Today’s Literacy Headlines

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do kids learn to read? Three widely used infographics try to answer that question, but they leave out some crucial information. But none of them capture the complexity of reading comprehension. The risk is that educators will interpret the infographics to mean that the current approach to teaching comprehension aligns with science, and all they need to fix are problems on the decoding end. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Local artist Shar Tuiasoa has just published her first children’s book, “Punky Aloha.” It brings readers into the world of the little Polynesian girl whose adventure in search of fresh butter for her grandmother’s banana bread is filled with surprising twists and turns. With the help of magic sunglasses, Punky learns to overcome her shyness and make new friends along the way.

The U.S. Department of Education wants to make it easier for families to find high-quality summer and afterschool programs and for schools and local governments to use federal relief funds to pay for them. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona on Thursday announced Engage Every Student — a partnership with five leading organizations to bring information and research about out-of-school-time programs together into one “centralized, readily available location.” The department will seek applications from an outside organization for a $3-$4 million contract in next year’s budget to run the initiative.

Nonfiction for kids has an image problem—at home, at school, and in the media. Despite a robust body of research showing that many children prefer nonfiction, and many more enjoy fiction and nonfiction equally, most adults mistakenly believe children prefer made-up stories. As a result, well-intended parents favor fiction for bedtime reading, and most teachers automatically choose made-up stories for read alouds and book talks as well as science and social studies lessons.

Transfer is “the ability to directly apply one’s previous learning to a new setting or problem” (Schwartz and Bransford, 1998, p. 68). We see everyday examples of transfer when we learn what a stop sign is and recognize it in another country where we can’t actually read the word stop itself. We see transfer in the way we still know what a chair is regardless of the material used to make it. Yet, for emergent bilinguals and dual language (DL) students developing biliteracy, transfer serves a more important role. Research has confirmed that when we use cross-linguistic transfer, it not only enhances but accelerates reading ability.

An estimated 6.1 million children in the United States have been diagnosed with ADHD. Millions more children with the disorder are surely left undiagnosed. Early intervention is so crucial for success down the road, at home and at school. It is important that teachers—who play a key observational role in ADHD assessments in a school setting—understand that many factors can play into a diagnosis and how racial, gender, and age biases can affect those factors. It is equally important that school systems provide educators additional support through more objective testing measures, many of which already exist.

Months of lockdowns have left a massive backlog of children who show the warning signs of autism, waiting for a formal evaluation to get help. That’s why Megan Roberts hopes to move autism evaluations out of doctors’ offices and onto Zoom conferences, using staff who already work regularly with schools and early learning centers. Roberts’s project is one of seven projects that have been awarded a share of $14 million grants from the National Center for Special Education Research. All of the funded projects are focused on supporting students with disabilities who have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic.

Nikki Prather wrote the book ‘The Bird Who Couldn’t Fly,’ to help kids better understand those around them with autism. Prather’s inspiration? Her ten-year-old daughter with autism, who’s also nonverbal. The book turned the page to a new chapter for her daughter, Genevieve. Since publishing in 2020, Prather said she’s seen her make more friends and do better in school. Prather read to Genevieve’s classmates and to other elementary schools in the West Valley School District during World Autism Awareness Month. “It was really helpful, they genuinely asked great questions about how they could be a better friend to her,” said Prather.

What is the Blueberry Award? Launched on March 21, 2022, the spring equinox, the award was founded by a team at Evanston Public Library. We felt it was long overdue to have a national award that celebrates the work that children’s book authors, scientists and illustrators are doing to support kids’ love of the natural world and desire to heal it. The winner amongst the 2021 books is How to Find a Fox by Kate Gardner, illustrated by Ossi Saarinen. We also named twenty-five Honor books and six Changemaker books that help kids act! We need that many honored books because kids need a whole library to learn about our incredibly complex planet and all the things we can do to slow global warming.

Based on the research, here are five things school and district leaders should know about how summer slide and COVID slide affect each other, and how schools can structure summer programs to help students accelerate their learning: each type of “slide” can make the other steeper; COVID hit summer school, too; iInstructional time matters; students seriously need to relax; and summer programs need teacher prep, too.

