Today’s Literacy Headlines

In San Antonio, Texas, elementary school principals get hands-on coaching and advice from early childhood experts during visits to pre-K classrooms. In Alabama, principals can attend a unique leadership academy to learn about how to support teachers working with young children. In Minnesota, a series of workshops offered across the state aims to educate school leaders and teachers on child development and pre-K through third grade work. These are just a few of the promising efforts identified by New America, a Washington-based think tank, in a series of reports that detail the need to better prepare principals to work with young learners—and that also highlight some potential solutions. Research shows there is a clear need for this: A 2015 survey found only 20 percent of early-career principals in schools with pre-K classrooms felt “well-versed” in early ed; and a 2017 nationwide scan by New America found in most states, principals start without “the knowledge and skills they need to best serve young students.”

Eleven words. The parents of the advocacy group Decoding Dyslexia Wisconsin pressed for years to see this 11-word definition enshrined in state law: “Dyslexia means a specific learning disability that is neurobiological in origin.” Last month, they succeeded as Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers signed a bill into law that includes the definition and makes Wisconsin one of nearly 40 states to require dyslexia guidebooks for school districts. The push is part of a long and ongoing fight to get the learning disability defined in state law and persuade educators to say the word dyslexia. It comes amid a nationwide debate over dyslexia—what it is, what it means for children, and how schools should address it. The public struggle is between renowned reading researchers who think “dyslexia” is an overused word and that the heavy-focus on phonics instruction called for to help struggling readers is an unproven overreach and the parents and disability advocates who argue on the other side that schools and teacher preparation programs are not doing nearly enough to help children learn to read.

Schools are constantly fighting for more resources: money, effective teachers, facilities. But one pivotal factor in student learning and child development isn’t often on the negotiating table: Time. The benefits of strategies like pushing back high school start times, hitting math and reading early in the day for elementary school students, and making sure students get a break to process their learning, have been documented in a deluge of research studies and championed by prominent organizations like the American Academy of Pediatrics and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But many schools aren’t putting that advice into action, an Education Week survey of school and district leaders conducted in December found. Less than half—41 percent—of those surveyed said their district had examined what brain science research says about learning and used that information to guide or inform scheduling or start times. The problem—teachers, administrators, and experts say in interviews—is the system itself.

Rachel Spears, an AmeriCorps volunteer at the Maurice A. Donahue School, was in her element on a recent February morning as she led preschoolers in a spirited chant to help them identify words that start with the same sound. Spears, a 35-year-old University of Connecticut graduate and Suffield resident, is one of three AmeriCorps volunteers assigned to Donahue using an innovative research-based curriculum to help children from prekindergarten to third grade develop the skills they’ll need to become proficient readers by grade four, which is a critical benchmark for children’s academic success.

Sydney Smith (Small in the City, Neal Porter Books) and Ashleigh Corrin (Layla’s Happiness, Enchanted Lion Books) have won the 2020 Ezra Jack Keats (EJK) Award for writer and illustrator, respectively. The Ezra Jack Keats Foundation, in partnership with the de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection at the University of Southern Mississippi (USM), recognizes “talented authors and illustrators early in their careers whose picture books, in the spirit of Keats, portray the multicultural nature of our world.”

According to Vanderbilt education researcher Ilana Horn, math is “inherently interesting” to all children. In the absence of diverse, relatable role models, though, kids receive messages from pop culture that math is only for certain people. Books revolving around math can spark curiosity and increase math engagement among kids of all ages. A growing library of children’s nonfiction tells true stories of mathematicians who explored and advanced our understanding of numbers and patterns in real life. Below are more than 10 children’s books about diverse people who played a role in math history.

Only about a third of third graders in Tennessee can read on grade level. About 64% of third graders are not set up for success, research shows. They aren’t reading on grade level and they aren’t considered proficient on state tests — and those are problems that will likely follow them through upper grades, high school graduation, their careers and their lives. Tennessee Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn, like her predecessors, wants to change that. Schwinn wants to tackle the state’s literacy crisis by ensuring teachers actually know how to teach and that schools and districts have access to appropriate, high-quality materials for teaching and learning. New The legislation would require every educator who is responsible for reading instruction, including classroom teachers, special education teachers and other certified or classified staff in schools, to have specific training by 2022.

March 2nd is National Read Across America Day which encourages students of all ages—especially those without access to books and libraries—to read more. Luckily, there are organizations committed to this initiative year-round. For instance, New York City-based Pajama Program promotes comforting bedtime routines for children facing adversity “so they can wake up rested and ready to thrive.” This involves providing them with pajamas and bedtime books. Meanwhile, national nonprofit ParentChild+ supports school readiness by sending educators right to the toddler’s home. With a focus on refugees, immigrants and families in crisis, learning specialists are trained to educate both parent and child on how to engage in more read-aloud activities. Educators from ParentChild+ often remind caregivers of the things children love most in books: beautiful, vivid pictures, rhyming text, animals, children who look like them, and children whose lives are very different from theirs. Here are just some of their favorites, including classics and new reads that promote cultural awareness.

