprehension problems.

For example, on , 46% of fourth graders couldn’t accurately understand the meaning of the word “conform” in a passage from the book The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo. Was it because they didn’t understand the question, didn’t know the meaning of the word “conform” or got misled in some other way?

Reading researchers like Hugh Catts have been raising the that most reading comprehension exams are not well equipped to pinpoint the reasons behind a student’s literacy mistakes. NAEP could take the lead here by introducing other types of assessments that seek to unpack the root causes of reading struggles, and how they might differ across age groups. 

For example, young students might get a phonics check like the one England administers to its 6-year-olds. Older students might benefit from an age-appropriate version of this, as researchers have found that even middle and high school students can struggle with complex words.

3. Give states flexibility on English Language Arts assessments

Building on the point above, the federal government currently requires states to administer their own reading or language arts assessments annually in grades 3 to 8 and once in high school. Right now, the states have all interpreted that requirement to mean that they must give generic reading comprehension tests.

But states could be given flexibility to interpret this differently. Educators might gain better insights into students’ reading challenges if they were tested on discrete skills like decoding, fluency and vocabulary, and comprehension questions were left to specific content areas like social studies and science. Louisiana attempted something like this a few years ago, but the feds could give states much more leniency to pursue this line of inquiry.

4. Nudge states on accountability

Congressional leaders probably don’t have much appetite to rewrite the Every Student Succeeds Act, which requires states to draft goals for student achievement and plans for holding schools accountable. But those original state plans were written nearly a decade ago, and conditions have changed (for the worse) since then. The Department of Education can’t force states to revisit their plans if they don’t want to, but it could signal that it would be open to letting states amend them in light of the declines of the last decade, especially among the lowest-performing students.

5. Empower parents with information

Despite their best intentions, schools are not good at helping students who fall behind in reading catch up. According to the from Amplify’s DIBELS early literacy screener, just 49% of students who start kindergarten well behind in reading get on track by the end of third grade. And the odds get worse every year that schools wait. Last year, among third graders who were far behind at the beginning of the term, just 5% caught up by the end of the year.

Thanks to , parents already have access to their child’s education records, but only if they request them. To bring greater urgency to this issue, Congress could require schools to inform parents when their child is behind in reading and to work with families to develop specific improvement plans.

If reading scores are a crisis, policymakers should treat it accordingly. But they also have to be realistic in accepting that there’s only so much they can do, and that part of the decline in performance can be traced back to the fact that kids aren’t reading for pleasure as often as they used to — and are adults.

So one way to improve literacy scores is for education leaders at all levels to talk about the importance of reading. People who read a lot tend to know more about the world, and people who know more about the world tend to succeed in many aspects of life. That’s not exactly a policy change, but leadership can shape behavior to make knowledge — and reading — cool again. 

Then, we did a similar project looking for positive outliers in middle school math. There was Worcester again, leading all of Maryland.

So it came as no surprise when we did a follow-up reading analysis last year, this time looking for exceptional individual schools, that three of Worcester’s five elementary schools made our Bright Spots list. In fact, Worcester’s high-poverty Pocomoke Elementary made our Top 5 list, beating the odds for its kids — posting proficiency rates far higher than its average poverty level would suggest — by the biggest margins in Maryland. It wasn’t even particularly close.

In fact, when Thomas Hamill, Worcester’s coordinator of research, presented to the school board, even he was at a loss for words, saying, “To have the quantity of scores that we have, at the level that we have, with the poverty that we have, there is no [statistical] reason for us to be performing as high as we are. … We are doing the improbable in Worcester County.”

So what is Worcester doing differently?

It starts at the top. The district is led by hard-charging superintendent . Back in 2016, she was as the state’s high school principal of the year for leading a turnaround at Pocomoke High School. When we talked, she repeatedly brought the conversation back to building a culture of connection and belonging. While many school and district administrators might espouse similar ambitions, Wallace makes it concrete by expecting all principals to be able to walk into any classroom and know every student by name, as well as each one’s individual strengths and needs. That’s a high bar.

More unusually for a superintendent, Wallace knows the exact number of third graders in her district who were not proficient in reading last year — 133 — and she has set it as her goal to reduce that number to zero. When asked why, she pointed out that kids tend to fall behind over time and worried that those 133 kids who weren’t reading proficiently by third grade are, “more likely to be incarcerated, more likely to live in poverty and more likely to suffer food insecurity” as adults.

Worcester is not just a literacy story, but it is getting amazing results in early reading. So what can we learn from them? On the surface, Worcester’s might look pretty familiar. When I spoke with Cassidy Hamborsky, the district’s coordinator of instruction (who was also an – educator), she talked me through what a typical day might look like. In grades K-2, teachers devote 150 minutes per day to literacy, divided among 90 minutes of core instruction using Great Minds’ , 30 minutes to foundational phonics skills and 30 minutes for the 100 Book Challenge from the .

But what seems different about Worcester is its clarity of purpose. This comes out in a few ways. One, Hamborsky says the district is vigilant about protecting core instructional time for all kids. For example, they wouldn’t take a student away from that time for personalized help or even something like talking with a school counselor. Those things can happen during other parts of the day, but they don’t want any kid to miss out on the time dedicated to building vocabulary and language development.

Two, they are religious about giving kids lots of time to practice. This is mostly through the 100 Book Challenge. During the school day, kids are typically reading physical books that help them build phonics skills or engage in sustained independent reading. Students are expected to complete two 15-minute blocks of reading at school — and then read for 30 additional minutes per day at home. This regimen may vary based on the child’s age and skill level, but kids have to log what they read and then have their teacher or parent sign off.

Families, in fact, are the third key component of Worcester’s reading plan. At the beginning of the school year, they’re asked to sign a “home coach contract” saying that they will check and monitor their child’s reading. Throughout the year, kids are expected to read for half an hour at home five days a week. Over the course of a 180-day school year, that could add up to 900 extra minutes of practice.  

Four, Worcester’s reading instruction is both personalized and data-driven. Every district says it’s data-driven, and Worcester uses some of the same off-the-shelf reading assessments (such as and ) that other districts use. But what separates Worcester from others is that it uses student reading logs to track each kid’s progress. The teachers know exactly which books each child has read and whether kids are keeping up with their reading on a weekly and even daily basis. Teachers will also hold regular check-ins with students, ask them about their reading and even listen to them read aloud.

I suspect this last piece is one of the reasons Worcester sees such consistently strong results. For example, low-income students in the district outperform wealthier peers across the rest of Maryland.

But while Worcester has a lot to be proud of, I think the most enduring reason for its success is that it has leaders like Wallace and Hamborsky who continue to strive for better. Wallace, for example, told me she lies awake at night thinking about those 133 kids who aren’t proficient readers yet and what it will take to get them there. There’s a lot to learn from what Worcester has accomplished so far, but perhaps the biggest lesson is that its leaders don’t think they’re done. 

My own state, Arkansas, is preparing to implement a key piece of its 2024 , which is modeled after legislation in Mississippi. This summer will be the first in Arkansas when third-graders will be retained if they are not reading proficiently. As expected, parents and educators are on edge and questions abound. The prospect of thousands of students being held back is generating lots of attention and anxiety. 

But as Arkansas moves to implement its version of the Mississippi law and other states look to emulate it, policymakers would be wise to consider what the research says about retention. In short, like everything else in education, there is no panacea for increasing student learning. Retention in and of itself is not going to singlehandedly raise literacy rates. The key to success in Mississippi was the supports the state provided before and after students were retained. 

�Ѿ���������������辱’s , passed in 2013, was a comprehensive K-3 reform law designed to ensure that all third graders read on grade level. Core elements included intensive professional development aligned with the science of reading, early identification of struggling readers, targeted intervention beginning well before grade three, deployment of state-funded literacy coaches and the retention of a small share of third graders who did not meet the reading benchmark.

As science of reading reforms expand nationwide and districts work to address pandemic-related learning losses, third-grade retention policies have become more common. As of 2024, have laws requiring promotion based on reading proficiency, and 13 additional states allow districts to retain students for this reason. Importantly, these laws typically are more generous in allowing exemptions than previous versions.

But while exemptions are often well-intentioned, suggests that, when broadly used, they can undermine policy effectiveness. Exemptions tend to reduce participation among the students who may benefit most from intensive intervention, including English learners who could benefit from extra help. The primary benefit of promotion-linked literacy policies is early detection paired with substantial supports, such as additional instruction, tutoring and coaching, before students reach third grade. So when exemptions are granted, they must be coupled with the same level of structured intervention Mississippi requires through individualized reading plans and intensive instruction.

Evidence from Mississippi helps clarify why retention alone is not the driver of literacy gains. In the first year of implementation, roughly 15% of the state’s third graders who scored below the promotion cutoff in the 2014-15 school year were retained, and among students just below the threshold, were held back. Yet fourth-grade scores began improving almost immediately, from 2013 to 2024, making Mississippi those children for reading and math gains during that time — well before retention could plausibly affect outcomes at scale. This timing strongly suggests that the gains were driven primarily by early identification, targeted intervention and intensive instructional support rather than by retention itself.

