Today’s Literacy Headlines

As Alabama students return to school this week, the youngest among them is heading toward a new hurdle never before attempted in this state. This year’s first-graders, come two years from now, will have to read on grade level. If not, they will not advance from third to fourth grade. That’s according to a new law passed by the Alabama Legislature this spring. The Alabama Literacy Act was designed with the goal of improving academic achievement across the state by ensuring early learners get a solid foundation in reading. Assistant State Superintendent Elisabeth Davis is heading up the state’s efforts to implement the new law, which covers everything from requiring teachers to be trained in the science of reading to regular assessments of how well young students are reading to working with parents to help their children read. Even though there are still decisions to be made about the tests and materials that will be used, one of the most important parts—teacher training—is already underway.

How do students best learn to read? Equally important, how do students learn to love reading? The Common Core emphasizes reading comprehension skills, like identifying the main idea of a text. Yet in her new book, “The Knowledge Gap,” Natalie Wexler argues that teaching those skills in a vacuum, rather than centering instruction around interesting and rigorous content knowledge, hurts both student achievement and engagement. In the excerpt here, Wexler observes two elementary school classrooms, each one taking a different approach to teaching reading. When young children are introduced to history and science in concrete and understandable ways, chances are they’ll be far better equipped to reengage with those topics with more nuance later on. At the same time, teaching disconnected comprehension skills boosts neither comprehension nor reading scores. It’s just empty calories. In effect, kids are clamoring for broccoli and spinach while adults insist on a steady diet of donuts.

The most important point raised in Natalie Wexler’s new book The Knowledge Gap is nearly an afterthought. It’s in the book’s epilogue. After a compelling, book-length argument in favor of offering a knowledge-rich education to every child and documenting our frustrating lack of progress in doing so—to raise reading achievement, promote justice, even, she suggests, to end school segregation—the author makes a surprising observation. “I’d love to point to a school district, or even a single school, and say: This is how it should be done,” Wexler writes. “Unfortunately, I have yet to see an American school that consistently combines a focus on content with an instructional method that fully exploits the potential of writing to build knowledge and critical thinking abilities for every child.”

Students with learning disabilities can struggle with reading comprehension, written expression and problem solving. Children who display learning deficits could have a disorder such as dyslexia, dyscalculia, auditory processing disorder, nonverbal learning, or visual perceptual/visual motor deficit. What’s being done to identify and accommodate students living with these kinds of disabilities? What do parents need to know to be a good advocate for their child? What resources are available to educators? Are learning deficits harder to identify in biligual students?

Over the last several decades, psychologists have unearthed a wealth of evidence on how children learn. But for three basic reasons, it’s proven hard to translate that evidence into classroom practice. There’s overwhelming evidence that, especially when students don’t know much about a topic, it’s best to provide information explicitly. But the prevailing theory in the education world has long been that it’s better for even novice learners to “discover” or “construct” knowledge for themselves, often in largely self-directed groups. Consistent with that theory, teacher-training programs encourage educators to value imparting skills over information—including supposed skills in reading comprehension and critical thinking. The reasons for the disjunction between the worlds of education and science are complex. But the obstacles to getting the findings of cognitive psychology into classroom practice fall into three basic categories.

More than 30 studies point to better reading comprehension from printed material. The benefit for reading on paper was rather small, after averaging the studies together. But 29 of the 33 laboratory studies found that readers learned more on paper. Genre is also important. In the studies that had students read narrative fiction, there was no benefit for paper over screens. But for nonfiction information texts, the advantage for paper stands out. The mounting research evidence against screens is important because it clashes with textbook publishers’ long-term plans to emphasize digital texts.

For the past three years, Greenwood Community Schools has seen early detection as the biggest key in helping children who suffer from dyslexia, and now all public schools are required to identify and assist those students. The law now requires every school district to have at least one reading specialist trained in assisting students with dyslexia. The law also requires schools to screen students for reading-based disabilities, and provide help through intervention for students who are or may be at risk of being identified as dyslexic. Greenwood schools has been using the a method to train its teachers to assist students from kindergarten through second grade, with the intention of making sure they are ready for the IREAD exam in third grade, said Lisa Harkness, the district’s curriculum director and its designated reading specialist. The method helps children develop literacy skills by breaking down why letters and words sound the way they do.

