Today’s Literacy Headlines

Amid the stress and disruption of the pandemic, parents and caregivers have had less time and energy to engage their babies and toddlers in conversation—and the lack of talk already shows in their language skills. New studies from Rhode Island Hospital and the nonprofit LENA Foundation find that infants born during the pandemic vocalize significantly less and engage in less verbal “turn-taking” behaviors found to be critical for language development. As those babies grow, experts worry they will need significant supports to be ready for school.

Two million students in 86 school districts across the country have had their access to books restricted because of book bans this school year, according to a new report by PEN America, a free speech advocacy organization. While book bans—specifically books with LGBTQ characters and people of color, or about race and racism—have been reported by media outlets across the country this year, the report sheds light on how widespread the book bans actually are through anecdotal accounts and by tracking what kinds of books are being targeted.

The ability to map letters to sounds is considered an important indicator of early literacy skills. Previous research shows that letter sound mappings in kindergarten is strongly associated with later reading success. A new study published in Child Development provides initial evidence that daytime naps could be beneficial for preschool children’s learning of letter-sound skills. “Having a nap after learning might facilitate the capacity to utilize newly learned information in a new task,” said Hua-Chen Wang, lecturer in the School of Education at Macquarie University.

Teaching students to identify and express their own emotions—and consider those of others—empowers them, and sets them up for learning. Here are practices to help kids at different grade levels develop the vocabulary and practice the emotional literacy skills to better understand and more effectively participate in the world around them.

A new multimillion-dollar effort will fund K-12 tutoring projects, experiment with new models, and bring more clarity to what works and what doesn’t—and create a tutoring network connecting dozens of districts and some states.

Patricia MacLachlan, an award-winning writer known to millions of young readers as the author of “Sarah, Plain and Tall,” a novel about two motherless farm children and the gentle woman who comes to the prairie to make them whole, died March 31 at her home in Williamsburg, Mass. Mrs. MacLachlan wrote more than 60 children’s books during her half-century career, which she began in her mid-30s after her own children started school, leaving her time in the day to collect her memories and observations and turn them into stories.

Dionysos: The New God is the last of George O’Connor’s Olympians, a series of graphic novels he’s been writing and illustrating for the last 12 years. Each book retells the ancient Greek myths through the lens of one of the gods or goddesses, from Athena, goddess of wisdom, to Hephaistos, god of the forge. O’Connor’s illustrations are bursting with action, humor and lots of details. He researched the ancient myths in order to get as close as possible to the original stories.

California education leaders say hiring more literacy coaches and specialists to work with both teachers and students is a key to getting all students to read by the third grade by 2026, amid what some have called a national literacy crisis. Literacy coaches mainly train teachers and school staff on literacy instruction, conduct professional development and facilitate whatever reading curriculum the school uses. Specialists work directly with the students in one-on-one or small-group settings.

Effective retrieval practice strategies help students identify what they know about a given concept and retain that information for the long-term. Here are some deeper dives into seven retrieval practices that work.

“It is impossible to overestimate Ross Todd’s influence on the school library profession,” said Joyce Valenza, who worked with Todd at Rutgers University’s School of Communication and Information since 2014 but knew him for more than a decade before that. An associate professor of library and information science at Rutgers University in New Jersey, Todd was committed to using evidence-based practice in school librarianship and research in the school library field that focused on three things—understanding how children learn and build new knowledge from information, evidence-based practice for school libraries, and information utilization for learning.

Colorado has unveiled an online database showing what reading programs schools use in kindergarten through third grade, part of a broader state effort to improve how schools teach reading. It’s part of a package of publicly searchable data mandated by a 2021 state law championed in part by dyslexia advocates. The effort represents Colorado’s first attempt to shed light on details that have long been out of reach for parents and the public, including what reading curriculums schools use and whether those programs have the state’s seal of approval. A 2019 state law requires Colorado schools to use reading curriculum backed by science. State officials have established a list of a dozen core programs that meet this bar.

STEM teacher Kyley Longo-McGarvey loved the idea of creating a sensory path at her school, Myers Elementary—but what makes this path extra-special is that her students designed it, in collaboration with their peers in special education. Because of the pandemic, notes occupational therapist Wendy Bush, “We’re seeing more dysregulation in the kids.” So, not only will Myers’s sensory path be used for kids with sensory needs; it’s a place where any kid can blow off some steam.