Importantly, Mississippi paired promotion decisions — whether retention or exemption — with structured, mandatory resources. Even students promoted via exemptions were required to have individualized reading plans, summer literacy programs and ongoing intervention. Survey and administrative evidence suggest that these promoted-but-still-supported students made meaningful reading gains, underscoring that the policy’s effectiveness hinged on the , not simply on whether students were retained.

Evidence from other states reinforces this point. In Florida, where third-grade retention has been studied extensively, outperformed exempted peers who did not two years later. This suggests that exemptions, when not paired with intensive intervention, can dilute policy effectiveness by allowing struggling readers to advance.

Survey evidence suggests that in part by the supplemental assistance provided to low-achieving students who were promoted via exemptions. By contrast, evidence from Florida shows that in reading two years later, indicating that exemptions were not consistently granted to those who would benefit most from promotion.

As Arkansas moves toward implementation, it would do well to consider not just �Ѿ���������������辱’s experience, but also Indiana’s, which saw the rubber meet on the road on retention more recently. students are repeating third grade after failing the state test or qualifying for an exemption. State leaders had expected to retain more, but passing rates on the reading assessment jumped nearly 5 points last school year, to just over 87%. Officials said the progress stemmed in part from the expansion of a statewide program, the Indiana Literacy Cadre, that focuses educators’ attention on research-based instructional methods. Participation increased from 41 schools in 2022 to more than 550 in 2025, and schools in the Literacy Cadre saw a 7-point increase in passing rates, compared with gains of 3.6 points at other schools. 

Arkansas can hope for similar outcomes of this year’s state tests. There is cause for optimism – when it comes to not just retention but the resources that come before these critical decisions, is more expansive and students have access to more assistance both at school and home (through a $1,500 grant to families for literacy tutoring). Secretary Jacob Oliva, who leads the state Department of Education released in January to ensure families are aware of their students’ standing and students are receiving ample supports both before and after the testing window.��

Across studies, the evidence is consistent: retention mandates alone do not drive literacy gains in isolation. only when retention is part of a that intervenes early and intensively. �Ѿ���������������辱’s experience demonstrates that it is the comprehensive series of interventions—�� — that produces lasting improvement.

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

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

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

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

“Sat!” Violet called out.

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

“Because it starts with s!” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, in her final budget proposal this week, is set to unveil a budget proposal for funding schools that invests $625 million in programs aimed at addressing the state’s K-12 literacy crisis.

The literacy investment would come at a time of increased focus on the troubling performance of Michigan students in literacy in the early grades. Just 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 last year.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

On the national front, , an exam known as the “nation’s report card.” That compares to 30% being proficient nationally. More concerning is that Michigan student performance has been stagnant and declining as other states that have invested heavily in early literacy have improved.

Whitmer, during her State of the State address last year, called for urgency in addressing the low performance, noting that Michigan spends more than most states.

“It’s not acceptable,” Whitmer said. “For our kids, let’s do better. Let’s face our literacy crisis with fierce urgency.”

“When every child reads, Michigan wins,” Whitmer said in a statement provided by the governor’s office. “As we face a nationwide literacy crisis, my education budget proposal includes big investments to build on the work we’ve done to help kids read.”

For the budget proposal she will deliver to the Michigan Legislature Wednesday, Whitmer’s Every Child Reads plan notes that investing in preschool and wraparound programs is just as important as improving curriculum and ensuring teachers are trained.

Here are some specifics of the plan the governor’s office shared with Chalkbeat this week:

• Part of the $625 million investment includes expansion of the state’s initiative, which aims to provide free preschool to children regardless of income. “It starts with high-quality early learning, because the sooner kids start learning to read, the better they become,” the governor’s office said in a media advisory.
• The budget would also invest more in Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling (or LETRS) training. LETRS is a professional development program based on the science of reading. The refers to a body of knowledge that emphasizes phonics along with building vocabulary and background knowledge.
• The budget will include funding that helps districts implement new science of reading-aligned curriculum. The Michigan Department of Education recently published a list of curriculums aligned with the science of reading. School districts aren’t required to adopt from the list. However, the current state budget has language requiring schools or risk losing a small percentage of their state funding.
• The budget proposes additional funding to expand summer, before-school, and after-school programming.

Additional details, such as information on how the additional funding would help districts implement curriculum aligned to the science of reading, weren’t available.

State Superintendent Glenn Maleyko, in a statement included in the governor’s advisory, said Whitmer’s focus on literacy is one shared by the Michigan Department of Education, which he oversees, and the State Board of Education, the elected board that hired him last year.

“Nothing is more important to our students and our state than improving literacy,” Maleyko said. “Reading and writing are the foundation for long-term success, and I look forward to working with the Legislature through strong teamwork and shared responsibility to advance these priorities and continue improving student outcomes statewide.”

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 .

But that short-term focus on the averages loses sight of what’s happening at the tails — the top performers and the weakest — and how things have evolved over longer periods of time. 

To zoom out, I worked with Eamonn Fitzmaurice, The 74’s art and technology director, to build the time-lapse tools below. 

The first one shows you the evolution of 12th grade math scores. This particular test was first administered in 2005 by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. When the 2024 scores came out in September, The 74 wrote about the declines overall and for the lowest-performing students.

The reading scores for 12^th graders are even more depressing. They haven’t gotten as much attention as the math scores, perhaps because the averages scores haven’t followed as dramatic of an up-and-down rollercoaster as the math scores have followed.

These graphs show the scores of 12^th graders in math and reading, but it’s likely that other grades and subjects would show similar patterns. It’s not just that average scores have declined across a wide range of tests, grades and subjects; we also have a lot more low-performing students than we did in the past. 

While the data presented here are at the national level, any state, district or school leader could see how things are changing in their community. At the classroom or school level, increased variability in student performance makes it harder for teachers to personalize their instruction and for school leaders to design systemwide supports. To get things back on track, policymakers should pay special attention to how their lowest-performing students are faring.

That idea is comforting. It is also wrong.

Dyslexia is not a visual disorder. It is a language‑based learning disability rooted in how the brain processes speech sounds and connects them to print. People with dyslexia struggle with foundational skills such as phonics and with reading fluency not because letters look confusing, but because written language does not come automatically.

For decades, peer‑reviewed research has whether fonts can meaningfully improve reading for people with dyslexia, and it is clear that . Studies comparing so‑called dyslexia fonts with standard typefaces such as Times New Roman, Arial or Calibri show no reliable gains in accuracy, speed or comprehension. In some cases, unfamiliar fonts even slow readers down.

This does not mean presentation is irrelevant. Reasonable font size, spacing and contrast can make text more comfortable to read and reduce visual fatigue. But these benefits apply to everyone. They do not address the core difficulties that define dyslexia, and they should not be mistaken for evidence‑based solutions.

So why does the font narrative keep resurfacing?

Because it offers a visible, low‑cost response to a complex, invisible problem. It is a form of performative accessibility — easy to announce, easy to implement and easy to celebrate — while leaving the real barriers intact. Changing a font is simple. Teaching children to read using systematic, explicit instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics is not. Providing early screening, trained teachers and assistive technologies like audiobooks and text‑to‑speech requires time, money and political will.

Accommodations that actually help people with dyslexia, such as audiobooks, computer apps that read documents aloud and write by listening to students speak, or extended time are often necessary to help students stay engaged with grade-level content while they are learning. They preserve access and dignity in the classroom by providing students with the opportunity to show what they know without struggling.

Children with dyslexia also need explicit, systematic instruction to learn to read and write independently. When accommodations like those above replace teaching rather than support it, students are denied the very skills that would allow them to access text on their own. Genuine accessibility means providing both: access to content now, and the instruction needed for independence later. These are not cosmetic changes. They are structural ones.

New York offers a telling contrast. Last year, Gov. Kathy Hochul signed creating a Dyslexia and Dysgraphia Center in the state Department of Education. The center will share best practices by setting standards for dyslexia screening in elementary schools, define evidence-based instruction, set expectations around teacher preparation and professional development related to dyslexia. The law is grounded in the science of reading and acknowledges dyslexia for what it is — a that has long been ignored and requires research‑aligned screening and specialized instruction for students as well as professional support for teachers, leaders and other school staff throughout New York state.

New York City’s NYC Reads initiative, launched under former Schools Chancellor David Banks and now continuing under Mayor Zohran Mamdani and new Chancellor , reflects the same understanding. By prioritizing curriculum quality, teacher training and evidence-based instruction, NYC Reads shifts the focus from symbolic gestures to systemic change. These reforms are harder, slower and far less photogenic than a font swap. They are also far more likely to work.

