Today’s Literacy Headlines

In most children’s books, old people exist only in counterpoint to young ones. A twinkly-eyed grandma dispenses wisdom and soup. A grandfather shows up specifically to die, thereby offering character-building insights into grief and loss. So it’s refreshing to read a young adult graphic novel and a picture book that focus squarely on the old folks themselves.

In Boston and countless other communities, Black and Latino families have a much harder time than their white peers accessing two key tools to literacy: an instructor trained in how best to teach struggling readers the connections between letters and sounds, or a private school focused on children with language disabilities. Nationally, these teachers and schools are scarce and coveted commodities, generally accessible only to those with time, money and experience navigating complicated, sometimes intransigent bureaucracies. In recent years, some dyslexia activists across the country have joined forces with Black and Latino leaders distraught over unequal access—jointly positioning “the right to read” as a revived civil rights movement.

Providing effective learning recovery requires a mix of instructional and managerial leadership—whether it’s adding a new tutoring program or adjusting the pacing of the curriculum—and some of it is brand new terrain for principals. But some districts and principals have found ways to carve out dedicated time on school days to help students recoup learning—or keep them from falling further behind. Here are ideas from three of them.

Boston is investing in an ambitious new initiative that promises every Boston Public School access to a school library program by 2026. It’s a major turnaround for the city, and a rare bright spot at a time when districts around the country are slashing library budgets and hemorrhaging staff. This year, BPS will see 25 new libraries along with 30 new librarians, with funding to ensure an opening day collection of new culturally sustaining books.

Will artificial intelligence, operating via “bots” and other non-human intermediaries, replace English composition and the need to teach and learn it? Why churn through those fussy, pesky precincts like grammar and spelling, especially when other technologies can fix it all up? Why take up good school time with this stuff, particularly considering how labor intensive it is for teachers and how irksome for many of their pupils? To me, three reasons are pretty compelling. First, writing helps you think better, more clearly, more cogently.

There are many ways schools can ensure a smooth transition for kindergartners and their families, experts say. That’s especially important for families whose children did not attend preschool or who are hesitant about enrolling their youngsters in kindergarten, perhaps due to fears over COVID-19, said Patricia Lozano, executive director of Early Edge California, which aims to expand high-quality early learning programs. The following six strategies can help smooth those transitions and set up kindergartners for the best results.

I reached out to a group of literacy experts and advocates to ask them what parents most need to know about early literacy given the national debate over how best to teach reading. What should parents do, especially if they notice their child is falling behind? I asked them all to answer this one question: If you could ensure that every parent in California knows one thing about how their child is being taught to read or what to look out for, what would it be? Here is their advice.

“People with learning differences are human,” wrote Deanna White, a neurodiversity advocate and parent learning coach in response to a question we posed on LinkedIn. “Unique individuals and wonderful humans that are better defined by their strengths. So stop focusing on the weakness.” We invited our social media followers across Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to weigh in on the most effective way schools can better support students with learning differences. Responses ranged from shifting educators’ mindset—like highlighting student strengths—to more far-reaching changes that would require schoolwide or district support.

We can use rubrics before, during, and after a learning experience. When we utilize this common classroom tool more effectively and more extensively, the metacognitive strategy of planning, monitoring, and evaluating will become embedded in the learning process.

California’s efforts to help children with dyslexia come amid a national push to change how reading is being taught to all children, especially to the youngest learners. The efforts have repeatedly stalled over the past few years because of deep disagreements over the best way to teach reading. The California Teachers Association has been one of the strongest opponents of dyslexia screening, saying children learn to read at their own pace and flagging potential learning disorders could railroad some students, especially English learners, unnecessarily into special education.

Contentious rhetoric from a minority of people has put educators and experts on the defense about the long-established benefits of social-emotional learning. After months of political football on the topic, and with heightened national concern about student well-being and learning loss, it’s time to get back to the discussion about what states, districts and schools should do to ensure students are developing the competencies necessary to promote learning and development. Here are four actionable steps we believe are critical to ensuring efforts to implement SEL in schools are done with maximum benefit.

