Today’s Literacy Headlines

Communities In Schools, the national organization that provides wraparound services to students in high-poverty schools, will receive up to $165 million from the Ballmer Group, the largest gift in the organization’s 45-year history. The announcement comes just a little more than a year after MacKenzie Scott, the billionaire philanthropist and writer, gave a no-strings-attached $133.5 million gift to Communities In Schools’ national office and select state affiliates to expand its in-school support services to low-income students. The latest gift from the Ballmer Group will go toward taking the Communities In Schools’ student-support model to 1,000 more schools, both in new locations and in places where the organization already operates.

As we commemorate the lives and history of Black peoples in the United States this February, SLJ has curated a list of fiction and nonfiction books that can be paired in the classroom to offer a nuanced presentation of major historical events of Black history. In this roundup, we feature books that cover some of the experiences lived by the enslaved in this country, from 1619 (the first slave ship) to 1865 (Juneteenth).

As veteran educators, for years we have encountered students who struggled with decoding and reading comprehension, yet were continually pushed on to the next grade. That led to questions: How did they get this far not knowing how to read? What reading program did they use in elementary school? What interventions are helping them catch up? Are parents aware that their child has reading challenges? Is a learning disability at play?

Shortly after taking office, schools Chancellor David Banks took aim at one of the most popular reading programs in New York City public schools, one that had been long embraced by his predecessors. The curriculum, created by Lucy Calkins at Columbia’s Teachers College, “has not worked,” he declared. “There’s a very different approach that we’re going to be looking to take.” Banks, along with Mayor Eric Adams, has vowed to reshape the way elementary schools teach children to read. Backed by a growing chorus of literacy experts, city officials argue the Teachers College approach hinges too heavily on independent reading without enough explicit instruction on the relationship between sounds and letters, known as phonics, leaving many students floundering.

Beginning in the upper elementary grades, research-backed study skills should be woven into the curriculum, argues psychology professor Daniel Willingham in a new book, “Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning is Hard and How You Can Make It Easy.” By the time children are in grade 12, our expectations are very high regarding independent learning. But the brain doesn’t come with a user’s manual, and independent learning calls for many separate skills. Once they’re expected to read something and commit it to memory because there’s going to be a quiz, for example, we need to be teaching them how to read hard texts and commit things to memory.

A lovely aphorism holds that education isn’t the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire. But too often, neither are pails filled nor fires lit. Reading may be the most important skill we can give children. It’s the pilot light of that fire. Yet we fail to ignite that pilot light, so today some one in five adults in the United States struggles with basic literacy, and after more than 25 years of campaigns and fads, American children are still struggling to read. Eighth graders today are actually a hair worse at reading than their counterparts were in 1998. One explanation gaining ground is that, with the best of intentions, we grown-ups have bungled the task of teaching kids to read.

Like many of us during this gloomy time of the year, Alice is sick of the cold and heavy winter clothing. So the little girl turns to a book that helps her escape to warmer, tropical worlds. That’s the premise of Grace Lin and Kate Messner’s new children’s book, “Once Upon A Book.” It’s a look into the imagination of a little girl who discovers the joy of reading and the meaning of home. Lin says, “… it’s a way to show them that a book is such a wonderful way to explore other places and other lives and to live another life in the book. But it’s a safe place because you can always — when you’re done, you close the book and return home. And that’s just what this book does, too.”

Raquel Martinez thinks a lot about time. The time of the day she schedules parent conferences. The time of year she holds open houses at Isaac Stevens Middle School, where she’s the principal. For her, time is essential to how she shows respect for the community her school serves. Many of her students’ parents are farmworkers—some of them migrant workers—who toil 12- to 14-hour days in apple orchards, and on cherry and potato farms in and around Pasco, Wash. “When I ask a family member to come [to the campus] during the day, they are losing money to buy food to put on the table,” said Martinez, 40, who is in her fifth year as the school’s principal.