How can school leaders know which of the myriad ELA curricula on the market deliver the most comprehensive content knowledge? Thankfully, there’s a new tool to assist them. The Knowledge Map Project, an initiative of the Institute of Education Policy at Johns Hopkins University and Chiefs for Change, evaluates twelve ELA curricula and rates how well they deliver content knowledge.[1] The project team, led by David Steiner, has performed the challenging task of reading each text in each grade level and analyzing them in terms of the knowledge they offer students about the world and the human condition. How topics are sequenced across grade levels is also evaluated to determine how well students have the opportunity to build on prior knowledge in a systematic way.

The benefits of early-childhood education can take a decade or more to come into focus, but a new study in the journal Child Development suggests preschool may help prepare students for better academic engagement in high school. Researchers at the nonprofit ChildTrends, Georgetown University, and the University of Wisconsin tracked more than 4,000 children who started kindergarten in Tulsa, Okla., public schools in 2006. Some 44 percent of the students participated in the Sooner State’s universal state-funded preschools, which include partnerships between school districts and early-learning organizations. Another 14 percent of the students had participated in federal Head Start programs, and the rest did not participate in either program.

Newark students have made scant academic progress so far this school year, according to sobering new test scores that underscore the severity of the pandemic’s toll on student learning and the extraordinary measures that will be required for students to recover. Based on mid-year assessments, no more than 6% of students in any grade from 3-7 are expected to reach the “proficient” level on the state math tests slated to begin next month, according to data that Newark Public Schools officials shared last week. By contrast, 27% of students in grades 3-8 met the state’s benchmarks on the annual math tests in 2019, before the pandemic shut down schools and drastically curtailed learning. Reading scores on the mid-year tests, which students in grades 1-7 took in February, were only slightly higher. In each of the tested grades, about 10% of students or fewer are expected to meet state English standards this year, the data show.

The time that teenagers and tweens spend on YouTube, TikTok, and other video-sharing sites has taken off during the pandemic, while reading time among those age groups remains flat. That was one of the key findings of a recent survey by Common Sense Media, a nonprofit research organization. Media use—defined as everything from reading books to watching videos to scrolling social media—by kids ages 8 to 18 was already on the upswing before the pandemic. But the pace of the acceleration has quickened significantly due to technology-related media use.

Planet Word, the Washington, D.C., museum dedicated to inspiring a love of language, opened a new permanent exhibit called Lexicon Lane on March 26. A combination escape room and puzzle hunt, Lexicon Lane is designed to resemble an old village and offers 26 unique puzzle “cases” for visitors to solve. But before you even enter the museum, there’s a tree in the way. It is virtually impossible to enter the museum without noticing the 18-foot “Speaking Willow” that is stationed in front of its K Street entrance.

One way to inspire discussion about the reading process is to read picture books about reading and learning how to read. These books should be read not only in the classroom but also at home by parents and caregivers. Reading about reading is one of the most helpful ways of immediately addressing the social and emotional needs of beginning readers. The picture books that follow explore the theme of reading from a variety of points of view, but each title assures children that reading achievements can be small, medium, or large—essentially affirming that all reading is worth celebrating.

Museums for Digital Learning (MDL) is a free learning platform that provides K–12 educators with curated museum collection resources and activities aligned with national content standards. Developed by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), Newfields Lab of the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, the Field Museum in Chicago, and History Colorado in Denver, MDL offers a way for museums of all disciplines to leverage digitized museum collections to support K–12 educators and students.

The new question of the week is: What is the best professional-development session you ever participated in, and what made it so good? Who among us hasn’t spent endless hours in pointless, terribly conceived, and horribly executed professional development? However, on occasion, amid these ordeals, some of us may have had a slightly more positive experience. Educators will share those pleasant surprises in this three-part series, and we can only hope that professional-development providers will be reading these commentaries.

These titles that celebrate moms illustrate a diversity of motherhood. There is no one way to be a mom.

A more flexible test, given on the devices schools and students are already using, that quickly produces actionable information for educators and policymakers: That’s the vision going forward for the test known as the Nation’s Report Card. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, is the only national, comparative gauge of K-12 student achievement. The pandemic—as it did with so many other fields—utterly upended things, resulting in the disappointing cancellation of its 2021 administration. Now its leaders say they’ve taken what they’ve learned to heart and are devising plans for a more resilient, purposeful exam.

