Today’s Literacy Headlines

To talk about the lessons we can learn from Valley Stream 30 (episode #6), Ed Trust brought together Jeffrey Howard, founder of The Efficacy Institute, Natalie Wexler, author of The Knowledge Gap, and Josh Anisansel, a Long Island school administrator who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Valley Stream 30. In a wide-ranging conversation moderated by podcast creator Karin Chenoweth, Josh Anisansel described Nassau County as highly segregated with tremendous inequities. Jeff Howard responded that these kinds of inequities are deeply woven into American society but that schools and districts that are fully mobilized are able to operate as if they didn’t exist. “Educators who get this right…reach a kind of state of grace where they come to a firm conclusion that there ain’t nothing wrong with these kids. These kids can learn at the highest levels.” Natalie Wexler argued that all children need a carefully sequenced curriculum that builds knowledge systematically both to help children learn about the world and ensure that they can read at high levels. Panelists grappled with whether programs and curricula are more important or the beliefs and systems educators bring to the enterprise and worked through a number of related issues.

Betsy Bird —collection development manager at Evanston (IL) Public Library— completed an end-of-year marathon on her blog, “A Fuse #8 Production. IIn what has become an annual tradition, Birdposts a booklist a day in December, representing her accounting of the year in children’s literature, in categories ranging from American history and funny books to picture book readalouds and comics and graphic novels.

The huge and largely unreported story is that American educators are trained to believe in ideas and methods that have little or no evidence behind them—and often conflict with what scientists have discovered about the learning process. Classroom materials rest on similarly flawed assumptions. The disjunction between evidence and practice makes it unnecessarily difficult for teachers to do their jobs and for all but the ablest and most advantaged students to learn. The glimmer of hope is that a growing number of teachers—along with some administrators, policymakers, philanthropists, and parents—are beginning to push for change. The leading edge of this movement has focused on reading, and primarily on the aspect of reading commonly known as phonics. The same goes for the other aspect of reading, comprehension. Teachers spend hours every week believing they’re teaching comprehension “skills” –think “finding the main idea”—when in fact they’re wasting precious time. As cognitive science has demonstrated, comprehension depends far more on how much you know about the topic than on generally applicable “skill.” This is an even more complex and insidious problem than phonics—and it’s not just about “reading.” It’s woven through the entire K-12 system, not just early grades. And the solution—switching to a curriculum and instructional approach that builds kids’ knowledge directly and explicitly, beginning in kindergarten, instead of focusing on illusory skills—flies in the face of what teachers have been told about how learning works.

This op-ed is part of a series of reflections on the past decade in education technology. Chip Donohue is the founding director of the Technology in Early Child Center at Erikson Institute, and a senior fellow at the Fred Rogers Center. As I reflect on the intersection of child development, early learning and technology over the past 10 years, I am reminded of a decade of polarizing arguments for and against young children using technology. In particular, I remain discouraged by 10 years of continuing debates about screen time that miss the importance of content and context in determining what uses of technology are beneficial for young children. My work has focused on always putting the child before the technology, identifying what we have learned while acknowledging what we still need to understand, and balancing the benefits while embracing concerns about children’s health and well-being in the digital age.

Valley Stream 30 is just over the Nassau County line from Queens, New York, and has attracted a diverse population of African Americans, Hispanics, and relatively new immigrants from Africa, the Caribbean, India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. It is in many ways a classic “white flight” district. Twenty years ago, 40 percent of the elementary school district was white. Today, only 5 percent. Superintendent Nicholas Stirling says that the fact that the district “celebrates” its diversity and sees it as a strength has allowed it to build the systems that support excellence and continual improvement. One of the things its diversity forces educators to think about is the wide diversity of background knowledge students bring to lessons. In this ExtraOrdinary Districts podcast, listeners will hear how, in addition to their careful attention to instruction, Valley Stream 30 educators have built system after system to support the learning of the adults in the system.

The students in Sharon George’s class are all refugees. Mariam came to the United States from Sudan. Her classmates are from Somalia, Syria, Burundi and Nepal. They have chosen this school, Fugees Academy in Columbus, OH, for its explicit focus on serving young refugee students and helping them through high school and into college. Fugees Academy is perhaps the only school in the nation to enroll refugee students exclusively. It was founded on the belief that these learners need more focused attention than they often receive in traditional public schools, and that they need to go back to basics to learn English. Fugees (its name is a play on “refugees”) tries to squeeze in many of the elements of a K-8 curriculum into three years of middle school, helping students learn two to three years of the English language in one. The school also places an emphasis on helping students overcome trauma they may have faced on their journey to the United States.