It’s summer break, but 14 rising third-graders spent a recent morning at Denver’s McMeen Elementary learning about proper nouns. Some of the 14 students were learning English as a second language. Others were native English speakers who struggle in reading. For 3½ weeks this summer, they all signed up to spend their mornings practicing literacy and language skills, and their afternoons doing fun activities as part of Denver Public Schools’ “summer academy.” The academy, which is free for families, has several purposes. It started years ago as a way to help English language learners maintain the progress they made during the school year. For nearly 30,000 of Denver’s 93,000 students, English is a second language; the most common first language is Spanish. Recently, the district has extended summer academy invitations to any students in kindergarten through third grade identified as reading “significantly below grade level,” who could use a similar literacy boost. The academy also serves as a training ground for teachers new to the district who must learn the way Denver teaches English language development.

In order to narrow the achievement gap between low-income and affluent students, schools may benefit from adopting elementary curricula focused on building knowledge, according to an article in The Atlantic. Previous case studies show students from different socioeconomic backgrounds and spanning different reading levels do not differ in reading skills, but rather in the knowledge and vocabulary that provides the context needed for reading comprehension. When kids from both lower and higher reading levels had the same knowledge, their comprehension was essentially identical.

Renée Watson is a New York Times best-selling, Newbery Honor,and Coretta Scott King Award–winning author. “I believe there are many ways to speak. We all have a choice to use or not use our voices. To engage or to keep to ourselves. When I teach writing workshops with young people, we talk about our artistic voices. We talk about how what we create is a way of speaking up for what we believe. We talk about our everyday voices, how we can be kind with our words, how we can use our words to bring comfort to someone. I push my students to read widely, to take in stories they relate to and don’t relate to. I encourage my students to write their world. As it is, as it can be. I invite students to speak their truths.”

Drawing distinctions between English-learners who struggle with the language and those who have learning disabilities is difficult. Educating English-learners or students with disabilities often requires special training and a firm grasp of sometimes complex federal policy. The prospect of identifying and supporting dual-identified students—who are eligible for extra support for both English-language acquisition and learning with a disability—often leaves teachers feeling underprepared and overwhelmed. A new brief from New America, English Learners with Disabilities: Shining a Light on Dual-Identified Students, offers a series of recommendations to help educators “more accurately identify ELs with disabilities and provide appropriate instructional services” by addressing gaps in educator knowledge, and inherent weaknesses in student referral strategies and assessment tools.

When 6-year-old Madison Smith finished reading her “Wreck-It Ralph” book, it marked her 1,000th book before starting kindergarten. Her mother, Crystal Smith, began reading to Madison as a baby. The mother-daughter duo read up to 10 books a day. Time spent reading has led Madison to develop a love for books and learning. According to a study conducted at Ohio State University in April 2019, children whose parents read one book a day from birth enter kindergarten having heard 1.4 million more words than a child not read to daily. This creates the “million word gap,” which is one explanation of the differences in vocabulary and reading development in young children.

It’s just kind of neat watching a grown child collaborate with their parent, don’t you think? Periodically we’ve seen it done with different pairings over the years. Sometimes it’s overt, as when Jonah Winter and his mother work on books like Diego, or when Rebecca Emberley and Ed Emberley collaborate on stories like the mildly perverse (in all the right ways) Chicken Little. In such cases of these you get the sense that the child and parent are really having a blast making a book together. So who are your favorite child/parent collaborators? Emma Walton and Julie Andrews? Is it a collaboration if your dad drew you into a story, like John Steptoe did with his kids when he created Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters?

English teachers are increasingly trying to teach comprehension using short texts and excerpts from novels. But if they just read whole novels aloud at a fast pace, they might get better results. Elementary school teachers have long used brief texts to teach reading comprehension, but now English teachers in middle and high school are also abandoning the idea of teaching whole books and novels. One factor is the pressure to raise scores on standardized reading tests that began in 2001 with the passage of No Child Left Behind. The tests aim to assess comprehension abilities through questions about short passages on disconnected topics, and teachers try to prepare their students by mimicking that approach in their instruction. Pretty much no one has argued that the way to boost comprehension is to have teachers read entire challenging novels aloud at a fast pace, pausing only occasionally to make sure everyone is following the story. And yet, a recent study from England suggests that approach can be powerful.