Lois Lowry (a two-time Newbery Medalist, for “Number the Stars” and “The Giver”) has written about schoolgirls and church mice, the Holocaust and dream spirits, the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the private lives of toddlers. She is most famous for warmhearted comedies and dystopic fiction. Her style is transparent: graceful and direct, not attracting attention to itself but pulling the reader in. Her signature is compassion. Knowing Lowry’s versatility, I shouldn’t have been surprised that in her latest book she succeeds in doing three things at once. “The Windeby Puzzle” is structurally strange and beautifully crafted, zigzagging, as its subtitle announces, between history and story. The story begins in 1952, when a small, remarkably well-preserved body is unearthed from a bog in northern Germany.

Two new specialized dyslexia programs will open at Brooklyn public schools as New York focuses more on children with the learning disability. Many teachers at the schools will be trained in a phonics-based approach based in research on how to help struggling readers; at other schools, reading specialists work with struggling students.

The United States Board of Books for Young People’s (USBBY) mission is to “[build] bridges of international understanding through children’s and young adult books.” The annual Outstanding International Books List recommends approximately 40 titles for readers, preschool through high school. Chosen by a committee of people who love and study children’s and young adult literature, these books represent the outstanding bridges authors, illustrators, and translators from around the world create each year.

A Tennessee teacher learns that her high-spirited, engaging lessons don’t have to vanish with the implementation of a challenging English curriculum. “From district leaders bringing in experts to train us, to our visits watching other teachers model lessons, to the way we have been effectively coached to plan, it has all helped me to appreciate the many ways in which our curriculum can lead to student success.”

Carey Wright recently finished overseeing Mississippi’s public education system during one of its most transformative decades. As state superintendent of education from 2013 to 2022, Wright led the Mississippi Department of Education as schools in the nation’s poorest state caught up to the national average in 4th grade reading and math after long lagging the rest of the country. Between 2013 and 2019, Mississippi posted the second largest gains in the nation in those subjects on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. During Wright’s tenure as one of the longest-serving state superintendents in the nation, she oversaw implementation of the Literacy-Based Promotion Act, a controversial measure that required 3rd graders to pass an annual reading exam to be promoted to 4th grade, as well as the first state investment in pre-K.

There’s a dizzying amount of activity going on in some states and school districts, spurred by the push to bring classroom practice in line with the “science of reading.” But not all of that activity translates into better reading instruction. Some teachers are being required to take rigorous courses that ask them to re-examine and abandon deeply held beliefs about how children learn to read. Even if they become convinced that change is needed—that is, they have the why—they may not be equipped to put their new understanding into practice. Other teachers are simply being asked to follow a radically different kind of literacy curriculum. They have the what—the instructional materials. But they may not understand why change is necessary.

Parents of dual language learners (DLLs) are often advised not to speak to their infants and toddlers in more than one language. This advice is rooted in outdated notions that speaking to a child in multiple languages, especially when they are infants and toddlers, will confuse them and cause delays in their speech and language development. This belief could not be further from the truth.

Nearly three years into the pandemic, students and teachers in the U.S. are still trying to close the education gap formed by COVID-induced school shutdowns and remote learning struggles. Robert Balfanz, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins School of Education, joins Geoff Bennett to discuss the challenges facing students nationwide and efforts to stem the country’s learning loss.

Teachers in every content area can build partnerships with the school librarian to support students’ academic literacy across the curriculum. School librarians have always been a cross-curricula resource. They provide physical and online resources to meet the needs of the teachers and students, but they are also able to teach information literacy skills (including academic reading) through inquiry across all subjects.

With nearly 60% of California children not meeting state reading standards by the third grade, strong parent-teacher partnerships and a statewide shift toward evidence-based reading strategies are crucial in helping students learn how to read, a panel of experts said during an EdSource roundtable. “Learning to read is not like learning to speak. We learn how to speak very easily. It is not the same with reading; we need explicit instruction,” said Megan Bacigalupi, a parent of a student with dyslexia and co-founder of CA Parent Power, a statewide parent advocacy organization focused on literacy.