Sixth grader Andre Turner leaned up against a wall-size mural of the new reading center at Confluence Academy-Old North. His head rested on the “B” about a foot taller than him that helped to form the word “Believe.” When his fellow students return from winter break, they will get to experience a quiet, relaxing reading room filled with black children’s literature and comfortable seating. The new reading room is part of the Believe Project, which is the brainchild of Julius B. Anthony, founder of the St. Louis Black Authors and Children Literature. “About 90 percent of the black children in public education in our region are attending a school in the Promise Zone communities,” Anthony said. “This is part of a Promise Zone community, and we really want to make sure that wherever we go we are supporting the work that was there and helping children fall in love with reading. That’s what this is all about.”

Creating a supportive and inclusive school culture for students with disabilities can be a tall task for principals—especially those without backgrounds in special education. To help more principals reach that goal, two research and advocacy groups for students with disabilities, the National Center for Learning Disabilities and Understood.org, have compiled a guide to deepen principals’ understanding of the most effective practices for educating students with disabilities—and help support classroom teaching that best serves those students.

Podcast episodes by APM Reports have raised questions about materials for teaching reading that are widely used in American schools. An author of those materials, Lucy Calkins, recently fired back at “phonics-centric people.” Calkins was one of several powerful people and organizations to weigh in on the debate about how to teach reading in the past few weeks. Senior education correspondent Emily Hanford’s work on the science of reading has helped spark a national conversation. There’s been lively discussion on social media and at education conferences. And many teachers and education officials say they are changing their approach to reading instruction. However not everyone is happy with the direction things are going.

In the courtyard of David Starr Jordan Senior High School, a Title 1 school in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, teens arranged some 600 new books on folding tables, library book carts, and wooden bookshelves inside a parked bookmobile. The teenagers were volunteering with the Book Truck, a peer-to-peer literacy nonprofit. The traveling bookmobile gives away high-demand YA titles to teens who are in foster care, experiencing homelessness, or come from low-income families. The volunteers wore name tags and were ready to help classmates choose two free books.

Children will better understand the work we’re asking them to do if they see examples of that work created by their classmates. Displaying students’ work and integrating it into lessons is also a powerful way to build motivation. That’s critical, especially if you’re a teacher who tries to minimize your use of external punishments and rewards. Researchers like Dan Ariely and Daniel Pink have revealed how deeply our work and our motivation are intertwined. When we have the opportunity to create work that matters to us, we don’t need as many external motivators like material rewards or even praise.

Education has many critical issues; although if you watch the nightly news or 24/7 news channels, you will most likely see very little when it comes to education. It sometimes make me wonder how much education is valued? Every year around this time, I highlight some critical issues facing education. These issues are not ranked in order of importance. I actually developed a list of about 20 critical issues but wanted to narrow it down to 12. They range from issues that impact our lives in negative ways to issues that impact our lives in positive ways, and I wanted to provide a list of issues I feel educators will believe are in their control. I have spent the better part of 2019 on the road traveling across the U.S., Canada, Europe, the U.K., and Australia. The issues that are highlighted below have come up in most of those countries, but they will be particularly important for those of us living in the U.S.

Dixie Amy coaches and cajoles her three students, a fifth-grader and two second-graders. She watches a timer and counts the words as her students read aloud. For most of the school day, Amy is the receptionist at Grand View Elementary School. But every afternoon, the former paraprofessional leads drills in fluency, or reading speed. She volunteered for the task, and the training for it. At Grand View, reading instruction is an all-hands-on-deck project. Last spring, 80 percent of its K-3 students read at grade level — more than 10 percentage points above the state average. Some of Idaho’s reading success stories are unfolding in remote, rural schools such as Grand View. Scores are improving significantly. Student growth far exceeds the statewide rate. Here is how four districts and one charter school are doing it, and what other schools can learn from them.

New results from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), an exam given to teenagers around the world every three years, revealed that reading scores among U.S. 15-year-olds have remained stagnant over the past two decades and the gap between high and low performers has widened. The announcement came on the heels of reports from the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress, which showed that only 35 percent of fourth graders and 34 percent of eighth graders scored at or above the proficient level in reading. Together, these results have prompted a flurry of questions about the effectiveness of current approaches to teaching kids how to read. Rebecca Silverman, an associate professor of education at Stanford Graduate School of Education, studies literacy development and instruction among pre-K and elementary school children. Silverman weighs in on the ongoing debate in teaching literacy, why she believes schools should take a more targeted approach and what it will take to make that possible.

The Program for International Student Assessment, a test designed to evaluate education standards around the globe, determined that American students have stagnated in reading and math performance since 2000. The disappointing news comes after years of bipartisan efforts to overhaul the U.S. education system. Why are students from one of the richest countries in the world performing relatively poorly on this exam? And what can be done to move America’s education system forward? Guests include Natalie Wexler, Education reporter, author of “The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America’s Broken Education System–and How to Fix It.”