The school’s leaders at P.S. 236 concluded that the reading curriculum they were using — created by Columbia University’s Teachers College and long championed by the city’s education department — wasn’t working for their students, who are predominantly low-income and largely not proficient readers. They decided to ditch the widely used program where students are often encouraged to independently read books of their choice. Instead, even as the pandemic threatened to derail their plans in September 2020, they moved ahead with a transition to a new reading curriculum where students collectively tackle challenging history and science texts. “We could not wait till we were back to normalcy,” said Lisa Schwartz, a literacy coach assigned to the school. Newly appointed schools Chancellor David Banks recently offered his own blunt assessment of the Teachers College curriculum: “It has not worked.” But changing how a school teaches reading is more complex than simply buying new materials, and the shift underway at P.S. 236 may offer lessons to other elementary schools in New York City considering a curriculum overhaul.

A new version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders released this month includes changes to the definitions of both autism and intellectual disability that experts say will further clarify the diagnoses. The American Psychiatric Association issued the updated manual, which mental health care practitioners, researchers and insurers rely on for decision-making in diagnosing and treating patients, following a three-year process to reflect scientific advances since the fifth edition was published in 2013.

In her new book, Beyond Coding, Umaschi Bers links teaching coding in elementary school to fostering literacy skills and strength of character. The CAL KIBO curriculum developed Bers’s DevTech Research Group at Tufts University introduces powerful ideas of computer science, such as repeat loops, in direct conversation with powerful ideas from literacy, such as repetition. However, before getting to this, it focuses on the concept of sequencing. Sequences can be found in natural languages through words and stories and also in artificial languages.

We are still just beginning to understand the many ways that the Covid-19 pandemic has affected our schools, our students, and all who work in education. We all faced and continue to face countless challenges. For us to move forward, we need to understand how deep these challenges run, how the pandemic has affected student achievement, and how our education system—including assessments—can adapt, innovate, and produce improved student outcomes. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), perhaps better known as The Nation’s Report Card, is in schools now, collecting vital data on what today’s students know and can do at this critical point in their academic careers, their learning experiences during the pandemic, where they struggle, and how we all can help. We’ll also learn about the impact on our teachers, and our schools.

Embedding important terms in stories created with upper elementary and middle school English learners helps them build their academic vocabulary. Interactive digital stories support students in acquiring academic and content vocabulary by embedding the vocabulary within a light, memorable narrative. As students cocreate the story with the teacher by naming characters, supplying backstory, identifying connections, summarizing key points, and more, they become invested in the tale. This interactive experience then serves as a conceptual and linguistic touchstone throughout the unit.

Schools are making a major transition from just communicating with parents to actually engaging with them. This premise led the conversation during a March 8 panel among three school communication experts at SXSW EDU in Austin, Texas. Four tips emerged to support best practices for approaching family engagement strategies, including listening to the school community, not assuming how families communicate and more.

The Eric Carle Museum of PIcture Book Art has announced its 2022 Carle Honors honorees. The Honors recognize people and organizations in four categories: Artist, for lifelong innovation in the field; Angel, an individual or organization whose resources help create illustrated children’s book exhibitions, education programs and more; Mentor, for editors, designers, and educators who are champions of the art form; and Bridge, for individuals or organizations who work in other fields and have brought the art of the picture book to larger audiences. The 2022 honorees are Faith Ringgold (Artist), Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library (Angel), Ajia (Bridge), and Cheryl and Wade Hudson (Mentors).

Louisa Moats is frequently quoted for describing the teaching of reading as “rocket science.” Teaching children to read is complex work that requires knowledge of reading science and of the child as a reader. If teaching reading is rocket science, books are the rockets sending children to places we can often only dream of visiting. Librarians will always be needed to bring the world of books to life for children. They have skilled expertise to support children to apply their literacy skills while also developing a love of reading. As the field continues to make sense of the science of reading, we need school librarians to continue to expand the literary landscape available to children.

Teaching students the neuroscience of emotions helps normalize emotional responses while empowering young people with the science of why we have big feelings and how they happen in the brain. In biological terms, emotions are our brains’ response to stimuli or experiences. While some are certainly more pleasant than others, emotions aren’t good or bad. All emotions are information.

To help connect educational innovations with the learners who want and need them most, the America’s Languages Working Group is launching a first-of-its-kind online portal: Model Programs and Practices Advancing Access and Equity in US Language Education is a registry of programs that can be emulated and adapted by on-the-ground efforts across the country to introduce students from diverse populations to effective language instruction. The portal collects advances in pre-K–12, college and university, and community-based language education, specifically the advances that improve access for more of the nation’s neglected learners and languages.