SLJ spoke with five school librarians about how they came to the profession, the work they do each day, and their connection with students. Here are their stories. Says librarian Dionne Howell-Taylor, “I love being able to create programming and getting to work with all of the students in the school. I want them to feel important and to know that the library is a safe haven. It’s important that we have Black librarians because librarians represent the core of a school. Everyone sees us, and we’re the glue that holds a school together.”

The research on early childhood education can seem as messy as a playground sandbox. Some studies show that preschool produces remarkable academic and social benefits for low-income children, and some don’t. But a more coherent story is taking shape with the latest 15-year milestone of a large, long-term study of 4,000 children who attended Tulsa, Oklahoma’s preschool program. In 1998, Oklahoma became the first state to offer free public prekindergarten for all four-year-olds. In the latest study, published in January 2023, children who went to preschool were far more likely to go to college within a couple years of graduating high school.

Klassen had been influenced by the quietly revolutionary artist before Carle made a single book for children. Calling it a tribute might actually be selling this book — Eric Loves Animals (Just Like You!) — a little short. The most complete collection to date of animals Carle depicted throughout his career, it succeeds on its own, regardless of one’s knowledge of or past affection for his work. The only bits of text in the book are the names of the (alphabetically presented) animals and carefully chosen quotes from the man himself. Children can understand and appreciate these quotes at face value while adults will discern their wisdom. The type is set in Carle’s hand-cut letter font.

While using Black history lessons to fill in the gaps in civics and general curriculum is necessary, so is providing access to stories that do not see the Black experience as one rooted only in oppression and enslavement.

Our special education team includes six teachers and four paraprofessionals, and we serve our students through a combination of models. We offer self-contained and behavioral support classes for students with significant exceptionalities, which some of us teach in designated classrooms that have remained intact. We also provide push-in and pull-out services for our students with mild to moderate learning needs, meaning that we teach them in a general education setting as well as pulling them out into a separate setting, which, this year, has become the hallway.

A quarter of Russellville, Alabama’s students are English learners. The demographic shift in the student body is a reflection of a national picture. A drive around downtown Russellville tells a story 20 years in the making. Around the corner from the historic Roxy Theatre on North Jackson Avenue stands the Pollo-lo-Quillo bakery. The busiest barber shop in town is Napoles, owned by a family originally from Guatemala. Even on Highway 43, the main thoroughfare, Wendy’s, Burger King, and Kentucky Fried Chicken share the road with Las Palmas Taqueria & Mexican Grill and El Patron.

Today’s Black librarians follow the path of those who came before them, breaking barriers and changing the profession.

Except that he was there alone, which is somewhat unusual, January 29, 2023, was an ordinary Sunday night at Doug Salati’s shared Brooklyn studio, started by Sophie Blackall and Brian Floca, which he “had the incredibly good fortune to join a few years ago.” Salati said that he was “catching up on some emails and getting a project I’m working on in order before the new week began” when the evening took a turn for the extraordinary. In what he described as “a once-in-a-lifetime moment,” he answered his phone to hear Robert Bittner, chair of this year’s Caldecott committee, inform him he had won the award for Hot Dog (Knopf).

The annual announcement of the American Library Association (ALA) Youth Media Awards is the biggest event of the year in the world of children’s publishing — 20 separate awards for books and media, all chosen by librarians. And who knows children’s literature better than librarians? The Newbery, Caldecott, Printz, Coretta Scott King and other Youth Media Awards are some of the most prestigious awards an author or illustrator can aspire to. The 2023 Youth Media Awards were announced Monday morning, January 30, during the ALA’s LibLearnX conference in New Orleans.

Early Monday afternoon, author Amina Luqman-Dawson felt like she was “floating in a dream.” “I am happy to stay in this state for a while,” said Luqman-Dawson after her debut novel “Freewater” won the 2023 Newbery Medal, and she was also awarded the Coretta Scott King Author Award.

Anyone who’s ever scratched their head over their car manual or struggled to parse a website’s terms of service knows: It’s hard to read about a topic you don’t really understand. It’s a common-sense statement that’s backed by research. Studies have shown that readers use their background knowledge — vocabulary, facts, and conceptual understanding — to comprehend the text they read. Much of this evidence isn’t new. But it’s received more attention now, amid the “science of reading” movement.