What should after-school programs be doing — especially when working with struggling readers? Louisa Moats calls the lack of effective reading instruction a national scandal “for decades.” Moats is a retired researcher, psychologist and writer who was the site director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Early Interventions Project in Washington, D.C. “We know what to do — let’s do it,” she said. When after-school programs seek to help children in reading, they, too, should call upon what has been shown to work. “I would advocate for more after-school programs to try to adopt one of the proven voluntary tutorial programs,” Moats said. A 2017 report from Research for Action, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit organization, looked at existing research on out-of-school time literacy efforts. The report, “Supporting Literacy in Out-of-School Time,” was funded by the William Penn Foundation.

Author and illustrator Mo Willems has sold millions of children’s books and created beloved characters, including the Pigeon, Knuffle Bunny, and Elephant and Piggie. Now he’s the Kennedy Center’s first education artist-in-residence, making new kinds of work for both kids and adults. Correspondent Paul Solman talks to Willems about how he engages his audience.

Education and mainstream media have focused on gaps in teachers’ knowledge of the settled science of reading development, as well as the widespread implementation of popular but disproven and ineffectual instructional approaches for teaching reading. Teachers, however, do not work in a vacuum. Collectively and individually, they seldom have the autonomy or the authority to implement significant changes to ineffective district-mandated reading assessments and curricula. Moreover, teacher evaluations are often linked to their fidelity to implementation of these curricula. Although research has found that instructional leadership is the second most important school-related factor contributing to what students learn in school (after classroom instruction), the role of school and district leaders in perpetuating these poor reading outcomes has been largely overlooked. As the demands for teachers to demonstrate knowledge of the science of reading increase, are there similar requirements for those who lead them? Would the school, district, and state educational leaders in your community be able to demonstrate knowledge of the science of reading?

From birth to age three, more than a million neural connections are created every second. The experiences young children have, or don’t have, during this period shape brain architecture and form 90 percent of the adult brain by age five. Simple motor tasks can also be brain-building activities. A motion as seemingly straightforward as crossing the midline—an imaginary vertical line separating the left and right sides of one’s body—can create new brain pathways in very young children, building the foundation for the development of cognitive skills such as reading and writing. That’s why Julie Jackson, youth services supervisor at the Kathryn Linnemann Branch of the St. Charles City-County (MO) Library, encourages kids to bring their arms across their bodies while she does a dance with shakers during her “Time for Twos” storytime sessions. Many storytime activities also develop executive function skills, which help us self-regulate, filter distractions, remember important information, and multitask.

In November, the California Department of Education (CDE) was awarded a $37.5 million federal Comprehensive Literacy State Development grant which will allow for the expansion of current literacy efforts statewide over the next five years.“Many of the students who are struggling with reading comprehension or are not reading at grade level are our most vulnerable students—economically disadvantaged students, English language learners, students with disabilities, and students in rural communities,” said California superintendent of public instruction Tony Thurmond. “This grant will allow us to promote and support equitable access to high-quality literacy instruction that will benefit not only our high-need students but all of our students from pre-K to high school.” The grant has three objectives: build state capacity to support literacy instruction, develop and implement a comprehensive state literacy plan, and build local capacity to establish, align, and implement literacy initiatives.

“AGAIN!!!” That request/demand will be familiar to any parent — kids hardly ever want to read a book just once. So we asked Matt de la Peña, Newbery medal-winning children’s author (and dad), to recommend books that stand up, reading, after reading, after reading, after reading … The good news is, there are a lot of great books out there. “We’re in a golden age of picture books,” says de la Peña. “There are books tackling so many different subjects that were never explored in the past.” It’s a great time to be making kids’ books, de la Peña says, and a great time to be reading them: “There are more creators who have been let into the door and that just gives the picture book arena so many more options, so many new voices … I think when you get more diverse creators, you’re going to get more quality stories,” he explains. Here’s de la Peña describing some of his favorite books.

There’s been a welcome surge of public discussion of the science on reading. But if we want all kids to become good readers, media coverage needs to point out that current practice conflicts with it. What scientists have discovered, however, is that “skills” are far less important to comprehension than the amount of knowledge the reader has about the topic. What works best is to build knowledge through a coherent curriculum that is implemented across grade levels, beginning in kindergarten. If the media doesn’t balance its incisive coverage of phonics with a more illuminating treatment of comprehension, I’m afraid we’ll end up repeating the vicious cycles of the past. If the pendulum swings back in the direction of phonics without a simultaneous change in the way we approach comprehension, many kids will learn to decode words but—especially as they reach higher grade levels, where assumptions about background knowledge increase—they won’t understand what they’re reading.

It all started with a big, controversial bet that young kids could actually learn from television. In its inaugural seasons, episodes dedicated to the letter n or the number 5 reflected the zeal of its educational mission and its laser-like focus on pedagogy. But from the moment it was first conceived in a 1967 report presented by its founder, Joan Ganz Cooney, Sesame Street quietly harbored larger ambitions.Born at the tail end of the 1960s, Sesame Street evoked a world that was grounded in a radical, even utopian, vision. The show was big-city urban, gritty, unafraid of controversy, sometimes psychedelic, and most alarmingly to some of its earliest viewers, racially integrated—and proud of it. The original target audience, reported The New York Times, was a “4-year-old, inner-city, black youngster,” and in between its charming, mainstream skits on literacy and numeracy, Sesame Street felt by turns avant-garde, iconoclastic, and revolutionary. Now in its 50th year, Sesame Street has remained astonishingly, resolutely inclusive. Long before the issues were addressed candidly on adult TV, Sesame Street was tackling racism, home eviction, neurodiversity, and disability with its audience of toddlers.