Monday March 2nd is the National Education Association’s Read Across America day as well as Dr. Seuss’s birthday. Pediatricians at SSM Health have implemented a program that would make the late author and illustrator proud. The program is called “Reach out and Read,” and it is implemented in examination rooms across the country. Dr. Bethany Crawford,a pediatrician at SSM Health St. Mary’s, said during a wellness check-up they give the child a book to help assess their development.

Just as publishers have been churning out a steady stream of excellent graphic fiction, they’ve also been providing visual readers with quality graphic nonfiction books. Many visual readers, it turns out, are also fact-seekers — they like books that provide information. They are curious about the world and want their books to provide answers. And even the most avid story lover is not always in the mood for a made-up tale. For all these kids, you cannot go wrong with the books below, which manage to make the real world thrilling, accessible and endlessly attractive.

The first assignment that Elizabeth LaGamba, assistant professor at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania, gives to her Current Issues in Reading Research graduate students each semester is to read the most recent What’s Hot in Literacy Report from ILA. In addition to sharing their feedback with the class, one of the requirements is to send their response to ILA. LaGamba wrote an article for Literacy Today about why she includes this as an assignment in her class and what it is about the report that she finds valuable. You can find her article, “A Guide to Professional Growth: Using The ILA 2020 What’s Hot in Literacy Report to Frame Our Study of Current Issues in Reading Research,” in the March/April issue. Here we share the feedback we received from her students in January when the 2020 report was released.

As librarians, we see how so many kids readily connect to comics and how this connection to books is helping to create lifelong readers. Dave Burbank, my library’s comics expert, likes to reassure worried parents that many young readers are drawn to the genre because comics bear a resemblance to the screens so ubiquitous in our kids’ lives, yet they are reading a book — not staring at a phone or tablet. We know that comics are especially beneficial to struggling or reluctant readers, as well as English-language learners. These books also offer all readers a way to practice important reading skills such as building vocabulary, understanding a sequence of events, discerning the plot of a story and making inferences. And comics give young readers training in visual literacy — helping them read and interpret images — an essential skill in our highly visual world.

Last fall’s release of the 2019 NAEP reading assessment — the so-called Nation’s Report Card for literacy — kicked off a new national debate about the best way to teach children to read. With two out of three children struggling to learn to read, and a widening gap between the highest and lowest performing children, state and district leaders (along with the general public) are again questioning what actually works. In this episode, Professor James Kim discusses why learning to read is so challenging, and he describes results of a pilot study of his new curricular model, called MORE, which focuses on building domain knowledge.

A handful of large, high-profile studies funded by the federal government over the past decade have returned near-zero impacts of PD on student learning. Fortunately, scholars have studied many other teacher professional learning in the past two decades, and recent evidence points to two forms as particularly promising: (1) teachers take a deep dive into new curriculum materials, and (2) individualized, intensive, and sustained teacher coaching. Focusing directly on instruction—through delving into curriculum materials or through coach feedback and teacher reflection—can be a powerful lever for changing that instruction. Many successful PD programs feature informal accountability for change—coaches regularly appear in teachers’ classroom to check in, keeping instructional improvement on the front burner. Coaching and curriculum-focused PD may help teachers focus on building their skill in one kind of instruction, rather than having their heads continually turned by different instructional approaches.

While having full-on conversations with babies can seem bizarre, it actually boost language skills, according to a new study. Unlike traditional ‘baby talk’, which typically includes talking with a different cadence at a higher tone using incorrect grammar, “parentese” is a version of ‘baby talk’ that follows adult grammar patterns, just in a different tone of voice and a slower tempo. The new study comes from the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences, or I-LABS, at the University of Washington. Researchers examined how parent coaching about the value of parentese affected adults’ use of it with their own infants, and demonstrated that increases in the use of parentese enhanced children’s later language skills.

My favorite moments with my students happen one-on-one. These moments often take place when a child is reading to me while I observe, take notes, and share what I notice about her strengths and needs as a reader. Whether you’re collecting information by listening to a student read, doing a formal assessment, or holding a reading conference, here are six ideas for making the most of that valuable one-on-one time. Tip #6: Teach the reader, not just the reading. While I have the child sitting beside me for a conference, I usually take a minute before or after we read to ask questions like, “How’s our class going for you? Any problems? How’s your baby sister doing?” Taking that half-minute to ask how students are doing can convey that we care about them as human beings, not just as a collection of reading levels and test scores. Over time, those little human moments can strengthen, reinforce, or repair the relationship at the heart of teaching.