As we seek to emerge from the pandemic and reimagine schools so that students do not just recover from the pandemic but are set up to thrive, what if we normalized schools as hubs with student supports? Last week, the Biden-Harris Administration launched the National Partnership for Student Success (NPSS) as a step in this direction. This three-year initiative brings together a coalition of more than 70 education, service and youth-development organizations to recruit, train and support an additional 250,000 adults to provide targeted student supports in schools. It is a partnership spearheaded by the U.S. Department of Education, Americorps, and the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University. The NPSS aims to be a national body that supports local efforts.

When it comes to academic interventions, given a choice between technology and a human being, “we always choose a person,” says Megan Murphy, head of school at Circle City Prep in Indianapolis. That’s why this spring, instead of bringing in some sort of artificial intelligence app to help students learn to read, Murphy turned to an online resource that brings live tutors into her classrooms. Ignite! Reading trains its instructors — mainly college students working toward a teaching degree — using materials from the National Council on Teacher Quality. They are then paired with young students across the country to run daily 15-minute tutoring sessions via Zoom.

With adequate supports, students with individualized education programs can succeed in the general education curriculum.

The International Literacy Association (ILA) announced today the winners of its 2022 awards and grants, including its top honor and one of the literacy field’s most prestigious—the William S. Gray Citation of Merit—which was awarded to City University of New York’s Linnea Ehri. The William S. Gray Citation of Merit honors a nationally or internationally known individual for their outstanding contributions to multiple facets of literacy development, including research, theory, practice, and policy. Ehri’s findings on the importance of grapheme-phoneme knowledge, phonemic awareness, decoding skills, and orthographic mapping have greatly contributed to today’s understandings about psychology processes and sources of difficulty in learning to read and spell.

The International Literacy Association (ILA) announced today the winners of its 2022 Children’s and Young Adults’ Book Awards, a program that honors emerging authors whose work exemplifies the best from rising stars in the literature landscape. The 13 titles from this year’s honorees represent a wide variety of genres, themes and topics. They include mind-grabbing examinations of nature and science, authentic and truthful portrayals of history and tales of resilience in the face of prejudice and injustice.

Deciding what constitutes good teaching is a messy business. Two researchers from the University of Maryland and Harvard University waded into this mess. They analyzed 53 elementary school teachers who had been randomly assigned to classrooms in their schools located in four different districts along the East Coast. The academics found that there was often a tradeoff between “good teaching” where kids learn stuff and “good teaching” that kids enjoy. Teachers who were good at raising test scores tended to receive low student evaluations. Teachers with great student evaluations tended not to raise test scores all that much.

The Biden administration is positioning its new initiative to bring 250,000 tutors and mentors to American schools over the next three years as a way to help propel students to academic recovery in the wake of pandemic schooling disruptions. The administration plans to increase coordination among districts and education organizations as they use existing COVID-19 relief funds to supply tutors and support recovery efforts. The U.S. Department of Education will work with AmeriCorps and a group of education organizations to supply “tutors, mentors, student success coaches, integrated student support coordinators, and postsecondary education transition coaches” into schools, according to a fact sheet about the new initiative.

I read Mike Petrilli’s very interesting article “How to narrow the excellence gap in early elementary school.” He observes that “…many more Black and low-income students are achieving at high levels in kindergarten, especially in reading, than in later years. This indicates that something is causing the excellence gap to widen in the early years of elementary school. (Other achievement gaps tend to grow during these early years, as well.)” I have been studying the achievement gap for many years using various data sources, beginning with the Coleman Report data in the mid-sixties and more recently with a number of statewide databases. In my experience, and from the data I have examined, the Black-White achievement gap remains fairly constant from third grade through the end of middle school (eighth grade)

The neural circuit for reading—often called the reading brain—combines processes used for vision in the cortex (to see written letters and words), hearing in the auditory cortex (to hear the sounds and rhythms that letters and words make and connect them to the written words), and language in the left hemisphere (to comprehend the meaning of written letters and words). Playing or learning to sing music, according to neuroscientists, is a parallel process. Working on challenging musical tasks over and over again, researchers say, strengthens the reading circuit dramatically, which in turn delivers a robust academic boost.