Andrew Clements, who mined a brief career as a teacher in Illinois in writing two dozen books for young readers, most notably “Frindle,” which sold more than eight million copies, died on Nov. 28 at his home in West Baldwin, Maine. He was 70. “Frindle” tells the story of Nicholas, a mischievous boy who bedevils his fifth-grade teacher by persuading all his classmates to refer to a pen as a frindle. Mr. Clements’s books have been praised for their portrayal of the dynamics between students and teachers, the intricacies of classroom and schoolyard culture and the breadth of adult’s as well as children’s emotions.

Lately the Caldecott Medal has begun to show its age for reasons that cannot be written off to the vagaries of time or taste. Today, in fact, the world’s very first prize for children’s book illustration is in urgent need of a makeover: The outdated rule that candidates must be American needs to go. Today, the children’s publishing industry is a global enterprise. Picture books are as ubiquitous an American export as iPhones and soybeans. At the same time, spurred by the rise of the internet, the ease of long-distance travel and a belated recognition of the value for American children of a cross-cultural perspective, American publishers have become increasingly open to working with authors and illustrators from abroad and to introducing books that originated elsewhere. With artists from France, Italy, Spain, England, Poland, South Korea, Japan, China, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia and Canada well represented on publishers’ lists, the time has surely come for the Caldecott Medal to drop the ban on illustrators who aren’t citizens or residents of the United States.

The most practical approach for schools and districts that wish to take a knowledge-building approach to literacy is adopting one of the few published curricula explicitly designed to build knowledge, such as Core Knowledge, Wit & Wisdom, or EL Education. While such programs do not necessarily align within a grade level to the science and social studies being taught in each state, these curricula do tend to align vertically from one grade level to the next. And all promote thoughtful knowledge-building through reading complex, grade-level texts. States could play a critical role in supporting students’ knowledge-building. Here’s how. First, states could look across their academic standards and build a “knowledge map” of the big topics students are expected to learn in each grade level across content areas.

Almost all American teachers supplement their core curriculum (if they even have one) with materials they gather from the internet. National surveys show that supplementation is a growing phenomenon, and that many teachers use supplementary materials in large proportions of their lessons. While we know that supplementation is widespread, and we have a good handle on what websites teachers rely on, we don’t really know what kinds of materials teachers seek out and whether they are any good. A new study looked at the quality of more than 300 of the most-downloaded high school English language arts (ELA) materials on three popular websites: TeachersPayTeachers, ShareMyLesson, and ReadWriteThink. The reviewers built a rubric to measure the quality of the materials along multiple dimensions, and we recruited ELA experts to help evaluate the materials. The report, “The Supplemental Curriculum Bazaar: Is What’s Online Any Good?” is published today. Here’s what they learned.

1919 was an explosive year in American history: molasses flooded the town of Boston; women fought for the right to vote; lynchings of African Americans led to the birth of the civil rights movement; the World Series experienced a shocking scandal. Martin W. Sandler is known for his excellent work in documenting the history of America. This November, the award-winning author earned the 2019 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature for 1919: The Year That Changed America. SLJ spoke to him about his newly bestowed honor, his creative inspiration, and his research process.

On a daily basis, every teacher navigates a wealth of questions about words and about the world. The English dictionary is replete with over half a million words, and many of our pupils can struggle to stay afloat as they swim in this sea of academic language. Given the sheer breadth and depth of vocabulary of the English language—alongside how critical it proves in mediating the academic curriculum of school—it is crucial that every teacher has a confident understanding of teaching vocabulary in the classroom. We cannot teach all of the words to our pupils. Their language develops daily, inside and outside of the school gates, with reading, talk and simply existing in the world, seeing their vocabulary grow exponentially. And yet, we can better develop our pupils’ vocabulary, identify their gaps in understanding, and teach new words with a greater likelihood of success.

I am a cognitive psychologist, which means that I use science to study mental processes. Cognitive psychologists interested in the science of learning take the basic building blocks of cognitive processes—how people perceive, learn, attend to and remember information—and build teaching and learning strategies that can be tested using the scientific method. Cognitive psychologists interested in the science of learning use the laboratory-to-classroom model to conduct research. Research in my field is powerful for educators because it yields insight about what causes students to learn. That understanding allows teachers and administrators to apply evidence-based teaching and learning strategies flexibly in the classroom.