Charlottesville (VA) bought Into Reading for kindergarten through fifth-grade teachers, and it will be used in all six elementary schools this fall. Albemarle County purchased Being a Reader, a K-2 program from the Center for the Collaborative Classroom, for all first-grade teachers and plans to expand it to either kindergarten or second grade next school year. The curriculum purchases are a key step in the divisions’ plan to improve its baseline support and instruction for all students, so that fewer students struggle to read later on. Experts say a high-quality reading program should address oral language development, phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, comprehension and vocabulary — components that build on one another. Historically, Charlottesville and Albemarle have bought programs that address only some of those areas and left it up to teachers to fill in the gaps.

Following the “staggering” results of an early identification program for students at risk of dyslexia this month, over 500 Palo Alto Unified School District (PAUSD) students have started to receive additional monitoring or specialized services. As part of its ongoing efforts to boost literacy by diagnosing dyslexia early, PAUSD educators administered the Shaywitz Dyslexia Screener to 2,100 K-3 students. Of the 546 students deemed at-risk, 239 will receive additional monitoring without specialized services, 225 will receive additional in- and out-of-class instruction, 73 were referred for further testing and nine were referred to Tier III supports which includes professional interventions.

Parents are increasingly concerned about the technology in school, while at the same time, ed tech is pushing its way into more and more of education world, from personalized learning which most often means a student in front of a screen, all the way down to computerized pre-school. In response to this issue, the Children’s Screen Time Action Network has released a “Screens in Schools Action Kit.” The kit provides parents and teachers both with information and explanations that help lay out the issues, as well as providing the language with which to discuss these issues (for folks whose position is “This stuff bothers me, but I’m not even sure want exactly to say about it”). It’s not arguing for the eradication of tech, but a balanced, measured approach.

We hardly think twice about spell-check and other auto-correct features in writing software—in fact, their absence would make some feel rather lost and empty. These days, text and email apps will even construct full responses that can be delivered with a quick tap of a finger. But the increasingly sophisticated technologies that people have come to rely on should not absolve personal responsibility for learning how to spell, write or communicate, says Dave Eggers. And their growing presence in the classroom is especially cause for concern. “I think that there is a mentality that’s sort of overtaken humanity that everything in life is being examined for how we might digitize it,” says the prolific writer and Pulitzer finalist. “Increasingly there’s less choice about when you use technology and when you don’t.” By no means is Eggers a luddite. But he’s passionate about the need for “refuges that are havens for quiet creativity and analog creation … a place to be weird.” That’s a spirit that is very much a part of 826, a network of elaborately whimsical tutoring and writing centers that Eggers helped launch in 2002. Eggers recently joined us for an eclectic conversation about many facets of education—including designing what he calls “unnecessarily beautiful” learning spaces.

In my practice as a school psychologist, I have seen evidence of the research finding that academic performance and mental health can have a two-way relationship. Students who do not develop strong reading skills are at greater risk for developing symptoms of anxiety, depression, and behavior problems. If you think your child has a language delay or difficulty with phonological awareness or decoding, discuss your concerns with your child’s teacher. Do not wait until your child is failing and falling behind to advocate for intervention and/or assessment. Early intervention has very high success rates for supporting reading development, but it is much more difficult to improve reading skills in older students.

The Ohio Department of Education began six years ago gathering experts statewide to study the state’s literacy data and identify gaps in learning, as well as examine how students were learning to read and how Ohio’s teaching methods compared to other more successful states. They began learning about the science of how the brain reads and found it needs explicit instruction to learn the sounds and letter connections to read words correctly. The experts developed a state improvement plan that aligns literacy instruction to the science of reading and helped create an interactive online edition of a training program designed to help teachers learn how to teach reading to their students based on the way the brain learns to read. That training program – called the third edition of Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling, better known as LETRS – is now being used by many Stark County schools and it has led to changes in how students here are being taught.

Worried that far too many students have weak reading skills, states are passing new laws that require aspiring teachers—and, increasingly, teachers who are already in the classroom—to master reading instruction that’s solidly grounded in research. In the past three years alone, at least 11 states have enacted laws designed to expand evidence-based reading instruction in grades K-3. Legislative analysts and activists who monitor the issue have noticed a flurry of recent state action on it. “There is an absolute buzz around the science of reading. There’s no question that states are getting on board with this,” said Laura Stewart, the director of the Reading League, a group that works to build understanding of what research says about good reading instruction.

Each year, our district middle schools participate in the Battle of the Books. If you are unfamiliar with the Battle of the Books, it is a massive book trivia contest in which participants battle in teams of three to answer questions about a list of 25 books everyone has read. It’s a shared reading experience of epic proportions. About 10 years ago, we started Battle of the Books merely to get kids reading and talking about books they might not normally choose. In hindsight, we recognize these battles have impacted our students far beyond that initial goal. Here are four areas in which these battles of the books have had an impact on our students far beyond our initial goal: exposure, teamwork, background knowledge, and insight.