When author Ellen Oh co-founded We Need Diverse Books (WNDB) five years ago, the focus was on the importance of marginalized youth seeing themselves in books. Over the years, Oh has realized that they were taking too narrow a view by zeroing in on getting the books to kids from marginalized communities. “While that is deeply important, just as important is the need for all children to read widely and diversely about all communities,” says Oh, the organization’s CEO and president. “It’s focusing on the importance of all aspects of Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop’s groundbreaking essay of ‘Windows, Mirrors and Sliding Glass Doors.’ So it has become increasingly important to talk about how diverse books are good for all children, all readers. In that way, we teach children empathy where none might have been before.”

Dav Pilkey got the idea of a lifetime in second grade, when he was sent to sit in the hallway. “I was having a lot of trouble in school,” he told TODAY’s Jenna Bush Hager. “I had just been diagnosed with what they now call ADHD. And I had — I have — dyslexia. My teacher didn’t know what to do with me. So she was sending me out into the hallway.” Pilkey says he didn’t want his friends to think of him as “the bad guy.” So he drew “Captain Underpants” as a way to entertain his friends. More than four decades later, Pilkey has entertained millions of second-graders. His “Captain Underpants” and “Dog Man” series have sold more than 100 million copies, become a movie, a Netflix series, and now, a traveling musical.

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) provides an opening for states, school districts, and communities to change the relationship between early childhood programs and schools in fundamental ways that can greatly benefit children and families. Decades of research confirm that the programs that serve young children and their families are most effective when they are of high-quality, aligned, and coordinated, leading to “continuity of high-quality experiences.” Yet quality is inconsistent and fragmented in our mixed delivery system of public and private programs, and the central disconnect between early childhood programs and elementary schools is particularly problematic. The ESSA plans many states have developed present opportunities to improve quality and significantly deepen collaboration between schools, districts, and community organizations.

Beau Terry is a bright student who “absolutely loves” school. However, it did not always come easy for him. Beau has dyslexia and struggled to read but did not get the help he needed in public school. Beau’s mom, Christie Aitken, said there were public school teachers who wanted to help, but said there were not intervention programs in place at the time ten years ago when Beau was younger. Aitken said Beau transferred out of public school and into private school where he got the individualized attention he needed. She is now celebrating the passage of an Alabama law that she says will give the additional help students need. The law would require all students K-3 struggling to read get an individual reading plan to help them become proficient readers. Those with dyslexia would also participate in specific intervention programs aimed at helping with areas like language development and fluency, according to the new law.

Across the community, dozens of miniature freestanding schoolhouses, robots, telephone booths and huts dot the yards of homes, churches and even some schools. They’re filled with other worlds just waiting to be discovered — romance, mystery, fairy tales, thrills and more — all free for the taking. Did folks in the area get together one day and decide to start giving away books? Well, sort of. It’s all part of an international effort with the motto “Take a book, share a book” that continues to grow 10 years after it was launched. These structures are called Little Free Libraries (LFL), an effort driven by a registered nonprofit that aims to inspire a love of reading and build community through neighborhood book exchanges. The organization began in Hudson, Wis., in 2009 and has since expanded to more than 90,000 registered libraries in all 50 states and 91 countries around the world.

Many teachers struggle giving science instruction its due. In fact, the 2018 National Study of Science and Mathematics Education reported that many elementary school teachers do not even provide science instruction every week. According to the National Science Teachers Association Position Statement, “Elementary science instruction often takes a back seat to math and reading and receives little time in the school day.” If STEM is so important, how can we give students more exposure to it? I was surprised to learn from Linda Kekelis, an education researcher and advisor for the STEM NEXT Opportunity Fund, that parents are one of the biggest influences on kids’ interest and persistence in STEM. Parents can not only spark a new interest in STEM, they can also encourage their kids to pursue a pathway to a related career.

