Today’s Literacy Headlines

California state superintendent of public instruction Tony Thurmond has announced a new $27 million digital literacy partnership that will provide free bilingual early literacy assistance to California children and families through interactive e-books, songs, and games in English and Spanish. This digital literacy partnership is part of a statewide literacy campaign to help all California students come to school ready to learn and read proficiently by third grade.

For all the welcome attention being paid to the Science of Reading, and literacy in general, there has been little focus in public policy on how to address the learning needs of secondary students who, for whatever combination of reasons, have failed to learn to read in elementary school. Earlier this year, the “What Works Clearinghouse,” an arm of the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute for Education Sciences (IES), made steps to elevate the narrative about secondary literacy when it issued a practice guide entitled, “Providing Reading Interventions for Students in Grades 4–9.”

While most kindergarten-aged children do attend some type of kindergarten, their experience depends on where they live. In some states, public school kindergarten is provided and funded in the same way as first grade. In other states, it is funded at a lower level and may only be offered for a few hours each day. This wide variation means children are getting uneven starts to their formal education. Every year there are states and local districts that consider expanding access to full-day kindergarten. This year Idaho, Utah, and California are worth looking at.

Two teachers seek help in communicating with ELL students and their families. The expert suggests that you use resources like ELL teachers or students to communicate with non-English speaking families, and to use district-approved technology to connect with students and parents.

Helping young learners negotiate the process of making choices can start with these engaging picture books and guided questions. As back-to-school classroom read-alouds, these books set the stage for classroom social and emotional discussions about strategies and resources for making personal and group decisions at school.

Many students with communication disorders were particularly affected by changes like virtual and hybrid learning that were implemented during the 2020–2021 school year due to the pandemic. As some of these children return to in-person instruction for the first time in more than a year, the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) recommends the following ways for families to help them prepare for a successful in-person school year and support recovery of communication, social, and learning skills.

It’s here. And librarians and other educators, not to mention students and families, are in high gear for the 2022/23 school year. In challenging times, we could use support. So the editors tapped some stellar individuals for insight and inspiration: “School Librarians of the Year Offer Ideas, Inspiration.” Following suit, I asked some experts for their picks in resources to help expand both our knowledge and perspective to serve students and teachers this year.

Long-term trend data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that 9-year-old students scored, on average, five points lower in reading and seven points lower in math in 2022 than did their pre-pandemic peers in 2020. The declines represent the largest drops in decades. The results underscore the steep challenge ahead for schools as the 2022-23 year begins. But NAEP data are notoriously hard to interpret. Here are five key takeaways from the data release, how to make sense of the findings, and what NAEP can—and can’t—illuminate about the effects of the past two years.

Rick Surrency, superintendent of Putnam County School District in Florida, traveled to Finland with seven other U.S. educators as part of a Fulbright Finland Foundation cultural exchange program. During the trip, Surrency and his peers had the opportunity to tour schools across the Scandinavian nation, which regularly tops international education rankings. Surrency shared his takeaways on how Finland handles playtime, standardized testing pressure, teacher strikes, and recruitment and preparation — as well as how he’s putting lessons learned to work in his own 10,000-student district.

The most important thing schools can do is teach children how to read. If you can read, you can learn anything. If you can’t, almost everything in school is difficult. Word problems. Test directions. Biology homework. Everything comes back to reading. But a lot of schools aren’t teaching children how to read. It came as a shock to Corinne Adams. “Public school should be this sacred trust between the community and the school,” she told me. “I’m going to give you my child, and you’re going to teach him how to read. And that shattered for me. That was broken.”

National test results released on Thursday showed in stark terms the pandemic’s devastating effects on American schoolchildren, with the performance of 9-year-olds in math and reading dropping to the levels from two decades ago. This year, for the first time since the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests began tracking student achievement in the 1970s, 9-year-olds lost ground in math, and scores in reading fell by the largest margin in more than 30 years. The declines spanned almost all races and income levels and were markedly worse for the lowest-performing students.