Before he became a best-selling writer, Dan Brown was an aspiring musician. In 1989, he self-produced an album of children’s music he arranged on synthesizers, titled “Musica Animalia.” It sold around 500 copies, and Brown soon forgot about it. He had better luck as a novelist, with page-turners like “The Da Vinci Code,” “The Lost Symbol” and other thrillers that collectively have more than 220 million copies in print. Now, three decades later, Brown is reviving his musical career with a hybrid children’s album and picture book that grew out of the music and poems he wrote for “Musica Animalia.” The book, “Wild Symphony,” is aimed at 3- to 7-year-olds. The story features a mouse conductor who recruits other animals to perform in his orchestra, dispensing wisdom about the value of patience, kindness and respect along the way. Readers can listen to the musical accompaniments for each page with a smartphone app that uses augmented reality to scan the page and play the music for “Bouncing Kangaroo,” “Wondrous Whale” and “Brilliant Bat.”

English-language-learner enrollment in K-12 schools has increased by more than 1 million students since 2000, according to a new report from the U.S. Department of Education. There are now an estimated 4.9 million children in U.S. public schools learning the English language. These students are in classrooms in most school systems—and enrollment is surging in states across the South and Midwest that had almost no English-learners at the turn of the century. The report tracks enrollment from the 2000-01 school year to the 2016-17 school year, the latest year for which numbers are available and provides a quick look at national demographic trends.

For most of her life, people questioned whether Nicki Vander Meulen belonged—in a traditional K-12 classroom, in law school or on the school board of one of Wisconsin’s largest school districts. When doctors diagnosed Vander Meulen with Asperger’s syndrome, attention deficit disorder, and cerebral palsy as a child, her parents fought for her right to attend the neighborhood elementary school. The school’s principal thought she belonged in a school for the severely disabled. Her parents knew otherwise. Despite a counselor who told her that she’d never graduate from college, Vander Meulen went on to graduate from high school with honors and earn undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin—where her law school classmates questioned whether the university providing a notetaker for her constituted an unfair advantage. Now, a board of education member for Madison, Wis., schools and a juvenile defense attorney, Vander Meulen may be one of the few people in the nation on the autism spectrum serving in public office. Vander Meulen recently spoke with Education Week about her life as a school board member with autism and her work as an advocate for children with disabilities.

Expanding upon their efforts to prepare more children for kindergarten, the Boston Children’s Museum and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) recently announced plans to double the number of states participating in a school readiness initiative from three to six. Building a National Network of Museums and Libraries for School Readiness is an initiative that aims to expose children to informal learning opportunities early on so that by the time they enter kindergarten, not only are they meeting academic standards, but they’re equipped with certain social and developmental skills. The network will target vulnerable populations that are less likely to have access to so-called “school readiness” activities that foster social interactions and skills development among young children. Vulnerable populations include those living in rural areas, immigrant children, English learners and the socioeconomically disadvantaged.

Over the past few years, Jana Beth Francis has led schools in a districtwide adoption of new elementary and middle school English/language arts and math curricula, designed to build students’ knowledge and engage them in more intellectually challenging work. Now, she’s supporting principals and teachers as they learn how to teach in a new way—which means heading out to the rural-suburban district’s 20 schools on a regular basis to look at student work and observe classrooms. She is part of a burgeoning national movement around universal, high-quality curriculum. More districts are now looking to materials designed to build knowledge coherently through grade levels, aiming to prepare students with a strong foundation for reading comprehension. But many school systems are still figuring out how to support their teachers with PD that helps them use these new resources effectively.

Denver’s Green Valley Elementary school is educating students with disabilities in general education classrooms, as opposed to separate special education classrooms, nearly all of the time. Denver Public Schools wants to move all of its schools in the same direction. In June, the school board passed a resolution committing the district to becoming “a model … in the nation” for inclusive practices. The resolution was inspired by a task force of parents, educators, and advocates. Their overarching recommendation: Stop segregating students with disabilities when research shows including them benefits all students. Special Education Director Robert Frantum-Allen is tasked with shepherding the change at the district level. He is a former Denver teacher of the deaf and hard of hearing, and he has a disability — dyslexia — himself. He thinks most educators believe in inclusion, at least in theory. Rather than starting with a mandate that all schools adopt inclusive practices immediately, Frantum-Allen is focusing this year on changing educators’ mindsets.

In recent years, Louisiana and Mississippi have led the country in progress on the nation’s report card for our K-12 students. But the states have much further to go, and we’re starting with learners in the earliest years, from birth to age 5. The impact of high-quality early childhood education is well-established, especially for children in low-income communities: stronger reading and math skills and higher staying power at nearly every stage of education. A strong commitment, and a set of clear action steps, pays off in extraordinary ways for our kids. In Mississippi’s nationally recognized, innovative early learning collaboratives, more than three-quarters of children emerge as kindergarten-ready — up 18 percentage points from four years ago, and outpacing every other kind of childcare provider. Here are some lessons on early education, and what we did to improve our states’ approaches.