Last month, Education Week published an opinion essay in print and online by Lucy Calkins, the Richard Robinson Professor of Literacy at Teachers College and the founding director of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. A lightning rod for controversy in the literacy field, Calkins defended her recent revisions to her Units of Study in Reading curriculum. But many readers were deeply skeptical and took to social media to share their thoughts. The criticisms of the essay and her approach were robust and prolific, as was the condemnation of Education Week for publishing her essay.

We asked and your pets answered. NPR poet-in-residence Kwame Alexander shares his latest community crowd sourced poem from pet owners around the country, from ages six to 86. We heard from over 700 of you, sharing the words of what your pets might be thinking about you, their next meals, their next adventures, their next cuddles and more. Read Alexander’s poem, titled Dear Captor: You Talk, I Wonder.

A policy brief from the Migration Policy Institute’s National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy finds that despite requirements under federal civil rights law to overcome language barriers, the country’s major early childhood education and care (ECEC) programs often fail to require collection of relevant data and/or adopt accountability measures that would allow them to ensure meaningful and equitable access to services for DLL children and their families.

It’s important for multilingual students to feel that their first language is valuable, seen as an asset, and a welcome part of their identity. Someone who can communicate in many languages has mental flexibility, an expansive vocabulary, and more. Students in our classrooms with languages other than English in their linguistic repertoires have advantages. The question for us educators is how we tap into that linguistic capital—especially if we do not speak or understand the languages that our students know. How and why do other languages fit into the mainstream classroom?

Some ambassadors handle multilateral negotiations and host elaborate events at embassies. But author Jason Reynolds spent his ambassadorship talking to young people about literature. The mandate of Reynolds’ position was clear: to be the ambassador for reading and writing for young people in the U.S. “The way that I decided to interpret that, though, is: How could I convince young people who may not like to read that they have a story of their own, and that their story is as important as everything that their teachers and parents are trying to get them to read,” he says.

When you’re looking for a friend, there are things that matter, and things that don’t. Julie Fogliano’s I Don’t Care is about what’s not important (“I really don’t care what you think of my hair, or my eyes or my toes or my nose”) as well as what is (“I care if you wish, and I care if you sing, and I care if you like to lean back when you swing.”) I Don’t Care started out as a freewriting exercise a couple of years ago. It came from a jumble of childhood memories, but it wasn’t about anyone in particular. “I just wrote, like, a whole bunch of pages of pretty much nonsense,” says Fogliano. But then, the story ended up on the desk of illustrator Molly Idle, who read the first line and immediately knew what the story was about.

It’s no surprise that loud, unwanted sounds can be disruptive and even damaging to ears. However, even background noise like the air conditioning running, the refrigerator humming and delivery vans idling outside can be cause for concern. According to Nina Kraus, a neurobiology professor at Northwestern University who studies sound, ongoing noises that people claim to “tune out” are unlikely to harm ears, but they can still have a profound effect on the brain. Repeated exposure to noisy environments has many negative impacts including increased stress, problems with memory and difficulty concentrating, writes Kraus in her book “Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World.”

Children in kindergarten when the pandemic broke out in the spring of 2020 are now roughly eight years old and in third grade this 2022-23 school year. A new report by the nonprofit educational assessment maker NWEA documents that third graders are currently suffering the largest pandemic-related learning losses in reading, compared to older students in grades four to eight, and not readily recovering. Learning to read well in elementary school matters. After children learn to read, they read to learn. Poor reading ability in third grade can hobble their future academic achievement.

Researchers have known that oral storytelling has a unique and powerful influence on many academic repertoires for decades. In fact, storytelling abilities at age 5 is one of the best predictors of reading comprehension in the 2nd, 4th, and 8th grades. There is such a strong correlation because oral stories are made up of the same complex literate language typical of written stories. This complex type of language is often called academic language.

To boost long-term retention, research shows that retrieval practice—using quizzes and flash cards, for example—and spacing learning sessions over time can make a dramatic difference.