The federal Head Start program has contributed to multi-generational positive outcomes, including increases in education attainment and wages and decreases in teen pregnancy and criminal involvement, according to a study from the University of Notre Dame and Texas A&M University published this month in the Journal of Political Economy. The 122-page study said it is the first large-scale examination of the intergenerational effects of the 57-year-old Head Start program, created to improve the school readiness of preschool children from low-income families.

The past two years have offered a variety of challenges for schoolchildren, so helping kids avoid the “summer slide” –- while still enjoying this break time –- is more important than ever, said SUNY Oswego counseling and psychological services faculty member Michelle Storie. “It is important to establish a balance of providing a mental break from school while also fostering learning opportunities in less formal environments and at home,” said Storie. Storie recommends children get “screen breaks,” or time when they aren’t on a smartphone, tablet, gaming device, watching TV or engaging in other electronic activities. Families should take advantage of the weather and opportunities summer brings.

The WNY Education Alliance has formed a collaborative with 11 other groups to increase awareness of the science of reading and help develop partnerships between local schools and educational organizations that support evidence-based reading instruction through teacher training and the implementation of high-quality, content-rich curriculum. The group plans to hold a conference dedicated to the science of reading this fall. “Teachers are doing this work on their own,” said Tarja Parssinen of the Alliance. After she was named to the newly created position of academic intervention services coordinator, she piloted a science of reading-aligned curriculum with an emphasis on phonics with a kindergarten classroom. “Our numbers since a lot of us have made the switch, and especially in those pilot classrooms, are phenomenal,” DeTine said.

HarperCollins Children’s Books has announced the launch of Allida, a new imprint at Clarion Books led by author Linda Sue Park and Anne Hoppe, v-p and editorial director at Clarion. Park is the author of the Newbery Medal–winning A Single Shard and the bestselling A Long Walk to Water. Launching in early 2023, Allida—named for the Korean word that means to inform, announce, or make known—will publish books for children and teens. “I want Allida to be creator-centered, because I feel strongly that when artists are supported in making work from their deepest passions, kids get better books,” said Park in a statement. “Stories and voices that come from outside the dominant culture are essential for giving young readers a richer understanding of our shared and complex world. With Allida, we have the exhilarating opportunity to build on the hard-won inclusion work of past visionaries by freeing artists from any content expectations other than good writing and great stories.”

Principals are more than twice as likely as after-school program personnel to say the primary focus of after-school programs for elementary, middle, and high school students should be providing academic support, according to a new Education Week Research Center survey. The findings come as many students still need to catch up on unfinished learning more than two years after the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted instruction.

The California Commission on Teacher Credentialing agreed this week to create a new teaching credential for pre-kindergarten through third grade that will require teacher candidates to show they are trained in how to teach reading. Establishing an early childhood education credential has been talked about for years … but it has gained urgency because of the phase-in by 2025 of transitional kindergarten for all 4-year-olds plus plans to expand state-funded pre-kindergarten. The Palo Alto based Learning Policy Institute projects between 12,000 and 15,000 teachers will be needed to fill transitional kindergarten positions, and yet only about 8,000 new teachers have annually been joining the teaching workforce by earning the existing credential.

Fort Worth schools are working with 19 community partners across the city this summer with one central goal — helping children learn to read. The collaboration, which is facilitated by the nonprofit Read Fort Worth, is of particular importance this year as teachers continue to help students recover from learning losses accrued over the course of the pandemic, while trying to prevent them from falling behind during the summer months. A history of low scores, compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic, catalyzed a “seismic shift” in the way educators teach reading across the Fort Worth Independent School District, including a new curriculum with a greater focus on phonics, professional development and a departure from long-used interventions and tools.