When children’s book author and illustrator Grace Lin visits schools, she often gets a lot of questions from students. “The one thing I always notice is there are always a lot of questions and never enough time to answer them all.” Often, answering questions and interacting with students is the most fun part, she said. “I thought, I’d love to answer them all.” Now, she’s gearing up to do just that. The Caldecott Honor winner and National Book Award Finalist is working on a new podcast, “Kids Ask Authors,” that she hopes to release next month. The weekly five- to 10-minute podcast will take on a listener question — which can be submitted online or by leaving a voicemail — with a guest author.

After examining our experiences at two well-known teacher training programs in Minnesota and looking at what we were—and were not—taught about the basics of literacy, we have come to the same conclusion: We were not prepared for the responsibility of the job. This failure to prepare teachers, we believe, should be a red flag for the current system in place for how we train and place teachers into classrooms. As we went through our respective teacher training programs, we noticed a common theme to our coursework. At every turn, it seemed that student interest was front and center. The idealized teacher should be passive, give minimal guidance, and certainly not talk for more than five minutes. Teachers should not be instructing so much as they should be prioritizing and facilitating student choice. Reading instruction was assumed to happen largely through osmosis and the now-dominant “workshop” model. The majority of early reading instruction revolved around “read-alouds” with picture books. There was minimal to non-existent training in effective whole-group instruction or the “Big 5” components of reading—phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension—although a consensus in research supports the effectiveness of utilizing these insights in reading instruction.

Question: What activity is done by most teachers in the United States, but has almost no evidence of effectiveness in raising student test scores? Answer: Analyzing student assessment data. This practice arose from a simple logic: To improve student outcomes, teachers should study students’ prior test performance, learn what students struggle with, and then adjust the curriculum or offer students remediation where necessary. By addressing the weaknesses revealed by the test results, overall student achievement would improve. Yet understanding students’ weaknesses is only useful if it changes practice. And, to date, evidence suggests that it does not change practice—or student outcomes. Focusing on the problem has likely distracted us from focusing on the solution.

Lagging student performance and newly relevant research, though, have prompted some educators to reconsider the ABCs of reading instruction. Their effort gained new urgency after national test scores last year showed that only a third of American students were proficient in reading, with widening gaps between good readers and bad ones. Now members of this vocal minority, proponents of what they call the “science of reading,” congregate on social media and swap lesson plans intended to avoid creating “curriculum casualties” — students who have not been effectively taught to read and who will continue to struggle into adulthood, unable to comprehend medical forms, news stories or job listings. The bible for these educators is a body of research produced by linguists, psychologists and cognitive scientists. Their findings have pushed some states and school districts to make big changes in how teachers are trained and students are taught. The “science of reading” stands in contrast to the “balanced literacy” theory that many teachers are exposed to in schools of education. That theory holds that students can learn to read through exposure to a wide range of books that appeal to them, without too much emphasis on technically complex texts or sounding out words.

Good news: the New York Times ran an article on reading instruction on its front page. Bad news: as with other recent coverage, the piece overlooks a huge and fundamental aspect of the problem. If we don’t make it clear that a vital part of teaching reading is building kids’ knowledge, we also risk having the pendulum swing, once again, away from phonics. Yes, there are signs of reading success at lower grade levels when phonics is taught well. But if schools don’t start giving kids access to knowledge beginning in kindergarten, that success will evaporate. The longer you wait to fill in gaps in knowledge, the harder it becomes. We may end up with teenagers who can read words but don’t have the background knowledge to understand what they add up to. And given the general confusion about what goes into reading, many will conclude that means we tried phonics, and it just didn’t work.

The Penn State University Libraries and the Pennsylvania Center for the Book have announced the 2020 Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, presented annually to an American poet or anthologist for the most outstanding new book of poetry for children published in the previous calendar year. This year’s winner is “How to Read a Book” written by Kwame Alexander, illustrated by Melissa Sweet, and published by HarperCollins Children’s Books. The Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award was named for the internationally renowned educator, poet, anthologist and passionate advocate of poetry for young people.

Though how the brain learns to read has been well-established in the scientific community for years and is backed by thousands of studies, many teacher preparation programs don’t include the mountain of research on reading instruction in their programs. Sometimes they have actively resisted it. But recent attention from frustrated parent groups and the media has put the spotlight on asking why so many young American readers struggle, and has put pressure on teacher prep programs to re-evaluate how they prepare teachers heading into classrooms. Both the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) and universities recognize the role that teacher training plays in ensuring teachers are equipped with knowledge of the science. For many years, Mississippi ranked at the bottom of national rankings for state education, but the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress test scores showed that Mississippi was the only state to make big reading gains. Some have speculated that Mississippi’s big gains in reading are connected to a reboot of their teacher training programs. The NCTQ report rewards two Mississippi schools, Delta State University and the University of Mississippi, with an “A+” rating, and two more get an “A.”