To improve literacy rates in the U.S., reading expert Timothy Shanahan says we need to stop looking for silver bullets and instead invest in teaching a much broader range of skills. He says we need to be doing the harder work of building reading programs focused on skills such as teaching students how to make sense of difficult texts, how to read effectively in the various disciplines they study in middle and high school, and how to use generative writing to deepen the knowledge they encounter in texts.

Morrisett co-founded the Sesame Workshop, originally the Children’s Television Workshop, with Ganz Cooney in 1968. He served as a board member until his death. The impetus for Sesame Street, which first aired in 1969, was both the civil rights movement and the fact that children from disadvantaged backgrounds were entering school months behind grade level, Morrisett said in a 2019 interview with member station WBUR. “Without Lloyd Morrisett, there would be no Sesame Street,” co-founder Joan Ganz Cooney wrote in Sesame Workshop’s announcement. “It was he who first came up with the notion of using television to teach preschoolers basic skills, such as letters and numbers. He was a trusted partner and loyal friend to me for over fifty years, and he will be sorely missed.”

Here are four main research takeaways for school districts as they assess the strength of their own writing program: reading and writing are intimately connected; writing matters even at the earliest grades, when students are learning to read; like reading, writing must be taught explicitly; and writing can help students learn content—and make sense of it.

New Jersey has become the first state to require information literacy curriculum standards for K–12 students—and the state’s school librarians played a major role in making that happen. The push to include information literacy in curricular standards in the state began years ago with a task force consisting of members of school, public, and academic library organizations.

If books can transport young readers to different places, transportation books show them the way. In today’s children’s picture book market, there are some exciting and unexpected rides for young vehicle-loving readers to check out—stories about family, how roads work, or how kids around the world get from one location to another.

Nonfiction is too often underrepresented in English/language arts classrooms, even though it’s “never been more vibrant or vital” for young people. That’s according to a new position statement by the National Council of Teachers of English that includes a list of recommendations to expand the use of nonfiction literature (which can include which can encompass memoirs, essays, informational texts, literary or narrative journalism, and more) in ELA instruction. The statement proposes a “paradigm shift” for reading and writing instruction, which often prioritizes fiction. .

3 years after a challenging shift to high-quality curriculum, students are more confident — and competent — than ever before. Jennifer Whalen, assistant principal for Battle Academy for Teaching and Learning in Hamilton County Schools says, “I believe our curriculum has helped to create that joy. Organized into four topical modules for each grade level, students and teachers have a full quarter to dive deeply into each topic, steadily building vocabulary, background knowledge and experiences that promote strong reading comprehension and literacy skills. Our students have found a real sense of pride in becoming experts as they move through the modules.”

Award-winning Cuban-American author Meg Medina has today been announced as the Library of Congress’ National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. Growing up in Queens, New York, Medina credits her Cuban mother, aunts, and grandmother with her early exposure to storytelling. She reflects how her childhood home did not have a lot of books, but her family would share stories via spoken word, “They just filled my mind with stories that had the double benefit of just helping them remember their stories and their lives and helping me understand my culture.”

“Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day” refuses explicit conclusions. That’s the source of its appeal. “It has been a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day,” Alexander says, on the book’s penultimate page. “My mom says some days are like that.” His mother acknowledges his experience without endorsing (or rejecting) any specific interpretation. Maybe she’s decided to give Alexander some space to figure things out on his own.

In one sense, the national conversation about what it will take to make sure all children become strong readers has been wildly successful. In the middle of all that, though, the focus on the “science of reading” has elided its twin component in literacy instruction: writing. Writing is intrinsically important for all students to learn—after all, it is the primary way beyond speech that humans communicate. But more than that, research suggests that teaching students to write in an integrated fashion with reading is not only efficient, it’s effective.