Brent Johnstone and Akeiff Staples met at Temple University, where they were both on the football team. Each went on to a career in social work, where they would cross paths from time to time. But as they put it, something else was “meant to be.” Five years ago, the two started a Philadelphia program to help fathers returning from prison re-engage with their kids through reading. They had seen firsthand how a lack of male role models, combined with frustration stemming from an inability to read, could lead to poverty, violence, substance abuse, and worse.

The transformation of one of America’s poorest and least-educated states into a fast-rising powerhouse took most outsiders by surprise. In reality, Mississippi’s emergence in 2019 resulted from a generation of groundwork in both schools and state government, with incremental gains coming along the way. Under Carey Wright’s supervision — Wright has been Mississippi’s superintendent of schools since 2013 — the Mississippi Department of Education introduced massive changes to instruction and adopted rigorous new learning standards. State lawmakers pushed through a raft of new education bills, including a controversial mandate to hold back third-graders who cannot read on grade level. And now, with the COVID era receding and Wright set to retire at the end of this month, bigger and richer states are looking to Mississippi as a model.

Children and teens are increasingly online. Librarians and media specialists can help them sort fact from fiction. Study after study has shown that effective library programs can increase student literacy and test scores and create more equitable student outcomes. Having access to the skills needed to decode text and other media impacts our students now and forever. Literacy can make or break their school performance and enhance their career and civic participation. All our students should have access to a school library and a certified librarian to help improve reading levels and foster critical thinking and source analysis.

From full-fledged lesson plans and virtual field trips to expansive digital archives and opportunities for professional learning, museums have so much to offer beyond the in-person experience. Whether you spend a few minutes dipping into a museum’s digital archives, an hour taking a webinar, or days implementing a classroom activity created by a team of museum educators, these mostly free experiences and resources are customizable and completely driven by you.

The most common symptoms of long COVID in children are headache, fatigue, and sleep difficulties, but a broad range of other ailments have been linked to the virus. They include “brain fog,” heart palpitations, shortness of breath, joint or muscle pain, gastrointestinal issues, anxiety, and orthostatic intolerance—a drop in blood pressure when someone moves from a prone to an upright position. Here are key suggestions from medical and legal experts, and those who support families with long COVID, as schools plan for next year.

The best dinosaur resources today celebrate the unique traits of these creatures and share evolving discoveries and theories about them and their prehistoric habitats. Consider adding new titles regularly, especially books that cite recent findings rather than reiterate old ones. Look for variety in how books share the information; for example, some group creatures by period, others list them alphabetically. These top-notch dino titles are a great place to start.

The Tennessee Department of Education released the 2021-22 Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program (TCAP) state-level results, which show that elementary students significantly improved their ELA scores and are performing at a level similar to pre-pandemic years. These results include both spring 2022 and fall 2021 end-of-course exams in English Language Arts (ELA), mathematics, science and social studies. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Tennessee maintained its commitment to an annual statewide assessment to provide reliable data on how students are performing, and this past school year reflects Tennessee schools moving forward with a statewide laser-focus on helping students catch-up from a pandemic and accelerate their learning.

Aware that regular exposure to rich, varied vocabulary would bolster her students’ long-term academic success, sixth-grade social studies teacher Megan Kelly set out to find smart strategies “to incorporate vocabulary into small pockets of time in class.” Dedicating entire lesson blocks to vocabulary isn’t necessary because even “brief encounters with words”— veteran teacher and education consultant Marilee Sprenger says 10 minutes or even as little as 2 minutes—can be surprisingly effective, as long as they’re woven into lessons regularly. Here are six quick, engaging classroom strategies for weaving vocabulary into your curriculum without disrupting your regular classroom flow.

Kathryn Cottrell was taught a specific and popular method of teaching students how to read when she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in multidisciplinary studies with a focus on literacy in 2020. As soon as she started her professional career as a student teacher at a Fort Worth elementary school, however, she could see that the status quo wasn’t working for all students. “It was relatively common that you would get fourth-graders who were not reading even on a second- or third-grade level,” she said. “So we were constantly trying to fill those gaps where they were missing … these foundational skills they were not getting, because the way that reading was taught previously was not aligned with cognitive science.”