What’s the secret sauce for academic success? A great teacher? More school funding? At-home support? This is a subject that generates impassioned debate in the halls of government as well as around kitchen tables across the country. Parents often think the key to their child’s academic success lies in which teacher they are assigned to and whether that person can identify children’s abilities, work to strengthen their core competencies and push them to be the best students they can be. At the same time, policymakers have focused on ensuring that teachers — especially at Title I schools — have the resources to ensure that no child is left behind. Of course, the answer is pursuing all of the above. But what I’ve found as leader of a charter school system in a disadvantaged urban area is that another key to success is alignment.

Two years ago, the Knowledge Matters Campaign visited public schools around the country — all of them serving large numbers of children living in poverty — that had chosen to tackle elementary literacy by very deliberately introducing students to a content-rich curriculum. These stories — of schools from California to North Carolina and points in between — were widely read by The 74’s readers. Given the abundant interest in literacy instruction that has taken place over the past year, we were eager to get back into schools to see what might have changed. This time we chose to focus on one state: Tennessee. We have asked school leaders to tell their own stories, since the voices of educators have proved to be particularly powerful in explaining this work. Over the coming six weeks, The 74’s readers will have an opportunity to hear directly from practicing educators about what their journey to improved results has entailed.

In the latest salvo in Wisconsin’s ongoing reading wars, a new coalition of educators, researchers, parents and advocates is calling for a fundamental change in the way the state’s children are taught to read. Calling themselves WI-Care, for the Wisconsin Call to Action for Reading Excellence, the proponents offer a road map for improving the reading proficiency of children in the state. It calls on the state Department of Public Instruction, parents, teachers, school board members — even the colleges and universities that train future teachers — to embrace “the science of reading,” shorthand for a back-to-basics approach that emphasizes, among other things, explicit phonics instruction and what’s known as “structured literacy.” The renewed push comes as pressure mounts on states and school districts across the country to address what many see as a crisis in reading education. Barely a third of U.S. students were deemed proficient in reading in the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the Nation’s Report Card. Wisconsin fared only slightly better at about 36%, and has among the widest black-white achievement gaps in the country.

America’s schools are intended to be an equalizer, a way to launch students from low-income families up the economic and social ladder. But a new study finds that in most school districts, a child’s academic mobility is just as tied to where he lives as his economic and social mobility. Using 14 years of school district data across six states, a team of researchers with the National Center for the Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, tracked the academic progress and graduation rates of 2.5 million children based on how they performed on 3rd grade reading and math tests compared to other students in their state. A student’s ranking in his state’s 3rd grade reading and math tests was 80 percent predictive of his 10th grade performance, after controlling for errors in state test measurements, the researchers found. That meant a student struggling in the bottom quarter of 3rd graders in her state was very likely to end up performing in the lowest 25 percent of 8th graders—and to end up in the same percentile in 10th grade.

Vanderbilt University neuroscientist James R. Booth is publicly releasing two large scale neuroimaging datasets on reading and language development to support other researchers across the world who are working to understand how academic skills develop in childhood. Available in the digital repository OpenNeuro, together the datasets include more than 3,000 magnetic resonance imaging scans that explore brain structure and function in school-age children. Booth and his colleagues have used the dataset on “Cross-Sectional Multidomain Lexical Processing,” which uses rhyming, spelling and meaning tasks to understand how children process features of both written and spoken language, to provide a deeper understanding of domain specific and domain general processes in the brain, and how this is related to academic skill. Through making these data publicly available, other researchers can extend the body of foundational research stemming from this dataset, which includes several tasks in both the visual and auditory modalities. For example, researchers could use network approaches to understand whether brain dynamics differ depending on task demands.

A trip to Disney World. A few days over at Grandma’s house (over the course of a year) to bake cookies. Letting your kid stay home because, well, it suits your schedule better. And then there are the actual sick days. At the end of the day, it equates to a lot of time not spent in the classroom and a lot of missed learning. How many days off are too many for your child? How many days off are too many for your child? For an answer, UVA Today turned to Robert C. Pianta, dean of the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education and Human Development, who, along with fellow researchers, followed 1,300 children from birth through high school, examining trends in school attendance. The findings showed primarily that missing 10 or more days of school in a given year and across years can add up in ways that have negative impacts on students’ achievement and social adjustment by eighth and ninth grade.

Reading is challenging for most of the students at Cascade Middle School in Vancouver, WA. More than 60 percent of the nearly 1,000 students who attend Cascade are classified as striving or reluctant readers. But this doesn’t deter Michelle Annett, the school’s teacher librarian. Annett, who’s been in the role for the last eight years, firmly believes that there’s a book out there for everyone, and she’s determined to help her students find it. Annett has had success with the Project LIT Community initiative, a national grassroots program designed to encourage students to read. The Project LIT Community includes educators and kids who work to promote literacy and make sure students have access to “culturally relevant” titles.