During winter, I start thinking ahead to summer. Those of us who work in public libraries, specifically youth services, know that summer is our busiest time of the year. School is out, and we have reading clubs to run and extra programming to offer. We’re also aware that some of our young patrons spend the entire day at the library while their parents work, and that, over the course of the day, they may fill themselves up on candy—or nothing at all. For this reason, many U.S. libraries, including my employer, Uniondale (NY) Public Library (UPL), have partnered with food banks to provide healthy summer meals in a safe, supervised setting for young people up to age 18. Uniondale is a diverse community, and the majority of our patrons are African American, West Indian, and Hispanic. My wonderful coworkers, who hail from around the globe, volunteered to showcase their own cultures during Multicultural Storytimes. These events were filled with songs, stories, artifacts, games, and dancing.

The plan was hatched with high hopes and missionary zeal: For the first time in its history, the United States would come together to create consistent, rigorous education standards and stop letting so many school children fall behind academically. More than 40 states signed on to the plan, known as the Common Core State Standards Initiative, after it was rolled out in 2010 by a bipartisan group of governors, education experts and philanthropists. American children would read more nonfiction, write better essays and understand key mathematical concepts, instead of just mechanically solving equations. A decade later, after years full of foment in American schools, the performance of American students remains stagnant on the global and national exams that advocates often cited when making the case for the Common Core. The disappointing results have prompted many in the education world to take stock of the Common Core, one of the most ambitious education reform projects in American history. Some see the effort as a failure, while others say it is too soon to judge the program, whose principles are still being rolled out at the classroom level.

Before coming to the public school, I’d spent a couple years working at a tutoring center that taught, among other things, an intensive phonics program to students with reading difficulties. I’d had dozens of hours of training in several different research-based reading programs, and taught close to 100 students how to read. At the time, I figured most early-reading teachers had, at some point, had similar cognitive science-based training. But as results from two new nationally representative surveys show, that’s not the case. In preparing this reporting series, the Education Week Research Center surveyed about 670 K-2 and special education teachers and 530 education professors who teach reading courses. The findings—among the first to look at teacher and teacher-educator knowledge and practices in early reading across the country—tell an illuminating story about what’s happening in classrooms, including what teachers do and don’t know about reading and where they learned it.

Ashley Bryan has been making children’s books for almost 60 years. In 1962, he was the first African American to publish a children’s book as an author and illustrator. He was also a pioneer in creating stories centered on children about African and African American history and culture. Bryan has worked on about 50 books, including illustrating books by poet Nikki Giovanni and novelist Richard Wright. He has won the Newbery Honor, the Coretta Scott King award, and the Hans Christian Andersen award. Bryan’s passionate life and wide-ranging interests are collected in his papers. When it came time for the Ashley Bryan Center to find an appropriate repository for the archive, they looked near and far.

This year on their Best Books for Kids list, New York Public Library included a section that was just “En espanol.” It got me to thinking. On 31 Days, 31 Lists I always include a day of celebration for “bilingual books”. What do I mean by that? Well, either these are books that were originally in English and were translated to another language, or they feature both English and another language in their text.

Seaford, Delaware, was the “Nylon Capital of the World” until DuPont closed its plant. Today it has twice the rate of poverty as the rest of the state. For years, three of its four elementary schools were among the lowest performing in the state. But Stanford education professor Sean Reardon identified it as a district where African American students were learning at a faster rate than white students. That turned out to be a harbinger of enormous improvement, ushered in by superintendent Dave Perrington who assembled a team of administrators committed to equity and excellence. They brought a new approach to reading instruction and to the use of data to drive improvement. This podcast brings you the voices of Perrington, principals, teachers, and the researcher who developed their reading program, Bookworms. Where once Seaford was one of the lowest performing districts in Delaware, it now matches its performance, and its third-graders are way outperforming the state. In a diverse district that serves African American and white students and the children of relatively new immigrants from Haiti and Central America, the schools are forging a path to excellence.

In Central New York, there appears to be one shining example where systematic phonics and other proven methods are being used to teach reading with astonishing results. In the Lyncourt Union Free School District, they knew they had to do something to improve student reading proficiency in the district. Lyncourt turned to The Reading League, a non-profit organization that works to fundamentally change the way our children learn to read. They took the training into the classroom, and in just two years, from 2017 to 2019, in grades two through six, Lyncourt has seen a 31% increase in students who are reading at or above grade-level expectations and 70% of all students in those grades are now reading at or above proficiency. This 2018 to 2019 comparison shows that out of 18 school districts in Onondaga County, Lyncourt tied for first place for the largest increase in grades third through eighth ELA proficiency as measured by state testing.