Nonprofit organizations that have spent decades offering social-emotional learning and equity-based support to schools are facing a new challenge: defending their existence. This year, education terms like SEL and equity have become embroiled in the controversy surrounding “critical race theory,” an academic framework that argues racism is a social construct that has been embedded into legal systems and policies.

A collaboration between the STEM Innovation for Inclusion in Early Education (STEMIE) Center, the Kansas Deaf-Blind Project, and the Kansas State School for the Blind has resulted in the development of two video demonstrations on engaging young children with visual impairments in storybook conversations. The first video produced in this collaboration offers a look at how to prepare children for a shared book reading experience using the book Rosie’s Walk (2022) by Pat Hutchins. The book was selected as it explicitly introduces spatial and positional concepts as well as cause and effect, and offers many other opportunities for STEM talk. Employing strategies to engage children who are deaf-blind, blind, or have visual impairments so that they can have a tactile experience of items mentioned in the story, this method also provides a great way for sighted children to learn.

With 36 books and counting,​ there is no denying that the volume of Kwame Alexander’s body of work is impressive. But it is his depictions about Black life and the travails of growing up and adhering to society’s rules that have truly impacted the canon of youth literature—and opened the minds of young Black readers by allowing them to see themselves reflected in the characters and beyond stereotypes.

Six-word stories are very popular. In six words, please share an education-related story that you experienced and/or advice you would offer other educators. Common sense and simplicity are at the heart of the best advice.

In the aftermath of the Uvalde tragedy, Mexican American author, filmmaker, and youth literacy activist e.E. Charlton-Trujillo launched 600 Books of Hope. The idea was to collect 600 new books from kid lit creators and publishers to give to the kids of Robb Elementary School. Quickly, the idea expanded to add a goal of 1,300 books for the other elementary schools in Uvalde. Now, the project has gotten even bigger, collecting books for middle grade and high school students. Creators and publishers have stepped with support, including donations from Candlewick Press, Chronicle Books, Cameron Kids-Abrams, Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Random House, and Simon and Schuster. The goal is for every student in Uvalde to get a book.

Mayor Eric Adams has made improving reading instruction across the nation’s largest school system one of his major education goals. In doing so, he is disbanding a key literacy program launched under former Mayor Bill de Blasio — the “Universal Literacy” program, which paired coaches with K-2 teachers in more than half of New York City’s elementary schools to improve their reading instruction. Instead, the city plans to continue to employ reading coaches, but they will work across all grades at an unspecified number of “targeted” elementary, middle, and high schools, officials have said.

A forthcoming study from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will include recommendations for creating “A New Vision for High Quality Pre-K Curriculum” for children ages three through five. An expert committee will research and issue recommendations around a variety of topics related to pre-K curriculum quality, including: the fundamental principles that should guide the development and use of pre-K curriculum; the features of pre-K curriculum that support equity and learning for all children; professional development opportunities needed by early educators to enable effective curriculum implementation; and funding mechanisms that can support the selection and use of effective pre-K curriculum.

At this Tennessee district, a new curriculum helped English Language Learners blend consonant-vowel-consonant words in just six weeks. “The CKLA skills curriculum, paired with Tennessee Sounds First, is systematic and explicit. It takes the guesswork out of what to teach. The results I have witnessed this year have been phenomenal. We are now equipped with high-quality instructional materials, first-rate training, and our students are excelling. I am excited to see how the literacy skills of these kindergarten students progress over the next few years.”

Indulge me and say the following out loud: Students should read fewer books and write less expository prose. Did that feel right? I doubt it. But that’s the message the National Council of Teachers of English is sending its members. Its recent position statement on “Media Education in English Language Arts” demands that educators “decenter” the reading of books and the writing of essays. It instructs teachers to shift their focus from print media to digital media—including GIFs, memes, podcasts, and videos.

Chalkbeat has chronicled this seesawing school year up close for the last 10 months. As this third year of disrupted learning draws to an end, reporters from our eight local bureaus interviewed members of school communities about the highs and lows of the year, how they’ll remember this time, and what lessons they’ll take with them from a comeback year that didn’t always feel like one.