Celebrated on September 8 each year, International Literacy Day (ILD) was created by UNESCO in 1967 to “remind the public of the importance of literacy as a matter of dignity and human rights, and to advance the literacy agenda towards a more literate and sustainable society.” The theme for ILD this year is Transforming Literacy Learning Spaces. This is a timely theme in the wake of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic that shut down schools and drastically shifted how many students across the globe accessed literacy education.

Our reviews teams scoured the lists for the best of new books to help children take on the first days of school.

Service learning and volunteering can be a powerful, transformative way to help children of all ages understand that they are valuable pieces of a broader community puzzle with the power to give back and improve the world around them. Schools should explore a range of opportunities to ensure that every participant reaps the benefits.

For decades, television shows have helped young children practice their ABCs and 1-2-3s. From “The Electric Company” to “Sesame Street” to “Between the Lions,” research has shown that educational programs can effectively teach kids the foundations of literacy and numeracy, like recognizing letters and sounds and how numbers represent quantity. Now, a new study finds that educational television can teach young children more complex reading skills, too—skills that could help set them up for greater success in a school setting. The show studied is a program on PBS called “Molly of Denali,” designed to teach children how to understand and use informational texts.

As elementary teachers return to school this fall, they will undoubtedly contend with one of education’s hottest topics: the “science of reading.” But getting the science right will require more than a workshop or a new program. It will take critical evaluation of curriculum and instruction informed by research on how children learn to read and how best to teach them.

Though best known for the crosshatched monsters in his 1963 classic, “Where the Wild Things Are,” Sendak experimented widely in style and genre over his six-decade career, creating picture books, comics, opera and ballet sets and more. He drew these styles from an ever-expanding “artistic genealogy,” as his friend and curator Jonathan Weinberg writes in WILD THINGS ARE HAPPENING: THE ART OF MAURICE SENDAK, including Mozart and William Blake, Titian and El Greco, Beatrix Potter, Herman Melville, John Keats. The book accompanies the first major retrospective of Sendak’s work since he died in 2012, at the Columbus Museum of Art.

If you’re a parent, you’ve probably noticed that comics are for kids again. But what graphic novels should your kids pick up when they’re ready to graduate from Dog Man (or perhaps aren’t even yet at that reading level?). Brooklyn comics bookseller Jason Mojica has some suggestions for parents of young readers.

The SoR movement and policy based upon it gets a lot right but it also underplays some key aspects of literacy improvement, such as the role of knowledge building in reading comprehension and the need for a systems’ approach to literacy reform. We in this field need to continue to put these two ideas out there. They do not contradict or undermine anything that the SoR emphasizes. If anything, they complement those ideas and make them more potent. If they are ignored, I worry that improvement will be minimal and reform efforts will be abandoned prematurely.

The veteran educator and leading voice for differentiated instruction offers five hopeful scenarios for classrooms this fall. There will be an abundance of collaboration, accomplishment, and adventure.

Documenting that a child is reading at home seems reasonable, particularly while they are an emerging reader, but once a child is on their way to reading independently, it’s an incomplete approach. It risks creating a situation in which a child feels like reading is a bit of a chore, rather than something they choose to do with their precious free time. How exactly do we support kids in developing a desire to dedicate time to reading? And how do we support them in reading extensively enough to achieve the volume of hours necessary to become proficient? It comes down to this: we’ve got to create a scenario in which the book is the draw—and that requires us to incorporate opportunities to learn about book choice and to build a reading community.

For the latest audio roundup, we turn to titles inspired by fairy tales and mythology, each published in 2022. Rewriting, adapting, subverting the familiar has long been a popular literary trope—who can argue with universal appeal? Cinderella, especially, continues to be an evergreen favorite, appearing in multiple stories, often in surprising permutations. Read (and listen) on!

A study published in the American Educational Research Journal found young children’s exposure to informational text — knowing how to find information — through free, public education media can provide low-cost, scalable and equitable access to effective learning opportunities. The findings provide encouraging evidence that access to research-based content can support young children’s literacy development both at home and in school, said Naomi Hupert, co-author of the study and director of the Center for Children & Technology at the Education Development Center.