Crucially, strong instruction is a prerequisite for identifying dyslexia. When classroom reading instruction is weak or inconsistent, it becomes nearly impossible to distinguish between children who were poorly taught and those who have a language-based learning disability. Teachers cannot reliably find dyslexic students until high-quality, evidence-based instruction is in place for everyone. Accommodations for access to grade-level work must be accompanied by evidence-based instruction. That is why literacy and dyslexia advocates were delighted to hear the new chancellor announce that NYC Reads will be deepened rather than abandoned by the new administration. When all kids get strong reading instruction schools, it creates the conditions under which dyslexia can be identified early and addressed appropriately.  It allows for all children to thrive.

Policy reform changes how systems function; performative accessibility changes how documents look. The distinction matters and the stakes are high. Literacy is not just an academic outcome — it is a gateway to affordability, opportunity and dignity. People who can read fluently are better positioned to navigate housing applications, understand contracts, access health care, secure stable employment and participate fully in civic life than those who cannot. Teaching children to read well is not merely an educational goal; it is a commitment to a more equitable society.

In one classroom, students identified literal and nonliteral language: an exercise in labeling text features. Students defined the types of language and carefully annotated the text with examples of both kinds, concluding with a perfunctory discussion.

In the other classroom, students identified literal and nonliteral language, but went further, grappling with what Neil Armstrong meant by “one giant leap for mankind” and connecting the famous phrase to the broader significance of the moon landing. The teacher engaged students by asking them if they, third graders firmly located on planet Earth, were part of the “mankind” of whom Armstrong spoke as he stepped onto the moon. The power of the text and the instruction echoed through that classroom.

Both teachers used the same high quality instructional materials. Only one truly supported students in building meaning. Across classrooms and districts, this pattern repeats, according to a.

In nearly two-thirds of 111 observed comprehension lessons, the work that students did supported only surface-level comprehension — a literal or task-oriented, partial understanding of the text that stops short of the deeper and fuller comprehension work readers need to engage in to succeed in later grades and beyond. Only 24% of lessons fostered robust comprehension, the kind that integrates literal and inferential understanding into a cohesive mental model of the text.

In other words: the curriculum is there. The materials are being used. But, in many classrooms, the meaning-making is missing.

SRI’s research focused on four large school districts that have implemented high quality curricula — including Core Knowledge Language Arts, Wit & Wisdom, and EL Education — for several years. Researchers surveyed 539 teachers who reported near-daily use of their district-adopted curriculum.

Students in these districts are reading and discussing knowledge-rich texts. On paper, this is what policymakers hoped for when states began recommending adoption of such curriculum.

But SRI also sent observers into classrooms in those four districts. The observations showed that teachers spent high proportions of class time on comprehension instruction, and that lessons featured many opportunities for student participation and highly engaged students. These findings represent the notable successes of the districts’ comprehension-focused curriculum implementation. But the comprehension instruction often stopped with the task — finding details, answering literal questions, naming text structures — without guiding students toward the bigger ideas and themes that define deep comprehension.

High quality instructional materials can lay the foundation for robust comprehension instruction. But they cannot deliver it on their own.

This is not just an instruction problem; it’s a systems problem. Curriculum designers, district leaders and instructional coaches may be unaware of the extent to which systemic practices determine the depth of comprehension instruction. SRI’s findings point to multiple well-meaning school and district forces that unintentionally nudge instruction toward the shallow end.

SRI researchers found narrow “standards-aligned,” “data-driven” approaches guiding teachers to focus on discrete skills and individual standards, despite the reality that comprehension standards are not individually measurable. There’s also insufficient teacher time spent discussing, analyzing and mastering the texts — and their content — as they prepare to teach knowledge-rich curriculum

Administrator classroom walkthrough observation rubrics and checklists often reward the most visible aspects of a comprehension lesson — posted objectives, student participation andx curricular materials in use — rather than what actually matters: Are students making meaning?

In short, well-intentioned systems may be signaling to teachers that addressing standards, completing tasks and tests, and simply using curriculum materials are the most important goals. But SRI’s findings suggest that these efforts might distract teachers from the true goal of teaching students to understand texts.  

SRI’s analysis of the 24% of observed lessons that did foster robust comprehension points to six teaching practices that matter. These practices include engaging students in text-specific analysis, modeling meaning-making, leveraging prior knowledge, providing instructive feedback, creating opportunities for text-based reasoning and structuring peer learning. These practices were more tightly correlated with robust comprehension — suggesting they could be steps toward how teachers might shift their practice toward that goal.

None of these are new ideas. Educators have talked for years about modeling, text-based evidence, and rich peer-to-peer discussion. What is new is the clarity with which we observed how these practices must be oriented toward the big ideas of a text — not merely toward a task — to move instruction from surface to substance.

For example, in one lesson, a teacher used strong instructional modeling to show students how to collect key details and paraphrase a main idea. Then, she showed students how to do it in a history text about how new navigational technologies facilitated European exploration of the New World, truly unlocking robust comprehension.

For policymakers and system leaders who championed high quality materials as a lever for literacy improvement, these findings offer both a warning and a roadmap. Fortunately, the districts involved have the literacy leadership and professional learning infrastructure to make key shifts toward robust comprehension instruction. Three next steps for literacy leaders stand out:

1. Define and communicate a clear vision for robust comprehension instruction. Districts must go beyond “fidelity” to curriculum and articulate what deep understanding looks like for students and what it demands from instruction. Discussion, writing, knowledge-building, and standards are all part of the story, but ultimately, robust comprehension must be the target.

2. Reorient professional learning around the knowledge-building texts and their meaning. Teachers need structured opportunities to build the historical, literary, and scientific content knowledge necessary to facilitate robust understandings of the knowledge-building texts. Their professional learning should require deep, collective unpacking of all the nuances in the texts. .

3. Align observation and assessment systems to priorities for instruction. If tools and interim assessments measure only surface features, surface-level instruction will persist. Systems must adopt tools that can discern whether instruction leads students toward robust comprehension and use that data transparently to support improvement.

These changes are not small lifts, but they are essential.

Perhaps the most hopeful finding in the study is this: Lessons that supported robust comprehension didn’t just deepen learning, they increased student motivation and engagement. Students liked these lessons more. The students in the robust One Giant Leap lesson could see themselves in the Apollo mission — and on the moon.

In short, the path to better literacy outcomes is also a path to more joyful teaching and learning.

SRI Education and The 74 both receive financial support from the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies

Teachers are rightly concerned that AI cheats and shortcuts will erode students’ independent thinking and that increased screen time will the social skills and human connection kids need more than ever in a technology-powered world.

As New York City superintendents, one in the Bronx and one in Brooklyn, we decided to lean into this moment and try to develop AI-powered teaching assistants that increase student thinking, foster human connection and complement effective teaching practice.

As a guide for sorting through the many AI product pitches in our inboxes, we focused on NYC’s big goal of increasing reading achievement and decided to concentrate on improving our core English Language Arts classes. We didn’t want another supplemental solution — an extra intervention when core instruction fails to meet the needs of diverse learners. Instead, we wanted more students to receive the support and feedback they need during class, so fewer of them require additional help. 

Since the New York City Public Schools had already done a lot of to improve phonics instruction and foundational reading skills in the , we decided to focus on middle school, where rigor increases along with students’ struggles. We met with principals who wanted to be early adopters share our goals and an early demo. Eleven schools in the Bronx district and three in Brooklyn signed up.

We did not want the entire class to become tech-powered; rather, we targeted the AI toward the most challenging parts of the lessons, when students were doing close reading and writing. Teachers assign each student to a small group, and they all open their Chromebooks and log into , which takes the texts and questions from the curriculum, makes them interactive and provides more targeted support for students who need it. 

Students first collaborate with their partners, discussing their initial thinking about each question. Then, they type or speak their response into the AI. The technology confirms what the students understand through instant feedback and then pushes them to go deeper, often directing them back to a specific portion of text and asking a follow-up question that guides them from literal comprehension to inferences and author’s craft. As one student said, “It’s like the handout is talking to me.” 

While all this is going on, teachers review a live dashboard that shows every student’s level of understanding of every question. If the teachers see students are struggling, they can provide immediate assistance to get them back on track.

After about 15 minutes of students working together with each other and the AI, the teachers push a button and the AI synthesizes the two biggest misconceptions in the class in real time, suggesting a discussion question to address each one (this was a “wow” moment for our teachers!). The teachers then lead a targeted class discussion, often with a lot more student participation than usual because the kids feel more confident after working with the AI and their partner.

Finally, all students complete an exit ticket, often a short written paragraph about the final question of the lesson. They again receive up to three rounds of real-time feedback on their work and revise their writing after each round. 

Based on 2025 New York State test results, classrooms that used these tools at least twice a week for the year doubled their rate of growth compared with the rest of their district. In in the Bronx, for example, those students saw growth of between 14 and 16 percentage points over the previous year, compared with a 7-point improvement overall.

While we are still learning, we hope the knowledge we gained will help other educators actively shape this next generation of AI-powered tools. Here’s some of what we learned.

First, it was important to ensure that our AI tools worked seamlessly with the high-quality instructional materials (HQIM) we had already adopted. As Heather Peske from the has highlighted, AI tools that instantly allow teachers to create lesson plans, change assessments or dial down the level of challenge risk undermining the quality and consistent learning progression on which HQIM curricula are built. 