Parents have gotten the message that reading with their children can help instill lifelong literacy skills. A new study adds to the evidence that parents can be providing the same boost to numeracy skills by making sure their preschool children have an enriching math home life, too. A new study in the journal Child Development tracked nearly 370 Spanish-speaking Chilean children and their families over two years, from the start of preschool through the end of kindergarten. Regardless of families’ socioeconomic background, the study found preschoolers whose parents gave them frequent opportunities to do simple math problems and games at home showed better arithmetic growth and performance by the end of kindergarten than children with less-engaging early math environments at home.

Planet Word– a museum dedicated to everything language in Washington D.C.– has announced that it is expected to open May 31 with 10 immersive galleries that will explore language in informative and entertaining ways. The museum will host a variety of exhibitions designed to inform and delight. In the large Great Hall, the museum will have 31 language ambassadors who will bring together spoken and signed languages from across the globe, including Navajo, Amharic, Zulu, and Iranian Sign Language. Through tongue twisters, folk songs, sports chants, words of affection, and other fun, culture-specific phrases, ambassadors like Kainoa, Mariko, Sebi, and Cesar will introduce you to their languages—and teach you how to speak or sign a few phrases too. A one-of-a-kind sound sculpture will greet future visitors to Planet Word: a 20-foot weeping willow tree designed by contemporary artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Walking under its branches will trigger unique audio from some of its 500 hanging speakers — each of which will contain an archive of recordings in a distinct language.

As researchers focusing on education technology, we see this often: interactive whiteboards covered in posters, desktop computers holding up plants, older devices that do not work with a newer assessment system. The list goes on. Our work at the nonprofit Education Development Center’s Center for Children and Technology focuses on how education technology can be used to support learning. The truth is edtech products that foster more learning than would happen in analogue settings can be difficult to find. When we get to see effective edtech products in practice, the view is exciting: We see kids engaged, teachers energized about the kinds of thinking their students are generating and strong learning outcomes that result from well-made tools matched to the students and educators using them. So naturally, one of the big questions we face is, how can we help ensure effective edtech happens more often? The key lies in helping educators to look at the available evidence and make careful decisions.

Jarrett and Jerome Pumphrey have been “making stuff” together since they were kids. Their latest project is a particularly special one, because it’s the first time they’ve created a book that they both authored and illustrated. Inspiration for The Old Truck came when Jerome was driving through central Texas, on his way to visit Jarrett. As he passed farm after farm, he saw old, aging trucks sitting out in the fields. “It’s such an iconic image,” Jerome says. “But it makes you wonder: What’s the story that could be behind that truck or the family that lives there?” So the brothers decided to write and illustrate a story about a family and a farm — all centered around a pickup truck that more or less stays in one place throughout the book. Around the truck, seasons change, years pass, and before long, the little girl from the beginning of the story has taken over the family farm.

For both boys, the struggles at school started in the first grade. Both families ultimately realized their sons needed support the public schools could not provide, particularly when it came to the all-important task of teaching them to read. But that’s where their similarities ended. Isaac and Landon grew up just 15 blocks from each other in Harlem, but they inhabit very different worlds. Isaac, whose parents make a six-figure income through work as a consultant and liquor distributor executive, goes home each afternoon to a newly renovated brownstone. Landon, whose mother Yolanda immigrated from the Dominican Republic as a child and is raising her three children alone, shares a bedroom with his siblings in a public housing complex. Both families set their sights on an option known as “private placement”: a federal guarantee that school districts must pay for tuition at a private school if they can’t meet the needs of a child with a disability. That set both families on an arduous and circuitous path – one biased toward wealthier families who have the money to hire pricey lawyers and the time and savvy to do extensive research on how private placement works.

Increasing book access for young people improves their chances for both personal and academic success. Unfortunately, too many children in the United States— disproportionally indigenous children, children of color, and poor children in urban and rural communities—live in “book deserts” without consistent access to engaging, current books to read. For many kids, school libraries provide their primary gateway to books. So our collections must be as relevant, representational, and engaging as possible. Even in communities that support libraries and librarians, school or district policies may unintentionally hinder students’ access. We educators must identify such obstacles and work to reduce their negative impact on young readers.

Teachers have been led to believe it’s good practice to have students work in groups or pairs, to boost learning and critical thinking. But too often, students get little or no benefit. One potentially powerful and underused interactive technique that reaches all students is writing. Instead of repeatedly having students turn and talk—and running the risk that the talk will lead nowhere or not even happen—teachers could sometimes ask them to take a few minutes to reflect and write.

