Today’s Literacy Headlines

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.

Four times a week, the waiting room at the St. Vincent de Paul food pantry in Indianapolis is filled. More than 3,000 families use the service, watching TV and letting their children play with donated toys to pass the time until it’s their turn. But starting later this summer, the waiting room will include a free library where children and families can choose books to take home.

Answer 10 questions to assess your knowledge on learning differences.

Every new school year, children, teachers, and parents struggle through a swirl of emotions that can undermine a joyful beginning. As teachers, we need to successfully handle those feelings, which may include expectations, anxiety, and even some fear about the demands of the new school year. Here are suggestions for making the transition to school easier for first-time learners starts with a few strategies that account for their emotions and uncertainty.

When working with students with sensory needs and difficulties focusing, fidgets can be a vital tool to help them stay engaged. Students with these needs can use these tools to burn off excess energy, reduce classroom anxiety, and energize their bodies to remain involved with the lesson. The key is to pick the right kind of fidget. They need to be quiet and low-tech and serve a purpose. The students also need to be taught the appropriate way to use them. The students must know that these are tools, not toys.

The Dearborn Public Library now offers literacy kits for families to use with children in preschool through third grade. The literacy kits were developed to help students and families practice skills identified in Michigan’s Read by Grade Three law: phonics, phonemic awareness, comprehension, vocabulary, and fluency. Read by Grade Three Literacy Kits are sorted by literacy skill and grade level. Each kit includes a sheet explaining the featured skill, activity suggestions, book suggestions, and a VOX talking book. The VOX talking books are books with an audio player that allows children to listen to a fluent reader and follow along with the text.

Tutoring is by far the most effective way to help children catch up at school, according to rigorous research studies. The research community urged schools to spend a big chunk of their roughly $190 billion in federal pandemic recovery funds on what is called “high-dosage” tutoring. Many schools embraced this sort of frequent tutoring … but [preliminary data points are not] proof that tutoring is working. “We need to be prepared for underwhelming results from tutoring operations,” said Brown University’s Matthew Kraft who leads the effort to study tutoring efforts in Nashville. He believes it will take time for schools to figure this out. “Changing educational systems at scale is hard.”

To become better readers, Natalie Wexler says, students should grapple with abundant, high-caliber texts in the elementary grades—not just skills and strategies.

Looking for fresh picks to add to your Spanish-language board book collections? These seven titles fit perfectly in little ones’ hands and are just right for lapsits and baby story time.

Ubiquitous video technology and social media have given deaf people a new way to communicate. They’re using it to transform American Sign Language. Over the past decade or so, smartphones and social media have allowed ASL users to connect with one another as never before. Face-to-face interaction, once a prerequisite for most sign language conversations, is no longer required. Video has also given users the opportunity to teach more people the language — there are thriving ASL communities on YouTube and TikTok — and the ability to quickly invent and spread new signs, to reflect either the demands of the technology or new ways of thinking.

More than half of the states are mandating changes to how early reading is taught. The process of phasing in new methods, materials, and philosophies will be challenging. Education Week’s new series of stories looks deeply at how the attempt to change teaching practice at scale is unfolding on the ground. The collection examines the national landscape and dives deep into the experience of one state—North Carolina—as it implemented a new reading law this past school year. Here are five of the most important takeaways to get you started.

The shifts in reading teaching that many states are asking schools to make go beyond simply adding a few new practices to teachers’ toolboxes. Instead, the “science of reading” asks teachers and leaders to adopt a new framework of how skilled reading develops—and what educators need to do to support that process. The most commonly cited requirement in legislation is for professional development—meant to increase teacher knowledge related to the science of reading, or to help them apply new learning to practice. The policies proposed in these laws are “a real mixed bag” in how effective they might be in changing student outcomes, said Nell Duke, a professor of early literacy development at the University of Michigan.

As of July 20, 2022, 29 states have passed laws or implemented new policies related to evidence-based reading instruction since 2013. State officials hope that these mandates will shift classroom practice, which will in turn help more students become proficient readers. But reading researchers and practitioners say that the process is rarely that simple. Even if states are promoting practices with a strong evidence base, initiatives of this scale require careful implementation to be successful. It’s still unclear whether many of these legislative actions will move the needle on student achievement, experts say.