Second, it was important to increase student collaboration, both in small groups and during full-class discussions. Most early AI products follow the old paradigm: Students put on headsets, look at a screen,and work silently on their own. No one knows the full complement of skills that young people will need in their AI-powered futures, but will be even more critical than it is today. 

Third, the biggest decisions we made were pedagogical, not technical. We wanted the AI not just to support students or save teachers time, but to help our educators be more effective. Our teachers helped design the “misconceptions spotlight” tool so they could see and address the biggest areas of student struggle. They also asked for a “highlight” tool so they could celebrate strong student thinking and call out exemplary work for discussion when the learning is still fresh and relevant.

Fourth, the North Star of any improvement effort must be student outcomes. Based on the 2024 NAEP results, reading achievement nationwide is at its lowest level in 30 years. In adopting any AI tool, school and district leaders must clearly define their goals at the beginning of any partnership, and then rigorously evaluate the impact. The is leading a movement to better align incentives and ensure contracts are tied to clear measures of student impact.

The decisions school leaders make today will shape tomorrow’s outcomes. When educators both embrace the transformative power of AI and hold tight to the values and knowledge of effective instruction, every school can build the future all students deserve.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘On the same page’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Big disconnect’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Texas State Board of Education on Wednesday delayed an initial vote on a proposed required reading list that includes several Bible passages, including some featured in the controversial, state-approved Bluebonnet reading program that some districts have adopted.

Members of the public who spoke on the issue were overwhelmingly opposed to the state’s proposed list, citing a lack of diverse authors and the religious texts among the reasons.

“What I see is an overemphasis on the Christian tradition without providing the kind of contextualization and analysis that religious texts require,” said Steven Mintz, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

In April, the board will discuss both Commissioner Mike Morath’s��proposed��list and an alternative, shorter list offered by Board Member Will Hickman. His list also includes some biblical texts, including the Good Samaritan, the parable of the Prodigal Son and the story of the tower of Babel.

“These are common stories that are, what I would say, part of cultural literacy,” he said.

When Texas approved a new reading curriculum that features Bible stories in 2024, education Commissioner Mike Morath told districts they could adopt it, reject it or even adapt it to their own local needs.

But a proposed statewide reading list, which relies on some of the same biblical lessons, would not be optional.

The selections, part of a longer list that also features scripture passages for and students, include Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son for first graders and a third grade text on the Apostle Paul’s conversion to Christianity. Those are among the stories that the agency published from the Bluebonnet reading curriculum, a spokesman said.

The proposed reading list, which includes classics from Shakespeare and Poe and the writings of historical figures, is scheduled for a preliminary vote by the Texas State Board of Education Wednesday.

One of the criticisms of the religious lessons in Bluebonnet is that they largely present an evangelical Christian perspective — an attribute the reading list shares, said David Brockman, a religion and public policy scholar at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.

“As with the Bluebonnet curriculum, this one-sided focus on the Bible conveys, intentionally or unintentionally, the message that the biblical tradition is more important and more worthy of attention than other religions,” he said. “This message in turn threatens to turn students, parents, and teachers who are not Christians or Jews into outsiders in their own public schools.” 

The state board narrowly approved the reading program in late 2024 after months of debate between Christian conservatives and those who argue that it emphasizes Christianity over other religions and could be used to proselytize elementary school children. The curriculum is one of several ways the state has tried to heighten students’ exposure to the Bible, knowledge that Morath says will improve overall reading performance. Bluebonnet, and now the reading list, have received praise from those advocating for a classical curriculum focused on Western culture. 

“This is the revolution America needs,” Jeremy Wayne Tate, founder of the Classical Learning Test, an SAT and ACT alternative, . 

Because of student mobility, there is a need for a “common literary canon,” according to . “When students switch schools, they will often read the same text twice or skip a text entirely due to local grade level selection differences.”

A requirement that the state include “religious literature,” in the curriculum has been for years. Some districts met that standard by offering standalone elective courses on the Old and New Testaments in high school. In last fall, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said the state board could also comply by integrating religious topics into other subjects, like language arts. 

The reading list would include a kindergarten passage on the Golden Rule, which emphasizes Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, where he instructed followers to “do unto others as you would have done unto you.” After a backlash, the state added references to similar lessons from other faiths. In first grade, there’s a book on America’s symbols, which also highlights connections to scripture.

‘Parents have every right’ 

Most districts in the state didn’t rush to adopt the curriculum, despite incentives from the state of up to $60 per student. A state database last summer showed that fewer than 200 of the state’s more than 1,200 districts and charters had ordered the reading materials, many of them smaller districts. Others adopted the program but discarded the religion-related lessons. 

In a , the Texas Freedom Network, which has been critical of including Bible lessons in the curriculum, showed that just 17 of the state’s 100 largest districts adopted it and were often slow to order the materials. The Fort Worth schools, now under state takeover, will begin implementing it this fall. 

Since last fall, the 72,000-student Conroe district, near Houston, has been fielding requests from parents to opt their children out of some of the biblical material. Parents are required to submit a request in writing to a teacher or school administrator, but officials told The 74 that they’re not keeping track of how many requests they’ve received. Last fall, one parent told board members that creating alternate lessons is adding to teachers’ workload. 

“Parents have every right to opt their children out of this,” Destinee Milton, who has a second grader and a fifth grader in the district, . Because the religious material is part of the same book as the rest of the lessons, “teachers are now required to spend their planning time” pasting in alternate content.

Mark Brooks, whose third grader attends Colin Powell Elementary in Conroe, asked that she be excused from lessons on Christianity and its influence on the Roman Empire. 

“I don’t think religion belongs in public schools,” he said. But the school seemed unprepared for how to handle the request. The district didn’t reply to a request for comment.

“We asked the teacher; the teacher didn’t really know. We talked to the principal; the principal didn’t really know,” he said. They eventually relocated his daughter to a separate room where she worked on a lesson about the roads that led to Rome, also part of Bluebonnet. 

Brooks said his daughter liked the alternate lesson because she finished it quickly and had more time for independent reading. He’s not opposed, he said, to brief mentions of religion in school, but described a passage on the Christian emperor Constantine crediting God with his success as a ruler as “way over the top.”

Mark Chancey, a religious studies professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said that if the board approves the reading list, it’s “only a matter of time before parents begin to opt their children out of these lessons” in districts statewide. He cited a Supreme Court ruling last year that upheld parents’ rights to keep their children from participating in lessons focused on LGBTQ-related story books for religious reasons. He expects parents to exercise those same rights when it comes to religious material. 

“It’s going to be classroom chaos,” he said. 

Supporters of the program argue that the Bible is a foundational document that should be taught in public schools and is necessary to understand historical references and works of literature. The Supreme Court, they say, erred in 1963 when it that mandated prayer and Bible readings violated the First Amendment.

“It will be impossible for Texas students to understand settlement in America, the Revolution, the Constitution, or the rest of American and World history, let alone literature, without knowledge of the Bible,” said Matthew McCormick, education director for the , a conservative think tank. “Many schools are countering what they see as favor to Christianity with what looks a lot like anti-Christian bias, but this is a disservice to the education of their students.”

Survey responses from teachers, collected through a link in a Bluebonnet Facebook group, show that educators remain divided on the religious components after several months of teaching the program. 

“I am a non-Christian being forced to give sermons in class,” one teacher wrote. “No consideration was given to the rights of teachers and students of various backgrounds with this curriculum.”

But another said there’s a way to teach the material without trying to influence what students think.

“If I present something as, ‘This is what this group of people believe and your family can discuss what you believe at home,’ it’s OK,” the teacher explained. “I wasn’t thrilled with the additions, but I had to put myself in the mindset of ‘It’s a story from a religion. I’m not teaching it as fact.’ ”

It’s a simple question, one that adults often ask of children. But as a co-founder of a bookstore in Pittsburgh, I know that Obama’s gift, coupled with his question, could be life-changing for those students. 

Books can be powerful tools for dreaming. When I was a graduate student, I spent many hours on the phone with my grandfather talking about life. I vividly remember him telling me he didn’t know much about the world I was experiencing in graduate school; I would have to figure it out for myself.

I turned to biographies, autobiographies and memoirs of people I admired, of people who pursued big dreams, overcame big and small barriers, and sought to make this world better — because that is what I wanted to do. 

Many years later, I stumbled on picture book biographies with my young sons. One day, when we were at our local library, my oldest son grabbed a book titled Preaching to Chickens off the library shelf. He and his younger brother had a running joke about chickens; they would say “chicken” to every question I asked them. So, of course, this book caught his eye.

I’d had my fill of chicken jokes, so I told them it was off limits. Then, my youngest son began crying, and like all fathers in public libraries, I folded. We checked the book out. It was about how future congressman John Lewis would make speeches to chickens as a child and imagine they were people. It gave me so much insight into the childhood of the Civil Rights Movement giant and taught me a lesson too: that sometimes, when children play, it can be a dress rehearsal for the person they will become.