Late last month, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction took a stand on a long-debated method of teaching reading to students, ruling that phonics has a place in literacy education after all. This announcement has some in the world of education rejoicing, saying this is a step in the right direction. John Humphries is one of them. Humphries is superintendent of the School District of Thorp, which is about an hour west of Wausau, and educates about 650 students in grades K-12. The district has spent thousands of dollars on new programs, professional development and consultants to steer staff at toward this type of research-based teaching, he said. And by the district’s own measurements, it’s working. When Thorp tested 40 second-graders in the fall of 2018 on their ability to do specific reading-related tasks, nearly half were at high risk for reading difficulties. A year later, those numbers were drastically lower.

On February 5th, Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva introduced the Supporting Young Language Learners’ Access to Bilingual Education (SYLLABLE) Act in the House of Representatives. The bill helps establish high-quality dual-language immersion programs in communities with high numbers of low-income families and supports those programs from pre-K to 5th grade. “Today, bilingualism is an asset in our multicultural society and provides our students with more job opportunities in the economy of the future,” said Rep. Grijalva. “The SYLLABLE Act recognizes that importance, supports dual language programs in low-income communities, and ensures that every child has access to new educational opportunities that prepare them for a successful future.” Studies show both native English speakers and English Learners in dual-language immersion programs benefit from bilingual education and experience substantial gains in language, literacy, and math. While these programs remain in high-demand across the country, they tend to cluster in affluent communities that provide limited access to low-income students.

Why did I decide to curate a series of books entitled “Freedom’s Promise” for ABDO publishing? “Freedom’s Promise” is a new line of 36 books that I have curated for 4th–12th graders. These books cover African American topics. Some are familiar, such as the March on Washington. Others are not as readily known. For instance, young people aren’t exposed to the idea that Europe has influenced Black Americans and that Black Americans have influenced Europe. I hope that there will now be books in libraries that transform how we see the world and how we see ourselves in it. I was born with an active imagination. With the gift of an innovative publisher, I have been able to write stories that reflect imaginings between the world, and me.

Schools across the country are celebrating in different ways this week. Some planned activities throughout the week, and others celebrated just one day, with activities including staff reading to students, older students reading to younger ones, and plenty of author visits. Kate Messner used her website to connect fellow authors to teachers and librarians at elementary, middle, and high schools, who set up Skype visits during the week. Messner, who just started a book tour for her latest title, Chirp, was in schools reading herself. Public libraries also took part, with events over the weekend and during the week. But the biggest celebrations are happening in classrooms and school libraries, where schedules have been changed to set aside time for read alouds. “We get caught up in scheduling and getting so many standards taught, so it’s just a really great day to celebrate reading,” says Lana Lozure, library and information technology educator at Northwood Hills Elementary School in Dallas. Lozure, who is in her first year at the K—6 school, asked fourth through sixth graders to volunteer to read to the younger students. Lozure’s day combined WRAD with Multicultural Children’s Book Day, which was the previous week, and organized a Monday program during which the older students chose from a list of diverse titles.

As the Newbery and Caldecott Medals call out the best new children’s titles, several books are being honored for telling stories of those with autism and other disabilities. The American Library Association named three winners and three honorees of its Schneider Family Book Awards late last month. The awards, which recognize authors and illustrators for the portrayal of the disability experience, are given annually in three categories. The winner in the young children’s group is U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s book “Just Ask! Be Different, Be Brave, Be You,” which shows kids that differences make us stronger. “A Friend for Henry” by Jenn Bailey — a story about friendship told from the perspective of a boy with autism — received the young children’s honor title.

World Read Aloud Day is Wednesday, February 5! To celebrate the occasion, Pam Allyn, the founding director of LitWorld, shares some ways to create a home or classroom environment for more impactful read-alouds.

In a move that already has the governor’s support, the Tennessee department of education is proposing major legislation that will require all current and new K-3 teachers—and those who train them—to know about evidence-based reading instruction. Gov. Bill Lee said he was setting aside about $70 million in his fiscal 2021 budget to support the suite of early literacy requirements. More states are getting interested in—and instituting—requirements that their teachers have mastered reading instruction that’s solidly grounded in research. Among other things, decades of cognitive science research have shown that young students need explicit, systematic instruction in phonics to learn to decode words. And they need strong vocabulary and background knowledge to comprehend what they read. But even on a landscape of rising interest and action, the changes Tennessee is proposing are among the most comprehensive and far-reaching.

Of all the booklists that I like to produce, this one might be my favorite. And why not? With a newly minted Newbery Award going to a COMIC for the very first time, librarians are knocking down the last barriers between these lovely amalgamations of text and image and young readers. World domination is imminent. Breathe it in. It’s a new day. This particular list consists of all the 2020 comics I’ve seen so far that made me inordinately happy. The best news is that it’s only February and we have so many more months of comics to come! Please note that a lot of these aren’t out quite yet. Consider them something to look forward to then.