Daniel Willingham is a University of Virginia psychologist who frequently engages in pop culture battles armed with academic research. He has made it a personal crusade to persuade teachers that the idea of learning styles is a myth. For years, he has complained that teachers aren’t heeding research about reading instruction, and that many educators are misguided when it comes to teaching critical thinking. Now, Willingham has shifted his focus from teachers to students. In his new book, “Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning is Hard and How You Can Make it Easy,” he points out all the wrong ways that students do homework, take notes in class or study for tests.

Traditionally, accessibility features have been perceived as tools that only benefit specific learners. For example, if you have a student with dyslexia, you might help that student learn how to use the text-to-speech and speech-to-text features of their device when reading and writing. However, accessibility features (while essential for some learners) can also be beneficial to other learners. If we view accessibility features through the lens of Universal Design for Learning, then we realize that accessibility features are one way to promote access and minimize barriers for the wide variety of learners in our classrooms.

Here’s a story you might know — it’s a classic fairy tale — “Once upon a time, there was a little old woman and a little old man who lived together in a little old house. They were lonely, so the little old lady decided to make a man out of stinky cheese.” It’s Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith’s take on The Gingerbread Man, with one very important plot twist — the stinky cheese man is so stinky that no one wants to run, run, run after him, much less eat him. It’s the title story of their 1992 children’s book, The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales

A more intentional focus on writing instruction is reaping big rewards for a Tennessee district. In Sumner County, a district serving about 29,000 students, school leaders in 2019 were looking for a new, more effective way to bolster students’ comprehension skills, starting in the early elementary grades. Sumner County began implementing a new English/language arts curriculum that incorporates writing as a main focus of students’ lessons, pushing them beyond memoirs and personal essays to build this background knowledge. While the bulk of the writing instruction happens in students’ ELA classes, other courses, like science and social studies, now also incorporate more writing projects linked to their lessons.

Subject-specific vocabulary goes hand-in-hand with a deep and meaningful knowledge of content. It allows us to engage with that subject, unlocks understanding, and promotes clear and precise communication. At the end of a topic or unit of work, I like to encourage my students to play with the words they’ve learned. I use five different word-association games that get students to recall, describe, explain, listen, and verbalize the subject-specific vocabulary from that topic or unit of work.

Many immigrants travel to new lands in hopes of a better life, but once they arrive they often feel small. Two new picture books show that the ways in which immigrants and people of color make themselves small — or are forced to minimize themselves — are myriad.

Author Meg Medina will be the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature for 2023-24, the Library of Congress (LOC) and Every Child a Reader announced. The 2019 Newbery Medal winner for Merci Suárez Changes Gears is Cuban-American and will become the first author of Latina heritage to serve in the role. Her platform will be “Cuéntame!: Let’s talk books,” an idea inspired by the Spanish phrase that friends and families use when catching up with one another. The goal is to encourage connection through books that offer mirrors of the readers’ lives as well as windows into new worlds and experiences.

Parents are influential in helping kids navigate the twists and turns that lead to literacy. I offer five teaching tenets to carry with you. Don’t worry, there are no scripted sequences, rigid rules, or worksheets forthcoming. These are principles any parent can remember and apply with ease during long, busy days with young children. Some of the five you may know instinctually. Others may have never crossed your mind. All deserve to be hallmarks of the way we approach raising readers.

At Kegonsa Elementary School, teachers try to demystify how different styles of writing are structured, down to the sentence level. They work with students on mastering the building blocks of paragraphs and essays, and they introduce tools students use to craft their own writing. All the while, kids are writing about the texts that they’re reading—linking together these two core components of English/language arts instruction. These components are hallmarks of a specific approach to writing instruction, one that favors explicit instruction and lots of modeling.

As literacy experts strongly suggest, encoding is often underrepresented in early literacy instruction, even in programs that claim to be steeped in evidence-based practices. Education Week spoke to literacy experts, researchers, and educators to find out why and what students miss when their exposure to encoding is irregular or minimal. We also culled strategies from structured-literacy advocates on how to embed encoding into daily classroom instruction.