From that moment, I realized that picture book biographies can be powerful tools for helping Black children imagine their future selves, overcome personal barriers, navigate big emotions, even use their talents to make the world a better place. 

The book , for example, reveals how James Earl Jones’ childhood stutter left him silent in school, until a caring teacher inspired him to write a poem and perform it in class. Presenting the poem out loud inspired him to take on acting, for which he became famous. His platinum voice became the gold standard. Ode to Grapefruit is a powerful illustration of overcoming personal obstacles, a lesson that can inspire children going through their own struggles.  

As any parent knows, managing big emotions can be especially challenging for young children. In the book , author Valerie Bolling shows how Marian Wright Edelman used her frustration and disappointment over racial injustice to make the world a better place by founding the Children’s Defense Fund and the Freedom Schools initiative. For kids struggling with big emotions, this book can be a tool to help them convert those feelings into positive change.  

Finally, in her book , Lisa Brathwaite writes about how fashion icon and entrepreneur Eunice Johnson used her exceptional fashion sense to found Ebony Magazine, which serves as an inspiration for Black women and continues to spark the imagination of Black people across the country. In addition to creating the magazine, Johnson founded the Ebony Fashion Show, which traveled to 66 cities across the United States from 1958 to 2009 to raise money for philanthropic causes. It’s an enduring lesson for children about how to use their talents to impact their community in big and small ways. 

For me, picture book biographies are not cradle-to-greatness stories for kids. Rather, they’re��tools to inspire children to pursue their dreams. This holiday season, as you think about the young people in your lives, perhaps consider a picture book biography, keep in mind Obama’s simple question. There’s no better time to encourage children to dream big.

This year’s list of stories takes us to Chicago, where several public schools sit mostly empty due to under enrollment; to Baltimore, where students are navigating a complicated transit system to get to school, often causing them to miss their first period class; and to Austin, where tweens attend “cotillion” classes that teach them how to fold a napkin, hold utensils and dance. They also tell the stories of a beloved child care worker detained by ICE, a teen who tragically fell in love with a chatbot and Black-owned barbershops that have made it their mission to get boys in their communities to fall in love with reading. And there’s more…

The selections come from large national publications, as well as local news and nonprofit newsrooms. Below, in no particular order, are 19 stories our team admired most this year. We hope you take the time to read (and share) these important stories written and produced by talented education journalists in newsrooms across the country.

By , Chalkbeat, and , ProPublica

The need to close underenrolled schools has become an important storyline this year, but few areas are dealing with as many nearly-empty buildings as Chicago Public Schools. ProPublica’s Jennifer Smith Richards and Chalkbeat’s Mila Koumpilova completed an in-depth analysis of underutilized schools in the country’s fourth-largest district and found that three in 10 buildings sit half-empty. And many come with a steep per-student price tag — the highest being $93,000. Richards and Koumpilova carefully explained Chicago’s history of school closures and the tense fight between district officials, families and the teachers union about next steps. They tune into what matters most: How tiny schools — some with enrollments in the double digits — impact student opportunities and educational experience. Some students seem to thrive in a tight-knit community, but the overarching lack of resources causes challenges for everyone. “You try to have a homecoming, but there’s no football team,” said a former principal of Hirsch High School, which has 100 students in a building that can fit 1,000. “There’s nothing to come home to.”

 

By The 19th 

As immigration enforcement activities have escalated over the past year, the early care and education workforce has been on edge. Immigrants represent more than 20% of the child care workforce nationwide. Chabeli Carrazana’s story for The 19th about Nicolle Orozco Forero — an immigrant child care provider who takes care of children with disabilities and was taken into ICE custody with her family — sheds light on the immense impact her detention and eventual deportation had on her community. Carrazana traces Orozco Forero’s journey: from fleeing Colombia two years earlier with her husband and sons, to searching for answers to her son’s unexplained illness to working toward her dream of opening her own child care program. Carrazana also illustrates how Orozco Forero’s rare expertise in supporting children with disabilities filled a critical gap in a field already strained by staffing shortages and limited specialized care. This story stays with you, especially the deep ripple effect of Orozco Forero’s deportation on the families and community she served.

Visuals by Eli Durst; Text by Dina Gachman, The New York Times

In Austin, tweens are attending “cotillion” classes where they learn how to fold a napkin, hold utensils and dance. These aren’t essential life skills but surreptitiously the founders of the Southwest Austin Cotillion hope to teach the kids social skills and build their confidence. The strict no-electronics policy ensures the kids embrace the awkwardness of it all. It’s inspiring to see these kids put on a brave face and give way to the odd social mores – at least for a few hours. The fly on the wall black-and-white photography and spare text of this article did an excellent job illustrating the story. Kudos to producers Jolie Ruben and Josephine Sedgwick for creating an interactive experience that feels like an old Life magazine article reinvented for the web. Here, the future of storytelling borrows from the past and utilizes the latest technology where it works.

By Iowa Public Radio

Following the pandemic, school districts ramped up the use of the four-day school week to address a teacher absenteeism crisis and recruit staff at a time of severe shortages. Nicole Grundmeier with Iowa Public Radio’s Midwest Newsroom took a deep look at the trend with her August feature on how the policies have affected students. With data, research and personal stories, she captured the tough choices districts face as they weigh the benefits and drawbacks of giving staff and kids a longer weekend. Jayce Moody, who used to wander out of class and throw things in frustration, could better manage his behavior with a shorter school week. “He no longer has to miss school for therapy and other appointments,” she wrote. “Jayce jumped several levels in reading.” But other families, she wrote, depend on schools for child care or food pantries to stretch meals until Monday. Grundmeier’s reporting offered a thoughtful examination of what happens before and after school boards vote on such a pivotal change to the schedule and how opting in favor of a reduced school week might not accomplish what they’d hoped it would. 

By and , The Baltimore Banner

Every day, hundreds of Baltimore middle and high schoolers are missing when the first-period bell rings — the result of a public transit system that makes it virtually impossible for as many as 25,000 students to get to class on time. Without a yellow bus system beyond elementary school, an investigation by The Baltimore Banner found, children as young as 11 crisscross the city on long, unpredictable and sometimes dangerous journeys that frequently get them to class late, or not at all. They stand in drenching rain, endure sexual harassment from strangers and witness violent fights on buses on commutes that can take 40 minutes each way on a good day — and often last twice as long. As the district doesn’t collect data on how students get to school, The Banner modeled their trips based on where they live and the school they attend. It then tracked the location of every Maryland Transit Administration bus every five seconds, 20 hours a day, and mapped those commutes using innovative, interactive graphics. The result: a poignant portrait of young people whose futures are being put at risk by the simple lack of a safe, dependable ride to school.

By , The Associated Press

Housing insecurity can be incredibly disruptive to a family’s life, especially when it comes to children’s education. To highlight this challenge, Associated Press reporter Bianca Vázquez Toness followed an Atlanta mother as she navigated the process of finding an apartment in the right school district, keeping her son on track academically and making enough money to keep the family afloat. There’s something about how Toness opened this story that felt brilliantly relatable and illustrated how issues, like housing insecurity, can happen to anyone. Toness does a good job humanizing these vulnerable circumstances and giving a glimpse into how hard parents work and fight to make sure their children are set up for success. You can tell Toness not only earned the trust of the family she highlighted, and told their story with the utmost amount of dignity, but she also was incredibly well-informed and resourced on how complex eviction is and can be. 

By, The New York Times Magazine

Florida attorney and mother of three, Megan Garcia, has become perhaps the best-known face in the fast-emerging legal and regulatory battle over AI chatbots. After her 14-year-old son died by suicide after forming an intensely romantic and sexually explicit relationship with a Character.AI bot, Garcia sued the tech creators for wrongful death, participated in multiple interviews and testified before the U.S. Senate about the need for stronger guardrails. By giving writer Jesse Baron access to her son’s conversations with the bot that personified Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones, Garcia enabled a masterful Baron to produce a gripping and illuminating account of how a lonely and often-despairing young teen can fall in love with a robot, losing the line between reality and fantasy and slipping further away from the physical world and its human relationships. It’s a harrowing descent. The Garcia case will likely be among the first to establish legal precedent around the juggernaut that is AI. Days after Barron’s story ran, Character.AI announced that it was banning those under 18 from using its chatbots. All of that comes too late for Sewell Setzer III, who truly believed that by dying he would be going home to Westeros and his one true love.

By Alvin Chang, The Pudding 

How much do children’s environment and experiences influence the rest of their life? Alvin Chang’s interactive “This Is a Teenager” tackles that question with ease — turning National Longitudinal Surveys data into conversational, visual storytelling. The project follows hundreds of teens into their late 30s, allowing viewers to dive into 24 years of circumstances and consequences. As the interactive timeline moves through the years, you can see who went to college, who stayed financially stable, who was the victim of violence, who considers themselves happy. I was absorbed for hours. The project revisits one teen in particular, called Alex, who grew up in a high-risk environment. He had a difficult home life, was bullied and held back in school. By 2021, he reported feeling depressed “most of the time.” Yet, as Chang writes, “we are blamed for not going to college, for being unhealthy, for being poor, for not being able to afford healthcare and food and housing.” That line hit hard, especially after watching Alex’s life unfold. The equally engaging complements the piece, making decades-long data feel digestible.