One small town experiments with new messaging platform to reach families that don’t speak English at home. The requests for translation from families of Tussing Elementary School in Reynoldsburg, OH, ranged from simple reminders that parents needed to sign a form to helping cope with medical emergencies. But during the pandemic, when communication with families at home became even more difficult, the Pickerington Local School District decided to try something new: the TalkingPoints translation app.

Getting your little ones to read daily is just as important as what they read. Reading diverse and inclusive books offers a powerful opportunity to teach your child about empathy and the world around them. Utah Library Association President, Rita Baguio Christiansen, said representation is something that helps to form a child’s identity. “Books are mirrors, and windows and sliding doors. We want all children to be able to see themselves in books and experience other experiences, other cultures, and backgrounds,” she said.

When I think of the parents I’ve interviewed in the past two years, some of the most affected in the early days of the pandemic were those whose children have learning disabilities or differences. Remote school was hard for everyone, but it was particularly difficult for families whose children — 14 percent of all American public school students — needed additional support to learn. As the majority of students return to some semblance of normal, I decided to check back in with parents of kids with learning differences.

If, for some reason, you happen to find yourself feeling overwhelmed or anxious about matters personal, professional or geopolitical, a new hotline offers advice on how to deal with those big feelings. “If you’re nervous, go get your wallet and spend it on ice cream and shoes,” a distinctly young-sounding voice enthusiastically advises. At various points since it became operational late last month, about 9,000 people an hour were calling PepToc, a hotline dispensing the wit and wisdom of students at West Side School, a small primary school (enrollment: 147) in rural Healdsburg, Calif., about 70 miles north of San Francisco.

Rates of children’s physical inactivity, misbehavior, and unmet health needs shot up during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic alongside concerns about parental stress, according to a new analysis of federal data on child well-being. Meanwhile, the numbers of children diagnosed with depression and anxiety stayed on pre-pandemic trendlines, growing steadily between 2016 and 2020. In findings with significant implications for the work of schools, researchers at the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration examined a trove of parent-reported data collected between 2016 and 2020. They analyzed five-year trends and looked for statistically significant increases between 2019 and 2020 in an effort to identify problems that may have been worsened by the pandemic and the continuation of troubling patterns that predate the national crisis.

As researchers involved with early care and education, we should be pleased that President Biden’s first State of the Union address underscored his administration’s commitment to public universal preschool. His plan could provide access for millions of children and families. Yet, our excitement is tempered by concerns that children will not thrive if we put more “school” into preschool. We urge policymakers to move away from the belief that young children need two more years of “school” before kindergarten. Preschool experiences can help set the stage for children to flourish academically, but an overemphasis on teacher-led instruction of school-readiness skills may do just the opposite. The early childhood brain evolves to flourish not through rigorous schooling, in any traditional sense, but through exploration, interaction and conversation. Access is critical, but so is giving young children classrooms full of warmth, support and meaningful activities.

Two years ago this month, schools closed their doors in 185 countries. According to UNESCO, roughly 9 out of 10 schoolchildren worldwide were out of school. It would soon be the biggest, longest interruption in schooling since formal education became the norm in wealthier countries in the late 19th century. At the time, I spoke with several experts in the field of research known as “education in emergencies.” They gave their predictions for the long-term implications of school closures in the United States based on the research on previous school interruptions caused by war, refugee crises, natural disasters and previous epidemics. Two years on, schools are open and masks are coming off in most places, restoring a feeling of normalcy. So, how have these predictions played out? Let’s take a look.

Less than three years ago, students at Minchinbury Public School were struggling to read and interpret even simple texts. Principal Rebecca Webster said she knew something had to change and the western Sydney school embarked on a new literacy program which focused on the explicit teaching of phonics. The final piece of the puzzle, Ms Webster said, was strategic support provided by the Education Department last year to improve comprehension and vocabulary. Initially, not all teachers were convinced, but Ms Webster said the results made it clear it worked.