California fourth graders trail the nation in reading, and half of its third graders, including two-thirds of Black students and 61% of Latino students, do not read at grade level. Yet, California is not among the states — including Mississippi, North Carolina, Florida, Connecticut, Colorado, Virginia and New York City — that have adopted comprehensive literacy plans to ensure that all children can read by third grade. And California has not set a timeline or given any indication it intends to create such a plan.

While students lost less ground academically on average in the 2021-22 school year compared to the first year of the pandemic, many students—especially those in remote learning for longer periods of time—still sustained serious losses, concludes a new report. The Center for Reinventing Public Education, a Seattle-based research organization, analyzed studies on students’ academic progress released since summer 2021 as part of a series of reports on the pandemic’s impact on student learning. The studies offer a snapshot of the various trajectories of students’ reading and math skills throughout the pandemic, though they are drawn from different states and populations.

August 26 is Women’s Equality Day, commemorating the passing of the 19th Amendment, which gave white women the right to vote. Share these 12 books with young readers who want to learn more about women’s suffrage.

While the pandemic caused widespread disruption to learning, one of the biggest concerns, for students of all ages, has been how it has affected their mental health. High numbers of teenagers have reported persistently feeling sad or hopeless, and the Biden Administration has tried to make student mental health a priority. For parents concerned about how their students are handling the new school year, here are five suggestions mental health experts say can help them monitor their child’s mental health.

In a small shelter made of cinder block walls and a tin roof, Armando Hurtado Medina writes on a whiteboard the size of the TVs in many American homes. It’s 6pm and lessons have just begun in this makeshift classroom found at the end of a bumpy dirt road that winds its way through a canyon in Tijuana, Mexico. Hurtado Medina is teaching basic English and about 10 students of various ages slowly recite the alphabet back to him. [This effort is] replicated across the border city as volunteers and grassroots organizations grapple with a transient population of migrant students and try their best to educate those who find themselves living in shelters while awaiting a better life beyond.

School librarian IdaMae Craddock and school counselor Ouida Powe discuss the power of their partnership and the bibliotherapy initiative they launched at Community Lab, a 6–12 public school in Charlottesville, VA. Craddock says, “There is much we librarians can do to partner with school counselors and promote student well-being through bibliotherapy. The counselor-librarian connection can and should be commonplace in schools.”

Students have a natural inclination to tell stories but can freeze up when it comes to writing. These tips help them channel their ideas onto the page.

U.S. Department of Education data shows 2.5 million children nationwide attend schools in districts that lack school libraries. In these book deserts, a greater burden is placed upon educators to expand students’ access to books through classroom libraries. A new resource from First Book, a nonprofit network of educators who serve children in need, aims to help teachers improve these classroom spaces to better engage young readers. Developed in collaboration with Susan Neuman, a professor of teaching and learning at New York University specializing in childhood education and early literacy development, the Literacy Rich Classroom Library Checklist is designed to help educators look beyond simply having books present in classrooms.

In a recent piece about the state of standards-based reform, Dale Chu weighs the benefits and challenges of a district “relinquishment” versus “instructional coherence” approach to improving student learning. Districts that pursue a strategy of relinquishment turn schools over to educators, embrace parent choice, and hold schools accountable in order to drive academic improvement. And those that pursue instructional coherence focus on the alignment of curricula, educator professional development, student assessments, and accountability systems to high academic standards. As a former leader of both Louisiana’s Department of Education and its Recovery School District, I’ve seen firsthand that relinquishment and instructional coherence are not at odds with each other.

If teachers start from the premise that all students can make valuable contributions, that opens avenues to success. Four veteran educators share tips on supporting students with learning differences as they return to classrooms during this pandemic year, and much more in this collection of Education Week articles.