By  The Hechinger Report

A report on Trump administration college admissions proposals, published earlier this month by The Hechinger Report’s Jon Marcus, may turn out to be one of the most consequential pieces of journalism of the year. 

Marcus looked at admissions data and found that while President Trump’s scrutiny largely zeroes in on race, his ban on DEI policies could harm men, notably white men, his most loyal demographic.

That’s because universities for decades have been quietly offering men, who tend to leave high school with fewer skills and lower GPAs, an advantage. While they’ve historically enrolled more women than men, federal data show, they’ve also admitted higher percentages of male applicants. At Baylor University, for instance, 56.8% of males who applied got in, versus. just 47.9% of females.

So while colleges may soon follow U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s exhortation to judge aspiring students “solely on their merits, not their race or sex,” the end result could be thousands of young men who don’t have a place in future freshman classes — a development that “drips with irony,” says one top policy wonk.

By , The Philadelphia Inquirer

Anyone who’s spent much time reading about schools will remember New York City’s “rubber room” — an archipelago of reassignment centers for hundreds of school employees awaiting arbitration for alleged professional offenses. In January, more than 15 years after journalist Steven Brill first popularized the term, Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Kristen Graham gave us an account of Philadelphia’s own rubber room, a way station where some teachers and administrators spend years gathering paychecks and dust. The dispatch offers excellent texture about wasted days in what is effectively a professional prison — the long-timers graduate into the best seats, while access to extension cords is carefully negotiated — but many of the details are dispiritingly familiar: Complaints from former rubber room occupants first bubbled into a citywide scandal back in 2011. It increasingly feels like the broader subject of teacher job protections and complaint adjudication is itself akin to the rubber room, a windowless abyss to which all education journalists must eternally return.   

By , NBCU Academy

Alvin Irby, a former first grade teacher, saw an opportunity to improve literacy among Black boys while watching one of his students get a haircut. In 2013, he founded Barbershop Books, providing books for children to read while sitting in the barber’s chair and training barbers to become mentors to their young clients. Reporter Maya Brown, who was then with NBCU Academy Multimedia, provides a beautiful masterclass in visual storytelling that shows how familiar cultural settings can be used to boost literacy and reading comprehension. In Brown’s video and text package, we see students getting haircuts and walking away with a stronger motivation to read and barbers who are passionate and committed reading coaches. What excited me most about this story was knowing that Black boys across the country are being seen and supported through Barbershop Books, which is now in 60 cities across the U.S. Brown brilliantly captures how these encounters not only shape the students’ hairline but their education journey, too. 

By and , ProPublica 

What if the leaders put in charge of the nation’s public schools are actually rooting against them? ProPublica analyzed dozens of hours of audio and video footage of public and private speaking events — as well as writings — for Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s appointees finding “a recurring theme is the desire to enable more families to leave public schools.” and ’s story dug deep into these records to paint a vivid picture of the powerful forces that both govern and seek to dismantle public education. Every sentence was impactful and the graphics, while cartoonish and playful, powerfully illustrate each point. The voices that fill the piece were well chosen, each offering an insightful view, to a movement that started well before the current administration. For instance, Maurice T. Cunningham, a retired associate professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts provided helpful context, saying parents’ rights groups have long aimed “to undermine teachers unions, protect their wealthy donors from having to contribute their fair share in taxes to strengthen public schools, and provide profit opportunities through school privatization.” 

By , The Hechinger Report

In 2006, Minnesota passed a law requiring all eighth graders to take Algebra I, a move designed to boost the number of students taking calculus and eventually going into math and science careers. But an investigation by The Hechinger Report suggests it hasn’t worked as planned. Reporter Steven Yoder analyzed federal data from 2009 to 2017 and found the share of the state’s students taking calculus rose modestly, from 1.25% to 1.76%. But other states saw far larger gains, and Minnesota dropped from sixth to 10th place among states for calculus enrollment as a share of total enrollment. The state’s ranking for eighth grade math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress also fell. Yoder’s research, including visits to classrooms in one Minnesota school district, demonstrates the need for more nuance in determining who should take algebra and when.  

By , The Washington Post

You would know this compulsively readable feature was written by The Washington Post’s Casey Parks even without the byline. Parks is a master at coming to inhabit a small community, chameleon-like, and finding its social glue. In this case, it’s the lone bookstore in Vermillion, South Dakota, threatened with closure when the state legislature voted to force the 10-year-old daughter of its owners to use the boys’ bathroom at school. Five and a half years ago, Mike and Jen Phelan opened the store on Vermillion’s Main Street where, red state reputation notwithstanding, most of the brick storefronts sported Pride flags. The locals embraced the couple’s transgender daughter, with the Vermillion School Board voting in 2021 to allow her to use the girls’ bathroom. Which she did without incident until South Dakota’s GOP statehouse majority passed a bathroom ban this year. As the Phelans packed to move to a New England community where the girl would be affirmed, they prepared to sell the business to Nova and Elias Donstad, a trans couple. “They fell in love reading next to each other most evenings, and they fell for South Dakota the way many transplants did — accidentally,” writes Parks. The bookworms were desperate to rescue the store, but couldn’t afford to buy it. As it happens, their neighbors couldn’t imagine Vermillion without the shop, and raised $22,000 for the couple’s down payment. 

By , CalMatters

Since The Boston Globe’s early 2000s reporting exposed widespread childhood sexual abuse in the Catholic church, similar school-based stories have proliferated. This has been made possible as states open “look-back” windows, temporarily lifting the statute of limitations on civil abuse cases. Survivors of childhood sexual abuse I’ve spoken with for my own reporting have shared the power of these windows: they provide an opportunity — albeit delayed — for justice. CalMatters Carolyn Jones’ reporting on California’s 2020 law — which provided a three-year window for victims to file claims and made it easier to sue school districts and counties — stands out because of her ability to skillfully and thoughtfully walk a tough line: emphasizing the very real presence of sexual abuse in schools and the need to hold complicit institutions accountable, while also exposing the unintended financial consequences that can result from these windows. The story raises complex and thorny questions: Who should be held accountable for years-old sexual abuse, especially in cases where the perpetrator is dead and school district personnel have since turned over? And how can we hold the systems that failed these victims responsible, without pulling funding from current students? 

By , NPR

NPR’s November interview with photographer Melissa Ann Pinney included a trove of incredible pictures that practically jump off the page, err screen. After being granted access to two Chicago schools starting seven years ago, Pinney began taking photos in her “Becoming Themselves” series. Pinney captures incredible facial expressions and body language of what she called “often overlooked communities of children and teens in Chicago.” Her ability to play with light and shadows adds a dimension of moodiness that feels right when teens are the subject. Each picture tells its own story with a range of emotions and experiences, including hope, fear, friendship, and love. My favorites include Lizzie Williams in her My Little Pony leggings;  Kho’vya Greenwood and her brother Coby at a prom celebration; and Jo Gonda and Andrew McDermott at the prom. Each photo is truly a gem — and Pinney’s interview adds to the experience.  

By Photographs by , The New York Times 

This year’s 50th anniversary of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act offers a stark reminder that we’re not that far removed from the days when people with intellectual and developmental disabilities were sent away to special public institutions. One of those, the Walter E. Fernald State School in Waltham, Massachusetts — “the Fernald,” as locals call it — housed John Scott, who had spina bifida and spent most of his 17 years there before his death and burial in an unmarked grave in 1973. In this heartbreaking and masterfully told story, New York Times reporter Sonia Rao describes the journey of Scott’s brother David, who was just 7 when John died, as he seeks to learn more about his brother and what happened to him. A direct appeal to the governor eventually led him to a rust-colored accordion folder filled with 70 documents about his brother’s short life. In interviews, a teacher described John as one of her brightest students and “a little ray of sunshine.” But she also spoke of what David called “atrocities” at the school. “Eighty percent of the stuff I saw there, I wish I could erase from my mind,” she said. That reality is especially poignant given that there were at least 10,000 unmarked graves for people like John in Massachusetts alone — and the Fernald is one of hundreds of similar institutions for people with disabilities that once dotted the national landscape.

By , Voice of San Diego

Just when you thought you’d seen every kind of shady behavior around AI and digital learning, along comes Voice of San Diego’s Jakob McWhinney with an: Would you believe that fraudsters are stealing community college students’ identities and enrolling in remote classes to cash in on their financial aid? McWhinney finds that thieves create “bot students” that enroll in large online classes and remain just long enough to cash in on state and federal aid. They often turn to generative AI to fake the first few assignments. McWhinney finds that one in four California community college applicants last year was a suspected bot. He offers an to help readers understand exactly how it all works. If the aid theft isn’t bad enough, he finds that the bots also bump real students from classes — and wreak havoc around enrollment. He talks to a Southwestern College professor who realizes that, two weeks into last spring’s semester, just 15 of the 104 students enrolled in her classes and a wait-list, were real. As a result, Southwestern now requires all remote students to show up face-to-face at enrollment time just to prove they’re real. 