Kid lit authors have been speaking out against book banning and censorship long before the wave of censorship efforts became national news. As more books get pulled from the shelves, many have stepped up their efforts. For a few, that included traveling to a school board meeting in Duval County, FL to speak out against the censorship of books in the district, specifically the removal of the Essential Voices Collection, which promotes diversity and inclusion with 176 titles for students K-12.

Here are the most notable picture and middle grade books, selected by The Times’s children’s books editor.

Naomi Peña’s son Jonah was in first grade when he was diagnosed with dyslexia. It’s the most common learning disability — 20 percent of the U.S. population is dyslexic — but as Peña quickly discovered, getting dyslexic kids help with learning to read in the public school system is extraordinarily difficult. Now, she is part of a growing movement, led by the parents of dyslexic students, to change how all children are taught to read.

Candidates training to become teachers need experience working with students as part of their training. What’s more, many of these potential tutors are in college and seeking part-time employment. They can be trained and supervised by the programs they are already part of. It’s a win-win-win. Tutoring is one of the few federal education issues with bipartisan support in Congress. The proposed PATHS to Tutors Act would establish a $500 million program to support tutoring partnerships among educator-preparation programs, school districts and nonprofit organizations in underserved communities.

In our annual ritual, we pored over hundreds of educational studies and pulled out the most impactful—from a new study on the sneaky power of sketchnotes, to research that linked relationships and rigor.

Roughly 50% of city students are not proficient readers by the time they reach third grade. To help catch them up, P.S. 40 is leaning on an intensive strategy: individualized tutoring at least three times a week. The program pairs CUNY students studying education with New York City public school children who are struggling to master literacy skills. Known as the CUNY Reading Corps, the effort has grown into one of the largest tutoring initiatives involving pre-service teachers. This year, it’s projected to include more than 800 tutors and reach roughly 2,700 of the city’s public school children, primarily first and second graders.

In the aftermath of ‘Sold a Story,’ let’s also look at ways schools are failing students in comprehension and in writing. As scientists have long known, the key factor in comprehension is knowledge, either of the topic or of general academic vocabulary. The best way to build that knowledge, beginning in the early elementary grades, is to immerse children in social studies, science, and the arts. [And] …if students aren’t writing about the content of the core curriculum, they’re missing an opportunity to cement new knowledge — the kind of knowledge that fuels reading comprehension. Research has shown that writing about content in any subject boosts learning.

Students in grades 3-8 are closing reading and math achievement gaps caused by pandemic disruptions to learning. But for some students — particularly those in the lower and upper end of these grades — full progress could take five or more years. Black and Hispanic students, as well as students from high-poverty schools also have the most ground to cover on the road to recovery, according to an analysis of testing data by the nonprofit NWEA, which administers the MAP Growth assessments.

When I begin the 31 Days, 31 Lists series I always like to kick it off with a great big enormous list and then take it down a notch on day two. Even so, readalouds are a critical part of any librarian’s stable of go to resources, so this isn’t a minor list. Yet finding good picture books that can actually engage large crowds is a tall order. That’s why I truly feel the books you see here today are the cream of the crop. And don’t worry. I’ve included plenty of suggestions on how to use them with your kids!

Data show gains in literacy since the heart of the pandemic, though students remain behind where they were before the pandemic.

In the last 15 years, millions of dollars have been invested in training students to have a “growth mindset,” the belief that anyone’s intelligence can improve through hard work. But now the merit of one of the most popular ideas in education has been thrown into confusion with the publication of two conflicting studies in the same highly respected journal. Each study is a meta-analysis, which means they are supposed to sweep up all the best research on a topic and use statistics to tell us where the preponderance of the evidence lies. How could two such studies come out within just three weeks of each other in Psychological Bulletin and arrive at opposite conclusions? Which one is right?

So the ability to read and write cursive has been fading from American society. But this matters because many of the most important historical documents in the U.S., everything from the Declaration of Independence to the Bill of Rights, are written in cursive. And our next guest says something is lost when people can no longer read these founding documents for themselves. Historian Drew Gilpin Faust writes, we will become reliant on a small group of trained translators and experts to report what history, including the documents and papers of our own families, was about.