The moon is a less aspirational subject these days, and, as the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission approached, I grew curious how contemporary children’s-book authors reckon with that now distant—old-timey, even—event.The recently published “My Little Golden Book About the First Moon Landing,” written by Chip Lovitt with illustrations by Bryan Sims, is perhaps the closest analogue among newly published books for “You Will Go to the Moon.” The text begins, “On July 20, 1969, two human beings walked on the Moon for the very first time. It is an amazing story!” There are other new books for kids that grapple more directly with the meaning of the Apollo program. “Rocket to the Moon!,” written and illustrated by Don Brown, is a witty graphic novel for slightly older kids that ends with a look back on Earth from space—seeming to imply that, if nothing else, the program gave us a quarter of a million miles’ worth of perspective on our home planet. Brian Floca’s “Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11,” a wonderful book, from 2009, that has been reissued this year in an expanded edition, ends by striking a similar there’s-no-place-like-home chord, showing us the Apollo 11 capsule splashing down safely in the Pacific, the astronauts returning “back to family, back to friends, to warmth, to light, to trees and blue water.” The most graceful evocation of this epiphany that I have found in a book for young people comes from “The Man Who Went to the Far Side of the Moon: The Story of Apollo 11 Astronaut Michael Collins,” which was written, illustrated, and designed (it includes photos, charts, and documents) by Bea Uusma Schyffert and first published in Sweden.

On a hot Sunday afternoon, beneath royal blue umbrellas pitched in the courtyard of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA) downtown, about 50 kids transform long strips of paper into colorful canvases under the direction of Hervé Tullet, the internationally renowned author of more than 80 interactive children’s books, including the wildly popular “Press Here.” They roam around like little Jackson Pollocks with inky markers in their fists, filling in blank space with fat pink circles or wonky green lines, contributing to the emerging patterns. “I give instructions, very clear, very simple, very bold,” the French-born Tullet says of his approach to the collective art-making practice literally underfoot, the latest iteration of his Ideal Exhibition. Through workshops and instructional videos, anyone can perform Tullet’s process and become an artist of the multisite project, part of which will hang in the ICA LA’s project room and evolve through Sept. 8 as gallery-goers continue to contribute. Tullet sees the Ideal Exhibition as a culmination of what he’s always done on the page: champion creativity and collaboration.

How many K-12 public schools, districts, and students are there? What does the American student population look like? And how much are we, as a nation, spending on the education of these youth? These data points can give perspective to the implications and potential impact of education policies. The Education Week library provides answers to these questions, and some other enlightening facts.

When preschool teachers read books in their classrooms, the questions they ask play a key role in how much children learn, research has shown. But a new study that involved observing teachers during class story times found that they asked few questions – and those that they did ask were usually too simple. Only 24 percent of what teachers said outside of reading the text were questions, the results found. And the kids answered those questions correctly 85 percent of the time. “When kids get 85 percent of the questions right, that means the questions the teacher is asking are too easy,” said Laura Justice, co-author of the study and professor of educational psychology at The Ohio State University. “We don’t want to ask all difficult questions. But we should be coaxing children along cognitively and linguistically by occasionally offering challenging questions.” While this study was done with teachers, the same lessons apply for parents. Previous research suggests that most parents don’t ask any questions at all when they’re reading with their children, according to Justice.

Although preschool can provide children with a vital foundation for success later in life, only 43 percent of four-year-olds nationwide have access to public preschool. The rate varies widely, with no options available in some rural and low-income areas, sometimes called “childcare deserts.” But a community outside Denver has found an innovative way to bring education to kids. The school on wheels sets up each morning beside this park. Eight children, ages 3 to 6, attend the morning session. Most speak Spanish at home. This community is over 90 percent Latino.

Some research has linked focusing on social-emotional competencies to higher academic performance and better outcomes outside of school. But while most teachers say it’s important for them to teach these skills, many still don’t feel equipped to help students manage their emotions—especially when it comes to the children who are facing the greatest hurdles, according to a new nationally representative survey from the Education Week Research Center. It’s not just teachers. Colleges of education have been slow to embrace the teaching of social-emotional learning as part of their core curricula for prospective teachers. Principals also report in surveys that they favor the teaching of SEL, but time constraints and lack of teacher training are a major barrier.