By , NBC News

In a year that will be remembered for intensifying political extremism on the internet and a sharp increase in political violence in the physical world, investigative reporter Tyler Kingkade of NBC News surfaces a compelling tale of what happens when everyday people find themselves in the crosshairs of the culture wars. After Charlie Kirk’s murder led to government-endorsed revenge against the far-right pundit’s critics, Kingkade highlighted how a small school district in Arizona was thrust into a campus safety crisis after an online disinformation campaign falsely accused teachers of celebrating his death. The lie, which centered on a costume worn by math teachers, was perpetuated by conservative influencers and Republican lawmakers. The resulting firestorm offers clear evidence that online vitriol can destabilize public safety — including in schools.

Out of 3,619 children’s books the reviewed in 2023, only 16% depicted African/African American characters. And the numbers were even more dismal for other characters of color: 13% of books depicted Asian Pacific Islander/Asian Pacific American characters, 8% of books depicted Latino characters, and only 3% of books depicted Indigenous characters.

In today’s climate, this absence is even more alarming. Consider that the U.S. Department of Education has its Diversity & Inclusion Council, canceled diversity, equity and inclusion training contracts, and removed DEI-related resources from its website. For the third year in a row, my home state, Florida, ranked number one in restricting and removing books from schools.

Whether you’re a parent or educator, this should make you uncomfortable. These efforts to suppress and erase diverse perspectives only make it harder for children to ask questions about identity and appreciate the full beauty of the world. And communities — not just in Florida but nationwide — need to come together to protect inclusive learning spaces by organizing and showing up to local school board meetings. Fear-driven policies should not define what children are allowed to know.

Books can serve as powerful tools to teach children how to interrogate the world. Children are constantly asking questions about identity. These conversations are coming up organically, after all, we do live in a racialized society. But what happens when schools suppress ideas that could help them make sense of all they are seeing and hearing?

Well, that silence loudly communicates that educators don’t care about their thoughts and feelings, that the subject isn’t worth talking about, or that the subject must be avoided or feared. When those thoughts and comments go unaddressed, it leaves children to find answers elsewhere, sometimes from unreliable or inaccurate sources.

In addition, offering children more books with diverse characters can be incredibly affirming. For example, in my work at an education nonprofit, one day I stood observing a tutor complete a literacy assessment on a 4-year-old Black boy. As the tutor read from an assessment storybook, the boy noticed a Black in the book. “That boy is as Black as me!” he exclaimed. The tutor looked at me, at a loss for words. I looked at the student, smiled and said, “He sure is! And you’re both very handsome.” I then looked at the tutor and gave him a gentle nod to continue the assessment. In that moment, that student’s very existence felt affirmed.

Reading books with diverse characters also helps develop empathy. I recall when a friend told me about her cousin who is a first-grade teacher in Florida. She had done a mock presidential election in her class between two book characters: Grace, a brown girl, and a duck. After the students voted, the teacher had the students explain why they voted for a particular candidate and created a chart to reflect their responses.

Some of the students who voted for the duck, responded “Girls can’t be president.” Others said they voted against her because “She’s brown.” My first thought was “Wow, these are 6- and 7-year-olds. How did they even arrive at this conclusion?” But I already knew the answer. We are all part of a racialized society, and our children are already having these conversations – on the school bus, in the lunchroom, on the playground.

This is why children should be exposed to diverse characters. They need to see the potential and possibilities that all people can have. Because if they don’t see it, it can be difficult to believe it, especially at an age when you’re still developing ideas of identity and self concept.

So educators and communities must do all they can to share stories that reflect a variety of experiences to help children build empathy, understanding and pride in themselves and in one another. That’s why the Children’s Book Prize announcement filled me with such hope. Representation does matter. Banning books that could impart critical lessons of understanding sends the wrong message.

So show up to your local school board meetings, make your voices heard. Young children need to cultivate a positive identity of themselves and others; they need to know that all people have stories worth telling; and they need to believe in their unlimited potential.

But how gradual is too gradual?

In a powerful new book, researcher Tim Shanahan argues that America’s classroom literacy practices move far too slowly. In , he contends that protecting students from difficult texts puts them on a treadmill with no exit.

Shanahan is a former director of reading at Chicago Public Schools, served on the National Reading Panel and writes the blog. In his new book, he walks through a number of problems with the leveled reading approach:

Kids can’t learn much from texts they can already read well

Shanahan dedicates his first chapter to a long history of how kids have been taught to read in the United States. From family Bibles in the 1700s to the McGuffey’s Readers used in one-room schoolhouses in the 1800s to the “modern” grade-level configurations beginning in the early  1900s, the texts given to students learning to read have gotten progressively easier. Beginning in the 1950s, the dominant idea became that of “leveled readers,” which attempted to match children with texts appropriate for their instructional level. Made infamous in recent years by Emily Hanford’s Sold a Story , the most popular version was the Fountas and Pinnell program, which sorted kids (and books) into an A-to-Z continuum.

Shanahan’s concerns start with how students are placed into these levels. Teachers listen to kids read aloud and count how many words they read correctly. Afterward, they ask questions to make sure the students understood what they read. These first steps make sense, but the issue comes with the false precision and subsequent placement decisions. Depending on the assessment and program being used, students may be placed in levels where they can already read 90% to 95% of the words in the assigned texts and understand 75% of the content.

Shanahan insists that being overly focused on readability in this way at the beginning of a lesson undermines learning. He writes, “Assigning students to challenging texts and making them successful — that is, making sure they can read and understand the text by the end of the lesson — is the key to raising reading achievement.”  

‘Just right’ reading levels are instructionally meaningless

Most teachers will be familiar with the idea of using “” to slowly introduce new concepts that are in the student’s “.” These frameworks strongly imply that learning can take place only when the material is neither too hard nor too easy.

But these break down once you start getting into practicalities. For example, when someone says a book is “just right” for a student, what does that mean exactly? Students’ ability to understand a passage will be tied to their background knowledge in the subject, their interest in it and how the passage is written in terms of vocabulary, sentence length or word repetition.

This presents a measurement problem when it comes to the classroom. For example, researcher Matt Burns found that the widely used Benchmark Assessment System was in identifying struggling readers. Shanahan notes that many commercial assessments have very large measurement errors, meaning a fourth grader may be assigned to reading levels ranging from grades 2 to 6. That’s too wide a range to be instructionally useful.

Instead, teachers should work with grade-level texts

Shanahan argues that leveled-reading advocates are missing the forest for the trees. By being so consumed with trying to determine what level a child is at, they assume selecting an easier text is the only appropriate way to help that student learn. But there are other, better options. To help students stay on grade-level material, teachers can pre-teach some key terms, slice the text into manageable chunks or use re-reading to make sure kids eventually understand. In short, the difficulty of a text is relevant to the amount of help students might need, but they shouldn’t avoid the challenge.

Moreover, having children work hard to read a text reinforces good literacy skills. Shanahan notes that “just right” texts eliminate the responsibility readers have to make important decisions and adjustments as they go along. When good readers confront challenging text, they slow down, re-read, make inferences, break words down into their component parts or look up words they don’t recognize. Grade-level texts require kids to practice these skills; leveled-reading materials do not.

Leveled books are well-meaning but wrong-headed

Leveled-reading advocates are very concerned about student motivation. They fear that children who face too difficult of a task will tune out or even start to question their own abilities.

But Shanahan points to a body of research suggesting that motivation can be driven by a number of factors, including the novelty of a text, how relevant it feels to a student and, yes, its level of rigor and challenge. Kids can even feel a sense of accomplishment after they’ve mastered a challenging text. Shanahan suggests that, rather than starting a lesson with material that students can already read, it would be better to begin with a more difficult passage and then work until students can read it fluently. The goal should be achievement and progress, not the mere act of reading.

More kids deserve grade-level texts

Shanahan argues that assigning students to instructional-level text — as opposed to text tied to their actual grade level — is essentially a backdoor way of holding  students back without doing the paperwork or alerting their parents. When I spoke with him, he made clear this wasn’t any type of judgment on the text itself. Books are neither good nor bad. The problem comes when fifth graders are stuck reading third grade texts.  

This can also make it impossible for kids to catch up once they fall behind. As Shanahan writes, it will be hard for those students to ever read more challenging books, “without exposure to the more advanced content, vocabulary, grammar, and the discourse and structure that more advantaged kids are experiencing.” Giving struggling readers shorter, simpler texts in effect deprives them of the very practice they need to improve.

 Shanahan is not naïve in assuming these instructional changes will be easy to implement. In fact, he spends a good amount of time offering advice for teachers about how to incorporate more grade-level texts in their classrooms. Nor is he sanguine about policymakers solving these problems. He notes that the Common Core attempted to do in policy what he’s encouraging in the book — make sure more students have access to grade-level texts. Those efforts ultimately backfired as teachers became even to resort to easier instruction-level texts. To me, that suggests the root of the issue may be cultural norms in schools and schools of education. To combat that, more educators would need to embrace the challenge of providing grade-level texts to all kids.