Indiana will spend $111 million to revamp its method of teaching reading to young students by prioritizing phonics, state leaders announced. The lion’s share of the funds will go to training teachers in the “science of reading” — a vast body of research on optimal early literacy techniques. The fund represents the state’s largest-ever investment in literacy, according to the Indiana Department of Education. It comes just a week after the state announced its most recent reading scores for third graders, which remained mostly unchanged from last year, except for drops among English-language learners. Concerns about the pandemic’s impact on literacy in general motivated the state to act.

Matt de la Peña grew up in two very different parts of San Diego. First, in National City, where his family and friends and everyone he knew looked out for each other and took care of each other. Later, they moved to Cardiff-by-the-Sea, where he was closer to the ocean and got to know kids from families who were different from what he’d known. “Sometimes, I get to visit schools in faraway towns and read them one of my books, to talk to them about what life was like, growing up in San Diego, and how San Diego is the inspiration for many of my stories,” he says. Those stories have earned him a Newbery Medal, the NCTE Intellectual Freedom Award, and a place on the New York Times Best Sellers list. His latest children’s book, “Patchwork,” illustrated by Corinna Luyken, encourages the twists and turns a child’s interests will take as they figure out what they like and who they want to be in life.

Over the years, name games have been a go-to tool for many teachers when learning the names of students. With some simple variations, teachers can lower the pressure of remembering names, or use new prompts for community building. The name game format is a fun warm-up and a way to check in and get to know the students all year.

Since 2013, thirty states have passed legislation or implemented new policies related to the “science of reading.” Their collective effort to change how early reading is taught in America’s classrooms is the focus of an excellent new project by Education Week’s Sarah Schwartz titled, “Science of Reading: Where Rhetoric Meets Reality.” Her series homes in on the complex and often messy work of systems change required to shift hearts, minds, and practices among teachers, administrators, and policymakers in order to bring reading instruction in line with the research consensus. The story examines how North Carolina’s version of the law, enacted in the middle of the pandemic and dubbed the “Excellent Public Schools Act,” is playing out.

Analyzing data from 3 million students assigned lessons through a widely used literacy program, the nonprofits ReadWorks and TNTP found that during the 2020-21 school year — the first full year after the start of the pandemic — students were assigned work below their grade level a third of the time. Children in high-poverty schools were given less challenging materials more often than their affluent peers — even when they had already mastered grade-level assignments. “Our analysis reveals a stark disconnect between the extent of students’ unfinished learning during the pandemic and the opportunities they’re getting to engage with the grade-level work they need to catch up,” states a report outlining their findings.

When Esti Iturralde’s daughter Winnie was in first grade, the girl struggled with learning to read. Like most parents, Iturralde blamed herself at first. The teacher consoled that Winnie just wasn’t ready, but Iturralde, a psychologist, began to suspect the type of reading instruction was holding her child back. “Her teacher was wonderful,” she said. “She created a really vibrant classroom for literacy with beautiful read-alouds and publishing parties. She involved families in reading to the children. So I thought, what’s missing here?” Iturralde ended up getting a crash course in the science of reading.

Longtime teacher Manny Aceves says students this past school year were like athletes attempting to complete a marathon after not running for two years. Children were winded at the outset after extensive remote learning, yet slowly their endurance for classroom work increased. His district purchased the software i-Ready, which identifies student reading and math levels. Some of his sixth graders were shocked when their results placed them at a second, third, or even kindergarten reading level. But by the time the year ended, a few kids were reading on grade level, and everyone had made progress, according to their teacher.

A new whitepaper highlights three strategies for helping English learners catch up — and how educators nationwide are making those innovations work. One educator highlighted in the whitepaper works to place evidence and outcomes at the heart of adoption of any new education technology. Effective educators prioritize newcomers, from ensuring classroom content is suitable to their age level and filling in instructional gaps (i.e. grammar) to providing virtual tutors, extending learning opportunities and offering a Newcomer Academy to ease the transition and integration for students into a new community.

Just over half of Education Next survey respondents give their local schools an A or B, compared to 60% in 2019. Public opinion of the quality of local schools has dropped but support for universal pre-K has increased significantly, according to annual survey results released Tuesday. The survey touched on a variety of education topics, such as school choice, instruction about race, and teacher salaries, but one of the big takeaways, according to the researchers, is the evidence of partisan differences regarding certain educational issues.