Reading advocates throughout Illinois say students struggle to read because schools are not using the science of reading, including teaching phonics. Now, they say, it’s even more important for schools to embrace effective methods as they try to catch up students who are not reading at grade level after the coronavirus pandemic disrupted learning for more than two years. Earlier this year, literacy advocates pushed a bill to standardize reading instruction across the state. The Right to Read Act would have required the state to create a list of evidence-based reading programs and develop lists of support, training, and grants for interested districts The bill also would have created a statewide online training program for current teachers in early education and elementary schools, and would have required teachers seeking licensure to show knowledge of effective reading instruction.

By helping young students develop social awareness and emotional literacy, teachers can create a calm environment in the classroom—and build the foundation for lifelong learning.

More than 650 teachers urge balanced literacy leaders to reckon with research. In their letter to the Hechinger Report, they say, “We, the undersigned, are teachers who … care about equitable outcomes for our students, across all domains of literacy. We do not argue that [Emily] Hanford’s work [in Sold a Story] is perfect, nor that foundational skills instruction will be the silver bullet for educational (or even literacy) justice. But through our own collective efforts, we have learned from the research Hanford has amplified, changing the way we teach early reading and accelerating every student’s access to the alphabetic code and the wonders of literacy.”

From the No Child Left Behind law to the common core, the goal of raising academic standards has driven education policy for the past few decades. But now some of the architects of that movement are saying that it didn’t go far enough—and that states need to measure success in some very different ways. While standards give teachers an end goal, they don’t provide a roadmap for how to get there. Choices about curriculum and instructional strategies are up to individual schools and teachers. In a recent webinar, education leaders who helped shape the standards movement over the past three decades argued that states should be doing more “quality control” when it comes to instructional materials—signaling which are high-quality and incentivizing and supporting districts to use them.

In response to book banning attempts that are disproportionately impacting diverse books and authors, We Need Diverse Books is launching “Books Save Lives,” a new initiative to fight back against censorship and support students and authors. The initiative includes grants of up to $10,000 to purchase banned and challenged titles for underserved schools and libraries; educational materials for on-the-ground efforts, to help arrange author visits, guide educators through conversations about banned books, and support media specialists; and coordinating of author visits and book giveaways for those affected by the bans.

In the decade since I began working in publishing, it feels harder than ever to compile a best-of-the-year list; with so many more titles being published each year, the piles of excellent books to sort through just get bigger and bigger. It’s the best (so to speak!) kind of problem to have, though—one that ensures a list brimming with gems. You’ll find the complete list of 100 best picture books here; below is an introduction to some of our selections.

Students in New Jersey could soon be required to learn how to spot misinformation. The New Jersey legislature, on Nov. 21, passed a bipartisan bill that would require public schools to teach media literacy. Media literacy, sometimes called information literacy, is defined as “the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, create, and act using all forms of communication,” according to the National Association for Media Literacy Education, a professional association for educators, academics, activists, and students.

Elementary school learners generally vary greatly in their learning readiness, their interests, and their learning profiles, as Carol Ann Tomlinson, Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia’s School of Education and Human Development, has explained. Teachers understand the different challenges each learner may need to master to thrive and sustain their intrinsic motivation to discover the world around them. Here are strategies to differentiate instruction in any one or all of four areas to successfully meet learners where they are.

In the continuing discussion of how to revamp reading instruction to ensure that all students learn to decode, educators, parents and concerned members of society must emphasize the need for literacy teaching that goes beyond phonics and past early elementary school. There is a huge gap between decoding and comprehension, leaving students without the skills to understand complex texts

Learning to read and write is hard. Most schools make it even harder by asking students to read and write about topics they know little or nothing about. Education expert Dylan Wiliam has said that cognitive load theory is “the single most important thing for teachers to know.” And yet few if any learn about it during their training—or on the job. Numerous studies have demonstrated the validity of cognitive load theory. Most have been done in the area of math, but the principles apply to any kind of learning. And generally, they support teaching new information explicitly rather than asking students to discover it more or less on their own. But let’s turn to what the theory can tell us about teaching kids to read and write.