Ultimately, Shanahan emphasizes that leveled-reading advocates have confused the goal and focused too much on reading as an isolated skill. But literacy is not a subject matter on its own, like math, science or history. It is a tool for learning about the world. It’s a good one, for sure, but the goal should be to teach kids to read so they can read to learn new things. That requires introducing more challenge than kids today are getting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why does reading to our youngest children matter?

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

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

Reading aloud creates a foundation for literacy, she said.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Skill and drill’ 

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

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

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

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

But, it’s becoming a lost art.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From one technology-raised generation to the next 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A school is no different.

In my Texas school district, I can walk into a classroom and, in the first five minutes, tell you if effective reading instruction is happening. I don’t need to see the lesson plan or even look at the teacher. I just need to look at the kids. Are they engaged? Are they in a routine? Are they getting the “reps” they need?

For too long, districts have been losing the game before it starts. They buy a new playbook (i.e., a curriculum) as a “hail Mary,” hoping for a fourth-quarter miracle. Still, they ignore the fundamentals, practice and team culture required for sustainable success.

Chapel Hill Independent School District is committed to educating all children to compete in an ever-changing world. To that end, we’ve made literacy a nonnegotiable priority across all campuses. We anchor our approach in research-based practices and a culture of continuous learning for both students and staff.

We’re building for the long run: a literacy dynasty. But our literacy success hasn’t come without putting in the work. We have a relentless focus on the fundamentals and, most importantly, a culture where every player — every teacher and administrator — fits our system.

Trust the Analytics, Not Your Gut

In reading instruction, we can’t make assumptions; all instruction has to start with the fundamentals. For decades, instruction was based on gut feelings, like an old-school coach deciding whether to go for it on fourth down or punt based on a hunch. But today, the best coaches trust the analytics, not their gut. They watch the game film.

Chapel Hill is an analytics district; we do our research. And our game film is the science of reading.

Many years ago, we started using structured literacy for a small group of students with dyslexia. It worked so well that we asked ourselves: If structured literacy is effective for a small group of students with dyslexia, shouldn’t it be essential for all students?

We didn’t just adopt a new curriculum; we redesigned our literacy infrastructure — from structured literacy professional development for every teacher to classroom coaching and a robust tiered system of support to ensure no student falls through the cracks.

That logic is our offensive strategy. It’s why we use tools like the Sold a Story podcast to show our staff why we’ve banned the strategies of a bygone era, like three-cueing. We have to be willing to reprogram the brain to align with what research proves works. But having the right playbook is only half the battle.

A great playbook is useless without the right team to execute it.

This is the most crucial part: “First who, then what.” In the NFL draft, teams don’t always draft the most talented player available. They conduct interviews and personality assessments and ultimately draft the player who best fits their system—the cultural fit.

Tom Brady is arguably the greatest quarterback of all time, but he couldn’t run a read-option offense, which requires a fast, running quarterback. He wouldn’t fit the system, and the team would fail. But put Brady in a play-action offense, sit back and watch the magic happen.

We operate the same way. When we interview, we’re not just looking for a teacher with excellent credentials and experience; we’re looking for a “Chapel Hill Way” teacher. It’s a specific profile: someone who believes in our philosophy of systematic, explicit, research-based instruction.

This culture starts with our team captains: our campus principals. We need them to believe in our playbook, not just buy in because the district office said so. We invest in their development so they can champion literacy daily, monitor instruction and ensure every classroom executes our playbook with fidelity. It’s their conviction that turns a curriculum on a shelf into a living, breathing part of our culture.

Talented teams win games. Disciplined, team-first organizations build dynasties.

Building a dynasty requires sacrifice. When an educator joins our team, whether they’re a rookie or a seasoned veteran, we ask them to let go of the “I’ve always done it this way” mindset. That’s the equivalent of a player prioritizing their personal stats over a team win.

It’s a team-first mindset. It’s about a willingness to put personal preference aside to build a championship team. For Chapel Hill ISD, our championship is ensuring every child learns to read.

Our team-first philosophy has translated into measurable results: Across campuses, students are gaining the foundational skills they need, and data shows growth for every subgroup, including students with dyslexia and multilingual learners. We want students to become a product of our expectations, rather than their environment. Our district, which serves a diverse population, including a high percentage of students classified as low socioeconomic status, consistently scores above the state average in third-grade reading.

At Wise Elementary, our largest campus[MOU1] , 56% of third graders met grade-level standards, and 23% scored above grade level on the 2023-2024 STARR assessment. And we had similar results across the district.

So to my fellow education leaders: Before you shop for a new playbook, ensure you have the right team culture in place. Define your culture. Draft the right players. Build your team. Coach your captains. And obsess over the fundamentals.

That’s how you win.

The adage is ubiquitous in education circles, and it’s a catchy way of underscoring the importance of early literacy. Indeed, being on track by grade three is a crucial milestone that correlates to long-term academic success.

But literacy isn’t a switch that flips from decoding words in third grade to independently comprehending text in fourth. Decoding and comprehension are like two wires that must remain connected for the lights to go on. Students need to build foundational skills, vocabulary and background knowledge throughout — at least — their K-8 years.

Mississippi’s test scores provide a clear illustration. In 2013, the state ranked 49th in National Assessment of Education Progress fourth grade reading scores, with just 21% of students at or above “proficient.” By 2024, that figure was 32%, putting Mississippi in the top half of states for fourth grade literacy. But �Ѿ���������������辱’s eighth grade scores peaked at just 25% proficiency in 2017 and 2019, and have since fallen to 23%.  

And this is the state that has been, perhaps, the most successful at improving literacy instruction.

So what’s happening?

Those eighth graders hadn’t forgotten what they had learned in elementary school. They could still sound out “c-a-t.” But those three letters make the sound “kaysh” in words like “education” or “vacation,” and most schools do not explicitly teach students that transition. So students struggle with decoding words as the vocabulary gets tougher. If they can’t decode multisyllabic words, they won’t comprehend complex text. 

While , to their credit, have moved aggressively to encourage proven reading instruction strategies in early literacy instruction, much of the education system — from standards to curriculum to teacher training — remains centered around the third grade myth. Schools simply stop teaching kids to decode words far too early.

Literacy instruction aligned with the science of reading places a heavy emphasis on screening for phonemic awareness, phonics and fluency, materials and teacher training aimed at helping K-3 students learn to sound out and decode words of one and two syllables. This shift is a crucial step forward, but it’s not enough.

If states want to see their investments in literacy pay off then, they need to reevaluate how they think about the crucial middle years — grades 4 through 8.

A 2019 revealed that  nearly eighth graders was below what it called the decoding threshold —a baseline level of reading fluency students need before they can successfully comprehend. Above the threshold, comprehension varies; below it, kids don’t have a shot.

Watershed Advisors analyzed reading standards across the country and found that just five states— Arkansas, Minnesota, Hawaii, Idaho and West Virginia — include advanced foundational skills beyond grade 5. And while nearly every state requires universal K-3 literacy screening, only Idaho and Kansas require this testing for older students. Meanwhile, a RAND found that grade 3-8 teachers “need more knowledge and training on how to help students who are experiencing difficulties with word reading, vocabulary and reading comprehension.”

Fortunately, research also shows a path forward. In pilot testing through funded research out of Reading Reimagined (an AERDF program), projects such as can improve decoding and comprehension together by focusing on advanced foundational reading skills such as syllabication, spelling, fluency, morphology and vocabulary acquisition. And a 2023 NWEA found that a whole-class focus on fluency for middle schoolers improved reading scores for students in the bottom half.��

To stop the middle-grades malaise, states should commit themselves to adopting comprehensive policy agendas aimed at teaching advanced foundational literacy skills in addition to supporting comprehension in grades 4 through 8.

First, they should update their late elementary and middle grade standards to require explicit, evidence-based instruction on skills such as morphology, multisyllabic decoding and reading fluency that are crucial for students’ ability to work through grade-level texts.

Second, they should mandate screenings that include a focus on the advanced decoding skills at the beginning of each year for all students in grades 3 through 9 — understanding that tests designed to measure early decoding skills are not appropriate for older students. 

Third, states should partner with publishers of high-quality curricula to ensure updated standards are reflected in materials used across the state.

Fourth, they should partner with high-quality professional learning organizations to provide teachers, teacher coaches, principals and district leaders with training and ongoing support on the new screeners and curricula.

Finally, they should work with districts and schools to observe whether educators are shifting their practice and students are learning more as a result, and use this information to adjust the state’s overall strategy 

One thing the third grade myth gets right is that reading is fundamental to learning. If kids can’t read confidently, they will struggle across subjects. States’ commitment to the science of reading across geographic and political lines is one of few recent bright spots in American education. Now it’s time to finish the job.