A recent book provides valuable information about what kinds of teaching strategies are likely to be effective, but many teachers will need more explicit guidance in how and when to implement them. The book, whose lead authors are Bryan Goodwin and Kristin Rouleau, is called The New Classroom Instruction That Works: The Best Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement. As the title suggests, its purpose is to inform teachers about research on education and enable them to apply it in their classrooms.

A new study shows that adding parent support programs to regular well check visits at pediatricians’ offices can improve the health and well-being of children and their parents. The program Smart Beginnings “significantly promoted” parents engaging in cognitively stimulating activities with their children, leading to an increase in talking to children, reading with children and the use of rich language — deliberately exposing children to a broad vocabulary throughout their daily activities.

This is the final guest post by Jason Reynolds, who is concluding his third term as the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. SEE YOU SOON. This is not the same as, See you later. I repeat, this is not the same as, See you later. “See you later” lacks urgency. It lacks seriousness and commitment. But my time as your National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature was certainly very serious to me and I was relentlessly committed. So to walk away from it, to bow out with a cavalier, See you later, is like throwing my hand up and waving goodbye while already turned away. Instead, I’ll say, See you soon. Because soon implies effort. That I’ll work to still be a light, partially to shine on the next ambassador, and always to shine on you.

Colorado State University’s teacher preparation program won the state’s seal of approval Wednesday and a nod to recent changes in how the university trains future educators to teach young students how to read. The decision is the latest development in an ongoing state effort to hold Colorado’s teacher preparation programs accountable for how they train prospective teachers on reading instruction.

The education community has been abuzz with the rise of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence tool that can write anything with just a simple prompt. Most of the conversation has been centered on the extent to which students will use the chat bot—but ChatGPT could also fundamentally change the nature of teachers’ jobs. So far, teachers have used—or considered using—the chat bot to plan lessons, put together rubrics, offer students feedback on assignments, respond to parent emails, and write letters of recommendation, among other tasks. While some educators worry about the implications of automating these parts of teaching, others say that the tool can save them hours of work, freeing up time for student interactions or their personal life.

Murfreesboro City Schools prioritized high quality curriculum and professional learning. Over this past year, we’ve focused heavily on deepening our understanding around foundational skills instruction. The Tennessee Department of Education has led a statewide effort to provide all teachers with sounds-first instruction aligned with the science of reading, and 99% of our district’s primary teachers and academic interventionists have completed this training.

Students in New Mexico’s Title I schools, including those in tribally controlled areas, will have access to 1:1 online tutoring services through a nearly $3.3 million investment funded with federal COVID-19 Governor’s Emergency Education Relief funds. Up to 20 hours of free and virtual tutoring services are available to students in grades pre-K through 8.

Elementary students need rich content knowledge to become better readers and to be able to engage in project-based learning (PBL). Within rigorous PBL, students need content knowledge development to effectively learn how to read, write, and talk. Without surface-level knowledge, students are unable to access deep and transfer learning within and across subjects. Studies have shown that skills don’t transfer without a rich content basis in which these skills can link.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a five-year $20 million grant to the University of Buffalo for the establishment of an artificial intelligence (AI) institute that will focus on the speech-language pathology needs of young children. The new AI Institute for Exceptional Education will aim to develop advanced AI technologies leading to new speech-language pathology assessments, interventions and services.

The skill sets of visual thinkers are essential to finding real-world solutions to society’s many problems. I am often invited to give talks at corporations and government agencies, and the first thing I tell managers is that they need a neurodiverse work force. Complementary skills are the key to successful teams. We need the people who can build our trains and planes and internet, and the people who can make them run. Studies have shown that diverse teams will outperform homogeneous teams.

For the past 25 years, U.S. policy has urged schools to keep students with disabilities in the same classrooms with their general education peers unless severe disabilities prevent it. But a recent international analysis of all the available research on special education inclusion found inconsistent results. Some children thrived while others did very badly in regular classrooms. Overall, students didn’t benefit academically, psychologically or socially from the practice. Analysis unable to disentangle which students benefit from being taught alongside general education peers.