There was a remarkable moment near the end of last week’s ExcelInEd conference in Salt Lake City—one that I never would have thought possible and might have scoffed had someone predicted it, even a few short years ago. Emily Hanford of American Public Media had just addressed a plenary session of nearly 1000 education policymakers in a crowded ballroom describing her new podcast, Sold a Story, which follows several years of her reports on the foundational “science of reading.” She described how some of the most popular—and most profitable—approaches to reading instruction in American elementary schools disregard what we know about how children learn to read. The meeting broke up with a warm round of applause. As attendees started speaking among themselves and heading for the exits, ExcelInEd’s normally circumspect CEO Patricia Levesque stepped to the mic and fired a parting shot. “You all now know that there is something in our schools that’s doing harm to our children, so what are you going to do about it?” she challenged the crowd of policy advocates and elected officials.

The 2022 Best Books have been revealed! Get access to all the titles and annotations, organized by categories. Download a full list of our selections for ready sharing with teachers, students, and more. Get an inside look into the makings of a Best Books cover in our interview with Guojing, the author/illustrator of one of our honored books, who illustrated our stellar December 2022 cover.

In this podcast with host Ezra Klein, researcher and scholar Maryanne Wolf (U.C.L.A.’s School of Education and Information Studies) discusses why reading is a fundamentally “unnatural” act, how scanning and scrolling differ from “deep reading,” why it’s not accurate to say that “reading” is just one thing, how our brains process information differently when we’re reading on a Kindle or a laptop as opposed to a physical book, how exposure to such an abundance of information is rewiring our brains and reshaping our society, how to rediscover the lost art of reading books deeply, what Wolf recommends to those of us who struggle against digital distractions, what parents can do to to protect their children’s attention, how Wolf’s theory of a “biliterate brain” may save our species’ ability to deeply process language and information and more.

Superintendent Megan Van Fossan is trying something new to address low academic achievement: using a game-based early literacy assessment. Van Fossan, who is in the first year of leading the Sto-Rox school district near Pittsburgh, is facing a challenging road ahead: 96 percent of students in the 1,170-student district are on the federal free or reduced-price meals program, and the school system is struggling financially and academically.

When teachers make an effort to incorporate a student’s home language into the classroom, multilingual children not only benefit academically, but they also feel a stronger sense of identity. In a new study published this summer, pre-K educators in New York City saw clear benefits to students speaking multiple languages but found that more professional development and support was needed to fully embrace those languages and cultures in the classroom.

Lauren Williams’ second-graders get two hours of reading and writing practice every day at Hamilton Elementary in Coon Rapids. All 27 of them learn in unison for about half that time. Each lesson contains a dash of phonics, some vocabulary building and a healthy dose of phonemic awareness — or how words are made up of a series of sounds. It’s a method of literacy instruction far different from the one used as recently as two years ago.

The El Busesito “little bus” preschool is run by Valley Settlement, a nonprofit that delivers free early childhood and family engagement programs to Latino immigrant families in Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley. The 40-mile region stretches from the red rock cliffs and geothermal pools of Glenwood Springs to the luxury resort town of Aspen and is marked by wide social and economic disparity. El Busesito operates four buses that travel to five neighborhoods to provide bilingual preschool education for nearly 100 children in the community.

The human brain is wired to speak and absorb language — but not to read. Only 20% to 30% of children learn to read without explicitly being taught. The remaining 70% to 80% need effective curriculum and structured instruction to gain the literacy skills to keep on track with their learning progression. The Science of Reading begins with a proven approach that utilizes phonemic awareness and phonics to systematically correlate sounds with letters and sound patterns with clusters of letters. The Science of Reading also emphasizes that children need background knowledge and vocabulary to comprehend text rather than solely drawing from their own experiences.