Already troubled by her 4th grade students’ low reading levels, San Antonio-area teacher Melody Fernandez entered “survival mode” when she was moved down to 1st grade—and discovered the full scope of what she and many of her elementary colleagues were not prepared to teach. She had learned a lot in her preparation about reading theories, but no specific protocols for teaching the subject. So she did what many teachers new to a grade do. She used the methods more seasoned colleagues told her to use, and the curriculum on hand, which relied on leveled picture books with easily memorized, repetitive sentence structures. In all that’s been written about early literacy, little attention has been given to the cultural factors that influence how such practices are learned, reinforced, and transmitted. Yet sociology plays a major role in why they linger on in classrooms—despite evidence that they can hinder young readers’ ability to crack the code.

On every schoolyard across the world you will find games invented by children. Hand-clapping routines, rhyming stanzas and intricate rules for tiny competitions; games born of the creativity, insight and idiosyncrasy of children’s minds. In New York City’s diverse playgrounds, kids play games in Haitian Creole, Korean, Spanish, Arabic and Polish, just to name a few. Unlike nursery rhymes, lullabies, or children’s songs these games are conceived of, built upon and passed along by kids, largely by girls. Irene Chagal, who researched the history and spread of hand-clapping games for her documentary “Let’s Get the Rhythm: The Life and Times of Miss Mary Mack,” describes these games as “playground lore,” a rich body of folk literature that is just outside the attention of most adults.

Shared reading between parents and very young children, including infants, is associated with stronger vocabulary skills for nearly all children by age 3, say physicians at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. According to research published in The Journal of Pediatrics, this is true also for children who genetically may be vulnerable to barriers in learning, attention and behavior development. “In a supportive environment, children who may be genetically at-risk, do just as well as their peers,” said Manuel Jimenez, a developmental pediatrician and assistant professor of pediatrics and family medicine and community health at the medical school, who is lead author of the study.

New results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a standardized test given every two years to measure fourth- and eighth-grade achievement in reading and math, show that Mississippi made more progress than any other state. There’s no way to know for sure what causes increases in test scores, but Mississippi has been doing something notable: making sure all of its teachers understand the science of reading. To understand what the science says, a good place to start is with something called the “simple view of reading.” The simple view says that reading comprehension is the product of two things: one is your ability to decode words and the other is your ability to understand spoken language. The simple view clearly shows that focusing only on decoding would be a mistake because that’s only half the equation. Reading instruction has to include language comprehension, too. This means lessons and activities that expand children’s oral vocabularies and knowledge, so they know the meaning of the words they can decode.

Many teachers likely did not learn the cognitive science behind reading in their teacher preparation programs. While decades of research have shown that teaching young students how to crack the code of written language through systematic phonics is the most reliable way to make sure that they learn how to read words, that approach to reading has not made its way into many preservice programs. Balanced literacy dominates the nation’s colleges of education. In an Education Week Research Center survey of more than 530 professors of reading instruction, just 22 percent said their philosophy of teaching early reading centered on explicit, systematic phonics with comprehension as a separate focus. Many proponents of systematic phonics are hopeful that the tide is slowly turning—that as states pass legislation requiring teachers to be trained in the science of reading, and as school districts begin to consider teachers’ knowledge of brain-based reading principles when hiring, colleges of education will be forced to get on board.

In the literacy world, there’s a perennial concern that focusing on foundational skills will come at the expense of giving kids opportunities to practice language and enjoy stories. But researchers and educators say that it’s not only possible to teach useful vocabulary and meaningful content knowledge to young children—it’s necessary. A body of research has shown that once students can decode, their reading comprehension is largely dependent on their language comprehension—or the background and vocabulary knowledge that they bring to a text, and their ability to follow the structure of a story and think about it analytically. Before students can glean this kind of information from print, experts say, they can do it through oral language: by having conversations about the meaning of words, telling stories, and reading books aloud.

Want to know if it’s time for phonics in Belinda Williams’s kindergarten classroom? Stand in the hall and listen. “I love phonics because it’s something that’s so easy to make fun,” Williams said. “We’re always doing something very active and very musical.” Williams said her Franklin Community Schools in Franklin, Ind., uses a 90-minute reading block each day, of which 55 minutes cover phonics instruction and practice. Yet she said she usually also dedicates her personal flex time later in the day to phonics, too, with different games everyday, using magnets and Slinkies, among other activities. There’s something to be learned from teachers who end a lesson with singing and dancing students, especially when covering skills some bemoan as the most boring part of early literacy.

Virtually all teachers—including those who have embraced the overwhelming evidence supporting phonics—have been unaware that their approach to comprehension conflicts with scientific findings. They have been trained to see comprehension as a set of discrete skills, like “finding the main idea.” The most commonly used elementary literacy curricula also adopt this approach. But studies have shown that comprehension isn’t a matter of abstract skills. It’s primarily dependent on how much knowledge and vocabulary a reader has relating to the topic. In an effort to boost reading scores, many elementary and even middle schools have virtually eliminated social studies, science, and the arts to make more time for practicing “finding the main idea” on disconnected texts that don’t enable kids to acquire much knowledge. Ironically, the subjects schools have marginalized are the ones that hold the potential to boost kids’ knowledge of the world—and, ultimately, their reading comprehension.