“Blue” traces the color through time and around the world: from Afghanistan’s lapis lazuli, made into jewelry, ground to create eye shadow and paint, to the indigo plant grown on plantations in India and Bangladesh, soaked in water and used to dye fabric. In Italy, Brew-Hammond writes “from the 13th century onward, some artists began reserving blue to paint the robes of Mary, the mother of Jesus.” Blue was illustrated by Daniel Minter, who says he uses the color in most of his work. “It’s my go-to color. A deep, deep blue,” he says. “A lot of the people in my paintings have tones of blue within the skin. And I use that to show the depth of color within our skin. And that beautiful blue that goes straight all the way to black.”

Halfway through the first school year using an overhauled literacy program, Richmond’s Nystrom Elementary is beginning to see some early signs of success. The 500-student Bay Area school obtained a waiver from West Contra Costa Unified that allowed it to discard the district’s previous reading curriculum, which has been criticized for not focusing enough on phonics. It replaced the program with one that has a greater emphasis on phonics, paired with research-based classroom practice in an attempt to bring every student to grade-level reading. Thus far, the school has seen “growth across the board” on students’ reading skills, said principal Jamie Allardice. And an increasing number of students are expected to end the year on track, he added.

A growing number of children’s book authors and literacy activists have been pushing for more bilingual books for kids, like “Para Todos.” That objective resonates with many bilingual households, particularly in California, where more than a quarter of residents speak Spanish as a first language. A number of academic studies in recent years have shown that bilingual books help improve literacy levels among immigrant families where English is not spoken at home, especially when the stories highlight diverse characters. “Having access to books where you feel represented or you feel heard and validated is a great thing to have at such a young age,” said Belen Delgado, education policy program associate at the Dolores Huerta Foundation, a grassroots activism hub with several chapters in California.

When Françoise Mouly’s children were learning to read, she schlepped a suitcase full of comic books from her native France to the United States to read to them. “With comic books, [children] get the pleasure. It’s not like a bit of medicine,” she says. The combination of engaging tales, funny pictures, and language children can grasp while learning to read is propelling a booming market for early readers. Comic and graphic novel formats are driving the popularity of these books for fledgling book enthusiasts.

TheCitywide Digital Library began in the summer of 2020 to create a collection of diverse and engaging digital books to support students and teachers navigating remote learning. By the end of 2021, NYC DOE students had borrowed more than one million ebooks and audiobooks. The digital collection includes more than 20,000 unique digital titles, including fiction, nonfiction, graphic novels, and cookbooks, all in multiple languages. Those titles are accessible to every student grades K–12, who can log in with a single school credential through the Sora reading app on their computer, tablet, or smart phone. Not only does it make using the system simple, students can keep track of everything they read.

This year, I’ve worked hard to make my classroom a happy place for my students, who come to class looking for some sense of normalcy in an otherwise chaotic world. I ask myself the following questions: What are my students’ favorite activities? What draws the most engagement in the classroom? What can I do to make these occurrences more frequent? These are the places I have seen joy emerge, and providing more opportunities for this to happen helps me keep going and stay focused on the essential part of my job this year—creating a safe environment where students can find joy in learning even in challenging times.

Yale researchers have found that prolonged school disruptions, such as those endured by so many children during the COVID-19 pandemic, resulted in a significant loss in reading abilities for disadvantaged children. This was particularly true for readers with weaker skills, children often found to have dyslexia, who account for about 20% of the population. The researchers also found, however, that intensive, evidence-based intervention can reverse these negative effects.

The kindergarten crisis of last year, when millions of 5-year-olds spent months outside of classrooms, has become this year’s reading emergency. As the pandemic enters its third year, a cluster of new studies now show that about a third of children in the youngest grades are missing reading benchmarks, up significantly from before the pandemic. In Virginia, one study found that early reading skills were at a 20-year low this fall, which the researchers described as “alarming.”

To give students an academic boost after two years of pandemic schooling, Denver Public Schools is spending federal and state coronavirus relief money on high-dose tutoring — three times a week for at least 30 minutes — for students in both math and literacy. Test score data shows Denver students have gaps in their learning. For instance, just 46% of Denver students in kindergarten through third grade were reading at grade level or above this fall, according to district test data presented to the school board in December. That’s down from 56% in fall 2020 and 53% in fall 2019, before the pandemic.

The teaching of grammar in primary schools in England (a key feature of England’s national curriculum) does not appear to help children’s narrative writing, although it may help them generate sentences, according to new research. The authors suggest the curriculum should focus more on what helps children to develop their writing skills at different points in development, such as focusing on teaching approaches such as sentence-combining, strategy instruction and emphasizing the processes of writing.