Look but don’t touch. It’s a refrain most of us have learned to follow — and repeat — by the time our favorite doll and toys live in somebody else’s bedroom. And one that grows easier to obey as our fingers and eyes spend ever more time dancing over keyboards and screens. But we are hard-wired to want to grab and hold. So here are four tangible delights that will make your eyes wish they had thumbs.

Sabaa Tahir’s All My Rage won the 2022 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. All My Rage was selected over four other finalists: The Ogress and the Orphans by Kelly Barnhill, The Lesbiana’s Guide to Catholic School by Sonora Reyes, Victory. Stand!: Raising My Fist for Justice by Tommie Smith, Derrick Barnes, and Dawud Anyabwile, and Maizy Chen’s Last Chance by Lisa Yee. “This feels like an impossible dream,” Tahir said, before briefly sharing the story of her family—her grandfather, who was a sharecropper with a fourth grade education; her grandmother, who was illiterate; and her parents, who emigrated to the United States 40 years ago.

More teachers regularly used new, standards-aligned curriculum materials during the 2021-22 school year than during the previous two years — a sign school systems may be turning to fresh instructional materials to help students recover from pandemic-era learning losses, a study released Tuesday by the RAND Corp. said. The recent push in some states to adopt rigorous, standards-aligned instructional materials might also be contributing to this trend. Additionally, federal K-12 emergency funding for learning recovery may have driven greater use of new instructional materials.

The growing focus on play in older grades is not always easy, as teachers contend with pressure to meet standardized testing mandates and a lack of support from some administrators. But educators who have turned to play-based learning say the approach is particularly helpful now, as pandemic disruptions have left students with social, emotional and behavioral gaps. It can be difficult to explain what play-based learning looks like, said Mara Krechevsky, senior researcher at Project Zero, an education research group in Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. Through their research, Krechevsky’s group came up with three basic tenets for playful learning: students should be able to help lead their own learning, explore the unknown, and find joy.

For many children, it was the pandemic that took something away. Most at Natchaug Elementary in Windham, Connecticut come from working-class families and qualify for free or reduced-price meals. Some lost loved ones to COVID. Many saw parents lose work. And, in schools across the country last year, that kind of stress followed kids back to class and has led to all kinds of disruptive behaviors. That’s the bad news. The good news is kids can be incredibly resilient, especially when they’ve got help – like the kind these first-graders are about to get from a research-backed group of puppeteers.

Despite having some experience with the internet, students in grades 3 to 8 may not know how best to find the information they’re looking for. Sharing keyword search strategies, brainstorming search terms, posting common search queries, modeling troubleshooting, and even exploring voice-to-text options can help students strengthen their navigation skills.

Social-emotional learning has run into some political roadblocks recently, but teachers overwhelmingly say that it has a positive impact on students’ academic outcomes. Eighty-three percent of 824 educators—including teachers, principals, and district leaders—surveyed by the EdWeek Research Center from Sept. 28 to Oct. 17 said they believe that SEL helps students master academic skills. Among that group, 51 percent said they found SEL “somewhat” helpful for academic learning, while 32 percent said it was “very” helpful. Just 3 percent said it had a negative influence on academic learning. Another 14 percent said its impact was neutral.

With challenging elementary standards and kindergarten readiness assessments looming, some may question whether educators should be spending so much time on play. But child development experts agree that this type of playful activity is exactly what young students should be doing every day— now more than ever since young children lost crucial opportunities to play and build social and pre-academic skills during the pandemic.

“Teachers have been trained since the 1940s to teach kids at their levels — without any real research support,” said Timothy Shanahan, a renowned literacy expert and professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chi­cago. “It makes sense to go slow and low to allow kids an opportunity to master the earliest decoding abilities. However, from Grade 2 on, I think we have made some bad choices — and more and more, the research is showing that kids learn more from working with more challenging texts.” Amid the deepening literacy crisis, many are beginning to question the wisdom of pigeonholing young readers. Critics say it’s high time the school system began rethinking leveled reading. What if leveled reading doesn’t boost learning after all? What if it just holds children back?