Young children need consistent exposure to high-quality, play-based early learning experiences at home and at school for literacy and language to flourish. This is especially true for pre-K children who are dual language learners (DLLs), cultivating these fundamental skills while acquiring a second language. With particular interest in how young DLLs’ language and literacy skills develop over time, a new study compares children’s development in both English and their home language over the course of one pre-K year.

With a clear research base to back them up, leaders at Ohio’s Mad River Local Schools have paired carefully structured phonics lessons in K-2 with related practices that are known to support good reading skills: helping students build content knowledge and strong vocabularies. As the project enters its fourth year, Mad River’s leaders are hopeful. State test scores in English/language arts have risen sharply in the buildings where children have had the most exposure to the new approach, and principals notice that more students—even the struggling ones—are better at tackling tough reading passages. “The difference between now and five years ago, I wouldn’t have believed it,” said Cory Miller, the principal of Virginia Stevenson Elementary, which dove into phonics in 2013-14, four years before Mad River adopted its new phonics curriculum, Fundations. “[Students’] fluency is much better, and they’re attacking words in systematic ways,” he said. “They’re not getting stuck on words.”

There’s a settled body of research on how best to teach early reading. But when it comes to the multitude of curriculum choices that schools have, it’s often hard to parse whether well-marketed programs abide by the evidence. And making matters more complicated, there’s no good way to peek into every elementary reading classroom to see what materials teachers are using. “It’s kind of an understudied issue,” said Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of Language at the Speed of Sight: How We Read, Why So Many Can’t, and What Can Be Done About It. “[These programs] are put out by large publishers that aren’t very forthcoming. It’s very hard for researchers to get a hold of very basic data about how widely they’re used.” Now, some data are available. In a nationally representative survey, the Education Week Research Center asked K-2 and special education teachers what curricula, programs, and textbooks they had used for early reading instruction in their classrooms.

One of the most challenging aspects of properly addressing the different brains of dyslexic children is recognizing them in the first place. Dyslexia occurs on a continuum and there is no “sharp dividing line” between having dyslexia and not having it. In the early years of elementary school, all children are learning to read, and all are developing their reading skills at different rates. Though dyslexia can take on many forms, two common areas where differences can be clearly seen and heard are slow reading and difficulty with handwriting and spelling. Also, in some cases, certain speech patterns can be an early indicator of dyslexia, like mispronouncing familiar words or using “baby talk.” For schools, teachers and parents, diagnosing dyslexia in English learners can present an extra set of hurdles.

The performance of American teenagers in reading and math has been stagnant since 2000, according to the latest results of a rigorous international exam, despite a decades-long effort to raise standards and help students compete with peers across the globe. And the achievement gap in reading between high and low performers is widening. The disappointing results from the exam, the Program for International Student Assessment, were announced on Tuesday and follow those from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, an American test that recently showed that two-thirds of children were not proficient readers. About a fifth of American 15-year-olds scored so low on the PISA test that it appeared they had not mastered reading skills expected of a 10-year-old. There were some bright spots for the United States: Achievement gaps between native-born and immigrant students were smaller than such gaps in peer nations.

The Award for Innovative Literacy Promotion in Europe is presented at the European literacy conferences every other year The recipient this year was Invito alla Lettura - Rai Scuola for its aim of improving the professional development of teachers in Italy in the field of literacy. Invito alla Lettura is a distance learning program addressed to teachers of kindergarten, primary, and secondary school, and it includes three TV and web series of 30 episodes. Its main goals are improving the quality of teaching literacy and promoting good reading practices that can be replicated by classroom teachers. The program can reach a wide audience and those areas of the country where there is greater need for training, disseminating the new knowledge of literacy achieved today through international research.

The most notable picture books, middle grade and young adult books of the year, selected by The Times’s children’s books editor.

Four years ago, when the staff at Danville Primary School found out they were going to learn a new way to teach reading, Mary Levitski thought: Here we go again. The 2015 training was different. Inspired by a tutoring center for kids with dyslexia in nearby Bloomsburg, Danville adopted a new approach that involved training every teacher using a somewhat old-fashioned method. Instead of buying glossy texts, it made its own workbooks. And it worked. Danville’s method relies on new reading science. It has roots in an old way of teaching but is based on new cognitive neuroscience research that has revealed how brains process sounds and symbols. It borrows from linguistics, the study of language and its structure. Students do not memorize lists of words for spelling tests, yet the average Danville fourth grader is spelling at the sixth-grade level.

As you read this sentence, your brain is making a series of rapid choices. As it processes each word, it’s matching it to one of tens of thousands in most adults’ vocabularies — about 60,000 for a skilled reader. “When you hear a word, you somehow magically, instantly come up with the meaning of that word,” said Bob McMurray, a professor in the University of Iowa’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. All readers — and listeners — do this, McMurray said, even first-graders who typically are choosing from a mental word bank of just 3,000 to 5,000 words. Just how children learn to make such quick determinations while reading and hearing words is the focus of a new research study of McMurray’s called Growing Words.