After two years of pandemic disruptions to students’ reading progress, schools nationwide are scrambling for ways to help them progress faster. Small-group instruction in reading is one of the most commonly used approaches to differentiate learning, but studies suggest that traditional ability-based classroom groups don’t always work and the structure of those groups can make a big difference in their effects, both on students’ reading achievement and their feelings of connection. Districts looking to use small reading groups can draw some lessons from other recent studies.

Educators looking for resources, lessons, and programming possibilities for Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day (March 8) can find plenty of free options online.

Costly independent evaluations have come to play an outsize role in the diagnosis and treatment of numerous disabilities, from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder to autism to dyslexia. Depending on the scope, the evaluations can involve up to two days of testing, interviews and observation with up to a dozen doctors and experts. And that’s even for disabilities that are relatively common: An estimated 9% of American kids have ADHD. Dyslexia hinders a person’s ability to read words correctly and efficiently, with between 5% and 15% of the population likely affected. The costs can make it more complicated and expensive for whole swaths of Americans — particularly families with lower incomes and those living in rural areas — to access desperately-needed special education services.

Shirley Hughes, a British author and illustrator whose picture books about the quotidian dramas and escapades of children entertained and reassured generations of young readers and their parents, died on Friday at her home in West London. She was 94. She was perhaps best known for “Dogger” (1977), in which a boy named Dave loses his beloved stuffed toy when he’s distracted by a school fair and the prospect of an ice cream cone. Drama ensues, relayed in Ms. Hughes’s direct, prosaic sentences. After a couple of mild cliffhangers and an intervention by Dave’s older sister, Dave and Dogger are reunited. Ms. Hughes often expressed concern about the growing pressures on children. “They always have something to do,” Ms. Hughes said in an interview in The London Telegraph in 2017. “It is difficult to protect them from being overstimulated. My whole idea is to slow them down and get them to make a leisurely examination of a picture at their own pace.”

Shirley Hughes, the author and illustrator whose everyday stories of early childhood cast a happy glow across generations of family life, has died aged 94, her family has said. Over a career that spanned 70 years, Hughes illustrated and wrote some 60 books, winning BookTrust’s inaugural lifetime achievement award in 2015, and being voted the most popular winner in the first 50 years of the Kate Greenaway medal for illustration for her picture book Dogger, which told the story of a little boy who is left distraught when his beloved toy dog turns up at a jumble sale.

The strategy has been shown to contribute to increased academic performance and reduced chronic absenteeism. The information teachers glean on the visits can be used to incorporate students’ interests and preferences into lessons. The main goal is to start the school year with positive home-school connections. Those positive connections can lead to increased parent involvement, higher student attendance rates, a reduction in implicit biases educators and families may have, and even a willingness to discuss more difficult topics like academic or behavioral concerns if those arise during the school year.

While measures such as masking and isolation mean temporary discomfort or inconvenience for most people, their consequences for still-developing young children are more mysterious, and possibly more significant and lasting. Children with speech or language disorders offer perhaps the clearest example of these murky trade-offs. Pandemic restrictions vary by state, county, and school district, but I spoke with parents in California, New York, Massachusetts, Washington, New Jersey, Iowa, and Maryland who said their children’s speech therapy has been disrupted—first by the loss of in-person therapy and then by masking requirements, in places that have them.

Teachers can make small changes to amplify language opportunities that create pathways toward success for English learners. The suggestions include: infuse instruction with peer-to-peer discussion and exploration; offer adapted or engineered texts when reading materials are dense; provide daily opportunities for written expression in all content areas with the use of scaffolds and accommodations; and utilize classroom resources.

President Joe Biden has a message to Americans: Consider becoming a tutor or serving as a mentor at your local school. “The American Rescue Plan gave schools money to hire teachers and help students make up for lost learning,” Biden said during the State of the Union address Tuesday. “I urge every parent to make sure your school does just that. They have the money. We can all play a part: sign up to be a tutor or a mentor.”

More than 1 in 3 children in kindergarten through grade 3 have little chance of reading on grade level by the end of the school year without major and systemic interventions. That’s according to a new study by the curriculum and assessment group Amplify, based on data from more than 400,000 students in kindergarten through 5th grades who participated in the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills, which Amplify administers. The research shows that though students have begun to recover lost academic ground in the last year, big holes remain in students’ fundamental reading skills.