Two schools in the Aldine Independent School District near Houston, Texas, went from lower performing school status to high performing ranking in reading and math achievement in 2021-22. Their school year spanned nearly a full year, at 210 school days. Superintendent LaTonya Goffney credits that longer school year for such strong and rapid academic improvements. It hasn’t just been the academics that have improved, Goffney said, but family engagement and whole-child supports have also increased at those campuses.

As a young writer wannabe growing up in rural West Virginia, I never imagined the possibilities for connecting with authors that have been made possible by videoconferencing platforms. I never even imagined that authors would be interested in engaging with me—but I’ve seen firsthand the enthusiasm that writers have for school audiences. At this point, I’ve helped facilitate about 10 virtual visits for authors with K–6 students online, as well as an online author visit with one of my undergraduate classes. Interacting with the author of a book they’ve read is a powerful way to engage students and gives them deep insight into the writing process.

As states and districts overhaul the way their schools teach reading, many are banking on one specific professional-learning program to propel this transformation: Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling, commonly known as LETRS. LETRS instructs teachers in what literacy skills need to be taught, why, and how to plan to teach them. The LETRS sequence takes a “speech to print” approach to teaching foundational skills. This idea—that explicitly and systematically teaching young children how sounds represent letters is the most effective way to teach them how to read words—is based on decades of research evidence. It’s a core tenet of the approach now being called the “science of reading.” But LETRS, like the science of reading, isn’t just about word reading. The second year of LETRS is all about language comprehension, and its method differs from typical approaches.

There’s a lot to like about digital books. They’re lighter in the backpack and often cheaper than paper books. But a new international report suggests that physical books may be important to raising children who become strong readers. OECD researchers are most worried about poorer students. As poor students gain access to technology, they lag behind rich students in access to physical books.

Sometimes adapting instruction is just about making decisions in the moment to reach all students, regardless of their gifts or challenges.

Students may need summer classes to stem learning loss between school years, but traditional summer school classes have given way to newer offerings that combine camp-like activities with academic lessons. Planning these robust summer learning opportunities takes time and effort to create attractive models students want to try, said Catherine Augustine, senior policy researcher with the RAND Corp., and one of two primary investigators for the nonprofit think tank’s National Summer Learning Project.

Over the summer, students typically lose the equivalent of about a month’s worth of learning, mostly in the areas of math facts and spelling. Research has also found that summer learning loss is more severe among students with disabilities, English language learners and students living in poverty. Some parents take advantage of school-based programs that can help students keep up their academic skills during the summer. But there are still ways that parents and other caregivers can stave off summer loss that do not involve school. Here are six.

North Carolina is one of more than two dozen states that have embarked on an attempt to radically transform reading instruction over the past few years. The goal is to bring instruction in line with the decades of research on how young children learn to read. Reaching that goal will be messy and hard. “Your philosophy on reading is as deep as religion,” said Sherri Miller, the principal at Lacy Elementary School in Wake County, N.C. “I’ve had many matches with people where you just go round and round and round. It’s kind of like the politics in our country.” For many teachers in North Carolina and the other states pursuing “science of reading,” the demands to change will require a seismic shift in how they teach and a complete rethinking of their best practices and beliefs.

Lucy Calkins’s eagerly anticipated new curriculum was meant to address her critics with a more research-backed, phonics-based approach to literacy. But its publication has been stalled after a debate over whether to accommodate conservative state laws. For critics of Professor Calkins’s long reluctance to emphasize phonics, the latest problems only add to their sense of frustration. Margaret Goldberg, a California literacy coach, pointed out that without new curriculum materials, thousands of schools and teachers nationwide might not realize that Professor Calkins was advising a major shift in literacy strategies, in part because she had not sent out free corrections for any of her old curriculum materials. The publication delay comes as millions of young children across the country lag in foundational reading skills after more than two years of pandemic disruptions.