These engaging books and guided questions can help young learners manage back-to-school anxiety, as well as worries in general. One way for teachers to facilitate a classroom social and emotional learning (SEL) discussion about beginning-of-school worries is to embed the conversation into a scheduled classroom read-aloud time.

In the 2021-22 school year, Tennessee, a high-poverty state with some of the country’s lowest literacy levels, saw noteworthy rebounds in student reading achievement. Three-quarters of Tennessee districts saw students’ reading scores improve to some degree, with upper elementary and middle school students making the largest gains. The state even saw a slight gain in the number of students reaching grade-level reading. The state has been pushing hard to improve K-12 education for more than a decade. In its latest move, the Volunteer State established Reading 360, which brought all its teachers online and in-person training, improved literacy coaching, and high-quality reading curricula supported by scientific research. These new supports are rooted in the ‘science of reading,’ a shorthand term for the large body of research on how the brain learns to read and how best to teach students to read.

Mayor Eric Adams has made literacy a priority, promising to overhaul reading instruction in New York City schools. Carolyne Quintana, the education department’s deputy chancellor for teaching and learning, shared some insights around the city’s push to incorporate more phonics in K-2 classrooms across the five boroughs, along with more training for teachers. Some smaller scale initiatives: Two new elementary school programs will target children with reading challenges including dyslexia, and about 160 elementary and middle schools will receive extra training on literacy strategies and different types of interventions for struggling readers.

Over decades, neuroscientists have created a well-defined map of the brain’s “language network,” or the regions of the brain that are specialized for processing language. However, the vast majority of those mapping studies have been done in English speakers as they listened to or read English texts. Massachusetts Institute of Technology neuroscientists have now performed brain-imaging studies of speakers of 45 different languages. The results show that the speakers’ language networks appear to be essentially the same as those of native English speakers.

A lack of exposure to peers during critical learning months and years has put many early childhood teachers in the situation of having to teach social and emotional skills before they can teach academics. A buddy program—pairing upper elementary or middle school students with students in pre-K through first grade—is a way for teachers to accelerate learning crucial social and emotional skills.

There aren’t many books for early elementary readers that feature quiet worriers. That’s why I was doubtful when my editor suggested I pull from my personal emotional experience to write my own early middle grade collection, with seven-year-old Marisol Rainey—a half-Filipino, half-white girl in pigtails growing up in south Louisiana—as its centerpiece. No one wants to read about a girl who’s afraid of everything, I mused. That’s not interesting. But then I thought about that little girl, little Erin, who wouldn’t even climb a tree, and I thought of all the other kids out there just like her, who think they aren’t brave or interesting. And I realized something: They deserve stories, too. The quietest personality in the room is just as interesting as the loudest.

As a teacher in Oakland, Calif., Kareem Weaver helped struggling fourth- and fifth-grade kids learn to read by using a very structured, phonics-based reading curriculum called Open Court. It worked for the students, but not so much for the teachers. The teachers felt like curriculum robots—and pushed back. Now Weaver is heading up a campaign to get his old school district to reinstate many of the methods that teachers resisted so strongly: specifically, systematic and consistent instruction in phonemic awareness and phonics. Weaver and his co-petitioners—including civil rights, educational, and literacy groups—want schools to spend more time in the youngest grades teaching the sounds that make up words and the letters that represent those sounds. His petition is part of an enormous rethink of reading instruction that is sweeping the U.S.