The Common Core literacy standards were intended to shift instruction toward building knowledge and away from illusory reading comprehension “skills.” But many teachers have stuck with “skills” and added nonfiction—a losing combination. For decades, schools—especially at the elementary level—have spent many hours trying to teach reading comprehension “skills” like “finding the main idea” or “making inferences.” But, as cognitive scientists have long known, the most important factor in reading comprehension isn’t skill; it’s knowledge of the topic. If schools want to boost comprehension, they need to build knowledge through history, science, literature, and the arts—the very subjects that have gotten short shrift to make room for comprehension “skills.”

This week’s column features first books in new series and the latest books in episodic series that can be read in any order as well as standalone titles that will entice readers to earlier books. We’ve included picture books and early chapter books for younger readers and books in a variety of genres for older readers. All are perfect for summer reading.

In order for students with a vast array of needs to master dense, rigorous curriculum and to demonstrate success on high-stakes assessments, they must have consistent opportunities to talk, read, and write about content-area concepts. To meet this challenge, teachers may reconcile their constrained time with the need to provide students opportunities for critical literacy practice by adopting the talk, read, talk, write (TRTW) routine. TRTW is a simple way to deliver content that is centered around students’ practice of literacy skills rather than centered on a teacher’s direct teaching of a concept. The TRTW routine can be used to teach an entire lesson but is also easily adapted as a routine for teaching individual terms or concepts.

School readiness once was thought to be solely the function of the child and family with focus primarily on pre-academic skills. We now recognize that schools and communities also are responsible for school readiness, and that a child’s experiences from birth impact the social, emotional, physical and cognitive development needed for school success. Pediatricians have a significant role to play in school readiness. They have longstanding relationships with children and families that are established early and grow over time. In many instances, pediatricians are at the forefront of advocating for access to health care, home visitation, preschool mental health consultation, early literacy funding, quality early childhood programs and child care subsidies. In multiple ways, pediatricians are an integral link between children and their families to school and community programs that promote school readiness.

Back in the 1950s, I walked around the block to my local library in Castro Valley — a first taste of independence at the age of 8. I loved the blond Swedish triplets Flicka, Ricka and Dicka. I loved reading about the Founding Fathers plus some Betsy Ross. Then there were the Betsy-Tacy books by Maud Lovelace and some Beverly Cleary. By current standards, the library shelves (and my favorites) were devoid of diversity and real-life angst. But much has changed, as can be seen in four new books that give visibility to the once unseen and recognition to subjects once taboo. I can’t help but compare what was available back in my day to what is available today.

“Molly of Denali,” the new PBS cartoon about a 10-year-old Athabascan girl with a video blog about life in rural Alaska is the first nationally distributed children’s series with a Native American lead. It follows the spunky and inventive Molly Mabray and her friends as they solve kid-friendly problems, like earning enough money to buy an inflatable tube to ride on the water or finding ways to keep four-legged creatures out of their garden. It also represents what is perhaps PBS’s most ambitious effort yet to educate its young viewers about a distinct cultural group, while investing in making sure that members of that group are involved at every level of production. Dozens of Alaska Native writers and advisers were recruited to help create the children’s series.

The mobile tech revolution is barely a decade old, and it brings special challenges to parents and caregivers, says pediatrician Jenny Radesky, who sees patients at the University of Michigan and is one of the top researchers in the field of parents, children and new media. “The telephone took decades to reach 50 million global users, and we had Pokémon Go do that within, like, two and a half weeks,” Radesky says. “So we all feel like we’ve been blown over by a tidal wave of all this new stuff.” Most of us feel like we’re failing, at least at times, to manage the competing bids for attention that come from work, kids, partners and from our digital devices. While she doesn’t want to come off as “judgy of parents,” Radesky and other experts shared four takeaways from the research that can guide parents who want to improve their relationships both with their kids and with technology.

The International Literacy Association (ILA) announced today the launch of the ILA National Recognition for the Preparation of Literacy Professionals, an initiative that recognizes outstanding licensure, certificate, and endorsement programs that prepare reading/literacy specialists in the United States—the only one of its kind. ILA National Recognition evaluates education preparation providers (EPPs) who seek the organization’s stamp of approval and award the designation on the basis of adherence to ILA’s Standards for the Preparation of Literacy Professionals 2017 (Standards 2017). Standards 2017 addresses the demands of 21st-century literacy instruction through rigorous field work, digital learning, and equity-building practices.