At the International Society for Technology in Education conference in July, a number of education leaders and teachers discussed a framework that can help build students’ problem-solving skills in any subject: computational thinking. They outlined four strategies that make up the computational thinking process: Decomposition — breaking a complex problem into smaller parts or questions; Pattern recognition — identifying trends, differences or similarities in data; and Abstraction — removing unnecessary elements or data to focus on what’s useful in solving a problem.

At the playground with his young children, U.K. author James Catchpole often finds himself fielding questions from kids about why he only has one leg. Catchpole responds much better to the question at 40 than he could at five, he says. But it still sends him back to his childhood and the awkwardness he felt when faced with that query again and again. That experience prompted him to write What Happened to You?, about Joe, who only wants to play pirates and is fed up with people at the playground asking why he’s missing a leg. His book complements the very small, but growing, number of illustrated books featuring characters with physical disabilities.

Community and connection are more vital than ever as children reconnect after nearly two years of disrupted learning and isolation. Last year—the toughest one in terms of behavior management that I can remember—I used three tools to create a positive community in my second-grade classroom. They helped me build students’ self-esteem, teach empathy and problem-solving, and inspire leadership among my students. This was my most successful year for behavior management, despite having a handful of children who needed a lot of support.

What do we know about how kids are catching up at school as the pandemic drags on? The good news, according to the latest achievement data, is that learning resumed at a more typical pace during the 2021-22 school year that just ended. Despite the Delta and Omicron waves that sent many students and teachers into quarantine and disrupted school, children’s math and reading abilities generally improved as much as they had in years before the pandemic.

Parents can serve as valuable education resources for their children—and teachers. Get links to 21 articles and other resources to support parent engagement.

Cox Campus, the online learning community of the Rollins Center for Language and Literacy at the Atlanta Speech School, is providing free, evidence-based courses, community, and resources for literacy educators. In 2021, Cox Campus surpassed 200,000 members and provided $15 million of professional development coursework to educators across early education and kindergarten through third grade. The Cox Campus addresses the continuum of deep reading brain construction from the third trimester of pregnancy through literacy. The coursework available on the website is grounded in equity and founded on structured literacy practices.

New America and MDRC recently hosted a webinar bringing together leading researchers and practitioners working with DLL communities to envision new assessments for DLLs. These experts surfaced several core aspects of an accurate, actionable, and equitable assessment approach for DLLs. One recommendation: Employ multiple assessment approaches to identify DLLs and understand their proficiency in each language.

We must continue teaching reading throughout all grades. Students are never “done” learning to read. In fact, even we adult readers can continue to push our capabilities and grow with advanced texts that take us into unfamiliar subjects. If we could give our students a love of reading, bolstered by a vast vocabulary, broad background knowledge, proficient decoding skills and instruction on how to navigate complex syntax, American education would change drastically. Our country, then populated with critical readers, would change too.

Jason Reynolds is not only a prolific and bestselling author, he’s also the national ambassador for young people’s literature. He visits mostly out-of-the-way towns, like Ronan, Montana, on the Flathead Indian reservation, where he met with middle-school students. “I don’t sell them on books by selling them on books. The fastest way to lose a child is to tell a child to read.” Instead, he encourages them to embrace their stories. “To me, reading becomes a lot more palatable if young people realize that the stories, the books that exist within them, are as valuable as the books that exist on the outside of them,” Reynolds said. “And we have to be able to imagine the stories that don’t exist.”

The U.S. student body is more diverse than ever before. Nevertheless, public schools remain highly segregated along racial, ethnic and socioeconomic lines. That’s according to a report released Thursday by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). More than a third of students (about 18.5 million of them) attended a predominantly same-race/ethnicity school during the 2020-21 school year, the report finds. And 14% of students attended schools where almost all of the student body was of a single race/ethnicity. “There is clearly still racial division in schools,” says Jackie Nowicki, the director of K-12 education at the GAO and lead author of the report. She adds that schools with large proportions of Hispanic, Black and American Indian/Alaska Native students — minority groups with higher rates of poverty than white and Asian American students — are also increasing. “What that means is you have large portions of minority children not only attending essentially segregated schools, but schools that have less resources available to them.”