It’s an extremely personal decision for educators with disabilities to decide when to share their experiences and with whom. Some have kept their diagnoses private; others started talking about it publicly to help students and families. Some did so after their seeing their own children struggle to get appropriate resources and accommodations in K-12. Others believe that showing vulnerability builds trust. Winston Sakurai, a former school principal who was diagnosed with dyslexia as a college student, thinks broadly about the needs of students—not just those with disabilities—when policies are being developed. He’s constantly asking, “‘Is there something that we are missing that we can actually help the students with?’ ”

Kids like to hear from other kids. The Kindergrams project builds on that realization. In the early days of designing their project, the LSX fellows were thinking about how to encourage children to ask questions of each other; soon that idea evolved into a multi-country project to collect and share audio clips from children around the world. “Kids ask a lot of questions, but those questions are not just about seeking information,” says Learning Sciences Exchange (LSX) Fellow Medha Tare. “They are also looking for connection.”

Fort Worth ISD is set to expand a specialized Early Reading Program after the pilot saw success in the 2021-2022 school year. Students were thrusts into stories about topics they actually enjoy, increasing their motivation to read. “It’s not an accident that that worked,” Robert Rogers, President of the Reading League Texas said. “There are some strategies for teaching reading that are highly effective and there are some strategies that are not.” Reading League Texas is the regional chapter for the national organization. Their mission is to ensure all teachers understand the best evidence-based methods to teach literacy.

Teachers can help students develop data literacy by asking them to collect, organize, and make sense of information about the world. Here are 6 ways to bring data science into your classroom. For example: (1) Connect data science to the content you’re teaching: Think about ways to incorporate data tasks and discussions about data into your existing instruction; and (2) Weave data throughout many subjects: Teaching about data and building data literacy doesn’t have to be limited to math or science instruction. Elementary classrooms have a unique opportunity to look for occasions to leverage data when teaching all subjects.

When Lauren McKinnon heard a new public elementary school was opening close to her home in Dallas, it was good news; but when she learned the school would offer an all-girls education format with a focus on STEM, she was excited, knowing inequities often exist for girls – like her daughters – in math and science. But something else stood out about the school that attracted McKinnon: its potential for a student body that looked more like Dallas as a whole. Dallas school districts are seeing success with ‘Transformation Schools’ that offer a socioeconomically mixed student body.

Raymond Briggs, the children’s author whose cheeky illustrations dignified workaday British life and an audacious breadth of emotions, most prominently in the wordless escapades of “The Snowman,” has died. By piling up square and rectangular frames like toy blocks, Mr. Briggs helped bring the visual language of comic books to children’s stories. Despite primarily gearing his work for children, some of his most successful books are meditations on death. “The Snowman” (1978), which was adapted into one of England’s most popular Christmas films, focuses on a fleeting friendship between a young boy and a snowman.

Durable learning—the kind that sticks around and can become the foundation of a growing body of internalized knowledge—comes from hard work and even some degree of cognitive resistance. We scoured the research to find five relatively simple classroom strategies—selecting paper-and-pencil activities, for example, over activities that might require more setup—that will push students to the next level of comprehension.

Experts say most teachers have only limited training in gifted education and tend to focus on students’ limitations rather than their strengths, leaving twice exceptional learners particularly vulnerable. In some cases, these students’ disabilities can mask their aptitude. In others, their accelerated nature can hide their challenges.

These 10 Spanish-language and bilingual early readers are perfect for early elementary kids starting to read independently.

A new study from neuroscientists at the University of California-Berkeley found that whether you’re reading a story or listening to it, you’re activating the same parts of your brain. Delilah Orpi, a literary specialist who works with struggling readers and students with dyslexia, has been using audiobooks in her teaching for years. She says audiobooks and podcasts aren’t as passive as watching videos. That makes all the difference. “When listening to a book or podcast we must visualize what we hear and make a ‘mental movie’ much like we do as we read printed text,” she said. “Through visualizing we can comprehend and recall information. Listening to stories actually strengthens our comprehension skills.”

New federal data provide a glimpse into what strategies schools have used to support learning recovery, and which ones school leaders think are most effective. The results show that while some research-tested models—such as intensive tutoring—have become popular, other strategies touted by prominent education groups haven’t gained as much traction. And schools report that the learning recovery methods they have been using have had mixed effects. That may partly be because both student and staff quarantines and absences continued to disrupt time in classrooms this past year, and schools reported high levels of teacher burnout.