Every year, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) throws a luncheon at its annual convention to announce the winners of two prestigious children’s book awards: the Charlotte Huck Award for Outstanding Fiction for Children and the Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction for Children. Authors Kate and Jol Temple and illustrator Terri Rose Baynton were named winners of the 2020 Charlotte Huck Award for their novel Room on Our Rock), a story about sharing and compassion that can be read forward and backward, revealing two narratives. The Charlotte Huck Award was established in 2014 to promote and recognize fiction that has the potential to transform children’s lives by inviting compassion, imagination, and wonder. Author Barry Wittenstein and illustrator Jerry Pinkney were named winners of the 2020 Orbis Pictus Award for their nonfiction book, A Place to Land: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Speech That Inspired a Nation. The Orbis Pictus Award, established in 1989, is the oldest children’s book award for nonfiction.

In learning to read, the brain performs an amazing feat: it creates a specialized circuit that’s just for reading, forging a new circuit by combining parts of the brain that were originally designed to serve other functions, such as retrieving names. This new “reading circuit” combines processes from different areas of the brain and then runs at a speed so fast it’s nearly automatic. But not all brains forge a flowing reading circuit easily. This is the case with dyslexia. Rather than being a disease or a medical condition (the common misperception), dyslexia is a different brain organization—one in which the brain’s reading circuit has been disrupted or re-routed in at least one way, and sometimes in two or three ways. This re-routing slows down critical parts of the reading process: attaching the right sound to a letter happens more slowly and forming words or sentences takes longer, then comprehending what was just read also takes longer. Dyslexia can additionally affect memory, especially working memory, making it harder for students to remember what they just read, or directions and learning sequences.

Research shows that children whose parents are involved in supporting their learning do better in school. For English-learners, educators think that parent involvement can be especially important for supporting successful language development. But a new U.S. Department of Education fact sheet shows that English-learner families—most of whom are Latino—are far less likely to volunteer or serve on school committees and attend school or class events, important opportunities to communicate about students’ academic progress. Maria Estela Zarate, a professor in the department of educational leadership at California State University, Fullerton, has found that schools and Latino families have different perceptions of what constitutes good parental involvement. Zarate found that teachers and school administrators felt that traditional back-to-school nights, open houses, and parent-teacher conferences were important venues to communicate about students’ academic progress. The Latino families that took part in the study didn’t; they viewed educators as the experts and deferred the educational decisionmaking to them. With that in mind, here are five ideas to help schools better connect with English-learner families.

It can be hard to stay relevant in the ever-changing world of children’s entertainment, but Highlights For Children magazine has lasted for generations by sticking to the formula of mixing fun with learning. As Emily Burkhalter’s third grade class at Evening Street Elementary School in Worthington, Ohio, is enjoying a free reading period, a top choice among the students is Highlights. The kids are quick to list off their favorite parts of the magazine, from the articles to the puzzles. The most popular feature among the students is “Hidden Pictures,” the visual puzzle that challenges kids to find small pictures inside a larger scene. “Part of its appeal to young children is its lack of ambiguity,” says editor-in-chief French Cully. “I mean it’s a little black and white. It’s practice for the big, harder moral decisions that are going to come later.”

A small, kindergarten-through-8th-grade district in rural Oklahoma, Lane was identified by Sean Reardon, Professor of Poverty and Inequality at Stanford University, as one of the few districts in the country that “grow” its students almost six academic years in five calendar years. Since he identified it, Lane has improved its absolute achievement considerably. When Karin Chenoweth visited she heard from teachers and administrators that its improvement process started when its former superintendent visited a nearby high-performing high-poverty district and realized that he hadn’t understood how important early learning and early reading instruction is. He began sending teachers to learn from nearby Cottonwood and they upped their reading instruction game. Today, years later, the two districts, both located in the Choctaw Nation, continue to learn from each other. Hear directly from teachers and administrators in both Lane and Cottonwood as they talk about what they have learned from each other and how improvement takes place.

Six-year-old Kaleb Gonzalez-Muniz carried his electronic reader to a visitor in his first-grade classroom at Walter Caldwell Elementary School and announced he was reading a book about the Loch Ness monster. “This woman thought she saw one, but what if she actually saw the last plesiosaurus?” he asked, pointing at the page of the Epic! digital library book. “I love this program because of that” enthusiasm, said his teacher, Jennifer Burnett. She was Caldwell’s 2017 teacher of the year and a finalist for the Polk County school district’s top teacher that same year. Burnett was one of nine Florida teachers chosen as a Master Teacher and brand ambassador for Epic!, a company that provides unlimited in-school access to a digital catalog of more than 40,000 books, audiobooks, quizzes and educational videos in a kid-friendly platform. Epic! for Educators is provided free of charge for elementary school teachers and school librarians.